AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Molly tightened his girth. "You're good, Major," she said.
"Good God, man, kiss her good-bye," Mrs. Long huffed. "What's this world coming to?"
Molly blushed. Valentine had never kissed a woman from saddleback before. It wasn't as easy as it looked in the movies; he almost fell on top of her.
"Uh. Thanks," Molly squeaked.
Valentine rode on in the tangled tracks of the column, trying to catch up. He passed a member of the general's color guard dumping rainwater out of his drumhead.
Irony. That's what it was. He had a daughter in the Caribbean who thought he was an uncle, and a son in St. Louis that ninety-nine out of a hundred would insist was an abomination and demand to be destroyed. Now this tousle-haired boy was calling him Daddy. Or Father, when he remembered his manners.
God is just, but that doesn't mean he lacks humor, Father Max used to say.
"Amen," Valentine muttered, clicking his horse into a trot.
ilderness of eastern Kentucky, New Years Eve, the Fifty-fourth Year of the Kurian Order: With the sun an orange-and-purple bruise along the western skyline, harpy country wakes up.
There's something odd about this particular Grog territory. Bird and animal life seems more furtive, the insects tougher and more numerous-even in the winter chill big black flies drone by like thrown pebbles. The kudzu on old utility poles and lines grows thick on every sunstruck prominence in a twisted-tendril game of king of the hill that dares you to contest its ownership. Thicker stands of wood have a bat-cave smell with nothing thriving in the shade but thistle and thorn and tree-hugging fungus looking like suppurating wounds.
The few highways cutting through harpy lands are barely open, the vegetation kept back only by big machines clawing through the potholed roads. The devastation from the New Madrid quake has never been repaired. Whole communities are nothing but heaps of rubble with a vine-covered wall or chimney still standing.
* * * *
Binoculars just made the warehouse and truck yard look worse. In the dark from a distance, Valentine could see the armory was only three buildings, two of cinder block linked by a nicer brick office forming an uneven U lit at the doors by tired bulbs that looked like they wanted to surrender to the night. With the aid of the binoculars, Valentine's night eyes picked out peeling paint, the tires and blocks holding down plastic sheeting on the roofs, and the plywood nailed over the windows.
Patel and Hoboken, the youngest of Patel's Shepherds, looked at it with him.
The ad-hoc raid had come together as though it were a natural, expected event, like a birth.
When Valentine proposed the operation at a scheduled meeting, he met initial resistance in the form of a frown and a shake of Colonel Seng's head, but Moytana and the Bear lieutenant Gamecock both came to assistance, claiming that their men were fretting, wanting either leave or an operation. They could have both by joining in the raid, as Hunters back from the KZ traditionally enjoyed at least a three-day pass, if not a twenty-one, in Southern Command's vernacular.
Valentine argued that the rest of the brigade might be reassured by a quick successful strike into the Kurian Zone and a return across the Mississippi, and Seng gave his approval.
Valentine turned in his written plan that very evening and started on the orders for the company the next morning.
As Rand organized transport, Valentine received an unexpected visitor. The Bear lieutenant knocked on the open door of the command shack. Dust fell from the ceiling and the spiders hunkered down in their webs.
"Morning, Major," Gamecock said. He had thick hair on the arms projecting from his sleeveless shirt, and wore the first legworm leather pants Valentine had seen since he lost his rig in Pacific Command. Most officers in Southern Command knew better than to lecture Bears on proper attire. He had an ear of roasted corn in hand and a flour sack over his shoulder. He gave Valentine a casual salute with the roasted ear as he looked around the command shack. "Okay to talk about the op?"
"In here," Valentine said. The command shack had a divider now, so Valentine enjoyed the luxury and status of a knothole-windowed office.
They went into the back room.
Gamecock finished off the roasted ear and tossed it in the waste-basket. The basket wobbled briefly. "Sorry about that, suh. Had to eat breakfast on foot this morning. This scheme of yours: You're going to be a Quisling Grog officer."
"Yes," Valentine said.
He tossed the flour sack on Valentine's table-desk. "I was going to trade this to a sorry excuse of a Guard captain for a case of Canadian scotch, but it's turning my stomach to see the guy who held at Big Rock walking around with an old single shot militia rifle.
"Go on, suh," Gamecock said. "Got it off a Quisling lieutenant colonel with matching tooling on his belt, hat, and boots. Even dead, he looked like a show-night fag but he knew his hardware."
Valentine extracted a gleaming submachine gun and a screw-on tube as long as the gun itself. It had odd lines; the barrel was pitched on a bias different from the frame. He picked it up and extended the handle just under the muzzle.
"That's an Atlanta buzzsaw," Gamecock said. "Model 18 Select entry model. Limited production run, elites and officers only. That cockeyed barrel's there for a purpose. The bolt's at an angle so recoil keeps the muzzle from climbing off target. Pretty accurate one handed, even on full auto. No selector switch-you can tap them out single shot with light pulls. Goin'
over to full auto, you just pull the trigger all the way. She'll group under a meter at a hundred paces. That silencer there is something I rigged."
Valentine looked at the magazines-two short and four long-and the twenty- and forty-round boxes. "Nine millimeter Parabellum."
