Sand and Fire (9780698137844)

by Young, Tom

  “Roger that, Musket. Safe flight.”

  Blount considered what advice or encouragement he could offer to the men around him. All of them knew what they were doing, and he didn’t want to patronize. So he kept his words simple and specific to the mission.

  “Double-check your antidote kits,” Blount shouted over the helicopter’s roar. “Make sure they’re in your left cargo pocket, so your buddy knows where to find them. Don’t use your own on somebody else.”

  Standard procedure. If you feel symptoms, the Marines had been taught, pop yourself with your own injectors. If you see somebody doing the funky chicken, as the instructors put it, they’re too far gone to treat themselves, so you’ll have to treat them. With their kits, not yours. You might be next.

  Marines patted their pockets, shouted, “Aye, Gunny!”

  Looking out the windows, in the last visibility of twilight, Blount discerned a line across the sea. Beyond it the light played differently, as if the water stopped at a giant sheet of cardboard. Across the cardboard, scattered lamps twinkled.

  The North African coast.

  “We’re about to go feet dry,” the pilot said. “You can come out of your LPUs in thirty seconds.”

  Blount repeated the order, shouting over the engines and wind noise. The men waited a few moments, then began unhooking the clasps of their life preserver units. The crew chief collected the LPUs and placed them in a stowage bag. No sense carrying a piece of gear you didn’t need anymore. With the LPU gone, Blount had better access to another piece of equipment clipped to his vest, an infrared chemical light. The chemlight consisted of a plastic cylinder with an inner vial that separated two chemicals. When you bent the flexible plastic, the vial would break, and the chemicals would mix to emit a glow—but not one in the visible light spectrum. The chemlight would appear only to someone wearing night vision goggles and would help distinguish friend from foe.

  Mentally, Blount reviewed the op plan. The helicopters would land just outside the village, and the Marines would conduct a small-scale movement to contact. A platoon of French Foreign Legionnaires would arrive by parachute to provide a ring of security around the village.

  Fire discipline was critical. Classic doctrine said you used a movement to contact when the tactical situation was vague. That sure held true tonight, Blount realized, since no one knew how many civilians remained in the village and what their loyalties might be. Yet again, he faced an enemy that hid behind the innocent.

  Blount thought of something he’d read in high school. His language arts teacher had assigned a story about some dude who took a tour of hell. The guy went through all these different circles of hell, and as he went deeper, the sins of the damned got worse and worse. At the very bottom, there was old Judas himself, forever getting eaten by Satan for betraying Jesus.

  Though young Blount had always thought of literature as something you had to put up with to get to play football, that story got his attention. It was sure more interesting than books about white English ladies worried about who they were going to marry. But now, aboard a Super Stallion bound for a target, Blount thought the writer got it a little bit wrong. Yeah, Judas belonged where he was. But right beside him ought to be anybody who ever used civilians as shields. On God’s green earth and whatever world lay beyond, there couldn’t be nothing lower than that.

  He thought of the child suicide bombers he’d been forced to shoot in Afghanistan. Blount wished a surgeon could just cut that memory out of his brain. The only comfort came in knowing he’d sent to hell the terrorist responsible for all that—on the blade of Grandpa’s knife.

  Over land now, Blount tried to follow the pilots’ navigation to maintain his own situational awareness. He dug his land nav map from a leg pocket and clicked on the green beam of a penlight. The topographical depiction differed from the aeronautical charts used by the pilots, and he had trouble orienting himself.

  “Where exactly are we now, sirs?” Blount asked.

  “I’ll mark it for you, Gunny,” the copilot said.

  The copilot borrowed the land map, took a pencil from the sleeve of his flight suit. On Blount’s map, the flier drew a tiny circle amid a brown expanse. Then the copilot pointed to numbers on a screen.

  “This is distance to go,” the copilot said. “This one is time remaining.”

  Forty minutes.

