by Aaron Gwyn
“They chained us in.”
“The fuck,” said Wheels, rising from his crouch.
“They chained us in,” Perkins said.
Russell felt the sweat break out along his spine. His legs had begun to ache from kneeling, but the surge of adrenaline washed the pain right out of him, and he twisted his head to the left and popped his neck. He knew they were about to die.
Wynne rose and crossed the room with the air of a man getting up to check the thermostat—everything about him exuded confidence; everything suggested calm—and Russell felt fear rise into his throat like something that would strangle him. Certainty of death, you accepted. Perhaps dying, perhaps not, put your teeth on edge and set them chattering.
The captain checked the doors, left and right, put his eye to the seam between them, pushed and pulled at the handles. Then he turned to Perkins.
“You have enough C-4 to blow them?”
Perkins said he had enough C-4 to bring the entire building down.
Wynne nodded. He told the sergeant to rig them. He pivoted on a boot heel, pointed to Ziza and Russell, and motioned for them to follow. As they started back up the stairs, Russell could hear Billings ask what the plan was, but the captain ignored him. They went up the first flight, then up the second and third, Wynne taking the steps two at a time, Russell and Ziza struggling to keep up. Rosa’s rifle grew louder, and they ascended the remaining flights and emerged gasping onto the building’s roof.
Blue sky very close, and the sun above the tree line like the portal to another world. All around them a sea of evergreen and cedar, terraced slopes in the distance, gray mountains and purple mountain shadows, white-capped peaks floating at the horizon’s edge. Russell stood with his breath fogging and the sunlight coppering his face, and when he glanced back beside him, he saw that Wynne and Ziza had gone prone on their stomachs. The captain had a handful of his pants leg in his grip, and as Wynne jerked him to the deck, a whip cracked a few inches from his ear, that noise of a bullet breaking the sound barrier just beside you, the thump of the rifle’s report following seconds behind. He lay for a moment with his heart hammering the thin shield of his sternum and then he looked at Wynne.
“Two seconds,” said Ziza. “Six hundred meters.”
The captain’s eyes cut toward Russell. “Thought you knew better.”
“I thought I did, too,” Russell said.
Rosa had set up his firing position behind some loose cinder block at the edge of the building, and they snaked their way over to him. The weapons sergeant kept his eye pressed to the scope, never once turning to look behind him. When the captain came up on his left side, Rosa cleared his throat and glanced down to jot some figure on his data card.
“They’re setting up a suicide rig out there,” Rosa told them. He spoke as if all of this were happening to someone else and he was observing it on a monitor.
“A what?” said Russell.
Wynne lifted his own rifle and stared out through the optic.
“Eight hundred meters,” said Rosa. “On the road out there. Just west of the tree line.”
“Got it,” Wynne said.
“What’s a ‘suicide rig’?” Russell asked. “What’s going on?”
Ziza was just to his right, and the commando leaned over and began to whisper.
“They have a truck,” he said. “They fill it with explosive and drive it into us.” He puffed his cheeks and lifted one hand from the deck, miming a blast.
Russell glanced toward Rosa and the captain, who seemed to be studying the device Ziza had just described. The optic on Russell’s carbine was a red dot with no magnification, and he’d left his binoculars in his left rear saddlebag.
“Captain,” said Russell, “we need to go.”
“Working on it,” the captain said. He pulled out his radio and apprised Bixby of their situation, then raised Perkins and asked if the doors were ready to blow.
“Affirmative,” Perkins said.
“Get the team back on the stairwell. When you detonate, come out shooting. Don’t stop till you get back to Mother.”
“What about you guys?” Perkins asked.
“Ziza and Russell and Rosa are going with you,” said Wynne.
“Then what about you?” Perkins said.
“We got a truck down there on the road with some kind of bomb. They’re going to try and ram us and bring the roof down on our heads. I’ll stay on overwatch until the rest of you are clear.”
“Carson,” said Bixby’s voice, “I don’t—”
“Not up for debate,” the captain said.
