March in Country (41 page)

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Authors: EE Knight

BOOK: March in Country
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“Not my style, Baron. We’re saying good-bye now, but not the way you think.”
He climbed up onto the flatbed with the glider. It sat on a little platform with a heavy spring. A line was attached just behind the landing wheel tucked into the bulbous canopy.
“You checked out on this thing?”
“I practically invented it,” the Baron said, testing the air with a wetted finger. “We used to screw around with these as cadets in the kettles of Wisconsin. Just tell the engineers that in this light wind we’ve got to be doing over forty, or I might end up in the treetops.”
Valentine tossed a gun belt containing one of the engineer’s .357 revolvers into the Baron’s lap and followed it with a box of shells. “There’s a survival kit and dried food and water under your seat.”
He gave a wave of the arm, and the engineer put the train in motion, taking it back to Missouri, or at least a siding where it would be derailed and have the driving wheels blown off.
Valentine watched the train pick up speed. The train had shrunk to the size of a dime held at arm’s length when he saw the winged dot rise perfectly. It altered course to better catch the light wind and rose.
He felt a little jealous.
After turning a few lazy circles, the glider turned and headed back for its launching platform. For a brief moment, Valentine feared the Baron would end his flight in a suicidal crash dive into the engine, but he simply swooped low over the train to land in the clear of the siding.
The glider came to rest in the crackling rush of grasses passing under its smooth, glossy belly.
Valentine hurried to the cockpit, but the Gray Baron was already climbing out
“You called my bluff, Valentine. Always had this weird feeling we were going to end up working together, from the first I laid eyes on you.”
He handed Valentine the gun belt. “I appreciate the gesture of letting me go, though I’m guessing you know I couldn’t go back to the KZ, and scratching a living in the sticks isn’t my style. Truth is, I love commanding those big brave bastards, and if there aren’t perks that go with the job already, I’ll earn some. How do I swear into this chicken run you call an army, anyway?”
CHAPTER TWELVE
The East Bank, May: Across the river from Saint Louis lies a collection of settlements known as the Tangle.
It’s watched over by a lone Kurian tower, a growth on what had been a bank building in East Saint Louis. The Kurian there is an odd one—weak, reclusive, and of little import to the scoundrels and smugglers across the river from the Grog metropolis. He has but a Reaper or two, rarely glimpsed, no police force, only a few toughs with wellmaintained armored cars to shuttle his mouthpieces and churchmen about. Southern Command’s intelligence service, insofar as they think about him at all, believe “Eastie” is some fallen Kurian exiled to a disputed area chiefly to keep his eye upon the Grogs across the river and maintain some manner of relations with them.
Which is just as well. East Saint Louis marks the farthest north Southern Command’s “Skeeter Fleet” will operate, facilitating the activities of Logistics Commandos buying, begging, borrowing, or stealing items from the industrial centers around the Great Lakes. They have been known to tie up in Eastie’s domain and deal with the shifty traders found on the Illinois side of the Mississippi riverbank.
When the barges full of well-armed Golden Ones, plus the newfound Headring Clan of Gray Grogs, tied up their barges under the shelter of the east half of the old McKinley bridge and occupied an old, gap-roofed warehouse near the river, there was not a great deal Eastie could do about it.
As it turned out, he did, however, report to the rest of the Kurian Order the mysterious flotilla of barges and their odd occupants.
Night still flowed down the Mississippi. The wind died at midnight and the air filled with mosquitoes and other night fliers, clustering around
Number One
’s running lights.
Bats, drawn by the mosquitoes, ventured far out into the river. Valentine, watching the hazy moon through the moist night air, imagined he could hear their cries as they echolocated.
Eating distance, even in the frustratingly zigzagging manner of this great intestinal river, gave him a sense of satisfaction. Watching the riverbanks slip by without the effort of crashing through brush and bramble, with food and water a couple of steps away and a blanket and pillow that would allow him to both sleep and cover mileage brought back memories of the old
Thunderbolt
and its endless coastline patrols. Back then he’d marveled at the ease of water travel as well.
Even the deceptively empty banks of the river comforted. The river, running near wild here, had pushed all but transient fishers, trappers, and the river traffic back. Of course, the occasional shed showed so many bullet holes from River Patrol machine guns it looked as though the spots were part of a paint job.
Thumps, calls, clanks, and hammering noises from the barges travelled across the gentle river water.
“What are them Groggies up to?” an idling River Rat wondered.
