Sand and Fire (9780698137844) (18 page)

Kassam gathered Rat Face and Monkey Ears at the table, and they moved the gear around. They put the flintlock in the middle of the table, surrounded by modern M9 handguns and M16 rifles. Then Kassam barked what sounded like an order, and another dirtbag came in from the next room. The new dirtbag held a camera.
He conferred with Kassam for a moment, and then snapped photos of the table.

Oh, I get it, Blount thought. One of those photos will go up on some jihadist website:
Captured infidel weapons then and now.
Cute.

Kassam stepped away from the table. The terrorist chieftain began hectoring Blount and his fellow captives. Blount could not understand a word until Monkey Ears came over and translated.

“How do you like your shores of Tripoli now, Marine?”

G
old looked out over the Sahara from the CH-53. The setting sun lent a rose-colored glow to the sands. She hoped enough daylight remained to get a good look at the crash site and find some clues. Since leaving the Army, she had struggled with finding the best way to make a dent, to ease the misery that plagued the world around her. The U.S. drawdown from Afghanistan had forced her to reevaluate how to use her talents. But now those talents had been misapplied because of a terrorist ploy, and Gold wanted to find those scumbags and stop them. Anger seldom motivated her, but it motivated her now. The burn of it felt strange down in her chest.

In the back of the helicopter, she sat on a troop seat near the two Marine officers, Captain Privett and Lieutenant Colonel Loudon. The officers carried rifles, but Gold had only a digital camera, a canteen, a booklet of M8 paper, and a supply of M291 decontamination pads. All wore headsets connected to the aircraft's interphone system.

A lot of questions rattled around in Gold's mind, but one remained foremost: Where are you, Gunny?
He had to be somewhere out in that vast desert, dead or alive—and if alive, captured or trying to evade capture. Would all of Gunny's strength and compassion, his love of kids, his devotion to his Marines, his competence as a warrior decay down to dust somewhere in those trackless dunes? The thought of losing him turned up the heat simmering inside Gold. She cautioned herself to focus that rage, keep it under control. Wrath ranked among the seven deadly sins—for a reason.

“That's a whole lot of nothing out there,” Privett said on interphone as he gazed outside.

“You got that right,” Loudon said. “Colonel Parson has the Mirages and the HH-60s going up again, and there's a drone up there most of the time. But they got a shitload of territory to cover.”

It would help, Gold knew, if one of the missing Marines or Legionnaires would make a radio call or at least turn on a beacon. But so far, nothing. No electronic signature of any kind. She looked out the windows, too, and let several minutes pass without saying anything. When she finally spoke, she tried to offer a sliver of hope.

“You know,” she said, “Gunny Blount's pretty resourceful.”

At least she'd thought of something truthful to say. Not “He'll be all right.” He probably wouldn't. Not “We'll find him.” In the unlikely event Blount was ever seen again—except in a slaughter video—he'd probably be found dead.

Privett and Loudon both looked over at Gold, and Loudon nodded. Yes, Gunny Blount was resourceful. They seemed to like the truth of that statement. No point in offering false encouragement to Marines.

“Ten minutes,” came an announcement from the cockpit. “Better finish suiting up.”

They had delayed putting on gas masks for as long as possible. The darn things were pretty uncomfortable. During chem exercises, Gold had seen people go into claustrophobic panics and rip the masks off their heads. The exercise inspectors would, of course, immediately mark them down as dead.

Gold had no issues with mask-induced claustrophobia, though she certainly didn't enjoy wearing chem gear. She peeled open the Velcro enclosure of her mask carrier, removed the mask. She checked the filter to make sure it was screwed in tightly, and she placed the mask over her face. Pulled the retaining straps over her head and
tugged at the tabs. Covered the filter with her hand, inhaled to check the seal. Good test.

Wordlessly, she unbuckled her seat belt and turned to Privett. She checked the security of his suit, the tightness of the drawstrings, the overlap of his sleeves around the wrist sections of his gloves. It always helped to use the buddy system to suit up for a toxic environment, to make sure no skin was exposed, no clothing had been left loose enough to admit chemical agents. As she examined Privett's gas mask, she found a loose retaining strap. The loose strap allowed part of the mask's seal to come away from his skin when he exhaled.

“Hold still,” she said. Tugged the strap tight.

