Black Storm (7 page)

“So that's it. 985's anthrax. And if he's got it, Saddam's the guy to use it. This is a no-shit threat.”

He nodded somberly around and pulled a folding chair under him. Its tinny scrape on the concrete was the only sound in the room.

“Anything else to say?” Paulik asked Bice. “You still think it's a nuke?”

“Yes.”

“What about the payload-range problem?”

“That's not as big a bump as Charlie thinks it is,” Bice said. “In the first place,
our
experts say you can build a primitive but effective enriched-uranium weapon with an all-up weight of three hundred kilos. And even if it comes in at four hundred or even six hundred kilos, it's not that hard to kick up a Scud's payload capacity. Strapping some solid-fuel boosters onto the first stage would do it. Or bolt three of them together and use them to boost a second stage.”

Provanzano said, “It's not as simple as you make it sound.”

Bice shrugged. “Maybe not. But his people have had years to think about it, brainpower from the Germans and Brazilians, and all the money they need. They know nothing deters like a nuke.”

As they argued, Gault sat thinking. When the spooks disagreed, the point he got was that the team had to be prepared for anything. Chemical, nuclear, germs…or maybe something no one had guessed at yet, some subterranean horror from the basement of Saddam's hate and paranoia.

But did it really matter what it was? As long as they found it? All he, the team leader, had to do was get them there. The navy guy would write the targeting message and Vertierra would squirt it out in a comm shot. Then they'd hustle back to the extract site and Mission Complete. As long as they stayed covert.

But how would he know? Say they linked up with the asset and the guy took them to a site. Now Gunnery Sergeant Marcus Gault, USMC, has his binoculars on it from a couple of hundred meters off. The asset says that's it, that's Flying Stones. But the air force had just bombed a bunker full of civilians. This sounded like a golden opportunity for the same kind of truly resounding fuckup. Especially if it was germs, like the CIA was saying.

The ceiling shook; Maddox put her hands over her ears. When the sound receded, Paulik said, “You look doubtful, Gunny.”

“Question, sir. We can take care of ourselves in Indian Country. But I'm not sure we're smart enough on the subject for ops against a biological target.”

“Exactly what I told your colonel, Sergeant,” Dr. Maddox said. “Your team needs to know what a bioweapon looks like; how to recognize a hazardous environment; what to do if you find yourselves in one. I'll help as much as I can, but I've already told him I don't think I can train you adequately in the time we have available.”

Gault didn't like saying this. His whole training went against it. But whether he liked it or not, the mission demanded it. So he said, looking at the lieutenant colonel, “Sir, if this really could be some kind of biological weapon, I'd want somebody BW-qualified with the team.”

“Along?” Provanzano stood suddenly, interrupting him. “Is that what this is about? You're sending people in after this thing?”

Paulik had been watching Gault and Maddox, who were staring at each other. He answered without taking his eyes from them. “That's our direction from General Boomer,” he said.

But the CIA man cut him off, was in fact still speaking over him. “If that's your direction, it's bullshit. There's no need to send in a recon team. We can localize this thing close enough to bomb.”

Gault looked up. So did the others. “You know where 985 is?” Paulik asked him.

“A surface-to-surface missile doesn't come bareboat. There's a troop unit that maintains and launches it. They eat, they shit, they communicate. When they communicate, we hear them.”

“So where is it?”

“I didn't come prepared to brief that. I was told this was for background. Nobody said anything about inserting a team. How would you know where to go, anyway?”

“We have an asset,” Bice said. “An insider, a mole
deep inside the project. An engineer, a guy who actually helped design the thing.”

“An insider…. Give me a break. Not the Syrians. ‘Pandemonium,' or whatever they call him—”

“I can't confirm or deny who it is.”

“Get out of here. It's the Syrians, isn't it? Tony, you can't trust those assholes!”

“Syria's a Coalition ally.”

“They're a Ba'athist state! They could flip any day. Or say whoever's running this agent decides he wants to be Hafiz al-Assad's left hand, earn some brownie points with Saddam for after the war. You're looking at compromise, capture, loss of your whole team. Call it off, Colonel. We'll localize your target for you. It's just a matter of going back and digging through the intercepts. Tony, if I convince you we've got the street address, will you go to Jack Leide with me and get this called off? These guys are laying their heads on the block.”

“You convince me, and I'll go to General Leide,” Bice said, but he didn't sound like he was going to be easy to satisfy.

Lieutenant Commander Lenson rapped the table then. They all looked over at him. “I'm going to have to say something about the targeting here. Specifically, the look-angle problem in the urban environment.”

He explained how Tomahawk guided, and the warhead choices. “What that means is, if we're talking about an urban site, possibly hardened or buried, just having a geographic location or a signals intelligence fix isn't going to be enough. It's not like targeting in the open desert.”

