Black Storm (20 page)

“I have always found it hard to predict what will make a given man decide to cooperate,” he said. “The truly brave will not speak. Like your comrade here. Not for a long time; not for days or weeks. But we know about the American marines, that they have to kill a member of their families before they are accepted into the Marine Corps.

“But most men will submit once they see a friend or wife or child threatened. Occasionally, I would say this of the cowards, one must operate directly on them. I think you are one of the cowards. Otherwise you would have saved your friend. What do you think?”

He sat rigid, still unable to feel or even think through the horror and the disbelief. But dimly he knew anything this man said was a lie. And any reply to him, a mistake. If he'd kept his mouth shut, like Zeitner, they'd have given up eventually and turned them over to the army. Now his fumbling, his fucking cleverness, had killed Jake. And probably himself.

And under that again yet a colder and older part of his mind knew that it was exactly this his interrogators were counting on: that he would act now out of guilt and fear rather than from what he still knew to be his duty. His feelings struggled below the surface of his still numbed mind, like carp tumbling just beneath the surface of a pond too murky yet to see into.

He knew then there was no way they'd release him now. Whatever this was…Mukhabarat, secret police, military intelligence…he wasn't leaving here alive. So there was no alternative, no way of second-guessing or tricking them. He could tell them what he knew, or he could die as silently as Zeitner had. Those were the only choices left in his life.

He set his teeth and sat looking stonily ahead.

After a moment more the major sighed, and spoke to the guards. The other watchers sat back, gazes gone distant, as if now he was no longer a human being to be reasoned with or threatened or even tormented, but only a thing to be disposed of.

He felt a set of what felt like headphones being slipped around his skull from the back. It fitted tightly and felt wet. He couldn't see what exactly it was. It didn't go over his ears, but pressed against his neck and his temples. The guard lifted a gray wire over his head and handed it to someone out of his view, somewhere behind him.

He felt his courage failing and looked at Zeitner. Whatever they did to him, peace and some form of honor lay on the other side. As long as he didn't talk. He'd spoken all the words he had to say in this life. He thought of biting through his tongue, but decided, Only when I can't stand it anymore. With any luck he could swallow the blood without them noticing, pass out, and die of blood loss. Not much of a hope, but a last despairing tactic.

The first shock was worse than anything he'd expected. He'd touched a cattle fence once as a boy, felt the fiery caress of electricity. This was different, a white hot bar of current that seemed to flow not through his brain but down his back. He arched in the chair and his hands locked, straining against the back of it. A whimpering grunt came through his locked teeth. He couldn't breathe.

He set his jaw and waited, eyes closed, for the next level of pain. It didn't come right away. The major stood by the desk, lighting another Gauloise. He said, “Listen to me. Dan. Are you listening?

“In a little while you will no longer be conscious. Yet you will still be able to speak. What you now think of as your mind will no longer exist. We will be talking to something beneath that. It will tell us what we need to know. That is how this process works. It is much faster than our old procedures. But no one who goes through it is the same afterward.

“Iraqi people are fundamentally kind. We do not like to see suffering, even in animals. Those who administer above me are convinced your presence here has some significance. They want answers and they will not wait. I ask you one last time. One: what your reconnaissance team is here for. Two: everything you know about the seaborne invasion of Kuwait, where it will take place and when, all the forces involved. Otherwise we will have no choice but to proceed.” He gave it several seconds, then, when he got no answer, nodded to whoever was behind Dan.

This time there was no pain but only a dazzling whiteness. As if he was immersed, drowning, in a cauldron of incandescent hot metal that for a moment magically did not burn—but only because the enormity of the pain exceeded his brain's ability to sense it. He tried to hold the thought that he couldn't speak. If they found out that the amphibious landing was off, that it'd never happen, they'd move their forces south, away from the coast. The thrust up into Kuwait could fail. It might even lose the war.

But then the pain arrived, so overwhelming he screamed again and again, the sound muffled through jaws welded shut by the current.

When it stopped, he panted for long seconds, feeling warmth beneath him and dripping between his thighs. Smelling his own shit. The pain didn't go away. It had only stepped outside his skull for a moment. He felt it beside him, its hand warm and possessive on his shoulder.

“Where will the Americans attack?” a voice he didn't recognize asked. It sounded friendly. Concerned. And without knowing where or who he was, he told it, “Faylakah Island.”

“No—no. I meant the main assault, in Kuwait. Where will the marines land? What will the forces be? How many men?”

