The Valley (36 page)

Forward observer.

“Let me call him and have him handle th—”

“Shannon's busy,” Black stated flatly.

Oswalt returned with the radio.

“Find some cover up there,” Black admonished. “You may need to keep moving around.”

His vision was too mottled for him to keep his eyes open without getting dizzy. He stretched an arm across his face.

“Hubbard, give him the freek.”

Hubbard gave it.

“They're waiting to talk to you,” he continued. “Just tell 'em where the bad guys are breaking through and where their biggest guns are shooting from.”

“Roger, sir.”

Black heard Oswalt sling the pack.

“You got this, Oswalt,” Hubbard said without conviction.

Black moved his arm and looked up at the big soldier through bright spangles. An explosion echoed from the far side of the compound.

“You're not scared of a damned thing,” he said.

Oswalt turned to go. Black collapsed back onto the hard floor, which wouldn't still itself anymore.

“Get there, Oswalt,” he called weakly as Oswalt disappeared into the noise and chaos.

Hubbard was on the radio now, passing coordinates of O.P. Traynor to the helicopters.

“We got a squad of guys in trouble there right now,” he was telling the pilot.

The floor was so cold.

Get there.

“Fuck you, Hubbard!” came Shannon's snarling voice through the walkie-talkie. “We're going without it, you fucker!”

“No!” Hubbard called back. “Don't do that! We've got air on sta—”

“WE'RE ON FIRE!” someone cut in on another net.

“Say again!” Hubbard shouted into the handset, finger in one ear. “What about fire?”

“In the yard!” the voice came back. “The generator started a fire in the yard! The fucking building's on fire near the chow hall!”

Fire. Of course it was fire.

“GodDAMN IT!” Hubbard was hollering, pounding the desktop over and over with his fist.

Fire would spread.

Black squeezed his throbbing eyes against the steady spinning and heaving of the room.

“You're doing good,” he mumbled at Hubbard, who was shouting uselessly into his radios.

Don't stop.

“We're gonna hold it,” he lied.

The exchange of gunfire echoed sharp in the stone corridors.

“Yo, Hill!” Hubbard's distant voice was calling into the Traynor net. “We got an Apache on the way to you right now. Hill, you there?”

The firefight in the halls sounded closer than Hubbard's voice.

Behind it rose the sound of a helicopter.

“Hill, come in, man!”

His last thought, as every molecule in his universe converted itself simultaneously to pure sound and the force of the blast poured cement and stone through the roof of the CP, was that at least he was already on the floor.

He did not dream, but saw.

A rough hand grasped the handle on the back of his body armor and hauled him to his feet.

His platoon sergeant. Brennan. Bleeding from a gash on his face. His mouth shouted without sound.

YOU GOOD, SIR?

Black's head rang with the noiseless echo of the blast that had knocked him to the ground.

He nodded. They clawed their way upward. The boulders were close.

Fultz, his radioman, climbed with them through the chaos. Ten more meters of tall, tan grass and the three of them tumbled panting behind the rocks.

The sounds of the fight were cutting back through the haze, returning to Black's hearing. The rattle and clatter of automatic weapons, punctuated with rocket impacts against the mountainside.

In twos and threes across the steep slope, a tatter of soldiers scrambled and clawed, dragging themselves and their buddies upward in tandem. Up from the doomed vehicles.

“X-Ray, this is Two-Six Romeo!” Fultz was shouting into his radio. “I have Two-Six Actual here.”

That was him. Two-Six. The “six” element of second platoon. Romeo was the radioman. Actual was the guy. The person in charge. The person responsible.

“X-Ray, how copy?”

Get out of the kill zone. First rule of getting ambushed, right after Return fire. They couldn't get out of the kill zone.

Most of the platoon was climbing up, up where they could get cover, get angles. Someone was dragging Zeke, the 'terp, along.

Zeke had told him. You go through that place with half a platoon, you all die, he'd said. Your commander is an idiot, he'd said.

So now they were all in it together.

“X-Ray, Two-Six Romeo!”

No one answered.

The volume of fire raining around them on the slopes was tremendous. Guys dove behind rocks and just curled there, until their buddies kicked them in the seat of the pants and made them go.

