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Bee stamped out a pretty good 4/4 base beat as she hung on to the drooping camouflage netting hanging across the open top of the barge.
Valentine wondered what the sentries on the other side of the river made of it all. A couple of sentries would get their sergeant, who would get an officer, who would probably call in an even higher officer, who would give the alarm.
This part of the operation was secret enough that even Valentine knew only the outline.
His only orders were to get in column with the rest of Jolla's command and move out to the northeast along an old highway.
They splashed ashore in darkness, fiddling and adjusting the tinfoil headdresses as they waded in the slough between two sandbars, heading for blue signal lights on the shore proper.
Upstream and down there were more boats and barges landing, and the riverbank echoed with the throbbing engine of the tug, the honking cries of outraged mules, and the low, firm voices of sergeants and corporals who could manage to make their softly spoken words carry through all the noise without shouting. Valentine saw lines of craft of all descriptions waiting to vomit out men and material.
Sailors and Logistics Commandos had set up lines, and netted bags full of gear came ashore like a parade of lumpy bats swinging in the wind. Someone had hung a portable radio from a tree, where it muttered out love songs in tribute to expectant and new mothers everywhere.
In between the songs were tips on prenatal health and nursing given by a woman with precise, softly hypnotic diction.
The Skeeter Fleet's ships weren't manned by pregnant women. The men liked the songs, and if the Kurians sounded some kind of civil defense alert for western Kentucky, they'd hear it over the broadcast.
"Make to route green," said Preville at the com set. "The colonel wants us to take over for the Wolf pathfinders."
Valentine relaxed a little. That was according to plan as well.
"Break open a box of green chemical lights," Valentine told Patel.
He heard a crump of artillery being fired downriver. Southern Command was supposed to be bringing a trio of big guns across. Rumor said they were Harry, Hermione, and Ron, three old 155mm behemoths. Hermione was famous for having fired the first shot of the Archangel counterattack.
Southern Command was sending them into the Kurian Zone with the same long-range blessing.
He instinctively checked the big-numeral watch looped through his top buttonholes. Oh five twenty-eight. The detail would be of interest to some historian or other. Valentine hoped it wouldn't be a New Universal Church archivist collecting notes for a paper on the suppression of the Cumberland insurgency.
Valentine formed his men into rather ragged lines, wishing he could find a high spot and see the light show. The Goobermaker's strange defense had been described to him, but he'd never seen the effect personally. All he saw was the occasional flicker of a shell heading east through breaks in the trees.
He didn't hear any counterbattery fire. One would think that the local Quislings would at least have mortars in place to harass the land-ing by now. Perhaps they were as wary of the Goobermaker's woods as the Wolves and Cats.
Pairs of Wolves marked the path to the old highway, looking even dumber than Valentine's company with painted tinfoil topping their weathered buckskins. A trail up from the riverbank gave over to a little road, which crossed a bridge and passed through a wood before jointing the old federal route. Valentine distributed his men in corporal-led units, supervising the placement of the glow sticks himself so that they'd be visible only to those coming up from the riverbank and following the trail.
The Wolves were glad to be relieved and hurried off in the direction of the firing.
It was a strange sort of KZ. As far as Valentine could tell, the Goobermaker made no attempt to build farms or settlements. He kept the old federal highway clear enough, though as they came into town he saw brush growing out of broken windows of otherwise fine brick buildings. The town looked like a decrepit old man with untrimmed eyebrows, ear, and nostril hair.
Jolla arrived and set up temporary HQ in an old primary school. As the rest of the support battalion showed up, he distributed the units so they'd be ready to move north.
"There's quite a show, if you want to go up to the school roof, Valentine," Jolla said. He'd ripped open a big triangle from his mask so it only half-obscured his face, making him look a bit like the Phantom of the Opera. "Just follow the power cords from the mobile generator."
Easily done. Valentine left Rand at company HQ with Glass and the heavy weapons Grogs and headed into the school, Bee trailing dutifully behind. Valentine had long since given up trying to get her to do anything but watch over him. Evidently he'd replaced Hoffman Price in her life some manner.
He followed the cords up the stairs and to the roof, where the main signals team was working. Seng's chief of staff, Nowak, was throwing orders like hand grenades. She was a rather willowy woman with baby-soft skin, though that too was obscured by tinfoil.
Valentine brought up his binoculars, focused on the torchlike flicker six or seven miles away.
The Goobermaker's turret-snail tower, topped by what looked like a broken minaret, was aflame, sending a long spiral of smoke like a question mark into the sky.
Artillery shells landed somewhere in the hills well south of the tower, looking like distant lightning in the growing dawn, big horizon-shaping flashes punctuated by smaller bursts.
Someone was putting up a steel curtain between the Goobermaker's lands and Memphis.
Southern Command was apparently giving everything it had in the eastern approaches to start them off.
"They did it?" Valentine asked, astonishment making him ask self-evident questions.
