In the Valley (14 page)

Paul closed the door and plopped down in the proffered chair. “What’s up, sir?” Paul queried.

“We just got some info down from FORSCOMJUN, and it ain’t pretty,” the colonel said with a calm expression.

“Turns out we have a false player in the local forces,” Green said as he popped a photo onto Paul’s halo. “Recognize this guy?” he asked.

Of course Paul did. It was Major Najibullah, the local provincial police’s head honcho. Paul had never liked the guy; he’d always had a greasy feel to him. Any time a Pashtun greeted you with open arms and held your hand, it was time to grip your knife even closer to your vest. That looked to be the case with Najibullah.

Apparently Paul’s instinctive feelings about this guy were well founded. Something was amiss if they were having this conversation about Najibullah. Paul was about to ask, but then he figured Green would tell him. And Green proceeded to do so.

“Some assets available to us in theater have passed along some halo intercepts from our Good Major,” Green started. He went on. “Apparently Major Najibullah is responsible for some of the bomb attacks here in our area of operations, including the one a couple of months ago, when Second Company was hit.” Green paused and looked at Paul. “I’m sure you remember that one, Paul.”

Hell yes, he did. Paul had an electric feeling course through him; his right hand started to twitch. That motherfucker, Paul thought. The next time he saw Najibullah, he was going to put a slug through his eye.

The colonel broke in. “Paul, I have the idea that other agencies are using Najibullah as an unwitting intel source. We are forbidden to take action against him—and, yes, I asked.” The colonel looked at Paul with a neutral, but unrelenting look. He continued, “I am expressly ordering you to take no action against Najibullah. Keep him at arm’s length, but do not kill him. If he gets taken down, we lose his intel on the dissident activities up in the Belt.”

The Belt—that was where First Company had been partying a bunch. Mike had just come back from there with Stork and Crest. “The Belt” was the team nickname for a string of villages along the Zudnok River. The villages were a dissident stronghold.

About every week there was some type of hostile activity there—whether it be a firefight, a bombing, reprisals against civilians, or a combination of all three. The Belt was bad juju, and it was the team’s home away from home, for now.

And here Paul was hearing that one of the drivers of dissident activity up there was Major Najibullah, the guy who was supposed to be fighting dissidents—unreal! And they couldn’t take him down.

Un-fucking-believable: as a line trooper, he had never dealt in these types of ambiguous situations. He had come to understand, however, that games like this were the norm in a counterinsurgency. This was the colonel’s bread and butter; he knew better than Paul how to deal with this kind of threat.

Paul fought down the murderous rage he felt. “You say I can’t do anything to this cocksucker, sir?”

The colonel looked at him with that same level gaze. “No, not a thing. Najibullah is a threat, but he’s an asset, too.” As the colonel said the words, Paul’s memory saw poor dead Nasrallah being carried past him in a shiny black bag, into the waiting maw of the transport. If Paul ever got the chance to kill
Major Najibullah, he would. The colonel saw the look in Paul’s eyes and just shook his head slightly, slowly.

They talked some more stuff over, upcoming operations and such. But none of it held Paul’s interest like the thought that Najibullah, a supposed comrade, had gunned for him, personally. And Paul had to go back to the Belt, where Najibullah held sway, tomorrow.

The situation was shocking, bizarre.

After the meeting broke up, Paul left the building, turned right, and went right back to the concrete patio he had been sitting at earlier, before he’d gotten the word about the police major. Paul sat right back down on the same green chair he had been seated in earlier. He stared at the mountain in the distance, only now it was more black than purple. He sighed and reached for another Fortunate. He thought about the near-cig brand name. Would Paul stay fortunate? He looked at the hand with the cigarette and remembered holding Najibullah’s hand with that selfsame appendage.

Lighting the near-cig, Paul inhaled, looked at the mountain and thought, What a hell of a strange situation. Resigned to what he had, he took another drag and waited for the darkness to descend.

A week later, he and Second Company were camped out back in the Belt, at Firebase Kas Warnoz. The firebase, next to a village with no name, wasn’t much to look at. Second Company had built a seventy-five-by-seventy-five-meter base up on a hillock surrounded by the ubiquitous earthen baskets. On a step on the side of the hill, the advisors had carved out their own basket-encircled niche, with a machine-gun emplacement and an improvised toilet.

