GOLD SAT WITH PARSON on the ramp underneath the wing of the KC-135. Cunningham watched from the landing gear. Every now and then the OSI agent would pick up his wrench, pretend to work on something, wipe his hands with a rag. Just to make things look right, the crew chief opened a laptop computer and made a show of checking maintenance manuals. He also scattered tools around his computer: a Phillips screwdriver, a speed wrench, and a set of socket wrenches. The rest of the Stratotanker crew went to the chow hall.
“What if the Afghans recognize us?” Gold asked.
“Doesn’t matter,” Parson said. “They know I’m the safety officer. I’m supposed to be out here if somebody has an emergency and rejects a takeoff.”
“What about me?”
“They know you work with the safety officer.”
“Fair enough,” Gold said. “So we’re hiding in plain sight.”
“That’s kind of how a deer stand works.”
Sounded like the Parson she had always known. A hunter at heart. An alpha wolf, ready to inflict violence when called for, but only to feed or protect his pack. And if Parson considered you part of his pack, he’d do anything for you. Gold had seen him prove that more than once. But he probably wouldn’t like the wolf analogy, Gold thought. She and Parson had fought off starving wolves while downed in Afghanistan during a winter storm. Not one of her better memories.
For two hours, nothing of note took place on the ramp or in the Afghans’ open hangar. Inside the hangar, a man swept the floor, then smoked a cigarette. As Gold watched, she felt a stitch of pain in her ribs. The bullet wound from her last mission. Afghanistan had left its mark on her. But the mission that had nearly killed her worked to heal her in some ways. She and Parson had helped rescue kids from a Taliban splinter group that used child soldiers. A mission worth her life. And one that made her feel her efforts had not been in vain. In a way, her physical agony eased some of her mental torments. More than a fair trade, in her view.
While they waited for something to happen, they used the time to continue catching up. Gold appreciated that Parson asked about Fatima, an Afghan girl they’d found orphaned. After Gold was shot, Parson had picked up where she’d left off and used information she’d gathered to find a good orphanage for Fatima and her brother, Mohammed. Though Gold and Parson had never been intimate, she thought of Fatima almost as their daughter.
“When’s the last time you saw her?” Parson asked.
“About a month ago. She’s reading so well now. She even tutors her brother.” As part of Gold’s work with the UN, she had toured schools and orphanages throughout Afghanistan. Fatima and Mohammed lived in one of the better facilities.
“I’m glad she’s learning,” Parson said, “but there are people in Afghanistan who won’t like that.”
Gold knew all too well what Parson meant. The Taliban opposed any education for girls. Terrorists blew up schools, threw acid in girls’ faces, murdered teachers. In Pakistan, the Taliban had shot a teenage girl who had campaigned for girls’ education. Gold offered a silent prayer for Malala Yousafzai, who survived the bullet wounds to her head and neck.
The growl of turboprops interrupted Gold’s thoughts. She looked up, shielded her eyes with her hand. Parson had told her the distinct sound of a turboprop came not from its turbine engines but from the propellers spun by the turbines. A pure jet made more of a whistling noise.
And there came the plane, a C-27 Spartan approaching through a clear sky. The aircraft banked to the left.
“Hey, Cunningham,” Parson whispered. “We’re gonna have company in a minute. A C-27 just turned downwind.”
“I see it,” Cunningham said.
Gold took a pair of foam earplugs from her pocket; she knew the noise of the Spartan’s engines would grow painfully loud when the aircraft taxied into parking. She twisted the earplugs, inserted them into her ears, and she watched Parson do the same thing. As the foam untwisted and expanded, her world grew quieter.
After a few minutes, the Spartan’s wheels barked onto the runway. Puffs of blue tire smoke erupted where the C-27 touched down. The aircraft rolled toward the far end of the runway, and three Afghan ground crewmen strolled from the hangar and onto the ramp. One carried a pair of yellow wooden chocks, each with a three-foot length of rope attached. The men looked at the Stratotanker, gestured and spoke among themselves. Gold removed one of her earplugs for a moment so she could hear better. The Afghans pointed at the tanker jet, and one of them said in Pashto, “He will have room to get by the wings.”
