The Valley (31 page)

S
tanding with his hand pressed cold against it, he understood.

It was an impressive construction. There was no way they got vehicles all the way up here. It must have been heavy-lift helicopters laying in all the pieces and equipment.

A wall of walls. Concrete blast barriers lined up twenty feet high, one against another on the slanting ground, shingled all across the gap, with another layer of shorter walls piled haphazardly atop, and more shoring up the gaps at the bottom. There must have been another complete set of walls built behind the one he could see, because the whole hulking thing had been filled with cement. It had oozed and dried like frosting at the seams, puddling through the gaps at the bottom.

It had been built in a hurry. He thought he knew when.

It was a slapdash arrangement, but the engineers had outdone themselves. At the highest, narrowest point in the land, not a hundred feet across, where all converged on a narrow pass between rising cliffsides, the United States Army had sealed the exit and entrance over the border, rendering this valley useless for any significant transit, of goods, drugs, or fighters.

It was pockmarked with black divots of ineffectual rocket fire. Charring and cracking at the bottom showed where a more serious attempt at breaching with explosives had been made. But the wall had held. Barely flinched, from the look of it.

He was sure some of the hardier locals could scale the steep peaks in a pinch. But for any real traffic of any volume, for anyone who hadn't spent his life scampering up and down among Afghan crags, forget it. There were no foreign fighters coming in this way from Pakistan, and there were no drugs going out. The Valley was closed.

No wonder the joes at Xanadu had called it the End of the World.

His palms felt the cold concrete. He hung his head and leaned forward until it rested against the wall.

Sorry.

He understood that he'd been right, that it had gone back to the beginning. But he'd been wrong. That was all past.

He thought he knew now who the servant was. And he knew that he would have to go back down. He would have to fix what he could fix.

He closed his eyes and heaved a shuddering breath.

“I'm sorry I didn't listen.”

I know.

He turned and slumped against the wall, sliding down until he sat at its foot, legs splayed before him, hands palms-up in the dirt. He rested his head against the reinforced concrete and saw the Valley laid out below him to the horizon. The sun had broken over the peaks and colored its heights and depths in golden haze and shadow.

Tearstreaks ran in the grime smeared on his face.

“When?”

Not now.

He palmed his cap off his head and let it crumple to the dirt beside him.

Soon.

He lay against the wall, watching the Valley fill with light, until the concrete chilled him.

Now go.

He pulled himself to his feet and trudged downhill until he found the outlet of a running spring to fill his water. The first spring of the Valley. He splashed some on his face and climbed back to the trail, where he began the long run down.

See you.

As he ran he thought of the Wizard Billy Brydon, sole survivor of the overrun and obliteration of COP Xanadu. He retraced in his head the terrified path Brydon must have followed all the way back down the Valley as he fled the cauldron that had taken all his friends. All the way to where he knew another American outpost lay. All the way to COP Vega, to where Black was not going.

D
espite the downhill travel it still took him the entire morning and into the early afternoon. He skipped the poppy field this time, working his way around the mountain on the tight portion of the trail. He was glad he had bypassed its cliffs and precipices in the dark.

When he knew that O.P. Traynor lay behind him, he cut away from the path to Vega and began descending the ridgelines that would take him where he needed to go. The sun shone clear along the mountaintops and he counted on his constant movement to give him a measure of protection in the open.

He could not see it yet but had committed its location to memory and moved confidently down across the heights. He had traveled these many miles unmolested and was grateful for his luck. He knew what he needed to do, and with a bit more luck could get it done.

Emerging from the trees onto a sun-drenched ridgeline, he saw it ahead. It was such an unusual feature, squatting on a mountaintop in a place its builders knew little of.

He approached the stone building slowly, not wanting to cause surprise. When he got within earshot he shouted.

“Corelli?”

Nothing. He approached. The stone construction was fascinating, the style alien to this land.

The thing was built simply. From this side, up on the ridge, he could see a single door and a small window set to one side of it. It was stout enough to have survived a hundred and fifty years of wind and snow and sun, and looked like it could do another hundred and fifty in a walk.

What plans they must have laid.

“Corelli, it's Lieutenant Black,” he called as he trotted up to the door.

