Silent Enemy Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Acknowledgements

  THE STORY BEHIND SILENT ENEMY

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALSO BY THOMAS W. YOUNG

  ALSO BY THOMAS W. YOUNG

  FICTION

  The Mullah’s Storm

  NONFICTION

  The Speed of Heat:

  An Airlift Wing at War in Iraq and Afghanistan

  PUTNAM

  G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

  Publishers Since 1838

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA •

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario

  M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd,

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  Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Copyright © 2011 by Thomas W. Young

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions. Published simultaneously in Canada

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Young, Thomas W., date. Silent enemy / Thomas W. Young. p. cm.

  ISBN : 978-1-101-52936-2

  1. Soldiers—Fiction. 2. Afghan War, 2001—Fiction. 3. Taliban—Fiction. 4. Afghanistan—Fiction. I. Title. PS3625.O97335S’.6—dc22

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

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  IN MEMORY OF MY GRANDFATHER MORGAN DANIEL, OF THE LEGENDARY EIGHTH AIR FORCE

  1

  The world went away, and every part of her hurt. But nothing made any noise. Silence rang pure as the thoughts of the dead. Sergeant Major Gold knew only that some power threw her in every direction at once, flung projectiles against her in the darkness. She was so close to the explosion the sound never registered.

  A moment before, the lights had been on in her office. Now her office no longer existed; nothing existed but blackness and force. No room even for fear, just shock and confusion. Then Gold’s senses began to return. Dust, grit, smell of burning. An odor like nitric acid.

  The fragments of her consciousness reconnected; her mind started to function again. For an instant, she thought with purely professional interest, So this is what it’s like to die in a bombing. Pain behind her eyes, a keening in her ears. What was that sound? Screams.

  Gold moved her fingers. Twitched her foot. Bent a knee. Everything hurt, but it all worked. She couldn’t imagine how that was possible.

  She eased up into a sitting position, checked for injuries. Maybe not bad, nothing broken. She coughed, and that hurt worse. Cracked ribs, maybe. Probably a concussion. Lucky. But what about everybody else?

  Gold felt for her helmet and rifle. The helmet had disappeared, but her fingers found the M-4. She wanted to fight, but she knew whoever did this was either long gone or dead with his victims. She used the weapon as a crutch to pick herself up from the floor. Then she struck her head on a collapsed beam.

  This day had always been coming, she knew. The Afghan National Police central training facility in Kabul made an obvious target for the Taliban. Gold helped run the literacy program; her office on the west end of the first floor was as far from the main entrance as it could have been. That was the reason she wasn’t burned or crushed.

  She coughed again, spat phlegm. Squinted through smoke, looked for the door. No door remained anywhere. But she found a gap in the wall.

  Outside, Gold took a clean breath. She inhaled once more, and that felt better. Still some pain in the chest. She staggered along the wall until she reached the front of the training center.

  The explosion had ripped open the concrete building, side to side, top to bottom, all four floors, like some monstrous shovel had torn an oval scoop from the front of the entire structure. A burned mass of steel lay on the ground near the blast crater, the engine block from what must have been a truck bomb. Moans, shouts, and curses came from within the rubble in Pashto, Dari, and English. Gold picked her way through broken masonry and twisted beams. She found part of a hand, with three fingers. A bloody scrap of uniform. A boot with a foot inside.

  A lone fire truck sputtered into view. Its horn blared in deep, staccato bursts. Afghan and U.S. flag decals marked the new Ford with labeling that read in three languages FIRE AND RESCUE STAY BACK. A second truck arrived. Firefighters clung to the side of the vehicles, bands of yellow reflective fabric across the backs of their turnout coats.

  The men pressurized a hose and opened its blast onto flames flickering thirty feet from Gold. A black spray of water and soot spattered her face. She fought tears, called names: “Hamid? Hikmatullah?” No answer but indistinguishable cries from victims hidden within the scene of destruction around her. The fires, crater, smoke, and screams made it seem hell itself had ruptured and burst up through the ground.

  Gold found her way to the rear of the training center, where an exterior wall stood intact. She pulled open a door, entered the part of the building where her classroom used to be. Little remained to distinguish one room from another. Each was open to the street outside, like a dollhouse with the front removed.

  “Ma’am,” called an American voice. A man in firefighting gear, maybe a civilian adviser. “Stay out of there!”

  Gold ignored him. She climbed stairs exposed to the sky. The thump of helicopter rotors began to build, grew louder. A Black Hawk settled onto the grounds of the police center.

  She shouted names over t
he noise. No reply. Water trickled from a broken pipe. Odor like car exhaust and trash fire. Then she heard a familiar voice.

