A picture was coming into focus.
The kid’s room was tiny. Maybe eight feet by five feet. The centerpiece of the place, on the wall directly opposite him, was a large and rumpled tapestry of black nylon. An upright five-pointed star sprawled across it in white silk screen, points extending just beyond the arc of a circle, making it look almost but not quite like a pentagram. In front of the star, his back to the viewer, was a man, naked, feet planted defensively, palms raised before him protectively, reeling back against whatever looming power lurked within the giant star.
On another wall was tacked a page torn from a magazine, a fantastical painting of a city perched atop an improbable mountain which tapered inward at its lower latitudes until the whole thing rested on a thin spear of rock. The rest of the wallspace was occupied by hand drawings on pieces of white paper, crowding one another in themed bunches like billslips on a RENT NOW bulletin board. One corner featured beefy creatures thumping huge mallets and lithe elvish archers astride perfect steeds. In another were many pictures of unicorns, in many possible universes. He wasn’t a bad artist.
Reclining on the bunk in a tan Army T-shirt beneath the tapestry, eyeing Black over the top of a book with a journeying gaggle of swordsmen and sorcerers on its cover, was Brydon himself. The Wizard.
He was a dumpy sort of kid. Acne scars marked his wide face, and he looked like, but for the physical fitness ensured by his tromping up and down high-altitude mountains all the time, he would be pretty pudgy. He didn’t exactly seem sociable.
His eyes were hooded, his hair a scrubby in-between of brown and blond. It was startlingly long even for a deployed soldier deep in the mountains and far from the FOB. There was no skin visible on the sides, and Black figured he probably had two and a half inches on top. A bona fide “shock.”
Brydon must’ve been some kinda good soldier, or some kinda weird, to be allowed to get away with that. Black wondered how many real friends he had in the platoon.
There was a little three-legged half stool in the corner.
“Can I sit?” Black asked.
“Sure.”
Brydon was in a half-sitting position against his pillow and didn’t move.
Black sat, pulling his little green Army notebook out of his pocket and setting it, closed, on a side table. He leaned back against the plywood wall, noticing for the first time a tattoo on Brydon’s right upper arm. A shield with two Latin words inscribed across its front: VAE VICTIS.
He didn’t recognize the unit logo. His eyes moved back up to Brydon’s face.
“I’m Black,” he said, even though the kid could obviously read his name tape. “You know what a fifteen-six is?”
“Not except what Sergeant Merrick said.”
Brydon spoke in an uninterested drawl that Black couldn’t place. Midwestern Nonspecific.
“Right,” Black went on. “So, like he said, it’s an investigation that I got assigned to do. It’s the lowest-level investigation in the Army.”
He put his hands up in a calming sort of gesture.
“I’m not an M.P. or anything, and you’re not in trouble.”
“Then why am I being investigated?”
This was the part Black hated about doing a 15-6. There was no way to really explain, to the satisfaction of the cynical and reasonably distrustful mind of a soldier, that he was being “investigated” but didn’t really have to worry. Soldiers always worried, with good cause. In their immortal motto, learned over and over the hard way: Shit Rolls Downhill.
“It’s not you specifically,” he explained. “I need to talk to a bunch of guys. I gotta talk to some of the other guys in the platoon, and I have to talk to Sergeant Merrick, and Sergeant Caine . . .”
“So the platoon’s being investigated.”
“Kind of. Not really. It’s not—”
He wanted to say, It’s not an INVESTIGATION-investigation, but he knew how stupid that sounded.
“It’s not the kind of investigation where . . .”
He trailed off.
“Look,” he said finally, flustered. “I’ve had to do these before. I just talk to soldiers and get some facts about something that happened, and write it down and it gets filed and then usually that’s the last anybody ever hears from anybody about it. All right?”
He knew a look of total distrust on a soldier’s face when he saw it.
“Facts about what that happened?”
Black grabbed his book.
