The Mullah's Storm

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Authors: Tom Young

BOOK: The Mullah's Storm
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Table of Contents
 
 
 
ALSO BY THOMAS W. YOUNG
 
The Speed of Heat:
An Airlift Wing at War in Iraq and Afghanistan
 
 
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, 80 Strand,
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
 
Copyright © 2010 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.
The mullah’s storm / Thomas W. Young.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-101-44320-0
1. Soldiers—Fiction. 2. Afghan War, 2001—Fiction. 3. Survival after airplane accidents, shipwrecks, etc.—Fiction. 4. Prisoners of war—Fiction. 5. Taliban—Fiction. 6. Afghanistan—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3625.O97335M
813’.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 CHIEF MASTER SERGEANT FRED WILLIAMS
CHAPTER ONE
 
A
leaden overcast covered the sky above Bagram Air Base, Afghanistan, hanging so thick and low that the afternoon became a long twilight. Peaks of mountains surrounding the Shomali Plain disappeared into the cold, gray mist.
Inside the C-130 Hercules transport plane, Major Michael Parson blew into his cupped hands to warm them, then pulled on his Nomex gloves. He donned his flight helmet and turned up the interphone volume at the navigator’s panel.
The rest of the crew strapped in. The pilot and aircraft commander, Lieutenant Colonel Fisher, adjusted his boom mike and said, “If we don’t get out of here soon, we won’t get out at all.”
Parson’s weather sheet told him why. The coded forecast read: “+BLSN, PRESFR.” Heavy blowing snow. Pressure falling rapidly.
At the flight engineer’s station, between the pilots and just forward of Parson, Sergeant Luke tapped on his calculator. With his grease pencil, he wrote numbers on a laminated takeoff card, then handed the card to Fisher.
“They need to get that son of a bitch out here now,” said the loadmaster, Sergeant Nunez. Nunez was back in the cargo compartment; Parson heard him on the interphone.
A blue van stopped in front of the airplane.
“Here he is,” said the copilot, Lieutenant Jordan. He tapped his fingers on the side console.
Two security policemen bearing M-4 rifles escorted the prisoner, a high-ranking Taliban mullah. They guided him out of the van and steered him toward the crew door, just downstairs from the cockpit. Shackles bound his hands and feet; he had just enough length of chain between his ankles to mount the steps. He wore blacked-out goggles. Long beard more gray than black. Desert camo coat and prison overalls.
Parson thought the mullah looked smaller and more frail than he had on CNN. But that had been just brief clips of the man exhorting crowds at Friday prayers, or older footage of him when his hair was all black, hoisting a Stinger launcher triumphantly over the smoking wreckage of a Soviet helicopter.
A woman in an Army uniform followed the prisoner. An interpreter, Parson assumed. A middle-aged, bald man in civilian clothes accompanied her. Agency, Parson guessed.
From the cargo compartment, Parson heard chains clanking as Nunez and the security police seated the mullah. Nunez was singing loudly,
“Guantanamera, guajira guantanamera, guantanamehhhhhra. . . .”
“Don’t do that,” Parson said over the interphone.
“Why not?” Nunez asked.
“It’s not professional. And they’re closing Gitmo, genius.”
“That’s all right. We got other places to put these
pendejos
.”
“Ready for checklists?” Fisher said. An order, not a question. “Let’s get these engines started.”
Terse, clipped commands crossed the interphone and radios, and the roar of spinning turboprops split the winter stillness. Parson scrunched his nose at the odor of jet fuel exhaust until Nunez closed the crew door. Large snowflakes splattered onto the windscreen and turned to running droplets on the glass. The cargo plane began lumbering, and Parson noticed the snowflakes getting smaller and flying sideways. The mountains off the far end of the runway dissolved in a white haze.
“Flash Two-Four, Bagram Tower. Clear for takeoff, Runway Two-One.”
Fisher lined up on the runway and advanced the throttles. Parson felt the vibration in his shoulders through his flak vest, and the acceleration pushed him back in his seat. The runway centerline stripes grew shorter and shorter until Jordan said, “Go,” and the ground fell away. A moment later, the windscreen went solid gray as the C-130 entered the cloud deck.
“Positive rate,” Fisher called. “Gear up.”
Parson watched his radar screen as the airplane climbed. In terrain-mapping mode, it showed the mountains ahead as if they were a green photograph.
“How are we doing, nav?” Jordan asked.
“You’re good as long as you stay on the departure procedure,” Parson said. He cross-checked the radar screen with his chart, monitored the plane’s progress. On the pilots’ instrument panel, he saw the digital numbers on the radar altimeter running down, then up, then back down. A mountain, then a valley, then another ridge.
Parson looked forward to breaking out above the cloud layer. Fisher would level off and put the Herk on autopilot. Nunez would make coffee. Luke would probably want to borrow Parson’s copy of
Shooting Sportsman.
Easy mission from then on.
Just as Parson turned back to his radar screen, missile warning tones shrieked through the cockpit.
Fisher whipped the yoke to the right, rolled the C-130 into a steep bank. Parson’s arms grew heavy with the pull of G forces.
“Flares, flares,” Jordan called. “Missile three o’clock.”
Parson grabbed the pistol-grip trigger for the antimissile flares. Punched off a salvo. The flares torched across the sky, trailing parabolas of smoke through the clouds. Parson hoped the fast turn and the flares, burning hotter than the engines, would fool the heat-seeker.
It was not enough.
An explosion rocked the airplane. Impact somewhere out on the right wing. Fragments slammed against the fuselage, sounded like thrown gravel. The aircraft yawed to the right. Then it began to vibrate hard. On the instrument panels, white needles inside black gauges trembled into unreadable blurs.

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