  “Maalim, maalim.” Teacher.

  The young man cried out again, and she found him. Mahsoud lay on his back in the remains of a hallway. Dust covered him, but Gold could see that his face was badly burned. He looked at her through reddened eyes. A section of wall had fallen across his legs.

  “Daa kharaab dai,” he said. It is bad.

  Seeing him like that made her want to rage, to cry, to strike out. Be professional, she told herself. ABC. Airway. Breathing. Circulation. If he can talk to me, then he has the A and the B. She felt the carotid artery. Pulse fast but weak. The C could be better.

  Gold tried to remove the concrete slab on his left thigh. She pushed so hard she thought her spine would crack. No movement. She pushed again. The slab moved a quarter inch, and Mahsoud screamed.

  “Zeh mutaasif yum,” she said. I’m sorry. Then she shouted, “Medic!” The helicopter had shut down now. Gold assumed it carried medical help.

  She could not lose Mahsoud. Her favorite student. Unlike many young men his age, he had somehow managed to learn to read during Taliban rule. So Gold was teaching him English while she taught the other police recruits to read their own language.

  He reached out to her with his left hand. His right was mangled. She took his hand, and he squeezed so hard it hurt. The grip of a blacksmith, his father’s occupation.

  “You’re going to be all right, buddy,” she said.

  He took two labored breaths, then said, “What is this word you call me?”

  “Like friend. Companion.”

  “This is good English word.”

  “Medic,” Gold yelled. “Now!”

  A Navy corpsman appeared and kneeled beside Gold and Mahsoud. The petty officer put a stethoscope to his ears and listened to Mahsoud’s chest. Shone alight into his eyes. Felt his abdomen, arms, ribs.

  “Does it hurt to breathe?” asked the corpsman.

  Gold thought Mahsoud would understand, but she repeated the question in Pashto, anyway. Mahsoud nodded.

  “Do you have other pain?”

  Mahsoud nodded again. The corpsman uncapped a needle, gave Mahsoud an injection. Then the corpsman shone his light under the concrete that trapped Mahsoud. Gold leaned to look. When she saw, she hoped Mahsoud did not notice her shock.

  His lower left leg was bent back toward his thigh at an impossible angle. A section of rebar, twisted and sheared into a meat hook, had spiked the knee. A horror of torn flesh. But not much blood.

  “Can we get this concrete off him?” Gold asked.

  “Even with the right equipment, this would be a tough extrication,” the corpsman said. “That concrete is trapping him, but it’s also keeping him from bleeding to death.”

  “He can’t stay here forever. What are you going to do?”

  “I’ll have to let my skipper handle this. He’s a surgeon.”

  Gold didn’t like the sound of that. “Will he amputate?” she asked.

  “If you put aside the problem of moving the patient, that leg still looks bad. I think he has some lung injury, too.”

  He’s not “the patient,” Gold thought. He has a name. He wants to help his fellow Afghans. God knows, their police need people who are trainable and honest.

  “What about my leg?” Mahsoud asked in Pashto.

  “They will do all they can,” Gold said.

  “You must not let them take my leg. You know I want to be a policeman.”

  The corpsman’s radio barked. The man pressed a TALK switch and said, “Yes, sir. Second floor. Be careful coming up. Severe trauma to the left leg, probable smoke inhalation. Entrapped patient, conscious and alert.”

  Gold surveyed the mess around her. Smoke still rising here and there. Tangled pipes and conduits. Pools of reddish water. Wailing of the wounded. Lives ruined by terrorists who thought they would launch themselves to paradise on a load of fertilizer and diesel fuel, or maybe a trunk full of daisy-chained 105s. Again.

  The corpsman kneeled, twisted open a water bottle. He dribbled water onto the burned part of Mahsoud’s face. Then he tore open a foil package and took out a dressing wet with some compound. Placed it across Mahsoud’s cheek.

  The doctor arrived, peeled off bloody latex gloves, and put on fresh ones. He clicked on a light to see Mahsoud’s leg. Looked around at the fallen concrete. Sighed hard.

  “Tell him I’m going to have to take off that leg,” the doctor said. “I’m sorry.”

  “He understands you, sir,” Gold said.

  Mahsoud began to cry. “I was going to be a bomb technician,” he said. “Now I will become a street beggar.”

  “I do not know what you will become,” Gold said in Pashto. “But you will never be a beggar.”

  “I wanted to help stop these apostates.”

  “You will, my friend. You will find another way.”

  The surgeon scissored Mahsoud’s trousers. Then he injected three syringes and waited for the anesthetic to take effect.

