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Out of Martinez's hearing, Valentine heard Ahn-Kha make an aside to Post.
"How'd you get a captured gun?" Ahn-Kha asked, touching Post's holstered .45. It was a duplicate of Valentine's; Post had given him one while they served together on the Thunderbolt.
"It's not Southern Command issue."
"Letter of the law," Ahn-Kha said. "A few dozen guns between all of us."
"For a column a half mile long."
Valentine turned his attention back to Martinez, still arguing with Meadows. "You think you can move this many through the hills? You're throwing away the lives of everyone here. I'll offer an amnesty. We can bring the command back together."
Meadows unhooked his pistol belt and handed it over to Martinez. "That 9mm is Southern Command issue. Wouldn't want to set a bad example." He looked at the'men holding the horse teams. "Five minutes!" he shouted. "We get going in five minutes!"
"Don't be a fool, Colonel," Martinez said. "We need you. And these good men." His beady eyes glanced up and down the files of men. It seemed that those who still shaved and cleaned their uniforms were all lined up with Valentine.
"Martinez," Valentine said, "you don't have a command. You have a mob. They way things are going in this camp, you won't even have a mob much longer."
Martinez sneered. "Think so? I'll give you a prediction in return. We'll outlast you."
The Eastern Ouachitas, Arkansas, February: In the decade before the Overthrow, the interstate between Little Rock and Hot Springs enjoyed a high-tech growth spurt. With key computer networks in prominent cities worldwide challenged by everything from terrorism to extended power outages, backup locations became the focus of a substantial slice of investment. In Americas heartland, in the basements of nondescript office parks, fiberoptic lines connected servers waiting to cut into action should the need arise without the slightest interruption in dataflow; "transparent redundancy, " in the phrase of the times.
Southwest of the blasted ruins of Little Rock, off of one of the feeder highways to the old interstate, a chocolate-colored three-story with bands of black windows once housed claim and policy-holder records for one of the world's top ten insurance companies. In 2022 the building nestled in the Ouachita foothills looked a little like a giant slice of devil's food cake amidst its landscaping and parking lots. Now the lots are meadows, and saplings grow on its roof as birds fly in and out of paneless top-story windows; just another unraveled piece of the commercial fabric of a rich nation. The lowest floor shows some sign of recent renovation. Plywood has been nailed up over broken windows and horses graze behind the building in a paddock made from downed power-line towers. A few camouflage-painted pickups sit parked outside a barbed-wire festooned gas station between the highway and the office building. The battered office building looks peaceful behind a sign reading STATION 26.
Except for the three bodies rotting in the noonday sun.
All male, all naked and all covered in a black mixture of rotting flesh and pitch, visited only by crows, they swing from a pylon that once held four lights above the parking lot next to the gas station. An uprooted stop sign stands in the parking-lot meadow between the bodies and the entrance road, redone in whitewash and black lettering-the two colors have run together in the hasty paint job -reading SABOTER S REWARD.
* * * *
"Bullfrog's been at it again," Finner said. "Sumbitch never could spell." He and Valentine crouched in the thick bush bordering the improvised horse pasture, examining the bodies from a stand of wintering lilac bushes, the western wind blowing the stench the other way. The rest of the column sheltered in the deeper woods a kilometer away, eating the midday meal out of their packs. The screening Wolves had been exploring the more open ground around the old office park and came across what looked like an inhabited office building. When they found the bodies they had summoned Valentine.
"Bullfrog?" Valentine asked.
"Sergeant Bill Frum. Top sergeant in the Guards, or so the men in his old unit say."
"A guerilla?"
"In a manner. He and his men joined up with Solon's crew in Little Rock and they gave him a commission. Only he's playing double agent or whatever you want to call it. He's got twenty or thirty diehards, twice that in part-time guerillas in the farms east of here, and about two hundred men scattered around who are supposed to be hunting guerillas. What they mostly do is look the other way."
Valentine reread the block letters on the sign. "So what about the bodies?"
"Camouflage."
"What's that mean?"
"His guerillas aren't really going up against the KZ forces. More like sneaking around and hitting the folks who cooperate. That burned-out farm we passed yesterday; I bet that was his work."
The scouts had reported bodies in the ruins, Valentine remembered.
"He's a good source of intelligence about the roads between the Rock and Hot Springs, for all that. Sometimes he sends a messenger, trades information or supplies he's been issued. In the last swap he told us they'd open the rail line south from the Rock again."
"He went to some effort to preserve the bodies. I wonder why?" Valentine asked!
"Shows any inspection groups that he's killing guerillas. I know he shoots deserters trying to get back home to Texas or Oklahoma. Picks off an occasional wildcatter come in from Illinois or Tenesseee to set up shop, and then burns down an empty house or two in fake 'reprisals." Bullfrog likes a good bonfire. He burns anything used to trade with the enemy-from a cart to a farm, and buries locals who join up and are carrying arms."
"Buries?"
"Buries alive, in a coffin with an airhole of old pipe, so they have time to think about what they did. Then claims the guerillas did it. That's what Major Rojo used to say, anyway."
