Wynne's War (24 page)

The captain asked if he had a shot.

“Affirmative.”

“Execute to follow,” Wynne said.

They reached the first floor, where Billings and Hallum were backed against the far wall and had their rifles pointed at the double doors. Wynne walked over and knelt beside them, motioning Russell and the others to do the same. Then he lifted the radio to his lips.

“Send it,” he said.

Russell heard the dry flat pop of the rifle shot. Then another a few seconds later.

Wynne's radio crackled: “Two Tangos down.”

“Continue engaging,” the captain said.

“Wilco,” said Rosa, and the sound of the next shot came partly through the radio speaker, Russell wondering why Rosa hadn't suppressed his rifle. Everything went quiet for several heartbeats, and then the rifle fired twice in quick succession.

“Two more,” said Rosa.

“Keep it up,” Wynne said.

The captain turned his head left and right, glancing at the men on either side of him.

He said, “When Rosa clears us to move, Perkins packs his Claymore, cuts those cords, and pushes open the left-side door. He'll post up just behind it. I want Russell and Zero on the right side. You two are the first two out. Perkins provides cover, Hallum falls into the stack behind Zero and gives covering fire from the right. If they need it. Wheels and the lieutenant are next. Zero and Russell move to cover, shoot and scoot, wait for Billings and Wheels. Then Perkins. Rosa and myself are last. We'll leapfrog back to the horses. Everyone roger?”

The men nodded.

“Ox and Mother will have the horses ready. We hit the tree line, mount up, and haul ass. Don't stop until dark, don't—”

“We're aborting?” Billings said.

“Negative, lieutenant. Just falling back.”

“Unless we get ourselves murdered,” said Billings.

“Atta boy,” said Hallum. “Keep thinking positive.”

Billings shook his head. He told Wynne maybe this was a sign.

“Sign of what?” Hallum asked.

“That we're about to get our asses kicked,” Billings said.

Russell drew a deep breath and waited for Rosa's voice to come back over the radio to tell them they could move, but when the sergeant's voice came, it told them they had an enemy element approaching from the south, hadn't noticed them until now.

“How many?” Wynne asked.

“Wait one,” said Rosa, and his rifle popped twice.

“I count twenty-plus,” he said.

“We're fucked,” Billings concluded, turning toward the captain.

Wynne seemed not to hear.

“How close?” he asked Rosa.

“About to knock on your front door,” said the man.

“Can you engage?”

“No shot,” said Rosa. “Going to have to—”

The sergeant interrupted himself with his own rifle, firing, Russell assumed, at targets farther out.

“Get ready,” Wynne told them. “Work your way from near to far.”

“You fucked us,” said Billings.

“Keep your groupings tight,” Wynne said.

“Right in the ass,” said Billings.

“Lieutenant,” said Wynne, “you don't shut your mouth and get your gun in the fight, I'll have Zero hogtie you and we'll carry you out of here like a casket.”

Russell thought that Billings would have a comeback for this, but he raised his rifle like he was told.

The captain's radio crackled and Rosa's rifle rang out, and then the doors began to rattle and Russell could see bodies moving back and forth on the other side of the gap.

“Roger up,” Wynne said. “After Perkins detonates and they start through the funnel, we open fire. Wait for my order.”

But the doors stayed right where they were, and soon the rattling stopped and the shadows outside disappeared.

Wheels said, “This is good, right?”

Rosa's rifle snapped above them. It snapped twice more and went silent.

“We got squirters,” he said.

“Which direction?” said Wynne.

“Looks like they're moving—” and his voice over the radio grew unintelligible for several seconds.

“Say again.”

“I say again: enemy is breaking contact and moving south.”

Wynne knelt there. Sweat beaded his forehead and dropped to the floor, perfect wet medallions forming in the talc. His blue eyes had begun to smolder. It wasn't Russell's imagination and it wasn't a trick of the light.

“They're withdrawing,” said Billings.

“Bullshit,” Hallum said.

“We need to get out of here,” Perkins said.

The captain keyed the radio and asked Rosa if they were clear to move.

