Sand and Fire (9780698137844) Read online

  “Grandpa,” Blount said, “you see what happened at Gibraltar?”

  “I sure did. Terrible thing. You and Bernadette and the girls were there, what—about a year ago?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Scares me to think about what could have happened. What did happen to somebody’s kids.”

  “Me, too. And that’s got me thinking about staying in. The Twenty-second MEU’s about to ship out.”

  Grandpa twisted his lips to one side, tilted his head back as he absorbed this news. Dug into his pocket.

  “I see you come for a serious peppermint discussion,” he said.

  Blount chuckled, caught the peppermint tossed his way.

  “Guess I did.”

  “What does Bernadette say about this?”

  “Maddest I’ve seen her in a while.” Blount unwrapped the peppermint and placed it in his mouth.

  “So what makes you think you need to do this?”

  Blount recounted everything that had swirled through his mind—his buddies going into harm’s way, his friend Kelley dying in the parking lot at Route One, the civilians poisoned to death. He didn’t say anything about the sheriff’s department not hiring. Maybe that was a little part of it, too, but not nearly the main thing. So he didn’t waste his grandfather’s time with the money issue. The wise old sergeant major would have seen right through that one.

  “What about your house?” Grandpa asked. “Would you sell it? You and Bernadette love that place. Working for Special Operations Command means either Lejeune or Pendleton. Lejeune’s, what, five hours away?”

  “I’ll homestead the family here and get an apartment in Jacksonville if I have to. Divide the time between here and there. Bernadette’s got a good job, and I wouldn’t want to make the girls change schools again.”

  “I thought you’d had enough after that last trip to Afghanistan,” Grandpa said. “That by itself would have been more than most men could take. So please don’t talk like you got anything left to prove.”

  “No, it’s not that. It’s . . . hard to put it into words.”

  Grandpa unwrapped his own peppermint, studied it for a moment, put it on his tongue. Seemed lost in thought until he crushed the peppermint between his teeth. He chewed it, swallowed, and said, “You remember what I told you when you first enlisted?”

  “Yes, sir. I do.”

  First and last, his grandfather had said, a warrior is a protector. You use force when you need to, and a big boy like you can do that real good. But in the main, you take care of folks. You go into a situation and think to yourself, the people here—at least the good people—are safer because I’m here.

  “I can’t tell you what to do about withdrawing that retirement,” Grandpa said. “Nobody but you can know where your heart is and what you gotta do. But I do know this: If you go back out there to fight, don’t do it for payback. You don’t like it that they killed your old platoon commander. You don’t like what they made you do in Afghanistan. But revenge will burn you alive, boy. It’ll turn you into something you don’t want to be.”

  Then Grandpa told a story from World War II that Blount had never heard. Blount thought that after all these years, his grandfather had related every incident, every moment he could remember about the Marines’ bloody island-hopping campaign across the Pacific. But this one, he had kept to himself. And after hearing it, Blount could understand why.

  As a young corporal on Iwo Jima, Grandpa Buell watched his fellow Marines raise the American flag on Mount Suribachi. Cheers went up; at first he thought the battle for that sulfurous, godforsaken chunk of volcanic rock had ended. But weeks of hard fighting remained. The Japanese had built a network of caves and pillboxes—hardened positions easily defended. Especially by troops loyal unto death to their emperor, troops who knew that with Iwo Jima in American hands, the B-29s could burn Japanese cities more easily.

  “We had to dig those bastards out across every foot of that island,” Grandpa said.

  He explained that he had a close buddy at the time, another corporal by the name of Mason. Buell and Mason had gone through Montford Point together, had heard all the foolishness about how coloreds wouldn’t fight. Mason came from Alabama. Before the war, he’d studied at Stillman, wanted to go into the ministry.

  “Mason grew up poor, though,” Blount’s grandfather said. “He used to hunt squirrels with a twenty-two, not for fun but to help keep meat on the table. My lands, that boy could shoot. Never seen somebody so deadly with a Garand rifle.”

