Excerpt from: BLACK STORM
St. Martin's Press, New York. ISBN (TK). Publication Date
Spring 2002.
Prologue
0100 22 February 1991: The Saudi Desert
No one spoke after the helicopter
lifted off. The engine noise overwhelmed all sound, walling off each
mind within the compass of its own skull. The deck shuddered, tilting
as the pilot pulled into a bank. Beyond the door gunner, hunched
over the pintle mounts for the machine gun, impenetrable night hurtled
by as they gathered speed.
The desert winter was cold and rainy, the worst
in thirty years. For days now a black overcast had sealed off the
stars. It opened only to loose soot-smelling, dust-gritty rain over
the half million men who waited, scattered across the desert, or cooped
in gray steel out on the Gulf, for the word to attack.
The helo dropped, steadied, hurling northward barely
a hundred feet above the sand.
Seven dark figures lay tumbled in the crew compartment,
where they’d hurled themselves during the thirty seconds the Navy combat
search and rescue Seahawk had touched down at the pickup point.
It held no seats, just bare aluminumwalled space lit by faint green lights
to port and starboard. The team’s camouflage battledress had no rank
insignia, no unit patches. They lay on top of gear and rucks and
weapons and each other, like some composite organism that had only dimly
come to consciousness of itself.
The pilot tilted his head back, peering beneath
night vision goggles as a line of blue-white lights lifted over the horizon.
The Tapline Road ran parallel to the border. Under the brilliant
lights both lanes were filled with tanker trucks and tank transporters,
all heading west. The headlights passed beneath the speeding aircraft,
and fell quickly aft. As darkness retook the world he looked through
the goggles again.
A weird topography of green and black floated up.
A dry undulating sea of sand and sand and sand, of barren ridges and blasted
wadis. And, fleeing close above it, the haloed green exhaust-flare,
pulled from the deep infrared by the lenses and amplifiers of the goggles,
of another aircraft.
The black helicopter ahead was an Air Force Pave
Hawk bird. It had better avionics and weapons, including a sophisticated
terrain-avoidance radar, but the Navy HH-60 had better navigation.
The pilot tracked it through the goggles, rising when it rose, dropping
when it dropped. When he had the rhythm he said softly into the intercom,
“Gunny, you on the line yet? Slap a cranial on him, Minky.”
“Six team leader on the line,” said a voice.
“That you, sir?”
“Welcome aboard the Baghdad Shuttle, Gunny.
Intel hasn’t changed, ingress is the same, but we may need to make some
last-minute decisions re primary versus alternate LZ. How about reviewing
that with my right seater.”
A faint green light clicked on, focused on an air
chart. Across the lower quarter a dotted stripe zagged from left
to right, gradually angling down. North of it were a series of circles,
carefully drawn in grease pencil. They grew denser and more closely
spaced toward the top of the chart, and some overlapped.
The copilot’s gloved hand pressed a pencil-point
down west of a blue-tinted scatter of lakes and marshland. It was
covered by two of the circles, which marked the threat radii of antiair
missile batteries. The copilot said, “We’ll know a few mikes out
if the primary’s a go.”
The team leader said, “It better be a go, sir.
You were at the briefing. We’ve got too far to hump from there as
it is.”
“Well, we’ll give it our best shot, Gunny.
Just warning you there may be some turbulence en route. Tray tables
in full upright position. You know the drill.”
“Just get us there,” said the team leader.
“Sir.”
“Roger that,” said the pilot.
# # #
The recon team leader was thirty years old.
He’d grown up as an Air Force brat, moving here and there around the country
until he enlisted in the Marine Corps at eighteen. Now he looked
closely at the map, going over the route and the plan for the thousandth
time in his mind. Turnaround and jumpoff, Point Charlie, Point Delta,
objective. In an hour and a half they’d be on the ground a hundred
and forty miles inside Iraq.
The air war had been underway since the UN deadline
expired on 17 January. The Air Force and Navy had been pounding the
Iraqis for four weeks now, starting with command and communications nodes
in Baghdad, then shifting to the ground forces dug in around Kuwait.
Some intelligence sources said they were decimated. Others said Saddam’s
Republican Guard was dug in so deep the bombing barely scratched them.
The fog and rain hadn’t helped.
He’d seen what happened when you underestimated
your enemy. Night after night on the perimeter in Beirut, that hot
fall of ‘83, listening to the crackle of gunfire as the Syrians, Israelis,
Palestinians, Hezbollah, and every other faction in the Middle East fought
it out. Someone with a direct line to God had set the Marines down
in the middle of it. He’d thought the locals understood they were
protecting them. Till he’d been awakened one October night by an
enormous explosion.
