Sand and Fire (9780698137844) (24 page)

“This is only the beginning, you know.”

Blount didn't answer. Ivan and Fender said nothing.

I ain't got time for your foolishness, Blount thought. I got work to do. Go sit with your dirtbag buddies so I can get to this other bolt.

“We have stocks of chemical weapons bigger than you imagine,” Monkey Ears continued. “We have some left over from Gadhafi. We have others sent to us by brothers in Syria. Bashar al-Assad should have remained an ophthalmologist. He could not even control his own arsenals.”

Blount shrugged.

“I tell you this because I want you to die with the knowledge of what we have in store for America. What we did in Sicily, what we
did in Gibraltar, came only as practice for what we will bring to your cities.”

The terrorists had said this before. In intel briefings, Blount had heard of threats like that from Kassam. But to hear it straight from one of the bad guys gave it a new ring of authenticity. Kind of like on a Marine base when rumors flew about a coming deployment: You might dismiss the first murmurings. But when you heard it from someone on the commander's staff, it became more real.

Blount denied Monkey Ears the satisfaction of a response. He just stared at the floor like he was too sick to listen. Ivan and Fender gave no reaction, either. But Blount burned inside. These lowlifes had long dreamed of a strong follow-up to 9/11, a dream spoiled by a combination of luck, good anti-terror ops by the U.S. military, and good policing. The combination had worked fairly well for years. The Boston Marathon bombings, awful as they were, didn't compare to the mass casualties of 2001.

However, terrorists had now figured a way to get chemical weapons into Europe. Who knew how? Container ships or speedboats, maybe. Didn't matter; if they'd done it in Europe they could do it in America. They might not get Blount's little girls, but they'd get somebody's children, somebody's spouse.

Fury rose within him like a fever. The shackles themselves angered Blount. Chained to a wall in Africa, he felt the rage of his ancestors. His people had suffered under a different brand of evil, but one just as vile as the one before him now. The preacher man back home knew what he was talking about when he said evil was real. Evil flowed in the world on a daily basis, and a great big gout of it had pooled and started to smell bad right here in this place.

G
old strode up the ramp of the C-130 Hercules waiting on the tarmac at Mitiga. She carried an overnight bag—an Army duffel packed with a satellite phone, her camera and GPS, a change of clothes, a notepad and pens, two MREs and four bottles of water. The worn duffel still bore a cloth strip with her old title:
SGT. MAJOR S. GOLD
.
Beside her name, a patch in the subdued colors of camouflage showed a set of jump wings and lettering that read
AIRBORNE
. She might have been boarding this plane for a military mission—except that she boarded alone, and instead of a uniform she wore a safari shirt, civilian tactical trousers, and an Afghan scarf.

The airplane's four turboprop engines thrummed in ground idle, the black exhaust smoke whipped by spinning propellers. The Herk had flown in from Sigonella with five pallets of rice bound for a refugee camp outside Illizi, Algeria. As Gold took her seat made of nylon webbing, she noticed lettering on the rice bags:
UN WORLD FOOD PROGRAMME.

The C-130 crew had originally planned to shut down engines to board their passenger; their regs allowed engines-running onloads only for military personnel trained to avoid dangers such as prop arcs. But Parson had radioed to them that their civilian guest was a free-fall-qualified parachutist and a veteran of the 82nd Airborne Division. Gold had stood beside Parson in the operations center as he made the call. The pilot just laughed and said, “Yeah, we'll do an ERO.”

Inside the cargo compartment, Gold took in the sights, sounds, and smells as if returning home. Burning jet fuel fumes combined with grease and mil-spec paint to form a metallic odor common to all warplanes. She eyed the two steel cables that stretched from the forward bulkhead to the troop doors near the tail. How many times had she clipped a static line to those cables—maybe in this very airplane—and waited for the green light?

Gold's past informed her present, gave her the qualifications for her current job. But now she felt a strong sense of the passage of time. It seemed just yesterday when she'd first received the order to stand up and hook up. She'd exited the airplane with feet and knees together, looked up to the reassuring sight of a fully inflated canopy. That sight had become so familiar, yet she knew she'd never see it again.

The loadmaster closed the ramp, and the Herk began to taxi. Fog spewed from the air-conditioning plenums; from experience Gold knew C-130s did that while on the ground in warm, humid air. The cargo compartment filled with mist until the flight engineer found the right setting.

She looked out the small porthole-style window as the aircraft lined up on the runway. The sound of the engines magnified, and so did the vibration throughout the cargo compartment. The C-130 began to accelerate. Distance markers ticked past, and the aircraft lifted into a smooth desert sky.

After the aircraft had cruised for only a few minutes, the loadmaster shouted over the engine noise.

“Ma'am,” he said. “There's a call for you on the radio. It's from Kingfish. You can use my headset.”

