Sand and Fire (9780698137844) (4 page)

From the pocket of her field jacket, Gold pulled out her camera. She turned it on and took a distance shot of the village. The medina—the old residential section—looked as uniformly beige as the desert that surrounded it. Palm trees appeared as feathers of green,
providing the only variation in color. From this perspective, Gold saw few signs of the horrors that had taken place just hours before. She and Lambrechts walked toward the village with Ongondo.

“More than a dozen people came to our refugee camp on foot,” Gold said. Lambrechts told the Kenyan officer about the burns on the women and children, and the old man who'd died.

“We found eighteen dead,” Ongondo said. “Some survivors suffer from burns, and others show no symptoms.”

“Who did this?” Gold asked. “And where did they get these weapons?”

“I have no idea who and where,” Ongondo said, “and I cannot imagine why.” The officer's voice cracked. Until that moment, Gold hadn't realized he was struggling with his emotions.

“These things can be hard to comprehend,” Gold said.

Ongondo wiped sweat from his face with his sleeve, stood with his gloves wadded up in his fists. Shook his head.

“The Baila tribe in Central Africa has a folktale to explain the inexplicable,” Ongondo said. “In the time before history, a woman went to work and put down her baby by the side of the field. When the child cried, a great eagle landed and spread its wings. The woman feared the eagle would kill her child, but the bird only stopped the child's crying. The next day, the same thing happened; the eagle landed just to soothe the child. The woman told her husband, who did not believe. She took him to the field the next day. When he saw the eagle land beside the baby, he drew his bow and shot an arrow at the eagle. The eagle flapped away, and the arrow hit the child. The eagle had wanted only to soothe the child, and he placed a curse. Kindness went away from mankind, and people kill one another to this day.”

“That is a very sad tale,” Lambrechts said.

Gold considered the wisdom packed into such a short story: senseless violence that kills the innocent. Telling the story seemed Ongondo's way of getting his feelings under control. She wished she
could talk further with the Kenyan officer. But he, Gold, and Lambrechts pressed on to matters at hand.

Inside the village, the first sign of trouble Gold noted came in the form of a dead goat. The animal lay sprawled as if struck by a car, except the goat had died in a courtyard far from any curb. Gold aimed her camera, pressed the autofocus button. The goat's black fur came into sharp clarity, and Gold took the photo.

Down the next alleyway, two AU men rolled a corpse into a black body bag. The dead person's left arm, stiff from rigor mortis, reached up from the bag as if the deceased wanted to climb out and live again. The men forced the arm down and zipped the bag closed. Gold waited before snapping another picture, to spare this unknown Libyan the indignity of being photographed in such a condition. She could not see if the person was a man or a woman.

“What an awful way to leave this world,” Lambrechts said.

A dog had died nearby, a dun-colored animal of indeterminate breed. Its lips curled upward, revealing fangs shown in a final growl. Gold imagined the dog could not have comprehended this vaporous enemy that inflicted such pain. The AU troops hefted the body bag, left the dog where it was.

The sight reminded Gold of photos she'd seen of Halabja, Iraq, where Saddam Hussein's regime killed thousands of Kurdish civilians with a gas attack in 1988. The death toll hadn't climbed nearly that high here. But the randomness of this attack and the mystery of the attackers gave plenty of reason to worry about what might come next.

The AU troops carried the body bag to a square by a mosque, set it down in a row beside eight others. Gold raised her camera again and photographed the row of bags. If not for the scirocco blowing the chemicals away quickly, how many more bags would there have been?

“This could have been much worse,” Ongondo said.

“I was just thinking that,” Gold said.

“My medics have set up a casualty collection point. Would you like to go there?”

“Yes,” Lambrechts said. “Right away.”

At the three CCP tents, a Libyan doctor and two nurses worked with three military medics. In the stifling heat, Gold removed her sunglasses and wiped her sleeve across her brow. Lambrechts waded into the throng of patients; scores of people filled the tents. The coughing adults and crying children made conversation nearly impossible. Lambrechts raised her voice to communicate with one of the medics.

“I am a physician,” she said. “Do you speak English?”

“No English. No English.”

“Parlez-vous français?”

The medic shook his head.

“Parli italiano?”

“Sì.”

While Lambrechts examined patients, Gold took photos that would emphasize the first point she'd make when she e-mailed New York—
Send more doctors and medical supplies.

The victims here appeared even worse off than those who'd reached the refugee camp yesterday. Many of their blisters had broken open to reveal red, oozing flesh underneath the ravaged skin. The sight brought bile to Gold's throat, but she forced her gut to calm and her mind to focus.

One teenage boy sat on the ground. Flaps of skin dangled from his face. He stared at the tent wall and took quick breaths. Pain, Gold imagined, had forced his mind in on itself until he could think of nothing else. She had known that kind of agony herself. Gold kneeled, opened her canteen, held it in front of the boy.

