Sand and Fire (9780698137844) (35 page)

Loudon went over to the radio operator, lifted the handset of the PRC-119.

“All stations, Thor Six,” he called. “BDA team move into place. Exercise extreme caution.”

Loudon, Blount, and about twenty other Marines from various positions around the target area began to head downhill. The bomb damage assessment team would take photographs and try to determine exactly what the bombs had destroyed.

Blount glanced over his shoulder, back up the hill. The sniper with the .50-cal watched and waited, his spotter beside him with an observation scope. The BDA team continued moving toward the devastated compound. Blount wished fervently that he'd find Kassam's body, to provide proof positive of the dirtbag's death. But at this distance he saw no bodies at all—only shattered bricks, crumbling walls, and two intact vehicles.

Loudon continued leading the descent down the outcropping into the sand bowl. The lieutenant colonel nearly lost his footing in a slippery chute of loose stones, and he stumbled ahead of his radio
operator. To maintain balance he took a long stride downhill and let the momentum carry him. Nearly at a run, he reached the edge of the sand bowl. Pebbles bounced and rolled across the ground behind him, and he came to a stop about fifty yards in front of the other men.

At that instant, movement caught Blount's eye, something within the few walls still standing. Could anyone have survived that air strike?

Before Blount could call out a warning, three men ran from within the bombed-out structure. One wore a dark tracksuit. The other two wore green field jackets, and all were bearded. They moved too quickly for Blount to determine if Kassam was among them. One dived into the pickup, and the other two jumped into the SUV.

“Fire,” Loudon shouted.

From behind and above him, Blount heard the deep slam of the .50 cal M107. A Raufoss round tore a flaming hole in the pickup's engine compartment just as the vehicle started to move. The pickup ground to a halt, smoke seeping from under the hood. The driver jumped out. The M107 boomed again. This time the Raufoss slammed through the driver's torso. The body collapsed in a smoking heap.

Marines opened up on the escaping SUV, but the bullets seemed to have no effect. Maybe the vehicle was armed, or maybe the range had become too great for the M16s.

The M107 fired once more. An orange flash and a wisp of smoke showed the Raufoss had found its mark, but the vehicle kept accelerating. The sniper sent another round, and the SUV only moved faster.

“Don't let that thing go,” Loudon shouted. “Call the Daggers.”

Blount stood closer to the radio operator than Loudon, and every second counted. The radio operator swung the PRC-119 from his shoulder and made a quick adjustment to the channel selector. As Blount reached him, the man held out the handset and said, “You're on Dagger's frequency, Gunny.”

Blount grabbed the handset, lifted it to his gas mask's voicemitter.

“Dagger flight, Thor Six Bravo with a fire mission,” he called. As he spoke, he watched the SUV growing smaller. A trail of dust rose behind it. Maybe Kassam himself was in that vehicle. If so, he was getting away. Please answer me, Blount thought. Please, please, please come up on freq.

“Thor Six Bravo, Dagger One-One, say your fire mission,” a voice responded. Very familiar. Yeah, that French pilot, Chartier. With the backseater they called Sniper.

Perfect, Blount thought. Time to talk a round onto a target.

“Sir,” Blount transmitted, “my position is objective area as briefed. Target is a vehicle heading south, away from objective area. Will not be marked.”

Blount released his talk switch, waited for a response.

“Dagger One-One copies target is a moving vehicle south of objective.”

Vengeance is mine, Blount thought. Maybe that went against the Good Book, but he couldn't help it. He had to summon all his self-discipline just to use proper radio procedure.

“Yes, sir,” Blount said. “Thor Six Bravo requests bombing or strafing attack. Run-in heading roughly one-niner-zero, pull out at your discretion. I can observe and will not control. Over.”

“One-niner-zero, pull out our discretion,” Chartier said.

Go get 'em, Blount thought. Hope your boy Sniper's as good as you say. Reckon this makes me Sniper's spotter.

Jet noise rose from a distant whisper to pealing thunder. Blount gazed at the sky above him. At first he saw no aircraft. He'd lost track of their position, but he knew they'd attack from the north. He followed the sound as best he could.

There.

Blount spotted two dark specks moving in unison above the northwest horizon. When they turned, their wing flash clearly
identified them as a pair of fighters. The Mirages rolled onto a southerly heading. One of them began to descend.

