Sand and Fire (9780698137844) Read online

  Before Blount sat down at the table, he embraced his wife. Her freshly washed hair smelled like lavender. The evening before, she had made love to him long into the night. He’d awakened to that same lavender smell on her pillow. By then she had dressed and gone out the door to her job as the guidance counselor at Beaufort High School, over on Lady’s Island.

  The television blared in the background. Bernadette picked up the remote, muted the sound of the newscast, and said, “Priscilla, why don’t you say the blessing?”

  Blount’s eldest prayed over the food, and then Bernadette began ladling the Chicken Bog. Steam rose from every spoonful. The one-dish, rice-based meal reminded Blount of the pilau they served in Afghanistan, but the seasonings tasted completely different.

  “So, what did you do today, baby?” Bernadette asked. “Did you get caught up on your sleep?”

  “Not really,” Blount said. “My body clock still don’t know where it is. I went over to the sheriff’s department today to see about a job.”

  “What did they say?”

  “They’re not hiring. Budget cuts.”

  “Don’t worry. Between all the sheriff and police departments around here, plus the highway patrol, I’m sure somebody’ll take you.”

  “I reckon.”

  “But don’t go with the highway patrol if they want to put you way up in District Three. You’ve been away from home enough.”

  “Yeah,” Ruthie said.

  Priscilla nodded, chewing.

  They could afford to wait for him to find the right job. Bernadette’s position paid all right, so they’d always saved most of what he made as a Marine. Gunnery sergeant pay, especially with a combat-zone tax exclusion, added up pretty good. That’s how they’d got this house. But it wasn’t just about the money. Blount wanted to feel like he was doing somebody some good. And he had a real specific skill set.

  He picked up the pitcher of sweet tea and poured. The ice in his glass cracked and popped like distant rifle fire as the tea flowed over it. When he took a sip, his hand encircled the tea glass the way a smaller man’s hand might wrap around a shot glass. He swallowed, set the glass back down on the coaster gently. Blount knew his strength, and he seldom broke anything he didn’t mean to break.

  As he ate, he kept one eye on the silent television. After a commercial for some video game, an anchor opened a new segment. A graphic appeared over the anchor’s shoulder—a black skull and crossbones. The screen cut to images of a desert town, and a new graphic read VIDEO FROM AL ARABIYA NEWS SERVICE. Women wailed and waved their arms by a row of body bags. Blount took the remote and turned up the volume.

  “. . . in the second chemical weapons attack by terrorists in a week. A spokesman for the African Union says at least nineteen people died near the Libyan town of Ghat. So far, there has been no claim of responsibility. But a variety of terror groups have staged conventional attacks across North Africa in recent months, and the use of even more destructive weapons is prompting calls for international assistance. Chemical agents such as mustard gas and sarin can cause horrible injuries, and we warn you that some of the following video is graphic.”

  A screaming child appeared with folds of skin hanging from her arms. Blount thumbed the remote’s power button and turned off the set. He didn’t want his girls to see some of what he’d seen. Bernadette looked at him but didn’t say anything.

  After dinner, Blount worked on unpacking. He took his seabag up to the master bedroom and began to put away uniforms. Eventually he’d move them from the closet to the attic, but he needed them for a little while yet. Later this week he’d drive to Camp Lejeune up in North Carolina. He’d sit through some separation briefings and get started on outprocessing.

  At the bottom of the seabag he found his old KA-BAR knife. The knife meant more to him than just an heirloom. He had carried it with him on every operation since boot camp. With this blade he had sliced parachute cord, hacked Euphrates River reeds, cut away clothing to give first aid to wounded buddies. And on one dark night in Afghanistan, he had taken a life with it. What to do with it now?

  He descended the stairs, went outside, and walked across the backyard where he planned to put in that big garden next spring. An old toolshed stood under a live oak behind the house. Blount lifted the hasp and pulled open the door.

