HARAKAT MAKAWA!”
The face was close above Black’s, screaming something in Pashto, eyes wide. All the weight pinned him on his back, grinding him into the wet ground.
“HARAKAT MAKAWA!”
Spittle stung his eyes. The hard point of a pistol drove into his left temple. A forearm rammed hard against his chin, rooting to get beneath it to his throat. He struggled uselessly, his boot heels driving channels in the mud.
“MUQAAWAMAT MAKAWAYE!”
It was only his panicked attempt to keep his chin down and protect his airway that drew Black’s eyes downward below the face. It took him a moment to process what he saw.
An elbow forced his chin upward, and he gargled out the only word that came to mind.
“American!”
The weight still pressed down but the wild eyes came into focus, darted up and down across Black’s person.
“Speak!” his attacker cried. “Speak English!”
“American!” Black gasped again. “Get off me!”
Still pressing him down with one hand while moving the pistol roughly to his throat with the other, his attacker leaned back until he was straddling Black. His eyes settled on Black’s chest. With his free hand he reached for Black’s chin strap, yanking it free and flipping his helmet off into the mud.
The man’s legs released their crushing hold around Black’s middle. He threw his arms up in total exasperation.
“Jesus Christ, Lieutenant! What the hell?”
He planted a boot in the mud and hauled himself up to his feet, holstering the pistol. Black lay on his back, panting.
“Goddamn it! I thought you were one of these assholes again.”
He jerked a thumb up toward the night, to the mountainside.
The man was not particularly tall but was built like a professional wrestler. His bearing was that of a sergeant, not a junior soldier. He stomped around the prostrate Black and scooped his helmet up from the mud. He offered his free hand, which Black took.
With his body armor, gear, and ammunition, he weighed more than 250 pounds. The sergeant hauled him to his feet with ease. Black stood, teetering, his entire back half coated in mud from head to toe.
“Sorry,” he panted.
“Don’t apologize to me,” the man snapped, agitated. “I was about to put a goddamn bullet in your face.”
He wore boots and fatigue pants cinched with a tan equipment belt. Both were now smeared with mud. The requisite tan T-shirt, with dog tags now flung loose from the collar, was tucked into his waist. Black could see the bare-armed muscles massing beneath it.
Black spat a brown mouthful between heavy breaths and thumbed over his shoulder.
“I was with the convoy.”
“Yeah, I got that,” the man shot back irritably, as though Black thought he was particularly dense. “Nobody told me they were dropping off passengers.”
“I’m the only one.”
“Gee, sir, are you sure?” the sergeant vented sarcastically. “You sure there aren’t any other anonymous wandering lieutenants creeping around my outpost?”
He held his hands up in a question and looked around himself theatrically. Black let it go.
The man looked past him, still annoyed.
“Where’d your rifle go?” he asked gruffly.
Black, his breathing slowing, scanned the wet ground and finally spotted it, a few steps away. He trudged over and gathered it up. It was covered in mud and useless until he could clean it.
“All right, you found it. Now come over under here before you get shot for real.”
Black glanced up toward the hillsides. The sergeant scooped up his ruck and carried it underneath an overhang, into the breezeway that ringed the courtyard. Black followed, stepping under the overhang as the man dumped the ruck at his feet.
His host blew out a long breath and seemed to compose himself. The agitation was draining out of him. He surveyed Black from top to bottom.
“So,” he said wearily, “who the hell are you, sir?”
“Fifteen-six officer,” Black answered.
“Fifteen what?”
“Fifteen-six. I’m the one that got assigned to do the investigation.”
The sergeant looked at him blankly.
“What investigation?”
“The shooting in the village.”
The sergeant’s gaze remained blank for a long moment. When he finally spoke, his tone was hard and accusatory.
“What shooting in the village, Lieutenant?”
“The warning shots.”
“The warning shots,” the sergeant repeated.
“Yeah.”
The man was becoming agitated again.
“Um, pardon my being so bold, sir, but what fucking warning shots?”
“On the twenty-third, last month. Dispersing the crowd.”
The sergeant’s eyes went elsewhere, then clicked back into focus.
“Wait,” he said. “What, the thing with the goat? The guy with the bullets in his fucking mud hut?”
“Yeah, that. Someone in the village complained to a Civil Affairs officer.”
“Someone complained to a Civil Affairs officer,” the sergeant repeated dryly.
“Yes.”
“Okayyy . . ?”
“And the Civil Affairs officer told Brigade, and I drew the investigation.”
