Wynne's War (22 page)

“What do you mean, ‘fillings?'”

“I mean fillings,” said Bixby. “Gold fillings. For teeth. There were entire ammo boxes of teeth.”

Russell took his face in one hand and massaged his temples with the thumb and middle finger. “I don't see how you didn't go absolutely berserk.”

Bixby turned and looked away.

“I'm not sure that we didn't,” he said, his voice lower and just at the edge of hearing. “You should've seen the captain. We did a body count, confirmed our kills, collected weapons and intel, and then started stacking up the boxes of plunder. What—nine, ten years worth? Carson stood there in the middle of all that. Cave was lit by torchlight, and the gold sparkled like a dragon's treasure. He started to preach. Never heard anything like it. Wish I'd written it down. He told us to look. Said this was what the enemy used to buy their rifles. Their rifles and mortars and roadside bombs. Provisions. He pointed to one of the boxes of fillings.

“‘You see that? Every one of those is a dead American.' We all just stood there, and he went quiet a couple of minutes and let it sink in. Then we set explosive charges on the weapons cache, wired it to blow, sent half the team out to get the ATVs, bring them up to load the ammo and VCR boxes, called in the medevac chopper for Joel, and started stacking bodies. And then he said—I'll never forget it—he said, ‘Eye for an eye?' He looked at us and shook his head. ‘Eye for an eye won't cut it.
Two
eyes for an eye. You take my eye, I take both of yours. That's our math now. That is how we win.'”

 

Afternoon of the next day, the captain waved him up from the rear of the column and then sat the gold stallion as Russell walked Fella past the other riders. They seemed to watch with great interest, Wheels and Rosa and Sergeant Bixby. Ox sat gripping his saddle horn in both hands, eyes glazed from the fentanyl, and one side of his mouth stuffed with gauze. When Russell reached the captain, Wynne turned in the saddle and looked back over his shoulder, staring for several moments. Then he looked at Russell, the Akhal-Teke perfectly motionless beneath him.

“We're being followed,” he said.

“Are you sure?” asked Russell.

“Pretty sure,” the captain said.

“Talibs?”

Wynne's mouth tightened and his brow furrowed. He asked how the horses were going to hold up around a lot of shooting.

Russell glanced down and patted Fella's neck. He'd done what he could to gunbreak the animals, but nothing got used to the noise of automatic weapons.

He glanced back up at Wynne.

“My honest opinion?”

“Your honest opinion,” said the captain.

“I think they'll go completely apeshit.”

“That's what I was afraid of,” Wynne said.

“We could split the team—half of us ride ahead leading the other half of the horses. Get a mile or so up the trail.”

The captain seemed to be considering it. Then he said, “I don't want to get in contact with only half our shooters, and I don't want to send you guys into an ambush of your own.”

“What do you want to do?”

“Scouts will be back in an hour. Let's hear from them.”

The scouts were late that evening. The team had made camp in a dry wash ringed by oak and holly. Ziza was posted near the trail on sentry, and when the captain's radio crackled to life, it was the commando's voice that came over the speaker.

“Scouts are coming,” it said.

“Copy that,” said Wynne, and then told the man to bring them on down to camp. He sent Sergeant Hallum to relieve his post, and the team waited in the gathering dusk. Fifteen minutes later they heard the crunching of dry leaves and then saw the two Afghan scouts following Ziza's short, athletic form through the trees. Wynne was seated cross-legged on the ground and he waved the three of them over, Ziza walking up and squatting beside his captain, the two scouts stopping several feet away, like children awaiting punishment. Russell listened as Ziza spoke to them in their native tongue, questioning them, it sounded like, and then the commando lifted a palm and turned to Wynne.

“They say there is a tower. Three, four kilometers down the trail.”

The captain looked at him a moment. He said, “
Tower?
”

“That is what they say.”

“What kind of tower?”