  Blount looked aft, considered the young faces with set jaws, determined eyes. Each man held his weapon between his knees with the muzzle down. That way, an accidental discharge wouldn’t pierce an engine or rotor blade. In less than an hour these men would face combat, some for the first time. Blount hoped for a quick, surgical strike with no Marine casualties, but he knew some of these guys might not see another sunrise. He vowed he’d do everything possible to bring them back safe. He felt grateful to fly in as stick leader; he could see this thing done right.

  The helicopter droned for another fifteen minutes, and Blount heard chatter on the radio.

  “All stations,” an accented voice called, “Mother Goose is at the baker’s.”

  Blount consulted his comm card, a laminated sheet with call signs and frequencies on one side, classified brevity codes on the other. Mother Goose was the airlifter carrying the French paratroopers. “At the baker’s” meant the plane was at the initial point for the run-in to the drop zone.

  “Twenty-five minutes,” Blount shouted to the Marines. “The Legionnaires are on time.”

  He half expected some wise-ass comments about the French, but somewhere over the black desert, the men had left joking behind. A minute or so later, the same voice spoke over the aircraft radio again.

  “All stations, Mother Goose bought a loaf of rye.”

  Silliest brevity codes Blount ever heard, but they worked. Jumpers away.

  The parachutists needed to hit the ground before the choppers arrived. For obvious reasons, troopers couldn’t float down in parachutes with helicopter blades spinning somewhere in the dark beneath them. The military had a word for avoiding such calamities: deconfliction. So far, so good, Blount thought. We’re deconflicted and on time.

  At this moment, he knew, the Legionnaires were free-falling in a high altitude/low opening jump. The plane that carried them flew so high the bad guys would never hear it. The troopers would land silently and wait, get eyes on the target.

  Blount watched the numbers count down on the cockpit screens. Anticipation and fear rose inside him, the fear harnessed and transformed into focus. Take something bad and make it work for you, he thought, the way a poison in small doses can become a medicine.

  Another accented voice came on the radio, weak but readable, speaking almost in a whisper. A man on the ground.

  “All stations, soft rain on the millpond.”

  More brevity codes. Safe HALO jump, nothing to report on the status of the village.

  Ten minutes to go. Blount called out the time remaining, and added, “Charge your weapons. Bust your chemlights. Turn on your radios and NVGs.”

  On his M16, Blount pulled the charging handle to chamber a round—shack! Shacking reverberated through the aircraft as other Marines did the same. He switched on his PRC-148 and cracked the chemlight hanging from his body armor. On his helmet, which he still held in his lap, he switched on the night vision goggles. But he decided to keep the headset on until just before the CH-53 touched down.

  A few minutes later, he lifted his helmet in front of his face at an angle to peer through the NVGs. He looked at the men behind him to see if the infrared chemlights worked as advertised. Sure enough, on each Marine, a cylinder of illumination glowed like redemption. In addition, everyone wore squares of glint tape on their helmets and shoulders to help identify them as friendlies. Viewed through the goggles, the glint tape sparkled like quartz under a black light. The Marines appeared transfigured, transformed, and purified for some mystical journey.
r />   But when Blount lowered his NVGs, the back of the helicopter went dark as a crypt. He raised them, took another look at his men, lowered them again.

  If a modern artist wanted to render a twenty-first-century ride to the underworld, Blount thought, this scene would do just fine. Lord knows we are bound for a dark, dark place.

  “Five minutes,” the copilot said.

  Blount repeated the time hack. “Five minutes,” he shouted. “Look alive, boys. Welcome to the shores of Tripoli.”

  “Oo-rah, Gunny!”

  A couple minutes later he heard a call from the lead aircraft.

  “Musket One-One has target in sight.”

  “Musket One-Two has negative contact,” the pilot of Blount’s helo answered.

  Both Musket One-Two pilots, scanning with NVGs, looked through all quadrants of their windscreen. With the naked eye, Blount saw nothing out there but night.

  “I got it,” the copilot said finally, pointing.

  “All right. I see it,” the pilot answered on interphone. Then he pressed the transmit button on his cyclic and said, “Two has a tally.”