The truck bomb had killed two hundred and
forty-one marines.
You didn’t underestimate Arabs. They
were courteous. They were patient. It was only when you thought
they were finished that they became truly dangerous. Then they didn’t
care if they lived or died, as long as they could take you with them.
He stared into the darkness beyond the windshield.
If he put on his NVGs, he’d see as well as the pilot. But it would
be better to conserve batteries for the mission. For a second fear
pierced him, like a sharpened icicle jammed up inside his skull.
He took a deep breath, reminding himself he had a good team and a solid
plan. They’d briefed and trained, not as much as he’d have liked,
but enough.
His own life didn’t matter. Any justification
for it had vanished in the blast of a shotgun a year ago. Bringing
his men back was the only reason he still had to stay alive.
But no mission ever went as it was planned.
And no one really knew what lay ahead in the dark, on the far side of the
invisible line that separated the two massive armies built up over the
last six months. Two massive forces, moving inexorably toward the
final impact.
# # #
The pilot asked the copilot for the next vector. He’d already
forgotten the men in the cargo compartment, behind them. He was too
wrapped up in flying thirty feet off the ground.
The two helos had taken off from the Allied
base at Al Jouf on a false course, then angled north and picked up the
team off a deserted stretch of road. So far neither helicopter had
come up on the radio. The Pave Hawk blinked its infrared position
lights each time they went over a check point. They’d preplanned
and timed the routes in and out, routing them through or beneath blind
zones in the coverage of the SA-8 and Roland sites. If they did it
right, they’d finish the insertion without a single radio transmission.
Which would be eminently desirable, considering
the French- and Russian-trained technicians who manned the direction-finding
posts, electronic intelligence posts, radar sites, and antiaircraft missile
batteries ahead.
“Cougar, Red Wolf Two.”
“Roll to Indigo, Red Wolf Two.”
He snapped to the new frequency. “Red
Wolf Two plus one, gate Tarzan, thence to xray kilo oscar papa, thence
kilo uniform victor delta, charlie charlie mike papa, lima alfa uniform
bravo. Read back, over.”
The distant AWACS bird, orbiting in great
slow circles thirty thousand feet above the Gulf, rogered his presence
and read back his intended flight path. Now they were safe from the
hunters above the clouds, USAF and Saudi F-15s, Navy F-18s, French Mirages,
Italian and British Tornados.
Unless someone made a mistake.
He was worrying about that, about what they
called “blue on blue,” when suddenly the Pave Hawk jinked violently.
He hauled around too, just as a dune loomed up out of the dark ahead and
flashed past their rotor tips at a hundred and twenty miles an hour.
Instead of rising the two aircraft dipped
even lower, into a wadi, and increased speed, flashing along barely twenty
feet off the lightless desert.
# # #
The assistant team leader, twenty-eight years old, from Farmingdale, New York, was huddled close to the vanishingly dim green light in the crew compartment, a coverless, dogeared, cola-spotted paperback held four inches in front of his eyes. His lips held a cool curve, lopsided, almost ironic, even though he wasn’t thinking anything amusing. He was leaning against the med kit, which he carried along with the usual weapon and 782 gear. The turbines howled, the fuselage swayed, G forces pressed him against the bulkhead, but he didn’t react. He was deep in One Hundred Tips for Making Your Small Business Work. The chapters had titles like: Focus on Service. Automate your Bookkeeping. Hire the Person, Not the Position. He was memorizing it, a page at a time. His lips moved silently, still tilted in that faint amused curve.
# # #
“Thirty seconds to the gate,” said the copilot,
who was simultaneously kneeboarding his map, working the GPS, and plotting
each waypoint on the Tacnav display. The pilot risked a quick glance
at the screen, then jerked his eyes back to the ground as it rose again,
as if the land itself was reaching up to stop them. He blinked sweat
out of his eyes, wishing he could see more clearly. Through the goggles
the hurtling desert floor was blur and shadows, boiling with the random
energy of amplified photons. He blinked again and squeezed his eyes
shut, then popped them open and hauled hard on the collective as beside
him his co-pilot sucked in his breath involuntarily.
If they hit one of those dunes, they’d never
have time to realize they were dead.
# # #
Back in the crew compartment, the naval officer
had lain motionless for the first few minutes, trying to get control of
his breathing. Feeling the others around him, pressed against him;
feeling the angles of the Hechler and Koch nine-millimeter under his legs.
Watching the door gunner, who craned downlooking into the blast of noise
and darkness and icy wind.
