The Wide Night Sky

by Matt Dean

  Chapter 2

  The Humvee’s headlamps scraped a few meters of light out of the black. Baker drove slowly, leaning so far forward that her chest nearly touched the steering wheel. Littlefield’s head bobbed like an ear of wheat on a broken stalk. Above and behind them, in the gun turret, Evans watched the road and swung side to side in his creaky harness.

  Littlefield felt a yawn blooming at the back of his throat, but he was too exhausted to open his mouth. He stared at his watch. Seven minutes past midnight. After a series of sluggish, half-assed calculations, he reckoned he’d gotten ninety minutes’ sleep in nineteen hours. That didn’t take into account some five- and ten-minute dozes he’d had here in the Humvee—but if he tried to add those in, he figured, he’d put himself to sleep for sure.

  A stainless steel mug of black coffee sat on the seat between his legs. When he’d brewed the stuff, just before they’d left Camp Dwyer, it had been so hot that he’d immediately burned his mouth. His tongue still felt numb and barren, and as if to prove it to himself, he kept dragging the tip of his tongue across his teeth.

  Evans said something. Littlefield didn’t catch it, but Baker heard, and she started braking. Motes of dust swirled up into the beams of the headlamps. A pair of tiny green lights cut through the rising fog of dirt. LEDs. What else could they be, if not LEDs?

  Now Littlefield was awake.

  Even before the Humvee had come to a stop, he swung his door open. He slid to the ground, his boots landing with a pair of soft thumps in the powdery pale dust. He set his mug on the floor of the vehicle and hoisted his weapon. With a flick of his little finger, he disengaged the safety.

  “I got ya,” Evans said.

  Littlefield gave a thumbs up. Good to go. He nudged his door closed with his hip.

  Now that he’d left the Humvee, he couldn’t find the green lights again. He walked forward, watching the ground for wires, for signs of digging, for anything too messy or too tidy. His boots crunched in the grit. The road was in poor shape, yes—rutted, strewn with sharp rocks, pocked with potholes—but it was, after all, just what you’d expect of a dirt road in a shit-poor district of Afghanistan, a torn-up narrow track stretching from the north end of nowhere to the south side of fuck-all.

  He heard something. Froze. Cocked his head and closed his eyes. Strained his ears.

  The sound had come only once, whatever it had been. And what had it been? A wheel with faulty bearings? A swinging gate with a rusty hinge? A soft-spoken bird?

  It came again, quieter this time, lower in pitch. Littlefield felt for his helmet-mounted scope and tipped his night sight forward on its pivot. The landscape in front of him brightened and turned green. A dozen or meters ahead, in the middle of the road, lay a bushy-haired, broad-nosed dog. Littlefield moved closer. A mutt, brindled on its neck and head, dingy white everywhere else. One haunch was matted with dried muck or blood. The dog looked up at him and folded back one of its pointed ears. The other ear twitched. Light flashed off the backs of its eyes. No LEDs, then. The eyes of a dog, that was all. And no birds, no ball bearings, no hinges—only a whimpering stray.

  Littlefield turned. He’d come farther than he’d thought—fifty meters or more. He cupped a hand around one side of his mouth and called to Baker and Evans. “It’s a fuckin’ dog.”

  Evans hollered back. “I know, Littledick. That’s what I said.”

  “Fucker,” Littlefield muttered.

  “What the fuck, Littledick? Let’s go.”

  “Eat a bag of buttholes. It’s a fucking dog.”

  “Jesus fu—” If Evans finished the word or said anything more, the wind carried the sound away.

  Hunkering down, cradling his rifle against his belly and chest, Littlefield duckwalked forward. The dog eyed him warily, but let him come within an arm’s length. He held out his hand, knuckles first, to give the dog his scent. Staring up, it whined and licked its chops, but it didn’t sniff him. It turned its head away.

  Lifting his night sight, Littlefield stepped aside to let the headlamps shine fully on the dog’s haunch. It was difficult to see—the distance, the glare, the floating dust, the trembling shadows—but he was fairly sure the mutt’s flank was covered in mud, not blood.