And then the memory of self returned, and he knew what he'd said. He swore and cursed, threatened, knowing he was speaking insanity. The voice—he remembered
now whose it was—didn't threaten or laugh. It just waited.

In that despairing moment, he knew he'd tell them. They'd burn away his mind, piece by piece, until what was left told them everything. Maybe Dan Lenson would still be sane when it was over. He hoped he wasn't. He couldn't live with that knowledge.

He was opening his mouth, taking a deep breath before he bit down, when strong hands seized him. Jamming, forcing a piece of whittled wood between his teeth. Wedging them just far enough apart so he could speak, but not close his jaws.

“We know what you're thinking,” the major said. “We've done this for many years, Dan. We're the experts. Do you understand? The sergeant didn't know. He's only a sergeant. But you're an officer, Dan. You know much more than he does. I think you know what the American plans are.

“You're going to tell us everything now.”

 

HE DIDN'T
know till afterward what it meant. His mind wasn't thinking thoughts by then. But his staring eyes registered the sudden blackness in the room. The startled exclamations around him in the dark. Then the clink as a cigarette lighter was flipped open.

Major Al-Qadi's face, lit by the upraised flame.

An appallingly bright flash, a crack so loud he couldn't help crying out. In that brilliance something his eyes could not quite credit. The face of an avuncular Stalin suddenly growing a third nostril. Then another black hole, between two startled eyes.

The flame whipped away toward the floor. The room lit by crack after crack of strobe-swift flame. The flashes, lurid and somehow movementless, illuminated the shapes of men rising from where they sat, trying to draw pistols, reeling back with upthrown hands.

Moving among them, a crouched shadow with gog
gled head, aiming the spurts of flame. Behind it two others, with the same distorted, inhuman heads, like kachina dolls. He saw without understanding their eyeless eyes, a queer pointed snout that turned from side to side, extended arms tipped with angular darknesses from which the flame leaped, again and again.

Then darkness once more. And in the ringing silence after, moans. The ringing crash as a table overturned, of brass teacups and servingware kicked across a tile floor.

A hand settled on his neck. He flinched away, and heard an insane gibbering burst past the wooden angularity that filled his mouth.

Flashlights, and sight, and with the moving illumination a faint enlightenment within his brain. Figures in desert battle dress, night vision goggles on their faces, and pistols in their hands. From racked memory came an image but not a name; a man in black and denim, big, broad-chested. His hands tilted what was left of Zeitner's head back almost tenderly.

Then he didn't remember anything, and it was all a warm blackness into which he let himself slide.

 

THEY ALL
right?” said Blaisell. He held the Glock in a two-handed shooting stance, guarding the door in case anyone unexpected arrived. Lenson didn't move, and Blaze glanced again, swallowing, at the sagging figure in the other chair. The spatter of blood and white stuff on the floor around it. He looked angrily at the other bodies slumped around the room, across the table, where they'd sat and where they'd died.

Vertierra had taken out the sentry with a knife. Then the gunny had come in from the other side of the building; thumbs up, all clear. They'd searched quickly around the exterior of the building and found the power cable. A snap of cutters, a flash of spark, and the lights in the windows went out. Then to the door. Sarsten, motioning them back, had kicked it open and tossed in the flash
bang. Gault had covered his goggles to avoid flaring them, then followed his weapon through. Vertierra close after, the MP5 ready, and Blaze had the Glock out and went through last. And then another flash-bang and into the room.

They'd followed Sarsten in fast but hardly got to shoot. He couldn't believe what he'd seen. A flare of light, and the SAS soldier had double-tapped the first man, shooting with a smooth unhurried skill that could be seen and still not understood, smooth and rock-accurate. Sarsten fired and moved till not a man was left standing and the magazine had clattered away empty and another one snickered in. And then he, Blaze, saw the guard coming from behind the guys strapped down in the chairs, starting to bring up the AK, ready to fire even though to him it must have been still pitch dark in the room, and he put the sights on him and squeezed the trigger until the guard reeled back and hit the wall and fell. Pictures under glass shattered down from it. All in the green weird light of amplified infrared.

He looked at Sarsten again with awe. He'd never seen anyone handle a pistol like that.

Gault came over and looked at Lenson. “Cut him loose. Get some clothes on him. His ruck's in the front room.”

“What about Jake?”

“I'll look at him. You take care of Lenson. Get moving, we can't stay long.”

