The Valley

by John Renehan

  “I steal in night,” he told them matter-of-factly, “and burn H.Q.! I carry player all way to my home, on my back, like a donkey.”

  The chief laughed heartily at his own exploits. Black and Danny joined in.

  “But do not tell Talibs about the record player,” he admonished them, flashing mock concern. “Music make them very mad!”

  More laughs as he gestured them graciously to their chairs. Black took one of those arrayed before the chief’s chair.

  Danny sat opposite him, looking uneasy. The chief approached and sat, clapping his hands twice as he did so.

  From a rear room appeared a boy of ten or twelve bearing a silver tray. On it were three silver cups filled with something amber. Tea, Black presumed.

  The boy, who wore a simple black tunic, offered the tray to the chief first, who directed him to Black. The boy turned his dark eyes to Black and watched his face silently as he took a cup. Black thanked him in Pashto. The boy said nothing and turned away.

  Danny was next, followed by the chief. Black sipped at his tea, which was scalding. The boy disappeared without a word.

  “My friends,” began the chief, through Danny, “I thank you for coming to my home, and I hope I can help you with any problem that you have.”

  Black looked instinctively at Danny, who had been looking uncomfortable the entire time since Caine had left. He reminded himself that it is bad form to talk to your translator when really you are talking to the other person.

  He turned to the chief and cleared his throat.

  “Sardar,” he began, doing his best to recall from his phrasebook how to address an elder. “Thank you for graciously taking the time to see me in your home. And I apologize for coming to you this morning with so little, uh, notice in advance.”

  He waited while Danny translated. The chief smiled and nodded tolerantly.

  “I hope,” Black continued, “that we also can help you with any problem that you might have, whether it is a big problem or a small one.”

  He realized that he was sweating. The chief was still smiling and nodding. Black sipped his tea and set it down. He cleared his throat.

  “And I hope that you will accept this small . . . token of my appreciation for your time today.”

  His hand was already in the first-aid pouch on his body armor, from which he’d removed the aid kit before leaving on the patrol that morning. In a smooth motion he pulled Smoke Toma’s brick of heroin from it and placed it in the center of the tea table before them.

  Danny’s eyes widened.

  Black sat back calmly in his chair. Toma, Black now understood, had been a hundred percent right. The chief clearly found him pleasant enough as far as Americans go, and obviously enjoyed holding court with easily impressed young officers.

  But he just as clearly didn’t take Black seriously as someone who could help him in any real way with his complaints. The chief surely recognized that if the Army had cared, they wouldn’t have sent someone of even lower rank than the captain whom the chief had complained to in the first place. In the chief’s eyes, by sending Black they were more or less telling him to go shove his problems. He had politely said as much to Black himself.

  The chief wanted to do business, get relief for his frustrated people. Now he would know that he could do business with this young lieutenant after all.

  Danny had gone rock-still and pale as a ghost. He tried to stammer something, but it couldn’t quite form itself into words.

  The chief’s gaze too was fixed on the brick, sitting there in the middle of the table between them like a baby elephant. The big man moved slowly from his chair, rising wordlessly to his full height and turning his gaze down on Black.

  —

  Goddamn fuck was the sole thought on Sergeant Caine’s mind as he stood in the middle of the clearing, scanning the hills and fidgeting. Fuck fuckity fuck.

  He heard the chief’s door clatter shut.

  That was fast.

  He turned. Danny had emerged, with Lieutenant Black behind him.

  Caine was momentarily impressed that Black had been able to finish his business with the chief so quickly. That thought fled when he saw how fast the two were moving.

  “Yo, Merrick!” he called over his shoulder, keeping his eyes on the lieutenant and the ’terp hurrying toward him. Both looked pale.

  —

  Black pulled up to Caine, with Danny close on his heels.

  “We’ve gotta go,” he said.

  “What?” asked Caine.

  “We have to go now,” Black answered, agitated.

