Wynne's War (14 page)

“I think they got somebody,” she said.

So they did. There were a dozen Afghan militiamen who worked out of the firebase as translators and guides, and they had in their possession a very thin man dressed in a soiled linen shirt that went just past his knees, sandals, a suede leather vest. He had a burlap sack secured over his head and tied with a length of rope, and his hands were bound with what to Russell looked like wire. The Afghans were leading him toward the center of camp on a paracord leash that had been wrapped around the man's waist. Every so often one of them would reach out and slap the base of his skull. They brought him to a pile of dirty snow and pushed him to his knees. One of the men stepped up and pulled the sack from his head, and the prisoner knelt very still, studying the ground.

Russell watched. The Afghans seemed to be arguing some point of custom or law. Russell saw that they were divided in their opinions, and he wished he spoke Dari or Pashto, whichever was being used. The American soldiers kept their distance, seeming reluctant to intervene or uncertain of exactly how.

There was a private standing beside the gate. He couldn't have been more than nineteen and looked even younger than that. Russell called to him and asked what was going on.

“It's one of the enemy spotters,” said the young private, “for the mortars that've been hitting us.”

Russell nodded. The Afghans continued arguing. They gestured at the kneeling man and they gestured at the sky—either at their ultimate destination or perhaps the cobalt expanse through which the mortars had fallen. Then an elder among the men stepped forward and lifted a hand and all went instantly quiet, and he regarded them with an almost clerical calm. He spoke very softly, and his listeners' brows furrowed with concentration, and some began nodding. He touched their prisoner gently on the shoulder. He pointed at the earth on which they stood. Then he raised an enormous knife in his fist. Russell didn't see anyone pass it to him, and he didn't see the man draw it from anywhere about his person. His hand had been empty and then it wasn't. The blade was a machete of strange manufacture, its edge curving obscenely outward, and the elder took one step forward and, with a single, practiced stroke, severed the prisoner's head cleanly from his body. Russell felt something buzz across his skin, and he watched in amazement as the man's skull went tumbling among the rocks. The headless torso pitched sideways and began to geyser blood onto the snow, and the elder, his robes freckled with the spray, passed his blade to a subordinate and stepped clear. One of the Afghans gave a shrill cry, and the cry was echoed by the others. The Americans had begun to stagger backward, and one young soldier turned and fled down the path toward his bunker.

But the ritual had yet to conclude. Two Afghan men came forward, each taking an arm of their prisoner, bringing his torso once more to a kneeling position, the blood all but subsided and turned now to seep. A third Afghan—a leader of the local militia whom Russell had heard several Americans refer to as Bari—came up with a five-gallon jerry can and began, without hurry, to pour the contents into the corpse's neck. Then he flung the can aside and began to rummage in the pockets of his robe. He produced a small box of matches, struck one and then another against the side of the box, and tossed it toward the corpse. Tongues of fire erupted and flames licked the bloody shirt of the headless man, reaching, at last, the cavity between his shoulders. The two men still holding the torso released their grip, and a ball of bright blue flame went up in the dusk and the torso fell forward, bent as if in prayer.

It didn't stay bent for long. Gasoline had filled the dead man's stomach, and gasoline had soaked his clothes, and as the fire consumed the corpse, it began to writhe. The Afghans once again released a piercing call as the torso wrenched upright and began to cavort in spasms, standing and falling, performing a macabre and frightful dance.

“Sweet Jesus,” said Russell and turned to look at Sara, but Sara was no longer seated beside him. He glanced at the wall of HESCOs, then over at the gates. He looked back toward the spectacle in the center of camp, and that was when he saw her. She'd managed to slip from the wall of sandbags and was threading her way among the soldiers, through the swarm of militiamen, now approaching the ring of elders, this small figure in surgical scrubs—girlish, petite—moving closer and closer to the dancing corpse.

Russell jumped down and went after her, moving past the astonished Americans, past the murmuring Afghans. She was within ten yards of the burning body when Russell caught up with her. He seized her by the wrist and began to lead her away. She came without struggle, limp as any doll. They went down the sandbag-lined path in the cold evening air until they came to the medical tent and stood for several breathless moments.

