The Valley (38 page)

T
he recovery section of Charlie Med was subdivided with plywood and sheets into individual curtained bays for convalescing soldiers. Black wanted to rest at his hootch, but the doctors told him no way.

He'd lost a significant amount of blood in the twenty-four hours between being shot and his first contact with the medics at Vega. The bullet had made a lucky pass-through, but his wound was fairly messed up from lack of prompt treatment and inadvisable physical activity. He had been severely dehydrated when found by Shannon, and the doctors told him he had suffered multiple significant concussions. He rated a bed in the hospital for a few days.

When they began asking questions about how he'd suffered his injuries, he kept his answers as perfunctory as possible. What information he did provide was so bizarre and confounding that they invariably shook their heads and waved him off, leaving him for the inevitable investigators to talk to.

Never mind, I don't even want to know. U.S. nine-millimeter pistol wound, got it. Banged your head falling onto a stone floor, got it. Wandered in the woods with no water, got it.

Then they would leave, which was fine with him. By the end of the first morning he was tired of the place.

“Goddamn, L.T., I thought I told you!”

The violinmaker.

“Sorry,” he replied, grinning.

She'd just shown up for a shift, with a pack slung over her shoulder. She'd seen his name on the incoming roster the night before.

She grabbed a stool and peppered him with gruff questions about the aid he'd received from the medics in the field and the treatment he'd gotten once he'd made it to Charlie Med. Since he didn't remember much about the first part, those questions were easy to answer.

When she'd satisfied herself that his care was not being neglected, she sat back against the plywood partition and looked at him, brow furrowed.

“What the hell, man? What happened out there?”

He looked down at his sheets, saying nothing and shaking his head.

She eyed him another moment then shrugged, letting it go.

“Anyway, I brought you some stuff,” she said, digging in the pack. “Continue the classical portion of your woeful musical education.”

Out came a portable CD player with an expensive-looking pair of headphones and a stack of discs. She handed them over and Black commenced thumbing through them.

“Charles Ives . . . ?” he mumbled.

The violinmaker rolled her eyes.

“American,” she said. “Everyone knows about him now, so you should know about him.”

He kept flipping.

He held up a disc reproachfully.

“I know who Beethoven is,” he complained.

“You've heard his Fifth Symphony?”

“C'mon,” he said. “Da-da-da-DUM.”

“Hey, I don't know, man. There are some serious holes in your music.”

Black looked away.

“We were sheltered.”

She eyed him sidelong, waiting for more, but he offered no more.

“I bet,” she said, shaking her head. “Anyway, no, you
haven't
heard it. Not till you hear
that
recording.”

She pointed at the CD in his hand.

“Wiener Philharmoniker?” he read. “Carlos Kleiber?”

“
Veener,
not
Weener,
” she corrected, exasperated. “Vienna Philharmonic. 1975.”

She pointed at the headphones.

“Put it on in the dark with those on. You'll see.”

“Thanks.”

“No sweat,” she said, rising to go. “I'll check on you during my shifts. And if you decide you wanna tell me what the hell happened, I'm around.”

“Cool.”

“Cool.”

She went. She came by daily to check on him and break his balls about one thing or another, but she didn't ask about the Valley.

She must have told Kourash he was at Charlie Med. He made his way over from the Green Beans Coffee the next day, fretting over Black like a doting parent and generally wringing his hands at the threadbare condition of his young friend.

“I am sorry, my brother,” he told Black sadly. “I wished that you do not go in this war.”

Sergeant Cousins came by to visit, which was good of him. Smoke Toma didn't show, which was probably for the best.

—

Late on the third day, the person Black had most hoped for and most dreaded walked in.

He appeared unannounced and lingered in the doorway a long time. His arm was bandaged but he didn't look bad physically. When he lowered his angular frame into a chair, Black saw the dark circles under his eyes and the ashen pallor of his skin. He wondered if he looked that bad himself.

He sat in the chair with his elbows on his knees, glaring at a far point on the floor. When he finally spoke it was in a voice so hollow and gray it startled Black. He hardly recognized it.

“What the hell,” Merrick said, eyes unmoving, “is the end of the world?”

