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Authors: Tom Young

BOOK: The Mullah's Storm
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“Fire in number three,” Luke called. A red light glowed in the number three engine’s fire handle. Then the light next to it came on.
“Fire in number four.”
“Oh, fuck,” Fisher said. “Shut ’em down.”
Jordan and Fisher began running emergency engine shutdown checklists. Parson took over the radio calls. He flipped the wafer switch on his comm box to UHF1.
“Mayday, mayday,” he called. “Flash Two-Four is an emergency aircraft. Taking fire. Two engines out. Ten souls on board.” He hoped his voice didn’t give away the fear he felt.
Jordan pulled the fire handles. Luke’s hands played across the overhead panel, shutting down fuel pumps and generators on the burning engines. The airplane was already half dead.
“Flash Two-Four, Bagram Departure. Say intentions.”
“Stand by,” Parson said. The altimeters showed a slow descent. Could be worse, Parson realized. Fisher still had some control. Parson saw him shove the two good throttles all the way up.
“That’s all she’s got,” Fisher said, pushing hard on the left rudder pedal to keep the nose pointed straight. “We’re going down, boys. It’s just a question of where.”
“Right turn zero-six-zero for a heading back to Bagram,” Parson said.
“I don’t have enough speed to turn into the dead engines.”
“There’s rising terrain to the left,” Parson said. “We can’t climb over it now.”
“Damn it. Just find me someplace to set it down.”
“Come left five degrees,” Parson said. “I’ll try to get you into a valley.” Mountains blocked a full turn left, and physics prevented a bank to the right.
Parson could see nothing out the windows except cloud. Inside, the radar showed more lines of jagged ridges. His heading took the plane between two of them. Farther from Bagram with each second, but maybe the landing would be survivable.
“Bagram, Flash Two-Four,” he called. “We won’t make it back to the field.” Parson transmitted coordinates for where he predicted touchdown. Nearly fifty miles from the base.
Jordan flipped a red guard from the alarm bell switch. He gave six short rings: Prepare for crash landing.
“I can’t see shit,” Fisher said. “I’ll just try to keep the wings level.”
“Stay on this heading,” Parson said. The numbers on the radar altimeter counted down as the plane neared the valley floor, but Parson saw only mist and swirling snow. He rotated his seat to face forward for the crash. A smell like burned oil filled the cockpit.
“Loadmaster,” Jordan said, “give us a scan on that right wing.”
“Heavy smoke from number four,” Nunez said. “The whole turbine section’s blown off number three. Fuel misting out of the external tank.”
“I’m keeping the landing gear up,” Fisher said. “Engineer, pull the breaker for the gear warning horn.” Luke leaned from his seat to trip a circuit breaker.
The C-130 broke through the cloud deck, revealing the stark terrain ahead. A scattering of evergreens stood among boulders and shale dusted with powder. Fine snow roiled in the air like a spray of milk. Parson felt a spike of fear deep in his chest. He’d hoped for a nice, flat field.
“Strap in tight,” Fisher ordered. “This is really gonna suck.”
Jordan gave a long ring on the alarm bell: Brace for impact.
“Flaps to a hundred percent,” Fisher called. “Feather one and two.”
Just feet above the ground, Jordan shut down the two remaining engines so they wouldn’t burn on impact. Eerily quiet now, the wounded airplane glided back to earth. No sound but the whistle of the slipstream until Parson felt the first wrenching jolt of a wing striking a tree. Then another, and another.
A scraping noise came from the back of the airplane as the tail crashed into rocks. The fuselage slammed to the ground. Parson jerked against his shoulder straps. His arms flailed. He felt stabs of pain as he bit his tongue and cracked his right wrist against the edge of the nav table.
The left wing separated with a grinding crunch, the sound of metal ripping like the aircraft itself roaring in pain. What remained of the plane swerved hard, sent up an arc of flying dirt and snow.
Then, for a moment, stillness and silence. Parson closed his eyes and braced for the fireball, fearing his flameproof flight suit would just prolong the agony. He smelled JP-8 fumes from ruptured fuel tanks. Breathing the kerosene odor was like inhaling needles.
