Black Storm (3 page)

Over the sea brooded a turbulent darkness deeper than any storm, blacker than any dusk. The smoke smelled like grease and acid, with a darker taste beneath: the stink of disaster and waste and war. The pall rolled a thousand feet deep over the uneasy waters between Kuwait and Iran where the Task Group was steaming. It left a slick on every surface and control in the helicopter, and it made visibility so bad that, banking away from USS
Tripoli,
the pilot didn't even bother to look up from his instruments.

Behind him, the lean, gray-eyed officer in sweaty khakis stared into the blackness with his mouth set. The burnt-oil stench made him feel like throwing up. He was remembering another time in these same waters, not that many years before, during the tanker-convoying effort known as Operation Earnest Will. Another time when war had loomed and men got ready to die.

And many had, when USS
Turner Van Zandt
had hit a mine. He rubbed his mouth, remembering how many had gone down with her. How many had slipped away afterward, of heatstroke and dehydration during days adrift. From the sharks and sea snakes, and the patrol boats that had attacked the helpless men in the water.

He seemed to have seen a lot of that in his career. Disaster. Loss.
Van Zandt. Reynolds Ryan
. Then deep in the China Sea, the frigate that had once been USS
Gaddis
but
at the end had no name at all. When he closed his eyes, he saw men in the water, men burned, men torn apart by shells. Maybe he carried it with him, like a communicable disease.

Maybe that was why the board had decided to promote others while he stood still. Marking time as his career slipped away.

He remembered his way past the memories as they flew southward, till gradually his tension ebbed and he leaned back and closed his eyes.

They landed aboard
Blue Ridge
an hour later. He swung out of the aircraft, reached back for a flight bag, and jogged across black nonskid. The air was hotter here than in the northern Gulf. The sky had cleared too, turning the bright hazy tan he remembered from years before. He handed his cranial to a crewman. Beside a weather-decks door a lieutenant with an aiguillette beckoned.

“Lieutenant Commander Lenson? Off USS
Tripoli
?”

“That's me,” Dan said.

“Welcome aboard, sir. Follow me, please.”

Belowdecks seemed very bright. Dan blinked, trying to keep track of where they were going in the white-painted passageways; then gave up. He was used to frigates, destroyers, not the labyrinth of this huge and nearly unarmed command ship. He barked his shin and started paying attention to the knee knockers. At last the aide pushed open a door. “The admiral's in here,” he said.

“In here” was extremely dim, lit in hazy blue, and smelled of rubber and ozone. The deck was soft underfoot, padded by insulating matting. Petty officers and junior officers sat tranced before screens and keyboards. Radio nets spoke in muted whispers, and under all other sounds purred an unending drone of ventilation. He stopped, waiting for his eyes to adjust, then followed his guide to where three officers sat before large decision screens. Dan came to attention. “Lieutenant Commander Lenson, sir.”

“Sit down, Commander.” A tense-looking man in trop
whites sat gnawing a pencil in a padded leather command chair. To his left was a hefty marine in starched desert battle dress. To his right sat an air force officer in Class Bs. Dan hesitated, then sat where the admiral pointed, perching sideways before a console.

The decision screens showed Task Force 151.11's movement west. Minesweepers and gunfire support ships were probing in toward the coast of occupied Kuwait. The amphibious task force was forming behind them. To the south were four carrier battle groups. The air picture swept out hundreds of miles farther, over Kuwait, Iraq, southern Iran, and Saudi Arabia. It showed carrier air patrols orbiting and strike groups ranging far inland. Dan wiped his forehead. In the air-conditioned dim his sweat felt icy cold. A shiver wormed down his back.

“Just got in, Dan?”

“Just jumped off the helo, sir.”

He'd met Wayne Kinnear during the planning effort that led to the impact of a hundred and twenty-two Tomahawk missiles on Iraq. Vice Admiral Kinnear was COMUSNAVCENT, commander of all US Navy and Marine forces in the Gulf. He wore the wings of a naval aviator and had shot down two enemy fighters in Vietnam.

