Black Storm (9 page)

She followed them back to the Humvee, remembering the weight of the gun, the pushing kick of it against her shoulder. She flexed her fingers, noting a broken nail from loading the magazines. She worried the ragged sliver off with her teeth, not caring what it looked like at all.

The Scud landed about zero-four that morning. Corporal Denny Blaisell was standing in the air force mess tent waiting for early breakfast, or supper, or whatever you called it when you ate your last meal before you went to bed but it was before everybody else got up. Feeling relaxed, because the mission was off. Jake said they were headed back to their platoons to get ready for the ground attack. Tex-Mex, the Indian or whatever he was, hadn't said anything at all. He was a weird one. Blaze had tried stirring him up a little, just to see what happened, but he just looked at him and didn't say a word. So then he'd bitched to the gunny about the MREs, wasn't there anything else, and Gault had told them to take the Hummer and go eat on the air side, but to stay together and not to talk to anybody and to come right back as soon as they were done.

Blaze liked the air force mess. The airmen had cassette players. Tonight two were playing at once, Judas Priest and 2 Live Crew.

There were even chicks there, “bomb dollies” they called them, like aircrewmen for the A-10s. One was in line in front of him. She was tough-looking, with short blond hair. He asked her where she was from. “Bumfuck, Florida,” she said, and turned her back on him. “Fucking lezzbo,” he muttered, loud enough for her to hear, but she didn't turn around again.

He was just about to the head of the line, smelling the bacon and listening to Desert Storm Radio talk about how somebody called Tariq Aziz was flying to Moscow, when the siren started going
wee-waw, wee-waw,
like when the Gestapo came for you in the old movies. Vertierra, in front of him, threw down his tray and grabbed for his mask. Blaze grabbed for his too. His hand found the carrier, but inside, his fingers encountered only emptiness.

He sucked air, remembering with a sick dropaway feeling how he'd hung it up to dry after scrubbing it out yesterday. It was in the
tent
. On the other side of the fucking
base
.

It wasn't a drill. They were announced ahead of time and after the first the team had just stayed in their tents and tried to sleep; the drills were always during daylight, in the middle of their sleep period. So this was for real; he didn't really need the guy who started yelling “Alert Red, missile raid, Scud launch, no shit, incoming.” Everybody in the tent was like sucked out the entrance, the cooks clanging lids over the hot food before they scooted. He swallowed the fear and pushed and shoved his way out with the others, a mass of battle dress and flight suits, ground crew and navy and air force and marines all mixed up together.

Outside, the sky was dark as dark. The lights went out along the perimeter. The sirens screamed at the sky, whipsawing down through his brain. He didn't know
where the shelter was. He didn't see Tex-Mex or F.C., so he followed the crowd, running with the other shadows, people stepping on the backs of his boots. Then suddenly the men in front of him disappeared.

He tried to stop, but somebody pushed him from behind and he half jumped, half fell down into a slit trench. He landed hard on mud-slick duckboards and his ankle twisted under him. He dog-crawled along the bottom of the trench, barely feeling the pain. He didn't feel safe till he was under the overhead cover, logs or something covered with dirt.

The last light went out. The sirens wailed on,
wee-waw, wee-waw
. Over at the airstrip, planes were taking off one after the other; it sounded like every engine on the airfield was turning up. He ripped open his pouch again, but the mask still wasn't there. Shit, shit, shit. “F.C.?” he yelled. “Tony?” and Nichols yelled back, “Here I am.”

Shouts from farther back in the trench. They were yelling “Scud, Scud,” and “MOPP gear.” “Oh, shit,” said a guy beside him. A nigger, by the sound of his voice. Blaze wondered what he should do. Finally he just lay still, tense as a coiled rattler.

A jolt came through the ground. No sound, no light, just the earth jerking under him. He clawed his fingers into sandbags hard as concrete. Seconds later came the sound, a supersonic
cra-a-a-ck
followed by a duller detonation like a sonic boom. They looked at each other in the dark. Then a cry of “gas, gas, don masks,” from somewhere outside.

Oh fuck. Rubber snapped around him as the others started donning. He fumbled in his pouch again, knowing it was stupid but unable not to, as if it might somehow reappear. How fucking dumb could you be? Leave your fucking MCU-2 in the tent. He couldn't stop panting. His mouth was dry. His heart was speeding up, fighting like it was trying to get out of his chest. He could smell the gas. He could taste it. He was starting to choke.

“Anybody got a extra mask?” he yelled. And to his surprise and relief somebody reached up above his head and there must have been some there in the shelter because then he had one in his hand.

More guys hurtled over the lip of the trench and crowded in. He ripped the carrier open and pressed the facepiece tight, yanked the straps to snug it tight against his skull. Total dark. A choking smell of rubber and plastic. Sweating, wondering if it was true Saddam put nerve gas in the Scuds. Beside him the air force guys were talking about how there was nothing else out here, how in the hell the Iraqis knew exactly where the base was. Their voices buzzed through the mask diaphragms, like cockroaches talking. He lifted his head, trying to suck air through the filters and not getting enough, wanting to jerk the mask off, clutching his hands over it so he wouldn't.

A flare popped on in the distance, throwing a red glow into the shelter. A helicopter went over, lights out, tearing hell for leather out into the desert. He remembered, fuck, he'd left the Glock in the tent too. Hope nobody was up there now going through their shit. His breath panted loud and harsh in his ears, like Darth Vader, and his wide-open eyes stared through the twin lenses into the dark as beside him a voice from Kansas talked about the Last Days and the Battle of Armageddon and Romans 10:9.

They sat in their masks for half an hour before the all clear sounded. Vertierra climbed over him, stepping on his leg. They crawled out of the trench, dusted themselves off, the sand cold and gritty against their hands. The lights were popping back on over at the airfield. A PA system on the other side of the base was talking away, but he couldn't make out what they were saying.