“Why don’t we just start at the basic stuff,” he said, then caught himself. “Sorry. Do you have any questions before we get going?”
“Like what?”
“Nothing in particular. Just if you wanted to know anything about how it works.”
Brydon shook his head. He sat up from his pillows a little bit.
“Sort of figured you’d be a captain or something,” he said.
From his two previous 15-6 assignments, Black was used to the usual slights and minor insubordinations of combat soldiers who are both annoyed at being interrogated and scared of being told they’d done something wrong when they were just trying to do stuff right. He ignored it.
“Your full name is Billy Brydon.”
“Yeah.”
“Specialist.”
“Yeah.”
It was one rank below the lowest sergeant grade. Some soldiers floated there for years without ever getting their stripes. Some didn’t want them.
“You’re a medic.”
“Yeah.”
“How long have you been in Sergeant Merrick’s platoon?”
“Who wants to know?”
So the kid was gonna be a pain regardless.
“It’s just basic admin data. Just background.”
Brydon looked at him skeptically.
“Three months.”
“Before that?”
“Stateside. Different unit.”
Black asked him all the usual. Where he went to basic training, when his service commitment was up. He could tell the kid’s mind wasn’t on the answers. He just wanted Black to get to it, so he could find out what he was gonna get rung up for.
Black closed the notebook and set it down on the side table. Whatever Brydon told him he would have to write down later anyway on a standard sworn statement form.
He flipped his chin at Brydon’s tattoo.
“What’s that?”
Brydon looked down at it involuntarily.
“‘Vae Victis,’” he mumbled. “It means—”
“‘Woe to the vanquished,’” Black cut in, finishing his sentence for him.
“How’d you know that?” Brydon demanded, startled.
Black shrugged.
“Doesn’t matter,” he replied. “Where’d you get the tattoo?”
“Doesn’t matter,” Brydon retorted, still eyeing Black like he thought he was about to get mugged.
Black let it go. Time to get back on track.
“Okay,” he said. “So the main thing I need to ask about is something that happened on the twenty-third of last month. It was a Wednesday. . . .”
He could see the kid searching his memory banks but could tell it was useless. Dates and days of the week were pretty pointless in a place like Vega.
Brydon looked at him blankly, shaking his head.
“Don’t worry about it. So, from the paperwork I got before I came up here, it sounds like your squad was on a patrol that day.”
“Okay.”
“And Corelli was there, and Shannon was there, and Sergeant Caine and Lieutenant Pistone.”
“Okay.”
Brydon was sitting up on his bunk now, arms around his knees, looking at Black intently. He spoke almost defiantly, as though egging Black on. Go ahead and tell me what the Army says I did. He was tense. Shit rolls downhill.
“I guess,” Black said, “the people in the village were upset.”
“All right.”
“And it’s hard to tell, but it sounds like they were upset because one of the old guys in town had his goat get killed the night before.”
There was a long moment while Brydon recalled the day Black was talking about. His face hardened as the memory locked into focus, and he looked at Black incredulously.
“You’re here about that?!”
“Well, no,” Black said, flustered again. “I mean, not really. It’s not really the goat. It’s about . . .”
You used to be able to talk to joes.
“Look,” he went on, recovering. “I know this whole thing seems really dumb. It is dumb. But the Army does fifteen-sixes for all kinds of things nowadays, even the smallest stuff. This is just the one I got assigned to do. Like I said, you’re not in trouble or anything. It’s just getting the basic facts and putting them on paper and then I go on my way.”
He had seen enough looks of disgust directed at himself to recognize one now.
“So why don’t we just knock it out,” Black said. “All right?”
Brydon didn’t say anything. He just glared at Black as though he had decided something fundamental and final about Black’s worth as a human being.
“So do you know if that’s right? If the guy’s goat got killed?”
“Yeah,” said Brydon, allowing his voice to drip with contempt for the entire exercise. “The guy’s goat got killed.”
“You were there the night before?”
