The Valley: A Novel - Softcover

Renehan, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0451471865 ISBN 13: 9780451471864

Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

*Named one of Wall Street Journal's Best Books of 2015
*Selected as a Military Times's Best Book of the Year


An intricate mystery unfolds against the backdrop of the Afghanistan war in this former Army Captain's gripping portrait of a fighting division holding a remote outpost.

"You're going up the Valley."

Black didn't know its name, but he knew it lay deeper and higher than any other place Americans had ventured. You had to travel through a network of interlinked valleys, past all the other remote American outposts, just to get to its mouth. Everything about the place was myth and rumor, but one fact was clear: There were many valleys in the mountains of Afghanistan, and most were hard places where people died hard deaths. But there was only one Valley. It was the farthest, and the hardest, and the worst.

When Black, a deskbound admin officer, is sent up the Valley to investigate a warning shot fired by a near-forgotten platoon, he can only see it as the final bureaucratic insult in a short and unhappy Army career. What he doesn't know is that the warning shot was not the worst crime in the Valley before his arrival, and his investigation will not only disturb the platoon's dark secrets but launch a shattering personal odyssey of obsession and discovery.

The Valley is a mind-bending mystery and a riveting tour de force that announces John Renehan as a great American storyteller.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

John Renehan served in the Army's Third Infantry Division as a field artillery officer in Iraq. He previously worked as an attorney in New York City. He lives with his family in Virginia. This is his first novel.

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Chapter 1

"Dude, don't do it."

Black startled and turned in his chair to see one of his least favorite people in the Army. 

Bradley Derr, twenty-four going on college freshman, slouched behind him with his hands in his uniform pockets, lip fat with dip, peering over Black’s shoulder at the memo sitting out in the open on his desk. Black hadn’t heard him approach. Hadn’t even noticed as Derr placed the plastic soda bottle he used for his dip spit on the desk right next to Black’s arm. 

He considered the bottle now as its two inches of dark brown fluid content came to rest. He turned slowly back to Derr and regarded him with a look that he thought was full of significance. It bounced right off Derr’s sunburned forehead. 

“Damn, Black, you lost in space or something?” 

He had been. Before Derr appeared he’d been staring for a long time at the same piece of paper that Derr now gestured to with a flip of his chin. 

“Dude, I’m telling you. Don’t do it.” 

Derr was a lieutenant. A junior officer like Black. Unlike Black, he did not work behind a desk in the battalion’s paperwork office. Derr spent most of his time outside the dreary midsize base where Black spent all of his time, stomping through the Afghan backhills with his platoon and shooting at people. It was precisely what Derr had imagined he would be doing when he set out to become an Army officer, and the universe had graciously given him no reason to question his assumptions.

Once every couple of weeks he would come back to the base with his guys and spend a day or so crunching around gravel pathways in his sunglasses and eating at the chow hall. When he had paper- type business he needed help with, he made his way back to Black, to be found reliably behind his desk doing precisely the opposite of what he had imagined when he became an Army officer. 

Which was where Derr stood now, sunglasses inverted on the back of his head, looking down at Black with mild pity from beneath blond gel spikes. 

“What do you need, Derr?” 

“I need a hard copy of my pay stub so I can show the bitchwife I ain’t holding out on her.” 

Derr considered himself a laugh riot, in addition to handsome and suave. Apparently some misguided young lady somewhere back in the United States thought so too. Derr was, inexplicably, married. 

“Bitchwife” was only one of the fond names by which Black had come to know Derr’s beloved. She was also, depending on the day, “fuckslut,” “my opinion,” or “the ‘ho,’ ” along with other names Black cared to forget. It occurred to him that he did not actually know the unfortunate girl’s name. 

“Such deep respect,” he said blandly as he turned to his computer. 

Derr snorted. 

“Pfft! You should hear what she makes me call her in bed.” 

He laughed and sent a fresh muddy slug into his dip bottle. He was proud of his ability to spit shining wads of tobacco phlegm cleanly through a two-centimeter Coke bottle opening, straight to the tidy puddle at the bottom, without leaving the brown residue often seen trickling down the insides of such receptacles. Derr considered this, alone among all aspects of the Army’s second-favorite pastime after smoking, to be unsightly.

“You know,” he said, “that’s funny, Black, because ‘Deep Respect’ is actually our name for one of our things she makes me do.” 

He adopted an athletic stance and prepared an expressive tableau. 

“I sort of get her by the legs right here, and—” 

“Why don’t I print your thing.”

Derr shrugged.

“Suit yourself, bud. Deep Respect’s good stuff, though. Works every time.”

Black did not ask and tried not to wonder what “works” meant. He called up Derr’s records and printed off his most recent Leave and Earnings Statement. He observed that, as fellow first lieutenants, he and Derr made precisely the same amount of money. Who should be more offended by that?

“Here’s your L. E. S., man.”

He handed it over.

“Thanks, Black.”

Derr turned to go, then stopped and thumbed at the paper on the desk.

“And I’m telling you, dude. Don’t do it.”

Black sighed. He finally bit.

“Why not, Derr?”

“Because you think you got hosed. You think the Army fucked you over that thing.”

That thing. Black said nothing.

“Okay, so you need to fuck it back,” Derr continued, shrugging as though this were the simplest thing. “Don’t sign that paper, and don’t take it to the commander. Fuck that shit.”

Derr rotated ninety degrees left.

“Am I right, Sergeant Cousins?”

Cousins worked with Black in the “S‑1 shop,” which was Army-speak for the battalion’s administrative office, handling personnel business for the unit’s four hundred people and supervising several paperwork soldiers, none of whom were present for some reason. He reclined heavily behind his desk with his feet up and his nose down in a men’s magazine.

“Mmm, you got it, sir.”

He didn’t look up. Black was searching for something else dry or snide to say to Derr when it occurred to him that, coming from a guy like Derr considered himself to be, to a guy like he believed Black to be, this was pretty generous and friendly advice.

“Thanks, Derr.”

“You got it, bud,” Derr said graciously.

He wove his way through desks and makeshift workstations toward the makeshift door.

“Take it easy, Sergeant Cousins. Gotta go fight and stuff.”

Cousins turned a page. Derr called over his shoulder.

“Don’t take no Deep Respect from the Army, Black.”

He chuckled at his own wit and fired another clean shot through his spit bottle opening, which while walking was actually a good trick.

“Nothin’ but net,” he told himself happily as the plywood door clattered shut behind him.

The office was quiet again. Black resumed staring at the paper on his desk. Cousins tossed his magazine aside and turned a balding head and gentle eyes on Black.

“You know, sir, far be it from me to agree with anything that Lieutenant Derr says, but he’s kind of right.”

Black just stared at the paper.

“I mean, you got your own opinion of things, so don’t let the Army tell you what’s what. You tell them.”

“How does not signing this help me tell the Army?”

“Gotta show up to stand up, L. T.”

L. T. The Army nickname for lieutenants, the most junior and least experienced of officers. 

It came from the way the rank was abbreviated in writing: capital L, capital T. Some sergeant sometime in prehistory thought it was funny to spell it out loud and address his green platoon leader that way instead of “sir” or “ma’am.”

Over the years it evolved. Sometimes it was a term of familiarity or affection, of something approaching respect. Sometimes it was just a way to avoid having to say “sir” to some college kid who had been in the Army for about a fifth of the amount of time you had but was in charge of you because he had been anointed as an officer.

Black was...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0451471865
• ISBN 13: 9780451471864
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 464
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland