PARSON FIGURED THE INVESTIGATION could go in one of two ways. Agents could trace the opium supply backward and target corrupt Afghan military personnel. Or agents could trace deliveries forward to Belgrade and find out who was selling the narcotics in Europe. When higher-ups chose the latter, Parson felt disappointed at first. He’d invested a lot of himself in creating the new Afghan Air Force, and he wanted nothing more than to get his hands around the neck of anyone who betrayed the oath of enlistment by smuggling that garbage. But he had to admit it made sense to go after bigger fish. Irena and her crewmates had picked up intel that established pretty firmly that the boss operated from Belgrade—or at least someplace where people spoke Serbo-Croatian.
The surprise came when Webster asked if Parson and Gold could help in the probe, wherever it led. At a meeting in the base commander’s office, Webster presented the idea as an extension of Parson’s duties as safety officer. Gold and Cunningham sat with Parson as Webster described what he wanted.
“Your crash analysis opened this whole can of worms,” Webster said. “Cunningham can use someone who knows air logistics. And if the bad guys are talking to people in Afghanistan, I can probably use a Pashto speaker, too, if Ms. Gold is up for it.”
Why the hell not? Parson thought. Might as well see this thing through to the end. If another serious accident happened at Manas, God forbid, he could always go back and deal with it. But more than likely, nothing would happen on his watch any more important than the problem before him now.
“Well,” Parson said, “I could sit around here telling people not to run with scissors, or I could go help catch this son of a bitch screwing around with the air force I helped build.”
“I hoped you’d see it that way,” Webster said.
“What about you, Sophia?” Parson asked. He hoped she’d agree to stay with the investigation; he wanted to spend more time with her.
“I’ll help if I can,” Gold said. “But my civilian status might limit what I can do.”
“Ah, I took the liberty of making some calls,” Webster said. “If you’d like—and it’s entirely up to you—the Army will put you on orders as an individual augmentee for as long as you want.”
Gold raised her eyebrows. Then she said, “All right; I’ll do it. But I don’t have any uniforms with me.”
“You won’t need them,” Cunningham said. “Civilian clothes for this op.”
For Parson, that was unusual but not unheard-of. He’d once flown a C-130 into Bangkok on a peacetime relief mission. In a concession to Thai sensitivities, the crew was ordered to wear civvies—not just when on the ground, but while flying. One of Parson’s weirdest memories involved operating a military aircraft while wearing jeans and tennis shoes. He didn’t know who they’d fooled, though. The airplane still had U.S. AIR FORCE painted on the side in three-foot letters. But perhaps wearing civvies made the diplomats happy.
“So where are we going?” Parson asked.
“Sarajevo,” Cunningham said.
“Some folks way above my pay grade have been talking to the Serbian government,” Webster said. “The Serbs plan to help, but they don’t want the Rivet Joint landing in Belgrade.”
Probably had something to do with NATO planes bombing targets in Belgrade several years ago, Parson thought. Didn’t matter. The surveillance jet could take off from Sarajevo, in Bosnia, and listen to comms all over the Balkans.
After the meeting broke up, Webster motioned for Parson to stay. The commander closed his office door.
“There’s another reason I want you and Gold to go with Cunningham to Europe,” Webster said.
“What’s that?” Parson asked.
“Some of the folks at OSI want to hand this off to Interpol and be done with it. In a lot of ways that makes sense. But given the part of the world this is coming from, I’d like us to stay with it, especially if it involves a bunch of ex-military types.”
“The good old FRY,” Parson said. “Former Republic of Yugoslavia.”
“Nothing in that place is ever simple. This could turn into a lot more than dope peddling. So I want you and Gold to make Cunningham understand why this is important. If he stays on task, maybe OSI will stay on task. You know what happened in Bosnia and Kosovo; you flew there. But Cunningham’s not old enough to remember.”
Parson knew all too well the things that had happened there, and he wished he didn’t remember some of it. But how to get Cunningham to understand? He’d have to think on that one.
On their last night at Manas, Parson and Gold had dinner together in the chow hall. Gold teased him that he should call the dining facility by its more correct term: DFAC, pronounced “dee-fak.”
“The military’s getting way too PC for me,” Parson said.
“Yet you’re still hanging in there.”
She had a point. The Air Force had been Parson’s life. He’d devoted himself single-mindedly to his career for two decades. He had enough years to retire and move on to something else, but he could not picture himself as a civilian.
“Yeah,” Parson said, “sometimes I think my glory days are behind me. I just don’t know what should come next. Looks like you have a pretty good plan, though.”
“We’ll see if I do. On some days I miss that sense of purpose I had in the Army. I need to spend more time in the new job before I get it all figured out.”
“And here I’ve just roped you into coming back on active duty for a little while. I thought this would give you only a short break. I hope it’s not causing too much trouble to leave the civilian job for this long.”