“Yeah, I was there the night before.”
“What happened?”
“Sounds like you already know, L.T.,” he said, impatiently.
“Humor me.”
“The guy’s goat got killed.”
Black gave him a Come on look.
The kid sighed noisily and shook his head. He spoke in one annoyed spurt.
“We were on a patrol outside the town and it was dark and foggy and somebody’s goat was wandering off his property and Miller, who’s an idiot, got spooked and thought it was the freaking bogeyman or something and shot it and the goat got killed. Okay?”
“Okay,” Black said patiently. “What about the next day?”
Brydon looked at him and shrugged as though the question, or questioner, was dense.
“We took a patrol down to the town to find out whose goat it was.”
“And there was a crowd of people there?”
“Yes,” he said tersely.
“What were they doing?”
“Standing there being pissed off.”
“Why?”
“Sergeant Merrick told me not to speculate on anything I don’t have knowledge of, so I don’t know.”
“I won’t write it down, and you don’t have to write it down,” Black said, trying to be patient. “Just off the record, I’m wondering if you could tell why they were upset.”
“Probably because Miller killed the goat, right?” Brydon retorted, as though Black were slow. “Goat equals livelihood, right?”
“Did someone fire a warning shot to disperse the crowd?”
“Yes,” Brydon sighed.
“Who?”
“Corelli.”
“Did anyone get injured?”
“Not that I know of.”
“So you didn’t treat anyone for anything on scene?”
Brydon looked at him like he was the world’s dumbest dummy.
“I think I just said that, sir.”
“Why did Corelli fire the warning shot?”
“You’d have to ask Corelli.”
The rest of the interview went like that. Brydon didn’t become any less impatient or any less difficult. Black wrapped it up pretty quickly. He figured he could talk to the kid the next day for any more details and a sworn statement.
He closed with his usual lawyerly, open-ended question.
“Okay, that should do it pretty much. Is there anything else you want to add or tell me?”
“Like what?”
Black reminded himself to be patient.
“It’s just a standard question to make sure I got everything.”
Brydon looked him in the eye.
“It sounds like you are on top of everything, sir.”
He leaned back on his pillows, signaling the close of any kind of cooperative interview.
Black thanked him and took his notebook and left the Wizard’s room.
Weirdo.
Most soldiers are at least a little bit relieved when the subject matter of a dreaded 15-6 turns out to be some trivial thing that no one’s going to get in trouble for. Some are mad at having their time wasted. Brydon mostly seemed annoyed by the pointlessness, the typical mediocre bureaucracy of the whole thing.
Black had to respect that a little.
He headed down the hallway to the door Merrick had told him belonged to Shannon. He knocked. After a very long silence a heavy voice said, “Enter.”
He opened.
The room was standard-issue meathead. Heavy-metal posters and jugs of workout powder. An Xbox video game system sat on a shelf beneath a small and beat-up monitor. The place was roughly the same layout as Brydon’s room, but on the wall where the strange tapestry had been hanging was instead a large picture of an overlit blonde with oiled balloon breasts reclining naked on the hood of a pickup truck for some reason.
Beneath her, sprawled two-legged in a chair in a straining T-shirt with his feet up on a side table playing the Xbox, was Shannon. His room was as tiny as the Wizard’s. He just took up more of it.
He was something comfortably over six feet, broad, blond, iron-jawed, and sunburnt. As with Brydon, a tattoo stretched across the horizon of a bare bicep—a knife bursting through a flaming garland with the letters XLIV on its blade. He didn’t look up from the game or pause his playing in the slightest.
“Corporal Shannon?”
Pause.
“Mm,” came the low rumble.
“I’m Lieutenant Black.”
Nothing.
“Did Sergeant Merrick tell you why I’m here?”
“Yup.”
Thumbs working the buttons wildly. Hails of automatic gunfire over the monitor’s speakers.
“Can I sit?”
There was a little half stool against the wall like the one in the Wizard’s room.
