by Aaron Gwyn
Russell walked over and took a knee behind Wynne. In the space of fifteen seconds, he’d sweated his clothes completely through. His calves burned. He leaned and looked around Wynne through the inner doorway. There was a stairwell leading up. The captain stood his rifle upright on his thigh, reached back, and clapped a hand on Russell’s shoulder.
“This’ll be over in about two minutes.”
“Yessir,” Russell said.
Perkins had come up on the other side of the doorway behind Ox and taken another stun grenade from his belt. He was pulling the pin when Wynne got his attention.
“Wait a second,” he whispered.
Perkins looked at him. He asked for what.
“Just wait,” the captain said.
They waited. Russell could hear the sound of boots slapping against concrete, the sound of someone descending. Then he saw a figure in blue on the other side of the doorway. Wynne fired his rifle twice and the figure went sprawling backward.
The captain looked at Perkins and nodded.
“Now,” he said.
The grenade was the shape of a can of shaving cream, nickel-sized perforations over its metal body, and Perkins had it clutched in one fist with the forefinger of the other hand through the pull ring. He yanked the primary ring, yanked the triangular secondary ring, then stepped around Ox and tossed the device through the doorway onto the stairwell. Russell closed his eyes and cupped his ears with his palms, and in a few seconds a flash strobed his eyelids and there was a humming in his head and the smell of aluminum. Wynne rose from where he was kneeling beside the door and charged forward, Russell behind him, ears still ringing, the muted footsteps of Ox and Perkins at his heels.
The stairs were made of poured concrete and badly constructed, and Russell tripped twice but managed somehow not to fall. They came to a short landing on the second floor of the structure and proceeded through a long empty room, posters on the wall of shirtless men in Levi’s, black and red backgrounds with legends in Cyrillic. A upended baby crib stood in one corner. A PlayStation without controllers or wires lay there on a beige carpet sample. No television. No power outlets that Russell could see. There was another door at the far end of the room, and the four of them formed up to either side of it, taking knees, catching their breath. Russell thought he heard voices from beyond the doorway. Then he was sure he heard them. He looked at Ox on the other side of the doorway and saw that the muscles along the man’s jaw were still bulging. He studied him a few more seconds from over Wynne’s left shoulder, and he’d just looked back to the doorway when a figure in a tracksuit burst into the room, sprinting. It was a blond man, blond hair and beard, and he was already past them and in the room’s center before he realized he wasn’t alone. He’d just started to turn when Ox and Perkins opened fire.
Russell watched the man in the center of the room turn and pitch to the ground. Perkins stepped farther away from the door, turkey-peeking around Ox to see if another enemy would be following the one they’d just shot. Wynne glanced at the dead man and then back to the doorway. He lifted a hand and motioned Ox and Perkins through. Russell’s ears continued to ring. Wynne waved him to the other side of the doorway, and he rose from his crouch, moved opposite the captain, scanned his sector, and then followed Perkins and Ox.
They went along a hallway, and then the hallway turned back to the south and they went down another short stretch, their boots making muted slaps against the floor.
The passage terminated in small room where a laptop sat closed upon a card table. Maps on the walls. A corkboard with thumbtacks pinning torn scraps of paper. A narrow window into which the last sunlight came. There was a thin man in olive-colored fatigues seated on the floor, leaning against the far wall with both hands crossed over his stomach, fingers interlaced, and his shirt blooming with dark arterial blood. His Kalashnikov lay beside him, but he made no attempt to take it up. He sat watching the Americans without interest, his eyes starting to glaze. The room smelled of feces and iron.
Wynne walked over to the man and kicked his rifle, which went skidding across the concrete. The captain studied this soldier for several moments and then he knelt there in front of him. Ox and Perkins had already turned back to the doorway they’d come through, Ox open-mouthed, massaging the left side of his jaw. Russell watched him a moment and then he turned to watch Wynne and the dying Chechen. He thought the captain would get back on the radio and inform Rosa and the others that they’d cleared the building, but instead he seized the man’s hands and pulled them away from his stomach.
“Where is it?” he asked.
