Black Storm (38 page)

“Leaving you guys?” Dan asked him. “There's got to be another way to do it.”

“There isn't, sir,” Gault told him. He was searching his chemical oversuit; he found the camera and held it out. “Look, we don't have time to fucking debate. You made the decision to go overt. This is how it plays out. Getting you and the doc back is the mission now.
Go
, F.C.! Don't worry about us. We'll make it.”

Dan took the camera, then hesitated, looking into Gault's eyes. He wanted to say how he wished it could be different; that he respected the man beside him more than he'd ever respected anyone before. But the gunny turned coolly away, firing again around the freezer. He motioned angrily to Sarsten, and pointed left.

“You heard the gunny. Let's get moving, sir,” Nichols said. “No shit, we don't have time to hang around. If they rush us, we're fucked.”

A series of ponderous explosions, close together, and the freezer shook. “Heavy MG,” Sarsten yelled. “On the right, elevated.”

Dan looked off to the left, searching for Blaisell. He couldn't see the corporal. But his eyes locked, just for a second, on Sarsten's. The SAS's chem suit was soaked with blood. He too had pulled his mask off. Under it his skin was smeared with camo paint and burnt powder. But he was still aiming and firing, though his whole upper body jerked each time the butt slammed back into his shoulder. Dan leaned down and yelled, “We're pulling out.”

“Suit yourself, mate.”

“That means you too. Let's go.”

“Not me, mate. I'm on my chinstrap here.” He fired again and the action of the Kalashnikov locked back. He struggled with it, his other arm nearly useless to brace it, and dropped the empty magazine with a clatter of steel. He put his thumb and forefinger together and jiggled his wrist. Pointed a finger at Dan and winked. “Take care,
wanker,” he said. Then pushed a fresh magazine home and aimed again.

Dan looked at Gault. “Take good care of yourself, Gunny.”

Gault nodded, not looking at him. The last thing Dan heard him say was, “It don't matter, sir. Give that little girl of yours a kiss for me.
All right!
Skirmish line, out to the left, on my command,
go!
”

17 March: Maximum Biocontainment Patient Care Suite, US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, Fort Detrick, Maryland

When the heavy steel door of the air lock finally sucked open, the pressure change patting his face and clicking in his ears, Dan saw for the first time what they'd dreamed of for weeks: the green-painted cinder-block corridor, the gray smooth tile floor. The rumble of wheels on concrete: a tired-looking man in blue coveralls, pushing a cart stacked high with cages. They were empty, but he caught the stink of animal excrement.

He stood irresolute, almost afraid for a moment to step out. To face what lay beyond and after and next.

The Slammer had been their world for two weeks. After the extraction, their helo had flown directly from Iraq to King Khalid airfield in Saudi. His memories of this period were confused. The water truck wouldn't start when they returned. So Nichols had hot-wired a taxi and they'd driven till the tank was empty, hid over during
daylight, then walked through the next night to reach the extract point.

By then they'd been dead on their feet, exhausted and hallucinating. Maybe he'd hallucinated the spooky figures in orange suits and green hoods. Imagined being helped into a sealed litter, tented with thick, clear plastic. The plastic zipping closed behind him. Then the long flight, gloved hands of the aeromedical isolation team reaching in to minister to his bodily needs. Looking through the sheeting at the blurs of the other passengers' faces, sealed away too, racked alongside him like so many Typhoid Marys.

Since then they'd been here. Playing cards and watching CNN in a cramped four-bed isolation unit deep in the bowels of the Institute of Infectious Diseases. Four hospital beds, but six patients in the bare smooth-walled room: Dr. Maddox, Corporal Nichols, and Dan himself, plus the aircrew from the helo, pilot, copilot, and gunner. So it was even more cramped with the folding cots set up. The Space Suits had to maneuver around them and the air hoses snagged and they were always cursing and pulling at them. Space Suits: that was what they called the nurses and doctors who came packaged in big blue inflated suits, gloved and hooded and supplied with air from outside. But then after that first annoyance they'd stop pulling suddenly and look toward their patients, fear in their eyes behind the clear plastic face shields. And the patients would smile grimly back. Knowing.

Dan had asked for paper on the second day, and started writing. He had a lot he wanted to get down. Just in case he didn't make it through this. The first thing to complete was his after-action report. He wanted to make sure whoever needed to know these things knew everything they'd done, everything they'd observed. And how well everyone on the team had done. Whatever happened, they deserved that.

Maddox went down first. When she did, they moved her into the room adjoining, where they kept the stretcher
transit isolators, the negative-pressure coffins they'd flown them back in.

By then they'd had all the shots, the inoculations, the experimental antivirals. Dan didn't bother keeping track. Just sat, feeling estranged from everything, waiting for it to start. Waiting to get sick, then actually being sick, sicker than hell. From the drugs; the side effects felt like intestinal flu, complete with vomiting and agonizing shits.

