Fire in the Blood Read online

Coop looked at the animal in the distance. Then back at the humvee. “Ride the fucking horse,” said Coop.

  “Into the sunset,” said the sergeant. “Greely says his Skittles for a month.”

  “And if the horse goes boom, I get what?” said Coop.

  “The unending admiration of a grateful nation.”

  “What about my Skittles?”

  “Coop, I will personally present them to your widow.”

  “Fuck her,” said Coop. “I want the Skittles buried with me.”

  Over the radio came a burst of cackles. Coop reholstered the handheld in his MOLLE harness, the squawks of laughter making him aware of his own unsmiling face. I’m sorry, he thought, looking down at his boots, cold grit blowing against his face. I didn’t mean that thing about fuck you.

  “Drive on, hero, drive on,” said the radio. “And here’s some shit for your listening enjoyment.”

  Coop sniffed and headed off again, the mariachi music blaring around him.

  They’d sighted the horse at dawn, only minutes after Coop’s convoy left FOB Snakebite. There were no towns within miles of the base. Just empty ruins, sketched under the shadows of the Sulaiman Mountains, whose vast and gauzy angles reminded Coop of a crumpled poncho. Martian desert spread endlessly west, bisected by a thin scrape of highway heading up-country to Bagram, along which the convoy would soon be traveling. And tied up along this same road, the mysterious horse. The wind had been picking up since dawn, and now the mission was on hold, waiting for a weather report. In the meantime, Captain Lee, the convoy leader, had suggested that the sapper team—consisting of Anaya, Coop, and Greely—might go investigate the animal and determine whether it constituted a mission-critical threat.

  Coop had volunteered for the long walk. His solo approach was loosely informed by tactical dogma (avoid scenarios where more than one sapper could get killed in the same blast), but mostly he’d wanted a few moments to himself, away from the others. Only now Coop found his desire for solitude fading with every step.

  All around him the earth had been burrowed and turned over, as if packs of wild dogs had gone digging for the bones of old wars. The excavations were the work of his colleagues, engineers on route clearance, who went out every day in big armored diggers, tractoring for land mines. If Coop had been a few degrees less hooah, this is how he would have spent the war. Instead he’d been loaned out to the infantry as part of a sapper detachment, his job to find hidden munitions in a country where there were more bombs than people.

  * * *

  —

  As Coop walked he occasionally caught an angry red flare in his periphery; painted rocks flashing at him from the desert. The red rocks were an international warning symbol used for tagging minefields. Coop avoided looking at them. It was like ants on the ground, you noticed one and then suddenly the rest came wriggling into view. There were hundreds of rocks out there and despite his best efforts Coop imagined them swarming, surrounding him, causing an eruption of itchiness under his kevlar vest.

  Coop tried to distract himself by making a scene of it, imagining the way he’d describe all this for Kay. The horse, still a figurine in the distance, standing alone on the cracked band of tar, Anaya’s music coming out of his radio. And all around him the raw desert permeated with land mines. The last three months he’d found himself doing this: everything he saw and thought and said and felt, it all got processed in terms of how he’d tell it to Kay. It made him feel better, a connection between his present circumstances and the imagined future when he got to see his wife again.

  The horse was closer now. Coop could see it was hitched to a post, just standing there, swishing its tail. A few hundred paces and he’d be there, except there was still no way of telling whether the horse was some kind of trap.

  The safest thing, he reasoned, would be to go back for his protective MOPP gear. Coop imagined how his teammates would react, laughing their asses off as he got dressed up for a chemical-nuclear apocalypse, all to go check out a horse. But then his imagination countered with a more ominous vision: Greely and Anaya at the Sports USA off Reilly Road, sharing a pitcher, commiserating in their disheveled Class A’s after Coop’s funeral. Sergeant Anaya would say: “Fucking tragic, man. What was Coop thinking?” And Greely, the FNG, would nod in solemn agreement. “You gotta MOPP up,” he’d say, slurping his Budweiser with the affect of a melancholy old-timer. The image made Coop pause on the road. He couldn’t abide the notion of his death becoming fodder for the new guy’s posturing.

