Wynne's War (2 page)

“Man of the hour,” said the sergeant.

“Yeah,” Russell said.

A soldier they called Wheels—Russell's battle-buddy and a Texan like Cairns—lifted his hand to quiet everyone. He was very short with a scar that went up his forehead, and pupils that quivered perpetually back and forth. Pale skin sunburned a bright red. Hair bleached almost white.

“Let's see,” he said, “if he'll tell us how it feels.”

Russell looked around at the expectant faces. He asked what was going on.

Wheels bent over, palmed his knees, and stared at Russell. Then his brow went slack and he began to nod.

“He doesn't know,” Wheels told them, glancing at the others, then back at Russell. “You don't even know.”

“Know what?”

Several of the men chuckled. Watching someone return from the infirmary with a concussion and bruised ribs was apparently very funny. He wondered where they'd gotten their hands on liquor.

Wheels clutched him by the shoulders. “You're famous, son.”

“You're drunk,” Russell said.

The men had crowded behind him on the bed, positioning themselves so as to see the computer screen. YouTube was open on the browser, a rectangle of video and below it the caption “Soldier Rescues Arabian.” Wheels reached down and clicked a button, and the footage began to play—a man running along a street, the distorted chatter of gunfire. The camera followed the man until a horse appeared in the frame, and it took Russell a few moments to realize the person in the video was him.

He sat there shaking his head. He asked where it was from.

“Film crew on a balcony across the street,” Wheels told him. “BBC.”

Russell watched as his image took one of the horse's reins and then as he and the animal began to turn. He could see the puffs of dust kicked up by the insurgents' rounds. He hadn't recognized how close he'd come to getting shot.

And then the blast of the RPG—the rocket's vapor trail and the explosion that sent him crashing into the animal's side—and then, briefly, a shot of him being dragged beside the horse. This was obscured by a building, and the camera searched left and right, and you could hear the cameraman asking where he'd gone. When the horse reemerged, Russell was on its back, and the camera tracked him until he went out of frame. There the video stopped.

Wheels said, “Been playing it on the news every fifteen minutes.”

“They did a thing on your granddad,” said a specialist named Bowen. “Guy on CNN.”

“CNN,” said Wheels with contempt.

“Talked about his being a Ranger, your granddad. World War Two. Talked about his training horses.”

“Communist News Network,” said Wheels. “Fuck they know about horses?”

Bowen studied the floor a moment. He was a goliath from South Boston and had dominated the New England Golden Gloves circuit before joining the army.

“They had pictures,” he said, shrugging.

“Everyone's got pictures,” Wheels said.

Russell ignored them. He clicked the button to replay the video, and when it was over he just sat.

“That's not an Arabian,” he finally said.

“What's that?” Wheels asked.

“It's not an Arabian,” Russell told him. “The caption says ‘Arabian.' ‘Soldier Rescues Arabian.' It's an Appaloosa.”

“Jesus,” said Wheels, “I want you to listen at him.”

Cairns shook his head. He turned and made for the other end of the barracks.

When the men tired of discussing the incident and went back to their evening routine—poker, e-mail, a few of them reading a series of novels in which the dead became animate and rose to feed on human flesh—Cairns came back around. He had very blue eyes, jet black hair, and his Texas accent gave his voice a strange authority. He pointed at the edge of Russell's bunk.

“You mind?”

Russell was lying on his back with his hands at his sides, trying to breathe as shallowly as possible. He opened one eye and squinted up at the man. He told him to be his guest.

Cairns hitched his pants and seated himself, turned toward Russell, crossed his left leg over his right, and sat with his fingers interlaced, cupping his knee.

“You feeling good, Corporal? You feeling satisfied?”

“I feel all right.”

“Lord knows,” said Cairns, “we want our Rangers happy.”

Russell stared at the man. He asked if there was something wrong.

“
Wrong?
” said Cairns, affecting a theatrical look. “Why would anything be wrong?”