  In the dim light he pulled the twine hanging from the overhead lamp, and the naked bulb winked on. The previous owner had cleared out all the tools; little remained in the shed except a bare wooden workbench. Pretty soon Blount would bring in new rakes, hoes, and probably a motorized tiller. Once he got the fence built around the pasture, the toolshed would also store tack, hay, and other things for the girls’ pony. He had plenty of time for all that, though.

  He could not think of a better place for the fighting knife than here in the toolshed by the garden, its fighting days done. Symbol of a long mission ended.

  Blount unsheathed the knife, held the grip in his fist. Stabbed the blade hard into the top of the workbench. He slammed the knife in so deep, no one but him would have the muscle to remove it. Blount placed the sheath down beside the knife. In the aged leather he could still make out the lettering that read USMC.

  The original owner, Blount’s maternal grandfather, had always taken pride that his grandson carried that knife. Grandpa Buell, now ninety-two, resided at an assisted-living facility outside Beaufort. He’d outlived his wife and most of his strength, but the old Marine’s mind remained sharp as ever. Grandpa had mentored Blount through some pretty tough times. A talk with the old man always helped put things in perspective. Blount decided to drive over and say hello, but first he went back into the house to tell Bernadette where he was going.

  “Oh, good,” Bernadette said. “You can take him these for me.”

  She wrapped aluminum foil over two dishes—a quart of Chicken Bog and half of a sweet potato pie. Blount carried the dishes out to his Ram and placed them on the floor of the passenger’s side.

  His truck gleamed; Bernadette and the girls had washed and waxed it for him before he got home. The Marine Corps sticker on the rear window shone with red lettering on a yellow background. Because Blount lived near the Beaufort air station and the Parris Island recruit depot, he saw USMC stickers on cars and trucks all over the place. Some of the stickers carried funny messages: THE 72 VIRGINS DATE COUNSELORS, TRAVEL AGENTS TO ALLAH, or HEAVEN WON’T TAKE US AND HELL’S AFRAID WE’LL TAKE OVER. Nothing wrong with a laugh, but Blount had chosen a sticker more in line with how he saw himself and his job: NO BETTER FRIEND, NO WORSE ENEMY.

  But the Corps would soon become his former job. Blount felt overjoyed to return to his family. However, he’d expected to end his time in the Marines with more sense of a journey seen through, a mission accomplished. He knew he shouldn’t take personally that sarin attack in Sigonella. Hard not to take it that way, though, after watching his old platoon commander die. And the news tonight brought that stuff right into his own dining room.

  A sense of loss came over him as he started his truck and steered down a narrow lane lined with cypress trees, their limbs dripping with Spanish moss. Who am I going to be now? Blount wondered. But then he told himself to stop talking foolishness. Nobody stayed in the Corps forever. Hadn’t he pushed his luck far enough?

  Blount shut down his truck in the parking lot of Sunrise Senior Living. He knocked on the door of his grandfather’s suite and found the old Marine sitting in his wheelchair. An oxygen tube wrapped over his ears and led to a cannula in his nose. The television chattered with CNN at low volume, and Grandpa held a book in his lap—a thousand-page doorstop on American foreign policy since 9/11. Even in the old-folks’ home, he kept up with current events, just like the intel sergeant major he’d once been. A shadow box hung on the wall. The box contained an NCO’s ceremonial sword, a row of medals, and a folded flag that had flown over the Capitol during the Ford administration
.

  “Hey, Grandpa. It’s me,” Blount said.

  “Welcome home, boy,” Grandpa said. He closed his book, spread his arms wide, and smiled. “I reckon this is welcome home for good.”

  “I guess so. Brought you some Chicken Bog and sweet potato pie.”

  “Come on in. I already ate, so just stick it in the refrigerator. I’ll eat it tomorrow. Bernadette cooks better than the chow hall we got here, that’s for sure.”

  Blount placed the two dishes in the small fridge and bent to embrace his grandfather. Then he sat down in a recliner beside the wheelchair.

  “You’re looking good,” Blount said. He liked the way the old man stayed engaged with the world. What a blessing he still had his intellect. There were people down the hall who had no idea where they were or what was happening around them.

