Black Storm (12 page)

Gault looked past them at the black sky. No stars. No moon. A dark night, maybe rain. Just right for insertion. He didn't believe in omens. He believed in luck, though. He hoped they got some.

The sound of the engines grew deafening, and then came the
whomp
of the landing gear. The black square of the hatch slid open. Without a word, speech useless now, he waved his team in, then tumbled in last as hard metal cut off the night and the smell of burning JP-5 surrounded them. He blinked, registering bare aluminum-walled
space lit by faint green to port and starboard. Before his eyes adjusted, someone's hands felt for his head and clamped a headset over his ears.

“Team leader, you set for lift?”

“Affirmative, let's go.”

A click and hiss, a new voice on the line. “Gunny, you on the line yet? Slap a cranial on him, Minky.”

“Six team leader on the line,” he said, feeling how dry his mouth was all of a sudden. “That you, sir?”

“Welcome aboard the Baghdad Shuttle, Gunny.”

Cocooned in the roar of engines, they grew heavy, lifting into the night.

No one spoke after the helicopter lifted off. The engine noise overwhelmed all sound, walling off each mind within the compass of its own skull. The deck shuddered, tilting as the pilot pulled into a bank. Beyond the door gunner, hunched over the machine gun, impenetrable night hurtled by as they gathered speed. Then dropped, steadied, speeding northward barely a hundred feet above the sand.

Sergeant Antonio Vertierra lay blinking at the overhead in the crew compartment. He lay against something hard, an angular metal box that jutted up from the floor. His weapon was under him, and his ruck. His legs were spread, knees crooked around someone whose back was wedged against him. It was uncomfortable. But he didn't move. Pain didn't bother him. Not that he didn't feel it. But life began in pain and was lived in pain and could not exist apart from pain. So why let it rule; above all, why lose one's dignity by acknowledging it aloud?

So now they were on their way. Into Iraq. Past the door gunner, as they gained altitude, a straight line of blue-white light tapered off to the far horizon. He recognized the road they'd come down, so many tanks and transporters the eye found it impossible to grasp. The richness and power of America. Then the lights wheeled past and darkness replaced them, suddenly and at once darkness
so intense that when he waved his hand in front of his eyes he couldn't see a difference. Only as seconds passed did he become aware of a radiance bleeding up from tiny lights at deck level, barely bright enough to sense.

When the roar of the blades and engine lessened, he made out someone talking. Sounded like the gunny, but his voice was muffled. There was no answering murmur, but he spoke on. Vertierra couldn't make out what he said, but a moment later the man who was wedged into him turned his head.

It was Zeitner. “Pilot says there's gonna be some turbulence,” the staff sergeant yelled. “If ya can find a handhold, grab on.”

 

OUT OF
nowhere, not understanding why he thought of it just then, Tony Vertierra found himself remembering a hot day in Lott, Texas.

He'd been hunting crows for Mr. Henderson. The farmer paid him ten cents for each ragged, limp bundle of feathers he presented at the back door. He killed them with his slingshot. Back home the boys could all shoot iguanas out of the mango trees, and their mothers would make a mole sauce with the roasted lizard, with tortillas and black beans, and sometimes a delicious white salty cheese.

He had much time to remember all this because in the open land of Mr. Henderson's fields he could not hide himself from the black birds who circled endlessly above. Instead he lay for long hours motionless on the dusty ground. But this too brought the memories. On their way to this country he and his aunt had to cross the desert before the Rio Grande. When the planes went over, looking for them, they had to lie motionless as the dead. Hoping the
oficiales
would not see them.

So that was how he lay in Mr. Henderson's fields. Like the dead. Till the cunning and suspicious birds had given up at last, and fluttered down.

Saudi reminded him of Texas. Not the cold, but the bareness, the sand interspersed with patches of rocky gravel, the sparse brush that smelled of a delicate sweetness when you rubbed it between your fingers and held them to your nose. A smell that clung for a long time after.

Lott, Texas, was where the Quakers who helped the refugees had relocated his family. One bank, one grocery store, not even a jail; when someone had to be locked up, they had to take him to the next county. He'd grown up in Lott, but he wasn't a Texan. The other kids called him a Mexican, but he wasn't Mexican either, though his family had lived there in the camps after they left Guatemala. It was difficult for them in Mexico because even their Spanish was half Mayan, the gutteral harsh-sounding dialect of the K'iche'. The
oficiales
despised the Indios, and stole or tore up their
documentos
unless they had money to pay. His aunt cried when they were finally safe in America. But still they were not Americans. He would have to apply, to become a citizen. He would have to beg.

