Wynne's War (10 page)

She nodded and placed the chicken in her mouth. She chewed several times and lifted her hand to cover it.

“What's that called?” she asked. Her nails weren't painted, but they looked glossy and neat.

“Which?” he said.

“What you're doing with them. What you were doing with that blond.”

Russell swallowed the bite of food in his mouth and sipped his coffee. He almost put his elbows on the table and then he caught himself and braced his forearms against its edge.

“It's horse breaking,” he said. “Or
some
would call it horse breaking. Horse starting. What you might see in a clinic.”

“What's a clinic?”

“You know,” he said, “a horse clinic. Like a seminar.”

“A class?”

“Yeah. More like a short class.”

“I guess I imagine a doctor's office,” said Sara.

“I didn't think of that.”

They sat staring at each other a few moments.

“This chicken is pretty good,” she told him.

“It is good. He makes good chicken. Makes good everything.”

“He's the cook?”

“No,” said Russell. “He just sort of does that. He's one of them.”

Sara glanced over to where Rosa stood behind the grill, her eyes reappraising the man.

She said, “Special Forces?”

“Yeah.”

“
He
is?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

She looked back at her plate, and both eyebrows went quickly up and down.

“Like Rambo.”

“Like Rambo,” Russell said.

 

Early morning, and a bird chirping out in the Afghan dawn—a sound like
chur-weet,
chur-weet
—but it wasn't the bird that woke Russell. When he rolled over and opened his eyes, he saw a man seated on a folding chair beside his cot. Russell started, raising up on an elbow and backing against the wall, blood pulsing through his carotids and his heart tightening like a fist. The man had blond hair, a blond moustache and beard. He wore the same unmarked khakis as the other operators, but he was missing the ring finger of his right hand. It was the first thing Russell noticed—no stump or stub. The finger was just gone. He'd almost reached for his pistol, but the missing finger had stopped him. He couldn't have said exactly why.

Russell lay there. All remnants of sleep had fled his body.

The captain smiled.

“Come with me,” he said.

Russell had fallen asleep in his pants and a T-shirt the night before. He sat up on the edge of the cot, located his boots, pulled them on, and laced them tight. The captain had already crossed to the doorway; when winter came they'd need to get an actual door. Russell grabbed his jacket and, sliding his arms into the sleeves, trailed Wynne outside into the morning chill, his pulse starting to slacken, the translucent specks swirling before his eyes moving slower now. Vanishing.

The captain went toward the stables. He was the same height as Russell, six-one, athletic and very lean, not bulky like his men. He looked to be in his early thirties, but he had to be older, Russell thought. He would have guessed forty, but it occurred to him this wasn't the kind of man you guessed about. Not correctly, at least.

The captain stopped at the corral and stood with his arms crossed to his chest, watching the horses: two paints and the Akhal-Teke stallion. The paints were bunched against each other at one end of the pen, pressed together, trying to get as far from the stallion as possible.

Russell came up and joined Wynne, and they stood for several minutes without speaking. The air stung Russell's cheeks, and he could feel it inside his ears.

“You've been busy,” the captain said, his voice melodious and deep.

“Yessir,” Russell said.

“How long did it take?”

“I've barely got them started,” Russell said. He lifted a hand and pointed to the Akhal-Teke. “Him, I can't even say that about.”

Wynne turned to look at Russell and then turned back to regard the horse.

“He's different,” Wynne said.

Russell almost said that depended what you meant by
different,
but managed to say, “What's he for?”

Wynne didn't respond. He stood several moments watching the stallion.

Then he said, “We come into these mountains on helicopter.” He lifted a finger and gestured at the surrounding hills. “What's the problem?”

“Problem?” said Russell.

“The problem,” Wynne said.

Russell thought about it. “They're loud,” he said, shrugging.

“What else?”

“Slow.”

Wynne looked at him, indicating he expected Russell to continue, but Russell's mind went suddenly blank and he dropped his gaze to the ground. He took a moment and cleared his throat.

