The Valley Read Online Free PDF

was no road or trail whatsoever, other than what had been worn by American vehicles, which were not exactly making daily trips up there.
    â€œThat’s what I’ve got,” Gayley said tersely. “What are your questions?”
    It was the line that squared-away Army officers always used at the end of a briefing.
    Black rooted in the file and brought out a personnel roster generated by the S-1 shop over at 3/44’s headquarters. COP Vega was manned by a single infantry platoon, not at complete strength. Forty-seven guys, unless someone had died since the last report had been generated.
    Which was entirely possible. The outpost came under attack, frequently. It had been in place roughly a year, and whoever did not want it there had clearly not given up on the idea of making it go away.
    â€œWhy there, sir?” he asked. “Why such a poor tactical location?”
    Gayley raised an eyebrow at hearing the word “tactical”
cross Black’s lips.
    Let it go.
    â€œThey had to build it there,” Gayley explained.
    Vega’s mission was interdicting the flow of foreign fighters crossing the border from Pakistan, down through the higher parts of the mountains and into the rest of Afghanistan. The Valley was a key route. The express lane.
    â€œEverything funnels through there.”
    Black nodded.
    â€œWhat else?” Gayley pressed, ready to get back to his evening.
    â€œThat’s it, sir.”
    Gayley nodded once and watched Black wrestle the paper pile together.
    â€œThese Vega dudes are no joke, Lieutenant.”
    Black looked up at the colonel.
    â€œTheir world is no joke. They’re strung out and they’ve lost a lot of buddies. They are not going to be happy to see you poking your nose around their outpost.”
    â€œRoger, sir.”
    â€œAsk your questions, talk to everyone you need to talk to, and write it up straight. Do not be ignored.”
    â€œI won’t, sir.”
    â€œBut do not get in their way, and do not fuck up their operations. Do the job, write the fifteen-six, and come back here.”
    â€”
    The S-1 shop door was padlocked. Everyone back in their bunks playing Xbox and watching movies on their laptops, or at the FOB gym.
    Black turned his key in the padlock and pulled open the door. He wove his way through desk-shaped shadows to his own area, at the rear. The place of honor.
    He clicked on the desk lamp. A smart-alecky friend had sent it to him in the mail as a joke, after he’d been given the S-1 desk job. It was a little music box number with a painted lamp shade that rotated when you turned it on, wraparound scenes of glorious south Pacific locales crawling around its surface in tacky Technicolor. He tossed the map into the pool of rainbow-hued light and only at that moment, with a faux island ditty tinkling softly at him, realized that he was still clutching in his other hand the manila envelope he had taken with him to Gayley’s office.
    He tossed that to the side and bent down over the map.
    He’d been in New York City years before. He remembered the feeling when he first stood beneath the Trade Center, his brain processing that this thing he’d read about and imagined was real, enormously, almost frighteningly real. That was how he felt looking at the map of the Valley, seeing this almost mythical place in specificity, in actual topographic representations, in symbols and annotations proving its existence, looking back out at him declaring
I am here.
    It turned this way and that like a serpent as it rose through the mountains. Vega was not the only American presence there.
    Down at its mouth lay another outpost. Combat Outpost Arcturus. Some officer was on an astronomy kick, apparently, when the names for the Valley posts were assigned. Somewhere in the sheaf of paperwork Gayley had given him he had seen it noted that soldiers called the place COP Heavenly.
    I’ll bet.
    Vega was a few miles further in beyond