Black Storm (27 page)

Other buildings, downstream, showed the ragged outlines and rising smoke of bomb damage. But the area across the river seemed undamaged, at least that he could see.

He thought he heard voices again, accompanied this time by a metallic clacking. A rapid mechanical rattling, like pawls jumping against gear teeth. It sounded familiar, though he couldn't remember where he'd heard it before. He couldn't tell where it was coming from either. Their angle of vision wasn't that great, looking out from inside the outflow. Maybe behind, above him? He moved right up to the grate, thrusting his face between the thick galvanized bars to see out. A few more meters of the bank came into view. It was concrete, sloped downward. Here and there a metallic glitter. He stared at them for a few minutes but couldn't tell what they were.

Other side, then…with some grunting and splashing he and the RTO changed sides. On the downstream view, not much different. He looked at every inch of what he could see. That was how you noticed things, not trusting the first glance. Taking a close look at everything, letting it all sink in. They had to move, couldn't stop here, but moving before you knew where you were going was the way people spotted you.

That was how he noticed the manhole cover. It was hard to see from where he was. He was looking at it from the side, not from the top. But he was pretty sure it was a manhole cover. He pulled back and lifted the damp map
above the water with his wet gloves. A thin blue line stretched across the river. Not one of the sewers. Not a drain either. Just a line, unmarked by call-outs or legends. But nothing showed above the surface.

He returned his attention to the river. It was foaming past faster than any body of water he'd ever crossed. Swimming it would be very dangerous. Even roped together, they'd be swept downstream. If another dropped bridge waited around the corner, they'd be in among it, maybe pinned against it, before they could reach the far bank. Even if by some miracle they did get across in one piece, they'd be way downstream of where they needed to go. Still, it was a possibility. He wouldn't rule it out yet.

He checked his watch. The trouble was, it would be almost four more hours till full dark. They couldn't swim across in the light. Not with the fishermen watching. And the invasion of Kuwait was going to start at 0400 tomorrow.

The only movement was the river. That and a car, creeping along on the far bank until it passed out of sight. A road, then, between riverbank and buildings. For a moment he wondered if maybe they
could
swim it in daylight, take a chance they wouldn't be spotted.

Something came drifting down the river, something dark. Part of it lifted above the surface, upraised, like an imploring hand. As it came abreast of him, swept steadily along, Gault saw it was a fallen tree. The imploring hand was a limb, broken short to a stump.

He was wondering if they could use something like that to float across, when a
crackcrackcrack
pealed out and white cones leaped up around the tree. He felt Vertierra flinch, reacting to the sound of gunfire from just above their heads.

The voices again; a pause, then the ratcheting noise resumed. He still didn't know what it was, but whoever was up there had rifles. AKs, by the sound. Therefore, most likely, troops. Men bored enough to fire at passing logs. Therefore, some sort of garrison.

Then he realized what the glints were, scattered here and there along the slope, and with that the ratcheting sound too made sense.

They were below an antiaircraft battery, sited here, where the river gave a wide field of fire. He'd heard that sound aboard ship, during floats in the Med. A memory: hot days, the smells of paint and stack gas and food and diesel fuel. Topside lines of marines exercising on deck, and the ship's company working on the AA guns. The mechanical noise was either maintenance or drill. Or maybe whatever machine loaded the cartridges into belts. The metallic glints were empty cartridges, lying where the guns' mechanisms had ejected them.

He lay there, going over their possible routes across, and at last concluded there were only two. He didn't want to swim that river unless he had to. He didn't want to wait until dark either.

But maybe there was another way.

 

DAN LAY
with his arms wrapped around himself. Gray stinking water slid endlessly down over him, and it was cold. Along with the others, he'd tried to climb out of it, edging up the sides or trying niches and corners to hoist himself a few inches higher, but there was no place to rest here in the outflow that wasn't underwater. So at last he gave up and sat braced against the current, eyelids drooping shut. Not really thinking at all, and not wanting to.

Then someone was shaking him awake. Vertierra, hands cupped to confine his murmur. “Gunny wants you down front.”

