Sand and Fire (9780698137844) (5 page)

“You ever hear such nonsense in all your born days?” Grandpa asked.

“I just can't believe they pay people for that.”

Blount's grandfather turned off the television and said, “I changed my mind. Let's have some of that pie.”

“Sounds good to me.”

Blount searched the cabinets and found paper plates, two forks, and a knife. He and his grandfather shared the sweet potato pie and said little else. Just enjoyed each other's company. The flavor of
brown sugar, the crunch of the double crust, filled Blount with a sense of safety and belonging. Funny how tastes and smells could do that. The odor of sewage took him to Fallujah. Choking dust swept him into Helmand Province. Rifle smoke carried him to the ranges of Quantico. And sweet potatoes and cinnamon brought him home.

When his grandfather got drowsy, Blount asked, “Want me to help you get into bed?”

“No, I got it. Just come on back as soon as you can.”

“I will, Grandpa.”

Blount hugged his grandfather goodbye, went out to his truck. As he drove home, a car began to tailgate him on the two-lane highway. Blount was already doing sixty-five in a fifty-five; he saw no reason to drive faster. The car rode his bumper for two or three miles. If Blount had braked for a deer, the idiot back there would have rear-ended him. Finally, the car—it turned out to be a Camaro—zipped around him in a no-passing zone. Evidently the driver was not one of the local Marines. The Camaro displayed a bumper sticker, but one that had nothing to do with the Corps:
HOW'S MY DRIVING? CALL 1-800-EAT-SHIT.

What's wrong with people? Blount wondered. You'd have to have no respect for anybody, including yourself. Relating to the civilian world, he figured, might take some getting used to.

I
n the ops center at Stuttgart, Germany, Michael Parson watched a drone feed from over the Libyan town of Ghat. Funeral processions inched along streets and alleys as mourners carried shrouded bodies from mosques to cemeteries. The victims came from an outlying village, and bereaved relatives had brought them into town for burial. Though the chemicals from the attack would almost certainly have dissipated by now, Parson could understand why the mourners didn't want to hold funerals in the village itself.

The sad parades had gone on for days. Muslims tried to bury their dead by the next sunset. So Parson surmised that the funerals he was watching—there seemed to be two separate ones—were for people who died today or last night. More and more of those hurt in the chemical attack lost their struggle for life as time went on. What a damned awful way to go, he thought.

A young French officer stood beside Parson. The Frenchman wore the epaulets of a captain and the wings of a pilot. Parson had rolled his eyes when he learned he would work with allied militaries and get an assistant from the French Army of the Air. But the French had just kicked ass while fighting insurgents in Mali. This young captain, Alain Chartier, had put a hurting on some bad guys from the cockpit of his Mirage, and that made him all right by Parson.

Chartier didn't brag too much, either—unlike a lot of fighter jocks. Instead, he related stories that gave credit to teamwork. For example, he talked about the time he got so fixated on hitting his target that he let his fuel get critically low. An emergency refueling
from an American KC-135 Stratotanker kept him from having to eject over insurgent territory. As he told his story, he tried to use American military slang, but he got it only half right.

“I was growing fangs and not paying attention to other things,” Chartier had said. “That boom operator saved my pork.”

Parson laughed and said, “Bacon. He saved your bacon.”

“
Oui
. Bacon.”

But they weren't laughing now. The color image on the screen tilted when the Global Hawk rolled into a turn. Then the image righted itself as the sensor suite corrected for the bank angle. The sensor operator, working from a Mission Control Element at Beale Air Force Base, California, zoomed in closer and adjusted the focus on a shrouded bundle held aloft by a dozen hands.

“C'est dommage,”
Chartier said.

“How's that?” Parson asked.

“A pity. Too bad.”

“Yeah, it's a damned shame.”

Chartier watched the screen for a while, seemed lost in thought. Eventually he said, “Do you think they will send you—us—into North Africa again?”

“Hard to say. We have Marines on a ship in the Med. Did I hear you guys have your Foreign Legion on alert?”

“
Oui
. Yes, sir. And other units, too.”

“I hope it doesn't come to another war.”

“I would like to fly over the Sahara the way Saint-Ex did, in a simple little plane, in peace.”

“The way who did?”

“Saint-Ex,” Chartier said. “Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. French pilot and author.”

“Never heard of him.”

“Ah, you must come to know Saint-Ex, sir. He will remind you why you learned to fly in the first place. He flew airmail routes over
Africa and South America in the 1920s and '30s, and he wrote of the Sahara like a beloved mistress. But then he died in the Second World War
.
”

“Sorry to hear that,” Parson said. He looked up at the Saharan image on the screen, and he found it hard to imagine loving such a wasteland. Maybe this Saint-Ex guy had hit the Bordeaux a little too hard.