  Merrick had come jogging up the clearing.

  “What are you talking about?” he cut in. “What happened?”

  “We’ll talk about it back at the COP. We have to go!”

  “Bullshit,” Merrick shot back. “What the fuck did you do?”

  Merrick turned to Danny and began to demand an explanation but stopped when he saw the linguist’s ashen face. Danny nodded urgently.

  “Fast, Sergeant,” he said.

  Merrick and Caine looked at one another. Something unreadable passed between them. Merrick hesitated no more.

  He turned on a heel and raised a hand in a rallying sign. He moved briskly downhill, head curled down as he spoke into the radio handset that was affixed to his body armor below his collarbone.

  Caine wheeled around and whistled to get the attention of those who hadn’t seen the signal.

  “Go with him,” he said tersely to Black, pointing at Merrick.

  Danny and Black fell in behind Merrick while Caine lingered behind to roust everyone into action and make sure no one missed the word. Soldiers on the perimeter looked around themselves, confused, then scrambled to their feet as they saw what was happening. The patrol congealed, forming itself up again into a long, staggered line and falling in on Merrick, who had deliberately slowed his pace to something almost nonchalant.

  They moved slowly through the middle of town. Heads swiveled right and left and craned upward to the mountainsides. Black could hear soldiers asking one another tensely what the fuck was going on? The plodding pace was unbearable.

  They passed the houses on the lower slopes. Women and children watched them go wordlessly.

  The lead soldiers reached the riverside and cut left through the grass and shade trees, back the way they’d come. Merrick, still ambling along, hung back at the bottom of the slope. He waited until the rest of the soldiers, one by one, had passed him.

  The instant the last man had reached the flats and was out of sight of the town, he broke into a run. He didn’t stop.

  The rest of the confused patrol followed suit. It was more of a jog, really, but with the amount of gear, ammunition, and weaponry everyone was carrying, it was no joke.

  They ran all the way along the riverside to the slope leading up to the promontory. Sergeants hassled and harangued panting soldiers as the patrol scrabbled up the pebble-strewn ground. In the woods at the top, they commenced running again, tripping through the trees to the dirt track.

  The sniper team was there, waiting, eyeballs starkly white against green-smeared faces. Merrick peeled off to meet them. After a few hurried words of instruction they turned without a word and began scrambling up the mountainside, straight up from the track. Merrick and the rest of the group continued on around the bend, back toward Vega the way they’d come.

  They had made little noise moving steadily down through the hills to the village. Now the patrol was a huffing, shambling clatter of equipment slugging up the track below the funny stone building.

  Guys by that point were truly sucking. Those carrying machine guns or other heavy weapons suffered the worst. Boots scuffed the ground; rifles hung downward from dangling limbs. More than one vomited. They were too fatigued even to peel off to the side of the road to do it.

  Cain
e, who alone among them all seemed to take the physical challenge in stride, stayed at the rear to ensure no one fell behind. Get up the goddamn hill! Get up it! he screamed at them, issuing a series of encouragements and threats as he deemed necessary. These ranged from conjuring graphic images of the various sexual liberties and favors the soldier in question would have earned from his wife or girlfriend if he made it to the top of the hill to a simple promise to shoot the guy’s balls off if he didn’t pick up the pace. How Caine kept this up while hauling himself and his gear uphill Black was not sure.

  Black himself suffered as much as anyone. He had kept himself in shape, but Vega sat multiple thousands of feet higher than FOB Omaha, and he had not spent the past several months moving through the high mountains carrying loads of fighting gear. He wasn’t remotely acclimated.

  As he stumbled upward, lungs burning and boot toes stubbing the dirt trail, his thoughts escaped. Circled back to a night at Fort Benning, at OCS. Their final land navigation test. Three hours to find three of five points, out there in the night somewhere. It was “go” or “no-go.” Fail the test, fail the school.