Ziza turned back to the scouts and barked at them in Pashto, the scouts responding in soft voices, deferential, and then the taller of the two knelt and began making a crude sketch in the dirt with the middle finger of his left hand. The team watched. Bixby came over and turned on his flashlight to get a better view. When the man was finished with the drawing, he spoke once more to Ziza and then fell silent.

The captain gestured at the sketch with his chin, illuminated in the circle of Bixby's flashlight. “What's that?”

Ziza lifted a hand and held it several feet off the ground. “They say this is a very tall building. The word they know to say is
tower.
” He shrugged an apology.

“How tall?” Wynne asked.

“One hundred meters,” Ziza said.

Ox was seated beside the captain—hadn't spoken all evening, hadn't done anything but stare at the ground and sway. At this figure, his head jerked toward Ziza and his eyes came alive.

“Bullshit,” he said.

“Ask again,” Wynne told the commando.

Ziza turned and spoke to the scout, his tone harsher, and when the scout answered, Ziza turned back to address the captain.

“They say one hundred meters.”

“Bullshit,” Ox said.

Wynne glanced at the weapons sergeant. He looked as though he was about to tell him to secure it, when Rosa spoke up. He'd been squatting over a pot of cold chili, stirring it with one of the cleaning rods for his rifle.

“If they have that kind of crow's nest, it's going to make for a hairy approach.”

The men began to murmur their agreement. Wynne nodded. He motioned Ziza toward the scouts.

The commando began to interrogate them and then he cleared his throat and stared down between his boots for several moments. Russell noticed the gray hairs that had grown in his moustache and beard—how long since any of them had had a shave?

“They are saying this tower is deserted,” Ziza told them.

“Deserted,” said Rosa, the way you might repeat the word
aliens
if someone told you they'd just landed in your backyard.

Wheels leaned over to Russell and whispered, “How can they know that?”

Russell shook his head. He motioned for his friend to listen.

“Did they go inside?”

Ziza told him they hadn't.

“How long did they observe?”

Ziza asked the scout and the scout answered. The man looked terribly ashamed.

“Several hours,” said Ziza.

“And there was no movement?”

“None,” Ziza said.

Billings was seated several yards away, massaging his legs, sulking as he always did in the evenings. Now he lifted his head and spoke.

“Captain,” he said, “I don't like this.”

“Fuck's there to like?” Wheels muttered.

The men fell to arguing. Dark closed in around them, and the stars winked on between the spidery shapes of the trees. There was no agreement as to the accuracy of the scouts' claims and none as to how the team should proceed.

When Russell woke the next morning the captain sat sipping coffee he'd brewed over a can of Sterno. Russell walked over with the sleeping bag draped across his shoulders like a shawl. He seated himself beside Wynne on a downed tree trunk that Ox had dragged into camp the previous evening, and the captain took the pot from where it sat smoking on its metal grate, poured a cup three-quarters of the way full, and handed it across. Russell thanked him. He inhaled the rising steam, then tested the coffee with his tongue. He blew into the cup for several seconds and then took a sip—rich and very strong.

They sat there in the half-light, birds calling from the darkness beyond the trees. Then he felt the captain looking at him.

“I was in the Regiment,” said Wynne.

“Didn't know that,” Russell said. “I knew you'd been through Ranger School. I saw you were tabbed.”

“It was only for two weeks,” Wynne told him, shrugging. “I'd dropped my SF packet about a month before and I was still unpacking boxes there at Benning when I got the call to head to Fayetteville.”

Russell nodded.

Then the captain said, “Your grandparents raised you.”

Russell couldn't tell if this was a question or a statement, but he told Wynne that yes, they had.

Wynne sipped his coffee. He asked what his father did.

“He was in the army,” said Russell. “Did three tours in Vietnam with the Lurps. Or his first tour was with them. After that, they all got folded into Ranger units.”

“What about now?”

“What do you mean?”

“What's he do now? Your father.”

“Nothing,” Russell said. “We lost him when I was real small.”

The captain was silent a moment.

Then he said, “Over there?”

“No, sir. Over here. He was killed in Tulsa.”

