The Valley

by John Renehan

  Emerging from the trees onto a sun-drenched ridgeline, he saw it ahead. It was such an unusual feature, squatting on a mountaintop in a place its builders knew little of.

  He approached the stone building slowly, not wanting to cause surprise. When he got within earshot he shouted.

  “Corelli?”

  Nothing. He approached. The stone construction was fascinating, the style alien to this land.

  The thing was built simply. From this side, up on the ridge, he could see a single door and a small window set to one side of it. It was stout enough to have survived a hundred and fifty years of wind and snow and sun, and looked like it could do another hundred and fifty in a walk.

  What plans they must have laid.

  “Corelli, it’s Lieutenant Black,” he called as he trotted up to the door.

  He peeked inside.

  “Hey, Corelli, are you—”

  Corelli was there. Black rushed to him.

  A deep gash scarred his forehead above his wild eyes. He thrashed against bindings behind his back. His body armor, helmet, and rifle were piled haphazardly in a corner. He jerked his head at Black and tried to speak through his gag, panic in his eyes.

  “Hold still,” Black told him.

  A stone worktable had been built into the corner of the room. Corelli’s hands were bound behind him tightly and around one stone leg by a pair of sturdy plastic flex-cuffs. Police used these during riots and other mass-arrest situations. Soldiers routinely kept them hooked on their combat gear, for handling prisoners captured in raids or firefights. Black guessed these had come off of Corelli’s person.

  On the worktable sat a green military radio set. Its cabinet was smashed, its display shattered. With a rock? A hammer? He turned to Corelli’s bindings.

  Corelli bucked against the gag, desperate to speak. Black yanked at it until he’d worked it over Corelli’s teeth and chin.

  “Sir, there’s a—”

  Black heard the sound and whirled around.

  An Afghan girl of ten or eleven stood in the threshold. She wore unusually short-cropped hair and a traditional Nuristani girl’s embroidered black dress. Her eyes shone silver-blue. Black recognized her.

  He had only time to wonder what had brought her all the way up here from Darreh Sin, raising a hand in greeting and opening his mouth to speak, before she brought Corelli’s pistol from behind her back and shot Black with it.

  The round struck just inside his left shoulder, spinning him and dropping him to the floor. A cascade of stars washed through his vision as his head struck stone. Corelli kicked and howled.

  He lay gasping on his back on the cold floor. The ceiling spun. The room went dark and light.

  Adrenaline coursing through him, he ordered himself to rise. He could not rise.

  Straining, he bent his neck and brought his echoing head an inch off the floor. He peered past his feet.

  Through the blurry doorway, speckled in a thousand dots of light, he saw the girl pick herself up off the ground and look about her. Bending to pick something up, she placed it behind her ear and stepped to the threshold. She stood there, eyes ablaze, surveying the scene.

  Corelli bucked against his bindings somewhere, shouting at her from a hundred miles away to Stay away from him!

  She took two steps and stood over Black. It was a red flower, the thing behind her ear. As she bent down she spoke words he did not understand.

  —

  She could not believe her luck.

  Truly, Father, you have guided my hand today.

  It had been an easy call, following the young soldier from his compound, and greatly interesting that he had come to one of the bearded American’s hiding places. Normally he and the other Americans pretended they did not know each other.

  When dawn came she’d had to hurry back before Mother missed her. She feared nothing might come of this.

  I should not have doubted.

  It took all the next night of waiting, until her moment came. Once that was done, dawn again, and again back to Mother. Poor Mother.

  She had never slipped away in the daytime. But she had felt certain that this time she must.

  You were telling me I must.

  Even if it were merely for another prisoner for the talibs it would have been worth it. Worth the risk, though it meant traveling as herself.

  But this prize was one she had not anticipated. Not so soon.

  The officer.

  He lay splayed on the floor before her looking pale and weak, his breathing labored.

  The one with the black bar.

  The frightened young soldier in the corner heaved and tugged against his bindings and shouted at her in his American tongue. She ignored him and stepped forward, regarding her prey.

  The servant. Just as they said he was.

  He looked back at her with eyes that kept going unfocused, his rubbered limbs grazing the floor ineffectually like an insect speared to the earth. He looked like he would lose consciousness soon. She had probably shot his heart.

  You guided my hand true.

  She bent over him.

  “Let me be your last living sight, devil.”

  She reached for his chest, waving aside his feeble efforts at defending himself. She pinched a corner of the fabric square that bore his mark, and pulled.

  It came away easily. She straightened and turned to the thrashing soldier in the corner.

  “Don’t worry,” she told him. “You won’t be alone for long.”

  She turned and left, heading downhill for home.

  Now the talibs will know. There will be no question. They will know who defends this land.

  She pocketed the square with the black bar on it. The black bar she had seen in the darkness, cowering in the doorframe of Mother’s home, in the flash of light that took Sourabh to paradise, to wait there for Father.

  I hope you were not frightened, Sourabh, while you were alone.

  She could see no face that night. Only the bar. Qadir had told her what the bar meant. The officer.

  Qadir had told her things she needed to know. Told Tajumal. But there was no more need for Tajumal now.

