by E. E. Knight
The radio room was buried by a direct hit, and Jimenez with it. The hospital had to go underground when a near miss blew down its southern wall. Beck died on the third day, torn to shreds as he turned the knocked-down remnants of Solon’s Residence into a final series of trenches and fire lanes. Styachowski took over for him, pulling back what was left of her mortars and placing them in a tight ring of dug-out basements, along with a few shells they were harboring for the final assault.
They knew it was coming when the Crocodile’s fire stopped. Thirty minutes went by, and the men gathered at their firing posts. An hour went by, and they began to transfer wounded.
The single remaining pack radio, kept operating by Post, crackled to life. For the past two days it had been rigged to the generator recovered from the kitchens. Post whistled and shouted for Valentine across the ruins. He hopped over a fallen Doric column, a piece of décor Solon fancied, and climbed down the wooden ladder to Post’s dugout. A shell or two pursued him. Just because the Crocodile was silent didn’t mean the mortars on Pulaski Heights quit firing.
“Urgent call for you, sir,” Post said. “Scanner picked it up.”
“Le Sain? Are you there, Le Sain?” the radio crackled, on Southern Command’s frequency.
“Go ahead; not reading you very well.”
“It’s a field radio.” Valentine heard distant gunfire over the speaker. “It’s me, Colonel. The Shadowboxer.”
“Go ahead, General. Another surrender demand?”
“It’s Scottie to you, Knox. Or whatever. I’m the one that surrendered, using your metaphor. I took a few members of my staff on board the Crocodile. We wanted to see the gun in action, you see. For some reason the Grogs didn’t think it was odd that I had a submachine gun with me. I shot the crew and pulled out a hand grenade. Grogs sure can run when they use all their limbs.” He laughed, and it occurred to Valentine that he’d never heard Xray-Tango’s laugh before. “Now I’m sitting between the magazine door and a shell. There’s a dead Grog loader propping it open. This shell’s a monster: it’s got to be a fourteen-inch cannon. My driver and a couple of members of my staff are making their way around the other side of the gun through the woods. The Grogs are running for dear life. Regular Cat trick, isn’t it? Infiltrate, assassinate. All that’s left is the sabotage. I’ve got a grenade bundle in my lap right now.”
“Scottie, I—” Valentine began. Post had an earpiece in his ear and a confused look on his face.
“Going to have to cut this short, Colonel.” Valentine heard automatic fire. “My driver almost has an angle on me. Apologies to St. Louis, looks like they aren’t getting their gun back. You know what the best part is, Le Sain?”
“What’s that?”
“Since I started dreaming up this plan night before last, my face hasn’t twitched once. God, what a relief, it’s wonderful. Over and out.”
Something lit up the sky to the east and Valentine felt the ground shudder. He counted twenty-two seconds. Then it came, a long, dull boom. Valentine went back up the ladder, and saw the top of a mushroom cloud climbing to the clouds, white flecked with gray at the edges. He watched it rise and spread.
Until the tears came.
The shells stopped, but not the attack. On the thirty-fifth day of the siege they came up the north face, like the wind behind a rain of mortar shells. They came up the east ridge; they came up the switchback. They came up everywhere but the quarry cliff.
The Beck Line collapsed.
Valentine’s men tumbled backward toward the Residence. What was left of the gun crews dragged the one remaing gun back to Solon’s prospective swimming pool and set it up there.
Even the headquarters staff turned out to stanch the attack. Valentine watched it all from a tangle of reinforced concrete, a conical mound of debris looking out over the hilltop beside what was left of Solon’s Residence.
“Officer by the switchback road,” Valentine said, looking through some field glasses. He and Ahn-Kha occupied one of the higher heaps of rubble. Ahn-Kha swiveled his Grog gun. His ears leveled and he fired, kicking up concrete dust.
“They’ll zero that,” Valentine said. “Let’s move.”
They slid off the mound and into the interbuilding trenches. Rats, the only animals that didn’t mind shellfire, disappeared into hidey-holes as they picked their way to the headquarters basement.
It still had a roof of sorts on it, three stories of collapsed structural skeleton. Among the cases of food and ammunition, Brough patched up wounds and extracted shrapnel with the help of her remaining medics. Bugs crawled in cut-off clothing, stiff with weeks’ worth of sweat and dirt.
