The Devil's Waters

The Devil's Waters - By David L. Robbins




Chapter 1

2010



On board HH-60 Pedro 1

Hindu Kush

Afghanistan

The earphones in LB’s helmet buzzed.

“Where’d he go?”

LB lay still. He’d stretched out on the Pave Hawk’s vibrating floor and wasn’t going to give up his spot just because the pilot sounded a little edgy. These helo jocks were good, and what little they didn’t know about the valleys and mountains of Afghanistan, multiple arrays of electronics could tell them. GPS, FLIR, Inertial Nav—the cockpit up front shimmered with green gauges, digits, and shifty electronic lines. LB lay in the back of Pedro 1, comfortable. He had his own job to do once they reached the village. He lolled his head to the side to glance out the window, into the canopy of high blue over the serrated edges of the Hindu Kush.

Beside him, Wally couldn’t help himself; he had to look. He rose to his knees, pivoting to get a peek out the windshield. The moment he did this, Doc’s boots filled in the vacated space.

Wally’s voice sizzled over the intercom. “Whoa.”

In that moment, the squall socked away the sky and mountains. The floor under LB’s rump and rucksack shook as their copter disappeared into the fat, blowing mist.

Around LB, everyone—the flight engineer, back-end gunner, even old hands Doc and Quincy—peered out the windows. This wasn’t a fascination with weather, how thick a whiteout nature could whip up at nine thousand feet in the Afghan mountains. The men were on the lookout for Pedro 2, the other Pave Hawk on the mission, with its own giant rotating blade somewhere, invisibly, close by.

LB couldn’t enjoy having the floor all to himself if no one was competing with him for it. The others had noses pressed to the windows like pooches, paying him no mind. The pilots and engineer continued their radio chatter. Even in their clipped speech over the intercom, LB deciphered some nerves. He slid back against the door, shoving himself to a sitting position, and shouldered beside young Jamie to get a gander at the storm.

“Whoa is right.”

The HH-60 blasted through the squall at 120 miles per hour. Snow and sheets of fog streaked by in hurrying, purling ghosts of opaque white. Visibility ramped down to zero.

The air frame rattled, suspended beneath the spinning rotor. The HH-60 was built for rugged, not smooth, flying. She was neither sleek nor pretty. The aircraft was designed to be hard to bring down, not much else. Left and right, mountain peaks and sheer walls zoomed by, completely obscured. Somewhere in this same blank morass flew Pedro 2, another HH-60.

“Ringo 53, Pedro 1,” the pilot called to their HC-130 fuel plane cruising two thousand feet overhead, above the storm. “You got eyes on?” “Negative, Pedro 1. Blind on your position.”

LB muttered, “Shit.” The intercom picked this up.

Wally shot him a cool rebuke from behind his Oakley shades.

LB ignored him. Wally was a captain and a CRO, but that didn’t have much juice up here, where all their tails were equally on the line. On his knees, LB squirmed between Doc and Quincy. He stuck his head into the narrow alley between the engineer and back-end gunner for a clear view of the cockpit.

LB didn’t look out the windshield or at the gauges and flowing emerald lines on the heads-down display. He was interested not in computers or satellites right now, but in the pilots, the hands on the controls.

He’d been in this situation before, a year ago in southern Afghanistan, Paktika Province. Same drill: high altitude, sudden whiteout, PR mission. The air force after-report said the copter pilots lost spatial orientation only minutes after being swallowed whole in clam chowder clouds. They stopped trusting their instruments, got hesitant, and decided to abort. They banked the Pave Hawk out of the mission flight path. In the thin air at ten thousand feet, the rotor couldn’t generate enough lift. The HH-60 sank into the unseen side of a mountain. The blades sheared into catapulting pieces in every direction; the fuselage slid backward, then somersaulted into five barrel rolls down the slope. Many miracles occurred in those tumbling moments. When the dented hulk of the HH-60 finally came to rest against a stone hut, in the dust, smoke, and adrenaline, no one had a single broken bone or even a gash, just a lot of bruises and some puking. Wally was there, too; he held up his breakfast burrito and emptied coffee mug. He earned himself a new call sign that morning: Juggler.

