by John Renehan
“You can’t B.S. me on this, Corelli.”
“Sir, I’m not—”
“Who’s Traynor?”
Corelli looked back at him, eyes wide.
“I don’t know, sir!” he protested.
“Corelli!”
“Sir!”
Corelli shook his head, hands up. Black looked at him closely. Corelli squirmed and looked elsewhere.
Black slapped the sheet back down on the table.
“Run down the rest,” he ordered.
They finished the last few names without discrepancies.
“Now count,” Black demanded. “I need to know how many guys are here, right now, today, besides you.”
Corelli ran down his roster.
“Forty-six, sir.”
Black counted his own, top to bottom.
“And I get forty-seven,” he said irritably, shoving the paper away from him.
He sat back in his chair and looked at Corelli.
“Which accounts for Traynor,” he said, casting an eye at the young soldier. “Whoever the hell Traynor is.”
Corelli looked here and there helplessly.
“Private,” Black said, staring at him closely. “It is very important that you tell me the truth here.”
Corelli caught Black’s gaze and returned it.
“Sir,” he said, without flinching this time, “I would not tell you anything that was untrue.”
Black looked him up and down. He sighed.
“No,” he said quietly, “I don’t think you would.”
Corelli seemed to relax a little.
“Sir,” he said, “can I ask a question?”
“What is it?”
“Why do you need to know every person who’s here?”
“So I can be sure I have talked to every soldier on this outpost.”
Corelli stared at his lap.
“Oh.”
He said no more.
Black’s gaze roamed the shadowy armory, along the weapons racks and lockers. There was a set of metal shelves along one wall. An Army-issue brown towel was spread across one, with small spare parts laid out across it. Firing pins, recoil springs. In the middle sat a bulkier item, cylindrical and made of black metal. Black recognized it as the bolt carrier from a rifle. The primary mechanism required to make the thing fire.
He pointed at it.
“Is that Oswalt’s?”
“Sir?”
Corelli looked surprised.
“C’mon, Corelli,” he said patiently. “I know Oswalt’s special.”
It was not all that uncommon, back on the FOB, for leaders to remove the bolt from or otherwise disable the rifle of a soldier known to have mental health issues or suspected of being suicidal. Lessened the chances of him hurting himself, or someone else, and it was less humiliating than taking his rifle away entirely. Until his buddies found out, of course, which they always did.
“Yes, sir,” Corelli answered. “That one belongs to Oswalt.”
Black hadn’t heard of taking the bolt from a soldier out in the field, which would seem to defeat the purpose of him being in the field at all. But it didn’t sound like Oswalt was allowed to go out on patrols anyway.
“How long?” he asked.
“For Oswalt, since I’ve been here, sir.”
Black nodded. He gathered up his roster and began to stand up. He stopped.
“What did you mean, ‘that’ bolt?”
Corelli hesitated.
“Corelli,” Black pressed. “Who else’s is in here?”
Corelli swallowed hard.
“The Wizard’s, sir.”
Now it was Black’s turn to look surprised.
“Where?”
Corelli pointed.
“In that locker, sir.”
“He goes outside the wire!”
“He’s a medic, sir. Doesn’t really need to be shooting people anyway.”
“Is his pistol disabled too?”
“Yes, sir.”
Black chewed on all this.
“How long?”
“Just the last few weeks, sir.”
“Why?”
“I wasn’t told, sir.”
Black took his roster and walked to the door. He paused there.
“Thank you, Corelli.”
“Nothing to thank me for, sir.”
“Just your duty, right?”
“Yes, sir.”
His earnestness was painful.
“But you’re not going to tell me anything that I don’t ask you myself, are you?”
Corelli looked down at his lap.
“Don’t be seen leaving here if you can help it.”
Corelli looked up, his face pale.
“Roger that, sir.”
Don’t press him any more.
“Corelli.”
“Sir.”
“Who didn’t tell you why?”
“Sir?”
“Who brought you the Wizard’s bolt?”
Black thought he saw Corelli wince.
“Sergeant Caine, sir.”
Black turned and left Corelli sitting alone at his little table with his paperwork in the pale pool of light.
19
He pushed open the door to the thrumming command post.
The box fan whirred in the corner. Lights winked on radio stacks. The occasional crackle of static echoed down from the dark mountains and found voice in the speaker boxes.
The soldier with the sci-fi novel sat with his elbows on the table, whiling away his usual shift. He was the one Black had hoped would be there. The bored, distracted one.
“L.T.,” he mumbled without interest as he saw Black enter.
Black found it unlikely to the point of near-impossibility that a soldier’s name could sit accidentally on the wrong company’s roster for months on end. But he decided he was obligated to rule out that possibility definitively, and he knew only one way to do it.
A folding chair sat against one wall next to the empty cot. He took it and plunked it down facing him, across the desk from the soldier. He straddled it, placing his forearms on the seatback.
