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"With your help," Valentine said. "Wherever your parents are, they're proud of you."
"You can be honest with me, Major. They're dead; they have been since that night. You can tell me the truth, can't you? I'm tough enough to take it."
"You're tough enough."
Hank waited.
"They're dead, Hank. I went after them, and I killed them with the rest of the Quislings. They were telling about the Quickwood. About the ruse."
"My fault, sir," Hank said.
Valentine had to harden his ears to make out the tiny voice. "No."
"It is," Hank insisted. "I heard them talking after the baby-after you told us she was dead. "We won't be sacrificed," Pa said, and they started speaking with their heads together. I should have told you or Ahn-Kha or Mr. Post-but I didn't. Just Mister M'Daw and then it was too..." The boy faded back into sleep, like a child who has fought to stay awake until the end of an oft-repeated story but lost.
Valentine knew from fifteen years of regret what sort of abyss yawned before the boy. Agony rose and washed through him along with a gorge he fought to keep down, all the pent-up emotional muck of his losses breaking in his roaring ears and wet eyes. Maybe if he'd been tending to his ax and the kindling as was his duty that day, instead of corn collecting, he would have warned Mom of the trucks coming up the road to the house; she would have grabbed his sister and baby brother and gotten his father from the lakeshore-
Regret might haunt Hank, grind the child down, or drive him to God-knows-which bitter lengths to compensate for an imagined fault. Valentine couldn't allow that to happen to the boy-or man, rather. If anyone on the hill exhibited the manly virtues Valentine had listed when he sent Hank off to the guns, it was the septic boy in the cot.
Being able to forgive himself was a cause as lost as the Razors'.
* * * *
There was still plenty of hot cocoa; it came in tins with little cups inside so all that was needed was a glass and hot water. He, Ahn-Kha, Post, Styachowski, Nail, Brough and Hanson met one final time. Their conference room was filled with wounded, so they gathered in the last artillery magazine. A few dozen mortar rounds stood, interspersed with sandbags, where once there had been hundreds stacked to the ceiling.
"You know what's always pissed me off about this operation?" Valentine asked.
"Your haircut?" Post asked. The officers had enough energy left to laugh.
"That railroad bridge. We never were able to bring it down."
"Isn't that in the 'too late to worry' file?" Nail asked.
"Not necessarily. If we get the men up and moving, we could punch through. Some of us would make it to the bridge. I doubt they've got reserves massed everywhere in case of a counterattack. Once we got off the hill it's only a mile."
"I'll go with you, my David," Ahn-Kha said. "I don't want to die like my father, in a burned-out hole."
"What happened to tying down as many troops as possible as long as possible?"
"Aren't you all sick of this?" Valentine said. "The dirt, the death? Sitting here and taking it?"
Styachowski and Nail exchanged looks. "If we do it, I imagine you'll need Lieutenant Nail."
"Of course I'd need him."
"Then I can't try my plan to save Hank," Dr. Brough said.
"What's that?"
"The boy, the one with the gangrenous arm. I've been curious about the resiliency of the Bears. I put some of Lieutenant Nail's blood in a dish with a bacterial culture. It killed it, like his blood was full of chlorine. I thought I'd try a transfusion; he and the boy have the same blood type. But it would take time for him to recover."
"You may not have that, Doctor. They'll attack again. I don't believe we're in any kind of shape to hold them off."
"Hank can't hold off the gangrene. It's system-wide."
Valentine finished his cocoa. "Nail, would you turn over your command to Styachowski? She's always wanted to be a Bear."
Nail tried walking on his wounded, mangled leg. He was still limping.
