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Valentine grabbed his first mosquito of the year. He knew better than to slap the little bloodsuckers, lest the sound carry.
They were outside the rising Kurian tower, near enough to see, through their binoculars, the power lines stringing from work light to work light.
Gamecock's Bears had departed for a crossroads blockhouse and communication center Valentine had marked on his exploration of the Kentucky/Tennessee border. It looked like exactly the sort of place, squat and thick and slit-windowed, for a secret cellar where a Reaper or two could wait out the sun. The Bears would take it on, and hopefully draw a large company of soldiers out of the camp.
The plan was that Gamecock's Bears would attack it, in a half effort, Kentucky guerilla fashion, and then retreat as soon as they started shooting back. That would hopefully draw out some of the troops from the construction camp, and maybe even a couple of Reapers. The Bears were the one military organization in all of Southern Command that relished a fight with the Reapers. When Gamecock found some advantageous ground, he'd turn on his pursuers, and the hunters would become the hunted.
He left Frat and crawled back into the thicker trees where Vendetta's operational headquarters had been set up. A limber Wolf had posted their antenna in a tree and the radio was manned.
It was a cold camp with colder food and no coffee. It would have to wait. They could celebrate success with a good fry-up and coffee boil.
Valentine would man operational HQ with the Wolves, in charge of the overall execution of Vendetta. So far, the most onerous part of being in command was the need to chat with Major Grace, who was making copious notes in a small pocket folder stuffed with papers and maps.
A third force had moved south with Vendetta. Six worms of the Gunslinger Clan rigged for cargo would be available to haul away wounded or valuables, depending on the outcome.
He looked up at the crest of the hill, where Frat sat against a tree stump, looking down at the rising Kurian tower through field glasses.
Frat Carlson still had the robust good looks that made Valentine think of Old World advertisements for colognes and watches. Except men in those ads never wore rather shaggy, shapeless deer-skins over a pilled cotton shirt.
He'd changed since being revealed as a Kurian agent. The whole camp more-or-less knew he'd been connected with the Kurians somehow and exposed, the details were still a matter of conjecture. Since many of the men at Fort Seng had their own Kurian Order skeletons, buried and unburied, Valentine had expected them to be more charitable toward the man they called "Tails."
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.