He peeked inside.

“Hey, Corelli, are you—”

Corelli was there. Black rushed to him.

A deep gash scarred his forehead above his wild eyes. He thrashed against bindings behind his back. His body armor, helmet, and rifle were piled haphazardly in a corner. He jerked his head at Black and tried to speak through his gag, panic in his eyes.

“Hold still,” Black told him.

A stone worktable had been built into the corner of the room. Corelli's hands were bound behind him tightly and around one stone leg by a pair of sturdy plastic flex-cuffs. Police used these during riots and other mass-arrest situations. Soldiers routinely kept them hooked on their combat gear, for handling prisoners captured in raids or firefights. Black guessed these had come off of Corelli's person.

On the worktable sat a green military radio set. Its cabinet was smashed, its display shattered. With a rock? A hammer? He turned to Corelli's bindings.

Corelli bucked against the gag, desperate to speak. Black yanked at it until he'd worked it over Corelli's teeth and chin.

“Sir, there's a—”

Black heard the sound and whirled around.

An Afghan girl of ten or eleven stood in the threshold. She wore unusually short-cropped hair and a traditional Nuristani girl's embroidered black dress. Her eyes shone silver-blue. Black recognized her.

He had only time to wonder what had brought her all the way up here from Darreh Sin, raising a hand in greeting and opening his mouth to speak, before she brought Corelli's pistol from behind her back and shot Black with it.

The round struck just inside his left shoulder, spinning him and dropping him to the floor. A cascade of stars washed through his vision as his head struck stone. Corelli kicked and howled.

He lay gasping on his back on the cold floor. The ceiling spun. The room went dark and light.

Adrenaline coursing through him, he ordered himself to rise. He could not rise.

Straining, he bent his neck and brought his echoing head an inch off the floor. He peered past his feet.

Through the blurry doorway, speckled in a thousand dots of light, he saw the girl pick herself up off the ground and look about her. Bending to pick something up, she placed it behind her ear and stepped to the threshold. She stood there, eyes ablaze, surveying the scene.

Corelli bucked against his bindings somewhere, shouting at her from a hundred miles away to
Stay away from him!

She took two steps and stood over Black. It was a red flower, the thing behind her ear. As she bent down she spoke words he did not understand.

—

She could not believe her luck.

Truly, Father, you have guided my hand today.

It had been an easy call, following the young soldier from his compound, and greatly interesting that he had come to one of the bearded American's hiding places. Normally he and the other Americans pretended they did not know each other.

When dawn came she'd had to hurry back before Mother missed her. She feared nothing might come of this.

I should not have doubted.

It took all the next night of waiting, until her moment came. Once that was done, dawn again, and again back to Mother. Poor Mother.

She had never slipped away in the daytime. But she had felt certain that this time she must.

You were telling me I must.

Even if it were merely for another prisoner for the talibs it would have been worth it. Worth the risk, though it meant traveling as herself.

But this prize was one she had not anticipated. Not so soon.

The officer.

He lay splayed on the floor before her looking pale and weak, his breathing labored.

The one with the black bar.

The frightened young soldier in the corner heaved and tugged against his bindings and shouted at her in his American tongue. She ignored him and stepped forward, regarding her prey.

The servant. Just as they said he was.

He looked back at her with eyes that kept going unfocused, his rubbered limbs grazing the floor ineffectually like an insect speared to the earth. He looked like he would lose consciousness soon. She had probably shot his heart.

You guided my hand true.

She bent over him.

“Let me be your last living sight, devil.”

She reached for his chest, waving aside his feeble efforts at defending himself. She pinched a corner of the fabric square that bore his mark, and pulled.

It came away easily. She straightened and turned to the thrashing soldier in the corner.

“Don't worry,” she told him. “You won't be alone for long.”

She turned and left, heading downhill for home.

Now the talibs will know. There will be no question. They will know who defends this land.

She pocketed the square with the black bar on it. The black bar she had seen in the darkness, cowering in the doorframe of Mother's home, in the flash of light that took Sourabh to paradise, to wait there for Father.

I hope you were not frightened, Sourabh, while you were alone.

She could see no face that night. Only the bar. Qadir had told her what the bar meant. The officer.

