The Valley (10 page)

His build was slight, his hair short and blond, his complexion pale even in the secondary moonlight. He looked to be about nineteen, tops. He wore a private's rank.

The name tape on his fatigues read CORELLI.

Caine flipped his cigarette to the ground and stubbed it with a boot. He pulled his muscled frame up from the bench. Black stood too.

“This is Lieutenant Black,” he began, but before he could go further Corelli's eyes, wide and earnest on a searching face, darted involuntarily from empty space down to the center of Black's chest, registering the bar on the Velcro square.

They clicked forward again as his feet clapped together and he snapped to a salute.

“Put your fucking hand down!” Caine snapped, waving his own hand so aggressively Black thought he was going to reach right up and smack the soldier across the side of his head.

Judging from Corelli's flinch reaction, it looked like he thought so too.

“I told you, Lieutenant Pistone told you, don't fucking salute out here!” Caine harangued him. “You think it's different because there's a different L.T. standing in front of you?”

“No, Sar'nt!” replied the abashed Corelli, who had snapped back to his previous position.

“Annnnnywaaaayy,” Caine continued, speaking pointedly and deliberately as though to someone who was very slow. “This, once again, is Lieutenant Black. He is here from FOB Omaha. He will be here for a week. He will be conducting an investigation pursuant to Army Regulation Fifteen-Dash-Six. He needs a bunk.”

He pointed at Black's gear.

“Take his ruck, get the master key, and secure his ruck in Lieutenant Pistone's room.”

“Master key”
was sergeant lingo for a bolt cutter. Everything in the Army got padlocked, but the person with the key wasn't always around when you needed it. Sergeants ended up cutting open a lot of locks.

“Sergeant?”

Corelli's voice registered hesitation.

Black understood. Even a platoon leader who got no respect was still an officer. Corelli wasn't looking forward to being the one to break into an officer's quarters.

“Did I fucking stutter!?” Caine shouted.

Corelli flinched again.

“
He
ain't using it! Now take the lieutenant's shit!”

“Roger, Sar'nt!”

Corelli scrambled to grab up Black's ruck and sling it over his shoulder. Black didn't need or want anyone to carry his bag, but decided it wasn't the time to say so.

“Here, take his rifle too,” Caine said, extending his open hand out toward Black.

He saw Black hesitating this time.

“Ain't no use to you filled with mud, sir. You've still got your sidearm.”

He gestured down at the holster on Black's hip, which somehow had remained fairly clean.

Black's rifle was almost certainly nonfunctional at this point. He handed it to Caine, who handed it to Corelli.

“Secure that in the room with his ruck,” Caine told the soldier.

Corelli turned to go.

“Actually,” Caine said as though the thought had just occurred to him, “take it to the armory and clean it first. Then secure it.”

“Roger, Sar—”

“I'll clean it,” Black said flatly.

Only the dirtbaggiest of dirtbag officers would have ever consented to a soldier cleaning his weapon for him.

“All right,” Caine said to Corelli, eyeing Black. “The lieutenant likes to clean his own weapon.”

He leaned back against the wall.

“Secure his muddy weapon in the room.”

Corelli “roger”d again, apparently relieved to be dismissed. He sent a last glance toward Black and hustled off down the darkened corridor.

Caine turned to Black.

“Resident choirboy,” he explained. “Super religious. Good soldier, though. Put him in charge of the armory because he can actually count. Unlike some of these bubbas.”

Black nodded.

“Anyway, figured it makes sense to stick you in the L.T.'s room. One of the only private racks we got.”

Black was not going to complain about that.

“Well, shit, sir,” said Caine, stretching. “May as well give you the grand tour.”

—

Tajumal watched the two Americans disappear into the bowels of their outpost, then backcrawled into the bushes and sat back against the cold hillside. There was much to consider.

Why did they fight?

This one was easy. The one American had shouted at the other. Not in Tajumal's language. In the trade language of the cities, which Tajumal understood.

He thought the other was one of us, even though he wore American soldier clothes.

The Americans were ready for this tactic. Tajumal swelled with satisfaction.

Just as I told Qadir.

Stupid Qadir, who was probably squatting high above right now, somewhere on the opposite hillside, looking down at the wrong side of the American base with his rifle. Hotheaded Qadir, full of brash ideas and recycled schemes, who thought the talibs would respect him if he shot enough Americans who were foolish enough to walk about in the open, or blew himself up like the dumbest Arab
mujahideen.

