Sand and Fire (9780698137844) (11 page)

“What does your group hope to accomplish?”

The prisoner drew in a long breath, studied Gold as if she had asked a foolish question.

“The pasha has made that clear in his recent statements. We will return this region to sharia law, to true Islamic rule, as in the days of old.”

Gold paused to fill in Ongondo on the questions and answers thus far. Bedoor spoke fairly standard modern Arabic, so she had an easier time understanding him than some of the refugees from the Ghat region.

“Ask him how many men Kassam has,” Ongondo said.

Gold put the question to the prisoner. At this point in interrogations, some low-level jihadists professed innocence and claimed they'd been forced to fight against their will. She wondered why he didn't try that.

“I do not know how many men there are,” Bedoor said.

Gold repeated Bedoor's statement in English. Ongondo sat on a box of canned pears, placed his elbows on his knees, steepled his fingers.

“Ask him what weapons they possess.”

Gold repeated the question in Arabic.

“I do not know. I had a rifle.”

Ongondo rolled his eyes, stood up, motioned for Gold to come with him. They stepped outside the shelter tent.

“Do you believe anything he's saying?” Ongondo asked, arms folded.

“I can't get a feel for this guy,” Gold said. “I don't necessarily think he's lying, because he could just deny everything. But he's pretty well spoken for a terrorist foot soldier.”

“These bandits come from all walks of life. Try asking him where Kassam has based himself.”

Back inside, Gold formed the question into Arabic. Bedoor looked out the tent's opening into the desert. He'd made little eye contact
with Gold during the questioning. His distracted manner almost made her feel she was communicating with a ghost, one made to appear against its will through a forceful séance.

“I cannot tell you that,” he said.

The answer rendered into English did not please Ongondo.

“Tell him he will answer that question, or he will have a very unpleasant day.”

This sounded a little too familiar, a little too much like interrogations Gold had interpreted in the past.

“You promised no mistreatment.”

“I will keep that promise. But we need that information if we can get it.”

Gold considered how to pose the question without threatening. She never shied from using her own judgment when it came to choice of words.

“These men want very much to know where Sadiq Kassam is now,” Gold said in Arabic. A true statement, certainly, without any venom.

“I am sure they do,” Bedoor said.

Now what to do? Gold did not need to maintain neutrality; the United Nations did not pretend terrorists had equal standing with the new governments of North Africa. Once again, time for a judgment call.

“If you answer their questions here, with me, you will fare better than if they take you elsewhere.” Another true statement.

Bedoor looked out into the desert again. He stared at the horizon, which brightened as the sun rose higher. He put Gold in mind of a specter again, waiting for the séance's spell to break and let him cross back over to the spirit world.

“Very well. The pasha's headquarters is an abandoned village near the town of Ubari.”

“Ubari, Libya?”

“Yes, it is on the Libyan side of the border.”

Gold updated Ongondo in English.

“Excellent,” he said. “Excellent work, Ms. Gold.” He gave a command to one of his troops: “Get me a map.”

A soldier hurried from the tent and came back a few minutes later with a chart marked in military grid zones. Numbers and letters marked the zones, with numerical designations for point coordinates.

“Can you read a land navigation chart?” Gold asked in Arabic.

“Some,” Bedoor said.

She spread the chart before him. Bedoor hesitated, looked up at the soldiers glaring at him. He pointed to a spot.

“Here,” he said. “Your map does not depict the village because it is so small. But it is here.”

Gold peered at the place Bedoor had indicated. As he said, the chart did not show a village. Was he lying? Not necessarily. Nomads moved around; villages grew and crumbled. He'd pointed to one of the strangest environments on earth, at the edge of the Ubari Sand Sea. The chart's contour lines appeared as irregular circles. A rolling expanse of dunes, interrupted only by a few saline lakes. Ongondo noted the grid zone, wrote down the coordinates.

“Do you think he's telling the truth?” Ongondo asked.

“Impossible to say,” Gold said.

Ongondo folded the chart and glanced at one of his soldiers.

“Take him back to the medical tent,” he said. “Let him rest.”

At that moment, Bedoor placed his hand into the waistband of his cargo trousers. He fished around for a moment, took out his hand, and placed something in his mouth. Bit down, chewed, swallowed.

“What did he just do?” Ongondo asked.

“He took a pill,” a soldier said.

Already suspecting the worst, Gold kneeled beside Bedoor's chair. She put her hand on his good arm and asked in Arabic, “What did you put in your mouth?”

Bedoor shuddered, gathered himself as if it took great effort to speak.

“There is no God but God,” he said, “and Mohammed is his prophet.”

Bedoor began to take rapid, shallow breaths. He slumped in the chair. His lower lip took on a blue cast.