“I don't have a three-sixty,” Rosa said.

“Do you see Tangos? Over.”

“Negative.”

“Are we clear to move?”

“I do not know,” Rosa said.

“Could be posted up outside,” Russell whispered. “Either side of the door. Could be trying to draw us out.”

Wynne glanced at him. His lips tightened and he nodded. He motioned for Perkins to move up, told him to disarm and pack the Claymore, cut the paracord lashings off the handles, and kick one of the doors back on its hinges. They knelt and watched as the demolition sergeant moved his rifle to one side and let it hang from its sling. He walked toward the center of the room, approaching the mine as though it'd been planted by the Talibs. He squatted over it and disconnected the wires from the fuse wells, rolled them around the clacker, and tucked the wires and clacker into one of his pouches. Then he took up the actual mine—small, crescent-shaped,
FRONT TOWARD ENEMY
embossed across its convex side—folded up the pairs of scissor legs on the bottom of the device, and slid it back in his bandolier. He paused a moment, then rose and approached the door, taking his rifle grip in his right hand and pulling his belt knife with his left. Russell realized, watching him, he'd forgotten to breathe. He could feel his pulse against his jacket collars, and he suppressed the urge to call out and tell the sergeant to get down, and then Perkins was passing the blade of his knife through the paracord, sliding the knife back in its Kydex sheath, reaching for the door. He gripped the steel handle and pushed it. Or he tried to push. The door traveled about an inch and stopped. Perkins pulled back and pushed again, pulled back and pushed, a metallic jangling against the outer side. When he turned toward them, his face had gone completely white.

“They chained us in.”

“The fuck,” said Wheels, rising from his crouch.

“They chained us in,” Perkins said.

Russell felt the sweat break out along his spine. His legs had begun to ache from kneeling, but the surge of adrenaline washed the pain right out of him, and he twisted his head to the left and popped his neck. He knew they were about to die.

Wynne rose and crossed the room with the air of a man getting up to check the thermostat—everything about him exuded confidence; everything suggested calm—and Russell felt fear rise into his throat like something that would strangle him. Certainty of death, you accepted. Perhaps dying, perhaps not, put your teeth on edge and set them chattering.

The captain checked the doors, left and right, put his eye to the seam between them, pushed and pulled at the handles. Then he turned to Perkins.

“You have enough C-4 to blow them?”

Perkins said he had enough C-4 to bring the entire building down.

Wynne nodded. He told the sergeant to rig them. He pivoted on a boot heel, pointed to Ziza and Russell, and motioned for them to follow. As they started back up the stairs, Russell could hear Billings ask what the plan was, but the captain ignored him. They went up the first flight, then up the second and third, Wynne taking the steps two at a time, Russell and Ziza struggling to keep up. Rosa's rifle grew louder, and they ascended the remaining flights and emerged gasping onto the building's roof.

Blue sky very close, and the sun above the tree line like the portal to another world. All around them a sea of evergreen and cedar, terraced slopes in the distance, gray mountains and purple mountain shadows, white-capped peaks floating at the horizon's edge. Russell stood with his breath fogging and the sunlight coppering his face, and when he glanced back beside him, he saw that Wynne and Ziza had gone prone on their stomachs. The captain had a handful of his pants leg in his grip, and as Wynne jerked him to the deck, a whip cracked a few inches from his ear, that noise of a bullet breaking the sound barrier just beside you, the thump of the rifle's report following seconds behind. He lay for a moment with his heart hammering the thin shield of his sternum and then he looked at Wynne.

“Two seconds,” said Ziza. “Six hundred meters.”

The captain's eyes cut toward Russell. “Thought you knew better.”

“I thought I did, too,” Russell said.

Rosa had set up his firing position behind some loose cinder block at the edge of the building, and they snaked their way over to him. The weapons sergeant kept his eye pressed to the scope, never once turning to look behind him. When the captain came up on his left side, Rosa cleared his throat and glanced down to jot some figure on his data card.

“They're setting up a suicide rig out there,” Rosa told them. He spoke as if all of this were happening to someone else and he was observing it on a monitor.