  Without warning, the dog yelped and leapt up. Littlefield yelped, too—he could hardly help it. He tumbled backward, landing on his ass and sending up a billow of dust. He froze. His heart flailed in his chest. The dog backed away and stood on three feet. It kept the mud-caked leg tucked up against its belly.

  Evans’s voice came to him, high-pitched and urgent: “What happened?”

  And then Baker: “You all right out there? Littlefield?”

  Littlefield raised his arm high above his head, waved, and gave a thumbs up. When his breathing had slowed, he returned to his squat and yelled over his shoulder. “Unharmed. All clear.” If the dog had been part of a booby trap, or if it had covered one, both it and Littlefield would be dead. That sufficed for an all clear.

  Laying his weapon on the ground at his feet, Littlefield clapped and whistled. The dog looked at him sidelong. It seemed ready to bolt. On the other hand, it had yet to touch down that injured leg.

  Littlefield remembered that he had a Clif Bar in his breast pocket. He took it out and ripped away the foil. Twisting a hunk from the bar, he offered it to the dog.

  “Come on, puppy. It’s food. Yummy-yummy. Good for you. Ten grams of protein. Builds strong bones and—” To himself, he said, “Speaking English to a foreign dog. Fuckin’ brilliant, Littlefield.”

  But the dog came closer. It smelled, then licked, the lump of food. After some moments of hesitation, it bared its teeth. Littlefield had never been much afraid of dogs—he loved all dogs, more or less—but at the flash of the white eyeteeth he shrank back. His hand shook, and he had to stop himself from jerking it away. But the dog gently took the sticky slab of food, that was all. Though its tongue flicked out, it never touched Littlefield’s fingers.

  In two bites, the bit of Clif Bar was gone. The dog came closer. Now it touched Littlefield, freely snuffling around his fingers and the back of his hand and the cuff of his sleeve. He broke off another piece of the bar, a bigger one this time, and the dog grabbed it. It circled away, its back to Littlefield, and sat down to eat.

  Behind him, the lights flickered and jumped. Littlefield looked over his shoulder. The Humvee rolled toward him. It couldn’t have moved any slower if a single marine had decided to push it from behind. Evans swung the spotlight around. Blinded, Littlefield held up his hand, palm out, to shield his eyes.

  “Just a fucking second, asshole,” Littlefield shouted. He turned his hand and raised his middle finger.

  The dog was looking for more food. Littlefield pinched another chunk off the Clif Bar. This time, just as the dog reached for it, Littlefield yanked it away. The dog paused, then stepped forward. Its bum leg quaked, reached vainly for the ground, and sprang back up. Littlefield lured the dog closer and again closer. He reached out to scratch under its chin, and it consented. He rewarded it with another piece of the Clif Bar. It let him stroke the top of its head, and he rewarded it again.

  Moving swiftly but—he hoped—not too aggressively, he scooped the dog into his arms. It thrashed and nearly broke free, but he opened his hand to show it the last chunk of Clif Bar. The dog snapped it up and licked Littlefield’s hand clean and nestled against him. Skinny as fuck, poor mutt.

  Littlefield crooned into the dog’s crooked ear. “You’re all right. Good boy. That’s it.”

  Tucking the dog under his left arm, picking up his rifle with his right hand, he walked back to the Humvee. Baker was waiting for him, standing a couple of paces in front of the vehicle, her feet planted far apart, her arms folded across her chest.

  “The fuck you think you’re doing, marine?”

  “I can’t just leave him,” Littlefield said.

  “Sure as fuck can,” Evans said from the turret. “Sheet far.”

  With time and c
areful attention to context, Littlefield had learned that sheet far—or, on occasion, sheesht far—was Tennessean for shit fire. Littlefield shot Evans a dark look but didn’t answer him. He turned instead to Baker.

  “Look at this poor guy.” He twisted his body so that the light of one headlamp fell across the dog’s body. “He’s nothing but dirt and fur. And I think he’s injured.”

