by Aaron Gwyn
But the ritual had yet to conclude. Two Afghan men came forward, each taking an arm of their prisoner, bringing his torso once more to a kneeling position, the blood all but subsided and turned now to seep. A third Afghan—a leader of the local militia whom Russell had heard several Americans refer to as Bari—came up with a five-gallon jerry can and began, without hurry, to pour the contents into the corpse’s neck. Then he flung the can aside and began to rummage in the pockets of his robe. He produced a small box of matches, struck one and then another against the side of the box, and tossed it toward the corpse. Tongues of fire erupted and flames licked the bloody shirt of the headless man, reaching, at last, the cavity between his shoulders. The two men still holding the torso released their grip, and a ball of bright blue flame went up in the dusk and the torso fell forward, bent as if in prayer.
It didn’t stay bent for long. Gasoline had filled the dead man’s stomach, and gasoline had soaked his clothes, and as the fire consumed the corpse, it began to writhe. The Afghans once again released a piercing call as the torso wrenched upright and began to cavort in spasms, standing and falling, performing a macabre and frightful dance.
“Sweet Jesus,” said Russell and turned to look at Sara, but Sara was no longer seated beside him. He glanced at the wall of HESCOs, then over at the gates. He looked back toward the spectacle in the center of camp, and that was when he saw her. She’d managed to slip from the wall of sandbags and was threading her way among the soldiers, through the swarm of militiamen, now approaching the ring of elders, this small figure in surgical scrubs—girlish, petite—moving closer and closer to the dancing corpse.
Russell jumped down and went after her, moving past the astonished Americans, past the murmuring Afghans. She was within ten yards of the burning body when Russell caught up with her. He seized her by the wrist and began to lead her away. She came without struggle, limp as any doll. They went down the sandbag-lined path in the cold evening air until they came to the medical tent and stood for several breathless moments.
Sara looked up at him. Her pupils were large as dimes and her expression that of someone coaxed from a trance. Euphoric. Enthralled. Her breath fogged in the blue twilight.
He stood there with her hand in his until the color came back into her face and her eyes shifted and she seemed to be returning.
“That—” he told her, when he managed to speak, “that was crazy.”
The next morning a storm rolled in from the west, and it began once more to snow, the white world descending, muffled and mute. The air was very quiet, very cold. Russell rubbed his hands together, cupped and blew into them, then reached down in a cargo pocket for his gloves.
All that day an unease gnawed his stomach. It wasn’t just the mortars and rockets, the thought of his death screaming in from above. The hollow beneath his sternum began to ache. His temples pulsed. Snow and the all clear only seemed to make it worse.
At dusk he glanced out from the tent where he and a few other soldiers had gone to seek warmth and saw three figures walking across camp, two large, one small—Ox and Pike and Wheels—watch caps pulled down to their ears and their jacket collars turned up against the cold. Wheels wore a checkered shemagh—black and brown—no telling where he’d gotten his hands on it. Russell walked out onto the packed white path with the snow crunching under his boots. He lifted an arm to wave, but the three men had already seen him and started his way.
As they approached, Russell saw that Ox had a chaw protruding from the left side of his jaw and then that Wheels had lined his lower lip with the stuff. He kept leaning over every few steps to spit. He came up, slapped Russell’s shoulder, and pointed to his mouth.
“Sergeant loaned me a dip,” he told him.
“Good for you,” Russell said.
The four of them stood several moments.
“We need to go out and stop this,” Pike said.
Russell agreed. He said the problem was how.
Then he said, “We?” pointing a finger at himself, then at Ox and Wheels and Sergeant Pike.
“You be up for that?” said Pike.
“How would we do it?” Russell asked.
“Sergeant was thinking an ambush,” Ox said. His lips parted and he spat expertly between his teeth, a thin stream arcing to the ground, not a drop clinging to his beard or the front of his jacket.
“We’re going to try to ambush them?” Russell asked. “We’d have to know where they were. We’d have to know where they’re going to be.”
“I know where they are,” Pike said.
Russell stood thinking about it. He thought the odds of Pike knowing the precise—or future—location of an enemy mortar team was slim to none.
Pike said, “How long before one of these rounds goes long and ends up hitting our camp.”
“Or the horses,” said Ox.
“Or the horses,” Pike said.
For some reason, Russell had yet to consider that as a possibility, as though the mountain and this hilltop fortress would prevent any wayward shell from killing everything in the corral.
“When would we go?”
“I think the sooner the better. Don’t you?”
“Just the four of us?” said Russell.
“Just us four,” Pike said.
Russell looked at Wheels, his friend standing there with pupils quivering. He opened his mouth as if to tell Russell his opinion of this plan, but he spat instead. Or tried to spit. He kept his teeth together like Ox, attempting to eject the tobacco juice between them, but unlike Ox, his technique was off and spit dribbled from his lips and down onto his beard. He leaned forward, palmed a knee with one hand and swiped the back of his sleeve across his chin.
