Sand and Fire (9780698137844) Read online

  “I’ll be right back,” Doc Albright said.

  The veterinarian returned with a syringe. He didn’t even take Digger into the examination room. Right there in the waiting room, with the puppy in Blount’s lap, the vet pinched fur from the scruff of the animal’s neck, inserted the needle. Doc Albright depressed the plunger, and Blount watched the clear liquid disappear into his best friend’s veins. As soon as the needle came out, the beagle stopped shaking. The pup relaxed immediately. His eyes changed color. He wagged his tail, licked Blount’s thumb.

  “That was quick,” Grandpa said.

  “It usually is, if it works,” Doc Albright said. “Bring him back if he don’t look right tomorrow, but I think he’ll be fine.”

  “What do you say?” Grandpa asked.

  “Thank you,” Blount said. “Sir.”

  On the ride home, Grandpa said, “I’m proud of you, boy. You found a problem, but you didn’t go squalling like a child. You figured out the situation and took action. That’s thinking like a man.”

  Digger lived long enough to greet Private Blount on his return from boot camp.

  Back at Route One, Gunnery Sergeant Blount found men in full MOPP chem-protection gear: gas masks, charcoal-impregnated suits, butyl gloves. Blount snapped on a set of medical gloves and went to work.

  In the parking lot, he found the Italian girl in the black dress. Somehow she’d crawled or staggered outside. Lying on the pavement, she looked even worse. Sweat beaded on her cheeks as if she’d just run a desert marathon. Wrinkles radiated out from her eyes, her face contorted. She continued to heave, though nothing came up from her stomach. The girl made a primal groaning sound and spat out a mouthful of mucus and saliva. Blount took a knee beside her, pulled out a pair of injectors.

  “I gotcha, miss,” he said. “I got what you need.”

  He took the first injector, a plastic cylinder the size and shape of a felt-tip marker. Blount removed the yellow safety cap at one end, arming the spring-loaded needle at the other end. The girl moaned again and rolled onto her side. That position was good; it exposed the fleshy backs of her thighs, and Blount didn’t want to punch a needle into her bone. With his left hand, the Marine held her knees to keep her from moving again. With his right, he pressed the atropine injector to the girl’s upper leg.

  A click from inside the injector told Blount the two-inch needle had rammed home. If the Italian felt pain, she did not show it. She only continued to twitch and drool. Poor girl’s nervous system is so jacked up, Blount thought, she probably can’t tell one hurt from another. He counted ten seconds and pulled out the needle. Then he uncapped the other injector, the one labeled PRALIDOXIME CHLORIDE.

  He pressed the injector against her other thigh, felt the snap of the spring. After another ten-count, he removed the needle. Blount rolled the girl over on her back.

  The wrinkles around her eyes faded as the muscles in her face relaxed. She coughed, glanced around, focused on Blount. Now she looked at him with the eyes of a human instead of a dying wild animal.

  “Grazie,” she breathed. A barely audible whisper, but Blount understood.

  He stretched out her sleeve and poked both needles through the fabric. Using his thumb and forefinger, he bent the needles into fishhook shapes so they’d hang from the dress. That way, other rescuers would know the girl had received one dose.

  One was apparently enough. The girl probably didn’t weigh a hundred pounds. She’d have been gorgeous, Blount thought, if she hadn’t just been poisoned nearly to death. Her chest rose and fell evenly now. Blount left her and surveyed the mess around him.

  The nurse from the clinic ran up, looked around, and bent over a patient. She held an injector to his leg. A few feet away, Fender worked on another victim. Blount threw the box of gloves to the corporal.

  “Put these on,” Blount ordered.

  “Aye, Gunny.”

  Sarin tended to disperse quickly. Blount figured that was the only reason he and Fender hadn’t dropped dead like tobacco worms sprayed with malathion.

  Yards away, between two parked cars, a man lay shaking on the ground. Maybe he’d stumbled that far before collapsing. Blount stepped over both moving and motionless bodies to reach him. Blount felt a shock of recognition when he saw the face, twisted and smeared with vomit: his old platoon commander, Lieutenant Kelley. At least a major by now. Kelley wore a white civilian dress shirt streaked with dirt, blood, and spit.

