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Heart pounding, a cold clarity came over him. The next minutes would be either him or them. Doubts vanished. Everything was reduced to binary at its most simple level, a bit flip, a one or a zero. Life or oblivion.
Three ... two ... one ...
"Smoke 'em up," Gamecock yelled.
A Bear from each four-man group pulled the pins on big, cyclindrical grenades. The senior nodded and they all threw toward where they heard orders being shouted.
Valentine smelled burning cellulose. The smoke grenades belched out their contents.
There was a stiff breeze on the heights and the smoke wouldn't last long. Gamecock put two fingers into his mouth and whistled.
"Action up! Action up!"
The Bears exploded out of the cover like shrapnel from a shell burst, save that each piece homed in on the target line with lethal intent.
Valentine followed them through the smoke. Gamecock kept toward the left, where more of the hill and therefore more unknown opponents potentially lay, so Valentine went around the right, trying to keep up with the barking mad Bear with the clipped ears.
White eyes with a thick bushy beard appeared from the growth to the right-a Moondagger opening a tangle of branches with his rifle butt. Valentine swung his machine pistol around and gave one quick, firm squeeze of the trigger and the man fell sideways into the supporting growth, held up by a hammock of small branches and vines. He heard a shout from behind the man, a yapping, unfamiliar word, and fired blindly at the noise.
He followed the sound of bursting small arms fire up the hill.
The four-man groups divided into twos, covering each other as they went up the hill in open order and they vanished into the smoke.
"Target in sight. Grenades!" Gamecock's disembodied voice sounded through the smoke.
Bullets sang through the trees, tapping off down into the thicker timber, followed by the tight crash of grenades going off uphill. Valentine felt the heat of one on his left cheek as it passed.
Then he was through the smoke. A wide, bright green mortar tube sat, a bloody, bearded man fallen against the arms of the bipod, looking like a dead roach in the arms of a praying mantis. Just beyond, a severed head lay next to what had been its body.
A brief flurry of gunfire turned to cries and screams as the Bears did what they did best: close quarters fighting. Only it was closer to murder.
The Bear with the cuts on his nose was perhaps the most impressive of all. He grapevined through the position with only his .45 gripped carefully like a teacup, his body following the foresight like it was a scouting dog. Valentine saw him drop three Moondaggers spraying bullets from assault rifles held at their hips in the time it would take Valentine to clap his hands.
Valentine saw Moondaggers fall, blown left and right by shotgun blasts or gunfire. The men on the other side of the slope saw the slaughter and ran from their positions and into the thickest timber they could find while their officers fired guns in the air, trying to stem the panic.
By the time Valentine realized the top of the hill and the mortar postions were theirs, the Bears were already over the hill and chasing what was left of the Moondagger infantry and mortar crew down the gentler reverse slope. Gamecock recalled his team and sent them to the right to check out the rest of the hilltop. The Bear with the old M14 knelt against a moss-sided rock, squeezing off shots as he squinted through the scope.
A bullet came back and he sank down, reloading. He rolled to his right, fired three times, and then rolled back behind the rock. No shots came back this time.
Some bit of sanity recalled him to duty. Valentine posted Preville by the mortars and followed a path north, finding himself atop a lime-stone cliff with a good view of the river valley and the treetops they'd advanced under. He withdrew into cover and fired first the red flare and then the blue, but as the first went off he saw work was already started on the bridge.
Rand had put the engineers to work as soon as he heard firing from the bluff top, figuring the mortar crews would have better things to do with Bears roaring up through the woods.
Valentine hurried back up to Preville and reestablished contact with headquaters. They connected him with Moytana, who reported the destruction of two armored cars. He'd delayed the center column, forcing them to come off the road and deploy, before retiring and leaving a screen of scouts who were giving enemy position reports as they fell back. The center column wouldn't reach the bridge for hours yet.
The long day would be over soon.
Valentine looked around at the dead being arranged by a couple of Bears in a neat row under the trees, their faces covered and arms and legs placed tightly together. Most of them had jet black hair and copper skin. Valentine recognized again the old game he'd seen so many other places-Santo Domingo, Jamaica, New Orleans, Chicago: elevate an ethnic minority to a position of authority, where their posi-tion and status depended on the continued rule of the Kurians above. More often than not, the more-visible middlemen took the blame for the misdeeds of those at the top.
Valentine counted heads. All the Bears were upright, including the four keeping watch to the south and west.
"Not even any wounds? Your command's not even scratched, it seems."
"Not exactly unscratched, Major," Gamecock said. "You left something behind, sir. Left ear. Lobe's gone."
Valentine reached up, grabbed air where the bottom of his ear should be.
"You could take up painting French countrysides cafes," a better-read Bear laughed.
