The Valley (11 page)

“There was no weapon in his hootch.”

Soldiers' weapons rarely left their sides on deployment, whether they were on duty or eating or sleeping.

“Hey, we got Columbo after all,” snorted Caine. “Guess you'll be a good investigating officer, sir.”

Black waited.

“We let him secure it in the arms room when he's not on duty,” the sergeant offered.

They walked further.

“Oswalt is special,” Caine said finally.

Black considered this.

“Head injury, or just special?”

“Just special,” Caine replied tersely. “Don't ask me how he got through basic training, but he did.”

Black dimly saw another turn in the stairwell ahead. He smelled pine.

“Army takes all kinds, I guess,” Caine mused.

“Got it.”

“Don't get me wrong. He's a good soldier. Work as hard as you want him to work. No attitude. Not a bad shot either.”

He shrugged.

“Nice kid. Just slow in certain areas.”

“He lives in the stairwell?”

“Hey, different strokes. He likes living there. But he does not go on the roof.”

“Never?”

“No,” Caine answered flatly, pointing at his head. “Doesn't pack the gearbox. Too easy to get shot up there, or shoot the wrong thing while you're by yourself on guard duty for six hours.”

“What
does
he do?”

“This and that. Fixes up a weapon pretty good. Let him listen to the radio sometimes when nothing's goin' on.”

He shrugged.

“Ya know. Earns his keep.”

Caine had stopped at the turn in the stairway.

“All right, sir, you're just gonna need to walk kinda fast when we're up there.”

“Will do.”

Caine turned and started up. Black followed him around the corner. At the top of the stairwell a rectangle of gray light loomed. The stairs ended in an opening cut flush into the roof. The two ascended.

After spending the past couple minutes in darkened hallways lit only by chem lights, Black's eyes had adjusted to the dark. The stairwell fell away beneath him and he felt a tingle of vertigo as he stepped up into the vast open space.

To one side, beyond the edge of the roof, a forested mountainside rose before him. In the other three directions, empty air. The outpost was perched on an outcropping of ground set on the steep valley slope. It was probably close to a mile across to the opposite side. Above them, the ridges were a thousand feet up or more. Beyond that, the clouds had broken further to reveal broad patches of crystalline starlight. The breeze that moved them carried down past the mountaintops and gently touched his face. It smelled like deep fall.

He hesitated only a moment before hearing Caine's “All right, then, sir,” as he trudged away briskly across the roof. Black followed.

The roof was wide and flat. Planked pathways had been created by laying wood pallets end to end, making walkways that forked out in three directions ahead of them. Caine took the middle one, heading for the hulking shape of a guard post squatting at one corner of the roof.

The thing looked like a haystack made of dark green sandbags. As they approached, Black could see many of them were split and spilling sand from where they had taken fire. From the haphazard pattern in which they lay, it looked like fresh ones had been laid down over old more than once.

Black looked left and right as they tromped across the wobbly planking, the racket of their steps sounding loud enough in the vast silence to reach the high ridges. He could see at least two other haystacks at far corners of the roof.

Their path led straight to the dark opening at the rear of the guard post. Caine stepped through without pausing. Black stepped in after him.

The roof inside was low. The interior of the guard shack itself was only a few feet on a side. Two rectangular openings faced out over the corner of the roof, one to the left and one to the right, with wide views of the moonlit Valley. Machine guns sat mounted in each window, and behind each one sat a soldier on a four-legged stool.

One had been speaking to the other in low tones, about what sounded like girl problems, as he looked out into the night beyond his gun. The other sat sideways on his stool, his back against the wall of the post, the window to his right, facing his friend.

“Goddamn it, Bosch,” said Caine. “You think you might want to watch your fucking sector?”

The soldier said nothing but cast an appraising look at Black and rotated lazily until he, like his friend, was facing out over his weapon.

“All right, sir,” Caine said, sounding bored.