“Are we gonna need new filters now?” he asked nobody in particular. Nobody answered. His legs were shaking so hard, dust was coming off his BDUs. He looked at the mask, considered putting it back in the shelter for the next guy. Then decided to keep it himself, for a spare.

THEY CALLED
his dad “Blaze” too. His father was a small-town barber, a man with a recognized place in Ten Sleep, Wyoming. He owned his own shop and a little house behind it. He'd been a barber in Vietnam and had cut General William Westmoreland's hair before coming back to Wyoming. When he told the story, his father called the general “Westy,” as if they were best friends.

Sitting on the vinyl seat after school, ripping through his homework or, better yet, reading a Spider-Man comic in the sun that came through the big plate glass window, he listened to his father talk. About the women who went into the big houses for money, and the divorcing and marrying for money, about the old ranchers who had land and money, and how much the big Lincoln that just pulled up must have cost. Sitting there listening to the buzz of the clippers and the roar of the stove in the winter, smelling woodsmoke and Marlboros and sweat and leather and hair lotion, he learned how the world really was and who was getting what, getting laid, getting the good job, screwing the neighbor's daughter, fixing the will. Not like they told him in school, but how the world really worked.

And at the end of the day it was his job to sweep all the hair up, pushing the old broom with its bristles curled like an old man's mustache, into a plastic garbage sack. His dad scattered it around the garden to keep the deer out. Deer didn't like the smell of human hair. Blond hair and gray, black and brown, everything but nigger hair. His father would let them come in and sit, but then he'd seat the men who came in after them. Never looking their way. Never saying a word. Till finally they'd understand and leave, sometimes curse him but more often just stand up and look at his father and at him and then push the door jangle and they were gone. But that had only happened a couple of times in all the years he was growing up, because there just weren't that many niggers west of the Bighorns and when they came they didn't stay long.

He hadn't done too good in high school, so they put him in air-conditioning shop. It didn't matter what you did there; the grades were a joke and half the time the seniors skipped. So after a while he got a part-time job at the Texaco doing oil changes and hammering out fender benders when guys would run their pickups into the fences on Friday nights. He wore a Stetson and tight Levi's and then he got his own pickup, a red-orange Chevy with a 400 V-8 he bought from Frank Hunt for seven hundred dollars when Frank went to jail for statutory. He even left Frank's bumper sticker on it, the one that said
THERE ARE TWO KINDS OF PEOPLE: THOSE WHO ARE COWBOYS AND THOSE WHO WANT TO BE
. The first night he had it he took Donna out and they drank some Coors and made love real slow back in the camper cab. He remembered how she smiled down, pumping it out of him till he shouted.

But then that November his dad died of emphysema and the lawyer said he didn't own the store or the house either—they were on leased land—and rented the shop to a woman from Sacramento who opened a bakery. Then Donna left for California; she was going to be in the movies. So he decided to get out of Wyoming too. And he didn't want to go in any fruity navy, ships full of fucking gays sticking it in each other's asses, or any fucking air force that sounded more like college than anything else. He liked the Marine Corps ads on TV, and he knew what the guys said at the barber shop. One old guy who'd been on Tarawa always said there was only one service for a real man.

 

WHEN THEY
got back to the recon area, Gunny Gault was waiting for them. He didn't say anything about the Scud. Just told them to stand by. Blaze wasn't shaking now, but he was ravenously hungry. When they'd gone back to the mess tent it was secured, the food was there, but for some reason the fucking officers wouldn't let anyone eat it. “We still on hold, Gunny?” Zeitner asked him.

“So far, yeah,” Gault told them. “Just hang loose, but don't go anyplace. Get your heads down and get as much sleep as you can, just in case.”

 

BACK IN
the tent they tore through some MREs, then he took out his Glock and fieldstripped it. A lot of guys in II MEF were Glockies. Something about the clunky little guns turned him on. Not like the Berettas, too big and with safeties all over it so dipshits couldn't shoot themselves. Or the modified .45s that were recon issue, good field sidearms but heavy. A Glock didn't have a safety, just a catch on the trigger so if your finger wasn't on it, it couldn't fire. They were mostly plastic too, so they were lighter in the field. He reassembled it, aimed it across the tent, and shot Miss February's tits off the centerfold. He followed up with a round up the snatch.

“Put it away, Corporal,” Nichols drawled from the other side of the tent.

Blaisell looked at him. The sniper had his M16 disassembled, was stripping out the bolt assembly. “What you chewing?” he asked him.

“Copie.”

“Can I have a rub?”

“If you beg for it,” Nichols said. Blaze felt himself grinning foolishly, not knowing how to take that or what to say.

Instead he brandished the Glock, did a Wyatt Earp twirl around his finger. “Want me to order you one of these? I got an FFL. I ordered them for all the guys back in the LAV. Glock's a good weapon.”

Nichols didn't answer, and Blaze aimed again and took out Miss February's eyes. “Ka bam, ka bam,” he said. Vertierra glanced up, then went back to reading; he had a
Betty and Veronica
out of one of the packages people sent from the States. Whatever happened, they wouldn't run out of cookies or mouthwash. A guy in his platoon had gotten a no-bra shot of some fat girl. That
could ruin your appetite. He didn't care for the shit most guys carried on patrol. PowerBars and granola shit like faggots ate in San Francisco when they weren't eating each other. So he'd gone into the tent where they kept the things people sent from home to “Any Soldier” and “Any Marine,” the goodies and candy and homemade fudge—it was fucking pogyville—and found a can of Planters nuts and raisins and M&M's and some coconut cookies, things like that, and made up his own gorp.