The Valley (18 page)

Danny freely confessed that he wasn't a military type and hated business. He'd opted for becoming a 'terp instead, to try to sock away some savings and make his start in life. He knew the risks.

“Maybe I get shot,” he said, chuckling, “or maybe I am big success!”

Black thought he caught the scent of the adventurer in Danny. Someone who had just discovered he enjoyed the risks, whether he would admit it or not.

“How long have you been here at Vega?”

“Four months,” Danny answered, then shook his head.

“This place,” he whispered, “is crazy, man!”

He chuckled as though a thought had just occurred to him.

“Nuristan,
that they call this now,” he said, grinning slyly. “Do you know what this means?”

Black shook his head
.

“Land of light!” Danny cried, sweeping both hands in an arc that encompassed the whole black valley.

Someone nearby shooshed him. He put a hand over his mouth in a mock
Oops!
and giggled. Black smiled. That was something else he hadn't known.

He found that he liked Danny immediately. He had liked many of the 'terps he'd known. Respected them. Respected the risks they frequently took, above and beyond their formal duties. Respected their readily offered loyalty, though all they were being paid for, technically, was a simple service. Respected their knowledge of the land and its people.

Mostly he respected their wise counsel. A 'terp's advice had saved his life once.

Caine stepped away into the dirt. Black turned to Danny, who gave him the
After you
gesture.

He waited a few seconds and followed, feeling the nakedness of open space and the hillsides above him. He resisted the urge to speed up, which would just bunch him up close to Caine. It was the sort of thing drill sergeants spent all of basic training yelling at trainees to stop doing.

He passed between two junior sergeants waiting at either side of the gate, each one counting every person that passed through the egress. It was sound practice. You can know who's in your squad and your platoon, and who is scheduled to be on a patrol, and who showed up for the patrol—but unless you actually physically count every single body as it leaves the gate you don't know to a certainty how many bodies are supposed to come back through it afterward.

“Seventeen,” they mouthed in quiet unison as he passed. They looked at him with unreadable expressions on their faces.

H
e stepped out under the crystal-black vault of stars. The dark mountainsides soared above, ridges mingling with sky. Open ground fell away before him.

With dawn coming soon, only about half the guys had pulled their night-vision goggles down as they left Vega. Black preferred his natural eyesight when he could make do with it. He squinted and located Caine to his right, moving away across the hillslope. He kept his spacing and followed.

The patrol headed downslope only a short distance then cut right along a barely visible trail laden with pebbles and slick in places from still-wet ground. They traveled along just above the fringes of the fog, which visibly receded below them as they went.

No one spoke, save for the whispers of traffic he could make out periodically over Caine's radio in the dark ahead of him. Beyond Caine, shadowy soldiers stretched into the distance in a staggered single file.

He looked behind him and saw Danny, ambling along, hands in pockets. He grinned and gave Black a small wave. Behind him more dark shapes, pointy with black weapons.

After a half mile or so skirting the flanks of the mountainside, the trail began to bend downward. The trees gathered closer and the going got slower. They picked their way along steep, lightly wooded ground.

A half hour in, Black looked upward and saw that the sky had started to turn. Not dawn, but the half-light that is neither day nor night. Goggles were coming off and being stowed away in kit bags.

The narrow trail wound around trees and among boulders, steep at first. As they descended it grew more shallow, finally bottoming out and widening into a broad dirt track running through a narrow offshoot of the Valley proper, a sort of tributary ravine with forested walls. To Black it felt like walking on one of the logging roads back at Fort Benning.

The trip down had taken time. Morning was in full flare by then, emerging to a cloudless sky. The ridgeline on their right was closer above them at this point, perhaps a few hundred feet. Sun shafts were cresting it and striking the higher valley slopes opposite.

The patrol moved at a slow but steady pace. Soldiers' heads swiveled this way and that, up and down the slopes, searching the shadows with the practiced routine of a unit that was used to being attacked.

Caine had slowed his pace and fallen back a bit closer to Black.

“Hey, L.T.”

He turned and ambled backward as he spoke.

Black gave him an upward nod of the chin: What's up?

Caine thumbed up and over his shoulder, toward the lower ridges on the right.

Black's eyes tracked upward.

“All the way up, sir. Up top.”

He saw. Perched along the ridgeline, between two slightly higher crests. An odd box-shaped structure.

“Binos?” Caine asked.

Black shook his head.

Caine came closer. He dug in a pouch and produced a little pair of field glasses. Black took them and craned skyward.

