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The idea of a famous Cat struck Valentine as a bit absurd, and he fought down a laugh. If his nerves gave way now he'd fall on the man, laughing or crying or confessing, and none were appropriate to the moment.
"We've come all the way from Fort Scott for you," Samoza continued.
The words took their time in coming. Valentine's shocked brain had to inspect each one as it came out.
"Thank you. Southern Command couldn't even make it fifty miles," Valentine managed, looking out over the graves.
"Southern Command opened the door for us. Archangel was a joint operation from the start. The Kurians sent troops up from Texas to take you boys down. We figured if they didn't want it, we'd like it back. We got more besides."
It all hit Valentine like a warm wave. Intellect gave way to pent-up emotion like the dike that had swallowed Styachowski, and he found himself shaking, with tears in his eyes. He hoped his brain remembered it all and would be able to sort it out later. "What's that, sir?" he finally said.
"We linked up with Southern Command just outside Hope. Ironic, wouldn't you say? Then it was north into Oklahoma, and down the river to you."
"What made you come all this way?"
"A Ranger teamster named Jefferson made a lot of noise in East Texas. Claimed we had to go help the man who started it all. He fought alongside us all the way to Fort Scott and lost a leg there to shellfire. Haven't taken it yet but figured it could wait. You couldn't."
Valentine held out his hand to the colonel.
"You came all this way for a few companies of men?"
"We're from Texas, friend. We remember the Alamo."
ock Mountain, March of the forty-eighth year of the Kurian Order: Viewed from above, the outline of Big Rock Mountain looks like a cameo of a Regency buck, or perhaps Elvis Presley done during his last Vegas days. The Arkansas River flows west into the King's forehead, complete with lock of hair hanging down, where it's stopped by the cliff face of a quarry and turns south. After the small bulge of the nose the river passes a protruding jaw. The hill curves off east, gradually leaving the river, into an oversized collar tucked into the hair flowing down to North Little Rock. What was Interstate 40 runs up the base of the north side of the hill.
It's a picturesque prominence, named "La Grande Roche" by Bernard de La Harpe in 1722 as he traveled among the Quapaw Indians. The climb up the 580-foot hill is worth it, for the view west and east along the two gentle bends the Arkansas makes as it flows into Little Rock. Or so it must have seemed to the man who built a luxury hotel upon it for the swells of the Gilded Age. But hotels are a chancy business; the hilltop property became Fort Logan H. Roots, when men trained for the Great War in the swampy ground of Burns Park north of the hill.
Following a progression so logical that it verges on the sublime, the fort became a Veterans Administration Hospital for those shattered in the staccato series of twentieth-century wars. It became a warren of buildings, from elegant Grecian structures complete with solemn columns to the smallest maintenance shack and pump house, surrounded by parks full of oaks and a hilltop lake, memorials and green-ways.
That was before the Blast. The twenty-megaton airburst, part of the nuclear fireworks that helped end the reign of man in the chaos of 2022, went off at ten thousand feet somewhere in the air between the Broadway Street and Main Street bridges over the Arkansas. It left nothing but foundations ten miles from the epicenter, barring reinforced concrete construction.
And a limb-shorn oak that had seen it all, like one of the shattered veterans of the former VA hospital.
* * * *
The men were gathered beneath the grandfather oak. The tree, perhaps because it was partly sheltered by one of the great buildings, had survived the blast and the fires that came with it. It had the tortured look of a lightning-struck tree, scored on the southeast side and shorn of older branches from two o'clock to four, and from seven to ten, though knobby amputations showed where the once-leafy limbs had been.
Valentine looked at the expectant faces in the afternoon sun. They were haggard, unshaven, tired. Post and Styachowski had pushed them to the extreme of what could be expected of soldiers, and then beyond. The former POWs were mixed in with the men he'd brought away from Martinez-though they looked better, strangely enough, than when they first arrived.
Almost anything is preferable to being inside barbed wire.
Post has assembled a list of operational specialties from the prisoners. The hilltop redoubt was well supplied with ration processors-women and men who were experienced canners, food dehydrators, pickling and drying specialists. There were no herds to slaughter or bushels of fruit and vegetables to puree and seal. "If they come up the hill, we'll just can the AOT troops like sardines," Post said with a fatalistic shrug. Valentine had almost a whole motor pool from Pine Bluff; invaluable to Southern Command with their wrenches and hoists, but they would have to put rifles in their hands and cartridge cases around their waists.
In this he was blessed, as Southern Command had a tradition of rotating men between front line and support duties, allowing the freehold to rapidly convert support units to combat operations. All of them had heard bullets fly and shells land in dreadful earnest. He wished he had more time to get to know them. Post and Beck would have to rely on volunteers to put together an NCO grid.
The four big guns were spaced out like the bases on an oversized baseball diamond in the open ground in front of Solon's Residence, each in its own pit, dug by the bulldozer, and ringed with sandbags. The backhoe was still making trenches to the ammunition dump, buried deep beneath a layer of sandbags, dirt, railroad ties and rail beams. This last came from the dismantled rail line the now-destroyed train had run on to the station near the old interstate.
Apart from the occasional shell from Pulaski Heights, the only military action to take place in the last forty-eight hours was a skirmish already going into the Free Territory folklore as the Great Howling Grog Chicken Raid. Ahn-Kha had led two platoons into the outskirts of North Arkansas and snatched up every chicken, goose, goat, piglet, calf, sheep and domestic rabbit they could run down and stuff in a sack-at the cost of the commanding officer getting a buttock full of birdshot from a twenty-gauge-while a third platoon blasted away at the men guarding the partially blown bridge from a thousand yards. Ahn-Kha had been running from a henhouse with a pair of chickens in each hand when the birdkeeper peppered him with shot that had to be dug out by a medic named Hiekeda with sterilized tweezers. In tall-tale fashion, the circumstances of Ahn-Kha's wounding and subsequent extraction of the pellets were exaggerated until, in one version already being told over the radio, Ahn-Kha was sneaking past a window with a sow under each arm and six chickens in each hand when an eighty-year-old woman stuck a gun out the window and gave him both barrels as he bent to tie his shoe. The shot, in that particular version, had to be dug out by a Chinese tailor working with knitting needles used as chopsticks. But the raid was the Big Rock Mountain garrison's first offensive success of the campaign. As a bonus, a baker's dozen of forgotten milkers were rustled from their riverside pasture and driven up the two hairpins of the switchback road on the south side of the Big Rock Mountain.
"Men," Valentine said. "You've been following orders that haven't made much sense for three days straight. You've done your duty without questions, or answers that made any sense. I'm going to try to straighten you out now. Please pass on what I say to everyone who is on watch at the skyline."
The "skyline" was the men's name for the edge of the hillside, where a series of foxholes and felled trees traced the military crest: the point where the slope could be covered by gunfire. They didn't have a quarter of the trained men they needed to man the extended line; by using three companies he could place a soldier about every fifteen yards along the line, if he didn't cover the cliffs above the quarry with more than sentries.
"We were the first move in an effort to take back the Ozarks from Kur."
He couldn't get any farther; the men broke into cheers and the corkscrew yip of the Southern Command Guards. Valentine let the cheers stop. He said a silent prayer of gratitude for the high spirits of the men, tired as they were.
"We're about as far behind the lines as we can be. There are divisions of Quislings between us and the forces north and south, which will soon be driving for us."
