Wynne's War (23 page)

The captain glanced over at the lieutenant.

“Or the feeds,” he conceded.

“How do you want to do it?” Rosa asked.

Wynne nodded. “Going to send in a fireteam to recon the building. After they clear it, we'll leave the scouts with the horses, get a couple of you to pull security, and I'll take in the rest. Any volunteers?”

“For the fireteam?” asked Bixby.

“The fireteam,” Wynne said.

“I'll go,” said Ox, speaking around the gauze.

“Negative,” said the captain.

“I'll be fine,” said Ox.

“You're fine now,” said Wynne. “I plan on keeping you that way.”

Rosa lifted his hand and Wynne nodded, and then Ziza lifted his.

Wynne said, “You get in there, Zero, get yourself shot, who's going to talk to the scouts?”

“What about me?” said Rosa. “What if I get shot?”

“Then we'll miss your cooking,” said Wynne. “Who else?”

“I'll go,” said Wheels, and Russell snapped his friend a look.

“You ever cleared a room?”

Wheels nodded.

“Two more,” Wynne said.

Russell lifted his hand, but Hallum and Perkins were quicker. Wynne told the four of them—Rosa, Wheels, Hallum, and Perkins—to stay in radio contact. They dismounted and handed over their lead lines and then stalked single file up through the trees and disappeared over the rise. The rest set about tying the horses. Russell sat on the ground next to Wynne, watching Ziza ready magazines, check gear, tighten the straps on his rig.

Ten minutes passed. Then ten more. Russell stared at his watch, picturing Wheels lying on the bare dirt floor of a compound, slowly bleeding out. He shook the thought from his head, but another quickly took its place—Sara in some godforsaken outpost, crouched in a tent as rockets screamed overhead. The captain's radio squawked.

“We're in,” said a voice that sounded like Sergeant Rosa's.

“Copy that,” Wynne said. “What kind of structure is it?”

There was a moment's pause. Then Wheels's voice came over the radio: “Big one, captain.”

Wynne looked over at Russell, but Russell only shook his head.

“Is it a tower?” Wynne asked.

“Not a tower,” said the first voice. “Nine or ten stories, though. It'll take a while to clear.”

“Do you require assistance? Over.”

“Negative,” the voice said. “Looks like we have it to ourselves.”

They sat and waited. It took the fireteam the better part of an hour to clear the building bottom to top, and when they'd done so, the junior weapons sergeant came back over the radio and told them they could walk on up.

The captain keyed the talk button.

“We're all clear?”

“Roger that,” said Rosa.

“You're positive?”

“Say again.”

“I say again: you're positive the building is clear? Over.”

“Building's deserted,” said Rosa. “Nothing but rat turds and sand.”

Wynne sat a moment, staring at the ground. His eyes seemed to flash on and off, a trick of the light, Russell thought. Then he rose, slid the radio into its pouch on his chest rig, took up his rifle, and started moving.

They moved up through the pine trees and sycamores, Wynne walking point with Ziza at his heels, Russell behind the Afghan Commando, Billings bringing up the rear. The trees fell away and they emerged into a clearing. Two hundred meters out stood the building that the scouts had reported the previous night. The four of them took a knee at the edge of the tree line and knelt there staring up.

“Jesus God,” Billings said.

It wasn't a tower, but for this country it was impressively tall: 140, 150 feet, rectangular in shape, gray in color, glassless windows climbing into the sky. It looked to be built of concrete and cinder block, though Russell had no idea how those materials found their way out here.

Wynne pulled out his radio and held it to his mouth.

“Front door,” he said.

“Copy that,” said Rosa.

“What's your twenty?”

“You see the roof?”

“Affirmative.”

Russell glanced up. What he'd thought was a vent or chimney atop the building appeared to sprout an arm. The arm waved back and forth and then promptly disappeared.

“Got you,” Wynne said. “How we looking?”

“Good shape,” Rosa told him. “I can see two klicks, every direction.”

“Where's the butcher and the baker?”

“I got Hallum on a third-floor window facing west and Perkins up on the sixth. Ranger's on the ground-floor lobby.”

