Black Storm (21 page)

Vertierra wrestled with the wheel, cursing in whatever
language he spoke when he wasn't speaking English, and they came out of a near-rollover back down onto four wheels. They were bouncing downhill on a gravelly long slope dotted with bushes and crossed with shallow ditches and, here and there, white-painted iron pipes jutting up out of the soil. The ground looked like it had been plowed long ago, then abandoned. Gault yelled at Vertierra to slow down before he rolled them, killed them all, and the RTO yelled back he couldn't do everything at once. Each time they hit a ditch the shocks bottomed with a tremendous jolt and dust boiled up from the floormats. Then they hit a rise. The back seemed to dip down and the wheels spun, and the jeep stopped moving forward and slid backward instead. They yelled at him to gun it, but the wheels just spun and they searched the dash without finding anything that looked like a four-wheel-drive shiftover.

Finally Gault said, “Forget it; Sarsten can back it out. We can dog it the rest of the way. That hollow in the field. Dismount and let's go.”

 

TONY SPILLED
out with the rest, and tossed the keys to Gault. Who caught them in midair, and handed them to Sarsten. The Britisher seemed about to speak, then didn't. He put the keys in his pocket. The others turned and ran for the shallow fold of land the gunny had pointed out.

It seemed like a long way across the open field. As he leaped one of the ditches, the ruck slamming against his back, canteens jumping around, Tony wondered why the gunny wasn't filtering them across, making it covert. Then he knew. They were late. If they missed this linkup, they'd have come all this way and lost Zeitner for nothing.

The hollow was deeper than it looked from up-slope, with scraggly dry-looking bushes screening the edge. When they were all down, panting from the sprint, Gault gave him the ‘put out security' signal. Tony stared at
him, then remembered he was assistant team leader, now that Jake was gone.

He passed the order, and the team went to their positions in silence. He searched his own sector over the sights of his weapon, observing how they bobbed with his breathing, looking for movement, any sign they'd been seen. Not that troops dismounting from a vehicle was probably that rare a sight here.

Okay, he had to start thinking like the ATL. He took out his compass and glanced from it to the terrain around him. He was facing the lake. To his right ran the road and on the road was the building. The only movement was ducks above the lake and an occasional vehicle on the distant highway.

He rolled over on his left side and took out the little binoculars Zeitner had carried. The building didn't look too different from West Texas: a hut or shack with a rusted tin roof, a chicken run or goat pen wired up behind it. Brush and small trees, green despite the cold; denser, lusher growth than uphill because it was close to the water. Tires leaned against what might be either adobe or some kind of pink-painted concrete. He focused finer and saw faded red spray paint on the wall. Arabic writing, but below that were block Roman letters. They read RESS TARANT.

The team lay motionless, casing their sectors for fifteen minutes before he felt someone's hand on his boot. He tucked the glasses back inside his blouse and low-crawled back to where the gunny and Nichols waited, at the bottom of a ditch, screened by the bushes.

Gault said that they were here, but he didn't see anyone waiting. Their contact might be late. Or maybe he'd already been and left. Regardless, he was going to go down to the restaurant and see what happened. “I'll do a leader's recon. If everything looks kosher, I'll pat the top of my head and you come on in. Got that? What's the signal?”

“Pat your head; means come on in.”

The gunny nodded. “We'll do linkup the way we rehearsed it. Me down front, the lance corporal giving me flank cover. The rest of the team in reserve back here with you. If there's hostile contact, rally point's back where we left Jake. Tony, what's your withdrawal route going to be?”

He hadn't expected the question. He tried to concentrate, and sketched a route on the ground with his finger.

When he was done, Gault nodded again, then went over hand signals during the contact. If he scratched the back of his neck while he was talking to the guy, that meant for Nichols to shoot him. Scratching his ass meant everything was cool. The sniper repeated it.

The bushes at the top of the hollow moved, and he whipped his sights around to cover them. He stared when Sarsten came over the crest, staying on his belly, and slid down in a little shower of dirt and rocks to join them.

“I'm b-a-a-ck,” he drawled, grinning. With his dark, arched eyebrows he did look a little like Jack Nicholson.

“What's the matter?” Nichols said. “Jeep won't start?”

“I didn't try it. Let me get this straight. If I heard what I thought I heard, up there? You're joining up with an Iraqi?”

“He's a resistance member,” Gault said, sounding angry. Vertierra studied his face. The gunny was pissed, but he was holding it back. Why?

“Ballocks! There's no resistance left in Iraq. Saddam killed them off years ago, and terrified everybody else. They're just sucking you white-eyes in.”

The gunny's face hardened. “We have to take the risk, Sergeant. But you don't. You've got a vehicle, if you want it. Go ahead and execute your extract.”

“Oh, I don't know,” Sarsten said. He unhooked a canteen, unscrewed the cap, and took a pull. “I sort of thought we were getting to be squaddies.”

Tony was behind the SAS man. He lifted his weapon slightly; caught Gault's eye. The gunny hesitated, then shook his head just an infinitesimal fraction. He said, “I
appreciate the offer, but we're trained for urban reconnaissance. You can carry out your extract plan.”

Sarsten smiled, but didn't move to leave. He had pulled his ruck around and was feeling in it.

Maddox slid a few feet down from the top. “You need a direct order?” she said harshly. “The gunnery sergeant detached you. That means you leave now.”

Sarsten shook his head. He found what he was looking for in his pack, shook something out, slapped it into his mouth. He followed the tablets with another gulp of water and capped his canteen.

“You wankers need me,” he said. “I saved your mate here. I speak Arabic. If things go to shite and you have to go clandestine, I can save your stones.”