Black peered around the boulder at the ugly straggle on the dry mountainside. Momentum. Keep the initiative. They had lost all initiative from the moment it began.

We have to regain it or these guys are all going to die.

Brennan's shouting brought him back.

“COULD YOU GET COMMS FROM YOUR TRUCK?”

Black shook his head.

“NO.”

“ME NEITHER.”

Black pointed up.

“FULTZ AND I HAVE TO GO HIGHER.”

If they climbed to the ridgeline and cleared the level of the opposite mountain they could maybe hit the retrans with Fultz's radio.

Helicopters. Jets. Artillery. All the glories and pleasures of life were carried in Fultz's pack. Black would direct them all like a maestro.

A blast sent them ducking to the hillside.

Brennan came back up and nodded.

“I'LL CONSOLIDATE HERE,” he shouted, pointing at the steeply sloping ground beneath his boots. “THIS IS HIGH ENOUGH.”

Black nodded back and turned to Fultz, who gave a somber thumbs-up. Brennan grabbed Fultz and immediately began yanking ammo magazines, grenades, the side plates on his body armor, anything else of any weight off of his person. The long-range radio pack with all its batteries was gonna be heavy enough on the way up.

When he reached for Fultz's rifle the kid finally resisted. Brennan tugged it away.

“YOU AIN'T GONNA NEED IT IF YOU DON'T HAUL ASS THE WHOLE WAY.”

The rifle weighed only eight pounds loaded, but the difference between running with your hands free and with a rifle in them was huge. Black slung his own behind his back.

Brennan clapped Fultz on the shoulder hard enough to almost knock him over, and turned to Black.

“I GOT THIS,” he hollered. “GO, SIR.”

Black went to a crouch on his boot-toes and peeked around the boulders. There was no sense waiting for a break in the fire. There was none, and there would be none.

Moving target. They're not gonna hit a moving target.

“SIR,” Brennan shouted from behind him.

Black turned his head. Brennan was shaking his.

“DON'T STOP.”

Black launched himself from behind the rocks and turned uphill.

The riot of sound was unreal. Explosions mingled with urgent shouts across the hillside. The bullets made a horrible soft thumping noise when they impacted the dirt close to him and Fultz. They clawed upward through the hail.

The first mistake he made was to raise his head and look ahead of him. A scrubby tan carpet of dry grass blades stretched steeply above them an impossible distance, dotted with stones and boulder outcroppings all the way to the horizon, where the grass met the sky.

They climbed past a tumble of boulders in which soldiers had taken up multilevel residence, rifles answering the fire from the slopes across the canyon. The nearest guy gawked at Black and Fultz clambering madly by, then understood.

“Go, guys, go!” he screamed wildly. “Get there!”

Black had had months to acclimate to the altitude. He was fit. But this climb was inhuman. He needed to rest.

Their attackers on the opposite side of the canyon were smart enough to figure out what was going on. Once they did, they let it be known.

Only the distance between the two sides of the canyon and the sure knowledge that stopping or slowing would mean death kept the two alive, kept them moving upward against their burning lungs and revolting legs. That and the fire peppering the ground near them.

They pressed on, panting and gasping.

The sounds of the main fight faded beneath them, overtaken by their own hoarse breaths. Black didn't look up ahead of them anymore. He saw only the dry earth before his eyes, and kept moving.

He realized that none of the contrived, enforced sufferings he'd endured through all of his training were anything at all.

Please, just one moment's rest.

An explosion opened the earth not far beneath them.

There were no rocks here big enough to duck behind. Only the open grass, burned in the sun.

Don't stop.

He'd had a roommate back at the FOB, another young officer whom Black hadn't liked much. The guy had cut out and posted a small square of paper near his bunk, from something someone back home had sent. In bold print at the top it read “A Lieutenant's Prayer.”

Black had found the title irritating before he'd even read what was below. The prayer itself he had found no less exasperating and precious. The words returned to him from nowhere as he scrabbled at the slope and crushed a foot-trail through the dead grass.

Please God

Do not take any of my guys

I cannot handle that.

