Authors: Amber Green
"Thanks, man,” he muttered and strode off. I waited a moment to follow.
Oscar leaned against the wall in a shady spot, cleaning his nails with a pocketknife. Under the concealing sunglasses, his mouth was pressed flat. No more give showed in it than in the man behind it.
I strode past him, and he pushed off the wall to follow me. Fuck him.
Half a dozen horses, half of them gray and half dun, milled in a paddock behind a chest-high mud-brick wall. Two of the grays were Arabs, one of them obviously aged and one—isolated in a cage near the earth-walled shed—heavily bandaged. The other horses came prancing up to us. The biggest, a bobtail gelding, was also gray. The big gray looked robustly healthy, but that tail was shameful.
Maybe it took both gelding and disfiguring a good horse to keep him from being stolen.
The dun mares were the tough little beasts I remembered so well: sort of like a quarter horse and sort of like a Welsh pony. Mike went to the gate while the rest of us went over the wall. The horses singled Oscar out from between me and Echo, muscling us aside to nudge him. He murmured to them with rough but obvious affection.
"You'll need the smaller saddle,” Echo advised me. “Want to come help me with the tack while Oscar goes through all the greeting? Can you believe he feeds them cigars? They love it."
In the heavily secured and rather cold tack room, I was happy to see an array of McClellan saddles instead of the adjustable aluminum-framed robo-saddles some of the guys talked about.
I'd learned to ride bareback. Although my uncles made money building the ornate wooden saddles used for the big-money goat-pulling tournaments, they weren't made for someone as small as I was then. In the US, I'd ridden western.
My mother couldn't send four boys through the endless procession of riding events she'd competed in as a kid, but we were encouraged to ride. The fancy tack she had won as a barrel-riding teenager had been kept in pristine condition, and the neighbors who could afford horses were happy to trade labor for riding time.
"You like the MOLLE-gear saddlebags? Or do you want the local wool ones?"
"Wool,” I said instantly. “That other stuff rustles.” I picked up two saddles to carry outside.
Echo dropped a tangle of straps and bits about my neck and draped aromatic horse-wool around my shoulders, then loaded himself at least as heavily. “You belong with us, all right. We ride gray horses in winter and dun in summer, because it's camouflage.” He snorted. “Same saddles, though. Like a saddle floating over rocks without a visible horse under it won't catch attention."
But a saddle is a whole lot smaller than a horse and has fewer moving parts to catch the eye. For camouflage in summer in Afghanistan, you couldn't beat a dun.
Kahar
, I reminded myself abruptly. The words my father used for horse colors were perfectly acceptable here. The snooty girls in their English getup who'd taunted me for not knowing fifty different ways to say
brown horse
were thousands of miles away. And if they were here, they were no longer flaunting thousand-dollar custom saddles.
And the grays were
kabood.
None of the horses would win any conformation show points in the US, that's for sure. Maybe they could show with mustangs, though they didn't have the weedy look and heavy heads of most mustangs I'd seen. The first question here would always be whether a horse could do the job, and second, whether he could survive.
My mare eyed me with evil intent, and I returned the look. She danced out of reach a few times, but I knew that game. I herded her into a nook probably designed to trap, until I could block her in against a boulder and let her get used to my presence for a moment. I eased the bridle over her head, the bit into her mouth. She tossed her head, mouthing at the bit, and eyed me as if wondering whether putting up with me as a rider was going to be worth the relief from boredom.
While she was chewing the idea, I ran a hand over her back, feeling for any swelling or heat. She wasn't all that far behind her last currying, and that back had more muscle than the rough coat showed. With the saddle on her back, she danced again, cocking a rear leg as if contemplating a good kick. But she didn't kick.
She didn't snake her head around to bite me, which was good. I'd have bitten her back, but biting is something I think of as a stallion thing; a mare doing it unnerves me. She had plenty of opportunity as I buckled and cinched.
She sniffed my shoulder and hair then, but her rib cage didn't expand or shrink. Ah, she was holding her breath—one of those tricky mares who knew that what her groom thought was a tight girth would become loose once she exhaled.
I waited. When she could no longer hold out, her ribs caved in. I cinched the strap tight. So far, so good.
