The Renegades (6 page)

“We got it, sir,” Blount said.

A smoke haze from the burning Mi-17 hung over the settlement. Tires had cut deep ruts in the muck of its one dirt street, but Parson saw no vehicles. Just a pair of chickens pecking at grains of spilled rice and a goat near enough to starving that its ribs protruded.

Wails and cries emanated from some of the houses. Blount chose the nearest one, pointed to the door, whispered to his men, gestured with his hand. One Marine moved toward the back of the mud-brick hut. He kneeled and held his weapon ready. The other four, led by Blount, stacked themselves by the front door.

Parson sent Reyes and Rashid to the right side of the structure. He crouched with Gold in what little cover they could take by a courtyard’s rock fence on the left. Nobody could slip out of the house unseen.

Blount did not use a ram or any other tool to breach the door. He just slammed his boot against the rough planking. It splintered and slapped open.

A woman screamed. Then she began what sounded like a singsong lament in Pashto. No one fired. Parson heard boot steps thudding through the hovel.

“Clear,” Blount shouted.

Parson and Gold rose from the fence and ran inside. Gold began speaking to the woman. Parson didn’t really know any of the language, but he’d heard Gold utter those syllables before:
We will not harm you.
The woman wore a drab brown dress and a purple
hijab
. Apparently she saw no reason to hide her face, and she seemed past caring, anyway.

“What’s she saying?” Parson asked.

“There is nothing more you can take from me,” Gold translated. “Kill me, burn my house. Nothing is left.”

“What does she—”

Gold held up her hand to silence Parson so she could listen. Right now, her expertise trumped his rank, and he knew it.

“They took her boy,” Gold said.

“Who did?” Parson asked.

“The Talibs.”

Parson was puzzled for a moment. Afghanistan had an awful problem with pederasty. In a society where unmarried men and women could not be seen together, far worse things happened than boys and girls stealing kisses. But the Taliban, for all their crimes against humanity, generally did not tolerate child molestation.

Gold spoke to the woman again. The mother answered back in short sentences, a calmer voice. She seemed at least to understand that the strangers who now invaded her home posed no further danger.

“Her son was—is—ten,” Gold said.

“Why did they take him?” Parson asked.

“She doesn’t know.”

Rashid watched the woman, his brow furrowed. He looked at the scene around him as if trying to make sense of it.

“What do you think, Rashid?” Parson asked.

“I hope not what I think.”

Whatever was happening, it did not accord with what Parson knew of the Taliban. When they hit a village they didn’t like, they usually left behind nothing but bones and ashes. Killing civilians was one of the few things at which they excelled. It certainly figured that in a time of natural disaster, they’d find a way to add to the misery. But whatever they’d done here had more method than madness.

“Did she recognize any of the bad guys?” Parson asked.

“No,” Gold said. “But she probably wouldn’t tell if she did.”

True enough, Parson thought. It’s hard to convince people you’ll protect them if they don’t know how long you’ll stay.

“Let’s see what else we find,” Parson said.

In the next house, they found nothing. Half the walls had collapsed in the quake or one of the aftershocks. The dirt-floor dwelling smelled of mold and stale bread, along with the cold soot of a burned-out cooking fire.

At the house after that, Parson walked through the door and stopped short. The sight before him ripped through all the barbed-wire fences he had strung around his emotions.

The little girl who’d been following Gold around lay clinging to the body of her mother. The child cried silently, could not form words or even sounds.

Blood had flowed along the edge of an overturned table and pooled in a corner of the room. Blood had spattered a shelf of crockery, apparently ejected from an exit wound. Tracks of blood wound through the hut: large boots, small shoes.

Gold kneeled by the girl. She put her hand on the child’s back. The girl spasmed as if in a seizure but made no other response.

When Gold spoke, the child turned, buried her face in Gold’s lap. Scarlet smears covered her hands and arms.

“Let me check her out,” Reyes said.

“Her name is Fatima,” Gold said.

