Read Warriors (9781101621189) for Free Online Page A

last words on the cockpit voice recorder would reveal any hints about the contraband. She doubted it, but she intended to translate anything she heard on that recording, no matter how trivial it might seem.
    â€œWhen do you think we’ll have the recording back?” Gold asked.
    â€œWe’ve shipped some evidence, including the CVR, back to the States,” Parson said. “They’ll send us the audio file over the SIPRNet.”
    Parson’s reference to the classified computer net made Gold doubly glad she’d maintained her top secret clearance. She hadn’t expected to need it with her new job, but both the government and civilian employers valued anyone with a TS, so you didn’t let such a clearance expire if you could help it. Gold considered for a moment whether she and the two men should even be discussing this in the rec center if any part of the matter was classified. No one else was listening, and a Toby Keith tune blasted over the speakers. But just to be safe, she decided to steer the conversation to more routine aspects of the problem.
    â€œSo how do you piece together what happens in a crash?” Gold asked. She took a sip of the wine Parson had brought her. She’d expected cheap stuff, but the red tasted rich and smoky. Not what she thought she’d find in a prefab building with country music on the CD player.
    â€œYou try not to make any assumptions,” Parson said, “and you listen to what the evidence tells you.”
    â€œSounds like prosecuting a case,” Webster said.
    â€œI saw the crash,” Parson said, “so that helps, and a wind shear event is pretty simple. But you still have to look at stuff like why they didn’t go missed-approach early enough to make it.”
    He’s in his element, Gold thought. She admired competence, and though Parson certainly had his rough edges, he spoke the language of aviation as if he’d invented it himself. She’d watched him fly a crippled C-5 Galaxy while badly hurt and in terrible pain. Gold remembered how he’d marshaled the combined skills of his crew to save his passengers—some of them, at least. This time, however, Parson could not save anyone; he could only try to keep other crews from making the mistakes that had killed the three fliers.
    â€œYou look at all the links in the chain,” Webster said.
    â€œYeah,” Parson said. “When something bad happens, it’s almost never because of just one thing. You get a chain of errors and missed opportunities and bad attitudes, and they link up to cause a damned disaster like we just had out there.” Parson gestured toward the runway with his beer hand, sloshing a little over his fingers. “Shit,” he said.
    â€œWe teach aviators to look for accident chains as they form,” Webster said. “If you remove one link, then there’s no disaster.”
    â€œHow do you do that?” Gold asked.
    â€œYou change what’s happening,” Webster said.
    â€œLike if you just heard the tower give a wind shear warning,” Parson said, “and you see you’re coming down at about eight thousand feet per minute, you don’t just sit on your ass and ride it in. You push up the throttles and go the fuck around.”
    Gold could feel Parson’s anger over the accident. He had not trained this crew himself, but he’d helped train many other Afghan fliers, and he’d put a lot of sweat and even some blood into helping them create a professional air force. To see an Afghan crew die in what he appeared to regard as a preventable crash—while smuggling drugs, no less—must come as an awful disappointment.
    She couldn’t do much for Parson until the CVR recording came back, so she decided to change the subject. Maybe get everyone’s mind off the destruction that had happened only steps away.
    â€œColonel,” she said, “it sounds like you have an interesting