by E. E. Knight
“Sir, your offer is tempting, but I have to stay with my men—at least until all this is over. I want to see them blooded.”
“Thought you were looking for promotion, responsibility. That’d come with a staff position. They make general more often than not.”
“I am, sir, but responsibility is like water. It flows better from the top down.”
Hamm murmured Valentine’s words, trying them out on his tongue. “Hey, I like that. Mind if I use it in my next speech to the division?”
“I’d be honored, sir. But I need to get back across the river—oh, speaking of the river, where can I find Captain Mantilla? I’d like to put in an order.”
“His tug’s tied up at the wharf right now. It’s battleship gray, with big blue letters on it. OGL. You need something, son?”
“Bourbon and tobacco. Not for me, for my officers.”
“I like your style, Le Sain. I’m glad you’re in my division.”
The barge was even uglier than the old Thunderbolt. It looked like a couple of aluminum mobile homes piled on a raft, and needed a lot of rust-stripping before another coat of gray. Sure enough, gigantic letters stood out on the side just below the carbon-coated stack, OGL.
The anchor watch was asleep. A fleshy man, bald as Valentine and bronze-skinned by birth and sun, slept in the sun at the end of the gangway. An iodine-colored bottle rested between his legs.
“Excuse me, boatman?” Valentine said, venturing up the gangplank. He still felt as though there was an inch of air between his feet and the ground—and he couldn’t stop looking at the bridge over the Arkansas River, and Solon’s Residence hill beyond.
If anything, the snoring grew louder.
“Sir?”
Valentine came closer. The man was a dedicated napper, so much so that he sacrificed shaving and bathing in its pursuit.
Valentine flicked his fingernail against the bottle, eliciting a ting. “Closing time. Last call,” Valentine tried, a little more loudly.
“Hrumph . . . umpfh . . . umpfh . . . double me up again, good buddy,” the anchor watch said, coming awake in eye-blinking confusion.
“Did I guess the password?”
“Sorry there, sir. I was resting my eyes, didn’t see you come up.”
“They’re still pretty red, friend. Eight more hours oughta do it. Can I find Captain Mantilla on board?”
“Engine room, I expect. He’s usually there when we’re not hauling.” The anchor watch stood up and gave his belt a lift. “Follow the blue streak.”
Sure enough, Valentine picked up a steady stream of grumbles and curses in English, Spanish, French and what he guessed to be Russian or Polish.
“C’mon, panoche. Loosen up, you bitch. Kurva, what’s the matter with you this morning, you old putain.”
“Cap, this ol’ boy’s come aboard askin’ for you,” the boatman called down the hatch. “Wearin’ a TMCC pisscutter and a turkey on his collar.”
“Merde. Just a moment, Chief.” Valentine heard tools being put down, and then someone coming up the ladder.
Mantilla’s face appeared in the sun, smeared with grease like Comanche war paint. He furrowed his brows. “Morning, Colonel. Saw you last night but damned if I can remember your name.”
“Le Sain, mon frere. I want to talk about getting a little extra cargo up here, the next time you come up the Arkansas.”
“Thanks, Jim Bob, I’ll take it from here.” As the sailor moved back to his shady rest, Mantilla pulled out a cigarette and sat on the edge of the hatch. “What can I get you, Colonel?”
“I’m an old friend of Miss Bright’s. You’ve done a few favors for her, and I need something similar. She sent me.”
Mantilla took a sidelong look at him and blew out a lungful of carcinogens. “You stick your head in the noose first, Le Sain.”
“When you talk to her faraway friends, you probably referr to her as Smoke. If you speak to the same people, call me Ghost.”
“Pleased to meet you. How can I help?”
“I need something brought to Southern Command.”
“Fair enough. I have to tell you plain, sir, that’s getting trickier by the month. I can’t guarantee anything. What is it, people, papers, photos?”
“Some wood. Just a few dozen four-by-four beams.”
“You’re shitting me.”
“It’s not really the wood, it’s what’s in the wood.”
“Gold? Platinum?”