It was the size of a large shack, but made of stone. The brilliant morning light hit it sideways from beyond the ridges and colored one side a blazing orange. He couldn't make out any doors or windows.

“Blockhouse Signal Mountain,” he murmured.

“What?” asked Caine.

“Nothing.”

He handed the binoculars back to Caine, who was looking at him funny.

“What is it?” he asked the sergeant, nodding his chin up the slopes.

“Some old British shit from a long time ago. They used to be here. Like, their colonies and stuff.”

He stepped up his pace a bit and started moving back to his spot.

“Thought you might be interested, L.T.”

Black nodded. He squinted back upward, but his angle on the ridge slopes was changing as the patrol traveled and the little structure was already mostly obscured.

“Telegraph,” came Danny's quiet voice from behind, startling him.

Black turned. Danny had moved up within a few feet behind him.

“What?”

“This is the . . .”

He cranked his hand in a circle before him, looking for the words.

“Great Britain, she had the telegraph, in the, the . . . network. All world.”

Black vaguely recalled reading about this once, about the worldwide telegraph network laid in the second half of the nineteenth century, largely constructed by the British across their many imperial possessions.

“How old?”

“Eighteen, maybe eighteen-seventy? Eighty?”

The time frame made sense. Right when the world was getting connected.

“So what's that thing?” he asked. “Some kind of . . . hub?”

“Yeah, man. Telegraph tower. End the line. End the network. They build, all way, they stop here.”

Black didn't understand why there would be any part of that network here in Afghanistan. He said so.

“This, remember, Pakistan is India those days. British.”

“Well, yeah, but . . .”

He trailed off before he said it.

Black knew they were close to the border with Pakistan, but not that close. Danny saw him processing the information. His eyes twinkled.

“Lines on map, these come, these go,” he said wryly, turning his palms upward in a
Who's to say?
“Yesterday's line, today's line, tomorrow's line. British man draws lines.”

He stuck his hands back in his pockets.

“Afghan man, he knows his land.”

Danny faded back to his place before he could be shooshed and scolded by Caine.

Black found it fascinating that the British had built telegraph infrastructure all the way to the Afghanistan border, or what was then more or less the border. They must have still had some optimistic hope for further expansion.

The road bent to the right ahead, around the mass of the mountain. The patrol instead continued straight, off into the trees.

Beyond the road the ground sloped slightly upward. Soldiers ahead fanned out to the left and right through the woods, forming a security perimeter. Black followed Caine as he moved straight ahead.

The trees thinned ahead of them, the morning light becoming more brilliant as it filtered through. Looking to his left and right, Black saw that the land sloped downward in each direction. He sensed that they were walking onto a sort of promontory.

Caine stopped after a hundred meters or so. He put a boot up on a felled tree trunk and stretched, looking back over his shoulder and motioning Black forward. Danny came up and joined them.

They were at the edge of the woodline, on a promontory as Black had suspected, looking down on a recessed flank of the valley. Forested slopes ran down to the river, which would soon be catching direct sunlight. A lesser tributary, something more than a creek but less than a river, joined it from a subsidiary valley rising away to the right. Between the river forks and the hills, nestled along the lower slopes in a crook in the land, was a village.

“Darreh Sin,” Caine said, handing over the binoculars again.

It was probably a mile and a half away in a straight line, maybe three hundred feet below them. It wasn't much. A few dozen homes, tops, most looking to be the usual hybrid stone-and-log constructions common to the area. Some creeped up the slopes, piled almost one on top of another. He could make out a few people here and there, out and about, mostly moving toward the river.

“It's small,” Black said.

Caine shrugged.

“Yeah,” he said.

He watched Black peer through the binos.

“This one's ‘friendly,'” he said, wagging quotation marks in the air with the hand that wasn't holding his weapon.

“The others farther up the Valley, not so much.”

“Huh.”

“Everyone's gotta decide how to deal with the Taliban his own way, I guess.”

Black watched the little dots heading toward the river. Women, as far as he could tell.

He pointed toward the little tributary valley. It looked like it led to higher ground.

“What's up there?”

“That's the Meadows.”

“Meadows?”

“Sort of a flat place up in there,” Caine explained. “Lotsa grass, shady trees. Little nook in the mountains. More farms in there. Houses.”

“You guys ever go there?”

“Not much,” Caine answered. “It all falls under this same chief and the same council. The Meadows is just, like, the suburbs of this town.”

Black craned the binos around but couldn't see far up the side valley.

“Anyway,” Caine said, “Sergeant Merrick's taking a squad out now. Get some chow if you want.”

