by Aaron Gwyn
He sat a moment. Then he opened Google in a separate window. In the search box he typed carson wynne and then the word captain. Before clicking the search button, he added special forces. He stared at the blinking cursor. Then he began to scan the results.
He’d half expected this to be another one of Wheels’s conspiracy theories, but it was true. Or the details were true. They were factual, at least. The captain had been born and raised in Rhinebeck, New York, a few hours north of Manhattan, and he’d graduated from Princeton, class of ’94—double major in religious studies and finance. After that, he’d become an associate at an investment firm; it looked as though he had started in the fall of ’96. Back in high school, he’d been the football team’s quarterback and had led them to state championships in his junior and senior years. Russell pulled up a news clipping along with a grainy black and white photo of an athletic young man with a football chambered above his shoulder. You couldn’t see much of what was beneath the helmet, but his eyes were two gleaming points in the pixelated image.
Russell read and clicked and scrolled. He found another photo of the man, color this time, likely taken with his unit at Bragg. Shot in three-quarter profile. The Special Forces and Ranger tabs on his left shoulder, the twin bars of a captain pinned to his beret. High cheekbones. Square jaw. Blond hair and blond eyebrows and very blue eyes. Women would have thought him handsome, and it occurred to Russell this image would’ve made a fair recruiting poster—ideal, in fact. Why you would put this man in the field, he couldn’t imagine. Ivy League education. Experience in business. This wasn’t an operator; he was an enlistment campaign.
Russell stared at the screen a few minutes and then he minimized the window and sat. The generator outside the building produced a loud, steady hum, and in the black background of the monitor, Russell could see himself reflected, his ghost image caught there in the glass. He had the creep of something very cold inching up his spine, and it wasn’t just the AC. He closed his eyes and imagined the horse, and he could recall, very distinctly, its odor—musty and rich and still so vivid it might have been in the room. He thought that all of this had started because of his choice to come from behind the barricades and help the animal, and he knew if he’d not made that decision, he wouldn’t be sitting where he was. He thought that it was a foolish decision, a foolish choice.
Then he opened his eyes and brought up the video, the horse frozen in mid stride.
“What choice?” he said.
A WEEK LATER THEY watched the sun set from the starboard side of the C-130 that transported them from Mosul to Bagram Airfield in the Parwan Province of Afghanistan. Russell had thought he’d nap on the flight, but the cabin was cold and he couldn’t sleep. He turned sideways in his seat and pressed his forehead against the padded insulation beside his window to study the sun’s descent as it dropped below a cloud bank; the air turned from plum to purple and the vapor trailing beneath the aircraft’s wing caught the day’s last light and sparkled briefly and then tarnished against the sky. He put a hand inside his jacket and ran his fingers very lightly across his ribs.
“Lithium,” said Wheels.
“What’s that?” asked Russell.
“Lithium.”
“The hell are you talking about?”
“Afghanistan,” Wheels told him. “Why we invaded this dump in the first place.” He turned and looked out the window. “Bin Laden, my ass.”
Russell stared at the man for several moments.
“Where you getting this?” he asked.
“Cell phones,” said Wheels.
“What?”
“What do you think all those BlackBerries run on? All those iPods and laptops? This place has the largest lithium reserves on the planet. You think we’re here because of Al-Qaeda?” Wheels gave a snort and a shake of his head. “We need their lithium.”
“You need lithium,” Russell said.
They landed at Bagram just after dark, and an air force tech sergeant named Hollis came aboard to escort them off the runway. The man conveyed them to a cinder-block building beside one of the hangars where they would spend the night, and then he was back for them at dawn, walking them across the tarmac and up to a buglike helicopter that had been in service since the sixties. The chopper was a CH-47, a troop carrier with four windows along each side of the cabin, circular, like the portholes on a sea vessel, larger windows on the doors behind the cockpit, where machine guns were mounted.
“This is you,” said Hollis, gesturing toward the craft. “There’s a surgical team on its way out. Hope you don’t mind the company.”