“If you don’t know, you can’t tell anyone. I just want to know if you can get them into the Boston Mountains.”
“Boston Mountains? You’re misinformed. That’s just a screen. The Ozark high command’s hiding out in the bayous in the southwest. Big Hal Steiner’s got them hidden.”
“Really?”
“Easier to feed them from the swamps and rivers. He’s got rice up the wazoo, too. The part of your army that’s holding out up north, it’s mostways teams of your Bears and Wolves wearing Guard uniforms. The invaders got so busy blocking up the mountains they didn’t catch the evacuation south. They think the whole southeastern corner of Arkansas is a Kurian backwater. All those Grogs Steiner has around the place has them confused.”
“I’ve been there. You could hide an army there.”
“They won’t be hiding there much longer.”
Valentine, already excited, hooked a thumb in his belt near his .45’s holster. “When?”
“Soon. Within weeks.”
“You a Cat, or what?”
Mantilla bristled. “Look, Colonel, let me have my secrets, too. We’re on the same team, isn’t that enough?”
“When you’re on a team it’s nice to know if you’re talking to a quarterback or the towel guy.”
“I’m more like the towel guy, Colonel. I’m due downriver yesterday. Can you get me your beams in double time?”
“How’s tonight?”
“Tonight’s excellent,” Mantilla said, nodding approvingly and relaxing again.
“How you want to work it?”
“There’s lots of shallows on the south bank, just downstream of the pilings from the first bridge. I’ll ground her. I’ll splash ashore and your men will rock me off using the wood as levers. That okay with you? Don’t want to break open the Quickwood and have a bunch of gold fall out.”
Valentine came to his feet. “Quickwood? How the hell do you know it’s called Quickwood?”
“From you.”
“How’s that?”
“Call it intuition. Specific intuition.”
“I thought only the Lifeweavers did tricks like that.”
The enigmatic captain scratched an itch between his eyes. “Lifeweavers and us towel boys.”
“Can you get me some bourbon and cigars? I told Hamm I was here to see you about that.”
“Popular items. I keep them in stock. I’ll drop them off tomorrow.”
Valentine held out his hand. “Until tonight, then, Captain.”
“Until tonight.”
Valentine looked at the traffic waiting for the ferry and decided to hazard the footbridge for the railroad workers. The span was complete, track had been laid to both ends of the bridge and the wood-and-iron construct, Xray-Tango’s first priority, would be ready to carry regular trains in another day or two once the sidings were coordinated. There had been a pontoon bridge, but it had been lost to the flood and never replaced. A few of the floats that weren’t swept away were still pulled up on the riverbank.
He ascended the bank—one day there would be stairs, according to some wooden stakes pounded into the riverbank dirt. The trusswork was admirable; many of the top beams were recovered and straightened from the structural steel of Little Rock’s former skyscrapers. Piled up ties waited for the crews to come and fix the rails to them. When finished, there would be a single track and a footpath wide enough for three men to walk abreast across the river, or a truck in an emergency. But the footpath would be finished last. For now, the workers had to either walk from tie to
tie or walk across on the fixtures at the base of the trusses. Valentine chose the latter.
Valentine liked bridges. The engineering appealed to the mathematic, rational part of him, and their suspended airiness gratified his artistic side. He paused in the center and looked around New Columbia, from the northward bend in the river to the northwest, where Solon had his Residence on the steep-sided hill rising three hundred feet above the river, mirroring the wider Pulaski Heights opposite, then across the antheap where his soldiers had their camp, to the swampy flats of the former airport to the southeast.
Raise a ruckus.
He examined the south-side river wharf, where a barge offloaded trucks, a few artillery pieces and little tracked carries that reminded him of beetles. The cargo had probably come from one of the factories on the Ohio—he’d heard the Kurians had opened the river to barges all the way to the Mississippi. It made sense; cargo could be moved more easily on the water than by any other method. The guns were probably 105s, a cheap, simple gun his fellow TMCCers called “use ’em and lose ’ems.” The Kurians, in their efforts to keep weaponry—and therefore humanity—at a pre-First World War level to prevent “the human predilection for self-slaughter” as the New Universal Church put it, frowned on most weapons greater than small arms or armored cars. Artillery was brought to a campaign, used and then destroyed when the fighting was over.
