by Young, Tom
Blount felt for the injector’s safety cap. Which end was the cap and which was the needle? Working blind, straining to focus despite nausea and panic, he fumbled with the injector. He knocked off the safety cap, then dropped the whole thing. Lord in heaven. He swept his hands through the sand around him. His fingers closed around a cylindrical object. Blount grabbed the ATNAA by what he thought was the safety end, cap now gone.
Wrong end. The pressure-activated spring punched the needle through his glove. Through his palm, and between his metacarpal bones. All the way through his hand. The antidote squirted uselessly into the air.
Blount let out a growl of pain, frustration, and anger at himself. The foul liquid sloshing inside his gas mask entered his mouth. He coughed and spat. Jerked the needle out of his hand and threw it to the ground.
He tore off his gloves. That put him at risk of absorbing chemical agents through his skin. But he already had enough of that mess inside him to make him deathly sick, and the poison would kill him if he couldn’t get medicine into his bloodstream. He had only two tries left. As stick leader and team chief, he needed to get himself straightened out and functioning.
Tracers flashed around him. Some incoming, some outgoing. He dug into his pocket for another injector.
Sweat slicked his fingers, ran down his back. Breathing came harder, like somebody was twisting and tightening that chain around his ribs. How long before he couldn’t breathe at all?
Blount clutched a fresh ATNAA. He’d just learned the hard way that the needle end was a little more narrow than the safety end. He ran his middle finger along the barrel of the injector, found the safety cap. Pulled off the cap. Jammed the other end against his left thigh.
The hypodermic slammed home. Felt more like a knife than a needle. The cords of Blount’s leg muscles clamped around the cold stainless steel and heightened the pain. The antidote coursed into his flesh like liquid fire.
Every instinct screamed for him to pull that thing out and make it stop hurting. But he held the needle for a ten-count. Then he withdrew the injector, dropped it to the desert floor. Procedure called for him to pin the spent ATNAA to his clothing, but he didn’t have time to fool with that now. Blount jammed his hand into his pocket for the last ATNAA.
He didn’t feel any better yet. Bile rose in his throat. He swallowed hard. Least I got something to do while I’m dying, he thought. He found the injector and popped off the cap. Pressed the business end to his left thigh.
This time hurt even worse. Pain blazed the length of his entire leg. Blount found the discipline to leave the needle in for ten seconds only by taking his hand completely off the injector. He let the needle hang embedded in his thigh for what felt like ten seconds—he forgot to count—then yanked it out and dropped it.
Then he realized he had another problem. Every breath came with more effort. Blount suspected the difficulty had more to do with the mask than with his lungs. Though he’d tried to swallow the vomit and spit, the fluid clogged the mask. He tried to pull in another drag of air. Got nothing in his nostrils but his own bodily fluids. He coughed hard, and that cost him the last of the air remaining in his lungs.
With the mask off, he’d likely die of chemical poisoning. With the mask on, he would surely suffocate.
Blount tore the mask from his face. Vomit splashed onto his head and neck. He shut his eyes tight and held his breath until his lungs shrieked for air. Maybe if he could delay breathing for just a few seconds the poison around him would dissipate more. He remembered an instructor’s credo in water survival: Breathing is a luxury.
Not anymore.
He opened his mouth, took in a breath, deep and ragged. That started a spasm of coughing, but at least if he was coughing, he was getting air. He didn’t smell any chemicals now, but with his nervous system in this state he didn’t trust any of his senses. Oh, God, did he feel sick. More fluid forced its way up from his stomach and into his mouth. He spat out the vomit. Groped for the anticonvulsant injector.
The CANA injector—Convulsant Antidote for Nerve Agent—flared wider near the safety end than the ATNAAs, so it felt different in Blount’s hand. But it worked the same way. He removed the cap and touched the CANA to the back of his thigh.
Blount cried out, shouted words he never wanted people to hear him say. He’d always thought he possessed high pain tolerance, but this poison and these stabbing needles were breaking down his self-control. He didn’t like that at all. You had to master your own self all the time, he believed. Sick was no excuse.
