Sand and Fire (9780698137844) Read online

  Several minutes ticked by with no more radio traffic: just the hiss and whine of an open channel, along with occasional crackles caused by the distant lightning. Then the first voice came back, this time speaking much more quickly.

  “Simba, Piranha One. We are—” The man held down his talk switch but paused for some reason. Gunfire sputtered around him. “We are under fire. Enemy in a row of houses to our east.” More staccato pops in the background, along with shouted orders too indistinct to make out.

  “Roger, Piranha. Shark will link up with you.”

  Another stretch of silence followed. Blount looked at Captain Privett, who tapped a pen across his palm. Nervous energy caused by frustration, Blount figured. Tough to listen to friendlies in contact and have no way to help them.

  “Do they have air cover?” Blount asked.

  “None that I’ve heard about.”

  Too bad. A gunship or attack jet might have helped those guys a lot. But American, French, and British aircraft were still moving into the region. Without all the pieces in place, troops who got into a scrape just might have to fight by themselves.

  The radio squelch broke again. The shooting sounded louder this time. “Simba—” The soldier let go of his transmit switch. Privett shook his head, glanced up at Blount. The soldier on the radio called once more: “Simba, where is Shark?” The boom of a grenade or mortar round rattled through the tinny speaker.

  More seconds of silence passed. The next time the squelch broke, Blount heard more shooting, a scream, and shouts in Arabic.

  “They’re getting overrun,” Blount said.

  Privett nodded, pressed his lips together, looked at the radio.

  “Piranha, what is your status?” a voice called.

  No answer.

  “Piranha, what is your status?”

  The static streamed unbroken for a moment, until a click brought back the sounds of battle. No words, but more shooting.

  Then some voices off mike. They sounded close, and they spoke in Arabic. Someone responded in English.

  “Please.”

  A burst of automatic fire sounded over the air.

  Click.

  Silence.

  Privett stared at the map in front of him. “Damn it,” he whispered.

  Every time Blount lost one of his brothers in arms, a little piece of him died, too. He didn’t know this AU troop just executed by terrorists. But he’d followed the losing battle, listened in on the man’s final moments. Just hearing the voice speak that last word formed enough of a bond for Blount to connect with this unknown soldier. Whatever the guy’s training or skill, he’d used what he had to try to fight the madness in his world. And if he had a family, they would soon know their worst fears had been realized.

  Blount left the TACLOG and went outside to the rail. The thunderclouds to the east glowered closer now. Their darkness blocked the sun and turned midafternoon to dusk. Needles of rain spat from the sky, flung sideways by rising wind. In his marksman’s mind, Blount made an instinctive calculation: that wind felt like twenty-five to thirty miles per hour. The ship’s forward progress complicated the math a little. But with the wind quartering off the bow, you’d correct for half-value wind speed if your target lay straight ahead. Dial in the setting. Spotter ready. Shooter ready. Fire.

  Sailors scurried around on the flight deck. Blount didn’t know their duties; perhaps they were preparing the Tarawa to face the storm. The ship heaved through rising waves; Blount felt that first little gut-turn of seasickness. The crests of the swells frothed white. Ahead, the clouds roiled and rose in what looked like a conscious display of menace.

  Lightning speared the surface of the ocean. Blount happened to be looking right where it struck; he thought he actually saw steam rise where fire hit the water. The bolt burned his eyes. When he closed them he could still see the lightning’s jagged imprint on his retinas.

  As he waited for his eyes to recover, he heard a shout from somewhere behind him.

  “Man overboard! Port side, man overboard!”

  The word passed quickly. A few seconds later an order came over the loudspeakers of the 1 Main Circuit, the shipwide public address.

  “Man overboard, port side. Launch the alert helo.”

  A flight crew ran to a waiting Seahawk: two pilots, a crew chief, a pair of rescue swimmers. Farther down the deck, a sailor grabbed a smoke float, yanked the pull ring, and tossed the float over the side. Orange smoke churned from the float and streamed downwind.