“Where's this lobby?”

“He'll be set up on the stairs when you come in. Just to your left.”

“Copy that,” said Wynne. “Tell him not to get trigger-happy. We're moving up.”

Wheels's voice came over the radio, some joke about being trigger-sad.

Wynne sat there a moment and then he cleared his throat.

“Corporal,” he said.

“Yessir.”

“You frag one of us, I'll have Ox skin you and make himself a pair of boots.”

“Roger that,” Wheels said.

Wynne put the radio away, rose, and moved toward the building, the three of them following. Russell looked over and saw that a worn gravel road breached the tree line in the distance and wound across the open stretch of field, approaching the building's front. Nothing about this place sorted with him. Nothing made sense. That old Ranger maxim imprinted on his brainpan: “Just Don't Look Right.”

They reached the entrance and stepped inside onto the bare concrete floor, sand grinding beneath their boot soles and the clop of their footsteps echoing off the walls. There was a stairwell on the north side of the room, and Wheels sat on the first step with his rifle at the low ready. When the captain glanced at him, he moved his right hand off fire-control and waved.

Wynne took several steps farther inside, and Russell moved off to the right. Unpainted cinder-block walls, a dusting of talc across the floor, and the bootprints of what must have been Rosa's fireteam, tracks leading toward the stairs. He turned back toward the entrance and saw the enormous cast-iron doors opening out into the gravel lot they'd just crossed. He hadn't even seen them coming in, that adrenal funneling-down: forest for the trees, trees for the branches, branches for the bark. Wynne had noticed the doors as well, and now he stepped over and pulled the left one creaking backward on its hinges. A large steel handle was welded to the inside, and an identical one welded to the outside. He dragged the door completely closed, then went to the one on the right and pulled it shut as well, a half-inch seam of daylight shining between them. He stood there with his back to them in the dim chamber, the only light filtering in from the stairwell. He looked over at Wheels.

“Anyone carrying cordage?”

Russell had several long strands of paracord in his left cargo pocket, but before he could offer it, Ziza stepped up and handed the captain an enormous coil. Wynne pointed to the set of iron handles on the inside of the doors and passed the paracord back to Ziza.

“Secure that,” he said.

“What are you worried about?” Billings asked.

“Burglars,” said Wynne. He removed his radio and asked Perkins if he was carrying a Claymore mine.

“I've got two,” Perkins said.

“Good,” Wynne told him. “Come down and set one just inside these doors and relieve Corporal Grimes.”

“I think we'll be fine,” said Billings, but the captain told him he wasn't going to risk it.

“I'm not seeing the risk,” he told Wynne. He gestured at the concrete walls surrounding them. “This is the most secure I've felt in weeks.”

“Maybe you could stay,” Ziza said.

Russell glanced at the two men, just shadows standing about ten feet apart. Billings towered over the Afghan, but if it came to fisticuffs, Russell's money would be on Ziza.

Billings stood there a moment. He said, “I think our terp is under the impression he's a
member
of this team.”

“You,” Ziza said to Billings, “have the impression you're its leader.”

Billings took a step toward the commando, but Wynne's voice was low and flat in the room's dead air.

“Stop,” it said.

Billings did. Stopped like a statue and stood there frozen. Russell's first thought was that if the lieutenant had really wanted the fight, no word would've stopped him.

“Zero's as much a part of this team as anyone,” Wynne said.

“I'm not?” said Billings.

“I didn't say that,” Wynne told him. “Do you want me to?”

Billings's gaze dropped to the floor, and there were several silent moments. Then they heard Perkins's footsteps on the stairs. He appeared at the first-floor landing, came down, and approached the doors, unslinging his pack, kneeling and beginning to remove equipment. He worked for about a minute and then he looked up and craned his neck toward the other men.

“Did I just miss something?” he asked.

Before anyone could answer, Hallum's voice came over the captain's radio.

“Underchild,” it said.

“Go ahead,” Wynne told him.

“You might want to come look at this.”

“What is it?” said the captain.

