by John Renehan
Stay on this mountain.
He clawed and pulled upward. He guessed he’d climbed about five hundred feet when he came over the top.
There was no fog up here. The stars in the black sky were clear.
“It’ll just take you too.”
Moonlight shone silver on the mountainsides. The ground opened wide before him.
31
A flat-bottomed valley lay cupped in the highlands. He stood at one narrow end, looking down into it, on the lip of a low pass at the top of the draw he’d just climbed. Steep slopes rose up on either side of him, cradling the lowland all along its length.
He guessed it at about two miles long and a half mile across at its widest, with surprisingly level ground along the middle. The view was as though he had just climbed a dam and were peering over the top at the mountain reservoir behind it.
The travel would be easy through here. Then another short climb through the pass at the far end.
He started down the gentle decline to the low ground, still breathing hard from the climb in the thin air. He hadn’t gone more than a few hundred yards before he saw the first blossoms.
The waist-high stems were topped with bulbous capsules the size of fists. Flowers had opened atop some of them. Others stood closed, not yet in bloom.
A field of opium poppies.
Examining the map before leaving Vega, he’d been expecting this little valley to be filled with more mountain grassland like that he’d seen when he peered through the scope at the Meadows. A find like this hadn’t occurred to him.
The field was vast. Stems and flowers caught the moonlight as far ahead as he could see, and from left to right, filling the flatland between the slopes. Somebody up here was thriving, whatever the Taliban had to say about it.
He would have to plow through or go around and pick his way along the hillsides just outside the field. Either way would be slow going. Either way would put him at risk of being seen by the field’s owners.
He stepped to the edge of the field, bending to look at the nearest stalks. He’d never seen a cultivated poppy field up close before.
The capsules were impressive, alien things, engorged with the ancient drug. He reached out and felt one, running his finger over its smooth surface.
Which wasn’t smooth. He leaned in to inspect it. What he saw made him duck down low to the ground.
Each capsule was scored with vertical lines inscribed by a blade. At the bottom of each incision was a growing white globule of latex, seeping from the plant.
The field was being harvested.
Everyone knew basically how it worked. The incisions were made at the end of the day, and the capsules were left to drain overnight. In the morning the dried latex—pure opium—was collected.
If it was to be collected in the morning, then the field would be guarded tonight. A plantation this size would be guarded well.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
He blew out a long breath. Words danced at the edge of his memory.
With walls and towers were girdled round
A hazy remembrance reached out across two nights without sleep. He was hearing voices.
Beware! Beware!
No, he was hearing voices. Squatting, he peered around behind him.
For he on honey-dew hath fed
Two orange cigarette pinpoints, moving lazily along the bottom of the slope toward the edge of the field.
And drunk the milk of Paradise
He turned back to the flowers, got on his hands and knees, and began to crawl.
32
He lay with his cheek in the soil, waiting for the voices to fade.
Stay awake.
It had gone like this the whole way. Crawl, then voices, then down on his belly for five or ten minutes. Voices fading, then more crawling.
He checked his watch. Two hours, he thought, since he’d started across the field.
The plantation went on without end. Whoever controlled this land was well funded and highly motivated. He knew only that it lay far outside the realms of Darreh Sin and its boisterous chief.
The voices moved on again. He pushed his body off the ground with some effort and drove on through the stalks and stems, his mind crawling backward.
He had heard stories about it. The guy in Ranger School who was so exhausted and hungry that he bit his own hand open believing it was a cheeseburger. But Black hadn’t really believed you could hallucinate from fatigue or fall asleep standing up until he saw someone do it in front of him.
The instructors had had them on another all-night hike through the mountains. A “ruckmarch,” they called it. Seventy-pound packs—rucks—all around, and off we go through the hilly backwoods of Fort Benning.
The guy was big. He’d volunteered to carry the big machine gun. He suffered. About ten miles in, at about two in the morning, someone took pity on him and took a turn with the big gun.
As soon as the guy handed it off and traded it for a regular rifle, he fell asleep. Black watched him do it. He fell asleep while walking but just kept on walking. He promptly veered off the trail into the woods. Black had had to chase him down and smack him awake before he hit a tree or fell into a creek.
Pushing through the vast poppy field, he stopped and listened a moment. Nothing. He rose to his knees and hazarded a peek above the bulbs, across the surface of the sea.
Good progress, he thought, gauging the distance of the surrounding slopes and passes. He ducked below the surface and drove on.
Later during that same night at Fort Benning, Black himself had seen the famous Officer Candidate School archway looming in front of him. The brutal march was finally over. They were back at the barracks.
But they weren’t. The archway had faded, leaving only black trees and dirt trail.
The poppy stems were thinning. Unbelievable. Glorious. He stopped at the last row, listening for sounds. He heard nothing and poked his head out from between them.