When he neared the circle of light, the doctor was already there. She held pills out. He swallowed them obediently as Gault told them both to be completely silent, there were troops right above them. He told them to float slowly up to the grate, to take their time and look things over. Then come back and they'd talk.

Dan looked out over the river. The city seemed omi
nously silent and strangely empty. He saw a few figures moving about on a shattered bridge, and once in a while a car moving along the far bank. That was all, except for the everlasting rush of the river, carrying along debris and foam in whirling eddies.

When they rejoined the gunny, Gault pulled their heads close in to his. He murmured, “That's the objective. Those buildings right across from us. It's a hospital complex. The buildings to the right are the Ministry of Defence.”

“I know,” Dan said.

Gault frowned. “You do?”

He had to force himself to speak. Above all else he wanted to sit quietly and do nothing, not even breathe. But behind the apathy he was beginning to remember what they were here for, beginning to argue himself back into participation in the mission. Not for himself. For Zeitner. Maybe even, in a strange way, and his thoughts grew confused again at this point, for the shepherd boy. And a hot spark of anger ignited, like a charged wire being pulled apart, at Saddam and Bush and Major, all the politicians whose greed and incompetence had so mismanaged things that now other men had to kill and maim each other to settle the matter. At humankind, all too eager to follow their gods and leaders into war. And maybe most of all, at Whoever had intended and continued such a fucked and evil world. He swallowed the cloying taste of shit that even the air tasted of now and coughed into his armpit and said, “I was doing targeting, remember? We hit the Defence Ministry the first day of the air war.”

“You know where we are?”

“Basically. Don't you have us on the map there?”

Gault unfolded it and they went over it again. Maddox said, “Ted said it was at the hospital complex?”

“Correct.”

“Well, that might make sense,” Dan said, studying the map in the light of Gault's flash. “What's the last thing
we'd target? A major medical facility. Where's he going to keep his ultimate deterrent? Right in the capital. Right next to the MOD. It could be.”

“If it's really there,” the doc put in.

Dan nodded unwillingly. The same thought he'd carried all this way with him: that Flying Stones, Hijurat Ababeel, Project 985, whatever, might all be just the Iraqi equivalent of Area 51 or the Face on Mars or the boy who needed pull tabs for a kidney operation, an urban legend that in the end would dissolve into mist.

Maddox went on, “And if we can find it. I count twelve buildings on this map. How do we know which one it's in? And how do we get into it, if we find it?”

“He's no help?” Dan glanced at the shivering Iraqi.

“No. Says he doesn't know.”

“You believe him?”

The gunny said quietly that that was hard to say; his story had changed over the course of the day. First he'd said he'd worked on the weapon; later he'd denied it, said he knew nothing about it. First he'd said he knew where it was, then he'd backed off that too. Maddox looked at Dan. “We'll talk to him,” she said. “See what we can get. Do we have time, Gunny Sergeant?”

Gault checked his watch. “We can't move till dark. Not with them up above us. He's all yours.”

So now they were squatting up-sewer with Ted. Maddox had plumped herself down next to him. Dan squished down on the other side. The Iraqi looked uncomfortable, but there was nowhere to go. After their descent of the chute, and without his glasses, he looked less truculent. He was also shivering hard, just like both of them. And the doctor was saying, disbelief and scorn plain in her voice, “You're telling me you worked on it, but you don't know what it is.”

“I didn't make it. I work in shop where they make it. The part that causes death.”

“The part that…you mean the warhead?”

“That is it. Not the…mee-sle. The warhead.”

Dan caught Maddox's eye, gave her an encouraging nod.
Go on
. “So it's definitely a missile,” she told Ted. “Well, that's helpful. But not much. What's in the warhead?”

“I don't know.”

“I mean, just in general. Chemicals? Biologicals? Some sort of radioactive weapon?”

Ted mumbled, “The boss said it was a ray of light.”

They looked at each other across him. “Excuse me?” Maddox said to him. “What exactly did he say?”

“He said it…
was
ray of light out of Saddam's forehead, like Tammuz, that it would conquer the Zionists and Americans. Saddam thinks he is Nebuchadnezzar. He will bring the Jews into a new captivity.”

