In the Valley

  In the Valley

  Jason Lambright

  Paul Thompson, an officer in the armored infantry, fights a counterinsurgency in humanity’s far-flung worlds. He is a member of a Pan-American Force Advisory Team who encounters worlds, cultures, and conflicts that are both strange and familiar. His experiences prove that the more things change, the more they stay the same—people remain people, even as they spread throughout the galaxy.

  His mission sucks, but as Paul would say, you just have to lace your boots a little tighter and put one foot in front of the other. Will he be able to both accomplish his mission and keep his sanity while chaos reigns around him? Will the Baradna Valley, the scene of a vicious struggle, crack him up or kill him?

  If he can overcome his shaking hands, untrustworthy allies, and murderous enemies, he’ll find out.

  Copyright © 2014 Jason Lambright

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 1499307063

  ISBN 13: 9781499307061

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2014908234

  CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

  North Charleston, South Carolina

  To the men and women who guard over us at night so that we may lie peacefully in our beds.

  In the Valley is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Battle Shock

  Signing Up

  Bashir on a Tear

  Basic

  Getting Ready for Pashto Khel

  The Armorer

  Ready to Rock

  The Bartender

  Magical Fish

  Paul’s Leave

  Counter-Explosive-Hazards Patrol on Foot

  Paul, on the Ship Headed to Hyades

  Holding the Bomb Maker’s Hand

  Paul’s Great Love

  Dinner with Bashir

  Paul’s Great Loss

  Shooting Dogs

  Letter from Home

  Goat Piss Hill

  Paul on Samarra 4

  Paul Struggles at Camp Kill-a-Guy

  Paul in Interregnum, OCS, Mumbai 3

  Entering the Baradna Valley

  Uncle Jack, Mumbai 3

  The First Pashto Khel

  Roodeschool 5

  Looking for Princesses

  Canton 2, Training the Team

  Kanaghat

  Mike Saves the Day

  Lyek’s Death

  Birthday

  Cleaning Out Ground-Cars

  Returning to the Valley

  On Foot to Pashto Khel

  Paul Runs into Amy

  Pulling Triggers

  Inadequate Shrinks

  The Colonel’s Fear

  Leaving Pashto Khel

  Battle Relics

  About the Author

  Paul Thompson had had enough. He tapped another near-cig out of his crumpled pack and surveyed the scene around him while his halo crackled garbled messages in his head. The breeze smelled like marijuana and greasy smoke; the cerulean sky screamed out the dawn overhead. Occasional pops, like firecrackers tossed by careless kids, sounded from the stone-upon-stone village nearby.

  Only, the pops Paul was hearing weren’t firecrackers; it was gunfire. He and his merry band had just cleared the village of a dissident cell. Their mortal remains lay at his feet. The clearing was still continuing, and—joy, oh joy—the provincial police had finally shown up to assist.

  His ad hoc company of advisees (Paul was an advisor) had surrounded the village before dawn, in a slinky movement of cursing, stumbling men. He had joined the men on foot, unarmored. In the parlance of the forces infantry, it had been a “basic dismounted movement to contact.”

  Doing stuff the old-fashioned way impressed the locals, and gaining their respect and covertly leading them was his job. It was kinda tough to do that when he was cocooned in his two-meter-odd-tall armored suit. Had Paul been so equipped, he could have rolled up this cell, flattened the village, and taken on a brigade of Old Earth panzers. But the situation dictated that he take an old-fashioned, unarmored approach.

  Cupping a near-cig in his left hand, he lit it with a bit of burning pot plant. He inhaled and wiped his eyes with the filthy sleeve of his locally adapted multicams. The villagers supplemented their income with the vast field of ganja he had just fought through. The unpleasant experience of bullets clipping off choice buds overhead while he fought for his life in the dark was not one he would care to repeat anytime soon. He swore he would never be able to smell ol’ Mary Jane again without the ball-tightening feeling of impending disaster—namely, a slug hitting him in the face. Even the trauma-weave cams he wore wouldn’t help much with that.