The kid lowered the paperback an inch or two and looked over it, obviously confused but too cool to show it.
“Evening, sir,” he said with a hint of a smirk.
Black saw deep red in his close-cropped hair. The sun had left a flay of dots across the ridges of his cheekbones beneath crinkled, mocking eyes. Black guessed that more than one smaller kid had lain on his back in a playground somewhere and contemplated the patterns of those freckles up close, tasting blood between pummelings.
He reached across and gently removed the novel from the soldier’s hands. He set it facedown and open on the desk. The kid followed it with his eyes.
“Do you know why I am here?”
“Um, here in the C.P. or here at COP Vega, sir?”
“COP Vega.”
“Uh-uh.”
“Then how would you know why I was in the C.P.?” Black asked, annoyed.
The kid shrugged, feigning confusion.
“Just wanting to be clear, sir.”
There was the smirk.
“I’m conducting a fifteen-six investigation. Do you know what that is?”
“Nope,” the kid announced triumphantly.
“Well here’s all you need to know,” Black said. “It means I am here on business that supersedes anything your chain of command tells you to do or not to do, and I’m about to give you a lawful order.”
The soldier nodded slowly.
“‘Supersedes’ . . .” he said thoughtfully.
“Yeah, and I can tell you know what that means, so spare me. You are ordered not to tell your chain of comma
nd that I have been here in this room tonight, or what I did here.”
The kid had nothing to say about that for once. He sat thinking while pretending not to be thinking.
“You can decide whether to follow that lawful order or to violate it,” Black went on, businesslike. “But be aware that if you violate it you will face criminal penalties for doing so.”
“So what you’re saying, sir, is that shit really does roll downhill.”
“Are you done?”
The soldier put up his hands in mock surrender.
“Hey, sir, why would I ‘do so’?” he asked. “I’m just a dumb grunt. Officers rule.”
“I need the radio,” Black said.
“Sir?”
“The radio.”
“Uh, which radio, sir?”
“The long-range. I’m calling your battalion headquarters to talk to your S-1.”
The smirk was back.
“Um, no can do, sir.”
“What?”
“Long-range is a no-go.”
“Why?”
The soldier thumbed upward, through the roof to the mountain peaks.
“Retrans tower is down, sir. We can’t talk to nobody back on Omaha for shit.”
“What do you mean it’s down?”
“Hajji knocked it out, probably.”
“That’s impossible,” Black countered. “Sergeant Merrick used the radio to report to your H.Q. that Danny is missing.”
The soldier shook his head, insufferably pleased at seeing a lieutenant so flustered.
“Couldn’t-a done it, L.T. Retrans has been down since the attack yesterday.”
All the hair on Black’s neck and scalp stood on end. Stars appeared briefly around the edges of his vision. He stared at the kid. The kid stared back.
“I mean, be my guest, sir, if you wanna give it a try,” he said, gesturing with both palms at the long-range radio.
Black stood, feeling a wave of dizziness wash over him. On impulse he reached across the desk for the handset as his host watched him placidly. He could not have been happier to watch Black key the hand mic and fill the speakers with steady white noise as he tried unsuccessfully to hail 3/44’s headquarters.
Knucklehead.
He set the mic back on the radio set.
“When is it gonna get fixed?”
The soldier shrugged.
“Whenever they send a team from Omaha to fly up there and set one up again, so it can get taken out again.”
This struck him as pretty darned funny.
“mIRC chat,” Black declared.
The Internet Relay Chat system was an encrypted version of online real-time text messaging systems. Its signal bounced off satellites, and it had rapidly become invaluable to remotely located outposts and their parent units. Someone in a headquarters back at Omaha could sit there on a “merk” terminal—no one knew what the m stood for; most assumed it meant “military”—and chat all night, getting nongarbled situation updates from various subordinate units, instead of tearing his hair out trying to talk on seven different scratchy radios.
“mIRC’s down, sir, but the commo sergeant’s on it first thing in the morning. I mean, unless you wanna go wake him up right now.”
mIRC also was prone to going offline frequently.
“Sat phone,” Black countered.
Most remotely located units kept at least one satellite phone on hand for situations just like this.
The kid blinked at him once.
“Sergeant Merrick does keep a sat phone, sir, but there ain’t no satellite for it to talk to way down here.”
He seemed most gleeful of all about that one.
“No line of sight, sir,” he shrugged happily.
He picked up his walkie-talkie.
“I mean, you can try it yourself if you want to, sir.” He held the radio aloft, smiling. “Want me to get him?”
“No.”
“Don’t worry, L.T.,” he said as Black turned to go. “Run silent, run deep, right?”
—
He crept quietly up the stairs, stopping this time to listen at the corner until he could hear the snoring from Oswalt’s wall hootch. He went by on tiptoe.
He lingered at the roofline, looking this way and that to ensure it was deserted. He walked briskly across the planking, toward the hulking shape of the guard post, and poked his head in.
