It was bigger than he’d expected, and there seemed to be no open air anywhere.
He’d imagined the usual arrangement for one of these remote bases. Individual structures and outbuildings and fortifications scattered across a small area of open land, with the whole thing bounded around by a berm or maybe concertina wire. But wending their way through the various wings of the sprawling outpost, nearly everywhere Black and Caine traveled was underneath some kind of roof or overhead cover. A lot of it was fully indoors.
It had started the way most COPs did, Caine explained as they walked. Before Americans came, there was an existing structure, high on the hillside—a large and well-constructed Taliban chief’s house. A sprawling mansion that doubled as a sort of meeting center.
When the first Army unit had come, Caine had been with it.
“That was a year and a month ago,” he said, walking alongside Black, their footsteps echoing off rough tile and stone walls. “We were livin’ the high life back at Omaha like you.”
Black held his tongue.
“Then they rousted us out of there and sent us up the Valley,” Caine went on. “No one had been this far. We were looking for a good site for a COP to run interdiction on the routes these crazy jihadis use to come across from Pakistan.”
He pointed through the walls and downward as they walked.
“There’s a town a little ways down below here, and here we are coming up the Valley and we get to the town and ask ’em, Where’s the H.T.I.C.?”
Head Taliban In Charge.
“And they point up the hill. So we take a squad up the hill and we find this dude’s house, just sitting up here on the side of the mountain behind a wall with nothing else around it. Like, a regular villa.”
He shook his head.
“Splendid isolation or whatever.”
They were walking now up a plywood hallway with fluorescent lights strung high at the seam of the wall and ceiling, which was itself made of plywood. Somewhere on the other side of a wall, a generator hummed peacefully in the night, its noise rising and fading as they passed.
“Anyway, he must not’ve been expecting us because he only had like two or three bodyguards in the place when we came. They made it easy too, because they started shooting at us, so we didn’t even have to call it in and ask, Do we capture the guy or what? We just killed the bodyguards, and we killed the Taliban’s ass because he was shooting at us too.”
“He didn’t run?”
“Hell, no. Kinda surprised us, ’cause we figured as soon as we showed up and started layin’ it on he’d just wanna, you know, un-ass the villa. But he freaking stayed put. Rifle in one hand, pistol in the other. Went down in a blaze of asshole.”
He chuckled at his own joke as they turned a corner, leaving the plywood behind. Their feet struck concrete. The walls in this corridor were hard and cold. A breeze found its way through a crack somewhere and whistled at them as they passed through.
“So afterwards we call it in to our command and tell ’em we found this big house. And when I say ‘house’ I mean, like, brick and cement and tile.”
He bumped a fist along the wall as he walked. Black now noticed it was clean cinder block.
“Properly made,” Caine continued. “Not even a lot of stone in it like most of the crap construction they have here. And so we say we found this house and what do you want us to do? And command comes back: Hold the house.”
They stumped up two plywood steps between split-level corridors.
“And we’re like, for how long? And they say: Until relieved.”
“Which was?”
“Two weeks,” Caine answered scornfully. “Two fucking weeks of holding this place on the fly. We weren’t even a full platoon, even counting the squad that was down in the town, which was Sergeant Merrick’s squad. He was here too.”
“What did you do?”
“We called Merrick’s squad on the radio and we said get your asses up here, which they did, and we fucking hunkered down for the night, scared shitless. And we didn’t sleep one wink because we had the joes out all night building machine-gun positions and setting Claymores and all that shit.”
“Wow,” Black said flatly, and meant it.
The modern military had a low tolerance for sending its soldiers into the kind of unplanned, uncontrolled, outnumbered, seat-of-the-pants situations that featured more prominently in older and more desperate wars. Nowadays that was a good way for senior officers to get relieved of duty and prosecuted for negligence.
They had stopped at a low concrete doorway with “C.P.” stenciled on it in black spray paint. Caine nudged the plywood door open with a boot and had to duck his head slightly to stick it through the entrance. Black followed suit. The hum of a box fan and the twinkling of electronic lights greeted him.