  “I’m doing all right. I see y’all had some trouble at Sig.”

  “Yes, sir. We did.”

  Grandpa pulled down his glasses, furrowed his gray eyebrows, and regarded Blount as if giving him a medical exam.

  “You feeling okay? That sarin’s some bad stuff. I don’t know how in this world you didn’t get exposed when you ran inside that place. Boy, you got more balls than brains.”

  Well, Grandpa hadn’t heard that part on the news. Bernadette must have told him everything. Fair enough.

  “We didn’t know it was nerve gas until we got in there, Grandpa. Corporal Fender and I got lucky, I reckon.”

  “You got that right.”

  “Maybe I won’t have to deal with nothing else like that.”

  Grandpa took a long breath of oxygen, reached into his pocket, and pulled out two peppermints. He handed one to Blount and unwrapped the other for himself. Blount opened the foil, popped the peppermint into his mouth, and crushed it between his molars. The peppermint ritual went back to their earliest conversations. The cool rush of sugar took him decades into the past, nearly brought tears to his eyes.

  “So how do you feel about leaving the Corps?” Grandpa asked. “You gon’ be a deputy?”

  Just like him, Blount thought. Straight to the heart of things.

  “That’s a good question. The department’s not hiring for now.”

  Blount wondered what his grandfather thought about his separation from the Corps. Grandpa had made a full career of the Marines—Okinawa, Inchon, Khe Sanh. Thirty years. Blount cared little what any man thought of him, except the man before him now.

  “I bet I know what you’re thinking,” Grandpa said. “You’re glad to be home, but you’re torn. It don’t feel like you thought it would feel.”

  The last shards of peppermint melted away on Blount’s tongue. How could that old man read his mind?

  “I didn’t think I’d feel torn. But I have been ever since I watched my old platoon commander dying outside that nightclub.”

  “So you knew one of them?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Grandpa raised his hand, crooked a wrinkled finger at Blount.

  “Listen to me, boy. You got nothing to prove to nobody. I’m so proud of you I could bust. You done more for your country already than most folks could ever imagine. It’s all right if you leave. It’s all right if you stay. You just gotta decide how you feel. And Bernadette and the girls, too.”

  That was the trouble. Blount knew how he felt right up until he heard the boom that stopped the music at Route One. But with a new threat out there, the whole recipe changed. Or did it? How would his wife and kids feel if he went back into harm’s way after telling them he was done?

  Plenty of service members joined up, served one enlistment, then got out. Saw more in one combat tour than anybody should see in a lifetime. And no one questioned their devotion to duty. So why do you want to tear yourself up about leaving after twenty years? Blount asked himself. You’ve seen enough for several lifetimes.

  Grandpa took off his glasses and began surfing through the TV channels. He stopped on one program, apparently at random. Four young adults—two men and two women—gestured and paced around a living room. Talked like something real serious had taken place. Grandpa punched up the volume a little, and Blount realized this was one of those reality shows where they put people together in a rent-free house and saw how they got along. These four were fighting over who would sweep the patio.

  “You ever hear such nonsense in all your born days?” Grandpa asked.

  “I just can’t believe they pay people for that.”

  Blount’s grandfather turned off the television and said, “I changed my mind. Let’s have some of that pie.”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  Blount searched the cabinets and found paper plates, two forks, and a knife. He and his grandfather shared the sweet potato pie and said little else. Just enjoyed each other’s company. The flavor of brown sugar, the crunch of the double crust, filled Blount with a sense of safety and belonging. Funny how tastes and smells could do that. The odor of sewage took him to Fallujah. Choking dust swept him into Helmand Province. Rifle smoke carried him to the ranges of Quantico. And sweet potatoes and cinnamon brought him home.

  When his grandfather got drowsy, Blount asked, “Want me to help you get into bed?”

  “No, I got it. Just come on back as soon as you can.”

  “I will, Grandpa.”