Qadir had told her things she needed to know. Told Tajumal. But there was no more need for Tajumal now.

She was the avenger. Not Qadir, not the young men who hurled themselves uselessly at the Americans. Only her. The bar would be her proof.

They will know who is faithful.

She hurried down over rocks and grasses, planning her explanations for Mother.

Rest, Sourabh. Rest with Father.

As she ran she felt tears run on her face, and she realized they were for joy.

—

In the dream he saw it clearly. Saw that he'd been wrong again. But she told him that was okay, and he was pleased with himself for seeing it now.

He lay on his back looking up at the stone window, and she stood over him. It was not her, but her. She reached and put a hand on his face, and told him not to worry. She told him to rest, there on the soft stone floor. She said he wouldn't be alone for long.

H
e lay in the black depths but could not rest because his head felt as though he were being kicked in it. The floor hardened beneath him.

The muted sounds resolved into a voice, and it came to him that he was in fact being kicked in the head.

“Please, sir. You gotta get awake now.”

By Corelli.

“Come on, sir. Wake up now.”

Kick.

The kid was using the side of his boot, but come on.

“Stop,” he croaked.

His mouth tasted like sand.

“Sorry, sir,” he heard Corelli answer. “Can't have you going into shock right now, sir.”

He couldn't bring himself to open his eyes yet.

“How long?” he whispered.

“Not more than fifteen minutes, sir. You just gotta stay awake for me, okay, sir?”

“Yeah,” Black managed.

His mouth was dry, and his head pounded horribly from where it had struck the floor. Something was on fire in the left side of his chest. Something was wet behind his back.

He cracked his eyelids open and immediately closed them. Much too bright.

I am in bad shape.

“I'm still awake,” he mumbled.

“Okay, sir. Good, sir.”

Corelli blew out a breath and seemed to go all to pieces.

“Ohhhhh, sir, I'm sorry, sir. I screwed up.”

Not now, Corelli.

“I'm gonna need a minute,” Black wheezed.

He took a minute. Above all else in the world, he wanted to lie perfectly still. Finally, he cleared his throat.

“What happened?”

“I slept, sir!” Corelli cried miserably. “I'm sorry I slept! I screwed up!”

He stamped the stone wall with the flat of his boot.

“I came here just like you said, sir. I found it and I waited here all day, but I couldn't call the frequency on the paper you gave me because the radio was smashed when I got here.”

Oh, damn.

“And then I waited all night,” Corelli went on in a gush of words. “And I just laid down to sleep for an hour before it got light. She got my weapon and hit me on the head with a rock or something while I was sleeping, sir. She had my pistol and my knife and my flex-cuffs and everything. She kept screaming at me and pointing until I sat here in the corner, and I was so out of it, sir, from where she had hit me with the rock, everything was just spinning, and she had my pistol and she kept hitting me on the head from behind with the pistol butt while she put the cuffs on. Ohhh, sir, my head hurts.”

Black twisted his head toward the sound of Corelli's voice and hazarded another glance. The soldier's face was ashen and the bleeding gash on his head looked ugly.

“I'll get help,” Black said immediately, starting to push himself up from the floor.

He didn't get halfway upright before the world spun upside down and he felt himself skewered on a hot poker which pierced him from the inside of his shoulder down through his hip. He collapsed back onto the floor, feeling a wave of nausea wash over him.

“Oh, sir, you just stay there. You're hurt too bad. Have you got a knife, sir?”

Knife. His knife.

With his armor and rifle and gear in Pistone's hootch.

“No.”

“Oh.”

You idiot.

“Okay. That's okay, sir. I'll figure something out here.”

He lay there in silence, waiting for the nausea to pass, while Corelli figured something out. After a full five minutes in which no plan was forthcoming, he realized that there was nothing to figure out. They were stuck.

I just need a minute.

The room's spinning slowed. As long as he lay still, he could think more or less clearly. But he was clearly no use to anyone for the moment. He could really have used some water.

He craned his head and looked at Corelli, who looked pale and forlorn.

“What did your platoon do to that girl's family?” he asked the young soldier.

Corelli looked at him in surprise before casting his eyes to the stone floor. His head followed, until Black could no longer see his face. A great heaving breath came out of him.

