Black Storm (18 page)

As soon as his arm-windmilling silhouette was clear, Gault picked out what hostile shapes he could and put rounds on them, sweeping from right to left to give F.C. more time to clear. He couldn't see much, the goggles flared each time he fired, but thought he saw a couple go down.

His magazine ran empty. He surged to his feet and sprinted off to the right with every ounce of adrenaline-boosted speed he could muster as behind him he heard Vertierra start ripping rounds off full auto. The night flickered and glared with fire and behind the lighter weapons he heard the
duh duh duh
of something heavier start up. It was firing tracer, and as each round went over, his goggles flashed like a close bolt of lightning. “Peel off!” he shouted to the attachments as he went by.

The firefight was degenerating into what it became every time he'd been in combat or live fire at night. A welter of impressions, noise, light, and confusion. The only way out was instant action, instant movement, every
man knowing exactly what to do and doing it with split-second precision amid flying hot metal. Fire and maneuver, fire and maneuver, until if you were lucky you could disengage.

He ran past a black shape, couldn't tell who; he'd lost count. Then another loomed up, had to be Zeitner because the green ghost-shape had unhooked a square from around his neck and was pulling the little stand-legs out. The ATL held up a gloved hand as Gault pounded by, pulled the time fuze on the claymore, and moved out after him.

The fire slackened, the usual lull after the first ten or fifteen seconds as everyone ran out his first magazine. He scanned the night, looking for the guys who'd already doubled back, and picked one up loping out on the reverse bearing and pounded after him. The cold air was a ripsaw in his throat, but he couldn't stop; if he lost the men ahead, those behind would lose them too.

The chain had to hold. It was all they had. If they were going to get out they had to move together. He thought of the rendezvous and immediately wrote it off. They weren't going to make it, that was all. All he could do was to try to save as much of the team as he could.

A thud and flash behind them as the claymore went off, and a wild burst of shrieks and firing into the dark.

 

WHEN HE
figured it at two hundred meters, F.C. Nichols slowed down. His heart was pounding but he wasn't excited.

Time to punch some targets, that was all.

He picked out a flat section of ground, wound the sling around his left arm, and went down to a three-point stance. He pulled off his goggles and pressed the contact on the side of the night scope. While it spun up he pulled another 5.56 mag out and laid it ready to hand. He turned his head and spat the stone in his mouth out onto the
ground. Then laid his cheek to the stock and peered through the sight.

From blackness the hillside leaped toward him, magnified two and a half times into a perfectly visible slope of rock. A trail he'd not made out before led slanting down it. The enemy patrol must have come down it, from the top of the wadi, gradually intersecting their own course. Drawing closer and closer, till they couldn't miss each other. Sweeping the field of view downward, he saw the Iraqi patrol, spread out in open order on their way toward him.

He set in the range and thought for a moment about the misty air. Finally he set in a slight up correction and a couple of clicks of windage. Then quartered the crosshairs on one of the advancing figures and squeezed off. The rifle cracked, recoiled, ejected, and fed. The plume of dust just above his target was clearly visible through the scope when he regained his sight picture. He corrected and the next round dropped his man. He shifted smoothly right, moving legs and body, not just his arms, and breathed in and out and in and half out and squeezed off.

Rounds zipped over his head. They were shooting back, reacting to whoever was putting their men down, but aiming too high. He relaxed, letting the residual tension flow out of his shoulders. He saw them stopping, looking for shelter, looking for the sniper. When they stopped, he shot them. The others went down, taking cover. Now they were all taking cover. The headlong charge was over. Situation under control, thanks to F.C. Nichols.

Then he heard the howl of incoming artillery.

 

BELATEDLY IT
occurred to Dan that he was supposed to fire and move out. Yeah, that was it, this was the one where you peeled out to the side and leapfrogged back.
Which side, he had no idea. He didn't see anyone between him and the flashes, though. If he fired he might hit whoever was left up there. His fumbling hand, numb and senseless as a Novocained jaw, located a fresh mag at last. He jerked the weapon up and somehow got it in. Racked the bolt and thumbed the selector to automatic and let it all go, aiming high just in case someone else was coming toward him he couldn't see.

Then he spun and peeled out, running in the crouch for all he was worth across rocks and sloping slipping scree. God, don't let me break a leg now. Huge tracers arched over him with a zipping noise. Bullets whacked invisibly around him.

Then a dazzling flash of light and a deafening
crack
-thud like a bolt of lightning. He started violently as a rattle sounded across the desert behind him, followed by screams.

