by E. E. Knight
Their shooting was poor, compared to the mortars across the river. Shells landed all over the hill, damaging little but the turf.
The besiegers were at the bottom of the hill in the predawn gloom. Valentine listened in to the field-phone chatter. Kessey had her guns set up so the observers and officers on the line called the mortar pits directly without going through her, trusting the individual mortar crews to prioritize the use of their shells. Styachowski had been relentlessly training the men on the system ever since. The mortars went into action first, dropping their shells all around the base of the hill.
The assault came. Hamm struck from two directions, the north and the east, both driving to cut off the men at the tip of the finger of the hill extending eastward, to get control of the road going up the hill Valentine had used on his first trip to Solon’s Residence. Styachowski used her guns to form a curtain of steel along the north face of the hill. Valentine paced and waited, watching the trees along the top of the eastern finger for signs of the Quisling troops. He forced himself not to call every time the firing quieted, and the company commanders had enough on their hands without him calling for status reports in the middle of action.
“Danger close! Danger close!” the voice of one of the forward observers crackled over the phone. He was calling in fire just in front of his own position—that the Quislings were partway up the hill this soon was troubling.
“Post, take over here. I’m going forward,” Valentine said.
“There’s no trench, Maj—” Post objected as he left.
Valentine had a soldier’s eye for ground. His route to Beck’s command post was determined by cover rather than directness. He scrambled through the fallen scrub oaks, along foundations of old buildings and then up a little wash to Beck’s position on the north face of the hill.
Beck was at a viewing slit in his wood-and-earth bunker, looking west down the ridge pointing toward the train station. He had a band of dirt across his face the same size as the slit, giving him a raccoonlike expression.
“They’re not having any luck from the east,” Beck said. “Too much fire from the notched hill by the war memorial. They’re coming up hard on the north side. Jesus, there it goes again . . . They’re using flamethrowers. Sergeant, call in more mortar fire where that flame’s coming from.”
Valentine looked at the little gouts of flame as the sergeant spoke into his field phone, binoculars in his other hand. Beck passed his own glasses to Valentine. Valentine surveyed what he could of the north side of the hill; there were mottled TMCC uniforms all along it, all lying in the same direction like freshly cut hay.
Some gutsy company officer fired a signal flare, and the aligned figures stood and began to run up the hill. Beck tore the glasses from his face and flicked a switch on a fuse box. Explosions blossomed across the hill as the signal traveled the wire, little poofs of smoke shooting down the hill like colored sugar blown through a straw.
“The claymores,” Valentine said. He saw the Abica brothers moving forward, great belts of ammunition about their necks like brass stoles.
“They’re turning around.”
“Lieutenant Zhao is back in the machine-gun post,” a soldier reported. “He says they’re heading back down the hill.”
They tried again. According to Beck the second attack showed nothing like the patience and skill of the first. Hamm concentrated all his gunfire on the easternmost tip of the hill, until a permanent cloud of thrown-up smoke and dirt hung at the end of the hill, constantly renewed by further shellfire. But the men there held; the machine guns weren’t silenced. As fast as they came up, they turned around and went down.
“We broke the second wave!” Beck’s forward observer shouted. “They’re running!”
“And the Third Division’s bad luck continues,” Valentine said. “Cease fire. Cease fire.”
“Why?” Beck asked.
“Let ’em run. I want the others to get the idea. So next time they come, they have to start from scratch, not from halfway up.”
“Hurrah for the Razors!” a soldier shouted as Valentine surveyed the devastated ridge. Stretcher-bearers braved sniper fire to bring in the wounded, and Valentine had come forward to see to those wounded. Pickups converted to ambulances were bumping across the shell-holed road to take them back to the hospital building.
God, and there’s only one doctor.
“Valentine, time for me to be moving on,” he heard, as he knelt beside a wounded man.
Valentine glanced up at Duvalier. “Interested in lugging a radio up Park Hill tonight?”
“No, sorry. Suicide isn’t my style. I’ve got another assignment. They think Solon’s outside Hot Springs. The Cats are concentrating. Someone’ll get him.”