Sara looked up at him. Her pupils were large as dimes and her expression that of someone coaxed from a trance. Euphoric. Enthralled. Her breath fogged in the blue twilight.

He stood there with her hand in his until the color came back into her face and her eyes shifted and she seemed to be returning.

“That—” he told her, when he managed to speak, “
that
was crazy.”

 

The next morning a storm rolled in from the west, and it began once more to snow, the white world descending, muffled and mute. The air was very quiet, very cold. Russell rubbed his hands together, cupped and blew into them, then reached down in a cargo pocket for his gloves.

All that day an unease gnawed his stomach. It wasn't just the mortars and rockets, the thought of his death screaming in from above. The hollow beneath his sternum began to ache. His temples pulsed. Snow and the all clear only seemed to make it worse.

At dusk he glanced out from the tent where he and a few other soldiers had gone to seek warmth and saw three figures walking across camp, two large, one small—Ox and Pike and Wheels—watch caps pulled down to their ears and their jacket collars turned up against the cold. Wheels wore a checkered shemagh—black and brown—no telling where he'd gotten his hands on it. Russell walked out onto the packed white path with the snow crunching under his boots. He lifted an arm to wave, but the three men had already seen him and started his way.

As they approached, Russell saw that Ox had a chaw protruding from the left side of his jaw and then that Wheels had lined his lower lip with the stuff. He kept leaning over every few steps to spit. He came up, slapped Russell's shoulder, and pointed to his mouth.

“Sergeant loaned me a dip,” he told him.

“Good for you,” Russell said.

The four of them stood several moments.

“We need to go out and stop this,” Pike said.

Russell agreed. He said the problem was how.

Then he said, “
We?
” pointing a finger at himself, then at Ox and Wheels and Sergeant Pike.

“You be up for that?” said Pike.

“How would we do it?” Russell asked.

“Sergeant was thinking an ambush,” Ox said. His lips parted and he spat expertly between his teeth, a thin stream arcing to the ground, not a drop clinging to his beard or the front of his jacket.

“We're going to try to ambush them?” Russell asked. “We'd have to know where they were. We'd have to know where they're
going
to be.”

“I know where they are,” Pike said.

Russell stood thinking about it. He thought the odds of Pike knowing the precise—or future—location of an enemy mortar team was slim to none.

Pike said, “How long before one of these rounds goes long and ends up hitting
our
camp.”

“Or the horses,” said Ox.

“Or the horses,” Pike said.

For some reason, Russell had yet to consider that as a possibility, as though the mountain and this hilltop fortress would prevent any wayward shell from killing everything in the corral.

“When would we go?”

“I think the sooner the better. Don't you?”

“Just the four of us?” said Russell.

“Just us four,” Pike said.

Russell looked at Wheels, his friend standing there with pupils quivering. He opened his mouth as if to tell Russell his opinion of this plan, but he spat instead. Or tried to spit. He kept his teeth together like Ox, attempting to eject the tobacco juice between them, but unlike Ox, his technique was off and spit dribbled from his lips and down onto his beard. He leaned forward, palmed a knee with one hand and swiped the back of his sleeve across his chin.

He looked up at Russell. His Adam's apple jerked.

“I think I maybe swallowed some,” he said.

 

They left Dodge just after midnight. Pike had procured tactical vests for Wheels and Russell, kneepads and helmets and pouches for their ammo. Their rifles were back down in camp, but Ox handed them a pair of Colt carbines with the sixteen-inch barrel, ACOGs mounted on the sight rails, night-vision optics on the quad rails just in front. Precision buttstocks. Suppressors screwed into the threaded muzzle breaks. The weapons still had their unmarked factory finish—you could run your thumb across the receiver and feel that powder-textured coating—and when Russell asked the sergeant where they'd come from, Ox simply told him to try to return it in one piece.

They were the better part of an hour working their way onto the valley floor, and when they reached the basin, the air was cold on Russell's face and the moon lit the bare oak limbs and cast spidery shadows against the snow and the bare patches of scree. The mortar team they hunted had been launching from about four kilometers out, and Pike thought the enemy position lay in a little draw that came down the throat of the mountains on the valley's opposite side. The sergeant's thinking was to try to get there before dawn and lay up for an ambush. That was provided, of course, the mortar crew wasn't already waiting.

