In the Valley (39 page)

The shrink relaxed. “Good. One last question, then I will allow you to return to your duties.” He paused. “Do you think that God speaks to you?”

Paul thought it was a ridiculous question on its face. Then he paused. In battle, at the worst of times, he had felt the presence of God. He couldn’t explain the feeling, but it was so. He spoke. “No.” It was a bald-faced lie. Paul had indeed felt that God had spoken to him.

The shrink had the questions answered; he had checked the blocks in his standard force combat-trauma questionnaire. Paul knew that if this guy had wanted to dig deeper, he would have found all sorts of stuff. But the force didn’t want that, so this guy skimmed the surface only.

“Well, Captain Thompson, I think that for a combat soldier in the midst of hostilities, you are about as well-adjusted as my parameters call for. Do you have anything else you care to add?”

Nice, thought Paul. Nice open-ended question at the end. The interrogator gives the subject just enough rope to hang himself after all.

“No, sir, nothing to add.”

The shrink from combat trauma gave a funny little smile and excused himself. Paul watched his free ride to Jade walk off. It would have been so easy, he
thought. All he had to do was speak his mind, and he would be on a shuttle, flying away from all of this, away from Kill-a-Guy, away from the Baradna.

But Paul couldn’t make it that easy. He still had a job to do. He forked up another mouthful of biscuit.

A
fter another day’s worth of missions, the colonel summoned Paul into his office. As usual when a junior gets called into the domain of his superior, Paul wondered what was up. Paul walked into the room and the colonel waved him to take a seat.

“Paul, you know I think you’ll make a good commander as you go forward in your career, and I wanted to take this opportunity to give you a quick counseling session so you’ll know what a senior commander faces going into battle.” The colonel shifted in his seat and he rubbed his eyes. He looked like what he was, a very tired man.

“Remember when I watched you guys fight at Pashto Khel?” Paul nodded. How could he forget?

“Let me tell you how the fight looked from my perspective, and then I want you to think, really think, upon what it is to send men to die. It will make you a better officer.” The colonel’s mouth twisted in a half smile. “Or, it will make you a nervous wreck.” He gave a sad chuckle. “The two things are not mutually exclusive.” With a long inhalation, the colonel began his tale.

He was up on the ridge overlooking Pashto Khel. The colonel wished he were down there in the valley, moving with First and Second Companies to encircle the village. But as much as he wanted to be down there, he knew his
proper role was in staying up on the ridge, overseeing yet another battalion-scale combat operation.

He was suited up, in case his guys below needed fire support. He was also providing micro coverage for the whole operation. He had the air-control bubbas with him. With three armored suits, there didn’t need to be that many of them up on the ridge.

The colonel was determined to stay as hands-off as he could in this operation; the Juneaus needed to gain confidence that they could do these types of operations with minimum to no force support. His goal was to leave behind a confident and combat-tested Juneau Army unit that was ready for independent operations when his team’s tour was over. Today’s show would go a long way toward seeing if his goal could possibly be met.

On his halo he could see that First Company was in the lead going down the river channel and that Second Company was bringing up the rear. He had walked on foot, unsuited, during the first Pashto Khel operation, and he knew very well what conditions the men down there were dealing with.

He watched as the two companies made it to the bridge and split off. Every now and then, he would slave feeds from either Thompson’s or Green’s feeds, just to get a worm’s view of the events unfolding. He saw the cliff that Second Company encountered and decided to just be quiet and see what solution they’d find; if they hustled, they could still make their time hack.

He looked in on Green’s feed. First Company didn’t have the same issue, and they were filing off to the east of the village on schedule. On his visual was a glowing green square in the village down below. The glowing shape was his halo’s way of saying, “X marks the spot.” That was where intel said Commander Mohammed’s house was. It looked as if Second Company was going to come nearer to it than First Company would, but it was going to be close. The colonel tracked the progress of Second Company across the field; he watched Z-man fall down. He held his breath.

He let it out when he saw Thompson help Z to his feet, and both men moved out. Glancing back over to First Company, he saw that they were almost in position, while Second Company was still moving out to the village.

If First Company was detected before Second Company could get in place, then they were going to have squirters, and the whole operation would be for naught. Commander Mohammed, thought the colonel, has to die.

He watched as the men from Second Company climbed over a wall, one by one. He figured that wasn’t much fun. Then he saw them move up to the village wall and begin to go east and west, forming their part of the cordon.

Something caught his eye. Two figures were standing still; it appeared one of them was squatting. The colonel zoomed in and read the tags above their images. It was Z and Thompson. Thompson was the one squatting. Don’t tell me he’s shitting, thought the colonel. A snort escaped his mouth.

Fox spoke up. “What’s up, sir?”

“Nothing, Fox, just Thompson taking a shit during an operation—that’s all.”

The men shared a chuckle.

The colonel watched as Second Company’s line shook itself out. The cordon was being formed, just about on time. It was 0509 local.

Gunfire sounded from the village below.
Braap, popopopop. Pop
. The colonel checked his visual; his halo confirmed shots fired just about on top of Thompson’s position.

The colonel said to Fox, “Call in a TIC to higher, Fox. Second Company has made contact.”

“Roger, sir.” Fox started talking into his halo; he was already calling a shuttle in. There were troops in contact, or TIC.

A ball of dread formed itself in the colonel’s stomach. What if Thompson or Z got hit? He did a quick check of their vitals. Both their hearts were still beating. He let out a sigh of relief but knew the dance had hardly started.

With an effort of will, he decided against slaving to Thompson’s feed; it would be enormously distracting, and he needed to monitor the entire operation. Besides, he decided to give Thompson five minutes to get sorted out, and then he would call.

