The Valley (30 page)

Y
ou see it now. Clearly.

His bootsoles made little sound as they padded against the soft dirt of the rising trail, one before the other. The land climbed ahead of him, gently. Invisibly.

The fog lay heavy upon the trail and the moon hadn't yet risen. But he felt sure of the route, sure of what lay ahead. He watched for tree branches in the mist and let his feet keep the trail.

Go farther. Farther up.

He would be well beyond the O.P. by now. Somewhere far below and miles behind lay Darreh Sin. He'd gone deeper up the Valley, he was sure, than anyone from 3/44 had ever been. Farther than he'd ever been.

Farther from there.

The trail was broad and flat in parts, close and challenging at other points. The river was not far, below and to his left. At times the trail cut close enough to hear it.

When the route moved away, the rest was silence. Only the quiet sound of his footfalls padding the land, over and over, upward to where he knew he needed to go.

You'll find it.

He'd chosen a pace that he could maintain, steadily, for as many miles as he needed to.

You won't falter.

It had been a trail like this one, that first dark morning at Fort Benning. Slugging through the black woods with the instructors hollering at them, emerging to the shining wet track, finding his friend afterward.

Let's go again, he'd said to the smartass, arms linked around shoulders. He had felt he could hit the track and run forever.

You can. Further.

The cooling mountain air filled his lungs and drove his limbs.

Go into the mountains further.

There'd been no trail the final night on the land navigation course, when the two of them made their mad flight across the mountains. They didn't have a prayer. Too far from the finish line. No time to use the map or the compass, no time to plot a route. Only time to run.

Scrambling and falling across the field of felled logs, he had realized that he didn't care. The task was ludicrous. Impossible. But he didn't care. He'd felt certain they would find the way.

You will. This is what you do.

As they bounded through streams and slashed their faces on vines, he had laughed aloud. In that moment he had never wanted to leave that forest.

You don't have to.

He drove further up the trail.

—

Three hours in, he found it.

Ahead on his right, just visible in the mist. He felt sure enough of the signature feature that he didn't stop to consult his topographic map.

The narrow draw rose sharply up and away from the path. Ahead, the trail proper narrowed and bent around the rump of the mountain, through perilous cliff's-edge portions he'd seen on the map. He left the trail and began climbing.

A rivulet of water trickled down among the stones and pebbles of the draw. He let it flow over his hands as he worked his way higher. As he rose, his thoughts circled back.

Back to the beginning.

Focus.

To the other climb, up the other mountain.

Stay on this mountain.

He clawed and pulled upward. He guessed he'd climbed about five hundred feet when he came over the top.

There was no fog up here. The stars in the black sky were clear.

“It'll just take you too.”

Moonlight shone silver on the mountainsides. The ground opened wide before him.

A
flat-bottomed valley lay cupped in the highlands. He stood at one narrow end, looking down into it, on the lip of a low pass at the top of the draw he'd just climbed. Steep slopes rose up on either side of him, cradling the lowland all along its length.

He guessed it at about two miles long and a half mile across at its widest, with surprisingly level ground along the middle. The view was as though he had just climbed a dam and were peering over the top at the mountain reservoir behind it.

The travel would be easy through here. Then another short climb through the pass at the far end.

He started down the gentle decline to the low ground, still breathing hard from the climb in the thin air. He hadn't gone more than a few hundred yards before he saw the first blossoms.

The waist-high stems were topped with bulbous capsules the size of fists. Flowers had opened atop some of them. Others stood closed, not yet in bloom.

A field of opium poppies.

Examining the map before leaving Vega, he'd been expecting this little valley to be filled with more mountain grassland like that he'd seen when he peered through the scope at the Meadows. A find like this hadn't occurred to him.

The field was vast. Stems and flowers caught the moonlight as far ahead as he could see, and from left to right, filling the flatland between the slopes. Somebody up here was thriving, whatever the Taliban had to say about it.

He would have to plow through or go around and pick his way along the hillsides just outside the field. Either way would be slow going. Either way would put him at risk of being seen by the field's owners.

He stepped to the edge of the field, bending to look at the nearest stalks. He'd never seen a cultivated poppy field up close before.

The capsules were impressive, alien things, engorged with the ancient drug. He reached out and felt one, running his finger over its smooth surface.

Which wasn't smooth. He leaned in to inspect it. What he saw made him duck down low to the ground.

