Black Storm (24 page)

WHEN THEY
had it straightened out, or as straightened as it was going to get, he felt the sinking feeling again. “Ted” insisted he'd never been told to take them directly to the site. Nor did he know exactly where it was. He'd heard it was beneath the Medical City. He didn't know exactly where beneath it, but he'd been told it was close to the river. No, he wouldn't say who'd told him. No, he couldn't go and get his boss, the one who passed information out of the country to Damascus. He'd left the city when the bombing started. In fact, Ted wouldn't admit he was working for the Syrians, only that he was doing Allah's work helping the enemies of Saddam, the enemy of Allah. They
were
the enemies of Saddam, were they not? They were Americans. Their wonderful radio there would tell them where to go. They had no further need of him, surely. Together they whipsawed him for nearly fifteen minutes, but in the end concluded either he knew nothing more, or he wasn't going to give it up without more forceful persuasion.

Sarsten got up from his heels and motioned him aside. A few feet distant he said, “Shall I take the piss out of him, then?”

Gault looked back at the guy. He was smoking again, squatting and looking pleased with himself. He kept stealing glances at Maddox, who was sitting on the running board of the truck with Lenson. He wondered if it was worth some field interrogation. Wiring his hands behind him, a few slaps to loosen his mouth. He decided it was too soon for that, and told the SAS no. This guy was the closest thing they had to an ally. Converting him into another hostile wasn't going to help. “Maybe if he keeps this up,” he told Sarsten.

“Just give me the word, Gunny. We'll make him sing.”

He strolled back and Ted stood. “So, you will go now?” he said, grinning and spitting out a shred of tobacco. The cigarette smelled rank, like some old cigar.
“Go down underground. Find Saddam's secret. Win the war.” He grinned wider, looking sideways at Maddox.

“Like shit,” Gault muttered under his breath. “You're going with us,” he said aloud.

Ted just smiled and shook his head.

He was considering strangling the fucker, stinking breath and all, when the tremor hit. A jolt against the soles of their boots, a sway and humming in the truss work overhead. Seconds later the sound arrived. He listened to the thuds of distant bombs, eyes on the Iraqi—who didn't react at all, as if he heard it every day. He probably did; he'd had four weeks to get used to it.

Gault wiped sweat off his face again. Like every mission, planning it was different from doing it. Time was passing. He had to do something. He got up and began quartering the garage, running his flash over the concrete. Aside from the surface roughness, it was unmarked. No sign of joints or accesses. Monolithic. He couldn't tell if it was part of a larger slab, if the garage they were in was part of a larger building. If there were adjoining buildings, shouldn't there be doors to them? “Reinforced?” he asked the Iraqi, pointing at the floor, but got only a blank look. Sarsten and Maddox watched him. Lenson stared at the wall.

He went on his knees to the map, checked the GPS again. The tremor came again, closer. He glanced at the overhead and saw Maddox looking up too. They were too close to the airport, and way too close to the railyard. Whether the explosions they heard were bombs or Tomahawks, freight-handling facilities attracted ordnance. He didn't want to be here when the US Air Force decided it was time to catch up on their quota of truck parks.

Finally he went around to the back of the truck. Vertierra was down on one knee, weapon cradled, watching the gate door. The gray light silvered his sweating face. He looked muddy and exhausted. “Get Nichols on deck to rig for breaching,” Gault told him.

F.C. WAS
still chewing on the cleaning patch. It was getting soggy-ragged, but it kept his jaw busy. Kneeling on the cold concrete, its whorls and ridges pressing into his knees through the battle dress, he checked that the rifle was on safe, then laid it carefully aside. He shrugged his ruck off and swung it around to face him. He pulled the charges out and set them on the concrete, then laid his demo card beside them.

The smell of the explosive brought back Quantico in the summer. The heat. The mosquitoes. The woods, green and dripping with summer rain.

The Corps taught breaching in the classroom first. Scarred wooden tables and plastic chairs whose feet left rust rings on the linoleum tile. C-4, TNT, tetrytol, ammonium nitrate, military dynamite. How to calculate charges to cut steel I-beams, rectangular sections, concrete T-beams, timber. How to crater roads and destroy a bridge abutment. Saddle charges, diamond charges, platter charges, a counter-force charge, where you blew through a standing column from both sides at once. Some math, not a lot; basic arithmetic, simple tables; procedures a man could remember under stress, at night, under fire.

After the classroom you went to the dummy explosives. Kindergarten clay that you shaped with your hands, kneaded into plasticity and molded to shape. Bright candy yellow, grass green, sky blue. The primary colors of a child's world. They practiced setting up out at Combat Town. How to blow a door, a brick wall four feet thick, how to cut through sheet steel or demolish a stick-built house. Then at last the real thing, waxy stiff blocks of gray explosive. Their first live charge was a quarter-pound of C-4 on a concrete block. It made a neat, perfectly cut hole.

The problem was, at school you always knew what you were blowing through. Here, it was anybody's guess. He struck the concrete with the heel of his hand, but of course
got nothing back. At least two feet thick, and judging by the fact trucks parked here, most likely steel reinforced.

He checked the demo card. An untamped charge on reinforced concrete between one and three feet thick required fourteen pounds of TNT. He didn't carry TNT. He had twenty pounds of C-16, Detasheet, in five-pound blocks, and eight detonators. The blocks were skinned with olive drab plastic. He peeled a couple and pressed them together, making a single square from the two dense-feeling rectangles, and leaned his weight on them to mash them into the whorls and indentations of the concrete. Considered adding another, then looked at the flimsy roof overhead and decided not to.

“We need to move the truck,” he told Gault. “I want the engine block over the point of detonation.”

“You sure about that?”

“I want something to absorb the back blast. We don't want the roof taking off.”

A tremor; a wait; a distant thud. Lenson got up and walked toward them.

“Tomahawks,” he said.

“Is that what it is, Commander?” said Gault. Nichols watched his pale eyes examine the naval officer's face.

Lenson looked pale but better than he had that morning. F.C. remembered getting him out of the blockhouse. He hadn't been able to walk then. He decided he wasn't going to let the fucking Iraqis capture him. Not while he still had a weapon, even if it was just his KA-BAR.

Lenson nodded. Said something about hearing them before, the sound was the same. Gault nodded, and after a moment Lenson went back to sit beside Maddox again.

To F.C. the gunny said, “Well, whatever it is, maybe it'll cover us setting this off. I'll get him to move the truck. You're all ready to go?”

“Just got to stick the detonator in.”

“Before or after?”

“Get the truck over it first. Then I'll crawl under and set it.”

The only trouble was Ted Man didn't want to move the truck. He said it was his. And after a while F.C. started to think maybe it wasn't such a hot idea after all. What if they just blew the wheels off? They didn't have jacks, or time, to pry a goddamn truck out of the way. Finally he went over to where the gunny and the Iraqi were arguing and said he'd changed his mind. Gault gave him a pissedoff look. Instead they moved the truck farther away. This Ted readily agreed to. He jockeyed it back and forth while the diesel fumes filled the garage.

When he finally turned the engine off again, F.C. dropped to his knees over the charge. Oil had dripped from the truck where it had parked, making a black pool that reminded him of blood. He had the cap ready and pressed it down into the explosive. Then looked to the TL.

Gault nodded, and he twisted and pulled the fuze igniter. Grabbed his rifle and jumped to his feet, and ran after the gunny for the back of the garage.

In an adjoining room they flattened themselves along the wall, just in case the roof came down. Through a window he saw empty rails, a lowering sky, the distant sky-pricking needle of a minaret.

The charge went off with a clap that left their ears ringing. The walls shook. Pieces of insulation and straw—the remains of birds' nests, he saw—fell from the roof. A clang and clatter of metal resounded from the bay area.

When they went back in, the air milled with smoke. It smelled like a firing range. He fanned the haze away and looked down. The charge had blasted a hemispherical absence in the concrete. At the bottom was a two-foot circle of tan gravel. The end of a rebar came out of one side of the cut, then took a sharp angle downward. He looked around the garage. Ted was running his hands over gouges in the side of the cab. There were holes in the overhead, too, through which they could see the sky.

“E-tools,” Gault said, looking into the hole. “And hurry up. We don't have much time.”

THERE WAS
room for one man at a time to work in the hole. They went in headfirst and worked hanging upside down, legs hooked over the edge, pitching the dirt up and out onto the concrete floor. Each man dug furiously for ten minutes, then backed out to give the next one a turn. Ted came over with a sledge from his truck and they used that to hammer off more concrete around the lip of the penetration. The work went fairly fast until the dirt began caving in on them. They dug it out around the perimeter of the hole, under the concrete, and kept going down.

In an hour they were six feet down, the “on” digger inside the hole, his head under the level of the foundation. Gault, squatting beside it, didn't like the way he was starting to feel. Each time he jumped in he worked furiously in the dusty air, coughing, twisting awkwardly to throw spadefuls of the loose soil into the bucket they'd lowered to get the tailings out of the pit. The sand shifted under his boots, caving in as he went down. At each plunge of the blade, he expected the ring of concrete, but it didn't come. The spades grated and sparked through a layer of weathered, burnt brick, and he wondered what ancient catastrophe or war had left it there. They said Baghdad was older than Rome. He dug till his shoulders ached and his throat was coated with the dry fine dust, then dropped the tool and wriggled out as Blaisell thrust his boots through the hole. Ted sat chain-smoking, grimly eyeing his truck. Maddox took her turn, though she didn't last long, and after a while Lenson got up and insisted on digging too.

Gault didn't mind underground work. They'd done some during the UAT workup, trying to refine tactics and weaponry for fighting in built-up areas. Building on stuff they'd read about Stalingrad and Hue City and the tunnels at Cu Chi. A city engineer had taken them into the drains of downtown San Antonio, and they'd war-gamed
against a police squad. What worried him was how little time they had. G day was tomorrow. He kept the men digging as fast as they could, rotating them in and out. But so far he didn't see anything like what he wanted. The ground looked undisturbed. He checked the map again, remembering what the army engineer had said about what got built probably not matching what was on the plan. If they didn't find this thing pretty fucking soon, he'd have to come up with some other way to get to the objective.

At last he jumped to his feet, grabbed another tool, and slid feetfirst in beside Sarsten. The SAS grunted angrily at being crowded, but Gault attacked the side of the deepening hole, digging not downward, but off to the north.

Six feet on, the steel blade cut chips out of a terra-cotta surface. For a moment he thought it was an old wall, buried here. Then he recognized it. The old square pipes he remembered seeing in pits along the road when he was a kid. Sarsten wriggled over beside him. Working side by side, they uncovered three feet of it.