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* * * *
With the company full up and the training proceeding as planned, Valentine found more time to study Seng's texts and notes from his term at the staff school. Seng was generous with his own time, translating cryptic notes if nothing else. Seng's graduation thesis, filling an entire binder, was on Winston Churchill when Britain was fighting alone during the dark years between the fall of France and Operation Barbarossa, when Germany launched her fatal attack on Soviet Russia. Valentine found the Seng thesis more interesting and readable than many of the historians he'd read in Father Max's old library.
He still felt his company lacked a certain spark of initiative that Southern Command's soldiers seemed to be born with. Or perhaps Valentine, with more experience in picked commands, was used to building a unit with a better grade of materials. Their instinct was to hand every problem up rather than improvise a solution and then report.
He took to sending out small units with simple tasks-find a backpack he'd placed in a ravine without being spotted by pickets-and then change their orders at the last moment and kill all radio communications. He and Patel would then lead a couple squads in a mock pursuit.
If they weren't bred to think on their feet, he'd train it into them.
The bright spot in the shakedown was Glass' improvement. He knew the men joked that in Ford and Chevy, Glass finally had some friends who shared his taste for mostly communicating in grunts. Glass wanted to try them out with grenade launchers or the new, ultralight knee mortars from a Southern Command inventor.
Valentine allowed himself one luxury (other than the occasional long shower with his gift soaps): He taught Bee to shine his shoes and polish his belt buckle and name tag on his A uniform. Bee was feminine enough to like things pretty, though he occasionally had to take the woven daisy chains of wildflowers off his pack or remove the mini-bouquets peeking out the gutter at the bottom of his pistol holster. Some of the other officers in the brigade asked him how he classified her-adjutant, aide, or spouse-but Bee's elephantine grace and gentility gave her a charm that assured her a constant stream of sweets and ribbons from officers "just passing through the trader stalls and thought she'd like this."
He'd even heard the Command sergeant major, the senior NCO for the brigade, refer to her as their "big beauty." She'd come a long way in the men's opinion since her arrival in a tutu.
For relaxation he played chess with Rand. Rand won most of the time. He was such a talented, cold player that Valentine wondered if he made intentional mistakes out of curiosity to see what his CO would do when presented with an opportunity, just to give his brain a new set of data points and challenges. Rand apparently never let anyone behind the shield of his professionalism, even when they chatted after their chess games about the progress of the company.
They weren't close, but he was as fine a junior officer as Valentine could ever want.
Then came the spring storms. The camp began to buzz. As usual, the men had somehow picked up that something was about to happen and soon, days before Valentine got his orders to report to a final briefing.
* * * *
The camp grapevine proved to be right. All future leaves were canceled, the day trips into town ended, and last-minute munitions arrived, including a small supply of Quickwood bullets.
With the gear, the important men and women who came equipped with bodyguards, advisers, secretaries, and drivers began to arrive the next day. Valentine gave the same status report for his company three times in one day.
It would have been four but General Lehman cut him off as Valentine spoke to him in the base officers' club that never really got going. The dusty chairs, old movie posters, and license plates from the states making up the UFR all looked like they wanted to be put out of their misery.
"Javelin's under step-off orders, Major. Any reason your men can't go with it?"
"No, General."
"Heard good things about you. Gage says your men have been giving him hell playing OPFOR."
"That's kind of him, General."
"Not sure I like you training Grogs though. Sniffer dogs have their purposes, but you don't want them juggling grenades." He stopped, waiting for an answer.
"Of course not, sir."
An aide appeared and handed Lehman a flimsy. Lehman excused himself, scanned it, and nodded his head yes as he handed it back.
"They'll add a bit of verisimilitude to the, what is it, technical crew your men are supposed to look like."
"That's the idea, sir."
"A good one. Yours?"
"No, one of the Liberty recruit's. She's company clerk now."
"I don't trust ex-Quislings much farther than I can throw them. They caused us a lot of trouble before. Hope it works out for you. See you at the briefing tonight, Valentine.
Dismissed."
The briefing, held in the guarded mess hall and using chairs begged and borrowed from every headquarters tent in the brigade, was mercifully brief. Which was just as well; the blackout curtains killed airflow as well as light. More than a hundred bodies burned a lot of calories over a couple hours. The tent quickly became stuffy.
Lehman opened it with a few words about how javelins were used in ancient warfare to strike troops behind the front ranks. Lambert and Sime and a few new faces were there, politicians most likely. In the throng of uniformed aides and assistants stood one man in hunting gear who took a lot of notes and a few pictures. Valentine guessed he was from the Battle Cry, Southern Command's military newspaper.