“Whatever.”
Something exploded on-screen.
“You want to look at me while I’m talking to you?”
“Not really.”
Black sighed inwardly, then took one quick step forward across the tiny room and in a sweeping motion smacked the controller as hard as he could out of Shannon’s hands. It ricocheted off the big kid’s forehead, which Black hadn’t meant to happen, and put a nice divot in the smooth belly of the reclining pickup truck girl on the wall.
Shannon leaped up, hands flailing reflexively about his bruised forehead. Black sat down on the stool.
“WHAT THE FUCK!?”
His yelling voice was a big one.
“Sorry,” said Black, not sounding sorry at all.
“You fucking hit a soldier!” the kid shouted, thunderstruck.
Black crossed an ankle over a knee.
“What, you’re gonna go tattle?” he said mockingly. “I hadn’t figured you for such a wuss.”
The kid gawked at him, dumbfounded and spluttering.
“Go ahead,” Black said calmly. “Go tattle. Or you can just hit me back and we can both go tattle, and we’ll see who gets it worse.”
He would not have been surprised at that moment to be seized in Shannon’s beefy hands and tossed against the wall. From the look on the big kid’s beet-red face, Black could tell he was considering it. But some part of his brain that was not burning all cylinders on pure rage-ahol registered the fact that while the lieutenant would get a stern talking-to for accidentally knocking a game controller into his forehead, he himself would probably get a dishonorable discharge for striking an officer, or at a minimum a trip down to buck private with several months of docked pay and scrubbing toilets in the evenings once he got back to the States.
Instead, Shannon turned angrily and squeezed his frame beneath the side shelves, coming up with the game controller. Its housing had split open. Black wondered whether it was Shannon’s head or the wall that did it.
“You fucking cracked it!”
“Sorry,” Black said again, still not sounding sorry. “Can we start now?”
He found his notebook on the floor and picked it up.
“Why don’t we start with the basics,” he said.
The kid loomed over him, brandishing the broken controller.
“You’re gonna wanna get the fuck out of here, sir.”
“Current rank, corporal. Current job, infantry.”
He glanced at a page of his notebook.
“Former job . . . forward observer?”
“Did you hear me?”
“Yeah, I heard you,” Black answered, sounding bored. “Do you know what a fifteen-six investigation is?”
“Yeah, and I don’t care. Go fuck your questions.”
“Then you understand you’re obligated to talk to me?”
Shannon, still standing, leaned in toward Black.
“I. Don’t. Give. A. FUCK what I’m ‘obligated’ to do,” he said very loudly, sending spittle onto Black’s face.
He tossed the controller aside.
“I already told Sergeant Merrick I’m not talking to you, anyway.”
“Why aren’t you talking to me?”
A momentary look crossed the soldier’s face. Confusion?
“I ain’t talking to you ’cause I ain’t talking to you.”
Black sighed audibly.
“That’s not actually an answer.”
Shannon sat, dwarfing his bunk, and looked Black in the eye. Heavy brows roiled against one another.
“Okay,” he said. “I ain’t talking to you because you look like a pussy and I don’t wanna answer pussy bullshit questions about me doing my job from a FOBbit that doesn’t live in my world and wouldn’t know which end of the goddamn rifle shoots the bullet.”
He paused for effect.
“Sir.”
An orator, then.
“How do you know they are bullshit questions when you don’t even know what they’re about?”
“Don’t have to,” Shannon said tersely. “You’re bullshit, so they’re bullshit.”
“Look, Corporal,” Black said tiredly, ignoring the fact that the soldier had already said about a half-dozen things that would get him severely punished if he were anyplace but deep in a godforsaken and deadly valley. “You realize you’re not in trouble, right? You realize no one’s out to get you, and I just have to ask my questions, then I can go away, right? But if you don’t answer any questions, then you are going to be in trouble.”
Shannon sat back against the wall and crossed his arms, angling himself away from Black.
