Sand and Fire (9780698137844) (14 page)

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.

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.

T
he 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 over 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.

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.