“Thor Six Bravo,” Chartier called, “Dagger One-One has target in sight.”

“Dagger One-One cleared hot,” Blount answered.

On the ground, the vehicle appeared only as a distant feather of dust. Out of range now for infantry weapons. But not for infantry talking to air.

The descending Mirage began to level off several hundred feet above the desert floor. Its roar seemed to fill the entire Sahara. When the jet streaked overhead, Blount noticed the clusters of fins and oblong shapes underneath the wings: an aircraft laden with death, but to Blount, laden with justice.

After the Mirage rocketed past the compound, one of the weapons fell from the jet. The bomb made a slight change in direction as it dropped, perhaps riding a laser beam from the Mirage. As if drawn by a magnet, the weapon steered directly to the moving SUV.

Flame erupted, blotted out the vehicle. An instant later the sound reached Blount's ears. More crack than boom, sharp and hard. Black smoke belched from the point of impact. Burning masses hurled themselves skyward—chunks of the SUV, accompanied by dozens of smaller embers. From the central swirl of flames, blackened debris flew in arcs, streamed smoke and fire, and bounced onto the desert floor.

The Mirage pulled up, banked into a climbing turn.

Blount raised both arms. In his right hand he brandished his rifle; his left hand he clenched into a fist. From within the gas mask, he let out a long monosyllabic growl, a victory cry. Sweat poured into his eyes and he didn't care.

“Precision-guided whoop-ass,” Loudon shouted.

Several Marines began to yell.

“Oo-raaah!”

“Gotcha, baby.”

Blount keyed his mike again.

“Good hit, Dagger,” he called. “Nice shot.”

The radio hissed for a moment before Chartier called back.

“Copy that, Thor.
Merci
. Do you require another pass?”

Blount scanned the target area. No movement. No gunfire.

“Negative, sir.”

“Roger. We'll remain on station until we reach bingo fuel.”

The sun now appeared as a bronze ball, fully risen above the horizon. The last whorls of red marbled into a sky growing bluer by the minute. Clear visibility stretched for miles; Blount noted with satisfaction that the helicopters would have no trouble coming back for him and his fellow Marines. The weather itself seemed to acknowledge Blount's right to get home.

But before he went anywhere, he wanted to make sure Sadiq Kassam had made a permanent change of station—to hell. Blount couldn't wait to find Kassam's body in the rubble and wreckage. He wanted—needed—to look into Kassam's dead eyes.

He joined the bomb damage assessment team searching the target area. Blount, Loudon, and ten other Marines began picking their way through the crumbled bricks and collapsed walls of the compound. The men snapped photographs, jotted notes, paced off distances.

One Marine stopped, and with a gloved finger pointed at something on the ground. He took a photo as other men came to look. Blount trotted over as fast as he could in heavy chem gear, hoping to see Kassam's corpse.

But it was only a foot, still inside a Russian-style black leather boot. Elsewhere in the rubble the Marines found a hand, several fingers, even a jawbone with bloody teeth. Nothing identifiable except through dental records or DNA analysis. Blount stepped over to Loudon's side.

“Sir,” he said, “do you think the CIA or somebody has a DNA sample from Kassam or one of his relatives?”

“I seriously doubt it,” Loudon said.

The only identifiable body was that of the man who'd tried to drive away in the pickup. The Raufoss round had all but blown him in half, but the face was still intact. A face Blount had never seen before. Younger than Kassam, with a much sparser beard.

So, where was Kassam? He's gotta be here, Blount thought.

What Blount really wanted was to find the terrorist leader alive, to make sure Kassam knew who took him out. And then to choke the life out of him slowly, to make him suffer like he'd made that boy Farmer suffer. He kept imagining his hands around that dirtbag's throat. Blount still remembered what his grandfather had said about vengeance. But by God, vengeance had its place.

Blount, Loudon, and a few of the other Marines hiked south to the SUV destroyed by the Mirage. The explosion had left a shallow crater in the desert floor. The wreckage seemed . . . incomplete, not enough to have been a vehicle. Twisted, burned metal lay surrounded by blackened sand. With anticipation tingling down to his fingertips, Blount walked over to the largest chunk of seared steel. Kassam's body had to be here.

