Four Summoners Tales Part 81

It troubled me in ways I couldn't quite explain.

"Look, Finn, just start from the beginning. There was a firefight here, and there's a h.e.l.l of a lot of blood, but there are no American bodies.The only other person we found is a kid, maybe ten years old. And it was definitely a boy, that's not even a discussion."

"Hooah," said Bunny.

I continued. "So, I need you to take a breath, get your s.h.i.+t wired tight, and tell me what happened.And I mean everything."

I can't know what Finn was thinking, but I watched his eyes and I could see the process of the frightened and disoriented man yielding all control to the trained soldier-the top-of-theline SpecOps gunslinger. Top handed him a canteen and Finn took a sip, swallowed, took some breaths through his nose, took a longer sip, and nodded thanks to Top. Finn blew out his cheeks and nodded.

"Okay," he said.

He told us everything.

As he spoke, I tried to get inside his head and see it all the way he saw it.

13.

rAttlesnAke teAm This is how his story fit into my head . . .

The heat.

The f.u.c.king heat.

The heat was a hammer, a fist.

Finn pinched sweat out of his eyes with thumb and forefinger and saw that

his fingers were dry.The desert had leached the moisture out of him. You'd think the desert would leave enough for tears, he thought as he blinked his eyes back into focus and fitted the monocular back into place. The rubber gasket was hot and soft against his eye socket.The heat made the rubber feel like flesh, like some curled length of worm.

He was stretched out on a flat shelf that was jabbed into a cliff wall too high above the jagged rocks below. He had a camo blanket over him and a smaller one over the barrel of his rifle.The blanket didn't do a f.u.c.king thing to deflect the heat and Finn felt like he was slowly being broiled alive. But it was better than being without cover, because his Irish skin didn't tan worth s.h.i.+t. He'd gone from freckle-white to skinned-knees red the first day here in Afghanistan. Since then he'd kept out of the sun, but being in shade didn't seem to offer so much as a splinter of relief. Nothing did. Not unless his team had to follow this mission into the higher mountain pa.s.ses, and then it went from h.e.l.lish heat to mind-numbing cold.

You couldn't win in Afghanistan.

Not with the weather.

Not with the people.

Not with the son-of-a-b.i.t.c.hing Taliban.

Finn knew he couldn't beat any of it, so he did what he always did. He

did what everyone else did. He did the only thing he could do.

He ate his pain.

He swallowed it whole, feeling it slide down his gullet like a bundle of

barbed wire.That was the only way you got through the day, and the week, and the month, and the whole tour.You ate your pain, knowing that the more you consumed, the more poison it would release into your system.After a while, that poison ate away at your nerves, your patience, your tolerance. Sometimes your humanity.

It drove some guys right over the edge. Finn knew-knew for f.u.c.king sure-who was collecting fingers from the Afghans. Maybe two-thirds of them were Taliban fingers.The rest? Well, when a guy had that much poison in his system, he sometimes said f.u.c.k it and took a trophy wherever he could find it.

A few guys had gone on trial for that. Most didn't; most never saw the inside of a military court. No one caught a whiff of the madness cooking inside of them.

Finn hadn't eaten that much poison yet. But, day by day, he found it harder to hate and revile the guys who went off the reservation. Day by day, that seemed to make more sense.

He ground his teeth and stared through the monocular, feeling the seconds and minutes catch fire around him in the burning afternoon air.

The rocky path below was empty.

All morning it was empty.

Well into the afternoon it was empty.

Not a mule. Not a sheep farmer.

Not a stray dog.

Empty.

Until it wasn't.