“And you got sent all the way from Omaha to this shithole,” the sergeant stated flatly, “to do a fifteen-fucking-six on a bullet hole in a wall.”
“Yeah.”
There was another long silence during which the sergeant stared at him blankly. He blinked several times, and then it became clear that his face was straining not to smile. His face lost.
“God bless the God damn Army,” he chuckled, shaking his head.
“Yup.”
“So now,” the sergeant said cheerfully, smiling while his eyes hardened, “you’re gonna waste my soldiers’ time doing your little interviews with your sworn statements and all the bullshit.”
“Yeah.”
The sergeant nodded thoughtfully.
“Mm-hm. Figures.”
He spat in the dirt.
“I mean, no offense or anything, L.T. I know you didn’t choose yourself for the fifteen-six, but up here we call it what it is.”
“Right.”
“Right.”
He eyed Black for another few moments before seeming to come to some conclusion in his head.
“Okay,” he said, businesslike. “So you’re here for, what, till the run next week? Or are they gonna send a helicopter just for you once you’re done being Columbo?”
“Here for a week.”
The sergeant shook his head again.
“All right,” he said, shrugging. “Well, shit.”
“Yup.”
“Well, you’re gonna need someplace to rack out, then.”
“If you got one.”
The sergeant pulled a walkie-talkie off his belt and thumbed it.
“Corelli.”
A scratchy voice came back.
“Here.”
“Come to the quad.”
“Roger,” said the radio. “Miller’s in the latrine.”
“When he’s done.”
He hooked the radio back on his belt, put his fists on his hips, and exhaled through pursed lips: What to do, what to do?
He looked at Black and extended a hand.
“Caine.”
Black shook it.
“Black.”
“I have Second Squad. Don’t expect a bunch of saluting here.”
“Didn’t.”
Caine gave a grunted laugh that was unreadable.
“That’s good. Get you shot anyway.”
He thumbed upward toward the hillsides again.
“Snipers,” he said with mock wonder, “seem to think bagging an officer is some great catch, for some reason.”
He stumped off toward a homemade wooden bench along the wall a few steps away. He eased down onto it, pulling his camouflage patrol cap off his head and extracting a smoke and lighter from a cargo pocket. He tossed the cap onto the bench next to him.
“Welcome to Vega, sir,” he said, cracking the lighter. “May as well take a load off. Miller takes forever in the shitter.”
Black walked over and sat in silence while the sergeant lit up. In the orange light he could see a square jaw below full cheeks, and close-cropped sandy hair over an open face that managed to be babyish and manful at the same time. He could have posed for the Burly Army Sergeant pin-ups calendar.
Black figured him for about thirty. Caine offered a smoke from his pack, which Black waved off.
“So, sir,” Caine said, blowing a cloud, “how’d you get picked for this glorious duty?”
“Luck of the draw.”
Caine snorted.
“Gotta love how you officers find new ways to fuck each other over,” he said, sending smoke into the breezeway.
“Just my turn.”
“Bullshit.”
Caine shoved the smokes and lighter back into his pocket and continued.
“I mean, no offense, sir. But someone fucked you, whether you know it or not. You probably cut in front of some colonel at the ice cream line on the FOB.”
“I don’t eat that stuff.”
“Yeah, right,” the sergeant snorted. “I’m just messing with you, L.T. I eat the shit out of that chow hall when I’m back on the FOB.”
“When was the last time you were back?”
“Let’s see. Three months? Something like that. Was back there for one whole day to pick up some incoming joes, then back up here to the glory life.”
He took another drag on the smoke and took his time letting it out.
“What was that you were yelling at me?” Black asked.
Caine pawed the haze in front of him.
“Just stuff,” he said, shrugging. “You pick up stuff. ‘Get down,’ ‘Drop your weapon.’ You know.”
He filled his lungs again.
“‘Suck faster.’”
He chuckled at his own joke and turned to Black.
“How’s the face?”
“Hurts.”
Black worked his stiffening jaw around. He’d been trying not to rub it in front of Caine.
“Sorry,” Caine said, not sounding it. “Like I said, no one told me you were coming. It wouldn’ta been the first time one of those suicide fuckers snuck on board in a U.S. uniform to blow his ass up.”
He jerked his chin at the muddy courtyard.
“It was during a convoy stop last time, too. Snuck through the gate while the trucks were doing the drop-off.”
“That’s weird,” Black said. “I thought you guys knew I was coming.”
“Maybe they told our fearless leader,” Caine muttered. “If so, he didn’t tell me shit.”
