Sand and Fire (9780698137844) (13 page)

When Parson read the third message, the exhilaration he'd felt since his Mirage ride drained away. Though the local-area familiarization flight had legitimate military purposes, he felt guilty for having enjoyed himself when matters of life and death loomed so close. The e-mail copied him in on a two-word order to the Marines:

EXECUTE TONIGHT.

A
board the USS
Tarawa
, the order Blount had waited to hear came over the 1 Main Circuit speakers:

“Call away, call away.”

The signal for Marines to board helicopters.

Two CH-53 Super Stallions sat ready to launch. Exhaust fumes rolled from their turbines and got snatched away by rotor wash rolling in gales across the flight deck. Dull gray paint coated the helos, and lettering on the sides in only slightly darker shades read
MARINES
. Refueling probes jutted from the noses of the CH-53s. The flight crews sat at their stations, running last-minute checks, communicating via the boom microphones on their helmets. Beyond the helicopters, the Mediterranean heaved in waves the color of iron. Blount carried his M16 as he led twenty other Marines to the rear of the second aircraft, and they walked up the helo's open ramp. He noticed the crew chief's helmet bore a sticker that read
NO FEAR
.

Good attitude, Blount thought, but not good advice. If you didn't feel fear, you were stupid and dangerous. But you pushed through that fear like a runner pushes through pain to finish a marathon.

Blount took his place on a seat made of nylon webbing, one up front near the pilots. As stick leader for this flight, he needed access to the cockpit, so he strapped on a gunner's belt. The gunner's belt connected to a tether that would let him move around and still have fall protection. He also needed to hear the pilots' interphone and radio traffic. For that, he took a headset from the crew chief and plugged it into an interphone jack. Blount removed his ballistic
helmet, which bore a bracket that held his night vision goggles, and donned the headset.

Weird beeps and tones sounded in the headset. The copilot was running some sort of test, and he didn't seem to like what he saw.

“I'm getting a fail on MWS,” he said.

“We need that,” the pilot said.

“Lemme try it again.”

The copilot flipped through a checklist binder, ran his finger down a page sleeved in clear plastic. With two fingers, he pressed a pair of buttons on the panel in front of him.

Lights on the panel winked and cycled, and most of them flashed off. One of the lights remained illuminated.

“Shit.”

“Try turning it off and back on.”

“Rog.”

The copilot pressed another button, and all the lights on the box he was testing went out. What the heck was MWS, anyway? All the military loved acronyms, but aviators took it to a crazy level. Blount tried to think. MWS? Missile warning system. Yeah, we do need that.

When the copilot powered up the system again, he pressed the test buttons once more. The beeps and flashes started anew, and this time the man looked satisfied.

“Good check.”

“Cool beans.”

Blount turned his attention to settling into his seat, if his equipment would allow. He wore a full charcoal-impregnated MOPP suit. Over the MOPP suit, he'd donned a Kevlar vest. His bayonet and IFAK—Individual First-Aid Kit—dangled from the left side of the vest. The IFAK contained the usual combat gauze and pressure bandages, plus a few additional things Blount liked to add. A gas mask carrier hung at his hip. Other pouches contained ammunition for his
M16, pen gun flares, nerve gas antidote, a radio, butyl gloves, and M8 test paper for detecting the presence of chemical agents.

A Velcro strap secured the sheath of his grandfather's KA-BAR. On top of everything else, the odd lumps of an inflatable life preserver bulged in uncomfortable places. If the chopper ditched at sea, he could pull tabs to fire CO2 cartridges that would inflate the life preserver's cells.

Over the troop seats, Blount noticed a placard that made him smile. The placard read
WARNING—DO NOT STOW FEET OR EQUIPMENT UNDER SEAT.
No problem. He carried everything on his back and shoulders, more than sixty pounds worth of gear. He kept his feet right in front of him, a dog tag laced into the left boot. An aircraft crash or IED explosion might blow dog tags from around your neck and make identification that much harder. But boots tended to stay intact—even if nothing remained of their owner but the feet inside.

The pilots called the ship's Primary Flight Control for their takeoff clearance.

“Musket flight cleared for takeoff,” came the answer.

