Operation Secret Storm

Antje brushed her flaxen Germanic hair behind her ear and set the f-stop at 16 to counteract the blinding glare of the desert. She squinted, hoping the sun wasn't taking its toll on her delicate skin and deepening the golden dust of freckles that lay across her enchanting nose. She had the full line of Clinique sunblocks and moisturizing emollients to ensure she didn't end up with the skin of Tommy Lee Jones, but she was taking no chances. Already, the constant blowing of the wind, and the yelling over the friendly fire had roughened her voice till she sounded like Christiane Amanpour imitating Demi Moore with a sinus infection.

Antje felt antsy. Yes, she looked like a blonder version of Dawna Friesen. And covering the desert war was a fabulous professional opportunity. However, just as Antje started to file her story on her sand-encrusted laptop, she spotted the familiar olive drab reflection of Sgt. Creed Colton sauntering across her screen. Noting a window of opportunity, she snapped the cover closed as fast as Geraldo Rivera traveling away from a Scud missile.

She believed in Creed. He was the intended target of her Arabian Nights fantasies, and she expected to meet with minimal resistance from him. She planned to incorporate both her Sassy Grape tanga and Sugarmelon v-string in an alternating, two-pronged assault and had had the briefing planned ever since she first spotted his undulating muscles and steel jaw. She knew he wouldn't be able to resist her Midnight at the Oasis scenario, but out of patriotism, she planned to wait till the all-clear was declared. Then the sultry desert was her territory, but she would be his captive.

Heated by the licentious images dancing in her mind, she fanned herself as a flush began to spread across her face. She felt a trickle of sweat on her flat, tanned tummy. It was a tummy flatter than the Iraqi desert, toned by years of daily situps and ab crunches. In idle moments, in war zones across the globe, she had bounced dimes off her belly more often than Peter Arnett had issued distorted reports. Her nipples began to swell against her many-pocketed canvas photographer's vest.

One nipple pressed, with an urgent sensuality, against against the durable YKK zipper of the left breast zip-pocket on her faded Banana Republic vest. Ah, the original Banana Republic. Mill Valley, California, reminded her of carefree nights in hot tubs. Those were the days, my friend, we thought they'd never end. The warm water gently caressing smooth, tanned skin, the bodies writhing in ecstasy beneath the California sky.

The other nipple pressed, with equal urgency, against the right flap-pocket of her vest. The vest was almost khaki in color, and thus it matched the light brown softness of her skin. Every afternoon, like clockwork, Antje emerged from the press tent in a businesslike camo sarong. From behind her sunglasses, she had seen Sgt. Colton pause from his task of managing sandbag placements and watch as she doffed her sarong and began to sunbathe on the tank.

She would pretend to fumble at the knot of the sarong to increase the tension. But soon, like Gauguin's frolicsome maidens in "By the Sea," she would be exposed, her lithe body reclining in the sun. And she would then feel the warmth of Sgt. Colton's gaze exacerbate the desert heat.

She recalled that day, that brutally hot day, when Sgt. Colton removed his shirt. It was like the janitor Willie in the "The Simpsons" doffing his shirt and revealing a form that made Sylvester Stallone in "Rambo: Part 8" look flabby. Oh, that Stallone. In those movies, he would sneak into camp at night to use the Nautilis machines. But Antje digressed.

Every day, of course, Antje gave silent thanks to the supply officers who had issued her the standard sand camo bra and thong. Even in wartime, her tan crucial to morale. Were soldiers advised to shave, when possible, to maintain personal discipline? Of course, they were. And, to no less an extent, Antje felt a duty. Sure, she could have gone into combat with the same pubic hair design which had served her so well in prior beach combat on Grenada. But no, not Antje. She elected to shave it into a silhouette of Tommy Franks. Her original intent had been to go for a front view, but his ears rendered that plan impossible.

Did Sgt. Colton take careful note of these things as his steely eyes raked the tank on which she reclined every afternoon? Did he observe her lithe, golden form as she slowly, slowly -- even more slowly than that -- applied Coppertone suntan oil? Did he watch, almost mesmerized, as her hands glided over the terrain map of her toned body? Did he run his bronzed, muscular hands over an empty sandbag and wish that said hands were applying said suntan oil? Affirmative.

Antje struck a contrapposta pose and stretched sinuously on the warm surface of the tank, wishing it was Creed Colton. Antje felt another droplet of sweat trickle down her torso and wondered if she had enough nerve to reenact her favorite scene from Body Heat. She replayed it in her mind -- a nevous William Hurt splashing a snowball on Kathleen Turner's chest and dashing for the paper towels. Antje rehearsed Turner's line, "You don't want to lick it off?"

Could she ever be so bold? Maybe better to wait for the suntan oil briefing scheduled for this afternoon. Reporters would be provided with SPF 3892 sunscreen and assigned a partner to run through proper application techniques. Antje planned to nail some terse yet incisive quotes from Sgt. Colton on Iraqi UV rays and use the opportunity to get up close and personal. With his hawklike gaze and undulating bronzed abs, he gave new meaning to the term spongeworthy.

But Antje's plan was not to be. The troops received orders to move out, and all the night, and the next, the tanks swept toward Baghdad, taking the embedded Antje with them. Bracing herself against the rumbling of the tanks, she snapped shots of civilian villages and ominous flares of bombs on the approaching horizon. She was filled with a sense of trepidation but also of exhilaration, her craving for Creed Colton for the moment superseded by her craving to capture images of war.

