The Valley (37 page)

T
he end of the tunnel loomed. He was there, not twenty meters away in the flashing dark, standing square in the middle of the courtyard, a row of rumbling gun trucks behind him, orange slashes arcing upward from all their turrets.

Tumult all about him, soldiers slugging ammo cans from the trucks, medics bearing litters toward them. But he stood there amidst it a picture of calm, his rifle hanging idly at his side, gazing upward at the inferno in the hillsides with the bearing of a man who has stepped out to the veranda to enjoy a Fourth of July display on the next field over.

At the end of the tunnel a medic squatted under the breezeway, hunched over a pair of prostrate legs, back turned. Black saw the medic's form bouncing and rushing at him with startling speed.

His confusion passed when he realized he was running at the medic. Of course.

Yes.

He pulled the startled kid entirely off balance doing it, nearly spilling himself, but the pistol tugged free in his grasp, free of the medic's holster. He completed a stumbling three-sixty, feeling like he'd barely broken stride, and felt his stomping boots smack on mud. Felt the cold air again. Saw the face, which had turned now and was looking over Black's head to the mountains.

It was a forgettable one, angular and unhandsome, taut with years of underestimation and underappreciation. But the burn in Pistone's coal-dark eyes as he soaked in the spectacle above them was all Black needed to see. A half second's glance to feel certain as he stamped ahead, bootsoles skidding beneath him, and squared the pistol in the air before his face.

The force of the medic's running tackle spun him from behind, sending the two of them tangled together to the ground. They smacked hard and slid, cutting a black trough across the slick surface now speckled in soft gray.

A single shot cracked into the dark as they struck. Black's sole contribution of violence to the day.

“Goddamn it, sir!”

The voice was so far.

“What the hell!?”

He felt himself pressed into the moist earth as the medic sat on him with all his weight. Felt the pistol pulled easily from his reaching hands. Felt the cold seeping through his uniform layers to his skin.

Heard another voice shouting at the medic, the voice of a sergeant to his soldier. Something about Black being altered and to stop fucking around and stick him already.

And his own voice, someplace distant, screaming upward at the spectacled face that stood looking down at him now, splashed in shifting orange light. At the same coal eyes. Screaming at those eyes that They were your guys.

The needle didn't hurt as it entered his injured arm. He felt nothing as its contents coursed through him. Pulled him downward.

Illuminated flakes fell gently into his vision, drifting between him and those eyes. He saw but did not hear the words that were spoken down to him in return. He understood them, though, and knew he would not forget them.

But the speaker turned away, and Black lost them as his straining limbs slackened and he sank lower, let them swirl away as particles of smoke before his waving hand. Let them free of his grasp and found his dark rest in ashes and snow.

—

He'd never been a good singer. Hardly could carry a tune. His sister made fun of him for it. But he'd never cared much.

Mostly he sang alone anyway. He'd sung through all his albums during the dark Land Nav nights in training. Sung himself all the way over the mountains and up here when the lieutenant told him to go. Sang when he was farthest from safety.

The rumbling surged in the distance. Corelli sang on, barely above a whisper, in a quavering boy's voice.

See him in a manger laid

Whom the angels praise above

It must have been thunderous where they were. He listened to the awful far tumult and sang to the stone floor as the snow outside settled to the ground.

While we raise our hearts in love

Gloooooo-oooooo-oooooria

In excelsis deo

The shape filled the doorway, framed black against the early evening.

Only what I have earned.

“Sir!”

He turned his head. Fultz, rasping and clawing beside him, pointed upward.

He looked. The ridgeline, barely twenty feet further.

As they stomped and struggled upward through the last steps, he heard a new sound growing above and behind him.

They staggered and fell to earth at the crest, out of sight.

He collapsed in a heap just over the top, the noise rising stronger and more steady behind them. He rolled to his back, heaving gasps raking in and out of him, a fresh panorama of height and depth filling his vision. His body, ravenous for air, gorged at the meager feast up here.

Fultz lay on his face beside him, sucking in the mountaintop soil, one arm thrust out toward him holding the handset.