The niche answered the advisor team’s basic security needs, and kept them at arm’s length from their erstwhile allies up on the hill. Bashir slept in a little hut in the village about two hundred meters away from the firebase itself. He had a nice little spot there. Rank doth have its privileges, Paul surmised.

Juneau Army patrols routinely came through the area via the north-south road through the villages. Second Company was just one of the units that was tightening their grip on the Belt.

Paul and Z were hanging out in the niche waiting for Second Company to come walking by. They were going out on a presence patrol that day, over to the river.

The Belt was really a linear feature on a plain of the Zudnok River. On one side of the river delta, the western side, was the north-south unpaved road that straddled the side of a cliff. Along that road was a string of villages: some with dissident sympathizers, some without.

The villages tended to be dusty affairs with the road entering from the south and exiting from the north. They would usually have a few trees (terrestrial and dinosaur trees), irrigation ditches, rice paddies, and goats. Most villages looked a lot alike to Paul, especially in this area of the Belt.

The western side was Paul’s side; the eastern side was where the main provincial road passed through, and that was someone else’s problem.

As it was, Paul had his hands full on the western bank. As he watched, Second Company’s column was marching down the hill in single file, like a line of ants. As they passed by, Paul and Z joined the column.

Their suits were balled up in the stowage position of the locked ground-car they had ridden out from Kill-a-Guy in. Today, they were unsuited and unarmored; it seemed to Paul that that was the case most of these days.

The patrol was a presence patrol, and the colonel was riding virtual shotgun via halo link. The only real purpose of a presence patrol was just to get out of the firebase and chat with the locals. Presence patrols tended to make the dissidents nervous and restricted their freedom of movement. After all, such patrols were carried out at random. Paul had gone on them at night, during the dawn, and in broad daylight.

Today, as Paul was swinging along with Second Company, he pinged Bashir. He didn’t see him. He got a response back on his halo: Bashir was up ahead with a friend, a certain Major Najibullah, who wanted to go along on the patrol.

Paul immediately got a sick feeling in his gut. That motherfucker. And Paul couldn’t warn Bashir that they were clutching a snake to their breasts—the colonel had been specific on that point.

In fact, not even Z-man, trailing behind him, knew—just Paul. As Bashir and Najibullah neared, the knowledge almost choked Paul’s breathing off. Ever since the colonel had told Paul of Najibullah’s treachery, Paul had been having a recurring dream.

In the dream, Paul was sitting in a circle with Second Company’s leadership. Najibullah was sitting to his right, and Z-man was sitting to his left. There was a big plate of rice set down in the middle of the group, and young boys were serving the soldiers chai tea.

The soldiers would reach into the big plate of rice with their fingers, roll the rice into balls in their hands, and pop it into their mouths. There was a plate of succulent goat bits, too, floating in a pool of lamb’s fat. Every now and then, someone would grab a piece of naan bread, dip it into the fat, and eat it.

The food was delicious in Paul’s dream. The soldiers were smiling and laughing, well at their ease amid the feast.

Paul, in his dream, looked over at Najibullah, who was grinning and laughing along with everyone else. Paul could see every detail of his face—the slightly bulging, red-rimmed eyes, the cruel little smile that Paul knew was upturned in delight at the prospect of causing the demise of his present company, the pinched point right between his black eyes.

Paul concentrated on that point as he reached to his chest-harness holster, pressed the stud that held his pistol in place, and slid his pistol quickly and
fluidly out of the holster. His thumb flicked the safety off his pistol as he swung the barrel right toward the spot between Najibullah’s eyes. As the end of his barrel and the tip of his front sight coincided with that fleshy spot between the Bomb Maker’s eyes, Paul pulled the trigger.

A black spot appeared on a very surprised Najibullah’s face, with a slightly singed area around the hole. Blood splashed out from the back of his fucking head, along with chunks of bone and brain.

Najibullah collapsed away from Paul, the surprised expression frozen on his face. The other eaters recoiled in horror.

Paul smiled in his dream and put another round in Najibullah’s chest, his clothes puffing slightly with the impact of the second round.