“You think he's right?” Wheels had asked Russell just before they set off.

“Do I think
who
's right?” said Russell. “About what?”

“The sergeant. You think he knows where these Talibs are posted up?”

Russell told him he had no idea.

“I don't see how he could know,” said Wheels. “Unless he's been out there. And if he hasn't been out there, he can't know anything.”

“Then I don't suppose we have to worry about getting shot,” Russell said.

Wheels stared at him.

“The fuck crawled up your ass?”

“I'm fine,” Russell said.

Wheels studied him a long moment. Then he said, “You can't afford to be thinking about any of that.”

“Thinking about what?” Russell said.

“She's a pretty girl,” said Wheels, “but this ain't the time.”

Russell didn't say anything.

“I haven't brought it up because you know how you can get.”

Russell said, “No. Tell me how I get.”

Wheels exhaled very slowly and shook his head. “Russ, I'm not trying to get on your case. I'm just saying.”

“We haven't even done anything,” Russell said.

“Not yet,” said Wheels. “But I've seen the way she looks at you. I've seen you looking at her. Save it for stateside. Right now it'll get you cross-threaded.”

Russell looked at him. His platinum hair grown out into a short rooster's comb. His pupils quivering back and forth.

“Since when did you become the voice of reason?”

“Since always,” Wheels said.

They deployed along a gorge that twisted across the valley floor. It had been a stream at one time but was bone-dry now and lined with egg-shaped stones, perfectly polished, glowing in the moonlight. Russell kept glancing down to monitor his footing. Easy, in such circumstances, to roll an ankle, pick up a mechanical injury, and then the entire mission would be a wash. He stopped at one point and pulled back the sleeve of his jacket to check his watch. First light was two hours away. He readjusted his rifle sling and continued walking.

The gorge began to angle northward, and they climbed its southern lip and shifted course to the east. They hadn't spoken a word since leaving camp and they didn't speak now, walking soundlessly and fifteen meters apart, scanning the country through their rifles' sights. Russell kept his eyes sweeping back and forth, dividing the terrain into sectors. A Vietnam veteran who'd done his tours with Long Range Reconnaissance had once told him that anything worth looking at was worth pointing your gun at.
Good advice,
Russell thought.

They reached the first slopes of the eastward range and defiled along an uneven goat trail heading south. They went several hundred meters, and then Pike brought them to a halt, raising his left fist in the air and then lowering himself onto a knee. The three men behind him knelt in unison. Anyone watching would have thought they'd rehearsed. Pike looked up a draw to his right and then pointed his index finger toward the stars and rotated it several times. They rose and moved into the gorge.

The walls of the culvert were slick with ice, and through the night scope the world burned with a sea-green light. Russell lowered the rifle and glanced at the moon, put his outstretched hand between it and the horizon. They had an hour's dark left, and here was where they'd lose it. He trailed Ox, taking great care to step in the man's tracks, like a child following his father.

After a ninety-minute climb—slow, treacherous—they reached the clearing Pike was searching for, fanned out and shouldered their rifles. There was no one about, but the snow had been marked by footprints, and in the middle of the clearing lay the perfect impression of a mortar's baseplate—this frozen, concave square, blue in the dawning air. The four of them stood looking at it. Wheels took a knee beside the indentation, reaching out a hand to trace its borders. He looked up at Sergeant Pike, then over at Russell.

“I will be damned,” he said.

 

Russell lay in the snow beneath the live oaks on the eastern edge of the clearing, blinking every few moments to brush the sleep from his eyes. He watched his breath dissolve in the air like smoke, and every few minutes he'd turn and stare back toward the melancholy hills where Firebase Dodge sat on its impregnable perch, waiting for the sun to crest the ridgeline. The dark forms of birds jerked against the sky. Dozens of them, swarming like insects. Russell watched how they seemed to spasm in flight and shift direction, a constant and crazed flapping. He blinked again, massaged his eyes with his forefinger and thumb, and he realized these were not birds. They were bats. Dipping down beneath the tree limbs, feeding on the wing. It was a mean omen, and he concluded one of two things would happen in the next hour: they'd either see no sign of the mortar team they sought or they'd all of them die in this place.