He was alone, still sprinting all out but losing his wind fast. No one with him. No, wait, somebody else was wheezing along to his right. As they ran, the gunfire behind them slackened. To occasional pops, then silence. He couldn't breathe anymore. He slowed to an exhausted shamble, scared and embarrassed. The patrol had come unglued. Where were they? For a moment he felt terrified all over again, the panic of a man alone on hostile ground. Then he remembered. Back two hundred yards, and regroup.

 

SHE'D GONE
to her knees at the shout behind them, not understanding the words but knowing it was wrong, whoever was yelling was wrong. The other soldiers would have gone by in the dark. Then the firing started, a terrifying roar. She dropped to her stomach and hugged the ground desperately.

When the lull came, she remembered her pistol. She fumbled for it and got it out and dropped it and scrabbled around for it. She half raised herself and aimed, then hes
itated. Wait, wait, weren't they supposed to run? She suddenly realized she was all alone.

Her mouth was open when the earth seemed to heave upward. The darkness split like smashed rubies. She dropped again and tried to crawl down into the ground, tried to burrow into the wet gravel and rocks like a mole.

When it stopped, her ears were ringing. She called out, yelling their names. Gault. Zeitner. Vertierra. No one answered. Her mouth was utterly dry. She got a canteen to it but found it was empty, just a little fluid sloshing in the bottom, like an old coconut. Her finger found a jagged tear in the plastic where something had ripped it open.

A voice, a figure from the dark. She jerked the pistol up. “Who's that?”

“Me. Zeitner.”

“Where'd you go? Where'd everybody go?”

“We rebounded back, like Gunny called. Then we couldn't find you. So he sent me back. Let's go, Major, we got to retrograde the fuck out of here.”

That sounded good. She was getting up, not yet quite to her feet, when a red light flickered on thirty feet away. She saw the assistant team leader's body, arms flung into the air, a fraction of a second before it hit her. After that last memory—of a shadow suspended in darkness, flying toward her—came nothing.

He first regained a sense of self not completely, but only partially; as perhaps an animal did. A self as yet nameless, knowing it existed, yet lacking the endless current of internal speech that is the marrow of the human mind. Knowing only that it lived, and was in pain. Then submerging again, into the black.

When he surfaced once more, his first thought in the echo chamber of his mind was What's this in my mouth, choking me. Then: What is that sound. And: What's wrong with my back, why can't I move. When he tried to straighten, the pain became almost too much to bear.

Gradually Dan floated up, not into light or knowledge, but into torment and a throbbing roar. He could not at first understand why he was bent into such an impossible angle. His eyes seemed to be working, but they were covered with a dark cloth, and either there wasn't any light on the other side of it or what lay over them was too opaque to sense light through. His tongue explored what he finally decided was cotton wrapped with rough twine; a gag, around which he could barely breathe.

Then suddenly, as if he'd blocked it out till then, the frontier of his self-awareness leaped outward and he gasped with the agony in his back, his thighs, his wrists. His whole body felt inflamed, as if he'd been beaten or kicked while still unconscious. He was lashed into a
chair, but not upright. Instead he was doubled, head forced down even with his ankles. The posture was intensely painful and disorienting. He was also shivering violently, and he realized by the grating of body hair against his cheek that he was naked. The pulsing roar was his laboring heart fighting to push blood through the narrowed arteries of his cramped body. He jerked against the ropes, strained to lift his head. The line became steel wire. There was no give at all, his most frenzied attempt did not even shift the chair. Only the roar became louder, and he found he couldn't get enough air; and the red tide rose quickly up over his panicked mind.

But then it ebbed, and the unconsciousness stepped back. He was sorry to feel it slipping away.

He sat that way for what felt like hours. Now and again he couldn't help struggling. His body made him do it, but he permitted it without hope. Whoever had bound him had done this many times before. For some of that time he prayed. When he did, the pain seemed to recede. Or perhaps he was growing numb, from lack of blood flow or from the unbelievable cold.

But the worst thing was not knowing what had happened to the rest of the team. To Maddox and Gault, Vertierra and Zeitner and Nichols and Blaisell. Sarsten he couldn't care about. He didn't exactly wish him dead, but it would be cosmic justice if one of those bullets flying through the dark had found its mark. But what about the others? Surely the Iraqis hadn't captured them all. The marines were too good, too fast, too smart for that.

Therefore, the mission continued. And if that was true, he was still on the mission too; only his part of it had changed. For if by any word of his the Iraqis suspected their target, they'd double and triple the guards. Move the weapon, if such a thing could be moved.

All he could contribute now was his silence. To keep the existence and goal of Signal Mirror from passing his lips.

He found he wasn't afraid to die. He only feared he wouldn't be strong enough not to.

