The Valley (5 page)

E
very Army unit had a supply sergeant, and every unit had an acquisition specialist. They may or may not be the same guy.

The acquisition specialist was the guy on deployment who could find and get anything. He'd usually been in the Army a lot of years, and he specialized not in working Army supply channels, but in working all the other channels besides those.

He knew how to get anything from the formal system, and he knew how to get anything else the other way. He knew where to go to work trades, and he knew how to reach into the local economy when everything else failed.

He was the reason that commanders who wanted a plasma-screen monitor for their command post had to order two or three just to have one make it all the way from the States. There were acquisition specialists at every stop along the way, and smart commanders eventually figured out that they needed one of their own just to defeat all the others.

Sergeant First Class Maru Toma was the only acquisition specialist Black knew personally on FOB Omaha. He was the master gunner—the senior technical expert—for an artillery battalion on the other side of the post. He had spent years as a forward observer, maneuvering with infantry forces on the ground and calling in air strikes and artillery bombardments to support their operations. Now he was close to retirement and he didn't play nice enough with officers to ever be a sergeant major, so he'd been given the master gunner slot. An on-call consultant, basically.

Black knew Toma played soccer most nights with a bunch of Dominican guys who worked in the main chow hall. Part of his network, no doubt. He swung by the dirt lot where they played, but it was dark and empty. He kept going.

Toma lived in an occupied building encircling a courtyard just like the Senior Dorm layout back at Black's unit. He had the largest room in the joint, of course, and he didn't have to share it with anyone. Black saw Toma's empty camp chair as he came around the corner, sitting outside his door with a still-smoldering butt in it.

In luck. He knocked.

The door swung open immediately. Toma must have been heading back out to finish his smoke. He stood there still in his soccer clothes, a beer bottle and opener in one hand.

He was a beefy Samoan with a good bit of the accent still hanging on. He was about four inches shorter than Black but probably weighed half again as much, most of that weight being muscle.

“What up, cuz?”

He crooked his elbow and put his free hand up for a guy clasp, pulling Black into a chest-bump hug. Black felt the opener and bottle clank against his back as Toma's other hand gave it a perfunctory smack.

All forms of alcohol were strictly forbidden on deployment. Toma being Toma, he didn't bother making the slightest effort to conceal the thing.

“Hey,” Black replied. “Got a minute?”

Military customs and courtesies were pretty much not relevant in dealing with someone like Toma. He was outside of all that. The sergeant shrugged and gestured him in with his head. Black followed.

Inside, he had to turn in a circle to take it all in. There were guys who tricked out their deployment living spaces, and then there was Toma. His hootch was spectacular.

Stateside furniture, quality electronics, multiple AC units. The typical minifridge would have been beneath Toma's dignity; Black gawked at a full-size stainless steel unit. Somewhere a command post was lonely without the plasma-screen TV that seemed to take up half a wall.

The place was L-shaped, with a split-level “bedroom” space around the corner, inside which Toma had installed a raised wooden deck to hold an improbably large non-Army bed. A hanging tapestry, currently pulled into tiebacks bolted to the jet-black bedroom walls, served as an entry curtain.

“Beer?”

Toma sent a thumb toward the fridge. Black waved him off. Toma shrugged again and settled into an easy chair, cigarette and lighter in hand.

“Whatcha got?”

Black knew enough to get right to it.

“What do you know about the Valley?”

“Who's asking?”

“Me.”

“How come?”

“I'm going up there tomorrow night.”

“Bullshit. You don't go nowhere.”

It wasn't an insult. Toma was just pointing out the truth.

“I've got a fifteen-six at a COP up there.”

“Okay, you got a fifteen-six. So?”

“You've been up there.”

“Bullshit.”

“Bullshit, ‘bullshit.' I know you've been up there.”

