6
Thunder woke him, and the spatter of raindrops on his face.
It was pitch-dark outside. The convoy was still moving. There must have been a decent wind because the rain was making it past the gunner standing in the open turret, through the opening, and back to where Black sat in his seat.
He looked at the poor kid’s legs, soaked almost down to the knee.
Had he not known to a certainty that no soldier worth a damn would voluntarily give up his post to an officer, he would have offered to take a turn up on the machine gun. He didn’t really mind getting rained on. Instead he sat and stared past the kid at the lights of the driver’s console and the green displays of the stacked radios.
There was nothing to see out the windshield. The convoy was rolling through the mountains in “blackout” drive, using no headlights and relying instead on night-vision gear.
He drew his little leatherbound book out of a pocket and opened it. He scratched a mark in the red glow of his utility flashlight. He stowed it away again.
More thunder. Distant.
“Hey, sir, you might want to get awake back there,” the sergeant called over his shoulder, goggles covering his eyes.
“Yeah, I’m up.”
“Roger. We’re coming into Heavenly.”
Black craned his neck and squinted through the windshield but could see nothing in the darkness ahead.
Good light discipline.
The vehicles, still grinding up a gentle slope, began to slow. Finally a dim amber point of light appeared in the rain not far in front of them.
Dark hulks filled the left and right windows. “Hessco” baskets, eight-foot-tall wire-framed cylinders lined with fabric and filled on the spot with rocks and dirt. The cheapest blast barriers on the planet.
They were entering a channel wide enough for the Humvees and not much wider. From the change in the tire sounds from below, it was lined with a thick layer of gravel.
The amber point resolved into a square, coming up fast on the left. A window, built into the blast barriers—no, a shack or some kind of low structure, sandbagged and incorporated into the walls of the channel.
As the lead vehicle approached the window, a pair of hands raised a windowpane from within. A head and shoulders squeezed out into the rain and wind. Black caught a glimpse of an enormous pair of safety goggles and an Army patrol cap squashed on a head backward.
“Woo!” cried the head and shoulders as they rolled past.
Thunder echoed off the mountain peaks above. The convoy came to a stop on the gravel bed.
“Ten minutes, sir,” said the sergeant from up front, pulling off his night-vision goggles and stretching in his seat. “Refueling only. Good time to take a whiz if you need it.”
Black pulled the heavy latch and leaned on the armored door. It swung open with all the ease of a bank vault. He stepped out into the rain.
His boots sank an inch into gravel. He bent a leg back until he could grab one foot with a hand and held it in a stretch, his other hand on the hot, rumbling vehicle. He rolled his neck to get the stiffness out and looked around him.
No part of Combat Outpost Arcturus was visible beyond the Hessco baskets forming the channel around their vehicles, and the weak amber light from the control shack. He guessed they weren’t really inside the COP’s perimeter but in a refuel lane designed to service passing convoys quickly and without having to open the main gate, wherever in the dark that was.
Soldiers and sergeants were climbing out of the vehicles and stretching as the begoggled figure hollered from his window at them.
“Nice night to visit! Thank you very much! Woo!”
He wore only a T-shirt on his top half. He was soaked to the skin. In one hand he clutched a radio handset, straining at the end of a coiled cord. He squeezed the button and spoke into it.
“Go, go! Let’s go!”
He tossed the handset back into the window and commenced hollering at no one, his goggles already obscured by water.
“Yes! A Heavenly night! This is the reason I joined the Army!”
The sergeant in charge of the shift. All the guy needed was an aviator’s scarf.
Black trudged around the vehicle and looked up and down the lane. The sergeant took one look at his shadowed form, standing there uncertainly in the dark, and figured his rank correctly.
“Pisser’s up there, sir,” he shouted over the noise of wind and engines.
He pointed up the gravel incline past the front of the convoy.
“Smoke on the other side of the Hesscos.”
He thumbed toward the control shack’s door a few feet away, next to a handmade sign which read PIT CREW.
