Black Storm (4 page)

Dan wondered if it was also that ever since he'd tried to resign once, then taken it back, he'd had the feeling certain people considered him expendable. He dismissed that as paranoia, though. “Where exactly are we going?”

“Out west, to link up with the team.”

“I mean, on this mission you're talking about.”

“I can't tell you yet, but it'll be serious Apache man-tracking Indian Country.” Paulik smiled broadly. “I got to do some of that in Cambodia. Livin' in the red. Does wonders for your nightmares.”

“What are we looking for when we get there?”

“I can't tell you that either, because actually we aren't sure. We just got to get some eyes in there to look around, see what they can find.” A crewman jogged toward them, and Paulik turned. “Okay, let's strap it on.”

“Well, look, wait a minute. They need me where I am.”

Paulik looked taken aback, as if the idea someone might question or object had never occurred to him. “Hey, I asked for their best guy and they shit you out. Don't worry, we'll have you back on your ship in a week. Two weeks, tops.”

“Well, all right,” Dan said, feeling like he'd just stepped overboard without a life jacket.

The aide, the one who'd taken him to the command center, came up to them. He said, “Admiral's got a last word for you, sir.”

Kinnear was standing forward of the helo platform. The wash from the turning rotors ruffled his hair. Dan yelled, “Be there in a minute,” to Paulik, ducked, and ran toward where the admiral stood.

“A couple Navy-only words,” Kinnear shouted over the engines.

“Yes, sir.”

“I don't know what this is about, but when it's over I want you back here.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

“If there's anything I should know about, call me. This sounds like an army boondoggle to me.”

“It sounds like a marine mission, sir. Colonel Paulik and all.”

“It's assigned to them, but the tasking came from Schwarzkopf. Just keep your eyes open. Remember what's going to happen when this is over.”

Dan stared at him. “When what's over, sir?”

“The war, Dan,” said Kinnear.

“To Kuwait, you mean? And Iraq?”

“No, to the Navy Department. When this is over the army and air force are going to be at our throats again.
This time, they'll want our expeditionary mission. You know why we were ordered to stop firing Tomahawks?”

“They're an expensive round. We're using them up.”

“Bull; we've got plenty of airframes. Schwarzkopf and Powell turned them off because we were getting too much network exposure.”

Dan digested that as Kinnear went on. “I'm sorry to expose you to the ugly underbelly of interservice politics, Lenson. Just keep that in mind, when they start telling you you have to ‘think joint.' I'll translate that for you. It means: we lie back and they do what they want to us.”

Dan said he'd bear that in mind. Kinnear nodded curtly and turned away. Then he turned back. “One last question. What's your feeling on TLAM-N?”

“The nuclear round, sir?” He debated telling the admiral about his own history with the nuclear Tomahawk, how he'd been fired from the cruise missile office for objecting to its development. But it seemed too long to go into, so all he said was, “I'm not too keen on nukes in general, sir.”

“Just keep that in mind,” Kinnear said.

Dan stood looking after him as he walked away. Wondering, What did that mean? No logical answer suggested itself, and he turned and trotted for the aircraft as Paulik waved him on.

Gunnery Sergeant Sid Gault drove fast through the dark, wearing his night vision goggles. The Humvee had the troop seats in back and the canvas sunscreen and the AR/VRC-90 radio like a big green air conditioner between him and the shotgun seat. The antenna was copper wire strung between four swab handles bolted vertically at the corners of the vehicle. It looked terrible, but it cut setup and breakdown time to nothing.

The gate sentry bent to peer in, then waved him through. A hundred meters inside he parked at the watering point, leaning out to scan the sand where his boots would go. He'd started doing that after seeing a Qatari tanker get the meat blown off his leg by an undetonated cluster munition.