“Drink this,” she said in Arabic.

The boy grasped the canteen with fingers that looked like half-cooked meat. He lifted the canteen to his mouth, drank for several seconds, passed the canteen back to Gold.

“I am sorry to do this,” Gold said, “but I need to take your
photograph to show what they have done to you.” Governments and aid agencies needed to see this.

The boy did not answer or even make eye contact. Gold snapped a picture of his hands and one of his face. A medic came over, helped the boy to his feet, and led him to an examination table. Gold hoped the medics could give him some kind of relief.

In the crowded tent, Gold felt she was only getting in the way. She rose to her feet, put her sunglasses back on, and went outside.

The quiet of the paths and alleys contrasted with the noise inside the hospital tents. Gold checked her watch; it was just after noon. Yet the village showed no normal bustle of life. No traffic, no vegetable merchants, not even the call to prayer from the muezzin. An entire community poisoned and sick.

A calico cat stalked across the sidewalk and disappeared down an alley. Gold decided to look around some more, so she followed the animal. The cat simply vanished, as strays could do, but something else caught Gold's eye. The far end of the alley opened onto a wider street. Along the concrete wall of a home there, someone had spray-painted graffiti. The red paint looked fresh.

Gold squinted, read the Arabic.
TO THE INFIDELS, TO THE SUFI APOSTATES, TAKE THIS WARNING. A NEW PASHA WILL RULE TRIPOLITANIA WITH ALLAH'S FIERCE JUSTICE
.

Pasha? Tripolitania? Those words evoked the days of the Barbary pirates. Maybe some terrorist chieftain sought to cast himself in their image.

Wait a minute, Gold thought. Why would you come this far into a village you'd just hit with chemical weapons, only to spray-paint a threat?

Well, you could do it if you wore a gas mask.

That implied preparation. A dangerous enemy with a plan. Gold took a shot of the graffiti. This photo, she'd send to Parson.

H
ome.

Blount sat in a high-back rocker on the front porch of his house, eight-year-old Ruthie in his lap. Priscilla, the older one, stretched out on the swing, which hung from the porch ceiling by a pair of chains. She kept the swing swaying with occasional nudges of her sandal against the hardwood floor while she read a book on an electronic tablet. The weather remained warm for October; through the screens of the open windows Blount smelled supper cooking. Bernadette, the woman who kept him sane and strong, was fixing Chicken Bog. The aromas of onion, sausage, chicken, and rice would have told even a blind man he was in the low country of South Carolina.

A violent and unpredictable world lay beyond the horizon, Blount knew all too well. But what he could see from his house looked like paradise. The front yard bordered a marsh lagoon. A pair of mergansers cut ripples across the estuary, the surface turned golden by the setting sun. Cordgrass bent with the tide. Palmettos with leaflets shaped like green bayonets stood sentry where the water met dry land. A fitting place for a Marine to make his home. The universe could have ended right then and there, and Blount would have gone out happy.

Behind him, he heard the sound of his wife's footsteps. Bernadette appeared at the screen door, a kitchen towel in her hands. Still fit after two children, partly because she ran with Blount every morning—when he was home. Skin the color of walnuts, long
fingers that could stroke his back and make everything that hurt go away, she was the most beautiful thing on God's green earth.

“Y'all come on in,” Bernadette said. “We're ready to eat.”

“Yay,” Ruthie said. Blount's youngest wriggled out of his grasp. She was getting near about too big to sit on his lap. Enjoy every minute, Blount's grandfather had told him. They'll get grown in no time.

Before Blount sat down at the table, he embraced his wife. Her freshly washed hair smelled like lavender. The evening before, she had made love to him long into the night. He'd awakened to that same lavender smell on her pillow. By then she had dressed and gone out the door to her job as the guidance counselor at Beaufort High School, over on Lady's Island.

The television blared in the background. Bernadette picked up the remote, muted the sound of the newscast, and said, “Priscilla, why don't you say the blessing?”

Blount's eldest prayed over the food, and then Bernadette began ladling the Chicken Bog. Steam rose from every spoonful. The one-dish, rice-based meal reminded Blount of the pilau they served in Afghanistan, but the seasonings tasted completely different.

“So, what did you do today, baby?” Bernadette asked. “Did you get caught up on your sleep?”

“Not really,” Blount said. “My body clock still don't know where it is. I went over to the sheriff's department today to see about a job.”

“What did they say?”

“They're not hiring. Budget cuts.”

“Don't worry. Between all the sheriff and police departments around here, plus the highway patrol, I'm sure somebody'll take you.”

“I reckon.”

“But don't go with the highway patrol if they want to put you way up in District Three. You've been away from home enough.”

“Yeah,” Ruthie said.

