In the Valley (31 page)

Paul pulled on the roots of a tree and heaved himself over another obstacle. He looked up and saw he was at the top of the hill, and Second Company guys were swarming around the doorway into the compound. Maktar was fucked.

“Five, this is Two-Three.”

“Go ahead, Five.” The colonel’s visual looked calm.

“Five, be advised: Second Company has gained the top of the hill, and it looks like the Juneaus are preparing to assault Maktar’s compound.”

“Roger, Two-Three, I have slaved your feed. Be advised: stay back, and let the Juneaus do the work. Good fucking job, Two-Three. I have One-Three with me; we have secured the area to the west of the hill.”

Paul looked at his feed and saw that the team and Juneau forces had drawn a neat cordon around Maktar’s fortress, and the AD bot had secured the rear. Paul had no idea how things had worked out as well as they had, but everyone involved had earned their paychecks that day.

Gunfire coming from the house picked up in volume. Paul looked over and saw that the Juneaus were rushing the fortress, spraying bullets as they went. Several dead fighters lay sprawled around the courtyard in front of the house. If they had been wounded when Second Company came up the hill, they weren’t by the time Paul got there. Z had been busy earlier, but it looked like there would only be fatalities from here on out.

Paul pinged the AD bot and got a total from it. So far, it had zapped eighteen bad guys. It was looking to be a very successful day. First, though, thought Paul, I have to live through it. There was still gunfire coming from within the house, and Paul’s face could always stop a stray round.

Paul called Z over. It was time to go into the compound, see what there was to see, and report in to the colonel. They moved to the door. Some excited Juneaus were talking about men they had killed inside. Paul asked them if there were any wounded; they shook their heads.

Just then, by the doorway, Bashir came out of the compound. “Paul, my friend, we have gloried in battle today! My men have taken this place from Maktar; we have killed his fighters! Come—you must see what we have captured!”

Taking Paul’s hand, Bashir guided him into Maktar’s compound. Paul expected to see a grisly sight—dead bodies sprawled everywhere—but the inner compound was only littered with shell casings and debris. Bashir, when asked, said the dead guys were in the upper floors of the house.

Paul took him at his word. He had no desire to go poking at corpses. Besides, Bashir had something more interesting than dead guys to show him.

First, a grinning soldier displayed a no-kidding recoilless rifle for him. Paul never expected to see a museum piece like that on a modern battlefield, but this was a locally produced piece, good enough for Juneau’s internecine combat. Besides, he suspected that this was the monster that had hit the house he was in earlier.

Paul smiled grimly. The operators of the little cannon were dead now, and he was not.

Bashir tugged his hand insistently. “My friend, I must show what else we found! Come; come.” Bashir led him to the entranceway of a little room.

Paul took one look inside and turned to Bashir. “No one is to come into this room until I have checked it for booby traps.”

The room was piled to the ceiling with ordnance and bomb-making materials. It was dangerous as hell, and Paul thought it might be rigged to blow if someone started messing around with the materials.

“Yes, I will see to it that no one goes in.” Bashir looked sincere, especially after Paul told him of his concerns.

If that room blew, a considerable chunk of the fortress would be gone, and Paul would blow up with it. That struck him as an undesirable outcome. “Good. I have to report this to the colonel.”

“Five, this is Two-Three.”

The colonel appeared in his visual again and motioned for him to continue.

“Five, did you see what I saw just now?”

“Yeah, I slaved your feed. I say you and Z-man clear out of there and wait in the courtyard for a bit, in case someone sets something off.”

A crash sounded out behind Paul. He turned and looked: some asshole had gone into the room and was throwing cases of explosives out of the windows!

Paul didn’t even bother to talk to Bashir about it. “Roger, Five. Moving to the courtyard.” He gathered up Z and waited outside to see if something went boom.
Shaken, Paul finally had time to reach into his pouch and pull out his trusty pack of Fortunates. He shook one out and lit it. He reckoned that if by the end of the near-cig nothing had exploded, then chances were good that nothing would.

Z sat by a dinosaur tree in silence, his eyes far away. He looked as if he was a bathtub, with the water slowly draining out. Paul got it. But they couldn’t let their guard down yet; there was still gunfire behind the house—the AD bot had spoken just a minute ago.