Today’s storm raged in northeast Afghanistan; the conditions were lousy all over this country. LB studied the men in the cockpit for situational awareness. Were the pilots keeping it together? The squall tossed them around, but Pedro 1 was built to take enemy fire; it could stand a good buffeting. In his twelve years as a pararescueman, LB had seen men and machines outperform any reasonable expectation, go far past what could be decently asked of flesh or metal. He’d been present, too, when machines failed and men broke. It was always a coin toss what was going to happen.

Wally sidled next to him. He made an okay sign with fingers and thumb, asking how LB was holding up. LB made a sour face. Wally bent his helmet’s mike close to his lips so the pilots could hear him clearly.

“How we doin’ up front?”

“The terrain’s taking us up another thousand. Not happy having to climb in this soup.”

“Stay with it, guys. We’ll make it.”

The helicopter lurched in a stomach-churning jump over a wind burst. Pedro 1 was giving her all. Young Jamie blew out his cheeks, no fan of roller coasters. Wally turned on the four PJs, sticking out an upturned thumb. Doc and Quincy looked to each other. Both were experienced soldiers—Doc a former marine, Quincy come over from the SEALs. Neither had been in a crash. Jamie was the newest PJ. This was just his second PR mission. He waited for the others.

Wally waggled the thumb, asking for a vote. As much as LB enjoyed frustrating Wally’s attempts at leadership—they agreed they’d been together too long—he was the first to stick up his own thumb. This time, Wally was right on the money. The safest thing to do in these conditions was to press forward, fly the flight plan loaded into the instruments, prepped for in the briefings. As long as Pedro 1 stayed airborne and performing along this route, and Pedro 2 did the same, they should rely on their avionics. Flying white blind was not as big a risk as losing confidence and faith.

The blowing ropes of fog and snow drew Doc and Quincy to one last, agonized glance out the windows before they voted thumbs-up. Red-cheeked Jamie made it unanimous.

Wally turned forward, toward the cockpit.

“We got a vote back here, Major. We want to push through. There’s a kid up ahead. He needs to meet us.”

The pilot pivoted enough to eye Wally, with LB beside him. Jamie, Doc, and Quincy came to their knees so the pilot could see the entire team.

The pilot’s lips parted to speak. He closed them, nodded, and returned to his instruments and the storm.

Smartly, Wally slid to sit on the shivering floor before the others could grab all the legroom. The PJs settled in with lowered chins and folded arms to await the consequences of their vote. LB kept on his knees. Wally lifted his chin to him, in thanks for the support. LB hit him on the shoulder, too hard.



The weather broke like a fever, after enough shaking and sweats to exhaust everyone in Pedro 1. The perfect sky and troublingly close cliffs reappeared with only a dozen miles left to the village. LB stayed on his knees, watching the pilots until the clouds parted and Pedro 2 corkscrewed out of the mist fifty yards ahead, right where they’d been thirty minutes ago when the storm stole them.

Wally thanked the pilots. He cast another thumbs-up around to the PJs, but no one came out of their own hunker to respond. LB sometimes felt bad for Wally and his sunny demeanor, his cheerful brand of leadership that often fell flat. Not this time. LB was sore and tasting the bile in his throat from the thrashing of the squall. He wanted to be on solid earth, even Afghanistan’s stony ground.

The pair of choppers barreled through a long, deep valley, carved between sheer slopes along the northern ridge of the Hindu Kush. Pedro 1 and Pedro 2 poured on the speed, beating at the flimsy air to put some distance between them and the squall rolling up behind them.

The pilot crackled over the intercom. “Figure fifteen minutes on the ground, boys. That system’s funneling right down the valley. I don’t want to be here when it hits.”

“Roger that.” Wally tapped his wristwatch at the PJs to keep an eye on the time.

The back-end gunner shoved aside his window. He lowered his visor and put both hands on the .50 caliber. On the left, Pedro 2 slowed and stood off, hovering high above a rocky creek carving through the valley. Pedro 1 surged forward.

LB secured his gear and med ruck, his M4 carbine. He unplugged his helmet from the HH-60’s intercom and jacked into the team’s radio comm on his Rhodesian vest.

He pointed at Wally. “Juggler, radio check.”

Wally responded. “Lima Charley. How me?”

“Loud and clear.”