Gold whispered in Pashto, stroked Fatima’s back. The child shook her head. Parson could imagine the conversation:
-Let the strange men examine you. -No, strange men have done enough today.

Finally, after much talk, Fatima stood and let Reyes look at her. The PJ opened his medical ruck, checked her for wounds, took her pulse.

“She’s not hurt,” Reyes said. “Physically, I mean. That must be her mother’s blood all over her.”

“She says they came and took her brother,” Gold said. “Their mother tried to stop them.”

Reyes unsnapped the tube to his CamelBak and offered it to Fatima. “Tell her to drink from this,” he said. “She’s dehydrated.”

Gold spoke. Fatima took the tube in her hand, which looked to Parson like the fist of a doll. She paused before placing her mouth on the tube, sipped once and then stopped. Too distraught to want water or food, Parson supposed. She was only doing as she was told because she felt some small connection to Gold, and because she simply didn’t know what else to do.

“This is so fucked up,” Blount said.

“You got that right, Gunny,” Reyes said.

“My daddy used to slap me and my mama around,” Blount said. “Ain’t nothing lower than hurting a little one.”

“I bet he didn’t slap you around for long.”

“I fixed it so he didn’t do that no more.”

For just an instant, Parson thought he saw a thousand-yard stare in Blount’s eyes. But then the big man focused again, watched for threats, monitored his men.

“Ask her if she knows why they wanted her brother,” Parson said to Gold.

Gold cut her eyes at him without turning her head. Parson knew that look:
You’re pushing it, sir.
She never hesitated to tell him when she thought something was a bad idea, and for that he was grateful. But this time she allowed one more question. Gold spoke again in Pashto.

“She says the men told him he’d become a soldier of God,” Gold said. “They shot the mother and took him away.”

So they were kidnapping boys for child soldiers? Using the chaos of the earthquake, perhaps, to pull off something they might not get away with otherwise.

Turning disaster to their advantage certainly sounded like the Taliban. Even when they’d ruled, they’d taken no responsibility for their people’s welfare. No real department of social services. No functioning ministry of agriculture. A government uninterested in governance. Only their militias and religious police took their duties seriously. Beyond that, Allah would provide.

By the time Parson’s team finished searching the rest of the settlement, night had fallen. A broken cloud layer scudded away to reveal a full moon bright enough to throw shadows. The search found two other murdered parents, as well as the existence of one other missing boy.

Parson couldn’t quite get his mind around what he was seeing. Disaster relief was hard enough without these assholes coming up with something like this. What God could they imagine they were serving? The problems he faced had changed now. Not just earthquake recovery anymore. He and Gold had a dragon to kill.

His head still ached from the RPG blast that began the attack on the helicopter. In much of his experience with RPGs, they’d appeared as harmless green pinpoints on night vision, ineffectual arcs in the blackness, fired upward at his aircraft and not even reaching his altitude. But this one had caged his gyros.

At least the weather was cooperating. Parson knew the Osprey crew would fly back on night vision goggles, but with the clear sky and lunar illumination, they’d hardly need them.

He worried whether darkness would bring back the bad guys, and he ordered everyone to stay alert. But all seemed quiet. Apparently, the insurgents already had what they wanted.

4

I
n the quiet of night, Gold watched and listened for signs of life. At first she heard only the distant tapping of automatic rifle fire, the music of destruction in sixteenth notes. Some skirmish in the next valley. Closer, she made out the yowl of a cat.

Parson had sent the rest of the team to bring back the bodies of the imam and the two other villagers killed in the attack on the helicopter. Now he walked ahead of her, safety off on his Beretta. With one hand, Gold took Fatima’s hand; with the other, she held her M4.

They stopped at a hut where lamplight shone through an oil-paper window. Parson knocked at the door. Gold let go of Fatima and gripped her rifle with both hands.

“We come as friends,” Gold said in Pashto. “We are Americans. We will not hurt you.”