He looked left and right and saw no one. He began to crawl forward, out of the field, but stopped short when he saw what was before him.
A mountain slope rose up sharply in his path, rising high to the stars. This made no sense to him. There should be flat ground ahead, climbing gently to the far pass, which he would traverse to get back to the trail.
He stayed there on his hands and knees for what seemed a long time before it hit him.
He was at the left edge of the field, not the far end of it as he’d thought. Down among the poppies, with no frame of reference, he hadn’t kept a straight course.
Rookie inattentiveness. Now he was way off to one side of the field. The left side, he was sure. Right?
Get it together.
He surveyed the mountain features from one end of the depression to the other. Yes, the left.
Cursing himself, he turned and crawled back into the stems, bearing left toward the end of the plantation and the pass that would take him out of this infernal valley. He reminded himself to check his location against the mountains more frequently this time.
The key, he had learned after that all-night march, was to be cognizant of the possibility of hallucinations under fatigue and stress. To know your own physical and mental limits. This very awareness could extend those limits. He’d learned to push his own envelope to the danger point without pushing it beyond. He’d learned that his own capacities were greater, his own limits further distant, than those of most of his fellow trainees. As long as you knew where they lay, you were good.
His friend had seen the California Raisins dancing in the woods that night at Benning.
He was smiling at the memory of his friend’s abashed face confessing it the next morning, when he emerged finally, exhausted, at the end of the poppy field, and saw a mountainside rising sharply up before him.
He stared up
the slopes uncomprehending, jaw slung dumb, face upturned to the moonlight.
Shaking his head, he turned back into the stems and plowed on. How long now?
More voices, in front and to his right. Another cut-through pathway probably. He went down on his belly.
The voices didn’t seem to be moving. A couple guys standing there having a smoke again.
Ten minutes went by, or so. The smell of the soil was rich and fertile.
He checked his watch. Two hours in, he thought. Right? Surely there was not much more left to the field.
Good thing he knew his limits. Knowing your limits was the main thing. Otherwise you push yourself beyond them and you wake up in a poppy field in Afghanistan with a gun in your face.
“From this place all the way to your end of the world.”
A moment’s rest would do him good.
33
Wake up.
He startled, his face jerking up from the soil.
He pushed stiffly to his elbows and looked all about him, frantic. It was still dark. The cold soil had him shivering.
He pushed the light on his watch. He couldn’t remember what time he’d entered the field. Five hours ago?
Dumb, dumb, dumb.
Had he heard something?
Get out.
Adrenaline coursing generously through him now, he pushed off the ground, abandoning thought, and ran. Stems bent and crashed away before him as he stomped through. The mountains rose to his left and to his right.
Moving target.
After not more than a few seconds his feet struck bare, open ground. He almost stumbled at the sudden lack of anything in his way.
He’d been a hundred feet from the end of the field.
He slowed, going to a squat like a runner on the starting blocks. He looked left and right and unholstered his pistol. At the sound of voices he took off running again, wildly.
Get there. Don’t stop.
The voices raised to shouts. He ran flat-out until he could hear them no more, and kept running as he hit the gentle slopes to the far pass.
He climbed as quickly as he could, not stopping until he’d crested the pass to the other side. He flung himself on the ground, heaving and panting. It had been easy going compared to the draw, but the thin air and his own adrenaline had him completely winded.
He checked his watch again. Light would come soon.
No one appeared to be following up the slopes. He took a long drink of water, draining the bladder, and collapsed on his back, allowing himself a minute to recover.
A fresh panorama greeted him on this side of the pass. He had crossed back into the Valley. It was narrower here, the opposing mountains closer and the bottom not so far below.
“Xanadu is what comes before the end of the world.”
He descended from the pass quickly, back down into the lingering fog. A full haze had enveloped him by the time he found the trail again. He took up his run and drove further on.
—
He guessed he’d gone barely another mile when he saw it. He might have missed the telltale markings had it not been for the early gathering light.
The goat track rose up and away from the trail to his right. He followed it, climbing through the dewy haze. As he’d expected, he didn’t have to climb far.
The track leveled onto a broad shelf of clear ground against the steeper mountainsides. Sheer rock walls, stained in dark brown, rose up from the site for a hundred feet or more before tapering into the rising slopes. He slowed to a walk and passed along its length. Its edge, where the ground sloped down into forest, was perhaps seventy-five feet from the cliffs at its widest. It couldn’t have been more than fifty yards long.
A slight breeze had picked up, beginning to move the fog, breaking it into clouds and wisps. The scene presented itself in pieces as he moved through the half-light.
Burned joists forked up through the shifting mist, reaching for the sky. A command post, maybe, or other temporary wooden construction.