Brough didn’t even look at the worst cases. After triage, performed by Narcisse, the worst cases were sent to the next basement over, which was only partially covered. There a few of the stronger-stomached women replaced bandages and murmured lies about recovery. That the men called the passageway to the next basement the “death hole” showed the general opinion of a sufferer’s chances within.
Styachowski and Post bodily shoved the men into positions in the final series of trenches as the stream from the crestline turned into a trickle. They moved dully, like sleep-walkers, and collapsed on top of their rifles and slept as soon as they were told to stop moving. Soon, what was left of his command had to keep their heads down not just from mortar fire, but from machine-gun fire that swept the heaps of ruins.
Valentine looked around the last redoubt. In a year it would be a weed bed; in five these mounds would be covered by brush and saplings. He wondered if future generations would wander the little hummocks and try to pick out the final line, where the Razorbacks were exterminated in their little, interconnected holes like an infestation of vermin.
Hank was in the death hole. His burns had turned septic despite being dusted with sulfa powder, and Brough was out of antibiotics. The boy lay on the blankets someone else had died in, waiting his turn, keeping the tears out of his eyes.
“We sure stuck a wrench in their gears, didn’t we?” Hank asked, when Valentine sat for a visit.
“With your help,” Valentine said. “Wherever your parents are, they’re proud of you.”
“You can be honest with me, Major. They’re dead; they have been since that night. You can tell me the truth, can’t you? I’m tough enough to take it.”
“You’re tough enough.”
Hank waited.
“They’re dead, Hank. I went after them, and I killed them with the rest of the Quislings. They were telling about the Quickwood. About the ruse.”
“My fault, sir,” Hank said.
Valentine had to harden his ears to make out the tiny voice. “No.”
“It is,” Hank insisted. “I heard them talking after the baby—after you told us she was dead. ‘We won’t be sacrificed, ’ Pa said, and they started speaking with their heads together. I should have told you or Ahn-Kha or Mr. Post—but I didn’t. Just Mister M’Daw and then it was too . . .” The boy faded back into sleep, like a child who has fought to stay awake until the end of an oft-repeated story but lost.
Valentine knew from fifteen years of regret what sort of abyss yawned before the boy. Agony rose and washed through him along with a gorge he fought to keep down, all the pent-up emotional muck of his losses breaking in his roaring ears and wet eyes. Maybe if he’d been tending to his ax and the kindling as was his duty that day, instead of corn collecting, he would have warned Mom of the trucks coming up the road to the house; she would have grabbed his sister and baby brother and gotten his father from the lakeshore—
Regret might haunt Hank, grind the child down, or drive him to God-knows-which bitter lengths to compensate for an imagined fault. Valentine couldn’t allow that to happen to the boy—or man, rather. If anyone on the hill exhibited the manly virtues Valentine had listed when he sent Hank off to the guns, it was the septic boy in the cot.
Being able to forgive himself was a cause as lost as the Razors’.
There was still p
lenty of hot cocoa; it came in tins with little cups inside so all that was needed was a glass and hot water. He, Ahn-Kha, Post, Styachowski, Nail, Brough and Hanson met one final time. Their conference room was filled with wounded, so they gathered in the last artillery magazine. A few dozen mortar rounds stood, interspersed with sandbags, where once there had been hundreds stacked to the ceiling.
“You know what’s always pissed me off about this operation?” Valentine asked.
“Your haircut?” Post asked. The officers had enough energy left to laugh.
“That railroad bridge. We never were able to bring it down.”
“Isn’t that in the ‘too late to worry’ file?” Nail asked.
“Not necessarily. If we get the men up and moving, we could punch through. Some of us would make it to the bridge. I doubt they’ve got reserves massed everywhere in case of a counterattack. Once we got off the hill it’s only a mile.”
“I’ll go with you, my David,” Ahn-Kha said. “I don’t want to die like my father, in a burned-out hole.”
“What happened to tying down as many troops as possible as long as possible?”
“Aren’t you all sick of this?” Valentine said. “The dirt, the death? Sitting here and taking it?”