As the rest of his team rolled out he told them to bring him back a few liters; he'd stay with the vehicle. This far forward he doubted they had to worry about terrorists, but those were the orders. To the north, just visible through the NVGs, huge plumes of greasy smoke towered into the black sky. Tanks were still burning up there. Iraqi armor, destroyed in their retreat a few days before. The night rumbled with jets going overhead and the thud of bombs as they pounded at the dug-in Iraqis in Kuwait.

As his guys slogged away through the dark, moving with the slow, tired-looking gait you picked up after
months on soft sand, Gault lowered his eyes to where his war had started, seven months before.

Ras al-Mish‘ab had been a Saudi National Guard base before the war, a two-mile square of concertina wire and guard towers. Its flat, hard sand was spaced with hardstand, slit trench, tent areas, and one-story buildings of sand-colored concrete. Like the other bases the Saudis had segregated their infidel defenders to, it was miles from anywhere, far south of the abandoned city of Khafji and only connected to it by a dirt road that wound between the practically impassible sabkahs. To the east, not in sight tonight through the dusty air but not far distant, lay the Gulf. To the south, empty coast till Bahrain. To the west, desert forever, a thousand miles of it all the way to the Red Sea. Empty till a few months ago. Now, filled with the greatest concentration of troops and armor since the battle of Kursk.

He'd seen it first the August previous, two weeks after the Iraqis invaded Kuwait. Second Force Recon Company had been doing site training in Washington with the District of Columbia SWAT team when the CO called with orders. They'd closed up shop with the cops and bused back to Camp Lejeune for a predeployment briefing at Force headquarters. They spent one night with their families, those who had them, then mustered the next morning and trucked to Cherry Point Marine Corps Air Station. A day and a half in a C-130 and disembarkation at Dhahran, a sprawling airfield choked with fighters and transports, the whole noisy confused gaggle of forces pouring in on a bewildering mix of time-phased logistics and out-of-your-ass scrambling. He remembered that first breath of Saudi air, hot as flame on your skin, down your lungs, the gritty feel of powder sand.

Practically the first troops in-country, they lived in a hangar for two days, then got orders to Ras al-Mish‘ab. Their initial tasking had been to establish OPs, observation posts, along the Kuwaiti-Saudi border. Which since
the invasion had become the de facto border between Saudi and what Saddam was already calling the “nineteenth province” of Iraq. But the marines and SEALs and Special Forces, light forces hastily set out as a trip wire, didn't call it the border. They called it the fire support coordination line, the boundary between friendly and opposing forces.

Khafji, which lay between Ras al-Mish‘ab and the FSCL, was a sizable city, with a port and a chemical factory, but no one lived in it now but mangy packs of pariah dogs. The population had pulled out when the Iraqis started shelling. It looked almost American, with modern buildings and four-lane highways. Vacant, abandoned, it felt like a postapocalyptic science fiction movie. Just the sly bony dogs, wary and skulking, and now and then a jeep full of Saudi troopers on what he figured was antilooter patrol.

The OPs were seven miles forward of Khafji, just south of the sand berms along the border. The teams moved into the customs posts, crenellated forts that looked like they'd been lifted from a Foreign Legion movie. They sandbagged the windows and dug fighting positions, did the basic grunt homework for a defensive position; fields of fire, avenues of approach, routes of egress, fire plan sketches. No artillery. No tanks. Just guys with rifles and radios, a warning bell that would go off if Saddam decided to wrap up all the oil in the Mideast in one neat package.

And there they'd sat for six months as the blinding heat waned into fall and then cool rainy winter. Living with the flies and the black bugs and the scorpions. Listening to REO Speedwagon and AC/DC and Guns N' Roses on the armed forces radio. Supply was fucked up, so they ate with the Saudis, rice and pita bread, lamb and chicken their hired Pakistanis cooked in fly-infested kitchens. Some of the men had gotten cramps, then got lethargic. Worms, the docs said.

