Wynne's War (11 page)

He'd met Billings up on the hill, the lieutenant who'd escorted them into camp—a man surly by nature, calculative, distant. Russell decided almost immediately he'd keep clear of Billings, but that took little effort given that Billings seemed determined to ignore him completely.

Pike was a different story, the sergeant who served as the team's senior engineer. It was this man who'd given Russell the T-shirt that day at the corral, then stood watching as he cut it into shreds. A little shorter than the others. A good deal more cheerful. He'd survived an IED in Kandahar Province, though his hearing had not. He was completely deaf in his right ear, and whenever you spoke to him, he'd tilt his head to one side and offer you the left. He was from Aspen, Colorado, and seemed at home in these mountains, or seemed like he would have been perfectly at home if allowed to carry a snowboard or a pair of skis. Russell spoke to him at breakfast and dinner, and he was easy to teach, very coachable. The horses responded to his even-tempered manner. When he petted the animals, he'd grin.

The weapons sergeants—Boyle and Rosa—were also friendly to the Rangers: they'd both served in the Regiment before joining SF. The two men were polar opposites, nearly inseparable. Staff Sergeant Boyle—everyone called him “Ox”—was a huge hulk of a man: six-four with red hair and a bushy red beard. He was the soft-spoken son of Iowa farmers: four hundred years ago he would have walked these highlands in a kilt. He'd been an All-American wrestler before dropping out of junior college to join the army, and spent his free time in the detachment's makeshift gym. Russell had seen him bench press 385 without so much as blushing, his chest like two bowling balls under his shirt, massive arms sunburned red, and veins bulging like blue ropes.

His junior, Sergeant Rosa, was a fourth-generation Mexican American from Yuma, Arizona, his father a member of the Yuma County SWAT team, his grandfather the former Yuma chief of police. Five-eleven, lithe-bodied, and lean: jet black hair and the boyish, beardless face of a sixteen-year-old. He sauntered about camp with a graceful, long-legged gait, seeming almost to glide. A clever young man, quick to laugh and yet possessing that academic air of the world-class snipers Russell had known—a killer by nature and disciplined as a monk.

The two weapons sergeants were accompanied by an Afghan interpreter. Russell rarely saw the three of them apart. The man's name was unpronounceable, so the men called him Ziza or Zero. He'd fought with the mujahideen when he was just a boy and later trained with American Special Forces when they entered the country in the fall of 2001. He'd been a member of the Afghan National Army Commandos and now was chalked to Wynne's team as a terp. He seemed more than that. He walked like the Green Berets and swore like the Green Berets, his English impeccable, though formal in its cadence. He stood five foot five and had close-cropped black hair, a wispy moustache and goatee, and a compact and muscular frame. He didn't look like the other Afghans. To Russell, he looked Filipino or Thai. He lifted weights with Ox and practiced on the shooting range with Rosa, and he wore a New York Yankees ball cap he only took off for prayer. He carried an enormous knife on his back in a Kydex sheath, more of a short sword than a knife, Japanese in design. Russell never saw Ziza without it.

These men were deferential toward Russell, or deferred, at least, to his expertise with a horse. They listened intently when he spoke. Those like Pike and Rosa didn't have far to go; others like Ox needed all the attention he could muster. The weapons sergeant looked about as at home on horseback as a horse looked in water—struggling constantly not to drown. Russell could tell that, like many men of his size, he was used to muscling his way through the world, and what he couldn't accomplish by physical strength mystified him completely. He was all quiet brawn, lacking the effortless finesse of Sergeant Rosa, and after lunch one day, he'd just dismounted the massive paint Russell had paired him with, when the horse backed without warning and stepped on his foot, tearing through the leather upper of his boot and cutting him to the bone. Russell watched as the man's face went a deep shade of purple, then as he dropped the reins and tried to hoist the mare off him like you might a sofa. The horse merely turned his neck to look back at the sergeant, as though trying to gauge exactly what this man might want, and Russell sprinted up, took her by the bridle, and led the horse forward several steps. When he looked back at Ox, the man was standing there with his hands on his hips, studying the blood welling up from the top of his boot.

