Wynne's War (17 page)

 

Russell woke to bleary daylight, his world like something viewed through a filthy pane of glass. He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes and ran his fingers beneath his eyelids to wipe away the sleep. He blinked several times and glanced around. The first thing he noticed was the pulse of the EKG, and then he saw the two men seated in folding chairs beside it. Russell slid upright and tried to prop himself against the wall. Too quickly. Motes swirled before his eyes, and he reached down with both hands to grip the mattress.

“Easy,” Sergeant Bixby said, standing and walking to the left side of his bed.

The medic's form shifted and blurred above him—beard, thin brown hair—and Russell eased himself back into the sheets. His brain seemed as though it was pulsing, and he thought he was going to be sick. He felt Bixby's hand on his forearm. He closed his eyes and inhaled.

“Did you hit your head,” asked the medic, “or was it the blast wave from the mortar?”

Russell pressed his tongue against the roof of his mouth. Somehow it kept his stomach from turning.

“Wave,” he heard himself say.

Bixby's hand moved from his arm. Russell heard pages being turned, the medic examining his chart.

“You'll be dizzy for a few days,” Bixby said.

Russell could feel his equilibrium returning. When he opened his eyes and turned his head, he saw that the man in the other chair was Captain Wynne.

He turned back and looked down toward his feet, the shame pressing into his chest like an iron. He lay for several moments biting his lip.

“Sergeant Pike—” Russell said, and then broke off. He took another breath and exhaled it, reminded himself that this was Wynne's team member, Bixby's brother-in-arms. They'd fought and bled with the man, and Russell's emotions were of no consequence.

“Wasn't your fault,” said Bixby. “Brandon was a big boy. He knew what was what.”

There were a few silent moments in the room. He could hear a helo spinning up from across camp, rotors slicing the air, then the sound of another chopper moving off through the mountains.

The captain asked him how the horses were coming.

“Do we need to get into that?” Bixby asked.

Wynne didn't register the question, just repeated his own.

Russell cleared his throat. He said, “I believe they'll work out pretty good.”

“Tell me what you mean by ‘work out,'” Wynne said.

“They're ready to ride,” Russell told him. “They'll stand to be saddled and, long as nobody does anything ignorant, they're not likely to throw. Aren't any of them gunbroke, but we can get them that way. Your men are going to need some more work, you don't mind my saying. Sergeant Breeburn can barely stay in the saddle.”

“True,” said the captain, “and now we're a man light.”

Bixby was still standing beside the bed reading Russell's chart, and he looked up from it and over at Wynne. Russell felt it immediately, palpable as a drop in temperature, the tension between the two.

“Carson,” the medic said.

Again Wynne ignored him. As though he weren't in the room. Russell had the strangest sensation. Might've been the concussion, but the thought occurred to him that Bixby was a hallucination and only Wynne was real.

“You'll be coming with us,” the captain said. “Grimes can replace Breeburn.”

Russell turned to look at him. Blond hair and close-cropped beard, blue eyes like sapphires inside his skull.

“On the mission?” said Russell.

“On the mission,” Wynne said.

Bixby cleared his throat. “Captain,” he said, and his voice shifted in tone. “Corporal Russell might have to be medevaced. We'll need to get him back to Bagram for a CT.”

Wynne looked at Russell a few more moments and then he looked at Bixby. The captain's glance confirmed the reality of the medic, and Russell felt somehow relieved.

Then he realized he'd had it wrong.

It wasn't that the captain was real and Bixby wasn't.

It was the captain's decision to look at you.

That's what made you real.

 

He saw Sara a final time a few days later. They stood next to the helipad in the morning light, watching members of the surgical team load their packs and personal equipment onto a Chinook as their replacements disembarked, a new group of medics and surgeons, blinking in the Afghan dawn.

The sky in the east blushed a pale shade of rose, and the jagged mountains stretched away into the Hindu Kush. Birds twittered from the gargantuan pines. He looked at Sara in her winter jacket and gloves, a watch cap pulled over her hair, her nose and cheeks flushed from the cold. The green of her irises were shot through with shards of amber. Her nose was small and straight. She'd plucked her eyebrows into slender half-moons, applied mascara very lightly. He wanted to tell her to be careful, but the words caught in his throat.

“How much longer will you be here?” she asked.

“Spring,” he told her. “Early spring.”

“Where will they send you after that?”

He told her he really couldn't say.

“‘Can't say' as in ‘don't know,' or ‘can't say' as in you just can't?”

“Both,” Russell said.

She looked down a moment, biting the corner of her lower lip. Then she looked back up and nodded.

“Would you say good-bye to Wheels for me?”

“'Course,” Russell said.

“Try and take it slow,” Sara told him. “Take your anti-inflammatory. I know you're going to stop the pain meds before you should, but if you start having numbness in your feet or legs, tell Sergeant Bixby. Numbness or tingling, either one. I think it's just the muscles, though. Will they fly you to Bagram for the CT?”

“I suppose that kind of depends,” said Russell. He didn't say on what.

“Well,” said Sara, “they need to. That and an MRI. They really should just—” Then she seemed to catch herself. She inhaled a deep breath, then exhaled it long and slow. “Okay,” she told herself. She forced a smile.

Then she reached and touched him very lightly on the arm. The index finger of her gloved right hand. The slightest, muffled touch. It lasted maybe a second, and then her hand returned to her side, but in that moment something had passed between them—a signal, a current—and Russell knew like he knew his own heartbeat that he was in trouble. He realized that by now he'd prepared himself to die a number of times, but he hadn't—not in any way that mattered—prepared himself to live.

