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Crow waited until the tension came off the coupling, then pulled it. Pressure cables for the car brakes hissed as the valves closed.
Valentine extended a hand and helped pull him back into the engine as the man working the controls applied the brakes. The rest of the cars pulled away, picking up speed on the slope.
"You did well, there," Valentine told Crow as the latter wiped his greasy hands on a rag.
The sheep and goats didn't like the motion and began to leap from the train. First a few goats, and then the sheep, all in a rush. Some went head over heels as they came off in a mass, a waterfall of wool and tufted hair. The goats' instinct was to head for high ground, and the more nimble goats made the escape up the hillside first. The sheep stuck together in bawling clumps.
Crow slipped and Valentine lunged, caching his arm. Crow's toes skipped on the tracks, sending up pebbles and dust. The train wasn't moving that fast, but the engine's tonnage could maim or kill even at a crawl. Valentine hoisted him into the engine compartment as the gunner opened up on some unknown target. Tracers zipped off into the darkness, zipping like hornets with meteor tails toward an enemy.
"Back up toward the rock pile," Valentine told the engineer, who applied brakes and sent the engine in the other direction. The gun overhead chattered again and Valentine heard casings clink into the canvas bags that prevented the spent shells from rolling around underfoot in the control cabin. Then, to the men at either side, he yelled, "Fall back! Fall back up the tracks."
Bullets rattled off the engine in reply. But the men began to move, NCOs tapping their charges on the shoulder and gesturing.
Valentine watched the spectacle of confused sheep and goats caught in a cross fire. Even experienced soldiers would hesitate to just gun down animals-there wasn't a man among them who didn't sympathize with the poor dumb brutes with little control over their fate, for the obvious reason that soldiers occasionally felt like sheep in that way-and Valentine's company used the confusion to scuttle back behind the rocks blocking the railroad cut.
The rocks were comforting in their thickness and sharp edging. There was good cover for shooting all along the fall; a crenellated wall on a medieval castle wouldn't have been more heartening.
The engineer and Crow leaped for the rocks, jumped over, and took cover, Crow leaving his rifle behind in his panic, the idiot. Valentine picked it up.
He tapped the gunner's leg. "C'mon. Leave it."
The gunner ignored him, emptied the weapon's box, and stood dumbly for a moment, as though waiting for someone to reload the weapon. Then he turned and looked down at Valentine with confused eyes. There was blood running down his face from a wound on his scalp.
"Out, back to the rocks," Valentine shouted, slapping him hard on the ankle.
The gunner finally left the cupola, slithered like a snake out of the battle seat and stirrups, and jumped out.
Valentine reversed the gears on the train one more time, clamped the pedal of the deadman's switch shut with a heavy wrench left for that purpose, and sent the engine puffing back down the tracks after the freewheeling boxcars, more to open the field of fire from the rock pile than anything. He paused in the doorway, suddenly tender about jumping, and leaped so that he landed on his good leg. He scrambled back toward the rock slide as sheep bleated in alarm at the engine picking up speed through their midst.
Valentine wished he'd thought to set some explosives in case a hero tried to jump into the cab to stop the engine before it collided with the boxcars.
The Quisling rail soldiers came up the cut one more time, but Glass and Rutherford and DuSable poured fire down the cut as the rest of the company took positions in the rock pile.
More sheep and goats fell than men, but the return fire was inaccurate in the dark. Mortar shells began to explode on the hillside. The fire corrected, and a shell dropped into the rocks.
Valentine heard a scream and he saw Cabbage run forward toward the blast, the big medical pouch bouncing on his hip.
Valentine drew his sword. The Reapers would come now, with the whole company listening to the sound of a man screaming his life out. Or they'd kill the men high on the hillside and then come tumbling down the grade like jumping spiders.
But he didn't feel them. The only cold on the back of his scalp was from the chill of the Kentucky spring night.
"They're coming! Brigade's coming," he heard Ediyak shriek from somewhere above.
Valentine felt a lump in his throat. He heard horse hooves and a motor from somewhere up the cut. The mortars shifted fire, sending a few rounds exploding back along the ridge, and then went silent.
Valentine saw a wave of soldiers pour over the ridgeline to his right, taking up positions to fire down on the railway Quislings. Every yard the enemy had fought for now meant a yard they'd have to fall back under fire from support weapons on the hillside. Valentine saw hands go up or men stand with rifles held over their heads, hurrying toward the rock slide to surrender.
His company ran forward to group the prisoners and relieve them of their weapons.
Valentine saw one officer carrying the machine pistol he'd lost; he recognized the colored tape holding the magazines together.
Harmony relieved the prisoner of his souvenir.
Valentine felt dazed, half awake, with the smell of gunfire and smoke and livestock and sweat in his nostrils. The weird elation that settled on a man when he starts to believe he'd survived, won, picked him up and floated him back toward the foremost troops to report.
Seng, frowning, sat in the passenger seat of his Humvee, issuing orders into a headset.
"You caused me at least two days' delay, Major," he said in response to Valentine's salute.