One at a time, LB made contact with the others until all had transmitted and received. Each team member checked his own radio the same way.

Pedro 1 slowed, hovering several hundred meters shy of the LZ. Out of the copter’s rear, a liquid gush blew from the tank release valve as the pilots dumped two hundred pounds of weight to accommodate the passengers they’d come to retrieve. At eleven thousand feet, every extra pound had to be accounted for and balanced so the chopper, after setting down, could fight its way back into the air.

LB rose to his kneepads. The others did the same in a circle. The chopper descended quickly, squeezing another pinched look from Jamie. Out the window, a stream coursed, swollen with winter runoff from snowy peaks on all sides. The HH-60 zoomed in low over the creek, then halted in midair while the pilots final-checked the landing. With an ease missing from the rest of the flight, the chopper touched wheels down.

The PJs unclipped their cow’s tails from the floor, and Quincy slid back the door. The back-end gunner swept the barrel of his .50 cal across the waiting village elders. Wally hit the cold ground first. LB and the rest formed up behind him, crouching beneath the spinning blades. Dust and small stones whipped at their boots. The elders’ dark chapan coats and beards wavered on the rotor wash.

LB lengthened his strides to pass the much taller Wally, raising a hand to the locals. A younger one, in a blue pakul hat to match his long frock, stepped forward. This one’s beard was the shortest, the hand he extended the least thick. Wally and Doc arrived beside LB. Jamie and Quincy spread out, attention on the first huts of the village a hundred yards off, the steep terrain rising behind it, and the sere shrubs along the stream.

“Welcome to Rubati Yar,” the young man shouted in English. “I am teacher.”

LB pulled off his glove to clasp the offered hand. Wally did not remove his sunglasses.

LB asked, “Where’s the boy?”

“Come.”

Wally nodded, stepping back. He rested a hand on the M4 carbine slung at his chest, near the trigger. LB motioned Doc to follow.

The teacher led them away from the stream, up a pebbled trail into the village. Rubati Yar was made up of a few dozen stacked-stone shacks, corrugated tin roofs, stave sheds, and goat pens clinging to a flat patch on the side of a mountain. One cinder trail ran beside the water ten kilometers downhill, leading west to the poppy fields of the Khumbi Khulkhan highlands. Twenty miles east sprawled Pakistan, twenty to the north lay Tajikistan.

In this sparse, far corner of Afghanistan, a boy had stepped on a land mine.

Yesterday a marine LRP team, walking this high-altitude stream, had been flagged down by the villagers of Rubati Yar. They showed the marine captain a boy in rough shape. Half his foot was blown off; black flesh framed the wound. The marines put in a call to Bagram Air Base for an air evac. The PJs spun up at first light.

LB labored for breath climbing the hundred-yard path into the village. Behind him, the river valley thrummed with the beating rotors of Pedro 2 hovering a mile off, the slowing blades of Pedro 1 near the stream, and high above, the circling HC-130 that would refuel both copters on the return to Bagram. Pausing to catch his wind, LB gazed south, where the squall crawled after them over white and russet peaks.

Doc passed him on the path. Four years younger than LB at thirty-six, Doc was the second-oldest PJ in the unit. Doc smacked him in the back on a Kevlar plate. Both men hauled almost a hundred pounds of medical supplies, weapons, communications, and armament up into the village. A breath at this height was a lot less nourishing than one at sea level.

“S’matter, old man?”

Doc ran marathons. LB lifted weights.

The Afghan teacher held out an arm, signaling that the walk was almost over. The boy’s hut lay just ahead.

Chickens scattered from their pecking at the corners of the village. A black-clad woman faded into the darkness of her hut, eyeing the passing PJs. Boys stood in doorways, dressed like little beardless men in the same woven coats and hats as their elders. Their hands, too, had begun to take on the roughness of this land, their eyes the mistrust, inheritances of such isolation. LB made no gestures, nothing to be misinterpreted. He closed in behind the teacher and Doc through the ancient alleyways of the village to a waiting open door.

The teacher entered first, bowing in greeting. Doc followed, LB behind him.

Inside, a dirt floor lay under threadbare prayer carpets. The window frames held no glass, only shutters. LB imagined the cold this household endured most of the year on the side of a mountain, night broken by homely candles, meals, and heat from a mud oven.