He told everyone to wait for his order and then motioned for Rosa to move aside and let him have the rifle. Rosa looked at him for several long moments.
“Rather not do that,” he said.
Wynne told him to take Ziza and Russell and get moving.
“You need a spotter,” Rosa said.
“I’ll be my own spotter.”
“Let me stay.”
Wynne shook his head.
“I don’t like this,” said Rosa. “I formally object.”
“Formally noted,” Wynne said. “Get gone.”
Rosa’s face tightened and he studied his captain. He exhaled very slowly and took his hands off the rifle. He rolled to his right and allowed Wynne to get behind the weapon, waited for him to pass his carbine. Then he just laid there on his back.
Wynne already had his eye to the scope. He thumbed off the safety and then he thumbed it back on and looked at the sergeant.
“Robbie,” he said, “it’s all right.”
“I don’t know,” said Rosa.
“If I don’t make the mission, you know what to do?”
“I know.”
“Make sure you Charlie-Mike. Don’t let him derail it.”
“I won’t,” Rosa said. He reached and touched the captain on the shoulder and then rolled onto his stomach and began crawling back toward the stairs.
Then they were descending the steps, Russell following the lean sergeant, trying desperately not to trip. Everything inside him seemed to be floating, and then he heard the captain discharge the rifle: one time, two times, a third. They reached the rest of the team bunched back on the stairs near the second floor. Perkins had his radio in one hand and a detonator in the other. Russell and Wheels exchanged a look, nodded to one another in greeting or good-bye, and then the captain’s voice came over Perkins’s radio.
“Execute,” it said.
The men hunkered into themselves and clapped their palms to their ears. Russell closed his eyes very tightly and pressed his forehead to the cold concrete wall. He counted backward from ten.
Nine.
Eight.
Seven.
The explosion pitched him onto his side, and something seemed to rattle loose inside his chest. When he opened his eyes, the air was fogged with a very fine dust, years of it shaken from the walls and ceiling, and the men were coughing. They rose one by one, their clothes powdered a light gray, and Wynne’s voice over Perkins’s radio was saying, “Now, now, now,” the words muffled in the clouded air.
They began moving. They reached the first floor and went through the smoke-filled lobby, paused at the ruined doors for the briefest moment, and then exited the building at a sprint. Those ahead of him were firing their rifles, but Russell couldn’t see what they were shooting at. He ran, coughing and trying to clear his throat, bright sunlight in his eyes and bright green grass beneath his boots. He’d lost his sunglasses at some point—no idea when or how. Rosa was just in front of him, and he could see Wheels about fifty yards ahead. The sound from the captain’s rifle echoed from behind, and enemy gunfire barked from the trees to their south.
He reached a trench and then a low berm, scrambled up it, then set out for the pine trees at a run. He’d just gotten up the slope and back onto level ground when the toe of his left boot caught something and he tripped. It happened very fast: one second he was all movement with the breeze stinging h
is ears, and the next he was sprawled on the grass with his rifle underneath him. He heard several closely spaced shots, and then Ziza was kneeling there, helping him to his feet. Russell felt a spasm in his lower back and when he pulled up his rifle, he saw that he’d jammed it muzzle-down into the ground and that the barrel was packed with dirt.
“Are you hit?” asked Ziza.
“I don’t think so,” said Russell.
“Can you walk?”
Russell told him he could run.
Then they were moving through the trees, dodging limbs, Ziza’s hand on his shoulder the entire way. They went down the slope through the pines, and he smelled the horses before he saw them. He sprinted along a stretch of trail and emerged into the clearing, where the other men were untying their mounts from the picket line and heaving themselves onto their backs. Bixby already sat his horse, and he walked it up beside Russell.
“You’re going to have to lead us out,” he said
“Out where?”
“Captain says take the trail on the other side, then on into the hills.”
Russell almost asked him the other side of what, but he knew the answer already. He sat a moment, shaking his head.