“They hover,” he finally said. “They don't fly high enough to get out of rocket range.”

The captain nodded. He said, “Issue we face in places like this is mobility. Choppers worked in Vietnam. Why shouldn't they work here?” He paused to look at Russell. “Correct?”

“Yessir,” said Russell.

“No, sir,” said Wynne. “Incorrect.” He told Russell this was not Vietnam. Seemed too obvious to even say, but it wasn't obvious to command. They were always fighting the last war.

Then he said Russell was right about one thing: helicopters had to hover to take off and they had to hover to land. They were vulnerable that way. The Taliban was always waiting, and if they managed to knock one helicopter out of the sky, the cavalry came in, and then the cavalry became the targets.

Russell nodded. “Like Robert's Ridge.”

“Robert's Ridge,” the captain said.

He gestured toward the horses with his chin. He said these animals would confuse the enemy. He said their enemies wouldn't hear them coming. Wouldn't expect it. He told Russell when 5th Special Forces first entered the country in October of 2001, they rendezvoused with the Northern Alliance's General Dostum and pursued the Taliban from Mazar-i-Sharif all the way to the Pakistani border. They'd done this on horseback. A lot of people didn't even know. And, mind you, these were Americans riding Afghan ponies, on Afghan saddles. No one seemed to wonder what they might have done on American horses with American saddles and tack.

Russell toed the dirt with his boot and studied the ground. When the captain quit speaking, Russell said, “You aim to take your men out on horseback?”

“I do,” the captain said.

“Up in these mountains?”

Wynne nodded.

“Can I ask you what for?”

The captain ignored this question. He pointed at the Akhal-Teke. He asked how the stallion was coming along.

Russell shook his head. “Captain, to be honest with you, he's just a damn psychopath.”

“Psychopath?”

“Yessir.”

The captain smiled. His eyes were very blue. They would be difficult to look at for long.

“How long will it take to break him?”

Russell couldn't answer something like that. “Hell,” he said, “he ain't even been cut.”

The captain's brow furrowed. Then it relaxed.

“Neutered,” he said, nodding.

“Unless you're planning on studding him out, I'd do that the sooner the better.”

“I don't plan to breed him, Corporal. And I don't want him
cut.
”

Russell cleared his throat. He told the captain that the way he was now, it would be all a rider could do to even stay atop him.

“Show me,” the captain said.

“Show you what?”

“Ride the horse.”

“Right now?”

The captain said it was waiting.

Russell glanced over. He saw that it was. The Afghan groom would have taken the saddle and blanket off yesterday evening and curried the stallion before putting him in the stall, so that would mean the groom had risen and saddled the horse and led him back out. Russell didn't want to speculate as to why. He brushed the knuckles of one hand back and forth across his chin.

“Sir,” he said, “let me go get this little mare I've been working with. She's coming along pretty good. If you want to see what kind of progress we're making, I'd as soon show you with her.”

The captain stared at him a moment.

“Go get her,” he said.

Russell nodded and told the man he'd be right back. He turned and went off toward the stables, entering through the tack room at the side of the building, then turning down the hallway that led him past the stalls. Third door down, he opened the latch and swung the door back on its massive hinge. Fella looked up at him out of the half-light of the ten-by-twelve enclosure. Smell of hay and horseflesh. The scent of sweet feed and pine. Underneath everything, that rich odor of manure like the oldest and most luxuriant soil. Russell took a halter from the nail on the wall and began to buckle it around the mare's head. She snorted and raised her left forefoot.

“Don't you make me look bad,” he told her.

Fella exhaled a long hot breath against his chest. Then she lowered her foot.

He ran a hand beneath her jaw and patted her neck.

