Wynne's War Page 8

  The captain stopped at the corral and stood with his arms crossed to his chest, watching the horses: two paints and the Akhal-Teke stallion. The paints were bunched against each other at one end of the pen, pressed together, trying to get as far from the stallion as possible.

  Russell came up and joined Wynne, and they stood for several minutes without speaking. The air stung Russell’s cheeks, and he could feel it inside his ears.

  “You’ve been busy,” the captain said, his voice melodious and deep.

  “Yessir,” Russell said.

  “How long did it take?”

  “I’ve barely got them started,” Russell said. He lifted a hand and pointed to the Akhal-Teke. “Him, I can’t even say that about.”

  Wynne turned to look at Russell and then turned back to regard the horse.

  “He’s different,” Wynne said.

  Russell almost said that depended what you meant by different, but managed to say, “What’s he for?”

  Wynne didn’t respond. He stood several moments watching the stallion.

  Then he said, “We come into these mountains on helicopter.” He lifted a finger and gestured at the surrounding hills. “What’s the problem?”

  “Problem?” said Russell.

  “The problem,” Wynne said.

  Russell thought about it. “They’re loud,” he said, shrugging.

  “What else?”

  “Slow.”

  Wynne looked at him, indicating he expected Russell to continue, but Russell’s mind went suddenly blank and he dropped his gaze to the ground. He took a moment and cleared his throat.

  “They hover,” he finally said. “They don’t fly high enough to get out of rocket range.”

  The captain nodded. He said, “Issue we face in places like this is mobility. Choppers worked in Vietnam. Why shouldn’t they work here?” He paused to look at Russell. “Correct?”

  “Yessir,” said Russell.

  “No, sir,” said Wynne. “Incorrect.” He told Russell this was not Vietnam. Seemed too obvious to even say, but it wasn’t obvious to command. They were always fighting the last war.

  Then he said Russell was right about one thing: helicopters had to hover to take off and they had to hover to land. They were vulnerable that way. The Taliban was always waiting, and if they managed to knock one helicopter out of the sky, the cavalry came in, and then the cavalry became the targets.

  Russell nodded. “Like Robert’s Ridge.”

  “Robert’s Ridge,” the captain said.

  He gestured toward the horses with his chin. He said these animals would confuse the enemy. He said their enemies wouldn’t hear them coming. Wouldn’t expect it. He told Russell when 5th Special Forces first entered the country in October of 2001, they rendezvoused with the Northern Alliance’s General Dostum and pursued the Taliban from Mazar-i-Sharif all the way to the Pakistani border. They’d done this on horseback. A lot of people didn’t even know. And, mind you, these were Americans riding Afghan ponies, on Afghan saddles. No one seemed to wonder what they might have done on American horses with American saddles and tack.

  Russell toed the dirt with his boot and studied the ground. When the captain quit speaking, Russell said, “You aim to take your men out on horseback?”

  “I do,” the captain said.

  “Up in these mountains?”

  Wynne nodded.

  “Can I ask you what for?”

  The captain ignored this question. He pointed at the Akhal-Teke. He asked how the stallion was coming along.

  Russell shook his head. “Captain, to be honest with you, he’s just a damn psychopath.”

  “Psychopath?”

  “Yessir.”

  The captain smiled. His eyes were very blue. They would be difficult to look at for long.

  “How long will it take to break him?”

  Russell couldn’t answer something like that. “Hell,” he said, “he ain’t even been cut.”

  The captain’s brow furrowed. Then it relaxed.

  “Neutered,” he said, nodding.

  “Unless you’re planning on studding him out, I’d do that the sooner the better.”

  “I don’t plan to breed him, Corporal. And I don’t want him cut.”

  Russell cleared his throat. He told the captain that the way he was now, it would be all a rider could do to even stay atop him.

  “Show me,” the captain said.

  “Show you what?”

  “Ride the horse.”

  “Right now?”

  The captain said it was waiting.