He looked up at Russell. His Adam’s apple jerked.
“I think I maybe swallowed some,” he said.
They left Dodge just after midnight. Pike had procured tactical vests for Wheels and Russell, kneepads and helmets and pouches for their ammo. Their rifles were back down in camp, but Ox handed them a pair of Colt carbines with the sixteen-inch barrel, ACOGs mounted on the sight rails, night-vision optics on the quad rails just in front. Precision buttstocks. Suppressors screwed into the threaded muzzle breaks. The weapons still had their unmarked factory finish—you could run your thumb across the receiver and feel that powder-textured coating—and when Russell asked the sergeant where they’d come from, Ox simply told him to try to return it in one piece.
They were the better part of an hour working their way onto the valley floor, and when they reached the basin, the air was cold on Russell’s face and the moon lit the bare oak limbs and cast spidery shadows against the snow and the bare patches of scree. The mortar team they hunted had been launching from about four kilometers out, and Pike thought the enemy position lay in a little draw that came down the throat of the mountains on the valley’s opposite side. The sergeant’s thinking was to try to get there before dawn and lay up for an ambush. That was provided, of course, the mortar crew wasn’t already waiting.
“You think he’s right?” Wheels had asked Russell just before they set off.
“Do I think who’s right?” said Russell. “About what?”
“The sergeant. You think he knows where these Talibs are posted up?”
Russell told him he had no idea.
“I don’t see how he could know,” said Wheels. “Unless he’s been out there. And if he hasn’t been out there, he can’t know anything.”
“Then I don’t suppose we have to worry about getting shot,” Russell said.
Wheels stared at him.
“The fuck crawled up your ass?”
“I’m fine,” Russell said.
Wheels studied him a long moment. Then he said, “You can’t afford to be thinking about any of that.”
“Thinking about what?” Russell said.
“She’s a pretty girl,” said Wheels, “but this ain’t the time.”
Russell didn’t say anything.
“I haven’t brought
it up because you know how you can get.”
Russell said, “No. Tell me how I get.”
Wheels exhaled very slowly and shook his head. “Russ, I’m not trying to get on your case. I’m just saying.”
“We haven’t even done anything,” Russell said.
“Not yet,” said Wheels. “But I’ve seen the way she looks at you. I’ve seen you looking at her. Save it for stateside. Right now it’ll get you cross-threaded.”
Russell looked at him. His platinum hair grown out into a short rooster’s comb. His pupils quivering back and forth.
“Since when did you become the voice of reason?”
“Since always,” Wheels said.
They deployed along a gorge that twisted across the valley floor. It had been a stream at one time but was bone-dry now and lined with egg-shaped stones, perfectly polished, glowing in the moonlight. Russell kept glancing down to monitor his footing. Easy, in such circumstances, to roll an ankle, pick up a mechanical injury, and then the entire mission would be a wash. He stopped at one point and pulled back the sleeve of his jacket to check his watch. First light was two hours away. He readjusted his rifle sling and continued walking.
The gorge began to angle northward, and they climbed its southern lip and shifted course to the east. They hadn’t spoken a word since leaving camp and they didn’t speak now, walking soundlessly and fifteen meters apart, scanning the country through their rifles’ sights. Russell kept his eyes sweeping back and forth, dividing the terrain into sectors. A Vietnam veteran who’d done his tours with Long Range Reconnaissance had once told him that anything worth looking at was worth pointing your gun at. Good advice, Russell thought.
They reached the first slopes of the eastward range and defiled along an uneven goat trail heading south. They went several hundred meters, and then Pike brought them to a halt, raising his left fist in the air and then lowering himself onto a knee. The three men behind him knelt in unison. Anyone watching would have thought they’d rehearsed. Pike looked up a draw to his right and then pointed his index finger toward the stars and rotated it several times. They rose and moved into the gorge.
The walls of the culvert were slick with ice, and through the night scope the world burned with a sea-green light. Russell lowered the rifle and glanced at the moon, put his outstretched hand between it and the horizon. They had an hour’s dark left, and here was where they’d lose it. He trailed Ox, taking great care to step in the man’s tracks, like a child following his father.
After a ninety-minute climb—slow, treacherous—they reached the clearing Pike was searching for, fanned out and shouldered their rifles. There was no one about, but the snow had been marked by footprints, and in the middle of the clearing lay the perfect impression of a mortar’s baseplate—this frozen, concave square, blue in the dawning air. The four of them stood looking at it. Wheels took a knee beside the indentation, reaching out a hand to trace its borders. He looked up at Sergeant Pike, then over at Russell.
“I will be damned,” he said.