  Ninety minutes in, near the far western edge of the sprawling course, he found his friend. The smartass, crouched over a rumpled, waterlogged map with his red-lens flashlight. He was sucking.

  He had no points. Drew a bad set, scattered far and wide and virtually impossible in the wet February conditions on the course. The only point he’d gotten close to had been underwater.

  Black had found only one of his points. They were both gonna get a no-go.

  They looked at each other and said: Not gonna happen. They replotted their points and ran. They ran both sets together.

  At nineteen minutes to spare, his friend was still short one. They roamed a valley bottom in circles, running out of time. Over a mile of thickly wooded mountainous terrain lay between them and the finish line.

  Go, his friend told him. Get home in time.

  No way, Black replied, and as he turned to argue he saw the signpost, the point, over his friend’s shoulder not ten feet away. They punched his paper and they ran.

  Ran like madmen, barreling through the pitch-black forest, tripping over roots, bumping into trees, and falling into streams. His friend wore the Army’s famously ugly “birth control glasses,” and they were so smeared with fog and sweat that he stuffed them in a pocket and ran without them. At one point they climbed over a series of felled logs, one after another, before switching their flashlights on and finding themselves in the middle of a vast clearing filled end-to-end with cut trees. They had to backtrack and go around. They drove on without hope.

  They burst from the forest, drenched and muddy, onto a paved road two hundred meters from the finish. They stagger-sprinted the final distance, Black’s friend panting at him to keep going while one of the instructors creeped along beside them in a pickup truck, taunting them through a bullhorn that they weren’t going to make it.

  They made it, with just over a minute to spare. Fellow trainees gawked at the picture of them crossing the line, covered head to toe in mud and secrets. No one asked them what happened. Most of them had their own secrets.

  The instructors would have called it cheating. Black and his friend called it taking care of your buddy. Black had considered it one of the most unlikely coincidences of his life, to find his friend that night, out of a hundred other trainees, in the vastness of the dark course, and decided it must have been fate. What happens on the night course stays on the night course.

  They never talked about it with each other afterward. Soon after they graduated, Black’s friend was tapped by the intelligence community for unspecified and increasingly spooky work which had left Black knowing little of his whereabouts and dependent mostly on the occasional and unpredictable e-mail like the one he’d gotten before leaving FOB Omaha.

  But on that night, they had been equal, and equally raw. It was the other occasion Black could remember, when he felt he’d seen his friend as he really was, behind the puckish mask.

  This run, Black decided as he hauled himself upward from Darreh Sin, was worse than that night on the course. Worse than any other exorbitant physical punishment dreamed up by the instructors at Fort Benning.

  But not the worst one you’ve done.

  It was all he could do not to fall back into the range of Caine’s taunts and torments. He refused to do that.

  Danny, who was not conditioned as a soldier, struggled mightily. He wheezed and huffed alongside Black, saved only by his slight frame and the fact that he carried no weapons or gear beyond a helmet and stripped-down body armor vest.

  After an eternity on the track they began clawing their way up the steep final slopes, tripping along the high trail. More than one guy slipped on its surface and slid down several feet, having to haul himself back up to rejoin the group.

  At last the gate to the courtyard came into view up ahead. The lead soldiers were staggering through it.

  Merrick and another sergeant stood on either side of the gate, panting and counting as guys came through. His eyes burned into Black as he and Danny stumbled past.

  “Eighteen, nineteenDon’tFuckingGoAnywhereLieutenant, twenty . . .”

  Inside, soldiers had scattered across to the overhangs around the perimeter, tearing open body armor and gulping for breath. Helmets clattered to the tiled breezeway floor as guys walked in circles, red-faced with hands on hips, or tried to make their trembling hands twist canteens open. Others’ legs buckled beneath them and they went to their knees, palms on concrete, heads hanging.

  Black made for the nearest overhang, pulling the Velcro open on his vest. Danny, coughing and dry heaving, followed him to the breezeway but didn’t stop. Black watched him disappear around a corner, bent at the waist and making horrible gurgling noises.