The man just stared. He was struggling for his breath. His blond beard was long and matted with blood.
“We can make it quick,” Wynne told him. “I know you understand.”
The man closed his eyes and drew a breath. Russell could see his chest expand. He reached down to his med kit, which he kept in his right cargo pocket. The kit had trauma shears, decompression needles, and a nasal airway. A half roll of QuikClot and a tourniquet. A fentanyl lozenge. He’d just pulled the kit out of his pocket when the Chechen blew a long breath into the captain’s face.
“The fuck you,” he said.
Wynne let go of the man’s wrists, reached and grabbed the collars of his olive jacket, and ripped it open, buttons tumbling between the Chechen’s legs, scattering across the floor. The man wore no shirt beneath the jacket, and the bullet hole was about two inches above his navel and pumping blood in time with his pulse.
Wynne studied the man’s face a moment and he studied the man’s stomach. He undid the Velcro strap on his right glove, pulled it off, and dropped it beside him. Then he drove his naked index finger into the wound.
The Chechen’s eyelids snapped open and his eyes bulged from their sockets. Sweat broke out on his forehead. He began panting.
“The fuck you,” he told the captain, spitting the words. “The fuck you.”
Wynne smiled. He pressed his finger deeper, twisting it.
The Chechen wheezed and then began to cough, and his face was a mask of torment. Russell stepped toward his captain. He raised a hand to place it on Wynne’s shoulder. Then he lowered it.
“Tell me where and I’ll make it stop,” Wynne said, his voice surprisingly calm. “Don’t pretend you don’t know, because we both know you know. We both know that, don’t we?”
The man was still coughing, his eyes clenched against the pain. He looked across the room and gestured with his chin. Wynne watched. He turned and glanced over his shoulder to where a poster was taped to the wall. The poster showed a man in an A-shirt and tight blue jeans holding a bottle of malt liquor, a caption in Cyrillic beneath.
“Perkins,” he said.
Russell watched the sergeant step over to the poster, remove his knife from his belt, slide it under the strips of tape, and pry it from the wall. Beneath the poster, a crude hole had been knocked in the wall, and Perkins reached inside and removed a small velvet sack with a bright yellow drawstring, bright yellow writing stitched along the crimson fabric. Russell couldn’t make out what it said. Before he had a chance, Perkins turned and tossed the bag to Wynne. The sack struck the captain’s palms with the sound of marbles clacking.
Wynne undid the drawstring and reached his naked hand down inside. Then he pulled a dark blue stone from the sack. It was knuckle-sized and polished so that it shone, shot through with striations of gray and white. The captain held it toward the narrow window, and there was an odd moment where Russell watched the light hit the blue of the stone, the blue of Wynne’s eyes.
Then the captain dropped the stone into the sack, pulled the drawstring closed, and tied it.
“That all?” he asked the Chechen.
The man stared up at him. Then he closed his eyes.
Wynne slapped him twice very quickly, very hard. “This can get a lot worse,” he said.
The man began panting.
“Are there more?”
The man seemed to wilt. You could se
e something in him break, like a plate shattering. He began to shake his head.
“No,” he said.
“Convince me,” said the captain.
“No more,” the man told him. His breath was coming to him in rasps.
Wynne studied him for several more moments. Russell had readied a pair of flexicuffs and he was stepping forward to hand them to the captain when the captain stood, swiped his finger along his pants leg, and pulled back on his glove. He slid the sack into a cargo pocket.
Then he pulled his pistol from its holster, pressed the muzzle to the Chechen’s forehead, and fired.
They made camp that night in a narrow draw and watched wolves thread their way along the slopes, down toward the compound to pick at the bodies. The gunfighters took turns with a night-vision monocular, staring at the furtive forms and their reflective eyes as they trotted with tails tucked between their legs, seven of them, eight. Wheels passed the device to Russell and he passed it right back. He didn’t want to see, and when he awakened in the dead of night to the alien yipping, he lay there in his sleeping bag gripping the earth beneath the layers of Gore-Tex, feeling as though he’d fallen through the world into an alternate plane: predatory, carnivorous, a universe of tooth and bone.
