Black Storm (5 page)

He turned his head to find one of his men behind him, and had a momentary impulse to say something witty; something like “See what happens when you don't stay hydrated.” But the words died as he looked again at what had once lived and walked and faced battle. Whatever he felt or didn't feel, they'd been soldiers. Other soldiers
were dying right now, on the far side of those berms, and a whole lot more would end up like this or worse when the ground attack started.

He looked at the sign again. If one of the Saudis saw it, the manure would impact the propeller. But he found he didn't care about that either. So at last he just headed back to the Humvee. He climbed up behind the .50 cal and said to Vertierra, “Let's get back, Sergeant.”

Half an hour later he was in his tent, and the hot shimmering rim of sun poking up over the desert signaled the end of another working day. He drank a bottle of water. Then pulled the flap closed and went to sleep.

 

MARCUS “SID” GAULT
had grown up as an air force brat, trailing his dad all over the country. He did two years at Auburn, in forestry management. Then realized he didn't want to manage forests, and enlisted in the Marine Corps, for no good reason he'd been able to put his finger on other than that when he went into the office the recruiter hadn't seemed to want him. Had acted like he had to prove something, to be good enough to sign up.

At Parris Island he was in Third Battalion. In the winter series, which was good, the sand fleas weren't as bad and you didn't have to worry about heat stroke. Platoon Thirty-Eighteen, India Company, Third Battalion. When he played back boot camp he didn't get the rifle pits, or the run-down World War II barracks. What came back to him was the final parade, when your parents sat in the bleachers and you marched by in full dress, a Marine at last.

He went to infantry school at Camp Geiger. Squad tactics. Offense. Defense. The elements of battle. Did a float with Third Battalion, Second Marines, then screened for Force Recon out of Camp Pendleton. That was where he met Tina, working cashier at Lum's. They were married in '86, and Cory was born the same year. He picked up sergeant, then went to DI at Parris Island, picking up staff sergeant meritoriously on the drill field. He used his DI
option to go back to Second Recon, where he'd picked up gunny just the year before.

He remembered that as the golden time. Loving his career, loving his wife, watching his boy grow day by day. Cory was a late talker, but the base pediatrician said that didn't mean anything, children varied in their developmental time lines. The boy wanted to be with him every minute he was home, would sit and watch him study or work.

Maybe that was why it had happened. The event, the accident, that changed everything about his life, his marriage—everything.

He'd been cleaning his shotgun in the basement den on Ivory Crescent, getting ready for duck season. Cory had been playing across the room. Four years old, talking happily to the plastic tyrannosaurs he'd named Newton and Stupid as his father worked with the spray can of Rem Action Cleaner and the screw-together aluminum cleaning rod. The sweet oil smell of Hoppe's Powder Solvent. The pristine white of the cleaning patches, turned black with sooty residue as they emerged from the action.

Then the recoil in his hands, the unbelieving moment as he'd stared down at the gun. Then lifted his head and looked where the magnum load of number-eight shot had gone.

The doctors said that with the brain damage there was no chance of recovery. He and Tina had let Cory go, the last thing they did together, and signed the papers to let what was left of him help other kids who needed it.

It was his fault. He'd loaned it to a guy to shoot skeet with, and hadn't checked the bore when the friend gave it back. A stupid thing. The kind of thing a boot would do. Tina left. Too many memories in the house, too many memories with him, she said. He kept going, but only because there wasn't anything else to do. All he had left was the Corps. The Corps in the day, and at night the half gallons of tax-free Jack Daniel's from the base package store.

So that when the Force went to war, he'd gone without
a backward glance. Not just because he was a marine. Because deep in the back of his mind was the hopeless hoping that someday he could find the only thing he wanted anymore: the secret of forgetting. Maybe someplace with sand instead of trees, clean and empty, might hold that secret. Like that river you were supposed to drink from when you died. The one that made you forget everything, and you could go across wiped clean, blank, reformatted, like an erased floppy disk.