They knew it was smallpox by then. The cultures from the sample the doc had brought back confirmed her call. But there wasn't any antidote or antitoxin for variola major, let alone the virulent and mortal variant Dr. Al-Syori had weaponized. So all the army could do was vaccinate them, pump them tick-tight with antivirals, and wait.

So they waited; watching the news images flicker across the screen; tanks plunging forward, skies full of helicopters, berms exploding, hundreds of prisoners walking toward the cameras with their hands in the air. A road of abandoned burning vehicles. The Kuwaiti flag going up side by side with the Stars and Stripes. The fiery plumes of burning wells stretching off to the flat horizon. And at last, a tent in the desert, men in olive drab and mustaches sitting down opposite the Allies.

And he'd watched and listened, taut with apprehension and guilt; but not once had there been any indication the Iraqis had wheeled, reoriented their forces, to face south. So either he hadn't talked, there in the bunker, or the word had gotten to the Iraqi command structure too late to do them any good.

All that time they waited to see who'd be next. But no one else came down with it. Only the doc. They listened to the Space Suits in the next room, and watched through a window as they worked around Maddox's bed. Watched till the end, all the way to the body bag, and when it was gone, the disinfecting cookers on the floor generating a formaldehyde cloud so thick that nothing lived on the far
side of the glass but a writhing whiteness of utter sterility, utter lifelessness.

He'd watched that deadly mist, mind blank. Remembering a fog rising from a silvery lake in Iraq, and the delicate rose as the first morning light touched it.

 

THE PHONE
call came in several days after the cease-fire. He picked it up, and for a moment didn't recognize the voice. Then he did. “Corporal Blaisell,” he said.

“Hey, sir, it's Blaze. Tricky tracking you down, but they finally gave me your number. You're where—some army hospital?”

“That's right. I'm glad you called.” Dan thought about asking if Blaisell had gotten sick, then realized if he had, he'd probably be dead. So instead he said, “How are you?
Where
are you?”

“I'm still in Saudi. They flew me back to a field hospital after the ragheads let me go. They're going to operate again, then fly me back home.”

“They took you prisoner?”

“Right, I get the POW medal now. Along with the Purple Heart, how about that? Bad news, though. They killed the gunny and Sarsten. When we finally ran out of ammo. I took a couple of rounds, but they operated and I pulled through. Somebody scored my Glock while I was out, though. Some son-of-a-bitching Iraqi's walking around with it now. Who made it from your end of the team?”

“F.C.'s here. They had us quarantined. It was smallpox, all right. The doc was the only one who came down with it, though.”

“How is she? She pull through?”

“No. She didn't make it.”

A brief silence, then “Too bad. She had balls. Well, I'm glad you made it okay, sir. You're a good man.”

“You are too, Blaze. By the way, I'm doing some medal write-ups. For everybody. I think you deserve something, and this has mostly been an Army war…. I
figure if we can make a case for some of our guys, the Navy Department might want to play catch-up.”

“You don't need to do that, sir.”

“It'd help your career. If you're staying in.”

“I got nothing better to do, sir. Not like Jake.” A pause, and they both listened to the faint crackle and drone of whatever connections lay between them. “Well…is F.C. there, you said?”

He'd handed the phone off and gone back to the television. And that was the only thing he'd heard from the outside, other than the TV news. Nobody from CINCCENT or NAVCENT had ever called. He had no orders; it was as if the Signal Mirror team had been forgotten in the heady aftermath of victory. He'd talked to his mom on the phone, and to Blair once, but that was all.

So he was feeling both lonely and disoriented as the door whooshed open, and he watched the empty cages rumbling by, wondering what had happened to the monkeys. And at last he stepped through, into the hallway, and saw her waiting. For a moment he couldn't believe it.

“Blair?” he said, astonished.

Blair Titus hesitated; glanced at the doctors with her. They smiled and she ran the few steps between them and hugged him. He felt her cool cheek against his. She was wearing a blue wool suit, a power-look outfit, with an open neckline and a little American flag pin on her lapel. Her hair was shorter than he remembered it, but it looked good on her. “You look terrific,” he told her.

“Thanks. I just drove up from Washington. They told me you were getting out this afternoon. God, the Beltway traffic; I just made it.” She looked at him searchingly, holding him out at arm's length. “But you're okay?”

“I'm okay.”

“Really? Your face—” He felt her finger trace the line of his ear, where the sutures had just come out.

“Really. It looked a lot worse two weeks ago.”

“They told me about the major. The one who died.”

Dan said, “She was a good soldier.”