This he did not like. At the school, a teacher had taken him into an office once and offered him money to buy clothes. He had thanked her gravely and walked away. To earn the clothes, to buy his lunch at school instead of signing to be given it for nothing, he shot crows for the farmers, sold fruit from door to door, stood by the road in front of the Al-Lyn trailer park, silently holding a sign that said he would wash cars for a dollar.

Not many cars came through Lott, Texas. But one day a man stopped to have his truck washed. His camper cab had many stickers on it in red and gold. Overcoming his shyness, Antonio had asked what they were. What Semper Fidelis meant. And the man had told him, and told him something else: that if he joined the Corps he could become an American because he'd earned it, not gone begging for it.

In boot camp he became Tony, not Antonio, but he still wore the silver medal of Our Mother Guadalupe his aunt
gave him when he left Texas. He was skinny and strong, but with much meat and much exercise he became even stronger, though he was always the shortest man in any squad. The Corps made him an 0451, a parachute rigger, for no reason he'd ever been able to figure out. He wanted to make sure he earned the money that came every month in a green check. For that, he volunteered, holding up his hand silently whenever the platoon sergeant asked for men for a special detail, a piece of work harder or more demanding than straight duty. He put in for recon twice, got turned down both times. His platoon commander said he was too good at the chutes, but he finally requested mast and then the lieutenant let him go. They didn't have many Hispanics in recon. Blacks either. They said it was the swim test, but he wasn't too sure about that.

Or maybe it was. He'd almost died in the pool the first time, and got sent back to his grunt-side platoon. But instead of giving up or quitting he'd gotten up at 04 and gone down to the base pool before dawn. Swimming every morning. Ignoring the panic that laced up his chest and made him feel like he couldn't get any air, the fear that made him want to go crazy and try to claw his way up out of the water. Plowing on until he could swim a half mile, then a mile. The second time, he passed.

He was still afraid of the water, especially when he had to put his head under. But he could do it. He was a Marine.

He checked his MP5, pulling it around in front of him, making sure the loop of ranger cord was taut.

 

HE WAS
feeling sleepy when suddenly the helicopter jinked violently. The forms around him stirred, cursing or muttering. He said nothing. Just spread his arms and legs, trying to cling like a fly to a ceiling. He heard the engine wind up, felt the airframe around him tilt forward as their speed increased. He could see nothing past the gunner,
nothing but blackness, but from the roughness of the air he guessed they were lower now. Much lower.

Maybe they were in Iraq already. Would the gunny tell them? He didn't know.

He rolled himself awkwardly, humping the weight of ruck and radio and batteries and ammo slowly up whatever it was he was sitting against, till he was upright. The radio meant you were not alone. You could call in artillery. Call in air support. Call in emergency extract if things went to shit.

The wind was a steady blast through the open door. He couldn't get over how cold it was. He could not remember ever being this cold. He squeezed his eyes closed and made himself go over it all again, how they were going to do the linkup, the passwords, the frequencies.

Suddenly, without warning, the aircraft tilted below him, bent into a wide shallow curve that pinned him against the bulkhead. He felt himself trembling.

“Mark, the border,” someone shouted into his ear. “Indian Country now.”

He couldn't help smiling inside at that. Indian Country. Did that mean he was home? He didn't think so.

He was about as far away from home as a man could get.

 

HE COULD
just remember Guatemala. He'd been so little then. Even his name was different. A Tun Rash Ulew. A Tun meant the same as Antonio. Rash Ulew was his family, named after the green land itself. Sometimes it seemed as if he ought to remember more. As if there was a hole where that remembering ought to be. He did know that it was very bad there. He often heard his aunt and her friends in the kitchen talking of what they called
la violencia.
They kept their voices low, as if even in Texas, the government or the
guerrilleros
might hear them.

He remembered, as a child, lying awake and listening to the distant flutter-beat of helicopters moving over the
folded green jungle, the deep ravines and lofty mountains of El Quiché Province.

He could close his eyes now and be that child again. Hearing at the same time, in a strange echo so much louder and more present, the roar of the engines around him now.

The government troops could not catch the
guerrilleros
of the ORPA. So they wiped out the K'iche' villages they said supported the rebels. It had happened in a village not that far from theirs. Someone, maybe the guerrillas, maybe a robber, had killed the Ladino landowner. A few days later planes dropped fire on the village. Then troops came from the sky and killed everything. Men. Women. Children. Pigs. Everything that lived. So that in the night he had awakened, hearing the distant pulse of rotor blades, and lain wondering if they would land in his village, and come and kill his family.

