by Aaron Gwyn
Russell went toward the captain. He felt like he was floating. His head seemed to drift through the clove-scented air. He stepped up to the locker, bent down, raised the lid, and let it fall back on its rusted hinge. Then he squatted there in the torchlight, staring down.
It was gold. Gold coins and gold bracelets and medallions of gold the size of your fist, faces in profile on the medallions, none that he recognized. Necklaces. Earrings and pendants. A perfect golden cup. There were steel handles on either end of the chest, and Russell closed his hand around one and pulled. Nothing. Like trying to lift the floor.
He put a hand to his sternum, massaged it, and then he gripped his temples with his middle finger and thumb. He felt his world dissolving, and he thought he was going to be sick. He rose unsteadily to his feet.
“Easy,” Bixby said.
Wynne was staring at him, those blue eyes searching his face. Scanning. Assessing.
“We have to get this out,” he said. “Use some of these ammo crates, divide it so it’s lighter, try and carry it down two at a time. You and Ox on one. Me and Bixby on the other. We’re looking at a few thousand pounds, probably. It’s going to take us several trips.”
Russell started to speak, but his mouth was so dry nothing came at first.
“You knew,” he tried to say.
Wynne continued staring.
“You knew the whole time.”
Wynne didn’t respond. He heard Ox clear his throat.
Bixby said, “We’re burning daylight.”
“Were there ever any prisoners?” Russell asked.
“We didn’t know what there was,” said Wynne.
“Perkins and Sergeant Morgan,” said Russell.
“All right,” said Ox.
“Ziza,” said Russell. “Sergeant Hallum.”
“That’s enough,” Ox said.
Russell had started to back away. He went slowly, palms out in front of him. Like the victim of a robbery.
Wynne watched. He said there’d be time for questions later. He said to give them a hand.
Russell kept stepping backward.
He said, “Wheels is out there with a bullet through his leg.”
“I understand that,” Wynne said.
“No, sir,” said Russell. “I don’t believe that you do.”
“The captain gave you an order,” Ox told him.
“We’re not going to get out of here with that,” Russell said, pointing at the chest.
“Calm down,” Wynne told him.
“If we move Wheels now, he might could have a chance.”
“Goddamnit,” said Ox. “You will get your ass over here and help move this crate. Do you have any idea what this will buy these fuckers?”
Russell was still moving toward the tunnel, inch by excruciating inch.
Wynne said, “Our enemy will use this to murder thousands. Think about that for a second: men and women and children. It’s not about any one of us. What do you think your grandfather would say if—”
Russell raised the rifle and trained the red dot on the captain’s face. His ears were humming and blood seemed to rush to the base of his brain. He could feel himself separating. He was twenty feet away from the captain, and compensating for the height of his optic over the barrel, the rounds would strike Wynne in the throat. When he thumbed off the safety, he could hear the smooth click of the selector snapping into place. He could hear the sound of the torches burning along the walls. He wouldn’t have heard this unless it was very, very quiet.
The captain stared at him for several moments.
He said, “You plan to shoot me?”
Russell kept backing toward the tunnel, boot soles scraping across the floor.
“Corporal,” said Ox, “have you lost your fucking mind?”
“It ain’t me that’s the crazy one.”
“You better lower that weapon,” Ox said, “and you better do it now.”
The captain said, “I’m willing to take your service into consideration. I’m willing to make some allowances. First, put down the rifle.”
“You say another word,” Russell told him, “so help me God.”
The captain said, “You’re heading down a treacherous road.”
“Put. Your weapon. On. The deck,” Ox said.
Russell felt his back collide with the wall. The opening to the tunnel was just to his right, but he wasn’t going to take his eyes off the captain to look. He stepped sideways, then sideways again, squatted down and started crawling backward. He was a few feet inside the tunnel, his left palm touching the ground, holding the rifle to his shoulder by the grip, the red dot swaying over the captain’s chest.
Wynne said, “You realize what you’re doing?”
“I should’ve realized a lot sooner,” Russell said.
“This is willful disobedience of a superior officer,” said Wynne. “Add to that, desertion.”
“You can go to hell, sir.”
“They can execute you for this, son. You understand that, right?”
Russell shook his head. He wasn’t disagreeing with the captain. He was trying to shake the man’s voice out of his brain.
Wynne stared at him another moment. His face was very solemn, almost sad. Then his expression seemed to soften. He nodded at Russell and gave the slightest smile.
“You can go,” he told him.
Then Russell was retreating, the arc of torchlight receding in front of him, scooting into the blackness at his back. He’d already decided to empty his magazine into anything that appeared in the tunnel. His arm ached from holding up his rifle, and after several meters he clutched the weapon against his body and focused on getting away. He was halfway through the passage, then a little farther, and then the walls fell away and he emerged into the chamber, crouched for a moment, and stood. He stepped to one side and turned on his carbine light. He waited for a grenade to come rolling down the tunnel. He waited for the flashbang that would detonate and knock him senseless.
