Wynne's War (19 page)

“Execute to follow,” Wynne said. He lowered the radio and tapped it lightly against the packed earth. He looked up and asked his men if they were ready.

Russell nodded along with the others, but it was a bald-faced lie and he couldn't imagine when it wouldn't be.

The captain rose from his squat and brought the radio to his lips. “We're moving up. When we blow the gate, bust 'em.”

“Wilco,” said Rosa. “Five out.”

“Could've wished us luck,” said Perkins.

“Luck's ass,” said Ox.

 

If the gate had been reinforced, it hadn't been reinforced properly, and when Sergeant Perkins blew it, the sheet-iron plates caved and went flying inward. Wynne's fireteam had stacked against the wall to the left of the entrance, and before the smoke had cleared, the four of them were inside and moving toward the main structure—torsos hunched over their rifles, hips locked, walking from the knees. The sentry Rosa had reported on the north side of the building was lying in the dirt with a bullethole in his right temple and the left half of his skull missing. Both the man's eyes were open and his tongue lolled on his bottom lip. Wynne waved the others toward the building's front door. Russell glanced at the last of the daylight in the west, and as he did, another sentry came around the corner. This man held a rifle at his waist, and he seemed merely curious about the noise he'd heard, not concerned enough to have his weapon shouldered. Wynne shot him in the chest and the sentry sat down very hard. Wynne shot him again and the man pitched backward and lay twitching.

There was a low adobe structure in the center of the compound, and they took positions at either side of the door, two on the left, two on the right. Russell was behind Ox and he could see the muscles along the right side of the massive man's jaw flexing and relaxing, flexing and relaxing. His face was very red. Russell looked across and saw Wynne turn to Perkins and slap his knee, and the demolitions sergeant nodded, removed a small brick of C-4 and a blasting cap from one of the pouches on his belt, stepped around Wynne, and squatted in front of the door. This door was made of the same sheet iron as the one they'd blown entering the compound, but it opened out instead of in. He'd have to blow the hinges. Perkins was standing to mold explosives around the top hinge when the captain said, “Try the handle.”

Perkins stared at him with his brow furrowed. Then he moved the pliers and blasting cap to his left hand, reached over and tugged on the handle, and pulled the door open several inches. He stuffed the contents of his left hand inside his cargo pocket and raised his rifle. Wynne lifted a palm and showed his team an outspread hand. Then, tucking his thumb, four fingers.

Three fingers.

Two fingers.

One.

Before Wynne dropped his hand, Perkins had already pulled the pin from a flash grenade, tossed it inside, then closed the door and leaned against it. There were a series of muffled shouts, and then a dull explosion shook the dust from the adobe walls. The air smelled suddenly of paint thinner and pine. Perkins opened the door and stepped back several feet for the captain to enter. Ox and Russell came from the right and charged after him. Russell was third in the stack, and before he'd even entered, the men in front were calling contact and firing, the suppressed rifles like short pneumatic sneezes. He stepped through the smoke and the scent of gunpowder, staring through his rifle's sights, his world framed in a circle of iron. There was a man in a blue tracksuit lying on his back with a spilled platter of food beside him, and there was a large dirt-floored room where a table had been overturned and another man bracing himself upright against the wall, both hands clasped to his throat as though trying to choke himself, blood welling between the fingers. Russell ignored the dead and the dying man and followed Ox and the captain toward the other side of the room and the open doorway there. The two men took up positions on either side of the passage, the muscles along Ox's jaw bulging like golf balls. In Basic Marksmanship, Russell had been taught to acquire his target with his dominant eye, like in deer hunting or like hunting elk with his grandfather in New Mexico. Later, he'd been taught to keep both eyes open. This technique was supposed to augment peripheral vision, but all it really did was prepare you for the adrenal surge of combat when your eyes bugged out of your head and you thought they might explode.

Russell walked over and took a knee behind Wynne. In the space of fifteen seconds, he'd sweated his clothes completely through. His calves burned. He leaned and looked around Wynne through the inner doorway. There was a stairwell leading up. The captain stood his rifle upright on his thigh, reached back, and clapped a hand on Russell's shoulder.

