Black Storm (16 page)

 

SARSTEN FINISHED
hosing down the gravel and hoisted and shook and buttoned. He stared out into the darkness, wondering why he couldn't see anything. Then he realized, and turned his goggles off and fumbled out the batteries. He heaved the discards out into the darkness, inserted the new ones, and turned it back on. The twin circles glowed once again.

He was sorry about the shepherd. But he wasn't about to make the same mistake twice. The Americans didn't
like it. He remembered how the lot of them looked at him when he came back wiping his knife. Like he was Charles fucking Manson.

So what! What did they think green work was all about! He couldn't even tell who was in charge here. Gault seemed to think he was, but who was the tall serious bloke? Who was the fucking bint, and what was she doing on a combat mission? Something was screwy. If they thought they could swan into Iraq like this they were going to get topped for fair.

He wondered again what exactly they were on about, out here. So far Gault had told him exactly fucking nothing. Okay, need to know, he understood that. The less people knew, the less they could give away if they were captured. The Regiment ran things the same way. But he couldn't help wondering. A hot mission, Gault had said. They were headed east, toward Baghdad. What was in Baghdad the Americans could be interested in, enough to send a team in?

He sat motionless, mouth suddenly coming open in the dark. Christ! There was only one thing. It was crazy, but it made fucking sense.

Somehow the Yanks had figured out where he was, tapped his phone or turned one of his generals to give them the tip. These lads were on their way in for Saddam. An assassination team. Covert as hell. The tall guy was CIA. The woman was some kind of bait. Once you knew that, it made sense. And somehow he'd lucked into it! The glory mission of the whole fucking war!

Somewhere in the back of his head he wondered if he wasn't getting it all wrong, if he wasn't going off himself. But no, he was just tired. Just fucking tuckers. And no fucking wonder.

He peered ahead. They still weren't moving. He grunted and sat down, resting the butt of his rifle on the gravel, and felt in his pocket and clapped two of the little triangular orange tablets into his mouth. Sucking on
them, waiting for the lift, the surge, the feeling of superhuman alertness and power and confidence it gave him.

Smiling to himself, in the dark.

 

FOR HOUR
after hour Dan had followed the sound of Sarsten's footsteps, trying not to think about anything except putting one boot in front of the other. Trying not to think of what the utter darkness to either side might conceal. Of who might be out here with them, of what might happen.

Or of what
had
happened, back at the hide site.

He'd squatted frozen in the hole, too shocked to move, staring up at Sarsten as he brushed the dirt from his trou and jumped down again into the shallow, stinking trench. He couldn't forget the man's expression, a glittering fixity of eye that had moved from one face to the next, cruel, amused, patronizing. His first thought had been to speak. His second had been the sinking knowledge it was too late. The boy was dead. He'd looked at Gault and seen the same dawning darkness on the team leader's face. Reproach was futile; a waste of breath and a danger to them all.

All he could do was promise himself that when they got back,
if
they got back, he'd charge Sarsten with murder.

The mist sifted down, mingling with his sweat. He pulled his soft hat off, careful to move slowly, silently, and blotted his face with it. The wind and the darkness isolated them, locking each into his own solitary shell. Occasionally, as the patrol made a correction, turning slightly left or right, he missed his step on the uneven rock. Each time this happened he grimaced in the dark. He didn't want to think about turning an ankle out here, or of falling down some unguessable precipice. If the man ahead of him went over a cliff, he'd go blindly after him. He couldn't see the ground he walked on. The sky was black, cut off from the stars by the smoke and overcast. The earth was black, lightless as the sky.

Dan was used to darkness. He knew the blackness of a ship's bridge, the gentle roll of the deck. This wasn't like a night at sea. He couldn't say how, but even in a moonless overcast he'd always felt some form of invisible light rising from the sea. He couldn't say where it came from, or what held it during daylight and radiated it again by night. Or emitted or transmitted it from the cold phosphorescence of drifting organisms a thousand fathoms down, from the dark yet always burning heart of the ocean. Maybe it was imagination, fancy, but he could make his way on deck at night by its intangible luminescence. Could put out a hand and feel steel exactly where he knew it would be, feeling just the way he knew it would feel, cold and slick and gritty with spray-borne salt.