When he looked back now, he could hardly remember the kid who'd signed up because the recruiter had acted uninterested. He couldn't imagine himself as anything other than a marine. He still had a soft spot for the air force, because of his dad. He respected the Rangers. Aside from that he didn't think much of the people the other services attracted. They seemed to see it as just a job. Which it wasn't. Maybe that was the pride.

But he didn't think a lot about it.

 

HE BLINKED
awake inside the tent, holding his hand over his eyes. The gray daylight looked fierce, unnatural. The sand fleas were crawling over him, though they didn't bite. They slowed down when it got cold, but they never went away, the way you figured a bug ought to in the winter. His drying underwear hung on a bungee between him and the light. “What?” he muttered.

“Helo incomin', Gunny. Tower says it's for you.”

He came awake. He swung his feet out, pulled his trou on, fumbled boots on over bare feet, and went out to the pad.

The helicopter dropped from a smoky sky. Gault didn't know the marine who jumped out, but the subdued railroad tracks of a captain and the jump wings registered. The guy was built like a refrigerator, solid chest and bull neck and buzz cut. The captain returned his salute, looking hard into his eyes. “Wake you up, Gunny?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Usually sleep in till zero eight?”

“We're on reverse cycle, sir. We ORP at night and bunk up during the day.”

The captain asked if he was the same Marcus Gault who'd led the team through the UAT concept development course at Quantico. Gault said he was, and the captain asked if he remembered a Major Paulik. Gault said no sir. The captain asked if he knew where the other UATers were. Gault said he still had three of them in the platoon.

“Get 'em,” the captain said. “And load up your personal gear, Gunny. We're taking you TAD for a couple weeks.”

And sure enough the captain was hand-carrying orders assigning one Gunnery Sergeant Marc S. Gault, USMC, for temporary additional duty with headquarters staff, First SRIG. Nor did he seem inclined to wait. So in the end Gault wrote out a radio message telling the rear what was going on and asking for a relief. Then he went back to his tent and started throwing his gear into his duffel. A few words of turnover with Abrahamson, and he grabbed his M16.

 

THE T-55S
had crossed their front in a steady rumble, and Gault dismounted everyone, got them away from the Humvees. There was no cover, and they were safer on the ground. But the Iraqis ignored them. Not a shell came their way. He remounted and headed south again. Other vehicles appeared, angling in across the desert and from side tracks, all funneling at top speed toward the only way out: down the coast road, over the causeway into Khafji and out the other side. Looking back, he could see the tanks redeploying. There wasn't much time to escape.

But at the same time what a great target they made, a mass of armor on the move in daylight. He gave Vertierra the wheel and started working the radio. The jamming had faded as they moved south, and he raised Taro and
asked for air strikes. But the air side was busy to the west, striking other armored spearheads. He got a promise of artillery, and several minutes later inverted pyramids of sand suddenly appeared out in the desert. By then, though, their targets had moved forward again. He called in adjustments, but realized he couldn't stay where he was. They'd roll over him.

The causeway was behind; the city rose ahead. Soon the heavy elements would counterattack. They'd need someone to spot fire for them, call air and artillery and naval gunfire from offshore. If they could find an observation point in Khafji…He told the guys what they were going to do. They'd have to abandon the vehicles, leave them some distance from wherever they holed up. Otherwise, if the Iraqis saw them, they'd do a house-to-house search.

By midnight they were barricaded in the cab of a container crane at the port, in sight of the Khafji Beach Hotel, looking down at the Iraqis as they edged into the deserted city and began looting. They stayed for two days, along with another team from First Recon, calling in fire on the Iraqis and dodging from building to building to evade them, until the Saudis retook the town.

