Silent Enemy by Tom Young

destination unknown.
Don’t know when we’ll be going home.
     
    If a platoon ran for long enough, the songs became more than jody calls. Put the calls in the right order and they became a story of battle, an epic poem. Literature in its earliest form, a legend chanted by elders, now called NCOs, repeated back line by line by young warriors so they could learn its lessons. Near the end, the soldiers drenched in sweat, the call would change to the minor flats of a dirge:
    I hear the choppers hoverin’
They’re hoverin’ overhead.
They’re coming for the wounded.
They’re coming for the dead.
     
    A tale of victory, but with an elegy for the lost. A reminder of the price paid.
    And now we’re all just a price to be paid, Gold thought. Waiting for the bill to come due somewhere in this endless sky.

7
     
    P arson watched the miles roll by on his CDU display, saw he was nearing the last waypoint on his route clearance. An airway intersection near Aviano, Italy. Beyond that, nothing on the flight plan page but a discontinuity.
    Apparently, the copilot was thinking about the same thing. “What do we do when we get there?” Colman asked.
    “We’re going to have to hold until they decide what to do with us,” Parson said.
    He pressed a button to bring up the edit page on his FMS. Touched a LINE SELECT key to start building his holding pattern. Right turns. Ten-mile legs. Teardrop entry from this heading. ENTER.
    When the autopilot turned the aircraft into the teardrop, Parson placed his hand on the throttles and nudged them back to slow the plane to holding speed. At this altitude, two hundred and sixty-five knots indicated. After five racetracks around the holding pattern, TACC called again.
    “What you got for me, Hilda?” Parson asked.
    “We’re sending you to Rota,” the flight manager said.
    That worked for Parson. Rota Naval Air Station had a nice long runway. In southern Spain, near the Strait of Gibraltar. Small base hospital, but maybe the Spanish hospitals in Cádiz and Seville could help. That is, if the plane landed in one piece.
    “What about some advice from EOD?” Parson asked. “Is there any way to defuse this thing?”
    No answer for long seconds. Then the flight manager said, “Ah, Air Evac Eight-Four, there’s still no consensus on that. Sometimes these fancy bomb triggers fail. A few of the EOD techs think your best bet might be to leave it alone. If you screw around with it and don’t know what you’re doing, you could set it off. But sometimes these bombs don’t work.”
    Just hope for a miracle? Didn’t sound like much of a solution to Parson. They’re writing us off, he thought. They’re giving up.
    “I need something better than that,” Parson said. “Tell them to think harder. Or find somebody who knows more.”
    “Air Evac Eight-Four, we’ll work on it,” the flight manager said. “Hilda Contingency Cell out.”
    There were times to leave well enough alone, Parson realized. He recognized his own tendency to tackle trouble rather than avoid it, perhaps to a fault. While in high school he’d run into a diamondback rattler during a summer hike. The snake lay outstretched across a swatch of sunlight in the trail, but it coiled and rattled when Parson approached. He knew the smartest thing would be to go around it. But a group of hikers was coming behind him. He’d passed them on the way up and he didn’t want to leave the snake there for them to encounter. He threw a fistful of pebbles at the rattler, but instead of slithering away, it only coiled more tightly and buzzed with a higher note. He found a four-foot stick and jabbed at the reptile. When the snake struck at the stick, one of its fangs held fast in the wood for a moment, and Parson saw venom drip into the dust. He raised the stick to throw the whole thing, snake and all, away from the trail. But the rattler fell off, thudded at Parson’s feet, and struck his leg. The bite hurt but did not swell. The enraged