Black did not actually know Toma had been to the Valley, but he assumed that before he'd taken the master gunner gig on the FOB, a guy with Toma's experience and qualifications had been dropping artillery rounds and calling air strikes all up and down those mountains.

“How you know that?” Toma asked, squinting.

Black put on his best conspiratorial grin.

“I know more about you than you think.”

It was a lame and risky thing to say with Toma, but he laughed.

“Bullshit. You're guessing. So what if I was up there?”

Black wasn't really sure what he wanted from Toma. It wasn't like he needed some special piece of gear to hunker down in an outpost and stay out of the way for a week. He didn't have anything Toma needed, and he didn't pretend that he and Toma were friends.

He mostly just wanted to see what Toma had to say. Toma's opinions of junior officers were quick and arbitrary, but for whatever reason he seemed to have decided that Black was one of the okay ones. In the past he'd always been cool.

“I don't know, man. Maybe just if there's anything I need to know.”

Toma considered.

“Sucks,” he concluded.

“Yeah, I figured. What else?”

Toma considered further.

“What's the fifteen-six on?”

Black gave the ten-second version. Angry crowd-type situation; warning shots. According to his paperwork, somebody in the village had given an earful to an Army Civil Affairs officer—Toma snorted at hearing this—who was passing through town on a goodwill mission. He put the complaint into the system, and the 15-6 came out the other side.

Toma took this all in, sitting staring at the wall for so long that Black almost asked him if he was okay. Finally he spoke.

“What town?”

Black scanned his memory.

“I think it's called Darreh Sin.”

“Never been to that one,” Toma said tersely. “You gonna see the chief?”

“The who?”

“The chief,” Toma said, exasperated. “The town chief. Jesus, cuz, you been on the FOB a long time.”

“Why am I seeing the chief?”

“Somebody complained, right? Somebody from the town complained to the Civil Affairs fag. That's the chief.”

“How do you know?”

“Civil Affairs dude is gonna be a captain or higher. Town chief is the guy that would make a formal complaint to an American officer.”

“Okay.”

“But he ain't gonna talk to anyone lower than a captain now,” Toma explained. “Beneath his station or whatever.”

Black was confused.

“Okay, so the chief complained to some American,” he said. “Why do I need to talk to him?”

He'd been picturing your standard interview-the-soldiers-involved-and-write-it-up type of situation, not some kind of summit meeting with an Afghan chieftain.

“You need to talk to him so you can get the fuck out of the Valley.”

“I don't get it.”

Toma pointed at him.

“I know your boss. Gayley, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Asshole Boy Scout.”

“So?”

“He ain't gonna accept no write-up with just soldiers' statements. He's gonna expect Afghan statements too.”

Black hadn't thought this far out.

“You radio in that you talked to the soldiers and they said everything was cool and tell him you're done,” Toma went on, “and see what happens. That motherfucker is gonna keep you out there another week and tell you to do it right. Right?”

Toma was right, of course. Gayley had shown no signs of particular love or sympathy for the Afghan people, but he had a taut and highly refined sense of honor and an extreme concern for procedural niceties. When it came to avoiding at all costs the slightest appearance of impropriety, he was a card-carrying Goody Two-Shoes. Investigating a situation involving Afghan civilians without talking to the civilians themselves definitely would not fly. Gayley would expect him to run the thing all the way to the ground, no matter how trivial and silly.

“Right,” Black finally responded.

“So you're fucked. Chief won't talk to you.”

“Why?”

Toma pointed at Black's chest.

Right. Lieutenant. Beneath his station.

“Okay, so the chief won't talk to me. I find the guy whose house it was.”

“He won't talk to you either.”

“Why not?”

“No one in the town is gonna talk to you without the chief's permission, and he ain't gonna give it. The Army sending a lieutenant is an insult to him after he complained to a captain.”

He raised his cigarette and lighter.

“No offense.”

Black considered all this.

“Okay, so what do I do?”

Toma hauled his bulk out of his chair, leaving his smoke behind.