  After a moment’s thought, Baker said, “How do you know it’s not crawling with bubonic plague or some fucking—”

  “We’ll get a doc to look at it.” The dog strained and whimpered. Littlefield nearly lost his grip on both the dog and his rifle, but he shifted and juggled and got them both under control. “Fuck,” he said. “I’m done fucking around.” He carried the dog to the side of the Humvee. “Kiara. Open my door?” He banged the door with his knee—lightly, just for emphasis.

  “It’s against regs, asshole,” Evans said.

  “Says the asshole who makes pruno in his CamelBak.” To Baker, he said, “Please?”

  For the better part of a minute, Baker stood put. But then, with a terrible sigh, she came around and popped the door open. Littlefield laid the dog on the floor of the Humvee. It curled up and yawned and chewed its foot.

  Baker said, “You do know it’s actually a female, right?”

  Littlefield poked his head in through the door. The dog lay with its tail toward him and its hind legs spread, and sure enough—female. He’d grown up thinking all dogs were boys and all cats were girls. Some habits never die. The dog stopped gnawing her foot long enough to stare back at him. Her eyes were wide and—he might be imagining it—reproachful, as if he’d violated her privacy.

  To Baker, he said, “I never said I was a fucking biologist.”

  “If she pisses or shits in my vehicle,” said Baker, “I’m rubbing your nose in it.”

  Littlefield climbed in and slammed his door behind him. The dog flinched, and he ruffled her neck to comfort her. Baker rounded the Humvee. As she crossed in front of it, she glared at Littlefield. He tried to grin.

  Evans crouched down in his harness. “Littledick, what the fuck’s your dysfunction?”

  Baker took her seat at the wheel and shifted into gear, and they started forward. One of the rear tires almost immediately hit a pothole. Evans thrashed in his harness, but he laughed. It was a full-on hearty guffaw that showed his gums and his gapped teeth.

  “I knew you were hard up for female attention, Littledick,” he said, “but this is—”

  Another bump, and this time Evans cracked his head on the edge of the hatch. His helmet must have absorbed most of the shock, but still, he cussed up a storm—a whole weather system, in fact.

  Baker pounded the overhead. “Get up there and watch the road, numb nuts. Holy Christ.”

  Littlefield shifted his feet, planting one boot on either side of the dog. She curled up against his right calf. But—fuck—he’d kicked up something wet. Whatever it was, it seeped through the cloth of his trousers. He leaned forward and felt around on the floor. There was—fuckety-fuck—a puddle. He swiped his fingers through it.

  Baker was staring at him. “You heard what I said. Her piss, your muzzle.”

  Already grimacing in anticipation, Littlefield raised his fingers and—fuckety-fuck-fuck—sniffed. “Coffee.” He was so relieved that he had to stifle a laugh. Wiping his fingers on his pants, he said, “I knocked my coffee over. Or she did. Come to think of it, maybe you did, when you hit that pothole.”

  Before Baker could say anything, Evans rapped on the roof. “Got a row of rocks.”

  Baker stopped the Humvee. When Littlefield got out, the dog whimpered and hauled herself up on her three good feet. Littlefield scratched the top of her head and eased her back down. He closed his door gently. No need to startle her again.

  From the turret, Evans called down, “If it’s another fuckin’ dog, man—”

  “Fuckin’ Christ, Evans, you got an off button?”

  “Nuh-uh. I’m the motherfuckin’ Energizer Bunny. I go on and on and on. Don’t take my word for it. Ask your mama.”

  “Fuckwit.”

  Littlefield didn’t need the night vision to see what Evans had seen—a row of flat rocks, laid end to end along the side of the road. In another place and at another time they might resemble a decorative border, though for sure a half-assed one. On a cliff above the Helmand River valley, if you saw a dozen clean rocks strung out at the edge of the road, you were looking at something that might kill you.

  Littlefield turned and motioned for Baker to fall back. The Humvee moved away, ten meters, twenty meters, thirty, fifty.