Russell said they didn’t.
Hollis had been carrying a manila envelope under one arm, and now he passed it to Russell. The envelope was sealed with transparent tape and the words DO NOT BEND stamped in red on both sides, but there were no other markings. The sergeant made no mention of the packet, just handed it across.
“Guys need anything else?” Hollis asked. “Coffee or anything?”
Russell glanced briefly at the envelope. He told Hollis they were good.
The man wished them a safe flight, turned, and started back across the runway. Russell watched him for several moments. The air was cool and the breeze prickled the skin on the back of his neck. He looked at Wheels in his cargo pants and polar fleece. He looked once more at the envelope in his hand.
“You think he had any idea who we were?”
“Don’t be speaking for me,” said Wheels.
“What?”
“I said don’t be speaking for me.”
“Speaking for you?” said Russell.
Wheels turned to watch the tech sergeant recede into the shadows.
“I might’ve liked a coffee,” he said.
They shouldered their packs and started for the chopper, Wheels in front, Russell following.
“If you wanted coffee, why didn’t you say something?”
Wheels didn’t respond.
“I’m sure we can find someone onboard with a thermos.”
“Let’s just drop it,” Wheels told him.
They went past members of the flight crew busy at the rear of the helicopter, men who looked up and nodded to them and then fell back to work, some momentary judgment flickering across their faces. You’d see this kind of thing on cargo craft from time to time: men out of uniform with hair past their collars. Beards and ball caps and pistols strapped to their thighs. You didn’t make eye contact. You didn’t dare address them. You didn’t know what agency they worked for and you didn’t want to know. Better just to treat them like ghosts.
Russell and Wheels walked up the loading ramp, went stooping past the rear gunner and then up the aisle between the red canvas bench seats on either side of the cabin. There were several older men wearing glasses, surgeons, Russell assumed, a number of support staff, and some empty space toward the helo’s front. Wheels shucked out of his pack and let it hang from one shoulder, turned sideways to move past the surgical team’s techs and medics, and Russell did likewise, eyes adjusting to the near dark of the cabin, shuffling around the rucksacks and duffles, trying not to step on ankles or feet. He switched his rifle from left hand to right, checked a cargo pocket for his sunglasses, and then a voice said, “Excuse you, asshole,” and Russell turned to look.
A woman was sitting there in digicam jacket and trousers. A young woman, petite and very short. She had a vaguely exotic look, eastern European, and her skin was pale and smooth, almost porcelain, her thick, coal black hair pinned in an intricate bun. She pointed toward Wheels and said, “Tell your friend to watch it.”
There’d been a low mumbling inside the fuselage, and now it stopped. Russell knew the men were staring at him.
“Sorry,” he said.
“What happened?” asked Wheels.
The woman told him that he’d just about knocked her over with his bag. She was addressing Wheels but looked at Russell as she spoke.
“He’s sorry,” Russell said.
“Hey,�
� said Wheels. “I’m standing right here.”
The woman continued to stare up at Russell. Her eyes were a pale shade of green. He couldn’t make out her nametape, but she wore the inverted teardrop of a specialist on her chest. A voice from the rear of the helicopter told her to stow it.
Russell stood there blinking a few moments. Then he apologized a third time and started for the front of the craft.
When they’d gotten themselves seated and their gear snapped in, Wheels turned to Russell and said, “Listen: I don’t need you apologizing for me. I don’t need you deciding about my coffee. I can decide about my own coffee. I can apologize for myself. We’re the same rank, Russ. You didn’t take me to raise.”
Russell nodded. He said his friend had a point.
Wheels raised his hands in a gesture of conciliation and leaned back against his seat.
“See,” he said, “that’s all I’m saying.”
But Russell didn’t see what he was saying.
He was looking toward the woman at the cabin’s rear.