Paul checked the overhead feed again; the colonel was coming up the hill. Mike was running the show down below; he was consolidating the vehicles and people down there for the exfiltration.

Paul knew he had to go back into the house to inventory the explosives there. His smoke was done; it was time to get back to work. He gathered up Z and walked back in. A pile had formed in the courtyard; it was nothing but munitions and explosives.

Holy shit, thought Paul. Standing outside the compound probably wouldn’t have helped if that stuff had gone up. Paul walked over to the pile and started examining stuff. There were scads of bullets, for starters. Paul spotted a dozen or so cases of old force “Bouncing Bettys,” bounding mines. There were Sinobloc antiarmor mines. There were cute little toe poppers. Hell, these guys had had everything but the kitchen sink at their disposal. Paul wondered where it had come from. And he didn’t doubt that Commander Maktar had been supplying shitheads all through the Baradna River valley. There was a mountain of crap here.

The colonel walked up, covered in perspiration from the climb. Strange, Paul didn’t remember having been tired coming up the hill. Adrenaline could do wonderful and mysterious things to the body.

“Good work, Paul. Now we have to figure out what to do with this shit; we can’t just leave it here.” He cast his eyes on the pile. There had to be over a ton of explosives and ammo there.

Some Juneaus cheered inside the house. Both men looked toward the upper windows of the place. The colonel shrugged. “Sounds like they’re having fun in there.”

Paul nodded. “Probably trashing Maktar’s house. Fuck him.” He continued, “Well, sir, we can’t just blow this shit in place—who knows how many civilians are down there in the village. It would be easy if the shuttles would just stick a Hadesfeuer in here, though, like we did at Pashto Khel.”

The colonel spat. “Fucking shuttles. We asked them to hit this place when we were pinned down, and they wouldn’t do it.”

Ah-ha, Paul thought. He had wondered about that. “Why’s that, sir?”

The colonel looked disgusted. “These assholes were using kids as ammo bearers, and the shuttles wouldn’t shoot, not even when these guys were shooting at them. The ROE would have covered them; I told them so.”

Paul just shook his head. Sometimes things worked out like that. “Well, at least the groundcars came up to support.”

“Yeah, they did. You should see three-four, though; Crusty tore it up in a creek or something.”

Paul groaned. Vehicle 3-4 was the groundcar the colonel and he had ridden in during a lot of missions. Keeping it tip-top was one of Paul’s priorities. Paul hadn’t seen it yet, but he would. He feared it wouldn’t be pretty.

The provincial police arrived. Bashir started talking with them, and they took over the scene. Second Company gathered themselves up and started marching down, each man carrying ordnance. Paul came down off the hill with Z and the colonel; he was exhausted. His halo clock said 1510 local—he had no idea where the day had gone. When they got to the bottom, Mike was waiting on them.

The colonel called the shuttles and had them set the AD bot’s self-destruct sequence. It had done its job well. Two minutes later, it blew. The explosion echoed off the canyon walls.

Now that the AD bot wasn’t keeping station anymore, First Company was ordered to sweep the southern side of the hill; Colonel Fasi wanted to see if Commander Maktar was among the dead. Mike and Stork went with them and looked. Half an hour later, they had a positive ID from the halo network. Maktar the Shithead was dead.

It’s a shame, thought Paul, that I couldn’t have driven Najibullah the Bomb Maker into that field with the AD bot. He smiled and reached into his pouch with the cigs.

Paul and the colonel hung out and discussed the day while Mike and First Company completed the sweep.

“My halo says thirty-one shitheads have been accounted for so far.” The colonel drew in on his smoke and leaned his head back, exhaling.

“Yeah, sir, I have to say that AD bot was a good call. Those things scare the shit out of me.” Paul shuddered inwardly.

“It was a good day’s work. Now, if we can just get out of here alive, I’ll stamp the day with my seal of approval.” The colonel flicked ashes and took another drag. Paul checked his feed: First Company was headed back in; the sweep was complete.

Shadows were beginning to stretch across the narrow valley they were in. The canyon walls were turning that peculiar purple color they get before sunset. It was time to go, before it got dark and people got crazy ideas in their heads.