  While Coop was considering his options he felt the air began to change. Reflexively he ducked as a crackling wall of noise came tumbling over the floodplain, followed by a cold gust of sand.

  “Clouds forming up,” said Sergeant Anaya from the radio. “Might want to get back here, you don’t want to get wet. Over.”

  This was the contradiction of his training, that he should cultivate an instinct for hidden ordnance—vessels with enough power to rip a person to pieces and scatter them over hundreds of yards—and then overcome his body’s alarms, the chemicals that told him to flee.

  “Out,” said Coop, and decided, Fuck it.

  He lumbered forward in a jostle of gear, swimming in his sweat, heat escaping his mouth in rapid breaths, just like the snorting animal in front of him.

  Coop had never seen a horse up close before. This one was white with gray and pink splotches. Its eyes stared forward, or to the side; Coop couldn’t tell. The horse’s ribs heaved massively, suspended in a carriage of muscle.

  The two of them were alone together in the desert. Coop came closer and the horse bowed its head toward the ground. Then it charged, shooting out to where the rope snagged, the horse twisting into a circular run while thrashing its head against the leash, one eye aimed wildly at the mountains.

  “Whoa there,” Coop said, because that’s what people in movies said to horses. And now he was trapped in the circumference of its gallop. The rope was closing fast. Coop ducked, but not before it twanged across his kevlar helmet. The horse reared and made another lap, and soon the leash was coming around again. Drawing his bayonet, Coop swashbuckled the line.

  The horse broke free but then slowed to a stop, pausing nearby. Coop put away the knife, panting. He felt he could smell the hot life of the animal, its big, blood-filled heart. Left out along the road like an offering. He wanted to cross the distance between himself and the horse, wanted to put a hand to its dusty flank; not for himself and definitely not for Greely or Anaya or any quantity of Skittles, but for Kay; so this moment could be part of the story he’d tell her. Coop liked to think she would be moved by the danger of this place, the gentle courage he showed while navigating the bomb-strewn terrain. The way he did little things, like saving this fucking horse. And through the story Kay would know the goodness within him, and that would matter more to her than their fights, more than the constant lure of her family, more than the wars and all the other forces that had pulled them apart.

  Coop took a step forward and the horse turned its head, regarding him with a single black eye. Coop stopped in place, feeling suddenly like a trespasser. He began to take another step but found himself deeply unnerved, as if there was some force of judgment contained in the animal’s flat gaze; a reflection in which Coop saw his own fraudulent heart. The horse seemed to know the truth. Even if they were reunited, Coop would never tell Kay everything he had seen and done.

  The wind came up and Coop found himself suddenly aware of his own smallness under the great billowing clouds. He started to fall back, creeping in reverse until his boots hit the highway. The horse studied his retreat with glassy indifference, a look both ominous and serene.

  * * *

  —

  Thunder boomed again over the plain as Coop returned to the humvee and slung himself into the driver’s seat. Anaya was on the radio, the receiver cradled between the sergeant’s shoulder and hi
s squat turtle head. Mariachi music was still playing from a small boom box.

  “Horse ran off,” said Coop.

  Anaya gave him the thumbs-up. “Chemist Three-Three, roger, we have determined, ah, no threat to the convoy operation, over.”

  “You didn’t ride it,” said Greely from the back.

  “Bullshit I didn’t ride it,” said Coop. “We galloped across the plains. Horse and man became one.”

  “Roger roger,” said Sergeant Anaya into the radio, “what is the mission status, over?”

  “Why’d you cut it loose?” said Greely. “It’s just standing there.”

  “Any news on the mission?” said Coop. Anaya held up his hand for silence.

