The Valley (26 page)

“What happened had nothing to do with Danny,” he said quietly.

Why are you lying?

“Sir,” said Merrick. “You might have noticed that we are out here alone in the middle of godforsaken nowhere.”

Black had slung his rifle over his shoulder when he took up the scope. He now realized at the same time as Merrick did that his hand was sliding slowly in the dark to his pistol butt.

“Oh, for God's sake,” Merrick said with disgust. “If I was going to waste you, do you really think I would show you all of this first?”

Black felt his face flush in the dark.

“What I am
saying
is you may have noticed that I have both violated regulations and risked myself and risked my men to bring you all the way out here on a sightseeing tour to convince you that I need to know what you know. Feel free to tell on me when you get back to Omaha and are getting fat in the chow hall with Colonel Gayley. But in the meantime, as long as we're out here together on the ass end of shitty, do you think maybe you could cut the crap and reciprocate a little bit?”

Black fingered the night scope. Merrick waited.

“The chief said that we had brought the Devil into his town,” he answered at last, “and brought his servant too.”

Merrick was quiet for a long moment.

“You're right,” he said at last. “That probably has nothing to do with Danny.”

He held out his hand for the scope. Black passed it back.

“I'm assuming
you
can find your way over the mountain and back to the O.P. without a map,” Merrick said.

Black cocked his head, catching the odd tone in the sergeant's voice.

“Yeah, I know your situation,” Merrick said flatly.

Black's mouth opened, then closed.

“Do you need me to hold your hand?” Merrick asked disdainfully.

“No.”

“I would hope not.”

He shoved the scope into his pack.

“I'll be back soon.”

Merrick stood and shouldered his pack.

“Who was Traynor?” Black asked.

It was not an unnatural question. Outposts were routinely renamed after someone who died there, usually under heroic or tragic circumstances, or both.

Merrick's reaction betrayed nothing out of the ordinary.

“He got killed up here when we first laid in the O.P.”

He offered nothing further. Black nodded and turned upslope.

It took him more than twice as long to ascend the steep mountainside as it had coming down. He felt even more naked than before, moving in the moonlight with his back to the Meadows. About halfway up he was able to cut to his left a bit and enter a wooded area that ran all the way to the summit. It was a minor detour, and it made him feel better.

Near the top he cut right, making his way through the trees and down along the gently sloping ridgeline. He emerged into the open and found where he and Merrick had climbed from the wooded chute. He lowered himself between the boulders and made his way back down to the O.P.

Stepping from the rocks onto the system of platforms and steps and ladders, he looked about himself. There was no one in sight. He heard muted laughter above him, which he assumed was Shannon and the others up in their boulder cave.

He trudged down a level to the radio room and stuck his nose in. Brydon was sitting on the floor with his back against the wall, reading a magazine and pretending Black wasn't there.

A very young private Black didn't recognize sat at the radio desk nearby. The kid's name tape read CHEN. Black was trying to figure out how he knew that name when a familiar voice came from his side.

“Uh, hey, sir.”

He turned. Seated on a stool in the far corner was the soldier from the guard tower at Vega. His friend Bosch sat next to him. They were the ones he'd heard greeting Brydon before.

Both soldiers looked stunned to see Black. Even the sullen and punchy Bosch registered surprise behind his usual scowl.

Black crooked his head in confusion and raised his hands: What gives? The first soldier cleared his throat, surprise turning to discomfort.

“Uh, yeah, so it turns out we've got an O.P., sir,” he said glumly.

Black realized where he had seen Chen's name. The soldiers on the roster that Corelli had said were out on a weeklong patrol.

“Guess you learn something every day,” the soldier continued.

Black fought a sinking feeling.

“When did you guys get here?” he asked.

“Just yesterday, sir.”

“Why
you
guys?”

“Guess it was just our turn, sir,” the first soldier answered moodily.

Bosch, who'd been staring at the floor, raised his head.

“Well, who sent y—” Black began.

He stopped when he saw the look in Bosch's eyes.

Footsteps tromped on the deck outside. The toothy-grinned soldier poked his head in, looking a little glassy-eyed.

“All right, boys,” he began, then saw Black. “Oh, hey there, L.T.”

Black nodded. Toothy continued.

“Hey, guys, we're just headin' up to the fishbowl for a smoke. Wanna come?”