The blood in Russell's body seemed to slow. He'd known he was going to have to listen to this at some point, he just wasn't sure when that point would be.

“Let me ask you something,” said Cairns.

Russell nodded.

“What do you think the proceeds of your little stunt would've been if that grenade had gone off about ten meters closer?”

“I don't reckon I'd be laying here,” said Russell.

“No, I don't reckon you would, either. Fact, I reckon you'd be laying someplace else. Maybe half a dozen places.” Cairn's face had gone red, and veins stood out on his neck. “Am I boring you, Corporal?”

It wasn't a question and Russell didn't answer it.

“You pull another maneuver like that, you'll wish you'd deserted.”

“Roger, Sergeant.”

“I'll see you charged with insubordination. I'll see you in Leavenworth.”

Russell lay very still. He could feel the headache coming on.

“Are you a Section Eight?” Cairns asked. “If you're a Section Eight, just tell me.”

“I'm not a Section Eight, Sergeant.”

“Why'd you do it? Don't tell me you don't know.”

Russell came up onto his left elbow, but that was as far as he got. The headache was very sharp, and the pain in his side was like needles and pins. He took a few moments and then he said, “I couldn't watch them shoot the horse.”

Cairns just stared.

“Corporal,” he said, “why are we here?”

Russell shifted his weight, repositioned his hips, and lowered himself back against the mattress. “‘To provide overwatch,'” he quoted, “‘for our operators and support assets in direct contact with hostiles.'”

“Anything in there about rescuing horses or kittens or whatever the fuck else?”

“No, Sergeant.”

“Are you a Section Eight?”

“Negative, Sergeant.”

“Are you going to pull any more ridiculous shit?”

“Sergeant, that's the first horse I've seen since I left home. I doubt I'll see another.”

Cairns scooted closer.

“Corporal, are you going to fuck up my squad with any more of this dumbass behavior?”

Russell took a short breath and released it.

“Negative, Sergeant. I think that I'm done.”

 

Russell laced his boots in the half-light and the cold of the barracks and stood from the narrow aluminum cot. The lieutenant was waiting at the end of the building, her silhouette in the doorway, black against the purpling sky. He glanced at Wheels in his rack—the man's face slack now and blank as a child's—took the tan beret and the jacket from his footlocker, and went up the aisle. The woman nodded to him when he reached the door, and he followed her into the courtyard and then along the sandstone corridor that went curving against the inner wall. The air prickled the skin on his arms, and he threaded his hands through the sleeves of his jacket—left and right—shrugged into it, zipping as he walked. The lieutenant went on before him, her steps almost soundless and the hair at the nape of her neck in an intricate bun.

The mosque at Qara Serai was calling worshipers to prayer, the sounds traveling in the predawn chill with their own peculiar lilt, alien to his ears and yet familiar in the way of dreamspeech, the way of song. They reached the colonel's quarters at the end of the passage, and Russell closed the storm flap up the front of his jacket, smoothing a hand across the Velcro fasteners. The woman motioned him through the doorway and took up a post outside. As he passed, he peeled the beret from his head and tucked it beneath an arm. He forced a smile at the woman, and she gave him just the slightest one back.

The hallway looked to have been carved from granite. He passed two doors on his right and three on his left, and at the next door he paused, straightened his jacket, and knocked lightly on the wooden jamb.

A voice told him to come in.

The room was small with very high ceilings, and there was a west-facing window that had been cut into the wall by hammer and chisel a hundred, maybe two hundred, years before. Stars were visible in the sky just beyond. The colonel sat at a mahogany desk, and when Russell entered, the man pushed his chair back and rose. He was in his early sixties, hair gone silver, the flesh beneath his chin just beginning to sag. He wore a precisely trimmed mustache whose bottom had been clipped so it didn't touch his upper lip or extend beyond the edges of his mouth. He returned Russell's salute and motioned him to one of the chairs in front of the desk, which was too large, Russell decided, to fit through the doorway. It would have been taken apart and reassembled, piece by piece.