Priscilla nodded, chewing.

They could afford to wait for him to find the right job.
Bernadette's position paid all right, so they'd always saved most of what he made as a Marine. Gunnery sergeant pay, especially with a combat-zone tax exclusion, added up pretty good. That's how they'd got this house. But it wasn't just about the money. Blount wanted to feel like he was doing somebody some good. And he had a real specific skill set.

He picked up the pitcher of sweet tea and poured. The ice in his glass cracked and popped like distant rifle fire as the tea flowed over it. When he took a sip, his hand encircled the tea glass the way a smaller man's hand might wrap around a shot glass. He swallowed, set the glass back down on the coaster gently. Blount knew his strength, and he seldom broke anything he didn't mean to break.

As he ate, he kept one eye on the silent television. After a commercial for some video game, an anchor opened a new segment. A graphic appeared over the anchor's shoulder—a black skull and crossbones. The screen cut to images of a desert town, and a new graphic read
VIDEO FROM AL ARABIYA NEWS SERVICE
. Women wailed and waved their arms by a row of body bags. Blount took the remote and turned up the volume.

“. . . in the second chemical weapons attack by terrorists in a week. A spokesman for the African Union says at least nineteen people died near the Libyan town of Ghat. So far, there has been no claim of responsibility. But a variety of terror groups have staged conventional attacks across North Africa in recent months, and the use of even more destructive weapons is prompting calls for international assistance. Chemical agents such as mustard gas and sarin can cause horrible injuries, and we warn you that some of the following video is graphic.”

A screaming child appeared with folds of skin hanging from her arms. Blount thumbed the remote's power button and turned off the
set. He didn't want his girls to see some of what he'd seen. Bernadette looked at him but didn't say anything.

After dinner, Blount worked on unpacking. He took his seabag up to the master bedroom and began to put away uniforms. Eventually he'd move them from the closet to the attic, but he needed them for a little while yet. Later this week he'd drive to Camp Lejeune up in North Carolina. He'd sit through some separation briefings and get started on outprocessing.

At the bottom of the seabag he found his old KA-BAR knife. The knife meant more to him than just an heirloom. He had carried it with him on every operation since boot camp. With this blade he had sliced parachute cord, hacked Euphrates River reeds, cut away clothing to give first aid to wounded buddies. And on one dark night in Afghanistan, he had taken a life with it. What to do with it now?

He descended the stairs, went outside, and walked across the backyard where he planned to put in that big garden next spring. An old toolshed stood under a live oak behind the house. Blount lifted the hasp and pulled open the door.

In the dim light he pulled the twine hanging from the overhead lamp, and the naked bulb winked on. The previous owner had cleared out all the tools; little remained in the shed except a bare wooden workbench. Pretty soon Blount would bring in new rakes, hoes, and probably a motorized tiller. Once he got the fence built around the pasture, the toolshed would also store tack, hay, and other things for the girls' pony. He had plenty of time for all that, though.

He could not think of a better place for the fighting knife than here in the toolshed by the garden, its fighting days done. Symbol of a long mission ended.

Blount unsheathed the knife, held the grip in his fist. Stabbed the blade hard into the top of the workbench. He slammed the knife in so deep, no one but him would have the muscle to remove it. Blount
placed the sheath down beside the knife. In the aged leather he could still make out the lettering that read USMC.

The original owner, Blount's maternal grandfather, had always taken pride that his grandson carried that knife. Grandpa Buell, now ninety-two, resided at an assisted-living facility outside Beaufort. He'd outlived his wife and most of his strength, but the old Marine's mind remained sharp as ever. Grandpa had mentored Blount through some pretty tough times. A talk with the old man always helped put things in perspective. Blount decided to drive over and say hello, but first he went back into the house to tell Bernadette where he was going.

“Oh, good,” Bernadette said. “You can take him these for me.”

She wrapped aluminum foil over two dishes—a quart of Chicken Bog and half of a sweet potato pie. Blount carried the dishes out to his Ram and placed them on the floor of the passenger's side.

His truck gleamed; Bernadette and the girls had washed and waxed it for him before he got home. The Marine Corps sticker on the rear window shone with red lettering on a yellow background. Because Blount lived near the Beaufort air station and the Parris Island recruit depot, he saw USMC stickers on cars and trucks all over the place. Some of the stickers carried funny messages:
THE 72 VIRGINS DATE COUNSELORS
,
TRAVEL AGENTS TO ALLAH
, or
HEAVEN WON'T TAKE US AND HELL'S AFRAID WE'LL TAKE OVER
. Nothing wrong with a laugh, but Blount had chosen a sticker more in line with how he saw himself and his job
:
NO BETTER FRIEND, NO WORSE ENEMY
.