They found stove fuel, several gallons, and poured it over desk and couch and the bodies. When all the tins were empty, they backed out. Vertierra threw in a white phosphorous grenade. As they humped away, Gault and Sarsten carrying Lenson and he and Tex-Mex what remained of Jake Zeitner, the building suddenly lit the night for a hundred yards around. The glare increased as the roof exploded, then gradually waned. It popped and crackled as ammunition cooked off.

They collected the doc, who'd stood security outside,
and went about four hundred meters south, away from any possibility of being backlighted, and knelt with their E-tools. They wrapped Zeitner in his poncho liner and got enough dirt and rocks piled on top of him to keep the dogs off. They divided up his food and ammunition and drank what was left in his canteens. Not talking, just sitting on the rock pile. They rested there for five minutes, while Gault took a GPS reading on the grave site. Then they walked back to the vehicle Vertierra had found parked a little way from the building, and shoved off.

For a long time Blaze kept looking back at the fire flickering on the horizon, like a Viking pyre. Then it died down and he couldn't even pick out the spot on the black desert, receding already into the distance, where it had been.

Gault kept low in the vehicle, his goggled head thrust forward. It was still dark, though barely, but since they were on a road, of sorts, eyes might be on them in the waning night. At the rate the light was coming, a good set of night glasses might give them away.

They were descending a trail of some sort, just grooves worn down into the dirt. From time to time pumping stations or farms slid past. Only a few were lit. Gault figured the bombing had knocked out the Iraqi power grid. The glow was probably gasoline lanterns. There'd be militia there, sleeping in the dark with weapons beside them. He glanced left and caught the shapeless blur of the driver. Vertierra. Tony, Gault, and F.C. were in the front seat. The others were wedged tight in the back, lying down in each others' laps so their heads didn't show.

It was a Soviet-made command car, the same kind the Syrians used. The suspension telegraphed every bump and pothole straight up his spinal column. The RTO had found it parked behind the building prior to their going in after Zeitner and Lenson. He'd gotten to it first and held up the keys in triumph. When they got in after burying Jake, Gault had studied the map for a few seconds, then pointed northeast. “That way. And for Christ's sake keep us in low gear.” Tony had started it, clutched, and man
aged to kill the engine. He did it again while they hissed insults at him, called him Low Rider, told him to let them drive, but he finally got it moving. Gault told them to have their weapons under cover but ready. If they came to a roadblock or a patrol they'd have to react fast.

Now, passing through a village, every window dark, every occupant asleep except for a barking dog, he wondered if going vehicular had been smart. Generally you stayed clear of roads in hostile territory. But it was the only way they'd make the linkup in time. With the firefight, and the major's problems on the march, and now Lenson to carry, they couldn't hump wadis anymore. It was this or abort. And he wasn't about to abort. Not after the price they'd paid.

He felt angry and guilty. Angry at Sarsten's insane taunt, the shout that had started the firefight. Guilty that he'd gotten to the intel post too late to save Jake. He missed the New Yorker's understated competence already. Son of a bitch, and the bitterest part was Zeitner had already pulled the pin on the Corps. If not for Saddam he'd have been out, managing that tire store upstate with Daro. He'd met Daro. Not the kind of woman he cared for, but Jake had. Fuck! Now he was a corpse in a poncho, getting cold under a pile of rocks.

Clinging to the windshield, looking ahead for the first indication of roadblock or minefield, he forced himself to go over the linkup procedure once again.

 

IN THE
back, huddled on the right side, Dan wasn't thinking clearly. He couldn't be where he was. With the team again, in the backseat of a car? Yet this was Major Maddox beside him. He could feel the silky prickle of her hair, which had come unpinned and was lying across his shoulder. Part of it curled against his chin. He felt the hard metal of his weapon too, lying across his lap. He dug his fingers into it till he felt the nails bending back. He wanted to bring it up and pull the trigger, kill some
one, but when he tried, Maddox pressed the barrel back down. Then laid her glove along his cheek, a caress that startled him, that made his confused rage lower its head and close its eyes.

Someone was talking to him, but he couldn't listen. The words didn't make sense.

He blinked into the grinding dark. He could drag back Al-Qadi's face. The smell of burning wool. Then, just for a strobe flash, Zeitner's exposed brain, the red gristle that had a moment before been a human face.

He turned his head and vomited again, but all that came up was bile and acid. It burned his lips and he ground his sleeve against them, relishing the ability to move, relishing the ability to choose his pain even if he couldn't control his mind. It careened out of control, frenziedly replaying what it had seen and suffered. The deafening crack of a pistol by his ear. Zeitner's head flying apart.

