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  Stapler advanced to where the Marines guarded the front of the compound, saying a few words of encouragement to each, and with professional competence, mentally counting the amount of ammo and weapons they had. He also mentally took muster.

  Ten minutes later, when he finished, he had a good idea of what they had to fight with and who survived the attack.

  With him and the lieutenant, they had eleven Marines to get thirty-two civilians to safety. At least there would be thirty-two if the ten at Alpha were still alive.

  This was not going to be easy. He hoped the oil riggers lived up lo their reputation of being brawlers. Better brawlers than a bunch of whining techno-nerds like he helped evacuate from the U.S. embassy in Senegal last year.

  The compound provided an adequate defense against small arms. Old oil barrels, most of them empty, had been stacked one and two high around the perimeter. Whether done intentionally or not, the barrels formed a nice, manmade perimeter around the area. The prefabricated, three room building braced against the low, rocky hill made him think of the movie Fort Apache, but in the movie, the buildings had been against the back fence of a wooden fort.

  Fort Apache wouldn’t have survived a rocket-propelled grenade attack. This place wouldn’t, either. Stapler could watch old Westerns nonstop when the opportunity presented itself. He preferred the movies with John Wayne or Randolph Scott in them — great Americans. It wasn’t the movie Fort Apache. What movie was it?

  Twelve feet away. Corporal Heights caught his attention as the young noncom stretched his legs to reposition himself behind a group of barrels. He’d recall the name of the movie eventually.

  “Corporal Heights!”

  “Yes, Gunny,” the short, wiry Marine responded. The corporal pushed his helmet back so he could see Stapler better.

  “Take one man and get up there on those rocks above the building! Make sure you watch your exposure. I don’t want you shot. Do a quick look-see, and then one of you come back and tell me what you see.”

  Corporal Heights stood and jerked his thumb toward the burning helicopters. “What about them, Gunny?”

  Stapler looked at the helicopters. The fires seemed as intense now as thirty minutes ago. “Not much we can do for them right now, Corporal. Let’s think of the living, and we’ll take care of the dead later. Now. get up there and assess our situation. 1 want to know if there are any places where those sneaky bastards can approach us without us seeing them.” He slapped the young man on the shoulder.

  “Go! And, for Christ’s sake, be careful.” Corporal Heights shouted, “Hank, let’s move out!”

  A tall, black Marine with a darker tattoo of the Marine Corps emblem on his right bicep grabbed his M-16 in a cross-arms position and ran after Heights. “Where we going, Corporal?” Jones asked with an inner-city accent that flowed in the river of a deep bass voice.

  “Up there, Jonesy. We ain’t good targets down here.

  We’re going to draw the fire away from our fellow Marines.”

  “Oh, thanks, Dave. Just what I need. More white men shooting at me.”

  “Ah, Jonesy, how you know those were white men shooting at us? They looked black to me. Should make you feel at home. Besides, you know the only reason I’m taking you is because you’re bigger than me and a better target.”

  “Gunny, what’s the one eight hundred number for the NAACP out here?” Private Jones shouted good-naturedly as the two friends hurried to the back of the compound.

  “You know why I know they white men. Dave? Because I come from the dark side of Baltimore, and if they’d been black, they wouldn’t have missed.”

  Stapler would have grinned if the situation were not so bad. Humor was how warriors hid their fear. He glanced around the compound, taking a quick assessment of his Marines. A couple were staring at the helicopters, but most focused their attention away from the conflagration and what it represented to each of them. He doubted the young lieutenant or his Marines had any appreciation of the precariousness of their situation. He was the only one with any combat experience, and that had been years ago in Liberia with two thousand other Marines to keep him company.

  Two riggers walked by, mumbled a greeting, and continued toward the back of the compound. The civilians would be looking to the eleven of them to save them, and Stapler had no idea how they would do it. The lieutenant was barely old enough to shave and, with his platoon sergeant dead, that left Corporal Heights as his number two.

  Corporal Heights had nearly three whole years in the Marines. Damn! Wish I had taken her credit cards, invaded Stapler’s thoughts. It would be one less worry out here. At least his Servicemen’s Group Life Insurance of $250,000 should cover whatever she runs up.