Dan wondered what to make out of this. None of the briefings had mentioned any kind of laser or beam weapon, and he was pretty sure anything like that was beyond the Iraqi capability. Tammuz, though, was interesting; it was another name for the long-range upgraded Scud. On the other hand, he dimly remembered something about Tammuz being the son of Ishtar—no, he wasn't sure of that—anyway, some early Babylonian god.

“Tammuz, the missile? Or Tammuz, the god?”

Ted shrugged. “That all
jahilia,
” he said. He didn't bother to explain what “jahilia” was, but it didn't sound like he meant it as praise.

“So, you worked on the warhead,” Maddox said. “Tell us about it. What was your job?”

“Drive machine,” he said, pushing with his hands, then extending them and lifting.

“Forklift?” Dan said encouragingly.

“
Aywa!
Forkleeft.”

Dan tried for heartiness, anything other than the exhaustion and guilt that was hardening around his heart like a leaden shell. “Okay! Now we're getting someplace. The forklift man. You move the warheads around. Good. Tell me about them. What are they like?”

“Concrete. It's concrete, hollow.” Ted swallowed,
looked around the drain. Then reached up, and sketched a diagram with his finger on the muck that coated the arching overhead. “Hollow, yes? With tube through middle. Holes in the tube. Hole at the nose. Nose plug, make it out of…plastic, like glass.”

Dan looked at it, groping through his exhaustion for what the guy was talking about. The challenge with any ballistic warhead was to bring it through the high-speed, high-temperature atmospheric reentry. Concrete could be a way to do it. Heavy, but it'd protect whatever was inside from the heat. The plug was strange, though. “Plastic, like glass.” Fiberglas? But Fiberglas would burn through, wouldn't it?

“Where exactly did you work?”

“I work in Karbala. But I live in Baghdad, in Al Quds. And one day man say to me, you know, that where this going, not far from Al Quds. And I say, where? And he tell me here.” He pointed toward the far bank. “Four of them, I remember now. He say, number four.”

Maddox said, “You're telling us you don't know what the payload was?”

Ted said he didn't know, a liquid, he thought. When they asked him what kind of liquid, he just shrugged again. All he seemed to know was that whatever it was, the man had told him it was in Medical City.

Dan stared at him in the tunnel dim. So that if this turkey was telling the truth, the only actual link was a chance remark that might as far as any of them knew simply be rumor. But that somebody had reported to the Syrians as a fact, and they'd handed on through who knew how many hands and ears till it reached US Defense Intelligence. Growing its own layers of legend and accretion at each passage from hand to hand, language to language, like a grain of sand around which more and more layers of shit wrapped themselves. Making an unemployed forklift driver an “insider,” a “mole,” an “engineer.”

“Why exactly are you helping us, Ted?” he said, mak
ing his voice as friendly as he could muster, lying waist-deep in runoff and wanting to throttle the guy.

“I want kill Saddam.”

“You're a friend of Syria, do I understand that right?”

“I don't care for Syria, or for America, or the Jews. I follow Ali. Anyone who kills Saddam, I help them.” He glared at Maddox. “But woman soldier, this
haram
. Not according to their nature, or Allah's will.”

Dan was thinking how a lot of American servicemen agreed with him when Maddox jerked her head up-tunnel. He fought his way against the current after her. A few feet was enough for the rushing water to mask their voices. She said, “I'm sorry, this is horseshit. He's obviously a hopeless bullshitter. But it was all there was, so our intel people believed what the Syrians told them. There's nothing here. We've lost one man getting here. If we try to cross that river, those troops out there will either shoot us or we'll all drown.”

“You think so? I think we could make it after dark. Find something that floats and hang on to it.”

“That's not exactly the point.” She glanced toward the leaden disk that was the exit, the malformed humps between them and the light that were the others. “Look, we're just the attachments, you and me. The gunny's the team leader. But once we get to the objective, we're in charge. Right? Well, we're at the objective, and I'm asking if you've seen enough.”