What the hell was he doing here, anyway?
He’d served in the Gulf before, but always aboard ship. He should
be miles offshore, navigating a destroyer toward a naval gunfire support
position. What was he doing with his face smeared with camo paint,
carrying a submachine gun and an eighty-pound pack? Would he ever
see his daughter again, or the woman who’d asked him once, one cool night
in a darkened garden, if he thought they could make a life together?
Instead he’d put the Navy first. As
he always had. Ahead of his ex-wife. Ahead of his daughter.
But maybe he’d been making a mistake all along. Institutions knew
no gratitude. But they needed people to blame when things went wrong;
and all too often, he’d been the nearest bystander.
He touched the equipment lashed and clipped
to his load-bearing gear. Night vision goggles. Gas mask.
Grenades. Canteens. Knife, flashlight, magazine pouch, antitank
weapon, compass, everything dummy-corded so a man couldn’t lose it in the
dark, no matter how clumsy or how sleep-deprived he got.
If the team found what they were looking for,
his mission would be to destroy it. In the pack of references in
his thigh pocket, he had all he needed to do that.
But now he suddenly struggled to sit up, feeling
suddenly sick as he remembered what else he carried: not as gear or maps,
but in his head. The Iraqis were set up to repel an amphibious invasion,
a Marine Corps assault from the sea. But that threat was a sham.
The marines would not be landing. If Saddam ever realized that, he
could wheel his forces south. Blunting, and maybe even stopping,
the impending Coalition assault across the Kuwaiti border.
He hoped the men around him were good.
Because as far as he could see, he was only going to be a burden until
they reached the objective. Once they did that, he was pretty sure
he could do what a very angry four-star general had ordered him to do.
If they got there alive.
# # #
“Penetration checklist rechecked complete,” the copilot said.
The pilot licked his lips but didn’t answer.
He squatted the helicopter even lower, shaving the last inches away between
the terrain and the hurtling aircraft’s belly. Now all light was
gone. Neither sky nor desert yielded the faintest luminosity.
Even through the goggles, the only illumination was the jittering, fanlike
glow of the Pave Hawk’s engine-heat two hundred meters ahead.
“Wadi coming up. Tarzan gate, twenty
seconds.”
The “Tarzan gate” was a lowlying ravine, or
wadi, that snaked across the border. Border-crossers could use it
as a tunnel under the Iraqi ground radars. But only if you flew low
enough. He pushed the cyclic forward even more, fighting his way
nearer to the earth. The earth was safety. But it was also
mortal danger.
“There’s the entrance,” said the co-pilot,
and at the same moment the Pave Hawk swerved. The pilot tilted the
stick slightly and the twenty-one tons of helicopter and crew and passengers
swung onto the new heading and tracked down the looming-up escarpments,
down through the blowing darkness, the clatterslam of rotating blades carrying
far out over the nightshrouded land.
# # #
At the very back of the compartment, the corporal held the butt of the
Glock he’d stuffed into his cargo pocket after the preloading inspection.
He was twenty-four, an E-4, the youngest man on the team. This was
his first recon combat patrol, and he was trying with all his might to
not crap his trou. He’d dropped them twice as they waited at the
pickup site, but now he had to go again. It was the lousy raghead
water. That and the shitty food, the Pak rice and the lettuce they
trucked down from the Bekaa. He shouldn’t of ate that lettuce.
Everybody knew the fucking Ay-rabs shit on the fucking lettuce to make
it grow, that was their fertilizer, goddamn it, goddamn.
The other guys had worked together before.
They had their own, like, code words. They acted like he was shit.
But once they hit the ground he’d be out in front. The scout.
The point. If he fucked up, they’d all get blown away. His
lips drew back from his teeth and in the dark and noise he panted hard,
trying to turn fear into hatred. Fucking ragheads. Smelly goat-fucking
ay-rack-ee motherfuckers. He hoped he got to score. God, come
on, let me score.
His hand found the butt of the Glock again,
and his finger lightly stroked the trigger.
# # #
“Mark, the border,” said the copilot, over the intercom so their passengers
could hear.
The pilot grunted. He was down to twenty
feet now, and totally fixated on not flying into the ground. Voiding
that ground-contact warranty. Gluing the shadow to the airplane.
Jokes, his brain feeding back jokes so he didn’t actually have to think
about how close death was. It had happened to crews before.
You didn’t have any depth perception with the goggles, just light and shade
and the blurry speckling seethe of amplified light. An H-60 would
make a hell of a big hole in the sand.
