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He earned the nickname from his riding coat, a modified duster that resembled an old cutaway that he wore riding. Frat was good with horses; he'd grown up on a Wisconsin dairy farm that also raised working and riding horseflesh. The coat was a mix of heavy canvas, moleskin, and leather, and must have set him back a few months' pay or some scrounged valuables or technology. He'd worn it a lot more lately, Valentine had seen it only once before Frat had been exposed, now it was a regular feature of his wardrobe while in camp.
Frat had changed on the inside. Valentine wasn't sure what to make of him anymore. No longer needing to play the part of an enthusiastic, diligent young lieutenant, he'd gone cautious and thoughtful.
He still had everything that had attracted Valentine to him in the first place: energy, intelligence, a guarded tongue, which complemented a steadiness of nerve. Whoever the Kurian doctors and educators were that selected him at a very young age as raw material for their training, they'd known their business.
That was the frightening thing about the Kurian Order at its highest level of the human food chain. The men and women acting as intermediaries between the Reapers and their human cattle were frighteningly well trained, disciplined, and capable. Valentine had read histories of Nazis who were tireless in their efforts to rid Europe of Jews, or Maoists who could zealously destroy entire generations in the Great Leap Forward. To see such drive and talent used in such a gut-wrenching manner . . .
Frat had been selected, trained, and released into Wisconsin to penetrate the fabled, and no doubt part imaginary, Underground existing in the Kurian Zone. Valentine didn't know much about them, save that there were small groups who met in highly secretive lodges. How they received their orders was a mystery, but every now and then a party of families would make it out of the Kurian Zone, or a plane carrying some high-ranking Kurian would crash, or a city would go dark long enough for some police prisons to burn.
Valentine had plucked Frat out of that Wisconsin farmland and, joke of jokes, suggested that he join the Wolves. He'd written Southern Command a glowing letter, praising the boy's abilities. They'd taken him in and trained him, and lo, the Kurians had an agent among the Hunters. God knows what sort of damage he'd wreaked while in the Wolves. Maybe he'd located and marked some Lifeweavers, or relayed information about scouting teams to Solon's army before its unusually well-organized and lucky blitz into the Ozarks.
Valentine decided Frat was simply a survivor. Perhaps part of the doctor's selection was evidence of emotional detachment. Valentine could sympathize. He sometimes wondered if there wasn't something wrong with him, deep down, to be able to have seen and done all that. And still sleep like an untroubled child, pillowed by some whore's fleshy breasts. What kind of a man was he? Was he a destroyer of horrors or a horror himself? The Lifeweavers had warned him, long ago, before he became a Wolf, that there was a price for awakening these latent atavistic instincts.
Perhaps that's why, after all this, he still liked Frat Carlson, wanted him to take this chance and run with it. If Carlson could redeem himself, so could Valentine.
Valentine sometimes sweated out uncomfortable thoughts of what he might have become, had he been born in a well-run Kurian Zone rather than a Minnesota backwater. Would he have been selected as a toddler, taught and groomed and not so much brain-washed as brain-cultivated ...
Carlson was also friendless. When he sat down to eat, others moved. People extinguished their cigarettes and picked up their shovels when he passed close and returned wordlessly to work, only to take up their conversations again after he had passed.
Valentine couldn't bring himself to either forgive or forget Frat's actions in central Kentucky, where he'd released a new form of the ravies virus that turned its victims into frothing psychotics with a madman's strength, able to tear doors off their hinges and break automobile glass without flinching.
Perhaps being freed of the Kurians had given him a new sense of honor, or a different perspective on life. Brother Mark was the judge of what was going on in a man's soul.
Valentine had bodies to look after.
Back with the Wolves, Major Grace sat primly on a natural stump. It even had a remnant of the trunk sticking up, forming an organic backrest.
Grace reminded Valentine of something his old friend Will Post had said, when they'd first served together on the Thunderbolt. The Kurian Gulf forces had had a new Inspector General come through, and he'd visited the Thunderbolt.
He'd removed the old captain and replaced him, and chewed out everyone from Valentine to the sailor peeling shrimp in the galley. He suggested a new color for the Thunderbolt's upper decks, and as he left, finding fault with the perfect regulation and satisfactory manner in which the gunboat was tied to the wharf, Post muttered something about a seagull visit.
Seagull visits, Post had said. They fly in, eat all your food, squawk every time someone makes a move, crap all over everyone and everything, and then depart.
Expressing opinions like that had left Will Post an aging lieutenant in the Costal Marines. But the signs of both humor and what Champers had called an "unmindful" attitude had endeared him to Valentine.
Valentine tried to relax. It would be easier to be at the point of the spear, in a way. Gamecock knew exactly where he was and how things were going. Valentine's first excursion into the Kurian Zone as a junior Wolf lieutenant was on an operation very similar to the one he planned with Gamecock and Frat. Bears to create a diversion, Wolves to get some families out. After it was all over, when he trudged into camp after meeting some loosed ravies and a Reaper in combat, he'd wondered why the colonel back at rally base had looked as exhausted as he.
Now he knew. Waiting was bad. Waiting and not knowing was worse.
With the rest of the Wolves as a reserve, backing up Patel's A company and Glass's heavy weapons teams from the Seng battalion, Valentine would attack the construction site in an effort to break out Champers's crew.
Valentine, Duvalier, Bee, and Brother Mark, plus some communications staff, would be the Operational HQ. Valentine felt guilty dragging Brother Mark into the country like this, but he had a sensitivity to Kurians that surpassed the indistinct tingle Valentine felt when Reapers were on the prowl nearby.
He'd done all he could, in his few days, to get the team ready. Using poles, clothesline, tentage, and some barbed wire, Valentine built a rough model of the construction site and two attendant camps based on his observations. He had the men run practice attacks, day and night.
The journey south went easily enough. They took pickups and trailers, fully half Fort Seng's motor pool, south along roads they were pretty sure to be safe. The last ten miles had to be covered on foot and legworm. Their vehicles retreated halfway to Fort Seng, where they waited for the pickup broadcast.
He passed the time by talking to Major Grace.
"If you don't mind me asking, sir, why all the note taking?"
"I'm The General's eyes and ears in Kentucky. He wants my opinion of you all. I want to make sure my eyes and ears have it right."
Grace's use of The General, with an intonation that suggested capitalization of the adjective, reminded Valentine of the man he always thought of as "The General," the leader of the Twisted Cross.
"Is this an opinion you can share with the subjects?"
Duvalier, having heard the beginning of the conversation, pulled her arms into the confines of her coat and settled down to sleep, pillowed by Valentine's pack.