“Oh, sir,” he said wretchedly. “This is all my fault.”

“What did he threaten to do if you told me about it?”

Corelli shook his hanging head.

“Not him, sir. Sergeant Caine.”

“That's who I meant.”

“What, sir?”

Something in what Corelli was saying didn't make sense to Black, but it wouldn't come into focus through the fresh dizziness. He couldn't crane his head and look backward and upside down at Corelli like that.

He lay on his back and stared at the stone ceiling, breathing deeply and painfully.

“He said he'd kill me, sir.”

Black, eyes closed against the dizziness, thought back to Corelli's guarded, meticulously composed answers to his questions that first day at Vega.

“You told me everything you could tell me while you were under threat,” he said. “It's not your fault.”

Corelli's answer was barely a whisper.

“Yes it is, sir.”

Black risked a glance at the top of the soldier's head.

“What did you do, Michael?” he asked quietly.

Corelli's voice broke slightly as he answered.

“
Nothing,
sir.”

“Tell me.”

Corelli sighed a long sigh. Then he told.

“It was a few nights before the thing with the goat,” he began, speaking slowly to the floor. “Sergeant Caine said that someone had spotted a fire above the Meadows, and we were going to take a patrol to check it out. Which was weird already, sir, because the Meadows is on the other side of the mountain and as far as I knew we didn't have anybody out that night that could've seen the fire.”

The guys at the O.P.

“Sergeant Caine was real agitated when we were leaving, sir, and he just got worse when we got close. I mean, when he saw it he kind of flipped out. You could see the fire going on the hillsides. It was one of the poppy fields—you know, where the Afghan guys grow the flowers for the drugs. But it wasn't like it was any danger to Vega, so I didn't understand what he was so worked up about.”

I think I do, Black said to himself.

“And he went off to the side and was talking all heated with Lieutenant Pistone, like maybe they were arguing but I couldn't really tell, and when he came back he said we were going to raid this guy's house in the Meadows who owns the field. Which was weird, too, because we didn't have Danny along.”

“Why not?”

“I don't know, sir. Danny was gonna come along on the patrol like usual. I saw him getting ready. But Sergeant Caine told him to stay back at Vega. I thought that was weird, but I'd only been here a couple months and I'm a private, sir, so, I mean, what did I know? I just kept my mouth shut and came on the patrol.”

“Where was Sergeant Merrick?”

“He let Sergeant Caine take that one, sir. They didn't always both go on the same patrols.”

“Okay.”

“So we headed down to the Meadows, but it all just felt
off
from the beginning, sir. I mean, Sergeant Caine was just real agitated, like I said, and he wouldn't say why we were gonna raid this guy's place.”

Black could venture a guess.

“We got there to the house and it was probably a little after midnight, and all the homes in the Meadows were dark, and Sergeant Caine, he goes and he's whispering to the lieutenant again, and then he grabs Shannon, who's there on the patrol with us, and they don't even do the knock-first or anything like we're supposed to do in the friendly towns.”

“Okay.”

“And Sergeant Caine just kicks the door in and they go in there with the lights turned on on their rifles, and everyone is shouting inside, and I can hear Sergeant Caine shouting back with a couple of his Pashto phrases. You know, ‘get down' and all that. And there was a man in there yelling something back at him, sounding real scared, and you can hear a woman in there too, and children, and you can tell it's just chaos in there, sir.”

He inhaled and let out a deep breath.

“And after a couple minutes Sergeant Caine comes back out,” he said, his voice quavering. “And he's got a
kid,
sir.”

“What?!”

“He's got a boy, sir. Like, a small boy, maybe seven or eight years old. And he's got him by his
clothes,
sir, just dragging him like you'd pull a puppy by the back of the neck. And the kid is wailing and crying and he doesn't know what's going on.”

Black closed his eyes.

“And then Shannon comes out behind him, sir. And
he's
got the kid's dad. And no one in the patrol knows what's going on. I don't think Shannon even knew what was going on. Sergeant Caine is saying, ‘Hold him there,' and Shannon's just standing there holding the kid's dad and watching Sergeant Caine.”

A dark chasm opened in Black's stomach.