This dark was different, contentless and black as death itself. Only the grating impact of his boots with the desert floor told him a world existed at all. And maybe that too was illusion, maybe he was alone in the infinite formlessness of the void.

Against that nothingness his memory summoned images. The cupping of a white breast. The twining of long white legs, scratchy soft, about his own.

He'd met Blair Titus in Bahrain several years before, during what was for him one of USS
Turner Van Zandt
's all-too-brief port visits, for her an area tour as defense staffer for Senator Bankey Talmadge. At first he'd been wary of her, wary of love. Disappointed twice, once by divorce and once by death, he'd tried to fight clear. But it hadn't worked. Or maybe neither of them had tried hard enough. They saw each other when they could, camping in the Blue Ridge once, meeting in Philly or Norfolk or Pensacola when she traveled on Armed Services Committee business and the navy shuttled him back and forth about the world. There never seemed to be enough time together.

The price you paid, he'd thought once, for being dedicated to what you did. And once he'd made the sacrifice, not gladly, but with the sense it was appreciated and
rewarded. But now when he added it up…a medal here, a pat on the back there…a letter of reprimand there, and lately the cold feeling when he read a promotion list, went down the Ls to the Ms and back to the Ks, realizing at last he hadn't missed it; his name just wasn't there.

He summoned her again, like summoning a spirit from the darkness. But she didn't seem real out here. More like an actress remembered from a movie, a far-off dream of golden hair and shining body. His mind groped in emptiness, and returned to him.

His daughter, then, smiling aggressively as she stepped into a backhand. But Nan's image too was flat and lifeless, motionless as a photograph. Then he remembered; it
was
a photograph, the one she'd sent him of her Olympic tryouts. She hadn't made the final cuts, but she'd seeded well for her age.

Her life seemed so distant from his own. Life itself, all life, all light, seemed to belong to a world and a time long past. Surely he had always stumbled through this night like a ghost, following other ghosts, speechless and lost in a darkness that would last through eternity; would broaden into the eternal night of a dead universe, expanding slowly into nothingness and silence.

He shivered at the icy caresses of the mist.

 

BEHIND HIM
in the darkness Maddox had recovered some burst of strength, some second wind. Some spurt of endorphins from outrage that blotted out the pain in her feet and the sore spasming in her thighs and calves.

She still didn't believe it. Not one man had objected. They had to have
noticed
. The mud on his uniform. The blood smell when Sarsten slid into the hole. The smirk. She'd moved as far away as she could, and he'd looked at her, once, as he slid in, the contempt and…something else in his eyes more than she could meet.

She'd squatted there, paralyzed, going through her options. Scream accusations at him…counterproduc
tive. As well as dangerous. Shoot him…be realistic. She thought of insisting they go back and dig the boy up, so they could swear they'd seen the body. Maybe take a picture. Gault had a camera. This made more sense. But then she realized Sarsten would have to lead them to the grave.

She'd looked at him again, at the casual way he slumped against his ruck. She could threaten him all she wanted. But then what would happen the next time he was behind her at night? A man who could kill a child without compunction, without orders, without remorse?

So in the end she too had turned her face to the dirt, enraged at herself, at them all. At this insanity men called war.

Now, biting her lips, she hunched her ruck up on her shoulders, cinched the straps tighter, and went on in the dark. She felt dizzy. Her joints felt molten and somehow soft, like hot iron. Her legs shook when she stopped. Her load was too heavy; she realized that now. But she could carry it. She
would
carry it. Determining only one thing: that she'd speak to the gunny about Sarsten as soon as they could talk privately. She wasn't going to let this bastard get away with it.

 

LAST CAME
Zeitner. He'd actually slept a bit during the day, to his surprise. Just now he felt good. Alert. Open to every sound in the night, every flicker in the distance. Through the NVGs it looked like heat lightning, soundless and distant; but something was going down ahead of them. How far ahead he had no idea, whether what he was seeing was antiaircraft fire over Baghdad or bombs or possibly artillery fire farther east.