He backed across the floor, watching the tunnel’s entrance, weapon shouldered and his flashlight casting its circle across the rock. His breath came to him in ragged gasps.
He passed the body of Sergeant Perkins. His light illuminated the brass of a dozen shell casings. Blood dried on the slick stone floor.
He moved several more meters.
Inhaled and exhaled.
Then he turned and ran.
When Russell made it back to Wheels, the sky was shading into evening and clouds trailed toward the mountains to the east. Russell knelt there beside his friend, studying the entry wound on his thigh, studying the flesh on either side of the tourniquet. He looked at him and said, “The captain’s gone completely batshit.”
Wheels said, “You’re just figuring that out?”
He told Wheels about the gold, but Wheels just nodded, as if it didn’t surprise him in the least.
“Can you walk?” asked Russell.
“I ain’t tried,” Wheels said.
Russell squatted there a moment. He told Wheels he’d be right back, rose and went across the clearing, and then down to where the horses were tied. He walked over to Fella, tethered to the picket line by her lead. When he ran a hand over the horse’s neck, her skin rippled like water.
“It’s all right,” he told her.
He heard Rosa fire his rifle from the hillside above, and then the noise of automatic weapons came from the distance. He waited for Rosa’s answering shot, but the shot never came.
He walked through the trees, threading his way back to the clearing. Wheels was leaning against a poplar and holding his left foot a few inches off the ground, his jaw clenched and his teeth gritted together.
“Can you ride?” Russell asked him.
“’Course,” said Wheels, and then he placed his foot against the earth and his eyes rolled into his head, and Russell thought Wheels was going to faint. He went over and steadied him, then bent to study the wounds. A clear serum was leaking from them.
“I think they got Sergeant Rosa,” said Wheels.
“I think they did, too,” Russell said.
“What do you want to do?”
“How about we skedaddle?”
“Captain ain’t going to like that,” said Wheels.
“Captain can kiss my Sooner ass,” Russell said.
He went back to where the horses were tethered, untied Fella, mounted her, and then rode over to the other picket line and untied Wheels’s horse. The stallion was nervous, but he led just fine, and Russell walked them up through the trees and back into the clearing. He rode over beside Wheels and then he brought both horses to a stop and swung down from the saddle.
They managed to get Wheels to the horse, and he took the horn in one hand and the cantle in the other and tried to pull himself up. He turned back and looked at Russell.
“I’m going to need a little boost,” he said.
Russell nodded. He interlaced his fingers, made a stirrup of his hands, bent, and slid them underneath Wheels’s left boot heel.
“Count of three,” said Russell. “One. Two. Three.”
Russell was bent from the waist, and he jerked up, lifting Wheels’s boot. He felt Wheels rising and then he felt something give way in his back, and a white hot pain shot down his legs. Then Wheels was in the saddle and Russell staggered and leaned against a tree. He thought for a moment he’d been shot.
Wheels was asking if he was all right. Russell didn’t answer. He staggered to his horse, put his foot in the stirrup, and swung himself up. When he got seated in the saddle, he knew something was very wrong, and he bit down so hard he was afraid he’d crack a tooth. His entire lower back felt as if the bones had been sucked out and stuffed with cotton, and a sharp electric pain was traveling down his legs, an ice cream headache in the nerves.
Russell flipped the reins and put the horse forward, and they went across the clearing, through the trees, past the other horses, past the captain’s perfect stallion, gunshots ringing out behind them as they chucked up and went riding down the trail.
THEY RODE UNTIL just after dark, the horses stepping along the trail between the high sandstone walls. Every hoof fall and bounce in the saddle sent the pain shooting down the backs of Russell’s legs, and he tried to lean forward to take the weight from his spine, but if he was going to ride, he was stuck with it. Wheels had begun to drift in the saddle, and when they stopped in a sycamore grove a few hundred yards from the trail, his leg started bleeding again and Russell couldn’t get it to stop.
Russell climbed down from Fella and leaned against her several moments. He could feel the horse’s heartbeat syncing with his own, his own with the horse’s, and he tried to decide how he’d get Wheels out of the saddle. Then he tried to figure out how he’d get him back on it when it was time to move on. He stepped back and looked at his horse. She had bent her neck and was cropping tufts of grass. He petted her several seconds.
“Let’s get you some water,” he said.
When he walked over to Wheels, his friend’s eyes were closed and Russell thought he’d passed out. He was about to place his palm on Wheels’s thigh, when he said, “What do we got to eat?”
“You hungry?”
“Starving,” Wheels said.
“Let’s get you down.”
“How you want to do it?”
“I’m open to suggestions,” Russell told him, and Wheels sat there, staring at the ground like it was something he’d build a bridge to. He looked at Russell.
“We’re about a pair.”
“Yeah,” said Russell.
“How’s your back?”
“Hurts,” Russell said.
“What do you reckon you did to it?”
Russell didn’t know.
“What if I just climb down on the right side here, sort of use you for balance.”
“Can you do it that way?” Russell asked.
“Yeah,” said Wheels. “I think.”
