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"Maybe I'll make some new ones," Mantilla said.
Last-minute stores of fresh vegetables came on board, and with no more ceremony than it took to undo mooring lines, the tug pushed the barge downriver into the narrow, dredged channel.
Valentine now knew why Mantilla's crew were somnambulists when they tied up. They worked like furies when the boat was in motion: throwing sacks of mail and unloading crates to shore boats along the run practically without stopping, nursing the engines, hosing windblown fall leaves off the decks, cooking and snatching food, and, most important, checking depth with a pole on the doubtful river. Mantilla's barge and tug was big for the Arkansas. Most of the river traffic was in long, narrow flatboats with farting little motors that sounded like fishing trollers compared to the tug's hearty diesels.
Valentine, feeling guilty for just watching everyone work, eating of their galley but toiling not for his bread, checked the materiel Southern Command had scraped up for his operation in Kentucky.
As usual, the promises on paper didn't live up to what waited in the barge.
There was plenty of material for uniforms: soft gray felt in massive, industrial rolls.
"I know what this is," Lambert said. "We took a big textiles plant outside of Houston."
"We'll have to sew it ourselves."
"It's light, and it keeps you warm even when you're wet. They use it for blankets and liners."
"What's it made out of?"
"Polyester or something like it. Everyone's talking about the winter blankets that Martinez is passing out made out of this material. But they're not talking about how he acquired them."
"What's the story?"
"Stuff comes from a fairly high-tech operation-a factory with up-to-date equipment and facilities. We captured it intact outside Houston. The ownership and workers were only too happy to start cranking out material for Southern Command as their new client. General Martinez wouldn't have any of it, though. He had them work triple-shifts cranking out fabric, and then when they'd burned through their raw materials, he stamped the whole product 'Property of Southern Command' and shipped it north. Factory never got paid and owner had no money to buy more raw materials, so it's sitting empty now instead of making clothes for Texans and selling uniform liners to Southern Command. But Martinez got close to a million square yards of fabric for nothing."
The weapons were painfully familiar to him: the old single-shot lever action rifles he'd trained on long ago in the Labor Regiment. They were heavy, clunky, and didn't stand up to repeated firing well. The action tended to heat up and melt the brass casings, jamming the breech. But it was better than nothing, and it threw a big .45 rifle bullet a long way. They'd be handy for deer hunting, if nothing else.
The guns kept turning up like bad pennies in his life.
"Don't look so downcast, Valentine. Check the ammunition."
Valentine opened a padlocked crate.
"Voodoo Works?" Valentine asked, seeing the manufacturer.
"Pick one up."
Valentine knew something was different as soon as he lifted up a box of bullets. He raised an eyebrow at Lambert.
"Yes, it's Quickwood. Testing found that the .45 shell was less likely to tumble and fragment. Only a couple of thousand rounds, but if you distribute the Reaper rifles to your good shots . . ."
She didn't have anything to say about the explosives Valentine uncovered next. They'd loaded him up with what was colloquially known as Angel Food, a vanilla-colored utility explosive that was notoriously tricky to use. The combat engineers used to say working with it kept the angels busy, thus the name. You could handle or burn it without danger, but it was quick to blow when exposed to spark. Even static electricity was dangerous.
For preserved food there was a lot of WHAM. Probably captured supplies taken off of Quisling military formations and now being repatriated to its native land. The WHAM had probably logged more time in service than many of his soldiers.
As to the training materials, they were mostly workbooks on reading, writing, and arithmetic: useful to many of the lower-level workers who escaped the Kurian Order functionally illiterate but not particularly useful to his troops.
For entertainment they had cases and cases of playing cards with the classic depiction of a bicyclist.
Valentine lifted one of the boxes and opened it. Inside, the cards were wrapped up like a pack of cigarettes.
"Strip poker?" he asked Lambert.
"Stakes aren't worth it, not with your face looking like that."
They laughed.
Valentine would have found it hard to put into words to say how relieved he was Lambert was joining them in Kentucky. She was the sort of person who did a good deal without drawing attention to herself. He'd come across an old quote from one of the Prussians, von Moltke something or other, that perfectly described her: accomplish much, remain in the background, be more than you appear.