The command post. A radio room, essentially. Square, cinderblock walls, maybe ten feet side to side, no windows. Its floor was set a couple steps below the level of the passageway. Large topographic maps of the countryside lined the walls. An industrial desk sat in the middle of the room, making an L with a table containing multiple stacks of military radio equipment. From here whoever was on duty could talk to everyone inside the COP, from the guard towers to the aid station, and anyone outside it on patrol, as well as keep contact with 3/44’s headquarters back on Omaha.
The only light came from a lamp on the desk and the winking green displays on the radio sets. The rest of the room was bathed in shadow and mostly empty, save for a rack with portable radios against the back wall and a cot in a dim corner to Black’s right. Two guys could share a long overnight shift and split time sleeping.
A soldier in camouflaged pants and tan T-shirt slumped on his elbows at the radio desk, bleary-eyed, reading a paperback novel with spacecraft crossing trackless heavens on its cover.
“Hey, highspeed,” said Caine blandly.
Highspeed. The timeless Army descriptor for a squared-away go-getter. That is one highspeed soldier. It could be used sincerely, or sarcastically, which is how Caine used it now, eyeing the schlubby sentinel.
“This is Lieutenant Black.”
One eyeball came off the page, registered Black’s presence, and rejoined its colleague. The rest of the soldier remained still. Probably, Black figured, he was wondering when his buddy was gonna get back from the latrine or chow or wherever so he could rack out on that cot.
“Hooah,” the kid mumbled.
Caine pulled his head out and let the door shut. He continued trooping down the hall.
“‘Wow’ is right,” he said, picking up their conversation where it had left off. “That was some fucking real-deal, old-school Vietnam firebase style, dump-your-ass-in-the-middle-of-nowhere-and-hope-for-the-best bullshit right there.”
“Out there flappin’,” Black offered.
“Out. There. Flapping.”
Caine drew a long sniffle and spat in the dirt. They were passing through a brief open-air passageway walled by head-high blast barriers on either side. It served as a channel between one structure and another. Black could smell the trees and the dry air.
“Dudes that night were praying and shit,” he said as they ducked into the next part of the complex. “Writing their freaking I’m sorry notes on the backs of M.R.E. boxes and all that.”
The air was close again, more humid. Every corridor in the place seemed to be made from a different combination of materials than the last. Ammunition cans of various types, Black noted, were stacked in corners at regular intervals throughout the labyrinth.
“And don’t think we didn’t get attacked that very same night and every fucking day after,” Caine continued. “Two weeks, seven K.I.A.s, and pretty much everyone got hit at least once.”
Black imagined the desperation of the situation. Caine was right; it was like something out of another time.
“They had to send birds to drop ammo and M.R.E.s and water for us, every day. But we held that shit. And after two weeks the engineers got here, on a fucking helo . . .”
He spat again, with contempt.
“. . . and checked out the house.”
Army engineers specialized in building temporary roads, bridges, and barricades, and fortifying existing structures on the fly.
“What’d they say?” Black asked.
Caine snorted.
“They looked around and stroked their chins and made smart faces and said, ‘Hmm, solid masonry. Hmm, load-bearing members. A good core.’ And all the shit I could’ve told them over the radio on day one. And then the bird came back and they got back on it and left, and our command said this is gonna be the COP. And we held it another five days until the engineer assets started getting here.”
Caine explained how the engineers started with the house, building around the big stone-and-cement structure as the core. They fortified it first and built off its existing sheds and outbuildings, then incorporated the masonry wall that surrounded it. They sandbagged up all its windows and emplaced portable “crow’s nest” guard towers on the rooftop corners.
Then came generators, shipping containers for supplies, blast walls around the mortar pit, and all the usual stuff. By the end they had built a standard little outpost, a series of structures centered on the chief’s house, all perched on the shelf of level ground against the steep hillslope.
It hadn’t been enough. There was too much high ground all around it. The place was attacked constantly from the mountainsides.
Over the course of the past year, most anything that was not covered had gotten covered. Fortified pass-throughs were built between structures, outdoor areas were turned into indoor areas, rooftops were sandbagged, blast walls were set down everywhere.