The boy lay in a cot on goatskins. The teacher moved to stand beside the father, who did not come forward to greet the Americans. Deeper in the shadows of the hovel, peering around the father, hid two women, drawing veils across their faces below the eyes. One, the younger, crooked an arm over her distended belly, pregnant. The teacher explained that these were the man’s wife and widowed daughter.

Doc advanced first. The mangling of the boy’s left foot didn’t seem so bad until LB flicked on his flashlight. He caught his breath.

The outer half of the boy’s small foot had been sheared off. From toes to heel, the wound ran jagged as if bitten by teeth, not a forgotten land mine. The part of the foot the kid had left was bloated and purpled. The swelling carried into his calf. In places, the dying flesh had ruptured. A pasty pale green ooze let off a cloying, putrid stench, the signature of wet gangrene.

LB aimed the flashlight where Doc put hands on the boy. He slid his med ruck to the ground and, not pulling the light from Doc, dug in for antibiotics and morphine.

Doc laid a bare palm to the boy’s forehead to feel the elevated temperature of sepsis, then to the quickened pulse in his neck. Doc folded back the hem of the boy’s long robe, exposing the whole leg. Swelling and necrosis stopped below the knee, but were headed that way. Gingerly, Doc wrapped his fingers around the calf and squeezed. The boy moaned on the goatskins. He brought young hands over his face to cover his pain. The calf creaked, filled with gas by the bacteria devouring the foot. In the corner of the hut, the father cringed. Behind him, both women quietly cried.

Doc fired up his own flashlight to illuminate LB kneeling beside the cot, inserting an IV into the boy’s hot arm. He injected one milliliter of morphine to ease pain and anxiety. Because the kid was septic and the morphine could lower his blood pressure even more, he plugged in a bag of lactated Ringer’s to maintain fluids. Last, he piggybacked both antibiotics, penicillin and clindamycin, to slow the march of gangrene up the boy’s leg. LB rested the plastic bags on the boy’s chest. Doc held up the boy’s leg under the knee so LB could fast-wrap the ankle and calf in gauze. The boy whimpered, breaths fast and shallow, then clamped his jaw bravely.

LB walked outside, gesturing for Doc, the teacher, and the boy’s father to join him. In sunlight, the father behind the beard appeared much younger than he did in the hovel. His eyes glowed, raw with tears and worry.

“Tell him,” LB said to the teacher, “his son is going to lose that foot and some of the leg. We won’t know how much till we get him back to the hospital. The doctors will do the best they can.”

The teacher did not look into the father’s face while he said this.

“Tell him his son’s going to live. But we have to go right now. Make sure he knows he’s coming, too.”

With urgency, the teacher repeated this.

Doc said to LB, “Let’s just lift him on that cot and carry him down.”

“Good.”

When the teacher finished translating, the boy’s father whirled in his long coat for the open hut door. Inside, he told the family what was happening. The women wailed until he shouted them silent.

Doc rested a hand on the teacher’s shoulder. “What do you teach?”

The man smiled shyly at the attention. “Reading and writing.”

“Can girls come to your school?”

“No. They have a separate school.”

“Is it any good?”

“I don’t understand the question.”

Back home in Vegas, Doc had four daughters, a wife, and a female dog.

LB turned the teacher by the arm. “Come on.”

Inside the hut, the father stood ready at the head of the cot, the women pressed into a dim recess. The teacher moved to the father’s shoulder. LB and Doc bent to hoist the foot of the bed. Doc lent only one hand to the cot; the other supported the IV bags.

“Up.”

The four maneuvered the cot out the door. The boy, like his father, shed years outside. He was no more than eight, smooth skinned with long black lashes fluttering under the morphine. The women filled the doorway, sniffling. The daughter’s veil had gone crooked from her crying; her mother reached to straighten it over the girl’s puffy face.

“Hang on,” LB said. “Set him down.”

The men lowered the cot to the rocky path. LB walked back to the hut, curling a finger for the teacher to follow. The father trailed.

The women retreated in the doorway. The mother hurried to obscure her daughter’s face.

“Wait,” LB said, holding up a palm. “Wait. Teacher, tell them to stand still.”