  Blount took off his headset, donned his helmet, and looked out through his NVGs. Weird sight. From an altitude of a few hundred feet, he could make out irregular shapes, the angles and polygons of a village in the night desert. But he saw not one speck of cultural lighting. Even during the small hours in the remotest hamlets, you’d normally catch the glow of one or two electric lights or at least an oil lamp. NVGs could even pick up the reflection of banked embers from a cooking fire. However, everything that burned or shone in that village had been extinguished.

  Had the place been abandoned? Had the intel been bad?

  Blount didn’t get a chance to ponder his questions. Without warning, the hamlet below erupted with gunfire.

  Tracers slashed the night. A stream of bullets arced up from the village, cut parabolas toward the other helicopter out in front. The helo banked to evade the rounds. On the desert floor, a light source bloomed so bright it nearly washed out Blount’s NVGs.

  The ignition signature of a shoulder-fired missile.

  A dart of light shot upward from the pool of glow on the ground. The heat-seeker corkscrewed toward the lead chopper. The aircraft’s defensive systems reacted faster than a human hand could push a button. Flares, hotter than the CH-53’s turbines, spewed from the helicopter. Burning magnesium set the night afire.

  The missile flew wild, confused by multiple hot things all around it. Musket One-One banked, turned, punched more flares.

  When the tracers erupted again, they lasered toward Blount’s aircraft. The pilot yanked the chopper hard right, danced away from the bullets. Blount could do nothing but hold on.

  “Two taking fire,” the copilot called.

  On the ground, light spilled from another missile launch. Something bright came up, a spiral of smoke behind it. The object seemed to hang in space, with no relative motion to the aircraft.

  That meant a collision course.

  Blount expected to see flares spawn from his helicopter. Nothing.

  “Punch ’em,” the pilot ordered as he whipped the cyclic for another turn.

  Maybe somebody squeezed the trigger for a manual flare launch. But Blount did not feel the soft thumps of igniting flares. Instead came the crack of something striking the side of the helicopter.

  And the boom of detonation.

  CHAPTER 13

  The night seemed to rotate around the helicopter. Earth and sky in night vision green twirled as if creating a vortex to pull Blount and his Marines out of this world and into some shade dimension. Men groped for handholds, shouted curses.

  The CH-53 spun wildly. In the cockpit, tones blared, warning lights flashed: Low pressure. High temperature. Low voltage. Fire.

  Smoke, sharp with the odor of burned oil, filled the cabin. Somebody shouted, “Brace!”

  The chopper struck the ground so hard Blount’s NVGs tore from his helmet. Now he knew only darkness and collision, as if the aircraft were a torpedoed submarine sinking to crush depth. The helo impacted as it swung in a circle, and the torque threw him from his seat.

  The tether on his gunner’s belt was meant to stop someone from falling from the chopper—not to restrain more than three hundred pounds of muscle, bone, gear, and body armor converted into a flying object. The tether parted, and Blount felt himself hurled into space.

  Disorientation, darkness, and concussion distorted his perceptions. He sensed that something dropped him a great distance, threw him down a mineshaft. Motion and violence defined his existence. Things struck him—perhaps other men, perhaps aircraft debris or body parts. Blount wondered for an instant whether he was already dead, swept up with the damned and cast into Hades.

  He landed on his back.

  His entire skeleton rattled with the shock of impact. The pain seemed too specific, too purely orthopedic, for the eternal suffering of the lost. Still alive, then. His mind began to form linear thoughts again, to sense the events around him. Men screamed. Gunfire chattered. Metal burned. Dear Lord in heaven, he thought, we just got shot down.

  Blount rolled onto his side, felt the fine sand of the Sahara underneath him. Somehow the force of the crash had thrown him out of the helo, but he could not remember the crew opening the ramp. He hurt everywhere, but everything seemed to work. Time to get back in the fight. Where was his rifle? He sat up, reached for his NVGs, remembered they’d disappeared, too. He had planned to rely on chemlights and glint tape to tell bad guys from Marines, but the loss of NVGs robbed him of that.