Kinnear pointed his eraser at the air force officer, then at the marine. “Meet Colonel Ed Salter, from the CINC staff in Riyadh. And Lieutenant Colonel Anders Paulik, First SRI Group, I MEF. Gentlemen, you asked me for a Tomahawk targeter. Commander Lenson planned the TLAM strikes on Baghdad that opened the air war. He also planned the strike against the suspected chemical warfare aircraft at the Al Rashid base two weeks ago. Since then I've had him working for Pete Bulkeley in the Northern Gulf, getting ready for the invasion. I have to admit, I had my doubts about cruise missiles before I saw them live on CNN.”

“You married, Commander?” said the Marine Corps colonel. Paulik was stocky, heavily built, with a crew cut and an accent Dan couldn't place. Not southern, like most
marines, as if they'd all been born again at Parris Island and had become through that at least honorary South Carolinians. His skin was weathered as dark as old bronze.

He thought about Paulik's question, about Blair Titus and their long-distance, off-again, on-again relationship; decided to go for the short answer. “No, sir.”

“Dependents?”

“A daughter. She lives with my ex.”

The air force officer said, “You look like you're in good shape.”

“I run, when I can,” Dan said.

Paulik asked, “Any medical problems? Back? Knees?”

“None that I know of. What's this all about?” He glanced at Kinnear, but the admiral's attention was on the screens.

Paulik didn't answer, just asked another question. “And from what the admiral says, you're shit smart on Tomahawk?”

“Lenson was in Joint Cruise Missiles for the program development phase,” Kinnear said. “He troubleshot the airframe when we had those crashes early in the program. Out here, he helped reprogram the Lacrosse radar satellites to give us the Iraqi terrain contours.”

“Okay, that's good, but how about tactical employment? Targeting angles, warhead types?”

“Well, as Admiral Kinnear said, we've done quite a bit of targeting. I know what the system can do.”

“And what it can't?”

“Well.” He cleared his throat, not sure what they were getting at. “The missile has its limitations. The mission has to be planned in advance. To program in the terrain matching and the flight profile. Once your round's in flight, you can't reprogram or recall; you're locked in to that target. And you need contrast for the final homing phase; that's done with a separate visual matching system. And the warhead's not all that heavy. I've developed algorithms for optimal targeting against the various types
of structures that make up the Iraqi military-industrial base—”

“Sounds like our boy,” Paulik told the admiral.

“Here's the situation,” said the bird colonel, Salter.

Lowering his voice, though the closest ear other than theirs was several meters distant, Salter explained they were trying to localize a rumored Iraqi threat. They had some intercept material. It confirmed their human intelligence, HUMINT as it was called in the trade, but they still had nothing precise enough to bomb with. They had to send in a ground team. CENTCOM's J-3, Major General Moore, had passed the mission to Lieutenant General Walter Boomer, commander of the First Marine Expeditionary Force—all the marine forces in the Gulf and Saudi. Boomer had passed it to the First SRI Group.

Paulik picked up there. “SRI stands for Surveillance and Reconnaissance Intelligence. We're the headquarters element between HQ I MEF and the divisional force recon units. This mission's short fuze, but it's the kind of thing we train for. We're sending a team in to find this threat, if it exists; localize it; and call in Tomahawks on it. We need a targeting guy. Thanks for volunteering, Commander.”

“I didn't volunteer,” Dan said, more or less by reflex.

Obviously following the conversation though he hadn't seemed to, Kinnear said, “Mr. Lenson here has gotten out of a few tight spots before. Not always smelling like a rose, but he came back.”

Salter said, “Then he'll have to do. We're not using Tomahawks anymore in the northern theater. After that bunker strike that killed all those civilians, we've pretty much moved the air war over the Republican Guard and stood the TLAM shooters down—”

“That wasn't a Tomahawk—”

Salter backtracked smoothly. “No, it wasn't, Admiral, and I didn't mean to imply it was. The two events are unrelated.”

“You bring your personal gear?” Paulik asked Dan.

“No. They just told me to get on the helicopter and bring my targeting kit—the templates and so forth.”

Kinnear raised his eyebrows. “Now, wait just a minute. I understood this to be a consultation. Not a raid on my staff. It's true we're not firing Tomahawks just now, but we're going to need Lenson here for the amphibious invasion.”

