He lay in the black depths but could not rest because his head felt as though he were being kicked in it. The floor hardened beneath him.
The muted sounds resolved into a voice, and it came to him that he was in fact being kicked in the head.
“Please, sir. You gotta get awake now.”
By Corelli.
“Come on, sir. Wake up now.”
Kick.
The kid was using the side of his boot, but come on.
“Stop,” he croaked.
His mouth tasted like sand.
“Sorry, sir,” he heard Corelli answer. “Can’t have you going into shock right now, sir.”
He couldn’t bring himself to open his eyes yet.
“How long?” he whispered.
“Not more than fifteen minutes, sir. You just gotta stay awake for me, okay, sir?”
“Yeah,” Black managed.
His mouth was dry, and his head pounded horribly from where it had struck the floor. Something was on fire in the left side of his chest. Something was wet behind his back.
He cracked his eyelids open and immediately closed them. Much too bright.
I am in bad shape.
“I’m still awake,” he mumbled.
“Okay, sir. Good, sir.”
Corelli blew out a breath and seemed to go all to pieces.
“Ohhhhh, sir, I’m sorry, sir. I screwed up.”
Not now, Corelli.
“I’m gonna need a minute,” Black wheezed.
He took a minute. Above all else in the world, he wanted to lie perfectly still. Finally, he cleared his throat.
“What happened?”
“I slept, sir!” Corelli cried miserably. “I’m sorry I slept! I screwed up!”
He stamped the stone wall with the flat of his boot.
“I came here just like you said, sir. I found it and I waited here all day, but I couldn’t call the frequency on the paper you gave me because the radio was smashed when I got here.”
Oh, damn.
“And then I waited all night,” Corelli went on in a gush of words. “And I just laid down to sleep for an hour before it got light. She got my weapon and hit me on the head with a rock or something while I was sleeping, sir. She had my pistol and my knife and my flex-cuffs and everything. She kept screaming at me and pointing until I sat here in the corner, and I was so out of it, sir, from where she had hit me with the rock, everything was just spinning, and she had my pistol and she kept hitting me on the head from behind with the pistol butt while she put the cuffs on. Ohhh, sir, my head hurts.”
Black twisted his head toward the sound of Corelli’s voice and hazarded another glance. The soldier’s face was ashen and the bleeding gash on his head looked ugly.
“I’ll get help,” Black said immediately, starting to push himself up from the floor.
He didn’t get halfway upright before the world spun upside down and he felt himself skewered on a hot poker which pierced him from the inside of his shoulder down through his hip. He collapsed back onto the floor, feeling a wave of nausea wash over him.
“Oh, sir, you just stay there. You’re hurt too bad. Have you got a knife, sir?”
Knife. His knife.
With his armor and rifle and gear in Pistone’s hootch.
“No.”
“Oh.”
You idiot.
“Okay. That’s okay, sir. I’ll figure something out here.”
He lay there in silence, waiting for the nausea to pass, while Corelli figured something out. After a full five minutes in which no plan was forthcoming, he realized that there was nothing to figure out. They were stuck.
I just need a minute.
The room’s spinning slowed. As long as he lay still, he could think more or less clearly. But he was clearly no use to anyone for the moment. He could really have used some water.
He craned his head and looked at Corelli, who looked pale and forlorn.
“What did your platoon do to that girl’s family?” he asked the young soldier.
Corelli looked at him in surprise before casting his eyes to the stone floor. His head followed, until Black could no longer see his face. A great heaving breath came out of him.
“Oh, sir,” he said wretchedly. “This is all my fault.”
“What did he threaten to do if you told me about it?”
Corelli shook his hanging head.
“Not him, sir. Sergeant Caine.”
“That’s who I meant.”
“What, sir?”
Something in what Corelli was saying didn’t make sense to Black, but it wouldn’t come into focus through the fresh dizziness. He couldn’t crane his head and look backward and upside down at Corelli like that.
He lay on his back and stared at the stone ceiling, breathing deeply and painfully.
“He said he’d kill me, sir.”
Black, eyes closed against the dizziness, thought back to Corelli’s guarded, meticulously composed answers to his questions that first day at Vega.