  Some kids were wailing over by a stony wall. Damn, it was hard to think over their screaming. Paul’s best guess was that they must be the families of the recently departed and exquisitely butchered dissidents in the field. The ringing in his ears and the lamentations of the children were working together to block out thought. However, Higher was calling with questions.

  “Two-Three” was Paul’s call sign. There was nothing cool for him, like “Devil” or “Maverick.” His handle was just a naked number. But then again the colonel’s call sign was “Five”—the colonel was a low-profile kind of guy. Usually soldiers of his rank would call themselves “Powerhouse Six” or something else dumb like that. That’s not how the colonel rolled. Paul, being a fellow who had come up through the ranks, respected that.

  “Two-Three, how many shitheads did you roll up down there?” His halo—the colonel’s proxy—was trying to drown out the screaming kids again. Paul took a breath, scanned the tree line, and answered, “We got five.” Paul added, “Five, do you have a visual on my position?” Paul would be happy if that were the case. The popcorn gunfire was getting on his nerves. Any additional security, like the overwatch from an armored suit, would be quite welcome.

  He had noticed that he was getting jumpier by the day, playing old-school infantry games with the lovely inhabitants of Juneau 3, on this his third combat rotation and by far the liveliest. The other two tours, while scary and challenging at the time, were a joke compared to this ball buster of a tour.

  He had once thought it sucked to patrol a potentially hostile wasteland on, say, Roodeschool 5 at forty klicks an hour in a suit. Ha! If he had only known then what he knew now. Paul had been beating the boonies on foot on the “June-bug” while trying to mind meld with a bunch of stinky settlers, most of whom were dissidents. There was nothing like holding hands with a bomb maker you knew was trying to kill you, the secret hidden behind his smile.

  Maybe Najibullah the Bomb Maker wouldn’t be so cheerful if he knew that force intel had a listening worm implanted in his cheapo halo. And Paul had to maintain the façade—his mantra had become “Hold on.” Hold on one more day, one more mission. Put one foot in front of the other. Cherish each suited-up mission; silently dread the basic dismounted ones. When his teammates weren’t looking, Paul’s hands shook like leaves. He fantasized hourly about pulling his pistol, looking Najibullah in the eyes, and taking his life. One problem: Najibullah was a provincial police major. Paul was under direct orders not to kill him.

  Paul wondered when his halo would dime him out as “combat stressed” to the colonel’s command unit. Maybe his headset was broke, the diagnostics gone haywire. It had to be, as hot as the fear and hate burned in his chest and as sick and cold as he felt in his heart.

  He had humped all over this backwater in the name of peace and the universal brotherhood of man. He snorted in self-derision. There was no brotherhood, and there surely was no peace—not now, not in the Stone Age, and certainly not after some bright boys and girls had invented the Glimmer FTL Drive in the mi
d-twenty-first. Turns out there were an awful lot of worlds within striking distance of old Sol that were in solar sweet spots and had some small chance of habitability by human spawn. Old Earth had a surplus of people and plenty of crazies, like, oh, a certain Paul Thompson, born and raised in Hopefield, Ohio, in the Pan-American Federation.

  So here he was, and there was the colonel with a simple answer: “Roger.” That’s mil-speak for yes. He was still scratching himself as to the obscure origins of the word. Roger…Who the hell was Roger? And why did a man’s name mean yes? Paul would be damned if he knew. He loved hearing “roger” now, though. His guardian angel was on station over the unholy mess.

  He threw the near-cig down and ground it out—not that he was concerned with starting fires. After all, a man’s head was burning up in a brush fire not two meters in front of him. The gesture was just the force of habit. Maybe he ground the butt a little bit too hard, out of sheer disgust.

  The colonel, unlike Paul, was wearing a suit, and Paul was damn glad he was on the ridgeline overlooking Pashto Khel. That was the name of the village he and his merry men had just thoroughly perforated, penetrated, and pilfered. So all the better that the colonel could see Paul’s position and be in place just in case Paul needed to call in the wrath of the gods on this miserable hole.