“Coffee’s in here.”
Black raised a hand in thanks and crunched away. Ghostly figures appeared through the rain and streamed past him. Soldiers, carrying heavy plastic jerry cans full of fuel.
None spoke to Black as they passed. Some wore dark rain slickers. Others were bare-armed in T-shirts like their sergeant, who shouted overly chipper encouragements at them as they commenced filling the vehicles.
Just past the end of the channel of blast barriers was a blue plastic Porta-Potty. Black tried the door. Occupied. He shoved his hands in his pockets and waited.
There was a wooden signpost set into the gravel next to the john. It was straight from a war movie. Black could barely make out the series of handwritten crossbars as he stood there, rain stinging the side of his face, waiting his turn.
KABUL: 138 MILES
The arrow pointed back down the mountains the way they’d come.
BAGHDAD: YOU WISH
FALLUJAH: YOU WISH + 40 MILES
JESSICA ALBA: 7,602 MILES
YOUR ACTUAL GIRL: HOME BLOWING JODY
HEAVEN: YOU’RE IN IT
HELL: 0 MILES
“Jody” went back to the Second World War at least. He’s the guy who stays home and steals your girlfriend or wife when you’re off at war.
There was one crossbar below “HELL,” part of which was broken off. The remaining piece had a line painted through it.
XANADU:
The door opened and one of the convoy drivers came out. Black caught it before it slammed and let himself in. He locked it, closing out the rain and wind.
It was pitch-dark inside. He had a small red-lens flashlight fixed to the front of his gear. He switched it on. It shone straight ahead onto graffiti:
TODAY IS THE LAST DAY OF THE REST OF YOUR LIFE
He emerged, letting the plastic door smack hard in the wind, and made his way around to the far side of the Hesscos. He didn’t need to smoke, but there was little point in him hanging out in the busy channel when the joes were trying to work.
There was less noise on this side, away from the diesel engines. The wind was still gusting down the valley, spitting rain slanting in diagonally. But he could hear himself think.
His eyes were adjusting. He sensed open space. He still couldn’t see any other part of the COP through the rain, but he could make out what looked to be an awning, ahead and to his left, running along the back side of the Hesscos and the control shack.
As he made for it he realized that there was a parallel row of blast barriers ten or twenty feet to his right. He was in another channel, this one apparently for foot traffic.
Looking skyward, he could tell that there was probably a partial moon behind the thick cloud layer. He could just make out dark peaks rising high and close on either side of the outpost. It sat at the juncture of two deep, steep valleys.
Those ridges, he figured, were probably a couple thousand feet above the elevation at which he now stood. He craned his head up until the back of his helmet hit the neckpiece on his body armor.
“Twenty-one hundred vertical feet, sir.”
The voice startled him. He turned to see a man standing there under the awning in a slicker and floppy-brimmed camouflage rain hat.
He couldn’t make out a face, but his chest had a sergeant’s rank on it. Under the shadowed brim of his hat glowed the orange point of a cigarette. A paint can filled with sand and stubbed-out butts sat in the gravel nearby.
“To the ridges?”
Black stepped under the handmade cover. The rain and wind were much quieted.
“Yup.”
More thunder rolled down from above. As he stood looking up at the sky Black realized that it wasn’t thunder he was hearing at all.
Once again the sergeant seemed to read his mind.
“Fixed-wing out of Bagram. Probably F-15s. We got an Air Force guy in the C.P. talking to ’em.”
“They’re out here for you guys?”
“They’re out here for you guys,” the sergeant corrected. “Gotta come out every time a supply run comes through here.”
Black was surprised.
“Even in this weather?”
“Fuck, yeah, in this weather,” the sergeant replied. “Especially in this weather.”
“Taliban hate fighting in the dark and in the rain.”
“Not your daddy’s Taliban.”