At the “
sir,
” the first soldier cast a glance over his shoulder at Black.

“So down there you've got the river.”

He pointed down the carpeted slopes and descending ridges. Black could not see water but could identify the gap in the trees several hundred feet below them where the course of the river must run.

Caine pointed to the right, a little higher.

“And if you go downhill that way, not quite as far as the river but around that bend in the hills there, you get to a little side valley. That's the village I was telling you about.”

“Darreh Sin.”

“Yep. Shithole.”

“Is that what it means in Afghani, Sergeant?” said the first soldier, chuckling.

“Shut up,” said Caine mildly. “So that's the town I was telling you about, sir, where we first found out about this place.”

He pointed farther to the right and higher.

“And if you go
up,
there's a trail—more than one trail, probably, but there's a trail that goes all the way up the Valley and gets you to Pakistan.”

“How far?”

“By foot?” Caine shrugged. “Who knows? Never been. Ain't allowed to go. Probably seven or eight miles, except nobody fucking knows where the border is. It's all disputed lands and shit up there.”

He stuck his hands in his pockets.

“But we know the trails go all the way because the local Valley dudes move heroin to Pakistan and the Taliban moves fighters from goddamn everywhere all the way down through here”—he swept his hand across the panorama like a cleansing wave rushing through the mountain passes—“and out to the rest of this outstanding country.”

“You guys interdict?” Black asked.

“Fighters? Yeah, technically that's part of the mission. Right after ‘Stay alive and don't fucking get overrun.'”

The first soldier gave an approving nod.

“We keep pretty busy on part one,” Caine went on. “So we don't get a lot of spare time to chase incoming jihadi tourists all up and down through the hills. We mostly try to just kill 'em when they try to kill us.”

“What about drugs?”

Caine shrugged again.

“That, we don't really worry about so much,” he said. “I'm sure there's poppy fields in the mountains on this side of the border too, but like I said, we don't really know 'cause nobody's ever been.”

He looked up through the hillsides.

“I'm sure they take care of their business up there,” he said, “and we take care of our business down here.”

Black took this all in, following Caine's gaze up the slopes. The forest seemed surprisingly noisy this time of night, between the light breeze and the frequent sound of animals snapping twigs and brushing through trees.

“How often you guys go down to Darreh Sin?”

Caine nodded as though expecting the question.

“We take a patrol down there about once a week or so.”

“Goodwill, or catching bad guys?”

Caine's head jogged left and right: This and that.

“In Darreh Sin,” he said, “more goodwill. We gotta take pictures of this water collection system they're building, that the U.S. paid for. Like, get the water from the mountain streams down to the crops and stuff more efficiently.”

He shook his head.

“Me, I'd figure it'd mostly piss off dudes in the next town over that this town gets cash and gets the better water. But what the fuck do I know? I'm not a Civil Affairs officer. I'm just a dumb sergeant. Anyway, gotta get pictures and show progress and shit.”

Black nodded.

“Fog's coming in,” interjected the first soldier from behind his machine gun.

Caine leaned forward and peered downward.

“Yup.”

Black leaned forward and looked. Wisps of mist were creeping about the hillsides at the bottom of the slopes where the river ran.

“Gonna fill up the whole valley,” Caine said to Black.

“I hate that shit,” said the first soldier.

“I love that shit,” said his friend, Bosch, speaking for the first time.

Caine turned to face Black, hands still in his pockets.

“So, sir, unless you've got more questions for this stop on the deluxe tour, I can take you down and show you your rack.”

Black indicated that he didn't.

They turned to go.

“Have a good one, sir,” said the first soldier over his shoulder.

“Yup.”

They creaked across the rackety planking again and back down through the stairwell, past the curtains of Oswalt's hootch, which was still filled with blue light from the DVD player. They wound through fresh passageways Black hadn't yet seen, until they arrived at a series of three or four wooden steps.