As the hours passed, his mind circled the same path and only wore it deeper. Till at last it ceased thinking at all, and he hung in darkness, a suffering atom in the midst of a chilling blackness.

Steps, suddenly; the quick opening of a door. The scuffing of heavy boots, and voices in guttural Arabic. He thought, Now they'll untie me, and the idea was so appealing he absolutely did not care what they would do to him after that; only that he'd be able to lift his head, and maybe move his arms.

Instead they lifted him, the chair or rack or whatever he was on as well, and carried it through a doorway (he knew because his shoulder caught on the jamb, and was rammed through with what sounded like a curse) headfirst. The second room was as cold as the first, but then came a third and his bearers let him down with grunts and sighs. The legs of whatever supported him grated on some hard rough surface, tile or concrete, as they dragged him around.

Harsh tobacco-smoke. The stink of burning kerosene. It was much warmer here. He heard a cough, a clink of glass. From somewhere the sound of what could be either a radio or a cassette player, a woman singing. He'd always enjoyed Arab music and for a moment the terror stood aside or maybe he stepped outside of it and for several seconds lived in the lilting melody. Words that he did not understand, but a tone of longing and joy deferred that he did. All too well.

A coldness against his skin. Flat and smooth and metal chill. Then it rotated, and he felt the thinness of its edge. It moved idly, almost tenderly along his cheek below his ear. Then rotated again, and with several powerful thrusts sawed through the line holding his head down.

A hand slapped his head upward, and the pain of the suddenly released tension made him cry out into the gag. Then it too was cut, and pulled from his mouth so hard he felt the flesh rip at the side of his lips. He tasted blood.

“Lieutenant Lenson.” The voice was that of an older
man, British-accented. He lifted his head, but for a moment couldn't speak. His throat did not seem to be working. Finally he said, “Present.”

This seemed to strike several people as comical. He could make out three different laughs, though he sensed more than that in the room. He heard a movement behind him, felt a prod that might be a weapon. But the laughter came from ahead, so he flexed his neck, tilting his head back and working his shoulders, and faced that direction.

“Lenson. And Daniel. Those are Jewish names, aren't they? Are you Jewish, Daniel? Wait a moment—lift it up.” Gloved fingers, wool by the feel, bored between his legs and found his penis. Held it up. To silence, and then to renewed laughter, hearty guffaws.

“You can't please a woman with that worm. Are all Americans that tiny?”

He didn't answer. Another voice said, “He does not like women.”

“You don't like women, eh, Dan? You give pleasure to men.”

More chuckles, but not as many as before. He kept his head up, trying to peer beneath the blindfold. All he could see was a faint bleeding of light.

More seriously now. “What religion are you, Daniel?”

He considered the merits of getting into a religious discussion and decided there were none. To these people, the only safe answer was Christian. “Christian,” he said.

“Is your friend Jewish too?”

“Friend?” he said, but the interrogator did not seem inclined to pursue it. Instead there was a mutter of conversation in Arabic or Iraqi, whatever, he thought, they were speaking. Iraqi was a dialect of Arabic. Iraqi, then.

“What are you doing in Iraq, Daniel?”

This too took some thought. And he was not thinking rapidly, or well. So far, though, nothing they'd done to him exceeded the Naval Academy Plebe Indoctrination guidelines, at least as certain firsties had interpreted them when he was at Annapolis. He knew this was different.
There were no rules here, no limits. Still there was a grim reassurance in it, to remember he'd been through trials not unlike this. He cleared his throat and said, “Military operations.”

“Let us start with your unit. I believe you will tell us the name of your unit? Will you not?”

This too took some thought, and he hung forward on the ropes to give, he hoped, an impression of weakness and maybe stupidity. Coming across as smart or functional did not seem like the best idea here. His actual assignment was on the staff of the commander, Task Force 151.11 in the Northern Gulf. But this didn't explain why he was in Iraq. Possible answers milled around in his mind. Apparently he thought for too long, because the interrogating voice spoke sharply and he was driven forward by a blow in the back from what felt like a rifle butt. “Your unit!”

“Sorry, I'm…not feeling too good. My unit's the First Surveillance and Intelligence Reconnaissance Group.”

Some discussion of this; or maybe what was going on was that the first voice was translating, explaining, to someone else taking notes or transcribing the interrogation.

A strange cunning mind within his mind that he recognized but had not heard for a long time, an amoral under-dog duplicity that had grown gradually in all his classmates during their first months at Annapolis, that was sly and resourceful and could never be obeyed wholly, for it was concerned only and always with personal advantage, whispered that this was a Good Thing but also a Bad Thing. On the good side, a transcription meant there would be some record that he'd been captured.