Boomboom!
came from the village below. Checking his halo, he confirmed what his ears told him was the case. Some asshole was throwing around an antiarmor rocket down below. He checked a little deeper into the matter. Yes, that had been the shitheads firing.

A little counter on his display was tallying shots fired, with bad guys in red and good guys in green. The numbers were moving so fast they were blurred. The colonel continued to watch. Finally, a glance at the clock told him five minutes had passed.

He called Thompson. He asked him what was going on, and he laughed to himself when Thompson told him deadpan that “angry homeowners” were shooting at him. He asked Thompson if he needed flares. The lieutenant, deadpan again, said he knew where the bad guys were and didn’t need illumination. The colonel finally asked him to call back when he had the situation under control and went offline.

The colonel zoomed back out and took a look at the overall picture again.

Some First Company bubbas had joined in on the shooting. There was a hell of a lot of lead going toward the targeted house. The sky was lightening. Just as the colonel noticed the sky, an antiarmor rocket peeled its way straight up into the sky and detonated at its five-hundred-meter self-destruct point. Around the same time, a bullet from down below went past his position with a Frisbee noise.

Things were hot down there. The colonel was sick with fear for his men, and he hated not being down there in the thick of things. Oh, he thought, if I were a captain again. But he was not. He was a colonel. He was doing his duty, even though he hated it. He was that kind of soldier.

He pinged Mike back at Kill-a-Guy. “One-Three, this is Five.”

Mike came back right away. He had been monitoring the situation via halo link. “Go ahead, Five.”

“One-Three, we have a troops in contact in Pashto Khel.”

The colonel imagined he could hear Mike curse over the halo connection. “No shit, Five. What are your instructions?”

“One-Three, I’ve got a shuttle inbound to Kill-a-Guy as we speak; hop on it and come down here.”

“What’s its estimated time of arrival, Five?” Yes, Mike was wide awake, now.

The colonel looked over at Fox. Fox held up seven fingers.

“Seven Mikes, One-Three. Better hustle. Out.”

The colonel had just gotten off of the halo connection with Mike when Paul called back. Thompson gave a decent SITREP and filled in the missing spots in the colonel’s situational awareness. Satisfied with Thompson’s report, he called Green.

Green reported some firing in his sector, but things were obviously quieter over there. The colonel had already figured out that the main effort was mostly taking place in Paul’s section of the line, but it was nice to talk to Green—it was the guy’s first basic dismounted movement, after all.

The colonel thought about it and then decided it had made a nice break-in for ol’ Green. He smiled at himself a little.

He was still damn nervous that one of his guys would take a bullet. It was a given that the Juneaus would take casualties, but he was vastly more concerned with his team.

Mike called and confirmed he was on a shuttle. They were inbound; the combat shuttle’s call sign was “Reaper One-Two.” Check, the colonel thought. It was always nice to have the extra firepower if you needed it. He didn’t think the shuttle would shoot, but from what he gathered from below, they were definitely going to need the dust off.

Paul called back. He said he was going to start moving down the line with Bashir and that Second Company had wounded. Damn, the colonel thought, I must be clairvoyant.

The shooting definitely seemed to be easing off, and the colonel was beginning to wonder whether they were going to catch Commander Mohammed. After all, all Shithead had to do was drop his weapons and go hide out in some person’s house. If he did that, the battalion’s chances of catching him would go through the floor.

Just then, he heard an intense burst of firing from down below. He wondered what that was all about. He zoomed his halo in on the place where the firing was coming from, and he saw Paul’s and Bashir’s tags over there.

He checked Paul’s vitals again—still breathing. He wondered what the firing was all about. There appeared to be some men lying in a heap: a few of them were probably dead, and a couple were wounded. As he watched, some Juneau soldiers went up to them and took their weapons and appeared to be stripping off the dead men’s clothes. There was some kind of fire or something, too.

He got a call from Paul. He could hear the weariness in his voice. Paul requested that he slave halo feeds, and the colonel looked through Paul’s eyes at the dead and wounded men. They had gotten Commander Mohammed.

Good job, thought the colonel, and he told Thompson so. The two men talked for a while. Then Thompson had to go again; there were some things happening that he had to get a handle on.

The colonel looked over at Fox, who was talking to the shuttle. Butter was pulling security and was standing by in case Fox needed help. When Fox got off his halo with the shuttle, the colonel spoke.

“Well, Fox, it looks like my guys might have pulled this one off.”

“Yeah, it sure does, sir. Hell of a lot of fireworks, though.”

“Yeah, there was quite a show, all right.”

Butter spoke up. “We had ringside seats, sir, not like the last one when we were pinned down in that fuckin’ valley.”

The colonel let out a sigh of relief. Maybe he was being premature, but it looked like his guys were going to live to fight again. Maybe. He felt a little of the psychic boulder that had been sitting on his shoulders lift. The colonel had feared for his men’s lives, but he was willing to sacrifice them if need be. Such a responsibility was a heavy load for one man to shoulder.

With a sigh, the colonel finished his tale. Paul looked at him and noticed the dark rings under his eyes.

“All of us are expendable, Paul. But the commander must make his expenditures wisely.”

Paul chewed on his words before he spoke. “When I go on to higher command, sir, I won’t forget.” In breach of the team’s custom, Paul stood up and
saluted the man from whom he had learned so much. The colonel returned his salute. With much to think about, Paul turned and left his office. As he walked away, he considered the old Japanese saying; “Duty is heavier than a mountain, while death is lighter than a feather.” Some burdens, thought Paul, are easier to bear than others.