“You told me everything you could tell me while you were under threat,” he said. “It’s not your fault.”
Corelli’s answer was barely a whisper.
“Yes it is, sir.”
Black risked a glance at the top of the soldier’s head.
“What did you do, Michael?” he asked quietly.
Corelli’s voice broke slightly as he answered.
“Nothing, sir.”
“Tell me.”
Corelli sighed a long sigh. Then he told.
“It was a few nights before the thing with the goat,” he began, speaking slowly to the floor. “Sergeant Caine said that someone had spotted a fire above the Meadows, and we were going to take a patrol to check it out. Which was weird already, sir, because the Meadows is on the other side of the mountain and as far as I knew we didn’t have anybody out that night that could’ve seen the fire.”
The guys at the O.P.
“Sergeant Caine was real agitated when we were leaving, sir, and he just got worse when we got close. I mean, when he saw it he kind of flipped out. You could see the fire going on the hillsides. It was one of the poppy fields—you know, where the Afghan guys grow the flowers for the drugs. But it wasn’t like it was any danger to Vega, so I didn’t understand what he was so worked up about.”
I think I do, Black said to himself.
“And he went off to the side and was talking all heated with Lieutenant Pistone, like maybe they were arguing but I couldn’t really tell, and when he came back he said we were going to raid this guy’s house in the Meadows who owns the field. Which was weird, too, because we didn’t have Danny along.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know, sir. Danny was gonna come along on the patrol like usual. I saw him getting ready. But Sergeant Caine told him to stay back at Vega. I thought that was weird, but I’d only been here a couple months and I’m a private, sir, so, I mean, what did I know? I just kept my mouth shut and came on the patrol.”
“Where was Sergeant Merrick?”
“He let Sergeant Caine take that one, sir. They didn’t always both go on the same patrols.”
“Okay.”
“So we headed down to the Meadows, but it all just felt off from the beginning, sir. I mean, Sergeant Caine was just real agitated, like I said, and he wouldn’t say why we were gonna raid this guy’s place.”
Black could venture a guess.
“We got there to the house and it was probably a little after midnight, and all the homes in the Meadows were dark, and Sergeant Caine, he goes and he’s whispering to the lieutenant again, and then he grabs Shannon, who’s there on the patrol with us, and they don’t even do the knock-first or anything like we’re supposed to do in the friendly towns.”
“Okay.”
“And Sergeant Caine just kicks the door in and they go in there with the lights turned on on their rifles, and everyone is shouting inside, and I can hear Sergeant Caine shouting back with a couple of his Pashto phrases. You know, ‘get down’ and all that. And there was a man in there yelling something back at him, sounding real scared, and you can hear a woman in there too, and children, and you can tell it’s just chaos in there, sir.”
He inhaled and let out a deep breath.
“And after a couple minutes Sergeant Caine comes back out,” he said, his voice quavering. “And he’s got a kid, sir.”
“What?!”
“He’s got a boy, sir. Like, a small boy, maybe seven or eight years old. And he’s got him by his clothes, sir, just dragging him like you’d pull a puppy by the back of the neck. And the kid is wailing and crying and he doesn’t know what’s going on.”
Black closed his eyes.
“And then Shannon comes out behind him, sir. And he’s got the kid’s dad. And no one in the patrol knows what’s going on. I don’t think Shannon even knew what was going on. Sergeant Caine is saying, ‘Hold him there,’ and Shannon’s just standing there holding the kid’s dad and watching Sergeant Caine.”
A dark chasm opened in Black’s stomach.
“And Sergeant Caine just starts screaming at the dad. And he’s got his pistol out and he’s waving it around, and waving it at the guy’s son, sir! He just keeps yelling the same thing at the guy.”
“Yelling what?”
“I didn’t understand it, sir. Sergeant Caine knows a bunch of Pashto phrases and stuff. But I memorized the main part of it and when we got back to the COP I tried to look it up on my phrase card, and it was something like ‘Where?’ or ‘Where is it?’ Something like that, sir.”
“Okay.”
“And the dad is shouting back, freaking out, and he keeps saying something that I didn’t understand except that I could hear him saying something about the Talib, over and over, like he was talking about the Taliban.”