Logistics.
He’d heard a lecture in Pine Bluff from a Guard general, who’d modified Napoleon’s dictum that “any lieutenant can plan a campaign, but it takes an unusual sort of soldier to carry one out.” This general’s version was that any lieutenant could fight their troops, but it took professionals to train and supply them so they’d be ready for a fight. Valentine was inclined to agree; in his days with the Wolves it seemed his days were filled with acquisition and distribution of food, water, bullets, bandages, boots, hats, antiseptic, salt . . . If they were lucky, there was only a shortage of one or two items on this long list of requirements for men in the field.
New Columbia was a tribute to the complexities of logistics. Solon was shifting his base from Hot Springs to his new capital, and Xray-Tango’s brush hair was going gray in the general’s efforts to keep up with the needs of the troops concentrated to the north and scattered to already-conquered stations west and south. Southern Command’s factories were so much scorched earth. What had been the Free Territory was in chaos, and the scattered settlements were being concentrated into collective farms; they’d not be contributing to the TMCC bread-bags until fall, if then. Every other day flat-bottomed barges were pulling up to the wharf and offloading, and soon the southern rail line back into Texas would be running more up from Hot Springs.
Wait at the station
For the victory train
We’ll run from the siding . . .
Whistling again, in syncopation with his footfalls, Valentine crossed the bridge.
The delivery of much of his Quickwood had gone off without a hitch; Mantilla’s tug showed up where and when arranged. He told Mantilla to ask Southern Command to strike as soon as possible, explaining what he had in mind. Time was critical, and they had to move while Consul Solon was still arranging his formations for the closeout moves in his bid to pacify the Ozarks.
“I can put the word in the Lifeweaver’s ear, but whether Southern Command’ll listen . . .” Mantilla said, shrugging. The night made his eyesockets black wells, unfathomable.
“One more thing, please.”
“How can I refuse anything to the Cat who would dare challenge such a lion in his own den? What is it, mon frere?”
“I won’t ask, but if you have contacts further downriver, especially near Pine Bluff, tell them to be ready to hit hard when I move. Civilian and militia uprising.”
“Such an order can only be given by Southern Command’s General Staff.”
“Then Southern Command’s General Staff can take it up with me.”
“If you live. It is a forlorn hope, my friend.”
“You know my orders; you passed them on to Smoke.
‘Raise a ruckus.’ The more widespread it is, the better.”
“You are exceeding your orders, I think.”
Valentine looked at the lights strung on the bridge like holiday decorations. “I think so too. It’s still the right thing to do.”
“We’ve got our orders to pack up and join the rest of the division,” Valentine said to his assembled officers the next night.
The meeting was held in his NCO bar and recreation room, formerly a basement gym in one of Little Rock’s office buildings. The crowd of sergeants, lieutenants, Bears and company officers kept Narcisse busy at the coffee urn. Everyone was eating dinner off of trays around a Ping-Pong table. The green surface was thick with three colors of chalk.
Nail and Ahn-Kha were lounging in wooden chairs outside the club, charged with preventing any interruptions for three hours. Post, the other officer with detailed knowledge of Valentine’s plan, at least since last night when he’d gone over it with his select circle, was keeping an eye on things along with Hanson, the gunnery sergeant Valentine had also brought into the plan in its formative stages. Hanson had given the operation its name: Double Boxcars. The crap pit slang described Hanson’s estimation of the scheme’s chances of coming off as planned, rolling two sixes with two dice. Twice in a row.
“But even if it’s a cluster fuck, we’ll cause a hell of a lot of damage.”