  Despite the crew’s quick action, Blount supposed the float marked only the general area to search. The Tarawa might have traveled several hundred yards between the moment the man fell overboard and when the smoke float hit the water.

  Six blasts sounded from the ship’s whistle. Overhead, someone ran up the Oscar flag, a square signal panel divided diagonally into triangles of red and yellow. The Oscar snapped and fluttered against a sky as slate-gray as the Tarawa itself. Sailors mustered in groups so their chiefs could determine who was missing. Blount reported to the TACLOG; all Marines were accounted for.

  When he went back outside, the Seahawk’s rotors were turning. In the gusting wind, the helicopter rose unsteadily. Its wheels left the deck, touched down again. The rotor blades slapped a louder rhythm, and then the Seahawk climbed away and lowered its nose.

  Blount wanted to help, but he had no role in the procedure. Rescuing a man overboard was one of the most basic naval skills; he knew the sailors would have trained until this drill became second nature. Still, he scanned the water. Spotting the dot of a man’s head would prove difficult in these conditions. Sailors working on the flight deck wore a vest with an emergency light, but even that could be hard to spot on a day like today. Spiderwebs of foam sizzled across the ocean’s troughs and peaks. Rain fell steady and dimpled the surface of the water. Gusts blew harder and kept shifting direction—now off the bow, now quartering, now off the beam.

  The helicopter turned and passed off the port side, just meters above the sea. The aircraft flew alongside the Tarawa’s wake, the crew probably hoping the path of churned water would lead them to their lost sailor.

  The smoke float receded in the distance. As the smoke spewed into the air, wind snatched and scattered the wisps like sails torn from a yardarm.

  Blount thought that if he were a superstitious man, he might have seen this accident as a kind of test, some challenge from a Neptune angered by the ship’s presence: You men of the Tarawa may pass no farther until you prove your worth. He wanted to reply in defiance, to shout into the wind: I got a score to settle and nothing’s getting in my way. Then he remembered his grandfather’s words. Fight to protect, not to punish. Act from love instead of hate.

  Try as he might, Blount could not see anything that looked like a man in the water. The Seahawk turned, crossed the wake, turned again. Then the aircraft slowed and hovered. Its main rotor whipped the surface and slashed spray into a microstorm boiling beneath the helicopter.

  Thank God, Blount thought. They found him. Just hope he ain’t drowned.

  A metal basket swung from the Seahawk’s hoist. One of the rescue swimmers rode the basket to the ocean’s surface, and the man kept looking down and pointing. The basket descended, disappeared into a trough. A few moments later Blount spotted the basket sliding up the shoulder of a wave, two men inside. Blount clapped and cheered along with the sailors around him.

  The cable tightened, and the basket rose into the air, dripping. The rescue swimmer worked on the figure splayed beside him. Not a good sign. Blount wondered if the swimmer performed CPR.

  The hoist reeled the cable until the basket dangled just outside the helicopter’s starboard-side door. Gloved hands reached for the basket and cable, pulled the rescue swimmer and sailor inside. Closed the cabin door.

  Sweet, Blount thought. He found it a pleasure to watch folks who knew
what they were doing, whether they flew a helo, shot a rifle, or built a barn. A man could get real good at something and use that skill to make the world a better place, even if only for a little while in a little area. Blount worried about the condition of the sailor, but at least the guy was in good hands.

  Rain stung Blount’s cheeks. Gusts whipped the Oscar flag in new directions, and what looked like white stones began bouncing on the steel expanse of the Tarawa.

  Hail, Blount realized. He’d seen a hailstorm strip a field of tobacco right down to the stalks, and he wondered what the ice rocks would do to the helicopter’s rotors. The shearing wind wouldn’t help, either. Those pilots sure had their hands full; old Neptune was in a real bad mood.

  The Seahawk accelerated out of its hover, dipped its nose, flew straight on toward the Tarawa. Blount felt the ship turn a few degrees; maybe the skipper wanted to put the bow into the wind to make it easier for the chopper to land. Blount’s Air Force friend, Colonel Michael Parson, had once told him everything that flies lands into the wind, from a sparrow to a space shuttle. Trouble was, the wind kept shifting.