The charred remains of a pair of shipping containers came into view next, their markings obliterated by the fire.
Other shapes were unidentifiable. Blackened debris littered the ground. He saw the scalded, skeletal chassis of a large diesel-powered generator.
You couldn’t help him.
At the end of the shelf he paused and turned back, surveying the scene.
“Sorry, Billy,” he murmured.
He turned and began climbing down the hillside toward the trail, leaving behind him the earthly remains of Combat Outpost Xanadu.
—
It was nearly fully light now. The Valley narrowed further as he moved deeper and higher. The hazy shapes of the peaks above were closer, the opposite slopes closing in. Trees crowded the trail and hindered the view ahead.
There were no more river sounds. He’d gotten above the springs and runoff that fed it.
The trail tightened ahead and bent around a hillside out of sight. He slowed to a walk and worked his way between trunks and rock at a narrow spot wide enough for a goat or a man and not much else.
Once clear of the bottleneck there was nothing else obscuring his view. The opposite slopes were barely a couple hundred feet away, and narrowing. The trees opened to scrubby mountain grass. Through the last remnants of mist he saw it ahead.
There was no more Valley left to climb. It was there before him, not a hundred yards away. The End of the World.
He approached in wonder, removing a glove, and touched it.
His heart sank.
34
Standing with his hand pressed cold against it, he understood.
It was an impressive construction. There was no way they got vehicles all the way up here. It must have been heavy-lift helicopters laying in all the pieces and equipment.
A wall of walls. Concrete blast barriers lined up twenty feet high, one against another on the slanting ground, shingled all across the gap, with another layer of shorter walls piled haphazardly atop, and more shoring up the gaps at the bottom. There must have been another complete set of walls built behind the one he could see, because the whole hulking thing had been filled with cement. It had oozed and dried like frosting at the seams, puddling through the gaps at the bottom.
It had been built in a hurry. He thought he knew when.
It was a slapdash arrangement, but the engineers had outdone themselves. At the highest, narrowest point in the land, not a hundred feet across, where all converged on a narrow pass between rising cliffsides, the United States Army had sealed the exit and entrance over the border, rendering this valley useless for any significant transit, of goods, drugs, or fighters.
It was pockmarked with black divots of ineffectual rocket fire. Charring and cracking at the bottom showed where a more serious attempt at breaching with explosives had been made. But the wall had held. Barely flinched, from the look of it.
He was sure some of the hardier locals could scale the steep peaks in a pinch. But for any real traffic of any volume, for anyone who hadn’t spent his life scampering up and down among Afghan crags, forget it. There were no foreign fighters coming in this way from Pakistan, and there were no drugs going out. The Valley was closed.
No wonder the joes at Xanadu had called it the End of the World.
His palms felt the cold concrete. He hung his head and leaned forward until it rested against the wall.
Sorry.
He understood that he’d been right, that it had gone back to the beginning. But he’d been wrong. That was all past.
He thought he knew now who the servant was. And he knew that he would have to go back down. He would have to fix what he could fix.
He closed his eyes and heaved a shuddering breath.
“I’m sorry I didn’t listen.”
I know.
He
turned and slumped against the wall, sliding down until he sat at its foot, legs splayed before him, hands palms-up in the dirt. He rested his head against the reinforced concrete and saw the Valley laid out below him to the horizon. The sun had broken over the peaks and colored its heights and depths in golden haze and shadow.
Tearstreaks ran in the grime smeared on his face.
“When?”
Not now.
He palmed his cap off his head and let it crumple to the dirt beside him.
Soon.
He lay against the wall, watching the Valley fill with light, until the concrete chilled him.
Now go.
He pulled himself to his feet and trudged downhill until he found the outlet of a running spring to fill his water. The first spring of the Valley. He splashed some on his face and climbed back to the trail, where he began the long run down.
See you.
As he ran he thought of the Wizard Billy Brydon, sole survivor of the overrun and obliteration of COP Xanadu. He retraced in his head the terrified path Brydon must have followed all the way back down the Valley as he fled the cauldron that had taken all his friends. All the way to where he knew another American outpost lay. All the way to COP Vega, to where Black was not going.
35
Despite the downhill travel it still took him the entire morning and into the early afternoon. He skipped the poppy field this time, working his way around the mountain on the tight portion of the trail. He was glad he had bypassed its cliffs and precipices in the dark.
When he knew that O.P. Traynor lay behind him, he cut away from the path to Vega and began descending the ridgelines that would take him where he needed to go. The sun shone clear along the mountaintops and he counted on his constant movement to give him a measure of protection in the open.
He could not see it yet but had committed its location to memory and moved confidently down across the heights. He had traveled these many miles unmolested and was grateful for his luck. He knew what he needed to do, and with a bit more luck could get it done.