His voice began to break.
“And he’s just pleading, sir! He’s just begging them to stop, and Sergeant Caine’s got his son and he won’t stop screaming at him.”
He swallowed hard.
“And the guys in the patrol are really starting to freak out, because it’s all so out there, sir. Like, everyone is scared and just wants Caine to let the kid go and get out of there.”
“What did Lieutenant Pistone do?”
He felt foolish asking the question. It required no answer.
He stood by and did nothing.
“What, sir?”
Corelli’s voice was tinted with confusion.
“Why didn’t he stop it?” Black asked.
Corelli twisted his anguished face up to him.
“He’s the one who did it, sir.”
“Did what?”
Corelli burst into tears.
“Shot him, sir!” he cried.
Black opened his eyes and saw stars.
“What? The father?”
“The boy!” Corelli wailed. “He didn’t even say anything before he did it!”
His voice wobbled like a child’s.
“He came over to where Sergeant Caine had the boy and he had his pistol in his hand and he just did it! Why did the lieutenant do that, sir?!”
Corelli sobbed freely. The telegraph station spun around Black, though he’d been lying very still.
“And you bring his servant into my town.”
Memories crowded him, jabbed at him.
“All valley people says get the Devil out of the valley.”
His mouth was very dry and his head felt as though it were full of pennies and someone were shaking it.
He took a deep breath and thought: I am a fool.
“What happened after?”
Corelli struggled to compose himself.
“Everyone just freaked out, sir,” he said miserably, lost in the horror of the memory. “The father was screaming and flailing against Shannon, and you could hear the women inside just screaming too.”
He gave a heaving sigh and shook his head.
“Even Sergeant Caine was freaked out, sir. No one thought the lieutenant was gonna do something like that. Sergeant Caine was yelling ‘What the fuck, sir!?’ And the lieutenant was acting all crazy.”
“How?”
“Like, he seemed spaced out, and he was all, like . . . formal, I guess. I mean, the dad is screaming his head off and crying and hitting Shannon with his fists, and the lieutenant is just . . . rambling, sir, in the middle of all this chaos, saying how ‘Now they’ll all know’ over and over, and giving these orders for us to return to the COP.”
“What did you guys do?”
“Sergeant Caine went and grabbed the dad from Shannon, and as he’s doing it this other kid runs out from the house and runs away into the trees.”
“A kid?”
“Yeah, another young kid. We couldn’t even tell if it was a boy or girl, but I guess the kid figured they were gonna get shot too, so they made a break for it.”
Girl.
“And Sergeant Caine tells Shannon to go after the kid. And Shannon hasn’t said anything this whole time, sir, and he just stands there and looks Sergeant Caine in the eye and tells him, ‘Go fuck yourself.’”
“What did Sergeant Caine do?”
From the upper corner of his eye he could see Corelli’s head come up.
“He was mad, sir. Like, panicky. And he said, ‘God fucking damn it,’ and then he dragged the father into the trees where none of us could see and he shot him too, sir.”
Corelli let that sit before continuing, matter-of-factly.
“Then he came back and he took us all away from the house, and he took us aside in another part of the Meadows, away from Lieutenant Pistone, and he told us that nothing happened that night and we didn’t see anything. He said that if we said one word of it to anyone, even Sergeant Merrick, the lieutenant was going to kill us too. Like, he was trying to act like he was behind what Lieutenant Pistone did, sir. He said, ‘Now you know the lieutenant does not play.’ But I could tell he was scared, sir.”
“Okay.”
“Then we all went back to the COP.”
“Who else was on the patrol?”
“Besides me and Shannon, it was just Hill, sir, and Chen.”
From O.P. Traynor.
“What happened after that night?”
“Nothing, sir. Sergeant Caine would remind us every week, remind me at least, what Lieutenant Pistone was gonna do. Nobody talked about it, and Sergeant Caine tried to just keep on like everything was normal.”
Black was confused.
“Why’d he let any of you guys keep going out on patrols?” he asked. “Why would Caine want to keep going down into Darreh Sin?”