  The helo clattered alongside the ship, crossed overhead, turned and flew astern. Blount guessed the pilots were trying to get a feel for the wind. The aircraft lined up on final approach, grew larger as it descended toward the deck.

  Gusts rocked the Seahawk. It banked, corrected, bounced some more. Wipers ticked a rhythm across the windscreen. The helo crossed over the stern and lowered itself toward the yellow and white lines painted along the flight deck. Almost home free.

  Blount felt the wind against his face die away completely. Then a gust hit him from behind. Rain and hail lashed down in a torrent.

  The Seahawk banked hard. Dropped to the deck like it forgot how to fly.

  Rotor blades struck steel plating and shattered into shrapnel. The helo rolled onto its port side, tail rotor and stubs of the main rotor blades still spinning. Flames erupted from the engines. Cracks clouded the windscreen, but Blount could see the crew inside struggling with harnesses, pulling at latches.

  Sailors ran for the downed chopper. Hoses appeared from everywhere, and a blast of foam doused the fire. Blount expected to see fliers piling out of their stricken aircraft, but all the doors remained closed. From outside the helo, sailors yanked at handles, but the Seahawk remained sealed.

  Blount wondered why in the world they couldn’t get that thing opened. Then it dawned on him. The chopper had hit just hard enough to bend the frame. The doors were jammed.

  He charged toward the Seahawk, boots splashing through pooling rain. Maybe the sailors had a hydraulic tool to tear into that thing like a can opener. That could take several minutes, though, and in the meantime Blount could lend them some muscle.

  The fire was out, thank the Good Lord. But if that boy they’d plucked from the water had suffered cardiac arrest, he needed to get to the medical bay right this minute.

  Blount pushed three sailors out of the way, climbed up on the side of the helicopter. Rain streamed over the airframe, made for slick footing. The chopper’s cabin door—aft of the cockpit—had two windows; he could see crewmen inside struggling with some sort of handle.

  “Can you jettison these windows?” Blount shouted. He didn’t know all the particulars of the Seahawk, but he knew every military aircraft was designed so you could get out of it fast.

  A muffled voice inside answered, “We can’t get the jettison lever unlocked.”

  Blount placed his hands on the cabin door’s exterior handle, turned it away from the position marked CLOSED & LOCKED. He braced one boot against a landing gear strut and pulled.

  Every fiber of his muscles burned. His teeth gritted. He uttered a growl as he pitted bone and tendon against buckled aluminum. The door scraped open about two inches. More voices called from inside the aircraft.

  “We’re gonna lose this guy if we can’t get him out of here.”

  “Pop out that front door.”

  A fist smacked against the window of the small cockpit door in front of Blount. The door detached and slid to the flight deck. Two gloved hands appeared at the edges of the door opening, and a pilot pried himself from the chopper, still wearing his helmet. All right, that was progress. Able-bodied men could scramble free that way pretty easily. But the cockpit door made a mighty small hole for pulling out an unconscious patient. Blount still needed to get the main door open.

  He adjusted his footing, shifted his handhold. A sailor climbed up beside him and looked for a spot to brace himself. The landing gear strut offered the only good point for leverage, with room for just one man. Blount appreciated the help, but he’d have to do this alone.

  “I got it, bud,” Blount said. “Just make sure this thing don’t catch on fire again.”

  “Aye, aye, Gunny.”

  The sailor slid off of the helicopter, and Blount set himself for another try. He adjusted his feet. Gripped the edge of the door and pulled not just with his arms, but with his entire body working as a crowbar. A simple matter of raw strength multiplied by mechanical advantage.

  Blount’s whole frame tensed with effort. He felt his spine compress, the cartilage in his elbows stretch. Another growl escaped his open mouth, and raindrops flecked his tongue. The metal began to cut into his fingers, and he wished he’d worn gloves. The muscles in his face squeezed hard enough to force his eyes closed.

  Just as he sensed his back had taken all it could withstand, the door screeched open about a foot. The sailors cheered.