Some of the work, the heavy stuff, had been performed by engineers after repeated insistence by Vega’s sergeants and their headquarters. The rest had been done piecemeal by the soldiers themselves.
Now the place had grown to a sprawling, patchwork complex of passageways and chambers, a Russian dollhouse of buildings within buildings, additions atop combinations. A compound.
Black found the place fascinating. You never knew as you turned a corner whether you would still be in the same structure or someplace totally new, grafted together on the fly. He guessed that you would be hard-pressed, looking at it from the outside, to identify the original house which sat at its core.
Caine pointed out to Black that they were at that moment passing through what had formerly been a front hall and sitting area where the chief would receive guests. Black looked down and saw broad, ornate floor tiles.
“Why’d they call it Vega?” he asked.
“Who knows?” Caine replied blandly. “Naming stuff is officer business.”
Fair enough.
“C’mon, sir. I’ll show you the roof.”
They had passed from the front hall and turned a corner into a darkened passageway. It was lit only with green glow stick “chem lights” placed in what looked to be soup cans that had been attached at intervals to the wall. The fancy tile was gone and the flooring was rougher here. Black felt the temperature drop as they walked.
They reached the base of a stone stairwell, leading up into darkness. Caine stopped and turned to Black.
“Hey, L.T., I see you’ve got your flashlight hooked to your gear there,” he said, pointing at Black’s chest. “I’m sure I don’t need to tell you not to turn that thing on past the top of these steps.”
Black just stared at him.
Caine shrugged.
“Hey, sir, you’d be surprised.”
He turned and clumped up the dark steps. Black followed.
After several steps the stairs turned right. Another chem light marked the corner. Black felt a slight breeze coming down the well from above. When he peered up the stairwell he saw a dim blue glow hanging in the dark above them.
They reached a tiny landing where the steps turned again. The glow was right in front of them, at about chest level. Black now saw that it was coming from behind some sort of sheet or curtain strung across an opening in the wall. Caine yanked a corner of it back.
“What’s happening, Oswalt?”
The curtain had been drawn across a recessed area set into the wall about four feet off the floor. Inside was the tiniest hootch Black had ever seen—a stone cavity maybe seven feet long by four feet high by four feet deep.
Hooks and masonry nails had been driven into fissures in the bare stone sides, from which a toiletry kit and various personal comfort items hung in little mesh bags. Some kind of mattress or bedroll was wedged into the space and draped crookedly across the uneven stone surface.
On it, reclining against a couple pillows, was a soldier in long-sleeved PT gear watching an action movie that Black didn’t recognize on a portable DVD player. Registering his visitors, he pulled a pair of enormous headphones off his ears, releasing a cacophony of tinny car-chase sounds into the stairwell.
“Oh, hey, Sergeant Caine.”
He had wide eyes and a young face, though he was not a small soldier and looked to be past twenty. His hands were large and strong and his hair buzzed down nearly to the skin, and his face carried a look of mild surprise that seemed to be a permanent expression. His deep voice echoed as from a hollow log lined with moss.
He didn’t seem fazed by, or even to take note of, Black’s presence.
“Hey, Oswalt,” Caine answered. “Whatcha watchin’?”
“Transporter 2. Hubbard gave me the DVD.”
“Is it as awesome as the first one?”
“Sure is, Sergeant.”
“All right, then.”
Caine turned to go. Black followed.
“Have a good night, Oswalt.”
“Good night, Sergeant,” Oswalt answered, pulling his headphones back up. “Good night, sir.”
Surprised, Black mumbled a “good night” over his shoulder as he and Caine trudged upward again. Caine didn’t speak, so Black just came out with it.
“There was no weapon in his hootch.”
Soldiers’ weapons rarely left their sides on deployment, whether they were on duty or eating or sleeping.
“Hey, we got Columbo after all,” snorted Caine. “Guess you’ll be a good investigating officer, sir.”
Black waited.
“We let him secure it in the arms room when he’s not on duty,” the sergeant offered.