“And Sergeant Caine just starts screaming at the dad. And he's got his pistol out and he's waving it around, and waving it at the guy's
son,
sir! He just keeps yelling the same thing at the guy.”

“Yelling what?”

“I didn't understand it, sir. Sergeant Caine knows a bunch of Pashto phrases and stuff. But I memorized the main part of it and when we got back to the COP I tried to look it up on my phrase card, and it was something like ‘Where?' or ‘Where is it?' Something like that, sir.”

“Okay.”

“And the dad is shouting back, freaking out, and he keeps saying something that I didn't understand except that I could hear him saying something about the Talib,
over and over, like he was talking about the Taliban.”

His voice began to break.

“And he's just
pleading,
sir! He's just begging them to stop, and Sergeant Caine's got his son and he won't stop screaming at him.”

He swallowed hard.

“And the guys in the patrol are really starting to freak out, because it's all so
out
there, sir. Like, everyone is scared and just wants Caine to let the kid go and get out of there.”

“What did Lieutenant Pistone do?”

He felt foolish asking the question. It required no answer.

He stood by and did nothing.

“What, sir?”

Corelli's voice was tinted with confusion.

“Why didn't he stop it?” Black asked.

Corelli twisted his anguished face up to him.

“He's the one who
did
it, sir.”

“Did what?”

Corelli burst into tears.

“Shot him, sir!” he cried.

Black opened his eyes and saw stars.

“What? The father?”

“The boy!” Corelli wailed. “He didn't even say anything before he did it!”

His voice wobbled like a child's.

“He came over to where Sergeant Caine had the boy and he had his pistol in his hand and he just did it! Why did the lieutenant
do
that, sir?!”

Corelli sobbed freely. The telegraph station spun around Black, though he'd been lying very still.

“And you bring his servant into my town.”

Memories crowded him, jabbed at him.

“All valley people says get the Devil out of the valley.”

His mouth was very dry and his head felt as though it were full of pennies and someone were shaking it.

He took a deep breath and thought: I am a fool.

“What happened after?”

Corelli struggled to compose himself.

“Everyone just freaked out, sir,” he said miserably, lost in the horror of the memory. “The father was screaming and flailing against Shannon, and you could hear the women inside just screaming too.”

He gave a heaving sigh and shook his head.

“Even Sergeant Caine was freaked out, sir. No one thought the lieutenant was gonna do something like that. Sergeant Caine was yelling ‘What the fuck, sir!?' And the lieutenant was acting all crazy.”

“How?”

“Like, he seemed spaced out, and he was all, like . . . formal, I guess. I mean, the dad is screaming his head off and crying and hitting Shannon with his fists, and the lieutenant is just . . . rambling, sir, in the middle of all this chaos, saying how ‘Now they'll all know' over and over, and giving these orders for us to return to the COP.”

“What did you guys do?”

“Sergeant Caine went and grabbed the dad from Shannon, and as he's doing it this other kid runs out from the house and runs away into the trees.”

“A kid?”

“Yeah, another young kid. We couldn't even tell if it was a boy or girl, but I guess the kid figured they were gonna get shot too, so they made a break for it.”

Girl.

“And Sergeant Caine tells Shannon to go after the kid. And Shannon hasn't said anything this whole time, sir, and he just stands there and looks Sergeant Caine in the eye and tells him, ‘Go fuck yourself.'”

“What did Sergeant Caine do?”

From the upper corner of his eye he could see Corelli's head come up.

“He was mad, sir. Like, panicky. And he said, ‘God fucking damn it,' and then he dragged the father into the trees where none of us could see and he shot him too, sir.”

Corelli let that sit before continuing, matter-of-factly.

“Then he came back and he took us all away from the house, and he took us aside in another part of the Meadows, away from Lieutenant Pistone, and he told us that nothing happened that night and we didn't see anything. He said that if we said one word of it to anyone, even Sergeant Merrick, the lieutenant was going to kill us too. Like, he was trying to act like he was behind what Lieutenant Pistone did, sir. He said, ‘Now you know the lieutenant does not play.' But I could tell he was scared, sir.”

“Okay.”

“Then we all went back to the COP.”

“Who else was on the patrol?”