Gold ran to find Lambrechts. When they returned, Bedoor was lying on the storage shelter's floor. Lambrechts and two medics helped carry him into the med tent. They laid him on an examination table, and Lambrechts pulled open one of his eyes and shone a penlight into it. She ripped open his shirt. Put the eartips of her stethoscope into her ears, listened to his chest. Immediately she tore away the stethoscope by its tube, placed the heel of her right hand on his breastbone and the heel of her left hand over her right. As Lambrechts started chest compressions, one of the medics drew a curtain around the table. Gold and Ongondo waited outside the med tent.

“I thought we searched him thoroughly,” Ongondo said.

“It would be easy to miss something as small as one pill in his waistband,” Gold said.

In the first several seconds, Gold heard Lambrechts firing off instructions in French, along with the clink of medical instruments—perhaps vials and syringes. Then the med tent grew quiet. A few minutes later Lambrechts came out, her expression clouded, hands in the pockets of her lab coat.

“He's dead,” she said. “Cyanide, I think.”

A
t Mitiga International Airport in Tripoli, Parson saw lots of work to do. The Libyan government provided ramp space alongside the main runway, well away from the passenger terminal and civilian gates. But now he needed to put up tents and temporary shelters to house maintenance teams and aircrews, intel briefers and medics, cooks and cops. All the tents and shelters required phone lines and computer cables, sandbags and sand-filled HESCO barriers, electricity and air-conditioning.

An Air Force Red Horse squadron—Rapid Engineer Deployable, Heavy Operational Repair Squadron Engineers—arrived in C-5 and C-17 cargo jets. Parson watched the engineers offload pallet after pallet of equipment needed to set up a forward base. He intended to bed down French Mirages here, along with the Pave Hawk helicopters and HC-130 tankers of an American rescue unit. The Mirages could provide air support for forces on the ground, the Pave Hawks could rescue downed pilots or troops in trouble, and the HC-130s could refuel the choppers in flight.

Vestiges of the airport's days as a military base remained. Old asphalt hardstands for parking fighters dotted the field; Parson found some of them still usable. Others had cracked up and were sinking into the soil. A few of the older buildings hinted of a 1960s air base. Parson couldn't tell which structures were built by Americans, and which had been put up by the Soviets or the Libyans.

Whenever he looked up into the sky at Mitiga, he thought of his father. Dad had been here once for just a few seconds, a few hundred
feet off the ground in the right seat of the Aardvark: Target acquired. Weapons away. Target destroyed.

Parson still hated not flying, but he decided this assignment wasn't too bad. Uncle Sam had entrusted him with a chunk of pavement borrowed from the Libyans and told him to turn it into a place to project power and kick some terrorist ass. Quickly.

Thanks to the Red Horse guys, it did happen quickly. By the end of the first week, three long rows of tents sprouted a safe distance from Runway 11/29. A deployable hardshell ops center fronted the tents. As soon as the operations center went up, a comm squadron began installing radios, computers, and antennas.

Parson walked into the ops center, found it stifling. He wiped sweat from his face with the sleeve of his beige flight suit as he considered where to put his desk. He heard an electric motor start outside. The cloth plenums for air-conditioning ducts swelled with airflow, and coolness began flooding the room. A Red Horse master sergeant came into the operations center, tested the air-conditioning by placing his hand in front of a duct.

“Damn, you boys are fast,” Parson said.

“Just part of the J-O-B, sir.”

Parson chose a corner for his own office, which amounted to a folding table, a folding chair, a laptop computer, and the pens he'd carried with him in his pockets. Bare bones, but enough to get started. He booted up his computer, logged in to his e-mail, and saw that he had 143 new messages. Since yesterday.

“Sometimes I wish I was still a butter-bar lieutenant,” he muttered under his breath.

“What's that, sir?” the master sergeant asked as he checked an electrical outlet.

“Nothing.”

Most of his e-mails concerned the endless little fires he had to put out to get this operation rolling. One of them confirmed his suspicions about what he'd seen from the drone cameras over Tarhuna: a
coalition team sent to the site found it empty. The men he'd watched loading the trucks had cleared out all the chemicals that had been stored there. God only knew where those chemicals were now.

Another of the e-mails came from Gold. It read:

HOPE THINGS SMOOTH ON YOUR END. THOUGHT YOU SHOULD KNOW THE UNHCR CAMP TREATED VICTIMS FROM ANOTHER RAID. MAINLY GUNSHOT WOUNDS, NO CHEM THAT WE KNOW OF. ALSO WANTED TO GIVE YOU A HEADS-UP THAT I HELPED INTERROGATE AN ENEMY PRISONER OF WAR. EPW NOW DEAD, APPARENT SUICIDE. DON'T KNOW IF HE PROVIDED ACTIONABLE INTEL, AND I CAN'T DISCUSS FURTHER ON NONSECURE E-MAIL. IF IT'S WORTH ANYTHING, YOU'LL HEAR THROUGH CHANNELS.