The Super Stallion swayed into the air. Blount felt a rolling motion as the gusting Mediterranean wind rocked the helicopter. The Marines around him began a war chant that sounded more like barks than words—devil dogs primed for a fight.
“Oo-rah, oo-rah, oo-rah!”

Corporal Fender gave a thumbs-up. The kid looked a little nervous, but he kept pursing his lips and looking around at his buddies. Blount took that as a good sign: Resolute. Feeling trust in the others and from the others.

Blount wondered what Bernadette, Ruthie, and Priscilla were up to at this moment. Maybe having lunch; it was the middle of the day back home. For just an instant, the scent of Bernadette's lavender shampoo came back to him as if she were right there. That memory
would have to do; he carried no pictures of his family, no memento like a scarf from his wife.

He had two reasons for that. One: If he were captured, God forbid, he wanted his enemy to know nothing about Bernadette and the girls. Two: Unlike a lot of servicemen, he'd never pocketed a challenge coin, a rabbit's foot, or any other good-luck charm during missions. He'd made it through his first deployment years ago without any sort of talisman, and after that he hadn't wanted to change anything. He admitted to himself he'd become superstitious about not being superstitious.

Though he didn't believe in trinkets, he did believe in prayer. Please let me get back home to them, he thought. And in the meantime, please help me do right.

The Super Stallion climbed and turned onto a southerly heading. Out the cockpit windows, Blount could see where sun, sea, and sky met at the horizon. Ragged clouds scudded along, growing pink with the dying day. Only a thin rind of sunfire remained above the water, and even that shrank by the second. Mission planners had timed this flight to arrive at the objective just at EENT—the end of evening nautical twilight. In other words, full dark.

On course and on speed, the helo hummed along, fairly pulsing with power. At this moment, the machine and the men inside it seemed invincible, but Blount knew how quickly fortunes could change in combat. Waves flashed by below, dark and undulating. The Marines grew quiet now. The Stallion flew with all exterior and most interior lights off, so the gloom deepened inside the aircraft as night closed in. The dull-green glow of NVG-compatible instrument lighting emanated from the cockpit. On the radio, Blount heard the lead helo check in with an Air Force AWACS bird orbiting overhead.

“Monticello, Musket flight is off the deck and en route.”

“Roger that, Musket. Safe flight.”

Blount considered what advice or encouragement he could offer to the men around him. All of them knew what they were doing, and
he didn't want to patronize. So he kept his words simple and specific to the mission.

“Double-check your antidote kits,” Blount shouted over the helicopter's roar. “Make sure they're in your left cargo pocket, so your buddy knows where to find them. Don't use your own on somebody else.”

Standard procedure. If you feel symptoms, the Marines had been taught, pop yourself with your own injectors. If you see somebody doing the funky chicken, as the instructors put it, they're too far gone to treat themselves, so you'll have to treat them. With
their
kits, not yours. You might be next.

Marines patted their pockets, shouted, “Aye, Gunny!”

Looking out the windows, in the last visibility of twilight, Blount discerned a line across the sea. Beyond it the light played differently, as if the water stopped at a giant sheet of cardboard. Across the cardboard, scattered lamps twinkled.

The North African coast.

“We're about to go feet dry,” the pilot said. “You can come out of your LPUs in thirty seconds.”

Blount repeated the order, shouting over the engines and wind noise. The men waited a few moments, then began unhooking the clasps of their life preserver units. The crew chief collected the LPUs and placed them in a stowage bag. No sense carrying a piece of gear you didn't need anymore. With the LPU gone, Blount had better access to another piece of equipment clipped to his vest, an infrared chemical light. The chemlight consisted of a plastic cylinder with an inner vial that separated two chemicals. When you bent the flexible plastic, the vial would break, and the chemicals would mix to emit a glow—but not one in the visible light spectrum. The chemlight would appear only to someone wearing night vision goggles and would help distinguish friend from foe.

Mentally, Blount reviewed the op plan. The helicopters would land just outside the village, and the Marines would conduct a
small-scale movement to contact. A platoon of French Foreign Legionnaires would arrive by parachute to provide a ring of security around the village.