“You might just want to come look.”

Russell followed Wynne and Ziza and Wheels up the stairs—one flight, two flights, a third flight—and stepped into a room nearly identical to the one they'd just left. Here, narrow windows had been cut in the walls, and the morning sun was creeping in, surprisingly bright. Hallum knelt beside what looked to be a shallow wooden crate, lidless, long. They walked toward him, and as they went, Wheels looked at Russell and said, “The Soviets.”

“What's that?”

Wheels gestured to the windows and walls.

“Soviets,” he said.

“What about them?”

“They built this,” said Wheels, his pupils quivering. “Back in the war. Back when they were fighting the mujahideen.”

Russell said he couldn't know that, but Ziza told him his friend was right. The Russians had choppered in materials and built bases like this all over the province, then left them standing when they'd begun to withdraw. He had started to explain the purpose of such facilities, when they reached Hallum and saw what he was kneeling beside.

It was a pine-board box filled with sand. Wynne and Wheels and Russell stood there while Ziza took a knee. At first glance, Russell didn't see why this merited attention, but then he noticed that the sand had been sculpted into berms and valleys and that someone had stood a wooden matchbox on end in the center—a rectangle of balsa with faded Cyrillic letters across one side. In the upper-right corner, a line of green plastic army men marched down one of the trenches. Russell's grandmother used to buy him identical toys at the supermarket when he was a boy. For a few dollars, you got a sack of fifty soldiers in various poses, a miniature machine-gun emplacement, a Sherman tank. The toy warriors in this sandbox had been arranged single file, one behind the next, and Russell knelt down beside Ziza and began to count them. A prickling sensation ran across his forearms, and the hair on the back of his neck stood. He'd learned to trust it: the hair on the back of your neck never lied.

“Thirteen,” he whispered.

“Yeah,” said Hallum.

Russell looked at Ziza. The commando had leaned forward and reached into the box. He slipped his fingers beneath the sand and began to feel around, first the lower left corner, then the lower right. Russell watched him, the contents of his stomach turning to bile. He was about to say the words
booby trap
when Ziza's hand caught on something and he went very still. Then the Afghan started to pull it free: a strand of rope, it looked like. Two strands. Ziza gave it a gentle shake and held it there above the box. Russell saw it was a necklace, joined together by links of gold. The necklace caught the light, and there was a muted metallic click as it dangled from Ziza's hand.

“You got to be fist-fucking me,” Wheels said.

Ziza passed the necklace to Wynne. Then he reached back into the box.

When he pulled his hand out, there were several rings in his palm. He set these to the side and, using both hands, began combing through the sand. He came up with half a dozen more rings, gold and silver, then a small platinum choker set with what looked like emeralds. He handed all of this to the captain, who stowed the items in the cargo pockets of his pants.

Ziza watched him a moment.

“We need to leave this place,” he said.

Wynne nodded. He pulled out his radio and asked Perkins if he'd set the Claymore.

“Roger that,” said Perkins.

Wynne keyed the talk button and asked Rosa if he read him.

“Five by five,” Rosa said.

“How're we looking?”

“No change,” said Rosa.

“Get ready to move,” Wynne told him. “We're about to get in contact.”

“Say again.”

“You heard me,” Wynne said.

He turned and walked toward the stairwell, calling for Bixby on the radio, telling him to ready their mounts.

“What's going on?” asked Bixby.

“Just get them ready,” the captain said.

The five of them had just started toward the first floor when Rosa's voice came back over Wynne's radio, echoing in the stairwell.

“You're a goddamned psychic,” it said.

“How many?” Wynne asked.

“Eight,” said Rosa.

“Eight,” Wynne said.

“Correction,” said Rosa, and then his next word was garbled.

Wynne told him to repeat the transmission.

“Eyes on foot-mobiles, six hundred meters.”

“Speak slower,” the captain said.

“From figures,” said Rosa, “One Zero Tangos.”

“Ten?” Wynne asked.

Rosa said, “I spell—Tango, Echo, November—ten enemy foot-mobiles, proceeding north-northwest.”