Sand and Fire (9780698137844)

by Young, Tom

  “Yeah,” Loudon said, “that’s definitely yellow.”

  A few things could cause a false positive, Gold knew. Wasp spray, for one. Not likely anyone had wandered through here with a can of Raid. So the area remained hot.

  Gold covered the inlet port of her gas mask filter and inhaled, just as she’d done when she first donned the mask. The resulting vacuum squeezed the mask against her face, reconfirming a tight seal. A needless gesture at this point, but now that she had hard evidence of contamination, the extra check made her feel safer. Loudon and Privett rechecked their suits, tightened drawstrings. Gold pulled out her camera again and hunted for more clues.

  She didn’t quite know what else to look for. But amid the shell casings and bent metal, she found something that would certainly interest the chain of command and the intelligence community.

  A dud round lay at her feet, most likely from some sort of mortar. The round carried the tail fins typical of an ordinary mortar shell, but its middle section looked a little longer than normal. Propellant had scorched the fins, but for whatever reason, the warhead had not exploded. Only part of the shell remained visible in the sand; the nose had buried itself. Did that thing contain a load of sarin or some other witch’s brew just waiting to go off?

  Gold felt pretty confident her chem gear would protect her from trace exposure to toxins. But she didn’t care to see how the mask and suit would perform if she got hit with a concentrated dose. She snapped a photo and backed away.

  If a dud round had turned up after an attack on an Army base, Gold would have followed the five Cs: Confirm presence of unexploded ordnance. Clear personnel. Cordon the area by at least three hundred feet. Check for other UXOs. Control the area and let only emergency services inside the cordon.

  Those emergency services would have included explosive ordnance disposal, to disarm or destroy the damned thing. Lacking all those resources for now, she could only warn the others.

  “Got a UXO,” she shouted.

  “Where?” Loudon called.

  Gold pointed.

  “I still don’t see it,” Privett said.

  Gold could understand. Perhaps in training exercises the young officer had directed searches for unexploded rounds following a mock attack. But in those exercises, UXOs were usually easy to spot. Instructors might place an intact, inert shell right on a sidewalk. But real mortars falling in real combat zones looked different. Gold had learned to recognize them despite their tendency to hide.

  With her heel, she dug a long line in the sand to mark the UXO as best she could. She added short diagonal furrows at the front of the line to form an arrow pointing to the shell. A lame effort that would soon get blown away by wind, but the best she could do at the moment. Loudon took pictures of the UXO, as well.

  After surveying the crash site, they moved to the abandoned village where the terrorists had hidden. The casings of expended AK-47 ammo littered the ground in greater numbers. Doors of mud-brick homes stood open. Inside the buildings, rough furniture sat broken and overturned. Smashed crockery crunched underfoot. In one kitchen, spilled flour dusted the floor.

  All these signs suggested to Gold a settlement vacated recently and quickly. Not the first time jihadists had taken over and destroyed a village. Strangely, no animals wandered the alleyways—not a single cat, goat, or chicken. Gold suspected the blowback from chemical weapons had driven them away.

  She found it curious that she saw no people, dead or alive. Had everybody evacuated? Or had the jihadists killed everyone and buried the bodies? She’d never known terrorists to go to the trouble of digging graves for their victims. As Gold and the Marine officers searched the dwellings, she entertained a fleeting thought that with no death odor in the air, there must be no corpses.

  Then she remembered no odor would get through her gas mask filter. During her Army training, she had once worn a mask in a bunker filled with tear gas. The air she inhaled carried no stench or sting at all. After a few minutes the instructors ordered the trainees to hold their breaths, remove their masks, and run from the bunker. Once Gold got outside the bunker, the mere traces of tear gas that drifted from her clothing made her eyes and nose stream. Each breath felt like inhaling thorns. Private Gold fell to her knees, hacking and groaning but marveling at how the mask had let her breathe with no discomfort in a room filled with that awful stuff.

