Warriors (9781101621189) Read online

  “CDS flaps.”

  “Reset, nine percent.”

  “Slowdown checklist complete.”

  “Crew,” Parson called, “one-minute advisory.”

  “Acknowledged,” said one of the loadmasters.

  Parson rechecked his scope, his instruments, his calculations. Felt his heart thumping underneath his flak jacket. The minute ticked away quickly.

  “Five seconds,” he called.

  Parson exhaled, counted backward again—this time to the release point. The copilot put a gloved hand to a switch on the side console.

  “Green light,” Parson called.

  “On,” the copilot said.

  The switch triggered an electric retriever that pulled a blade against a restraining strap. Parson knew the strap had parted when he heard the CDS bundles rumble along the rollers in the cargo compartment.

  “Load clear,” the loadmaster called.

  The blips on Parson’s SKE scope held steady—the electronic signatures of the two other aircraft in the formation. If all had gone well, their loads were also parachuting to earth now, floating down to precalculated multiple points of impact within the safe zone.

  Please let them fall on target, Parson thought. But he’d never know. If this were a training drop, a guy from aerial port would walk over to the practice bundles after they hit the ground, step off the distance to the desired impact point, and radio the results. The navigator who missed by the widest margin would buy the beer that night for all the crews.

  The scores for this drop carried higher stakes—whether people would eat or starve, live or die. But no drop zone control officer waited down there to tell Parson how he’d done.

  Parson’s crew cleaned up the completion-of-drop checklist, and the formation accelerated away into the escape route. As the aircraft climbed and turned, the clouds broke apart enough to reveal glimpses of the dark hills below, snapshots interrupted by mist. The pilot looked down through his windows and said, “Damn, look at that.”

  “What?” Parson asked.

  “Some kind of firefight.”

  Parson lowered the night-vision goggles on his flight helmet, switched them on. Stepped around the flight engineer’s seat to peer out the left windows. At first he saw only rushing stratus so laden with moisture that it sprayed the glass. But when the mist opened up again, Parson noticed the tracers. Ground-to-ground, nothing aimed up at the sky. And as firefights went, a strange one. From the air, night infantry battles usually appeared as random spears of light. The burning magnesium of tracer rounds illuminated scattered angles and vectors in a tangled display of war’s hellish geometry. But all these shots came along a single line, and they all flashed in the same direction.

  “I don’t think that’s a firefight,” Parson said.

  “What is it, then?” the pilot asked.

  Parson stumbled over helmet bags to get back to his seat. He pressed a line select key on his nav computer to store the present coordinates.

  “I don’t know,” Parson said. “Not quite sure what to make of it.” Now that he had the position marked, he could report what they’d seen to intel.

  He gave the pilots a heading to take the C-130 out of the combat zone and back to the normal air routes of peacetime Europe. Parson’s unit staged at Ramstein Air Base, Germany, as part of the Delta Squadron formed to fly these relief missions. Delta operated out of an old alert facility hidden among the trees in a remote section of the base. Where fighter-bombers had once poised to launch nuclear strikes against the Soviet Union, transport aircraft now departed on missions of mercy. Or, as Parson saw it, missions of paralysis and indecision. We’ll feed refugees when and where the Serbs will allow, he thought, until ethnic cleansing wipes out Bosnian Muslims altogether. A patch on the sleeve of his flight suit bore the effort’s name: Operation Provide Promise.

  Parson was no historian, but he did see the irony in Delta Squadron basing itself in a disused Cold War alert shack. He planned his routes on a rusting table beside a disconnected rotary telephone. The office boasted a steel door two feet thick, originally intended to keep out Russian nerve gas and radiation. Now the door stayed propped open with a cinder block. An old electric signal board above the scheduler’s desk might once have heralded Armageddon, with panels indicating alert status and weapons codes. Some wit had pasted over the panels with other kinds of messages: “Release the Hounds.” “Pizza’s Here.” “Whenever I Sober Up, There’s All These Dials and Gauges in Front of Me.”

