He lay with his cheek in the soil, waiting for the voices to fade.
Stay awake.
It had gone like this the whole way. Crawl, then voices, then down on his belly for five or ten minutes. Voices fading, then more crawling.
He checked his watch. Two hours, he thought, since he’d started across the field.
The plantation went on without end. Whoever controlled this land was well funded and highly motivated. He knew only that it lay far outside the realms of Darreh Sin and its boisterous chief.
The voices moved on again. He pushed his body off the ground with some effort and drove on through the stalks and stems, his mind crawling backward.
He had heard stories about it. The guy in Ranger School who was so exhausted and hungry that he bit his own hand open believing it was a cheeseburger. But Black hadn’t really believed you could hallucinate from fatigue or fall asleep standing up until he saw someone do it in front of him.
The instructors had had them on another all-night hike through the mountains. A “ruckmarch,” they called it. Seventy-pound packs—rucks—all around, and off we go through the hilly backwoods of Fort Benning.
The guy was big. He’d volunteered to carry the big machine gun. He suffered. About ten miles in, at about two in the morning, someone took pity on him and took a turn with the big gun.
As soon as the guy handed it off and traded it for a regular rifle, he fell asleep. Black watched him do it. He fell asleep while walking but just kept on walking. He promptly veered off the trail into the woods. Black had had to chase him down and smack him awake before he hit a tree or fell into a creek.
Pushing through the vast poppy field, he stopped and listened a moment. Nothing. He rose to his knees and hazarded a peek above the bulbs, across the surface of the sea.
Good progress, he thought, gauging the distance of the surrounding slopes and passes. He ducked below the surface and drove on.
Later during that same night at Fort Benning, Black himself had seen the famous Officer Candidate School archway looming in front of him. The brutal march was finally over. They were back at the barracks.
But they weren’t. The archway had faded, leaving only black trees and dirt trail.
The poppy stems were thinning. Unbelievable. Glorious. He stopped at the last row, listening for sounds. He heard nothing and poked his head out from between them.
He looked left and right and saw no one. He began to crawl forward, out of the field, but stopped short when he saw what was before him.
A mountain slope rose up sharply in his path, rising high to the stars. This made no sense to him. There should be flat ground ahead, climbing gently to the far pass, which he would traverse to get back to the trail.
He stayed there on his hands and knees for what seemed a long time before it hit him.
He was at the left edge of the field, not the far end of it as he’d thought. Down among the poppies, with no frame of reference, he hadn’t kept a straight course.
Rookie inattentiveness. Now he was way off to one side of the field. The left side, he was sure. Right?
Get it together.
He surveyed the mountain features from one end of the depression to the other. Yes, the left.
Cursing himself, he turned and crawled back into the stems, bearing left toward the end of the plantation and the pass that would take him out of this infernal valley. He reminded himself to check his location against the mountains more frequently this time.
The key, he had learned after that all-night march, was to be cognizant of the possibility of hallucinations under fatigue and stress. To know your own physical and mental limits. This very awareness could extend those limits. He’d learned to push his own envelope to the danger point without pushing it beyond. He’d learned that his own capacities were greater, his own limits further distant, than those of most of his fellow trainees. As long as you knew where they lay, you were good.
His friend had seen the California Raisins dancing in the woods that night at Benning.
He was smiling at the memory of his friend’s abashed face confessing it the next morning, when he emerged finally, exhausted, at the end of the poppy field, and saw a mountainside rising sharply up before him.
He stared up the slopes uncomprehending, jaw slung dumb, face upturned to the moonlight.
Shaking his head, he turned back into the stems and plowed on. How long now?
More voices, in front and to his right. Another cut-through pathway probably. He went down on his belly.
The voices didn’t seem to be moving. A couple guys standing there having a smoke again.
Ten minutes went by, or so. The smell of the soil was rich and fertile.
He checked his watch. Two hours in, he thought. Right? Surely there was not much more left to the field.
Good thing he knew his limits. Knowing your limits was the main thing. Otherwise you push yourself beyond them and you wake up in a poppy field in Afghanistan with a gun in your face.
“From this place all the way to your end of the world.”
A moment’s rest would do him good.