Black Storm (15 page)

Gault pointed to the peepholes and in a moment they were closed. Crouched, the team waited in silence so total their heartbeats thudded in their ears. Head lowered, Maddox imagined she could hear the others' hearts. Her own was whamming away hard enough.

The crunch and rattle of gravel. A cough. Footsteps
crackled, then ceased. Then came again, crossing the knob north of where they crouched.

Lenson's eyes met Blaisell's. The kid was breathing shallowly through his mouth. He gave back a broad grin. Too broad. He had something brown stuck in his front teeth. Dan noticed it with that strange feeling of timelessness, that sense of how important and unique the tiniest thing was, that had always come over him when danger was close.

For a long time then they didn't hear anything. Vertierra had his eyes closed, perhaps to hear better.

A stone struck the sheet, not a large one, but big enough to kick dirt off the bottom of the cloth. They watched it in silence.

Footsteps crunched again. They came over the lip of the knob, stopped, then came on. The air seemed to grow thicker in the pit. The team breathed through open mouths, staring at each other. Then the steps stopped again. For quite some time they couldn't hear anything. No sound at all. As if the whole world had stopped, except for the racketing engines in their chests.

Very slowly, the gunny lifted a corner of the cloth.

The boy was looking right down at him.

 

GAULT LOOKED
up into the kid's face. He was unbearded and black-haired, very thin, with a seamed scar below his nose; perhaps a clumsily repaired harelip. Ten years old? Twelve? It was hard to judge; these people were smaller than Americans, and they looked hungry and careworn. The boy carried a stick like the woman's. He was in dark trousers and a worn jacket. His mouth had dropped open, and his eyes were wide and wondering, fringed with long dark lashes like a girl's. Looking into the muzzle of the silenced MP5, aimed directly at his chest.

Gault felt how cold the metal was as he slipped the safety off. Fighting the sense of horror, all the deeper for the knowledge, embedded it seemed in his very flesh, that
he'd done this before. It was every recon marine's nightmare. The kid had to come down. He had to come down into the hole with them. He had to come
now.

“Salaam aleikum,”
he said to the boy, forcing himself to speak very softly, in case there was somebody else down in the wadi. Detaching his left hand from the fore-stock, he beckoned him closer. The boy stared back but didn't answer. His parted lips didn't move, nor did he respond to the gesture. Gault noticed a blue rag wound around his throat. Some silver trinket dangled from it.

The sense of doom sank deeper. Holding those dark eyes with his own, he began taking up the slack in the trigger as he gestured again, more urgently now. If the boy came down, the situation was manageable. Duct tape him, stash him away, then when they left, soup him up on enough morphine he'd be out for the rest of the night. If he came down, they wouldn't have to do what he was being forced toward. The team didn't have heavy weapons or close support. Discovered in enemy territory, they'd be wiped out.

The equation was simple. Eight lives to one.

If the only thing that could save his marines' lives was this boy's death, he had no choice.

He knew all this. There was no arguing with it. The only trouble was, he'd already done it.

He'd already shot a child. And he didn't think he could do it again.

His hands were shaking now, the front sight wavering on the boy's chest. He tried again to pull the trigger, and again he failed. The moment drew out, drew out. Behind him he heard the woman mutter, “Don't.”

And he couldn't. It might be an operational necessity, but he couldn't do it. Not looking into the dark frightened eyes, so close and wide he could actually make out a tiny image of himself reflected in them; not seeing the dirty small fingers slowly release the stick till it clattered to the ground. He turned his head and hissed to Vertierra, “Grab him, Tony.”

But that was a mistake. As soon as their gazes unlocked, the kid flinched as if somebody had goosed him up the ass. He wheeled, stumbling as if his legs had turned to rubber, and pinwheeled into a run. “Get back here!” Gault called, raising his voice; but the kid was sprinting now, full out, waving his arms. Making good time too, zigzagging over the rocks as if he expected a bullet in the back.

A high gibbering scream came back to them. Shit, Gault thought furiously, shit, shit, fuck. We're compromised.

“Okay, everybody, strap it on. We're gonna relocate,” he said, reaching for his ruck. They'd have to move out fast. Break contact, then hide up again. The CIA guy, Provanzano, had said this part of Iraq would be empty. Like shit! If you got away from the roads in the States, you hardly saw people. Here they were all over, the peasants or whatever the fuck they were, and their fucking goats scavenging for every withered blade of grass.