Styachowski had spent hours with Valentine writing on the Ping-Pong table that afternoon. She’d taken to wearing baggy cargo shorts because of her cast, and she’d loosened her shirt to give her more freedom of movement as she reached across the table to draw, fighting an occasional sniffle. Valentine coundn’t help but admire her splendid body, though it seemed that her gymnast’s legs and swimmer’s shoulders had sucked all the vitality from the rest of her: she was still as pale and bloodless as ever, even on the hearty, well-balanced meals issued by Xray-Tango’s commissary.
Her constant questions as she wrote out orders helped sort his own ideas. The men would have to get rid of their TMCC uniform tops; the rules of war, such as they were, allowed ruses in enemy uniform as long as the uniforms were changed before taking hostile action. The men would dispose of their tunics. Narcisse was already dyeing their undershirts black. To further distinguish friend from foe in the dark Ahn-Kha had suggested bandoliers of red demolition tape. There were rolls of it lying around, used to mark off areas known to contain mines, unexploded munitions or construction blasting.
Each quadrant of the table had a sketch of a critical zone in the plan: the wharf and supply warehouses, the train line running through New Columbia, the prison camp, and the Kurian Tower.
The last was the result of a cryptic comment from Mantilla as they’d loaded the beams onto the foredeck of his aged barge, after his faked grounding had been ended. “Good luck, Colonel. Be sure you hit the tower. Go down. Not up. The rat’s in the cellar. Here’s a little gift from the Redhead. You’ll need it soon, I think.” He’d given Valentine a bag with two bottles of bourbon. It had a false bottom. When Valentine found the hidden zipper he came up with his pair of Cat “fighting claws,” and a little box with five flash-bangs inside. They were about the size of yo-yos, and each had a lacquered picture from a matchbook on it. Valentine recognized the matchbooks; they were bars and restaurants he and Duvalier had dined in while posing as husband and wife in New Orleans. A note from Duvalier rolled up in the box read:G -The Good captain kept these for me, for you.
Luck-s
A second, rolling, blackboard stood against the wall, where Valentine had drawn the rail line running north from New Columbia, adding times for the trip up to Third Division’s position.
If there were an unexpected visit from Xray-Tango, Styachowski’s Ping-Pong table would be covered with plastic and a tablecloth, then heaped with food. Hopefully the visiting general wouldn’t notice the detailed drawing of the Consular Residence along the way,
and Valentine could look like he was giving a simple briefing about their shift north to join the TMCC’s lines south of the Boston Mountains.
There were the usual questions. Dumb ones from officers who’d already had their role explained to them, and just wanted to hear it repeated again. Smart ones about what to do if there were a disaster at another component of the plan. Styachowski answered all questions, never once needing an assist from Valentine. She’d absorbed the details of Boxcars like a sponge taking in water, but had chafed at not having a more active roll in the operation.
“If the train’s SNAFU, go to the barge,” Styachowski said in answer to a question about failure in one part of the operation. “If the barge is underwater, go to the train. If they’re both impossible, we’ll get what we can across on the ferry.”
Then there were the inevitable what-ifs. Valentine finally called a halt to it.
“Things are going to go wrong. Improvise. This plan boils down to getting to Objective Omega with everything you can haul. Supplies. Medicine. Prisoners. The tubes. But getting the men there comes first. I’d rather have you alive on the hill than dead trying to haul another mortar up there.”
“But there’s bound to be fighting,” a sergeant said.
“At the docks and warehouses it’ll be supply sergeants and clipboard-holders. Everything else, save the Kurian Tower, are sentries and police. Other than the guards at the prison camp, they’re not used to carrying weapons every day. You’ll outnumber and outgun them. The nearest real troops are watching the river and the roads from Pulaski Heights. If they move, their orders will probably be to go secure the Kurian Tower. They can’t hurt us with anything but their mortars, and I don’t think they’ll fire into the town. If they do, they’ll just help us do our job.”
“As we said at the beginning,” Post added, “we’re like bank robbers. Scare everyone shitless, grab the money and haul ass before the cops arrive. And that’s all.” The men chortled at that. “How you scare ’em, how much you take and how soon the cops show up are variables we can’t know until we’re in the middle of the robbery. So you’re going to have to do some thinking.”