They walked further.
“Oswalt is special,” Caine said finally.
Black considered this.
“Head injury, or just special?”
“Just special,” Caine replied tersely. “Don’t ask me how he got through basic training, but he did.”
Black dimly saw another turn in the stairwell ahead. He smelled pine.
“Army takes all kinds, I guess,” Caine mused.
“Got it.”
“Don’t get me wrong. He’s a good soldier. Work as hard as you want him to work. No attitude. Not a bad shot either.”
He shrugged.
“Nice kid. Just slow in certain areas.”
“He lives in the stairwell?”
“Hey, different strokes. He likes living there. But he does not go on the roof.”
“Never?”
“No,” Caine answered flatly, pointing at his head. “Doesn’t pack the gearbox. Too easy to get shot up there, or shoot the wrong thing while you’re by yourself on guard duty for six hours.”
“What does he do?”
“This and that. Fixes up a weapon pretty good. Let him listen to the radio sometimes when nothing’s goin’ on.”
He shrugged.
“Ya know. Earns his keep.”
Caine had stopped at the turn in the stairway.
“All right, sir, you’re just gonna need to walk kinda fast when we’re up there.”
“Will do.”
Caine turned and started up. Black followed him around the corner. At the top of the stairwell a rectangle of gray light loomed. The stairs ended in an opening cut flush into the roof. The two ascended.
After spending the past couple minutes in darkened hallways lit only by chem lights, Black’s eyes had adjusted to the dark. The stairwell fell away beneath him and he felt a tingle of vertigo as he stepped up into the vast open space.
To one side, beyond the edge of the roof, a forested mountainside rose before him. In the other three directions, empty air. The outpost was perched on an outcropping of ground set on the steep valley slope. It was probably close to a mile across to the opposite side. Above them, the ridges were a thousand feet up or more. Beyond that, the clouds had broken further to reveal broad patches of crystalline starlight. The breeze that moved them carried down past the mountaintops and gently touched his face. It smelled like deep fall.
He hesitated only a moment before hearing Caine’s “All right, then, sir,” as he trudged away briskly across the roof. Black followed.
The roof was wide and flat. Planked pathways had been created by laying wood pallets end to end, making walkways that forked out in three directions ahead of them. Caine took the middle one, heading for the hulking shape of a guard post squatting at one corner of the roof.
The thing looked like a haystack made of dark green sandbags. As they approached, Black could see many of them were split and spilling sand from where they had taken fire. From the haphazard pattern in which they lay, it looked like fresh ones had been laid down over old more than once.
Black looked left and right as they tromped across the wobbly planking, the racket of their steps sounding loud enough in the vast silence to reach the high ridges. He could see at least two other haystacks at far corners of the roof.
Their path led straight to the dark opening at the rear of the guard post. Caine stepped through without pausing. Black stepped in after him.
The roof inside was low. The interior of the guard shack itself was only a few feet on a side. Two rectangular openings faced out over the corner of the roof, one to the left and one to the right, with wide views of the moonlit Valley. Machine guns sat mounted in each window, and behind each one sat a soldier on a four-legged stool.
One had been speaking to the other in low tones, about what sounded like girl problems, as he looked out into the night beyond his gun. The other sat sideways on his stool, his back against the wall of the post, the window to his right, facing his friend.
“Goddamn it, Bosch,” said Caine. “You think you might want to watch your fucking sector?”
The soldier said nothing but cast an appraising look at Black and rotated lazily until he, like his friend, was facing out over his weapon.
“All right, sir,” Caine said, sounding bored.
At the “sir,” the first soldier cast a glance over his shoulder at Black.
“So down there you’ve got the river.”
He pointed down the carpeted slopes and descending ridges. Black could not see water but could identify the gap in the trees several hundred feet below them where the course of the river must run.
Caine pointed to the right, a little higher.
“And if you go downhill that way, not quite as far as the river but around that bend in the hills there, you get to a little side valley. That’s the village I was telling you about.”
“Darreh Sin.”
“Yep. Shithole.”