The silver-laced whiteness when the current was turned on.

Beyond that, he didn't remember. Not remembering didn't bother him. He wished he could forget it all. But he couldn't; he was only blocking part of it, and the thought of why his mind might be doing that terrified him. He'd screwed everything up, everything. Thought he was so smart, stringing the interrogators on. His mouth had cost the sergeant his life. Had he told them about the landing?
What
had he told them? He got only an image for an answer: a black telephone being lowered slowly back into its cradle.

What did that mean? Had Al-Qadi phoned it in, that single essential element of information—that the massive assault force off Kuwait was
only a diversion
—before Blaisell and Sarsten and the rest had burst in?

He lowered his head between his hands and groaned. And again he felt her hand on his neck. So terrifyingly inadequate against the horror bubbling in his skull, yet still comforting despite its impotence, maybe because it
was so unequal to what the universe confronted them with; a single human contact he braced like a shoring timber against the darkness outside.

 

SHE WORRIED
about Lenson. His skin was icy. They'd gotten his clothes back on, but that didn't mean he wasn't hypothermic. Shock hypothermia, exacerbated by torture. He responded to touch, but didn't answer when she asked how he felt. He might retreat into catatonia. Some trauma survivors never spoke again.

She didn't kid herself. She'd be happy to turn back. Let somebody else deal with Saddam and Al-Syori. Burying Zeitner had taken all the fun away. And there'd been damn little to start with.

She couldn't help thinking that if he hadn't come back for her during the shelling, he'd probably still be alive.

Then she remembered what might happen if they failed, and rubbed her face hard, trying to balance thousands of Israeli lives against her own. Back at ‘Ar‘ar it had seemed clear. Out here, she wasn't sure it made a convincing trade-off.

She reached up to adjust the goggles. Zeitner's goggles, passed on now to her. They were heavy and awkward, but she couldn't believe the view. Being able to see in the dark was godlike. She could see every turn in the road, and the green-outlines-on-black-shadow of darkened buildings going by. They were going generally downhill, though the road was so bumpy and had so many turns it was hard to tell. The engine seemed very loud, and the gears ground when Sergeant Vertierra shifted. The heater worked, though. She felt its dragon breath even back here in the rear.

The warmth, initially welcome, made her legs come to life, and that was bad. Pain lanced up her ankles. She needed rest, elevation, ice. But all she could manage was a handful of the fat white ibuprofens. So when she'd seen the jeep in the light of the flames, heard the engine
start up, it was sweet. She looked at her watch, remembering the linkup was supposed to be at dawn; and already the night was wearing thin, a threadbare old black dress.

She stripped off her glove and put her hand on Lenson's neck. He felt warmer. The heater would help. She got a pulse, weak but regular. She called his name, shook him, but he still didn't respond.

She glanced at her watch, couldn't find it, cocked the goggles around till she could. “PB time,” she told them all, and felt in her breast pocket for the card. Plastic snapped as they thumbed pills out, swallowed them dry or with the tilt of a canteen. She popped hers, then snapped off another and pushed it between Lenson's lips. Studied him for a few seconds, then shifted around in her seat and got out her gas kit. The diazepam autoinjector was provided as an anticonvulsant, but it would serve as a tranquilizer too. Diazepam was the generic name for Valium, after all. She pulled out the injector and twisted off the cap. The spring would drive the needle through the uniform cloth, so she didn't need to roll up his sleeve.

She was positioning it against his arm when Gault turned in his seat. “What are you doing?” he said. He didn't sound happy.

“Giving him a sedative.”

“Put it away.”

“I'm sorry, are you the doctor here?” It came out sharper than she intended.

“Listen up, Major.” Gault glanced front, then at her again. “You don't give anybody in this team anything until I approve it. Understand me? I want him able to walk and carry a weapon.”

“He's suffered major psychological trauma.”

“Not as much as Jake Zeitner did.” Gault stared her down, and despite herself she dropped her eyes, wondering if he blamed her. “If he can walk and return fire, leave him alone. Hear me? Put it away. Now.”

Pressing her lips together, she kept her head down. And after a moment, she felt him turn his attention back to the road.

 

WHEN THE
light grew, they saw the lake. It sprawled below them, a great sheet of gray-brown water reflecting the even more colorless sky. A motionless mist hung over it, a pearly curtain hiding whatever lay on the far shore. The land sloped down to it. Power pylons stood like giants with upstretched arms. There was a highway down there too, and along it some sort of construction, though at this distance they couldn't tell yet what kind. Gault kept checking his watch.

