Sand and Fire (9780698137844) (31 page)

“I suppose that's the officer you told me about?” Parson said.

“Yes. He's Major Ongondo. He speaks the Tuaregs' language, and I think those guys have something to tell you.”

T
he murky, dust-laden air reminded Blount of the start of the Iraq War in 2003. At one point during the push north from Kuwait, a dust storm turned the sky to ocher, grounding aircraft and fouling weapons systems. If you blew your nose, it looked like you'd smeared your handkerchief with orange paint.

Back then Blount fought alongside fellow members of a thirty-five-man platoon. Now he'd face whatever was coming with only three other men: Fender, Escarra, and Grayson.

Blount donned a set of dust goggles so he could at least keep his eyes open amid flying grit. The four men lay prone with their weapons, watching the truck at several hundred yards' distance. Its occupants apparently hadn't seen the escapees; the vehicle kept moving toward the west. Its direction of off-road travel supported Blount's suspicion that Kassam had his henchmen driving in wider and wider circles out from the hell house.

“I think it's leaving,” Fender said.

“Just keep low,” Blount said. “I don't think they saw us, but they could swing back around. Another truck could come along pretty quick, too.”

The vehicle disappeared. It did not seem to drive out of sight. Instead it simply dissolved into the dust storm.

Blount shifted his weight a bit to keep pressure off the radio at the front of his tactical vest. He reached into a pocket, found a handkerchief colored in the same digital camo as his uniform. Wrapped it
around the PRC-148 to give the radio at least a little dust protection. Fender wrapped an identical handkerchief around his nose and mouth, giving him the appearance of an Old West bandit armed with modern weapons.

The weather made it seem less and less likely that rescue forces could reach Blount and his men anytime soon. Had he cheated death—or postponed it just for a matter of hours? He knew stories of American POWs who made heroic escapes only to get recaptured. During the Vietnam War, Air Force pilot Lance Sijan ejected from his burning F-4 Phantom over hostile territory. Despite a fractured leg and a torn-up right hand, he evaded capture for more than a month. After the enemy caught up with him, Sijan coldcocked a guard and escaped. Blount especially liked that part of the story—a man with multiple injuries who could still kick a bad guy's ass. But the North Vietnamese recaptured Sijan hours later, and he died in prison. In the same war, aviator Bud Day broke his arm when he punched out of his F-100. After his captors found him, they strung him upside down. Day later got away and even made it into South Vietnam. But the enemy found him again, shot him in the hand and leg, and sent him to the Hanoi Hilton.

Those guys had lived up to the Code of Conduct. For Blount, the takeaway from the Code's several articles came down to this: Resist until you got nothing left. If you're in command, lead the fight as long as anybody has the means to fight.

Resisting and evading would get a lot easier if Blount could communicate. He decided to try another radio call. He pulled his handkerchief away from the PRC-148 enough to reveal the transmit button. Pressed the switch and said, “Any station, any station, Havoc Two Bravo.”

The only answer came from the wind, lifting powder from the ground so that it looked like the earth smoked. His rifleman's mind, always calibrated for wind and range, estimated the gusts at better
than twenty-five miles an hour. Blount did not know the limitations of helicopters and their crews, but he knew these conditions would push the capabilities of both machine and man. He thumbed his transmit switch again.

“Any station,” he called, “Havoc Two Bravo.”

Static joined the wind in a mixture of blank noise. The absence of any response pulled Blount's fear onto an elemental plane, a primordial dread of the unknown. Nothing existed in the universe except the lifeless ground beneath him, the three men beside him, and the enemy seeking to kill him, lurking somewhere out there beyond the edge of visibility.

“Keep your eyes open, boys,” Blount said. “We might be here for a while.”

He peered into the beige gloom, searched over the sights of his rifle for any solid objects amid the dust—objects that might signal an enemy's approach. The other men did the same. Nothing out there but a desert trying to lift itself to the sky.

Blount had pretty much given up on the radio when the PRC's hiss broke. A pulsing noise replaced the static, a carrier wave without voice but with the ambient sound of a helicopter in flight. Then someone spoke.

“Havoc Two Bravo,” the voice called, “Pedro One-One, do you read?”