He slumped over to a padlocked trunk in the corner, opening it with a key he wore on a chain with his dog tags. He came back and tossed a small paper-wrapped package at Black, who caught it with both hands.

It was oblong, five or six inches long, about the thickness of a two-by-four but with more heft. The paper was folded around it but not sealed. Black pulled it open.

Inside was a rectangular object wrapped in something like cellophane. It had a brown hue like wet sand. It looked like compressed clay.

Black had seen pictures before, but he stared at it for probably a full ten seconds before it clicked that he was looking at the real thing in his lap.

“A fucking brick of heroin?”

Toma had eased himself nonchalantly back into his chair.

“What am I supposed to do with this?” Black demanded.

Toma lit up his smoke.

“For the chief.”

“What?”

“Straight money.”

“I don't get it.”

Toma blew a long cloud into the room.

“Chief sees that, he knows you got the juice, even though you're just an L.T. He'll talk to you then.”

“What, so I'm supposed to
sell
the chief some heroin?”

“
No,
cuz.”

Toma shook his head, exasperated.

“It's a present. Like a tribute. You ain't gonna walk into the chief's house and try to sell him one sorry-ass brick of heroin. He'll laugh his ass off before he shoots you for wasting his fucking time and insulting him.”

Black tried to process. Toma continued.

“You go to him and you show him your respect and all that, and do it up good. You give him the brick like a gift, like you're showing you know he's the guy. Then he knows you're for real too, you got access to shit, and you guys can do business.”

“I thought the poppies were pretty much gone from these mountains,” Black said. “Because of the Taliban.”

Toma looked pained and pitying all at once.

“Okay,” Black said, relenting. “So I give it to him and he thinks I wanna, what? Help him move heroin?”

“Probably. You think it ain't happened? But don't worry, you won't have to make no deals or nothing.”

Toma took a long drag.

“He don't need you for heroin. If he's in the business, which if he lives in the Valley he is, he's got all his poppies up in the hills and wherever. This is just a get-to-know-you. It's a dance, going through the motions. You give him the gift and he figures out where you're coming from. Figures maybe you can help keep the Taliban off his back over the heroin, right? Or just do some good trading for other stuff. Those dudes all want electronics and shit. Anyway, doesn't matter. You play nice and say how you wanna see him again in the near future and all that.”

“Okay.”

“You won't have to see him because you'll be gone from the Valley by then,” Toma went on. “But you flirt with him, right? Then before you go, you say you wanted to talk about one other thing.”

“The complaint.”

“Right. Then you get his statement about the complaint. Probably he tones it down some because you guys are boys now, and you won't have to investigate any more. Then you go back to Vega and you're good to go. You turn in your paper to Gayley and he's happy.”

He drew a smoky-handed flowchart in midair.

“Gayley sends it up to Brigade. Then the Civil Affairs pussy probably goes back out with a wad of cash for the dude with the goat and a wad for the dude with the bullet in his damn mud hut. Civil Affairs bro feels like a big shot. Gayley gets a medal for winning hearts and minds.”

He crossed his ankles and leaned back in his chair.

“Circle of life and shit.”

Black was shaking his head.

“What if the chief tells the Civil Affairs guy or someone from Vega about the brick?”

Toma looked at him like he was deeply stupid.

“Chief ain't gonna tell on you.”

Black realized he was right. What on earth would the chief gain by doing that?

“It's still crazy,” he said doubtfully. “I can't go walking around with that kind of contraband on me.”

As soon as he remembered who he was saying it to, he felt foolish. Toma just looked annoyed. He pointed at Black.

“When was the last time someone stopped you on the FOB and searched your shit, L.T.?”

Black said nothing.

“When was the last time someone made you open your ruck and your duffel and do a layout like you're a soldier?”

“Okay, I got it.”

“Look, cuz, you do what you want. I'm just saying, you can take it with you, like insurance.”