Well, that was interesting. An EPW who sang, then killed himself? Sophia always seemed to find herself in the thick of things, in or out of uniform. Parson wanted very much to know what the guy said before he died. But she was right: If the intel counted, and if he needed to know, he'd find out soon enough.

Another of Parson's e-mails brought good news. A C-5 coming in tonight would deliver a pair of crash trucks and a team of firefighters. With crash response in place, he could start bringing in aircraft.

The other non-annoying e-mail came from Frenchie. More correctly, Captain Chartier. The e-mail read:

MON COLONEL,

I AM PLEASED TO REPORT I WILL ACCOMPANY MY SQUADRON TO MITIGA AS SOON AS WE RECEIVE A SLOT TIME. THANK YOU FOR SETTING UP OUR HOME AWAY FROM HOME. PERHAPS I SHALL TAKE YOU UP IN THE MIRAGE, NO?

MERCI BEAUCOUP,
ALAIN CHARTIER

CAPITAINE, ARMÉE DE L'AIR

A jet ride sounded like a fine idea to Parson. A flight made operational sense, too. The Mirage pilots would need to get familiar with the local area and the approaches to Mitiga before flying combat missions. And since Parson had the responsibility for running the base, a local hop would improve his own situational awareness. But for an American officer to get a ride in a French jet, approval would have to come down from the two-star level. Parson replied to Chartier's e-mail:

I'LL HOLD YOU TO THAT IF IT GETS APPROVED, FRENCHIE. MANY THANKS. GOT PARKING SPOTS WAITING FOR YOU GUYS. HAVE A SAFE FLIGHT OVER THE MED.

MP

Parson spent the rest of the day responding to e-mails, issuing instructions to staff, and checking on schedules for arrival of personnel and equipment. When a C-5 Galaxy arrived that evening, Parson noticed the letters WV painted on the tail. An Air Guard crew, he realized, out of Martinsburg, West Virginia. The mountaineer fliers conducted an engines-running offload. They kneeled the jet, lowering the airframe on the landing gear's jackscrews to place the cargo deck closer to the ground. A loadmaster opened the aircraft's visor, tilting the entire nose up and away from the fuselage. That exposed the cavernous cargo bay, which contained not just two fire trucks but a fuel truck, as well. As Parson watched the crew offload their cargo, he thought of his own days as a C-5 pilot—and a mission from hell that took him more than halfway around the world with an airplane falling apart around him. Even that experience had not spoiled his love for flying, and he hoped to return to the cockpit soon.

Drivers steered the trucks down the Galaxy's forward ramp. The crew closed up the airplane and unkneeled it. After spending less
than an hour on the ground, the big jet thundered away into the darkness.

Parson could have spent the night in a hotel in Tripoli. But he decided if tents were good enough for the troops and fliers deploying to North Africa, they were good enough for him. He unrolled a sleeping blanket over a cot in a twenty-man tent occupied by no one else. The tent would fill soon enough, but for this one evening, the solitude under the canvas felt nearly as comfortable as an upscale hotel room.

He took off his boots and placed them in a plastic bag to keep scorpions out. Took his pistol out of its holster and placed it on a metal bookshelf beside his cot. Unzipped his flight suit and hung it on the corner of a locker. In his boxer shorts and Air Force–issue T-shirt, he stretched out on his cot. By the light of a naked bulb, as Saharan winds billowed the tent walls, Parson opened the book Chartier had sent him,
Wind, Sand and Stars
, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

Frenchie had sent the 1939 American edition. Parson noticed the author had dedicated that edition to American pilots and their dead. Good on him for that, Parson thought. Frenchie had explained how Saint-Ex started flying back when planes were made of cloth and pilots were made of steel. The author's life ended far too early, while flying a P-38 Lightning on a recon mission out of Corsica in 1944. The Mediterranean became his grave.

Parson began reading and he immediately related to the tales of fighting through violent weather, navigating across jagged mountains. He'd experienced the same challenges, only in more modern machines. But he never could have described flying in such precise and poetic words. One line in particular caught his attention: 
“
. . .
below the sea of clouds lies eternity
.
”

Damn straight it does, Parson thought. He knew too many people who had proved it, beginning with his father.

The book drew him in so deeply that he had a tough time deciding where to stop. But he had plenty of work to do tomorrow, so with reluctance he dog-eared a page, dropped the book to the floor, and turned out his light. The rhythm of flapping canvas put him to sleep almost immediately.