They were there. He reached in his pocket and proffered the pack of smokes. He had a question for them.
Bosch examined him skeptically with his dark eyes and made no move. The other soldier cleared his throat.
“Um, hey there, sir,” he said.
“What’s up?” Black answered.
“Not much, sir, not much,” the soldier said, fingering his machine gun idly.
He looked at his friend, who said nothing, and cleared his throat again.
“Um, listen, sir, I, uh . . .” he rambled.
“Just say it,” Black cut in impatiently.
“Um, sir, I think we can’t really be talking to you up here right now, sir.”
Black’s brow furrowed.
“Okayyy.”
“Yeah, I mean, you know, sir, we would just get fried for having anyone up here smoking and joking while we’re on duty is all.”
“All right.”
“I mean, you saw how ticked Sergeant Caine was the other night when ol’ Bosch here wasn’t posted on his weapon. That kind of thing, sir. You know how it is.”
Black’s eyes narrowed.
“Sure.”
“Not that it’s just Sergeant Caine, sir,” the kid added. “I mean, any of the NCOs would go ballistic on us if they caught us up here talking to, um, a visitor, sir.”
“Right.”
Black slid the cigarettes back into his pocket, looking at the soldier closely.
“Sorry, sir.”
“No worries.”
He turned to leave.
“Oh, and hey, L.T.?” said the first soldier.
Black turned back.
“Um, you know how we were telling you about the first night they took this place?”
“Yeah.”
“With the drug lord dude and stuff?”
“Yeah.”
“Um, sir, if you don’t mind, maybe don’t mention to Sergeant Merrick that I told you that.”
Black looked at him quizzically.
“He doesn’t really like to talk about all that old stuff, sir.”
“Okay.”
“Bad times and all.”
“Right.”
He turned again to go.
“Um, and maybe not Sergeant Caine neither, sir.”
Black nodded his assent.
“If you don’t mind.”
“Not a problem,” Black answered tersely.
Bosch spoke up for the first time since Black had arrived.
“Best if you just didn’t come back up here for a little while, Lieutenant,” he said bluntly.
Black shot the testy kid a look.
“Yeah,” he answered with annoyance. “I got that.”
He snuck back down past Oswalt’s hootch, stepping quietly on the stone stairs.
He was learning his way around Vega. He knew a couple different routes back to his own room now. One went outdoors a bit. It was a darker, more secluded way to go.
He took that route, lost in thought.
Danny was gone. No one was looking for him.
A soldier heading in the opposite direction startled him, but they passed one another with mumbled greetings and went each on his way.
Danny didn’t get snatched. He wasn’t dumb enough to leave himself in a position like that.
He had left of his own accord. Something at Ve
ga was more frightening to him than what was out in the Valley.
“You unleash the Devil, and his work.”
He crossed briefly through open air, the shadowed mountainslopes soaring up above his head, rushing up to meet the black sky. He passed through an entrance back inside, nearly back to his hootch.
“And you bring his servant into my town.”
There were questions that only Danny could answer. One in particular.
“Jesus, L.T., where you been?”
The voice made him jump. He turned.
Caine, lurking in the shadows, much as Black had done while waiting for Corelli. He stepped out into the half-light, wearing no coat, his muscles bulging beneath his tan undershirt.
“Whattaya doing,” Caine asked. “Going for a midnight tour?”
“What do you want?” replied Black.
“C’mon with me, sir.”
He jerked his chin back over his shoulder, down a connecting corridor.
“What for?”
“Goddamn, L.T., can’t you be easy about anything?”
“What for?” Black repeated.
Caine exhaled in exasperation and glanced to his left and right.
“Because I can help you, sir, that’s why.”
He turned down the darkened corridor.
“Now c’mon,” he demanded gruffly.
He strode away. Black watched him for a few steps before following.
20
Caine pulled the heavy door shut on the shipping container, sealing them in darkness. He fished for a flashlight and sent a beam along the floor until he found what he was looking for. He stepped on the power strip with his toe and a thousand Christmas lights winked on.
They hung in icicles from the roof of the container, filling half the airspace above their heads. More strings ran all up and down the wooden interior walls. A klatch of cheap folding lawn chairs huddled around a makeshift card table fashioned low to the ground from M.R.E. boxes and a plywood plank. A mini fridge squatted in the corner with a boom box and a pile of CDs stacked on top of it. More M.R.E. boxes sat piled against one wall, and a case of water bottles next to that.
The walls were dotted with posters and magazine tearouts of women in various stages of undress. At the far end was reserved the place of honor for a large print of an exotic female emerging from the archway of an ivy-lined villa somewhere, a crystal blue pool behind her, wearing only an airy blouse unbuttoned in front, and sheer bikini underpants. Someone had taken a knife and made two small slits in the poster along the string of her panties, through which a dollar bill had been folded and threaded.