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Karas must be some kind of coin enthusiast. That or he was a student of the little common details that built a culture and a community.
Zak gave Valentine a discreet wave. His sister winked and moist-ened her lips.
* * * *
The rest of the march had its share of difficulties. Valentine lost two soldiers of his company, whether through desertion or simple loss he never learned-they took bicycles into a town that allegedly had a good, safe market and never returned.
Seng was moving too hard to the northeast for Valentine to delay in searching for them.
He led a detail in civilian clothes into town but could learn nothing.
Bee slept outside his tent like a dog. Duvalier brought home grisly trophies now and then-Quisling scouts, an unfortunate pimp who tried to drug her at trans-Appalachian Inn, a Reaper who'd lost a foot to a bear trap.
Word of Red Dog's Reaper-sensing powers spread, and Seng attached him to brigade headquarters as scouting and detection gear. The dog went out with Wolf patrols and nighttime picket checks. Red Dog's cheery enjoyment of his excursions rubbed off as they neared their goals.
There certainly were pleasures to the march. Valentine loved the vistas of this piece of country. The old, round, wooded mountains had a tumbledown beauty, and seemed to keep secret histories in the silent manner of aging former belles.
Valentine visited the Bulletproof camp and learned some of the ins and outs of the Kentucky Alliance. All the clans were powerful orga-nizations, powerful enough so the Kurians kept watch on them and sometimes started feuds to prevent any one from getting too powerful. At least that's what Zak thought, expressing his opinion over some well-diluted bourbon at one evening's camp.
After a final pause that allowed Brother Mark and a pair of Cats to attend a meeting with the guerrillas and the underground, they marched to a map reference point and made camp on a defensible hillside. It was well watered, with a nasty rock pile to the north on one flank and a swamp to the south. Below, just visible between two lesser hills, was the town of Utrecht, seemingly chosen for its misty, moun-tain environs and the echoes of history in its name.
The representatives of the guerrilla army guarding the town seemed woefully undermanned, tattered but well-armed. The leg-worm ranchers mixed with them more freely than the Southern Command troops.
With Bee leading the cart horses and Ediyak sitting beside with the company fund, Valentine took a barter cart down into the valley and saw a better ordered group of men, perhaps in reinforced regiment strength, camped on another hill to the northeast of town.
Thinking that this was the partisan army proper, he turned the cart onto a road skirting town and toward their pickets, and received yet another surprise when he saw tattered flags identifying the men as belonging to Vermont and New Hampshire.
"Who the hell?"
"I'll be damned. Those are the Green Mountain Boys," Ediyak said. "Jeebus, all that's missing is a complement of Kee-bec Libertay for us to have every Freehold east of the Mississippi represented here."
Valentine waved hello to a corporal's guard watching the road but the soldiers just stared at him, waiting for orders from their superiors.
They were good-looking men, wearing woodland camouflage, boots, leather gaiters, and a good selection of Kevlar. Most had 4x combat sights on their assault rifles. On closer examination Valentine saw what were probably masked gun emplacements on the hillside, and a headlog or two peeped out from covering brush at the edge of open hillside pasture.
Anything short of a divisional assault on this hill, with armored car support, would be torn to bits.
Their tents weren't laid out in an organized fashion, but in little groupings that made their gently sloping hillside look like it had sprouted a case of green ringworm. Camouflage netting covered some tenting and mortar pits; others were open for the world to see.
"Dots, you magnificent bitch," Valentine found himself saying. Good God, how did all this come about? She'd played her cards very close to the chest.
His vision had come true-and then some. He'd imagined leading some Wolves and technicians to the aid of the guerrillas. Lambert had taken that idea and turned it into something for the history books.
It made him clammy just to think about it.
Valentine turned back into town. It was a rather old-fashioned main-street type of town, and every third building seemed to be named after somebody or other, nineteenth-century achievement emblazoned in Romanic letters in stone ready to bear witness to their greatness until wind and rain wore down even their gravestones.
The civilians either were keeping indoors, were terrified, or had fled the gathering of forces. Valentine saw Southern Command uniforms mixing with the timber camouflage of the Green Mountain Boys, guerrillas in patched riding coats and legworm leathers, all meeting and talking and buying each other drinks. A trio of milk-shouldered girls in halter tops, plump and tempting, called out to the soldiers from the expansive porch of an old Victorian mansion just off the town square. Valentine wondered if some entrepreneur had followed a regiment on the march and set up shop, or if it was a local establishment operating discreetly under Kurian eyes and now enjoying a quick gold rush of uniforms.
Bee whooped excitedly. Valentine saw a tower of faun-furred muscle, back to him, moving through the crowd in the middle of a complement of men with foxtail-trimmed ponchos hanging from their shoulders. Valentine felt his throat swell. He whipped the cart horses, hard, and caught up to the short column.
"Yo! Old Horse," Valentine called to the Grog's back. It ignored him, perhaps not hearing him in the noisy street. "Hey, Uncle!" Valentine yelled.
The men in back turned, and so did the Grog.
It had a long scar running up its face and a fang missing. An eyelid drooped lazily; the other glared at him, keen and suspicious.
It wasn't Ahn-Kha.