As he climbed now he could think of nothing but those words.

Someone on the other side of the canyon was still giving it a go. Rounds thudded into the earth nearby. His legs felt like they had been poured with lava.

Please God let me stop.

S
ix Actual.

Dark.

“. . . Six Actual.”

Someone nearby was talking.

This was something important, he told himself. He found it hard to maintain interest.

You should listen.

He listened. It was gone.

Someone else was talking. That wasn't the voice.

“. . . near the connexes by the north wall of the compound.”

Oswalt.

“There are three or four there and on the far side, and no friendlies.”

Over a radio speaker. He proceeded as blandly and methodically as if he were reading off serial numbers in the arms room.

That's good. Oswalt will take care of everything.

“Roger that,” came the pilot's easy reply. “Coming around.”

It troubled him that he couldn't hear the other thing. He felt sure it was important.

Well, he would rest a moment instead then.

“. . . Six Actual, how copy?”

Oh, it was coming back. Good.

“Vega X-Ray, this is Vega Six Actual, how copy?”

This was something he knew.

“Vega X-Ray, this is Vega Six Actual, Cyclone Mobile is three minutes out, how copy?”

Now he understood.

“Vega X-Ray, how copy?”

It was odd. He was sure he had been lying on his back.

He seemed to be standing now, though he wasn't certain he could feel his feet. Moving past piles of stone intermingled with disheveled radio equipment.

“Sorry,” he heard himself mumble to the motionless form behind what was left of Hubbard's desk, “but I had to throw the book at you.”

Hubbard didn't laugh.

Nobody gets my jokes.

It was tough going, climbing over the rubble between him and the door.

“. . . X-Ray, how copy?”

The sound faded behind him as he crossed the threshold.

He was vaguely aware, as he traveled the corridor, of the air vibrating, throbbing around him. He could feel it on his face, pulsing, returning, but the sounds seemed distant. Mostly he heard his boots scuffing along the floor.

Brennan ran up to him.

Not Brennan. A soldier, mouthing words at him that he knew he could hear. He just couldn't muster the interest in what the kid was saying.

There was smoke ahead. Probably from the door he was heading toward.

He passed through an open space between two buildings, noting the great flames soaring above him to his left as he went. To his right he was sure there had been a wing of the building where now there was empty air. Maybe there hadn't been. Maybe it had always been rubble.

He thought he might be coughing. He passed indoors again and was pleased to see Fultz pressing on at his side.

Not Fultz. A soldier passing by, screaming something to him. Neat trick, Fultz.

It would be right down this passage, then through another open area. That's the way. Then there would be one more tunnel.

He felt air on his face again. Cold air. Then heat. Cinders washed across his vision in an artificial wind.

It was dim. Nearly the end of twilight. He saw light and looked up mutely to the black mountainside looming above the compound's buildings.

A lateral scrum of orange sunbursts rolled side by side, descending its face. There must have been dozens, all at once, a carpet of fire unfurling.

Someone invited bombers. It looked as though the mountain were crumbling down on top of them in flames.

He scuffled forward. The cinders stung his face. No, they weren't hot.

Cold.

Not cinders. Cold pinpricks. Frozen.

Snow.

It fell silently through the pressing din around him as he dragged his booted feet through the dirt yard. An early snow.

He loved the snow.

The tunnel approached, pressed in close and dark, but he kept moving. Almost there.

He hadn't passed half its length before he saw it, framed by the rectangled opening ahead. Right there beyond the end of the tunnel, like sighting the promised harbor in a spyglass. Like it was meant to be.

Six Actual.

—

Corelli raised his bare head in the shadows and watched the first flakes fall past the door.

Christmastime soon, back home.

He shifted his weight against the stone. It helped to move sometimes, let a different part go numb. Ease the pressure from the bindings on his hands.

The snow was barely visible in the deep pale of the gloaming sky. He thought he could hear the sound it made as it fell, even over the distant rumble of violence from beyond the mountain passes. From where his friends were.

Weighed in the balances.

He felt himself shiver beneath his uniform. The chill from the stone. He lowered his head and sang quietly to himself while he awaited what he deserved.