Fire discipline was critical. Classic doctrine said you used a movement to contact when the tactical situation was vague. That sure held true tonight, Blount realized, since no one knew how many civilians remained in the village and what their loyalties might be. Yet again, he faced an enemy that hid behind the innocent.

Blount thought of something he'd read in high school. His language arts teacher had assigned a story about some dude who took a tour of hell. The guy went through all these different circles of hell, and as he went deeper, the sins of the damned got worse and worse. At the very bottom, there was old Judas himself, forever getting eaten by Satan for betraying Jesus.

Though young Blount had always thought of literature as something you had to put up with to get to play football, that story got his attention. It was sure more interesting than books about white English ladies worried about who they were going to marry. But now, aboard a Super Stallion bound for a target, Blount thought the writer got it a little bit wrong. Yeah, Judas belonged where he was. But right beside him ought to be anybody who ever used civilians as shields. On God's green earth and whatever world lay beyond, there couldn't be nothing lower than that.

He thought of the child suicide bombers he'd been forced to shoot in Afghanistan. Blount wished a surgeon could just cut that memory out of his brain. The only comfort came in knowing he'd sent to hell the terrorist responsible for all that—on the blade of Grandpa's knife.

Over land now, Blount tried to follow the pilots' navigation to maintain his own situational awareness. He dug his land nav map from a leg pocket and clicked on the green beam of a penlight. The topographical depiction differed from the aeronautical charts used by the pilots, and he had trouble orienting himself.

“Where exactly are we now, sirs?” Blount asked.

“I'll mark it for you, Gunny,” the copilot said.

The copilot borrowed the land map, took a pencil from the sleeve of his flight suit. On Blount's map, the flier drew a tiny circle amid a brown expanse. Then the copilot pointed to numbers on a screen.

“This is distance to go,” the copilot said. “This one is time remaining.”

Forty minutes.

Blount looked aft, considered the young faces with set jaws, determined eyes. Each man held his weapon between his knees with the muzzle down. That way, an accidental discharge wouldn't pierce an engine or rotor blade. In less than an hour these men would face combat, some for the first time. Blount hoped for a quick, surgical strike with no Marine casualties, but he knew some of these guys might not see another sunrise. He vowed he'd do everything possible to bring them back safe. He felt grateful to fly in as stick leader; he could see this thing done right.

The helicopter droned for another fifteen minutes, and Blount heard chatter on the radio.

“All stations,” an accented voice called, “Mother Goose is at the baker's.”

Blount consulted his comm card, a laminated sheet with call signs and frequencies on one side, classified brevity codes on the other. Mother Goose was the airlifter carrying the French paratroopers. “At the baker's” meant the plane was at the initial point for the run-in to the drop zone.

“Twenty-five minutes,” Blount shouted to the Marines. “The Legionnaires are on time.”

He half expected some wise-ass comments about the French, but somewhere over the black desert, the men had left joking behind. A minute or so later, the same voice spoke over the aircraft radio again.

“All stations, Mother Goose bought a loaf of rye.”

Silliest brevity codes Blount ever heard, but they worked. Jumpers away.

The parachutists needed to hit the ground before the choppers arrived. For obvious reasons, troopers couldn't float down in parachutes with helicopter blades spinning somewhere in the dark beneath them. The military had a word for avoiding such calamities: deconfliction. So far, so good, Blount thought. We're deconflicted and on time.

At this moment, he knew, the Legionnaires were free-falling in a high altitude/low opening jump. The plane that carried them flew so high the bad guys would never hear it. The troopers would land silently and wait, get eyes on the target.

Blount watched the numbers count down on the cockpit screens. Anticipation and fear rose inside him, the fear harnessed and transformed into focus. Take something bad and make it work for you, he thought, the way a poison in small doses can become a medicine.

Another accented voice came on the radio, weak but readable, speaking almost in a whisper. A man on the ground.

“All stations, soft rain on the millpond.”

More brevity codes. Safe HALO jump, nothing to report on the status of the village.

Ten minutes to go. Blount called out the time remaining, and added, “Charge your weapons. Bust your chemlights. Turn on your radios and NVGs.”