“Are they worried about us?” Parson asked.
“No,” Gold said. “They’re talking about wingtip clearance.”
Parson nodded, apparently satisfied his plan was working. The C-27 rolled along the taxiway now, growing larger and louder. Gold replaced the earplug, and she smelled the exhaust whipped by propeller blast. The aircraft lumbered past the Stratotanker, and Gold noted the green, black, and red roundel of the Afghan Air Force. Through the cockpit windows she saw the pilots—one clean-shaven and one bearded—both wearing headsets and brown flight suits.
The C-27 made a right turn into the parking apron, and the move placed the exhaust and prop wash directly over Gold and Parson. The hot wind burned her eyes and tousled her hair, and the fumes of burning jet fuel stung her nostrils. She and Parson retreated to the other side of the tanker. After a minute or two, the Spartan’s engines finally hushed, and the acrid gale subsided. Parson walked under the tanker’s tail, feigned interest in the KC-135’s boom assembly. From there, he gained a better vantage point to watch the ramp. Still hidden by the wheels, Cunningham began snapping photos.
The ground crew unloaded three pallets. Gold noticed nothing unusual, and Parson and Cunningham didn’t seem to, either. She saw that Parson stayed away from the KC-135’s gear struts to avoid drawing attention to Cunningham’s hiding spot.
Gold joined Parson in the shade of the tail. She faced the runway, her back to the C-27, and whispered, “See anything suspicious?”
“Not really,” Parson said, “other than that they’re here at all. Can’t think of any legitimate reason for them to ship out this much stuff.”
“So what do we do now?”
“That’s really up to Cunningham and the OSI. But I imagine they’ll be more interested in who takes that stuff out than who brought it in.”
“Where’s Colonel Webster today?” Gold asked. “He might have enjoyed our little jaunt down the runway.”
“He would have,” Parson said. “But I think he’s doing the lawyer thing. Checking manifests or something.”
The Afghans left the C-27 unattended for more than an hour. Gold supposed the fliers and ground crewmen had gone to lunch. When they returned, one of the pilots walked around his airplane. He examined the underside of the wings, opened panels along the fuselage and then closed them, checked tires.
“What’s he doing?” Gold asked.
“Through-flight inspection,” Parson whispered. “We advisers and instructors all used to harp on good procedures. Maybe he listened.”
The pilot climbed aboard, followed by the other two crew members. A few minutes later the auxiliary power unit howled up to speed, and one of the propellers began to turn. As the second engine started, Parson retreated to the far side of the Stratotanker. Gold followed him, sat beside him near the crew chief, who continued reading manuals on his computer. Probably not just acting, Gold guessed, but using the time to study. Warm wind from the C-27’s props flowed around and under the KC-135, and Gold felt the smoky breeze on her cheek.
The engine noise made conversation difficult, so Gold and Parson did not speak. But Parson met her eyes, nodded, patted her back. She took his hand, closed her fist around two of his fingers shortened by frostbite years ago. Funny how we can communicate, Gold thought, even when we can’t talk.
She released his hand, and he looked away from her. Parson unzipped a pocket, pulled out a datebook, and opened it. Back to business as usual. As he worked, Gold noticed his scars. When he pushed up his flight suit sleeve, the effort revealed a mark left by a terrorist’s sword, of all things.
The Spartan taxied out of the parking apron. Its wings rocked with each dip in the pavement. The aircraft rolled down the taxiway, turned onto the runway, took off. Banked to the south and eventually vanished.
“The Poppy Express rides again,” Parson muttered.
“Maybe,” Gold said. “Hey—you’re going to have a long day out here. Why don’t I go get some food for you guys?”