He pointed as he started digging in his pack. Merrick and a line of soldiers had assembled fifty yards or so to their right.

“Route clearance?”

“Yup.”

Probably they had encountered booby traps and snipers along the way in the past. On terrain like they were traveling on, there were only so many different ways to get where you wanted to go. It was easy for an enemy to plan for American forces using a particular route. Merrick probably wanted to shake the trees a bit and rattle whoever might be out there into going away or fighting.

Black heard noise in the brush to his right and turned. A smaller group of four soldiers in heavy camouflage appeared from the trees and spoke briefly to Merrick. When they were done, they trudged back toward the dirt track, where it continued on beyond the bend in the mountainside. Two carried long-barreled sniper rifles.

They would be heading to positions where they could see Merrick and his squad as it made its way across the Valley floor and along the river—and see anyone else who might be watching them. Merrick's group disappeared downslope.

Black wandered back in away from the woodline. Those soldiers who hadn't taken up positions on the perimeter were scattered throughout the area. Some took a knee. All huddled close to trees, looking this way and that into the distance. They rooted in cargo pockets for little packets of M.R.E. crackers and cookies. These they tore open with their teeth and ate with one hand, the other on their weapons. Sergeants moved periodically among them to make sure no one was getting groggy during the lull.

The patrol had left so early that probably no one had eaten much of anything. Black hadn't either, but he'd had the presence of mind to raid an M.R.E. case that was sitting in the courtyard for the purpose. He sat down on a rock and pulled out a tan Spaghetti with Meatballs packet. It was a prize among M.R.E. entrees. He tore it open and ate it cold with the standard-issue plastic spork.

Danny wandered over and situated himself nearby, squatting on his haunches with his back against a tree. They chatted quietly.

An hour passed with little other talking, except when a nearby soldier asked Black to repeat his Chuck Norris joke. It had made its way through the outpost and was now famous in its lameness.

Caine's radio chirped nearby, startling him. The sergeant, sitting on a log, looked like he'd been getting a bit groggy himself. He stood and unclipped the handset from his body armor, walking toward the edge of the wood line to survey the valley below.

He came back a minute later, speaking in low tones into the radio. Soldiers in the woods around them rustled to life and climbed to their feet.

“Time to go, L.T.,” he said. “They're gonna meet us down there.”

They traveled the same route Merrick had taken. The downhill going was dodgy at first, loose dirt and pebbles slipping away beneath their sliding boots. As they descended, the slope lessened and grass came up underfoot. They emerged into clear sunlight. Soon they were traveling along reedy green flats near the river.

Black was surprised by how lush it was here, compared with the arid terrain of so much of the country. Flowering shade trees overhanging with shrubs springing up around them, everything subsisting on the nearby river water. It was, frankly, beautiful.

A squat building of timber and stone sat ahead among a clustering of trees between the trail and the river. It looked like it had several rooms in it. Black turned back to Danny questioningly.

“This . . .” Danny searched for the word. “Birth house. Babies, momma.”

He explained how in Nuristan villages children were born in a special building outside of town where they and their mothers would stay for a few days.

“Medicine is bad,” he said. “Many die.”

Past the birthing house they found Merrick and his squad. He turned wordlessly and pressed forward. After another hundred yards or so he turned and bore right, uphill. Caine and the rest of the patrol followed. They were now directly downslope of the village, which Black could see above them through the remaining trees.

Two dark-haired women came downhill, heading toward the river. One wore a black garment somewhere between a dress and a robe, which went down to her ankles. The other's was similar but brown. Both wore embroidered blue scarves around their necks in a light fabric, which they loosely curled up and around the backs of their heads. They kept their eyes on the ground as the soldiers passed and moved on toward their business.

The patrol pressed upward and reached the outskirts of the village, passing the first mud homes as they climbed toward the hillslopes. Outside one a boy of about fifteen in a goatskin vest bent to lace a hide boot. He straightened as they passed. Caine gave him a small wave good morning. The boy watched them impassively from behind green, studying eyes.

More homes appeared on each side. Some were more or less huts. Some were made of stone and logs, and others almost entirely of skillfully crafted wood. A couple had more than one story to them. Smoke from morning hearths trickled upward from more than one.

None of them had fences or barriers around them, despite being built in some cases very close to one another. He'd never seen that in Afghanistan.

People came and went on their morning business. Silver-haired men in gray and black cloaks trudged uphill, squat Chitrali hats or checked
keffiyeh
scarves protecting them from the sun. Probably heading toward the slopes where their goats grazed.