The ground underneath him felt like rock. He shifted his body and tried not to think. During the raid, Ox had bit down so tightly he’d splintered a molar. After they’d exfiltrated from the compound, Ox walked back to Bixby and collapsed. The medic had examined his mouth with a penlight, and then they’d loaded the sergeant on a Skedco, dosed him with fentanyl, and dragged him up into the hills. He lay several feet from Russell now, twitching in his opiate dreams.
They performed stand-to in the dark before daybreak, the Rangers seated back-to-back with rifles propped on their thighs. Russell could feel Wheels’s muscles knot and tense. He glanced over at Ox, the sergeant holding the bridge of his nose pinched between thumb and forefinger, lying there with his mouth stretched wide. He would tire, allow it to close, but as soon as his teeth met, his mouth would snap open like the jaws on a trap.
Russell turned his head and whispered back to Wheels. He told him that the captain knew.
“Knew what?”
“About the compound. He knew what we were walking into.”
“Didn’t seem to me he knew shit.”
“I don’t think he knew they were Chechen,” said Russell. “I don’t think he knew that. But he definitely knew the place was there. He took something out of there. That’s what the whole thing was about. He wanted to go in and get it.”
Wheels asked him what it was.
“It was a bag of stones.”
“Stones?”
“Blue stones,” Russell said.
“Like jewel stones?”
“They were in this cubby in back of a poster on the wall. One of those bags like liquor comes in. Stone I saw was about the size of a quarter. Blue.”
Wheels sat for a moment.
“Sapphires?” he said.
“I don’t think so,” said Russell. “It wasn’t clear, but I don’t know what sapphires look like before they’ve been polished.”
“Cut.”
“Whatever,” Russell said. “There was a whole sack full. Or I assume so. I only saw the one.”
They sat for a moment.
“Lapis,” said Wheels.
“How’s that?”
“Lapis,” Wheels said. “They mine it here.”
“Is it worth anything?”
“It’s worth something,” Wheels said. “Why you think they were hiding it?”
A few seconds passed. The morning blew a cold breeze across their faces. Russell could see his breath in the air.
“He executed one of the hostiles. Just straight-up greased him.”
“Shit’s bad all over,” Wheels said.
They followed the trail north, mounting up at dawn and riding until the sun set behind the western hills. They ascended low mountains by rocky switchbacks and descended to forests on their far side: scrub oak and holly, trees of gargantuan size, the soldiers dwarfed by the perfectly straight trunks from whose high branches monkeys screamed, sending down acorns and bits of bark. Their horses stepped nervously. Russell would lean down and straighten himself along Fella’s neck, speaking in a soft voice, telling the animal she had nothing to worry about. That she was a good horse. She was a sweet little mare.
The next day Ox fainted under the noon sun and pitched sideways in his saddle. He would have dropped to the ground but for Ziza, who, riding behind the sergeant, pushed forward and managed to pin Ox between their horses and get an arm around his waist. He called for help, and several of the men dismounted, and together they lifted Ox and carried him to a level space beside the trail. The sergeant’s eyelids fluttered. He came to for a few moments, gave a low, guttural moan, and then his eyes rolled back in his head and he went unconscious. Bixby, who’d been riding toward the column’s rear, walked up and knelt over the man. Russell watched the medic take off his jacket, roll it up, place it under Ox’s head, and then, very gingerly, part the man’s lips and open his mouth. He retrieved a small penlight from his cargo pocket and spent several minutes inspecting the man’s teeth. Wynne was standing there in the circle that had formed around Ox, and the medic looked up at him.
“That tooth’s got to come out,” Bixby said.
Wynne nodded. He hitched his pants and squatted beside the sergeant, reached over, and placed a hand on his sternum. Russell could see the man’s chest rising and falling under the captain’s palm, rising and falling. Wynne motioned for Bixby to hand him the flashlight. He clicked it on and, bending over, stared into Ox’s mouth. He leaned closer and then looked back at Bixby.
“The one on the right?”