Styachowski and Nail exchanged looks. “If we do it, I imagine you’ll need Lieutenant Nail.”
“Of course I’d need him.”
“Then I can’t try my plan to save Hank,” Dr. Brough said.
“What’s that?”
“The boy, the one with the gangrenous arm. I’ve been curious about the resiliency of the Bears. I put some of Lieutenant Nail’s blood in a dish with a bacterial culture. It killed it, like his blood was full of chlorine. I thought I’d try a transfusion; he and the boy have the same blood type. But it would take time for him to recover.”
“You may not have that, Doctor. They’ll attack again. I don’t believe we’re in any kind of shape to hold them off.”
“Hank can’t hold off the gangrene. It’s system-wide.”
Valentine finished his cocoa. “Nail, would you turn over your command to Styachowski? She’s always wanted to be a Bear.”
Nail tried walking on his wounded, mangled leg. He was still limping.
“I hate to miss out on a fight if my Bears are involved.”
“I’ll bring them back to you, if I can,” Styachowski said.
The transfusion took place within the hour. It was done under fire; the Quislings launched a probing attack to see what sort of defenses the defenders still had. It left Nail drained, and after a tiny meal—by Bear standards—he drifted off to sleep.
As it turned out, they weren’t able to try Valentine’s plan that night anyway. The day’s clouds dissolved and it was a clear night for the half moon. They’d be spotted on the river too easily. Valentine looked down at the bridge, and saw the white Kurian Tower beyond, shining under its spotlights like a slice of the moon fallen to earth.
The Quislings cleared the roads and brought armored cars up the hill. They prowled the edges of the ruins like hungry cats at rat holes, shooting at anything that moved. Styachowski and the Bears went out and buried what was left of the mortar shells where they had driven before. The next day they managed to blow the wheels off of one. It sat there, looking like a broken toy in a rubble-filled sandbox.
Then came the quiet dawn. The harassing fire slacked off, and the men were able to dash from hiding hole to hiding hole without anything more than a sniper bullet or two zinging past. Valentine was watching Hank sleep. He felt strangely relaxed. Perhaps it was because of the color in Hank’s cheeks and his deep, easy breaths. The boy was on the mend. He worked out a final plan. His last throw of the dice, in the strange table run that had begun with Boxcars.
He talked it over with Ahn-Kha, Nail and Styachowski at the nightly meal. Post had been briefed early and would assume command of what was left of the Razors—mostly a noisome aggregation of wounded sheltering in dugouts and the basements of Solon’s headquarters.
“It’s worth a try,” Nail said, looking at the weird, question-mark-shaped assault path Valentine had mapped out. He had a little of his energy back. “They won’t be expecting it, after all this time, with them so close.”
“It could take the heart out of them. Even more than the loss of Xray-Tango,” Ahn-Kha said. The Golden One’s ears drooped unhappily. He’d been tasked with his supporting role.
“The only heart I’m after is in that tower,” Valentine said.
Nail joined them despite his weak state. Valentine wanted to leave him and Styachowski both back at the camp, but they presented a strangely united front, and he couldn’t argue with both.
Their chosen path to the river was down the cliff face above the quarry. Valentine had only rappelled once, long ago, in an exercise as a trainee. Valentine, Ahn-Kha and the Bears crept out of the trenches and moved west, where they fixed ropes to tree stumps.
“I would like to come on this, my David,” Ahn-Kha said.
“Sorry. I need your muscles to haul us back up this rock,” Valentine said. “Don’t stay here and die. If you get overrun, try for the swampy ground to the north. Go back to your people.”
Ahn-Kha looked over his shoulder at the shattered walls and missing roofs. “My only people are here, now. I will wait. Unless a bullet finds me, I will wait here, yes, even through another winter and another like that.”
Valentine gripped arms with his old ally. “I’ll be back sooner than that.” He looped a line through a ring on a harness improvised from an AOT backpack, and dropped over the edge.
Naturally, he burned his hands.
The Bears loaded their gear onto an inflatable raft as Valentine applied antiseptic and dressings to his hands. The raft was a green thing that rose at each end like a sliced quarter of melon. A box containing four of them had been on the first train brought to Big Rock Hill. With a little luck and a little more dark, they might be able carry the Bears to the other side without being observed.
