The Valley

by John Renehan

  Caine knew Merrick, and he knew that Merrick would blow his top when he found out about Black and the 15-6. There was no reason for him to wait until the next morning, in the chow hall, in the presence of both Black and a bunch of joes, for him to drop the bomb on Merrick. In fact it was improper for him to wait so long to tell the senior guy that there was a visiting officer in his post.

  Either he was dumb, or he thought Black was dumb, or both.

  He set his rifle in the corner and stretched out on the bunk, trying to shake the same uncomfortable feeling of being in someone else’s living space. His jaw still hurt from where Caine punched it the night before. He pulled his book out and started reading, pausing periodically to stare at the ceiling.

  After a while he realized he hadn’t gotten chow when he went to meet Merrick. He was hungry. He rose and gathered up his rifle, slinging it over his back, and headed for the door, happy to get out of Lieutenant Pistone’s strange hootch.

  He stopped at the funny restroom closet and took note of the vast field of Chuck Norris–themed graffiti scrawled all over the walls inside. In keeping with venerable tradition, most of it drew upon the martial artist’s grave reputation (WHEN THE BOOGYMAN GOES TO SLEEP, HE CHECKS UNDER THE BED FOR CHUCK NORRIS), improbable powers (CHUCK NORRIS IS SO FAST HE CAN RUN AROUND THE WORLD AND PUNCH HIMSELF IN THE BACK OF THE HEAD), and fearsome prowess in all things.

  Directly in the center, in large print, was what appeared to be the original item.

  CHUCK NORRIS SHAT HERE

  AND SHIT WAS NEVER THE SAME

  He browsed some of the other entries, appreciating soldiers’ endless, often vulgar creativity. He was still smiling over a clever one (CHUCK NORRIS CAN LEAVE A MESSAGE BEFORE THE BEEP) as he pushed open the door and nearly ran into two young soldiers walking down the narrow corridor. They had seen him grinning.

  “Something funny, there, sir?” asked one.

  Black didn’t miss a beat.

  “Just Chuck.”

  “Oh, you a fan of Chuck, sir?”

  He had the air of the smartass about him.

  “Who isn’t?”

  The kid smirked at his buddy.

  “Just thought maybe you officers were too fancy for Chuck, sir.”

  Black put his hands in his pockets and turned to go.

  “‘Chuck Norris is so badass,’” he said, making one up on the fly, “‘he can even kick the fancy out of an officer.’”

  It took the two soldiers a silent, goggle-eyed moment to process just how lame Black’s attempt at humor was. But only a moment.

  They both erupted in astonished laughter.

  “Damn, you all right, L.T.!” called one as Black headed off down the hallway.

  “Hooah, sir!” called the other with mock enthusiasm.

  Their voices faded behind him, one of them musing aloud about a white officer named Black.

  “Take it where you can get it, bro!” he heard the other one laugh.

  He made his winding way back to the chow hall, which he’d expected to be empty at this time of day. It wasn’t.

  Several soldiers around a table looked up as he entered, their conversation immediately lapsing into silence. They stared at him blankly, dark circles under their eyes as they watched him cross to the food station. As had all young soldiers once he’d passed the age of twenty-five, these ones looked like they were fourteen years old.

  He said nothing and went about his business. Gradually conversation picked up again, in quieter tones.

  He had expected these guys to be living on M.R.E.s pretty much year-round. There were cartons of them stacked in the corner, but at least for a couple days after a supply run it looked like they could scrape together something approaching food. The outpost must have had a minor ability to keep things refrigerated. A generator-powered chest freezer or something somewhere. Not too bad.

  The grub wasn’t anything to write home about. Cooler cases filled with cold cuts and bags of spongy white bread, with an open box of mustard and mayo packets off to the side.

  But it wasn’t M.R.E.s. The joes at the table chomped their limp sandwiches greedily.

  Black grabbed a paper plate from a stack and started fixing himself a baloney with mustard on Wonder. He heard the door slap shut.

  Someone came up next to him and grabbed a plate. He felt himself being examined sidelong.

  “Afternoon, L.T.”

  He looked up long enough to see a soldier he didn’t recognize. The kid looked as skinny and haggard as the rest of them.

  “Hey.”

  He looked down and recommenced squeezing half-filled mustard packets onto meat folds. The soldier did the same.

  He felt himself being examined again. He raised his head suddenly and looked the kid in the eye.

  “What?” he asked sharply.

  “Uh, sorry, sir,” the soldier said, flustered. “Um, nothing, sir. I was just, um—”

  Black gave him an Out with it, then! look.

  “Sir, sorry if this isn’t my business, but . . . weren’t you the, uh, the guy that—”

  “No.”

  Black went back to his cold cuts. The soldier realized their brief conversation was done.

  “Oh, okay. Uh, sorry, sir.”

  “No problem.”

  Black took his plate and sought out the table closest to where the gaggle of joes was chatting. He sat down with his back to them. Their mumbled talk got even quieter.

  You’re a pain in the ass.

  He finished his food quickly and went back to Pistone’s spartan quarters. He lay on the bunk and read his book. He made a quiet decision while he did so.