The Global Hawk flew several more orbits over Ghat, and still Parson saw nothing but the town and its mourners. He'd been working on a theory, and he decided to see if that drone could prove what he suspected. On a secure telephone, he placed a call to the drone's command center at Beale. When a master sergeant answered, Parson identified himself and explained what he wanted.

“Are you ready to initiate secure transmission, sir?” the sergeant asked.

“Sure. Going secure.”

Parson pressed a button on the specially designed phone, and the handset hissed and beeped for a few seconds. Then the sergeant's voice came back, as clearly as before.

“I'll get the mission commander for you.”

“Thanks,” Parson said. Chartier looked at him with raised eyebrows. Parson placed his hand over the receiver and whispered to the Frenchman, “This is what we call a WAG—a wild-ass guess.”

Or maybe a little better than a WAG, Parson hoped. He had never trained as an intel analyst, and he didn't consider himself much of a sleuth. But he could apply some plain old common sense. A new voice came on the phone line.

“Colonel Harris here.”

“Yes, sir,” Parson said. “Colonel Michael Parson. AFRICOM planning cell.”

He added the
sir
out of habit. Parson still couldn't believe the Air Force had seen fit to promote him to O-6. He had pinned on his
eagles just before taking the AFRICOM assignment. Never one for spit and polish, he'd had his ass chewed by colonels often enough to believe he'd never become one himself. However, he'd helped bring down terrorists ranging from a high-ranking Taliban mullah to a lowlife bin Laden wannabe who kidnapped boys to make them child soldiers. Along the way Parson also stopped a nut job who wanted to reignite the Bosnian War. Some of his citations credited him with initiative and drive. But Parson chalked it up to being in the right place at the right time with the right people by his side.

“What can I do for you, Parson?” Harris asked.

“I'm sure you know everybody's wondering where terrorists have been getting chemical weapons.”

“Of course.”

“Maybe the stuff comes from right there in Libya.”

Parson discussed how in 2003 Muammar Gadhafi announced that he'd get rid of his chemical and biological weapons. Gadhafi saw what had happened to Saddam Hussein's government and decided to play nice. Didn't do him a lot of good; the Libyan strongman eventually suffered a fate as bad as that of the Iraqi dictator. Rebel fighters pulled Gadhafi out of a drainpipe and worked him over. Accounts varied about whether he died from bayonet wounds, gunshots, or shrapnel—but in any case, he came to an ugly, bloody end.

“But what if Gadhafi didn't really disclose all his chem and bio stocks?” Parson asked. “What if he played a shell game with the Chemical Weapons Convention?”

“And you're thinking somebody's using what he hid?”

“Yes, sir.”

A frightening prospect; Parson hoped he was wrong. Inspectors had overseen destruction of part of Libya's chemical weapons and documented the location of others. But no one could say with certainty that every shell and bomb, every ton of sulfur mustard, nerve gas, and precursor chemicals had been accounted for.

“They even had some of it hidden at a turkey farm,” Parson said.

“Geez,” Harris said. “So there's no telling how much is left or where it's located.”

“That's what worries me, sir. Old Gadhafi loyalists, foreign fighters, Islamic fundamentalists could have cached stockpiles anywhere.”

So where to look now? Parson and Harris discussed logical starting places—which included every military base in Libya, along with defunct chemical production sites such as Rabta and Tarhuna. Suspicion might focus on truck convoys going to weird locations, or maybe rattletrap old cargo planes landing on makeshift airstrips. But with insurgents rampaging all over North Africa, how could you tell a truck full of conventional bombs from a truck full of chemical bombs?

“We're looking for a needle in a stack of needles,” Harris said.

“I wish I could come up with something more specific,” Parson said.

“Your idea makes as much sense as anything else I've heard,” Harris said. “I'll see if we can dedicate more drone orbits. But it'll be up to the CFACC.”

The Combined Forces Air Component Commander was a three-star general—far above Parson's pay grade. Parson could only send suggestions up the chain of command. The CFACC might be getting other suggestions, too, and Parson didn't know what priority his would receive.

When Parson ended the call, he wondered if he'd really accomplished much. How would his suggestion sound to the general?
I got it, sir. Let's search all over Libya for something we might not even know when we see it.
But it seemed better than just waiting to get hit again.

He looked around the room, saw that Chartier had disappeared. The Frenchman came back into the ops center a few minutes later and said, “Intel wants to brief us at two.”

“What about?”