Most foreign fighters knew that they couldn’t compete against American forces in most nighttime situations because they didn’t have the gear. And most just hated fighting when they were uncomfortable. Rain meant they stayed inside.
“These dudes,” the sergeant continued, “would sell their freaking daughter for the chance to come out here and rocket the shit out of your convoy while you’re sitting here getting refueled.”
He took a long drag, the cigarette momentarily illuminating a wide, weary face.
“Rain or no rain.”
Black considered this.
“Drones don’t see shit in this weather,” the sergeant finished, “so this is prime time.”
Which explained why the outpost had to be in blackout. Its existence was no secret, but in the rain and without night-vision gear, being invisible made a difference.
Black looked up at the sky beyond the ridges.
“Came on station before you got here,” the sergeant said. “And they’ll be up there until you go.”
“Who’s spotting for them?”
“We can’t see the tops of the ridges from here, obviously,” the sergant replied. “And like I said about the drones, so when it rains we gotta put observers on the ground up there.”
The guys who spotted targets and told the jets where to drop bombs.
“We got one team on those ridges”—the sergeant pointed—“watching the other ridges and the other valley walls, and one team on those ridges watching the other side.”
“That’s a long climb.”
The sergeant took a smoke and nodded.
“Pain in the ass at this altitude. They start out the night before the convoy comes through, then conceal themselves and camp out up there during the day. After you guys go they’ll come back down. Probably break their asses in all this rain.”
Black imagined the two small teams, each sitting in a puddle in a hunting blind on a mountainside, looking across through a night-vision scope at the other team and wondering whose puddle was deeper.
“Are they hitting targets or just doing area denial?”
The sergeant shrugged.
“Sometimes they’ll just drop some stuff here and there to let anybody on the mountain know to just stay the fuck where they are. Who knows in this weather? Could be blowing up a dude with his goats.”
Black didn’t know what to say to this. Finally the sergeant laughed.
“Relax, L.T.,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m kidding. We ain’t savages up here.”
He flipped his chin upward to the mountainsides.
“If they see something and can’t get a good I.D., they just put munitions close enough to scare the shit out of whoever it is.”
He sent a long streamer of smoke from the corner of his mouth up the Valley.
“So tell those Vega dudes we hope they like their chow and happy mail packages from home, ’cause guys got their asses on the line down here so they can do sniff-a-panty up there.”
“Will do.”
A flash from over the top of a ridgeline caught Black’s eye. The light hit the clouds, and the boom came rumbling down the valley walls a few seconds later.
“So what are you, sir, the new platoon leader?”
“Huh?”
“Only seen but one officer go up to Vega, and that’s the lieutenant up there.”
He appraised Black top to bottom.
“Dude looked more tore up than you.”
“Thanks.”
“No sweat. So you ain’t the new P.L.?”
Black shook his head.
“I’m doing a fifteen-six.”
“Shit,” the sergeant declared. “This whole valley’s a fifteen-six. What’s yours?”
“Warning shot in a village, no injuries.”
The sergeant said nothing and stood still for so long Black thought his cigarette would go out in the damp. Finally he took a long draw and got it back to life. He exhaled slowly and considered his words carefully.
“Son,” he said. “Of a goddamn bitch.”
“Yup.”
Time to get going.
“See you later, Sergeant.”
“Take it easy, L.T.,” the sergeant said as Black trudged away. “Don’t end up in Xanadu.”
Black looked back over his shoulder but the man was bending over stubbing out his cigarette in the can. He turned without looking and disappeared through a low doorway.
Back in the cacophonous refuel lane, soldiers were still finishing up with the vehicles, and their goggle-faced leader was still exhorting them with false or crazed enthusiasm from his little window. Black helped himself to a Styrofoam cup of coffee from the PIT CREW shack.
It was a small hive of radios and laptop computers lit only here and there by little red or amber lamps, to minimize any light spillage into the night. People were busy and left him alone. Radio traffic from the teams up on the ridges crackled down periodically through the rain. He downed the coffee quickly and left quietly.