Kingfish? Oh, yes, Gold thought. The call sign for Mitiga operations. Probably Parson himself. The loadmaster took off his headset, unplugged it from one interphone cord and connected it to another. Gave the headset to Gold.

“Our call sign is Reach Eight-Six,” the loadmaster told her. “You're on secure voice.”

Gold donned the headset, pressed the talk switch, and said, “Kingfish, Reach Eight-Six. Gold here.”

“Sophia,” Parson said, “we just got some bad news, and I didn't want you to hear it thirdhand. They've executed one of the prisoners.”

Gold closed her eyes, drew in a deep breath. Despite all her hopes, she'd known this was likely. And she could well imagine all the horrors Parson's words implied. Static sizzled over the channel as Parson released his mike switch. Gold pressed her own switch to ask a question. But she wasn't sure she wanted to know the answer.

“Who was it?”

“Sergeant Daniel Farmer. A Marine.”

Gold offered a quick and silent prayer for Farmer and all those who loved him. Sorrow churned within her amid all the anger she carried. She tried to focus on her job; that was the best thing she could do for Blount and the others in enemy hands.

“Any changes in the mission?”

“Negative,” Parson said. “I thought you should know. Sorry to have to tell you this way.”

“It's okay, Michael.”

“Be careful, Sophia. Kingfish out.”

Gold gave the headset back to the loadmaster. She tried to hold back the brimming in her eyes, but lost the battle and had to wipe tears. A short time later, the loadmaster spoke up with another announcement.

“You might want to buckle in tight, ma'am,” the crewman said. “We're gonna do a tactical arrival.”

Gold pulled her seat belt tighter, nodded.

“I've done them before,” she said.

After a few minutes, the engines hushed as the pilot pulled back the throttles. Clanks and hydraulic hisses signaled the gear and flaps
deploying. The Herk rolled into a steep bank, and Gold felt the airplane spiraling down. Thousands of feet below, the blue tents of the refugee camp rotated in the window.

The plane completed one turn, then two and three before the wings leveled. The ground loomed close, and then came the soft bumps of touchdown on a dirt airstrip.

When the propellers entered reverse pitch, Gold felt her torso yanked forward by the rapid deceleration. Dust enveloped the C-130, beige powder obscuring the view out the windows. The airplane slowed to walking speed. The dirt maelstrom cleared immediately when the prop blades returned to a pitch setting for forward thrust.

After taxiing off the rough strip, the Herk crew opened the ramp and shut down the engines. The smell of the desert rolled into the airplane: dust baked by the sun, and air oddly laden with moisture. The loadmaster pushed the pallets of rice one at a time onto a waiting forklift, aided by African Union troops. Gold recognized Major Ongondo supervising the effort. She thanked the crew for the ride, hoisted her overnight bag, and hopped out of an open troop door. Ongondo noticed her, came over with an outstretched hand.

“Ah, the ubiquitous Ms. Gold,” Ongondo said.

From his sunny demeanor, Gold supposed he hadn't heard the news.

“Major,” Gold said, shaking his hand.

“I presume you came to help run this camp. This one is quite new.”

“Actually, no. I'm looking for any kind of information that might help us find our missing personnel. This is not a good day.” Gold told him about Farmer's execution.

Ongondo placed his hands on his web belt, lowered his chin. Behind him, his men broke down the pallets of rice. One by one, they carried each bag into a mess tent.

“I am very sorry to hear this,” Ongondo said. “I imagine you have come searching for facts.”

“You could say that. I need to see if anyone has seen or heard anything that might lead to Kassam.”

Gold wiped her face with her checkered scarf. The morning sun had risen higher now, and the temperature climbed with it. The day promised to be warm for fall in North Africa.

“I'll try to identify some refugees willing to speak with you. We do have some clans here that have done business with Islamists. Things are a little tense, in fact.”

The major led Gold into one of the blue tents. The temperature inside felt only slightly cooler than outdoors. No air-conditioning units, but an industrial fan whirred in a corner. An orange electrical cord as thick as Gold's thumb curled between the fan and a generator that hummed outside. The fan's breeze flowed across a row of empty cots, and the tent's interior glowed with the watery light of sunshine filtered through blue fabric.

“Perhaps you can use this as an office for a few hours until more refugees arrive,” Ongondo said. “Some of the other tents have already filled.”

“Thank you.”

Gold opened her duffel. She had packed clothes and toiletries on the bottom, tools on top. She sat on a cot, pulled out her notepad and pens, her sat phone, and two bottles of water. Placed everything beside her on the canvas. Ongondo left and came back several minutes later with two refugees: a man and a boy.

