In the Valley (12 page)

Paul hated culverts.

He was walking in the vicinity of Bashir, as usual, in the middle of long columns of twos that snaked along the road leading to the village. Every now and then, the column would divert into a field to look at something or to ask villagers questions. Sometimes Paul would be in on the questioning; sometimes, not; but he was always scanning the rooflines of the compounds, the tree lines, and passing donkeys.

Paul’s eyes were never still. And his body was never still. Trauma-weave cams or not, being shot would not be a pleasant experience; he would at least be violently thrown to the ground—maybe break a rib or two. If he kept his body and eyes moving, he would be alert, in motion, and harder to hit.

As Second Company finally neared Nagamas, some of the troopers started to get a little skittish. The Juneau Army troopers started to question everyone. One little boy was gesturing frantically in the direction of a bridge. It was directly in front of the village, about 250 meters away. The exchange, taking place about halfway between Paul and the bridge, caught his attention, so he listened in to the conversation via his halo.

“So, did you plant it, you little donkey fucker?” asked the Juneau trooper.

“No, I swear it by the Holy Koran!” answered the boy, with a pleading, desperate tone.

“You little drop of sweat on a camel’s twat—you are too ignorant to read of the Koran’s holy words. I do not believe you. Where is your father—that we may speak with him?” The trooper was really boring in on the kid. But the
questioning wasn’t really crazy, and Paul was more concerned with the bridge dead ahead.

Was there really a bomb underneath the bridge, or was this yet another false alarm? Paul pinged Bashir’s halo and sent him a standard explosive-hazard search diagram, the age-old inverted V.

The inverted V looked just like that, a V. Imagine the object one wants to look at as being in the center and just ahead of the V’s arms, with the patrol leader being somewhat toward the bottom tip of the V, where he could see everything that was happening.

The theory was that the troopers to the right and left of the object to be searched were also the farthest away from said object. Also, the soldiers on the tips of the arms of the V could observe the object directly; in the case of a linear feature, such as a culvert or a bridge underpass, the soldiers at the tips of the arms of the V could look through the object and see whether there was an obstruction in it. Bombs counted as obstructions.

A dismounted, or foot, counter-explosive-hazards patrol was not the safest exercise in the world. In fact, it was the least safe method of explosives clearance. However, one worked with the tools at hand, and the Juneau Army was a little short on nifty counterbomb robots, fighting suits, and EOD personnel.

So standard practice was for the Juneau Army to look for bombs with their own eyes. That was exactly what Bashir’s guys were doing. Paul could see them trying to shake out in a formation via halo link as he watched.

He reached into his cig-and-other-stuff pouch and started rummaging around; the early morning sun was starting to drill into his eyes. It was going to be another muggy, sunny, 41-degrees centigrade day.

At that moment the whole world seemed to disappear in a clap. A violent explosion toppled Paul and Z off of their feet like leaves in a summer storm, and
men and equipment of the Second Company went flying. The ground trembled a kilometer away from the force of the blast. Several of the houses close by the bridge collapsed, and what little glass there was in the village shattered.

Two donkeys walking over the exploding bridge were killed instantly. No villagers died. The villagers weren’t stupid; when they saw the nearing Juneau Army patrol, they left the area. Some of Bashir’s men had seen this, Paul learned later, and it was the reason Second Company had gotten nervous as they’d approached Nagamas.

When he found out about the fleeing villagers, Paul had a serious discussion with Bashir about the importance of passing information up through the halo chain. But that was for later. In the present, Paul came to with ringing ears and instinctively pinged Z’s halo.

Z was all right; he was apparently calling Paul’s name. Paul couldn’t hear it over the ringing in his ears, however. He grabbed his balls instinctively, just to make sure they were still there. With the reach of his hand, he felt the comforting, undisturbed bulge between his legs. Thank God, his penis was still there. He sat up and clutched for his rifle, rolling over on his belly automatically and sweeping his sector with his weapon. He was having a hard time seeing with all the dust in the air, so he had his halo go over to thermal.

Paul saw a lot of moving black blobs (he had his halo set to darken for heat in black-and-white; the color displays annoyed him) with Second Company tags above them; one small black form, identified as a civilian boy, was currently being beaten by several Juneau Army soldiers.

Paul pinged Bashir for a casualty figure; Bashir pinged right back with one dead soldier, a trooper named Nasrallah, and three seriously incapacitated men. Paul was pleasantly surprised—with an explosion that bad, he had feared worse casualties.

In fact, that little boy being beaten had saved the lives of any number of soldiers, including himself. Paul asked Bashir via halo link to have the troopers stop with their child-beating antics.

The dust started to clear. Paul almost pinged Z to go forward and provide aid to the three seriously wounded dudes, but then he saw Z’s form already moving out, aid rucksack unslung. Good work, Z, thought Paul.

Paul mentally toggled over to his tactical display and asked for Second Company’s disposition. He saw that at present the company resembled a blob in two dimensions; their security was a mess. He shot a proper formation over to Bashir, who was busy yelling at one of his platoon leaders, and reached into his backpack for one of his precious tube micros and launched it.

A man-pack tube-launched micro drone resembled an Old Earth military parachute flare, and its method of deployment worked exactly the same. A person would point the tube in a safe direction, unscrew the cap with a pin inside, and place the cap on the bottom side of the launcher. With a solid thwack on the bottom of the tube, there was a small puff and pop, and the micro drone was on its way.

Micros were, of course, kept in launchers in a standard or command armored suit. They were also kept in launch tubes on ground-cars. The man-pack version was designed especially for the situation Paul was in—a dismounted patrol with neither a ground-car nor a suit available. SOP (standard operating procedures) on Paul’s team dictated that they were only to be used in emergencies.