Russell lay in the snow beneath the live oaks on the eastern edge of the clearing, blinking every few moments to brush the sleep from his eyes. He watched his breath dissolve in the air like smoke, and every few minutes he’d turn and stare back toward the melancholy hills where Firebase Dodge sat on its impregnable perch, waiting for the sun to crest the ridgeline. The dark forms of birds jerked against the sky. Dozens of them, swarming like insects. Russell watched how they seemed to spasm in flight and shift direction, a constant and crazed flapping. He blinked again, massaged his eyes with his forefinger and thumb, and he realized these were not birds. They were bats. Dipping down beneath the tree limbs, feeding on the wing. It was a mean omen, and he concluded one of two things would happen in the next hour: they’d either see no sign of the mortar team they sought or they’d all of them die in this place.
He was mistaken in both assumptions. As light was spreading among the leaves and limbs, he heard a sudden exchange of low voices and then watched in disbelief as four men came down the trail toward the clearing. Four Talibs. He blinked and counted again. There were five. They were dressed in oversize black shirts and thin black trousers, turbans that were a lighter shade of black, gray almost, and three of them lugged an ancient Soviet-era mortar that would have weighed well over a hundred pounds. There was no practical way of transporting this weapon if the wheel base was lost, and it was apparent to Russell that this was precisely the case.
The three men set the mortar crunching into the snow and began attaching its bipod. One of them—tall and lean, shod in cheap plastic sandals—unslung a canvas bag from his shoulder and started removing rounds, placing each six-pound shell within reach of the launcher, nose-down in the carpet of white. The others kept up a whispered exchange in Pashto or Dari, and the shape of the words caused a tremor of panic to run the length of Russell’s body and settle like a boot in his back. He watched as the men finished assembling the mortar and began to dial in coordinates, one of them peering through a set of binoculars toward the hills where the American firebase was awakening in the early dawn. Russell drew a bead on the torso of the nearest combatant, aligning the red dot of his gunsight with the center of his enemy’s chest, aiming center mass. He thumbed the selector, pressing it very slowly to SEMI, following the switch with the pad of his thumb and catching it before it clicked. He curled his finger inside the trigger guard and felt the cold metal against his callus. Then he just lay there, focusing on his breath.
One of the men had set a spotting scope on its tripod at the far end of the clearing and was staring at something to the north. He’d just turned back toward his comrades when a vulval slit perforated his Adam’s apple and he went down very hard in the snow, legs crossed under him, a strange movement that almost looked vaudevillian. He gripped his throat with both hands as though he were choking. Blood welled between his fingers. Several of the Talibs had turned to watch. They seemed not to understand what was happening, and two of them went sprawling face-first and another’s head burst like a melon and he staggered three steps before collapsing.
The suppressed rounds buzzed through the clearing like wasps. The remaining man didn’t even raise his rifle. He took off sprinting toward the trees where Russell was concealed. Russell pressed the trigger twice very fast—two shots spaced on top of each other. He saw the man’s face very clearly—eyes stretched wide, brows slightly raised, beads of sweat visible on his forehead. When the bullets struck him, he spun to one side and fell forward, his momentum carrying him until he collided with a tree. Russell came up on his knees and, keeping his rifle trained on the man, got his feet under him and moved up. The man lay on his stomach, both arms around the tree trunk as though he were embracing it. Russell stood a few moments and then lowered his rifle to the low-ready position and toed the man with his boot. The man just lay there. Russell glanced at the other bodies in the clearing. Pike and Wheels and Ox were entering from the south side, sidestepping the terrain with rifles to their shoulders, staring out over their scopes. Russell raised a hand and motioned to them, and Pike motioned back.
The two of them met on the level expanse of snow. The sun had crested the eastern mountains, and Russell turned his back to the light, squinting.
“You smoke him?” Pike asked.
“Yeah,” said Russell.
Pike swiped a gloved hand through his beard and glanced toward the man Russell had killed. Then he looked at Russell and gave him a tight-lipped nod.
Russell massaged the skin just above his left eyebrow. He turned and looked at the spotting scope on its tripod.
“What were they looking at?” he said.
Pike seemed not to hear him. He walked over to one of the corpses and began to search the body for intel. Russell watched him a moment and then he stepped across to the scope. It was a brand-new Bushnell 60x65, the kind the marines were using north of Baghdad, and Russell knew it had been taken from American personnel. He bent to look through the eyepiece.
The haze of mist and vapor rising from the rocks. Shadows. Tones of white muted brown. He stood and slung the rifle over his shoulder and leaned to look again. He drew a breath and began adjusting the focus. What came into view didn’t make sense, and he blinked several times to correct the picture, but there it was: a man in a clearing much like the one in which Russell stood, staring at him through an identical scope. This man, however, was dressed in black—turban, shirt, and trousers—and to his left were several more men, likewise dressed, hovering above a mortar tube. The man was staring through his scope at Russell and gesturing to the men beside him. They were repositioning the tube, and the spotter seemed to be motioning them to hurry. Russell’s breath caught in his chest and he turned to look at Pike. He’d just opened his mouth when he heard the barely perceptible hiss of the mortar round.