When she finished, Privett placed the hood of his chem suit over his head, then checked Loudon's mask and suit. Gold buckled her seat belt for landing. The helicopter descended, and when it rolled into a turn, she looked out to see the crash site. The scene nearly made her physically ill.

Below, she saw the hulk of a CH-53 Super Stallion, just like the one she was riding. Debris lay around it, probably parts the chopper had scattered as it hit the ground. Darkened sand surrounded the wreck, although the aircraft did not appear to have burned. Maybe spilled oil, hydraulic fluid, or fuel accounted for the discolored sand.

The Marine pilots kept the CH-53 in a turn, and a couple of orbits over the area revealed no sign that any bad guys had come back. The pilots landed several hundred yards away from the crash site. A good idea, Gold figured. Otherwise the rotor wash would have disturbed whatever evidence remained. The HH-60s that had recovered the bodies earlier, as well as the surviving CH-53 from the initial mission, might have already compromised evidence.

The helo shut down, and Loudon and Privett climbed from the aircraft, gloved fingers over the trigger guards of their weapons. Gold followed. Their bulky suits slowed their movements, and in the barren terrain, she could not help but think of a moon landing. She felt like a space traveler encased in protective gear, surrounded by an
environment that could kill her if her suit suffered so much as a pinhole.

Parson had briefed her on how to document a crash scene. He wanted lots of photos, and he'd said to begin with a wide shot of the whole area. Get an establishing shot, he'd said, just like a filmmaker would use to open a scene. Gold fumbled in a leg pocket for the camera. The butyl gloves made it a challenge even to turn on the thing, but she eventually pressed the power button and heard a faint zing as the camera came to life.

She aimed the camera, took a shot of the wreckage and the abandoned village behind it. Moved closer to the crash site. Shell casings littered the ground, most of them the 5.56 millimeter of Marine M16s. Gold also saw the shorter brass of M9 pistol ammunition, along with the 7.62 millimeter of AK-47s. The Marines had given a hell of a fight; no doubt about that.

Few bootprints indented the sand. Gold imagined rotor wash or desert winds had erased them.

The temperature hovered in the upper eighties, and Gold began to sweat inside her suit. She hated to stop work to drink water, but she knew if she didn't hydrate she might pass out and become a danger to the others. She put her camera away, dug into another pocket and found a decon pad.

In a chemical environment, the simplest tasks became complicated. Her gas mask included a drinking tube that mated with a receptacle on the canteen cap. She could insert the tube without ever exposing the water to toxins. But the cap might have become contaminated. Gold opened the decon pad and rubbed it across the canteen cap. Felt the outside of her mask for the tube, but couldn't quite find it.

Even drinking water required the buddy system. Loudon walked up to her, peered at her mask, and detached the drinking tube coupling from her mask's outlet valve cover.

“Thanks,” Gold shouted, knowing the gear muffled her words.

Loudon took her canteen, decontaminated the tube coupling, and seated the tube in the canteen's cap. He turned the canteen upside down to let gravity do its job. With her teeth, Gold took hold of the end of the tube inside the mask. Then she began to drink from the tube like sipping soda from a straw.

The water was warm and tasted like a canteen that had sat in storage for five years. Gold wished she'd thought to bring Gatorade or at least put ice in the water. But the foul-tasting water would keep her from keeling over.

She took her teeth off the tube and yelled, “You need to drink, too, sir.”

Loudon nodded, and Gold took his canteen. Set him up to drink just the way he'd done for her. When he finished, they replaced their canteens on their web belts and continued the survey of the crash site. Privett was already at the wreck of the helicopter, snapping his own photos. Something on the ground caught his attention, and Privett motioned with his arm for Loudon and Gold to come take a look. Loudon trudged over, walking heavily in the rubber boots that covered his combat boots. Gold followed close behind.

At Privett's feet lay a gas mask—one of the American models, an MCU-2 like Gold's. Something had stained the sand around it with discoloration a shade different than the petroleum stains near the helicopter. Blood from a gunshot wound, perhaps, or the result of someone vomiting his guts out while dying of chemical exposure. The wreckage had shielded the discolored sand from wind that might have covered it with more sand. Gold tried to stay in an analytical frame of mind and not get angrier, not think about the suffering that had happened on this very spot.