Paul thought that this fucked-up situation could be called an emergency. He needed both a medevac shuttle and eyes in the skies—there would be squirters after this little attack, and he wanted the bastards behind the attack if the Second Company could get them.

A micro drone would help a bunch. Thirty seconds after launch, the micro’s icon popped up in his visual field. The first thing Paul did was check for any incoming small-arms fire. There was none. There were, however, some outgoing fires: at what, who knew? He pinged Bashir with the micro info and hoped Bashir could give his bubbas some fire discipline.

The second thing Paul did was send out a priority ping to the colonel, with the location, description, and number of casualties involved in the attack.

Finally, Paul shot out a medevac request to higher.

Instantly, there was a halo ping from Mighty Mike. His ugly mug appeared in the lower left-hand corner of Paul’s visual field.

“Sir,” Mike’s speaking icon said, wearing that curious, catlike intense expression, “I have all the administrative bullshit under control. The colonel saw the attack on your feed. I slaved my feed to his, and he has it all. Be advised: a medevac shuttle is inbound in 2.1 minutes; set up your LZ now. Z will bring the casualties to the CCP, which I designate as being next to your LZ. I suggest the rice field 130 meters northwest of your position would make a decent spot.”

“Start now, sir; you’re going to have a busy day.” Mike signed off. He knew exactly what to say and when to say it. Things were indeed starting to look busy.

Paul hustled to set up his landing zone and casualty collection point in the spot Mike had suggested. Why argue with the man about it? It was a good spot. He took three Juneau guys with him for security and pinged Bashir and Z with his plans and whereabouts. Bashir agreed and gave him a “roger” icon back. So did Z.

Paul had no sooner chucked his shuttle beacon out, when he heard the distinctive whine of an inbound shuttle. The shuttle’s halo icon appeared in his view at the same time.

“Two-Three, Two-Three, this is Angel One-Six inbound to your location. Do you read?” came the voice of the medevac crew.

“Roger, Angel One-Six, this is Two-Three. Do you have a visual on my beacon?” answered Paul. His heart was thumping in his chest—both from the adrenaline of the attack and from having to hustle to set out the LZ. Paul’s mouth was dry—he felt as if he was sucking on cotton.

“Got you, Two-Three. LZ looks clear. Be on the ground in three-zero seconds.” Paul saw Z moving up with a gaggle of Juneau Army soldiers carrying
the wounded in ponchos. Paul saw a twisted arm sticking out of one of them—the blood looked more black than red. He caught Z’s eye and held up his hand, palm outward, stopping Z-man in place. With his other hand, he gestured over his head in a flapping gesture. Z looked upward and saw the bird. Everyone crouched down and the backblast took them, hurtling sticks, sand, and trash around the LZ.

“Two-Three, this is One-Six. Sending a crew chief to you to guide WIA on board. Wave your hand over your head, so she sees you.”

Paul complied. A helmeted figure hopped out of the down-thrust ramp of the shuttle. She was carrying three miniskids for Z’s “customers.” The crew chief walked directly to Paul and pinged his halo for additional information. He had none. She already had basic diagnoses for the wounded from Z’s halo.

Z was ready to receive her, being forewarned through his halo. With some help from the Juneaus, the three wounded men were loaded on the miniskids and carted into the maw of the shuttle. Poor dead Nasrallah was carried on last, zipped up in a shiny black bag.

From the bomb attack to the shuttle’s imminent departure, Paul’s halo clock told him eleven minutes, thirty-six seconds had passed. Paul wondered how the poor suckers had done medevacs in the distant past, without halo support or micro feed.

He didn’t know, but he pitied those long-dead, ancient warriors. He bet a lot of guys had died waiting on evac.

After the shuttle left with an ozone-stinking blast of air, Bashir walked up to Paul. They looked at each other. Without a word being said or a ping from their halos, both men knew Second Company would have to do a “hard” knock search on the village ahead.

Second Company spread out on-line (soldiers abreast of each other) into a two-hundred-meter-wide rough pincer formation. They conducted the
sweep, and it wasn’t pretty. Splintered doors, screaming kids, bleating goats and sheep—the search passed in a whirlwind.

Worse yet, they didn’t catch the people responsible or find any munitions or other prohibited weapons. In short, the day was a wash, and Second Company had lost some good men, too. Paul would later learn his close brush with death was the work of an asshole he had eaten with and joked with—Najibullah the Bomb Maker, major, Juneau Provincial Police.

Three hours after the bomb attack at the bridge, Paul looked back on the smoking remains of Nagamas. He lit a near-cig, inhaled, and wished he had never stepped on the FSS
Merton R. Johnson
, Hyadesbound from Earth.

P
aul was wishing he had never stepped on the FSS
Merton R. Johnson
. It was boring beyond words.

When he had first approached the ship on the shuttle, he had been hanging weightless in his bright red straps. Some asshole had gotten to his space-sick bag just a little too late. Globules of puke were drifting around the cargo compartment where Paul and 115 other soldier and sailor guys and gals were strapped in the sea-green compartment. They were waiting to dock and board the kilometer-long, cigar-shaped interstellar transport.

There was no view screen for the passengers to gawk at or portals to peer out of. He was flying military steerage, and he and his fellow transportees were known as “pax,” short for
passengers
. Paul guessed that “pax” was a military abbreviation for cattle, and the shuttle was a cattle car.

Earlier, when Paul had arrived in Cuba, he was immediately seconded to Departure Hold on Force Installation Gutierrez. Departure Hold, he soon realized, was an amazingly boring, nondescript terminal stuck in the corner of the installation. There were no doors to exit the facility, except for emergency exits that looked to Paul to be locked. He mused that that had to be some kind of safety violation. Maybe the locked exits were a breach of safety regs, but they definitely emphasized the cattle chute–like atmosphere of the place.