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"Do you?"
"Of course."
"Be glad for them. I mink Groschen is going to get his chance with that gun."
* * * *
Time enough? Time enough ? Valentine wondered. Valentine had seen Kurian concentration camps by the dozens. This had to be one of the shabbiest he'd ever seen.
The camp was wired into sections of thirds, one-third for women, the center third for guards and the most crowded part for the male prisoners. A single tower stood over the central common yard-judging from the road ruts, trucks came to pick up and drop off prisoners. The fence, just a series of stout poles to hold concertina wire was not even double layered, or electrified, or topped with razor wire. At each corner of the camp, outside the wire, was a sandbagged guard post. Prisoner and guard alike lived under prefabricated roofs; the walls were nothing more than pieces of tent and tarp, though the guards' tents in the center had openings that served as windows. Valentine's nose picked up the smell of corn flour baking in the only complete structure in the place-a Quonset hut set in the guards' section.
The guards' section was a frenzy of activity. The guards were piling up boxes and sandbags at either end of their Quonset; nervous men peered out from under their helmets, rifles ready. Zhao had thrown enough of a scare into them that they had abandoned the outer guard posts, but four men still remained in the tower. The machine gun that so frightened Zhao was positioned to cover the road.
"What do you think?" Valentine asked Nail, after having Zhao take his men and spread them out to the front of the camp. He watched another Bear, the quasi-giant Rain who'd bearded Martinez, heat the blade of his knife with an old liquid lighter, careful to keep well out of sight of the camp. Not that the men would have much night vision outside the brightly lit camp.
"Piss-poor layout, even for a temporary camp. Why do they still have all the lights on? It's like they want us to pick 'em off."
"Look at that," Rain said. "The poor bastards in there aren't waiting for us."
A trio of men were working at the concertina wire behind their tent in the tower's blind spot. Someone among the prisoners had been waiting for this moment; two men were working at widening the hole with pieces of wood as the first crawled through, cutting.
Valentine spoke: "Saves us the trouble. Nail, go back and tell Lieutenant Zhao to spread for skirmishing. Meet up with us there, at those concrete pilings that look like tree trunks. See them?"
"Sure, sir."
"Zhao should just demonstrate. It's not a real attack. I want them to shoot at the tower, once we start. If they kill them all the better. I just don't want that gun aimed at us. Oh, be sure to call out before you come up on them. They're nervous."
"Yes, sir," Nail said, disappearing into the darkness.
"Groschen, Rain, let's work our way around to the north side of the camp. Try and find something we can throw down on that wire."
By the time Nail caught up with them in a skeleton of reinforced concrete, the Bears had found an old metal fire door and pried it off its rusted hinges. It was a heavy, awkward burden, but Rain managed to get it up on his back.
"They're almost through the wire. What the hell are you doing?"
Nail looked up from the pile of TMCC uniforms he was lighting. "We're going Red, sir. It's a ritual. Haven't you ever seen Bears go into action before?"
"Not up close. The tower might see some of the light from that fire."
"Let 'em. Nothing makes the Quislings shit like Bearfire."
Valentine tried to keep his attention on the camp, but the little circle of Hunters going through their ritual distracted him. It was something out of another time and place, when men in animal skins nerved themselves for action through tribal custom.
They stared into the fire for a few minutes, sitting cross-legged and silently contemplating the blue-bottomed flames. First Nail began to sway; in a moment the others joined in, until they were moving in synch like seven metronomes, first right, then left, then right, all the while staring into the fire. When they were all moving in unison, exchanging grunts that meant nothing to Valentine, Nail rose onto his haunches and the others followed suit. Rain took out the knife he had sterilized, raised his Reaper-robe sleeve, and revealed a long line of little brown scars, hash marks running up to his triceps. He reached up with the blade and added another cut, parallel to all the others. He passed the blade to the next man, then sprinkled gunpowder out of a shell casing into the wound.
The knife traveled the circle, the men holding it out across to each other over the flames, until Valentine's own arm began to hurt in sympathy. The blade traveled from Rain, the one with the most scars, to Nail, and then to the others, each solemnly dusting the wound with the powder from their own shell casings. Valentine found himself wondering about hepatitis rates among the Bears.
When it was done Nail rose, a little drunkenly, and came up to Valentine.
"We're ready. They through the wire?" he said. Nail was enunciating a little thickly.
"Yes, men are starting to slip out. Someone's keeping them together at the edge of camp, though. Let's go meet them."
The Bears took up their assortment of weapons and the steel door. They ran, hunched over, up to the garnering point of the escapees.
"Someone's-" a tattered lookout said, before a Bear came from the shadows to clamp a hand over his mouth.
"Easy, men," Valentine said, holding out a hand as a couple of the prisoners took up rocks. "There's a Bear team here. Nice work on the wire. If you don't mind, we'd like to use it to get in. Who's in command, here?"
