Wynne's War (20 page)

They performed stand-to in the dark before daybreak, the Rangers seated back-to-back with rifles propped on their thighs. Russell could feel Wheels's muscles knot and tense. He glanced over at Ox, the sergeant holding the bridge of his nose pinched between thumb and forefinger, lying there with his mouth stretched wide. He would tire, allow it to close, but as soon as his teeth met, his mouth would snap open like the jaws on a trap.

Russell turned his head and whispered back to Wheels. He told him that the captain knew.

“Knew what?”

“About the compound. He knew what we were walking into.”

“Didn't seem to me he knew shit.”

“I don't think he knew they were Chechen,” said Russell. “I don't think he knew that. But he definitely knew the place was there. He took something out of there. That's what the whole thing was about. He wanted to go in and get it.”

Wheels asked him what it was.

“It was a bag of stones.”

“Stones?”

“Blue stones,” Russell said.

“Like jewel stones?”

“They were in this cubby in back of a poster on the wall. One of those bags like liquor comes in. Stone I saw was about the size of a quarter. Blue.”

Wheels sat for a moment.

“Sapphires?” he said.

“I don't think so,” said Russell. “It wasn't clear, but I don't know what sapphires look like before they've been polished.”

“Cut.”

“Whatever,” Russell said. “There was a whole sack full. Or I assume so. I only saw the one.”

They sat for a moment.

“Lapis,” said Wheels.

“How's that?”

“Lapis,” Wheels said. “They mine it here.”

“Is it worth anything?”

“It's worth something,” Wheels said. “Why you think they were hiding it?”

A few seconds passed. The morning blew a cold breeze across their faces. Russell could see his breath in the air.

“He executed one of the hostiles. Just straight-up greased him.”

“Shit's bad all over,” Wheels said.

 

They followed the trail north, mounting up at dawn and riding until the sun set behind the western hills. They ascended low mountains by rocky switchbacks and descended to forests on their far side: scrub oak and holly, trees of gargantuan size, the soldiers dwarfed by the perfectly straight trunks from whose high branches monkeys screamed, sending down acorns and bits of bark. Their horses stepped nervously. Russell would lean down and straighten himself along Fella's neck, speaking in a soft voice, telling the animal she had nothing to worry about. That she was a good horse. She was a sweet little mare.

The next day Ox fainted under the noon sun and pitched sideways in his saddle. He would have dropped to the ground but for Ziza, who, riding behind the sergeant, pushed forward and managed to pin Ox between their horses and get an arm around his waist. He called for help, and several of the men dismounted, and together they lifted Ox and carried him to a level space beside the trail. The sergeant's eyelids fluttered. He came to for a few moments, gave a low, guttural moan, and then his eyes rolled back in his head and he went unconscious. Bixby, who'd been riding toward the column's rear, walked up and knelt over the man. Russell watched the medic take off his jacket, roll it up, place it under Ox's head, and then, very gingerly, part the man's lips and open his mouth. He retrieved a small penlight from his cargo pocket and spent several minutes inspecting the man's teeth. Wynne was standing there in the circle that had formed around Ox, and the medic looked up at him.

“That tooth's got to come out,” Bixby said.

Wynne nodded. He hitched his pants and squatted beside the sergeant, reached over, and placed a hand on his sternum. Russell could see the man's chest rising and falling under the captain's palm, rising and falling. Wynne motioned for Bixby to hand him the flashlight. He clicked it on and, bending over, stared into Ox's mouth. He leaned closer and then looked back at Bixby.

“The one on the right?”

Bixby said, “Second mandibular molar. It's cracked all to hell.”

The captain clicked off the flashlight and handed it back to Bixby. He asked the medic what he wanted to do.

“We have to pull it.”

“You have your dental kit?”

Bixby shook his head.

“What do you have?” Wynne asked.

The medic stared at him. “Pair of needle-nose pliers.”

Wynne was silent a few moments. Then he asked if Bixby would dose him with morphine.

“More fentanyl,” Bixby said. “I'm going to lay the lozenge against the gum line. Still not going to be enough. When I start, he's going to come around. We're going to have to hold him. We got to find a way to keep his mouth open.”

