Sand and Fire (9780698137844) Read online

  “Are you ready to initiate secure transmission, sir?” the sergeant asked.

  “Sure. Going secure.”

  Parson pressed a button on the specially designed phone, and the handset hissed and beeped for a few seconds. Then the sergeant’s voice came back, as clearly as before.

  “I’ll get the mission commander for you.”

  “Thanks,” Parson said. Chartier looked at him with raised eyebrows. Parson placed his hand over the receiver and whispered to the Frenchman, “This is what we call a WAG—a wild-ass guess.”

  Or maybe a little better than a WAG, Parson hoped. He had never trained as an intel analyst, and he didn’t consider himself much of a sleuth. But he could apply some plain old common sense. A new voice came on the phone line.

  “Colonel Harris here.”

  “Yes, sir,” Parson said. “Colonel Michael Parson. AFRICOM planning cell.”

  He added the sir out of habit. Parson still couldn’t believe the Air Force had seen fit to promote him to O-6. He had pinned on his eagles just before taking the AFRICOM assignment. Never one for spit and polish, he’d had his ass chewed by colonels often enough to believe he’d never become one himself. However, he’d helped bring down terrorists ranging from a high-ranking Taliban mullah to a lowlife bin Laden wannabe who kidnapped boys to make them child soldiers. Along the way Parson also stopped a nut job who wanted to reignite the Bosnian War. Some of his citations credited him with initiative and drive. But Parson chalked it up to being in the right place at the right time with the right people by his side.

  “What can I do for you, Parson?” Harris asked.

  “I’m sure you know everybody’s wondering where terrorists have been getting chemical weapons.”

  “Of course.”

  “Maybe the stuff comes from right there in Libya.”

  Parson discussed how in 2003 Muammar Gadhafi announced that he’d get rid of his chemical and biological weapons. Gadhafi saw what had happened to Saddam Hussein’s government and decided to play nice. Didn’t do him a lot of good; the Libyan strongman eventually suffered a fate as bad as that of the Iraqi dictator. Rebel fighters pulled Gadhafi out of a drainpipe and worked him over. Accounts varied about whether he died from bayonet wounds, gunshots, or shrapnel—but in any case, he came to an ugly, bloody end.

  “But what if Gadhafi didn’t really disclose all his chem and bio stocks?” Parson asked. “What if he played a shell game with the Chemical Weapons Convention?”

  “And you’re thinking somebody’s using what he hid?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  A frightening prospect; Parson hoped he was wrong. Inspectors had overseen destruction of part of Libya’s chemical weapons and documented the location of others. But no one could say with certainty that every shell and bomb, every ton of sulfur mustard, nerve gas, and precursor chemicals had been accounted for.

  “They even had some of it hidden at a turkey farm,” Parson said.

  “Geez,” Harris said. “So there’s no telling how much is left or where it’s located.”

  “That’s what worries me, sir. Old Gadhafi loyalists, foreign fighters, Islamic fundamentalists could have cached stockpiles anywhere.”

  So where to look now? Parson and Harris discussed logical starting places—which included every military base in Libya, along with defunct chemical production sites such as Rabta and Tarhuna. Suspicion might focus on truck convoys going to weird locations, or maybe rattletrap old cargo planes landing on makeshift airstrips. But with insurgents rampaging all over North Africa, how could you tell a truck full of conventional bombs from a truck full of chemical bombs?

  “We’re looking for a needle in a stack of needles,” Harris said.

  “I wish I could come up with something more specific,” Parson said.

  “Your idea makes as much sense as anything else I’ve heard,” Harris said. “I’ll see if we can dedicate more drone orbits. But it’ll be up to the CFACC.”

  The Combined Forces Air Component Commander was a three-star general—far above Parson’s pay grade. Parson could only send suggestions up the chain of command. The CFACC might be getting other suggestions, too, and Parson didn’t know what priority his would receive.

  When Parson ended the call, he wondered if he’d really accomplished much. How would his suggestion sound to the general? I got it, sir. Let’s search all over Libya for something we might not even know when we see it. But it seemed better than just waiting to get hit again.