  He walked past the end of the line and scanned the high dunes from where he thought the attack originated. The simmering air above the hot sands of the Sahara desert waved above the bodies lying motionless on the battlefield.

  He closed his eyes for a few seconds while he organized his thoughts, balancing what they had against what he thought they’d need. After five minutes, Stapler nodded a couple of times, satisfied with his assessment.

  He turned toward the three civilian white high mobility multipurpose wheeled vehicles, commonly called humvees. This was a piece of luck. Humvees he knew and, even if they were the civilian variant, they could endure the sands.

  For a short moment, a vision of them fleeing across the Sahara, crowded inside these humvees, running for safety, terrified him. It vividly brought to him the odds against everyone here escaping with their lives. Stapler ran a hand under the lip of his helmet and wiped the sweat from his brow. The idea that they might have to drive out seemed far-fetched, but the Army CH-47s lacked the legs to both reach them and safely return to their base. Right now — at this very moment — an alternative option was staring him in the face — one that was not very appealing.

  He rubbed the sand off the window and pressed his face against the glass. The interior looked clean. He ran a hand across the hood, bringing away a film of fine dust.

  The fourth vehicle, partially hidden behind two of the humvees, was a large ten-and-a-half-ton flatbed truck with a metal pylon fence surrounding the bed. Already his mind was weighing how they would convoy out, if the situation warranted them abandoning this stronghold. The truck would be where the bulk of their supplies and most of the evacuees and Marines would have to ride.

  Stapler did a quick calculation in his head and realized they could not fit forty odd people in the four vehicles. He looked around and saw no one. He unzipped and peed on the back tire of the truck. Stapler sighed. A good pee always felt good. “An empty bladder frees the mind, so never pass up an opportunity to drain the lizard. ” A quote from the Emily Post battlefield etiquette espoused by Top Sergeant Macgregory. Combat is best fought with empty bowels and dry bladders, or you run the risk of them being empty and dry when the fighting stops.

  Stapler looked over his shoulder as he walked around the side of the truck, causing him to nearly collide with one of the oil riggers coming the other way. Two inches separated Stapler from a rigger who leaned to the side, bracing an elbow against the back of the truck. Weight lifter, thought Stapler as he stepped back. White T-shirt with the sleeves rolled up with a precision match on both arms, stretched by the large biceps of the man. The man’s rugged, sun-scorched face broke into a large grin, revealing polished white teeth.

  “Oh, sorry,” the oil rigger said, his German accent easily detectable. “I hope you feel better now.” The man straightened and clasped his hands in front of him.

  “Who are you?” Stapler asked, involuntarily taking another step backward.

  “I am Heinrich Wilshaven, mein klein man. They are mein babies,” he said, patting the side of the truck. “I take care of them and keep them running.” Heinrich sighed, ran his hand under his cap and through thick blond hair that seemed to flop everywhere when freed. Heinrich shoved the hair back under his hat. Several seconds of awkward silence foll
owed.

  Heinrich propped his wrist on his hip. “I am good at keeping things running.” He winked.

  “Are they ready to go? Any problems with them?” Stapler asked, touching the truck.

  “What is ready to go? Me?” Heinrich pointed at himself.

  “I am always ready to go, American soldier.”

  “Marine.”

  “Marine?”

  “Yes, we are United States Marines, not Army.”

  Heinrich nodded. “You are one of those they call the Devil Dogs?”

  “We’ve been called worse.”

  “Excellent. Marines are far superior to soldiers; don’t you think?”

  Stapler sighed. “The vehicles, Heinrich? Are the vehicles ready to go, if we need them?”

  Heinrich nodded. “Yes, the vehicles are in excellent shape, even if, mein Gott, they are not German. I work on them every day. They have a full tank of petrol, and I change the oil every two weeks.” He turned with a lopsided smile, the left lip coyly higher. “Wherever you want to go, they will take you there.”

  “Two weeks?” Leslie could not remember when he last changed the oil on their ten-year-old Ford Mustang.