“Making themselves bunks, I expect,” his mate on watch said, watching the barges with the boat’s sole pair of binoculars. Their strap had its own flotation strip, and someone had added some extra rubber cushioning to the housing. Optics were hard to replace.
The convoy travelled in two parts.
Cottonmouth
were the boats exploring where the barges were heading.
Exodus
were the barges themselves, with the support of the armored firefighting tug. Then
Rattler
covered the convoy from upriver, a mere two boats and the slowest ones adapted for riverine fighting.
Valentine was tempted to ask for the glasses, but he was nothing more than a glorified passenger in
Number One
. Besides, if he was feeling too relaxed and lazy to dig around in his dunnage for his own glasses, it couldn’t be that important.
He decided to make conversation. His mind kept drifting to Snake Arms, and those hard muscles under that deceptively soft flesh.
“Back in the Wolves,” Valentine said, “when I was trying to convince Captain Patel that I knew my ass from a knothole, I learned a saying, ‘If a Wolf doesn’t have it, he makes it. If he can’t make it, he captures it. If he can’t capture it, he’d does without.’ ”
They all watched the tug begin another careful turn, its paired barges in front reminding Valentine of a cargo wagon with an eight-horse team, following in the wake of the pilot boat.
If only we’d grabbed another tug or two. We’d be able to make better speed. Shorter cargo barges would mean easier turns.
Still, the amount of space they’d covered in a single night’s run was nothing short of astonishing—a steady five miles an hour thanks to the smaller boats feeling their way forward. They’d be north of Saint Louis sometime before noon.
“That’s the worry, Valentine,” Captain Coalfield said. Like most men who spent their lives on water, he was darkly tanned and seamed. Rather wispy hair gave away his years—his body certainly didn’t. Coalfield was all muscle. “There’s a River Patrol station at the mouth of the Illinois River. We got by it northbound by tying together, dousing all our lights and using trolling motors on all but one boat in a dark run. Unless they’re all drunk as Milwaukee brewers, these barges aren’t getting past without the River Patrol having something to say about it.”
According to intelligence, there were no heavy cannon at Alton. Mortars, machine guns, and light cannon protected the base itself from potential Grog raids, but trained artillerymen and their pieces were needed at other borders of the Kurian Zones. The River Patrol relied on their fast, hard-hitting boats to command the Mississippi.
“You don’t need much to take out Grog canoes and flatboats,” Coalfield’s executive officer said when briefing Valentine on Alton.
Captain Coalfield shifted his grip again.
He would have made a bad poker player, Valentine decided. There were all kinds of “tells” that he was uncertain.
“We’ve never made the run past the mouth of the Illinois River with such a big flotilla before,” Coalfield said.
“That may be to our advantage,” Valentine said. “Three big barges, loaded, an escort of combat vessels—it’s coming from the wrong direction for anything Southern Command would do.”
“Could be they were alerted by riverbank spies.”
“I’ve been up that riverbank as a lieutenant. There are a few gangs of headhunters, but they have to watch themselves. The Grogs raid across the river into the bluffs all the time. There’s nothing worth guarding on that bank until you get to the big farms in the flats.”
Weather came to the rescue of their doubts. As they approached Alton, thunder began to crackle. A line of fast-moving storms boiled up from the south, and soon rain turned the boat into a one vast drum.
“Better go down in the cabin. Lightning on the river can be dangerous,” Coalfield said.
Morse lamps were flashing back and forth between the barges and the escorts.
Hair running with water, Valentine complied, as Coalfield made a note on a plastic-covered clipboard next to the ship’s wheel. “We’re all reducing speed,” Carlson told the man at the wheel. “Tighten up on the pilot boat.”
Valentine, stripping off his shirt in the cramped, food-stuffed cabin, had a strange flash of Frat Carlson and Stockard sheltering in an old farm shed. If they were being tracked, the bad weather would put the pursuers off, and hopefully buy them time to rest for the remainder of the overland trip.
Valentine always thought of Saint Louis as “the Green City.”
He’d seen two great ruins in his life: Chicago’s downtown and Saint Louis. The buildings of Chicago’s downtown, while sporting tufts of green here and there, never became too overgrown, mostly because the unfortunates dumped there cultivated every bit of useful soil. Potatoes and onions grew in the old boxes that had held trees; tomatoes grew from old sinks propped up in glassless windows.
Saint Louis could not have been more different. The Grogs did not utilize the higher floors of the city’s great structures, except for thrill-seeking youths looking for risky reaches to prove themselves. They liked to see vines and bushes clinging to the sides of concrete and glassless windows bearded by kudzu and creepers. The growth sheltered insects, birds ate the insects, and hawks ate the birds. The Grogs, in turn, captured and trained the hawks to hunt waterfowl.

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