Will Mackin - Bring Out the Dog

The drone was on the wrong side of the storm that sat over Logar, and its camera, which normally looked down on our targets, was searching a dark wall of cumulonimbus for a hole. Not finding one, it punched into the thick of the storm. For a moment, it seemed like it would be okay; then ice piled onto its wings as if a bricklayer had thrown it on with a trowel, and the drone hurtled toward earth. I wrote down its grid, because if it crashed we’d have to go out and fetch its brain. But as the drone fell into warmer air, the ice peeled away, and when it leveled off, its camera remained facing aft. I watched the drone pull a thread of the storm into clear morning air. By the time I heard the rotator’s approach, the storm had passed.

Outside, covering everything, was a pristine layer of snow, which dawn had turned pink. I started the pink HiLux. I honked the horn, and it made a pink noise. Levi emerged from his pink tent with his pink ruck. I drove him down a pink road to the pink LZ. The rotator came in sideways, and its thumping rotors kicked up a thick pink cloud. Crouching, Levi and I ran through the cloud to a spot alongside the warm machine. A crewman opened the side door and handed me the mail, which included a package from Levi’s mother. Then Levi hopped aboard and was on his way home.

The sun rose as I drove back to the TOC, and the whole outpost sparkled at the edge of the war. The stamps on the package from Levi’s mother featured Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. The detail chosen was Icarus drowning. His legs kicked above the surface. The water looked cold and dark. What was not shown in the stamp was how the world went on without him.

The new liaison was asleep in Levi’s chair when I got back. I opened the package quietly, so as not to wake him. More Kattekoppen. I put it on the shelf with the rest and was about to go to bed when the phones started ringing.

Two soldiers on their way home from a bazaar south of Kabul had taken a wrong turn. They’d hit a dead end and been ambushed. Bloody drag marks led from the scene, which was littered with M9 and AK brass. Witnesses said that the soldiers had been taken alive, which meant a rescue operation, led by us. We received pictures of the soldiers from a search-and-rescue database. One soldier had a chin and the other did not. The TOC filled with CIA, FBI, and ODA. Then a massive helicopter slung in the missing soldiers’ ruined truck. Its windows had been shot through, and bullet holes riddled the skin. We opened the doors to find the smell of the missing soldiers still inside, along with the stuff they’d bought at the bazaar, intact in a flimsy blue bag.

The drag marks at the scene led to a tree line. The tree line opened onto a number of compounds, which we raided that night. Those compounds led to other compounds, which we raided the next day. The second set of compounds led to a village, which, overnight, we cleared. That delivered us to a mountain. It took two nights and a day to clear all the caves up one side and down the other. Which led us to another village. And so on.

Time became lines on a map leading in all directions from Chin and No Chin’s ambush. Space existed only between those lines. We searched for the missing men night and day.

One night, west of Sangar, as we trudged through snow with the wind in our faces, an air-raid siren blasted, and a small village appeared in an explosion of light. The village, just beyond a tree line, seemed so peaceful as to mock me. Like, what are you afraid of, this stone wall? That donkey cart? Or was it the siren whose noise filled my lungs and poured out my open mouth? I radioed the howitzers for a fire mission.

“Send it,” they replied.

I had coordinates for the village, and had I obeyed my instincts I would’ve transmitted them and brought heavy shells whistling down, but the leaves in the trees before me shone like silver dollars in the wind. And kids, awakened by the ruckus, quit their beds to run out under the streetlights. Women chased after those kids, leaving barefoot tracks in the snow. Had the women worn shoes I might’ve thought that the whole thing—village/light/siren—was a trick designed to set us up for an ambush, and I might’ve said “They’re wearing shoes” over the radio, so that future patrols might know what to look for. But the women ran smiling and barefoot after their giggling kids. And men, appearing on their roofs, opened their arms to one another and shouted over the siren’s blare: Isn’t this something!

This, we later learned, was the unexpected restoration of power after months without—the opposite of a rolling blackout. The resulting commotion continued until one light went out, then another. Until the women had chased the kids inside and the men had waved goodbye. Until all the lights were out. Then someone shut down the air-raid siren, and its blare died to a whistle, and the whistle died to a tumble of bearings. After which all was dark and quiet.

“Send your fire mission,” the howitzers repeated.

“Never mind,” I said.

IF WE’D BEEN asked how long we’d go on searching, our answer would have been: as long as it takes. Think of the families back home. Baby Chin. Mother No Chin. But in truth there were limits, and we had methods for determining them. From the streaks of blood found in the drag marks, we ascertained wounds. From the wounds, we developed timelines. And we presented these timelines on a chart, which read from top to bottom, best case to worst. By the time that village lit up beside us, we were at the bottom of the chart. The next night, we started looking for graves.

There was no time to sleep. My fingernails stopped growing. My beard turned white. Cold felt hot, and hot felt cold. And, soon enough, I began to hallucinate. One night, as we approached a well, I watched Chin jump out and run away, laughing. Another night, I saw No Chin ride bare-ass up a moonbeam.

Meanwhile, the Mah-Jongg Kid had proved himself worthy by having the howitzers fully prepped for that pop-up non-ambush, and for every close call since. At first, I preferred Levi’s circles to M.J.’s hyperbolas, which opened onto an infinity that no howitzer could possibly reach. But then, as the search for our missing comrades wore on, producing only dry holes and dead ends, the idea of thrusting death somewhere beyond the finite gained a sort of appeal.

We were down to almost nothing on the unwanted-food shelf. Only Kattekoppen and some kind of macaroni that required assembly were left by the time we found No Chin’s body in a ditch outside Maidan Shar.

No Chin had a note in his pocket indicating the whereabouts of Chin. We would find Chin, it said, buried under a tree by a wall. We hiked to trees without walls, walls without trees, graveless walls, and treeless graves, until finally, by a process of elimination, we stumbled on the right combination and dug.

Under a thin layer of dirt was a wooden box. Crammed inside the box was Chin. His last name was embroidered on his uniform, for all to read. But no one read it aloud. Because to do so, it seemed, would’ve reduced the whole thing to a name. As if we wouldn’t have given our lives for a man whom none of us had known. One we hadn’t expected to find alive, yet we’d all hoped to find alive. And we were sorry to see him go.

Prior to the mission, I’d filled my pockets with Kattekoppen, which came in handy, because Chin had been dead for a while. Long enough to leave him covered with malodorous slime. The smell only got worse as our medics lifted Chin out of the box and slid him into a bag. Lex, Tull, and Hugs gagged. Hal, of all people, let loose a slender arc of bile. But I popped a steady supply of Kattekoppen, which kept the stink at bay.

THE NEXT MORNING, when the rotator arrived, we slid Chin in one door and Levi hopped out the other.