  Somewhere back at the staging ground, Captain White would be consulting with Bagram, getting a report from the weather combat team, whose pressure sensors might register a dip in the atmosphere; a forewarning of sudden rainfall that could flood the valley and wash their convoy from the road. Coop hoped the mission wouldn’t be canceled. There had been a lot of recent gossip about a Big Operation coming down the pike. That very morning, before they went off to inspect the horse, Greely had spotted two boonie-capped civilians in a powwow with Captain White. “Don’t get too riled,” Anaya had warned when Greely made this report. “CIA don’t automatically make it a high-speed mission, hooah?”

  Rumors of The Big Op had started with PFC Tosker, a Bravo mechanic from Philadelphia whose Italian-speaking girlfriend sent him a clipping from Il Messaggero profiling a local paratrooper. According to the article, this Roman was “currently deployed to a remote Southeastern base, assisting US Forces with the ongoing hunt for Abdul Razaq, former Minister of the Treasury under the Taliban.” As others had excitedly observed, there were Italian forces stationed at FOB Snakebite, so when a convoy operation was announced a few days after Tosker got the article, gossip shifted heavily toward this Razaq guy being the target. It was more information than they ever got from Command, and it was enough for Coop to get excited. His unit had arrived in the wake of Operation Anaconda, a monthlong pummeling of the fighters who’d hunkered in the eastern mountains. President Karzai kept saying that Bin Laden was most likely dead, and in the first weeks of his deployment Coop had begun to worry he’d missed the war. But now, after seven months of missions, his new fear was that he hadn’t done anything in Afghanistan he could truly be proud of. Certainly he had done things he regretted.

  “No word yet,” said Anaya, cradling the handset.

  “You know what I’ll bet happens to that horse?” said Greely, still talking from the backseat. “Prolly gets eaten by mountain dogs.”

  * * *

  —

  A line of gun trucks were arranged along the sloped ridge just down the road from FOB Snakebite, and Coop parked the truck alongside this formation. Overhead the sun had come up but the sky was still darkening toward storm.

  “Be back, I’m checking with Command,” said Anaya as he dismounted. Coop opted to stay behind and make some final inspections on the vehicle. He watched the sergeant and Greely head downhill toward the staging area, a garden of crooked olive trees and rubble where the infantry sat back-to-back in pairs on the ground, tearing open their morning MREs. Haggling over chow had just begun.

  “Cheese spread for cinnamon drink, y’all.”

  “Peanut butter! Who wants some motherfucking peanut butter?”

  Coop turned his attention to the truck. Their humvee was an eighties-era tactical clunker; basically a plus-sized doorless jeep, still painted green for jungle warfare. For extra armor the floor of the truck had been packed down with several layers of sandbags. According to the official explanation, this protective barrier would help deaden the impact of a land mine or IED, though Coop suspected the result would just be extra sand in your corpse.

  “Pound cake?” said Greely, suddenly standing behind him. Coop hadn’t heard the private come back up the hill.

  “I can’t shit for days, I eat one of these,” said Greely, holding out a brown foil rectangle.

  Coop waved the package away.

  “You don’t wanna come down and eat with the others?” said Greely.

  “I’m good,” said Coop. “Gonna resecure these tarps, case it keeps breezing up like this.”

  “Hooah, hooah,” said Greely, lingering by the truck. Coop found himself irritated by the FNG’s presence. His kevlar helmet was tilted crookedly, with the chin strap undone, and Greely wore a pair of wraparound polychromatic shades that always reminded Coop of rich-kid snowboarders and highway cops. In the Army they called people like him “ate-up,” but it was more than just sloppiness. Gaumy, that’s what he was, a good old Maine word. Working the tie-downs, Coop contemplated a renaming: Private Gaumy the FNG. He wondered if he could pitch the new nickname to Anaya.

  “Chaplain will be here soon,” said Greely. He jerked his thumb back to where the grunts were assembled.

  “Think I’m good,” said Coop.

  “You miss the prayer, maybe God lets us drive over a mine. Then that tarp ain’t gonna do shit, right?”