  “Sir, it’s me, Blount. Sir, can you talk?”

  Kelley showed no sign that he even heard the question. He let out a long keening sound through chattering teeth. Blount uncapped a set of injectors, pressed both of them against the officer’s leg. The needles snapped simultaneously, and Blount felt the antidotes coursing through the plastic housing of the injectors.

  Please let this fix him, Blount thought. Please don’t let me be too late. Blount counted to ten, pulled out the needles.

  Kelley entered some deeper form of spasms. The officer’s fists clasped so tightly that his fingernails cut into his palms. His head slammed against the front tire of the car beside him. His knees knocked together, and his skin took on a gray cast. In the course of two wars, Blount had witnessed all manner of dying. But he had never seen anything like this. Nerve gas turned its victims into ghouls right before it killed them.

  From his training he knew that, in severe cases, you administered three doses, one right after the other. If this wasn’t severe, then the word had no meaning. He armed another pair of injectors, jammed them against Kelley’s thigh. Once again he heard the twin snaps. Kelley continued to twitch and shake. After ten seconds, Blount pulled out the needles and uncapped a third pair of injectors.

  Once more, he jammed the injectors against Kelley’s leg, watched the spring-loaded needles strike through fabric and into flesh. He tried to hold the needles in place. In deep convulsions, Kelley wrenched and thrashed. As Kelley twisted to his left, he jerked his leg away from Blount’s hand. Both needles came out of the officer’s thigh. Blount found himself holding two injectors, each needle spewing liquid uselessly into the air.

  “Damn it,” Blount hissed.

  Blount stabbed the needles back into Kelley’s leg and held them there as the injectors emptied.

  Kelley stopped trembling. Blount thought the triple dose had finally worked. But Kelley did not move at all. Blount yanked out the spent injectors and tried to roll the officer onto his back. The man’s eyes appeared dull and fixed, pupils constricted to dots. Kelley had quit breathing. No pulse, either. If those shrunken pupils saw anything, it was not in this world.

  Blount stared for a moment, a fistful of Kelley’s shirt still in his hand. The antidote was supposed to work; he’d just seen it work fine on that girl.

  He had shared long deployments and deadly firefights with this officer. But after all that, Kelley had to die like this? Without even getting a chance to fight back?

  CHAPTER 2

  The Omni Air International DC-10 rotated off the runway at Sigonella and climbed into the dusty Mediterranean sky. Blount had stayed up all night helping treat victims of the gas attack and load them into ambulances. At last count, the sarin had killed twelve American service members and four Italians. Twice that many people remained in hospitals.

  Blount had wanted his final homecoming to be a joyous event, bringing him a sense of satisfaction and completion. Like the old song said, a time to lay down his sword and shield, down by the riverside, and study war no more. Enter a life of community and tranquility, family, and friends. Summer evenings with the girls on the porch, making ice cream the good kind of way, turning the crank by hand. Bass fishing and rabbit hunting.

  But now he could feel only anger and guilt. Somebody had poisoned his friends and comrades-in-arms, along with defenseless civilians. Made them die in one of the worst ways you could think of. And for what? Even if the bad guys had
any kind of legitimate grievance—and Blount didn’t believe they did—nothing justified their tactics. His own people had suffered worse than anything most jihadists had ever experienced, and his elders had overcome through dignity and nonviolence. Nothing excused terrorism. Ever.

  So Blount was mad, for sure. But what kept him awake now, even in his sleep-deprived state, were the questions. Could he have saved Kelley? Blount had let the needles come loose when administering the third dose, and some of the drugs had squirted onto the pavement. Would that wasted antidote have been just enough, just in time, to help his friend? Maybe not. But guilt was the enemy that stalked Blount in his dreams, and now that enemy carried even more ammunition.

  As the island of Sardinia slid under the wings, a flight attendant came by.

  “Is there anything you need, sir?” she asked.