From within the home came the sounds of wooden clatter, metallic clinks. Perhaps a grab for a weapon. Gold snapped her fire mode selector to the
AUTO
position.

“Leave us,” a voice called from inside.

“We have with us a little girl of your town,” Gold said. “Her name is Fatima. Her mother is dead. We want only to leave her in someone’s care.”

“I know no one by that name.”

“Sir, can you take in this child?”

“Leave us!”

Gold moved away from the door, put her rifle back on
SAFE
.

“My cousin lives here,” Fatima whispered.

That did not surprise Gold. Cousin or no, Fatima would be another mouth to feed, and a worthless girl at that. A goat probably carried more value here. She explained the situation to Parson, and he summed it up in his own way: “Bullshit.”

It seemed not a shred of mercy remained for anyone in Afghanistan, but especially not for females. During previous deployments, Gold had heard of parents selling girls to buy food. Even in antiquity, Afghanistan had been a bad place for women. Gold thought of a nearby historic site, the Tomb of Rabia Balkhi. Rabia Balkhi was a medieval poetess who’d died in an honor killing. Her brother had killed her for having sex with a slave lover, and she’d written her final poem in her own blood.

Parson and Gold knocked at two other homes. At one, they got no answer, though a cooking fire burned inside. At the other, the answer came: “I will not open my door to infidels.”

“We’ll just have to take her back with us,” Parson said.

“Don’t we need to get clearance from Task Force first?” Gold asked.

“We’ll just ask forgiveness instead of permission.”

That worked for Gold. She worried about how Fatima might react to an aircraft ride and getting dropped off with strangers at the MASF, but it seemed better than leaving her to fend for herself.

Gold kneeled to speak with the girl at eye level. “Fatima,” she said, “you will have to come with us. We’ll take you for an airplane ride and get you some food and a place to sleep.”

“I want to go home.”

Gold fought tears. “I know you do, my dear,” she said. “But your mother is gone. I know this is hard, and I am so sorry. But there is no one to take care of you here.”

Fatima began to cry. “My brother might come back,” she said. “I have to be at home if he comes back.”

Now Gold’s eyes watered too quickly to control. She blinked, felt the tears escape. Droplets fell onto her arm, her rifle barrel. She let the M4 lean into the crook of her elbow, and she embraced Fatima. Against her arms she felt the softness of the little Afghan girl and the hard angles of the weapon.

Gold sniffled, tried to regain her composure. “I do not think he is coming back, Fatima,” she said.

The girl’s shoulders quivered. For a moment she wept so hard, she could not speak. When she found words again, she asked, “Is he dead like Mama?”

“No, Fatima. We do not believe he is dead. But some very bad men took him.”

“Can you bring him back?”

Gold did not know what to say. She wanted to offer the girl some hope, but to offer false hope would be unforgivable.

“We will try,” she said finally. “But we do not even know where they took him.”

“Please bring him back. He wants to come home. He was crying when they took him away.”

Gold released Fatima from the embrace, then held her by the arms. “We will do all we can,” Gold said. “That is all I can promise.”

Even if some miracle brought the boy back, Gold could see little but misery in both children’s futures. Mortal life presented few crueler fates than that of an orphan in Afghanistan. At best, grinding poverty. At worst—Gold hated to think of the abuse that happened to kids of either sex.

“What is your brother’s name, Fatima?”

“Mohammed. He is Mohammed.”

Parson had remained near enough to listen. Gold knew he’d have understood not a word, but the situation required little interpreting. She half expected him to tell her not to get involved with one Afghan child; that wasn’t their mission. But he only watched and listened. A pool of darkness hid his face, so Gold could not judge his expression.

When she’d first met him years ago, he seemed insensitive, even profane. Then she saw how he bonded with friends and crewmates. Like most military men, he didn’t spend a lot of time talking about his feelings. But if he saw a threat to one of his own, he made his feelings clear through action—even violence. In the beginning, he blamed all of Afghanistan, all of Islam, for the loss of his C-130 crew. But now he loved some of the Afghans like brothers, though he’d never express it that way.