“Is he so important?”
“Wherever he goes the Quislings do better, for some reason. He’s like a lucky charm.”
Valentine went back to cleaning the soldier’s face. The man’s elbow was torn up, and the skin on his forearm and hand already had a gray look to it. He’d never use his right hand again. “They won’t try that again, will they, sir?” the private said, smiling.
“They’re dumb, but they’re not that dumb,” Valentine said. “You taught them about touching hot stoves.”
“It was them Bears, sir. They backed up our platoon. When the flamethrower burned out the machine-gun crew, they went down and got ’em, then held the machine-gun post, flames and all. We took the line back after that.”
“Good teamwork, hero.” He looked up at Duvalier. She stared at him, strangely intent. “Take off. It’s getting dark. If you pass a TMCC mail pouch while you’re sneaking through the lines, drop a note in for Xray-Tango; tell him I want to have a word.”
Duvalier’s lip trembled. “Val, if you guys get pushed off here . . . make for the south bank. There’s good cover in the hills.”
“We’re here to stay, Ali. In the ground or above it.”
She hugged him from behind; he felt her lips brush the back of his neck. Then she was gone.
There was a week-long respite from all save harassing fire. The Quislings were being careful with their shells, so only one or two an hour landed on the hill. Sometimes they would ratchet up the fire into a bombardment, so every time a shell landed Valentine tensed, waiting to see if others would follow. It was exhausting.
The only thing Valentine remembered about the period between the Third Division attack and the arrival of the Crocodile was Nail’s recovery. Dr. Brough reported that one day the wounded Bear simply sat up and swung his legs off the bed, then walked downstairs for breakfast. He returned to command of the Bears and reorganized his tiny but ferocious group. With wounds from the Reaper fight healed, his teams were back at full strength.
Which was something that couldn’t be said for the rest of the command. The bonfire they’d held to celebrate the victory was lit with the flames of Pyrrhus. The hospital overflowed with the bloody debris of his victory over his old general. Beck’s line was a series of points; if the enemy came again as they had the first day of the attack, they would go through it like floodwaters through a screen door.
Then the first “railcar” struck.
The men called them that because it was what they sounded like as they roared overhead, looking like red comets of sparks. They may have sounded like railcars, but they struck like meteorites, causing the ground to writhe and shake in an explosive earthquake.
The shells landed all through the long night, every hour at the hour, precisely. The timing made the shelling even worse. Each man, Valentine included, dreaded the rise of the minute hand toward the top of the clock. One overshot the hill and splashed into the Arkansas River, while others killed men just from the concussion. Valentine saw one man with either a part of a lung or a stomach sticking out of his mouth. Others died without so much as a tooth being found.
The explosions drove man and animal mad. Max the German shepherd had to be put down after he attacked anyone who came near. The wounded
in the hospital had to be tied into their bunks to keep from crawling under them, tearing out IV lines.
“It’s the Crocodile, sir,” a rummy-eyed old Guard said to Valentine in the blackboard-walled briefing room. Post stood next to him. “That’s what we called it, anyway. They tell me from a distance it’s all bumpy and green, and the tug tower sticks up like an eye.”
“I’ve never heard of it.”
“It’s a Grog thing, out of St. Louis. She shelled us from twenty miles away on the Missouri, when we were dug in during the siege on the Bourbeuse in ’61. She’s naval artillery. She goes on the water and they move her around in an armored barge, like a battleship. I think they put the gun together on the banks, but nobody knows for sure.”
“Solon’s called in the Grogs? He must be desperate.” Valentine wondered what kind of deal Solon had made to get the Grogs to aid him.
“You may get a chance to find out,” Post said. “A messenger came forward at oh-nine-hundred, on the dot, under a flag of truce. He had a letter from Xray-Tango. I guess Hamm’s been ‘relieved’ because it’s signed General Xray-Tango, CINC New Columbia State, Trans-Mississippi. No demands, just a parley.”