“We’re riding into an ambush,” he told the sergeant.
Bixby nodded. He asked how the horses would behave.
Russell imagined a lot better than him. He reined Fella and turned her and began leading the riders up the goat trail that slipped along the hillside through the pines.
By the time they reached the tree line, the horses had begun to nicker and stamp. Fella went immediately tense beneath him, and he leaned down to pat her neck. He heard the crack of the captain’s rifle and thought he could see his scope winking from atop the building in the sun. He couldn’t locate the enemy, but there were intermittent bursts from their rifles, and he put Fella forward on tentative hooves. He heard the clap and clack of gear as the others fell in behind him, and then there was the snap of rounds passing overhead. He touched his heels and pushed Fella up to a trot. The building now was about two football fields away, standing to their left like a monolith against the morning sky. The noises of the horses’ hooves against the turf rose to a rumble you could feel inside your chest, and the smell of crushed grass filled his nostrils, rich and very fragrant. He heard another series of rifle shots, and when he glanced toward the building he saw that the suicide truck they’d sighted was moving toward it, maybe ten, fifteen miles per hour, and then the vapor trails of two RPGs streaked low across the plain and detonated to their right. Fella surged forward and sped to a gallop, the horses behind matching her speed, rifles cracking and the noise of low concussions echoing as the building drew closer and the air stung his eyes, watering now from the cold. He seized a tighter grip on the reins and stretched himself along Fella’s neck, speaking to her, telling her she was doing very good. Something tugged very hard on the cargo pocket of his left pants leg, but he didn’t look to see what. The rattle of machine-gun fire grew distant, and then they were on the other side of the building, the structure now between them and the enemy, the rifles growing instantly muffled. The ground began to rise, and he slowed Fella to a canter and went uphill along the trail, steeper and steeper, bunch grass waving in the breeze. He dropped to a walk and felt the bellows of the horse’s lungs fill and empty, fill and empty, glanced behind him, and saw the others. No one seemed to have been hit and, inexplicably, no one had been thrown. Ziza was leading the captain’s stallion, and the scouts were bringing up the remuda. Russell wiped his eyes and halted Fella up on the hillside, turned and looked back and saw that the building looked very small from this height.
When Bixby reached him the first thing Russell said was, “Captain Wynne.”
The sergeant’s radio was already out, pressed against the side of his face. He was saying, “Underchild Actual, this is Underchild Four; how copy?” repeating the transmission again and again, his voice growing louder and more panicked until all protocol was dropped and he was screaming, “Carson, are you there? Carson?”
“Motherfucker,” said Rosa and he’d just gotten the word out when an explosion shook the earth and the horses seemed to scream with once voice. The gelding Perkins rode stood back on its hind legs, pawing air. Perkins hit the ground and the horse whinnied and then went surging up the trail. No one followed. Their eyes were on the building and the enormous tongue of flame erupting out its rear wall. They watched the structure smoke and totter and they watched as it began to collapse: the roof dropping and the walls exploding outward and a huge cloud of white mushrooming into the clear, faultless sky. Several of the men cried out, and Bixby got his horse under control and turned to take it downhill toward the plain, Ox and Rosa just behind.
Only Lieutenant Billings seemed to have figured the calculus of the situation, and he placed his fingers into the corners of his mouth and gave a shrill whistle that froze all of them in place.
They turned to look at him.
“Get back here,” he said.
Bixby just stared. He whispered what sounded like the captain’s name.
“He’s gone,” said Billings.
“Fuck you,” Rosa said.
Billings turned his horse a full revolution and swept his eyes over each of them, then touched his heels to the palomino’s ribs, snapped the reins, and began ascending the trail. One by one the men fell in behind, silent, stunned. The path took them higher, and they passed into a grove of evergreen, and the valley behind them was obscured by trees. Russell understood that he was now riding under the lieutenant’s command, and he knew like he knew his own heartbeat that this man would abort the mission and lead them back to the outpost under the shadow of Firebase Dodge.