He doffed an invisible cap toward Black.

“Invites to you too, of course, sir.”

The awkwardness in the air caught up to him. He surveyed the glum crew and drove on through.

“C'mon, then, all y'all, let's go.”

“What's the fishbowl?” Black asked.

“Aw, sir, it's the best place for a smoke in the whole world. C'mon, ya gotta come.”

He waved everyone out.

“All right, fine,” said the first soldier, climbing off his stool.

No one looked happy. The cajoling continued.

“C'mon, you too, Doc. Hey, Chen, you chill out here at the radio, all right?”

The kid nodded. Low man on the totem pole. Everyone else roused themselves without enthusiasm.

“That's right. C'mon, Doc. All right, then, sir.”

Black followed him out onto the deck.

T
hey'd had to climb a series of ladders then squeeze up through a narrow, vertical gap between boulders to get there. But the kid was right.

The fishbowl was a flat slab of rock, a natural ledge maybe twenty-five feet across, surrounded on three sides by granite and on the fourth by open air. The edge of the slab dropped off into nothingness, with the vastness of two mountains looming side by side across the Valley.

Several collapsible camp chairs sat in a semicircle, arrayed around what Black at first thought was a standard cigarette butt can but then realized was a cylindrical metal wood burner. Someone had stacked a pile of miniature log cuts against one of the rock walls. A couple had been tossed into the burner and were now aflame.

Two soldiers were already up there, lounging in chairs before the fire.

“Damn, Hill,” said one, seeing their glazed-over tour guide emerge from the boulders.

Hill. A hundred percent hillbilly and his name was actually Hill.

Another name Black remembered from the roster. Another kid out on a “weeklong” patrol.

“You do enough tokin' for one d—”

The soldier stopped when he saw Black.

“What's up, there, sir?”

The kid and his buddy looked very familiar. It took Black a moment to put it together, what with the two not being covered in camouflage face paint.

“You guys are on the sniper team.”

He'd last seen them at the trailside above Darreh Sin, during the mad slog back to COP Vega.

“Hooah, sir,” said the kid. “In the flesh.”

Merrick had said the snipers nearly didn't make it “home.” This, apparently, was home.

Everyone sat, Brydon choosing a chair at the far end of the semicircle and placing himself glumly in it. Hill passed around a pack of smokes. They all lit up.

“So whattaya think, L.T.?” said Hill, sweeping their surroundings with his smoke hand.

Black looked out at the dark panorama beyond the rock slab.

“Not to be a downer,” he said, looking at the little fire, “but you guys don't think it's a little bit crazy to be lighting that thing up here on the mountaintop?”

“That's the beauty, sir,” said Hill through a breeze of smoke.

“What's the beauty?”

Hill gestured out into the night.

“You look out over there, sir,” he said. “We're covered on three sides. The only people that can see this fire is someone that's wayyyyyyy—”

He pointed across the chasm toward the other mountains, whose top halves were visible.

“—the heck over there.”

“Okay.”

“Only a supersniper could make the shot from that mountain, sir.”

He took a drag.

“And Afghani dudes with a rifle generally ain't super,” he said, exhaling to the nods of the sniper team guys.

Black squinted at the far slopes.

“It ain't like they don't know we're here anyway,” Hill went on. “This fire pit must drive 'em crazy, wanting to kill us every night but not being able to get us. Kinda cool, right?”

“Right.”

The two guard tower soldiers from Vega eyed the blackness uneasily.

“And if they
did
actually make that shot one day,” Hill continued, kissing a narrow cone of smoke across the gulf. “Well, shit, that's just sporting, right? I mean, they almost
deserve
the kill if they can make
that
shot.”

He grinned his cigarette-stained grin and drew another cloud into his lungs.

“Makes you feel
alive
up here, sir!”

Bosch spoke up for the first time.

“That's fucked up,” he said sullenly.

Hill leaned back in his chair and stretched his legs out in front of him, crossed at the ankles, gazing out at the void.

“Well
this,
” he said quietly, “is where you come to do fucked-up shit.”

He looked at Bosch with piercing eyes.

“Right, Bosch?”

Bosch said nothing. The first soldier shook his head.

“You're crazy, Hill.”

“Pfft!” Hill scoffed. “Crazy. What's crazy? We're livin' up here like the Swiss Family Robinson on top of a mountain in the middle of no-freakin'-where.
That's
crazy.”