Each wore a blue
cheche
, the traditional headgear of the Tuareg people. The headgear looked much like any other turban, except its wrappings also covered the lower part of the face. The presence of Tuaregs surprised Gold. In some of the conflict that had seared North Africa in recent years, the nomadic Tuaregs had allied with Islamists. Together they had fomented a rebellion in Mali, and Tuaregs had also fought on behalf of Gadhafi in Libya. Mixing Tuaregs with other refugees fleeing jihadists seemed like a recipe for trouble. No wonder Ongondo had spoken of tension.

Why had these guys fled here, anyway? Perhaps the new brand of Islamist represented by Kassam did not respect old alliances. Also, many Tuaregs' interpretation of Islam did not support the strict sharia law that jihadists imposed. No telling how alliances were shifting in the chaos all around.

A more immediate problem occurred to Gold. She did not speak their native language. She tried a greeting in Arabic.

Blank stares.

She seldom felt stumped, but she felt that way now. She wondered if she could find an Arabic speaker out here who also spoke one of the Tuareg dialects.

“I speak some Tamahaq,” Ongondo offered.

Gold turned toward him, mouth open slightly.

“Ah, that's helpful, sir. Where did you learn that language?”

“University of Nairobi. I majored in African Studies.”

Well, that explained his broad knowledge of folktales, proverbs, and languages. On a better day she would have asked Ongondo more about his schooling, but now was not the time.

“Can you ask them how they wound up here?”

Ongondo nodded and began speaking. His questions and the Tuaregs' answers carried vowel sounds that sounded vaguely like Arabic. That made sense; the Tuareg dialects were part of the Berber languages—which were part of the Afro-Asiatic languages. And the Afro-Asiatic tongues included Arabic.

Understanding the classifications was one thing; understanding the conversation was quite another. Gold had to wait for Ongondo's translation. She could, however, read the fatigue and fear in the Tuaregs' eyes.

“Their clan had camped south of here,” Ongondo said. “I am not sure exactly how far south. Some of the Tuaregs still spend a lot of the year on the road as traders.”

Ongondo and the two refugees continued speaking in the Tuareg dialect. While they talked, Gold twisted open the two bottles of
water she'd placed on the cot and handed them to the Tuaregs. The refugees paused in their chatter to take long swallows and to make hand gestures Gold interpreted as thanks. The boy closed his eyes and let the fan's breeze flow over him as if someone were rubbing his face with satin. Gold wondered how often he'd felt a fan, let alone air-conditioning.

“Bandits raided their camp,” Ongondo said. “Burned their tents, stole goats and bags of millet. Shot anyone who resisted. These two are father and son. The mother and another son were killed.”

Gold regarded the two. She had seen that glazed look of grief and suffering too many times, mainly in Afghanistan, and she never got used to it. She didn't want to get used to it. To become emotionally calloused could lead to accepting violence and abuse as normal.

“Please tell them I am so sorry for what happened to them,” Gold said. “Do they know who did this to them and why?”

More conversation in Tamahaq. Tears ran from the boy's eyes, down his mocha-colored skin until they disappeared under the folds of his face covering.

“They say the bandits called them
kafir
, unbelievers,” Ongondo said.

These are Muslims, too, Gold thought, but jihadists would declare
kafir
anyone who got in their way. These people had supplies the terrorists wanted. That made them unbelievers.

“Pretty ironic, since some of the Tuaregs once aligned themselves with jihadists,” Gold said.

“Like aligning with an adder,” Ongondo said. “If you let it into your house it might kill the rats. But it would just as soon bite you.”

“Can they identify any of the attackers?”

Ongondo translated the question. The refugees shook their heads.

“Do they know where their attackers came from?”

Same answer.

Gold considered what else to ask. These two seemed to know nothing that might lead to Kassam. Or if they did know, they were afraid to talk. A dead end either way. She hoped conversations with other refugees might prove more helpful.

The Tuareg father began speaking. Not in response to a question from Ongondo, but something he volunteered. His eyes brimmed as he talked. Ongondo nodded slowly, as if moved by the words. While he listened, Ongondo crooked a finger and pressed it to his lips. Gold thought she recognized the situation: The Tuareg man was expressing a complicated idea, and Ongondo had to put some thought into how to translate it.

When the Tuareg finished, Ongondo paused for a moment. Then he said, “This is hard to convey in English, but he says earth and heaven and hell have spun out of their orbits. Demons from hell have been flung to earth.”

So it seemed. Gold had received evidence of that over the radio a short time ago.

“Wow,” she said. “That's poetic and heartbreaking at the same time.”

The poetic part didn't surprise her. Though she did not speak this language, she knew the Tuaregs had a strong oral tradition: adventure poems, love poems, war poems, folktales and legends passed down for uncounted generations. Recent events would give them more stories to recount, and not the good kind.

Before Gold could think of any words of solace, a commotion interrupted her thoughts. Shouts came from outside, angry voices in at least three languages. Was this a terrorist attack within the refugee camp? But she heard no gunfire, no explosions.