  Grandpa’s eyes glistened as he spoke of his old friend. He said the brass intended for black Marines to serve only in support roles such as delivering ammo, but he and Mason wound up fighting anyway. Blount had no idea where this story was going, but he knew it couldn’t be good.

  One night, Mason vanished. Nobody saw him go down. Nobody heard him scream. Nothing. Just gone. Wasn’t like him to run off, and on Iwo Jima, where would you have run off to, anyway?

  Two days later they found him in a cave. The Japanese must have wounded him, or maybe come up behind him and grabbed him unawares. With all the caves and tunnels on Iwo, the enemy could just pop up out of the ground anywhere around you.

  Mason’s broken, naked body hung from ropes. They had cut off his ears. They had gouged out his eyes. They had sliced off his penis.

  “You wouldn’t die from none of that, though,” Grandpa said, “nor from any other single wound on him.”

  His arms, legs, chest, and back were striped with hundreds of knife cuts. Mason had bled to death, very slowly. Missing for two days, and the body still warm.

  “Back during the Depression, I seen a man who got lynched,” Grandpa said. “Blood all over him. But this was worse than any lynching I ever heard tell of. After that, I kind of lost my mind.”

  Buell fought on with the fury of a man possessed. He even wondered if he and Mason and everybody else around him had died and gone to hell. The whole place smelled like sulfur and death, and there wasn’t nothing but blood, pain, sand, and fire. How could you tell it from hell?

  “There’s fire in hell,” Blount’s grandfather said, “and by God, I brought fire.”

  Buell picked up a special weapon, an M2A1 flamethrower. Two tanks of jelled gasoline on his back, propelled by compressed gas. That thing could throw a stream of burning napalm fifty yards.

  “Nobody said a thing to me about it, either,” Grandpa said. “At that point we were all the same race: Marines. And we all wanted the same thing: payback.”

  The day after the Marines found Mason’s body, they encountered a team of Japanese inside a concrete pillbox. From inside, the Japanese fired a Type 92 heavy machine gun. The pillbox sat atop a hummock, and the machine gun’s field of fire stopped the American advance on that little section of the island.

  Buell came up with an idea. If the platoon could pour rounds at the pillbox’s embrasure and make the enemy keep their heads down, he could climb the side of the hummock. Under suppressing fire, the Japanese would have a difficult time bringing the 92 to bear on their flanks.

  From whatever cover the Marines could find behind rocks and in depressions in the sand, the platoon opened up. With his flamethrower, Buell charged up the right side of the hummock, the treads of his boots throwing up black sand. Another Marine went up the left side, holding a grenade.

  Somehow the Japanese managed to hit the man with the grenade. He’d already pulled the pin; when he went down, the grenade exploded and tore him up. But that distracted the Japanese enough for Buell to get into position. Buell dropped to the ground only about fifteen yards from the pillbox.

  With his left hand, he pointed the nozzle and squeezed the igniter trigger. With his right, he pressed the firing trigger and felt hell in fluid form course through the hose. Buell aimed the jet of burning napalm through the embrasure, and fire filled the pillbox. The four men inside beg
an to scream, and two of them ran outside, flames in the shape of sprinting men.

  “Don’t shoot ’em,” Buell shouted. “Let ’em burn.”

  The two Japanese ran right through the Marine platoon, fell to the ground twitching and writhing. No one fired a shot. The other two danced around inside the pillbox, fire stirring fire.

  The platoon took two other pillboxes in the same fashion, with no mercy bullets for burning men.

  “Most of the enemy on Iwo Jima wouldn’t give up,” Blount’s grandfather said, “so they needed to die. But they didn’t need to die like that.” He sat silently for a while, then added, “I just wish I’d done that a little different. But I reckon you take my point. If you gotta fight, fight to protect. Don’t let vengeance burn a hole in you.”