He could only be referring to the young officer in charge, or nominally in charge, of the platoon. Black had seen his name listed in the 15-6 paperwork.
“Lieutenant . . . Pistone?”
“Not ‘Pist-OH-nee,’” Caine corrected him. “‘Pis-TONE.’”
He exhaled haze.
“Like ‘alone.’”
“Oh.”
“Anyway, yeah, that’s the one.”
Caine said it in a tone that told Black everything he needed to know about what he and probably the other sergeants and soldiers in the platoon thought of their lieutenant.
“I should probably link up with him in the morning,” Black said.
Gayley had told him Pistone would be his point of contact.
“Ain’t here,” Caine answered through a cloud.
“What?”
“Left on the convoy. R&R leave, or the commander needed him or some shit.”
Black recalled the figure passing him in the dark to climb into the Humvee he was exiting.
“Too bad,” Caine deadpanned. “Not sure how we’re gonna make it out here a whole week without his guidance and mentorship.”
Black was flummoxed. A 15-6 investigation was officer business, and he’d expected to coordinate things through the platoon leader.
“Who’s the platoon sergeant?” he asked.
The platoon sergeant was the senior noncommissioned officer in the unit. He would be second only to the lieutenant, though in reality it was often the sergeant and not the officer who ran things.
“Dead.”
“Oh.”
“You got me, and you got Sergeant Merrick,” Caine explained. “He had First Squad, but he just got his E-seven, so he’s the acting platoon sergeant.”
“E-7” was the administrative designation for a sergeant first class. The stripes on Caine’s cap said he was a staff sergeant, one rank below Merrick.
“But we pretty much split the duty,” Caine added.
“Okay.”
“Merrick is just gonna love you and your investigation, sir, by the way.”
“I don’t doubt it.”
Caine tapped his smoke and sent ashes to the stone walkway.
“Anyway, we’re it. Us and some E-fives”—buck sergeants—“and a buncha joes, out here flappin’.”
Out there flappin’. Army-speak for being left alone to do a thankless or dangerous task with no backup.
“Got it.”
Caine looked at him.
“Don’t worry, L.T.,” he said. “You can do your little investigation. You can talk to the joes you need to talk to, and make all your paper.”
“Right.”
“But you do it on our time and you don’t disrupt our operations.”
“Don’t intend to.”
“These joes are wrung out and they got jobs to do and they got buddies dead,” Caine went on. “They hardly got any downtime as it is and they don’t need to spend it on some chickenshit that some FOBbit officer dreamed up.”
He took another drag.
“No offense.”
“None taken,” Black answered, but the sergeant was already looking past him, scowling.
Black turned at the sound of footsteps jogging down the breezeway toward them.
“’Bout time,” Caine said crossly. “Tell Miller to eat a bran muffin.”
“Roger, Sar’nt,” came the earnest answer.
A soldier stood bolt upright before them, feet apart and hands crossed behind the small of his back, staring at an invisible point in the universe above Black’s and Caine’s heads. Parade rest—the position a junior soldier assumes when talking to a sergeant of any rank.
His build was slight, his hair short and blond, his complexion pale even in the secondary moonlight. He looked to be about nineteen, tops. He wore a private’s rank.
The name tape on his fatigues read CORELLI.
Caine flipped his cigarette to the ground and stubbed it with a boot. He pulled his muscled frame up from the bench. Black stood too.
“This is Lieutenant Black,” he began, but before he could go further Corelli’s eyes, wide and earnest on a searching face, darted involuntarily from empty space down to the center of Black’s chest, registering the bar on the Velcro square.
They clicked forward again as his feet clapped together and he snapped to a salute.
“Put your fucking hand down!” Caine snapped, waving his own hand so aggressively Black thought he was going to reach right up and smack the soldier across the side of his head.
Judging from Corelli’s flinch reaction, it looked like he thought so too.
“I told you, Lieutenant Pistone told you, don’t fucking salute out here!” Caine harangued him. “You think it’s different because there’s a different L.T. standing in front of you?”
“No, Sar’nt!” replied the abashed Corelli, who had snapped back to his previous position.
“Annnnnywaaaayy,” Caine continued, speaking pointedly and deliberately as though to someone who was very slow. “This, once again, is Lieutenant Black. He is here from FOB Omaha. He will be here for a week. He will be conducting an investigation pursuant to Army Regulation Fifteen-Dash-Six. He needs a bunk.”
He pointed at Black’s gear.
“Take his ruck, get the master key, and secure his ruck in Lieutenant Pistone’s room.”