  Blount liked the civilian crews of these Defense Department charters. Always respectful and appreciative. They saw the faces of the warriors every day, so they had some idea of war’s cost. For too many folks back stateside, combat amounted to nothing but a reality-TV show. A channel to flip through between Wheel of Fortune and the Home Shopping Network.

  “No, ma’am,” Blount said. “I’m good.”

  What he needed waited a few thousand miles across that water. Bernadette and his daughters, Ruthie and Priscilla.

  The DC-10 made a refueling stop at Naval Station Rota in Spain. Blount waited in the passenger terminal and saw a group of Marines who had just flown in from Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. Their battalion was attached to the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit. Blount’s battalion was attached to another Lejeune-based MEU, the 22nd. A young sergeant dropped his seabag on the floor and sat next to Blount.

  “Where you headed?” Blount asked.

  “Getting on the boat from here, Gunny. Sailing out on the Iwo Jima.”

  The USS Iwo Jima was an amphibious assault ship, built specifically for taking Marines to a fight. With all the recent trouble in North Africa, maybe a strong force floating in the Med would make terrorists think twice.

  Blount knew well the mix of excitement and apprehension the Marines of the 24th MEU would be feeling about this deployment. Another challenge, another chance to back up your buddies and prove your worth to the organization you loved. But along with the anticipation came the fear of what might happen to some of those buddies.

  In the snack bar next to the passenger terminal, Blount bought an egg sandwich and a half pint of orange juice. He didn’t really feel hungry, just tired, but he still couldn’t sleep. He sat in a booth, pulled off the sandwich’s top slice of bread, and shook black pepper onto the fried egg. Put the bread back into place. As he ate, he gazed idly at the snack bar’s display of a matador’s sword, cape, and felt hat. Then he ordered the only thing the snack bar made really well, a cup of café con leche. He stirred the Spanish-style coffee, sat down at another booth under a television tuned to CNN. The anchor handed off the broadcast to a reporter speaking live from Sigonella:

  “The death toll has risen to twenty in the nerve gas attack on a nightclub outside the American naval air station here. Some officials have compared this strike to the 1995 Tokyo subway incident, when the Aum Shinrikyo cult killed thirteen people with sarin gas.

  “However, the Japanese attack involved liquid sarin carried in plastic bags. Last night’s incident used weaponized sarin delivered by some sort of munition. Investigators say it appears an explosive device was planted inside the nightclub. The attack targeted only the club; the air station’s security was never breached.

  “The base here remains on its highest level of alert, which the military calls Force Protection Condition Delta. So far, no terrorist group has claimed responsibility.”

  A voice on the PA system called Blount’s flight. Blount swallowed the last of his coffee, then joined the passengers filing up the air stairs into the DC-10. Minutes later, the jet thundered away from the ground and banked to the west. Blount watched the wide beaches of Rota pass beneath him; across the bay, he saw the ancient port of Cádiz. Years ago he’d taken a walking tour of Cádiz’s Old Town and learned how this region had once come under the rule of Moors campaigning north from the Sahara. For centuries, swords had crossed at this meeting place of continents. He thought of the Marines about to board the Iwo Jima, and he wished them Godspeed.

  Blount finally fell asleep after the DC-10 leveled off above the Atlantic. About two hours later, he woke from his nap with a blank mind. For just a second, he had to ask himself why he felt anxiety. What was wrong? Then all the events of the night before came back to him, with the image of Kelley as he trembled, drooled, then stared blankly out of dead eyes.

  Kelley and Blount had fought together a decade ago across the rooftops and back alleys of Fallujah. The town hosted a hornet’s nest of insurgents, many of them not even Iraqi. Intel thought one of them might be Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian terrorist infamous for the on-camera beheading of American contractor Nicholas Berg. When the networks ran the Berg story, they cut away from the video after al-Zarqawi drew his knife. But at an intel briefing, Blount saw the entire thing. The sight sickened him and filled him with determination. Apparently, it had the same effect on his commanders. They decided Fallujah had to be cleared.

  So the Marines, along with some real bad Scottish dudes called the Black Watch, sealed off the place after encouraging civilians to leave. Then Blount’s platoon helped sweep through the town, house by house, bullet by bullet. They called it Operation Phantom Fury.