Each capsule was scored with vertical lines inscribed by a blade. At the bottom of each incision was a growing white globule of latex, seeping from the plant.

The field was being harvested.

Everyone knew basically how it worked. The incisions were made at the end of the day, and the capsules were left to drain overnight. In the morning the dried latex—pure opium—was collected.

If it was to be collected in the morning, then the field would be guarded tonight. A plantation this size would be guarded well.

So twice five miles of fertile ground

He blew out a long breath. Words danced at the edge of his memory.

With walls and towers were girdled round

A hazy remembrance reached out across two nights without sleep. He was hearing voices.

Beware! Beware!

No, he was hearing voices. Squatting, he peered around behind him.

For he on honey-dew hath fed

Two orange cigarette pinpoints, moving lazily along the bottom of the slope toward the edge of the field.

And drunk the milk of Paradise

He turned back to the flowers, got on his hands and knees, and began to crawl.

H
e lay with his cheek in the soil, waiting for the voices to fade.

Stay awake.

It had gone like this the whole way. Crawl, then voices, then down on his belly for five or ten minutes. Voices fading, then more crawling.

He checked his watch. Two hours, he thought, since he'd started across the field.

The plantation went on without end. Whoever controlled this land was well funded and highly motivated. He knew only that it lay far outside the realms of Darreh Sin and its boisterous chief.

The voices moved on again. He pushed his body off the ground with some effort and drove on through the stalks and stems, his mind crawling backward.

He had heard stories about it. The guy in Ranger School who was so exhausted and hungry that he bit his own hand open believing it was a cheeseburger. But Black hadn't really believed you could hallucinate from fatigue or fall asleep standing up until he saw someone do it in front of him.

The instructors had had them on another all-night hike through the mountains. A “ruckmarch,” they called it. Seventy-pound packs—rucks—all around, and off we go through the hilly backwoods of Fort Benning.

The guy was big. He'd volunteered to carry the big machine gun. He suffered. About ten miles in, at about two in the morning, someone took pity on him and took a turn with the big gun.

As soon as the guy handed it off and traded it for a regular rifle, he fell asleep. Black watched him do it. He fell asleep while walking but just kept on walking. He promptly veered off the trail into the woods. Black had had to chase him down and smack him awake before he hit a tree or fell into a creek.

Pushing through the vast poppy field, he stopped and listened a moment. Nothing. He rose to his knees and hazarded a peek above the bulbs, across the surface of the sea.

Good progress, he thought, gauging the distance of the surrounding slopes and passes. He ducked below the surface and drove on.

Later during that same night at Fort Benning, Black himself had seen the famous Officer Candidate School archway looming in front of him. The brutal march was finally over. They were back at the barracks.

But they weren't. The archway had faded, leaving only black trees and dirt trail.

The poppy stems were thinning. Unbelievable. Glorious. He stopped at the last row, listening for sounds. He heard nothing and poked his head out from between them.

He looked left and right and saw no one. He began to crawl forward, out of the field, but stopped short when he saw what was before him.

A mountain slope rose up sharply in his path, rising high to the stars. This made no sense to him. There should be flat ground ahead, climbing gently to the far pass, which he would traverse to get back to the trail.

He stayed there on his hands and knees for what seemed a long time before it hit him.

He was at the left edge of the field, not the far end of it as he'd thought. Down among the poppies, with no frame of reference, he hadn't kept a straight course.

Rookie inattentiveness. Now he was way off to one side of the field. The left side, he was sure. Right?

Get it together.

He surveyed the mountain features from one end of the depression to the other. Yes, the left.

Cursing himself, he turned and crawled back into the stems, bearing left toward the end of the plantation and the pass that would take him out of this infernal valley. He reminded himself to check his location against the mountains more frequently this time.

The key, he had learned after that all-night march, was to be cognizant of the possibility of hallucinations under fatigue and stress. To know your own physical and mental limits. This very awareness could extend those limits. He'd learned to push his own envelope to the danger point without pushing it beyond. He'd learned that his own capacities were greater, his own limits further distant, than those of most of his fellow trainees. As long as you knew where they lay, you were good.

His friend had seen the California Raisins dancing in the woods that night at Benning.

He was smiling at the memory of his friend's abashed face confessing it the next morning, when he emerged finally, exhausted, at the end of the poppy field, and saw a mountainside rising sharply up before him.

He stared up the slopes uncomprehending, jaw slung dumb, face upturned to the moonlight.