  The local head honcho on the op, Bashir, called Paul over. Bashir was a powerfully built, dark-haired man with an incongruous potbelly. He spoke no Spanish and had just a little English. Paul only had a smattering of phrases from Bashir’s lingo. The translator program in the mil-grade halo in his helmet covered most of the gaps. It wasn’t perfect, but you couldn’t expect a halo from Earth to know all the local Farsi-derived slang.

  Bashir said, “These men—they must die.” He was agitated, all hopped up on adrenaline and probably, if Paul’s guess was right, the local version of the venerable opium plant. If pushed, the seemingly unarmed Bashir would produce a P-39 pistol like magic, and someone would perish. Keeping Bashir on the team was important for everyone’s health.

  Paul looked at the quivering mass of humanity at his feet. Three dissidents lay like broken toys in various positions of unlovely death. “His” men (they were actually Bashir’s Second Company) had done well. During the predawn firefight by the distant wall to the north, the dissident cell had been persuaded to make a run for it. In doing so they had run through the rich, pungent marijuana and smack into Bashir’s blocking force to the west. They died as they thought they were reaching a safe haven, gunned down and exsanguinated from two sides.

  Paul’s advisor group had learned via a rat in the village the night before that the local dissident leader, Commander Mohammed, was going to be home. So the Juneau Army soldiers had moved out for the kill. The entire operation, elegantly simple, resembled nothing so much as a noose tied around the neck of the dissident cell. One rifle company, the First, had circled to the east, and the other, the Second, had circled to the west. Voila—the village was surrounded.

  The fight started when a guard dog tipped off the dissidents. A shithead (the team’s earthy name for a dissident) went to investigate and damn near ran into Paul in the pot field by a wall. He opened fire so close by that Paul could swear, over his ringing ears, that he could hear the clatter clatter clatter of the bolt working back and forth in the clapped-out receiver of the Kalashnikov rifle.

  As firefights go, ordinance began whipping all over the place: shit was flying everywhere; there was mass confusion, chaos, random dismemberment, and death. Laser death rays were still for the future. Hot metal definitely held pride of place in the combat of the twenty-fourth century.

  The colonel, Second Company’s guardian angel, had moved with an air-control element to the ridge towering over the unlovely display. He pinged Paul’s halo and got, through Paul’s optic nerves and brain waves, a visual on his predicament. Bashir wanted to kill Paul’s two living prisoners. He wanted it bad. Paul’s duty was to stop him; the prisoners had to make it long enough to be interrogated by the provincial police.

  Shooting the two prisoners out of hand would have secretly delighted Paul. After all, not one hour prior, in the shock and fury of the assault, one of these shitheads had tried to take Paul’s head off with a close-range burst from his crappy AK-47 clone while screaming his god’s name. Paul had responded with a burst from his M-74 and was fairly sure he had clipped the bastard. If he felt like it, he could review the exact moment on his halo and confirm the hit, but—fuck it—he couldn’t bear to see it.

  Strange that a thoroughly trained soldier, well within his rights, could feel a drenching shame at the thought of the lives he had just helped extinguish. But it was so.

  What he was seeing right now (his medic, “Z-man,” working like a fury to save the two wounded dissidents) was bad enough—let alone rewatching, with diamond-sharp halo clarity, that fateful instant. A man had dropped under the red chevron of his aiming display when he pulled the trigger. He didn’t need a halo replay to see the moment. His mind, and not the halo, supplied the vision.

  The wounded men were shaking like leaves, their life’s blood poured upon the ground. From the distant wall, the children’s shrieks grew painful. Close by, the men with the ragged holes begged for their lives.

  Funny that he and his medic had been trading fire with these knuckleheads, and now Z-man was racing the clock to save a couple of them. If only Paul could clear his head. The keening from these fuckers pushed away all thought like a white-noise brain-sucker machine.