The man spoke for LB. The women did not disappear into the house.

From behind, Doc called, “What’s up?”

The father rushed forward, in front of his wife and daughter. He bellowed, waving LB and the teacher back from them. LB held his ground.

“Tell his daughter to take down the veil. I need to see her face again.”

The teacher rattled his head. “This is not possible.”

“Make it possible. Tell Pops here she might be sick. We need to check her out.”

The women watched the discussion from the doorway, with the father blocking the way. While the teacher spoke, the father waved his arms more, raising his voice in ire and pointing at LB.

The teacher faced LB with shoulders down. “He will not allow it.”

“Then tell him to look. Look at her hands. Her feet and ankles. Face and neck. He’s gonna see they’re swollen.”

The father rejected this before the teacher had finished translating.

“He says she is with child. This is natural.”

Doc piped up. “Ask him if she ever has seizures. Ask if she shakes, do her eyeballs roll up in her head.”

The father shouted over the question. He aimed a leathery finger at the boy moaning on the cot.

“C’mere.” LB pinched the teacher’s coat to draw him close. “Ask Mom.”

“I cannot speak to her.”

LB let the teacher go. He stuck his tongue in his cheek, considering what to do. He shrugged at Doc, who shrugged back.

Doc set down the bags to put his M4 into his hands. He moved between the father, the teacher, and the women. Doc spread his legs and set himself. The two Afghan men raised their voices and hands, but neither advanced on the stolid Doc, who held both at bay.

LB stepped around them to the mother. She positioned herself in front of her pregnant daughter, both with veiled faces and frightened eyes. They did not retreat, though the father hollered and pointed for them to do so. Doc kept the man back not with his weapon but with a raised, warning finger. Neighbors came out of their own stone hovels to investigate.

Quickly, LB pantomimed what he wanted the mother to do, lift her daughter’s long frock to show her ankles.

The wrinkles beside the mother’s eyes deepened as she looked at LB. After more loud objections from her red-faced husband, she nodded and spoke.

LB called to the interpreter, “What’d she say?”

“Her daughter sometimes shakes. Her hands and face are swollen, and her feet. She does not need to show you.”

LB returned the mother’s nod.

“It’s called eclampsia. It’ll kill the baby, and maybe your girl here. Her blood pressure’s too high; we’ve got to treat it. We can fix it in Bagram.”

LB held out an arm, inviting. The mother waited for the teacher’s translation, then took her daughter’s hand from atop the girl’s belly. She left the doorway, towing her daughter. Leaving the hut, she shouted behind her into the dark.

Inside, deep in the shadows, what LB thought had been a pile of clothes shifted, rose, and ambled forward. An old man, grooved and pitted by decades of mountain wind, scuffed into the light past LB without a glance or a word. He passed the cot, patting the boy’s head.

The angry father finally closed his mouth when his wife and daughter strode past him without deference, heading down the hill. Doc slipped his M4 back over his shoulder. The teacher, father, LB, and Doc hoisted the cot. Carrying his corner, the father sulked, conflicted, until his eyes fell again on his boy, soon to lose a foot. This was not a bad man.

LB freed a hand to press the push-to-talk on his unit radio. “Juggler, Juggler. Lima Bravo.”

“Go, LB.”

“Leaving the village now. Came for two. Bringing back five.”

A pause, then, “Typical. Roger.”

The cot slowed them on the path. LB grew breathless headed down from the village, just as he’d been going up. The old man and two women arrived first at the copter. They waited outside the reach of the idling HH-60’s slowly turning blades.

The four men carried the cot close to the copter’s open door, easing the boy down. Quincy and Jamie hurried to tend to the women and the old man, who looked to have taken his longest walk in years. The father and teacher intercepted the two PJs.

Wally stepped to LB, lips pursed and skeptical, eyes masked by his reflecting shades.

“Where we gonna put ’em?”

Wally was right to ask. There wasn’t room in the HH-60’s bay for the five-man PJ team plus this whole Afghan family. Pedro 1 had dumped only enough fuel to evacuate the father and son. The two women and the old man were unexpected, another four hundred pounds of load at eleven thousand feet. The chopper couldn’t spill fuel while on the ground. The purge valve was located right below the jet engines. If the exhaust didn’t ignite the fuel puddled in the dirt, static electricity from the whirling propellers probably would. A fuel dump had to be done in the air. The alternative was a fireball.