 

THEY FLEW
west. The sun gave him that much; and for a while he tracked the berm in the distance, the border between warring principalities and powers; then it angled off in the great northwest tangent that would end eventually at Jordan. He and the captain and Zeitner and Vertierra and Nichols sat wordlessly, butts cradled in nylon webbing, cranials and Mickey Mouse ears insulating them as effectively as if they sat in separate rooms. F.C. looked haggard. He had cammie paint in the creases behind his ears. Gault sign-asked if he was okay. He said he was. The sky went blue, then gray again, but they'd left the Destructo Zone of oil haze and overhead doom.
They landed only once, along a road that came straight as a taut wire over one horizon and disappeared over the other. A deuce and a half was waiting, and when the skids went down another marine swung out of it and trotted toward them. Gault didn't recognize him; a young guy. As soon as he was aboard they lifted off again and settled back into that western-heading groove. And gradually the droning vibration and the missing sleep got to him, and his head sank.

Arrowing westward over the empty desert, Gault slept.

 

THE ROOM
was unpainted concrete block, with no windows and a buzzing fluorescent light. The floor was concrete painted brown, with a drain in the center. He didn't know what base this was. Coming in, he'd seen an airstrip, protective wire, guard towers. Cobras sitting in revetments. Tents. Conex boxes. More revetments around ugly warthog A-10s, like tadpoles with stubby wings, and off on the far side of the strip enormous mounds of green-painted bombs from which yellow forklifts shuttled back and forth. No chairs, so they settled on the concrete, looking up at a stand with a display. It was covered by opaque plastic marked
SECRET
. Vertierra broke open the shrink-wrapped case of water and passed bottles around.

The captain stood up front, looking even larger in the small room. Too large, Gault thought, looking at his bull neck, his tree-trunk thighs. The big guys didn't seem to make it in the recon community. The best physical type was neither tall nor short, neither skinny nor bulked. Team guys were buffed but not grotesquely so. Kohler passed out memo books and pencils, like a teacher before a test. Then went back to his modified parade rest.

“As of now, we're in lockdown for mission prep. No phone calls, no mail, no leaving the base. No discussion of the mission outside these rooms, even among yourselves. Everybody understand?

“For those who haven't met me yet, I'm Captain Kohler, with S-2 of First SRIG. Personel from I MEF and possibly from Riyadh will also be part of the briefing team. They're on their way here now. Lieutenant Colonel Anders Paulik is the S-3 of First SRIG. He'll be here shortly too. Till then, he's asked me to give you a quick mission brief so you can start planning.

“Why are you here? Two reasons. First, you're all recon marines. Second, we wanted street fighters. Most of you've been through the Urban Assault Team concept demonstrator, and if you were in Khafji or Beirut or Monrovia, you've done as much of it as anybody in the Corps.”

Kohler turned the first sheet to a Magic Markered page. It bulleted HUMINT, Enemy Communication Intercepts, Visual Imagery, and Information Received Direct from Enemy. The bottom line was titled Flying Stones.

“Most intel work consists of looking for anomalies. Anomalies are abnormalities; items of data different from what you expect, or weird new shit you have no explanation for. One anomaly might be an error or a misunderstanding. When they pile up, you start looking for what's making that hump in the groundsheet.

“Putting the anomalies together, we think Saddam's got some kind of weapon of mass destruction held back. He's using conventionally armed Scud-Cs against Saudi and Israel. This is something else, something he thinks is so big 'n' bad it'll stop us kicking his ass out of Kuwait.

“We have a name. The Arabic translates as ‘Flying Stones.' We have a suspected location: in central Iraq, under the coverage of the Kari integrated air defense network. Based on that, CENTCOM's handed us a ‘black' mission: find, identify, and localize it.”

He flipped the chart, and there was western Iraq.

“I'm going to read you the mission statement,” said the captain. Gault took out his notebook. So did the others. Kohler read slowly, so they could get it down. “On order, UAT Reconstitute Twelve will insert into Iraq, link up with indigenous resistance, reconnoiter suspected
nuclear/biological weapons site west of Baghdad, and squirt back targeting data before extraction. Mission has priority.”

He read it again, and one by one they put their pencils up to show they had it. The bare cinder-block space was about as quiet as Gault had ever heard a compartment full of marines. Like everything else the captain had said so far, the words meant more than they said. “Mission has priority,” for example. That meant that whatever happened in Kuwait, whatever happened elsewhere in the war, they'd stay till their mission was complete.