The Valley (12 page)

He yanked the Velcro rank patch, with the lieutenant's bar, from the center of Black's uniform. He clutched it in his fist and stepped in until his face was close, looking up at Black's. His eyes had gone dark.

“You go wandering around bumping into shit and fucking up our operations,” he said in a hushed voice, “and I
will
fucking shoot you, officer or no officer.”

He paused the merest moment, took one step back, and slapped the rank patch, crooked, back onto Black's uniform. He turned on a heel and strode off down the hallway, calling a cheery “Good night, sir!” over his shoulder.

Black just stood there, his heart rate returning to normal. Colonel Gayley's words returned to him.

They're strung out and they've lost a lot of buddies. They are not going to be happy to see you poking your nose around their outpost.

He closed the door.

T
he room was sparsely appointed. Bunk, wooden chair, wooden rod with uniforms hanging from it, little homemade set of shelves with socks and underclothes folded, little homemade nightstand. Not much else.

Black was used to hootches wallpapered with posters or swimsuit calendars, strung with Christmas lights, littered with knickknacks from home. The closest thing to decoration here was a little framed picture on top of the shelves and what appeared to be a leatherbound journal sitting on the nightstand.

He bent and looked at the picture. The top half of a young man, his bare arm crooked round the neck of the top half of a girl.

She was small and sprite-like with a frizzy blond mane, caught in midlaugh as she squinted happily at the camera. He wore spectacles, and his own hair was buzzed nearly down to the skin. His narrow face was almost babyish. He looked into the lens with a pursed smile and pinched eyes that seemed to be trying hard to project confidence. The couple stood beneath palm trees somewhere fabulous, on a hill or a cliff with the ocean behind them.

Lieutenant Pistone, presumably. And his girl.

The setting, the pose, the exuberant pixie of a girlfriend, the selection of
this
photo as the one you bring to the Valley. Black was a quick study of the various sorts of people who are attracted to the military. There were a lot of different ones, but he felt he could peg Pistone pretty quickly. Geek made good.

He had known the type before. The brainy guy who was never good with the girls, never got picked for the team, spent an ineffectual childhood probably getting picked on a little bit, developed a nice put-upon complex. Then discovered the military somehow and learned that even if you are all those things you can still get to do
this.
That your military life can stand as a triumphant ongoing
Fuck You
to all the guys who'd always been cooler.

He became your squared-away supersoldier, in his own way. Fastidiously organized, diligent about physical training. Not necessarily a good leader.

He walked around with the sound track of his freshly awesome life playing in his head. He tended to forget that succeeding in the military was not so much about his own cosmic journey to heroism as it was about how good he was at dealing with people, handling people, taking care of people. Sooner or later, the Army turned on him, left him friendless there as in life.

Quick to judge.

He stepped over to the nightstand and ran his fingers across the cover of the journal, which was embossed with Celtic scrollwork. It was a fancy leather job with a strap tie and everything, your standard overpriced impulse buy in an economically nonviable specialty store hawking wind chimes on the quiet main street of a tourist town you visit with your pixie girlfriend.

Diary?

He looked around and only then noticed a small footlocker under the bunk. He let that be. He unslung his rifle and sat down in the wooden chair, feeling keenly aware that not only was he making himself at home in another man's space, but that that man had no idea when he left it that his home would be intruded upon while he was gone. It was weird.

Shaking off the feeling of being a burglar, he rose and opened his ruck. He pulled out a fresh uniform and stripped off his muddy one, hanging it on a spare hanger from the wooden rod. He dressed and pulled his weapons cleaning kit from the ruck, sitting in the middle of the floor with his dirty rifle in front of him. He disassembled the weapon, stripping it down to the extractor, and spent the next hour working in silence, the pieces spread on the floor around him.

Weapon assembled again, he set it on the crisply made bunk and sat down next to it. He stared at the door and realized that sleep would not come quickly if he lay down. He thought of Caine's warning, but only briefly, as he rose and stepped out into the hallway.

—

“Good way to get shot by mistake, sir.”

The soldier cocked one eye over a shoulder from behind his machine gun as Black ducked his head and stepped into the guard post. Other than that, he and his friend had hardly acknowledged Black's arrival at all.