Back outside people were climbing into vehicles for the last push up the valley. The refuel soldiers had disappeared. Goggle man turned his attention to the departing convoy.
“Have a Heavenly evening!” he cried from his window. “Enjoy your stay! Beware he who would be king!”
Black climbed into his seat and pulled the heavy door behind him, shutting out the strange sentinel’s ravings.
He was fairly well soaked by then, but it didn’t bother him much. He was mostly glad to be leaving Arcturus behind. It gave him the creeps.
The driver and vehicle sergeant were already in their seats, doing radio checks and getting ready to go.
“What was all that?” he called up to them.
“All what?” the sergeant asked.
“About being king.”
“Always says shit like that. Bible or something.”
“Freak,” offered the driver.
“What’s ‘Xanadu’?” Black asked.
The sergeant shrugged and went back to his checks.
In two minutes the convoy was rolling, the familiar churn of gravel beneath tires. The end of the refuel channel passed the windows. Their view opened up to the familiar blackness. Gravel gave way to dirt, and the invisible outpost fell away behind them as though it had never existed.
Black settled in. He closed his eyes but didn’t sleep this time.
—
“Vega X-Ray, this is Cyclone Mobile, over.”
The sound of the sergeant speaking the name of their destination into the radio roused Black from a near trance.
He pushed the light on his digital watch. It had been another ninety minutes of slogging wet travel. The ride had gotten bumpier and slower the farther they went.
The sergeant keyed the hand mic again. Tried his call again.
Moments passed as the signal made its way up into the dark, dancing among the windswept peaks and stone faces above them. Black wondered how far they were from the outpost, how many mountain passes or switchbacks still lay ahead of them. The vehicles ground on through the muck.
A burst of static from the radio.
“Cyclone Mobile, Vega X-Ray,” came a scratchy call back.
“X-Ray” denoted a command post or operations center. The voice on the other end was probably a soldier pulling late-night duty in Vega’s radio room.
The sergeant keyed the mic.
“Cyclone Mobile inbound, six vehicles, twenty-five personnel. Checkpoint Grapevine, time now.”
“Roger,” came the voice through the static and interference.
A checkpoint in the military didn’t always mean what it sounded like. In this case it was just a common point of reference on a map, so a headquarters could follow the progress of a convoy.
Black was opening his mouth to ask what “Grapevine” referred to when the sergeant hollered up to the gunner in the turret.
“Evans!”
“Sar’nt!” from above.
“Down!”
He dropped down from the turret and flopped into the passenger’s seat opposite Black. He was good and soaked.
The sergeant turned to the driver.
“Hit it,” he said.
The kid pulled off a glove and reached up to the ceiling, touching something with a bare finger. A square of sky blue illuminated on a tiny MP3 music player. He tapped it.
The vehicle erupted in sound. Black jumped.
The crew had wired speakers into the four corners of the Humvee. Not regulation, but not uncommon. Black hadn’t noticed the black boxes until now.
An obviously old rock recording echoed in the darkened crew compartment. A punctuated three-note electric guitar figure repeated itself over and over, starting on a higher pitch each time, layering dissonances as it climbed the scale then falling back down to where it had begun and cycling over again. A string section ducked and wove like a serpent through the guitar. Bass and snare drums circled and thudded on a different track, lining up with the guitar only every few bars.
Black saw a dizzying, endless flight of broad stone steps, bounding upward through vaulted caverns to the dark heavens. He liked this song.
The gunner rooted around and found his seat belt. He buckled it, flipped his night-vision goggles up off his face, and settled back into his seat, eyes closed.
“What’s this?” Black shouted.
The soldier opened his eyes and looked at him incredulously.
“Seriously, sir?” he shouted. “‘Kashmir’?”
Black changed the subject.
“Why ‘Grapevine’?”
The kid reached up and unsnapped his goggles, handing them across to Black. He put them on and looked around the compartment.