He took a drag and exhaled slowly.

“This place ain't even real,” he muttered through the haze.

He lingered in his smoky thoughts before turning to Black with his wide-gapped smile.

“You ever wondered what's crazy and what's real, sir?”

Black turned and looked him in the eye.

“Yeah,” he answered flatly. “I have.”

For a moment Hill seemed taken aback. He shook it off and squinted at Black, nodding his head mock-knowingly.

“So,” he said brightly, “whatcha doin' way up here, sir?”

Black glanced at Brydon, who looked at the ground.

“Just got some business with Sergeant Merrick.”

The kid nodded conspiratorially.

“Mmmmm, I gotcha, I gotcha, sir. Hooah. Officer business.”

He raised his cigarette in a toast.

“Well, welcome to our humble abode.”

Black raised his own and dipped his head.

He was content to listen to the soldiers smoke and joke, but no one besides Hill seemed able to relax with him there. The taciturn Bosch said little, as usual, and kept eyeballing Black. His friend from the guard shack stared off into the night awkwardly. Brydon examined the stone slab and seemed to wish to be invisible. The snipers for their part had never met Black before. Soldiers as a rule don't loosen up around officers they don't know.

“How did Traynor die?” he said to no one in particular, but looking straight at Brydon.

The medic looked up, surprised, catching Black's eye briefly before looking away again.

“Aw, sir,” said one of the snipers. “You sure you wanna know that one?”

“Hit me.”

The sniper shook his head, took a long pull on his smoke, and told it.

“It was when they first took this ground,” he said, gesturing at the rock around them. “All this glorious little tidbit of shitty land here that we're sitting on.”

“Okay.”

Vega, he explained, was still brand-new at that point. No one had gone much past there, and the platoon came under frequent attack whenever it tried to. Word came down from headquarters that they needed to find high ground to lay in an O.P. between Vega and Darreh Sin.

“They needed a squad,” the sniper said. “A volunteer squad, to move fast and light and identify a location. Then air assets would come and secure it.”

“Traynor's squad.”

“You got it, sir.”

The sniper looked around at his buddies.

“That was a tight nine guys,” he said, shaking his head. “Knew each other's girls and hung out all the time off-duty and all that shit. Kinda weird, honestly.”

Somebody chuckled.

“Not, like, gay weird,” the sniper continued, “but anyway, you know how it goes with squads. Sooner or later everything kinda breaks down all onesie-twosie, just each dude with his coupla buddies. Not those dudes. They were like nine freaking brothers.

“So Traynor's the junior guy. E-two private, got to the unit, like, three weeks before they deployed, and here he is trying to hold his own with dudes that are practically like family.”

They scouted the ridges and passes for a day before they found the site. It was perfect. They made camp for the night.

They hadn't seen a soul up there. But someone had seen them. Someone was ready. As soon as day broke, they were attacked, by a significantly larger force.

“They never even knew who it was,” the sniper said. “Taliban, or what? Never knew how they had got seen or how the enemy laid so much heat on 'em so quick.”

The situation rapidly became untenable. Nine guys, barely dug in, with only the weapons they could carry up to the heights of the mountains. There was no chance. Too many attackers with too many heavy weapons and rockets, pushing in around and below them. Multiple guys were wounded immediately.

Under heavy fire, the squad managed to climb higher and drag the wounded up to the ridgeline. They called for air support to keep them alive and MEDEVAC—medical evacuation—helicopters for the wounded.

Attackers pressed them from below, now from both sides of the mountain, lobbing rockets and grenades up onto the ridge and resisting all efforts by the Americans to drive them back.

Most of the squad at this point were either incapacitated or already dead. The attacking force, whoever it was, could taste it coming. The complete overrun and annihilation of an American position. That didn't happen every day.

An attack helicopter arrived and did what it could. It was hard to pick out the attackers in the wooded slopes, and the chopper itself kept coming under fire from the trees. The pilot had to keep pulling back. What he did see, he reported later.

He saw a cluster of Americans on the ridgeline. Only one really was moving. But the one guy was racing back and forth frenetically across the mountaintop, from one edge of the ridge to the other. He moved like a madman, sending grenades and machine-gun fire down into the treeline, keeping up as much flash and noise as he could to convince the attackers that there was still a fighting force up there.