  He turned and saw the last of the soldiers come through the gate, followed by Caine giving a sweaty thumbs-up as he passed Merrick. That would be everyone except the sniper team. Merrick had sent them along the high ridges to provide cover. They would take more time to get home.

  The courtyard perimeter was now filled with confused and gasping soldiers, cursing through wheezing breaths and asking one another what was going on. Caine wove his way among them toward Black.

  “What the fuck happened?” he demanded. “Where the fuck is Danny?”

  “Barfing.”

  The effort of saying it nearly made Black do it.

  Merrick was right behind Caine, sweating profusely and walking fast.

  “Clean up this clusterfuck!” he spat in Caine’s direction, sweeping his hand across the smatter of indisposed soldiers and hastily off-loaded gear littering the courtyard.

  He pointed at Black without slowing.

  “Come,” he said flatly, stalking past him.

  Merrick led the way off the breezeway through a narrow channel formed by blast barriers, then under overhead cover to a doorway. He kicked it open and stomped inside, leaving the door to clatter in Black’s face as he stumbled through on fluttering legs.

  They were in someone’s hootch. Probably one of Merrick’s junior sergeants. He wheeled on Black, who was bent at the waist and gasping for breath.

  “All right, sir,” he said, still winded himself and looking down at the sorry-looking Black like a furious parent demanding answers from a naughty child. “We’re back at the COP. What the fuck was that shitshow?”

  In the dim of the hootch a shower of bright twinkles washed across Black’s vision and he felt the floor tilt dizzily. He ordered himself not to be sick to his stomach in front of Merrick.

  “No,” he panted.

  “What?”

  Black pushed through the cramps clenching his abdomen and forced himself upright. Sweat stung his eyes as he stood to his full height and looked up at the sergeant.

  “I am not telling you anyth—”

&nb
sp; It was at that moment that the first of the mortar rounds crashed to earth on the grounds of COP Vega, filling the hootch with deafening sound and sending everything in it flying off shelves and tables. The sound of automatic weapons fire followed immediately.

  “Get back to your hootch!” Merrick shouted at him, wheeling out the door toward the courtyard.

  Black followed.

  The courtyard was the expected tumult, shouting soldiers scooping up helmets and weapons and stamping off toward the myriad doorways and passageways leading to the various parts of the outpost. Merrick stood in the open courtyard, shouting into a radio about the sniper team that was still outside the wire.

  As Black ran down the breezeway another mortar round impacted just outside the gate, heaving earth over the wall into the courtyard and momentarily deafening everyone still in the open. He saw Merrick rise from a protective crouch and stalk toward one of the exits leading back into the innards of the COP.

  Black found the right passage and barreled into it. He pounded up steps and around corners, weaving his way through the outpost as explosions shook the walls and the ground beneath him shuddered. Soldiers stomped past in every direction and ignored him. He lost his way and turned around, then lost it again. The place was a maze.

  As he circled and circled again amidst the crashing chaos, he heard only the words of the chief of Darreh Sin, over and over, as he had towered over Black and Danny.

  You sneak into my valley like a snake at midnight, he had said, slowly, seething.

  And you unleash the Devil, and his work.

  He was brandishing the brick of heroin in a gnarled, muscled hand. His voice was louder now, his face red.

  And you bring his . . . his servant into my town.

  Danny kept translating, involuntarily, eyes wide, hands clutching the arms of his chair, as the chief’s voice rose to a shout.

  I SHOULD KILL YOU ALL NOW!

  The brick squashed through the middle in his grasp, but Black and Danny were already out of their upturned chairs and stumbling for the door. There was no more translation as the chief hollered further horrors at them. The brick in its pieces had struck the wall next to the doorway as Black blundered through after Danny, and as the door clattered shut behind him he’d heard one of the chairs shatter against the wall.