He too was uncomfortable over what he'd just witnessed. It hadn't seemed necessary. Gunny Gault hadn't told the new man to do that. On the other hand, he hadn't actually seen what went on, and he didn't know what Sarsten had said when the gunny took him aside after
ward. Maybe he'd just coldcocked the kid and taped him up and stashed him behind a rock. The dirt, hell, everybody had dirt on their uniform; they'd spent all day in a fucking hole. Maybe he was making stuff up.

It happened, alone in your mind, the way you were alone on patrol. Guys in front of you, but all alone back here. Tail end was the most dangerous position. If they made contact he'd be the last out. He had to emplace the claymore and heave the grenades. The claymore was an iron weight on his chest.

He turned his head and upper body uneasily, aiming his weapon out behind them. Only to find through the goggles the emerald seethe of amplified darkness, and nothing beyond that at all.

 

THEY MOVED
steadily through the hours before midnight. Gault stopped every hour for a five-minute listening halt and breather for the attachments. When they halted, the marines deployed out into their security posture, attention and weapons aimed outward. Lenson and Maddox dropped to their knees, then backward onto their rucks like upended turtles. In the center, covered by the others, Gault, Zeitner, and Sarsten huddled over the map, a poncho over them to shield the disappearing-faint red spot of a combat flashlight.

Five minutes, barely enough time to catch your breath and adjust your gear. Nichols gnawed a PowerBar. Blaisell rubbed his face nervously. Vertierra squatted to finally relieve himself into a Ziploc, sighing with relief.

Then they were on their feet again, humping east once more.

 

THEY WERE
picking their way down a slope covered with small slick flat rocks, shale or slate, when a terrific flash lit the sky to the southeast. A transient pulse of white-hot light; then, twenty or thirty seconds later, a solid detona
tion each man felt in his gut. They halted in their tracks, waiting for whatever came next. The rumble was like the end of the world. It went on for minutes, only gradually dying away. Blaze stared breathless, thinking, Somebody's getting his ass greased good.

Gault was thinking, That sounded like a fucking nuke. He turned and whispered in the sky-crackling aftermath, “Lenson up.”

When Sarsten turned and gave him the word, Dan hustled forward, ruck banging painfully against his kidneys. There had to be a comfortable way to rig the thing, but he hadn't found it yet. A shadow, low to the ground; he stumbled over the patrol leader. A hand grabbed his web gear, pulling him down. A warm breath met his ear.

“Was that a nuclear weapon, Commander?”

He smiled in the dark. Then stopped smiling. Kinnear had given him the proword, after all. Was it possible? How would they know?

Then he remembered the radiac gear. He got his ruck off and went down into it. A rustle, something cold and slick between him and the dark; then the scarlet glow of a combat flashlight. Gault had draped his poncho over them. He set the AN/PDR-43N on the ground and turned it on, knowing he wouldn't get much of a reading, that even if it was a bomb the fission products wouldn't be here for hours even downwind. But the needle didn't move at all. He tried it again, got into the back cover, jiggled the batteries. Nada.

“The gear's down,” he whispered to Gault. “But I doubt it was a nuke. An ammo dump, maybe. Do you want me to take this apart? I might be able to fix it, if it's a loose contact.”

The gunny just stood up. “Not now. We'll just keep going,” he said, and Dan jogged back toward his place.

 

SHE STARTED
feeling faint around two. She'd felt bad for the last few hours. Each time they stopped she'd gone
down flat on her back, looking up into the dark, hearing her heart pounding. Her legs throbbed. Then it happened.

The clatter, shockingly loud, brought the column to a halt. Zeitner's head whipped around; he'd been peering behind them, where he'd been seeing things for the last hour. First black curling things, like swollen snakes, at the edge of his vision. Then black ghosts, writhing toward them like like charcoaled, limbless corpses from a George Romero movie. He lifted his weapon, ran a few steps, and fell over something soft.