  So now, instead of following a stench through the village, she followed flies. Through the broken window of a cinder block hovel, black flies buzzed, lit on shattered glass, flitted in and out of the building. Their presence surprised her; she’d have thought the chemicals would have kept them away. But perhaps the poisons were dissipating enough for the flies to survive.

  Gold looked through the window. At first she thought she saw piles of laundry. Then she recognized feet and hands, bloated bellies, exposed skin with an unnatural green tint. Perhaps two dozen bodies had been tossed into that room: men, women, children. Apparently the terrorists had dragged all the bodies into that room to get them out of sight as they waited for the Marines.

  Now her anger boiled. Her hands sweated inside her double set of gloves. All these innocents, murdered because they got in the jihadists’ way. Gold closed her eyes for a moment, grappled with the fury within her.

  She had seen other massacres, in Afghan villages attacked by the Taliban. Facing such horrors never got easier. If anything, each incident tore at her heart worse than the one before. She had long ago stopped asking why a higher power allowed such things to happen; the answer to that question would not come in this mortal life.

  Gold gestured to Privett and Loudon.

  “Sirs,” she shouted through her mask, “you need to see this.” Bit off each word as if it had a caustic taste.

  The Marine officers joined her at the window, peered inside.

  “Oh, God,” Privett said.

  “I wondered where everybody had gone,” Loudon said. He pushed open the door. Flies rose inside the room, swarmed around, settled again. “We gotta document this,” he said. He took out his camera, and Gold did the same.

  She took a photo of a boy lying on his back, sweatshirt bunched under his arms, chest exposed, dried blood around his mouth and nose. She snapped an image of a man atop a heap of other bodies, a gunshot wound to his head. She captured another shot of a woman wearing an olive headscarf. The woman’s body showed no obvious sign of injury, and her mouth remained frozen open. Gold could imagine the agonized final breaths, pain eased only by death’s final release.

  “Looks like they shot the ones who didn’t get slimed,” Privett said.

  “Those might have been the lucky ones,” Loudon said.

  The village yielded still more evidence. The houses protected some of the alleys from wind and rotor wash, and in those pathways Gold found bootprints and blood spatters. Some of the blood, dried to a rust color, had smeared across the outside wall of a home. Perhaps someone had fallen against the wall after taking a bullet. Other bloodstains streaked the stones of a walkway and suggested a body dragged across the stones.

  Gold wondered what was going through the minds of Privett and Loudon. They knew all the Marines who’d fought here. As Loudon snapped more photos, Gold could not discern his expression underneath his gas mask.

  “What do you make of all this?” she asked.

  “Hard to say,” Loudon said. “Can’t tell which of the blood and shell casings came from the firefight with our guys and which of it happened when the insurgents first entered the village.”

  And some of the blood might have come from wounded terrorists, Gold supposed. Maybe the Marines and Legionnaires had given as good as they got. She just wished she knew where Gunny Blount was now. Gold had once found herself in the hands of terrorists. If anybody could handle that kind of stress, Gunny Blount could. As Gold’s mind strained to find excuses for hope, she thought of a National Geographic
article she’d read about the brain chemistry of explorers and adventurers. According to the article, the brains of explorers and their like—pilots, sailors, soldiers, and Marines—produced large amounts of dopamine. Dopamine, a neurotransmitter, helped process anxiety and control motor skills. In other words, it had a lot to do with functioning under pressure.

  In Gold’s long career, she’d seen people with varying ability to handle dire stress. Some could hack it and some could not. She didn’t know if you could break it down to organics; to her, courage and skill were spiritual things. But if dopamine would help, then she wished Blount all the dopamine in the world.

  Gold examined the bloodstains and drag marks more closely. Someone appeared to have been pulled to a vehicle; the drag marks ended at a set of tire tracks. The tire tracks stood out clearly in the fine sand of an alley between two houses.

  “Looks like they put somebody in a truck or an SUV,” Gold said.