The Pave Hawk swung hard left and tracked
up a side wadi, the bluff edges closing in, then rose, rose, as the land
climbed. He pulled the collective and climbed too, following, then
suddenly popped up over a rise.
They went over the Bedouin camp about ten
feet up. He only realized what it was after they were past, retrieving
from memory the conical tents a fraction of a second before they rocketed
over them, the dark sparkling with gun-flashes. The Bedoui gypsied
back and forth over the border. Some were Iraqi, others Saudi, most
pretty much independent of both sides, according to the briefers.
Like the Arabs said, me and my brother against my cousin, me and my cousins
against the infidel.
The pilot hoped he never went down out here.
He was Jewish.
A brilliant flash jerked his head around.
A climbing flame rose majestically out of the dark. He ignored it,
knowing it probably didn’t have a lock-on. The border Arabs had Strelas,
but they launched them blind, without waiting for a fire-acquisition tone.
True to form, the glare wavered, then fell aft and at last plunged downward
to lose itself in the chalk-dust and sand-cloud plume they were dragging
across the desert floor behind them.
The Air Force chopper was getting too far
ahead. He couldn’t lose sight of it. They needed two birds
in case one went down. Pushing the cyclic forward as he added power,
he breathed very slowly in and out, and with tiny, nearly imperceptible
movements of the stick threaded the hurtling needle of night.
# # #
The communicator rolled himself awkwardly, humping the weight of ruck
and radio and batteries and ammo slowly up the back of the aluminum column
that enclosed the landing gear shock absorbers, till he could sit upright.
Rifle and radio, if you had those you could get through just about anything.
Defend yourself with one, save yourself with the other. Call in fire.
Call in air support. Call in emergency extract if things went to
shit.
He couldn’t get over how cold it was.
Seemed like the coldest place he’d ever been. He squeezed his eyes
closed and tried to see the map. Made himself go over it all again,
how they were going to do the linkup, the passwords, the frequencies.
He’d left Guatemala when he was nine.
He did not recall much of those days, of what his aunt still spoke in mutters
of as la violencia. But he remembered listening to the distant flutter-beat
of helicopters moving over the folded green jungle, deep ravines and lofty
mountains. The government troops could not catch the guerrilleros.
So they wiped out the K’iche’ villages they said supported the rebels.
The troops came from the sky, and killed everyone. Women. Children.
Everything that lived. So that in the night he woke, hearing the
distant pulse of rotorblades, and lay wondering if they were coming to
kill his family.
And now he was a soldier. No, not a
soldier, a Marine . . . but he wore a uniform and carried a gun . . . and
now he himself, little A Tun who was, rode the invisible helicopters through
the night. Did children listen fearfully now below him, linking past
to future in an invisible chain? When had that chain begun?
When would it end? The fear in his belly, was it the fear of a child?
When did a man stop being a child? When did a Guatemalan become an
American, cowboy-confident in himself and his gun?
He thought, but did not speak. He seldom
spoke. Only when there was need.
Somewhere in there, thinking about it, he
went to sleep.
# # #
The copilot sat tensely, plotting fixes and trying to keep his hands
from shaking. He wanted a cigarette, but knew he couldn’t have one.
The ground flashed by too close to look at. So he didn’t, just kept
his eyeballs pressed to the map and then the Tacnav, trying to keep his
jitters under control.
An hour went by that way, and nothing changed
except that they were now a hundred miles inside Iraq. The fuel-onboard
gauge dropped gradually as they headed northeast, threading between two
SA-8 sites and then swinging due east to pass the Roland battery at Mudaysis.
The ground getting flatter, less cut by wadis. The relief going level,
into what looked like meticulously graded gravel.
What terrified him was the emptiness.
On and on and nothing living, no vegetation, no trees, not the smallest
stunted bush. As if death itself had moved over this empty terrain.
Some immense evil in the shadow of which nothing could live. Occasionally
a tone in their earphones signaled the edges of a missile envelope, the
invisible grope of a fire-control radar. But each time they heard
it the Pave Hawk had already turned away, and they banked to follow and
the deadly whine faded.
# # #
The sniper was from Yauhannah, South Carolina. He was twenty-six.
He’d rolled aboard folded over his rifle, tucking the scope into his gut,
protecting his zero. He’d lived with the Colt for four years, and
shot it in every day during the lockdown. A heavy-barrel sniper-select
M-16 with a 203 forty-millimeter grenade launcher under the rifle barrel.
The nine-mils were okay for close quarters, but you could reach out and
touch someone with the 5.56. Day or night, he could put a bullet
through a man’s eye socket at four hundred meters. One shot.
One kill.