“This'll be over in about two minutes.”

“Yessir,” Russell said.

Perkins had come up on the other side of the doorway behind Ox and taken another stun grenade from his belt. He was pulling the pin when Wynne got his attention.

“Wait a second,” he whispered.

Perkins looked at him. He asked for what.

“Just wait,” the captain said.

They waited. Russell could hear the sound of boots slapping against concrete, the sound of someone descending. Then he saw a figure in blue on the other side of the doorway. Wynne fired his rifle twice and the figure went sprawling backward.

The captain looked at Perkins and nodded.

“Now,” he said.

The grenade was the shape of a can of shaving cream, nickel-sized perforations over its metal body, and Perkins had it clutched in one fist with the forefinger of the other hand through the pull ring. He yanked the primary ring, yanked the triangular secondary ring, then stepped around Ox and tossed the device through the doorway onto the stairwell. Russell closed his eyes and cupped his ears with his palms, and in a few seconds a flash strobed his eyelids and there was a humming in his head and the smell of aluminum. Wynne rose from where he was kneeling beside the door and charged forward, Russell behind him, ears still ringing, the muted footsteps of Ox and Perkins at his heels.

The stairs were made of poured concrete and badly constructed, and Russell tripped twice but managed somehow not to fall. They came to a short landing on the second floor of the structure and proceeded through a long empty room, posters on the wall of shirtless men in Levi's, black and red backgrounds with legends in Cyrillic. A upended baby crib stood in one corner. A PlayStation without controllers or wires lay there on a beige carpet sample. No television. No power outlets that Russell could see. There was another door at the far end of the room, and the four of them formed up to either side of it, taking knees, catching their breath. Russell thought he heard voices from beyond the doorway. Then he was sure he heard them. He looked at Ox on the other side of the doorway and saw that the muscles along the man's jaw were still bulging. He studied him a few more seconds from over Wynne's left shoulder, and he'd just looked back to the doorway when a figure in a tracksuit burst into the room, sprinting. It was a blond man, blond hair and beard, and he was already past them and in the room's center before he realized he wasn't alone. He'd just started to turn when Ox and Perkins opened fire.

Russell watched the man in the center of the room turn and pitch to the ground. Perkins stepped farther away from the door, turkey-peeking around Ox to see if another enemy would be following the one they'd just shot. Wynne glanced at the dead man and then back to the doorway. He lifted a hand and motioned Ox and Perkins through. Russell's ears continued to ring. Wynne waved him to the other side of the doorway, and he rose from his crouch, moved opposite the captain, scanned his sector, and then followed Perkins and Ox.

They went along a hallway, and then the hallway turned back to the south and they went down another short stretch, their boots making muted slaps against the floor.

The passage terminated in small room where a laptop sat closed upon a card table. Maps on the walls. A corkboard with thumbtacks pinning torn scraps of paper. A narrow window into which the last sunlight came. There was a thin man in olive-colored fatigues seated on the floor, leaning against the far wall with both hands crossed over his stomach, fingers interlaced, and his shirt blooming with dark arterial blood. His Kalashnikov lay beside him, but he made no attempt to take it up. He sat watching the Americans without interest, his eyes starting to glaze. The room smelled of feces and iron.

Wynne walked over to the man and kicked his rifle, which went skidding across the concrete. The captain studied this soldier for several moments and then he knelt there in front of him. Ox and Perkins had already turned back to the doorway they'd come through, Ox open-mouthed, massaging the left side of his jaw. Russell watched him a moment and then he turned to watch Wynne and the dying Chechen. He thought the captain would get back on the radio and inform Rosa and the others that they'd cleared the building, but instead he seized the man's hands and pulled them away from his stomach.

“Where is it?” he asked.

The man just stared. He was struggling for his breath. His blond beard was long and matted with blood.

“We can make it quick,” Wynne told him. “I know you understand.”

The man closed his eyes and drew a breath. Russell could see his chest expand. He reached down to his med kit, which he kept in his right cargo pocket. The kit had trauma shears, decompression needles, and a nasal airway. A half roll of QuikClot and a tourniquet. A fentanyl lozenge. He'd just pulled the kit out of his pocket when the Chechen blew a long breath into the captain's face.