The noise resolved itself and roared over his face, faceless and unknowing. Heavy-lift cargo helicopters, on their way someplace in some other godforsaken valley, with twenty-foot concrete blast barriers hanging beneath them.

A
hazy, brutal shape loomed before his vision, haloed in snowglare. He moved his hand, which had been holding his head, and squinted upward.

Shannon. Just looking down at him. Smeared in grime and sweat.

Behind him the courtyard and its walls were covered in a gentle inch of snow, which now threw the morning sun in Black's eyes. The Humvees were gone, muddy ruts and bootprints the only sign of their former presence. He tasted multiple flavors of smoke.

Someone had propped him in a folding camp chair in the breezeway and put a field jacket on him. A fresh IV line snaked out from beneath the coat. His head pounded like a dozen hangovers. He realized he was shivering.

“Found your pack,” Shannon grunted.

Black lowered his head and saw his assault pack, which he had left in Pistone's hootch two days before, hanging by its straps in the corporal's huge hand. It sloughed to the stone in a slumping heap of canvas by Shannon's feet. Black heard two dull objects move against each other inside it.

Black stared at the pack dumbly. His jaw felt slack, as though his mouth were hanging open.

He raised his head and looked up again. Shannon was looking away.

“Might need that,” he said to the breezeway wall.

Black looked past him at the silent hills, now mottled in gray. The side of his face throbbed.

“Corel—” he began, and erupted in a fit of coughing.

When he finished he saw Shannon looking down at him again in distaste, brow curled as though trying to solve a problem in his head. He produced a dirt-stained, half-drunk water bottle from a cargo pocket and held it out silently. Black took it and drank, water running down the sides of his mouth.

When he looked up Shannon's hands were shoved in his pockets and he was looking away again.

“Empty pair of flex-cuffs,” he muttered.

Behind him the wind on the slopes raised white swirls from dusted tree limbs. Soldiers and medics hustled to and from the courtyard. Most carried ammunition and M.R.E. cases, which they stacked against the breezeway walls.

Black tried to remember how long he'd been watching them. How long he'd been conscious.

“Oswalt,” he croaked.

“He's cool.”

“O.P.”

Shannon turned and eyeballed the soldiers coming and going before he spoke.

“Ain't no O.P.”

Black looked past Shannon at the snow-powdered hills.

A medic sergeant appeared, the same one from the night before, informing him that his MEDEVAC flight would be arriving in a few minutes. His tone made it clear that there would be no dicking around and Black
would
be getting on the bird.

The sergeant stomped away, barking at his junior medics.

It took Black a moment to realize that Shannon was still standing there. He'd momentarily forgotten.

He noticed for the first time that Shannon's body armor and weapon were stacked against the breezeway wall nearby. He looked up at the hulking soldier, who stared intently down the breezeway, hands in his pockets again.

Soldiers came by with cots and cases of medical supplies. Everything in the outpost was being assembled close to the courtyard.

“I didn't—” Shannon blurted out suddenly.

Black looked up. Shannon, looking out at the hills, shook his head and exhaled in muscular exasperation.

“I didn't know Sergeant Merrick was fucking investigating anything,” he said in an angry gush of words, “until he told you out there yesterday.”

He crossed his bulging forearms.

“I didn't know who knew what or who wanted to know what.”

He glared at the soldiers hustling about the courtyard and shoved his hands back into his pockets.

Black watched the soldiers too.

“Bullshit,” he sighed wearily.

Shannon uncrossed his arms and looked down at Black a long time before he spoke.

—

From above, in daylight, it looked so ordinary. A valley like all the rest. Mountains like any others. From up here they could've been the mountains back home. Like with his dad and brother.

They flew just below the level of the ridges, hazy sunshafts winking, flashing across into his eyes. He watched out the chopper door as the coils of black smoke receded, its origin shrinking to a dot in the crook of the snow-dusted valley sides.

Did Brydon go with Caine, when he went out to do his business?

He had dreaded asking the question.

Naw. That wasn't the dick Caine fucked him with.