Oscar was already in the saddle, testing his mare's responsiveness to the reins and checking for any unusual reactions. From what I recalled and what I'd seen on YouTube, these would have mouths a lot harder than I'd become used to.
She planted herself, bracing against my pull a few times. I let her. That wouldn't last. She rolled her eyes at me, ears back. But she didn't kick.
I checked the buckles and ran a finger under the edge of the saddle and the cinch, admiring the smooth lay of both, and grinned at Mike. “It fits like it was made for her."
He swung into his own saddle. “Roger that. She was bought to fit the saddle. How does it fit you?"
I shortened the stirrups, then swung up. “Like it was made for me."
Oscar scowled. “Close enough."
What? What's eating you?
He took off, raising a cloud of dust like some black hat in a movie. I held my mare in, though she danced with eagerness to follow. Echo's stocky little mare jittered beside me, but Mike wasn't up and settled yet.
No, Mike was down and checking his girth.
I wouldn't have mounted before checking my girth. But voicing that little fact would do no one any good. Mike also made a point of checking his mare's feet, then mounted again. His brows knotted. “Watch me a minute. Is this mare's gait uneven?"
I watched him for only a few steps before I called halt. “She's favoring her off rear leg."
He swung down, scowling, and ran his hands down the favored leg. “I thought so. I can't feel anything, but the old girl's probably not up to mountain scrambling. Help me catch the gray gelding with the bobbed tail, please. This saddle fits him real well too."
I wondered again about the bobtail. My grandfather and uncles gloried in their horses’ long, sweeping tails.
Oscar came cantering back. “OGA with tack."
The corral had only the one unclaimed horse sound enough to catch anyone's interest.
"Shit,” Mike said succinctly, flipping the halter off his mare's ears and tossing it in Oscar's direction. “Grab Bob."
Oscar backed three paces and jumped the corral wall like it was waist high instead of chest high. I urged my mare close to the wall to watch him approach the gray and snag the halter neatly over its head. He leaned over and bucked the halter and led the horse to the gate.
He looked over the wall at me. “Face covered, mouth shut. Even if they take you, I'll get you back. Count on it.
I heard the theme song from
Terminator
and turned slowly, holding in my suddenly antsy mare more with my legs than my hands. Why might they take me? And why
I'll
get you back, not
we'll
get you back?
Five men, their faces concealed by shemaghs that covered everything but their Oakley sunglasses, piled out of the crew cab of—surprise!—a Toyota pickup! The driver and the gunner standing behind the cab held their positions.
The five who came out moved like their joints were all loose, like stoned cowboys, and every one wore a pistol harness. “Y'all can dismount now, fellahs. We need these horses for the day."
"They're not for hire, sir,” Mike said crisply. “They're my personal property. Some ID, gentlemen?"
The guy in the lead struck a hipshot pose. “Then we're commandeering them. Buying them, if you prefer. Either way, get down. We have a curtain call half a mile away in fifteen minutes."
Echo maneuvered between me and them, his machine gun off his back and laid casually over one thigh. His poorly tied shemagh caught the wind and whipped against his face.
Interesting. He had a free hand and a gun hand. His mare didn't need reining for guidance.
"I still haven't seen ID,” Mike observed.
The loose-jointed men flipped open ID wallets. I couldn't see anything of what was in them, but the men flipped them shut again with supreme confidence. The one in the lead cocked his head. “I'm guessing you're an NCO, am I wrong? ‘Cause if you are, I outrank you."
Mike gave a slight tilt to his head, and they went for their guns.
In the clatter, Mike raised one hand. “You don't want to do this, and for the record, it doesn't matter what your rank is. I don't care if you're CIA, Special Ops, or sanitation engineers. What matters these days is the rank of the top guy who's willing to put his ass on the line to back you up in whatever you're currently doing. I'm guessing your boss is not as intimately acquainted with your mission as mine is with mine. Who you wanna call?"