“Is that what it means in Afghani, Sergeant?” said the first soldier, chuckling.
“Shut up,” said Caine mildly. “So that’s the town I was telling you about, sir, where we first found out about this place.”
He pointed farther to the right and higher.
“And if you go up, there’s a trail—more than one trail, probably, but there’s a trail that goes all the way up the Valley and gets you to Pakistan.”
“How far?”
“By foot?” Caine shrugged. “Who knows? Never been. Ain’t allowed to go. Probably seven or eight miles, except nobody fucking knows where the border is. It’s all disputed lands and shit up there.”
He stuck his hands in his pockets.
“But we know the trails go all the way because the local Valley dudes move heroin to Pakistan and the Taliban moves fighters from goddamn everywhere all the way down through here”—he swept his hand across the panorama like a cleansing wave rushing through the mountain passes—“and out to the rest of this outstanding country.”
“You guys interdict?” Black asked.
“Fighters? Yeah, technically that’s part of the mission. Right after ‘Stay alive and don’t fucking get overrun.’”
The first soldier gave an approving nod.
“We keep pretty busy on part one,” Caine went on. “So we don’t get a lot of spare time to chase incoming jihadi tourists all up and down through the hills. We mostly try to just kill ’em when they try to kill us.”
“What about drugs?”
Caine shrugged again.
“That, we don’t really worry about so much,” he said. “I’m sure there’s poppy fields in the mountains on this side of the border too, but like I said, we don’t really know ’cause nobody’s ever been.”
He looked up through the hillsides.
“I’m sure they take care of their business up there,” he said, “and we take care of our business down here.”
Black took this all in, following Caine’s gaze up the slopes. The forest seemed surprisingly noisy this time of night, between the light breeze and the frequent sound of animals snapping twigs and brushing through trees.
“How often you guys go down to Darreh Sin?”
Caine nodded as though expecting the question.
“We take a patrol down there about once a week or so.”
“Goodwill, or catching bad guys?”
Caine’s head jogged left and right: This and that.
“In Darreh Sin,” he said, “more goodwill. We gotta take pictures of this water collection system they’re building, that the U.S. paid for. Like, get the water from the mountain streams down to the crops and stuff more efficiently.”
He shook his head.
“Me, I’d figure it’d mostly piss off dudes in the next town over that this town gets cash and gets the better water. But what the fuck do I know? I’m not a Civil Affairs officer. I’m just a dumb sergeant. Anyway, gotta get pictures and show progress and shit.”
Black nodded.
“Fog’s coming in,” interjected the first soldier from behind his machine gun.
Caine leaned forward and peered downward.
“Yup.”
Black leaned forward and looked. Wisps of mist were creeping about the hillsides at the bottom of the slopes where the river ran.
“Gonna fill up the whole valley,” Caine said to Black.
“I hate that shit,” said the first soldier.
“I love that shit,” said his friend, Bosch, speaking for the first time.
Caine turned to face Black, hands still in his pockets.
“So, sir, unless you’ve got more questions for this stop on the deluxe tour, I can take you down and show you your rack.”
Black indicated that he didn’t.
They turned to go.
“Have a good one, sir,” said the first soldier over his shoulder.
“Yup.”
They creaked across the rackety planking again and back down through the stairwell, past the curtains of Oswalt’s hootch, which was still filled with blue light from the DVD player. They wound through fresh passageways Black hadn’t yet seen, until they arrived at a series of three or four wooden steps.
A plywood door was set into the wall on the right. In large stenciled letters it read:
THE SHIT
Someone had taken a marker and added WELCOME TO above it.
Caine yanked open the door to reveal a sort of indoor-outdoor closet containing a Porta-Potty shed. It sat on wood planking and was completely enclosed in blast walls and plywood roofing. Black assumed there were layers of sandbags piled on top, on the outside of it. The little built-in plastic chimney rose up from the shed and disappeared through the fortified roof.
“Here’s the nearest latrine, sir. Like our indoor plumbing?”
“Impressive.”