Wally cocked his head. “You ever think things through before you do them?”

Wally motioned for the chopper’s engineer to hand down the Stokes litter. Reaching to his vest, Wally flicked the comm switch to Pedro 2’s frequency. The copter flew a bone pattern, a slow oval above the valley miles off. Framed between peaks, the storm line crept closer.

“Pedro 2, Pedro 2, Hallmark.”

When the copter answered, Wally informed the pilot to come in for a pickup. Dump five hundred pounds first.

He turned to LB. “All right. Let’s load your folks up. Me and Quincy’ll wait for Pedro 2. These are your patients, LB. You go with them.”

LB loosed a sigh. That had been his exact plan, to wait with Quincy for Pedro 2. Wally had leaped to it before he could say anything.

This was vintage Wally. The man had a nose for credit, what would get him noticed and promoted from captain to major fastest. Staying on the ground in unfriendly territory to assist the evac of a local family would make a nice little act of selfless courage, good reading in the paperwork afterward. LB was a first sergeant, not bucking for more. PJs weren’t officers; CROs were. LB was going to stay a pararescueman. He wanted to wait for Pedro 2 so he could stretch out for the ride back, that was all. But now that Wally had laid claim to the second chopper, LB made a plan. He considered it a game, like chess, to thwart Wally. Not because the man wouldn’t make a respectable major. Wally was a stickler and too good-natured by half, but a fine officer. Wally had guts and skills. LB just liked opponents, and Wally so often made himself one.

Jamie and Quincy herded the family under Pedro 1’s accelerating prop. The pilots intended to take off the instant everyone was on board. Turbulence from the squall was already cascading down the mountains towering above Rubati Yar. The teacher stayed back with the village elders and others who’d gathered by the stream. They grabbed their hats as the winds from the storm and copter built.

The valley grew noisy as Pedro 2 neared. High above, Ringo 53 droned, circling. Both copters were going to need refueling soon. Pedro 2 closed to a hundred yards from the stream and slowed, showing its belly, waiting for Pedro 1 to clear.

Because the boy would be taken off the chopper first at Bagram, he needed to be loaded in last. LB pointed for the father to climb on. Jamie and Doc followed, to help the mother and pregnant daughter climb on. Concern for his two sick kids and the approaching storm had convinced the father to make an exception for these American soldiers touching his females. Last, Jamie lifted the old man into the bay by himself.

LB shouted, “Start strapping ’em in,” and Jamie and Doc began strapping gunner’s belts around the Afghans to anchor them to the floor.

“Quincy, get on the other side of the basket. Wally, we’ll hand him up to you. Start tying the kid down.”

Wally jumped into the copter.

On the count of three, LB and Quincy lifted the boy. Wally grabbed the head of the Stokes litter to guide it onto the HH-60’s floor.

LB indicated the IV bags for fluid and antibiotics lying in the skins beside the boy. “Hang those up.”

“Got it.”

The copter’s engineer found a fruit roll-up to lay on the kid’s chest. LB tossed it back, explaining that the kid was headed for surgery and couldn’t eat.

The rotor spun faster, ready to go. The engine whined to a higher pitch, and the copter bounced, eager to be airborne.

With Wally focused on the IV bags, LB pointed to Doc, then at the kid. Doc nodded.

LB slammed shut the HH-60’s door. Grabbing big Quincy’s sleeve, he ran past the cockpit, knocked knuckles on the cowling, hauled Quincy out of the prop wash.

With no hesitation, the blades whirled harder, the chopper’s wheels growing light on the bare earth. Inside, Wally framed himself in the large window of the shut door, leaning across the Stokes litter and the kid in it.

Wally’s gloved palms flattened on the impact glass. He eyed LB from the rising copter.

Wally didn’t order the HH-60 to set back down and let him off. He knew the gangrenous boy had to get to Bagram fast. Both choppers hung on the edge of the chasing squall. Like the good officer he was, Wally assessed the situation. He took the appropriate action and did nothing.

LB waved up from the fading ground. Wally mouthed the words that had given LB his call sign years ago.

You little bastard.