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"That'll only slow them up for an hour or so," Crow said. "Their rail gangs can do anything but build a bridge in just a few minutes."
"I don't suppose there are any bridges."
"Lots, but they'll dismount and follow. If we even get that far. Somebody might have torn up track for scrap steel or used ties to build a cabin. You never know."
"We'll risk it," Valentine said. "At the very least these people will be no worse off than they were before."
* * * *
Valentine joined Preville up at the ridgeline at company HQ, where he talked to Seng over a scrambler. Seng didn't sound happy about it. Valentine had been assigned to conduct logistical raids, not start small-scale guerrilla warfare on the Cumberland a week before they were due in Virginia, but Seng was too good an officer not to see a chance to bag a bunch of railroad security troops more adept at flushing guerrillas out of the tall timber than facing combined arms attacks.
"I've only got a few Wolves left at HQ. Most of them are elsewhere," Seng said, his voice crackly thanks to the scrambler.
"I'll try to keep the Reapers homing in on lifesign," Valentine said.
Then he broadcast in the clear to "Allegheny HQ" that they'd intercepted the train carrying
"Doctor Faustus" and he was safely on the way back. Some lonely slob, probably working the transmitter out of some shack near Mount Eagle and creating nonsensical chatter between Seng's HQ and the mythical operations' headquarters, acknowledged.
That would give the Kurian intelligence services something to chew on for a while as they examined the manifests of those shipped north as aura fodder. Hopefully some selection officer would be chopped for a screwup that existed only in Valentine's imagination.
It also might give the impression of a quick, fast-moving raid. If half the pursuit forces headed into the Kentucky hills following their foot trail, that many less would be left to pursue the train.
The toughest part of getting going again was convincing the transportees to climb back into the boxcars. Valentine didn't blame them; the Kurians hadn't bothered to provide much in the way of food or sanitary services. They refilled the cars' big yellow freshwater jugs from a handy stream, and his troops shared out what rations they had handy.
Valentine sent Rand with the carts that would have carried off whatever goodies they could have raided from the train, plus the small amount of supplies they'd bartered or scavenged on this trip, back east toward headquarters. He put Crow up front and the wounded Salazar with company headquarters in the caboose, now freed of bodies but not the sticky, coppery smell of blood despite a quick swilling-out. Cabbage already had an IV going, with Salazar as comfortable as doping could make him.
Even better, the intercom with the engine still worked.
The train bumped into motion. Bee didn't like being in the train, for whatever reason. She clapped her hand over her head and made nervous noises.
Valentine had nightmares of meeting a high-speed relief train coming south head-on and had to make plans for the abandonment of their charges. But they made Crow's turnoff, and the rocking and clattering increased as they moved down the old spur line.
The terrain around here was too hilly for good legworm ranching, but herds of sheep and goats grazed on the slopes. They passed signage for old coal mines, saw the rusting, vine-covered remains of old conveyors and towers frowning down on slag piles tufted with weeds and bracken fighting for a precarious existence on soil that had accumulated in nooks and crannies. In some places more recent strip mining scarred the hills, leaving the Kentucky ridges looking like an abandoned, opened-up cadaver on an autopsy table.
They set up watches, allowing most of his men to rest. There was little enough left to eat.
Valentine didn't think much of their guide, a rather slow man in his thirties who thought that by "guide," his duties required telling old family stories about who got married in which valley, the hunting abilities of his preacher's astonishing coon dogs, and the time Len Partridge got his index finger blown off by Old Murphy for sneak-visiting Mrs. Murphy while he was off gathering legworm egg skin. Valentine did manage to glean that the Kurians still sent trains into this region in the fall to trade for legworm meat, though it was sandwiched into a story about a wounded hawk his cousin Brady nursed back to health and trained for duck hunting.
Luckily there were only brief delays due to downed trees on the tracks. The men moved-or in one case dynamited-the trees with high-spirited enthusiasm. The audacity of a theft of an entire train had been the highlight of the march across Kentucky.
But the sinking sun set him nervously pacing the caboose until he realized he was making the rest of the occupants nervous, and he distracted himself by discussing Salazar's condition with Cabbage.
They came to a small river and stopped to check the bridge's soundness, with Valentine thanking his lucky star that he had such a diverse group of ex-Quislings in his company. He consulted his map and saw that the river arced up into the hills where Seng was headquartered. Sheep and goats and several legworms grazed in the valley.
"The bridge'll hold, sir," came the report over the intercom. "We can take a span out with dynamite and slow up the pursuit."
Not the Reapers. They'd come hot and hard with men on horses, or motorbikes, or bicycles, homing in on the crowded lifesign in the railcars-
Valentine tapped the intercom thoughtfully. "I want a conference with all officers,"
Valentine said. "Give the refugees fifteen minutes out of the cars."
* * * *
They traded the captured rifles and shotguns and boxes of ammunition with the shepherd families for a generous supply of sheep and goats. The shepherds and goatherds thought him a madman: He was willing to take kids, tough old billies, sick sheep, lamed lambs. Valen-tine was interested more in quantity than future breeding potential. He warned them that there'd be some angry Reapers coming up the tracks shortly, and they'd better clear out and play dumb.
Then he had his men load the animals onto the boxcars.