Sarsten reached out suddenly and ripped the sheet back. Light flooded in. Gault blinked, grabbing for him, but the SAS man was scrambling out of the hole, boots kicking wet gravel in on them. He was shouting in Arabic. The high thin cries of the boy receded into the gray silence of the wind. Briefly the horizon held two receding figures, one small, one larger. Then they both disappeared over the edge of the knob.

Gault fought the rest of the sheet back and stared with the others where they'd disappeared, wanting to shout, knowing he couldn't. Christ! God! What was Sarsten doing?

“Want me to go after 'em?” said Zeitner, beside him. No point observing noise discipline now. Not with Goat Boy yelling his head off.

“No. We'll head south, then dogleg east and look for cover. Stay together and move fast, and be ready to shoot. Shit! Where the hell's he going?”

Dan was pulling his ruck on, wrapping his elbows in
the unfamiliar straps of the 782 gear. He'd gripped his own weapon as Gault aimed up at the boy. For a moment he'd thought the gunny was going to shoot. Now he was sorry he hadn't. No, he couldn't seriously think that. Could he? A noncombatant. A child…He glanced at Vertierra, saw the RTO turning his transmitter on. Their eyes met and Dan understood. He was setting up to call in the extract. What good it would do them in full daylight, he didn't know. Sarsten had taken off after the kid, might even catch him if the boy stumbled. He reproached himself: he should have taken off after him too. Too late now, though.

Then Zeitner was yelling at him and Maddox, cursing them up out of the hole as Blaisell quickly coiled the wire to the claymores, pointing them out into a security perimeter. The team went to their bellies, covered their fire sectors.

When they were all in position, Gault looked around once more, at the bare wet-shining gravel, the empty distance beyond. He listened, extending his senses; lifted his head to scent the wind.

At last he got up and moved out, in a crouch, weapon at his shoulder, toward where Sarsten and the boy had disappeared. At the edge of the knob he dropped to his belly. He motioned: danger front. The team's weapons swung around, aiming at the thud of approaching boots.

It was Sarsten, loping back up from the wadi. Alone. They pointed their weapons to both sides as he approached. Gault went to a knee, waiting as the SAS sergeant jogged up to them.

“We don't have to move,” Sarsten said. He was breathing hard. His eyes looked strange, flat, like he was looking through what was right in front of him at something only he could see.

Gault said, “Where'd the kid go, Sergeant?”

“I sorted him out.”

“You sorted him out?”

“That's right.” Sarsten quirked his mouth upward on
one side; it might have been a sardonic smile. It was hard to tell. The camo paint disguised the features, disguised expressions and identities, leaving only the flat gaze of those empty eyes. They could not be camouflaged or disguised, and looking into Sarsten's, Marc Gault felt suddenly he hadn't understood the man at all, as if he'd spoken to them in some foreign dialect unrelated to any speech he knew.

Lenson reached out, taking a fold of the SAS man's trou. Gault looked and saw it too. Black wetness, grains of gray sand. The SAS bent down and brushed off his knees.

“What did you do?” Gault asked him again.

“What you should have done, Sergeant. I waited for you to. But you didn't.”

Maddox said, “He asked you what you did to the boy, Sergeant.”

Sarsten smiled, a grim tensing of the lips that did not change the expressionlessness of his eyes. “I persuaded him not to talk.”

“What's this dirt on your knees?” Lenson said.

“You bury your trash, don't you?” Sarsten looked back at them coldly. “Look, don't give me this shite. Do you know how I lost my team? One of these fucking shepherds saw us. I captured him. No, no, he said. I won't tell anyone you're here. We all hate Saddam. So I let him go.

“They ambushed us three hours later. Three truckloads of troops. They sorted us out. For fair.” He looked down into the hole, at Maddox. “What are you looking at?” he asked her. “It was him or us. You rather it was us? What the hell are you looking at?”

“You,” she said.

Gault cleared his throat. “Sergeant.” He pointed a few yards off. “The rest of you, back into the site. Rig that sheet again.”

“We're not relocating?” Zeitner asked him.

Gault said, voice hard, “Sergeant Sarsten says we don't have to. All right, Sergeant. Follow me.”

When they were out of earshot, he squatted, getting them below line of sight if somebody else came over the top of the ridge. Sarsten looked angry. Gault noticed a stain where his knife lay sheathed against his thigh.

Gault told him, “You just fucked up big time, chief.”

“Not me, chum. I did a job you didn't have the bottle for. That's all.”

“You didn't have to kill him. We had ranger cord and morphine. Bring him back, that's all you had to do.”