But no fire came. Parson exhaled, felt cold air rushing into the broken flight deck. Shouts came from the back.
“
Allah-hu akbar! Allah-hu akbar!
”
Then a dull thump. Metal against flesh.
“Shut the fuck up!” Nunez yelled. “Do you fucking understand me? Bet you understand this.”
Whack
.
Then the woman’s voice: “That’s enough.”
Parson unbuckled his harness, took off his helmet, spat out a mouthful of blood. Still stunned, he saw tiny points of silver floating across his eyeballs. He heard Fisher groan.
“I think my legs are broken,” Fisher said. “Somebody check on the others.”
“I’m all right,” Luke said. “I’ll look in the back.”
Parson stumbled to the copilot’s seat, leaned on it with his right hand. That launched waves of pain that brought him to his knees.
“I fucked up my wrist,” he said through gritted teeth. He cradled the wrist with his left hand and examined it. Maybe not broken, but sure as hell cracked and bruised.
The copilot didn’t move or make a sound.
“You okay?” Parson asked, nudging Jordan’s shoulder with his good hand. No response.
Parson pulled himself to his feet. Now he saw Jordan’s open eyes staring lifelessly at the floor. He checked for a pulse at the carotid artery, and when he did he felt an odd bulge at the side of Jordan’s neck.
“I think his neck’s broken,” Parson said. “He’s dead.” It still hurt where he’d bitten his tongue, and the pain slurred his words.
Fisher closed his eyes and grimaced. “See if you can get somebody to help me out of this seat,” he said.
Parson descended the flight deck steps. He found Luke and Nunez pulling first-aid kits off their wall fasteners, and he swallowed hard when he saw the mess in the cargo compartment. The civilian spook sat slumped to one side, his seat belt still holding him in the troop seat. A gash in his skull revealed spongy tissue. One of the security policemen held a compress on the other’s chest. The injured SP was on his back, blood streaming under and through the gauze pad. The blood ran across the floor and pooled in the tie-down rings.
“What happened to them?” Parson asked.
“Shrapnel, I think,” Nunez said.
“Jordan’s dead. Fisher’s legs are broke. Can you help me move him?”
The prisoner sat quietly, silenced at least for now by Nunez’s blow. The woman guarded him. The uninjured SP checked his partner’s pulse and placed an ABU jacket over the man’s face.
Parson climbed back to the flight deck, then supported Fisher’s thighs as Nunez carried him down the steps and into the cargo compartment. Fisher cried out with each bump. His fingers clawed into Parson’s arm. They laid him down across the troop seats.
“Let’s see if I can get outside,” Luke said. He rotated the handle on the crew door, kicked the door hard. It opened about halfway, and the flight engineer turned sideways to crawl through. “I’m going to make a radio call,” he said.
Parson watched him let go of the bent door frame and drop to the ground. Luke pulled his PRC-90 from his survival vest, extended the antenna, pressed the transmit button. He squinted against the stinging ice pellets.
“Mayday, mayday, Flash Two-Four down. Any station, Flash Two-Four down.”
“Flash Two-Four, Bookshelf. Say location.”
Parson gave Luke a thumbs-up, relieved that the engineer had already made contact with the AWACS bird orbiting far overhead. Parson handed Luke a scrap of paper with the crash site coordinates, which Luke transmitted to the AWACS.
“We’ll relay to search-and-rescue forces,” the AWACS controller said. “But be advised weather conditions have everything grounded in your sector.”
“We kind of figured,” Luke said. He stared at the murk above.
Parson heard what he thought was the
pop, pop
of burned metal as it cooled. Blood spurted from the flight engineer’s throat. The radio dropped from Luke’s hand, and he crumpled to the ground. Then came a burst from an M-4 firing out a troop door behind Parson in the cargo compartment. A man in a black turban ran toward the airplane and fell.
Nunez scrambled for the dead SP’s rifle and covered the other open troop door. He fired a trio of shots. The brass casings flipped through the air, rattled as they dropped.
