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They were dispersed on a steep hillside overlooking a railroad cut. Valentine stood between Patel and Glass, who had the Grogs' .50 set up within a blind of machete-sculpted brush. Wolf scouts had relayed a report of a lightly guarded cargo train heading north on the Lexington track, and Valentine's company was dispatched to hit it if it looked like it contained anything useful.
Below them, an engine and ten boxcars stood on a single track in front of a blocked bridge.
The engine puffed like an impatient fat man.
Valentine stood above Patel, watching one of his Kentucky recruits talking to the engineer from the cover of a stand of thick redbud. A few other members of first platoon stood, looking at the blocked bridge. Another pair of soldiers, Rutherford and DuSable, who Valentine considered his two coolest heads, stood at the back of the caboose, swapping some captured New Universal Church activity books and Lexington newspapers for cigarettes and what looked like a sheaf of mimeographed crossword puzzles with the guards in the armored caboose.
Whether the engineer wondered why some technical crew just happened to be blocking a bridge where trains were running yesterday, Valentine couldn't say. Crow, the soldier in question, was a good talker and had worked rail crew as a boy and into his early manhood.
The binoculars in Valentine's hands stayed steady on the armored caboose. Patel watched the gunner in the little bubble just behind the engine. They were woefully attentive to duty, experienced enough on the lines to know that any unexpected pause called for extra vigilance.
"Faces. In the boxcars," Patel said. "It's not cargo; it's fodder."
"Another load heading up for Cincinnati," Harmony, a Tennessean, said. "Blood money."
Valentine swiveled his glasses over a few degrees. His vision blurred for a moment as redbud intervened, and then he saw it. A pair of haunted eyes looking out through the bars, knuckles white as the prisoner hefted himself up to the airholes at the top of the car.
He did some quick math. Maybe four hundred human souls behind that puffing engine, bound for destruction.
"No point hitting it now," Glass said. "Nothing we can use."
Valentine ignored him.
"What caused you to get culled, cuz?" Harmony said as if talking to the prisoner. "Heart murmur show up on a health check? Forget to make a payoff? Screwup under the boss's eye on a bad Friday?"
A clean-cut young officer left the caboose. Another railroad guard trailed behind him wearing the harassed look or adjutants everywhere in any army. After a conference with the engineer, they approached Crow, who gestured for them to come and look at the bridge.
They walked out to the edge of the gorge, and Crow pointed to the pilings at the base of the bridge. A couple of the idling workers fiddled with the pile of shovels and picks at the edge of the road; another went back to a captured pickup with a freshly painted logo the platoon had been using, avoiding the officer.
A perfectly natural move.
Captain LeHavre always told him not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. This would be as good an opportunity as they would get with this train.
Valentine looked again at the young officer, wondered why someone hardened by experience wasn't on this trip. Maybe he was fresh out of some New Universal Church leadership academy, telling himself that this winnowing, distasteful in the particular, helped the species in general.
Tough luck kid.
"Give the strike signal," Valentine said. "Glass, have the Grogs hit the engine first, then the caboose."
Patel rose and made a noise like a startled wild turkey.
Rutherford and DuSable shoved the newspapers in their vests, reaching for the small, cylindrical grenades that hung within.
Glass made a face, but patted Ford on the shoulder and pointed at the engine. He and Chevy swung their .50 and aimed.
"Open fire," Valentine said.
The .50 chattered out its lethal chukka-chukka-chukka rattle. The glass of the cupola turned to spiderwebbing and blood.
Crow froze up. One good shove and he could have sent the young officer headfirst into the gorge. Valentine silently implored him to move, but he ducked down at the gunfire.
Another of Valentine's men in gray denim, a thick-armed ex-motorcycle cavalry named Salazar, raised a shovel and bashed the adjutant with it as Crow still gaped. The soldier didn't have time to make sure of the adjutant, for the lieutenant had his pistol out. The flat of the shovel caught the lieutenant under the chin, tumbling him into the gorge.
Two hammering bangs, less than a second apart, sounded from the armored caboose.
Plumes of dust spouted up from the ventilators on the roof of the caboose. Rutherford and DuSable crawled like fast-moving snakes toward the front of the train, sheltering next to the wheels of the boxcars, where the men in the caboose couldn't bring their mounted weapons to bear.
The Grogs shifted their .50 to the armored caboose, emptying the rest of the box of ammunition, punching holes around the firing slits.