“And tomorrow morning every jundie's in Iraq out looking for us? What do you think we're out here for, mate? You and your team better switch on. Oh, and by the way. Next time you want an Arab to come over where you are? You go like this.” He turned his palm downward and extended the fingers toward the ground, pulled his whole hand back toward him. “Don't do like you did, with your finger. He didn't even know what you wanted.”

“You don't make decisions like that on your own. This is a team, not a bunch of independent operators.”

“I may be
with
your team, Sarnt, but—”

“Don't bother going there, Sergeant. Your command attached you to me. That puts you under my orders.”

Sarsten shrugged, as if to say, So what are you going to do about it? They stared at each other. Finally the Britisher said, “All right, mate, you said what you had to say, and I said what I had to say, and we're still all here together in bandit country. Now what?”

“Now you roger up that you're in line from here on out.”

Sarsten hesitated, then nodded, face hard. Gault held his eyes a second more, then got up.

Back at the hide site Maddox looked up at him, then back at Sarsten. The SAS man didn't return her look. He just jumped down into the pit and folded himself against the bank, aligning his M16 along its fire marks again.

Zeitner started to say something. Gault whispered angrily that it was done, too late, to rig the sheet again and shut up.

When they were hidden again something tapped
lightly above their head. Dr. Maddox swallowed, looking up at it. The tapping came again. Again. A worm of water writhed down it. Then the tapping increased, swelled, till the steady roar of the rain isolated them all. Not one of them looked at another. Instead they looked off into the distance, or at the taut dripping cloth close above their faces. And the rain came down again, endless and cold.

The sound of the wind filled the night, and the smells of the desert; rain, goat dung, and wet earth, the sharp tense note of faraway smoke. They smelled their wet uniforms and their own body odors and the oily tang of their weapons. They marched through icy darkness, through a lightless river of scent and sound. Only ranger eyes, dots of phosphorescent tape on the back of their gear, saved those without night vision goggles from a collision each time the man ahead stopped. Then came strained seconds of listening, till at last the column would start again with the muffled crunch of boots on sandy gravel, the whisper-zip of a stunted shrub on a trouser leg. The harsh breathing that echoed the wind.

After Sarsten had killed the boy they'd simply waited, there at the hide site. No one speaking. Each occupied with his own thoughts. No one else approached the knob. The afternoon waned with incredible slowness. Then for a lengthy cross section of eternity the desert lit red, the last light dying in a coruscating glow streaked with contrails far to the west. Their eyes had lingered on the gunny, who'd waited motionless, save for an occasional glance at his watch.

At last he'd nodded. And they'd begun sterilizing the area; rolling and stowing the cover sheet, filling in elbow holes and grenade sump, triple-checking for dropped
items or wrappings, rubbing out boot prints or any other sign human beings had spent a night here. When he'd looked the ground over, Gault gave Blaisell a compass course with finger numbers, passed the file-ahead signal, and moved them out, all without a word. Checking each man as he passed, expression invisible behind the inhuman insect eyes of the NVGs.

Since then they'd marched in silence. Some could see and some couldn't, but even if they'd wanted to, none of them could speak. So they spoke to themselves, and in the privacy of their hearts whispered what they dared not aloud.

Out at point, first in the slowly moving file that stretched out fifty yards behind him over the desert, Blaze moved step by slow step after the luminescent needle of his hand compass. He carried his weapon shouldered, moving it left to right and back again in slow sweeps synchronized with the arc of his head. Through the green circles of electronic vision coruscating shadows blended and shifted like black smoke.

It took practice and time to view the world at night. The heavy tube of the device, projecting like a downward-displaced unicorn's horn four inches in front of his face, set the muscles of his neck aching. He saw the desert limned in washes of green and black. The distance was hazed. He made out no horizon. Only a few yards ahead did the rocks and gravel emerge into clarity, into definition, swimming toward him as he advanced as if he walked across a sea floor many fathoms down.

He'd been sweating when he started, scared again, but it didn't take long before he was totally concentrated. Now he didn't notice his headache, or anything else, except an occasional flash of pure dread. If they made contact he'd get lit up first. If the ragheads had mines out here he'd step in the shit first. He just hoped it'd be a good-sized charge, not one of the little nut-cutters that popped up to crotch level and blew your balls off. He'd rather just die, quick and clean.