“Murdered?”

Russell said no, not murdered. He told the captain how his father's pickup had stalled on the tracks of the Frisco Railroad, how he'd stayed in the cab trying to get it started until he was hit by a train.

“I was only eighteen months old,” said Russell. “I don't even remember him.”

“What about your mother?”

“I remember her just fine.”

“How'd she deal with all of it?”

“Percodan,” said Russell. “Percocet. Vicodin and Valium. Anything else she could get her hands on.”

“Did she ever come out of it?”

“Couldn't say. Last time I saw her was the day after my seventh birthday. I don't know where she is. I don't even know if she's still alive.”

“Your grandparents were your father's parents?”

“My mother's,” Russell said.

They sat there, the sky paling against the ink black limbs.

“Children of adversity,” Wynne said.

“How's that?”

“Friend of mine. Operator named Eric, one of the first guys ever selected for CAG. He—”

“Delta Force?”

“Right,” said Wynne, “Delta. He told me that right after they'd stood up the unit, the head shrinkers were interested in figuring out what made the elite elite. If there were any common denominators. The men who made it through selection were from all walks of life. Every ethnicity, every kind of background. Short, tall, rural, urban. On first glance, they didn't seem to have much of anything in common.

“So they ran their tests. Psych evaluations. Questionnaires. And what they found was that, to a man, these operators came from broken homes. Had abusive fathers, mothers who were addicts. A lot of them were orphans. They'd been beaten and molested, in and out of foster care. The phrase they came up with was
children of adversity.
Guys with deep psychological scars but whose trauma hadn't wrecked them. Because usually it does. They end up in prison. End up on drugs. Drunks and derelicts. Institutionalized. But the small percentage who don't—these men were somehow stronger. Stronger and stranger. Children of adversity.”

Russell raised the coffee to his lips but he didn't drink. He bent over and sat the mug on the ground.

He said, “Be real honest with you: I can't say my life's been all that bad.”

Wynne studied him.

“I mean,” said Russell, “there's plenty of folks that have had it worse. My grandparents were real good people. They treated me like I was their son. They might as well have been my parents.”

Wynne nodded. “Except they weren't.”

“No,” said Russell. “Not technically speaking.”

They sat there. Across camp, one of the men cleared his throat and spat. There was the sound of sleeping bags being unzipped.

“I guess,” Russell said, “I feel like, all things considered, I've had it pretty good. I wouldn't want my life to be any other way than what it's been.” He looked at the captain. “That make sense?”

“Makes sense,” Wynne told him.

The captain rose and pitched the dregs of his coffee out onto the carpet of dead pine needles. Then he turned back to Russell.

“And yet,” he said, “here you sit.”

 

Dawn had just broken when they struck a trail that veered north and passed along a narrow gorge where crows squawked to one another from the crags high above them and the noise of the horses' hooves echoed off the sandstone walls. They emerged into a wooded vale, and up ahead they could see the scouts waiting in a grove of pine, gargantuan trees climbing toward the sky like ancient totems. Wynne led them down a dry creek bed and then along a slender path that snaked its way through the evergreens. When they reached the scouts, Ziza rode up to speak with the men for several minutes and then came back to report to the captain. Wheels and Russell were sitting their horses to one side, and Russell touched his heels and put Fella forward, approaching Wynne's stallion from the rear.

“Not worried about any of that,” the captain was saying. “If we all go up there together, they take out the whole team in the funnel.”

“I don't think there is a ‘they,'” said Ziza.

“There's always a ‘they,'” Wynne said.

The captain reined his horse about to face the others and waved them close.

“Structure's on the far side of these trees,” he said, “four hundred, five hundred meters. Our scouts' ‘tower.' We're going to need to clear it room by room. If there's intel, we need to collect it. Can't just pretend it doesn't exist.”

“What kind of intel?” Bixby asked.

“I don't know what kind, Mother. This isn't even on our maps.”

“Or the drone feeds,” Billings added.