Black felt very tired.

He pointed at the wheelchair in the corner.

“Give me that thing.”

T
hey got their coffees from Kourash, who fussed over Black and gushed hospitality all over the startled, surly sergeant.

“A friend of
Breedman
Will is my brother,” he said graciously.

“I'm not— I'm . . .” Merrick stammered.

“Can we have the deck for a bit?” Black asked his friend, thumbing over his shoulder toward the back door.

Kourash palmed his chest.

“Yours, my brother.”

Merrick pushed Black's chair through the door, which Kourash latched behind them, and out onto the empty deck. The air was chill, but the snow in the mountains hadn't made it down this far.

They situated themselves at a metal table in a corner. Merrick lowered himself into a plastic deck chair and squinted out at a bleak amber horizon.

The late afternoon sun hung above the mountains, sending long shadows across the plain toward Omaha and inching across the wood planks where they sat.

Black looked at the tall sergeant folded awkwardly into the small chair, legs out straight before him, boots crossed at the ankles, eyes to the mountains.

“Where'd you hear that?” he asked Merrick.

“The people in the Meadows.”

“Oh.”

Merrick turned to him.

“And you said it.”

He eyed Black closely.

“Laying on your ass in the woods.”

He said nothing more. Just looked.

Black dropped his gaze and told him about the wall.

—

He told Merrick how the soldiers at Xanadu, whoever they were, had obviously been tolerating the growers while they tried to stop foreign fighters coming in. Until someone somewhere got tired of all the hassle, of being unable to control a critical piece of geography, and came up with the idea of the wall.

Told how the growers were cut off right along with the fighters and all the other growers in the Valley. How the growers flipped sides. How they massed forces with the Taliban and obliterated Xanadu.

And how the wall stayed. How no one could punch through it. How the growers of the Valley must have made a new deal with their new allies to move their product.

But someone else in the Valley found out about the wall. About Xanadu.

“How?”

Black looked away.

“I don't know.”

Caine knew the growers' predicament, but he couldn't have known about their new arrangement. He was the reason the growers in the Meadow burned their fields that night.

“To get out from under his shakedown,” Merrick said flatly.

The Darreh Sin growers were getting double-shook down, by an American and by the Americans' enemies. The American didn't know it, and the growers couldn't tell him. Their backs were against the wall, and their chief's back was against the wall.

And then Pistone. The last thing that nobody could take, on top of every other thing.

Merrick sat in silence, his cup sending tendrils of steam into the cool air. Finally he shook his head.

“No,” he said flatly. “The whole Valley, all those freaking tribes with their feuds and all their bullshit, they don't all team up to take us out just because some nobody and his son get shot somewhere.”

Black watched the coils rise from his own coffee.

“The boy,” he said, “was the thing that made it all come apart.”

They slurped somberly at their warm cups and shivered in the breeze spilling out of the passes and across the plain and chilling them where they sat.

Merrick watched the disc of the sun creep downward toward the mountaintops.

“Who the hell comes up with a fucking wall across a valley?”

Black watched it too.

“People very high up the food chain.”

He cradled his coffee against the breeze.

“In more than one country.”

Merrick scowled and sipped and set his cup on the tabletop, planting his feet flat on the deck beneath him and crossing his arms.

Black eyed him.

“That's why you kept the O.P. guys in lockdown when they came back to the FOB.”

Merrick nodded gruffly.

“No Americans east of Darreh Sin.”

Officially.

Soldiers trudged past in both directions, going about their business, alone and in pairs, rifles slung over their backs as they made for the chow hall or the M.W.R. or the gym or their hootches. The day rhythm of the FOB was turning to night.

Merrick uncrooked an arm and took a sip of coffee. He set it back down and extended his long legs in front of him, recrossing his arms against the chill. His eyes fell to a distant universe floating in the air over the ends of his boots.

“Pistone . . .” he murmured.

He looked out at the mountains, then looked down again. When he spoke his voice was run through with bitterness.

“Made an asshole of me,” he said. “Both of them.”

Black sipped at his own coffee and set it down. The sun hung just above the line of the ridges.