It was usually quiet at the border. It was so flat they
could see fifteen miles into Kuwait from the tops of the police post. Occasionally a plume of dust sifted skyward in the distance. A few miles past that, the fortifications started. Wire, trenches, minefields, all the World War I stuff the Iraqis had used to stop the Iranians. Once Gault watched through binoculars as a camel wandered into a minefield and blew himself up. At night deserters would come in, hands raised, and the Saudis would take them away for interrogation. After a while the teams started rotating back to Al Mish‘ab, for PT in the sun and what passed for liberty, taking Zodiacs out into the bay to spearfish or pick scallops off the reef. Or buy cream cheese in glass jars and canned beef, try to gain some weight back on Pringles and Twinkies and warm Pepsi at the gas station outside the gate. No beer. No magazines. Mail, but two weeks late. A couple of days off, then they'd rotate back to the border.

Which was where he'd been the evening the Iraqi Third Armored and Fifth Mechanized, moving between passes of the recon satellites, had come charging across with T-55s.

The guys came back, lugging plastic-skinned cases of bottled water. Their blouses were dark with sweat and spilled water. He looked around one last time, then climbed back into the vehicle.

“Let's go find us some Syrians,” he said, and started it up.

 

INTEL HAD
said the Iraqis couldn't attack. That was why there were no heavy forces there, just the OPs and then thirty miles back a jumble of Saudi Guard, Saudi Marines, Omanis, Bahrainis, and a not-real-well-soldered-together “army” of miscellaneous units from the other Arab allies. The Iraqis were hunkered down, they said. Half their combat effectiveness gone. Ready to run when the ground offensive started.

Like shit, Gault thought.

He and Vertierra and Abrahamson had been on the roof of the police post, watching Harriers and A-10s working over the Wafrah orchards all day long. OP-7 had called in movement, and the close air support had come out and circled and after a while the
crump
of bombs shuddered over the desert. Late that afternoon the jamming started, a scratchy buzz that wiped out their VHF.

Not long after dark they heard the tanks. They got their binoculars and NVGs and looked north over the berm. Gault couldn't see anything, but there was no mistaking the sound. They'd heard it before, far off on summer nights, but never this close, never this loud. The creak and squeal of bogies made the hair crawl on the back of his neck. He tried the radio again, but it was still jammed. He transmitted anyway, just in case Higher could hear him.

They stared out for a long time. He saw nothing through the sights. In fact, he couldn't even see the berm. He blinked, refocusing. But it was gone, replaced by a green night-cloud within which vague bright shapes swam like fluorescent ghosts.

Then Abrahamson yelled, “Tanks!” and the first three came out of what he suddenly realized was smoke, generated behind the attacking armor and pulled forward by the wind to cloak them. Because suddenly, like some evil conjuring trick, there they were, thin long barrels rising, then falling as the tanks' hulls slammed down, coming over the berm like boats coming off a wave, then charging, snorting out of the smoke and dust directly at them. T-55s, the round turret, but with—he stopped, gripping the barrels of the binoculars—with the barrels
reversed
, pointing back over their hulls.

In the corner Vertierra was still trying to raise Task Force Taro, speaking slowly and clearly to cut through the interference. And for a moment Gault's heart had surged as he thought,
They're surrendering
. Advancing with turrets reversed, wasn't that the sign for surrendering—

But then the turrets began rotating. And he'd realized
then what it all meant, the comm jamming, the reports from farther west of movement along the berm. The thud and roar of guns, the flashes of light that pierced the western sky. That flickered from the direction of the thin line between Saddam and the forward logistic dumps, ammo, fuel, water, food; everything he needed to disrupt and destroy the impending offensive.

One of the T-55s slowed. It rocked to a halt and the turret steadied. The barrel lifted. He realized it was pointed at them only as a flash obliterated the image. He ducked without thinking. The projectile whipcracked over their heads. A miss, but the next one might not be.

“I want a star cluster,” he yelled over the rising clatter of tracks. Vertierra sprinted off for the pyrotechnic. “Then everybody in the vehicles. Right now!”