The interpreter kicked the prisoner to the floor, held him down with her foot, aimed her rifle at him.
“Peh zmekah tsmla,”
she ordered.
“Chup shah
.
”
With his good hand, Parson drew his Beretta from his survival vest. Burned gunpowder stung his nose. He heard someone grab the partially open crew door and try to pry it farther open.
Parson felt he couldn’t turn fast enough. But he raised his arm as an insurgent squeezed through the door. He fired two shots from his pistol. The intruder neither fell nor advanced. Parson fired again. The man’s torso jerked as it absorbed the rounds. He still didn’t fall, wedged in the crew door. Parson was pumping bullets into a corpse.
He moved to the crew door, pushed the dead man back outside. The body slumped and lay still in the snow. Parson forced his way through the door, jumped down to check on Luke. The bloodied face seemed like that of a stranger. No breath, no heartbeat. Wounds to the chest as well as the throat.
The broken remains of Luke and the insurgent rested within feet of each other. Flakes melted instantly as they touched warm blood. Beyond the wreckage, Parson saw only trees and rocks diffused by the swirling powder.
“See any more?” Nunez called.
“Not now,” Parson replied. He climbed back into the cargo compartment.
“Negative,” the security policeman said, peering out the troop door across from Nunez. The SP ejected a spent magazine and pulled a fresh one from his vest.
“Where’s Luke?” Fisher asked.
“Luke’s dead,” Parson said. “And search-and-rescue isn’t getting here anytime soon. The weather—”
“Sirs,” the security policeman said, “we need to get ready for another attack. Every hajji within ten miles heard this plane go down.”
“They know we have their preacher guy,” Nunez said.
Parson saw Fisher looking at what was left of his plane, crew, and passengers. Then Fisher’s eyes seemed to rest on the mullah.
“We need to get him out of here,” Fisher said.
“That’s crazy,” Parson said. “You can’t travel with two broken legs.”
“No, I can’t. And the smaller the party, the easier it will be to evade. You’re the highest-ranking guy standing. I need you to take the prisoner and the interpreter, and go.”
“Forget it. I’m not deserting my crew.”
“You heard the briefing,” Fisher said. “This mullah is about as high-value as any detainee we have. We can’t risk him getting freed by his buddies.”
Parson felt dread flow into him like a toxin. Every instinct told him to stay with his crewmates. He looked out into the snowfall. Evade? Here, with a prisoner?
“Mike,” said Fisher. “I just gave you an order.”
“But—”
“We’ll stay with Fisher,” Nunez said. “Leave us some weapons and ammo, and the SP and I will take care of him till they can get a helicopter in here.”
Parson could hardly believe it. He’d always thought Nunez was a drunk whose life amounted to flying from one party to another. But now this. Setting up for an onslaught like a pro.
“You okay with that plan?” Parson called to the interpreter. She was a master sergeant. Maybe thirty-five, blond hair. Accent sounded like New England, but not when she spoke Pashto. Her name tag read: GOLD.
“Yeah,” she said. “Let’s do it.”
“Then get your stuff and keep it light,” Parson said. “Just your rifle and ammo. Layer up your clothes as much as you can.” He hated what Fisher wanted him to do, but now this sergeant and the prisoner were his responsibility.
Parson went to Fisher and held out his left fist. Fisher tapped it with his own fist. It was the same gesture they used when they ran the Combat Entry checklist.
“I got the first round when I see you again,” Fisher said.
“No cheap stuff, either,” Parson said.
He put on a desert parka and pulled a black watch cap over his head. He wished he had snow camo now, but C-130 crews flew over so much varying terrain, it was impossible to dress for all of it. On the flight deck, he retrieved charts from the nav table, folded them into small squares. He found Luke’s backpack filled with flight manuals. Parson dumped out the books and put the charts and two first-aid kits in the pack. He also picked up two sets of night-vision goggles, Luke’s binoculars, and three Meals Ready to Eat. From his own flight bag he took a package of charcoal handwarmers and three bottles of water.

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