The Devil's Pitchfork

PROLOGUE Descent

Derek Stillwater and Richard Coffee crouched on a desert ridge, peering across the expanse of sand toward an Iraqi ammunition depot. Dressed in biological containment suits that were camouflaged for night work with black face paint and tight black gloves, they watched the target site through night vision goggles. They hated the suits. They were clumsy, bulky and hot. Sweat soaked their skin and rolled down their backs and sides. Both men were thankful they didn’t have to wear the gas masks unless all hell broke loose. They were both Special Forces. Above them the desert night was overcast, cloud cover at a maximum, no stars or moon visible. A Special Forces kind of night.

Coffee went about setting up a laser targeting system. Somewhere overhead flew an F-117A Stealth fighter. Once the ammunition depot was targeted and Stillwater gave an OK, the fighter would take out the depot, leaving a massive gaping hole in the Iraqi supply line.

Twenty miles away Coalition troops were ready and waiting to break through the Iraqi defense.

Stillwater didn’t like it. Through his night vision goggles the desert glowed green. Two miles north he could see the shapes of men guarding the depot. Off to his left, much closer, was an Iraqi patrol. They were noisy and used flashlights; he found it hard to believe they would be so careless. But so far everything about the Iraqi army had surprised him. It had been amazingly easy to slip through their patrols in a specially equipped dune buggy, driving in the dark while wearing night vision goggles.

Quickly Stillwater went about laying out his equipment. He was a specialist in biological and chemical weapons. The first thing he set up was a miniature weather station. Whether the Iraqis knew it or not, they had picked a good spot for their ammunition stores; the weather conditions here were unpredictable, particularly the wind, which shifted and veered and swirled around a series of low and high ridges on three sides of the depot.

The anemometer began to spin. Wind speed: 15 knots. Direction: unstable. Mostly a north or northwest wind. Stillwater grimaced. Bad, bad, bad, he thought. The Iraqis were known to have large stores of biological and chemical weapons. Saddam Hussein was a big fan of sarin and cyclosarin gas. If the bomber nailed the depot and the wind was blowing toward the U.S. and Coalition troops, even at a distance of twenty miles there was likely to be fallout with unpredictable results.

In a briefing regarding the mission, Stillwater had recommended that allied troops stay even further back. The answer: greater distance was not tactically efficient. Meaning when the depot was blown the troops would advance quickly.

So now, on the front line, Stillwater had to make a decision. Were the weather conditions going to allow this bombing? Derek felt sand pepper his neck. That was fine. If it began to hit his face, they were in trouble.

Suddenly behind them appeared two Iraqi soldiers, also wearing night vision goggles. They began to shout at Coffee and Stillwater in hoarse Farsi and point their guns.

Dast kasidan! Payin! Payin!

Not seeming to pay attention, Coffee clicked one more switch and gave Stillwater a thumbs-up.

Shit, thought Stillwater, and he hit a preprogrammed sequence on his radio giving the all-ahead. His mission was clear. The targeting laser took priority over the safety of the troops.

The wind direction suddenly shifted from the west. If only it would hold. He watched the vane shift, north, west, north, north, west, south, west…

The soldiers barked orders, clearly wanting the two Americans to surrender. Slowly, eyes on the vane, Stillwater placed his hands on top of his head.

In a rough voice Coffee snarled, “Madhar eta coon mae kun um!”

The Iraqis began to scream at them.

“Offering to buy the beer?” Stillwater asked.

“I was suggesting that I would like to have anal sex with their mothers,” Coffee said.

“Oh good. I was worried you’d say something that might make matters worse.” Stillwater didn’t take his eyes off the weather vane.

West, west, west.

“Just buying time.”

“I would prefer they didn’t kill us—”

They didn’t hear the F-117A fly overhead, or see its batlike shadow blot out the sky. But Stillwater had a sense of the five-hundred-pound bombs coming down just prior to impact. The roar, even from two miles away, was deafening, setting off other bombs, a chain reaction of explosions. The ground shook, seemed to undulate like a writhing snake. For a moment it felt like the end of the world. Dust rose like flies from a corpse.

Stillwater, thrown to the ground with Coffee, kept his eyes on the weather vane.

An alarm went off in his ear, the small earphone connected to a Chemical Agent Monitor, the second piece of equipment that was his responsibility. It was rigged for audio alarm only. The display that would indicate intensity and type of gas was blacked out for covert night action.

“Gas!” he shouted at Coffee.

But Coffee was rolling on the hard desert floor, handgun pulled, firing at the Iraqi soldiers who had also been flung to the ground by the force of the shock waves.

In the distance the depot continued to explode, armaments going off from the compression caused by the U.S. bombs. Coffee’s .45 seemed like a popgun in comparison.

Stillwater pulled his gas hood over his head and ran to Coffee, staggering as the ground shook beneath his feet. Coffee was gasping for air, scrabbling for his own hood. Snatching it from his hands Stillwater yanked it over his head. Antidote, antidote, he thought, quickly grabbing for the kit attached to his belt.

With practiced hands he slammed together the ampoule of atropine and injected it into Coffee’s thigh. Coffee slumped to the ground, chest heaving. Turning, Stillwater saw that the Iraqis were on the ground, gasping for breath, clawing with bleeding fingers at their throats, dying for air. They would soon be dead.

Stillwater’s gaze returned to the weather vane.

A gust of wind struck the helmet of his gas mask, sand making skittering sounds against the shield.

North.

North.

North.

The wind had shifted. It was blowing the poison gas and whatever else Saddam Hussein had in that depot. It was blowing the fallout toward the waiting troops.

He glanced at the Iraqi soldiers. Both were still, skin blistered, faces swollen, lying in pools of vomit and blood and shit.

Lugging Coffee onto his shoulders, Stillwater carried him to their dune buggy and dropped him into the passenger seat. Stillwater felt for a pulse beneath the hood.

Weak.

But steady. He’d live.

It took Stillwater only minutes to load their equipment into the dune buggy and haul ass out of there, back to the troops. As he drove, he radioed a warning of the cloud of toxic waste that was coming their way.

He hoped he wasn’t too late.