He had nearly lost his way getting back to the roof, turning back once or twice before finding himself in the chem light passageway. Quietly up the breezy stairwell and past Oswalt's little wall hootch, which was finally dark inside and emitting beefy snores. Then up and out across the planks.

Caine had not been exaggerating about the fog. From the higher parts of the Valley, down the river run, it had flowed and swelled until it filled every available space. Then it rose. A silent gray sea lay before them, stretching across the Valley, its near shore only a couple hundred feet below the outpost.

Black stood with his hands in his pockets, mesmerized. Finally the first soldier spoke.

“Probably clear out Sniper Town at least.”

“What's that?”

The soldier pointed upward, indicating the hillslopes above Vega.

“Watch our asses all the time. But they hate this crap. Usually go home when it comes out.”

Black said nothing.

“Their own goddamn valley and it even creeps
them
out,” the soldier said, shaking his head. “Superstitious about it. You know what they call it, sir?”

“What?”

“‘Devil fog.'”

“What's that mean?”

“You know, sir,” the kid said, making disdainful quotes in the air. “‘Folklore' and stuff.”

“Like what?”

The soldier shrugged.

“You know, like, the bogeyman,” he said. “Got all kinds of stories about it. Like, the Devil walks in the fog and steals your babies and shit.”

“Oh.”

“Which is hilarious, 'cause what they should be scared of is themselves,” the soldier continued. “All these fucking tribes with their chiefs always assassinating each other and raping each other's daughters 'cause somebody took your goat a hundred years ago and all that bullshit.”

The kid shook his head.

“Jackasses,” he concluded.

The other soldier, the one called Bosch, was leaning back against the wall again and regarded Black idly from behind dark, unimpressed eyes.

“I see you found the laundry service, sir,” he said dryly, eyeing Black's fresh uniform.

In response, Black rooted in his pockets and pulled out a pack of smokes and a lighter. He mouthed one and offered the pack to the first soldier, who frowned at the lighter.

“Light discipline, sir.”

Black shrugged.

“We're under cover. You said the snipers are going home anyway.”

The soldier said nothing. Black held the pack out to his friend instead. He recognized a kid who broke rules just to prove something when he saw one.

Bosch looked at it a moment and then took one. They lit up. Black inhaled slowly.

Don't cough like an amateur.

After a minute or two of first-puff haze, the first soldier spoke up.

“So, sir, can I ask a dumb question?”

Black gave a
What's that?
flick of his head as he blew a streamer out past the machine guns.

“Um, what are you doing here, sir?”

“Wanted to see the fog.”

The soldier frowned.

“No, sir. I mean, what are you doing at Vega? We haven't seen any other officer here besides the L.T. in, like, never.”

Black blew out a streamer of smoke and shrugged nonchalantly.

“Gotta take care of some bullshit.”

The soldier nodded gravely as though that were as thorough and forthcoming an explanation as anyone ever needed to give for anything in the Army.

“Roger that, sir.”

They shot the breeze.

The first one had a girl who he'd been having problems with since he deployed, which was nothing new for soldiers. He was round-faced and freckled, jaded in a mellow Midwestern way. Most of his high school friends were home doing meth.

The other soldier, Bosch, didn't say a lot, but he seemed like a cynic with principle, which Black approved of. An observer. Black felt his skeptical eyes on him even when he was talking to the other soldier.

He was smallish but solidly constructed, not short enough to be called short, but just short enough to be called not tall. His hair pushed the limits of Army regulations and looked as though it would flourish into dark curls had it been allowed to grow any longer. He wore a permanent
Yeah, what about it?
scowl, and a thick
mustache straight from the '70s.

Black reminded himself to ask about his funny name if the kid ever opened up a little. He guessed Bosch had kicked more than one bigger kid's ass over it.

“Where you from, sir?” the first soldier asked him.

“In the Army, or the world?”

The soldier shrugged.

“Either one, I guess.”

“Long story.”

“Army or world, sir?”

“Both.”

The Army was full of people who took a lot of long roads to wherever they were standing at that moment. Some of them didn't like talking about those roads. The soldier was unoffended and unfazed.