“Master key” was sergeant lingo for a bolt cutter. Everything in the Army got padlocked, but the person with the key wasn’t always around when you needed it. Sergeants ended up cutting open a lot of locks.
“Sergeant?”
Corelli’s voice registered hesitation.
Black understood. Even a platoon leader who got no respect was still an officer. Corelli wasn’t looking forward to being the one to break into an officer’s quarters.
“Did I fucking stutter!?” Caine shouted.
Corelli flinched again.
“He ain’t using it! Now take the lieutenant’s shit!”
“Roger, Sar’nt!”
Corelli scrambled to grab up Black’s ruck and sling it over his shoulder. Black didn’t need or want anyone to carry his bag, but decided it wasn’t the time to say so.
“Here, take his rifle too,” Caine said, extending his open hand out toward Black.
He saw Black hesitating this time.
“Ain’t no use to you filled with mud, sir. You’ve still got your sidearm.”
He gestured down at the holster on Black’s hip, which somehow had remained fairly clean.
Black’s rifle was almost certainly nonfunctional at this point. He handed it to Caine, who handed it to Corelli.
“Secure that in the room with his ruck,” Caine told the soldier.
Corelli turned to go.
“Actually,” Caine said as though the thought had just occurred to him, “take it to the armory and clean it first. Then secure it.”
“Roger, Sar—”
“I’ll clean it,” Black said flatly.
Only the dirtbaggiest of dirtbag officers would have ever consented to a soldier cleaning his weapon for him.
“All right,” Caine said to Corelli, eyeing Black. “The lieutenant likes to clean his own weapon.”
He leaned back against the wall.
“Secure his muddy weapon in the room.”
Corelli “roger”d again, apparently relieved to be dismissed. He sent a last glance toward Black and hustled off down the darkened corridor.
Caine turned to Black.
“Resident choirboy,” he explained. “Super religious. Good soldier, though. Put him in charge of the armory because he can actually count. Unlike some of these bubbas.”
Black nodded.
“Anyway, figured it makes sense to stick you in the L.T.’s room. One of the only private racks we got.”
Black was not going to complain about that.
“Well, shit, sir,” said Caine, stretching. “May as well give you the grand tour.”
—
Tajumal watched the two Americans disappear into the bowels of their outpost, then backcrawled into the bushes and sat back against the cold hillside. There was much to consider.
Why did they fight?
This one was easy. The one American had shouted at the other. Not in Tajumal’s language. In the trade language of the cities, which Tajumal understood.
He thought the other was one of us, even though he wore American soldier clothes.
The Americans were ready for this tactic. Tajumal swelled with satisfaction.
Just as I told Qadir.
Stupid Qadir, who was probably squatting high above right now, somewhere on the opposite hillside, looking down at the wrong side of the American base with his rifle. Hotheaded Qadir, full of brash ideas and recycled schemes, who thought the talibs would respect him if he shot enough Americans who were foolish enough to walk about in the open, or blew himself up like the dumbest Arab mujahideen.
Why would they care about a teenage boy who can kill only the stupidest and most worthless of the Americans?
Qadir, who treated Tajumal like an idiot and a child because he was a whole five years older. Who knew where to find the Americans’ base but knew nothing more. Whose highest achievement would be to end his life in meat chunks on the mountainside. Who probably wouldn’t even manage to take any Americans with him because they would see him coming a mile away.
Qadir does not know what I can do. Does not know who I am. He only knows a useless little boy he sees creeping around the mountains, which he thinks are his mountains. But he will know. And the talibs will know, and the Americans will know.
Qadir had some use. He had certain information Tajumal had needed to know. But Qadir didn’t know what to do with that information.
I do.
With the Americans, the real fight was the battle of brains.
Which is why I watch, and I watch again, until I find the knowledge I need. Tonight I have found it. Once again, Father, you have guided me true. May you be proud in paradise. And may Sourabh, God’s blessings upon him, play happily at your feet, and may you rub your fingers in his hair as you used to rub them in mine, and may he gaze up at you with all his love, forever.
Only Tajumal had been close enough to hear the shouting, to know that Qadir’s latest plan was pointless. Only Tajumal had held firm, not fled at the commotion as Qadir would have done. And only Tajumal had seen the thing that was much more important, the thing Qadir could not have seen as he cowered up there on the wrong side of the valley in the dark.
The salute.
Only Tajumal knew what the others could not know. What would bring hope to all.
The officer has returned.
Praise to Father. Praise God.