Bixby said, “Second mandibular molar. It’s cracked all to hell.”
The captain clicked off the flashlight and handed it back to Bixby. He asked the medic what he wanted to do.
“We have to pull it.”
“You have your dental kit?”
Bixby shook his head.
“What do you have?” Wynne asked.
The medic stared at him. “Pair of needle-nose pliers.”
Wynne was silent a few moments. Then he asked if Bixby would dose him with morphine.
“More fentanyl,” Bixby said. “I’m going to lay the lozenge against the gum line. Still not going to be enough. When I start, he’s going to come around. We’re going to have to hold him. We got to find a way to keep his mouth open.”
“You want to tie him?” Wynne asked.
“We have to tie him. Get a couple of the guys to sit on his legs. We got to keep him from biting down.”
Russell cleared his throat. “Sergeant Bixby,” he said.
The medic turned to look at him.
“What about a bit?”
“A horse bit?” Bixby asked.
Russell nodded.
“It’ll break every tooth he’s got,” Bixby said.
“Not if we use a Mullen.”
“Do you have a Mullen?” Wynne asked.
“I have two,” said Russell. “I have one in my saddlebags I never even took out of the wrapper.”
Billings was standing there with his arms crossed to his chest. “The fuck’s a Mullen?”
“It’s a milder mouthpiece than your standard bit. One I have in my bag is made of rubber.”
“And that’ll keep him from biting?” Bixby said.
“It will absolutely keep him from biting.”
“Will he be able to work around it?” Wynne asked.
“Let me grab it for you,” Russell said.
He turned and started up the trail until he reached Fella standing hobbled there at the head of the column. He undid the buckle on his left-side saddlebag, pulled out a small fleece blanket, and pulled out two pairs of socks and a jar of crunchy peanut butter. He reached down inside the leather pouch and came up with a rubber snaffle in a clear plastic sack. He took the knife
from his harness, cut the sack open, sheathed the blade, and began jogging back down the line—the horses one behind the other with their heads drooping between their shoulders, sunlight glinting off their coating of gray mountain talc. A row of ghost horses. Shimmering.
When he made it back to the men kneeling around Ox, he pitched the Mullen to Bixby and the medic dumped the bit from the sack and began to turn it in his hands. It was made of dull green rubber, five inches in length and about as big around as a Magic Marker, T-shaped at either end where the bit rings protruded. Bixby studied it very closely, pressing his thumbnail into the rubber. Then he opened his mouth and fit the device longwise between his teeth, clamping down, the muscles flexing along his jaw. Wynne and Russell watched. The medic rocked the contraption back and forth, holding it by the bit rings, and then he took it out and removed a bandana from his pocket. He looked up at Russell and nodded.
They lifted Ox and carried him into the shade of an enormous pine. Bixby undid the clasps on the sergeant’s chest rig and unbuttoned his jacket. He knelt there for a moment beside his patient and swiped his forehead with the back of his hand.
“How are you wanting to tie him?” the captain asked.
“Paracord,” Bixby said. He gestured to Ox’s hands where they lay at either side of his torso. “We can loop his wrists, tie up to a couple of these saplings, stretch him out a little. Same thing with his feet.”
Wynne told Bixby he didn’t want his weapons sergeant trussed up like Jesus Christ.
“How would you do it?” the medic asked.
Wynne considered the question. Then he shook his head and ran his fingers through his beard.
“Let’s just get it over with,” he said.
Bixby wrapped the sergeant’s wrists with gauze, then took a length of paracord, made a honda knot at one end, slipped the loop over Ox’s right wrist, and drew the slack through until the loop was tight. He walked over to an oak sapling several feet away, passed the paracord around it, tightened until the sergeant’s right arm came off the ground and extended out from the shoulder, then secured the rope to the tree with a highwayman’s hitch. He did the same with Ox’s left arm, tethering it to a low limb that jutted from the pine, and motioned for Wynne to bind the man’s ankles. Wynne took the spool of paracord and built his lasso, slipped it over the man’s boots, and trailed the rope back between Ox’s feet. He drew it taut and stood for a moment.