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Valentine wanted to add that if Daniels would keep his companies in closer contact, Valentine wouldn't have had time to mine their road, but that would be presumptuous.
"You could act a little more like Quislings. They always fall back in the face of superior numbers. They don't hunker down and let the first wave get past."
"I know, sir," Valentine said.
Gage cooled down. He'd obviously just been chewed on by Seng, who was pushing the brigade like a madman. "They still calling your guys the shit detail?"
"I haven't heard it in a while," Valentine said.
"Got to hand it to you, though. After the last time getting at those Grogs of yours with the auto 50s, everyone figured we hadn't run into your boys yet because they hadn't started sniping.
Weren't you staff at one timer"
"Supposed to be. An old ghost caught up to me and I never made it."
"Sorry to boil up on you like that. I'm glad you'll be on our side when we march up-country."
* * * *
As January turned to February, a big duffel bag arrived, labels and identifying inking scrawled all over it. It turned out to be all the way from Pacific Command.
Valentine read the letter in the waterproof courier pouch stitched onto the canvas: Valentine,
After many wanderings your goods surfaced and I became aware of their existence. I promptly inventoried and dispatched them to Denver, courtesy of a liaison, and I'm confident they'll make it to Southern Command before too many more months pass.
Been seeing a lot of your friend Gide. She's got a mouth on her but she's turning into a dead shot witch of the woods. They're talking about putting me into GHO up here and if that happens I might see about a ring for the end of those snake tattoos. She lost three toes and a chunk of buttock t0 a mortar round, so she's off the A-active list but is recovering nicely. She sends a kiss and wants to know if you're still musky. I won't be ungentlemanly and speculate.
Please accept your property with my compliments and apologies for the delay. What the hell is that thick leathery material, anyway? If you've got any to spare I'd like some for a jacket, Yours in the Cause
J. LeHavre, Colonel
Pacific Command
His old legworm leathers, gear, and sword had been wrapped up in a waterproof, but someone had made off with his boots either before it was turned over to LeHavre or along the road. Valentine wished their new owner's feet well.
The thief, if there had been a thief, missed a stiffened cuirass of cross-grained Reaper cloth, light and breathable and yet strong enough to stop a rifle round.
He looked at the sword. Some craftsman had put a new sharkskin grip on it-at least he thought it was sharkskin; it might have been roughed up big mouth-which was just as well as the old woven one had been getting ragged and bloodstained. He looked closer. There was a tiny little G inked just under the hilt cap next to the stitching. Now that he knew what to look for, he found a similar initial stitched just inside one of the interior side's many map pockets.
Nice to have a souvenir of his best memories of the Cascades.
Valentine noticed that she hadn't returned the old Steyr Scout. He didn't regret it-she'd probably make better use of it than he could.
* * * *
With the company full up and the training proceeding as planned, Valentine found more time to study Seng's texts and notes from his term at the staff school. Seng was generous with his own time, translating cryptic notes if nothing else. Seng's graduation thesis, filling an entire binder, was on Winston Churchill when Britain was fighting alone during the dark years between the fall of France and Operation Barbarossa, when Germany launched her fatal attack on Soviet Russia. Valentine found the Seng thesis more interesting and readable than many of the historians he'd read in Father Max's old library.
He still felt his company lacked a certain spark of initiative that Southern Command's soldiers seemed to be born with. Or perhaps Valentine, with more experience in picked commands, was used to building a unit with a better grade of materials. Their instinct was to hand every problem up rather than improvise a solution and then report.
He took to sending out small units with simple tasks-find a backpack he'd placed in a ravine without being spotted by pickets-and then change their orders at the last moment and kill all radio communications. He and Patel would then lead a couple squads in a mock pursuit.
If they weren't bred to think on their feet, he'd train it into them.
The bright spot in the shakedown was Glass' improvement. He knew the men joked that in Ford and Chevy, Glass finally had some friends who shared his taste for mostly communicating in grunts. Glass wanted to try them out with grenade launchers or the new, ultralight knee mortars from a Southern Command inventor.
Valentine allowed himself one luxury (other than the occasional long shower with his gift soaps): He taught Bee to shine his shoes and polish his belt buckle and name tag on his A uniform. Bee was feminine enough to like things pretty, though he occasionally had to take the woven daisy chains of wildflowers off his pack or remove the mini-bouquets peeking out the gutter at the bottom of his pistol holster. Some of the other officers in the brigade asked him how he classified her-adjutant, aide, or spouse-but Bee's elephantine grace and gentility gave her a charm that assured her a constant stream of sweets and ribbons from officers "just passing through the trader stalls and thought she'd like this."
He'd even heard the Command sergeant major, the senior NCO for the brigade, refer to her as their "big beauty." She'd come a long way in the men's opinion since her arrival in a tutu.