“Hooray.”
“So you’re invoking your right to counsel?”
It was the only other angle he could think of.
“My what?”
“To a lawyer,” Black answered. “If you’re refusing to answer my questions, then you’re saying that you’re claiming your right not to incriminate yourself, and you want a lawyer to defend you. But like I keep saying, there’s nothing to defend yourself against. Unless there is and you just don’t want to tell me.”
“What is this, a fucking cop show? I don’t need a goddamn lawyer.”
“Okay,” said Black patiently. “So you don’t want a lawyer, and you won’t talk to me. So now you’re just refusing to cooperate with a fifteen-six investigation, which is a chargeable offense. So now I have to go back to the FOB and tell my commander you wouldn’t cooperate, and some major or a colonel is going to come up here and you’ll have to deal with him.”
“Bullshit,” spat Shannon. “Nice try, sir. Ain’t no major or colonel ever set foot in this joint since I’ve been here. I ain’t even seen the captain in command of my own goddamn company.”
“They won’t have a choice,” Black countered. “You refuse to answer a few simple questions and then this piddly little fifteen-six gets blown up into a big deal and they have to send it up to Brigade headquarters marked OBSTRUCTED, and then Brigade has to send someone real to investigate for real, instead of sending a flunky lieutenant like myself.”
Shannon regarded him with squinted eyes, smiling a carnivorous smile.
“You trying to scare me, L.T.?”
Black held his hands up innocently.
“Nope.”
“Yeah, you are. You’re trying to scare me.”
“I’m just trying to help you get me and every other officer in the Army off your back.”
“Bullshit,” Shannon said, pleased with himself for figuring out what was going on. “You’re gonna come at me with majors and colonels and think I’m gonna get scared and talk to you.”
“Not my intention.”
“Yeah, it is. I ain’t scared of you or your lawyer bullshit.”
Black tossed the notebook aside.
“Well, someone’s scaring you, because you won’t talk to me.”
Shannon looked at him like he was straight crazy.
“You fucking . . .”
He trailed off, flabbergasted.
“Me what?”
Shannon shook his head as though to clear it. Finally he uncrossed his arms and put his hands on his knees, leaning forward again to look at Black closely.
“All right, sir,” he said disdainfully. “You want it?”
“Want what?”
“You want what I have to say?”
“Please.”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure.”
“Okay, good,” Shannon said.
He took his time sitting back on the bunk. He crossed his arms again. He eyeballed Black for a good moment before he spoke. When he did, it was in tones of pure contempt.
“First off,” he said. “Fuck you, Lieutenant. Fuck you because you’re still a pussy and you don’t know shit.”
“Okay.”
“And you go tell my commander that I cursed at you, if you can find him back at the FOB. I don’t give a fuck.”
“I got the message that you don’t like me,” Black replied without emotion.
Shannon’s brow curled and flexed.
“See that . . . ?” he spluttered, pointing at Black.
He shook his head again, disgusted.
“‘I got the message that you don’t like me,’” he said in a nasal singsong. “Look at you, sitting there like you know something. Talking about what scares me.”
He loudly snorted phlegm from the back of his throat, and for a moment Black thought he was actually going to spit it on him. He must have swallowed it instead.
“You don’t know shit,” Shannon said. “You don’t know my world.”
“Then tell me.”
“I am telling you, you jackass. You want to know what fucking scares me?”
“I do.”
“Good, because I’m going to tell you, since you know so much about what’s fucking scary in this place.”
“Okay.”
Shannon pointed a thick finger at the hallway.
“I heard you talking to Sergeant Merrick this morning in the chow hall. I heard him tell you about the last K.I.A. we had.”
“I remember.”
“That was Parsons,” Shannon said. “He was only here six weeks.”
“Okay.”
“Sergeant Merrick didn’t tell you how he died.”
“How?”
“He fell back on a patrol.”
“Okay.”