And now he was a soldier. No, not a soldier, not like the men in the green trucks with their
automaticas.
He was a marine…but he wore a uniform and carried a gun…and now he himself, little A Tun who was, rode the invisible helicopters through the night.

Did children listen in fear now below him, linking past to future in an invisible chain? When had that chain begun? Would it ever end? The fear in his belly, was it the fear of a child? When did a man stop being a child? When did a Guatemalan become an American, cowboy-confident in himself and his gun?

He thought about this for a time, wondering. All Americans came from somewhere else, didn't they? When did they stop remembering, stop being what they'd been?

Gradually his lids drifted downward again.

 

HE AWOKE
again, how much later he didn't know; woke amid yells and the clatter of the door MG, woke to someone grabbing him at the same moment blast and flame tore through the fuselage.

They were turning over, he was sliding downward. Floating in the air. The gun kept clattering, the flame visible past the bent figure in the door. Not bursts, just a steady clatter like the gunner didn't care if he burned the barrel out. Another bang lit the inside of the fuselage, and he heard the sound of tearing metal as something punched past not far from him.

The flash showed faces around him. They thought they were in darkness, but they were revealed by light. In that light he saw revealed their fear in the face of death. His heart went out to them. They were his team. His people. The closest thing he had to a country, now.

They were heading for the desert floor, bodies sliding toward him, then lifting off the deck as the aircraft nosed over. He felt the gunny reaching for him, and reached out too. Gripping rough cloth, feeling the hard muscle beneath.

Twining their arms together, they waited for death.

Gault had no idea how they did it, but at the last possible moment the guys up front got the aircraft back under control. More rounds punched through the fuselage, whanging like a rivet gun perforating the aluminum, but they lurched level again and seemed to pick up speed. At any rate, they hadn't crashed. Yet. He let go of the others and shoved up to look past the door gunner. Reached to turn the NVGs on, and was instantly sorry. The ground was too close to look at. He turned them off again and grabbed for a handhold as the deck bucked upward, then down, sending them floating in a jumble of straps and rucks, weapons and legs and arms all meshed and thrashing in the weightless dark.

But somehow they were still alive, despite the wind whistling through the holes and the acrid stink of incendiary compound.

The copilot came on the line. “I need help up here,” he said, voice no longer as cool as before.

“What you got, sir?”

“Commander Jabo's hit. There a corpsman back there?”

“We're all trained in battlefield medicine, sir.” Gault fought himself free, twisted to look forward. The narrow passage between the cockpit and the after compartment
was a well of darkness. Nothing but dim phosphors of instruments.

“Well, can one of you get up here? Wait, I think I…seat restraint's off. Can you take care of him back there? I've kind of got my hands full.”

 

WITH THE
pilot's seat empty, the copilot tried to bear down and concentrate. He brought them up another fifty feet. Too high, radar visible; but the way his hands were shaking, if he stayed low they'd fireball into a dune or a rock outcrop. They were flying over villages, some sort of industrial facilities, pumping stations or what he didn't know. AAA twisted up, ribbons of lovely light like the fireworks at Disneyland if you didn't think about what they could do. What they'd damn near done.

He didn't know if it was a shell or bullet, but it had come through the right-side fuselage with a jolting bang, traversing upward from the right chin side across the cockpit and out the overhead. The cockpit had filled instantly with smoke, biting into his lungs. He'd clawed at his mask, then relaxed as the cabin ventilation cleared it almost instantly.

But then they'd twisted off and headed for the ground, and he'd glanced over and seen the pilot slumped back, and he'd grabbed desperately, knowing that it was too late, the ground was coming up.

He pulled his mind off that and ran his eyes over the instruments. Airspeed. Attitude. Gyro. He lined up on 040 again. Fuel needle steady, thank fuck they hadn't magic-BB'd the gas. But the TACNAV was dark. Now he had to fly and at the same time navigate from his knee pad. He squinted through the goggles at the chart. They should be crossing something called the Wadi Abu Gher.

When he looked up, the ground was in his face again. Shit! This wasn't gonna work. His hand cramped on the stick. He got the nose back up and peered through the windscreen, only then realizing the Pave Hawk was
gone. Somewhere in the chaos of being hit he'd lost the lead helo.

They flew at 150 knots through the Iraqi night, and in his earphones pealed the peremptory
peep peep peep
of the radar warning signal. Someone down there had locked on.

 

ZEITNER GOT
a body dumped in his lap without knowing what the hell was going on. Gault was yelling, but it was unintelligible above the storm of rotor blades and wind whistle. The airframe shook like a rattletrap pickup. Suddenly everything went slanted and he grabbed the guy in his lap to keep him from sliding toward the door.

