“I think you’re pretty decent.”
“You’d be mistaken.”
Dirge in a Major Key:
Part II
S. L. Farrell
THE CHINOOK WAS LOUD, crowded, and uncomfortable. Underneath them, lit only by starlight, sandy, low hills crawled toward the horizon and more hills emerged to replace them, until finally the sun rose to color the world red and then yellow. Rusty was in the chopper with him, along with four dozen UN troops and their officers, Lieutenant Bedeau among them. They wore flak jackets and helmets and carried live ammunition in their weapons, but there had still been no real resistance—not at Kuwait International, not at any of the places that Michael had been to in the endless parade of days and nights.
Michael had lost count of time. All the places in the Ar-Rumaylah field in southern Iraq were starting to look the same, blurring in his memory. The employees of each facility had packed up and left, leaving papers and half-eaten snacks on their desks. In each place, the wind wailed mournfully as it blew dun-colored sand between the buildings. The army of the Caliphate was an eternal no-show.
The other teams—Kate with Lohengrin in the Al-Burqan field in Kuwait; Tinker on the Az-Zuluf platforms out in the Gulf—reported the same: no resistance. The wellheads, the pumping stations, the pipelines, the refineries: they’d all been abandoned. Michael, Rusty, and their blue helmets would stay a day or two or three until UN contractors and support troops were sent in from HQ at Kuwait International, and then they’d be on to the next place.
The ease of the operation was a relief to everyone, Michael no less than the others. He’d not been looking forward to another battle in some godforsaken locale, especially when the enemy carried a special hatred for him.
He glanced out the window nearest him. The radio headset squawked with terse updates. DB kept tapping on the flak jacket that covered his chest, but the dull sound it returned gave him no comfort. Easy or not, the whole operation still felt wrong. Everything was too easy. Michael was sweating, and it wasn’t the heat. He slipped one of his hands under his flak jacket and rubbed at the bruise on his chest, the fading remnant of the sniper attack at Kuwait International.
They hate you for what you did in Egypt. . . . The people of the Caliphate, they don’t like you very much. . . .
“Wellheads, one minute.” The warning came from his headset. Around him, soldiers checked gear and readied themselves: their group was French, as were the bulk of the UN ground forces, armed with stubby FAMAS G2 assault rifles. The Chinook tilted, then dipped with nauseating suddenness as the rotors wailed. Michael caught a glimpse of the towers of derricks, several buildings, and a trio of huge storage tanks for the crude oil, but then dust and sand rose in a dense, choking cloud, blocking sight of the landscape, and he felt the shudder as the wheels touched ground.
The rear door yawned; a squad of blue helmets jumped out, ducking their heads against the rotor wash and running across the sand with weapons ready. Alongside him, Rusty coughed in the gritty air. “Cripes,” he muttered. More troops tumbled out. Michael checked the two M-16s he carried—still leaving his upper set of hands free—and lurched to his feet. “Let’s go,” he said to Rusty.
“Why don’cha stay behind me, fella?” Rusty suggested. “Just in case.” Michael thought that an excellent idea.
They lumbered down the ramp and onto the sand at a jog.
Their Chinook had landed alongside the administration building for the facility—Lieutenant Bedeau was leading the first set of blue helmets, and had already kicked open the doors of the building and gone in. As with all the wellheads they’d taken, there didn’t seem to be anyone around: no cars in the parking lots, no one near the storage tanks or near the oil derricks set in a mile-long arc just to the east, no one moving in the village five hundred or so yards away to the west near the main road. The pipeline-linked refinery a half mile to the south looked equally deserted. The Tigre choppers hovered overhead menacingly, loud in the sunlight, but their guns were silent.
Maybe, he thought, maybe Jayewardene and Fortune were going to get what they’d hoped. He rubbed the bruise under his Kevlar again and crouched behind Rusty, scanning the rooftops and half expecting to feel the kick of a slug against his jacket.
“We’re secure here,” he heard Bedeau say in his headset in French-accented English. “Aucun problème.” The relief in the man’s voice was palpable. Someone laughed nearby; he saw the closest soldiers let the tips of their weapons drop slightly.
These assignments were already becoming routine. They were beginning to expect it to be easy. That worried Michael more than anything.
“Nobody home again,” Rusty said. In the midst of the pipes and derricks, he looked like a piece of old equipment that had decided to become ambulatory. “Good deal.”
They swept the facility closely and made certain that the employees had indeed abandoned the place, that there were no soldiers of the Caliphate or snipers hidden about, and that the facility hadn’t been either sabotaged or booby-trapped. Rusty had been given the task of using the metal detector on the grounds, with two demolition experts a careful dozen steps behind him, checking any hits he found. He grinned at Michael with the earphones stretching dangerously around his orange-red head. “I found lots of pieces of old pipe, and a whole buncha coins.” He held out a large palm, and Michael saw several silver and bronze-colored coins there, adorned with Arabic lettering. “Souvenir, fella?”
Michael took one. He brushed the sand from it and stuck it in his pocket.
A few hours later, Michael, Lieutenant Bedeau, and a six-member squad of blue helmets trudged out to a small village along the narrow paved road passing the complex, while Rusty and the others continued to sweep for mines and booby traps. The village was a collection of small houses huddled together in the sand with a few stores and a petrol station. All the houses looked the same: prefab, cheap company housing. The veiled faces of women watched them from behind shuttered windows as they approached.
There were children—a dozen or more, their ages seeming to range from maybe seven to perhaps fourteen—playing soccer between the houses. Usually, no matter where he went, the strangeness of Michael’s spidery figure would bring them running and chattering toward him, but these only stopped their game and stared as they approached before melting away into the bright shadows between the buildings. “. . . Djinn . . .” He heard the word in the midst of the stream of whispered Arabic, and it gave him a chill. He began to watch the windows of the houses carefully, half expecting the muzzle of a rifle to appear. The children vanished, the soccer ball abandoned on the sand. The village seemed preternaturally quiet; it made the small hairs stand up on Michael’s arms. His lowest set of hands clutched the single M-16 he was holding tighter, his finger sliding close to the trigger.
It’s all kids, women, and old men here, he reminded himself, but that gave him little comfort. Any of them could just as easily press a trigger.
Lieutenant Bedeau, in addition to English, also spoke Arabic. He called out a greeting, his voice sounding terribly small. For several seconds there was no response at all, and Bedeau shrugged at Michael. “We’ll go building to building looking for weapons,” Michael began, but then a door creaked on rusty hinges and an elderly man stepped out from one of the houses. His thobe—the standard white robelike garment of the region—swayed as he moved, revealing a stick-thin body underneath. They tensed, all of them: had the man made a wrong gesture, he would not have lived to take another breath. But the grizzled elder kept his hands carefully in sight as he spoke to Bedeau in a burst of rapid-fire, gap-toothed Arabic. Bedeau nodded; they exchanged a few brief sentences.