  From Blount’s point of view, the op went pretty well until Corporal Lane got hit. As the platoon advanced by ones and twos across a street, a boom scattered pigeons from the power lines drooping overhead. Warm blood spattered Blount’s face like spray from a hot shower. Just in front of Blount, Lane collapsed.

  Blount grabbed Lane by his tactical vest and dragged him to a house that the platoon had already cleared. The rest of the platoon took cover among riddled buildings lining the street. Kelley and a medical corpsman followed Blount into the house. Just to make sure they were safe, Kelley swept the room with his rifle and checked a stairway at the back. No shots, no bad guys inside. Blount wiped his eyes and face. His glove came away bloody, with some kind of sticky matter mixed in.

  The corpsman dropped his medical ruck beside Lane, who had taken a round in the mouth. Or maybe the cheek or chin. The high-velocity slug had torn up his face so badly it was hard to tell. Lane gurgled and coughed once. The cough sprayed blood. Then he seemed to struggle to inhale. Lane stared up at the ceiling, scraped the floor with his heels as if he needed to push himself up out of water to breathe.

  “Damn it,” the corpsman said. “I gotta open his trachea.”

  “How can I help, Doc?” Blount asked.

  “Hold his head steady. Extend his neck just a little bit.”

  Blount placed his knees on either side of Lane’s helmet. He put one hand under the wounded man’s neck and lifted as gently as he could.

  “That’s good,” the corpsman said. “Keep him in that position.”

  Kelley looked on as he spoke on his radio. “Anybody got eyes on that shooter?”

  An answer came back amid electronic blips and pops: “Negative, sir.”

  The corpsman dug a gauze pad and a curved plastic tube from his medical kit. He opened the blade of a folding knife. Tapped two fingers on Lane’s Adam’s apple. Lane clawed at the floor and tried to sit up. Blount held him down.

  “Hold still, bud,” Blount said. “I know it feels like you’re suffocating. Doc’s gon’ fix you right up.” Funny thing, Blount thought, to cut a man’s throat to save him.

  The corpsman placed the tip of his blade on Lane’s throat and made a vertical incision about an inch and a half long. A little line of blood appeared. He stroked with the knife again to deepen the cut, and then pulled the edges of the incision farther apart. Dabbed away the
blood with the gauze, then cut again.

  The depth of the cut surprised Blount. He’d always thought a man’s windpipe lay right under the skin. The corpsman sliced through yet another layer of tissue, and the light-colored rings of Lane’s trachea became visible. Doc twisted his wrist and made a horizontal cut, this one much smaller. Air hissed through the opening. The corpsman shoved the tube into the hole, and the edges of the cut closed around the tube.

  Lane’s breath sounded strangely hollow as it flowed through the tube. He stopped struggling.

  “You the man,” Blount told Doc.

  The corpsman ignored the compliment. “We gotta get him out of here,” he said.

  Automatic-weapons fire sputtered from somewhere outside. The rip of an AK. Two pops on semiauto answered. That’s what Fallujah usually sounded like: hajjis spraying and Marines aiming. The single shot that got Lane was an exception.

  Outside, from behind doorways and courtyard walls where they’d taken cover, other members of the platoon sized up the situation and checked in with Kelley. Blount heard the calls over the officer’s MBITR radio.

  “We got multiple shooters in a building to the west,” a squad leader reported. “They got a field of fire over anything that moves farther down the street.”

  Kelley tried to look out a window, but he couldn’t have seen much from that vantage point. A ray of light through the cracked glass highlighted the name tag Velcroed to his vest. The tag bore his name and the Marine Corps emblem, along with other notations: 1LT, USMC, A POS. Kelley put his hands on his thighs, sighed hard. Then he stood up and, with his thumb and forefinger, pressed the push-to-talk switch clipped to the front of his body armor. Spoke into his radio again.

  “See if you can get up on the roofs and put some rounds on them. Hold them where they are until I can get an AT4 up here and shoot a rocket up their ass.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  Blount liked the sound of that. Try to pin us down, will you? Better watch what you wish for.