Black looked around the interior of the helicopter. There were other soldiers there, strapped into the narrow seats. Lesser wounded like himself. After the criticals and the bodies.

One of them, caked in ash and dried blood, saw Black looking at him. He smiled and gave a flip of the chin. Black looked away.

What was Caine doing outside the COP?

You know what he was doing.

Where is he now?

Shannon had told him, watching Black's reaction coolly. When he spoke it was without triumph and without pity.

I told you the day I met you, Lieutenant. You fuck with this valley and it will fuck you back.

“HEARD WHAT YOU DID, SIR,” the soldier in the bird called over the rotors and wind.

Black turned his head and looked at the kid blankly.

“HEARD WHAT YOU DID.”

What he did.

How did Caine know where to go looking for Corelli?

He hadn't expected Shannon to know.

That was probably me.

Shannon's big brows curled at him.

Thought you were a paperwork bubba.

Long story.

The soldier in the helicopter nodded at Black enthusiastically.

“FUCK YEAH, L.T.!”

They'd gotten below the snow line. Scrubby slopes sped past the open doors.

What were you gonna be, Lieutenant? Before you ran away from it to be in the Army?

It was the second time that week someone had asked him that. He said so.

Yeah, well, whatever it was,
y
ou might want to just go do that. Army ain't for you.

The medic sergeant had come back then, and told Black his ride was almost there.

See you later then.

But Black called to Shannon, over the rising noise of the approaching helicopter.

Why did you refuse the order that night?

It was the only thing he'd really wanted to know from him.

When Caine told you to go after the girl?

Shannon had got a distant look in his eyes.

Didn't know if it was a girl or boy.

Black told him. Shannon's assessment was succinct.

Goddamn.

Two medics had come up the breezeway, ready to help Black aboard. Shannon bent to gather his gear.

Yeah, well, anyway, I don't give a fuck about no hajji kid.

That Black believed.

But Caine was an asshole.

He shouldered his load.

And so are you.

And he'd turned and stumped away down the breezeway, a hulking, moving island of calm in the blowing snow.

Mountainsides fell away. The broad plain opened below them. The chopper banked and adjusted course, bound for home.

Clear of the valleys, they picked up speed. The sound of the wind and the engines was deafening in the open compartment. But all Black could hear was what Shannon had told him. About Caine.

Sergeant Merrick found him.

Where?

The big corporal looked steadily into his eyes.

Like Parsons.

Like who?

Their altitude was appreciably dropping, the air warming.

They crucified his ass.

Black looked out the door and saw Omaha in the distance.

H
e thumbed through the stack of bills then tossed them back onto the cot with the rest. A chilling breeze blew through the gaps and sent them swirling past the open trunk, brown rectangles lined up in its mouth. He'd only seen heroin bricks in person one other time.

He took a last look around Caine's hootch and strode out, climbing over rubble and picking his way through the remains of the disemboweled outpost.

His lieutenant was waiting, silently. Everyone else was on board already. The two of them checked the timer and set the detonators together. Strode out to the hulking, crouching bird, rotors turning, whining, ready to claw upward.

They stopped at the base of the ramp. The lieutenant looked at him expectantly.

He knew it would come to this nonsense. He should let it go. Remember what Shannon said.

Goddamned Shannon.

Just let it go. Don't let on.

No goddamned way.

He turned and looked in the lieutenant's dark eyes.

“Get on the fucking helicopter, sir.”

The lieutenant looked back at him, long and probingly, before turning and stumping up into the troop compartment.

Shaking off the feeling of sudden nakedness, he turned back and looked at it. All of it. Looked up to the empty hills and mountainsides, which had taken all of them.

Not empty.

The crew gunner hollered at him through the rotor wash. He had the kid by several ranks, but helicopter crews, like medics, honor no courtesies and respect no rank. They respect the bird. It's what keeps them in the sky.

Merrick turned away and put one boot heavily on the ramp, then the other, its sole scuffing a little cloud of dirt behind it as he stepped up.

He didn't look out as they rose away. He looked at the ID card in his hand.