Paulik said, “So even if you know where it is, you can't destroy it?”

“That depends. See, cruises aren't ballistic missiles. They navigate by matching the terrain with a map in their head. Once they reach the target area, they home by matching a stored image with the scene they see through their onboard camera.

“We could design most of the mission ahead of time, knowing our final target's somewhere in western Baghdad. But are there buildings in the flight path? What's the best approach angle for penetration? The best fuzing? We need hard data. Pictures, if we can get them.”

“So we
do
need a team on-site?” said Paulik, looking less and less happy with what he was hearing.

“No, you need another weapon,” said Bice. “You want air strikes. F-117s, not navy missiles. This is an air force mission.”

They were all talking at once now and, as the roar from overhead built again, shouting above each others' voices. Provanzano and Bice were face-to-face, shaking fingers at each other. Lenson and Maddox were both trying to talk. Paulik sat immobile. At last the colonel hammered his fist down on the table. Startled, they fell silent.

“All right, that's enough. Gunny, do you have anything more for these people?”

“No, sir, I don't. Far as I'm concerned, they've raised more questions than they answered.”

“How do you feel about this mission?”

He didn't have any problem answering that. “Not good, sir. I thought I knew who I was meeting up with, what the objective was, and what fire I was calling in. Now I don't. And even if we did, with all due respect, sir, as the team leader I want somebody along smarter on this biological stuff than we are. Either the doc here or somebody real like her.”

Paulik was shaking his head before Gault finished. “All right, that's it. Gunnery Sergeant Gault and his men are ready to take some risks. But what I'm hearing is bullshit. Guesses. Rumors. ‘Unconfirmed sources.' I will not put a team in without a clearly defined objective and a clear plan to follow when they get there. I doubt Higher would. Period.” He got up, face flushed, and was opening his mouth again when the engines began.

It was a major strike, plane after plane taking off, and they waited while above them, around them, the turbine
roar built and built to a nearly unendurable crescendo, then slowly moved off into the distance. When Paulik could be heard again, he was shouting, “I'm bucking this up the chain of command. But if I don't get back something better than what I just heard, I don't care who orders me to do it. I'm not letting this mission proceed.”

The next morning Maureen Maddox woke to a rap on her tent pole. “On deck, Doc. Breakfast in ten.”

She scrubbed her face with a Wet Wipe and followed the murmur of male voices in the mist-streaming light that vibrated beyond the dunes. The sun wasn't up yet, but its gray preradiance illuminated sand, tents, and a wary-looking dog that stood watching in the distance, motionless as a forbidden image. Before one of the tents, men stood in line. As she came up they straightened, arms whipping up quivering-straight. She returned the salute, wondering if they knew they were asking for tendonitis when they were forty. When she fell in, they glanced at each other. The marine in front of her said, “You go ahead, ma'am.”

“I'll wait.”

“No, go ahead.” He stood aside, and the others did too, not so much inviting as commanding her to go to the head of the line. So she did.

To stacks of green mess trays, containers of reconstituted eggs, toast and canned jam, a steel thermos of coffee. She saw Captain Kohler there eating. There was only one table; when she set her tray down the enlisted men, sergeants and corporals, stood immediately, though this time they did not salute. They wore DBU trou and green T-shirts with taped dog tags. The T-shirts were sweat-
stained and she realized they'd been up for a while already, apparently doing PT. Without their blouses they weren't as muscular as she'd expected. They looked fit, their faces were lean and their arms ropy with muscle, but they didn't look like supermen.

Kohler stood too, at last. “Good morning, ma'am. You remember Gunny Sergeant Gault, from the briefing?”

“Yes. Hello, Gunny.”

“Sergeant Zeitner. Lance Corporal Nichols. Corporal Blaisell. Sergeant Vertierra.”

In one way she admired their military precision, their faultless bearing and straight-ahead gaze; but in another she suspected, though it was hard to say why, that it was less a show of military courtesy than posting a boundary between her and them…. She told them to stand at ease. They glanced at one another, then sat back down and resumed shoveling food.

“Anything new, Captain?” she asked Kohler. “Or are we still on hold?”

“No word, ma'am. Colonel Paulik flew out right after the briefing last night.”

“So what's the plan?”

“I thought you and Commander Lenson might want to get in some shooting,” Kohler said. He smiled, very faintly. “Just in case.”

She looked at the others, but not one of them met her eye.

 

ONLY YESTERDAY
she'd been seeing patients in Rafhā', at the Ninety-third Evacuation Hospital. Rows of ISO shelters—rigid-framed tents, complete with box-framed doors and plywood floors—pegged into the cold sand. Gray sky, dun sand, green tents.