  She was the avenger. Not Qadir, not the young men who hurled themselves uselessly at the Americans. Only her. The bar would be her proof.

  They will know who is faithful.

  She hurried down over rocks and grasses, planning her explanations for Mother.

  Rest, Sourabh. Rest with Father.

  As she ran she felt tears run on her face, and she realized they were for joy.

  —

  In the dream he saw it clearly. Saw that he’d been wrong again. But she told him that was okay, and he was pleased with himself for seeing it now.

  He lay on his back looking up at the stone window, and she stood over him. It was not her, but her. She reached and put a hand on his face, and told him not to worry. She told him to rest, there on the soft stone floor. She said he wouldn’t be alone for long.

  36

  He lay in the black depths but could not rest because his head felt as though he were being kicked in it. The floor hardened beneath him.

  The muted sounds resolved into a voice, and it came to him that he was in fact being kicked in the head.

  “Please, sir. You gotta get awake now.”

  By Corelli.

  “Come on, sir. Wake up now.”

  Kick.

  The kid was using the side of his boot, but come on.

  “Stop,” he croaked.

  His mouth tasted like sand.

  “Sorry, sir,” he heard Corelli answer. “Can’t have you going into shock right now, sir.”

  He couldn’t bring himself to open his eyes yet.

  “How long?” he whispered.

  “Not more than fifteen minutes,
sir. You just gotta stay awake for me, okay, sir?”

  “Yeah,” Black managed.

  His mouth was dry, and his head pounded horribly from where it had struck the floor. Something was on fire in the left side of his chest. Something was wet behind his back.

  He cracked his eyelids open and immediately closed them. Much too bright.

  I am in bad shape.

  “I’m still awake,” he mumbled.

  “Okay, sir. Good, sir.”

  Corelli blew out a breath and seemed to go all to pieces.

  “Ohhhhh, sir, I’m sorry, sir. I screwed up.”

  Not now, Corelli.

  “I’m gonna need a minute,” Black wheezed.

  He took a minute. Above all else in the world, he wanted to lie perfectly still. Finally, he cleared his throat.

  “What happened?”

  “I slept, sir!” Corelli cried miserably. “I’m sorry I slept! I screwed up!”

  He stamped the stone wall with the flat of his boot.

  “I came here just like you said, sir. I found it and I waited here all day, but I couldn’t call the frequency on the paper you gave me because the radio was smashed when I got here.”

  Oh, damn.

  “And then I waited all night,” Corelli went on in a gush of words. “And I just laid down to sleep for an hour before it got light. She got my weapon and hit me on the head with a rock or something while I was sleeping, sir. She had my pistol and my knife and my flex-cuffs and everything. She kept screaming at me and pointing until I sat here in the corner, and I was so out of it, sir, from where she had hit me with the rock, everything was just spinning, and she had my pistol and she kept hitting me on the head from behind with the pistol butt while she put the cuffs on. Ohhh, sir, my head hurts.”

  Black twisted his head toward the sound of Corelli’s voice and hazarded another glance. The soldier’s face was ashen and the bleeding gash on his head looked ugly.

  “I’ll get help,” Black said immediately, starting to push himself up from the floor.

  He didn’t get halfway upright before the world spun upside down and he felt himself skewered on a hot poker which pierced him from the inside of his shoulder down through his hip. He collapsed back onto the floor, feeling a wave of nausea wash over him.

  “Oh, sir, you just stay there. You’re hurt too bad. Have you got a knife, sir?”

  Knife. His knife.

  With his armor and rifle and gear in Pistone’s hootch.

  “No.”

  “Oh.”

  You idiot.

  “Okay. That’s okay, sir. I’ll figure something out here.”

  He lay there in silence, waiting for the nausea to pass, while Corelli figured something out. After a full five minutes in which no plan was forthcoming, he realized that there was nothing to figure out. They were stuck.

  I just need a minute.

  The room’s spinning slowed. As long as he lay still, he could think more or less clearly. But he was clearly no use to anyone for the moment. He could really have used some water.

  He craned his head and looked at Corelli, who looked pale and forlorn.

  “What did your platoon do to that girl’s family?” he asked the young soldier.

  Corelli looked at him in surprise before casting his eyes to the stone floor. His head followed, until Black could no longer see his face. A great heaving breath came out of him.

  “Oh, sir,” he said wretchedly. “This is all my fault.”

  “What did he threaten to do if you told me about it?”

  Corelli shook his hanging head.

  “Not him, sir. Sergeant Caine.”

  “That’s who I meant.”

  “What, sir?”

  Something in what Corelli was saying didn’t make sense to Black, but it wouldn’t come into focus through the fresh dizziness. He couldn’t crane his head and look backward and upside down at Corelli like that.

  He lay on his back and stared at the stone ceiling, breathing deeply and painfully.

  “He said he’d kill me, sir.”

  Black, eyes closed against the dizziness, thought back to Corelli’s guarded, meticulously composed answers to his questions that first day at Vega.

  “You told me everything you could tell me while you were under threat,” he said. “It’s not your fault.”