“You want to tie him?” Wynne asked.

“We have to tie him. Get a couple of the guys to sit on his legs. We got to keep him from biting down.”

Russell cleared his throat. “Sergeant Bixby,” he said.

The medic turned to look at him.

“What about a bit?”

“A horse bit?” Bixby asked.

Russell nodded.

“It'll break every tooth he's got,” Bixby said.

“Not if we use a Mullen.”

“Do you have a Mullen?” Wynne asked.

“I have two,” said Russell. “I have one in my saddlebags I never even took out of the wrapper.”

Billings was standing there with his arms crossed to his chest. “The fuck's a Mullen?”

“It's a milder mouthpiece than your standard bit. One I have in my bag is made of rubber.”

“And that'll keep him from biting?” Bixby said.

“It will absolutely keep him from biting.”

“Will he be able to work around it?” Wynne asked.

“Let me grab it for you,” Russell said.

He turned and started up the trail until he reached Fella standing hobbled there at the head of the column. He undid the buckle on his left-side saddlebag, pulled out a small fleece blanket, and pulled out two pairs of socks and a jar of crunchy peanut butter. He reached down inside the leather pouch and came up with a rubber snaffle in a clear plastic sack. He took the knife from his harness, cut the sack open, sheathed the blade, and began jogging back down the line—the horses one behind the other with their heads drooping between their shoulders, sunlight glinting off their coating of gray mountain talc. A row of ghost horses. Shimmering.

When he made it back to the men kneeling around Ox, he pitched the Mullen to Bixby and the medic dumped the bit from the sack and began to turn it in his hands. It was made of dull green rubber, five inches in length and about as big around as a Magic Marker, T-shaped at either end where the bit rings protruded. Bixby studied it very closely, pressing his thumbnail into the rubber. Then he opened his mouth and fit the device longwise between his teeth, clamping down, the muscles flexing along his jaw. Wynne and Russell watched. The medic rocked the contraption back and forth, holding it by the bit rings, and then he took it out and removed a bandana from his pocket. He looked up at Russell and nodded.

They lifted Ox and carried him into the shade of an enormous pine. Bixby undid the clasps on the sergeant's chest rig and unbuttoned his jacket. He knelt there for a moment beside his patient and swiped his forehead with the back of his hand.

“How are you wanting to tie him?” the captain asked.

“Paracord,” Bixby said. He gestured to Ox's hands where they lay at either side of his torso. “We can loop his wrists, tie up to a couple of these saplings, stretch him out a little. Same thing with his feet.”

Wynne told Bixby he didn't want his weapons sergeant trussed up like Jesus Christ.

“How would you do it?” the medic asked.

Wynne considered the question. Then he shook his head and ran his fingers through his beard.

“Let's just get it over with,” he said.

Bixby wrapped the sergeant's wrists with gauze, then took a length of paracord, made a honda knot at one end, slipped the loop over Ox's right wrist, and drew the slack through until the loop was tight. He walked over to an oak sapling several feet away, passed the paracord around it, tightened until the sergeant's right arm came off the ground and extended out from the shoulder, then secured the rope to the tree with a highwayman's hitch. He did the same with Ox's left arm, tethering it to a low limb that jutted from the pine, and motioned for Wynne to bind the man's ankles. Wynne took the spool of paracord and built his lasso, slipped it over the man's boots, and trailed the rope back between Ox's feet. He drew it taut and stood for a moment.

“What are we tying this to?” he asked.

The medic's brow furrowed. He glanced to either side of him.

“Stake it,” Russell said.

Bixby and Wynne looked over to where he squatted beside the trunk of a low cedar.

“Sharpen one of these branches, drive it into the ground, tie off from that,” Russell explained.

Wynne stared at him a moment and then turned to consider Bixby. The medic nodded.

Russell cut a limb from one of the pines, stripped it of needles, then began to whittle it with his knife. It took about five minutes, and when he was finished, he pounded the stake into the ground with an entrenching tool about a yard away from Ox's feet. He'd cut a nock in the stake for the paracord, and Wynne stretched out the sergeant's legs, looped the cord around the stake, and tied it off. The three of them stood over the man. Bixby looked at Russell.