  He looked around the room, saw that Chartier had disappeared. The Frenchman came back into the ops center a few minutes later and said, “Intel wants to brief us at two.”

  “What about?”

  “They would not say, but they act like it is important.”

  In Parson’s long career, he’d found that the quality of intelligence briefings varied widely. Sometimes a briefer, excited and engaged by his work, put together what seemed almost like a well-organized newscast. He’d gather information from classified and unclassified sources and tell you what you needed to know about your mission. Others just flipped through PowerPoint slides as quickly as possible and twisted simple concepts into ridiculously complicated acronyms. Why did a car bomb need to become a VBIED—vehicle-borne improvised explosive device?

  At two o’clock, Parson and Chartier left their cell phones in their desks and went to the briefing room. The projector screen read THIS BRIEFING IS CLASSIFIED NATO SECRET. NO ELECTRONIC DEVICES. Officers and NCOs from several nations filled the thirty seats. A U.S. Army major locked the door and began the presentation. To Parson’s approval, the major spoke plainly.

  “We have a claim of responsibility for the chem warfare attacks at Sigonella and Ghat,” he said. “Slide, please.”

  The major’s assistant, an Army specialist, clicked a mouse. The next screen showed a bearded man in a black kaffiyeh. He had dyed his beard an off shade of orange, and a scar bisected the bridge of his nose. The man wore a green field jacket draped with pouches for AK-47 magazines—standard terrorist chic. But a much older weapon caught Parson’s eye. Stuck into a bright red sash tied around his waist, the jihadist carried a flintlock pistol.

  Parson leaned forward just to make sure his eyes weren’t fooling him. An antique pistol? Where would a North African terrorist even get a thing like that? The Cabela’s catalog?

  “Whiskey tango foxtrot,” Parson said.

  “What is this expression you use?” Chartier whispered.

  “What the fuck.”

  The French aviator chuckled, raised his eyebrows.

  “This waste of humanity is Sadiq Kassam,” the major continued. “We believe that is his real name. He comes from Algeria, and he is forty-eight years old.”

  “What’s with the orange beard and the flintlock?” Parson asked. “Is this some kind of punk rock pirate?”

  The Americans in the room laughed, including the major.

  “Sir, the beard dyed with henna means he’s made a trip to Mecca,” the major said. “You got me on the pistol, though. Their supply must have had that on back order for a very long time.”

  More chuckles, but then the major turned serious. “This guy is no laughing matter. He ran with the Armed Islamic Group of Algeria back in the 1990s. They killed for the sake of killing. Kassam emerged more recently as a rival to Mokhtar Belmokhtar, another waste of humanity who orchestrated the attack on the Algerian natural gas plant in 2013. Belmokhtar was reported dead after that; we’re not so sure. But Kassam seems to want to take his place.”

  Probably so, Parson thought. These extremists always draped themselves in holiness, claimed they murdered civilians in the name of God and acted only as heaven’s humble servants. But in truth a lot of them had the egos of rock stars. When not fighting infidels, they fought one another.

  “Kassam has released a video to Al Jazeera,” the major sai
d. “I’ll let the shithead speak for himself.”

  The Al Jazeera video began to play, and a news crawl in Arabic scrolled across the bottom of the screen. Kassam started speaking in Arabic. Someone had superimposed a graphic of English translation:

  “In the name of Allah, most gracious and merciful, I bring news of His holy struggle. The Armed Islamic Group of Tripolitania seeks to bring sharia law and infinite justice to the whole of North Africa. The people long for a new pasha, a ruler who will serve as Allah’s instrument on Earth. The winds of the Sahara once struck fear into the hearts of infidels who sailed near our coasts, and those winds shall bring fear again.”

  Tripolitania? The graffiti in the photo Sophia had e-mailed said something about Tripolitania. Parson couldn’t read the Arabic script, but she’d told him it referred to the Barbary states back in the nineteenth century. As the video continued, Kassam drew the flintlock and began waving it.