She wondered how contaminated the area remained. The M9 tape on her suit showed no color change, but she wanted to check more closely. Gold opened an outside pocket on her gas mask carrier and found her M8 test paper. The sheets of M8 paper came in
booklets of twenty-five. She flipped through the booklet, and with her rubber-clad fingers tried to grab hold of a single page. The gloves robbed her of all dexterity; she felt like a surgeon operating with oven mitts. When she thought she'd grabbed a single sheet between her thumb and forefinger, she made a tearing motion and ripped away four sheets.

Gold let three sheets flutter away while she held on to one. She placed the booklet back inside the mask carrier, then kneeled beside the discarded gas mask on the ground. Touched the paper to the gas mask's face shield. Held up the paper to examine it.

No color change.

M8 paper reacted immediately in temperatures above freezing, so Gold would have seen the evidence if chemicals remained on the mask. Most chemical agents dissipated quickly, but the absence of nerve gas in one spot didn't mean the whole area had cleared. She walked a few steps, placed the test paper against the ground. Still nothing.

She moved to the front of the wrecked helicopter and touched the paper to the aircraft's refueling probe. Examined the paper, saw no reaction.

“Everything I've checked so far is clean,” Gold shouted.

Loudon gave a thumbs-up. Gold debated declaring the area safe and removing her mask; it certainly would feel good to take off the thing. But she decided to test a few more surfaces.

Gold reached up to one of the cracked windscreen panels of the CH-53, wiped the test paper across the dirty glass. The effort left a clean streak on the windscreen, and the M8 sheet seemed to have picked up only dust. But a corner of the paper changed color. The difference was so subtle Gold nearly missed it: beige to yellow.

Yellow indicated G-series nerve gas.

A different variety. Parson had told her the M9 tape worn by the pararescuemen who first responded to the crash indicated V-series
gas. The terrorists possessed an assortment of chemical weapons, and they didn't seem to be running out.

“Got a positive,” Gold yelled.

She showed the M8 paper to Loudon and Privett. Loudon took the paper and held it up in the light of the setting sun.

“Yeah,” Loudon said, “that's definitely yellow.”

A few things could cause a false positive, Gold knew. Wasp spray, for one. Not likely anyone had wandered through here with a can of Raid. So the area remained hot.

Gold covered the inlet port of her gas mask filter and inhaled, just as she'd done when she first donned the mask. The resulting vacuum squeezed the mask against her face, reconfirming a tight seal. A needless gesture at this point, but now that she had hard evidence of contamination, the extra check made her feel safer. Loudon and Privett rechecked their suits, tightened drawstrings. Gold pulled out her camera again and hunted for more clues.

She didn't quite know what else to look for. But amid the shell casings and bent metal, she found something that would certainly interest the chain of command and the intelligence community.

A dud round lay at her feet, most likely from some sort of mortar. The round carried the tail fins typical of an ordinary mortar shell, but its middle section looked a little longer than normal. Propellant had scorched the fins, but for whatever reason, the warhead had not exploded. Only part of the shell remained visible in the sand; the nose had buried itself. Did that thing contain a load of sarin or some other witch's brew just waiting to go off?

Gold felt pretty confident her chem gear would protect her from trace exposure to toxins. But she didn't care to see how the mask and suit would perform if she got hit with a concentrated dose. She snapped a photo and backed away.

If a dud round had turned up after an attack on an Army base, Gold would have followed the five Cs: Confirm presence of
unexploded ordnance. Clear personnel. Cordon the area by at least three hundred feet. Check for other UXOs. Control the area and let only emergency services inside the cordon.

Those emergency services would have included explosive ordnance disposal, to disarm or destroy the damned thing. Lacking all those resources for now, she could only warn the others.

“Got a UXO,” she shouted.

“Where?” Loudon called.

Gold pointed.

“I still don't see it,” Privett said.

Gold could understand. Perhaps in training exercises the young officer had directed searches for unexploded rounds following a mock attack. But in those exercises, UXOs were usually easy to spot. Instructors might place an intact, inert shell right on a sidewalk. But real mortars falling in real combat zones looked different. Gold had learned to recognize them despite their tendency to hide.

With her heel, she dug a long line in the sand to mark the UXO as best she could. She added short diagonal furrows at the front of the line to form an arrow pointing to the shell. A lame effort that would soon get blown away by wind, but the best she could do at the moment. Loudon took pictures of the UXO, as well.