The team leader put his mouth next to his ear. “It's the pilot. He got hit, check him out,” Gault was yelling.

Zeitner felt for his combat flashlight. Couldn't help the guy if he couldn't see. The light gleamed off black blood. It covered the front of the flight suit. He checked the airway first, thrusting his fingers in rough and deep. Clear, but the guy didn't react the way he should when somebody stuck fingers down his throat. So he put the light in his own mouth and pulled his KA-BAR and ripped the suit apart up to the shoulder.

Classic sucking chest wound. He kicked savagely at somebody else who was pressing in on him, the helo still jinking and howling around the sky. He turned his head and vomited and groped for his kit and found a field dressing more by feel than by sight.

Gault again. “Copilot wants that light out, it fucks up his NVGs.”

“I got to have light, Gunny. Move over here and shield me.”

He was ripping the packaging off the dressing when two hands in surgical rubber gloves came into the lit area. He hadn't wanted to touch the wound, but they went right to it, spread it, and went in. He stared as they felt around, then as one dug deeper, into the chest cavity. A jagged
piece of golden-colored metal came out, amid a pulsing welter of bright blood.

“Is there a needle in that kit? Sutures?”

Relief flooded him. Shit, he'd forgotten they had a doctor with them. “Uh, yes, ma'am,” he said, and backed off to give her room.

He glanced up to see the other team members sitting with their backs against the forward edge of the compartment, sealing the light off from the copilot. The gunner began firing again. Cartridge cases clattered to the deck. The engine spooled upward, and he swallowed. Then the major said, calm in his ear: “Just hold the flashlight. I'll take over from here.”

 

GAULT AND
the copilot were arguing over the mission. The copilot said he was aborting. They'd been seen, they'd been hit, he couldn't navigate and fly at the same time, and they'd lost the lead aircraft.

“Lost as in shot down?”

“Lost as in, he's not in VFR.”

“What?”

“I can't see him. So I can't follow him. So I'm aborting.”

“This is a go mission,” Gault shouted as evenly as he could. He was trying to stay cool but the motion was getting to him. There was something wrong with his NVGs too. When he turned them on, they flickered. Maybe from getting banged around during the evasives. If they aborted they'd just have to do it all over tomorrow night. He snapped the rubber band on his wrist, the one with the freqs on it for the rapid reaction force. They were supposed to come get you if you stepped in a shit sandwich, but he didn't think it'd happen this deep in Iraq. He said again, “This is a go mission. There's too many wheels turning. Your pilot's doing all right back there, the doc's operating and he's doing all right.”

“He still alive?”

“I told you he's doing all right.”

“I better abort. We lost the Pave Hawk.”

“Stiffen the fuck up, sir. You just get this fucking bird there, okay?”

The copilot found himself getting a little calmer. No one had shot at them for the past few miles, for one thing, and the radar tone had peaked and then faded without their getting in range of whatever missile or gun battery had locked on. He took deep breaths, then reached for the mike.

The Pave Hawk answered and gave him a radar bearing. He came right to 055 and in about four minutes picked the other helo up, the two dim IR beacons snapping off as soon as he called them in sight. He saw he was eighty feet up and forced himself to bore in, bear down, snuggle down into the fuzzy fur of Mother Earth. The mama who'd keep you safe, or kill you. Depending on just how close you got.

Point Delta. He glanced at the chart and saw the radar must have been the Mudaysis airfield. They were threading south of a big SA-6 envelope, coming off the flat desert into hilly country broken by wadis. The Pave Hawk lifted and so did he. A warning tone ululated again but faded. The last turn. Thirty more miles.

“You guys can get ready,” he yelled back. “Fifteen-minute warning.”

 

THE GUNNY
told them to load mags. Blaze pulled the MP5 around where he could get to it. It caught on his ruck and he cursed and fought it around till something tore free. He didn't care what; he wanted that weapon in his hands.

His mouth was dry. Seeing the red glistening inside of the pilot's lungs had taken him back to when he was a kid, nine, third grade, and his mother went away, left them and left town and they never had even a letter from her. His uncle came over to the barbershop and said to his
dad, “Blaze, let's celebrate, where do you want to go out for dinner, just you and me and the boy.” And he'd yelled for Cake 'n' Steak and when they got there he ordered his rare, because that was what they said on TV. But then he'd cut it open and it had been bloody raw but he'd eaten it anyway and halfway through threw up, right there in the restaurant…the red glisten was just like that, like raw meat…. He slammed in a mag, heard it click seated, worked the bolt an instant before he remembered not to.