A plywood door was set into the wall on the right. In large stenciled letters it read:

THE SHIT

Someone had taken a marker and added
WELCOME TO
above it.

Caine yanked open the door to reveal a sort of indoor-outdoor closet containing a Porta-Potty shed. It sat on wood planking and was completely enclosed in blast walls and plywood roofing. Black assumed there were layers of sandbags piled on top, on the outside of it. The little built-in plastic chimney rose up from the shed and disappeared through the fortified roof.

“Here's the nearest latrine, sir. Like our indoor plumbing?”

“Impressive.”

Back at his unit in the States, Black had known a sergeant who figured out how to convert a little utility closet in their headquarters into a stand-up shower, complete with a tile floor and fully waterproof. Great for showers after morning PT. Once people in other units found out, everyone wanted him to build one for their headquarters. This potty closet rivaled that in its ingenuity. It was a nice piece of construction.

“We kind of had to build it this way,” said Caine with a little pride. “A kid died in the shitter last year when a mortar hit one of the Porta-Johns.”

“Yuck.”

“Yeah,” Caine drawled. “What a way to go, and so forth. Anyway, all of 'em are enclosed now.”

He turned and headed up the steps, into a low-ceilinged plywood hallway strung with fluorescents. Several doors sat at intervals along the left wall. All but one were padlocked shut.

Caine stopped at the one which wasn't and pulled the door open.

“Home sweet home, L.T.”

He held the door.

Black stepped through into a windowless room with concrete walls and a fluorescent light blaring from the ceiling. Lieutenant Pistone's hootch.

It looked well kept and orderly. Black's ruck, courtesy of Private Corelli, slouched in the middle of the floor.

He turned to Caine.

“Thanks.”

“Hey, gotta give you someplace to rack out,” Caine shrugged. “
He
ain't using it.”

“Right.”

Caine lingered in the door. He shoved his hands in his pockets, hesitating.

“Listen, sir,” he said. “I know right now you're thinking ‘Is this dude gonna be a pain in my ass?'”

Black didn't bother denying it.

“Look,” Caine went on. “I know you have a job to do, even if it
is
pointless and stupid.”

Black said nothing. Caine sighed.

“I'm not gonna make life difficult, all right, sir?”

“All right.”

Caine looked at Black searchingly.

“But I told you how we got here,” he said. “I told you how we got this place, and now you know. Now you know why I call it ‘my' outpost. I figure after what we went through here we kind of own it at this point, right? There's more of our goddamn blood on the floor of this house than the other side's. You know what I mean?”

“I do.”

“So I'm just saying, be respectful of that when you're investigating my guys, okay?”

“I will.”

“I know how things start sounding,” Caine went on, “when you put it on paper and send it up to Brigade headquarters. How some simple thing like the mob and the warning shots starts sounding like some goddamn massacre or like we're terrorizing the town or some shit.”

“I know.”

“That's not my soldiers,” Caine said, looking him in the eye. “They got friends dead and they gotta worry about not getting themselves dead. I don't want them thinking they fucked up and are in trouble for doing their jobs.”

Black nodded.

“They go through enough shit out here,” Caine finished, “and they don't need that too.”

“Not my speed.”

“Right,” Caine said dryly.

He looked Black up and down and shook his head. He laughed again.

“Shit, sorry about all the mud and the face, L.T.”

“Don't sweat it.”

“Anyway, so you saw where the latrine is, and anybody can point you to the chow hall. Just find me when you're up in the morning, and I can get you what you need.”

“Will do.”

“Better yet,” Caine said, looking at the dark circles under Black's eyes, “you should probably sleep in. You look like you haven't slept in a week.”

“Sounds good.”

Black thought Caine was finally going to go. Instead he just stood there, looking at Black silently.

He was about to ask the sergeant if there was anything else he could help him with when Caine sighed, as though saddened by something. Before Black knew what was happening the sergeant's hand shot out, straight toward his chest.