“A what?” said Russell.

Wynne lifted his own rifle and stared out through the optic.

“Eight hundred meters,” said Rosa. “On the road out there. Just west of the tree line.”

“Got it,” Wynne said.

“What's a ‘suicide rig'?” Russell asked. “What's going on?”

Ziza was just to his right, and the commando leaned over and began to whisper.

“They have a truck,” he said. “They fill it with explosive and drive it into us.” He puffed his cheeks and lifted one hand from the deck, miming a blast.

Russell glanced toward Rosa and the captain, who seemed to be studying the device Ziza had just described. The optic on Russell's carbine was a red dot with no magnification, and he'd left his binoculars in his left rear saddlebag.

“Captain,” said Russell, “we need to go.”

“Working on it,” the captain said. He pulled out his radio and apprised Bixby of their situation, then raised Perkins and asked if the doors were ready to blow.

“Affirmative,” Perkins said.

“Get the team back on the stairwell. When you detonate, come out shooting. Don't stop till you get back to Mother.”

“What about you guys?” Perkins asked.

“Ziza and Russell and Rosa are going with you,” said Wynne.

“Then what about you?” Perkins said.

“We got a truck down there on the road with some kind of bomb. They're going to try and ram us and bring the roof down on our heads. I'll stay on overwatch until the rest of you are clear.”

“Carson,” said Bixby's voice, “I don't—”

“Not up for debate,” the captain said.

He told everyone to wait for his order and then motioned for Rosa to move aside and let him have the rifle. Rosa looked at him for several long moments.

“Rather not do that,” he said.

Wynne told him to take Ziza and Russell and get moving.

“You need a spotter,” Rosa said.

“I'll be my own spotter.”

“Let me stay.”

Wynne shook his head.

“I don't like this,” said Rosa. “I formally object.”

“Formally noted,” Wynne said. “Get gone.”

Rosa's face tightened and he studied his captain. He exhaled very slowly and took his hands off the rifle. He rolled to his right and allowed Wynne to get behind the weapon, waited for him to pass his carbine. Then he just laid there on his back.

Wynne already had his eye to the scope. He thumbed off the safety and then he thumbed it back on and looked at the sergeant.

“Robbie,” he said, “it's all right.”

“I don't know,” said Rosa.

“If I don't make the mission, you know what to do?”

“I know.”

“Make sure you Charlie-Mike. Don't let him derail it.”

“I won't,” Rosa said. He reached and touched the captain on the shoulder and then rolled onto his stomach and began crawling back toward the stairs.

Then they were descending the steps, Russell following the lean sergeant, trying desperately not to trip. Everything inside him seemed to be floating, and then he heard the captain discharge the rifle: one time, two times, a third. They reached the rest of the team bunched back on the stairs near the second floor. Perkins had his radio in one hand and a detonator in the other. Russell and Wheels exchanged a look, nodded to one another in greeting or good-bye, and then the captain's voice came over Perkins's radio.

“Execute,” it said.

The men hunkered into themselves and clapped their palms to their ears. Russell closed his eyes very tightly and pressed his forehead to the cold concrete wall. He counted backward from ten.

Nine.

Eight.

Seven.

The explosion pitched him onto his side, and something seemed to rattle loose inside his chest. When he opened his eyes, the air was fogged with a very fine dust, years of it shaken from the walls and ceiling, and the men were coughing. They rose one by one, their clothes powdered a light gray, and Wynne's voice over Perkins's radio was saying, “Now, now, now,” the words muffled in the clouded air.

They began moving. They reached the first floor and went through the smoke-filled lobby, paused at the ruined doors for the briefest moment, and then exited the building at a sprint. Those ahead of him were firing their rifles, but Russell couldn't see what they were shooting at. He ran, coughing and trying to clear his throat, bright sunlight in his eyes and bright green grass beneath his boots. He'd lost his sunglasses at some point—no idea when or how. Rosa was just in front of him, and he could see Wheels about fifty yards ahead. The sound from the captain's rifle echoed from behind, and enemy gunfire barked from the trees to their south.