He counted to ten out loud. Removed the needle and threw the injector as far as he could. Found his rifle on the ground. Picked it up and shook it, muzzle down, to clear any sand that might have entered the bore.
The M16 seemed so heavy. He felt so weak, and Blount never felt weak. The night grew brittle around him, as if he would need to crack through a barrier to move forward. Was that the poison talking? Or the medicine? And why wasn’t the medicine working any better? He tried to shoulder the rifle, make somebody pay for doing this to him and his Marines.
But he couldn’t make the weapon do what he wanted. The signals between his brain and his hands got all gummed up, like a computer about to crash. The fingers of his right hand spasmed, hit the trigger. Loosed three rounds up into the darkness. Not aimed fire but an accidental discharge.
Lord. Blount had never, ever let a weapon go off by accident. And he’d have given the devil’s own wrath to any eight-ball private who did.
His vision went grainy. A few hundred yards to his right, the other helicopter settled toward the ground. Dim figures ran toward him from several directions. Friends or foes? Hard to say. Some of them were shooting. Were they shooting at the helicopter? The poison that made him so sick also made it hard to think. The men coming at him must be Marines. He’d let them help him into the chopper. In a minute he’d feel better and then he could do something useful.
He tried to move to the men running toward him. But his feet and knees would not take orders from his head. Blount swayed, fell down hard. He let go of the rifle so he wouldn’t shoot his friends. Tried to sit up but could not.
Four men reached him. He raised his arm, expected an extended hand to bring him to his feet.
Instead he got a kick in the side.
“What the . . .” Blount said.
He saw that the men wore gas masks. Different model.
A boot slammed him in the head. The men grabbed at his arms and legs. He started to bring up the rifle but another boot kicked the weapon away. He clenched his fists, tried to swing. No use; he could generate no force. One of the men began to shout orders to the others.
The gas mask muffled the words. But in Blount’s last moment of consciousness, he recognized the language. Arabic.
CHAPTER 14
Parson realized something was wrong as soon as the STU phones lit up. The ringing of one secure telephone unit might mean routine communication. But when all three secure lines rang nearly at once, as computers pinged with flash traffic and the VHF and UHF radios buzzed, you knew you had a problem. The noise level in the ops center rose. Two duty officers, both of them captains, answered the first two calls; each held a receiver to one ear while using a fingertip to close the opposite ear. Parson did the same when he grabbed the third call.
“Kingfish ops,” he said. “Colonel Parson.”
“Sir, this is Captain Adam Privett. I’m in the TACLOG of the USS Tarawa. We just lost a helicopter at Objective Thomas Jefferson.”
Parson scanned a room full of junior officers and NCOs. The worst had happened, the Marines needed help, and the lives of a lot of good men might depend on what happened in this operations center in the next few minutes.
“I got pararescue on Alpha Alert,” Parson said.
“We’ll take whatever you got, sir.”
“Gimme your nine-line.”
Pa
rson slid a pen from the sleeve of his flight suit. Flipped open a writing pad to take notes on the nine standard elements of information for a rescue. He already knew the coordinates of the site, as well as the frequencies and call signs of the aircraft involved. But when Privett came to line four, Parson knew this was no ordinary rescue. As the Marine officer spoke, Parson jotted on his pad:
4) Special equip—MOPP gear
5) Number patients—unknown
6) Site security—unknown
The worst news came at line nine, for nuclear-biological-chemical contamination.
9) Chemical contamination confirmed
Parson had never faced anything quite like this: ordering crews into a mission so bad that rockets and bullets were the least of their problems. Suit up, boys; you’re flying into a cloud of poison. He had no time to agonize over it. He cradled the phone on his shoulder and called out to one of his captains.
“Tell Pedro they’re alerted,” Parson said. “I want ’em in here in two minutes.”
“Yes, sir.”