Above, the moon glowed bright like a coin of mottled fire. The planets of early evening joined it as cold points of silver. At the edge of the village, a few local men gathered where Reyes, Rashid, and the Marines had brought the dead.

“Do any of you know this child?” Gold asked.

No one answered. Rashid repeated the question, and the men pretended not to hear him. Gold wanted to slam the butt of her rifle into their cheekbones. Then she thought to herself: You’re thinking like Parson. At least they were taking responsibility for burying their imam.

“I guess we’re done here,” Parson said. He sounded tired, disappointed.

“Then I’ll get us a ride,” Blount said.

The Marine took out his PRC-148 and made a call. In his huge hands, the radio looked like a miniature model of itself. He used an antijamming system that hopped frequencies, and the voice that answered seemed to come from within a shaking echo chamber. Gold could make out only one word: “Inbound.”

“I guess the girl’s coming with us?” Reyes asked.

“Yeah,” Parson said.

“Let me tote her up to the field,” Blount said. “She’s been through enough today without having to walk up that hill.”

Fatima cowered, held on to Gold when the Marine bent toward her. “It is all right,” Gold said in Pashto. “He is my friend, and he is your friend.” Then she said in English, “Thanks, Sergeant. Just don’t put your hand on the top of her head.”

Blount searched his pockets until he came up with a Hershey’s bar. He unwrapped it and handed it to Fatima. Then he slung his rifle over his right arm and picked her up so that she sat on his left shoulder.

“I got one about this age back home in Beaufort,” he said.

Fatima ate as Blount carried her up the hill, away from the village. Gold doubted the girl had ever tasted chocolate before, but she showed little reaction to it.

In the grass field, a couple hundred yards from the burned-out hulk of the Mi-17, Blount set Fatima on the ground.

“Just sit tight, honey,” he said. “I gotta get ready for our ride to come in.” Then he added, “I don’t reckon you understand me, do you?”

By now, the girl seemed to have lost her fear of the gunnery sergeant, who must have looked to her like a giant from a fairy tale. Fatima listened to him speak as if she did understand, but when Blount busied himself with something in his rucksack, she moved over to Gold and looked up quizzically.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“Mazar-i-Sharif,” Gold said. “Have you ever been there?”

“No.”

Fatima had probably never traveled half a klick out of her village. The rest of the child’s life would turn on this night, and Gold wondered what events were being set into motion.

Blount found what he was looking for in his ruck. He pulled out four chemical light sticks, sliced open their wrapping with his KA-BAR knife. Using his thumb and forefinger, he bent the first one until the glass vial inside the plastic tubing popped. The two chemicals flowed into each other to form a radiance of neon blue, and Gold thought it looked like a tiny molecular re-creation of the pulsars and quasars above. Starlight writ small. Blount repeated the process with the other three chem lights. He walked the field and dropped the light sticks to form an inverted
Y
landing signal.

After a few minutes, Gold became aware of a distant buzz, like the thrum of a cicada but in a lower key. The sound slipped in underneath the night, and she realized she’d heard it for several seconds before it registered in her mind.

A warbling came from Blount’s radio. He pressed a talk switch and said, “The LZ is cold, sir.”

Gold wasn’t wearing night vision goggles, but in the moon’s glow she could still pick out the shape of the Osprey. It flew with all strobes and nav lights off, a black shadow against the sky.

As the aircraft approached to land, Gold shielded Fatima’s eyes from the blowing grit. The Osprey touched down, and Blount spoke again into his radio, turned up the volume. He gave a thumbs-up to Parson. This time Parson picked up Fatima.

Blount led the way around to the Osprey’s open ramp. Gold walked behind the dim outlines of Parson and Fatima, Reyes and Rashid. She sat on the nylon webbing of a troop seat and turned her rifle muzzle down so any accidental discharge wouldn’t strike a rotor.