“We're running out of time,” Nichols said from the backseat. Gault nodded without turning his head.

“Where the fuck are we?” Sarsten said. He'd slept up to now; just fallen asleep in the back as soon as he'd hit the seat. Now he sat up, looking at the water. He sounded up again, almost hectic, and Gault wondered if he'd taken another of the orange tablets he'd seen him swallowing before. They had to be stimulants, Benzedrine or Dexedrine, something like it.

“This is where we split up, Sergeant,” Gault told him. “You can help cover the meet-up, then we'll go on in from there.”

“Meaning what, mate? You're ditching me?”

That's exactly what I'm doing, you fucking lunatic asshole,
he wanted to shout into his face. But made himself say instead, “No, just that you've done your mission. No point taking on ours too.”

“I told you that back at the fucking LZ.”

Gault couldn't disagree with that at all. It had been his mistake, taking him. So he tried to keep his tone reasonable. “You're right. You're right; I should have just let you extract with the rest of your team. But look, Sergeant. I'm glad we had you along back there. But we wouldn't have
had the contact at all if you hadn't decided you were going to show off your Arabic.”

“Show off my…oh, get fooking serious, mate. They knew we were there. That's what they were yelling. I was telling them not to shoot, we were friends. Some jundie was just too fucking heavy on the trigger.”

“Forget it. We're going into urban reconnaissance mode now. We're trained for it. You're not. You've got your own backup extract routine, right? Now you've got a vehicle to get you there.”

“Fucking shite,” said Sarsten, but he didn't say anything more because just then two trucks turned out of a side road ahead.

Gault faced front, focusing the goggles on them. Two heavy trucks, canvas tops, the kind that carried troops. They were accelerating, moving at thirty or even forty, way faster than he'd drive on these shitty roads. Vertierra let up on the gas, tossing them forward as the jeep slowed. Gault told him, “Keep your speed up, Tony. Watch which way they turn. If they go down toward the lake, fall in behind.”

But they didn't. As their track intersected the one the team was on, the trucks braked in a spray of mud and water. Then they turned uphill, toward them, one after the other. As they got closer he saw they were Soviet-made, like the jeep.

“Get your hats off,” said Sarsten, behind them. “And get the fucking cammie paint off your face.”

Gault whipped his cover off, pulled off Vertierra's, scrubbed at his face with his sleeve. Most of the paint was gone anyway with the rain and wear of the long night. He glanced back to see Lenson staring obliviously off to the right, to see Maddox and Blaisell and Nichols come up from rubbing their faces. With their stubble, they might look like Iraqis, at least through a window going by at high speed. The men, at least. “Drop your head forward. Like you're asleep,” he told Maddox. To Vertierra he said, “Step on the fucking gas, get us up to fifty.”

“Man, I'm at seventy now. This speedometer's hosed.”

“It's in kilometers,” Lenson said, startling them all. After a moment Gault said, “Back with us, Commander? That's good. He's right, RTO. So get us up to a hundred. Or whatever, just fuckin' go!”

The lead truck was almost on them. Gault made out the driver and another man in the cab. Both in the drab Iraqi battle dress. Vertierra raised a lazy wave, hanging his arm out the window. Then the truck was towering over them, abreast, then past, the next coming up, a blast of wind, a splash and clatter of road grit against metal and glass. The second driver looked down as they passed. Gault saw dark eyes fix on his own through the dirty windshield, but they didn't widen, he didn't look surprised or point.

They rounded a bend in the road and he saw the rendezvous point. It had been briefed to them as an abandoned restaurant on a one-lane road five klicks south of the lake. The light was coming now, and he could see for miles in every direction except across the lake, where the rose-tinted mist cut off his sight line north. The land was under cultivation, it was open. The only building actually on this road was a mile east of them. He guessed it was a couple of miles south of the lakefront. There was the marsh behind it, like on the map. He got the map out of his thigh pocket and checked it again, tried to eye-shoot a bearing on the lake and the marsh. It looked about right.

He told Vertierra, “Downshift and head out cross-country, about forty degrees to your right.”

The only problem was the RTO didn't bother to slow down first. They went off the track at speed, hit the embankment, and sailed through the air for twenty feet before the wheels whammed down again with a jolt that bottomed out the springs and whipcracked their heads forward. Blaisell started yelling and Sarsten told him coldly to shut up.