“He didn’t want to, sir,” Corelli said. “But we had to go. We had that water project that we had to go down and take pictures of and stuff, once a week. Sergeant Caine couldn’t leave just us in the COP all the time, ’cause that would look too suspicious to the rest of the platoon. And he definitely couldn’t explain to our H.Q. why we couldn’t go take the pictures anymore.”
Black imagined these patrols.
“Those trips must have been hairy.”
“Very hairy, sir. We went two or three times since it happened, before the time we took you down there.”
Darreh Sin was making more sense.
“What about the goat thing?”
“The goat thing was just the goat thing, sir. That’s all that was. Honest mistake. Sergeant Merrick made us go down to the town the next day to try and make it right.”
“I’ll bet Sergeant Caine wasn’t happy about that one.”
“Not even a little bit happy, sir.”
“But he couldn’t say anything.”
“No, sir. I think he was trying to keep Sergeant Merrick as much in the dark as anyone.”
“So you went down there, and the vibe was weird.”
“Very weird, sir,” Corelli said, shuddering. “That’s when I knew.”
“Knew what?”
“Knew that they knew who each of us was, sir. Not just knew what happened. We knew they all knew. But knew each of us specifically that was there, sir.”
His voice went distant.
“I could just see it, the way those guys were looking at me.”
“That’s why you were so jumpy and ended up firing your weapon.”
“I guess so, sir.”
Black lay still for a moment. He realized he was terribly thirsty.
“When did Hill disappear?”
He saw Corelli start in surprise.
“Uh, how’d you know about Hill, sir?”
“I just do.”
“A couple days after that night, sir. Nobody’s seen him on the COP since then. Sergeant Caine keeps saying he’s out on a ‘long patrol,’ but he never comes back in again. And then Bosch went away a couple days ago. I thought that, that maybe . . .”
“They’re fine,” Black said. “I saw them.”
“Sir?”
“Don’t worry about it. What about Lieutenant Pistone, after that night?”
“He just practically disappeared after that night, sir. I mean, he was around the COP, but nobody saw him. He just hid out in his room, and he definitely didn’t go out on any patrols anymore. Sergeant Caine probably told him to lay low, sir. In fact, the morning after the goat thing, right before Sergeant Merrick took us down to Darreh Sin, Sergeant Caine told me I didn’t have to worry because the locals were mostly mad at Lieutenant Pistone, and the last time we were down there he had told the mayor or the chief or whoever that the lieutenant had left Vega and he wasn’t coming back.”
Corelli shook his head.
“I just still don’t understand it, sir. I mean, Lieutenant Pistone didn’t exactly seem like a nice guy, but, I mean, he definitely didn’t seem like . . .”
“I know,” Black said.
He reread the diary entry in his head.
“He fooled me too.”
They sat and lay a moment.
“Was Doc Brydon there that night?” Black asked.
“No, sir, thank God. I think Billy had enough on his plate.”
Black peered up at Corelli, but nothing more was offered.
“What do you know about Brydon?” he asked.
“What do you mean, sir?”
“Like where he was from and what his deal was.”
Corelli paused.
“Nothing much, really, sir. I like Billy.”
“But.”
Corelli was wrestling with something.
“Well, I mean, it was weird when he showed up, sir.”
“How’s that?”
“The night before he got to Vega, sir, this weird thing happened,” Corelli said, drifting back into the memory.
“What happened?”
“Well, I was on duty in the C.P., sir, and I was just monitoring the frequencies and reading my book, and I started picking up all this broken-up chatter on the Brigade net.”
The frequency for anyone in the entire area of operations, including the Valley, to talk to the Brigade headquarters.
“Firefight chatter,” Black said.
“Yeah, firefight chatter, sir. How’d you know that?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“Okay, sir. Um, anyway, it was bad, sir. I mean, the firefight was bad. Well, the connection was bad too. Like, real patchy, like we were just getting little bits here and there. But you could tell something was going on somewhere. Somebody was in real trouble, but we had no idea who. I mean, it wasn’t Heavenly, and there’s nobody farther up the Valley, so we were sitting there wondering if somehow we were getting transmissions from another valley. Like, maybe the weather was doing it or something.”
“Okay.”