On the other hand it meant he was in the hands of professional interrogators.

Another question, pronounced loudly and somewhat pedantically. “Answer more rapidly. What service is this group associated with?”

“The United States Marine Corps.”

Another word; another blow, this time much harder, and to the head. His ear caught the steel of the butt and he felt it tear, felt warmth trickle down his neck. He lay forward and tried to breathe, wishing he could see them coming, slip them a little. “Don't begin by lying to me, Lieutenant. You are US Navy. What is the US Navy doing in Iraq?”

“I'm an ANGLICO,” he said.

A pause; then a slithering sound, the flip of pages.

“You're an Anglican?”

“No, an ANGLICO—an air and naval gunfire liaison officer. I can call in air strikes, or battleship gunfire.”

“You obviously think we're fools. We are far out of range of battleship guns.”

“But not of air strikes.” He reflected briefly on how much to give them; whether that was enough. He decided to stop there.

But his interrogator didn't want to stop, and through repeated application of the gun butt and also of the odd lit cigarette to his ears and other sensitive areas, Dan gradually invented a mission for UAT-12 he thought might satisfy them. They were a reconnaissance patrol inserted to look for Scud launches. Once they saw one, or located Iraqi forces, they radioed in the location for targeting by aircraft. He let this go bit by bit over what felt like several hours, but knew it was nowhere near that long. The interrogator seemed to have all the time in the world.

Occasionally he would whiff a rich coffee smell, and the harsh tobacco odor was never gone. They were smoking all around him. Finally the interrogator was silent. Dan heard the rapid click of telephone buttons and a long conversation, during which he sat and enjoyed not being burned or hit. In the other room the radio or cassette player came on again, another female vocalist accompanied by what sounded like cowbells.

The rattle of a handset slammed down, and suddenly his head was dragged back. He gasped, but it was only the
blindfold coming off. He blinked into the glare, realizing he was directly under a large fluorescent fixture.

The room was pretty much as he'd pictured it, except the walls were painted red to about the height of a man. Above that they were cream. Two large photographs on the wall, one of Saddam in Arab robes and the other of an older Arab he didn't recognize. A table with colorfully enameled demitasse cups. A rusty air conditioner in a painted-over window. Not one but two round kerosene heaters, both throwing a cheerful orange glow out over a floor laid with the square glazed tiles that back in the States would be called Mexican.

Reminding him, in a vivid sudden flash, of his ex-wife's place out in Utah. Seeing it so minutely it was like he was there. A rambling house, with high ceilings and low furniture and expensive-looking modern paintings. Vines on overhead sunshades. A sunlit checkerboard of light and shade on a patio with tiles just like this, and beyond an adobe wall the Rockies floating like tethered balloons. He'd hated the house the moment he stepped in, but now in memory it felt like a faraway vision of Paradise, a lost heaven of safety and comfort and belonging.

Three men sat facing him, all in the drab Iraqi uniform that managed to look at the same time both British and Soviet: green sweaters with shoulder tabs, their trousers tucked into polished Russian-style boots. They could be brothers, all three chunky and mustached. The one on the right had gray in his hair. In front of them on a folding table were objects he recognized. His dog tags—that was where they got the “lieutenant,” then; he'd never bothered to change them, just pulled them out of his gray metal academy-issue lockbox and put them on without thinking. The Iraqis were smoking, looking at him. After a moment the oldest spoke, in English. “Cigarette?” The pack was blue. They were smoking Gauloises.

“No, thanks.”

“Go ahead. No charge.” The others chuckled and for a moment it might have looked almost companionable,
four dudes sitting around in a warm room having a smoke and coffee. They must have caught his glance at the tray because one lifted the little teapot inquiringly.

The trouble with this whole scene was that he didn't know what to do. He'd never been to E&E, Escape and Evasion, the school pilots and aircrews told the stories about. Where you learned how to undergo interrogations, what to say, how to escape. The navy didn't consider destroyer officers liable to capture. He'd been trying to remember not just the Code of Conduct, but the GMI training he'd gotten in-theater on surviving a terrorist abduction. They'd been written for skyjackings, but…. Who ever wrote them had recommended trying to establish a human relationship with your captors. Accepting small favors was part of that. Establishing a common ground. At last he cleared his throat and said, “Is that Arab coffee? I love Arab coffee.”

“Good, good, you love Arab coffee. Give him some,” said the older man. For a moment he thought they might free his hands, but instead one of the soldiers held the cup out. He dipped his face and managed to suck about half of it up. It was tepid and sludgy and tasted great, though it stung the inside of his mouth and his lips where the flesh had ripped. He sat back and licked the grounds off his lips.