  Russell glanced over. He saw that it was. The Afghan groom would have taken the saddle and blanket off yesterday evening and curried the stallion before putting him in the stall, so that would mean the groom had risen and saddled the horse and led him back out. Russell didn’t want to speculate as to why. He brushed the knuckles of one hand back and forth across his chin.

  “Sir,” he said, “let me go get this little mare I’ve been working with. She’s coming along pretty good. If you want to see what kind of progress we’re making, I’d as soon show you with her.”

  The captain stared at him a moment.

  “Go get her,” he said.

  Russell nodded and told the man he’d be right back. He turned and went off toward the stables, entering through the tack room at the side of the building, then turning down the hallway that led him past the stalls. Third door down, he opened the latch and swung the door back on its massive hinge. Fella looked up at him out of the half-light of the ten-by-twelve enclosure. Smell of hay and horseflesh. The scent of sweet feed and pine. Underneath everything, that rich odor of manure like the oldest and most luxuriant soil. Russell took a halter from the nail on the wall and began to buckle it around the mare’s head. She snorted and raised her left forefoot.

  “Don’t you make me look bad,” he told her.

  Fella exhaled a long hot breath against his chest. Then she lowered her foot.

  He ran a hand beneath her jaw and patted her neck.

  When he led her out of the stable toward the round corral, the captain was seated on the split-rail fence. Russell nodded to him, opened the gate, walked his horse through, and then turned to pin the gate shut behind him. He put a boot in the stirrup and hoisted himself into the saddle. The horse was a little tight, but her back was round, head down, and he took her about the corral at a trot, feeling her beginning to soften beneath him. He spoke to her as they made a revolution, as they made another. Then he gave the slightest pull on the reins, turned the horse, and walked her to the center of the corral, bringing her about to face the captain, who had climbed from his perch and come over to lean against one of the corral panels.

  “Do it again,” he said.

  “Do what again?” Russell asked.

  The captain raised a hand and, pointing his index finger at the ground, drew a counterclockwise circle.

  Russell nodded. He chucked up, turned the horse, and began to make another circuit, this time pushing Fella up to a canter, his ears stinging in the cold, the filly snorting twin jets of vapor out into the morning air. She was going to make a good horse. She was starting to respond to the touch of his heels. He wouldn’t have to do much more with the reins, and he thought he could get her to where he’d barely need them at all.

  When he stopped her again and glanced over toward the captain, he saw that the man had turned and started for the main pen. Russell sat the horse, watching him go. Then something in his stomach dropped, and before a thought had time to germinate, he’d slid from the saddle, led Fella over to the corral’s edge, and dallied the reins across one of the panels. He stepped up and over and followed Wynne, the man now climbing the split-rail fence, then dropping down into the pen where the stallion stood waiting.

  “Hey!” Russell called. “Captain!”

  Wynne didn’t respond. He went toward the animal, approaching the way you might approach a pet. Russell’s first thought was that the stallion would lunge at the
captain as it had lunged at Russell the day before—more luck than reflexes that had prevented Russell from being knocked senseless—but the stallion didn’t lunge and Wynne didn’t slow his pace. Didn’t reach a hand out to let the horse smell him. Didn’t so much as touch the horse until his left boot was in the stirrup and he was heaving himself onto the animal’s back—that golden expanse of shining coat and flawless muscle—heaving himself up and throwing a leg over and then seizing the reins. He sat the horse naturally, but it didn’t matter how naturally you sat: the stallion could break your neck in half a second. The safest place around a beast like this was on it, but Russell knew the captain wouldn’t be seated on it for long. His first thought was that all of this was about to be over and he and Wheels would shortly find themselves back on a helicopter to Bagram. He was surprised to find the thought disappointed him.