The guy in the front pulled down his shemagh to show his grin. Perfect white teeth. They looked fake. “You guess wrong. We have orders from on high: Put ‘Nice American’ face on for any local charity do-wah-wah that comes up. Especially this one, since CNN is setting up their satellite feeds now. There will be a Coalition presence. But guess what? We need horses, and we need zero risk of some rag-head fanatic with tears running down his face jabbering on CNN about how we stole his horses, just when he bizmah-fucking-lah needed them to take a load of sheep turds to the bakery. And these here are the only registered US-owned—"
"Personally owned!” Echo snapped.
Don't interrupt the elders
. I chided him mentally.
"What
ev
-ah, Blondie. We have the authority to confiscate your left nut if we want it, but—lucky you!—we only want the horses. If you're white about it, we might even return them this evening."
"Dismount,” another clarified. “Or face immediate arrest."
I caught a flicker of movement and turned. Oscar was handing something book-sized over the wall of the corral. He gestured past me. I took the thing—an iPad mirroring my masked face—and then the sky and handed it to Echo. He snorted softly and passed it on to Mike.
"Drop it or lose a kneecap,” someone snarled.
Mike angled the screen at them. “Smile, boys. You're on live feed. Eleven hundred viewers now, and no telling how many more coming in over the next thirty seconds. Especially if things get exciting."
"Bluff,” a man in the rear muttered. One of them, maybe the same one, whipped out a phone the size of a deck of cards and went into thumb-typing overdrive.
The faceman looked at Mike's screen, his smile losing its smug menace. “As I was saying, soldiers, the children's burn ward will have to close tomorrow unless our contributions can keep it open. The Coalition has organized a game of buzkashi, the national game here in Afghanistan, in order to raise enough money to keep the children under medical care, to give them some relief from the unspeakable pain and scarring. No little kid should suffer that kind of pain."
The thumb-typer showed him a screen, and he took off his sunglasses to smile again. This smile oozed insincerity, which I hope transmitted well. “We deeply appreciate your volunteering your horses to allow us to field a team. The need is critical; the need is now; and surely the children's cries would melt your heart."
"No man forks my horse,” Mike drawled, “unless I trust him. If the Coalition needs my horses, they get my men to ride them. Sorry for any confusion you
gentlemen
might have suffered, but if you boys want to ride, you can bring your own mounts. Lead the way."
Echo looked past me at Oscar. I threw a glance back too. His face was invisible behind sunglasses and shemagh, and neither hand was visible. His rifle's muzzle didn't project from behind his shoulder. So Echo wasn't the only one with rifle in hand.
Echo eased his mount toward mine, surreptitiously pushing me out of the line of fire.
Were they always this paranoid, or was I missing something? Best to go with their instincts instead of the ones I'd let get dulled with too many years on ships.
The faceman tried to catch Mike's bridle, only to find Mike's arm in the way. “You can't seriously mean to play instead of us. This is a very rough game. Injuries are expected. We don't have time to train you!"
"Nor I you,” Mike pointed out. “You cannot have my horses, which are personal property and specially trained. Didn't you say fifteen minutes? How far do we need to ride to get to the game? You don't want the US team to lose by default, do you?"
The field was maybe half a mile long, with rapidly filling stadium seating along one side, right in front of the circle of justice. It seemed small, but I hadn't been on a game field since I was nine, so what do I know? The camera trucks were clustered, the cameras pointing at the stands, the mountain backdrop, or the goalposts. But the real goal was here in the middle, the circle of justice where all men must come.
"We were scheduled to use the other field,” the CIA faceman told Mike, “but the bomb dogs found an old land mine, probably dating to the eighties. Couldn't have been alive or it'd have gone off long ago, so we suggested running a junker of a truck over it, but some lard-brain who expects to collect his retirement someday decided the field wasn't
sa-afe
."
He hawked and spit. At least it wasn't tobacco spit. “We told him this field was proven safe. About a hundred of them were playing buzkashi here Monday, and nobody's hooves got blown off. If you're worried, of course, we can take your places."
Mike shook his head.
I kept trying my mare with knee pressure here or a weight shift there. When a rider doesn't have time to train the horse, all he can do is educate himself as to what actions cue the animal to do what. I leaned way far down my right leg. She stopped dead, as she had before, only moving when I settled in the saddle and urged her forward.