Shaking his head, he turned back into the stems and plowed on. How long now?

More voices, in front and to his right. Another cut-through pathway probably. He went down on his belly.

The voices didn't seem to be moving. A couple guys standing there having a smoke again.

Ten minutes went by, or so. The smell of the soil was rich and fertile.

He checked his watch. Two hours in, he thought. Right? Surely there was not much more left to the field.

Good thing he knew his limits. Knowing your limits was the main thing. Otherwise you push yourself beyond them and you wake up in a poppy field in Afghanistan with a gun in your face.

“From this place all the way to your end of the world.”

A moment's rest would do him good.

W
ake up.

He startled, his face jerking up from the soil.

He pushed stiffly to his elbows and looked all about him, frantic. It was still dark. The cold soil had him shivering.

He pushed the light on his watch. He couldn't remember what time he'd entered the field. Five hours ago?

Dumb, dumb, dumb.

Had he heard something?

Get out.

Adrenaline coursing generously through him now, he pushed off the ground, abandoning thought, and ran. Stems bent and crashed away before him as he stomped through. The mountains rose to his left and to his right.

Moving target.

After not more than a few seconds his feet struck bare, open ground. He almost stumbled at the sudden lack of anything in his way.

He'd been a hundred feet from the end of the field.

He slowed, going to a squat like a runner on the starting blocks. He looked left and right and unholstered his pistol. At the sound of voices he took off running again, wildly.

Get there. Don't stop.

The voices raised to shouts. He ran flat-out until he could hear them no more, and kept running as he hit the gentle slopes to the far pass.

He climbed as quickly as he could, not stopping until he'd crested the pass to the other side. He flung himself on the ground, heaving and panting. It had been easy going compared to the draw, but the thin air and his own adrenaline had him completely winded.

He checked his watch again. Light would come soon.

No one appeared to be following up the slopes. He took a long drink of water, draining the bladder, and collapsed on his back, allowing himself a minute to recover.

A fresh panorama greeted him on this side of the pass. He had crossed back into the Valley. It was narrower here, the opposing mountains closer and the bottom not so far below.

“Xanadu is what comes before the end of the world.”

He descended from the pass quickly, back down into the lingering fog. A full haze had enveloped him by the time he found the trail again. He took up his run and drove further on.

—

He guessed he'd gone barely another mile when he saw it. He might have missed the telltale markings had it not been for the early gathering light.

The goat track rose up and away from the trail to his right. He followed it, climbing through the dewy haze. As he'd expected, he didn't have to climb far.

The track leveled onto a broad shelf of clear ground against the steeper mountainsides. Sheer rock walls, stained in dark brown, rose up from the site for a hundred feet or more before tapering into the rising slopes. He slowed to a walk and passed along its length. Its edge, where the ground sloped down into forest, was perhaps seventy-five feet from the cliffs at its widest. It couldn't have been more than fifty yards long.

A slight breeze had picked up, beginning to move the fog, breaking it into clouds and wisps. The scene presented itself in pieces as he moved through the half-light.

Burned joists forked up through the shifting mist, reaching for the sky. A command post, maybe, or other temporary wooden construction.

The charred remains of a pair of shipping containers came into view next, their markings obliterated by the fire.

Other shapes were unidentifiable. Blackened debris littered the ground. He saw the scalded, skeletal chassis of a large diesel-powered generator.

You couldn't help him.

At the end of the shelf he paused and turned back, surveying the scene.

“Sorry, Billy,” he murmured.

He turned and began climbing down the hillside toward the trail, leaving behind him the earthly remains of Combat Outpost Xanadu.

—

It was nearly fully light now. The Valley narrowed further as he moved deeper and higher. The hazy shapes of the peaks above were closer, the opposite slopes closing in. Trees crowded the trail and hindered the view ahead.

There were no more river sounds. He'd gotten above the springs and runoff that fed it.

The trail tightened ahead and bent around a hillside out of sight. He slowed to a walk and worked his way between trunks and rock at a narrow spot wide enough for a goat or a man and not much else.

Once clear of the bottleneck there was nothing else obscuring his view. The opposite slopes were barely a couple hundred feet away, and narrowing. The trees opened to scrubby mountain grass. Through the last remnants of mist he saw it ahead.

There was no more Valley left to climb. It was there before him, not a hundred yards away. The End of the World.

He approached in wonder, removing a glove, and touched it.

His heart sank.