“I'll be goddamned,” he said in an almost casual whisper. He pursed his lips and bent to probe the wound with an index finger. He glanced over at Russell and shrugged.

 

Russell was leaning against the split-rail fence of the corral that evening, watching the sky darken and blush, when the team's medical sergeant came out to give him a report. The sun had just dropped below the lizard's back of the western hills, and he studied Bixby, the man Sara had been down to visit a few weeks before, as he made his way along the talus path. There was a weariness not only in the man's stride but in the slump of his shoulders, in the way his hands hung loosely at the ends of his arms like something else he'd been given to carry.

He walked across to Russell, took a deep breath, and nodded.

“Corporal,” he said by way of greeting.

“Sergeant,” Russell said.

The man was average height, average build. Back home, in civilian clothes, he'd not be mistaken for a member of Special Forces—or a member of anything at all. He'd let his hair grow long and his beard grow out, but his hair was thinning and you could see scalp through the brown fluff, red in the declining light. He had a soft, kind-featured face and the intelligent eyes common to medics. A largish nose. Lips chapped by windburn and sun. He would've looked perfectly at home behind a desk with a passkey clipped to his belt, but he had a gun holster clipped to it now. A MultiTool. A three-magazine pouch that held ninety rounds of 5.56 NATO.

“How's your patient?” Russell asked.

Bixby turned and glanced over his shoulder as though the man might be standing there behind him. He waved a hand vaguely in that direction and turned back.

“He'll be fine,” he said.

“I didn't think the horse would back up on him. Looked like he was bleeding pretty good.”

“Don't worry,” said Bixby. “He seems to enjoy it.”

Russell shook his head, and a horse whinnied from somewhere in the stable. He said, “How long you been out here, Sergeant?”

“A while,” Bixby said.

Russell asked him what he did back home, and the medic said he designed software for a firm in Seattle.

Russell coughed. He never asked this many questions. He was working his way to the one he really wanted to ask and he couldn't get himself to stop.

“The captain's kind of different,” he heard himself saying.

Bixby nodded.

“You known him a long time?”

“Long time.”

“Don't know that I've ever met an officer like that.”

“You won't,” Bixby said.

Russell cleared his throat.

“What's he want with these horses?” he said. “He told me you need them to ride up in the mountains, but that doesn't make a lot of sense.”

Bixby stood there a moment. His lips tightened and he looked out toward the corral. “I'm not a planner,” he said.

“Roger that. I'm not asking for logistics. It's just like I told the lieutenant—” He paused, fumbling for the name.

“Billings,” said the medic.

“Billings,” Russell said. “I'd be able to do a lot better job of training these guys if I knew anything about what I was training them to do. I mean, I know they'll be riding. I know they'll be up in these hills. But where they'll be riding and for how long and anything else you can tell me—”

“Corporal,” said Bixby, “I'm just here to kiss it and make it better. Anything else, you're going to have to ask the captain.”

“I asked the captain,” said Russell. “Didn't make any more progress than I'm making now.”

“Well,” said Bixby, “there you go.”

 

The mission was covert. That much was clear. If the medic wouldn't talk about it and the lieutenant wouldn't talk about it and the captain wouldn't talk about it, they were doing all of this off the books. The army had a term for everything, and the term for this was
deniable operations.
Which basically meant there'd be no medevac for the Green Berets if they took casualties—and no artillery or air support. If they were captured, their government wouldn't claim them. No cavalry would come to get them out. About as close to a suicide mission as you could get. He didn't envy them. Not even a little.

Wynne supervised for several days, coming out in the evenings to stand at the corral. Then Russell woke the next week and discovered that the captain had taken half the team and gone out on recon, back into the hills. Left behind were Pike and Billings and Ox, Sergeant First Class Hallum, and Staff Sergeant Perkins, the ODA's junior engineer. Russell didn't worry about it anymore—which team members were in camp and which were out with Wynne. He concentrated on his work with the horses. Getting them soft and supple. Getting them to accept saddle leather and the touch of human hands.