  Four o’clock came and went. Caine didn’t show.

  He didn’t mind. He didn’t want to bombard guys the minute they came off shift anyway.

  At about four forty-five, he finally heard Caine’s knock on the door. He rose and grabbed a little green hardcover notebook from the side table, just like the one Merrick had had in the chow hall. Five by eight inches, standard government issue, fits in the cargo pocket of a uniform. Mandatory equipment for officers and senior sergeants. He shoved the thing in his trousers, crossed to the door, and opened it.

  Merrick.

  Black let his surprise show on his face. Merrick saw.

  “Expecting someone, Lieutenant?”

  Merrick looked down at him with what Black could only describe as unconcealed contempt.

  Annoyed at himself, Black ignored the comment and stepped into the hallway. Merrick set off immediately, forcing Black to step quickly to catch up.

  “No, I’m not leaving my second to take you to talk to my soldiers,” he said, answering a question Black hadn’t asked.

  He left a perceptible emphasis on “my.”

  “If you’re going to waste their time with bullshit, they hear it from me.”

  Black again said nothing. They went down a different set of passageways and breezeways and bits of sky than Black had seen the night before. He was increasingly impressed with how much there was to the place.

  They turned a corner and made their way down a corridor made of temporary blast walls on one side and an exterior wall of the building on the other, with metal sheeting for a roof. They arrived at a square stone opening fitted with a homemade wooden door. The door read:

  BAY TWO

  HELLRAISERS

  Inside was your classic soldiers’ deployment rabbit warren. You started with a large empty room in an occupied building. Some kind of big space, preferably with a high ceiling. You got a whole lot of wood sheets and two-by-fours and turned the soldiers and their sergeants loose on the place with saws, hammers, and nails. Within a couple days it was transformed into dozens of individual living spaces.

  None of them had roofs because there’d be no ventilation otherwise. The electricity si
tuation, a creeping-vine chaos of extension cords, power strips, and amateur splices, was an inevitable and ongoing flout to the niceties of the fire code.

  But every joe had his own space and his own door. It might be the size of a closet, but it was his. On deployment, that was no small thing.

  The bay was lit by a couple of large overhead fixtures set fifteen feet above them in the ceiling. Merrick started briskly down the first narrow passage.

  He stopped in front of a door. Many of them were written or painted or stenciled on, but this one was blank. He stopped just past it and turned to face Black.

  “Brydon,” he said, motioning curtly to the door with his head.

  Black stepped up and knocked.

  “Yeah,” came a gravelly voice from within.

  Black pushed the door open and stepped through. Merrick stepped in after him. Black turned around immediately and stepped back out again.

  This time he waited, forcing Merrick to step out after him. As soon as he did, Black turned on his heel and took several steps up the passage, away from the open door. He turned and waited for Merrick to catch up.

  “What are you doing?” Black asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I talk to the guys alone.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “I’m the investigator, and you’re their superior,” Black said matter-of-factly. “You don’t go into the interview.”

  Merrick shook his head.

  “That’s not how you do it,” he said, angering. “What is this bullshit?”

  “Like hell it’s not,” Black answered coolly. “You ever been around a fifteen-six before?”

  Merrick did not like that one bit. He stepped in close and spoke tersely.

  “Yeah, Lieutenant, I’ve seen a fucking fifteen-six before. Have you? That’s not how you fucking do it. I stay with my guys.”

  In for a penny . . .

  “Yeah, well, if you saw a fifteen-six like that,” Black shot back, “then you saw someone doing it wrong. You ever read the regulation, Sergeant?”

  From the look on his face he was pretty sure Merrick would like to hit him. He pressed.

  “I go in alone. That’s how you do it. You want to stop me, stop me. I’ll sit in Lieutenant Pistone’s hootch and read my book all week and go home and say I got obstructed, and then you can deal with a field-grade officer up here in your business.”

  Merrick seethed downward at him.

  “Or you can let me do my business,” Black finished, “and go home and you can forget all about me and this fifteen-six.”

  He waited. Behind his anger, Merrick appeared to be thinking things through. Given his experience and obvious intelligence, it occurred to Black that he might actually have read the regulation.

  The sergeant turned on his heel and stomped down the hall to Brydon’s blank door.

  “Hey, fuckhead!”

  “Yeah,” came the same voice in the same even tone.

  “The lieutenant here has some questions for you,” Merrick said in clipped tones into the doorway. “He has come all the way from Colonel Gayley’s bullshit unit to conduct a fifteen-six investigation.”

  “Roger,” drawled the voice, sounding bored.

  “You will answer his questions accurately. You will not fucking speculate on any information that you do not have specific personal knowledge of. If the lieutenant takes more than thirty minutes of your time”—he turned to look at Black—“you will report it to me afterwards.”

  “Roger.”

  “And try not to cast any fucking spells on him. He’s only a lieutenant.”

  “Roger.”

  Merrick turned to Black.

  “That is Shannon’s door over there,” he said irritably, pointing down the hallway. “Corelli’s is the last one around the corner.”

  He stalked away down the hallway in the direction he’d pointed.

  Black watched Merrick knock heavily on the door he’d identified as Shannon’s.