  The captain took hold of the reins, gave them a snap, and the stallion came forward, going from statuesque immobility to motion in a blink. Russell made the edge of the pen, stepped up, and seized hold of the top rail. He thought perhaps he could vault the fence, step over and grab hold of the bridle before the captain was thrown, but the stallion was already moving at a canter, a quick three-beat gait too fast for a pen this size, the other two horses pressed underneath the overhang at the south end of the stable, clouds of dust rising from the stallion’s hooves and the captain sitting perfectly upright in the saddle, with his blond hair and beard and those luminescent blue eyes like jewels lit from behind.

  He made two passes around the corral and then he made a third, dropping the stallion to a trot, then slowing him back to a walk. Russell watched as he reined up in the center of the pen, stopped the horse and sat there amid the dust he’d raised, then slid from the saddle and made his way over to the fence. He hadn’t even broken a sweat.

  Russell studied the captain a moment. He asked him how long he’d been riding.

  Wynne didn’t answer. He turned to consider the stallion and then looked up at the paling sky. His face was impassive and calm.

  “I was just wondering how you learned to do that,” said Russell.

  “Do what?” Wynne said.

  “What you just did,” Russell told him, pointing toward the Akhal-Teke. “How’d you learn to handle that thing?”

  The captain turned to look at him.

  “Watching you,” he said.

  In the days to come Russell would train the men of ODA-372 to ride, teaching them the correct way to hobble their mounts, load their saddlebags, to lean back and squeeze their thighs when they descended a slope. There were now ten Green Berets in camp, and it took time to distinguish one from another, to learn their names or learn the names they went by, the names they’d give a soldier such as himself, a Ranger, sure, but still just an 11-Bravo, still only infantry.

  He’d met Billings up on the hill, the lieutenant who’d escorted them into camp—a man surly by nature, calculative, distant. Russell decided almost immediately he’d keep clear of Billings, but that took little effort given that Billings seemed determined to ignore him completely.

  Pike was a different story, the sergeant who served as the team’s senior engineer. It was this man who’d given Russell the T-shirt that day at the corral, then stood watching as he cut it into shreds. A little shorter than the others. A good deal more cheerful. He’d survived an IED in Kandahar Province, though his hearing had not. He was completely deaf in his right ear, and whenever you spoke to him, he’d tilt his head to one side and offer you the left. He was from Aspen, Colorado, and seemed at home in these mountains, or seemed like he would have been perfectly at home if allowed to carry a snowboard or a pair of skis. Russell spoke to him at breakfast and dinner, and he was easy to teach, very coachable. The horses responded to his even-tempered manner. When he petted the animals, he’d grin.

  The weapons sergeants—Boyle and Rosa—were also friendly to the Rangers: they’d both served in the Regiment before joining SF. The two men were polar opposites, nearly inseparable. Staff Sergeant Boyle—everyone called him “Ox”—was a huge hulk of a man: six-four with red hair and a bushy red beard. He was the soft-spoken son of Iowa farmers: four hundred years ago he would have walked these highlands in a kilt. He’d been an All-American wrestler before dropping out of junior college to join the army, and spent his free time in the detachment’s makeshift gym. Russell had seen him bench press 385 without so much as blushing, his chest like two bowling balls under his shirt, massive arms sunburned red, and veins bulging like blue ropes.

  His junior, Sergeant Rosa, was a fourth-generation Mexican American from Yuma, Arizona, his father a member of the Yuma County SWAT team, his grandfather the former Yuma chief of police. Five-eleven, lithe-bodied, and lean: jet black hair and the boyish, beardless face of a sixteen-year-old. He sauntered about camp with a graceful, long-legged gait, seeming almost to glide. A clever young man, quick to laugh and yet possessing that academic air of the world-class snipers Russell had known—a killer by nature and disciplined as a monk.