Thinking of dying made him remember the boy. For a moment, realizing what the SAS man had done, he hadn't known what to think. A kid. An unarmed civilian. But suddenly he'd caught on like all at once that this was what they meant when they talked about team loyalty, initiative in the field. It was like code. The goatherd or whatever he was would have called the village in on them. Hell, in another year he'd probably've been carrying a Kalashnikov himself. And understanding that, he'd smiled up at Sarsten, just to show him he knew, one stone killer to another. And Sarsten had narrowed his eyes and given him a cold answering look out of the black-smeared face. Cool as shit. The motherfucker was ice, all right.

He stopped thinking then and froze, one foot off the ground in midstep. Then put it down silently, heel and then toe, and stood without moving as he held his breath, listening with all his being. There. Past the ragged rasp of his breath and the swishing thump of his own heart; past the faint whine of the NVG like a mosquito inside his head. There it was again. Only what was it?

Voices?

He listened, sweating, as they ebbed and went away and came again and went away again. He couldn't make up his mind if it was men talking in the distance or the mutter and whine of the wind. He closed his eyes and turned his head slowly back and forth. Off to the left? He opened his eyes but there was nothing there. Just the wavering shadows, the black of night.

He centered his head where he thought it was and took a slow breath. Keeping his firing hand pointing the weapon, he reached up with his left and toggled the infrared illuminator on.

The world lit up. From murky olive the desert turned the arsenic of a burning flare. Black shadows leapt from the rocks in front of him. But even in its invisible light he saw nothing. No sparkle of return from metal. No shapes of heat source. He swept his head around, scything the
beam across the team's front. He got only a confused impression of broken ground dropping away ahead. That one quick sweep, and he released the button and waited tensely for the space of three heartbeats. If anyone was out there with a night vision device, the IR illuminator would look like a searchlight. The wind fell, and rose, and fell again. A fine mist chilled his face.

He heard no more voices.

Inside his head flashed on a tape one of the guys in the LAV platoon had played over and over till they all could hear it even when the player was off. It was an old song by the Cure about killing an Arab. His lips moved soundlessly in the dark, shaping the words. Then he moved forward again.

 

BEHIND HIM
F.C. Nichols waited silently, down on a knee, buried in darkness as a man lies immured in heavy earth. Wishing again, just like he had all the past day, that he had something to tuck in his cheek.

For the last hour he'd followed the ranger eyes on the back of Blaisell's ruck. They bobbed and floated through the Halloween dark, the only thing that gave light in all the world. He had a trick he'd picked up of putting his foot down flat, all at once, rather than heel and then toe. It seemed quieter, on the sand. It seemed to relax his leg muscles too. He got calf cramps on long humps. Then the point had stopped, and he'd stopped too, waiting, peering off into the dark to their left.

F.C. didn't have his goggles on. He'd turned them off. That saved the batteries. Plus he just didn't trust the things. They had their place. But a marine had to be able to do without everything but his rifle. After a while you grew a new sense. You could tell when something was in front of you. He didn't know how it worked, but it worked. You could hear better too. Your smeller got sharp. You could feel differences in the wind, like it was telling you what it had blown over, water or forest or
marsh. You became a spider, senses webbing out into the dark and bringing you back more than your mind knew how to know. Feeling, if you were in the woods, the trees all around you; and sensing more sharply ahead, till you could tell if you were about to collide with a bole.

But there weren't any trees out here; and just now, waiting behind the halted scout, he felt the nothing out all around them. The cold wind unimpeded, whispering and then howling in his ears, gave him only the mist and a faraway smell of burning. The flat gravel and sand stretching out and away ahead of their slowly advancing boots.

He frowned. For a moment he'd felt something ahead. He reached out, but it vanished, floating away from the ghostly fingertips he sent after it.

Then the luminous spots danced again, receding, and he heard the crunch of Blaisell's boots. He blinked in the darkness and felt around with his free hand on the ground. Found a small ovoid and rubbed the dirt off it and tucked it into his mouth.

Sucking on the stone, he got up and resumed the march.

 

BEHIND HIM
Gault halted too, looking off to the right. That was his sector. Each man had one. Eyeballs all around. The point man ahead, number two to the left, number three to the right. He didn't need to look ahead; he trusted Blaze for that. The kid had good eyes. Strung kind of tight sometimes, kind of a cheese-dick with his Glock and his smart mouth, but he was a good point. He felt confident about all his men. His mind played with that statement. About all
his
men. About all his
men
?

No, she wasn't the problem, as long as she kept up, kept quiet, and didn't try to pull rank. He only had one worry just now, and it wasn't even the Iraqis. It was Sarsten. The flint-eyed Brit was bad news. He wasn't part of the team, and that was a threat to them all.

