In the Valley (21 page)

The weapons operator usually controlled the turret on top with his halo. The turret could handle any number of weapons: the M-241 machine gun, the 12.7 mm heavy repeater, or the 40 mm automatic grenade launcher. The weapon used on a particular vehicle in a given convoy was up to the discretion of the convoy commander. On this particular day, the convoy commander was the colonel.

The gunner also had the option of manual controls for the weapon located in the turret on top of the ground-car. To use this option, the gunner had to pop open a large hatch above his head, open the turret cover, and manually control the weapon. It was a lot less effective than halo controls, but it beat having nothing.

The driver’s-position manual joystick was hardwired into the vehicle’s central processor. The small key-locked joystick was there for the driver to operate the vehicle in the unlikely case that his mil-grade halo controls went down.

The interiors of the vehicles were simplicity itself due to the halo controls. There were none of the jutting boxes, controls, gauges, and screens of earlier military vehicles. There were four heavily armored doors, four suit-sized seats (which could be adapted to fit an unsuited soldier), and the driver’s backup joystick. That was it. Their spartan ground-cars looked like boxes with wheels.

Paul was driving the command ground-car behind the vehicle being towed. The colonel was concentrating on a micro feed, and Al-Asad was scanning his gun’s sector. The mechanic was just hanging out and enjoying a scenic ride through Juneau. Then they noticed sparks starting to fly from under the vehicle ahead.

Sparks on the roadway were a bad sign. It was full dark now, and the convoy was on the main provincial highway. The sparks got worse.

The colonel called the tow vehicle: “Mechanic One, this is Five.”

“Go ahead, Five.”

“One, be advised: the vehicle you are towing is throwing off a lot of sparks.” A pause followed. You could almost hear the mechanics in the vehicle ahead of them thinking.

“Uh, roger, Five. We should pull over and check it out—over.”

Paul looked over and saw the colonel concentrate. “Negative, One. We press on unless something else happens.”

Paul got it. It was better to cause harm to a vehicle, a piece of equipment, than to expose the men out on this deadly stretch of highway. There were weekly attacks on the highway. It wouldn’t do to linger. The pucker factor went up on this
trip. What now? Paul thought. Last night, we were sitting on an ambush. Tonight, we have vehicular fun and games on Bomb Alley. It was a six-pack of fun.

The colonel said, “Paul, unless that thing catches on fire, we ain’t stopping for shit.”

“Sure is throwing a lot of sparks, sir.”

No sooner were the words out of Paul’s mouth than something caught fire underneath the vehicle. The colonel and Paul looked at each other. They had jinxed themselves.

“One, this is Five; the vehicle you are towing is on fire. We’re going to have to stop and put it out.”

The colonel just shook his head.

“Roger, Five, stopping.”

“All stations, this net; stopping convoy for mechanical issues. Put out security, guns—maintain station.”

The colonel looked over at Paul as the vehicles ground to a halt. The towed truck ahead of them was burning merrily underneath, with cheerful yellow flames that illuminated the scene with flickering shadows.

“Paul, I’m jumping out. In my absence, you are the vehicle commander.”

“Roger, sir.”

The colonel dismounted.

“Al-Asad, what have you got?” Paul asked his gunner.

“Nothing, sir. Sweeping to the east.”

“Good man, Al-Asad.”

Paul checked the micro feed quickly and clicked to vehicle diagnostics. Everything showed green. Green is good, Paul thought. He watched the rat fuck in front of him unfold, with the mechanics doing their best to smother the flames.

Mike came on the air. His job was to control the situation during the halt and ensure that he had the other guys in suits maintaining local security. Mike was issuing short sets of choppy orders to get the perimeter formed how he wanted it. He said to Stork, “One-Three Mike, this is One-Three. Get on the other side of the ditch.”

The colonel was with the mechanics, trying to put out the fire. Paul concentrated on his vehicle and his gunner.