Like at Khafji. When the Iraqi armor
came through, and surrounded them in that deserted town.
The colonel had climbed out of the tank in
his natty greens and black beret like Saddam himself. From the rooftop
overlooking the square the sniper had put the crosshairs down on him.
Looked for a moment into his face; the heavy black mustache, the sunglasses,
the self-satisfied smirk. He’d taken one more click for the wind,
sucked a slow breath and half let it out. Then one after the other
shot the colonel and then the three other officers who sat frozen in the
staff car, still staring at the man whose skull had suddenly opened like
a grisly tulip in front of them. By his third round the enlisted
troops got wise, diving for cover, but the staffies just sat with their
seat belts buckled as he killed them one after the other. When he
had punched all their tickets he’d gone back to the tank in time to see
the colonel roll off his perch on the frontal armor and topple face down
into a skystreaked puddle-rut filled with the rain that had fallen all
that day.
He hadn’t felt bad about it. If they
didn’t want to get their asses shot off, they shouldn’t have invaded somebody
else’s country. Shouldn’t have taken on the US Marine Corps, and
with it, package deal, the best damn sniper ever born.
He just wished he had something to chew.
Aside from that, he was perfectly content. Rifle tucked protectively
along his side, he stared out into the passing night.
# # #
At 0150, the sky ahead suddenly turned to white fire. It outlined
the lead helicopter black against white, so clearly the pilot could see
its rotors going around.
He hauled into a hard bank, his goggles flaring
into a solid blinding brilliance as the light kept increasing. He
pushed them up, close to panic, and saw the light pouring down across the
desert as the fire climbed toward the sky. For a moment he couldn’t
tell what it was.
“It’s a fucking SCUD,” breathed his co-pilot.
“Tag the waypoint, goddamn it, tag it now.”
A wall of tracers rose suddenly and all at
once out of the desert, blazing toward and then over them. They were
huge, brilliant, but the pilot could barely see them. Afterimages
chased across dazzled retinas, fear shuddered his hands. They were
from ZSU-23s. A four-barreled, twenty-three-millimeter son of a bitch
with a dish radar on a tank chassis, and for every one of those huge balls
of tracer there were three high-explosive rounds in between. If they
locked him up, he was dead. He popped chaff but knew it might not help.
Out of control, the helicopter lurched to
starboard, rotor tips clawing toward the sand.
# # #
The Army doctor lay with her eyes squeezed tight, trying not to throw
up. She’d felt sick to her stomach ever since they took off.
She hated helicopters. She didn’t think this was going to work. A
squad of grunts, on foot, trying to find what a mad dictator had spent
years and billions to hide? What the CIA couldn’t find, and Defense
Intelligence said didn’t exist? These people were insane. Totally
unconnected to reality.
But they wouldn’t listen to her. When
four stars gave an order, that was the burning bush. But it wasn’t
just that. Even she had to admit it.
She’d studied with Fayzah Al-Syori.
Fayzah worshipped Saddam. But could she do something like this?
Could any physician? It was bullshit. It had to be.
But with that many lives at stake, you couldn’t
take a chance. You couldn’t stand aside when people started perverting
everything science had learned in the century since Pasteur first guessed
what all those strange little wigglers you saw through the microscope were
actually doing.
A terrifying roar came through the howl of
the engine. Light played through the canted windows, throwing flickering
shadows across the greasepainted faces around her. She flung her
arms out instinctively as the nose pitched up. Gay bright Independence
Day sparklers she recognized after a horrified instant as tracers burned
past the door gunner. Then the flame was inside, with them.
A deafening bang cracked through the metal around her. And God help
her, she hadn’t meant to, but that was her screaming as they went down.
# # #
The team leader reached out and grabbed the people closest to him.
If the helo went in they’d ballistic through the cockpit windshield a fraction
of a second after the pilots. Holding on to them wouldn’t help.
He knew that. But it was all there was to do.
The door gunner was firing. Not bursts,
just a steady clatter like he didn’t care if he burned the barrel out.
Another round punched through the fuselage, loud as a stun grenade in a
closed room. Blinded, deafened, he braced for impact.
So they were right, the ones who’d said it
was too risky. But Semper Fi wasn’t just a word. It meant accepting
risk, when the mission called for it. Accepting the possibility that
you, and the men you led, might not come back.
They were heading for the desert floor, bodies
sliding toward him and then lifting off the deck as the aircraft nosed
over. He wasn’t afraid, though. Hadn’t been afraid of anything
since the night he’d shot his son.
Clamping his teeth together, holding tight
to his men, he closed his eyes and waited for the end.
-----------
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