Why would they care about a teenage boy who can kill only the stupidest and most worthless of the Americans?

Qadir, who treated Tajumal like an idiot and a child because he was a whole five years older. Who knew where to find the Americans' base but knew nothing more. Whose highest achievement would be to end his life in meat chunks on the mountainside. Who probably wouldn't even manage to take any Americans with him because they would see him coming a mile away.

Qadir does not know what I can do. Does not know who I am. He only knows a useless little boy he sees creeping around the mountains, which he thinks are
his
mountains. But he will know. And the talibs will know, and the Americans will know.

Qadir had some use. He had certain information Tajumal had needed to know. But Qadir didn't know what to
do
with that information.

I do.

With the Americans, the real fight was the battle of brains.

Which is why I watch, and I watch again, until I find the knowledge I need. Tonight I have found it. Once again, Father, you have guided me true. May you be proud in paradise. And may Sourabh, God's blessings upon him, play happily at your feet, and may you rub your fingers in his hair as you used to rub them in mine, and may he gaze up at you with all his love, forever.

Only Tajumal had been close enough to hear the shouting, to know that Qadir's latest plan was pointless. Only Tajumal had held firm, not fled at the commotion as Qadir would have done. And only Tajumal had seen the thing that was much more important, the thing Qadir could not have seen as he cowered up there on the wrong side of the valley in the dark.

The salute.

Only Tajumal knew what the others could not know. What would bring hope to all.

The officer has returned.

Praise to Father. Praise God.

I
t was bigger than he'd expected, and there seemed to be no open air anywhere.

He'd imagined the usual arrangement for one of these remote bases. Individual structures and outbuildings and fortifications scattered across a small area of open land, with the whole thing bounded around by a berm or maybe concertina wire. But wending their way through the various wings of the sprawling outpost, nearly everywhere Black and Caine traveled was underneath some kind of roof or overhead cover. A lot of it was fully indoors.

It had started the way most COPs did, Caine explained as they walked. Before Americans came, there was an existing structure, high on the hillside—a large and well-constructed Taliban chief's house. A sprawling mansion that doubled as a sort of meeting center.

When the first Army unit had come, Caine had been with it.

“That was a year and a month ago,” he said, walking alongside Black, their footsteps echoing off rough tile and stone walls. “We were livin' the high life back at Omaha like you.”

Black held his tongue.

“Then they rousted us out of there and sent us up the Valley,” Caine went on. “No one had been this far. We were looking for a good site for a COP to run interdiction on the routes these crazy jihadis use to come across from Pakistan.”

He pointed through the walls and downward as they walked.

“There's a town a little ways down below here, and here we are coming up the Valley and we get to the town and ask 'em, Where's the H.T.I.C.?”

Head Taliban In Charge.

“And they point up the hill. So we take a squad up the hill and we find this dude's house, just sitting up here on the side of the mountain behind a wall with nothing else around it. Like, a regular villa.”

He shook his head.

“Splendid isolation or whatever.”

They were walking now up a plywood hallway with fluorescent lights strung high at the seam of the wall and ceiling, which was itself made of plywood. Somewhere on the other side of a wall, a generator hummed peacefully in the night, its noise rising and fading as they passed.

“Anyway, he must not've been expecting us because he only had like two or three bodyguards in the place when we came. They made it easy too, because they started shooting at us, so we didn't even have to call it in and ask, Do we capture the guy or what? We just killed the bodyguards, and we killed the Taliban's ass because he was shooting at us too.”

“He didn't run?”

“Hell, no. Kinda surprised us, 'cause we figured as soon as we showed up and started layin' it on he'd just wanna, you know, un-ass the villa. But he freaking stayed put. Rifle in one hand, pistol in the other. Went down in a blaze of asshole.”

He chuckled at his own joke as they turned a corner, leaving the plywood behind. Their feet struck concrete. The walls in this corridor were hard and cold. A breeze found its way through a crack somewhere and whistled at them as they passed through.

“So afterwards we call it in to our command and tell 'em we found this big house. And when I say ‘house' I mean, like, brick and cement and tile.”

He bumped a fist along the wall as he walked. Black now noticed it was clean cinder block.

“Properly made,” Caine continued. “Not even a lot of stone in it like most of the crap construction they have here. And so we say we found this house and what do you want us to do? And command comes back: Hold the house.”

They stumped up two plywood steps between split-level corridors.