  “Of course. With this dust,” Heinrich waved his hand around the site, “you must change the oil regularly, or the engines get grit into them.”

  “Gunny!” came a shout from the lieutenant.

  “Thanks, Heinrich. Get them ready to go in the event we need them.” |

  “Of course, Marine, and if you need to use my truck again … ” Heinrich winked. “Let me know. It helps keep | the dust off the wheels.” Great, thought Stapler. Just what I need. Enemy surrounding me, stranded in the desert, wife running amok with credit cards, and now a man twice my size daydreaming about my hips.

  Stapler walked to the end of the truck and waved at the lieutenant, who was walking around the center of the compound, searching for him. And baby-sitting a brand new officer. What more can God send me? More sand?

  Seeing the gunnery sergeant, Lieutenant Nolan hurried over.

  “Gunny, we need to get those riggers at Alpha site over here. I just talked with Mr. Jordan, and he is concerned about leaving them out there any longer than we need to.”

  “Yes, sir, LT. But we need to wait until we secure our: position. We also need to report our situation to Homeplate before we do anything else. And then we can see what we can do about those stranded at Alpha site.” [

  Lieutenant Nolan pointed at the burning helicopters. | “What are we going to do about them?” ‘

  Stapler shrugged his shoulders. He knew the lieutenant’ meant the dead Marines. “Not much we can do, LT. If we go out now, we expose ourselves to any snipers left behind.

  We’ll have to wait for the fire to burn down. Probably tonight sometime. Then we’ll recover the bodies.

  Until then, we live with the smell and the sight.” Stapler tugged his ear. “LT. you know there are no rescue helicopters that I know of, which really complicates our problem of evacuation. It also means that if choppers can’t get’ ‘ in here to rescue us, those bodies will have to be buried; here.”

  Lieutenant Nolan stared for a moment and then said,” Bearcat says they have a radio in the shack we can use to contact Base Butler and Homeplate.’”

  Stapler nodded, wondering if the lieutenant heard what he had just said. Their only radioman and the radio was part of the funeral pyre in the troop compartment of the lead CH-53.

  Stapler’s eyes roamed the compound as they walked toward the office building. He marked the Marines’ positions while surveying the surrounding desert landscape.

  They’d he back, he knew Me didn’t know when, but he knew they would. Too many of the enemy and too few of them. A couple of the headdresses — called ghutras — worn by the dead attackers roiled across the blinding white sands, pushed by a brief but strong gust of desert wind.

  The shimmering hot air, radiating a couple of feet above the desert floor, gave the headdresses a fluid appearance as they danced across the sands. Just as suddenly as the wind whipped up. it disappeared, and the ghutraa fell back onto the battlefield amid the dead bodies. If they didn’t bury them tonight, the stench would be horrific by tomorrow morning. He looked up, half expecting to see buzzards or crows. Stapler shielded his eyes. Only the ever-present sun in a cloudless sky burned down. A sky marred by whiffs of dark, oily smoke boiling straight up for about fifty feet where a slight west wind caught it, spreading the smoke like rolling dark clouds as it disappeared out of sight ttoward the horizon.

  Bearcat Jordan stood in the doorway, holding (he screen door open for the two Marines. Worry lines, Stapler called them. Scrunched forehead, searching eyes that never seemed to focus, and a nervous twitch. Worry etched its lines across the supervisor’s face. Well, join the crowd, big man, Stapler thought. We should be more Than just a little worried. As he walked by, Stapler smelled whiskey on the man’s breath. Oh. well, fear affected different people different ways. For him. he found he ate less, drank more water, and had no desire for alcohol and ex … though how one has sex on the battlefield was an other story, one that Macgregory seemed to know by heart.

  Stapler recalled the moment when they ran out of the helicopters. As the lead CH-53 exploded, everything seemed to shift into slow motion, like swimming in thick soup; too slow sometimes, exacerbating the fear gnawing at his stomach. Along with the other survivors of the ambush, he had made the oil barrel barrier, firing at the unseen enemy in the surrounding dunes. He had found himself surprised to be alive and unwounded. Miraculously, none of the other Marines who survived the attack suffered a wound. Either they had been extremely lucky, or those Algerians were notorious bad shots.