The mission was complete and it was essential to start moving before nightfall. While it was improbable that local dissident forces would regroup after the spanking they had just received, it could be the case that some holdouts were
waiting for darkness to fall to start bleeding the battalion along the route back to Firebase Atarab. It was time to leave what had been Maktar’s hill.

Mike returned with First Company. He said not a word—there was a lot of death on the southern side of the hill. With halo-controlled precision, the battalion turned toward their vehicles.

When Paul walked up to the circle of groundcars, parked in an improvised lot that had been a sheep field, he saw Crusty. Or rather, Crusty saw him.

Crusty held up his hands, high-fiving the air. “Way to fuckin’ go, sir! Good fuckin’ job!”

Paul smiled. He didn’t see what the big deal was—his guys had done their job, and so had he. Paul had some words for Crusty.

“Good job to you, too, for bringing those vehicles up. Walking out of this place would have sucked big dicks.” Paul meant it with all his heart. He thought about sitting down in his nice gunner’s seat and watching a sector, suited and climate controlled—the thought was intoxicating after the day he had had.

Paul watched the Juneau Army guys file past with their captured explosives, heading toward their unarmored groundcars. He didn’t envy them.

After smoking yet another Fortunate, he climbed into his groundcar, suited up, and got ready to go. After a few minutes, the colonel hopped in and suited up. Paul heard him groan with pleasure and fully sympathized. Sitting in a groundcar seemed a safe luxury; it had been a long day. The colonel put out a call.

“All team vehicles, give me a thumbs-up when you’re ready.” As usual, the colonel’s tones were clipped and coolly professional. From what Paul had understood, though, the colonel had definitely gotten heated up with some people earlier on in the day: fully understandable, in Paul’s opinion.

All vehicles were ready. Mike’s vehicle led on the way out. They had to climb over a rock wall to get out. Paul held his breath; he thought they would flip the groundcar, but Stork, who was driving, managed to right the vehicle just in time. If they were almost flipping vehicles on the way out, Paul couldn’t imagine what it had been like for Crest to come to Kanaghat when the shooting was still happening, even though he had watched his feed.

Paul sat in his gunner’s seat and scanned. It was quite possible that some shithead would try to light them up on the way out.

Groundcar 3-4 had indeed taken damage on the way in. However, it seemed to be doing fine—despite its crunched fender and ripped-off exterior controls. There was nothing like a trip through a stream to tear up a vehicle.

Looking down the “road” that had been plowed through walls and houses, Paul whistled. It was a vehicular gauntlet. Just then, the truck lurched and slewed to the side. Paul’s halo visual lit up with a flashing icon:
TURRET AUTOMATIC CONTROL INOPERATIVE
. Shit—they needed their guns!

The colonel said, “Paul, get up there and run that gun manually.”

Paul was already moving. He undogged the hatch above him and stood up in his suit. The turret was spinning out of control. The barrel of the grenade launcher struck him full force.

Paul blacked out from the pain. If he had been unsuited, the turret would have ripped him in half. As it was, it really hurt. His halo diagnostics were scrolling a list of injuries on his lower right visual. He clicked them off and forced the barrel of the grenade launcher to the side.

While holding onto the barrel of the grenade launcher, he reached for the autocontrol-disconnect handle and yanked it. He felt the barrel move under his hand—the turret was free. He then popped open a recess in the turret and
popped the manual control handle out and spun it; the turret moved under manual control.

Whew, thought Paul, that sucked. But he had the gun back, albeit manually operated, with the sighting system slaved to his halo feed. Standing up through the hatch on the groundcar, he rotated the handle and brought the gun to bear on his sector.

“Guns up, sir.”

“Roger, Paul. Good work.”

And then Paul saw the tree. There was nothing he could do.

Next thing he knew, he was jammed up against the turret again, with wood chips all around him. His diagnostic icon was blinking again, and his whole body hurt. Reflexively, he stood up and tried to move the turret crank handle. It was frozen solid, with the gun and turret stuck at the one-o’clock position.

“Paul, what happened up there?”

“Sir, the gun is down. We hit a tree.”

“Shit. OK, stay up there in the hatch, and give us fires with your M-74 if we need it. Can you do that?”