Firebase Dodge had been constructed atop the ruins of a redoubt built by the British in the nineteenth century. In the photos Russell pulled from the envelope, it looked like a castle. Or the ruins of a castle. The American outpost had been built on top of it: high, sturdy walls constructed from old stone masonry, a good deal of granite, it looked like. There was a large tower in the compound’s center, octagonal, maybe fifty, sixty feet in height, thin slits in the upper stories from which defenders could observe and snipe. The whole fortress perched on a mountaintop overlooking valleys of terraced green.
He sat on the rumbling seat, thumbing through the photographs. Six of them. Seven. Five color and two black and white. He realized that they’d yet to be briefed on the details of their mission. They’d yet to be given any sort of objective. He knew this helo would take them to Firebase Dodge, but he didn’t know where the Special Forces camp was in relation to this outpost. He didn’t know if they’d be put aboard another helicopter and flown to a second location or perhaps be required to ruck up and march out into the hills. The best thing he could say about any of it was the new clothes and gear. He glanced at Wheels sleeping there beside him, slid the photos inside the envelope, leaned his head back against the quilted insulation, and closed his eyes.
He’d not been asleep for long when the copilot’s voice came through their headsets, informing them that the outpost was taking mortar fire. Then, five minutes later, they were notified that shelling had ceased and their helicopter was cleared to land. By the time the Chinook circled the firebase and started to put down, mortars were falling once again, detonating fifty meters north of the sandbag perimeter. Russell watched out the Plexiglas window as rounds came in and sent up clouds of gray dust in the morning sky. Panic inched its way up his spine, vertebra by vertebra. He didn’t think the pilot would land under these conditions. He thought they’d be ferried back to Bagram. Then he felt the chopper rapidly descend and the wheels touch earth, and he heard the engines shift pitch and begin to wind down.
A mortar landed closer and shook them in their seats. The panic reached the back of his skull, and his jaw seemed to go cold. He lifted his headset’s left earpiece and leaned over to Wheels, shouting to be heard over the whine of the rotors: “How’d you feel about getting the hell off this thing?”
Wheels told him he was for it.
They unfastened their gear and began moving through the kerosene-scented air. The helicopter seemed to rest at a peculiar angle, and Russell had the sensation they were going downhill. When they reached the rear of the cabin, the members of the surgical team were standing there bunched against one another. Russell raised himself on the tips of his toes and saw that the M-240 gunner on the loading ramp was shaking his head and motioning the passengers back toward the front, one hand in the air making chopping motions, furiously mouthing words Russell couldn’t hear. They turned, went back up the aisle, scrambled through the narrow crew door, and then ran hunching across the gravel toward the row of HESCOs that marked the nearest bunker. They’d not gone farther than twenty meters when Russell felt the wind from the rotors kick up and saw the helicopter’s shadow grow smaller across the ground. The breeze was out of the north and there was a sharp edge to it, and they reached the bunker’s opening and started down a flight of cinder-block steps, at the bottom of which squatted a burly man, naked to the waist and wearing flip-flops. He had a headset to one ear and a walkie-talkie to the other. He nodded and told them to keep moving. Russell turned to look up the steps he’d just descended and saw the helicopter moving off to the south. He couldn’t believe they’d just been dropped off like this, and then another mortar struck and rattled the thought from his head. The surgical team came down the stairs dragging their duffle bags and equipment, squeezing by the Rangers and traveling along the corridor. He and Wheels waited until they’d passed and then fell in behind them.
They went down an earthen hallway, sandbag antechambers to their left and right. Russell could hear mortar rounds hammering somewhere in the world above. Grains of sand dislodged from the ceiling and sprinkled down the collar of his jacket, strangely cool. The corridor turned and turned again, and they started going up. When they ascended the incline at the far end of the bunker, the surgical team was gathered at the top of the steps, some kneeling, some seated against the wall with palms over their ears. The woman was standing in the entryway, silhouetted against the bright blue sky. Wheels and Russell watched her for several moments. Wheels asked him what she was doing.