They waited by the riverbank as they half inflated the boat. It only needed to carry their gear, and the lower its profile the better. A warm breeze blew down the river for a change. Summer was coming on, and the frogs were welcoming it with creaky voices. Bats emerged from their riverside lairs in the quarry and hunted mosquitoes with meeping calls Valentine’s hard ears could just pick out.
Valentine and the men were nervous. Even Rain, who had started a second set of slanted brownish scars on his left arm, shifted position and mumbled to himself constantly.
The Bears huddled together as they worked the little bellows that inflated the raft, keeping watch for patrols at the riverbank. The AOT had lost men on this side of the hill to snipers and had given up trying to occupy the narrow strip of ground between the cliff face and the river, but they could never be sure there weren’t dogs loosed at night.
“What’s going red like?” Valentine asked. He’d heard various stories, including one from ex-Bear Tank Bourne, but he was curious if different men felt it differently.
“You can’t control it too well,” Red said, patting the belt-fed gun on his lap. “All that has to happen is a gunshot and over I go. You get all hot and excited, like you’ve just won a race or something. Everything seems kind of distant and separated from you, but you have perspective and everything, so when you chuck a grenade it lands where you want it, not a mile away. Pain just makes you hotter and ready to fight more. It wears off after everything’s all over, but once in a while Bears drop over afterward and don’t wake up. Their hearts burst.”
“You feel like you can run, or jump, or climb forever,” Hack put in. “Sometimes you have to scream just to give it all somewhere to go. Here’s something they don’t talk about at the bar, though. Most Bears piss themselves over the course of it. Every single red nick I’ve got on my arm means I’ve come back with a pantload of shit.”
Nail nodded. “I always go into action with an extra diaper under my pants. The guys in Force Apach
e wear kilts—actually, more like flaps—that’s another solution.”
“Glad I’m a Cat,” Valentine said. “What about you, Styachowski, what do you want for a handle?”
Styachowski looked up from where she sat, knees hugged to her chest, one hand wrapped with a leather wrist guard for her archery. “I’d like to be named by my team.”
“How about ‘Guns’?” Nail asked. “From the cannon. Plus, she’s got the arms for it.”
Styachowski looked down, flexed her muscles. “Let’s wait until after tonight.”
The chill of the Arkansas River’s current was enough to geld the seven men. The river flowed differently every few yards, it seemed; for a few minutes they had to kick hard to keep from being pushed downriver too far, then they’d hit a pool of slack water in the lee of some sandbar. They swam like pallbearers with a floating casket, four to each side. They made for a spot halfway between the Pulaski Heights and the bridge, near the place where Styachowski had been buried by the fallen sandbags the day the river ran mad.
When their feet struck muddy bottom again, they halted, and Valentine went up the bank for a scout. He saw that the rail bridge was lined with sandbags, thick with men and weapons points. Cable was strung about ten yards upstream, festooned with razor wire and looking as though there were more lines underwater, barring access to the bridge pilings. The boats would never make it through without a good deal of work with bolt cutters and acetylene torches.
But his Bears were on the enemy side of the river. In the distance, the concrete tower of the Kurians stood like a white tomb in the rubble-strewn grave of Little Rock.
Each pair of Bear eyes fixed on it like lampreys. Any chance at a Kurian was enough to heat their blood. He took the team up for a look.
He wished his blood could run hot like the Bears’; the spring night was no longer as warm as it had been when they were dry on the other side of the river. The water beaded on his oiled skin. The greasy coating served two purposes; it helped him resist the water and darkened his face and torso. His legs protruded out of camp shorts. He slipped some old black training shoes, preserved dry in the rubber boat, over his feet and put on a combat vest and his gunbelt, then picked up a cut-down Kalashnikov and an ammunition harness. He would have preferred the comforting bluntness of his PPD, but it was out of 9mm Mauser and the gunsmith didn’t have the right molds for reloads. Finally he put his snakeskin bandolier of Quickwood stabbers over his arm and checked his bag for the presence of a battered old dinner bell that had, until a day ago, served as a Reaper alarm in one of the trenches.