  From the alert shack’s decay alone, an observer could have surmised that the Cold War had ended. But the breakup of the USSR and its client states had led to other kinds of trouble. Ethnic tensions had brought a bloodbath in the Balkans.

  The international community had hit upon an ingenious solution to wide-scale massacre: just let it run its course, and eventually it would stop. That tactic had worked pretty well the year before in Rwanda. Eight hundred thousand dead in a hundred days, while the world stood by.

  Aboard the C-130, Parson realized he’d let several seconds pass without watching his scope, scanning his instruments. Do your damned job, he told himself. Keep your mind and your eyes on what you’re doing. He checked his charts again, saw that the aircraft was nearing the combat exit point.

  When the aircraft passed the next waypoint, Parson called for combat exit procedures, and the engineer read the checklist: External lights on. Night-vision goggles off. Cabin repressurized. Fuel system back to crossfeed. Survival equipment stowed.

  Parson popped the clasps on his flak jacket, shrugged out of the heavy armor. Underneath it, his flight suit had dampened with sweat.

  With his body armor off, Parson could reach all his flight suit pockets again. He unzipped a chest pocket and fished out a little notebook. Tapped keys on his nav computer to call up the position he’d stored, and wrote down the coordinates.

  Then he considered how to describe to intel what he’d witnessed at that location. He could say with certainty only that he’d seen rifle fire from a position along a line, more or less all at once. But given the reports coming out of Bosnia—mass killings, walking skeletons found behind razor wire—he needed little imagination to guess what that rifle fire could mean.

  • • •

  IN THE JUMP SEAT of the Rivet Joint nearly two decades later, Parson remembered that night with profound sadness. He’d known exactly what was happening on the ground below him. A type of crime supposedly relegated to the past. After you knew of such things, he thought, you couldn’t withdraw deep enough into yourself not to know them anymore.

  14

  GOLD HAD HEARD AND READ much about the storied city of Sarajevo: the Jerusalem of Europe, host of the 1984 Winter Olympics. A beautiful multicultural town that endured one of the worst sieges of modern warfare from 1992 to 1995. During the siege, attacking Serb forces tried to make that part of Bosnia all their own. As the Rivet Joint descended for landing, Gold viewed the lights of nighttime Sarajevo from behind Parson’s jump seat. He and the pilots had said she could come forward to look at the city, as long as she went aft and strapped in before landing.

  From Gold’s perspective, the sight gave no hint of the horrors that had once taken place there. Sarajevo’s cluster of tall buildings stood sentinel over the Miljacka River, the water painted bronze by glare. A sprawl of homes illuminated the hillsides, and the undulating sparkle made it appear the lights rode waves on a dark ocean.

  When the landing gear came down, Gold returned to her seat beside Irena and buckled in. The aircraft thudded onto the runway and, after what seemed like a long taxi, shut down on a military ramp several hundred yards from the main terminal. Parson and the Rivet Joint crew changed from flight suits into civilian clothes, and the American embassy sent a bus to take them to their hotel.

  On the bus, Parson slumped into a seat beside Gold and said, “Last time I was here, we got
mortared.” He seemed a little distracted, like he was reliving that moment. Sometimes it helped to recall those things, Gold realized. But sometimes it just sent you into a spiral. She decided to try to keep him talking.

  “Looks peaceful enough now,” she said. A Lufthansa Airbus taxied up to the terminal. The scene could have taken place on a slow Saturday night at any civilian airport in the world.

  “Hope it stays that way,” Parson said. “We heard on the news a while ago that they’re burning churches and mosques again.”

  “Oh, no. Why?”

  “Beats the hell out of me. You’d think they’d have had enough of that.”

  Here, Gold knew, a church or a mosque could have stood for centuries. What a horrible shame to destroy something of such historic, artistic, and spiritual value. She felt glad when Parson changed the subject, and glad that he still felt chatty.