 

 

 

 

T
HEY RODE OUT
of camp in the blue light before dawn, thirteen riders, four mules, six riderless horses bringing up the rear in the remuda. It was the first week of March, and there was still snow in the shadows of the trees and in the stony draws on the northern slopes, but by noon the air was warm enough for shirtsleeves. The horses stepped briskly, vapor rising from their nostrils like steam from a grate. Wynne rode at the head of the column, Russell at the rear, the other soldiers in single file following their captain into the hills on a narrow trail that snaked up through the pine trees and cedar.

That first day they rode without speaking or even pausing to consider their maps. They'd reconned up this very trail in training with Russell, but they kept noise discipline regardless, the only sound the muted clop of horseshoes against the packed earth, or the fall of a dislodged stone as it skittered among the loose scree and talus. They'd sent two Afghans ahead of them as scouts, and these men were to steal half-day journeys and report back in the evenings. The air grew thinner and the trees fell away, and they traveled a high pass along the hillside where the tops of these mountains rose up around them and birds circled in the cobalt sky and the sun was a bright companion in that perfect blue expanse.

They made camp on the other side of this peak in a sheltered bowl of rock and waited for the return of their scouts. Russell saw to the horses and helped the men hobble their mounts, checked hooves and horseshoes, and then he stayed behind with Fella while the others dug their Ranger graves and Wheels built a fire. Russell curried his horse and then stood speaking to her in soft tones with a hand to her neck until he felt the muscles loosen beneath his palm. He ran his fingers down her back and told her she was a good horse and then turned and made for the fire.

 

Wheels and Russell had been briefed by Lieutenant Billings the day before they rode out, the two of them struggling to keep up with the flood of data, the flow of the narrative spilling from the assistant commander's chapped and petulant lips. Russell never thought he had the capacity for hatred, but he'd begun to hate this man: a political maneuverer bitter about his role as second-in-command. He couldn't imagine how Wynne tolerated him or why he kept him on. Even after they'd helped ambush the enemy mortar team, Billings seemed reluctant to brief these Rangers, outsiders both of them, not to mention corporals.

He told them that a SEAL Team had gone missing the previous summer: six operators dropped off in the northeastern part of this province with orders to patrol into the mountains on foot. They'd made radio contact with headquarters the day after their insertion and they'd made contact a few days later. Then all contact stopped. They seemed to drop off the grid. The drones couldn't locate their heat signatures and IR beacons, satellites couldn't detect their GPS. As if they'd walked into another dimension and vanished entirely.

Other teams were sent to look for them—search and rescue—but such efforts were dicey given their location along the border. Special Operations had kept up the search for several weeks, considered bringing the Pakistani military into the hunt, then decided they'd better keep the matter in-house. Command began to give up hope, families were notified, and the men from the team were formally listed MIA.

Then one of the SEALs walked in to a marine outpost, staggered in out of the mountains and was medevaced to Bagram. The CIA went to work on him but got nowhere. Then they'd called in Captain Wynne.

Which, Billings said, was where the situation became more complicated still. The SEAL was half-crazed from his ordeal, and seventy-two hours of what was basically an interrogation had not made him any saner. Wynne knew the terrain better than any officer in the coalition, and Special Operations wanted his opinion of the man's story. CIA didn't want to believe him even when his credentials checked out, so they took blood and DNA samples. They couldn't believe anyone could just walk out of the willowwacks, Navy SEAL or not.

It was Wynne who'd got him talking. They'd choppered him over the evening of August eleventh, and the captain sat at this man's bedside the better part of a week. The SEAL told him how his team had gone in through the valley, proceeded up through the mountains following their maps and GPS. How they got into day two of the mission, dug in that morning to wait the day out, and when they got on the move around nightfall, everything had gone to hell.

Their maps were wrong. The terrain was wrong. They lost GPS signal for several hours, and when it came back up, north didn't look like north anymore, and they were off course. Their coms operator wanted to scrap the mission, try to backtrack to the insertion point, but the team leader wasn't having it, and he marched them all night through the mountains, and by morning, they were lost.

That evening they got in contact with an enemy element, took casualties, and humping their wounded to a fallback position, were overrun by Taliban and taken into the hills. The wounded died on the way up, so the enemy stripped their gear, burned the bodies, scattered their ashes on the mountainside. The other four SEALs were brought into camp blindfolded, then taken back into one of the compound's caves and locked inside a cell. No food. They were watered from plastic bowls like dogs. One of the men came down with dysentery and died a week later. The other three were led out one by one and tortured. A few more days of this and two of them woke one morning and found their buddy dead. He'd soaked one of his socks in the water bowl and suffocated himself. So then there were only two.

It was at this point in the man's story where Wynne and the CIA officers had a difference of opinion. This SEAL in the hospital bed, who claimed to have escaped an enemy stronghold and walked out of the mountains in his boots and boxers with no food or compass, was in bad shape, and several of his American interrogators didn't believe there was a Taliban camp at all. They thought the team had gotten in contact, taken causalities, then died off trying to get to a fallback position, this SEAL being the last man, his mind broken by his trials.

Others believed he had been taken prisoner, that his buddies had been tortured, that he'd escaped. What they didn't buy was his claim that there were other POWs at this camp, six or eight of them—he could never decide the exact number—that the Talibs had collected. They didn't believe the enemy would want to keep prisoners more than a few weeks, and they didn't believe they'd keep prisoners they hadn't used in propaganda films and then relieved of their heads. Their conclusion, though, was the same as the first set of analysts: that this SEAL had gone native and ought to be remanded to psych.