“Colonel Le Sain,” Xray-Tango said, when Valentine emerged from the lines. Nail and Ahn-Kha stood alongside, Nail carrying the white flag. They met on an old residential road at the base of the hill. The growth had been blasted and burned by shellfire.
“General Xray-Tango,” Valentine said. The general’s spasm-afflicted eye sent out mental distress signals like Morse code.
“Both still alive, I see,” Xray-Tango said.
“I should have shot Solon and you when I had the chance on that hill back in March. Would’ve been a nice change; the commanders kill each other and the privates live.”
“What are you suggesting, a duel? We both take our pistols, walk ten paces and shoot? The winner gets the hill?”
“Save a lot of blood, General.”
“You know it’s ridiculous. Change of subject.”
“You sent the message, General. What are we to discuss?”
“Your surrender. Prevent the ‘further effusion of blood.’ I believe that’s the traditional wording.”
“You’re working for the experts in the effusion of blood, General.”
“Forget it, Le Sain. I’ll go back and blow you off that hill.”
“General, suppose we step over under that tree and talk,” Valentine said.
“That’s better. A smart man knows when his bluff’s called.”
They walked along the old road at the base of the hill, leaving Nail, Ahn-Kha and Xray-Tango’s aides looking across the road at each other. A red oak sprouted from a crack in the pavement, now big enough to offer them some shade in the late-morning sun. A dead apartment complex watched them with empty eyes.
“Just out of curiousity, General, what happened to Hamm?”
Xray-Tango’s eye twitched. “He was”—blink-blink-bliiink —“relieved.”
“Permanently, I take it.”
The general said nothing.
“What are the terms, General?”
“Very generous, Le Sain. Very generous, indeed. These come from Solon and all the governors. Each has allowed their seal on the deal.”
“I can just hear my last words as the Reaper picks me up: ‘The seals are in order.’”
“It’s got my name on it, too, if that means anything to you. It says you and your men can walk away. You can travel wherever you want, with your small arms. Join Southern Command’s lines for all we care. Just get out of New Columbia.”
“That simple, huh?”
“We kept it simple so you could understand it.”
“I need to contact my higher ups.”
“Oh, Colonel,” Xray-Tango said. “I almost forgot. One more gesture of good faith for you. Bring him forward.”
One of Xray-Tango’s aides waved, and two soldiers stood up from the bushes, a slight figure between them. It was Hank. Valentine held his breath as they brought the boy forward, fearing some sort of sadistic display.
The boy had his right hand swathed in bandages. He was thin and haggard.
“What did you do to him?”
“That’s a story, Colonel. He was being questioned, you see. By General Hamm himself.”
Hank looked up at Valentine. He read pride, and something like defiance in the boy’s eyes.
“I didn’t tell them anything, sir,” Hank said.
“No, he didn’t,” Xray-Tango continued. “Hamm took the boy to a charcoal grill. He threatened to cook the boy’s hand there on the grate, smash it down like a hamburger with a spatula. Wanted to know who the spy at his headquarters was, like some kid would know. Your boy here stuck his own hand into the coals. Stared right at Hamm until he passed out. One of the men there puked from the smell.”
“Hank—”
“Take him back with you. Your whole command, in the person of a prepubescent boy. What’ll it be, Le Sain? Do they live or die? Does this brave kid live or die? Up to you.”
Valentine pulled the boy over to his side of the road. “I’ll see you later.”
“You have until sunset. After then, anyone coming off the hill is dead. You’ve already had some deserters. This is your last chance.”
“No, General, it’s yours.”
Xray-Tango stared with his owl eyes. “Pretty pathetic threat.”
“You’re fighting two wars, General, one with me and one with your conscience. The things you’ve seen, the people you’ve helped. You’ve been on the wrong side your whole life. You should have talked to your wife more.”
“Huh?”
“She was a Cat. Same as me. The Lifeweavers train us to assassinate Kurians, Quisling generals, what have you. Maybe she was on an assignment, to kill you maybe, but she saw some hope in you, Scottie.”
Xray-Tango’s eye twitched. This time it didn’t stop after three.