“And we're like, for how long? And they say: Until relieved.”

“Which was?”

“Two weeks,” Caine answered scornfully. “Two fucking weeks of holding this place on the fly. We weren't even a full platoon, even counting the squad that was down in the town, which was Sergeant Merrick's squad. He was here too.”

“What did you do?”

“We called Merrick's squad on the radio and we said get your asses up here, which they did, and we fucking hunkered down for the night, scared shitless. And we didn't sleep one wink because we had the joes out all night building machine-gun positions and setting Claymores and all that shit.”

“Wow,” Black said flatly, and meant it.

The modern military had a low tolerance for sending its soldiers into the kind of unplanned, uncontrolled, outnumbered, seat-of-the-pants situations that featured more prominently in older and more desperate wars. Nowadays that was a good way for senior officers to get relieved of duty and prosecuted for negligence.

They had stopped at a low concrete doorway with “C.P.” stenciled on it in black spray paint. Caine nudged the plywood door open with a boot and had to duck his head slightly to stick it through the entrance. Black followed suit. The hum of a box fan and the twinkling of electronic lights greeted him.

The command post. A radio room, essentially. Square, cinderblock walls, maybe ten feet side to side, no windows. Its floor was set a couple steps below the level of the passageway. Large topographic maps of the countryside lined the walls. An industrial desk sat in the middle of the room, making an L with a table containing multiple stacks of military radio equipment. From here whoever was on duty could talk to everyone inside the COP, from the guard towers to the aid station, and anyone outside it on patrol, as well as keep contact with 3/44's headquarters back on Omaha.

The only light came from a lamp on the desk and the winking green displays on the radio sets. The rest of the room was bathed in shadow and mostly empty, save for a rack with portable radios against the back wall and a cot in a dim corner to Black's right. Two guys could share a long overnight shift and split time sleeping.

A soldier in camouflaged pants and tan T-shirt slumped on his elbows at the radio desk, bleary-eyed, reading a paperback novel with spacecraft crossing trackless heavens on its cover.

“Hey, highspeed,” said Caine blandly.

Highspeed.
The timeless Army descriptor for a squared-away go-getter.
That is one highspeed soldier.
It could be used sincerely, or sarcastically, which is how Caine used it now, eyeing the schlubby sentinel.

“This is Lieutenant Black.”

One eyeball came off the page, registered Black's presence, and rejoined its colleague. The rest of the soldier remained still. Probably, Black figured, he was wondering when his buddy was gonna get back from the latrine or chow or wherever so he could rack out on that cot.

“Hooah,” the kid mumbled.

Caine pulled his head out and let the door shut. He continued trooping down the hall.

“‘Wow' is right,” he said, picking up their conversation where it had left off. “That was some fucking real-deal, old-school Vietnam firebase style, dump-your-ass-in-the-middle-of-nowhere-and-hope-for-the-best bullshit right there.”

“Out there flappin',” Black offered.

“Out. There. Flapping.”

Caine drew a long sniffle and spat in the dirt. They were passing through a brief open-air passageway walled by head-high blast barriers on either side. It served as a channel between one structure and another. Black could smell the trees and the dry air.

“Dudes that night were praying and shit,” he said as they ducked into the next part of the complex. “Writing their freaking
I'm sorry
notes on the backs of M.R.E. boxes and all that.”

The air was close again, more humid. Every corridor in the place seemed to be made from a different combination of materials than the last. Ammunition cans of various types, Black noted, were stacked in corners at regular intervals throughout the labyrinth.

“And don't think we didn't get attacked that very same night and every fucking day after,” Caine continued. “Two weeks, seven K.I.A.s, and pretty much everyone got hit at least once.”

Black imagined the desperation of the situation. Caine was right; it was like something out of another time.

“They had to send birds to drop ammo and M.R.E.s and water for us, every day. But we held that shit. And after two weeks the engineers got here, on a fucking helo . . .”

He spat again, with contempt.

“. . . and checked out the house.”

Army engineers specialized in building temporary roads, bridges, and barricades, and fortifying existing structures on the fly.

“What'd they say?” Black asked.

Caine snorted.

“They looked around and stroked their chins and made smart faces and said, ‘Hmm, solid masonry. Hmm, load-bearing members. A good core.' And all the shit I could've told them over the radio on day one. And then the bird came back and they got back on it and left, and our command said this is gonna be the COP. And we held it another five days until the engineer assets started getting here.”