“No, you don’t understand,” Shannon pressed. “I don’t mean he got lost, or wandered off or fell back a half mile. You know how far he fell back?”
“How far?”
“Ten meters,” Shannon said flatly.
He looked at Black a long moment.
“He was the last guy and he fell back ten fucking meters from where he shoulda been in the patrol, and it was dark and a little bit foggy. That’s it. Didn’t even hear him get grabbed.”
“Okay.”
“Know what the Taliban does when they capture a soldier?”
“What?”
“They put his ass on a video and they hold him for ransom until we trade some of their own assholes for him. Which we do, even though the commander in chief doesn’t admit it when he’s on TV talking about how great shit’s going over here.”
“All right.”
“That’s the Taliban,” Shannon said flatly. “Taliban are pussies.”
His eyes bore into Black.
“You know what these Valley fuckers did?”
“What?”
“They left him for us.”
Black had a sinking feeling.
“What do you mean?”
“They left him on a tree.”
“Oh.”
“A hundred meters from our wall, across open ground. First tree we would get to if we walked out.”
“Okay.”
“Tied to the tree, no fucking balls on him, intestines hanging out.”
Black didn’t say anything.
“Alive.”
He watched Black for his reaction before going on.
“Didn’t even call out to us for help,” Shannon said, a note of reverence entering his voice. “Didn’t want us to go get him and get shot. We didn’t see him till it got light the next morning. Still alive.”
He seemed to forget Black was there.
“God damn kid, eighteen years old, hooah-hooah airborne trooper, one year ago kissing girls on the Ferris wheel back home, ends up tied to a goddamn tree in this goddamn place looking at his buddies looking back at him from the wall. And we can’t go get him because every Valley sniper is up that fucking hillside just waiting for his chance.”
Black could only think of one thing to say.
“How long?”
“All day, into the night. You know who finally went out to take care of him?”
“Who?”
“Sergeant Merrick.”
“Okay.”
“Alone. Wouldn’t let any of us come with him. Told us he’d fucking shoot us if we tried to follow.”
Black considered this.
“That’s a great man,” Shannon said defiantly, looking past Black. “And he ain’t gonna get no goddamn medal for what he did.”
“Couldn’t save him?” Black asked.
Shannon ignored the question. Instead he leaned forward again and put his hands on his knees, his own eyes turning back to Black’s.
“So there is only one thing in this godforsaken place that scares me, Lieutenant,” he said, anger rising again. “And it ain’t dying. I ain’t scared of that, and I definitely ain’t scared of your lawyer bullshit.”
“Okay.”
“I’m scared that when they get me and I get strung up to a tree with my balls off and my guts out I’m not gonna be strong like little Parsons was strong. I’m scared I’m gonna be weak and I’m gonna call out for my buddies to help me, instead of just dying like a fucking pal. And my weakness is gonna make Sergeant Merrick or one of the other great men who serve here come out and get themselves killed trying to help me.”
His speech hung in the air.
“That,” Shannon said, “is my world, and that’s why I don’t give a fuck.”
“Understood.”
“Bullshit,” Shannon said, sounding weary. “You don’t understand shit.”
He sat back against the wall, regarding Black. He spoke in a low voice.
“You don’t know what this place is.”
“What’s that mean?”
“It means the Devil is in this valley, sir. And he will get his.”
He gestured with his chin toward Black’s notebook.
“So you write what you wanna write in your little book, and go back to the FOB and come back with your majors and colonels. They know where to find me if they wanna come here and get me.”
He picked up his video game controller.
“I’ll be dead anyway, so it won’t matter for shit.”
Black gathered up his notebook and stood. There wasn’t anything else to say.
Shannon started messing with the broken game controller. Black pushed open the door and left, wondering just how much of a needless pain it was going to be to get a couple simple statements and make his paperwork and go home.
He went to the end of the makeshift corridor and hung a right, as Merrick had instructed him. He took several brisk strides to the last door and kicked it open with his boot.