  “Look at me, Mahsoud,” Gold said. “I want you to look at my face.” Look at anything but the cutting.

  “Do not let go of my hand, teacher.”

  “I won’t. I’ll stay right here.”

  The surgeon opened a case and took out a long stainless steel knife.

  AT BAGRAM AIR BASE NORTH OF KABUL, Major Michael Parson peered out the cockpit windows of his C-5 Galaxy. He was waiting for aerial port to load several old Humvees into the aircraft’s cargo compartment. The worn-out vehicles were supposed to be going back to Al Udeid Air Base, in Qatar. Parson wanted to take off as soon as possible. Get the hell out of this godforsaken country. But when he’d checked in at the Air Operations Center, the intel guys were talking about a major explosion nearby. There was no telling how that might affect flight operations.

  Static crackled from loudspeakers on the steel lamp poles along the ramp. Then, an announcement on Giant Voice: “Attention on base. Bagram is at Force Protection Condition Delta. MASF personnel stand by for a mass casualty event.”

  The flight engineer, Sergeant Dunne, sat at the engineer’s panel. He wore his headset over salt-and-pepper hair a little longer than regulation. He unwrapped the foil on a stick of Wrigley’s and chewed it with a frown, as if the gum tasted strange. Dunne took off his headset, interrupted his preflight checks.

  “What the hell’s going on?” he asked. “There’s all kinds of chatter on the tower frequency.”

  Parson looked out the cockpit windows. A pair of F-16s launched, the streak-scream of their takeoff rumbling over the base in waves. The jets rode the orange-and-blue flames of their afterburners in a near-vertical climb, and they vanished from sight as they soared higher.

  If they’re putting up fighters for a combat air patrol, Parson thought, this must be bigger than the usual suicide bombing. Coordinated with other attacks, maybe? He looked to the south, where the fighter jets had disappeared.

  “Just keep your preflight going,” Parson said, “but watch your back.”

  “Will do,” Dunne said.

  “I’ll check in at ops and see what’s happening.”

  As Parson jogged across the ramp, he heard the whine of aircraft turbines, then felt the wind from helicopter rotors. On the Army flight line, blades spun on three H-60s, red crosses on their sides. One by one, the Black Hawks lifted off, hover-taxied from the apron, and fluttered away to the south. Going to pick up wounded, Parson guessed.

  Inside flight ops, the babble of voices mixed with the squelch and pop of radios, the jangle of telephones. Parson found the air base commander, a full bird colonel. The sleeves were rolled up on his ABU fatigues. Beretta in a holster across his chest. Handset to his ear.

  “At the police center?” he said. “Yes, sir. We have an aeromed team ready to go. Yes, sir, I’ll hold.”

  “Colonel, I’m the aircraft commander of Reach Three-Four-Six,” Parson said. “Is my mission on schedule
?”

  “You’re not a Reach call sign anymore,” the colonel said. “We’re putting you on an Air Evac mission to Germany. We’re going to get a shitload of patients. Most of them will need to fly to Landstuhl.”

  There had to be some mixup. Other planes, like the C-130, were far better configured for patients. Easier to get the wounded on and off. More reliable pressurization. Parson had done plenty of aeromedical flights during his days as a C-130 navigator. But this was his first mission as a C-5 aircraft commander. The last thing he needed was a task neither he nor his crew had ever done on a C-5, a plane never meant for air ambulance flights.

  “I want to help,” Parson said, “but are you sure this is a good idea?”

  “We don’t really have a choice,” the colonel said. “You’re all we have to work with at Bagram. There are some patient support pallets in storage at one of the hangars here. Once your loadmasters install them, the aeromeds will take it from there.”

  Not ideal, Parson thought, but we can make it work. Install the pallets, run some drop cords to power the aeromeds’ equipment, and we’ll have ourselves a flying hospital. A damned big one, too. Parson was proud to fly the largest aircraft in the Air Force fleet. Nearly two hundred and fifty feet long, with a max weight of more than four hundred tons, the C-5 could transport outsized cargo that nothing else could carry. But the A-models were older than many of the crew members who flew them. And with all those miles of wiring and tubing, in a mix of technology from two different centuries, a lot could go wrong.

  When Parson got back to the tarmac, choppers were already returning with wounded. Dust and exhaust mingled in their rotor wash, stung his eyes, abraded his throat.

  At the C-5, his four loadmasters were sliding the patient support pallets into place. Each pallet had stanchions for mounting stretchers. The loadmasters had expected to chain down ten Humvees, but now they were setting up for about forty wounded.