  Can’t believe he bought that, he was thinking as he stepped into the Wizard’s room.

  12

  A picture was coming into focus.

  The kid’s room was tiny. Maybe eight feet by five feet. The centerpiece of the place, on the wall directly opposite him, was a large and rumpled tapestry of black nylon. An upright five-pointed star sprawled across it in white silk screen, points extending just beyond the arc of a circle, making it look almost but not quite like a pentagram. In front of the star, his back to the viewer, was a man, naked, feet planted defensively, palms raised before him protectively, reeling back against whatever looming power lurked within the giant star.

  On another wall was tacked a page torn from a magazine, a fantastical painting of a city perched atop an improbable mountain which tapered inward at its lower latitudes until the whole thing rested on a thin spear of rock. The rest of the wallspace was occupied by hand drawings on pieces of white paper, crowding one another in themed bunches like billslips on a RENT NOW bulletin board. One corner featured beefy creatures thumping huge mallets and lithe elvish archers astride perfect steeds. In another were many pictures of unicorns, in many possible universes. He wasn’t a bad artist.

  Reclining on the bunk in a tan Army T-shirt beneath the tapestry, eyeing Black over the top of a book with a journeying gaggle of swordsmen and sorcerers on its cover, was Brydon himself. The Wizard.

  He was a dumpy sort of kid. Acne scars marked his wide face, and he looked like, but for the physical fitness ensured by his tromping up and down high-altitude mountains all the time, he would be pretty pudgy. He didn’t exactly seem sociable.

  His eyes were hooded, his hair a scrubby in-between of brown and blond. It was startlingly long even for a deployed soldier deep in the mountains and far from the FOB. There was no skin visible on the sides, and Black figured he probably had two and a half inches on top. A bona fide “shock.”

  Brydon must’ve been some kinda good soldier, or some kinda weird, to be allowed to get away with that. Black wondered how many real friends he had in the platoon.

  There was a little three-legged half stool in the corner.

  “Can I sit?” Black asked.

  “Sure.”

  Brydon was in a half-sitting position against his pillow and didn’t move.

  Black sat, pulling his little green Army notebook out of his pocket and setting it, closed, on a side table. He leaned back against the plywood wall, noticing for the first time a tattoo on Brydon’s right upper arm. A shield with two Latin words inscribed across its front: VAE VICTIS.

  He didn’t recognize the unit logo. His eyes moved back up to Brydon’s face.

  “I’m Black,” he said, even though the kid could obviously read his name tape. “You know what a fifteen-six is?”

  “Not except what Sergeant Merrick said.”

  Brydon spoke in an uninterested drawl that Black couldn’t place. Midwestern Nonspecific.

  “Right,” Black went on. “So, like he said, it’s an investigation that I got assigned to do. It’s the lowest-level investigation in the Army.”

  He put his hands up in a calming sort of gesture.

  “I’m not an M.P. or anything, and you’re not in trouble.”

  “Then why am I being investigated?”

  This was the part Black hated about doing a 15-6. There was no way to really explain, to the satisfaction of the cynical and reasonably distrustful mind of a soldier, that he was being “investigated” but didn’t really have to worry. Soldiers always worried, with good cause. In their immortal motto, learned over and over the hard way: Shit Rolls Downhill.

  “It’s not you specifically,” he explained. “I need to talk to a bunch of guys. I gotta talk to some of the other guys in the platoon, and I have to talk to Sergeant Merrick, and Sergeant Caine . . .
”

  “So the platoon’s being investigated.”

  “Kind of. Not really. It’s not—”

  He wanted to say, It’s not an INVESTIGATION-investigation, but he knew how stupid that sounded.

  “It’s not the kind of investigation where . . .”

  He trailed off.

  “Look,” he said finally, flustered. “I’ve had to do these before. I just talk to soldiers and get some facts about something that happened, and write it down and it gets filed and then usually that’s the last anybody ever hears from anybody about it. All right?”

  He knew a look of total distrust on a soldier’s face when he saw it.

  “Facts about what that happened?”

  Black grabbed his book.

  “Why don’t we just start at the basic stuff,” he said, then caught himself. “Sorry. Do you have any questions before we get going?”

  “Like what?”

  “Nothing in particular. Just if you wanted to know anything about how it works.”

  Brydon shook his head. He sat up from his pillows a little bit.

  “Sort of figured you’d be a captain or something,” he said.

  From his two previous 15-6 assignments, Black was used to the usual slights and minor insubordinations of combat soldiers who are both annoyed at being interrogated and scared of being told they’d done something wrong when they were just trying to do stuff right. He ignored it.

  “Your full name is Billy Brydon.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Specialist.”

  “Yeah.”

  It was one rank below the lowest sergeant grade. Some soldiers floated there for years without ever getting their stripes. Some didn’t want them.

  “You’re a medic.”

  “Yeah.”

  “How long have you been in Sergeant Merrick’s platoon?”

  “Who wants to know?”

  So the kid was gonna be a pain regardless.

  “It’s just basic admin data. Just background.”

  Brydon looked at him skeptically.

  “Three months.”