  Blount hugged his grandfather goodbye, went out to his truck. As he drove home, a car began to tailgate him on the two-lane highway. Blount was already doing sixty-five in a fifty-five; he saw no reason to drive faster. The car rode his bumper for two or three miles. If Blount had braked for a deer, the idiot back there would have rear-ended him. Finally, the car—it turned out to be a Camaro—zipped around him in a no-passing zone. Evidently the driver was not one of the local Marines. The Camaro displayed a bumper sticker, but one that had nothing to do with the Corps: HOW’S MY DRIVING? CALL 1-800-EAT-SHIT.

  What’s wrong with people? Blount wondered. You’d have to have no respect for anybody, including yourself. Relating to the civilian world, he figured, might take some getting used to.

  CHAPTER 5

  In the ops center at Stuttgart, Germany, Michael Parson watched a drone feed from over the Libyan town of Ghat. Funeral processions inched along streets and alleys as mourners carried shrouded bodies from mosques to cemeteries. The victims came from an outlying village, and bereaved relatives had brought them into town for burial. Though the chemicals from the attack would almost certainly have dissipated by now, Parson could understand why the mourners didn’t want to hold funerals in the village itself.

  The sad parades had gone on for days. Muslims tried to bury their dead by the next sunset. So Parson surmised that the funerals he was watching—there seemed to be two separate ones—were for people who died today or last night. More and more of those hurt in the chemical attack lost their struggle for life as time went on. What a damned awful way to go, he thought.

  A young French officer stood beside Parson. The Frenchman wore the epaulets of a captain and the wings of a pilot. Parson had rolled his eyes when he learned he would work with allied militaries and get an assistant from the French Army of the Air. But the French had just kicked ass while fighting insurgents in Mali. This young captain, Alain Chartier, had put a hurting on some bad guys from the cockpit of his Mirage, and that made him all right by Parson.

  Chartier didn’t brag too much, either—unlike a lot of fighter jocks. Instead, he related stories that gave credit to teamwork. For example, he talked about the time he got so fixated on hitting his target that he let his fuel get critically low. An emergency refueling from an American KC-135 Stratotanker kept him from having to eject over insurgent territory. As he told his story, he tried to use American military slang, but he got it only half right.

  “I was growing fangs and not paying attention to other things,” Chartier had said. “That boom operator saved my pork.�
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  Parson laughed and said, “Bacon. He saved your bacon.”

  “Oui. Bacon.”

  But they weren’t laughing now. The color image on the screen tilted when the Global Hawk rolled into a turn. Then the image righted itself as the sensor suite corrected for the bank angle. The sensor operator, working from a Mission Control Element at Beale Air Force Base, California, zoomed in closer and adjusted the focus on a shrouded bundle held aloft by a dozen hands.

  “C’est dommage,” Chartier said.

  “How’s that?” Parson asked.

  “A pity. Too bad.”

  “Yeah, it’s a damned shame.”

  Chartier watched the screen for a while, seemed lost in thought. Eventually he said, “Do you think they will send you—us—into North Africa again?”

  “Hard to say. We have Marines on a ship in the Med. Did I hear you guys have your Foreign Legion on alert?”

  “Oui. Yes, sir. And other units, too.”

  “I hope it doesn’t come to another war.”

  “I would like to fly over the Sahara the way Saint-Ex did, in a simple little plane, in peace.”

  “The way who did?”

  “Saint-Ex,” Chartier said. “Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. French pilot and author.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “Ah, you must come to know Saint-Ex, sir. He will remind you why you learned to fly in the first place. He flew airmail routes over Africa and South America in the 1920s and ’30s, and he wrote of the Sahara like a beloved mistress. But then he died in the Second World War.”

  “Sorry to hear that,” Parson said. He looked up at the Saharan image on the screen, and he found it hard to imagine loving such a wasteland. Maybe this Saint-Ex guy had hit the Bordeaux a little too hard.

  The Global Hawk flew several more orbits over Ghat, and still Parson saw nothing but the town and its mourners. He’d been working on a theory, and he decided to see if that drone could prove what he suspected. On a secure telephone, he placed a call to the drone’s command center at Beale. When a master sergeant answered, Parson identified himself and explained what he wanted.