  There wasn’t a whole lot Blount knew to say except “Yes, sir.” However, he understood exactly what his grandfather meant. He’d felt the same rage in that Afghan cave, and he’d killed his enemy with the same fury. Grandpa’s story didn’t mean nothing was worth fighting for. It just meant you needed to be real particular about when you did it and why. Blount wondered if the flabby, cake-eater politicians who sent him out there ever gave these things as much thought as he had during the last five minutes.

  Blount went out and got some Brunswick stew to share with Grandpa for lunch. The two men ate in silence, except for Blount’s words of thanks for the counsel. The younger Marine left the older one to his books and television, and as Blount drove home, he hoped to find the right things to say to Bernadette and the girls.

  While he waited, he cut up an onion and three cayenne peppers. He’d also bought extra quarts of Brunswick stew to bring home. Blount figured his wife wouldn’t be in a mood to cook tonight, and the fresh onion and peppers would serve as condiments for dinner.

  He was warming the stew on the stovetop when he heard Bernadette pull up. The girls came in first and went up the steps without talking to him. When Bernadette entered the doorway, she didn’t look angry, only tired. She went upstairs, too, and Blount wondered if he was getting the silent treatment. A few minutes later she came back down in jeans and a tank top. Bernadette walked into the kitchen, came up behind him, put her arms around his waist.

  “I’ll be straight with you,” she said. “I don’t want you to do this. But I knew what you were when I married you, and it was part of why I married you.”

  Blount felt her place her face against his back. He stirred the stew with one hand, put the other hand over both of hers. He felt the moisture of tears soak through the fabric of his shirt.

  “You just come back to me,” Bernadette said. “You always better come back to me.”

  He felt a flood of relief so great that he teared up, too. The stresses of deployments had broken up many a marriage, and Blount never forgot how lucky he was to have a woman this strong. He put down the spoon, turned around, and held his wife close.

  “I will, baby.”

  The girls seemed distracted during dinner. Something was on their minds; maybe they sensed what he had to tell them. After the meal, when he started to explain his plans, they said they already knew. Bernadette had told them after all.

  “I don’t want you to go,” Priscilla said, looking down into her bowl and sniffling.

  “Me, neither,” Ruthie said. “But Mama says you’re like the sheepdog guarding all the other animals in the barnyard.”

  Blount smiled at his youngest daughter and then at his wife, and he mouthed the words Thank you.

  In the twilight, he took his family for a walk by the water. A pair of cormorants swished by overhead, and the night insects began their concert. From across the lagoon came the sound of an alligator’s bellow, a low grumble followed by a hiss and a splash. That noise might have brought fear to some folks, but to Blount it just sounded like home. Don’t mess with that alligator and he won’t mess with you.

  When they got back to the house, Blount said, “You-all go on inside. I’ll be right back.”

  He went into his toolshed, pulled the string for the light. Grandpa Buell’s KA-BAR stood where Blount had left it, stabbed hard into the workbench. He placed his fist around the leather grip and wrenched it out of the wood. Tested the edge with his thumb.

  Blount opened a drawer beneath the workbench, found a whetstone. He drew the blade across the stone for several swipes. Slid the knife into its sheath.

  You and me ain’t done quite yet, he thought.

  CHAPTER 8

  In the AFRICOM operations center, Parson kept an eye on four separate video screens. One displayed a drone’s-eye view of Libya’s old chemical production facility at Tarhuna, southeast of Tripoli. That feed came from an RQ-4 Global Hawk. Two other screens showed Predator feeds—one from above an army base near Benghazi, and the other over the airfield at Ghadames. The BBC aired silently on the fourth screen.

  The Combined Forces Air Component Commander—a three-star—had acted on Parson’s suggestion to put drones over places that might hide uncataloged chemical weapons. Parson felt gratified that he could upchannel a recommendation and see some results. But he hardly considered himself a tactical genius; he realized he probably got his drones because nobody had any better ideas.