The soldier, now highlighted in green and white, thumbed toward the left-side window. Black unbuckled his belt and half stood, leaning way over to see beyond him.
Out the side window he saw nothing. He thought he could make out a valley wall a few hundred yards away, but it was tough through the rain. He leaned farther. Then he saw.
The roadbed ended abruptly about four feet to the vehicle’s left. Stones and dirt gave way to open space. Beyond it, blackness.
“What?” he asked, pointing.
“River,” the gunner said.
Black sat down in his seat, shuddering, and rebuckled his belt. He looked ahead, through the front windows.
They were driving along a mountainside—a cliffside, really—on the narrowest of dirt tracks. The road was barely wide enough to accommodate the trucks. A rock wall rose to the right of them, and empty space fell away to the left. Pulling a trailer behind a vehicle under those conditions was madness.
The gunner read Black’s mind.
“Supply truck,” he said.
“And a Humvee full’a bubbas,” the sergeant called over the din.
“Twice,” added the gunner.
“And a helicopter another time,” offered the driver, prompting the sergeant to tell him to shut up and watch the road.
They had slowed to a crawl. Ahead, the harrowing track wound upward and left, then further up and right. It looked like it curved around into the night sky itself.
He understood now why the gunner had come down inside. It wasn’t to keep him from being thrown under the vehicle in the event of a rollover. There was no rollover here. It was to make it more likely the bodies would all be recovered in one place.
He pulled off the goggles and gave them back to the gunner, who snapped them in the UP position on his helmet. He clearly had no interest in watching the proceedings himself.
Black decided it was probably just as well he’d left his own set of goggles in his pack. The gunner read his mind.
“Better this way, L.T.,” he hollered, settling back into his seat and closing his eyes again. His chin bobbed right and left to the cycling music.
—
“Vega X-Ray, this is Cyclone Mobile, over.”
“Cyclone Mobile, Vega X-Ray.”
The connection was clearer now.
“Passing Checkpoint Two, time now.”
“Proceed.”
“Evans!” the sergeant shouted again at the turret.
“Sergeant!”
“Be awake!”
The gunner cycled the big .50-caliber machine gun.
The sergeant called over his shoulder at Black.
“All right, sir. When we pull in to Vega it’s gonna be hop-hop. We ain’t stopping except to drop the trailers and peel out.”
“Okay.”
“I’m sayin’ you’re gonna have to un-ass the truck in a hurry.”
“Got it.”
Black leaned forward in his seat and squinted past the sergeant and driver. Nothing but dark. The sergeant saw him out of the corner of his eye. Now it was his turn to unhook his night-vision goggles. He handed them back over his shoulder wordlessly.
“Don’t crash, Nelson,” he said to the driver.
“Roger, Sar’nt.”
Black took the goggles and held them up in front of his eyes. The world turned green and bright again.
Hints of a rutted track appeared in front of them. The ground was wider now but they were driving basically cross-country, hand-railing a black area below to their left that must have been the river. To their right the ground rose sharply.
They were running along the right side of the Valley, gently uphill. As they came around a bend, he saw it, ahead and well above them.
Combat Outpost Vega was situated on the hillslope, as high above the level of the track as was feasible before the ground became too steep. Immediately above the collection of squat structures and blast walls, the valley side rose sharply.
The whole site was directly exposed to fire from the hills opposite the river and the steep slopes above. High ground on all sides, with minimal ability to see who or what might be coming down the hillside. All in all, a terrible position.
“Need ’em back, L.T.”
Black handed the goggles up. He sat back. There was nothing to do at that point but wait for the word to bail out.
The vehicles slowed and turned, began to grind upward. After several minutes like this, the sergeant took up a different radio handset.
“Fighting Fours X-Ray, this is Cyclone Mobile.”
Moments passed.
“Cyclone Mobile, Fighting Fours X-Ray.”