  “Gunny,” Lieutenant Nolan said, snapping Stapler back from his thoughts. The lieutenant flopped down in; the chair in front of the console and tossed his helmet on the floor beside him. “That feels good,’” he said softly, wiping the sweat from his brow.

  The squeak of the metal office chair as the lieutenant rocked back and forth made Stapler think of fingernails being dragged down a chalkboard. He shivered involuntarily and moved away.

  Lieutenant Nolan spun the chair around to the communications suite and tuned through the frequencies as he fired up the radio. Another office chair lay on its back near a metal desk shoved against the far wall. Stapler figured’ Bearcat or one of the other riggers had knocked the chair over, diving for cover when the firefight broke out. Under the bullet-shattered window, a half-full coffeepot perked, the orange light still on. On the opposite side of the trailer where a calendar hung, Stapler noticed a rolled-up map He moved to it, grabbed the small metal grip and pulled it; down. It took a couple of tries before the map caught and stayed down. Behind him, the rise and fall of radio noise told him the lieutenant was still searching for the Homeplate frequency. He hoped the young officer remembered the frequency; he sure didn’t.

  Stapler looked at the map. He tugged his ear. Must be a geological chart. It didn’t look familiar to him, other than that he could tell it was Algeria.

  Bearcat saw him looking at the chart. “This is where we are, Sergeant.” the oil rigger offered, leaning forward and putting his finger where a red dot had been stuck on the map. “It’s a hard chart to read unless you can imagine yourself five miles down. Look here—” he started.

  “Where is Alpha site?” Stapler interrupted.

  “It’s too close to have two red dots, so we just use the one for both of us. Look here.” Bearcat said, opening a drawer and pulling out a folded National Geographic map.

  From outside, a large commotion interrupted the two men. Another attack was the first thought that crossed Stapler’s mind, though he heard no gunfire. He grabbed his M-16 with both hands and burst through the door.

  The lieutenant looked up. “What’s going on, Gunny?” Stapler shouted over his shoulder. “Don’t know, sir, but I’m going to find out! You get through to Homeplate.”

  Stapler shoved his helmet back on as he jumpe
d down the steps.

  A quick observation showed him no enemy in front of them. He stopped running and realized how bright the sun seemed after only a few minutes out of it. He put his sunglasses on.

  Bearcat Jordan followed, folding the map and tucking it in his back pocket.

  Across the compound, three Marines faced Sheila Forester and Karim Washington. From the hillside, Corporal Heights worked his way to the floor of the compound.

  Stapler watched the corporal for a couple of seconds and, satisfied the Marine wasn’t going to fall and break his fool neck, he turned his attention to the commotion.

  He couldn’t make out the words at this distance, but the tone told him they were arguing.

  Stapler walked hurriedly to where the five stood.

  Voices rose and fell as the Marines argued with the woman until only the sound of Sheila’s voice could be heard.

  “What are you trying to do? Get yourselves shot?” Stapler asked as he drew near. Sheila stopped, turned, and faced Stapler.

  The three Marines stepped back.

  She spread her legs slightly and put her hands on her hips. “I am asking when we are going to get out of here.

  But, obviously, none of you know. Since you seem to be the leader of this bunch, then maybe you can answer the question, which the whole world wants to know: When are we getting out of here?” “Please, Sheila,” Karim said, reaching out to touch her on the shoulder. [

  She shrugged away from the man, narrowing her eyes [as she glared at him. “Keep your hands off me, Abdullah.”:

  Stapler remembered he had one of those Afro-, American first names … then it came to him: Karim [Washington. Her name, on the other hand, he remembered with no effort. Sheila Anne Forester. A man would have to be a eunuch not to notice her. Pert nipples shoved the: white cotton shirt out slightly, stretching it so the darker, areola surrounding each were easily discernible. She had tied the tail ends of her shirt into a knot just above her pierced navel, and the unbuttoned top two buttons revealed a wide cleavage. No Sophia Loren, he thought, more a Jamie Lee Curtis. He let an audible “Huh huh” escape, but no one noticed.