  So far, watching the feeds was like watching grass grow, except there was no grass down there. The Predator over Ghadames recorded routine civilian traffic approaching and departing the desert airfield. The one over Benghazi showed nothing unusual for a base used by the new Libyan army. Parson made a mental note to request moving that drone somewhere else. He also considered moving the Global Hawk from over Tarhuna. So far it detected only a disused chemical plant, most of it underground. From sixty thousand feet, the facility appeared as little more than an indentation dug into the red sand at the base of a hill. Just three small buildings on the surface of the desert, with possibly more buried and invisible. Parson had seen no vehicles or personnel since the Hawk got on station yesterday.

  The workload had grown for Parson since the French officer, Captain Chartier, had left. By now Chartier had returned to Luxeuil Air Base to rejoin his strike squadron and get current again in the Mirage 2000. Parson envied his young colleague’s flight duty. After a long career as a navigator and then a pilot, Parson found himself deskbound much of the time as his rank and responsibilities increased.

  With little happening on the drone feeds, Parson turned his attention to the news. The BBC camera showed people milling about in some kind of auditorium. Parson looked closely and recognized the well of the United Nations General Assembly. A graphic on the screen read AWAITING STATEMENT FROM UN SECRETARY-GENERAL. Parson turned up the volume. A few minutes later a balding man in dark-rimmed eyeglasses and a gray suit took the lectern. He began to speak in fluent English with a Slavic accent. The graphic changed to read UN SECRETARY-GENERAL ANATOLY BERETSOV. With a grim visage, Beretsov began to speak.

  “The United Nations Security Council has voted unanimously to authorize the use of armed force against terrorist factions in North Africa. We take this step with great reluctance to put the men and women of our militaries in harm’s way. However, the use of chemical weapons against civilian targets represents an affront to all standards of human decency.

  “The governments of Egypt, Algeria, Libya, and Tunisia have agreed to permit use of their airspace and, in some cases, their airports and other facilities. American and French forces have begun to deploy to the Mediterranean, and they will be joined by British, Spanish, and Italian assets as needed. All the members of the Security Council hope for a quick resolution to this threat to the lives and well-being of the innocent.”

  Parson had already gathered and analyzed all the data on Mitiga International Airport. He’d found the field suitable for pretty much anything the allied countries might want to fly into it.

  The next task would involve coordinating what went where—figuring out how to bed down aircraft at differen
t fields to avoid a MOG problem. MOG meant maximum on ground: ramp space too choked with aircraft to accommodate any more flights. Number-crunching and logistics, basically. Parson mused to himself how a kid might look up into the sky at an airplane and think: I want to do that when I grow up. But nobody tells the kid if he does it long enough, somebody will take away that shiny jet and replace it with a damned desktop computer.

  Parson glanced back at the drone feeds and still saw mainly just a lot of dirt. When his cell phone rang—his duty phone, not his personal phone—he turned down the BBC and said, “AFRICOM Operations. Colonel Parson.”

  “Bonjour, sir. This is Captain Chartier.”

  “Frenchie,” Parson said. “How the hell are you? Do you remember how to fly that rocket of yours?”

  “Oui, mon colonel. I was an instructor in the Mirage, so it was like going back to a longtime girlfriend. She is fast as ever.”

  Lucky bastard, Parson thought. Enjoy it while it lasts.

  “So what’s up?” Parson asked.

  “I wanted to let you know my squadron has received deployment orders. We will leave Luxeuil sometime in the next few days, but we do not yet know our forward location.”

  I’ve got a pretty good idea, Parson thought, but I can’t say on a nonsecure phone line.

  “Well, fly safe,” Parson said. “And give ’em hell.”

  “Certainement. Oh, and I have sent you something. I mailed you a book by Saint-Ex. Wind, Sand and Stars.”

  “Thanks, Frenchie. In English, I hope.”

  “Of course.”

  Parson felt a little stupid for not speaking or reading any language but his own. Especially when he got around people like Chartier and, to an even greater extent, Sophia. He worried about her down there in the Sahara with UNHCR.

  “I appreciate it,” Parson said. “Let me know if I can do anything for you guys once you get in theater.”