“I didn't suspect Pistone either,” he said finally. “Until Corelli told me.”

Merrick turned on him sharply.

“Yeah, well, you didn't work with Pistone every day,” he spat. “Guy walked around right in front of me and I didn't know jack.”

He shook his head in disgust.

“The people even tried to tell me.”

“What?”

“The fucking civilians. In the Meadows.”

He drifted into memory.

“Said the Devil isn't gonna take any more of their babies.”

They both considered that.

A Humvee rumbled by on a dirt road behind the market. Its noise faded, leaving the two of them staring at their cups.

“Fucking nothing was right since that night,” Merrick muttered. “I knew it, but nobody would say dick.”

Black waited for more, but Merrick didn't offer it.

“That's why you tried to scare me off,” he said finally.

Merrick scowled at the deck, his gaze boring a hole in the wood before his feet. When he finally spoke it was as though to himself, with defiance.

“I was
working
it.”

He exhaled heavily and shook his head, eyes to the deck.

“Never even found out who he had helping him move his shit down the Valley.”

Black looked away and studied the contours of his cup. Merrick seemed distracted and didn't notice.

Black had realized something, though he doubted Merrick wanted to hear it. He said it anyway.

“I would've done stuff the same way.”

“Well, then you'd be an idiot,” Merrick shot back angrily. “I let my senior squad leader
and
my lieutenant make a fool of me. I didn't know what was going on in
my
fucking platoon.”

He stood and stalked across to the railing at the edge of the deck, hands crammed in his pockets. He glared at the mountains and watched as the entire disc of the sun dipped below the ridges.

It seemed to grow instantly colder as the sun disappeared. Black wished he'd brought something thicker to wear.

Merrick spoke, facing the mountains.

“None of them came to me.”

Black looked up.

“Not one.”

He looked down at his half cup of chalky coffee and decided to tell the truth.

“They respected you.”

Merrick turned around, eyes narrow, the sunset panorama framed behind him.

“Screw off.”

“Shannon said you didn't need to be burdened with knowing about the Meadows or any of the rest of it.”

“That's fucking stupid,” Merrick said bitterly. “Fucking Shannon.”

“Shannon worships you.”

“Shannon's dead.”

He went out by himself, Merrick said, to cut Caine down from the tree.

“Against my orders,” he added.

He came back and slumped into his chair, dark clouds roiling his brow.

He took up his coffee roughly, sipped it, frowned, and set it back down. Black tasted his own, which was also cold.

People passed by in the fading light. Merrick's eyes drifted again, to the same invisible point. A minute passed in silence.

When Merrick spoke it was in a growl, through nearly clenched teeth.

“I tried to beat that fucker.”

Black looked up. Merrick, his bitter gaze fixed in the distance, shook his head in disgust.

“I tried my hardest to beat his ass.”

Black's brow furrowed.

“You did beat him.”

Someone else just . . .

Merrick looked up at him, scowling. He shook his head.

Black didn't understand.

“Caine didn't get killed on the way to the station,” Merrick stated flatly. “He got killed on the way
back
from it.”

Black asked him how he knew that. Merrick told him. There was little else to say.

They drained the last of their gray coffees and rapped on the door. Kourash let them through, and Merrick wheeled Black back through the gravel and along the dirt pathways, back to Charlie Med.

Black climbed onto his bed. Merrick watched him silently, hands in his pockets.

“The thing that happened with your last platoon,” he said finally.

Black looked up in surprise. Merrick looked at the floor.

“The way it was in the papers and stuff. Was that how it went down?”

“Yeah.”

Merrick opened his mouth to speak, then closed it. He crossed his arms then shoved his hands in his pockets again. When he finally spoke it was in a voice with little comfort.

“Maybe stuff in life balances out in the end.”

Black said nothing and looked down at his sheets.

Merrick turned to go, then stopped as though remembering something. He turned around and looked at Black.

“They found Doc Brydon's body in the Taj Mahal while you were out running around the Valley.”

Black watched his own hands smooth the sheets.

“Shot himself in the face. You know anything about that?”

“No.”

Merrick left. Black reached into his pocket and removed Jason Traynor's ID card. He sat staring at it.