  “Or several somebodies,” Loudon said.

  She tried to imagine the scene: wounded and poisoned men thrown into vehicles, voices shouting in Arabic, rifles jabbing and pointing. Sick and injured prisoners taken . . . where?

  Gold followed the tire tracks, hoping to get a direction of travel. Only one dusty road led through this village; maybe she could at least learn which way down that road the insurgents had fled.

  But as soon as the tire tracks reached the end of the alley, they disappeared. The blast of helicopters and the rush of the wind had left the desert as desolate as if no man had ever crossed it.

  CHAPTER 21

  Blount had always enjoyed good health; he could count on one hand the times he’d been really sick. One of those came during seventh grade when a flu bug put him down for two weeks. During that illness, strange and vivid dreams haunted his sleep. Lost in deep woods that formed a maze. Charged by a bull with steel horns. Attacked by a buzzard that wouldn’t let him alone until he picked up a dead tree limb and knocked the bird out of the air.

  Such vivid dreams came to him now, with all the stark colors of the flu dreams. But the new dreams did not take him into fights with monsters. Instead they took him into his past.

  He found himself standing on yellow footprints painted on pavement—his first day of boot camp at Parris Island. Not far from his home, but an entirely different world. His grandfather had tried to prepare him for the rigors of basic training. Physically, he was ready. The running, the obstacle course, the heat all challenged him, but he met each challenge. The difficulty came with the mental stress: the yelling, the impossible-to-please drill instructors, the stuff he had to memorize.

  One day a DI demanded that he recite the first general order of a sentry. Blount drew a blank.

  “Sir,” he said, “this recruit’s first general order is—” Nothing. No words would come.

  “What’s your problem, there, recruit?” the DI shouted. “Got vapor lock in that mush brain of yours? How are you gonna think under fire?”

  “Sir,” Blount yelled. The DIs wanted everything loud. “This recruit—”

  The DI moved in for the kill. His sweating face, veins bulging, came within an inch of Blount’s nose.

  “This recruit blah blah blah!” the DI screamed. “You can’t even tell me your first general order? You gotta be shitting me!”

  “Sir, no excuse, sir.”

  “Damn right there ain’t no excuse. I bet every other recruit in this platoon can tell me their first general order.” The DI barked at the boy standing at attention next to Blount. “You there. Dunnigan. Tell me the first general order.”

  Dunnigan recited it flawlessly.

  “See how easy it was for him,” the DI yelled at Blount. “I think I know what you are, Recruit Blount. You’re our first FTA.”

  Blount’s heart nearly shattered. Failure to adapt. Not good enough for the Corps. Not good enough for his grandfather. Recruit Blount resolved not to let that happen.

  He studied whenever they let him stand still. He studied while standing in the vaccination line, while waiting his turn at an obstacle, while drinking the lukewarm water they gave him. He memorized the general orders, the chain of command, the assembly and disassembly of the M16 rifle. He awaited the challenge of the next time a DI demanded to hear the first general order.

  That moment came back to him now in a dream so real he could feel the Parris Island humidity.

  “Recruit Blount, what is your first general order?”

  “Sir,” Blount shouted as loudly as he could, “this recruit’s first general order is to take charge of this post and all government property in view.”

  The DI took a step back.

  “All right, Blount,” he said. “Tell me your chain of command.”

  Blount recited the names, all the way from his drill instructors to the Navy secretary to Defense Secretary William Perry and President Bill Clinton.

  “Well, maybe Recruit Blount has finally managed to unfuck himself.” The DI walked away to harass somebody else.

  Blount came to wakefulness in his chains and filth with the words of the first general order ringing in his ears as if he’d just shouted them.

  This recruit’s first general order is to take charge of this post and all government property in view.