Russell lowered himself onto the thin metal seat. His heart had begun to race. He tried to slow it, but that only made it faster. He focused on his posture: feet together, back straight, hands resting palm down on his thighs.

The colonel seated himself and scooted closer to his desk, glancing through his reading glasses at a sheet of paper, which he fingered briefly and set aside.

“Morning,” he said.

Russell told him good morning.

“Lieutenant Wilkins get you up?”

“No, sir,” said Russell. “I was awake.”

“Watch how you sit in that thing,” the man told him. “Leg wobbles. We had it taken over to supply; they sent it back with the same exact problem.”

Russell said he'd be careful.

The colonel nodded, brought a fist to his mouth, and cleared his throat.

“Dr. Halpern tells me you're recovering.”

“Getting there,” Russell said.

“He tells me there was a concussion?”

“Yessir.”

“But you're feeling better?”

“Much better. Yessir.”

The colonel rubbed his palm along his jaw and repositioned himself in his chair.

“That was a hell of a hit you took.”

Russell nodded.

“Watched the video on Fox. You've seen it?”

“Yessir. Just last night.”

The colonel leaned back in his chair and regarded him a moment.

“Kind of crazy, aren't you, Corporal?”

“I don't know, sir.”

The colonel stared at him. “You don't know?”

“No, sir.”

“You were that Ranger in the video riding an unsaddled horse through a firefight?”

Russell shifted in his chair. He glanced at his hands on either knee, the knuckles white.

“Yessir,” he told the colonel, “that was me.”

“And you won't own up to being crazy?”

Russell looked down at his hands again and then back up at the desk. He tried to speak but nothing came.

“Corporal?”

Russell closed his eyes briefly. When he opened them, he said, “Sir, I never done anything like that before.”

“Never done anything like that?”

“No, sir.”

“So your position is this craziness is kind of new to you?”

“Yessir,” Russell told him. “Pretty much.”

The colonel wiped the crease of a smile from the left side of his mouth. He reached and took up the sheet of paper he'd set on a stack of manila folders and held it at arm's length, squinting.

“Message came through last night,” he began, his voice shifting into a formal cadence. “You been attached to us six months now, so you're acquainted with the protocol.”

Russell nodded.

“You know about our sister company in Afghanistan?”

“I know we have one,” he said.

The colonel blinked several times. He glanced at the paper in his hand and then seemed to study a spot on the wall just behind Russell's head.

“You also have to know that there are officers in this task force way up the food chain above me.”

“I assume so, yessir.”

The colonel opened his mouth to continue and then closed it. He exhaled a deep breath and tossed the paper back onto the stack of folders.

“Let me be as direct as I can.”

Russell nodded.

“I have received an order to release you from my command next Tuesday at nineteen hundred hours and put you on an overflight to Bagram. You'll be reassigned to a Special Forces element operating in Nuristan Province, mountains of eastern Afghanistan. Captain by the name of Wynne. I assume you've heard of the man.”

“No, sir.”

“Haven't heard of him?”

Russell shook his head.

“Do you know the region? Nuristan?”

“Sir, I do not.”

“There are loud voices,” said the colonel, “who don't believe we should be anywhere near this area, and to be frank with you, Corporal, it chaps my ass to send one of my men on some Green Beret bullshit, but I have protested your transfer and have been kindly advised to fuck myself.” He stopped and shook his head. “I fought it hard as I could.”

Russell sat there a moment. His home was seven thousand miles away in northeastern Oklahoma, and for the first time in months, he wanted to be there very badly.

“May I ask a question, sir?”

“Ask it.”

“Do you have any idea why they want me?”

The colonel's mouth tightened. He tapped the desk three times with the knuckles of his right hand. He said, “Captain Wynne's made a bit of a name for himself. He's the one got those marine snipers out during that clusterfuck in Fallujah. Almost died doing it, but he's got balls, and he's not afraid to stand up to the Agency.”