  “Z, stick that fucker you’re working on with some happy juice. I don’t give a fuck how, but shut them up.” Maybe Paul’s order, delivered flatly, would help the situation, would help to clear his head.

  He and Z-man, a laid-back, kindly medic from Detroit, were the only forces in the village. Everything else was a local operation, from the dissidents that died to the Juneau Army soldiers that killed. It was classic counterinsurgency, hundreds of light years from Old Earth, using classic tools.

  Mikhail Kalashnikov would have been astounded if he could have known that his tool, forged in the Second World War on Old Earth, would have proved to be the favorite choice for settlers in humanity’s diaspora. Nearly four hundred years later, untold billions had been produced. Like a hoe or a hammer, Kalashnikov’s automatic worked.

  Paul shook his head. He looked dead in Bashir’s eyes and said, “These prisoners are under my care, custody, and control. You will not kill them.” Bashir’s prominent eyebrows came together; his swarthy face paled. This battlefield confrontation was not on Paul’s to-do list for the day, but here it was. What made the brewing argument harder was that he could see where Bashir was coming from, in spades.

  The dissidents were bad juju. They had killed, blown up, and generally terrorized this valley for years. They were nihilists who delighted in death and destruction. They followed many beliefs: neocommunism, fascism, jihad—you name the poisonous idea from Old Earth’s deep well of bad ideas. All dissidents had one trait in common however. They wanted to cut Earth’s apron strings, to be free to screw up new worlds without Earth’s ideals (or jaded, decadent paternalism, depending on your point of view). The forces existed to stop the dissidents and to provide for a common defense against all threats, even the pie-in-the-sky threat of intelligent-life contact.

  The sharp end of the force, as in all armies, was the infantry, armored or not. And the tool of the force infantry was the armored suit and the mil-grade halos that linked the line troopers. Right now, the colonel was watching the brewing confrontation between Paul and Bashir while cocooned in his suit on the ridge, and he was not pleased.

  The colonel spoke through Paul’s halo. “Get Bashir’s men to stop looting and let the provincial police into the village. And keep those prisoners alive until the PP takes them into custody.” He was pissed; Paul could tell. He could almost feel the bad vibes through the contact plate in his helmet.

  It was time to tell Bashir how it was going to be—Bashir couldn’t hear t
he colonel, of course. The halo in Paul’s helmet transmitted the colonel’s voice directly into his brain through the contact mounted in the cushioning pad on his head. In an earlier era, they had locked people up for hearing voices in their heads. Now, the halo made hearing the disconnected voices of others routine.

  If desired, the halo could bring up a visual of the colonel, a chemical analysis of the stench coming from the burning man/bush combination two meters away, or Z-man’s vitals and exact coordinates. But Paul didn’t need the visual distractions now—he had a pissed off extraterrestrial Pashtun on his hands and two still-living prisoners to protect.

  Paul looked directly at Bashir. Something electric passed between them, not electric as in here come the fiddles and wine, but electric as in grabbing ahold of a cattle fence. “Bashir, you need to get your men under control and stop pissing around in the village. I will deal with these wounded men here.” Paul’s tone was flat and brooked no argument. Bashir just looked at Paul as if he was something to clean off of his knife. His face was as pale as a china cup.

  It was another day in the forces. Paul was a long way from the stars that had shown over his cradle, his mother, and her lullabies.

  Hopefield, Ohio, was a good place to grow up. Crime was low, as it was everywhere in the federation. The restless youth signed up to go off-world as either settlers, soldiers, or sailors. There wasn’t much cause for those that remained to go around kicking up fusses. The people who remained generally had it good. Conversely, some who remained didn’t have the ambition to tie their own shoes. There was no financial impediment to getting on a ship, what with the indenture clause and all.

  Earth had known relative peace for centuries, ever since humanity could dump its teeming population into the stars. Of course, it had helped that the almost third world war in the 2040s had collectively scared the pants off of everyone. Nothing like watching most of the Middle East and a couple of other places dissolve into nuclear fire to wake up everyone else. The brief war had been “pour encourager les autres” on a global scale.