The spot where they had stopped sucked moose cock, in Paul’s opinion. Not that they had any choice in the matter, but it still blew mightily. There was heavy vegetation, and walled compounds were on both sides of the road. The brush was interfering with Paul’s thermal feed.

In short, neither he nor the micro drones the colonel had launched could see shit. They were sitting ducks.

Paul’s hand shook, ever so slightly. He concentrated on his job and on the spectacle of the mechanics getting the blaze under control. The fire had just been put out when gunshots rang out.

Pop. Pop. Braap, braap, poppop
. His halo and the micro feed identified the gunfire as having come from the northeast. Twenty-one rounds of 7.62 mm had been fired in their direction. No one was hit, so someone was a pretty shitty aim.

The turret on the trailing vehicle, with Crest on the gun, spat back exactly twelve rounds at the source of the gunfire.
Duh duh duh duh. Duh duh duh duh
, the M-241 spat back defiantly.

Pandemonium broke out among the mechanics in front of Paul’s ground-car. They crouched, charged their M-74’s, and started looking every which way. Yeah, they were wearing trauma-weave cams, but they weren’t suited up, like Mike and his boys. Having been in their shoes, Paul sympathized with them.

The colonel came over the halo. “All stations, the fire is out. Mission accomplished. We received some fire; time to Charlie-Mike before more people show up to the party. Five out.”

With halo-guided precision and Mike’s direction, the team folded in their perimeter and mounted back up. Team 1.69 hauled ass out of that potential kill zone with the stricken vehicle.

The team could have probably swept northeast and found the shooter and been successful. Of course, they could also have run into heavy opposition and gotten shot up with an antiarmor rocket. The mission was a vehicle recovery, after all. Later on, guys on the team would play rear-seat admiral on the question as to why they hadn’t gone after the shooter. Heck, some guys, given distance from the incident, weren’t even sure they had been shot at—halo evidence notwithstanding. Paul judged the colonel’s call as the correct one, both at that time and later on.

The team made it back to Kill-a-Guy at around 2230 local with the piece-of-junk vehicle and still-breathing members of the recovery crew. Paul counted it a success.

Z and Paul started going through their recovery ritual, but it was halfhearted, at best. The two men were worn down from little sleep, but they got the job done. It turned out that Paul’s insistence on recovery operations after every mission was a good thing.

The colonel walked up to Paul just as he was finishing up the postmission chores. The colonel was wearing a Mona Lisa smile—never a good sign. Something was up. Another mission had come down.

Paul, Z-man, and the colonel headed back out at dawn the next morning. Third Company needed advisors on a presence patrol. The traffic in Pul-i-Irmohk was heavy. That was the name of the town at the base of the hill from Kill-a-Guy. Z-man was driving while Paul ran the gun.

Paul was scanning to the south when he heard a loud pop, and the colonel’s windscreen bloomed with a distinctive radial pattern. Paul’s halo shot out a message:
ONE
7.62
ROUND
FIRED
FROM
64
DEGREES
, 147
METERS
.

In other words, out of Paul’s sector. The colonel, justifiably startled, sent out an immediate ping to Third Company’s commander, Ashrallah. The convoy halted and wagon wheeled with typical halo-guided precision, and a bunch of Third Company’s bubbas got out.

Thanks to the mil-grade halos the advisors were wearing, Third Company had an exact fix on where the shot had come from. The sniper had fired from a stone-on-stone house halfway up in a block of slovenly tenement buildings. Someone was going to be in for a very unpleasant surprise.

The colonel spoke. Paul scanned his sector. “Hey, Paul, I’m dismounting and doing this search with Third Company. You’ve got the vehicle while I’m gone. I’ll slave my feed to yours.” He smiled. “We’re going to get this fuck. Stay frosty.” The colonel dismounted, and Paul chillaxed on his gun, pulling security.

So much for a presence patrol, thought Paul. This section of Pul-i-Irmohk was definitely about to feel Third Company’s presence. On his halo feed, Paul watched the Juneaus assault the block of buildings while he scanned his sector with the grenade launcher.

