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Little Rock's collection of warehouses and piers was Station 3, according to the sign over the entrance. Station 3 also had a motto: "Crossroads of the Future." Or so Valentine read as he stepped up the stairs and under a pre-2022 post and lintel in the neoclassical style. The rest of the headquarters building was a cobbled-together mix of wood floors, brick walls and beam roof. Communications passed from the radio room upstairs through old-fashioned air-pressure tubes. There was an audible shoomp as a new message arrived at the desk of an officer. Another wrote outgoing messages in block letters on square-lined paper and sent them shooting back upstairs.
"The general will see you now, sir; your assistant can wait outside," a corporal said. He had the self-assured look of a ranker who was used to having officers at his beck and call. Ahn-Kha waited for a nod from Valentine, then went back outside.
The brigadier general had a corner office with narrow windows filled with the first unbroken glass Valentine had seen in the Rujns. What wall space wasn't taken up by windows had maps and bulletin boards on it. A liquor sideboard held trophies of figures in various martial arts poses instead of bottles. The desk smelled of recently applied varnish.
"Coffee?" Brigadier Xray-Tango asked. He had a neat uniform, with the same yellow star on the shoulder, and a hearty manner, under a haircut so close it resembled peach fuzz. Friendly but harassed eyes looked out from under bushy brows. There was something wrong with the face, though, and it took Valentine a moment to see it. Xray-Tango's left eye was open wider than the right; it wasn't that the right was squinting, it was more that the left lid stayed a little farther open. Valentine liked to look at a man's hands after his face, and as he poured the coffee Valentine looked at the work-roughened fingers. The nails were rimmed with a stain that matched that on the new desk, which was topped by a stenciled desk plate that read bgdr general's. xray-tango.
"Thank you, sir." Valentine sniffed the aroma from the thermos. "The real thing?"
"Privileges of rank."
"What's all the hardware for? Boxing?"
"Some. Ever heard of Tae Kwon Do?"
"That's like kickboxing, right?"
"A little. It's a martial art. I fought for my old brigade out west. Retired undefeated." He held out his left hand; on the finger next to a wedding ring Valentine saw a ruby red championship ring with "S X T" engraved beneath the "Single Combat Champion" tide. "Can I see your orders, Colonel?"
Valentine sorted them and placed them in three piles on his desk. "Marching orders. Supply requisitions. Organization Inventory for the recruits. Y'all like your paperwork up here."
"That's a weak-looking OI," Xray-Tango said, glancing through the pages.
"Farm kids and men in from the borderland boonies. But they're good woodsmen. They know about moving through country and shooting."
"That territory organized?"
"Not as well as it should be. Most of them are the usual assortment of malcontents who chose carrying a gun over using a shovel in a labor camp."
General Xray-Tango's left eye twitched; a quick three-blink spasm, the third slower than the first two.
"You're moving kind of stiff, Colonel. Injury?"
"I came off a horse a couple weeks ago and broke a rib. I just got the cast off."
The eye twitched again and Xray-Tango took in Ahn-Kha's formidable frame.
"Why the bodyguard?" he asked Valentine.
"The Grog? SOP down there for anyone above captain, sir. Bodyguard. Master-at-arms. I don't know what you'd call it up here. He shakes up soldier and civilian alike."
"Kind of like your own personal Hood, eh? Not sure if I like that. A good leader shouldn't have to dole out summary justice. How often you use it?"
"I lost one on the way. I had to shoot a deserter. Just a homesick kid. I didn't know what kind of paperwork I had to fill out so I just made a report, countersigned by my second in command and the dead man's sergeant. We don't have dog tags but his work card's attached. That's how we did things in Natchez."
"That's the least of my worries, Le Sain."
"Why's that, sir?"
"To be honest, we've no record of you coming here. By Kur, I need you, that's for sure. All this rain with the spring thaw; I've got a command and a bunch of warehouses that might be underwater in a day or two. Consul Solon has zero, and I mean zero, tolerance for wheeling and dealing. So I'm going to have to do some checking. No offense to how they do things in Louisiana." The eye twitched again; blink-blink- bliiink.
"Don't follow your meaning, sir."
"I started out in the Oklahoma High Plains, Colonel. Not the most exciting place for duty. We had a captain out there, got bored with his duties and got himself a transfer to Lake Meredith. And when I say got himself a transfer, I mean he wrote one up, signed it and moved his troops a hundred miles just for a change of scenery. He figured he'd earned it after a lot of dusty years watching railways and cattle wallows. So happens he was a good officer and the Higher Ups let him get away with it. We've been after Frum at Post 26 for months to meet his recruitment quota for the year-and all of the sudden he's not just met it, he's overfilled it, with a Louisiana colonel to boot."
Valentine sipped his coffee, straining to keep his hand steady. The story was so close to his own that he listened for men moving in behind to put him under arrest, but all he heard from outside the office was typing.