“Sergeant Caine and Shannon went out to go up to higher ground and check it out, sir. Which Sergeant Merrick would never have let him do, just him and another guy by themselves, but he was gone on his R&R leave and Sergeant Caine was running the show. So he and Shannon went up there, sir, and they came back a few hours later and said they didn’t find anything.”
“Billy showed up the next day.”
He could feel Corelli’s searching gaze on him.
“Well, yeah, sir. The next day Sergeant Caine brought Billy to me at the armory, and said he was cross-transferred from another unit, and to add him to the roster. Which was weird because I hadn’t known there had been a convoy in the middle of the night or anything.”
He sighed.
“I don’t know, sir. I guess I just figured maybe he was a guy who had had some trouble in his other unit, which is why he got transferred. And I figured maybe it just kind of bothers him, whatever it is. Like, it’s hanging over his head.”
“He didn’t tell you anything else?”
“No, sir. I got the feeling maybe he wanted to tell me something else, but he hasn’t told me, so I don’t push it. I mean, I figure whatever he’s dealing with, it’s his business, sir.”
He paused.
“I figure maybe that’s why Sergeant Caine always arranges for him to go on so much R&R leave all the time.”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, you know, sir. Just trips for a day or two. They’ll send a guy if they think he’s, you know, if they think he needs a break for real.”
He paused.
“It’s just, Billy seems to need a lot of breaks, sir.”
Black thought he understood something.
“Did you ever tell him about that night in the Meadows?”
“No, sir,” he murmured. “I kind of think he might know, though.”
“How’s that?”
“He’s friends with Bosch, and I think maybe Bosch told him. He started kind of being nicer to me all of a sudden, giving me music and stuff. Like he knew something was bothering me too.”
Corelli’s breathing sounded as though he might start sobbing again.
“I couldn’t do it, sir!” he cried wretchedly.
“Do what?”
“I didn’t tell him or anyone! No one was talking to anyone about it. Everyone was scared of what was going to happen to us.”
“You tried to tell me, and you’re telling me now.”
Corelli’s voice went wispy and blank.
“I was a coward and I’m going to burn for it,” he murmured to no one in particular.
“No one’s going to burn,” Black said. “It’s time to get out of here.”
Corelli looked at him questioningly.
“The Monk’s coming, sir?”
“The Monk’s not coming.”
Corelli sat in silence a moment.
“Oh, sir,” he groaned. “We’re screwed, aren’t we? We’re stuck up here.”
“No one’s stuck,” Black said. “I’m getting you out of here.”
“Oh, sir, you’re too—”
In one motion Black pushed himself to a sitting position. Pain shot from his shoulder down through his waist, and his head felt like it would burst. The room spun again and for a few moments he was sure he would vomit.
He looked around himself, panting. Only then did he see the pool of blood on the floor where his shoulder had lain. His left arm hung limply at his side.
He was so thirsty.
“Sir,” Corelli said matter-of-factly, “you are in no position whatsoever to attempt any kind of rescue.”
Black ignored him, instead turning so Corelli could see the back of his shoulder, where the bullet had passed through.
“Is this actively bleeding?”
“Uh, I don’t think so, sir, but there’s a big pud—”
“Good.”
Corelli watched as Black slowly eased himself forward until he was on his hands—hand—and knees, facing the doorway. Webs of pain spidered out across his chest and side.
“Stay here,” Black directed.
He realized the ridiculousness of that statement and laughed out loud. Corelli looked at him with concern.
Black managed to plant a foot in front of him and pull himself up on the doorway edge. Everything went a little tilty.
“Sir,” Corelli called after him. “Don’t tell Billy if he doesn’t know already. I want to tell him myself.”
“Billy’s dead.”
He stumbled through the doorway into the light.
The panorama before him was overwhelming. He felt as though he would fall off the mountain into the sky if he didn’t hold on.
He waited for the dizziness to subside and focused his eyes on the ground before him. Corelli’s pistol lay in the dirt. He let it be.
He placed one foot in front of the other, facing along the ridgeline toward COP Vega. Then the next foot.
He made it about twenty steps before he fell down.
“Walks in the fog and steals your babies and shit.”
He picked himself up and started again.