It ended up being much easier than he thought, and Russell helped Wheels down and then a few feet over into the trees, and they made their camp, Russell spreading their saddle blankets and sleeping bags and then going back to the horses for their MREs.
When he ducked under the limbs, Wheels was seated against the trunk of a sycamore with his leg crooked up, studying the wound. He looked over and saw Russell.
“What are your thoughts on a campfire?” he asked.
“I wouldn’t risk it,” said Russell, and Wheels said that was probably for the best.
He walked down to a stream and found a cloudy pool into which he sunk his canteen. He squatted there watching the moon reflect off the water’s surface and then he lifted the canteen and stood. He thought the odds were against them living through the night.
They sat mixing creek water into their MRE packets—beef ravioli, potato cheddar soup, cocoa beverage powder—stirring the concoctions into various pastes and slimes. Russell had treated the water with purification tablets, strained it through a T-shirt, and still the mixtures tasted foul. They ate every bite and then ran their fingers along the inside of the packages and licked them clean. They’d decided to make a third meal and split it between them when an immense explosion echoed down the valley and a low rumble shook the ground. Flocks of birds went scattering from the trees. They sat frozen with their hearts hammering.
“The fuck was that?” Wheels said.
Russell’s mouth was full of chocolate pudding. He swallowed painfully and stared up at the stars.
“Artillery?” said Wheels.
“Wasn’t artillery,” Russell told him. “We’d have heard the round.”
“Then what was it?”
Russell shook his head.
“Should we get out of here?”
“Probably.”
“Are we?”
Russell thought about it for several moments. Then he said if something was going to get them, it would have to get them.
When Russell woke the next morning in the gray light before dawn, Wheels was sitting up against the tree, eating another MRE. Russell brightened when he saw him seated like that, but when Wheels passed him the canteen he’d been drinking from, his hand felt like he’d just removed it from a fire; Russell set the canteen aside and pressed the back of his hand against his friend’s forehead.
“You’ve got a fever,” he told him.
“Tell me something I don’t know,” Wheels said.
They were on the trail all day long. Around noon, Russell’s back began to hurt so badly that he removed everything from his Molle pouches and stowed the various items in his saddlebags. Then he began to strip off the body armor. The vest weighed just under thirty pounds, and he felt lighter after dropping it, but not much. Wheels, sick as he was with blood loss and fever, turned in the saddle and looked back toward the sound of Russell’s IBA hitting the dirt. He stared at Russell a moment.
“You’re bulletproof now?” he asked.
Russell didn’t answer, and after a while Wheels faced forward and they rode on.
That evening, they made camp in a narrow draw beneath an overhang in the rock, and it began to sprinkle and then to rain. Russell was lying face-up on his sleeping bag when the drops started, and he watched them slant in the twilight. His back was to the point that he had to breathe very shallowly in order to stand it. The electricity pulsed down the backs of his legs, and the toes of his right foot were completely numb. He had two fentanyl lollipops in his kit, but he was saving them, he didn’t know for what. He rolled to his side, made it to his feet, and walked over to where he had the horses hobbled, removed the poncho from his saddlebags, and then went to get Wheels’s. When he came back, the man’s fever was gone but his breath was very shallow and he stared at Russell as if from some great distance. His eyes had calmed and the pupils were motionless.
“Don’t you even think about it,” Russell said. “You hear me, Brett?”
Wheels gestured down at his leg. The bandage was soaked through with blood.
/> “Only got so much of that in me,” he said.
“You stay with me,” said Russell. “Don’t leave me out here like this.”
Wheels shook his head, closed his eyes for several moments. Then he wet his lips again and looked up at Russell.
“They’re going to ask you about him. Tell them the truth.”
“Tell them yourself,” said Russell.
“Promise me something,” Wheels said.
Russell nodded.
“Don’t try and take a bullet for the man.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Russell.
“Yeah, you do. When they ask about him, you tell them everything you saw. Tell all of it. Don’t leave nothing out. Don’t try and make him look no better than what he is.”
“You don’t need to worry about me making him look good,” said Russell. “I get the chance, I’m going to give somebody an earful.”
“Just tell them the truth,” said Wheels.
“When have you known me not to?”
“That’s what I’m saying,” Wheels said. “Don’t start now. Don’t try and cover for the man. I don’t care that he was a Ranger.”
“He ain’t no Ranger to me,” Russell said.
Wheels smiled.
“Good,” he said. “That’s good.” He reached and patted Russell on the arm. “Now quit bugging me and let me sleep.”
Russell prayed that night. He couldn’t remember the last time he had. He always pictured God as some amalgam of his grandfather and an old face in the sky, and he lay on his back staring up at the sandstone overhang, asking that they make it out alive. He said he didn’t want to die out here and he didn’t want his friend to die, and he asked that he’d be able to see Sara again, and he asked for a good night’s rest. He thought of praying for his back, but he figured he’d already asked enough of God, and he drifted off to sleep listening to the sound of rain against the rocks and the snuffling of the horses.