  The rocks lay on top of a long low hummock of loose dirt. Beyond that, the ground sloped downward and away from the roadbed. Littlefield fished his flashlight out of his pocket. He shone the beam along the rocks, the berm, the scrub-strewn hill. He caught sight of a brown, slender thing that glimmered when he held the flashlight a certain way.

  For a second, he thought it must be one of the vipers that hid in burrows during the day or buried themselves in the sand. At night they climbed trees or flew over the ground, the sidewinding little cunts—or they coiled around themselves, rasping their scales together in warning, making a sound like a slab of bacon frying on a griddle. Some of the vipers were gray, some greenish, some rust-colored. Some were just this shade of shit-brown. But this particular shit-brown thing couldn’t be a snake, or at least not a living one, or by now it’d be somewhere else.

  Littlefield stepped over the rocks and over the mounded dirt and walked crabwise down the bank. The brown thing was, after all, an electrical cord. Here it lay on the bare soil, there it was covered with another row of stones, and further along it had been heaped haphazardly with loose weeds. He swept the beam of the flashlight ahead of him. Halfway down the hill there was a sprawling bush, apparently dead.

  Keeping clear of the wire, Littlefield sidled down the slope. The bush wasn’t a bush at all, really—or rather it had been a bush, but one that had lived its piss-poor life somewhere else, until someone uprooted it and dragged it here. Now it lay on its side, its knobbly roots hanging in the air. It was clear of snakes.

  On the ground beyond, he found the trigger—nothing more complicated than a nine-volt battery. And here was the end of the wire—nothing fancier than a household extension cord, split down the middle.

  Littlefield pocketed the battery and trudged back up the hill, his rifle thumping against his back. When he got to the road, he squatted alongside the row of rocks. He took out his utility knife, opened it, and flaked away a bit of the dirt underneath the stones. He aimed the flashlight beam into the crevice, and the light glinted back at him. There was something white under there. Some fat PVC pipe, packed with powder—or maybe, if these dudes were highfalutin, they’d used C-4. There’d be nails, tacks, shards of metal, buckshot, broken saw blades, anything that could slice, mangle, or kill. The gruesome beauty of these things was that they cost their makers almost nothing.

  With his knife, he cut the wire. He left about six inches hanging off the end of the pipe. He cocked his head and squinted out across the surface of the road. The dirt was packed down hard, and there were no signs of digging. He got up and walked the road on either side, checking for more rocks, more wires, more devices. Nothing. No electrical cords, no pipes, no snakes.

  He could spend hours or days going up and down this road and back and forth across it. He could search until he collapsed or died. Even if he never uncovered another bit of PVC pipe or another length of wire, he couldn’t be sure there was nothing to find. You can’t prove a negative. He heard it in his father’s voice.

  Back to the row of rocks. He lay in the road and pried up one of the stones, a centimeter or two at first, just enough to get light in. He looked for a pressure plate or a spring or a mousetrap. Nothing—not that it meant anything to find nothing.

  Son, you know you can’t prove a—

  For fuck’s sake. He nearly dropped the rock. He lai
d it gently down and sat up on his haunches. He hung his head. It was the second of September. No, the third. Here, it was the third. In the States, it was still the second. His dad’s birthday. Into the dusty air, for what it was worth, he said, “Happy birthday, Pop.”

  Sighing, wiping his forehead with the back of his hand, Littlefield lay down and went back to work. He held the flashlight between his teeth. Catching and holding his breath, he lifted the stone by degrees. Tiny, tiny degrees. When it was clear of the ground—with daylight, so to speak, all the way around it—he set it aside. He pried up another stone—slowly, assuming nothing. Another. Another and another and another, until finally he’d laid the pipe bare. It was a foot long, two or three inches in diameter.

  At a glance he could see that there was nothing clever about it, no booby traps within booby traps, no decoys or dodges. It was all just as it appeared. Whoever had made this thing was a linear thinker, through and through—bomb, wire, trigger, boom. Even so, Littlefield was reluctant as all fuck to pick the thing up. He had to. Didn’t want to, but had to.

