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“Are we on for tonight or what?” Jenna groaned. The women soldiers, Americans and Afghans, were killing time in the mess hall
while they waited for final word on the plans for the evening. Winds were picking up, and a few dense clouds lingered near
the horizon, like eager guests in a doorway.
Marjan shifted in her seat, pulled her elbows off the long table, and placed her hands on her lap. She had been restless,
unnerved since the afternoon briefing on the mission. A red laser light pointed at the river they would cross and the three
roads that connected the village with its neighbors. The laser bounced from the clearing where the helicopter would hover
as they fast roped to the ground, then pointed to the path they would take to approach the village unseen. Then the red light
made wild circles on the compound they would target, where two high-value targets linked to insurgent groups were thought
to live.
Marjan wiped her palms on her government-issued pants. Her stomach felt ready to revolt. She took a sip of water. She could
tell Elaha that she wasn’t up for tonight’s mission. She should have done it right after the briefing, but she had hesitated.
Then came word that they might not fly, and she thought if she waited, she might not have to ask to be excused.
Since waking that morning, nothing seemed right. She’d wondered if she was getting her period or if the cash she’d withdrawn
from the bank might have fallen out of her purse on the way home.
Marjan was always mildly worried. It was the soundtrack of her life, playing on an endless loop. What if, what if, what if.
It had been one year since she had reclaimed her daughter from the orphanage. They slept in one room now so that Marjan could
watch Hawa, curled on her side with one cheek pressed against the mattress. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, Marjan
would move closer to Hawa to hear the light whistle of her breaths moving between pursed lips.
What if I’d been able to convince the Rasulis to let her live with me? What if I had found another way?
She wished she were home now, sleeping beside her daughter instead of waiting for someone to announce that they would not
be flying over that thin bend of river and into a clearing one mile away from the target compound.
“I can’t sit still anymore,” Jenna said as she pushed away from the table. She stood and raised her arms above her head in
a long stretch.
“Weren’t you saying you had a migraine earlier? It wouldn’t be the end of the world if you got a night off,” Gabby said. She’d
been a cross-country star throughout high school and showed no signs of slowing down. But when anyone fell behind on their
training runs at the base, Gabby slowed her pace just to encourage them.
“I said you were giving me a migraine,” Jenna clarified. “And I didn’t bust my ass to get into this unit so I could sit around on a base all day.”
Grunts of agreement. They were, on a whole, an impatient bunch.
“Why did you want this?” Krista asked, mostly hoping a conversation would make the time go by faster.
“For the incredible work-life balance, of course,” Jenna replied with her signature dry humor.
There was laughter at the table. Khatol hid her grin behind her hand. They might not know exactly what was meant by “work-life
balance” or some of the other phrases the Americans used, but the sarcasm needed no translation. Marjan realized she had just
pressed her lips together to stifle her own smile. Soraya threw her head back and laughed with her whole being. She and some
of the other FTPs were more like the American women in that way, comfortable with their joy.
“For me, it’s a family thing,” Gabby said. “My dad served. My granddad served. It’s in my blood. What about you?”
“The angel of death made me do it,” Krista said, grinning.
“You taking orders from the devil?” Jenna asked with a raised brow.
“Satan’s not the angel of death,” Krista chided.
“She’s right. It is not Shaitan. It is Azrael,” Soraya explained, sitting up. “My father used to tell us about him just to
scare us. When God has decided a person’s time has finished, he sends Azrael to take the soul from the body. There is a story
about this. They say God gave Azrael the name of a person whose time was finished. Azrael visited the man. He was so scared.
When he saw Azrael, he knew his name was written on the list of souls and Azrael will return him to God. The man did not want
to die, so he ran far, far away. He traveled for one week and did not tell anyone, not even his wife or children, where he
was going. He covered his head so no one could recognize him and hid in a cave on the side of a mountain.”
“It was not a mountain. You’re telling the story wrong,” Khatol protested in Dari. She could understand English very well
but wasn’t as comfortable speaking it.
“There are a hundred versions of every story, aren’t there? This is the way the story was told to me,” Soraya replied good-naturedly.
“The man slept that night and thought himself very clever, but when he woke up in the morning, the angel Azrael was standing
over him.
“‘What are you doing here?’ the man asked and Azrael explained. ‘God instructed me to take your soul from your body at this
location and on this date, and I have been thinking and thinking, How can I make you travel so far from your home and your
family? But here you are, at this place and at this time just as it was written.’”
Jenna, Krista, and the other women chuckled. Soraya leaned back in her chair and looked over at Khatol for her approval. Khatol
shrugged as if to say her telling had been acceptable.
“But that’s not the angel of death I was talking about,” Krista said.
“You’re talking about the gunship,” Gabby guessed.
She was also the munitions expert of the troop, a recorder of minutiae, and a history buff.
“The AC-130. They fly that beast nice and low, and while the pilot’s making a big loop around the targets, those guns are blazing off the side.
The Gatling fires thousands of rounds per minute. They call it the crowd-pleaser.”
“Crowd-pleaser? What does that mean?” Marjan asked. The only way to improve her English was to ask about every new word or
phrase she heard, even if it meant revealing her ignorance.
“A crowd-pleaser is something that makes a lotta people happy,” Gabby explained with a chuckle.