The return call from FOB Omaha, from the headquarters of 3/44—the “fighting fours”—was distant and staticky. Black realized they were talking through multiple retransmission towers between the convoy and its home, over all the peaks and across the plain to the antennas on Radio Hill.
“Roger, Cyclone Mobile, R.P. Vega, time now.”
“Roger, Cyclone Mobile, copy R.P. Vega, time now.”
The sergeant set down the handset.
The ground leveled. Black felt the vehicle accelerate and veer into a sharp left turn that pressed him against the door. He put his hand on his rifle and unbuckled his seat belt. The Humvee decelerated sharply.
“Hit it, sir,” called the sergeant.
“Thanks for the ride.”
“Hooah,” came the bland reply.
The vehicle came to a halt. He grabbed the handle and yanked it up, shouldering the sluggish door open into the dark.
Cool air hit him. His boot squashed into mud. He swung around but before he could push it closed another soldier had shoved past him and climbed into the open door. Someone catching a ride back to Omaha.
Lucky.
He looked around himself in the noise, finding his bearings in the poor light.
He was standing in a courtyard, more or less. Seventy-five or a hundred feet on a side, low structures and Hessco baskets all around the perimeter, save for a single ingress-egress point barely wider than a Humvee. There were no visible lights anywhere.
The first three vehicles of the convoy had pulled a wide U-turn before stopping, arraying themselves in a semicircle facing the exit. The rear vehicles had peeled off and with the smooth precision of an aerial acrobatics squad had arrayed themselves side by side, backing the trailers up against one row of barriers.
Before they’d even stopped, their rear doors had come open and a pair of soldiers jumped from each, stomping to the rear of each vehicle and unhitching the trailer latches. Moments later and they had completed the reverse operation with three empty trailers that were waiting for the convoy. Then back into the trucks, which immediately lurched forward and into formation. The lead vehicles were already rolling toward the exit.
It was an obviously well-rehearsed drill, and had taken no more than ninety seconds total. The convoys must have gotten some heat at the drop-off point in the past.
The last Humvee rolled past him, splashing mud and rumbling toward the exit. Before he had really processed what was happening, he was watching the convoy clear the barriers and disappear into the dark. Only at that moment did he notice that someone from the convoy had extracted his rucksack and dumped it in the mud beside him.
The sound of the trucks faded. Black turned in a slow circle.
The rain had lightened, the whistling wind eased. Moonlight was breaking through the clouds and throwing shadows.
He could make out more detail now in the structures lining the courtyard. Some sort of awning or overhang ran the length of it, creating a breezeway all round. Beneath it, darkened doorways beckoned at intervals.
Elsewhere shadowed pathways opened between gaps in blast barriers, presumably leading to this or that part of the outpost. But he saw not a single light in any direction, and heard not a sound save the whisper of the invisible breezefront sweeping gently down through the tree-covered mountainside above him.
He’d been left alone.
Figures.
He turned in another circle. The courtyard was empty and silent. He hadn’t been expecting much of a reception at Vega, but a living person would have been helpful.
Black sighed inwardly.
“Figures,” he said out loud, a fraction of a second before the fist struck the right side of his face, sending him reeling and disorienting him enough that he didn’t even see the dark body coming at his midsection. The blow knocked his rifle out of his hands, driving him off his feet and into the mud.
—
The one whom the talibs called Tajumal rose from bed at the sound of the distant bombs, dressed quickly, and stepped before the cracked little shard of mirror hanging on the dirt wall. It had been removed from an American military vehicle.
Tajumal saw the face of a boy, perhaps twelve years old, scarf tied as a headband, looking back from beneath a hooded cloak.
For you, Father. For you, my brother.
Always they rained the bombs on the people of the valley on the nights they came. So easy to know. Their stupidity would lead them to justice. Soon. It was time to go see.
Guide me, Father. Show me what I need to see.
Through the little stone house on tiptoes past where Mother slept. The woolen curtain, covering the door against the rain, barely rustled as Tajumal slipped past it and was gone into the night.