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His company, armed with the weapons meant for trade, backed up by Glass' pair with their machine guns, lay under piles of brush taken from legworm deposits, using the tiny hummocks of the snakelike legworm trails to rest their rifles.
With one squad left guarding his escape and evasion trail, he set up three parallel kill zones, anchoring their flanks with the .50s.
Once the men were in position, barrels down and hidden, he and Rand hurried around, laying brush across the groups of prone men.
The three-truck, one-car patrol was heading east, which struck him as strange. Better for him. They were coming off the rise six miles to the southeast, a good place to observe a long stretch of the Green River Valley.
They had a single antiaircraft cannon as armament mounted in the bed of a heavy-duty pickup. Just behind the cannon truck, the rest oi: the men rode in the beds of the armored double-axel trucks. Old mattresses and spare tires hung from aluminum skirting as improvised armor.
Valentine waited to detonate the mine until the cannon truck was over the old soda can that served as a marker. The mine, simple TNT under gravel in the potholed road, luckily went off right under one of the wheels and sprang the truck onto its side.
His men held their fire while the other vehicles turned off the road, facing the buildings at an angle. As the men dismounted to the side facing Valentine's line, he gave the order to fire.
"Antenna!" Valentine shouted.
The platoon fired on the command car. Valentine saw blood splatter the windows as the glass cracked and fell.
The .50 calibers completed the execution begun by rifle fire. The Grogs employed their guns like tripod-mounted rifles, firing single, precise shots, sniping over open sights.
Valentine went forward with his machine pistol, leading a maneuver team with Patel offering support fire. A shielded machine gun sprang up from the bed of the foremost of the trucks, almost like a jack-in-the-box as it unfolded, the gunner cocking it smoothly. Valen-tine fell sideways, shooting as he fell. The gunner made the mistake of swinging his weapon to shoot back, exposing himself to the riflemen.
Valentine watched invisible hands tug at the gunner's clothes and the gunner went down, shooting in the air as he fell. Through the gap under the truck Valentine saw two figures running for the old, half-collapsed barn. He took careful aim and planted bursts in one back and then the other.
The firing died down to single shots as the platoons made sure from a distance that the enemy was down. Valentine waved Rutherford and DuSable forward. They put their autoloading shotguns to their shoulders and stepped out. They took turns covering each other as they checked the cabins of the vehicles.
Valentine heard a shotgun blast, turned around.
"Thought he moved," DuSable explained.
"This one's wounded bad," Rutherford said.
Valentine nodded. He had to finish the job. They couldn't leave wounded behind who could tell stories.
Rutherford said, "Sorry, bro," and fired.
"Give up, give up," another bearded man shouted, holding his hands up as DuSable approached him.
DuSable ordered him to the ground. "Take him prisoner," Valentine said.
He had a sort of a long scarf about his neck. Valentine thought he might have been in the gun truck. He looked dazed but could walk. He wouldn't slow them up. Headquarters could figure out what to do with him.
"We're clear to this end, sir," Rutherford called, firing one more blast at a wet coughing sound.
"The easy part's over," Valentine said.
"I admire your definition of hard, sir," DuSable said, reloading his shotgun.
While scouts watched the road, the men worked in pairs, loading bodies into one truck.
Then they backed it into the barn.
Valentine nodded to Patel. They both drew their knives and went to work.
Meanwhile Glass brought forward the dead bodies they had taken out of camp, now clad in legworm leather vests and soft boots such as the locals favored, and had the Grogs dig shallow graves for them near the road. They had assorted hooks and chains looped or stuffed in their pockets.
They hung some of the Moondagger bodies upside down from the rafters and cut their throats, letting the last of the blood run onto the barn floor. Then Valentine started cutting off beards.
He'd mutilated bodies before for effect in Santo Domingo. Then he'd only been risking his soul.