  Coop turned around to face Greely. He pointed to the far mountains. “Tell me, Greely, the Taliban fighters living up there in the caves, with nothing but their old Russian weapons and raw onions to eat—you really think any of us are praying harder than them?”

  “Joke’s on them,” said Greely. “Praying to the wrong God.”

  Coop assumed a grim smile. He knew Greely was just playing his role in the banter. But still the conversation somehow made him angry.

  “Hell, Greely, you ever read the Bible? This is the place where your God got invented.”

  Then Coop turned back to the truck and pretended to make a few more adjustments with the tie-downs until he heard Greely shuffle away. He looked back and watched Greely join the other soldiers as they finished breakfast, leaving their rucksacks and gear in little hillocks throughout the ruins. The grunts began to thicken, standing together without helmets or BDU jackets, bare arms showing tattoos of barbed wire, sugar skulls, and Jump Wings bearing gothic proclamations like “Death from Above.”

  The gathering provoked a thin sense of longing in Coop. He marveled at the grunts’ ability to freely answer the call to come together, to join with your fellows; a shared goodness to which Coop no longer felt he had any claim. But still it pulled at him, and after watching a few more minutes Coop found himself venturing down the hill.

  * * *

  —

  Soon the chaplain arrived, coming weaponless into the disorderly pack. He was lean and bowed like a rusted lumber blade and seemed to belong elsewhere, not to the soldiers and their coarse slackness but to the bare desert and the sky that shadowed them all. The chaplain wore Special Forces and Ranger tabs on both shoulders, and on his right lapel an embroidered crucifix. At his arrival the other soldiers quieted, put out their cigarettes, scooped chaw from their lips and flicked it on the ground.

  “Gather round, troops,” said the chaplain. “Gather round.” Coop hung at the periphery. He imagined the farther he was from the center of the group, the less his misgivings would contaminate the ritual.

  “What is this gaggle?” barked the chaplain. “Come around now, everyone link arms.”

  The grunts became a dense wall of human camouflage. Coop saw Greely grinning within the press, wearing those ridiculous sunglasses. The chaplain began to speak:

  “Now, troops, this is a nondenominational prayer. There’s no litmus test for faith in my Army, men. You can be a Christian, pagan, Satanist, Jedi, whatever you may feel. I’m going to say some words about my God, and all I ask is you consider who exactly you’re appealing to for protection on this blessed morning. You wouldn’t kick down a door without knowing who had your six, hooah?”

  “Hooah,” the circle responded.

  The chaplain lowered his head and began to pray.
/>   Almighty God, I ask for your blessing.

  These are humble creatures before You,

  this congregation of infantry.

  Pay no attention to their ferocity,

  for though they are made of sand and steel,

  these men are fragile and require your favor.

  These are killers, God, but they are your killers.

  “Hooah, amen,” said the grunts, and they began to release one another. But the chaplain let forth with a second movement. His voice lost its bark and took on a low, quivering quality, a seizured crooning—like a Pentecostal Elvis, Coop thought.

  There are IEDs out there, Oh Lord, and forces

  of the devil who would do them harm!

  You, Lord, who cast out the serpent,

  help us destroy the enemies of salvation!

  Save your mercy for these men.

  I beg for their protection from wickedness

  so they may enjoy each other’s camaraderie

  and the fruits of this world for one more day.

  Amen.

  Coming back up the hill Coop heard the roar of truck engines, the mechanical swiveling of turrets, the thwunking of rucks being loaded into the bed of humvees. Anaya stood by their truck wearing a big grin.

  “Fuck the rain,” he said. “Mission’s a go. You ready to mount up?”

  * * *

  —

  The sun shone hard over the battered desert. Coop drove with one hand raised in salute, trying to block the glare while his foot fluttered rapidly between gas and brake. The team’s sapper vehicle was next to last in the order of march, and all day the convoy had stretched and collapsed like an accordion, a constant flashing of red brake lights. Several times they became lost and were forced to execute tactical halts and turnarounds until it was discovered that some of the vehicles had different versions of the same Soviet map.