Tony glanced at the gunny, tense for the signal to take him. The SAS was big, he was hard, but if all four of them piled on they could cable-tie him, no sweat. But Gault didn't give a sign. He just lay there. Finally he said, “So far you've acted like a loose cannon, Sergeant. Will I have compliance now?”

No, Tony thought. No way! He frowned, trying to get the message across, but Gault wouldn't look at him.

“Absolutely,” the Englishman said.

“That doesn't mean just to me. You take orders from Sergeant Vertierra too. From
any
member of the team. You execute what you're told to do, when you're told to do it, and not a lick more. You don't act on your own and you don't speak unless spoken to.”

“Just tell me what to do, Bwana,” said Sarsten. Shrugging, turning his palms out like a rebuked child. Smiling.

“Give me your med kit,” Gault said.

Sarsten watched as the gunny buttoned the stimulant tablets into his own breast pocket. For a moment he seemed about to speak, but didn't.

“Take security facing south,” Gault said, and without a word back, the SAS rolled over out of the group and to the edge of the depression, propping his rifle at the ready and squinting into the growing light.

WHEN THEY
broke up, F.C. edged up to the crest and looked out over the field. Nothing moved but the birds over the lake. Some kind of black duck. He checked the rifle again and crouched, not wanting to do this, but knowing he had to. Then pistoned his legs and shot suddenly up out over the edge and doglegged out to the right.

He took it in a rush, bent low, trotting zigzag from one bush to the next, then dropping to scan around before the next burst. He made his way across the field, taking advantage of every stunted bush, down into the marsh.

When he reached it the land dropped, went dark, went soft. His boots sucked in clingy mud, and the smell of the marsh came up around him. It was a familiar smell. It smelled like Carolina pluff mud. The grass was tall, whispering and brown around him. A rustle ran among the roots, and he brought his weapon up and froze till it scurried away. Low to the ground like that he figured it for something like a water rat or a nutria. If they had nutria in Iraq. Rats, he was pretty sure, were everywhere.

He was still feeling dark about Jake, and having the Brit back aboard didn't help. For a couple minutes there he'd thought he was gone. Then he'd come back. F.C. grinned tightly to himself, remembering how ready Tony had been to take the asshole from behind. He couldn't see what other choice the gunny had, though. Not if the guy wouldn't leave. You couldn't tie him up and leave him for the Iraqis. Not after seeing what they'd done to Zeitner and the navy guy, Lenson. The only other choice was to kill him.

It was a temptation, that was for sure.

Fifty yards in, he came to an irrigation canal about four feet wide. It was shored up with pieces of plywood, which had gone rotten and were falling in. The water was murky gray and stank of chemicals. It was six inches deep, oozing slowly toward the lake. He followed it, working his
way gradually closer to the road, till he came to a culvert where he could see across a waste of brown dead grass to the restaurant, or used-tire place, or whatever it was.

He decided that was as close as he was going to get without breaking cover and started setting up for the shot from a belly hide. He got his grease kit out and rubbed it between his hands and smeared on more camo paint, nice and thick. Garnished his bush cover with some of the brown grass. Then raised his head very slowly, breaking silhouette off to the side of the culvert.

According to the mil-markings on his reticle, the building was two hundred meters away. He watched the wind on the tasseled tops of the marsh grass and dialed in a correction. Then shouldered the rifle and put his crosshairs on the building again.

It jumped close through the scope, and he saw now it was abandoned, windows broken, the tires propped in front rotten, with strips of tread falling off. It looked like the kind of store along the back roads at home that sold recaps to colored and poor whites. He ran the scope carefully along under the eaves, over the roof, looking for loopholes or loose tin or pried-off boards. An attic was a favorite sniper position. He checked a pile of sand off to the left but saw no sign of anyone.

He sank back and lowered the rifle slowly and looked to his left. Gault was lying behind a bush watching him. F.C. gave him a thumbs-up and glued his face back to the scope. It bobbed with his breathing and he slowed it down, felt his heartbeat slow, felt everything slow and collapse down into the magic circle through which he looked. His finger left the guard and touched the trigger very lightly, then let up. His thumb found the safety and, as Gault's head bobbed into the field of view, very slowly eased it off.

 

GAULT WENT
out in the other direction from the hide site. You never went straight in at an objective. A sniper could
backtrack you and target the rest of your team. He felt time ebbing away like blood. He went along north through the brush at a high crawl, then dropped into a cut where he could walk bent over. Over the top, low crawl now, then a rush to the cover of another fold of land. Two hundred meters out, he boxed right, then right again and came in from the northwest.

He was still on edge from the face-off with Sarsten. He'd almost given Vertierra the nod to coldcock him. Only one thing stopped him. No, two. The first was that with Zeitner gone he was a man short. Sarsten was a shooter and a damn good one. They might need that. But he also remembered the old saying: Whoever lies first gets believed. If Sarsten got back first, they'd have to refute his version of the events on the knob. The SAS man was smart enough, cunning enough, that if his version got out first that would become the official record. The fact that they'd be accusing an ally, not an American, of a war crime, would make it even harder.

That could end up looking very bad for Team Twelve. No, on the whole, he preferred the guy inside the tent pissing out, rather than outside the tent pissing in. Especially if he lived up to his word and toned down from here on out. Taking away his speed might help.

He stopped fifty yards from the abandoned building, lying in the underbrush, listening and waiting. He took the time to open out his senses, smelling the dank of the marsh and the distant lake. The oily, shitty odor that lingered everywhere. The closer-in smells of smoke, maybe from the city that couldn't be far off now, that had to be on the far side of that misty lake. The rustle of wind in the grass, rising now from the dead calm of dawn, and the distant diesel snorting of a truck up on the highway. Even under the overcast, the light was growing fast. He felt naked under it. He was used to moving in the dark now, and he felt the morning radiance like a tumor must feel the radiation that is trying to kill it.