There's no purity in the desert. It cannot be anything but dirty. It is made up of everything that's been sweated away, everything that won't burn.
Staff Sergeant Monty Lord worried he was the only one smart enough to realize how malignant the desert was. Other people passed through it, lived in it. They couldn’t see how it hated them. All that sand wanted nothing but more sand. And the heat wanted nothing but to burn.
No wonder people from here end up so fucked. This place wasn’t made to produce sanity. It was made for people to blow themselves up in.
His thoughts were interrupted by Gigante. The big black man—six foot four and just shy of three hundred pounds—was aiming the Humvee’s mounted .50-cal out at the horizon. He made a chuttering sound with his lips, like a kid with a toy gun firing imaginary bullets.
“CHTCHTCHTCHT!” Gigante puffed out, shaking the .50-cal as if with recoil. Then waving it from side to side, like he was hosing down a barbarian horde. “CHTCHTCHT!”
“Knock it off,” Lord told him.
“Yeah, Sarge,” Gigante said, letting go of the .50-cal.
When they’d first met, Lord had been a bit intimidated at the prospect of commanding someone a head taller than him and with muscles bigger than his head too. That’d diminished over the years of their deployment. Like a sled-dog, Gigante was happy to go in a direction someone smarter than him dictated.
But he also liked to bark. “Why, though?”
“We’re behind enemy lines,” Lord reminded him. “De facto stealth mode. We need to ninja this shit.”
“Don’t you need an enemy to have enemy lines?” Hotsauce asked. “We kinda vaporized their army, remember?”
Lord didn’t remember. He hadn’t been part of the onslaught. That was all Air Force. And some Navy. A lot of buttons being pushed, a lot of mouses being clicked. Tangos eliminated from continents away. All they needed the Army for was when some poor bastard got shot down and someone had to go pick him up and take him back to FOB.
And even then, the Apaches were covering the likely crash sites. Lord and grunts like him were just out as a precaution. In case the flyboy had accidentally parachuted onto a moving van and ridden it a couple hundred miles from where radar had lost him.
“You’re supposed to be working the drones,” Lord reminded him.
“I’m working the drones!” Hotsauce pointed to the windows on his laptop. “Drone 1, desert. Drone 2, more desert. Drone 3, no downed airmen. You know what there is instead?”
“Desert,” Gigante guessed.
Hotsauce checked his watch. “And in eighty-two minutes, we move out and drone-sweep another thrilling grid coordinate. With a motor that’s going to be a lot louder than Gigante.”
“Yeah, his mouth isn’t loud, but if he gets carried away and blasts a sand dune—”
“He’s not that dumb.”
A wiry five foot six, Hotsauce was always a bit resentful of being the small fry of the trio. Especially since he was of average height. He just had the bad luck to be assigned to a squad with one giant and one Monty Lord, who was six foot nothing. Making the average height closer to six feet than to five foot something, at least in their vicinity.
Hotsauce didn’t like that math. It made him ornery. He was too smart to be outright insubordinate, but not smart enough to get past his hang-ups.
“Okay, he is that dumb, but I’m the same rank he is and I’m not that dumb—” Hotsauce turned his attention back to his laptop. “Shit, I got something!”
Lord could’ve rolled his eyes. I told you to work the drones. “What’ve we got?”
On the .50, Gigante muttered a hell yeah and gripped the machine gun tighter, like the enemy would be in sight any moment.
“Calm down,” Hotsauce told him. He was looking forward to netting some arterial spray too, but he was smart enough to know there was little chance of that. Between being excited and wrong or being smart and right, he went for smart. “It’s probably some Haji who got his element wrecked by an F-15 and now he just wants to surrender to us.”
Lord didn’t pay him attention. He was focused on the monitor. In the blaze of the desert, heatvision was useless. Motion detection was still marginal—big enough movements of sand could set it off. The crystalline graphics for it on the drone’s POV looking like tiny diamonds embedded all over the ground. But there were big starbursts where something substantial was moving. Not a vehicle. If this were a city, Lord might write it off as a dog. But this far out in the wastes, it most likely had to be something.
And if it wasn’t—what else did they have to do except make machine gun noises?
“Give me a heading,” Lord told Hotsauce, heeling his hand into the Humvee’s starter button to fire up the engine. “And Gigante, finger off the trigger.”
“Yeah, yeah, I’ll let you have a chance to shoot ‘im,” Gigante promised, resting his forefinger outside the .50’s trigger guard.
***
“Five hundred yards—” Hotsauce announced, nine minutes later, when they were on a beeline to the sparkles of movement the drone was still picking up.
He had one hand on the laptop, ready to adjust the drone in a thousand little ways if something revealed itself. His other hand was on his M7 rifle. He wasn’t braced beyond his seatbelt and so the Humvee’s roaring flight up and down the sea of sand dunes tossed him around in his seat like he was vibrating with excitement. And he might as well been.
“We coming, baby,” Gigante muttered, maybe to himself, maybe to the .50. “Oh yeah, we almost there.”
“Four hundred yards,” Hotsauce said over him.
“Maintain situational awareness,” Lord ordered. “Gigante, make sure no one’s creeping on us; Hotsauce, keep on the drones.”
He was eying whatever was pinging the drone’s motion detector. It could only be moments until it showed up through the windshield. They were driving right at it.
“Two hundred—one hundred—” Hotsauce continued.
Lord took his foot off the gas, taking his eyes momentarily off the windshield to scan all around. No sign of ambush, no indication this was a trap. But it wouldn’t until it was sprung. And if something needed to be killed, he wanted to be first to see it, first to terminate it. Lord didn’t believe in leading from the rear.
They were coming down the slope of a hillock-sized sand dune. Now the terrain leveled out and across a flat expanse of sand Lord saw a bundle of rags, heaped up on the ground like a prostrate worshipper of the emptiness itself.
Lord toed the brakes. Slowing them to a crawl. Then he brought his foot back to the gas pedal. Ready to slam it down if he heard one of the magic words: contact. RPG. Anything.
“That ain’t moving,” Gigante observed, training the .50 on it. “Want me to frag it, just to be sure?”
“They haven’t shot at us yet. They’re not even moving.” Lord made a quick decision; he put on the brakes, shifted the Humvee into park. “Hotsauce, on me. Gigante, perimeter. This might be a hot exfil.”
“So we’re getting out of the Humvee?” Hotsauce asked, his tone making the question into bitching.
“That an IED, you want the Humvee in the blast radius?”
“I don’t want my ass in the blast radius!”
“Don’t worry, I’m pretty sure Gigante can manage calling in a medevac.”
Lord got out of the Humvee. His movements quick, decisive; their own kind of order. He didn’t check to see if Hotsauce was flanking him because he knew the man would be. Lord went left, Hotsauce went right. Spread out to avoid being in the same field of fire. If the bundle started firing, it might get one of them, but the other would annihilate it.
“Whoever you are,” Lord called, “put your hands up and hold real still. This is the United States Army and we will open fire if you do not identify yourself.”
The bundle stayed where it was. It shifted—as if breathing—but that could’ve just been the fabric, pushed around by the ever-present wind.
No answer. Lord hadn’t expected one. He signaled to Hotsauce with closed fist: hold. And, M7 trained and finger on the trigger, he advanced on the unknown.
Boots feeding little sprays of sand into the constant wind.
Body hunched down, movements as machinelike as they could be made.
Until he was next to the bundle. Able to prod it with the muzzle of his M7.
He got a moan leaking out of the bundle, as pus would run from a lanced boil.
Lord took one hand off his rifle and used it to move some of the cloth aside.
“Jesus Christ, it’s a kid.”