Sara would come down in the evening and watch quietly as he worked, leaning against the corral with her arms crossed one over the other and her chin atop them. Watching the horses. Watching Russell work the horses. Whenever he led the Akhal-Teke into the pen, she'd lean forward and her eyes would go big and bright. He'd glance over and see her sitting on the edge of the fence, and he knew if he hadn't been there to caution her back, she would've tried to approach the animal and touch it.

Lying on his thin cot in the minutes before he descended into sleep, Russell thought about her and the captain and the way the stallion seemed to draw something out in them. Or drew something out in Sara. With Wynne the process was inverted. Reversed. He seemed to siphon the creature's wildness and rage. He seemed somehow to drain it. And without a doubt it was rage that Russell felt down in the animal's bones—rage and madness. Seated on its back, he could feel that constant chaotic simmer. It could erupt at any moment into outright bedlam. How you could take that out of the horse was beyond Russell entirely. The most he could manage was to channel it. As always, his grandfather's words circled inside him—
Make the wrong thing difficult and the right thing release.

But Sara was herself pulled along by the stallion's manic electricity, something essential drawn out of her as she watched Russell steer the horse around the pen. He could see it on her face, the attraction of it. Wildness was a quality Russell had been taught to govern. You didn't run toward it and you didn't dare to flee. You tried to take hold of it—firmly, respectfully. You tried to steer it toward order. And what you couldn't govern, you tried to identify before it broke you to pieces. There was a wildness in the world that couldn't be governed at all.

His grandfather taught him that like knew like. And a lesser wildness would always be drawn to a greater. Which meant, thought Russell, turning toward sleep, that Sara moved toward the stallion's wildness and the stallion toward that of Wynne. Like recognizing likeness, lesser flowing into greater. Where Russell fit into all of this, he hadn't yet decided.

Mornings, he would rise before dawn, lace his boots by feel, and navigate out to the corral by flashlight. Hamid, the Afghan groom, would always be waiting. The man didn't speak a word of English, but he and Russell had already established an intricate series of gestures that allowed all the communication they required. He was a short man with sunken cheeks and few teeth left in his mouth, and Russell liked him immensely. He had his prayer beads constantly in hand and never seemed to sleep. He was with the animals when Russell walked out to the stables in the morning, and he was with them when Russell curried Fella and retired to his quarters at night.

They squatted across from each another one afternoon in the cool stable, looking out at the November day, heat shimmer on the bare dirt of the corral, the shoulder of the mountain just beyond. Russell's clothes were drenched with sweat and coated with a fine layer of talc. He'd stripped off his jacket and laid it on a hay bale and opened a pack of beef jerky he'd taken from the camp's mess. He chewed in silence, staring at the dirt between his knees, and then he looked up at the groom and offered him the plastic bag.

Hamid regarded Russell's gift with curiosity. He took it in hand and removed a strip of dried meat. He raised it to his nose and sniffed and then put it in his mouth. Russell realized that the man wouldn't be able to tear the beef with his gums, but it didn't matter, because a grimace stretched across his face and he handed back the bag of jerky and then the strip of meat he'd sampled. He shook his head and presented his wrinkled palms, pressing them forward as though he were pushing something across the ground.

“You don't like it?” Russell asked.

Hamid made the pushing gesture. He shook his head.

Russell smiled. He selected another strip of jerky from the bag and took a bite.

He spent his mornings and evenings at the stables, working the horses, packing and ponying, teaching the Green Berets in camp to saddle and ride, how to keep their horses' heads up, keep the animals soft, the proper way of tailing them up an incline. Of the men on Wynne's team, only four had ever ridden, and only one of these had ridden enough to be considered anything but a novice. Most of the men he'd met in Special Forces were southerners, many from Tennessee and the Carolinas, but several of these soldiers had scarcely been in the woods before joining the army, and large animals such as horses seemed to unsettle them. The first thing Russell had to teach was how to approach a horse, to let it see you, smell you, let your idea become the horse's. He'd fallen back on those words of his grandfather's so often they'd become a kind of mantra.