“You can get dressed now, Warrant Officer,” she said, snapping latex off her hands. As the patient slid off the examining table she turned away to give him privacy, dropping her gloves into the infectious-waste bin. As he
dressed she went to the door to look out. The cold light of Arabian winter laid itself against the flat sandy waste beyond the compound entrance, over concertina wire spiraled through welded Xs of steel I-beam. Like the spiral of DNA, she thought, of some recurrent and malevolent virus or rickettsia.

The warrant asked her a question, and she answered patiently. He'd accomplished the nearly impossible task of catching a venereal disease in Saudi Arabia, or so someone thought, and had been driven over from the Sixty-second Medical Group at Log Base Charlie for evaluation.

That was her job, she and the four other MDs and lab techs in the Deployable Diagnostic Laboratory. Pulled together fast and ad hoc from Fort Detrick, they had a fairly sophisticated setup: polymerase chain reaction equipment, gel electrophoresis boxes, spectrophotometer, centrifuges, thermal cyclers. From the bags of urine and blood and the occasional live patient they coaxed leishmaniasis, sand fly fever, dysentery, and a dozen other bugs the Arabian Peninsula provided free of charge to visitors. Around their tent stretched a square kilometer of other, identical ISOs and the older-style GP Large tents. And the Ninety-third was just one of forty-four field hospitals scattered across Saudi Arabia and Bahrain.

The beds were ready. The instruments gleamed ready. Twenty-five thousand army medics in-country. No one knew when the offensive would start, but the computers estimated there would be thirty-three thousand dead and wounded, more casualties faster than the army had processed since Korea. Not only would they arrive en masse, they'd probably come contaminated with nerve gas, mustard, or biological agents. No wonder everyone walked around looking apprehensive, those who weren't in their bunks. Catching up on sleep before it started.

When the patient left at last—she suspected he had leishmaniasis, not syphilis, but the tests would tell the tale—she looked at her watch. She'd promised herself
noon off. Down the center of the compound stretched a straight street screened from the desert by the acres of canvas. During the summer the women gathered there to sunbathe on towels and folding chairs. It was too cold now to think about tanning, but she could walk up and down the half mile of boot-scuffed sand. She could not leave the compound. The Saudis wanted American women kept out of sight. She pulled her scrubs off and went out into the little waiting area.

The techs and the warrant with leishmaniasis (or syphilis…or maybe, she thought for the first time, chancroid? The cultures would not lie) were sitting watching CNN. The picture was wavery, and there was no sound, but she recognized Wolf Blitzer. Then a video began, black and white, grainy, streaked with static. A squared-off building grew in a set of crosshairs. It rushed toward the camera, larger and larger. The last frame was of a pair of blast doors. Then the screen went blank. The watchers stirred uneasily, as if expecting something more, or something different.

“Doctor?”

Brockman was her sergeant first class; she took care of the details, Maddox only occasionally read what she was signing, to keep her honest. “Colonel Eitzler wants to see you stat. In the HQ tent.”

She nodded and walked out. Not knowing that was her call to arms.

 

SIR, MA'AM,
I'm not going to turn you into recon marines in a day. What I'm going to try to do is show you what you need to know to survive, and not to screw up so badly somebody gets hurt.”

She and the naval officer, Lenson, sat down on the sand. Lenson looked uncomfortable in battle dress. They obviously weren't his; they were short in the legs. She said to the lance corporal, “Just a moment, Corporal. I'm
not sure I understand why I'm getting this indoctrination, or whatever it is.”

Nichols looked surprised. “Well, ma'am…the captain said, take you and the commander out and give you what you needed to know. Aren't you our attachments?”

She smiled. “He is. I'm not. I'm just here to give you the medical background on the threat.”

Nichols still looked puzzled, so she just said, “Well, just go on and do what you have to do. I'll cooperate.” It came in useful sometimes, knowing how the troops operated.

“All right, ma'am…as I was saying. We don't sit down in the field. When we stop, it's take a knee. When we're in a rest area, take a knee. Once you sit down you want to lay down, when you lay down you want to go to sleep,” he told them. “So go to a knee instead. All right, now I'm going to show you how to cammy up.”

“I know that,” she said. She'd done it in field exercises, but he acted like he hadn't heard, just showed them how; a smear of green on their palms, a quick wipe down each other's face. He told them to forget the Rambo movies, different colors and fancy patterns. If their faces didn't reflect light, it was enough; hours of humping and sweating would make a mess of anything more elaborate anyway.

Nichols went from there to their gear. He explained how each item they carried had to be in the proper pocket. Each patrol member had to be able to find any item on his buddy's body without searching and without speech. Signal mirror, insect repellent, compass and maps, where to stow each one. Next he covered “deuce gear,” a web-belt-and-suspenders combination that held canteens, ammo pouches, first aid kit, butt pack.

