The Renegades by Tom Young

blizzard Afghanistan had ever recorded. He managed to survive with Gold and their prisoner, but all his crewmates had died. The hurt remained with Parson as if the crash had just happened.
    When Parson stepped inside the helicopter, he saw Reyes examining the imam. The old man had been shot in the side, and Gold held a bandage on the wound.
    “Don’t die on me, grandpa,” Reyes said. “I worked my ass off to dig you out.”
    Gold looked at Parson as he stepped around the flight engineer’s body, but she did not speak. Rashid’s copilot held pressure on a wound to his own arm.
    Parson’s boot slipped in the blood on the floor. He nearly fell, but he caught himself against the cockpit bulkhead. He gathered up his headset, lowered himself into the pilot’s seat, and plugged the headset into a comm cord.
    On that unfamiliar helicopter panel, it took Parson a second to find the control head for the UHF radio. Blood stuck to the frequency selector. The radio and all the avionics remained powered up as if the Mi-17 still waited to fly. Parson pressed the talk switch on the cyclic.
    “Mayday, mayday,” he called. “Any aircraft. Golay Six-Four is down. Enemy fire.”
    To his relief, an answer came quickly: “Golay Six-Four, Cyclops One-Eight. Go ahead.”
    “Cyclops,” Parson said, “we are an Mi-17 with about ten wounded U.S. and Afghan personnel.” Parson followed up with his location, and he described the injuries. “Who am I talking to?” he added.
    “Cyclops is an RC-135 on station.”
    A Rivet Joint bird. A Boeing filled with electronic eavesdropping gear. Not the first aircraft Parson expected to reach in the midst of an earthquake recovery, but he’d take any help he could get.
    A few moments later, the Rivet Joint called back. “Golay,” the pilot said, “be advised an MV-22 is inbound your position.”
    “Golay copies,” Parson said. So the Marines were on the way in an Osprey. Maybe once the wounded got out, he could learn what the hell had happened in the village.
    Parson turned off the APU and kept the radio alive with battery power. No sense tormenting the injured with that turbine screaming. And this way, the crew could hear better if those insurgent bastards tried to sneak up on them again.
    The silence felt strange. Nothing but the whimpers of the patients and the grainy hum of UHF. In the quiet, Parson thought he heard distant thunder. Then he realized nothing could have come out of that clear sky but an air strike. Around the natural disaster, the war went on both near and far. Pain did not stop for pain.

3
    G old kept direct pressure on the imam’s wound like Reyes had told her. She held little hope for the man’s survival. Judging by the angle of entrance, the bullet might have ripped through his lungs. Pink foam flecked his lips. Reyes performed a chin lift to help the imam breathe. Then he moved on to the other wounded. Triage, Gold realized. He doesn’t think the imam will make it.
    The old man’s eyes grew glassy. He stopped bleeding. In a few minutes, Reyes came back, put two fingers to the imam’s throat, shone a light into his pupils. “He’s gone,” Reyes said.
    Gold ripped the soaked compress off the wound, slapped it onto the floor. Blood dripped from her fingertips. Some of it had seeped under her nails and formed burgundy stains as if she’d dug barehanded into red soil. She wiped her fingers on her ACU trousers.
    “I’m sorry,” she said.
    “I thought the old guy was home free when we got him out,” Reyes said.
    There’s no such thing as home free, Gold thought. But why had the insurgents attacked now? Couldn’t they see this was a relief operation?
    In her training, she’d studied not just language but religions and cultures. Her own faith and interests led her deeper into philosophy and theology. And as she looked down at the imam, she thought of an old Talmudic teaching:
To take one life is to kill the whole world.
    Beside him lay two other patients who