The shepherd boy. Granted, he'd been a danger. Still,
Gault thought, we didn't need to kill him. A couple of Syrettes of morphine and some ranger cord, and they'd have been hours on their way by the time he came out of it.

But the kid hadn't cooperated, and he himself had clutched, hesitated. Had fucked up, granted; but Sarsten had taken that as an invitation to take charge. Gault didn't think killing civilians was SAS doctrine. He knew sometimes you had to do things that didn't go in the patrol report. When shit happened, a team leader did what he had to to save his men and accomplish the mission. Men had always done things in wartime they never spoke of afterward. And it was at least half his fault. But what worried him most was that Sarsten hadn't waited for orders. He'd moved out on his own.

A team had room for only one leader. And what had the man's own teammate called him, back at the helicopter?—“the Devil Incarnate.” He'd thought it was a joke, a combat nickname. Now he wondered.

Damn it, Blaisell was still holding them up. They had to make distance tonight. More than he'd planned for; the dogleg south and then following the wadi had taken them off a straight line to the meet site.

He slipped the map out again and held it up, focusing the goggles, fighting their clumsy weight and the weird disorientation of monocular vision. The contours of the land, the lines of roads and wadis, blurred and merged. He squinted, trying to figure where they were and how far they had yet to go.

They were coming down out of the higher lands west of the Euphrates. Between them and Baghdad lay three large lakes, or low areas that would become lakes in the rainy season—like now. He saw more from memory than from the map how a network of roads webbed out between the middle lake and the lower. That neck of land was only ten klicks wide. Pipelines, roads, irrigation canals, converged there. The overhead imagery had showed chemical works and an airfield, an open yet pre
sumably intensely patrolled area that men on foot couldn't hope to get through, even at night.

So they wouldn't go through it on foot. One of the tributary roads angled southwest from the neck area, running out into the badlands. It petered out into what the photos showed as a dirt track before finally dying at ruins along a dry wadi bed; then picked up paving again as it curved back toward the lower lake, the Bahr al Milh. That was where he was headed now, to the dirt track along the wadi, west of the lakes. Provanzano had said it was deserted. His imagery guys had gone back over the archives for four weeks and not one shot showed any traffic.

He pondered, wondering again if anyone would show up to meet them. If the contact could be trusted. If Syria could be trusted. If they weren't walking into an ambush. Then he noticed Nichols was up and moving again. He folded the map and stuffed it back, shifted his ruck to a slightly more comfortable position, and got to his feet with a barely suppressed sigh.

 

WHEN THEY
stopped, Vertierra grunted, almost aloud. Then caught himself, and the sound died in his chest.
Silence. Stealth
. He bent and put his hands on his thighs, trying to shift the weight off his back. Behind him the SAS man was a black outline, an occasional clink or grunt or faint clatter of rock. The man did not move silently. Maybe he was tired, but he made a lot of noise. Now he heard the hiss of piss on gravel.

He didn't like the man behind him. Killing the boy…a dark-haired, small-boned child who if you didn't look too close might have been a K'iche'…it was too much like things he didn't want to remember.

You didn't decide to be a soldier in Guatemala. The military roamed the countryside in big green trucks, stopping every boy who looked like he was over seventeen. If he couldn't produce his
cedula,
his proof of age or mili
tary service, they loaded him into the truck then and there. And somehow getting their boots and their uniform and their
automatica
made scared peasant boys into killers of children and women. Like this Sarsten, this man behind him in the dark.

Also the Marine Corps didn't make boots to fit his size feet. He felt the skin rasping away, it felt like a piece of window screening, grinding in where the skin of his heels was blistering away from the flesh. He was sweating too and he had to shit. He hadn't been able to all day at the hide site. Not in front of the woman. He hoped he wasn't getting sick. Not when he had to hump the radio, the extra batteries, along with weapons and ammo and water. The RTO always had more to carry than anyone.

But there wasn't anything he could do about any of these things, so now he stood waiting, bent over, trying to still the trembling in his legs. He figured right here, right in the middle of the file, was the most dangerous place to be. An ambush, they let the point man go by. The tail-end charlie wasn't in the fire zone yet. It was the middle they aimed at, the communicator was the guy who got lit up. He bent over farther, fighting the need to let go in his trousers, praying in a strange mixture of English and Spanish and K'iche'. Not to the High God who had long ago abandoned mankind, but to the Cloud God, he who made the darkness transparent for those who feared him.