  The two weapons sergeants were accompanied by an Afghan interpreter. Russell rarely saw the three of them apart. The man’s name was unpronounceable, so the men called him Ziza or Zero. He’d fought with the mujahideen when he was just a boy and later trained with American Special Forces when they entered the country in the fall of 2001. He’d been a member of the Afghan National Army Commandos and now was chalked to Wynne’s team as a terp. He seemed more than that. He walked like the Green Berets and swore like the Green Berets, his English impeccable, though formal in its cadence. He stood five foot five and had close-cropped black hair, a wispy moustache and goatee, and a compact and muscular frame. He didn’t look like the other Afghans. To Russell, he looked Filipino or Thai. He lifted weights with Ox and practiced on the shooting range with Rosa, and he wore a New York Yankees ball cap he only took off for prayer. He carried an enormous knife on his back in a Kydex sheath, more of a short sword than a knife, Japanese in design. Russell never saw Ziza without it.

  These men were deferential toward Russell, or deferred, at least, to his expertise with a horse. They listened intently when he spoke. Those like Pike and Rosa didn’t have far to go; others like Ox needed all the attention he could muster. The weapons sergeant looked about as at home on horseback as a horse looked in water—struggling constantly not to drown. Russell could tell that, like many men of his size, he was used to muscling his way through the world, and what he couldn’t accomplish by physical strength mystified him completely. He was all quiet brawn, lacking the effortless finesse of Sergeant Rosa, and after lunch one day, he’d just dismounted the massive paint Russell had paired him with, when the horse backed without warning and stepped on his foot, tearing through the leather upper of his boot and cutting him to the bone. Russell watched as the man’s face went a deep shade of purple, then as he dropped the reins and tried to hoist the mare off him like you might a sofa. The horse merely turned his neck to look back at the sergeant, as though trying to gauge exactly what this man might want, and Russell sprinted up, took her by the bridle, and led the horse forward several steps. When he looked back at Ox, the man was standing there with his hands on his hips, studying the blood welling up from the top of his boot.

  “I’ll be goddamned,” he said in an almost casual whisper. He pursed his lips and bent to probe the wound with an index finger. He glanced over at Russell and shrugged.

  Russell was leaning against the split-rail fence of the corral that evening, watching the sky darken and blush, when the team’s medical sergeant came out to give him a report. The sun had just dropped below the lizard’s back of the western hills, and he studied Bixby, the man Sara had been down to visit a few weeks before, as he made his way along the talus path. There was a weariness not only in the man’s stride but in the slump of his shoulders, in the way his hands hung loosely at the ends of his arms like something else he’d been given to carry.

  He walked across to Russell, took a deep breath, and nodded.r />
  “Corporal,” he said by way of greeting.

  “Sergeant,” Russell said.

  The man was average height, average build. Back home, in civilian clothes, he’d not be mistaken for a member of Special Forces—or a member of anything at all. He’d let his hair grow long and his beard grow out, but his hair was thinning and you could see scalp through the brown fluff, red in the declining light. He had a soft, kind-featured face and the intelligent eyes common to medics. A largish nose. Lips chapped by windburn and sun. He would’ve looked perfectly at home behind a desk with a passkey clipped to his belt, but he had a gun holster clipped to it now. A MultiTool. A three-magazine pouch that held ninety rounds of 5.56 NATO.

  “How’s your patient?” Russell asked.

  Bixby turned and glanced over his shoulder as though the man might be standing there behind him. He waved a hand vaguely in that direction and turned back.

  “He’ll be fine,” he said.

  “I didn’t think the horse would back up on him. Looked like he was bleeding pretty good.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Bixby. “He seems to enjoy it.”

  Russell shook his head, and a horse whinnied from somewhere in the stable. He said, “How long you been out here, Sergeant?”

  “A while,” Bixby said.

  Russell asked him what he did back home, and the medic said he designed software for a firm in Seattle.

  Russell coughed. He never asked this many questions. He was working his way to the one he really wanted to ask and he couldn’t get himself to stop.

  “The captain’s kind of different,” he heard himself saying.

  Bixby nodded.

  “You known him a long time?”

  “Long time.”

  “Don’t know that I’ve ever met an officer like that.”

  “You won’t,” Bixby said.

  Russell cleared his throat.

  “What’s he want with these horses?” he said. “He told me you need them to ride up in the mountains, but that doesn’t make a lot of sense.”