Inside the twisted beams and sheet metal, Blount found human remains—but what remained came closer to fossil than corpse. His excitement over the Mirage strike corroded into simmering wrath. A skeletal black husk stared back at him, the flesh seared away to leave little but an openmouthed skull. A crisp film covered the ribcage; Blount couldn't tell if it was shriveled skin or melted clothing. The arm bones ended in a general scattering of ash and debris, with no hands visible. Perhaps the intense heat had burned them away, bones and all.

The very face of death, the skull seemed to mock Blount. He looked into the eye sockets, and he wished he could grant this
dirtbag three more seconds of life, just to ask, “Who were you?” But the burned bones looked like they could have been dead a thousand years. For the moment, at least, they were impossible to identify.

The last time Blount had felt so powerless came rushing back to him. In his mind he saw Sadiq Kassam spattered with Farmer's blood, holding a dripping machete.

“Guess you got the last laugh on these bastards, Guns,” Loudon said.

Blount turned away from the wreckage, slung his rifle over his shoulder, peered out across the Sahara. He felt the flames inside him building, spreading like fire in a tobacco barn raging through dry, cured leaves. “I don't know, sir,” he said. “Kassam could still be out there.”

Loudon placed his boot on the singed engine block. “We'll find out soon enough,” he said.

Or not, Blount thought. And even if we do get Kassam, how long before a new chief dirtbag takes his place? And how long before another terrorist cell gets its hands on weapons of mass destruction? Blount saw his grandfather on Iwo Jima facing an enemy that could appear from nowhere and melt away just as quickly. You could throw fire and steel, kill in sickening numbers, and still never know when the enemy would pop up behind you.

He wanted to assail his enemy right now, to open fire, to thrust with a blade, to smash with a boot, fist, or elbow. He wanted to cut loose with a flamethrower like Grandpa, get payback in grand style. But he had no place to throw the flame. Nothing burned but his own spirit. He balled his hands into fists, walked in a circle, dragged deep breaths through the filter of his gas mask.

“Guns,” Loudon said. “Are you all right?”

Loudon stood over a piece of an axle. The blast had burned away the tires completely. However, one rim remained bolted onto the axle, giving it the appearance of a giant steel mallet. Blount looked down at the incinerated metal.

“Give me that,” Blount said. Forgot about the “sir.”

Blount charged toward Loudon. Loudon stepped back, eyes widened in fear. But Blount didn't want to hurt the lieutenant colonel. He wanted that axle.

He leaned over and grabbed it with both hands. Yanked it up from the ground the way a weaker man might lift a baseball bat. Blount hefted it by the broken end. At the other end, sand streamed from the edges and grooves of the bare rim. Blount ran at the chunk of wreckage that contained the scorched remains.

He swung the axle over his head like a battle-ax. Brought it down hard on the twisted metal frame of the destroyed vehicle. The impact made a loud clang. Dust and ash bounced from the burned steel.

“Guns,” Loudon said. “What are you—”

Blount wasn't listening. He swung the axle again, sweating inside his gas mask. The rim at the end of the axle whanged once more into the wreckage.

“I'm gon' get you,” Blount growled. He drew back the axle for another blow, wielded it like a maul. This time the impact tore away some of the wreckage that encased the burned body.

The blackened skull heightened Blount's rage. As he raised the axle again, the effort twisted his gas mask so that the facepiece dug into his nose. He ripped the gas mask off and flung it to the sand.

“Gunnery Sergeant Blount,” Loudon shouted. “You will place that mask back on your head!”

Blount heaved the axle again. Ignored Loudon's order. He smashed the rim into the grinning skull inside the wreckage. The skull exploded into flying shards of bone and soot.

Blount took in a long breath of unfiltered air. It went down clean; he felt no sign of chemical poisoning. But then he realized the insane chance he'd taken.

“Marine,” Loudon shouted. “You
will
pick that mask up off the deck and replace it on your face.”

Horror replaced Blount's wrath. He'd let emotion break down his
military bearing, his common sense, even his devotion to family. He'd let rage overcome judgment. After all he'd survived, he'd risked losing his life, widowing Bernadette, leaving his kids fatherless, in a fit of fury. He dropped the axle. Grabbed the mask, pulled it over his head. Sweat slickened its seals and straps.