  “Hit it one more time, Gunny,” one of them cried.

  Blount relaxed for a moment, took two deep breaths. Thought to himself, Please just gimme strength for another minute. Stiffened his body, and pulled again.

  The bound-up rollers in the door tracks broke free. The door slid fully open with such force that Blount lost his balance and fell from the aircraft. Instinct took over, and he used a martial arts move to break his fall: he slapped his forearms onto the ship’s deck just as his hips and back hit the wet metal. Banged his elbows, and that hurt something awful, but better than cracking his head.

  Two sailors climbed inside the helo and helped the rescue swimmers lift their patient out of the aircraft.

  “Will he make it?” a sailor asked.

  “I think so,” one of the rescue swimmers said.

  Blount lay on his back in the rain, spent. Blood trickled from shallow cuts in his fingers. Fender came over to check on him.

  “I’m good, bud,” Blount said.

  The men lowered the patient to the deck and took him away on a litter. A sailor ran up with a Hurst tool.

  “Don’t need it,” one of his shipmates called. “The gunnery sergeant kicked that helicopter’s ass.”

  Sailors laughed. Blount sat up and smiled, his uniform soaked. He thought of one of the stories his grandfather had read him when he was a child. Something about steel-driving John Henry outworking the steam hammer, but then dying of a heart attack. I beat the Hurst tool before it even got here, Blount thought, and all I got is cut fingers. He felt the pounding of his heart begin to slow to a normal rate. Fender helped him to his feet.

  Blount rubbed his elbows. They still stung. Behind him, two petty officers spoke as if he weren’t there. Perhaps they thought the wind covered their words, but Blount heard it all.

  “That’s one of the biggest dudes I ever seen in my life,” one of them said.

  “Yeah,” his shipmate answered. “Seems like a real nice guy, but you don’t ever, ever want him mad at you.”

  CHAPTER 10

  Sophia Gold worried as soon as the helicopters thudded overhead. The United Nations refugee camp expected no visitors today. Outside the UNHCR tents, she squinted, shaded her eyes with her palm, and recognized three old Soviet-designed choppers of the Kenya Defence Forces, flying on behalf of the African Union. The aircraft carried the red, green, and black r
oundel of Kenya’s air force, along with the emblem of the AU: a gold-colored map of Africa that showed no national boundaries.

  The aircraft approached to land at the camp’s makeshift helipad, a few hundred yards away from the camp. Rotors churned the warm air, and the helicopters seemed to crawl through the sky. As they descended, dust erupted beneath them, kicked into the air by downwash. The sand swirled against the billowing tents, and Gold clamped her eyelids shut. When the gritty gale subsided, she opened her eyes to see Major Ongondo emerge from the lead helicopter.

  The Kenyan officer did not have on a MOPP suit today. Instead he wore camo fatigues in the British style for temperate weather: a green-dominated pattern of black, beige, and brown. Not ideal for the desert, but certainly more comfortable than full chem gear. His shoulders sagged under the weight of a flak jacket stiff with ceramic plates, and he carried a Heckler & Koch G3 rifle on a sling over his shoulder.

  The helicopters shut down, and men jumped from the crew doors. They opened the rear clamshell doors at the back of the choppers, and Ongondo and his men began unloading patients. Nurses and medics ran to help, and Gold went with them. Wounded men, women, and children lay on stretchers. Some of the men wore uniforms; the others were civilians. They seemed to have been evacuated hurriedly; a few of the injured had not even received first aid. A small boy in a blood-spattered Pokémon T-shirt uttered moans that sounded more like the screech of an animal than any sound a human would make. Something, probably a high-velocity bullet, had torn through his hand and left a bleeding mass of tendons and splintered bone.

  Gold climbed aboard one of the helicopters and took one end of a stretcher by its wooden handles. Ongondo lifted the other end, and they carried an injured woman out through the back of the chopper. A bandage filthy with blood and dust covered the woman’s shoulder.

  “Ah, Ms. Gold,” Ongondo said as they shuffled toward the medical tent. “I remember you.”