“Well, there’s never a good time to leave it. And I hate to leave my friends in Afghanistan, but I know I’ll have to leave them sooner or later. We’re drawing down.”
“You do what you can, where you can, when you can. Then you gotta let go.”
Peering over her paper cup of iced tea, Gold rolled her eyes at him. He knew what she meant. Both of them had trouble letting go. Both had an instinct to try to fix the world in their different ways. And, Parson thought, both of us should know better by now. Yet here we are, on the wrong side of the globe from home, because we have the stones to think we can make a difference.
“You know,” Gold said, “when you’re young and you want to do good, somebody will tell you what to do. Go learn a language. Go learn to fly. But when you get older, you have to find your own path with a lot less help.”
“Ain’t that the truth,” Parson said. Not for the first time, Sophia had found the words to express what he was thinking. He didn’t know what should come next in his life. But he wanted to do something helpful. And he wanted her to be part of it.
The next day, Parson sat again in the jump seat of the Rivet Joint as the aircraft thundered off the runway at Manas. The mountains dropped away and dissolved into the haze below. Gold and Cunningham rode in the back with Irena. Up front, Parson sipped coffee and watched the pilots and navigator work, and he monitored their chatter on interphone and radios. He felt like a crew dog again, and he could almost imagine himself waiting to take his turn at the control yoke or the nav console. For the most part, however, those days were behind him. This wasn’t his jet, and he didn’t know its systems and procedures.
But he did know the sucker had plenty of power. He could see that from the healthy climb rate registered on the vertical speed indicators. After several minutes, the Rivet Joint leveled at thirty-four thousand feet, and the pilots throttled back to a silken cruise.
The aircraft commander put the plane on autopilot and opened his flight manual. The man studied for about half an hour, frequently glancing up at instruments and making sure the copilot had things under control. Eventually he said, “Okay, I’m bored. Nav, can you find us some news on HF?”
“Coming up,” the navigator answered. A few seconds later he said, “BBC on HF1.”
Parson turned a volume knob on the jump seater’s comm box. A female newscaster spoke in crisp tones, with just a hint of an Indian accent:
“In other news, tensions between Serbs and Muslims are on the rise across Bosnia and Serbia following a chain of church and mosque burnings. Officials say three people died in continued rioting today in the Bosnian town of Zvornik, a scene of wide-scale atrocities during the 1990s. The leaders of Bosnia and Serbia have appealed for calm. In Belgrade, the president’s office issued a statement saying Serbs have no desire to return to the dark days of ethnic warfare.”
“Oh, great,” the copilot said. “Why is there always trouble wherever we go?”
“Because we’re in the military, dumbass,” the navigator said.
“Seriously, though, I thought that place had quieted down.”
“It had,” Parson said. “I don’t know why this shit’s flaring up again.”
Parson thought back to some of the earliest missions in his career, when he’d been a young lieutenant not long out of ROTC and nav school. He remembered one night in particular when he’d sat at the navigator’s station in the lead aircraft of a three-ship formation of C-130s. The formation had droned through the darkness, heading for the initial point on a run to drop bundles of food and medical supplies.
On his scope, he saw the blips of the left wingman and right wingman. All three C-130s used SKE, or station-keeping equipment, to maintain formation position on instruments in the murk that shrouded Bosnia. The weather made things tough that night. Clouds obscured the drop zone.
Parson had to “shack” this drop—put it exactly on target. If he missed, intelligence officers had warned, the bundles would fall outside the safe zone. The relief supplies might lure the IDPs—internally displaced persons—to their deaths at the hands of the Bosnian Serb Army, or Arkan’s Tigers, a freelance death squad.
The pilots and engineer wore night-vision goggles, but Parson kept his own NVGs turned off. He couldn’t drop visually in this soup, so he relied on the adverse weather aerial delivery system’s computer to help him. He checked his scope again. Almost time.
“Thirty seconds to slowdown,” Parson said.
He watched the numbers count down on his instruments, bathed in the green glow of NVG-compatible lighting.
“Five seconds to slowdown,” Parson called. Please don’t let me screw this up, he thought. Four Mississippi, three Mississippi, two, one. “Slow down, slow down now.”
The pilot knuckled back the throttles, and the flight engineer began reading the checklist.
“Flaps.”
“Fifty percent.”
“Aux pump.”
“On.”
Parson’s eyes darted between his checklist and his scope and instruments. No room for error now. He breathed through his oxygen mask in the depressurized airplane. The pure oxygen felt cool as it filled his lungs, and it helped settle his nerves.
“Ramp and door.”
“Clear to open.”
A swirl of cold air entered the flight deck as the back end of the aircraft yawned open. Parson could not see the cargo and the open ramp; the flight deck bulkhead blocked his view. But he could imagine the two helmeted loadmasters back there, standing by for his one-minute call. The engineer and the pilots finished configuring the C-130 for the drop.
“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.