The call surprised Blount so much that he nearly let the radio slip from his hand. The other men turned their heads toward him, eyes expectant. Blount gestured toward the open wasteland.

“Keep watch,” he said. Then he pressed his talk button and said, “Pedro One-One, Havoc Two Bravo has you five by five.”

“Roger, Havoc. On what vehicle did you learn to drive?”

An authentication question, Blount realized, taken from a form he had filled out years ago. The form included statements about him no enemy could know. The document became classified as soon as a service member completed it, and it was sent out to rescue forces if
the member went missing. Right now, Pedro needed to confirm Blount was really who he said he was.

“A red Farmall tractor,” Blount said.

“That checks, Havoc. Be advised Pedro One-One and One-Two are a flight of two Pave Hawks inbound to you. Do you have an update on your position?”

Blount raised himself on his elbow enough to reach the pouch where he stored his DAGR. Hoped that from a distance he'd appear as but a lump in the sand. Pulled out the device and read off his coordinates to the chopper pilot.

“Pedro copies,” the pilot said. “ETA fifteen minutes. Can you say conditions at your position?”

Blount scanned around, stared into the maelstrom.

“Sir, I think the winds are gusting about twenty-five,” he said. “Visibility's only several hundred yards. A few minutes ago we spotted a truck, and I'm pretty sure it's hostile. No vehicles or other personnel in sight at this time.”

“Roger that. See you in a few, if the visibility holds.”

A big
if
. The storm showed no indication of letting up. Blount wasn't a pilot, but common sense told him visibility would get worse near the ground, close to the source of the dust. And that's exactly where visibility became most critical for the aircrew.

“Do you think they can pick us up?” Grayson asked.

“Don't count on it till it happens,” Blount said. “If those helos get here and they can't see to land or at least hover over us and drop a basket, they'll just climb up where the air's better and fly home.”

Blount strained his eyes, tried to will the blowing sand to part enough for him to see farther. The effort only made him dizzy; for a moment he lost all depth perception and imagined that visibility had dropped to mere feet. Then his eyes focused again and he discerned sand ripples across the ground for several hundred yards.

“Let's spread out a little bit,” Blount ordered. “Make sure we're covering a full three hundred sixty degrees.”

The men crawled a few feet left or right, shuffled themselves until a rifle aimed toward each cardinal point of the compass. Escarra seemed to understand without translation; he trained his AK-47 due east and peered into the distance. Several minutes went by. All the while, Blount listened to the wind whip the Sahara, and he kept hoping to hear the pounding of helicopter rotors.

Instead he heard a single word in Spanish. Escarra spoke without emotion, without raising his voice. Two syllables from a language Blount didn't speak told him all he needed to know.

“Mira,”
Escarra said.

Blount looked toward Escarra's assigned sector.

In that direction, a solid point took form at ground level amid the shapeless eddies of flying grit. At first it seemed motionless, but after a few seconds the point began to enlarge and shift to take on the lines and angles of a pickup truck.

“Good eyes,” Blount said. “Possible target to the east, boys.”

Fender and Grayson rose up slightly on their knees and elbows, turned their eyes and weapons toward the threat. Blount switched his M16 from safe to semiauto, watched the truck approach.

“Keep watch all around us,” Blount said.

“Aye, aye, Gunny,” Fender said.

This could get complicated, Blount thought, with a firefight breaking out just as the Pave Hawks arrive. Better warn the crews. He lifted his radio again.

“Pedro, Havoc Two Bravo,” he said. “Be advised we have a vehicle approaching our position, possibly hostile.”

“Roger that, Havoc. Our gunners copy, too.”

Blount figured his team had one advantage: four men flat to the ground presented a much lower profile than a truck full of dirtbags. Whoever was in the vehicle probably hadn't seen Blount and his men yet. Now he just needed positive identification of a hostile target.

“I don't have positive ID yet, fellas,” Blount said. “But if you see a
threat, shoot first and shoot straight, but remember we don't have a whole lot of ammo.”

“Aye, Gunny,” Fender said.