He thought that he should be grateful but found he was in despair.
The trail rose and then descended, and the trees fell away, and they emerged into a shallow sandstone trough where, several hundred meters to their left, was the valley where the collapsed building lay in a smoking ruins. None of them could look at it for long, and when Russell glanced over, his throat tightened. They traveled down the ridgeline, went past a jagged rock formation in the shape of a whale, and then defiled down a slope and then along a field where green grape fields twisted in the sunlight.
When they rounded the bend on the far side, the captain was seated on a low rock wall that ran beside the trail, elbows braced against his thighs, sipping from the hydration tube in his pack. Lieutenant Billings slowed his horse, and the others dropped their mounts to a walk. Wynne looked up to regard each of them in turn, his blue eyes dimmer in the gold light of morning, his blond hair dusted gray with talc and his uniform almost white with it. He wasn’t carrying Rosa’s rifle, but other than the missing weapon or the powder that covered him head to foot, there was no indication he’d been anywhere near a fight.
The men began to dismount and walk up to him—Bixby and Ox and Ziza, Russell trailing right behind—reaching to touch their captain on the arms or back or shoulders. Russell’s eyes were hot and wet, and he was backhanding tears from his cheeks. He felt as though they were enacting a ritual for which he had no name, something lying dormant inside him all these years, asleep and swimming in his blood. They filed past him like pilgrims at a shrine and then stood with baffled expressions. Russell glanced over and saw that Billings and Rosa were standing a ways back, Billings with rage burning in his eyes, and Rosa with his head lowered, studying the ground. The captain walked toward them, approaching the lieutenant first. Billings had already started to back away—it occurred to Russell that Wynne might strike him—and when the captain reached him, he seized the man’s head in both hands, drew him close, and planted a kiss on his cheek: more terrifying, somehow, than any blow. Billings blanched, and when the captain released him, he stumbled backward several steps and looked as though he’d fall. He murmured something Russell couldn’t hear and then went silent, Wynne already moving toward Sergeant Rosa.
The man was kneeling there in the dirt, and when he gla
nced up, Russell could see his eyes were wet. Wynne came up and extended a hand, and Rosa stared at it, shaking his head. Then he took it. The captain pulled him to his feet and embraced him, and the sergeant began to weep. He was saying something over and over, a note of desolation in his voice. Wynne held him very tightly, a sound coming from his lips that sounded like shhhhhhhhhhhh.
Evening of the following day the men were camped in a sandstone wash beside a dry riverbed when the scouts rode in at dusk and reined their horses out beyond the firelight. The two of them spoke in hurried Pashto whispers and then approached Wynne where he sat between Ox and Ziza, stopping a few feet from the captain and performing a sort of martial bow. There was a series of exchanges between the scouts and Ziza, and then Ziza turned and told Wynne that the compound they’d been seeking was only a two-day ride.
Wynne stared at him a moment. He sunk his plastic spoon inside the packet of rations he’d been eating, wiped the corners of his mouth, and stood.
“Two days,” Wynne repeated, but you couldn’t tell if it was a question. The captain’s shadow moved back and forth in the firelight. Ziza asked the scouts if they’d seen the enemy.
The taller of the two men inclined his head toward the other, they spoke several sentences, and the shorter man began to shake his head.
“No enemy,” the tall scout said. He swept a hand in front of his chest, the gesture like a vague salute.
Rosa had walked over to join the discussion, and Bixby soon followed. An informal meeting broke out among the sergeants, and Russell rose, dusted the seat of his pants, and found Wheels in his sleeping bag with his jacket covering his chest. His eyes were open.
“You can really see the stars,” he said.
Russell looked up. They blazed brilliantly, and there was even a sense of warmth.
Wheels said, “ATMs.”
“What’s that?”
“I was laying here and I realized I’d forgotten ATMs. It took me awhile to remember what they even looked like.”
Russell took a seat beside Wheels on the cold ground.