  “Back during the siege,” he said, “they dug a tunnel underneath this airport. It connected Sarajevo with an area controlled by the UN. The tunnel was about the only way for people in the city to get food to stay alive and weapons to defend themselves.”

  “Some of the tunnel is still open,” Irena said. “It’s part of a museum now.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Parson said. “Sounds like you’ve been here before.”

  “Yes, sir,” Irena said. “A few times with my parents.”

  “So what are we doing tomorrow?” another crew member asked.

  “I don’t think you guys are flying,” Cunningham said. “I gotta meet with some people.”

  Gold could imagine the coordination required for an operation like this. More than likely, an alphabet soup of agencies from the U.S. State Department to the NSA were talking to counterparts in Sarajevo and Belgrade. Sovereignty issues, as well as nerves still raw from the ’90s, would require careful diplomacy. Most of these maneuvers remained invisible to the troops and cops at the tip of the spear. They got an order and carried it out based on decisions made far above their pay grades.

  When the bus began to roll, the Rivet Joint commander made a call on his satellite phone. After a conversation of several minutes, he switched off the phone and said, “All right, guys. Agent Cunningham is correct; we’re off tomorrow. You know the drill. Sleep in or see the sights. Just don’t do something stupid and make me bail you out of jail.”

  During the ride to the hotel, Gold tried to look for any scars from the war—bullet holes in walls, buildings left unrepaired—but she saw none of that. The bus pulled up in front of a cube-like yellow structure, the Holiday Inn. Beyond it gleamed a pair of silver office towers. Gold thought of her many nights in tents or even on the open ground. If this was how Air Force linguists lived, a job like Irena’s might have tempted her when she was that age.

  “My dad said this was one of the worst areas for snipers during the war,” Irena said. “Reporters used to get trapped in this hotel.”

  “Looks pretty good now,” Parson said.

  “You’d never believe those silver towers got burned up, either,” Irena said. After a pause, she added, “My parents cry every time they come back.”

  “I can understand that,” Gold said. Well, she thought she could, anyway. She didn’t presume to know how people from this land would think. But she’d spent years in Afghanistan, where people also carried a strong sense of place.

  “Home is everything,” Irena said. “Some Americans don’t get that because they move around all the time.” But here, Irena explained, home wasn’t just property you could buy and sell. Home implied a connection with your ancestors, your blood, your history, and your honor.

  Irena said nothing about not wanting to share the land with Muslims, and she’d made clear enough her horror over the war crimes of the past. However, her sentiments helped Gold comprehend the power of the bonds here between the people and their country.

  The fliers hoisted their bags and filed off the bus. They lined up to check in at the hotel desk, blue U.S. government travel cards held between their fingers. Irena chatted amiably in Serbo-Croatian with the desk clerk. During the wait, Parson disappeared. He came back from exploring the hotel and said, “Restaurant’s still open for a late dinner.”

  “I need to get a shower after that long flight,” Gold said. “See you back down here in twenty minutes.”

  After her shower, Gold felt a little refreshed but still tired and hungry. At least her old wounds did not hurt much now; on most days she still felt the soreness. Healing, in all its forms, could take time. She found Irena, Parson, and Cunningham at a table in the restaurant. Parson had already downed half a glass of beer. A full glass of red wine waited at an empty seat.

  “Thank you,” Gold said as she sat and took the glass. Very kind of Parson to remember what she drank. She supposed he had some of his own healing to do yet, physical and otherwise. On some days she still noticed his limp.

  Parson nodded at her, sipped his beer, picked up a menu, and asked, “Irena, what’s good here?”

  “Everything, sir.”

  Gold had tried food in many parts of the world but never here. She ordered pljeskavica, a spicy grilled ground beef. The pljeskavica turned out to be better than any hamburger meat she’d ever tasted, though the seasoning made her thirsty. She drained her water glass just as Cunningham asked, “So for you guys lucky enough to have tomorrow off, what are you doing?”