The truck bounced and wallowed through the sand, and when it came within a couple hundred yards, Blount could see six men kneeling in its bed. Scarves covered their heads and faces, leaving only their eyes exposed. Some wore goggles. All carried weapons—mostly AK-47s, but one had a long tube. A launcher for rocket-propelled grenades, Blount realized, or else a shoulder-fired antiaircraft missile. Either way, bad news for helicopters.

One of the men in the truck bed stood up and placed an AK across the top of the cab. He took aim as the vehicle continued swerving across the desert.

“They see us,” Blount shouted. “Fire!”

The men opened up. Blount squeezed off two shots at the jihadist aiming over the cab. The man dropped into the truck bed as his weapon slid forward. The AK clattered across the hood and fell into the sand.

Bullets punctured the windshield. The pickup skidded, began to roll over. Five men and one limp body tumbled out onto the desert floor. The truck came to rest about a hundred yards away, on its right side with its open bed oriented toward Blount and his team. Two men remained in the cab. Blount couldn't tell if those two were hit; they had fallen all over each other.

The terrorists thrown from the vehicle scrambled for their weapons. Blount kept firing on semi-auto, one shot at a time. So did Escarra, Fender, and Grayson. Two of the dirtbags raised themselves and fell immediately as the escapees' rifles popped off rounds and ejected brass.

The sharp edge of rifle smoke salted the air. Two jihadists lay prone, firing. One in front of the vehicle fumbled with his launch tube.

Over the shooting, Blount heard—and felt—the thudding rhythm of helicopters. The crews needed to know what they were flying into. Blount thumbed his transmit switch again.

“Pedro,” he called, “Havoc's in contact. Enemy clustered around overturned pickup.”

“Copy enemy pickup truck,” the pilot answered.

The jihadists' rounds flung little geysers of sand around the men. Escarra cried out when a slug struck his upper left arm. Blount saw the blood begin to redden the Spaniard's sleeve.

Hot, sharp things pricked Blount's face: grit kicked up by bullets striking the ground. The enemy must have heard the choppers, too. The guy with the launcher started looking up at the obscured sky. Blount touched off a shot at him just as he scrabbled around to the other side of the pickup. Missed.

Now the guy could fire at the choppers from behind cover. Not good. The aircraft would come within range at any moment; Blount heard the slap of rotor blades getting louder. Yet, above him, he could still see nothing but a sky filled with dirt.

This whole mess had started when jihadists bagged a helicopter. Not happening again, Blount decided.

“Gimme some covering fire,” he yelled. “I'm gon' flank 'em.” Blount wanted to move around toward the other side of the truck so he could aim at launcher guy behind it.

Fender, Grayson, and Escarra poured rounds downrange. Blount knew it was a calculated risk to burn through limited ammunition by using it up as covering fire. But he hoped the choppers would open up at any moment with their immense firepower.

One of the terrorists still inside the cab fired out through the windshield. His shots chewed out an opening the size of a basketball in the safety glass. Fender returned fire, ejected an empty mag. While Fender reloaded, Grayson and Escarra kept shooting, and Grayson's weapon emptied. They could keep firing at this rate only for a few more seconds.

Blount leaped to his feet. Sprinted in front of the truck, about forty yards away from it, hoping for a good firing angle. The terrorists' bullets cracked around him. The dirtbags were dividing their fire between Blount and the other three men.

From the corner of his eye Blount saw a helicopter take shape above him. The aircraft appeared gauzy and translucent through the dust, an inanimate object forming spontaneously amid the storm. Close, too. Well within the kill range of an RPG or shoulder-fired missile.

Just before Blount gained a good angle on his quarry, a round struck his tactical vest. The slug failed to penetrate the vest's protective insert, but it knocked him off his feet. Blount tumbled into the sand. He hugged his rifle close as he hit the ground, and he managed to keep dirt from fouling the muzzle of the M16. The flintlock pistol in his pocket dug into his thigh. He coughed, felt a sting in his ribs.

Blount remained on the ground, rolled twice. Ended up in a prone position about twenty yards from the truck's front end, with his rifle pointed at launcher guy. Blount had a clear shot now, and he could see the man's weapon better. Sure enough, an RPG-7 tube.

The Pave Hawks began descending, both finally coming into clear view. Tangible machines now instead of vaporous suggestions of themselves.