The Valley (25 page)

I
t was situated high near the mountaintop where the ground lay close to vertical, among a steep tumble of boulders and thick trees just below the long summit ridge. From its location were wraparound views down two dark faces of the mountain, the Valley and the river curving around its base. Black assumed he could have seen Darreh Sin somewhere beneath them, had he known where to look.

It had taken them a couple hours to get there. Trudging the final steps along an exposed and slippery path high against a steep gravel-strewn slope, Black felt more than anything like he were entering a treehouse.

In among the wooded cover there looked to be at least three or four separate levels to O.P. Traynor. Separate structures, really, one suspended near or above the other amidst rocks and trees set into a slope that ran nearly straight up at that point.

Each level was tiny and constructed mostly of plywood and sandbags. Each was offset laterally from the next, so that none of them touched its neighbor. Some weren't even fully enclosed, resting somewhere between an open-air room and a platform in the trees. A series of homemade steps and ladders ran up and down between them all, with sandbagged fighting positions scattered throughout.

Even in the cool of the night, at that elevation it had been a slog to reach the place. Black didn't care to think about the effort it must have taken to haul all that wood up there. It must have been some crazy good location to justify putting so much effort into building what was by definition a temporary post.

A short series of steps led from the gravelly surface up into the trees. A wooden platform adjoined a storage enclosure. M.R.E. cases and water bottle pallets sat stacked inside.

Merrick passed this by and headed up the next set of steps. Black and the others followed.

At the next level an open deck adjoined a small wooden structure that appeared to be the post's communications and command center. On the outside was hand-painted RADIO SHACK. Soldier humor.

A skinny, toothy-grinned soldier in camouflage trousers and tan T-shirt ambled out of the shack with his hands in his pockets. He surveyed the patrol.

“Sar'nt,” he said, nodding to Merrick.

He had hillbilly stamped on him front and back. Even his short-cropped chestnut hair managed to seem messy.

His eyes fell to Black's rank and name tape. His eyebrows went up.

“Sir,” he grinned.

He gave the
What's-up?
chin flip to the rest of the patrol.

“Boys.”

“Lieutenant Black,” Merrick explained, thumbing in his direction.

“Hooah, sir,” the soldier said, appraising him. “Special guest. Haven't seen an officer up here in a bit. Besides L.T. Pistone, I mean.”

Merrick turned to Shannon and Brydon and the rest.

“Chill out,” he said. “I need to talk to the lieutenant.”

Soldiers as a rule don't wait to be told twice when instructed to take a break. You don't know when it's gonna end or when the next one's gonna come, so you may as well get to it. They disappeared immediately up the next set of steps, leading further up into the trees and the higher levels.

The toothy soldier fell in behind Shannon and the others.

“Why yes, now that you ask,” he said in a mock-sophisticated voice to no one in particular. “Don't mind if I doooo.”

“Drink some fucking water,” Merrick said to the retreating group.

Brydon broke off wordlessly from the rest and went into the radio shack instead.

“Hey, Doc,” came a familiar voice from inside.

It was the first time Black had heard anyone address Brydon with the customary moniker for an Army medic.

“What's up, Billy?” came another voice, also familiar.

Black watched the joes trudge up the steps and disappear into what looked like a cave entrance in the mountainside, or at least a sheltered space beneath two large boulders. Merrick waited until they'd gone.

“All right, sir,” he said, turning to Black. “You and me.”

“What?”

“Let's play hooky.”

“Where are we going?”

“You can water up right there,” Merrick said, pointing to a stack of water bottles outside the radio room. “Come or don't come.”

He grabbed a couple bottles and started trudging up the steps, stopping and turning back halfway up to see if Black was coming. Black bent and took a couple bottles for himself, shoving them in his cargo pockets.

At the next level up, Merrick led him into a steep, almost vertical chute running up among the rocks. They climbed between boulders and used tree branches to ascend. After about fifty feet they emerged from the brush into open air and moonlight.

Black experienced the same rush of vertigo as when Caine first took him onto Vega's roof. They were on top of the mountain, more or less, standing on the highest ridgeline.

The ground was bare up here, and the view phenomenal. Looking to his right, Black saw the ridgeline rise gently toward a large cluster of trees surrounding the summit. But for that fact, he would have been able to look down in all directions.

Opposing mountain faces loomed, bathed in moonlight and shadow, their peaks at or below the height where Black and Merrick stood. Somewhere beneath them, the river and Darreh Sin. Somewhere behind, COP Vega.

Merrick stopped and motioned Black to him. He poured his bottles into the water pouch Black wore over his back. Black did the same for him. Merrick stomped the empties flat and shoved them into his pack, turning wordlessly and starting down the back side of the mountain, opposite O.P. Traynor.

The way down this side was as dry and spare as the way up the other side had been lush and wooded. Scrub brush, dirt, and crumbled stones made it as inviting as a coral reef compared to the forest through which they'd traveled from Vega. Far below and to their left, the thin silver ribbon of the river glistened in the moonlight.

They descended for about twenty minutes, mostly in silence except where Merrick would point out old Soviet land mines near the trail. As they got lower on the slopes the foliage picked up a bit, finally offering some welcome cover. Black had felt uncomfortably naked on the moonlit mountain face.

They reached a shelf in the land that was well covered with trees and brush. Merrick stopped at the edge of it and knelt behind a fallen log. Black knelt beside him and looked down.

They had descended to just above a long, wide draw which sloped upward to their right. A creek ran down it to their left.

Across the draw, maybe a mile distant, there was a pass making an opening in the opposing mountainslopes. Beyond it Black could dimly make out a lush area of low, flat land nestled in the high hills. Grassy expanses alternated with thick copses of trees.