Back at his unit in the States, Black had known a sergeant who figured out how to convert a little utility closet in their headquarters into a stand-up shower, complete with a tile floor and fully waterproof. Great for showers after morning PT. Once people in other units found out, everyone wanted him to build one for their headquarters. This potty closet rivaled that in its ingenuity. It was a nice piece of construction.
“We kind of had to build it this way,” said Caine with a little pride. “A kid died in the shitter last year when a mortar hit one of the Porta-Johns.”
“Yuck.”
“Yeah,” Caine drawled. “What a way to go, and so forth. Anyway, all of ’em are enclosed now.”
He turned and headed up the steps, into a low-ceilinged plywood hallway strung with fluorescents. Several doors sat at intervals along the left wall. All but one were padlocked shut.
Caine stopped at the one which wasn’t and pulled the door open.
“Home sweet home, L.T.”
He held the door.
Black stepped through into a windowless room with concrete walls and a fluorescent light blaring from the ceiling. Lieutenant Pistone’s hootch.
It looked well kept and orderly. Black’s ruck, courtesy of Private Corelli, slouched in the middle of the floor.
He turned to Caine.
“Thanks.”
“Hey, gotta give you someplace to rack out,” Caine shrugged. “He ain’t using it.”
“Right.”
Caine lingered in the door. He shoved his hands in his pockets, hesitating.
“Listen, sir,” he said. “I know right now you’re thinking ‘Is this dude gonna be a pain in my ass?’”
Black didn’t bother denying it.
“Look,” Caine went on. “I know you have a job to do, even if it is pointless and stupid.”
Black said nothing. Caine sighed.
“I’m not gonna make life difficult, all right, sir?”
“All right.”
Caine looked at Black searchingly.
“But I told you how we got here,” he said. “I told you how we got this place, and now you know. Now you know why I call it ‘my’ outpost. I figure after what we went through here we kind of own it at this point, right? There’s more of our goddamn blood on the floor of this house than the other side’s. You know what I mean?”
“I do.”
“So I’m just saying, be respectful of that when you’re investigating my guys, okay?”
“I will.”
“I know how things start sounding,” Caine went on, “when you put it on paper and send it up to Brigade headquarters. How some simple thing like the mob and the warning shots starts sounding like some goddamn massacre or like we’re terrorizing the town or some shit.”
“I know.”
“That’s not my soldiers,” Caine said, looking him in the eye. “They got friends dead and they gotta worry about not getting themselves dead. I don’t want them thinking they fucked up and are in trouble for doing their jobs.”
Black nodded.
“They go through enough shit out here,” Caine finished, “and they don’t need that too.”
“Not my speed.”
“Right,” Caine said dryly.
He looked Black up and down and shook his head. He laughed again.
“Shit, sorry about all the mud and the face, L.T.”
“Don’t sweat it.”
“Anyway, so you saw where the latrine is, and anybody can point you to the chow hall. Just find me when you’re up in the morning, and I can get you what you need.”
“Will do.”
“Better yet,” Caine said, looking at the dark circles under Black’s eyes, “you should probably sleep in. You look like you haven’t slept in a week.”
“Sounds good.”
Black thought Caine was finally going to go. Instead he just stood there, looking at Black silently.
He was about to ask the sergeant if there was anything else he could help him with when Caine sighed, as though saddened by something. Before Black knew what was happening the sergeant’s hand shot out, straight toward his chest.
He yanked the Velcro rank patch, with the lieutenant’s bar, from the center of Black’s uniform. He clutched it in his fist and stepped in until his face was close, looking up at Black’s. His eyes had gone dark.
“You go wandering around bumping into shit and fucking up our operations,” he said in a hushed voice, “and I will fucking shoot you, officer or no officer.”
He paused the merest moment, took one step back, and slapped the rank patch, crooked, back onto Black’s uniform. He turned on a heel and strode off down the hallway, calling a cheery “Good night, sir!” over his shoulder.
Black just stood there, his heart rate returning to normal. Colonel Gayley’s words returned to him.
They’re strung out and they’ve lost a lot of buddies. They are not going to be happy to see you poking your nose around their outpost.
He closed the door.