  His mind registered two priorities: find a weapon, and take cover. Everything else flowed as unprocessed background noise. He scrabbled to his feet, stumbled toward the biggest chunk of helicopter wreckage.

  Something tripped him. In the darkness he realized it was a body. Alive or dead he could not tell. But he kicked a rifle as he staggered along. He groped for the M16, smacked the forward assist with the heel of his hand to make sure the weapon was locked. The injured needed attention, for sure. He hoped to God the Navy hospital corpsman had survived, and Blount planned to help him as soon as he could. But in combat, the first step in first aid was to kill the enemy.

  The injured were already calling for help:

  “Corpsman up!”

  “Doc? Where’s the doc?”

  “Doc up!”

  Blount crouched behind a tangle of aluminum. Next to him, a plate of steel rose from the ground like an obelisk. A rotor blade, stuck in the sand. Above him in the night, the other helicopter thudded overhead.

  The village lay only a couple hundred yards away. Cloaked figures sprinted among the houses. The enemy wore what looked like shemaghs or balaclavas over their heads, but the darkness made it hard to tell. Blount flicked his fire selector to BURST and watched for a good target.

  A boom sounded from between two of the buildings, accompanied by a spray of sparks. A glowing dot coursed toward the downed helicopter. Some sort of grenade, fired through a launcher? Blount squeezed his trigger, loosed three rounds at the shooter.

  A second boom echoed when the grenade—or whatever it was—exploded. Blount expected to feel the sting of shrapnel. No stings came.

  He smelled an odd odor. Almost like something you’d smell in a hospital. Camphor, perhaps.

  Oh, sweet Jesus, Blount thought. Help us now.

  “Gas, gas, gas!” he shouted.

  Blount dropped the M16. Held his breath, squeezed his eyes shut. Threw off his helmet. Tore open the Velcro enclosure of his gas mask carrier.

  With the mask in his right hand, he dug his chin into the mask’s chin cup and pressed the whole assembly tight against his face. Blount had been taught to don a gas mask in nine seconds or less. Now, nine seconds seemed far too long.

  Still holding his breath, he pulled the mask’s harness ove
r the back of his head. Yanked at the neck straps to cinch it all down. He cleared the mask by placing his hand over the outlet valve and exhaling. The edges of the facepiece fluttered with the escaping air.

  Next, he covered the filter canister’s inlet port and inhaled. The facepiece collapsed against his cheeks. Good seal.

  Quick. But not quick enough.

  A sickness came over Blount like he had never known. His mouth filled with saliva. He could not remove the mask to spit, so he swallowed hard. His chest tightened as if a chain had looped around him.

  Off to his left, a red pen gun flare spat upward. As Blount’s body betrayed him, his mind struggled. What did that red flare mean? He should know.

  Emergency extraction.

  One of the squad leaders must have assumed Blount was dead and fired the signal to abort the mission.

  More spit, foam, and vomit forced its way into Blount’s mouth. He could not let himself throw up into his mask, so he forced himself to swallow. Some of the vomit escaped his lips anyway and began to gurgle in the mask’s inlet valves. So this was what it felt like to get poisoned to death, how those people had died in Gibraltar and Sig. How Blount’s old friend Kelley had suffered in his last moments.

  He sank to his knees, felt his bladder let go. The warm liquid ran down his thighs.

  Ain’t nobody can help me now, Blount realized. Even if they see me, they’re probably poisoned, too. Time the other helicopter touches down, I’ll have crossed over to Beulah Land.

  He groped for his auto-injectors.

  Blount carried four of them. Three were the newer ATNAA injectors that contained doses of atropine and pralidoxime chloride in one syringe. The fourth contained diazepam as an anticonvulsant. His trembling fingers found one of the ATNAAs. Blount hoped he’d keep enough control of his central nervous system to get this done. In the stress of combat, some folks had trouble even with gross motor skills like slapping a bolt release with the heel of your hand. But self-treatment with hypodermics required fine motor skills, working with your fingertips.