As the colonel neared the buildings with the Juneau Army soldiers, Paul heard the firing start—good times. An hour later, Third Company had bagged the shithead, and the provincial police arrived on the scene and secured it.

Finally, the colonel got back in the ground-car with a shit-eating grin. Paul looked at the star-shaped pockmark on the windshield, right in front of the colonel’s face, and understood why he was glad the shithead had been bagged.

Over the past three days, the team and the Juneau Army had bagged six confirmed shitheads. For low-intensity counterinsurgency ops, it was a respectable total.

Third Company Charlie-Mike’d on their scheduled presence patrol.

Paul, Z, and the colonel finally returned to Kill-a-Guy that evening. Seventy-two hours of hell, Paul thought, as he cleaned his equipment yet again. Z was too tired to bitch, and so was Paul.

The next day, he was sitting in his green chair in the hazy orange sunlight, chain-smoking Fortunates. The tension was taking longer to wear off these days; the electric-fence feeling was coming easier and easier.

Paul was turning into a chain-smoking dick of a combat officer. The transformation, a flip of a switch, was involuntary and entirely necessary in his surroundings. Still, he regretted the change. By nature he had been an easygoing guy.

If he ever left this place, would he be able to turn the “dick switch” off? Paul didn’t know, and he mourned his long-lost home and the beautiful green trees of the Ohio Valley.

A
dick of an officer stood before Paul and his apprehensive classmates. Just last night, he had in-processed to his new unit, the 166th Infantry Regiment (Training), Third Battalion, Company B, Officer Candidate School, located on Mumbai 3.

He was assigned in a gruff, cursory method to Second Platoon, First Squad. The method they used in assigning his billet was simplicity itself: each soldier in the processing line had received a consecutive halo feed that filled slots automatically.

That explained their current predicament. Leadership slots had been filled at random, not by ability. And while a number of the “students” here were experienced NCOs and soldiers, many were not. Some poor suckers had won an OCS slot simply by joining the force, graduating basic, and being selected for leadership because they had a college degree.

God, if Paul had only known what a meat grinder of a course this was going to be, he might have turned it down. He had always known that the officer selection schools were a pretty rough experience, but this was worse than he imagined. It was even worse than basic.

How could OCS be worse than basic? Basic was brutal, and the punishments for infractions were severe. OCS was no different. Basic was all about teaching elemental soldiering skills; OCS was about leading soldiers to do the basic things well. Basic conditioned the body, so did OCS. There were some subtle differences, but on the surface they seemed similar. But there was one huge, unsubtle difference that Paul had not fully appreciated before arriving at this godforsaken drill field on Mumbai 3.

In basic, competent instructors who had a precise program for how everything was supposed to be done had led the trainees. The trainees simply had to show up and be brutalized—that is, trained.

At OCS, the trainees conducted the training. It was like letting the lunatics run the asylum. The trainees did everything from requesting chow, to organizing physical training, to ensuring that all soldiers were in the right place at the right time. They did all of it.

And right now, Paul and his fellow trainees were suffering for the mistakes their “leaders” had made. This particular minute’s infraction had been failing to follow the training schedule in getting all trainees to the classroom, on time and to standard.

The class was called “Proper Operation of the Mk VIIb Battle Optic.” Well, Paul and his fellow classmates, Class 52A, were learning about the front-leaning rest position, instead. The front-leaning rest position is the push-up position. Holding oneself rigid in that way gets to really hurting after a while.

The dick of an officer was striding in front of their shivering, heaving selves while he lectured them. “Candidates, your leaders have failed you.”

In front of the formation of students, two candidates were standing and watching. They were the student platoon sergeant and the student platoon leader. They were not allowed to join in the suffering; they could only stand and
watch. Paul would learn later during his own leadership hazing that watching, instead of doing, just made the experience worse.