Marjan saw Khatol stiffen. They were all soldiers here. They had all signed up to fight. Still, they couldn’t help but remember
that AC-130s had mistaken more than one Afghan wedding party for militants.
“Closer, but that’s not the angel of death I’m talking about either,” Krista said. “There was a woman from my town who was
in the Air Force—Colonel Allison Black. She was a navigator on an AC-130 gunship and she was on a combat flight supporting
Special Forces on the ground. Green Berets, I think. She spots some suspicious-looking targets and tracks them back to a compound
in the middle of nowhere, with a few cars and a couple dozen armed guys. She’s on the radio reporting what she’s seeing to
the Special Forces and gets the green light to start firing. She lets it all rain down on them, one-oh-fives and forties,
and in the meantime the friendlies on the ground have an Afghan warlord with them, some general. He’s hearing her voice on
the radio, and he can’t believe a woman is running this mission. He says something like, America is so determined to beat
the Taliban that they send their women over to kill them.”
“Hell yeah,” Jenna says with a laugh.
“So, these targets are just getting wiped out. The Afghan general gets on his radio and starts messing with the targets. He
tells them they’re getting killed by an American woman and even puts his radio on so they can hear Black’s voice coming through.
The general saw the laser pointer coming down from the sky and, hearing all the hellfire, he called her the Angel of Death.
The nickname stuck and he even sent her an AK-47 as a gift.”
“Oh, I know this woman! I heard about her,” Elaha insisted.
“Did I miss anything?” Krista asked.
“I don’t know too much, only that she killed a lot of Talibs that day, maybe fifteen years ago?
I was too young, but some of my relatives heard General Dostum talking about her at an event.
He was telling women they did not need to suffer in the dark the way they did under the Taliban.
He talked about an American woman soldier and called her the Angel of Death.
He said if we fight the Taliban, Afghan women can be strong and free like American women.
This made me want to become a soldier too. ”
“Fifteen years, here we are,” Jenna repeated. The span of time quieted the circle of women. A decade and a half of fighting
the Taliban. How many more years would it take? How many more missions? Some nights were a total waste. Some were wins. But
still, in the distant reaches of the country, Talibs still gathered in compounds just like the one the Angel of Death had
ordered wiped out two decades ago.
“I am happy I became a soldier,” Khatol declared. “I don’t think I want to do anything else. And if I die, at least I die
fighting for my country.”
“Amen, sister,” Krista echoed. “I don’t know how you all do it, though. Signing up for this job when you have to hide what
you do from just about everyone you know. And you still show up smiling.”
“And made-up like you’re about to walk a red carpet,” Jenna added, shooting a pointed glance at Soraya for their running joke.
“If I die, I die pretty,” Soraya reminded them, batting her eyelashes at Jenna.
Marjan stood up to stretch. She was finding it harder and harder to sit for more than a few minutes at a time these days.
Her legs were restless. She had grown restless.
“If I die, I die fighting for my daughter,” Marjan said. The room grew still again at the thought of girls like Hawa. Would
they have the freedom to write music and climb trees and graduate from high school and choose if they wanted to marry? Would
they live in peace or would they need to take up arms too?
How many angels of death did one country need?
“Heads up, soldiers. We’re rolling out in thirty minutes,” an officer announced from the doorway before disappearing again.
Marjan checked her phone. There was no message or missed call from Ingrid. What would her life be like if Ingrid hadn’t decided she wanted to learn more about halfway houses that day? Marjan didn’t want to think about it.
She started a text message to Ingrid.
Is everything good? Hawa is sleeping?
“Marjan! I need you outside,” Elaha called out. Marjan nodded and shouldered her backpack. She glanced down at her phone and
decided against sending the message. She felt an urgency to send some kind of message to her daughter before getting on the
helicopter, though she couldn’t think of what to say. She reread her message. If Ingrid was asleep, Marjan didn’t want to
wake her with such a meaningless note or one that would make her worry unnecessarily.
She deleted her message and followed her commander outside.
“Are you okay to fly tonight?” Elaha asked.
“Yes, of course,” Marjan said, trying not to let her voice betray her. “Why?”
“Because ever since we were briefed on tonight’s mission, you . . . you don’t seem yourself. And if we’re about to take off,
we need everyone sharp and at their best. Is there anything I should know?”
This was Marjan’s chance to say she wasn’t feeling well. She could even tell her commander the real reason her palms were
sweaty just thinking about descending into that village where her older sister, Shahla, had been taken to as a bride all those
years ago. She had no way of knowing if Shahla still lived there. She certainly had no idea if the compound they had talked
about in the briefing belonged to Shahla’s husband.
But Shahla’s husband was related to Abdul Khaliq. And if they were hunting nefarious figures in the area, there was a decent
chance Abdul Khaliq and his family were somehow involved.
“I’m fine. I guess I’m like Jenna and I don’t like waiting around,” she said, trying to sound unruffled.
Elaha looked uncertain, but Marjan knew the hour was late and having a platoon member back out wouldn’t reflect well.
“Mistakes cost lives,” she warned.
“I won’t let you down,” Marjan promised.
Marjan adjusted her helmet and checked her gear for the tenth time, the whirling blades of the helicopter lifting them into
inky skies. There was no running from Azrael and there was no running from this mission. Marjan closed her eyes and put her
trust in the angels of fate.