Colonel Salter cleared his throat. “You know there's not going to be an invasion, Admiral.”

“Not the mainland—I know that's off. But Faylakah Island, we're going ahead with that.”

Salter said apologetically, “Sorry, sir, that's not in the CINC's plan either. You'll get official word tomorrow. What you're executing is purely a deception plan. A diversion, to keep their eyes on the sea while the army goes in farther west. And I'm taking your man here with me. If there's a difficulty with that, sir, I suggest you call General Schwarzkopf direct.” To Dan he said, “You won't need gear. We'll provide everything. We're leaving in ten minutes. You might want to drink some water before we go.”

Dan had been sitting with one arm on the console, watching the volleys going back and forth. At the news that the landing was off, he tensed. It explained a lot of things he'd been wondering about. Such as why there hadn't been any preparatory shelling of the Kuwaiti beachfront, the liquid petroleum factory, the other facilities that could shelter Iraqi forces for a counterattack. But no one had told the eighteen thousand marines and thousands of supporting sailors out there getting ready. And the destroyers, cruisers, battleships, and minesweepers of Task Force 151, which—he glanced at his watch—should be just now entering the Iraqi minefield.

Kinnear had flushed, obviously angry. “If the CINC wants him, he can have him. The planning's done now anyway. But this about the landing not coming off—”

“It's not going to happen, Admiral,” said Salter again.
“Both Secretary Cheney and General Powell are against it. But I'd keep that very close hold. If Saddam even gets a hint we're not coming in from seaward, he can swing those eleven divisions south and knock the hell out of I MEF coming up through the Saddam Line.”

They were all silent, contemplating that. Finally Kinnear nodded. “Very well, take him. I'll have the helo called away for you.”

 

AS THEY
waited to board, Paulik stared off over the slowly passing sea. A small combatant, perhaps a missile boat, flying the green Saudi flag kept station a thousand yards off, and Dan recognized a British Sheffield-class destroyer on the horizon to the north; he guessed it was
York
. The smoke was thinner down here, and again he noticed the sky, faded like a master chief's khakis. And looking down into the sea he saw that it was the same transparent blue he recalled from years before. The cruise that had ended so badly for USS
Turner Van Zandt
and her strangely divided yet always courageous captain.

“Been in combat before?” Paulik said, interrupting but in a strange way paralleling Dan's thoughts.

“Yes, sir.”

“Ground combat?”

“Oh—ashore, only once. I was on an amphibious staff in the Med. During the Syrian incursion. Colonel Steve Haynes was the MAU commander. I got ashore with the landing force, but I wouldn't say I know much about ground warfare.”

“Well, what you need to know, we'll get you up to speed on. Let me explain a little more about this mission. You know what Force Recon is.”

Dan tried to concentrate. “They're like Delta Force or the SEALs, as I understand it. Special operations.”

“Well, yes and no. Our Force Reconnaissance community trains to the same standards, but we're not walled off from our parent service the way they are.

“Anyway, a couple years ago I was in Quantico working what we called the Urban Assault Team concept. The UAT trained with high-tech gear, new weapons, new tactics, new sensors in order to penetrate, operate in, and extract from high-density urban environments. We figured that's where warfare's going in the long run, urban environments like Beirut and Northern Ireland and so forth.”

“Makes sense.” Dan glanced back to see the chopper pilots climbing into the cockpit, the turbines start to whine.

“Yeah, I thought so, but we got defunded in eighty-nine and had to send everybody back to their units. Those who stayed in got deployed out here in the Desert Shield buildup. But as it happens, this mission's going into a built-up area. When I realized that, I thought of a couple of my sharp performers from UAT. I found them, MEF tasked the division to shit them out to me, and I'm using them as a nucleus to build the Signal Mirror team. You're gonna be what we call an attachment.”

“You said ‘Signal Mirror'.”

“That's the code name. Right.”

“Tell me again why you need a navy guy for a marine mission.”

“I need a Tomahawk targeter in good physical shape, somebody who can think under pressure and come out with the right decision. The admiral seems to think that's you.”