When he led her out of the stable toward the round corral, the captain was seated on the split-rail fence. Russell nodded to him, opened the gate, walked his horse through, and then turned to pin the gate shut behind him. He put a boot in the stirrup and hoisted himself into the saddle. The horse was a little tight, but her back was round, head down, and he took her about the corral at a trot, feeling her beginning to soften beneath him. He spoke to her as they made a revolution, as they made another. Then he gave the slightest pull on the reins, turned the horse, and walked her to the center of the corral, bringing her about to face the captain, who had climbed from his perch and come over to lean against one of the corral panels.

“Do it again,” he said.

“Do what again?” Russell asked.

The captain raised a hand and, pointing his index finger at the ground, drew a counterclockwise circle.

Russell nodded. He chucked up, turned the horse, and began to make another circuit, this time pushing Fella up to a canter, his ears stinging in the cold, the filly snorting twin jets of vapor out into the morning air. She was going to make a good horse. She was starting to respond to the touch of his heels. He wouldn't have to do much more with the reins, and he thought he could get her to where he'd barely need them at all.

When he stopped her again and glanced over toward the captain, he saw that the man had turned and started for the main pen. Russell sat the horse, watching him go. Then something in his stomach dropped, and before a thought had time to germinate, he'd slid from the saddle, led Fella over to the corral's edge, and dallied the reins across one of the panels. He stepped up and over and followed Wynne, the man now climbing the split-rail fence, then dropping down into the pen where the stallion stood waiting.

“Hey!” Russell called. “Captain!”

Wynne didn't respond. He went toward the animal, approaching the way you might approach a pet. Russell's first thought was that the stallion would lunge at the captain as it had lunged at Russell the day before—more luck than reflexes that had prevented Russell from being knocked senseless—but the stallion didn't lunge and Wynne didn't slow his pace. Didn't reach a hand out to let the horse smell him. Didn't so much as touch the horse until his left boot was in the stirrup and he was heaving himself onto the animal's back—that golden expanse of shining coat and flawless muscle—heaving himself up and throwing a leg over and then seizing the reins. He sat the horse naturally, but it didn't matter how naturally you sat: the stallion could break your neck in half a second. The safest place around a beast like this was on it, but Russell knew the captain wouldn't be seated on it for long. His first thought was that all of this was about to be over and he and Wheels would shortly find themselves back on a helicopter to Bagram. He was surprised to find the thought disappointed him.

The captain took hold of the reins, gave them a snap, and the stallion came forward, going from statuesque immobility to motion in a blink. Russell made the edge of the pen, stepped up, and seized hold of the top rail. He thought perhaps he could vault the fence, step over and grab hold of the bridle before the captain was thrown, but the stallion was already moving at a canter, a quick three-beat gait too fast for a pen this size, the other two horses pressed underneath the overhang at the south end of the stable, clouds of dust rising from the stallion's hooves and the captain sitting perfectly upright in the saddle, with his blond hair and beard and those luminescent blue eyes like jewels lit from behind.

He made two passes around the corral and then he made a third, dropping the stallion to a trot, then slowing him back to a walk. Russell watched as he reined up in the center of the pen, stopped the horse and sat there amid the dust he'd raised, then slid from the saddle and made his way over to the fence. He hadn't even broken a sweat.

Russell studied the captain a moment. He asked him how long he'd been riding.

Wynne didn't answer. He turned to consider the stallion and then looked up at the paling sky. His face was impassive and calm.

“I was just wondering how you learned to do that,” said Russell.

“Do what?” Wynne said.

“What you just did,” Russell told him, pointing toward the Akhal-Teke. “How'd you learn to handle that thing?”

The captain turned to look at him.

“Watching you,” he said.

 

In the days to come Russell would train the men of ODA-372 to ride, teaching them the correct way to hobble their mounts, load their saddlebags, to lean back and squeeze their thighs when they descended a slope. There were now ten Green Berets in camp, and it took time to distinguish one from another, to learn their names or learn the names they went by, the names they'd give a soldier such as himself, a Ranger, sure, but still just an 11-Bravo, still only infantry.