“Traynor,” said Black.

“You know it, sir.”

The MEDEVAC bird arrived. Its pilot was a madman too.

“Dude had the balls to descend,” the sniper said, pointing back over his shoulder. “Fucker came down over the summit and flew right down the ridgeline at about twenty-five damn feet. He was so low nobody could get an angle to fire up at him.”

Traynor didn't get on the helicopter.

The MEDEVAC pilot didn't know what the other pilot had seen, which was that there was only one person left fighting on the mountaintop. Otherwise his crew would have made Traynor get on. The pilot only knew that the place was hot and they had critical wounded to get out.

Traynor helped the crew drag three wounded on board and watched it go.

Later, after it was all over, the MEDEVAC crew reported that they had asked Traynor how many guys were left on the mountain with him. Standing there in the rotor wash, he just shouted, “We're good,” and ran back to the fight.

But the other pilot, the one flying the attack helicopter, could see only one American moving on the mountaintop after the MEDEVAC bird left. Everyone else with him was dead.

Traynor kept racing around the mountaintop, keeping up the fireworks display, raiding his buddies' bodies for ammunition and grenades.

“How'd it end?” Black asked.

“The Apache finally had to bail,” the sniper said, “but Sergeant Caine saw what happened next.”

“Caine?”

“Yeah. He was coming with the Q.R.F. from Vega.”

Quick reaction force. The rescue squad.

“Everyone was broke off from hustling the whole way up the mountain from Vega,” he said, thumbing the black air behind him. “Except Sergeant Caine. You know how he is in the mountains. Freaking machine.”

Black thought back to the harrowing climb back from Darreh Sin, with Caine seemingly not even winded, haranguing everyone to speed up.

“He climbs ahead of the rest of the Q.R.F., and he's coming down the ridgeline over the summit up there.”

He shook his head.

“Thirty seconds too late. Saw the rocket land right under Traynor's freaking feet.”

“Oh.”

“Vaporized his ass,” the sniper said glumly. “Sergeant Caine couldn't even find some damn chunks of him to stick in his coffin.”

Everyone was silent. The guard tower soldiers from Vega had been rapt.

“Best part,” the sniper told them, “none of those dudes Traynor put on the MEDEVAC bird even made it.”

He examined his cigarette, which had nearly died while he'd been telling the story. He sucked it back to life and shook his head.

“Losing Traynor was rough on Sergeant Caine, man. He liked the kid. Kinda took him under his wing.”

“If everybody else on the mountain was dead,” the first soldier asked, “why didn't Traynor get on the MEDEVAC?”

“Yeah, he coulda been on that bird and outta there,” the sniper answered. “He knew he was probably fucked. But he wasn't gonna leave his buddies' bodies to get fucked up and desecrated and shit, and he wasn't gonna take a space on a MEDEVAC from a dude that was still alive, no matter how hurtin' and critical the guy might-a been.”

“Damn.”

“Damn right. Hardly knew those dudes for two weeks before they deployed, but he laid it down without blinkin'.”

The sniper eyed Black.

“That, sir, is loyalty,” he said. “Your boys is your boys, even if you just met 'em.”

He took a theatrical drag as the other sniper nodded his approval.

“Y'all got that on the officer side of the house?”

Black gave him a look that, to his surprise, made the kid shut his trap. No one else said anything.

Black's mind wandered, out among the mountain spaces. Hill's voice brought him back.

“Lucky Traynor,” Hill said quietly.

“What?” asked the first soldier.

“Taliban, or whoever the fuck, done him a favor.”

Everyone looked at him like he was nuts.

Hill stubbed his smoke out and got a fresh one. He put out his feet and leaned back in his camp chair, surveying his audience. Making them wait for it.

“Saw a thing on the news, a few years back,” he said. “Sixtieth anniversary of Pearl Harbor, right? They're talking about this dude who was the only survivor of one of the ships that got sunk there.”

He lit up.

“Wasn't one of the bigger ships, right? Didn't have a whole lot of guys on it, but he was the only one that made it out.”

“Okay,” said the soldier.

“Dude was thirty at the time. Been in the Navy a little bit. News story was about how he went out to Hawaii on the anniversary, for the first time ever since the war. You know, old codger tour group with the blue hats and shit.”