“Beats me,” said Russell. “Maybe she’s curious.”
“Maybe she’s fucking nuts,” Wheels said.
Russell looked at him. A voice said, “Behind you,” and they turned to see the shirtless man coming up the passage. His shoulders were wide enough to touch the tunnel walls, but he twisted sideways, snaked past Wheels and Russell, and went up the steps. He had blond hair buzzed down to stubble, coated with a thin layer of talc, and tattooed in an arc across his back was the word INFIDEL. He wore the headset around his neck now, but the walkie-talkie was still in hand. He gestured with it.
“We’re good,” he said. “They’re done for now.”
Members of the surgical team began to ascend the last few steps and exit the bunker. Wheels and Russell followed, blinking in the sunlight.
They stood for several moments, all bunched together. Then Wheels asked the shirtless man how he knew the attack was over.
“Prophet just gave the all clear.” The man pointed his radio’s rubber antenna at the sky and described a small circle: “Our intel network.” The surgical team had formed up around him as he spoke, and he gave them a quick once-over and said, “If you’re ready, we got you set up over here.” He set off walking, and the team began to follow him across the camp. Wheels and Russell just stood.
“I don’t think he means us,” said Wheels.
“I don’t think he does, either,” Russell said.
He glanced around the firebase. At the trenches snaking between the sandbag walls. At the cinder-block bunkers, the canvas tents of various sizes. At the HESCOs surrounding the base’s perimeter, stacked on top of the sandstone walls, the machine-gun emplacements every twenty meters. Concertina wire sparkling in the sunlight. And everywhere the bustle of men—most of them shirtless, pants legs cut off at the knee, many wearing tennis shoes or no shoes at all. One soldier passed in front of them with a bright red mohawk, tattoos sleeving both arms to the wrist.
Another soldier, this one in uniform, approached the shirtless man and the column of techs and surgeons. They conferred together a few moments, the shirtless man turning to point back at the Rangers. The uniformed man nodded and then started in their direction.
Russell saw, as the man drew closer, that he wore the rank of a first lieutenant on his chest, and the sleeve insignia of the 82nd Airborne on his left shoulder. He was tall and thin with dark hair buzzed in a crewcut. He came up, shook Russell’s hand and then Wheels’s
. He introduced himself as Kent, but his nametape read KELLAM.
“Weren’t expecting you guys till tomorrow,” he told them.
Russell didn’t know how to respond to this. He just nodded.
“You want the tour?” Kent asked. “We can get you chow if you’re hungry.”
He turned and pointed to the mess tent, which squatted at their right, long and low-slung, canvas flapping idly in the breeze and exuding a faint odor of grease.
“Hell,” said Wheels, “give us the tour. We can eat anytime.”
He hadn’t addressed the officer as “sir,” but the lieutenant didn’t seem to notice. He escorted them down a trail worn smooth by a thousand boot heels. There was the armory bunker, he told them. Over there, supply. Russell asked where they could find the commanding officer, but the man seemed not to hear. They went along the wall of HESCOs at the camp’s western edge—cutouts in the shape of soldiers, plywood decoys propped above the barriers—and there was a gap in the barricades; they were granted a view of the valley beneath: the mountain falling sheer for several hundred meters and then descending in green terraced slopes. In the distance, more mountains, dotted with pine trees, thick in the morning haze.
He asked the lieutenant if they got sniper fire at this altitude.
Kent pointed to one of the plywood silhouettes to their left, and Russell glanced over to see the nickel-sized holes perforating its torso.
“Anyone ever get hit?” Wheels asked.
“They get hit,” Kent said.
He walked them toward the north end of camp and the camp’s main entrance—steel gates protected by gunners and razor wire. Kent told them about the trail that ascended the face of the mountain in switchbacks and then he led them down another path by the latrines, lengths of PVC pipe hammered into the ground, damp ground and the swarm of flies, plywood outhouses a little farther down. It was the job of some unfortunate private to burn their contents every day with diesel.
