He ducked and spun, sending up an elbow to shrug his attacker free.
Danny’s surprised, sweating face shone wide-eyed in a leafy shaft of moonlight.
Black charged, holding his rifle crosswise before him. His momentum, with all his gear on, drove Danny several tripping steps backward across the slope until they both fell across a log and landed hard on the slanting mountainside.
Black pushed himself up and away from Danny, backing off several feet and raising his rifle.
“No!” Danny gasped, terrified. “L.T.!”
“It’s you!” Black hurled at the linguist, squaring on him. “He’s you!”
“What?!”
“The servant! You’re the servant!”
“L.T.! No! What?”
“Don’t bullshit me, Dan—”
A crackle of leaf and twig behind him.
Five meters roughly.
He spun. A dark figure loomed before his rifle. Before any conscious thought, he squeezed the trigger.
Nothing happened but the dull metallic snap of a weapon failing to fire.
He blinked. The Monk stood frozen for a moment, then glided away downslope, through the trees.
Black whirled around again to Danny, who remained motionless on the ground with his hands up. He let his rifle fall, swinging taut from a short strap D-ringed to his gear, and drew his pistol.
“L.T.!”
“Shut up.”
He looked around him and moved a few steps further away to where a log lay across the ground. He lay his pistol on its side on the log, pointing in Danny’s direction, close where he could grab it. He unhooked his rifle from its strap.
“What did you do here, Danny?”
He cracked open the rifle and began to strip it, keeping one eye on his work and one eye on the frightened ’terp.
“What, did you rape a kid or something? Did you try to cut in on the chief’s drug business?”
He pulled the charging handle out, freeing the bolt assembly, while Danny stammered and protested.
“I’m sick of everyone lying to me out here, Danny.”
He yanked a patrol cap from his cargo pocket by its bill, snapping it open with a flip of his wrist and setting it upside down like a dish on the log.
“So you need to tell me the truth now or I’m going to shoot you, right here on this mountain. Do you understand?”
Danny’s wide eyes widened further.
“What did the chief want to tell me, before he freaked out over the heroin?”
He tossed the charging handle into the upturned patrol cap and got a fingernail underneath the loop of the retaining pin as Danny opened his mouth to respond.
“Why did he want to get me alone?”
He tugged the retaining pin free and pinched it between his teeth.
“L.T.!” Danny exclaimed, harshly. “This is what I tell you! It was not the chief!”
“What?”
He tipped the bolt carrier into his palm and nothing came out.
“It was not the chief who wanted you to talk alone,” said Danny. “It was me, L.T.”
There was no firing pin in his rifle.
He looked up at Danny.
“The chief did not say for Caine to leave,” Danny said. “I say that. I wanted you talk to the chief alone.”
Black looked at him uncomprehendingly. Danny went on in a gush of words.
“I make it up, L.T. Chief is talking about Who is young officer, He looks like baby, and this. I tell him Sergeant Caine makes apologies but has to go, but he can tell any problem to young lieutenant, and young lieutenant will tell his boss and bring help.”
Black’s mind spun.
“I hope maybe he tell you, L.T. Tell you what happen.”
“What do you mean? What happened when?”
“On patrol,” Danny said. “Not goat patrol. Before. One week, ten days.”
“What patrol?”
Danny shook his head miserably.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t see. I don’t go on this one. Night time. They tell me, Danny you stay at Vega. They come back, something is wrong. I know something is wrong. Too much whispers, soldiers are scared.”
“Which soldiers?”
“I don’t know all, but some the guys you talk to for investigation. Some these guys for sure.”
“Shannon?”
“Yeah. And Corelli. These guys on patrol.”
“The Wizard?”
“I don’t know, man.”
“The sergeants?”
“Caine for sure. Merrick he stay at Vega. And lieutenant too, he goes. He looks bad when they come back. Goes to his room—your room—and stays. He knows the bad thing happens.”
“He didn’t stop the bad thing?”
Danny just looked at him reproachfully and shook his head slightly.
“I don’t know what happened, L.T.,” Danny said. “But everything is bad since the night. Everybody is scared. Nobody talks nobody. Then you come. I hope you help. I know chief knows story, because he is different too, every time we come to town after. I hope chief tells you the story.”
And you screwed that up.
“What are you doing out here?” Black demanded.
“After Darreh Sin, after chief, I cannot stay at Vega. You do the heroin . . .”
His hands churned the air for the word.
“Heroin square, and the chief is so mad, and the attack and the bombs. Sergeant Caine, Sergeant Merrick, they will ask me what happened with chief. I know you will not tell them, because . . .”
He peered at Black in the dark.
Because you screwed up.
“So I go,” Danny said with finality. “It is not safe for me staying at Vega. They will ask, and I’m scared if I lie and help you they will know.”
He looked at the ground.
“I don’t know what they do to get me to answer.”
That hung in the air. Black picked up his pistol.
“Are you lying?
“L.T.,” Danny said sadly. “I watch you.”
Black cracked open the pistol too and began pulling it apart.
“You are man who needs the truth.”
It only took a few moments to get the simpler pistol down to its basic parts. It too had been disabled.
Black looked up at Danny wordlessly. He set the useless pistol pieces down. His thoughts circled backward until he understood.
“What else do you know?”
Danny looked at him with dark eyes.
“The valley, it . . .”
He swept his hands toward himself as though trying to contain a cloud of smoke.
“. . . gathering, L.T. No one at Vega is safe.”
“What do you mean?”
“I hear too much. All valley people says get the Devil out of the valley.”
“Are you with the Monk?”
Danny swallowed.
“I go, L.T.,” he said. “Please.”
“Are you with the Monk?”
Danny stood slowly.
“Please, I go. I help you if I can.”
“Wait.”
Black sat back on his haunches, his mind spinning.
“What else did the chief say?”
“L.T.?”
“Right when we were running out. He was saying some stuff that you didn’t translate.”
He saw recognition in Danny’s eyes. Danny shook his head.
“You watch out this chief, L.T. He is in a bad . . . place? With his people.”
“What was the thing he said?”
Danny nodded.
“I don’t understand this part,” he said. “I mean, I hear the words, I understand the words. I don’t understand what he means.”
“What were the words?”
“Well, you hear he say I should kill you all, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Then the next he says, this one is no sense. He says I kill all, I kill every man of you to . . .”
He made spheres in the air with his hands.
“Earth . . ?” he said, frowning. “Ball?”
“World?”
“This, I think, L.T.,” Danny declared. “I kill every man of you from this place all the way to the . . . to your end of the world.”
Black watched Danny head downhill through the trees as he reassembled his useless weapons. When he was done he rooted deep in a cargo pocket and came up with the little heart-strewn envelope the Monk had given him back at Vega. He slumped down, sitting against the hillside, and tore it open.
A single slip of paper lay inside. He read it, then closed his eyes for a few moments, memorizing its contents. He folded it back into the envelope and returned it to his pocket.
He stared downslope a moment in the direction Danny had gone. He pulled a map from his cargo pocket and held it close to his face, squinting under the red light of his flashlight. When he was done he folded it back up and put it away.
He picked his way slowly back to the rocks that would take him up to the fishbowl where the soldiers were waiting. He was already squeezing himself back up through the last boulders before he noticed the extra voices up on the slab.
He emerged and stood. Everyone turned and looked at him.
Shannon and the two soldiers Merrick had brought on the patrol stood off to the right, near the ledge, having a smoke. Hill and the guys from the guard tower were still in their chairs.
“Hey there, sir,” came a voice from his left.
Caine sat in a camp chair next to Brydon.