But the Corps would soon become his former job. Blount felt overjoyed to return to his family. However, he'd expected to end his time in the Marines with more sense of a journey seen through, a mission accomplished. He knew he shouldn't take personally that sarin attack in Sigonella. Hard not to take it that way, though, after watching his old platoon commander die. And the news tonight brought that stuff right into his own dining room.

A sense of loss came over him as he started his truck and steered
down a narrow lane lined with cypress trees, their limbs dripping with Spanish moss. Who am I going to be now? Blount wondered. But then he told himself to stop talking foolishness. Nobody stayed in the Corps forever. Hadn't he pushed his luck far enough?

Blount shut down his truck in the parking lot of Sunrise Senior Living. He knocked on the door of his grandfather's suite and found the old Marine sitting in his wheelchair. An oxygen tube wrapped over his ears and led to a cannula in his nose. The television chattered with CNN at low volume, and Grandpa held a book in his lap—a thousand-page doorstop on American foreign policy since 9/11. Even in the old-folks' home, he kept up with current events, just like the intel sergeant major he'd once been. A shadow box hung on the wall. The box contained an NCO's ceremonial sword, a row of medals, and a folded flag that had flown over the Capitol during the Ford administration.

“Hey, Grandpa. It's me,” Blount said.

“Welcome home, boy,” Grandpa said. He closed his book, spread his arms wide, and smiled. “I reckon this is welcome home for good.”

“I guess so. Brought you some Chicken Bog and sweet potato pie.”

“Come on in. I already ate, so just stick it in the refrigerator. I'll eat it tomorrow. Bernadette cooks better than the chow hall we got here, that's for sure.”

Blount placed the two dishes in the small fridge and bent to embrace his grandfather. Then he sat down in a recliner beside the wheelchair.

“You're looking good,” Blount said. He liked the way the old man stayed engaged with the world. What a blessing he still had his intellect. There were people down the hall who had no idea where they were or what was happening around them.

“I'm doing all right. I see y'all had some trouble at Sig.”

“Yes, sir. We did.”

Grandpa pulled down his glasses, furrowed his gray eyebrows, and regarded Blount as if giving him a medical exam.

“You feeling okay? That sarin's some bad stuff. I don't know how in this world you didn't get exposed when you ran inside that place. Boy, you got more balls than brains.”

Well, Grandpa hadn't heard that part on the news. Bernadette must have told him everything. Fair enough.

“We didn't know it was nerve gas until we got in there, Grandpa. Corporal Fender and I got lucky, I reckon.”

“You got that right.”

“Maybe I won't have to deal with nothing else like that.”

Grandpa took a long breath of oxygen, reached into his pocket, and pulled out two peppermints. He handed one to Blount and unwrapped the other for himself. Blount opened the foil, popped the peppermint into his mouth, and crushed it between his molars. The peppermint ritual went back to their earliest conversations. The cool rush of sugar took him decades into the past, nearly brought tears to his eyes.

“So how do you feel about leaving the Corps?” Grandpa asked. “You gon' be a deputy?”

Just like him, Blount thought. Straight to the heart of things.

“That's a good question. The department's not hiring for now.”

Blount wondered what his grandfather thought about his separation from the Corps. Grandpa had made a full career of the Marines—Okinawa, Inchon, Khe Sanh. Thirty years. Blount cared little what any man thought of him, except the man before him now.

“I bet I know what you're thinking,” Grandpa said. “You're glad to be home, but you're torn. It don't feel like you thought it would feel.”

The last shards of peppermint melted away on Blount's tongue. How could that old man read his mind?

“I didn't think I'd feel torn. But I have been ever since I watched my old platoon commander dying outside that nightclub.”

“So you knew one of them?”

“Yes, sir.”

Grandpa raised his hand, crooked a wrinkled finger at Blount.

“Listen to me, boy. You got nothing to prove to nobody. I'm so proud of you I could bust. You done more for your country already than most folks could ever imagine. It's all right if you leave. It's all right if you stay. You just gotta decide how you feel. And Bernadette and the girls, too.”

That was the trouble. Blount knew how he felt right up until he heard the boom that stopped the music at Route One. But with a new threat out there, the whole recipe changed. Or did it? How would his wife and kids feel if he went back into harm's way after telling them he was done?

Plenty of service members joined up, served one enlistment, then got out. Saw more in one combat tour than anybody should see in a lifetime. And no one questioned their devotion to duty. So why do you want to tear yourself up about leaving after twenty years? Blount asked himself. You've seen enough for several lifetimes.

Grandpa took off his glasses and began surfing through the TV channels. He stopped on one program, apparently at random. Four young adults—two men and two women—gestured and paced around a living room. Talked like something real serious had taken place. Grandpa punched up the volume a little, and Blount realized this was one of those reality shows where they put people together in a rent-free house and saw how they got along. These four were fighting over who would sweep the patio.