  Corelli’s answer was barely a whisper.

  “Yes it is, sir.”

  Black risked a glance at the top of the soldier’s head.

  “What did you do, Michael?” he asked quietly.

  Corelli’s voice broke slightly as he answered.

  “Nothing, sir.”

  “Tell me.”

  Corelli sighed a long sigh. Then he told.

  “It was a few nights before the thing with the goat,” he began, speaking slowly to the floor. “Sergeant Caine said that someone had spotted a fire above the Meadows, and we were going to take a patrol to check it out. Which was weird already, sir, because the Meadows is on the other side of the mountain and as far as I knew we didn’t have anybody out that night that could’ve seen the fire.”

  The guys at the O.P.

  “Sergeant Caine was real agitated when we were leaving, sir, and he just got worse when we got close. I mean, when he saw it he kind of flipped out. You could see the fire going on the hillsides. It was one of the poppy fields—you know, where the Afghan guys grow the flowers for the drugs. But it wasn’t like it was any danger to Vega, so I didn’t understand what he was so worked up about.”

  I think I do, Black said to himself.

  “And he went off to the side and was talking all heated with Lieutenant Pistone, like maybe they were arguing but I couldn’t really tell, and when he came back he said we were going to raid this guy’s house in the Meadows who owns the field. Which was weird, too, because we didn’t have Danny along.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know, sir. Danny was gonna come along on the patrol like usual. I saw him getting ready. But Sergeant Caine told him to stay back at Vega. I thought that was weird, but I’d only been here a couple months and I’m a private, sir, so, I mean, what did I know? I just kept my mouth shut and came on the patrol.”

  “Where was Sergeant Merrick?”

  “He let Sergeant Caine take that one, sir. They didn’t always both go on the same patrols.”

  “Okay.”

  “So we headed down to the Meadows, but it all just felt off from the beginning, sir. I mean, Sergeant Caine was just real agitated, like I said, and he wouldn’t say why we were gonna raid this guy’s place.”

  Black could venture a guess.

  “We got there to the house and it was probably a little after midnight, and all the homes in the Meadows were dark, and Sergeant Caine, he goes and he’s whispering to the lieutenant again, and then he grabs Shannon, who’s there on the patrol with us, and they don’t even do the knock-first or anything like we’re supposed to do in the friendly towns.”

  “Okay.”

  “And Sergeant Caine just kicks the door in and they go in there with the lights turned on on their rifles, and everyone is shouting inside, and I can hear Sergeant Caine shouting back with a couple of his Pashto phrases. You know, ‘get down’ and all that. And there was a man in there yelling something back at him, sounding real scared, and you can hear a woman in there too, and children, and you can tell it’s just chaos in there, sir.”

  He inhaled and let out a deep breath.

  “And after a couple minutes Sergeant Caine comes back out,” he said, his voice quavering. “And he’s got a kid, sir.”

  “What?!”

  “He’s got a boy, sir. Like, a small boy, maybe seven or eight years old. And he’s got him by his clothes, sir, just dragging him like you’d pull a puppy by the back of the neck. And the
kid is wailing and crying and he doesn’t know what’s going on.”

  Black closed his eyes.

  “And then Shannon comes out behind him, sir. And he’s got the kid’s dad. And no one in the patrol knows what’s going on. I don’t think Shannon even knew what was going on. Sergeant Caine is saying, ‘Hold him there,’ and Shannon’s just standing there holding the kid’s dad and watching Sergeant Caine.”

  A dark chasm opened in Black’s stomach.

  “And Sergeant Caine just starts screaming at the dad. And he’s got his pistol out and he’s waving it around, and waving it at the guy’s son, sir! He just keeps yelling the same thing at the guy.”

  “Yelling what?”

  “I didn’t understand it, sir. Sergeant Caine knows a bunch of Pashto phrases and stuff. But I memorized the main part of it and when we got back to the COP I tried to look it up on my phrase card, and it was something like ‘Where?’ or ‘Where is it?’ Something like that, sir.”

  “Okay.”

  “And the dad is shouting back, freaking out, and he keeps saying something that I didn’t understand except that I could hear him saying something about the Talib, over and over, like he was talking about the Taliban.”

  His voice began to break.

  “And he’s just pleading, sir! He’s just begging them to stop, and Sergeant Caine’s got his son and he won’t stop screaming at him.”

  He swallowed hard.

  “And the guys in the patrol are really starting to freak out, because it’s all so out there, sir. Like, everyone is scared and just wants Caine to let the kid go and get out of there.”

  “What did Lieutenant Pistone do?”

  He felt foolish asking the question. It required no answer.

  He stood by and did nothing.

  “What, sir?”

  Corelli’s voice was tinted with confusion.

  “Why didn’t he stop it?” Black asked.

  Corelli twisted his anguished face up to him.

  “He’s the one who did it, sir.”

  “Did what?”

  Corelli burst into tears.

  “Shot him, sir!” he cried.

  Black opened his eyes and saw stars.

  “What? The father?”

  “The boy!” Corelli wailed. “He didn’t even say anything before he did it!”