The Osprey rose into the air. Closed off in the privacy of darkness and engine noise, Gold fought back tears, managed to compose herself. If she suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, she’d make
post
the operative word. Deal with it later. Now she had a job to do. And it involved a new kind of enemy.

—

T
he makeshift command post at Mazar reminded Parson of the early days of the Afghanistan war: plywood walls, folding chairs. Permanent headquarters had grown up in Kabul and at the big air bases. Kandahar airfield, with all its new hangars, would have been unrecognizable to troops who hadn’t seen it since the start of the war.

But with a new crisis centered in the north of the country, the evolution of a military presence started over at the beginning, with tents, cheap wood, and HESCO barriers. The CP door even had a makeshift counterweight to keep it pulled closed: a plastic water bottle filled with sand, strung up by parachute cord.

Parson had made an initial report to intel last night when they’d landed. Now, this morning, he wanted to debrief more thoroughly. He joined Rashid and an American intel officer in a secure teleconference with Task Force at Bagram and with CENTCOM headquarters at MacDill Air Force Base, Florida. It was seven in the morning at Mazar, and at MacDill, nine and a half hours behind, it was nine thirty at night. Parson had put on the same flight suit he’d worn yesterday, and it smelled like smoke and sweat. The officers on the TV screen in front of him wore clean ABU fatigues.

“They lit us up pretty good,” Parson said. “But I don’t think we were who they wanted.” He explained about the missing boys.

“The Taliban has used child soldiers before,” a CENTCOM colonel said. “But they were recruited out of madrassas in Pakistan. Taking them by force is something new.”

As Parson listened, he found foam cups and poured coffee from a pot placed atop a stack of MRE cartons. He handed one to Rashid and drank from the other. The coffee had gone bitter from too much time on the hot plate.

“This stuff sucks,” Parson said.

“Indeed it does,” a major at Bagram said. Parson had meant the coffee, but he agreed with the major’s statement.

“Some Taliban rank and file have taken us up on the amnesty program,” the colonel said. “And even a few of their commanders have put down arms. But this seems like two steps back. It’s hard to see how this fits in.”

Parson didn’t care how it fit in. Divining the intentions of terrorists seemed a waste of time. Analysts fretted over how to interpret a statement, how to view an action. To Parson, the only way to view the Taliban was through crosshairs—which he’d done more than once.

Rashid sipped his coffee and frowned. Parson knew how the Afghan pilot felt this morning. He’d lost a crew member and an aircraft. That was a special pain Parson well understood. But the man still had a job to do, and Parson figured the best thing was to get him back in the air as soon as possible. At the moment, Rashid twirled his lighter between his fingers like his mind was somewhere else and he wanted a cigarette.

The major in Bagram excused himself from the teleconference, then returned. “Intel shop says Al Jazeera has a new video from the bad guys,” he said. “We’ll try to put it up if you like.”

“Please do,” the colonel from MacDill said.

“Yes, sir.”

Parson looked at Rashid and the intel officer, shrugged. The screen went to snow, and when the picture returned, it showed a bearded man in white robes and a black turban. No salt in his beard; he looked to be in his thirties. On the wall behind him hung a green flag. Two AK-47s leaned against the wall, beside another weapon Parson had not seen in terrorist videos before: a curved Arabian sword, called a
saif
, resting in its scabbard. Silk tassels dangled from the hilt. The scabbard’s chape and locket gleamed of old silver. The man in front of the weapons spoke in accented but fluent English.

“With great regret we note that some of our former Taliban brothers have capitulated to the crusaders,” he said. “They have entered talks with the puppet government in Kabul, which is religiously forbidden. Some have announced they will cease offensive operations due to the natural disaster.

“We view these measures as apostasy and declare these former brothers
kafirs
. The earthquake was an act of God, a holy punishment for cooperation with infidels. Therefore, we forbid any acceptance of relief from infidel nations. Likewise, we forbid the pigs and monkeys of Jewish and Christian aid organizations from entering the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. God alone shall provide according to His will.”