They had two Humvees, an M60, and their rifles. Nothing to face a brigade of tanks with. He told the men to get the logs, the crypto gear, and the night vision gear. When they had what they could carry, he took out two grenades, made sure the stairway was clear, then pulled the pins and laid them on top of the radios.

They were in the vehicles, speeding and bumping across the desert, when he saw that the tanks had already cut them off.

 

DAWN WAS
limping in through the smoke and overcast when they caught up with the Syrians. He'd been assigned to them after Khafji, to get them used to Americans. They were well north of their assigned grid square location. That made no sense. The last he'd heard, they weren't going over the border on G day. They said they were there to defend Saudi Arabia, not to attack an Arab brother. Gault had pointed out Saddam had no problem attacking
his
Arab brothers, but they just laughed softly and smiled at each other like they knew something he didn't.

Major Amidallah was sitting on his tank as he drove
up. The Syrian Ninth Armored was equipped with Soviet-made T-62s. They were painted a dusty sand camouflage. He noticed they'd finally mounted the VS-17s, the big purple-and-orange reflective panels that marked Coalition armor against air strikes. He'd been trying to get Amidallah to do it for weeks. Maybe the Syrians were joining the team at last.

“Ah, Gunny Gault. Good morning. You are noticing our panels.”

Gault stood up in the Hummer, trying to give as professional an impression as six feet of desert-gaunt marine, blue eyes and close-cropped blondish hair could convey. “Yes, sir. Good decision, sir.”

“You see, we are on your side. I have been telling you that.”

Amidallah hadn't told him anything of the kind, had in fact screwed, fucked, and misled the advisors as much he could. But Gault just said, “Yes, sir. And I know what famous fighters the Syrians are. Where you heading, sir? I had you two klicks south of here.”

“We are taking our position as ordered.”

“Are you joining the attack, sir?”

“We are in the reserve. Backing up our Arab brothers.”

“That will hearten us all no end, to have such fierce warriors behind us,” he said, troweling it on. Arabs loved compliments. Sometimes he thought they actually believed them. “Will you really stay back in reserve? Surely you won't let your brave brothers, the Qataris and Bahrainis, attack without you?”

Amidallah lost interest in the conversation. He shouted to his driver, who had stuck his head over the hatch, then climbed in. The engine roared, the tracks jerked and then rolled into motion. The other tanks and ZSUs started up and moved out after him, coughing black exhaust into the dark dawn light, throwing mud up behind the tracks.

Gault parked off the road, out of the mud, and watched them move out. President Assad had played both sides all
through the buildup. He'd sent the Ninth to Saudi, but then offered it to Saddam to screen the Iraqi army from the Allies if the Iraqi dictator agreed to withdraw. They kept roaring by, swarthy, mustached faces regarding him from each tank. Some saluted. Most just stared, or let their eyes rove past as if he were a rock, or a pariah dog. Gault didn't care. He really didn't care.

The growing light turned a nearby shadow into an Iraqi armored personnel carrier, hit and wrecked during the retreat. The rear ramp lay on the sand twenty meters away. He went over, watching where he stepped, and peered into the cavern-dark interior. As his eyes adapted he tensed. Its crew was looking back at him.

They were still sitting where they'd been when the sabot round or TOW round had torn through the light armor and blown the rear ramp off its hinges. Only now they were leathery shadows of human beings. The explosion had crushed them back into the hull of the vehicle, molded them into seat backs and webbing and handholds. Portions of flesh and muscle had extruded through the firing ports and hung down outside, like beef jerky. They'd been flattened and scorched and then, over the days since, the burnt cooked meat had dried in the desert air till it was proof even against the flies.

One Iraqi corpse had a sign around its neck. It read
DON'T FUCK WITH THE CORPS
.

Once he'd have torn it down, then thrown up from the sick barbecue smell and the sight of human beings flattened like roadkill. Now he didn't feel anything. People died in war. They died every day. You didn't even need a war to kill them. Just a moment of inattention. Something as simple as not checking the bore of a shotgun.