He showed them how to secure each piece of equipment with the green nylon line he called “ranger cord”, how to insert the batteries upside-down in the flashlight, so a jostle wouldn't turn it on accidentally, revealing their
location at night or exhausting the batteries in daylight; a dozen other tips she could see were designed for walking zombies, sleepless and exhausted. She nodded, and the marine moved on to the ruck, how to stow it and wear it. “You won't be carrying the mission gear. We'll be humping that. If an attachment can manage his own weapon and ammo, and what he'll need at the objective, that's enough.”

That sounded good, but when she stood at last with full ruck and web gear, it was like being teleported to Jupiter. She hitched the belt up and regarded six full canteens with dismay. “I've heard of water retention, but this is ridiculous.”

They stared at her, and she said, “Oh, never mind. What else?”

“Well, if you're ready, I was going to run you through some basic squad tactics.” Nichols gave it a beat. “We patrol in what we call Ranger file. The point man first. Then the team leader.”

They went to a knee and he selected some stones lying handy. He laid them out in a line, then began switching them around. He went through the drills for hostile contact, ambushes, sniper fire or air attack or artillery fire. When he was done, Lenson asked him to go over them again. Maureen nodded. Everyone in the team would have to know them cold; there would be no time for explanations in the rapid ballet of fire and movement. To hesitate or head in the wrong direction would be like jamming a finely tuned machine. The men sat hunched over, eyes locked on the pebbles as Nichols moved them about on the gritty damp sand under the gray sky. She looked at them, so intent it was cute, like little boys playing war, and asked herself wryly why she never met any guys like this back in Frederick.

 

HER FIRST
husband had been a drummer, a musician, from Toledo, where she'd grown up. They'd dated in high
school and for some reason she no longer remembered she'd married Mickey the year she entered med school.
No
married human being belonged in med school. But he said when she graduated she could support his career. And somehow she heard that as a bargain, thought
he
would help
her
out while she was in school.

Instead he started eating. He modeled clothes part-time, mostly suits, but as his waistline expanded, demand for his image decreased. Then one day he came home; they'd let him go at his day job, working stats at an ad agency. After that he spent his nights with the band and his days rolling blunts and eating pizza and chips in the apartment. When she told one of her instructors about her money troubles, he suggested the Army Reserve.

Their last day together she came home to find a new set of drums in the living room. Mickey had charged it on their Visa card. Her accession bonus, money she'd counted on to see them through the semester. That night she told him he had to take the drums back, lose weight, and get a job. She took his stash from under the waterbed and flushed it down the toilet. He'd left without a word, a pout on his puffy but still-handsome face. She'd wondered for years if it had been her fault, if somehow
she
had turned him into that overweight, apathetic slug.

 

COLONEL EITZLER
was the CO of the Ninety-third. He returned her salute as she reported, told her to have a seat and help herself to coffee, all he had was instant but it had caffeine in it. He'd be back in a minute. She sat down, picking up a copy of the September
JAMA
. It wasn't a real office, just a medical headquarters tent, the kind she'd been in all over the world.

The funny thing was that she'd been in Saudi Arabia since October, but so far hadn't seen a single Arab. Landing at King Fahd had been like landing at a US base. Americans, American vehicles, what looked like light tanks, American aircraft and army MPs with guard dogs.
An enlisted man met her with a Toyota jeep. He told her they were going to Ascon Village. “What is that?” she said. He told her the Saudis had built Ascon for the Bedouin nomads, who'd stayed two days and decided town life wasn't for them. It looked like a suburb in Ohio, except for little raked-pebble front yards instead of lawns. From there she'd flown to Rafhā', and here, except for the occasional trip to a unit that had reported intestinal complaints, she had stayed.

Eitzler came back in. He introduced the stocky officer with him as Lieutenant Colonel Anders Paulik, US Marine Corps. The marine smiled grimly at her. “Major.”

“Good morning, Doctor,” she said, rather coolly. He raised his eyebrows and she noticed too late he wasn't wearing the caduceus. For some reason she didn't like this man. It was the kind of instant impression she tried to guard against.

Paulik was asking about her, if she was the one from Fort Detrick. She said there were several personnel here from USAMRIID.

“But you're the one who works biodefense?”

“No—at least, not the way I think you mean. I'm a preventive medicine officer. Right now we're having an outbreak of
Shigella
dysentery. We're trying to identify the source and put preventive measures in place.”

“But that's not your specialty, is it?” Anders said. “Back home?”

“I specialize in zoonotic and other exotic infectious disease.”

“Including anthrax?”

She didn't react for a moment. Then she said, “That's what I spend most of my time working on back at Fort Detrick.”

Anders had been looking at her legs, her chest. She didn't like it, but she was used to it. From certain men. He said suddenly, “You play sports, Doctor?”