Black was fairly certain that this was the draw and the creek he had seen rising up from the main river, from Darreh Sin. Which would mean the sheltered land across the draw was . . .

“The Meadows,” he said aloud.

Merrick nodded and took off his pack.

“You want your answers, sir?”

Black looked at him uncomprehendingly.

Merrick rooted inside and produced a hefty piece of equipment, which he handed over. It was a high-powered thermal scope. Detached from a weapon, it was a handy nighttime telescope.

Black took it and switched it on. He put it up to his eye and watched the world go green.

Scanning across the flatlands of the Meadows, he could make out many dwellings in and among the trees, or right out in the open grasslands. Goats and livestock glowed warm in the sight, idling or sleeping outside the homes.

The place looked sheltered and inviting. If you had to live in Afghanistan, he thought, this wouldn't be a bad place to do it.

It didn't take him long to identify what it was Merrick wanted him to see.

Figures moved along the far right edge of the land, where the grass gave way to the higher slopes. Terraced growing fields were planted at the margins, and the figures moved among them, bending and squatting. What looked to be goats stood near a shack at the edge of the crops.

Black clicked the scope to its highest magnification and squinted at the men and their crops.

“Poppies,” he said finally.

“Correct,” Merrick answered.

“Harvesting the latex.”

“Yes.”

“For opium.”

“And morphine and heroin, yes.”

Black scanned his memory banks for the briefing materials he'd once received on the heroin trade in Afghanistan.

“I thought they harvested it in the mornings,” he said.

“They do.”

“Why are they doing it in the middle of the night?”

“I don't know.”

Black pulled back from the eyepiece and looked at the sergeant in the dark.

“I
think,
” Merrick said pointedly, “that maybe they don't want the Taliban to see them.”

This didn't make sense to Black.

“Well, the Taliban knows there are poppy fields all through here,” he said.

“Right,” Merrick declared. “Taliban's everywhere in this Valley, even when you don't see 'em. Even when the locals don't see 'em. Make no mistake, and don't forget it.”

“So if the Taliban doesn't like them growing for heroin, why don't they come in here and destroy the fields?”

“Who says the Taliban doesn't like them growing for heroin?”

Black looked at him questioningly.

“Yeah, I know, sir,” Merrick said. “The Taliban doesn't like drug use. Officially.”

“Officially?”

Merrick looked pained.

“It's not simple here, Lieutenant. The Taliban knocked out the poppy harvest in this country for about one year here. One. Before we showed up. And even then I don't believe for a second that there weren't pockets of it, way up in crappy places like this, or higher up still. The Taliban that are left might dream of those old days again, but for now they know they can't do shit about it. They don't have the numbers or the force to knock it all out. So if
someone
is making big cash off this shit, then they want a piece. We never know who is making deals, who is getting shook down or intimidated. We don't know jack.”

“Okay.”

“Maybe these guys want to clear the fields and move the stuff through the Valley when the Taliban isn't looking, so they don't have to pay their cut.”

“Okay.”

“I
think.
”

There was the pointed phrase again.

“Or maybe these dudes are hiding from one of the other clans in the Valley. Maybe they're being hustled by the tribe over the fucking hill and they're trying to sneak a little out on the side before the official harvest tomorrow.”

“Okay.”

“Or maybe a hundred other things. Are you getting the point?”

“No.”

Merrick looked irritable.

“The
point
,
Lieutenant, is I don't fucking know.”

“Right.”

“And neither do you.”

“Right.”

“Get it?”

“No.”

Merrick sighed impatiently.

“You asked me what is going on in the Valley,” he said. “I don't know what the hell is going on. Whether it's drugs or any other thing. That's the point.”

He aimed a finger across the draw.

“
This
is what's going on. This and every other goddamn thing that we don't see and we don't understand and never will.”

He turned back to Black.

“This is
their
Valley, sir. These are
their
problems and
their
feuds. This is
their
bullshit. We could stay here twenty years and we're not gonna get to the bottom of it. Not even halfway. Get it?”

“I get it.”

“Bottom line,” Merrick continued, “I don't know and I don't care, sir. The Army makes me deal with this town and these meadows because bad fuckers come through here and because we're supposed to try and see if friendly works better than ‘fuck you' up here. Beyond that, I have no interest in this village or the next one or the next one. I care about keeping my soldiers alive.
That's
my job, not worrying about who is stabbing who in the back over heroin or who's gonna get their fair share of free water once we leave, or whose daughter is gonna get married off to which fat fuck for how many goats, or any other goddamn problem they have with each other that we'll never know about.”

Black regarded him in the moonlight.

“Is that why you have an O.P. up here that your command doesn't know about and half your platoon doesn't know about?”

Merrick flashed surprise but quickly composed himself.

“What makes you think,” he said coolly, “that my command doesn't know about it?”

He looked at Black with an expression that indicated he was going to say nothing more on the subject.

“And now, sir,” Merrick said, pointing across the draw at the Meadows, “I am going to go into this place, because even though he is not one of my soldiers, Danny is my responsibility, and some of the people I have unfortunately come to know there might know what happened to him.
Might.
I have no fucking clue if they will or won't, but seeing as how I don't know shit about this place it is the only guess I have.”

The façade of theatrical hostility was falling away again, though what replaced it was no less cold or off-putting.

“I am going in there alone, because there is no way in hell that I am going to risk my soldiers again after what you caused in Darreh Sin. But seeing as how I've now shown you everything that I
don't
know, and seeing as how you already put my entire platoon in danger, I would really like it if you gave me one piece of information to help me possibly keep from getting
myself
killed, which is what the fuck happened with the chief?”

Black stared out at the Meadows.