The hand fastened to his shoulder, painful even through the battle-dress jacket. “Unchamber the round, Corporal.” He pulled the magazine and worked the bolt again, heard the cartridge flick out and clatter heavy-bulleted somewhere down onto the metal deck. Let the bolt slam and reseated the mag. Zeitner's hand released and went away. He sat feeling sweat ooze over him, all over his face.

“Five mikes. Get your gear buckled,” the gunny yelled over the drone of the engines, the whine of the wind through punctured metal like a chorus of cheap whistles. “Get your shit on. Look like fuckin' recon marines.”

And suddenly Denny Blaisell understood there wasn't any way back, there wasn't any way out. Face-to-fucking-face with it, man, he thought, both terrified and so excited his dick went rock hard. Full auto rock and roll.

“One minute. Lock and load, weapons on safe. One minute!”

Lips moving, so scared he panted, “Blaze” Blaisell fumbled with his weapon, staring wide-eyed into the roaring night.

 

I'M GONNA
land straight ahead two hundred yards.”

The gunner: “Okay, skipper, got it.”

“Passing forty knots—landing configuration.” He fumbled for the landing checklist, found he couldn't read and fly at the same time, staring through the goggles like through two toilet-paper tubes with green cellophane
taped over them. So he did it from memory, snapping switches by feel. Contingency power. No lights. AFSC on, check harness.

“Crewman checklist complete.”

“Roger that…give me a call.”

“About thirty feet…twenty…LZ looks clear. Slight slope to the right.”

The crew chief: “LZ good on the left.”

“Ten feet.”

The gear thumped, absorbing the shock as he slammed twenty-one tons of American metal onto the gritty soil of Iraq. “Clear to depart, Gunny,” he told the marine. “Unass quick and get those other people in here. We don't have a lot of fuel or a lot of time.”

But when he looked back they were already jumping out.

 

GO, GO,
go,” Gault yelled. “Move, move, move. Get in the fucking vege. Fire discipline, watch for friendlies.” He waited as Vertierra, then Blaze and F.C. rolled out through the starboard door. As they left he swept the interior with his strobing flickering night vision, making sure nothing got left behind. He hoped the radio didn't lose its fill in all that banging around. If they couldn't phone home they'd be in the hurt locker come time to extract. The attachments hung back, looking toward him, and he hustled them out, yelling; it didn't matter about noise discipline with the engine blasting and the rotors whipping around. A last look at the pilot, who was lying against the landing gear housing, the crew chief bent over him. Then he scrambled to the door and jumped.

To hit and tumble and roll back up, weapon shouldered, aiming out into the flickering darkness. He sprinted over uneven ground, buttonhooking around the tail and heading out to port like they'd rehearsed. Faster to use the aircraft for orientation on the LZ, instead of the
compass. He couldn't see the others; the goggles' field of vision was too narrow.

Twenty meters out he dropped to prone firing position. The strobing got worse, till he could barely see. They were in a wadi, gravelly sand studded with little bushes and, here and there, coarse grass. Cold rain brushed his face. He smelled wet earth and a scent between turpentine and jasmine that was probably the bush he was lying on. It was colder than he'd expected. They'd come four hundred klicks north, into a whole different weather system. This was the overcast and rain that had stopped the air strikes on Baghdad. But the worse the weather, the better for the insert. He shivered, staring over the suppressed submachine gun, the wet gravel cold against his balls. Nothing moved in the darkness.

He tucked the weapon into his elbows, rolled on his back, and pulled the goggles off. He opened the battery compartment and reseated the batteries and screwed it down again as tight as it would go. When he put them back on, they still flickered but not as much. He went up on a knee, did a three-sixty, checking the shadows.

The helo was a bright green double blob of infrared. The rotors, still engaged, a shimmering halo above it. It would stay for ten minutes, in case they had contact jumping off. Meanwhile he was supposed to link up with the Brits. But where were they?

He was wondering if they'd missed the meet when light pinpricked the darkness. He lifted his goggles to make sure it was red. Check. He blinked two from his own flash. One came back. He got to his feet and jogged toward it at port arms. As he passed, his team rose from scrub and rocks as if being born from the ground. Zeit was moving them out, covering him. Gault felt uneasy. He hated linkups.

Up a little rise, and men rose up suddenly around him, silent, the outlines of their weapons green against black.

They were pointing at him, and he stopped, looking at them. One wore what looked like a black sweater.
Another, some sort of camo uniform. A third had a stocking cap on. Another, what looked like an Iraqi helmet. Two were carrying a third, and others were limping and weaving as they walked.