“Cool.”

They smoked and watched the Valley fill up with fog.

“How often do you guys get hit?” Black asked.

They told him. It ran the gamut. In the outpost and out on patrol, large ambushes, small ambushes, solo snipers, heavy weapons and light, anyplace and anytime.

Except in the past two weeks. Things had been quiet, except when they left the COP on foot for patrols. No real attacks on Vega to speak of. Hardly any sniper activity even.

“Which just means they're gonna hit us again,” the first soldier said. “Hard.”

He drummed his hands on his legs.

“Always do. They're just watching our asses out there. Just figuring shit out.”

Drum, drum.

“Who's watching you?” Black asked.

“Shit, you tell me, sir,” the soldier spat. “Half the time we don't even know who the hell it is attacking us. Supposedly the Valley tribes hate the Taliban and stuff, but then we know for a
fact
that it ain't always Taliban dudes that are coming at us. We'll get in a firefight and find dead bodies of fuckers we just saw in the village the day before, so we
know
Valley guys are mixed in there too.”

He shook his head.

“Smile at our asses in town and then try to kill us on the mountain.”

“Why?”

“Fuck if I know, sir. These Valley assholes got so much shit going on with all their alliances and breaking alliances and drugs and feuds and changing sides every day, who the hell knows how the Taliban fits in with it all? The shit's so complicated you may as well ask why you got kicked off yearbook staff.”

I miss joes, thought Black.

“Fuckin' Taliban,” the soldier muttered. “Fuckin' Valley dudes.”

He turned to Black.

“Gimme one of those— I mean, sir. If it's all right.”

He pointed at the pack of cigarettes, which Black had left sitting on the window ledge. Black made a
Be my guest
motion. The soldier grabbed one, peeked over his shoulder toward the stairwell, and lit up.

“This place,” he announced sagely, “is fucked.”

That pretty well summarized in four words all the intelligence that had ever come across Black's desk concerning the Valley. He said as much. The kid laughed.

“Yeah, well, welcome to it in three-D, sir!”

He swept his hand across the panorama before them.

“Hope you get a good show before you gotta go.”

“Pass,” said Black dryly.

The soldier chuckled.

“When's your next patrol down to the town?” Black asked.

“Day after tomorrow, I think.”

The three of them lapsed into silence and stared at the gray ocean rising toward them. Its blanket seemed to silence everything in the Valley. Through the open windows Black heard not a single noise of night.

He thought back to his days as a trainee at Officer Candidate School—OCS—back at Fort Benning, deep in the mountainous woods of western Georgia. The instructors would send the candidates, as they were called, out into the wilds to test their land-navigation skills.

You'd get a topographic map and a compass and a sheet of paper with a set of grid coordinates. The grid coordinates were your “points.” Each point on the map represented an actual little signpost planted in the woods somewhere.

A point might be on top of a mountain or in the bottom of a ravine. Wherever. Each trainee got his own sheet of paper with his own set of points. Each point had a hole punch with a unique imprint hanging from it. You traveled alone, and you had a certain amount of time to find a certain number of points and punch your paper at each of them.

It was a pain. The training course was a few miles on a side. It had some of just about every kind of woodland topography you could think of inside it. Swamps, mountains, rivers, forest so dense you could barely squeeze between trees, sticky vines that cut your face, tempting logging trails that looked like dirt but turned out to be made of Benning's famous orange clay and became ultraslick mud-butter in the rain. Trainees regularly came out of the course soaked to the skin, bruised, faces lacerated.

But “Land Nav” training got you out of the school's main complex where the instructors screamed at you all day and woke you up all night, and into the woods where you finally had some peace and quiet. If you were fast enough finding your points, you could even lie down and take a nap, and not a soul on Fort Benning would know where you were. Everyone loved Land Nav. At least the daytime sessions.

The night sessions were different. You had animal sounds and invisible gullies to fall into and your own overactive imagination to deal with. There were trainees who took their sheet of points and just walked fifty meters out into the woods and sat down against a tree for three hours, thinking about the vastness of the black course before them. At the end of the session they came back to camp and said,
Sorry, I couldn't find any of my points tonight.