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The arm suddenly gave way with horrid ease. Valentine sprang to his feet, let the general up.
"You're done," Valentine said.
"So are you," Xray-Tango answered. "We're going to roll up your men like-"
Valentine raised his voice toward the assembled Quisling soldiery. "The general lost. You're to retreat west, home to Texas or Oklahoma."
Dozens of faces suddenly brightened. An end.
"No!" Xray-Tango roared. "That wasn't what this was about."
"He's trying to back out of it," Valentine shouted over his shoulder to his soldiers. It was all lies; his men deserved more than lies, but if he could take the heart out of the Quislings, make them feel that their lives were being sacrificed after the general's loss of a duel-
"Back to your posts. Back to your posts. Open fire on this rabble," Xray-Tango shouted.
"Welshing Quisling!" a Razor shouted. Boos broke out on both sides.
"Back up the hill, men," Valentine said. "He lost and he's not squaring up!"
The two groups of men parted like magnets pressed positive to positive. Two floods of dirty soldiery retreated in opposite directions.
Valentine carried Hank up the hill himself.
* * * *
Responsibility. Valentine had dreamed, on his long trip back across Texas, of being able to give up the burden, turn his command over to higher ranks. Let someone else make the decisions for a while, and lie awake nights because of the consequences. This was a decision he couldn't make.
He tried to consult higher authority. He had raised Southern Command on the radio, and got a colonel in Intelligence Operations who told him that "as the officer commanding locally, you're better able to evaluate the situation and reconcile your orders to keep as many as you can of the enemy tied down as long as possible, denying traffic across the enemy's road, river and rail network, rather than someone who had to be apprised of the situation over the radio."
"Thanks for nothing," he replied, fighting the urge to curse. He didn't want the techs in the radio room telling the others at breakfast that he'd lost it.
The anger at his superior officer was surpassed only by that with himself. He slammed the microphone down and retreated to his room. All over the camp, the story was spreading that Valentine and Xray-Tango had fought for New Columbia. Valentine had won, but the Quislings wouldn't leave. It made the men fighting mad, all the more determined to stay and win.
But Valentine lay in his bunk, feeling like a fraud.
* * * *
The day's respite gave him a chance to gather the men in the open, in the afternoon sunshine. He gathered them at the grave site, where the fifty-three, now swollen to triple the original number, rested under their tiny hand-sewn flag. Valentine took in the faces. They reclined, his handful of Jamaican Thunderbolt marines, prisoners, Southern Command Guards, Bears, officers, NCOs and men, not a mass of uniforms, but a collage of faces. Faces he knew and trusted, under their dirt and bug bites. Only one or two had regrown the beards and mustaches they'd lost in the woods outside Bullfrog's phony station. Most had kept themselves as shorn as new recruits or in short, spiky hair-with showers a rarity, fleas, ticks and lice had multiplied.
He met the gaze of Tamsey, a corporal who'd shown him pictures of sixteen sisters. The boy had seen his mother die giving birth to his sixth sister, then his father remarried a woman with daughters of her own and jointly they produced more, and he knew every detail of each of their marriages. Next to him was a private named Gos, so nearsighted that he was almost blind, but an expert at feeding belts into a machine gun overlooking the switchback road on the southeast side of the hill. Gos could whistle any popular tune you could care to name, pitch-perfect. Amy-Jo Santoro, the heroine of the Reaper fight in the hospital, turned out to be an insomniac who sewed at night. She'd fix anyone's uniform, provided they gave it to her clean of dirt and critters; she had a horror of lice. There was Tish Isroelit, reputedly the Razors' best sniper, who'd stalked and then managed to bring down a Quisling colonel at dusk by the glow of his after-dinner cigar, shooting him through a closed window. She kept score by adding beads-Valentine had forgotten the exact ranking system, but it was color-coded-to braids in her chestnut hair. Sitting crossed-legged behind her was Denton Tope, a combat engineer whom everyone called "the Snake." Though a big man when he stood, he could press himself so flat to the ground one would swear his bones were made of rubber, useful for his trips out in the dark and wet to replace mines and booby traps at the base of the hill. He was always borrowing powerful binoculars at night to try to spot satellites among the stars. Dozens of other mini-stories, sagas that had briefly joined with his own and were likely to end on the churned-up hill, waited for him to speak.
"This is the deal," Valentine began. "That wasn't a duel for the hill, that was a private fight. Here's the truth: General
Xray-Tango has given us until sundown to walk off this pile on our own. He'll escort us, with our rifles, anywhere we want. Hot Springs. Up north to Branson, maybe; see a show.
"Or we can stay here. Let them waste their time and bullets killing all of us, instead of Southern Command soldiers liberating towns and villages full of your relatives. Make sure there are a few less of them at the end of it all. At the end of us."
"So it's a life-or-death decision. How many of you know what the phrase 'Remember the Alamo' means?"
Hands went up all across the command. His command.
"I see a few who aren't familiar with it. It refers to a battle fought two hundred and fifty years ago, or thereabouts. Some Texicans under a colonel named Travis were holding out against a general named Santa Anna at a little abandoned mission station on the Rio Grande. They were outnumbered, surrounded, but they fought anyway, gave a man named Sam Houston time to organize his own counterattack. It became a battle cry for an entire war.
"How many of you remember Goliad?" No hands this time. "I'm not surprised. They were also a group of men in that same revolt against Santa Anna. They didn't fight like the men at the Alamo. They surrendered. Santa Anna executed every one of them.
"I'm not saying we'll be remembered, I'm not saying we'll be forgotten. What we do up here may have an effect on the future. Whether that future remembers us or not... it's not for me to say. I'll tell you another thing about the Alamo. Each of those men made a personal decision to be there. Some say they stepped across a line in the sand.
"I'm not doing anything that dramatic. Any of you who want to leave can get up and walk down mat hill. I'm staying, and Ahn-Kha's staying. Each of the rest of you have a decision to make. You have until sundown to get out of town, according to Xray-Tango. He's going to kill the rest of us. Well, he's going to try.