“Thanks,” Parson said. “That’s a good idea. When you come back, just call my cell, and I’ll escort you back onto the flight line.”
Gold crossed the parking apron, hoped the Afghans would not see her. No big deal if they did, she imagined. They’d just think she was running an errand for the boss. But she preferred not to call attention to Parson’s aeronautical deer stand. She made it to the flight line’s entry and exit control point, waved to the security police as she walked through the opening in a chain-link fence topped with coils of razor wire.
In the chow hall, she found Webster finishing a late lunch. Across the table from him, she put down her bowl of potato soup, cracked open a can of Diet Coke. Ripped a cellophane packet that contained a napkin and a plastic knife, fork, and spoon.
“So how’s the deer hunt going?” Webster asked.
“Good, sir,” Gold said. “Or at least I think so.”
“I saw we had a C-27 come in from Afghanistan.”
“Yes, sir. They just left.”
Gold took a spoonful of the soup. A little too salty, but better than eating MREs in the field. A group of soldiers, about twenty, entered the chow hall. Gold watched them as they signed in and took their plastic trays. Junior enlisted, mainly. Their camo bore a striped patch on the sleeves—the insignia of the Third Infantry Division out of Fort Stewart, Georgia. Each soldier carried an M4 carbine with the magazine removed. As they shuffled along the serving line, they slid open glass refrigerator doors to pick up apples, prepackaged salads, boxes of Parmalat milk.
From their faded and worn fatigues, from their tired smiles, Gold surmised they were on the way home from Afghanistan and not the other way around. She knew well what they might have seen and done. These troops would return to their communities aged beyond their years. No one, not even their spouses or parents, would ever truly understand what they had gone through. Most of their old high school classmates experienced war merely as reality TV, an interruption to computer games and online shopping, with no personal stakes, no hard decisions, no consequences, no responsibilities.
Webster’s voice brought Gold back to more immediate problems. “I checked some shipping records,” he said, voice low. “Most of what those C-27s bring here goes on to Belgrade. I just called Cunningham to let him know.”
“Belgrade?” Gold said. “Not what I would have expected.”
She didn’t know what she would have expected, but she hadn’t thought the capital of Serbia served as a big transshipment point for opium. Dealers, she supposed, would ship anywhere and any way that made them money.
“Belgrade surprised me, too,” Webster said. “They have some organized crime, but the State Department rates Serbia as only a medium-crime-threat country.”
“Have you ever been there?” Gold asked.
Webster sipped his Mountain Dew, gave a wry smile. “Kinda,” he said. He explained how he’d flown a tanker back in 1999 during the Kosovo air campaign. When ethnic Albanians in Kosovo tried to gain independence from what remained of Yugoslavia, a war ignited between Kosovo rebels and the Serbian military. NATO feared a genocidal campaign similar to what had happened in Bosnia, and the alliance launched air strikes. Webster refueled stealth fighters and other attack aircraft that hit targets all over Kosovo and Serbia, including Belgrade.
“I’ve heard Lieutenant Colonel Parson talk about that,” Gold said. “He flew in Bosnia and Kosovo, too.”
“We thought we were salty old veterans after that thing ended,” Webster said. “Of course, we had no idea what was coming.”
Gold made no comment, just looked around her at the veterans of the post-9/11 world. Most of these troops would have been children when Webster and Parson flew over the Balkans. She finished her soup, thanked Webster for letting her join him. Then she made her way down the chow line again, built roast beef sandwiches for Parson, Cunningham, and the crew chief. As she gathered packets of mustard, a jet landed outside. Sounded like a big one.
Carrying a paper bag of sandwiches, chips, and soft drinks, Gold pushed open the chow hall door, squinted against the sunlight. She called Parson from her cell phone when she arrived at the flight line’s entry control point. He asked her to wait a few minutes. An Antonov had just taxied into parking. Parson shouted over the scream of its engines. In the distance, Gold could see the wings of the Russian aircraft looming across the tarmac, dwarfing everything else on the ramp.