“The fuck you,” he said.

Wynne let go of the man's wrists, reached and grabbed the collars of his olive jacket, and ripped it open, buttons tumbling between the Chechen's legs, scattering across the floor. The man wore no shirt beneath the jacket, and the bullet hole was about two inches above his navel and pumping blood in time with his pulse.

Wynne studied the man's face a moment and he studied the man's stomach. He undid the Velcro strap on his right glove, pulled it off, and dropped it beside him. Then he drove his naked index finger into the wound.

The Chechen's eyelids snapped open and his eyes bulged from their sockets. Sweat broke out on his forehead. He began panting.

“The fuck you,” he told the captain, spitting the words. “The fuck you.”

Wynne smiled. He pressed his finger deeper, twisting it.

The Chechen wheezed and then began to cough, and his face was a mask of torment. Russell stepped toward his captain. He raised a hand to place it on Wynne's shoulder. Then he lowered it.

“Tell me where and I'll make it stop,” Wynne said, his voice surprisingly calm. “Don't pretend you don't know, because we both know you know. We both know that, don't we?”

The man was still coughing, his eyes clenched against the pain. He looked across the room and gestured with his chin. Wynne watched. He turned and glanced over his shoulder to where a poster was taped to the wall. The poster showed a man in an A-shirt and tight blue jeans holding a bottle of malt liquor, a caption in Cyrillic beneath.

“Perkins,” he said.

Russell watched the sergeant step over to the poster, remove his knife from his belt, slide it under the strips of tape, and pry it from the wall. Beneath the poster, a crude hole had been knocked in the wall, and Perkins reached inside and removed a small velvet sack with a bright yellow drawstring, bright yellow writing stitched along the crimson fabric. Russell couldn't make out what it said. Before he had a chance, Perkins turned and tossed the bag to Wynne. The sack struck the captain's palms with the sound of marbles clacking.

Wynne undid the drawstring and reached his naked hand down inside. Then he pulled a dark blue stone from the sack. It was knuckle-sized and polished so that it shone, shot through with striations of gray and white. The captain held it toward the narrow window, and there was an odd moment where Russell watched the light hit the blue of the stone, the blue of Wynne's eyes.

Then the captain dropped the stone into the sack, pulled the drawstring closed, and tied it.

“That all?” he asked the Chechen.

The man stared up at him. Then he closed his eyes.

Wynne slapped him twice very quickly, very hard. “This can get a lot worse,” he said.

The man began panting.

“Are there more?”

The man seemed to wilt. You could see something in him break, like a plate shattering. He began to shake his head.

“No,” he said.

“Convince me,” said the captain.

“No more,” the man told him. His breath was coming to him in rasps.

Wynne studied him for several more moments. Russell had readied a pair of flexicuffs and he was stepping forward to hand them to the captain when the captain stood, swiped his finger along his pants leg, and pulled back on his glove. He slid the sack into a cargo pocket.

Then he pulled his pistol from its holster, pressed the muzzle to the Chechen's forehead, and fired.

 

They made camp that night in a narrow draw and watched wolves thread their way along the slopes, down toward the compound to pick at the bodies. The gunfighters took turns with a night-vision monocular, staring at the furtive forms and their reflective eyes as they trotted with tails tucked between their legs, seven of them, eight. Wheels passed the device to Russell and he passed it right back. He didn't want to see, and when he awakened in the dead of night to the alien yipping, he lay there in his sleeping bag gripping the earth beneath the layers of Gore-Tex, feeling as though he'd fallen through the world into an alternate plane: predatory, carnivorous, a universe of tooth and bone.

The ground underneath him felt like rock. He shifted his body and tried not to think. During the raid, Ox had bit down so tightly he'd splintered a molar. After they'd exfiltrated from the compound, Ox walked back to Bixby and collapsed. The medic had examined his mouth with a penlight, and then they'd loaded the sergeant on a Skedco, dosed him with fentanyl, and dragged him up into the hills. He lay several feet from Russell now, twitching in his opiate dreams.