  He looked around, tried to take stock of things. Ivan lay on his side, with his hand over the pressure bandage on his leg. The Russian appeared to sleep. Fender sat awake with his back to the wall, chains coiled on the floor beside him. The corporal nodded when Blount looked into his eyes. Shackles partially covered Fender’s tattoo, the one on his left wrist that read Anne. You had something to live for, too, Blount thought. Too sad to ponder, especially with a boy that young. At least Blount had enjoyed a good life for a while, with a fine family and home. Until he threw it all away. Nothing left now but to die a good death.

  As if reading Blount’s mind, Rat Face came into the room. He wore a leering grin, which made his acne and rat nose all the more ugly. Rat Face looked at Blount and made a slashing motion under his throat with his finger. Then he held up the finger as if indicating a one.

  Yeah, I know, Blount thought. One day till the executions start. Unless the coalition leaves all of North Africa today, which ain’t gonna happen.

  Rat Face retreated into the adjoining room and returned with a tray carrying three bowls. Breakfast time, then. Blount guessed Rat Face resented his job of helping feed the prisoners, so he needed to start his day by taunting them. When Rat Face brought Blount’s bowl, he spilled part of it on Blount’s legs. He walked away with a smirk.

  The bowl contained lentil gruel again, this time cold. Blount tipped the bowl to his lips and forced down several mouthfuls of the sorry excuse for food. Tasted like congealed lard. He wanted very much to wash it down with some water. Couldn’t hurt to ask.

  “Water,” Blount said. “We need water.” Maybe Monkey Ears was in the next room and would understand the English. Blount had no idea if any of the other dirtbags spoke his language.

  Blount heard some abba-dabba talk next door. Some of it sounded like bitching. Then came the sound of pouring. Good, then.

  Rat Face came in with two tin cups. He sat one down beside Ivan and one beside Fender. Left and came back with one more cup, and brought another dirtbag in tow.

  Standing over Blount, Rat Face made a hawking sound at the back of his throat and brought up a gobbet of mucus. Spat into Blount’s cup. Put down the cup and walked off laughing with the other dirtbag.

  So you got your worthless little ass kicked by a man half-dead from poison, Blount thought, and now you want to save face.

  That was all right. Blount had resolved to kill one more enemy before they killed him. And he hoped it would be Rat Face.

  Blount picked up his water cup. The ball of snot and spit floated on top. He shook the cup until the gobbet floated to the edge, and he poured it onto t
he floor. The rest of the water looked clean enough, so he put the cup to his mouth, drank it all down with one long pull. He needed to stay hydrated to get his strength back, and he didn’t expect to live past the incubation period of whatever germs he ingested.

  Fender shuddered when he saw Blount drink the water. Blount shrugged and whispered, “How do you feel, bud?”

  “Like shit. But it don’t matter, does it?”

  Blount wished he could form some encouraging reply, but he lacked the words. Maybe it didn’t matter how any of them felt if they were about to die anyway. Blount just hoped he, Fender, and the others could focus long enough to go out the right way. If you accepted that you were already dead, you could function so much better.

  But Blount found that acceptance hard to maintain. His mind seemed bound to seek hope, to think of home, to want to return to Bernadette and the girls. Those thoughts could lead to nothing but despair. He forced himself to think only of the here and now and his final mission of taking out one more bad guy. Channeling his mind down that single narrow path felt like walking a fallen pine log to cross a creek, balancing with each step.

  From time to time Blount would see a mental image of his wife or one of his daughters. That only sapped his concentration and made his eyes brim. So he tried to work on mission planning. When they came to get him, what combatives could he use?

  More than likely, one dirtbag would unlock his shackles while another held a rifle on him. When he made his move, the dirtbag with the weapon would open up for sure. Blount could expect to have only a second or two. He’d have time for one explosive blow, and he’d need to make it count. So, what type of blow?

  That depended. He could strike as soon as they unlocked the first arm or wait until they freed both arms. Both arms would give him more options. But if he acted as soon as they freed the first one, he might have more element of surprise. Maybe get an extra half second to work.