Within ninety seconds, two Pave Hawk rescue helicopter crews—call signs Pedro One-One and Pedro One-Two—showed up for a quick mission brief. Four pilots, six pararescuemen, two flight engineers, and two aerial gunners awaited orders. The pararescuemen—also known as PJs—lugged medical rucks and wore kneepads over the legs of their flight suits. All the crew members carried M4 carbines, the weapons’ rails bristling with optics, flashlights, and forward hand grips. The men also carried M9 pistols in thigh holsters.
Everyone seemed alert but not tense. One crewman had a tin of Skoal stuffed behind a pair of medical shears on his tactical vest. None of them sat down. They crowded around Parson to listen for instructions, arms folded across pouches bulging with spare magazines and handheld radios.
“Guys, you gotta go in MOPP Four,” Parson said. “Alarm Black at the crash site.”
“We’re ready to suit up, sir,” one of the pilots said.
Like all his crewmates, the pilot looked to be in his late twenties. He wore a black patch on his sleeve that read PEDRO 66. Parson recognized that call sign; the flier wore the patch in honor of five members of a rescue crew killed in a 2010 crash in Afghanistan.
“Two Marine CH-53s assaulted the objective,” Parson went on. “Musket One-One and Musket One-Two. Musket One-Two got shot down. One picked up all the survivors they could carry. They had to abort the mission, and they did confirm the presence of chemical weapons.”
“Enemy personnel still at the site?” another pilot asked.
“Unknown,” Parson said.
Parson printed out a weather sheet for the pilots while the enlisted crew members ran to their aircraft. Setting up to fly with chem gear would delay takeoff for a few minutes, but that couldn’t be helped. At least the weather cooperated, sort of. No cloud ceiling, visibility four miles in dust. Not ideal, but the Pave Hawks could look for survivors with infrared imaging as well as night vision goggles. A man on the desert floor—at least a living man—would appear as a warm object contrasted against a cooler background. Much of the night remained, so the crews still had the advantage of operating in darkness.
The pilots jogged across the ramp to their waiting Pave Hawks. Parson stayed close to his computer, radios, and secure phones, but he stepped outside for a moment to see the helicopters take off. The ramp’s floodlights gave off a glow softened by the dust in the air. A few of the brightest stars burned through, and in the haze, they glittered with the uncharacteristic colors of amethyst and garnet. The evening seemed almost pleasant, as if nature itself beckoned crews into the night, only to suck them into a toxic trap.
The Pave Hawk fliers had already suited up with helmets, gloves, and masks. The hoses of their chem gear snaked from the masks to electric blowers that supplied the men with scrubbed air to breathe. They closed their doors, manned their guns, and taxied across the tarmac, rotors kicking up grit, strobe lights flashing underneath the tail booms. At the departure end of the runway, the Pave Hawks levitated into the darkness.
As soon as Parson got back to his desk, a call came over the UHF radio. He recognized the call sign of the AWACS plane monitoring the battle space and coordinating all the air assets.
“Kingfish, Kingfish,” the voice said. “This is Monticello.”
A master sergeant on Parson’s staff lifted the hand mike of the Thales radio. Thumbed the transmit button and said, “Monticello, Kingfish. Go ahead.” The sergeant was talking to an AIO, an airborne intelligence officer aboard Monticello. The secure-voice radio lent a warbling sound to the AIO’s words as the system decrypted the signal.
“Kingfish, be advised the Marines report four missing. The French Foreign Legion reports two paratroopers missing. Names to follow.”
Six missing? Parson wondered what the hell was going on out there. He slid his notepad closer, took out his pen.
“Kingfish ready to copy,” the sergeant said.
Parson wrote down the names as the AIO spoke.
“Missing personnel are as follows: Legionnaire First Class Ivan Turgenev, Adjutant José Escarra, Corporal Tony Fender, Corporal Mark Grayson, Sergeant Daniel Farmer, Gunnery Sergeant A. E. Blount.”
Parson stopped writing after scribbling Farmer. Had he heard that last name right?