“I'm so sorry. I'm just glad the casualty lists were so light.” She tried to smile, as if she thought he didn't want to talk about it. “Anyway, I'm glad you made it. Let's go to lunch. There's a nice place called Tauraso's out in Frederick. You've probably had enough army food for a while.”

“It'd be nice just to see the sky again.”

She started to turn away, then turned back and held him again. Tight, this time. Into his ear she murmured, “We spend too much time apart.”

“That's true.”

“But maybe we can make it work. Other people do.”

“Make it work?” He blinked, still not feeling he was with the program. The aftereffect of all the drugs, or maybe the sudden pressure change from inside to outside, made his head feel like it was stuffed with used rags.

She said, her mouth still so close against his ear he could feel her breath, like a recon marine passing a message on patrol, “You asked me once, and I said no. Well. At lunch. Today. Ask me again.”

Dan looked at her, not sure anymore what he wanted to do. She seemed so self-assured, so confident, so separate, so…powerful. He'd always thought two people had to need each other, to make a life together. Was it worth trying again, after he'd screwed up one marriage?

He no more had the answer to that question than he understood what had happened in Iraq. The decisions and terror and violence. What others had done, and what he'd done himself.

But you couldn't wait till you had the right answers. Some things would become clearer with time. Others, he'd change his mind about as the years went by. And some, he'd never fathom. No one knew or could see ahead. That was why human beings needed something beyond themselves. To make sense of the world. Or to reassure themselves the world
did
make sense, no matter how often it didn't.

Sometimes you just had to take it on faith. So that now
he said, surrendering to the future, “All right. I'll ask you again.”

She held out her hand, and he took it, and they walked down the hall, toward doors that opened to distant blue mountains.

The Tigris flowed quietly at last under an empty blue spring sky, green and somehow thick-looking, as if composed of a liquid more viscous than water. The group moved slowly along a tree-lined boulevard. Some wore coveralls and carried respirator masks, sample kits, and detector equipment; others were in drab uniforms, shoulder boards, and black berets. One Iraqi carried a camcorder, filming every step they took, but none were armed. They reached the entrance, a wide ramp sloping down from the river. The hospital rose above it, story after story, untouched. An Iraqi in a white coat hurried toward them, carrying a clipboard.

Steel doors rumbled up as they trudged down the ramp. The interior was dark, and a faint smell of diesel fuel welled up from it.

Colonel Anders Paulik, US Marine Corps, was the leader of the inspection team. He stopped to consult a GPS receiver and a map, confirming their exact location. The others waited patiently. He looked back at the river, then down at the doors again. Finally he pulled his half-face respirator from its belt pouch and seated it over mouth and nose. He tested it, pulled the straps tighter, then led the way forward.

The huge interior was empty. Vaulted ceilings caged lightless fixtures. The flashlights made pale beams that
probed uncertainly about in the gloom. “Can't we get some light down here?” Paulik asked, voice muffled by the mask.

His escort, an Iraqi general, had not bothered with breathing protection. He said loftily, as if such matters were beneath his notice: “Sorry, no. Lights don't work.”

Paulik did not respond. He moved forward, following the pale searching of his beam. Sending it down the long open vaulting, smelling even through the mask of fuel and mold and another smell, a faint, bitter chemical after-taste. Water dripped from the ceiling. His boots splashed through it. Behind him the technicians fanned out, intent on instruments and sampling kits.

Paulik kept walking, hearing the Iraqis close behind him. Along with the general was the man in the white coat, who had been introduced as the director of the medical center. The colonel pushed his light beam into what looked like an abandoned control booth. The concrete was starred with bullet marks. Glass lay in shattered sheets across the offices within. A chair lay where it had been knocked over. Nothing else remained save the concrete floor, dusty and bare, showing still-faint outlines where heavy objects had rested, black tire marks where vehicles had passed.

“What was this area?” he asked the escort. The general turned and spoke in Arabic to the man in the white coat.

They faced him again. “It was storage space,” the general said. “For the hospital. Now it is unused.”

“What happened here? What were these bullet spalls from?”

“Those are not bullet marks,” said the doctor, in English, though he had spoken to the general in Arabic. “Those are where forklifts ran into the concrete.”

“This was a storage site for biological weapons,” Paulik said. Both men shook their heads, but said nothing.

“You owe me the truth. Your president agreed to a full accounting and destruction of all nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons.”

The general looked upward, to the ceiling, or to Heaven. “No, never. As I have told you so many times. We never manufactured such weapons. This was never a storage site for such things. Nor did we have the type of weapons you allege.”

Paulik held his gaze for a long moment. “You're so full of shit,” he said.

The general didn't answer. Paulik stared him down, then called to the technicians: “Take samples here. And here. And over there, next to the wall. That's where the refrigerators were.”

The Iraqis watched, saying nothing. When he looked back at them again, they were smiling.