“They would not say, but they act like it is important.”

In Parson's long career, he'd found that the quality of intelligence briefings varied widely. Sometimes a briefer, excited and engaged by his work, put together what seemed almost like a well-organized newscast. He'd gather information from classified and unclassified sources and tell you what you needed to know about your mission. Others just flipped through PowerPoint slides as quickly as possible and twisted simple concepts into ridiculously complicated acronyms. Why did a car bomb need to become a VBIED—vehicle-borne improvised explosive device?

At two o'clock, Parson and Chartier left their cell phones in their desks and went to the briefing room. The projector screen read
THIS BRIEFING IS
CLASSIFIED NATO SECRET. NO ELECTRONIC DEVICES
. Officers and NCOs from several nations filled the thirty seats. A U.S. Army major locked the door and began the presentation. To Parson's approval, the major spoke plainly.

“We have a claim of responsibility for the chem warfare attacks at Sigonella and Ghat,” he said. “Slide, please.”

The major's assistant, an Army specialist, clicked a mouse. The next screen showed a bearded man in a black kaffiyeh. He had dyed his beard an off shade of orange, and a scar bisected the bridge of his nose. The man wore a green field jacket draped with pouches for AK-47 magazines—standard terrorist chic. But a much older weapon caught Parson's eye. Stuck into a bright red sash tied around his waist, the jihadist carried a flintlock pistol.

Parson leaned forward just to make sure his eyes weren't fooling him. An antique pistol? Where would a North African terrorist even get a thing like that? The Cabela's catalog?

“Whiskey tango foxtrot,” Parson said.

“What is this expression you use?” Chartier whispered.

“What the fuck.”

The French aviator chuckled, raised his eyebrows.

“This waste of humanity is Sadiq Kassam,” the major continued.
“We believe that is his real name. He comes from Algeria, and he is forty-eight years old.”

“What's with the orange beard and the flintlock?” Parson asked. “Is this some kind of punk rock pirate?”

The Americans in the room laughed, including the major.

“Sir, the beard dyed with henna means he's made a trip to Mecca,” the major said. “You got me on the pistol, though. Their supply must have had that on back order for a very long time.”

More chuckles, but then the major turned serious. “This guy is no laughing matter. He ran with the Armed Islamic Group of Algeria back in the 1990s. They killed for the sake of killing. Kassam emerged more recently as a rival to Mokhtar Belmokhtar, another waste of humanity who orchestrated the attack on the Algerian natural gas plant in 2013. Belmokhtar was reported dead after that; we're not so sure. But Kassam seems to want to take his place.”

Probably so, Parson thought. These extremists always draped themselves in holiness, claimed they murdered civilians in the name of God and acted only as heaven's humble servants. But in truth a lot of them had the egos of rock stars. When not fighting infidels, they fought one another.

“Kassam has released a video to Al Jazeera,” the major said. “I'll let the shithead speak for himself.”

The Al Jazeera video began to play, and a news crawl in Arabic scrolled across the bottom of the screen. Kassam started speaking in Arabic. Someone had superimposed a graphic of English translation:

“In the name of Allah, most gracious and merciful, I bring news of His holy struggle. The Armed Islamic Group of Tripolitania seeks to bring sharia law and infinite justice to the whole of North Africa. The people long for a new pasha, a ruler who will serve as Allah's instrument on Earth. The winds of the Sahara once struck
fear into the hearts of infidels who sailed near our coasts, and those winds shall bring fear again.”

Tripolitania? The graffiti in the photo Sophia had e-mailed said something about Tripolitania. Parson couldn't read the Arabic script, but she'd told him it referred to the Barbary states back in the nineteenth century. As the video continued, Kassam drew the flintlock and began waving it.

“As in the days of old, we will terrorize our enemies. We will kill and enslave nonbelievers who seek to defeat our religion. My forebears in jihad took this pistol from an American sailor more than two centuries ago. And Allah has delivered into our hands far more fearsome weapons. As we showed you on the Crusader island of Sicily and in the backsliding region of Ghat, we are not afraid to use what Allah has given us. With these weapons we will strike even at the serpent's nest in America.”

Just keep running your mouth, Parson thought. Somebody's going to take that pistol away from you and shove it up your ass.

Extremists had a way of blaspheming the very principles they preached. This bastard spoke of restoring the former glory of Islamic rule—through indiscriminate use of weapons of mass destruction. Sophia would know more about the details, but Parson guessed this violated all kinds of Muslim teachings. Parson remembered her telling him about the seventh-century caliph, Abu Bakr, who established ten rules for Muslim armies. One said no killing of a child, a woman, or an aged man.