Caine explained how the engineers started with the house, building around the big stone-and-cement structure as the core. They fortified it first and built off its existing sheds and outbuildings, then incorporated the masonry wall that surrounded it. They sandbagged up all its windows and emplaced portable “crow's nest” guard towers on the rooftop corners.

Then came generators, shipping containers for supplies, blast walls around the mortar pit, and all the usual stuff. By the end they had built a standard little outpost, a series of structures centered on the chief's house, all perched on the shelf of level ground against the steep hillslope.

It hadn't been enough. There was too much high ground all around it. The place was attacked constantly from the mountainsides.

Over the course of the past year, most anything that was not covered had gotten covered. Fortified pass-throughs were built between structures, outdoor areas were turned into indoor areas, rooftops were sandbagged, blast walls were set down everywhere.

Some of the work, the heavy stuff, had been performed by engineers after repeated insistence by Vega's sergeants and their headquarters. The rest had been done piecemeal by the soldiers themselves.

Now the place had grown to a sprawling, patchwork complex of passageways and chambers, a Russian dollhouse of buildings within buildings, additions atop combinations. A compound.

Black found the place fascinating. You never knew as you turned a corner whether you would still be in the same structure or someplace totally new, grafted together on the fly. He guessed that you would be hard-pressed, looking at it from the outside, to identify the original house which sat at its core.

Caine pointed out to Black that they were at that moment passing through what had formerly been a front hall and sitting area where the chief would receive guests. Black looked down and saw broad, ornate floor tiles.

“Why'd they call it Vega?” he asked.

“Who knows?” Caine replied blandly. “Naming stuff is officer business.”

Fair enough.

“C'mon, sir. I'll show you the roof.”

They had passed from the front hall and turned a corner into a darkened passageway. It was lit only with green glow stick “chem lights” placed in what looked to be soup cans that had been attached at intervals to the wall. The fancy tile was gone and the flooring was rougher here. Black felt the temperature drop as they walked.

They reached the base of a stone stairwell, leading up into darkness. Caine stopped and turned to Black.

“Hey, L.T., I see you've got your flashlight hooked to your gear there,” he said, pointing at Black's chest. “I'm sure I don't need to tell you not to turn that thing on past the top of these steps.”

Black just stared at him.

Caine shrugged.

“Hey, sir, you'd be surprised.”

He turned and clumped up the dark steps. Black followed.

After several steps the stairs turned right. Another chem light marked the corner. Black felt a slight breeze coming down the well from above. When he peered up the stairwell he saw a dim blue glow hanging in the dark above them.

They reached a tiny landing where the steps turned again. The glow was right in front of them, at about chest level. Black now saw that it was coming from behind some sort of sheet or curtain strung across an opening in the wall. Caine yanked a corner of it back.

“What's happening, Oswalt?”

The curtain had been drawn across a recessed area set into the wall about four feet off the floor. Inside was the tiniest hootch Black had ever seen—a stone cavity maybe seven feet long by four feet high by four feet deep.

Hooks and masonry nails had been driven into fissures in the bare stone sides, from which a toiletry kit and various personal comfort items hung in little mesh bags. Some kind of mattress or bedroll was wedged into the space and draped crookedly across the uneven stone surface.

On it, reclining against a couple pillows, was a soldier in long-sleeved PT gear watching an action movie that Black didn't recognize on a portable DVD player. Registering his visitors, he pulled a pair of enormous headphones off his ears, releasing a cacophony of tinny car-chase sounds into the stairwell.

“Oh, hey, Sergeant Caine.”

He had wide eyes and a young face, though he was not a small soldier and looked to be past twenty. His hands were large and strong and his hair buzzed down nearly to the skin, and his face carried a look of mild surprise that seemed to be a permanent expression. His deep voice echoed as from a hollow log lined with moss.

He didn't seem fazed by, or even to take note of, Black's presence.

“Hey, Oswalt,” Caine answered. “Whatcha watchin'?”

“
Transporter 2.
Hubbard gave me the DVD.”

“Is it as awesome as the first one?”

“Sure is, Sergeant.”

“All right, then.”

Caine turned to go. Black followed.

“Have a good night, Oswalt.”

“Good night, Sergeant,” Oswalt answered, pulling his headphones back up. “Good night, sir.”

Surprised, Black mumbled a “good night” over his shoulder as he and Caine trudged upward again. Caine didn't speak, so Black just came out with it.