Please don’t let it be him, Parson thought. No, that’s not the right attitude, he told himself. No matter who it is, he’s somebody’s son or father. But please don’t let it be Blount. The big Marine with the big heart had gone through enough already. Parson had seen Blount’s great compassion for Afghan orphans. He’d also witnessed Blount’s wrath unleashed on a terrorist in Afghanistan—one of the most frightening things Parson had ever beheld. He remembered thinking it was a damn good thing that kind of strength got tempered by Marine Corps discipline and a strong moral compass.
“Ask him that last name again,” Parson said.
The sergeant relayed the question.
“Gunnery Sergeant A. E. Blount,” came the answer.
Parson held his pen over the page, as if not writing it down would stop it from coming true. He knew Blount had a family, and he thought he’d even heard something about Blount getting out of the military. Why did this have to happen now?
He closed his eyes for a second, wrote down the name.
CHAPTER 15
Blount was riding.
His mind, passing in and out of consciousness, registered that he was rolling along, lying on the ridged bed of a pickup truck. He knew little else with certainty. In a muddled state of awareness, he could not distinguish between reality, dream, and memory. The metal furrows of the truck bed made it hard to find a comfortable position, but in his fatigue he did not care.
The ride felt familiar, and he thought he recognized his situation. Exhausted from pulling ground leaves, he had fallen asleep in the back of his grandfather’s truck on the way from the tobacco field. They’d get back to the house in a few minutes. He’d need to use Gojo to scrub the tobacco gum from his hands, because Grandpa wouldn’t let him sit at the supper table until he’d washed up. The gritty pumice of the hand cleaner would grind off the black gum, but only time would remove the stains. If he was this tired, he must have earned his meal of hoecakes, butter beans, stewed tomatoes, string beans, and peach pie.
He started to raise up to see if Digger was in the truck with him. Why was it dark out?
A boot slammed him in the chest and knocked him back down onto the truck bed.
Voices shouted in Arabic. Through his squinted eyes Blount made out indistinct figures leaning over him in the night, spitting and yelling. He felt so weak. Not from work but from sickness. His weapon was gone. But maybe he had enough strength . . .
He let instinct and muscle memory take over. Glow from inside the cab gave him enough light to see. When the nearest enemy leaned a little too close, Blount sprang to a sitting po
sition. He grabbed the man by the shirt, yanked him down. The man twisted as he fell and landed with his back against Blount’s chest. Blount slid his right arm under the man’s chin, encircling the neck. To create a choke hold, Blount grabbed his own left bicep with his right hand. Great ropes of muscle now locked the terrorist’s throat. Blount leaned forward, squeezed hard. Let out a long growl as he clamped down, his arms functioning as a vise. The death embrace seemed almost intimate. The odor of the man’s sweat filled Blount’s nostrils. Up close, Blount noticed acne underneath the man’s beard, the rat-like tilt of his nose.
The man began to gurgle and kick, as blood no longer flowed to his brain and air no longer reached his lungs. And if Blount could get the angle right, maybe he could send this son of a bitch to hell a little faster by breaking his neck.
“You wanna be a martyr, Rat Face?” Blount hissed. Clamped tighter.
The butt of an AK-47 smacked the side of Blount’s head. A foot stomped his leg. Still he held on to his prey, squeezing the life out of it. The man gurgled louder. His tongue lolled from his mouth. His eyes bulged.
“I ain’t playing,” Blount growled. “You going over the river with me.”
The rifle butt struck Blount again and again. He felt his jaw crack.
He also felt his prey start to go limp. When you get where you’re going, boy, you tell Satan to kiss my ass.
So tired. So very tired. God, that AK stock hurt when it hit.
Blount let go.
The terrorist scrambled away from Blount, buried himself in the far corner of the truck bed. Placed his hands around his neck, coughed and jabbered in Arabic. Blount savored his victim’s look of fear for just a moment.
You and me ain’t finished, Blount thought.
Another boot kicked him in the chest.
A wave of nausea hit him. Bile came up in his throat, probably the last fluid in his stomach. He rolled onto his side and vomited. He heard distant laughter, though it came from only feet away. His fingers found a sticky substance. Blood and spit. He rolled onto his back.