  “I’m going to church, sir,” Irena said.

  “Guess your aircraft commander doesn’t worry about you getting drunk and raising hell,” Parson said.

  “I attend an Orthodox church back home, but I don’t often get to hear a service in Serbian.”

  “You work too hard,” Parson said, “like somebody else I know.” Gold half smiled, took a sip of wine, said nothing.

  “Oh, it’s not work,” Irena said. “Anybody want to go with me?”

  Gold had planned to take advantage of the rare luxury of sleeping late, but here came an opportunity even rarer. Her job had led her deep into many cultures and religions. And now she could experience something new with a native guide. She felt glad to have another woman along on this mission. Gold loved working with Parson, but she’d spent most of her professional life surrounded by men.

  “I’ll go,” she said.

  “Terrific,” Irena said. “Anyone else?”

  “What the hell,” Parson said. “I’ll go, too.”

  “They say women are a civilizing influence,” Cunningham said, “but I never thought I’d live to see this. I’m out on a Saturday night with a bunch of GIs, and they’re talking about going to church.”

  Parson laughed. “If you tell any of my old squadron buddies,” he said, “I’ll deny it.”

  After dinner, Gold sat up and read from her edition of John Locke before turning out her light. She pondered what she would witness the next day, how she’d feel about it. Through her long work among Muslims in Afghanistan, she had plenty of experience navigating the complexities of a great religion that some had misused for their own aims. Tomorrow, she would come across another example.

  She remembered seeing a news photo of Radovan Karadžic and Ratko Mladic standing behind an Orthodox priest—two indicted war criminals with a cleric. Hard to fathom, but Gold was sitting in a hotel once shot up by snipers who had fired in the name of religion.

  The next day Irena hailed a cab in front of the Holiday Inn. Gold wore slacks; she had no clothing really suited for church, and neither did Parson, who wore a collared shirt and wrinkled khaki trousers. She’d never seen him in a civilian coat and tie, and she guessed she never would. Only Irena dressed appropriately, in a conservative blue dress.

  At the Serb Orthodox cathedral, four small domes topped by a crucifix surrounded a large central dome. Irena explained that the nineteenth-century cathedral’s formal name was the Cathedral Church of the Nativity of the Theotokos, and that Theotokos
was the Greek title for Mary, or the Mother of God. Gold found the copper-colored exterior gorgeous, but when she walked inside, the basilica’s interior took her breath away.

  Chandeliers lit the arches and columns. The scent of incense filled the nave. As congregants entered, they crossed themselves, kissed an icon, and greeted one another. Gold studied the iconostasis, a partition at the front of the cathedral, covered with icons of Christ, the saints, and the prophets. Priests entered the nave through doors in the iconostasis, and they began the ceremony of the Divine Liturgy.

  Gold understood little during the two-hour service, though she knew the moments when the priests chanted scripture, with an inflection nearer to singing than speaking. And then the real music began. Gold needed no translation of the Slavonic hymns. The words almost didn’t matter during what was probably the most beautiful sacred music she had ever heard.

  What she did not hear was a sermon—at least, not one in the lecture format familiar to most American Protestants. Nearly all the service consisted of formal ceremony, clearly with deep meanings for the congregants. Gold had seen people approach their Creator in many ways: through fasting, through singing, through the deprivations of an ascetic life, even through the exertions of a whirling dervish. Now she had seen one more, and for her, the music alone was worth the experience.

  When the service ended, Irena led Gold and Parson through the narthex and out into the street. Several men wearing dark suits, sunglasses, and earpieces moved among the churchgoers. Security, Gold supposed, given the recent news.

  “Let’s go for a walk,” Irena said. Gold took her meaning immediately: Things are a little tense; no sense hanging around and having to explain who we are.

  When they had walked a couple of blocks from the cathedral, Parson asked, “Did you see those big dudes in shade glasses?”

  “I certainly did, sir,” Irena said.

  “Did anybody say anything about what’s been happening?” Gold asked.