The next morning, the rescue squadrons landed with their Pave Hawk choppers and HC-130 Combat Kings—specially equipped C-130s that could refuel helicopters, conduct searches, and drop pararescuemen. Parson spent much of the day on the flight line, greeting crews and helping their maintenance teams set up shop. The work got him away from his desk and put him in a good mood.

That afternoon, the Mirage 200Ds arrived with Gallic flair. Chartier called in on the ops frequency, and the tower approved a low pass. Eight jets came in two elements of four aircraft. The first element made a pass over the field in close formation. To Parson's aviator's heart, the sight was a thing of beauty, representing the height of engineering talent, mechanical craftsmanship, and piloting skill. One by one, each Mirage peeled off, leveled its wings onto a downwind leg, and dropped the landing gear. Turned base, banked on final approach. Descended the glide path with engine hushed. Settled onto the runway amid puffs of tire smoke, and rolled along in a nose-high attitude for aerodynamic breaking. The second element landed in similar fashion. Newly arrived ramp crews marshaled the French planes into parking, and the pilots and backseat weapons systems officers raised their canopies and shut down their aircraft. Chartier sat in the lead aircraft, French tricolor patch on his left sleeve, oxygen mask disconnected from his helmet. He waved a gloved hand when he saw Parson.

“Bonjour!”
Chartier shouted. He pulled at fittings inside the front cockpit; Parson figured he was unplugging the interphone and G suit connections. In the rear seat, Chartier's weapons systems officer removed his helmet. Chartier jerked his thumb toward the rear
cockpit. “This is Captain Giraud. He is so deadly with the weapons on the Mirage that we call him the Sniper.”

“Pleased to meet you, Sniper.”

“Good day, sir.”

“Sniper scored some good hits back during Operation Harmattan,” Chartier said.

Parson had to search his mind for a second, but then he remembered. Back in 2011, when allied forces teamed up to stop Muammar Gadhafi from slaughtering Libyan rebels, the French took part with their Mirages, Rafales, and Super Étendards. Operation Harmattan was named for a West African trade wind. Americans knew the mission better as Operation Odyssey Dawn.

The backseater appeared a few years younger than Chartier. Dark hair, sweaty and matted from the helmet. Each flier's face still bore the imprint of an oxygen mask. The aviators climbed down from their jet and stretched.

“It gets a little cramped in the Mirage,” Chartier said. “I will be glad when our masseuse arrives.”

Parson laughed. “Yeah, right.”

“No,” Chartier said. “I am serious.”

“The hell you say.”

“Our Air Force gives us a masseuse. Hours in a cramped cockpit can lead to orthopedic problems and blood clots in the legs. If her time permits, your American crews can also visit the masseuse.”

Parson shook his head. “You boys know how to live; I'll give you that.”

“Vive la France,”
Giraud said.

Parson surprised himself with the way he warmed to his French colleagues. He recalled with embarrassment his attitude when the French opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Freedom fries with my Big Mac, thank you. The failure to find large stocks of chemical weapons in Iraq put a different spin on things. Meanwhile, the froggy bastards
had done good work in Afghanistan, and now they were helping in North Africa.

More C-5s, C-130s, and C-17s came in over the next few days. They delivered, among other things, an Air Force Emergency Management team to set up a contamination control area. If fliers came back from a mission with gear and clothing exposed to chemical agents, they could decontaminate at the CCA. The transport aircraft also brought fuel teams, intel officers, maintenance crews, chairs, tables, a complete field kitchen, and a beautiful raven-haired masseuse named Michèle.

“Now we are ready to fly,” Chartier proclaimed.

“Veev luh France,” Parson said as he watched Michèle descend the steps of a C-5.

“Your accent needs work.”

Chartier made good on his promise to take Parson up in the Mirage. When the local-area familiarization flights began, the French approved Parson for a backseat ride. He borrowed Giraud's helmet and G suit, and he climbed into the Mirage's rear cockpit with the eagerness of a new flight student. He had spent his career in the heavies—first as a navigator in the C-130 and then as a pilot in C-5s. During pilot training Parson had flown spin recoveries and aerobatics in the T-6 Texan II, but life in the C-5 consisted mainly of straight-and-level flying, point A to point B. Critical missions, to be sure, but no turns hard enough to gray your vision, no rolls to swap sky and earth.

The French pilot briefed Parson on emergency procedures for problems such as engine failure and rapid decompression. All pretty standard stuff, except Parson wasn't used to flying with an ejection seat. Parson buckled himself in, connected his interphone cord, G suit, and oxygen mask. A radarscope dominated his main panel. Apart from that, the cockpit seemed built in the usual fighter configuration. A center stick for flight controls, throttle on the left side. Up front, Chartier turned on the battery switch, and inverters and
avionics fans began to buzz. Annunciator lights illuminated both cockpits, and Chartier's voice crackled in the headphones of Parson's helmet.