Still, at the end of the day, as heavenly shades of night were falling, at twilight time, he swam into her mind, and his swimming reminded her once again of a California hot tub. She could picture him easily lounging against the frame, bubbles frothing against his skin, breaking on his iron-hard pecs. In fact it was odd how readily the image sprang to her mind. Could it be she'd actually run across him in her halcyon youth in California? If they'd once shared a hot tub, that would explain why he looked at her as if he knew all too well her tonsorial predilections.

In reality, her tonsorial predilections had changed, Tommy Franks being too difficult to maintain. She pondered achieving approximate, if not perfect, symmetry, and settled on duplicating the shape of Jordan. Not Michael Jordan, the country of Jordan. She further pondered seeking Sgt. Colton's assistance on the matter. She imagined him gripping the razor with absolute precision, plotting the coordinates of Jordan on her body, and deftly applying a warm lather to her soft skin.

She imagined him holding the razor as he created the oval above Irbid, Jordan. Imagined him patiently shaving the line from the Dead Sea down to Al'Aqabah. She shivered at the thought of him carefully creating the long, jagged line of Jordan's border with Saudi Arabia. The fantasy was too much to bear. Antje steadied herself by setting up her tripod to catch the looming shapes of the Baghdad skyline through the dense yellow haze of the sandstorm's aftermath.

Antje hoped that Saddam's cruel regime would be cancelled faster than Phil Donahue's new show. Yet uncertainty lingered in the desert air like her perfume, a scent designed by Chanel for combat use. As she moved to adjust the tripod, adjacent soldiers were distracted. Yes, their primary focus remained locating the Republican Guard. But they remained equally alert to the possibility of spotting a visible thong line in what Conway Twitty described as "tight-fittin' jeans."

Indeed, not to put too fine of a point on it, Antje's svelte form reminded them of the Elgin Marbles, or at least the female ones. But these soldiers were not lewd, crude, and tattooed. Antje had been surprised at the cultural sophistication of these fellows in dusty camo. She had expected them to be clutching dogeared copies of Playboy and Penthouse.

But their minds were not in the gutter in Quatar. Often, in Quatar, they played uitar. Classical guitar in Quatar. To the gentle rhythms of Segovia, she found the soldiers reading Flaubert. One particularly dark evening, she heard two soldiers discussing the relative merits of Gauguin and Cezanne. Were the loins of these soldiers set ablaze by visions of tan girls swimming nude in the warm, inviting waters of Tahiti? Oh no, their attention remained solely on artistic merit.

Antje's mind drifted. It drifted to the beach scene in "From Here to Eternity," with Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr. Perhaps sand was the link. Perhaps passion. Who can say? All Antje knew was that eternity might be found in a blade of grass, a grain of sand.

That night, at the Post-Impressionist discussion group, Antje entered the tent to find Sgt. Colton discussing the origins of Cubism with exquisite originality. Without missing a beat, in the midst of a sentence involving the words "fragmentation of space and shape", his unerring gaze fixed on her and she was riveted by his insight and bedroom eyes. He disposed of Cezanne with a few more words, and as the discussion progressed to more arcane art influences of the Tao in the Edo Period, Antje sidled around the dark edges of the tent till she was close enough to feel the rhythm of his breathing. A rhythm that imitated the steady, reassuring pattern of waves on the shore in "From Here to Eternity."

Antje felt a breeze brush her cheek and looked around. Sgt. Colton had lifted the tent flap and jerked his head towards it, indicating her to come, er, go there. She followed him and once outside, said "What--", but was stopped as he turned and fixed her with a gaze that rivaled the intensity of James Dean's. Silently, she led him the short distance to her solitary press tent and drew him inside.

Suddenly his arms were around her, his hands in her hair, and his mouth on hers. Instinctively, she parted her lips and his questing tongue drew her into a vortex of liquid whirling passion. She gasped for breath and felt his lips on her neck and shoulders, leaving imprints of his molten passion. Almost as in a dream, she felt his large, strong hands caressing her back. One hand, the left, rested for a second on her waist, then touched her hip gently, yet insistently, with a sense of eminent domain.

It was a firm, yet full and muscular hip, toned and tanned. Into Creed's mind crept unbidden a vision of her in the cowgirl position, her firm, spankilicious hips flexing in passion. Perhaps it was the footage recently on satellite television of the rodeo finals from Las Vegas? Perhaps it was Creed's basic, undeniable sensitivity to feminists climbing mountains? Whatever the reason, Creed felt, in his heart of hearts, that a woman's place was on top.

She watched, dazed, as his suntanned hands undid one button of her blouse, then another, then another. She saw his rough, calloused hand move slowly toward her bra. His hands moved inexorably towards her breasts and when his thumb found her turgid nipples and moved slowly back and forth over them, she felt a fire invade her loins so savage that it made the desert heat seem like the flicker of a dying candle.

Swept away by a strange destiny in the beige sands of March, Creed's passion rose. As soon as his unmatched visual acuity delivered crisp, digitized images of Antje's swollen nipples, his passion began throbbing with more intensity than Victoria Clarke at a Pentagon briefing. For Antje's part, it did not escape her notice that Creed looked like a younger, more sensual version of General Myers.

As she saw his tanned jaw, covered by beard stubble, begin to lower toward a swollen nipple, Antje let out a moan more passionate than any cri de coeur. But an instant later it was drowned out by the obscene blare of an air raid siren. They sprang apart, panting. In an instant, he was gone and she was left alone in her tent as he went to don the full panoply of desert warfare.