  With one hand, he raised the pipe from the ground. Heavy fucker. With the other hand, he trained the beam of his flashlight underneath. One last search. One last check for tripwires and triggers. Nothing—not that he could prove a negative, Thanks, Dad, and happy birthday. His hand shook, the light shook, the pipe shook.

  Breathe, Littlefield. He forced the air out of his lungs, only to find that he had to force it back in again. Butt of his flashlight between his teeth, he cradled the pipe in his cupped hands. He got to his feet.

  Back down the hill. He went straight for the dead shrub, carrying the pipe at arm’s length. He kept his eye on it, as if it were a viper that might strike him. It wasn’t the first time he’d done this—and it wasn’t the first time he remembered carrying, as a boy, some repugnant dead thing from the edge of the Ashley River to the house, his baby brother capering and clamoring behind him, giddy with the sheer grossness of their plan to leave it, whatever it was, in Corinne’s bed. Then as now, he’d walked fast and with a stiff-legged, flat-footed gait.

  When he got to the uprooted bush, he knelt and laid the device on the ground. He found the wire and dusted it off. With his knife he stripped a couple of inches of fresh wire at the end of one of the strands. He twisted the bare wire to a point and bent it back like the head of a candy cane. He did the same with one of the strands hanging off the pipe—strip, twist, bend. He hitched the hooks together—loose wire to pipe’s wire—and twisted each bit of wire back on itself. In a couple of seconds, then, he had the wires braided together into an almost unbreakable splice.

  As he finished splicing the second pair of wires together, a wave of heat washed across his face. His ears burned. It was simple, irrational panic—the unfounded fear that he’d just completed the circuit and armed a roadside bomb, even though the device was down here, right in front of him, not up there. Before he’d even understood why he was afraid, much less how baseless his fear was, his hand had gone to the breast pocket where he’d put the nine-volt battery, patting to make sure it was still there.

  Sitting back on his heels, he paused to catch his breath. He switched off his flashlight and slipped it into a cargo pocket. He unclipped the chinstrap of his helmet and, tipping his head forward, let the helmet drop into his open palm. Sweat washed down his forehead, and he blotted it with his sleeve.

  “I’ve been doing this too long,” he said aloud.

  He heard a footfall. Fuck. Heart thumping, he jammed his helmet on, got to his feet, and reached for his rifle.

  “Thought you were whackin’ off out here—or dyin’.” Evans. “Scare you?”

  “Yes, motherfucker.” Without a thought, Littlefield had swung his rifle up so that it aimed more or less at Evans’s gut. He pointed the muzzle at the ground. “Lucky I didn’t shoot your ass.”

  “About done here or what?” Evans looked toward the Humvee. “Your bitch is crying for you.” He grinned. “The dog, too.”

  “I just have to finish this fucker off.”

  Littlefield nodded toward the top of the hill, but neither of them moved.

  “What’s up?” Evans said. He turned his head and spat.

  “I don’t—”

  “We waiting for something?”

  Littlefield sighed and started up the slope. “How’s that nurse friend of yours? Still claiming those bumps’re ingrown hairs?”

  “Was you talking to yourself when I came down there? You know what they say about people that talk to themselves.”

  “They’re from Kingsport, Tennessee?”

  They’d almost reached the road. Evans backed away, toward the Humvee. “I’m counting the seconds.” Grinning, he blew Littlefield a kiss. “Don’t keep me waitin’ too long.”

  “Evans, you’re a motherfucking cartoon character,” Littlefield said. But he was grinning too.

  With one hand he plucked the battery from his pocket. With the other he felt on the ground for the wire. He got down on his belly. Here was the fun part. After the panic, the fear, the twitchy hands, here was the reward. He tapped the base of battery against his watch band. He blew dust out of the female connector.

  “Fire in the hole.”

  He drew a breath and held it. He touched the wires to the battery’s connectors.