“Come hold him,” he said.

Russell stepped over Ox, turned, and sat in the dirt, cradling the sergeant's head in his lap, interlacing his fingers and making a cup of his hands into which he fit Ox's chin. He flexed his forearms, tightened them along the man's temples, and pulled. When he thought he had him good and tight, he glanced at the medic and nodded. He could feel Ox's pulse against his wrists.

Wynne had squatted above the sergeant's legs and grabbed him by the hips. Bixby knelt beside him. He had his needle-nose pliers in one hand and a few antiseptic swabs in the other. He swiped the pliers' stainless-steel jaws, one and then the next, threw a leg across his patient, and sat upon his chest. He paused a moment and looked at Russell, and then the two of them just stared. Russell was the first to look away. He seized a tighter grip on the sergeant's chin, his forearms beginning to burn. He hoped that the man would remain unconscious.

Bixby had to have been hoping the same. He braced his free hand against the man's collarbone and, squinting, lowered the pliers to Ox's mouth, inserting them between his lips, working around the bit. He squinted and craned his neck to one side, mumbling something. Russell thought he might be able to perform the procedure quickly, and then they could untie the sergeant. He felt the steady beat of the man's pulse. He felt the pliers click against the broken molar, and as soon as they did, Ox's eyes sprang open and he began to scream.

Or tried to scream. With his tongue pinned beneath the Mullen, the noise was just a gurgle. Ox tried to pull against his restraints, but there was no slack. At times like these, you learned to duck into yourself. That's how Russell thought of it—head dipping between his shoulders. Hunching into himself. Ducking. He'd been doing it so long, he couldn't remember when it started. He thought, inexplicably, of Sara. Their time at Dodge had been the opposite of ducking, and he knew in a strange kind of flash that he loved her. He tightened his grip on Ox's chin and pulled.

Bixby withdrew the pliers and settled a hand against the sergeant's neck. He told Ox it was all right. He told him he'd fainted. He said he'd just given him fentanyl and that the procedure would take a minute at most.

“The tooth's got to come out,” he said. “We can't let it get infected.”

Ox's eyes rolled up in his head, and when Bixby reinserted the pliers, the sergeant's body began to shudder as though wired to a circuit. There was a muted, underwater click, and the medic removed a bone-white fragment from Ox's mouth and dropped it beside him in the dirt. He swiped the back of a hand across his forehead and bit his lip.

“Just a couple more,” he told Ox. “You're doing good.”

It didn't look to Russell like Ox was doing good. It looked like sheer agony. He glanced up and saw a falcon in the blue vault above them, riding the thermals. When he looked back down, Bixby had inserted the pliers once more into Ox's mouth and then tightened his grip. Russell heard a dull, wet snap.

“Shit,” said Bixby.

“Just fucking finish,” Wynne said.

“Going as fast as I can.”

“Mother,” said the captain, “I swear to fucking God.”

Russell closed his eyes. He saw himself following Ox into the compound. Haze of gun smoke with the noise of American boots against the packed dirt floor. The rustle of gear and hiss of fabric, thigh against thigh, brushing—
swick,
swick,
swick.
The sneeze of their suppressed rifles. The burning in his throat and the copper taste on his tongue and the pain that always came with shooting a weapon indoors: the overpressure caused your eyes to ache for weeks. Firing and moving and fighting gravity with every step and his heart going like mad, and he tightened his grip on the sergeant's chin and opened his eyes and found himself looking at the captain, sprawled now against Ox's legs, his hands pressing against the sergeant's hips, the two of them, Wynne and Russell, with maybe fifteen inches between them, face-to-face, staring at one another, and why was he shocked to see the captain weeping?

 

When Russell woke in the night, Sergeant Bixby was seated there beside him, legs crossed and palms upon his knees, moonlight silvering his face. Russell lay a moment wondering whether he ought to pretend sleep, but then the sergeant spoke:

“You don't like what the captain did.”

He thought, at first, that Bixby was referring to Ox. He reached and unzipped the sleeping bag, rolled onto his side, and sat. The night was cold and clear, and thin wisps of cloud trailed across the moon like ink inside a water glass, bleeding out, dispersing.