  “As in the days of old, we will terrorize our enemies. We will kill and enslave nonbelievers who seek to defeat our religion. My forebears in jihad took this pistol from an American sailor more than two centuries ago. And Allah has delivered into our hands far more fearsome weapons. As we showed you on the Crusader island of Sicily and in the backsliding region of Ghat, we are not afraid to use what Allah has given us. With these weapons we will strike even at the serpent’s nest in America.”

  Just keep running your mouth, Parson thought. Somebody’s going to take that pistol away from you and shove it up your ass.

  Extremists had a way of blaspheming the very principles they preached. This bastard spoke of restoring the former glory of Islamic rule—through indiscriminate use of weapons of mass destruction. Sophia would know more about the details, but Parson guessed this violated all kinds of Muslim teachings. Parson remembered her telling him about the seventh-century caliph, Abu Bakr, who established ten rules for Muslim armies. One said no killing of a child, a woman, or an aged man.

  When the briefing ended, Parson and Chartier returned to the ops center. Given Kassam’s threat of continued attacks, it seemed even more likely now that NATO or UN forces would get involved. As a member of the AFRICOM planning cell, Parson figured he’d better get cracking.

  The new Libyan government had already given permission for military use of Mitiga International Airport near Tripoli. Parson sat at his computer, tapped at the keyboard, and brought up airfield data for Mitiga.

  The field’s long history mirrored the history of the country. First built by the Italians in 1923, the base was captured by the Germans during World War II. The U.S. took it over during the Cold War and named it Wheelus Air Base. Wheelus hosted the cargo planes of the old Military Air Transport service and the bombers of Strategic Air Command. The U.S. closed Wheelus in 1970 and turned it over to the Libyans, who renamed it Okba Ben Nafi Air Base.

  At around the same time the Americans were preparing to shut down the base, Muammar Gadhafi deposed Libya’s King Idris in a military coup. In 1986 Gadhafi got the bright idea to bomb the La Belle disco in West Berlin to kill and injure American servicemen. Payback was a bitch; President Reagan launched Operation El Dorado Canyon. Parson’s own dad, as a weapons systems officer in an F-111 Aardvark, attacked the base that American fliers once called home. The elder Parson had spoken of the grueling mission from RAF Lakenheath in Britain.

  “France, Spain, and Italy denied overflight,” Dad had said, “so we dragged our asses all the way around the Iberian Peninsula. Refueled in the air several times.” But the long flight paid off when he found that row of Ilyushin transport planes in his crosshairs.

  Parson could not ask about that raid now. His father had died in the crash of his Wild Weasel during Desert Storm.

  In the 1990s, the Libyan base targeted by the elder Parson converted to a civilian airport. It bore a new name: Mitiga International.

  Hope Dad didn’t tear up Mitiga too bad for the Libyans to repair properly, Parson thought, because I might need it soon. Parson’s computer told him Mitiga boasted two runways, the longest just over eleven thousand feet. Long enough for any plane in the U.S. inventory—assuming the runway and taxiways could bear the weight of a heavy like a C-5 or a B-52. He needed to dig a little more and find the pavement classification numbers. Then he could write a proper Giant Report on Mitiga. Boring as hell, not nearly as much fun as flying. But the work needed to get done right.

  As Parson worked, he glanced at Chartier. The Frenchman scrolled through e-mail. One message in particular seemed to catch his attention. Chartier’s eyes widened, and he smiled faintly. Parson jotted some notes on a writing pad, then said, “What you got, a picture from one of your girlfriends in Paris?”

  “No, sir. It is from my squadron commander back home.”

  “What’s up?”

  “I am sorry, sir. But they are recalling me for a possible alert. They want me back in the Mirage. No more flying a desk.”

  Parson leaned back in his chair, tore off a sheet of notebook paper. Wadded up the paper. Tossed the paper wad at Chartier, who grinned as it whizzed by his nose and bounced off his computer screen.

  “You lucky, champagne-swilling, croissant-eating son of a bitch.”