Paul dreamed of killing the bastard bomb maker, over and over. And here he was, Najibullah the Shithead, standing with his potbelly next to Bashir. They were discussing the day’s patrol as Paul reached their position, on a dike next to the main village irrigation ditch.

As if reading Paul’s mind, the colonel’s icon popped up. He must have been monitoring the patrol from Camp Kill-a-Guy. “Steady, Paul,” the colonel said. It was good advice for this totally fucked-up situation.

“The peace of God upon you, my friends,” Paul said with not a trace of the murder in his heart cropping up in his voice. Bashir and Najibullah both greeted Paul warmly in return, and together they plotted the day’s events.

God, if Bashir only knew that everything he was doing with this bastard—this Najibullah—was going straight to the dissident’s halos. It was an unsettling thought. At least if Najibullah is with us, Paul thought, we shouldn’t be ambushed. But on the other hand, nothing would be accomplished, either.

Second Company moved out along a dike next to a huge rice paddy, with the bomb maker, Najibullah, in tow. The dike went east and eventually led to
the Zudnok River. Second Company reached a village later in the patrol along the rice fields. The village’s elder males, as usual, came out to greet them.

It was a ratty-looking delegation: three guys in brown and tan robes with either skullcaps or muffin hats on their heads. Looking at Najibullah, they asked if the men would perhaps like to eat, to rest.

Bashir and Najibullah both thought that was a fine idea, and under the spreading shade of a dinosaur tree in the merciless heat, Second Company sat down in a series of circular groupings while the village boys brought the men their food and refreshments.

As usual, Paul sat in the command circle with Bashir and Najibullah. A plate of food was brought out. The meal consisted of rice, lamb, and naan. Najibullah sat next to Paul, and they held hands as Najibullah began telling stories.

Holding hands with guys was something Paul had had to get used to. Here on Juneau one did it a lot.

Suddenly, an unsettling feeling swept over Paul, an intense burst of déjà vu. He had to restrain himself mightily to keep his hand in Najibullah’s and not sweep out his pistol and end his life, just as it was in the dream.

Finally, the meal ended, and Second Company got up to leave. Paul, as had been his custom, offered a Pan-American flag patch to one of the village youths. All of a sudden, the light changed behind the boy’s eyes. “This patch—I dare not take it.” His eyes flickered to Najibullah. Immediately, Paul pinged the discussion to the colonel and got an answering ping back that he was monitoring.

“Why not?” asked Paul.

Once again, the boy’s eyes went to Major Najibullah. “This thing—it is forbidden for us in the village to have it. I will be beaten.”

Without another word, Paul stuck the flag patch back above his shoulder pocket, turned, and left with Second Company. He felt Najibullah’s eyes on his back all the way back to the firebase.

The colonel had seen the whole exchange, of course. One day, Paul vowed, Najibullah would get his.

A day later, and just before Second Company’s hitch in the field ended out at Kas Warnoz, Paul was sitting in the advisor niche and smoking a Fortunate. The day was nearing sunset, and a haze had settled over the rice fields and villages in the distance.

As usual, around this time of day, Paul was having a near-cig and giving his weapons a quick field clean. He was sitting in the position on top of the earthen baskets by the corner of their advisor niche with the M-241 machine gun propped in front of him. As one would expect of a machine-gun position, he had a pretty darn good view.

He heard a convoy of Juneau Army ground-cars approaching, about a klick away. Some donkeys wandered in the field between the firebase and the road with the approaching vehicles. The scene was serene, in that strange Juneauesque way.

He polished away on some piece of his weapon while glancing up every couple of seconds. He had his halo set on motion detect out to three hundred meters, so nothing was likely to sneak up on him. Still, he was never entirely relaxed. His hands would go polish-polish; his eyes would dart down to the object in question. He would take a drag off his near-cig. After that, he would scan the near distance, intermediate, and then far, in a series of visual steps that would repeat as long as he was on guard at their little outpost.

The convoy in the distance had reached the edge of the little village by the firebase, maybe eight hundred meters away. The lead vehicle, as Paul watched, disappeared in a huge puff of brown and black, with fire at its center. Half a second later, the
bang
reached Paul.