“That is . . . horseshit.”
“Do you suppose they killed her quick, or slow?”
“Shut up. Shut up! I’ve made my offer. You have until sundown.”
“They probably killed her. Maybe she was hung. In New Orleans I used to hear the guys in the wagons talk about a last ride for the women they—”
“Shut your fuckin’ mouth!”
Valentine raised his voice in return. “What kind of sword is hanging over your head, General? How thick’s the thread? You don’t get us off this hill in hip-hop time and they’ll haul you off, I bet. Brass ring or no. I saw one taken once. They jerked the ring right off, along with the owner’s finger—”
Xray-Tango’s eyes widened as he thought through the implications. “Balls,” he howled. Xray-Tango’s left fist exploded toward Valentine’s jaw.
Valentine slipped under it, and just dodged a right cross that he only saw coming at the last split second. Xray-Tango moved fast for a big man. A jab by Valentine bounced off a beefy triceps. Xray-Tango paid it no more attention than a plowhorse did a fly.
Xray-Tango squared on him and the Cat’s vision exploded into dueling rainbows; all the colors of the spectrum and a few Valentine didn’t know existed danced to the ringing in his ears. He brought his forearms up to cover his face and saw a fuzzy apparition between his parallel radii.
Xray-Tango took the opportunity to work Valentine’s stomach, the blows like the kicks of an entire team of mules. Valentine lashed out, but it only left him open for a combination that left him looking at the grass.
He fought for breath, took one and the mists cleared. He heard men shouting as he rolled to his feet.
Xray-Tango advanced, his fists turning tight circles in front of his massive shoulders. “Should have taken your dose and gone down, Valentine.”
Valentine saw men from both sides gathering, emerging from their holes and trenches and piled-rubble redoubts to watch the fight. Even those who stayed behind with their weapons stood atop headlogs and sandbags to see the action.
Valentine tried a c
ombination, but the big arms came up and he just missed losing part of his jaw to Xray-Tango’s riposte.
“Who do you really wanna hit, General?” Valentine said.
Xray-Tango stepped in with lethal speed and tried the uppercut that had started the music still echoing in Valentine’s ears, but the Cat stepped out of the way. The blows came like an artillery barrage, but every time the general’s fist cut nothing but empty air. Valentine sidestepped, backstepped, but there were no ropes to pin him, just an ever-shifting circle of soldiers.
“Shadowboxing, General. You’re shadowboxing,” Valentine gasped between breaths. “Quit fighting me and fight them!”
“They’re fighting for the hill,” someone in the crowd shouted as others came up. “A duel. General Extasy’s winning against the Red Renegade!” An excited murmer went up from the crowd; every soldier’s fantasy seemed to be coming true—the two big bugs fighting, instead of all the little worker ants.
Xray-Tango began to pant. “How are you going to win if you never hit back?”
Valentine bent under another combination, slipped under Xray-Tango’s reach and came up behind the general, and tapped him on the shoulder.
“Did she ever ask you to desert, Scottie?”
“Narrr!” Xray-Tango bellowed, swinging laced fingers as though he held a sword to take Valentine’s head off. Valentine ducked under it and the momentum of his blow carried Xray-Tango off balance. Valentine helped him to the ground with a cross.
The audience roared with excitement. “Southern Command is winning!”
“Extasy’s a champ, you dunks,” a seargeant from the other side shouted.
Xray-Tango rolled to his feet with the same grace that seemed so out of place in his big frame. Suddenly his feet were against Valentine’s chest as he launched himself at Valentine with a two-heel kick, and Valentine felt something snap as both opponents fell backward to the ground.
The general rolled, got a hold of Valentine’s leg and it was a ground fight. Against most other men Xray-Tango’s weight would have ended the contest, but Valentine was a veteran of dozens of Zulu Company wrestling matches, often ending with Valentine facing the old top sergeant, Patel, before Patel won and went on to regimental competition. Valentine got ahold of an elbow and kept Xray-Tango’s face in the dirt so he couldn’t breathe. He forced the arm up, up—