  CHAPTER 6

  On a Thursday morning, Blount steered his Ram onto Interstate 95 North for his journey to Camp Lejeune. The trip would take hours, but driving through the rural coastal plain of the Carolinas would give him a chance to think, to get some perspective. He hadn’t realized retiring from the Corps would feel so wrenching. Once a Marine, always a Marine.

  Cool wind blasted through the truck’s open window. Blount’s fellow South Carolinian Darius Rucker sang over the radio, something about a “come back song.” Blount sighed; in his own life, he could take that line two ways. He felt pulled in two directions.

  This year’s tobacco crop had come in late; Halloween was only a couple weeks away, and some fields still stood studded with denuded green stalks. Pretty soon the farmers would run their Bush Hogs over the stalks, then disc the fields under and maybe plant winter wheat. Near one of the fields, Blount saw a row of bulk tobacco barns shaped like windowless, silver mobile homes. Their owner must have been curing the last of his crop; the fragrance of drying tobacco leaves wafted through the air. The aroma of curing smelled nothing like cigarette smoke; Blount had once described it to a British Royal Marine by telling him to imagine the richest tea leaves he’d ever smelled, mixed with brown sugar and bourbon.

  Just past Santee, Blount reached the bridge over Lake Marion. At the water’s edge, a nine-foot alligator lolled in the shallows. The middle of its tail looked as big around as Blount’s biceps. Blount recalled seeing a big old gator one time while fishing with his grandfather.

  “You better respect his strength,” Grandpa had said, “but he won’t hurt you if you don’t mess with him.”

  Maybe Blount would get a chance to fish these waters more often. Once he got outprocessed, he’d have all the time in the world for the simple pleasures. Especially if he had to wait a while to get a law enforcement job. He sure hoped the hiring freezes wouldn’t last too long.

  Halfway across the bridge, he spotted a johnboat plowing across the still surface of Marion, propelled by a trolling motor. Two boys with fishing rods sat in the boat.

  For Blount, that was what the counselors called a trigger.

  His palms grew slick on the steering wheel. Memories and images came back of their own accord. A bright morning in South Carolina turned into the blackest night in Afghanistan. Blount saw three boys about the same age as the kids in the boat. They came out of the cave, walking toward him and the other Marines. Blount yelled at them with what little of their language he knew, taught to him by that smart Army woman Sophia Gold.

  “Zaai peh zaai wudregah!” he shouted. Stay where you are.

  The children kept coming at him. Blount backed up several steps and repeated his command.
Sweet baby Jesus, stop right there. Don’t make me do this.

  He called for them to halt in Pashto and English. He’d have hollered in every language in the world if he could have, right down to caveman talk. Anything to make something different happen.

  They wouldn’t listen. Some other grown-ups had got to them first, taught them nothing but wrong things. He was running out of time. They were running out of time.

  Blount raised his weapon, leveled his sights on the children. Cut all three of them down.

  All three kids wore suicide vests. On one of them, the vest detonated.

  The blast knocked Blount off his feet. His cheek hurt; something had cut his face. Maybe a ball bearing from inside that suicide vest. He felt his sweat and tears mix with the blood. He raised himself with one gloved hand. For the first time in his life, he felt like turning his rifle on his own self. Couldn’t do that, though. Other Marines counted on him. He got up and pressed on.

  The thump of his truck tires crossing the north end of the bridge brought Blount back to the present. That Afghanistan scene played like a movie in his head whenever it took a mind to. He didn’t control the projector.

  The tobacco and cotton fields, the pinewoods and trailer parks rolled by until he came to Jacksonville. Here, just like at home, many of the vehicles carried Marine Corps stickers. Familiar turns took him to the main gate, where the brick signpost read CAMP LEJEUNE—HOME OF EXPEDITIONARY FORCES IN READINESS. Blount’s battalion now served with the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit, one of three MEUs based at Lejeune.

  He showed his ID to the gate guard, who examined both sides of the card and handed it back. Blount noted that the back of the card identified him as someone falling under Geneva Convention Category II, which spelled out how he must be treated as a prisoner of war. Fortunately, that bit of information had never played a part in his career. And the Geneva Convention would have meant nothing to any of the enemies Blount had ever fought.