Valentine's Rising (45 page)

Valentine tried a combination, 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—

The arm suddenly gave way with horrid ease. Valentine sprang to his feet, let the general up.

“You're done,” Valentine said.

“So are you,” Xray-Tango answered. “We're going to roll up your men like—”

Valentine raised his voice toward the assembled Quisling soldiery. “The general lost. You're to retreat west, home to Texas or Oklahoma.”

Dozens of faces suddenly brightened. An end.

“No!” Xray-Tango roared. “That wasn't what this was about.”

“He's trying to back out of it,” Valentine shouted over his shoulder to his soldiers. It was all lies; his men deserved more than lies, but if he could take the heart out of the Quislings, make them feel that their lives were being sacrificed after the general's loss of a duel—

“Back to your posts. Back to your posts. Open fire on this rabble,” Xray-Tango shouted.

“Welshing Quisling!” a Razor shouted. Boos broke out on both sides.

“Back up the hill, men,” Valentine said. “He lost and he's not squaring up!”

The two groups of men parted like magnets pressed positive to positive. Two floods of dirty soldiery retreated in opposite directions.

Valentine carried Hank up the hill himself.

 

Responsibility. Valentine had dreamed, on his long trip back across Texas, of being able to give up the burden, turn his command over to higher ranks. Let someone else make the decisions for a while, and lie awake nights because of the consequences. This was a decision he couldn't make.

He tried to consult higher authority. He had raised Southern Command on the radio, and got a colonel in Intelligence Operations who told him that “as the officer commanding locally, you're better able to evaluate the situation and reconcile your orders to keep as many as you can of the enemy tied down as long as possible, denying traffic across the enemy's road, river and rail network, rather than someone who had to be apprised of the situation over the radio.”

“Thanks for nothing,” he replied, fighting the urge to curse. He didn't want the techs in the radio room telling the others at breakfast that he'd lost it.

The anger at his superior officer was surpassed only by that with himself. He slammed the microphone down and retreated to his room. All over the camp, the story was spreading that Valentine and Xray-Tango had fought for New Columbia. Valentine had won, but the Quislings wouldn't leave. It made the men fighting mad, all the more determined to stay and win.

But Valentine lay in his bunk, feeling like a fraud.

The day's respite gave him a chance to gather the men in the open, in the afternoon sunshine. He gathered them at the grave site, where the fifty-three, now swollen to triple the original number, rested under their tiny hand-sewn flag. Valentine took in the faces. They reclined, his handful of Jamaican
Thunderbolt
marines, prisoners, Southern Command Guards, Bears, officers, NCOs and men, not a mass of uniforms, but a collage of faces. Faces he knew and trusted, under their dirt and bug bites. Only one or two had regrown the beards and mustaches they'd lost in the woods outside Bullfrog's phony station. Most had kept themselves as shorn as new recruits or in short, spiky hair—with showers a rarity, fleas, ticks and lice had multiplied.

He met the gaze of Tamsey, a corporal who'd shown him pictures of sixteen sisters. The boy had seen his mother die giving birth to his sixth sister, then his father remarried a woman with daughters of her own and jointly they produced more, and he knew every detail of each of their marriages. Next to him was a private named Gos, so nearsighted that he was almost blind, but an expert at feeding belts into a machine gun overlooking the switchback road on the southeast side of the hill. Gos could whistle any popular tune you could care to name, pitch-perfect. Amy-Jo Santoro, the heroine of the Reaper fight in the hospital, turned out to be an insomniac who sewed at night. She'd fix anyone's uniform, provided they gave it to her clean of dirt and critters; she had a horror of lice. There was Tish Isroelit, reputedly the Razors' best sniper, who'd stalked and then managed to bring down a Quisling colonel at dusk by the glow of his after-dinner cigar, shooting him through a closed window. She kept score by adding beads—Valentine had forgotten the exact ranking system, but it was color-coded—to braids in her chestnut hair. Sitting crossed-legged behind her was Denton Tope, a combat engineer whom everyone called “the Snake.” Though a big man when he stood, he could press himself so flat to the ground one would swear his bones were made of rubber, useful for his trips out in the dark and wet to replace mines and booby traps at the base of the hill. He was always borrowing powerful binoculars at night to try to spot satellites among the stars. Dozens of other mini-stories, sagas that had briefly joined with his own and were likely to end on the churned-up hill, waited for him to speak.

“This is the deal,” Valentine began. “There wasn't a duel for the hill, that was a private fight. Here's the truth: General Xray-Tango has given us until sundown to walk off this pile on our own. He'll escort us, with our rifles, anywhere we want. Hot Springs. Up north to Branson, maybe; see a show.

“Or we can stay here. Let them waste their time and bullets killing all of us, instead of Southern Command soldiers liberating towns and villages full of your relatives. Make sure there are a few less of them at the end of it all. At the end of us.”

“So it's a life-or-death decision. How many of you know what the phrase ‘Remember the Alamo' means?”

Hands went up all across the command. His command.

“I see a few who aren't familiar with it. It refers to a battle fought two hundred and fifty years ago, or thereabouts. Some Texicans under a colonel named Travis were holding out against a general named Santa Anna at a little abandoned mission station on the Rio Grande. They were outnumbered, surrounded, but they fought anyway, gave a man named Sam Houston time to organize his own counterattack. It became a battle cry for an entire war.

“How many of you remember Goliad?” No hands this time. “I'm not surprised. They were also a group of men in that same revolt against Santa Anna. They didn't fight like the men at the Alamo. They surrendered. Santa Anna executed every one of them.

“I'm not saying we'll be remembered, I'm not saying we'll be forgotten. What we do up here may have an effect on the future. Whether that future remembers us or not . . . it's not for me to say. I'll tell you another thing about the Alamo. Each of those men made a personal decision to be there. Some say they stepped across a line in the sand.

“I'm not doing anything that dramatic. Any of you who want to leave can get up and walk down that hill. I'm staying, and Ahn-Kha's staying. Each of the rest of you have a decision to make. You have until sundown to get out of town, according to Xray-Tango. He's going to kill the rest of us. Well, he's going to try.

“I'm going down to the radio lounge. The smart thing to do is run. It may not be the right thing to do, but it's the smart thing. The dummies can join me for a drink. We need to be back in the line at sundown. I expect the Crocodile will start firing again.”

 

Valentine used his knife to cut open a carton marked “snakebite serum,” from the medical quarters. Mantilla had given him the case that night he'd passed most of the Quickwood on to Southern Command. He extracted a bottle of bourbon and broke the seal on the paper screwtop. He sniffed the amber contents. He flipped up two shot glasses on the bar.

“One drink for you, Colonel Travis, and one for me.”

Travis didn't seem to want his, but Valentine left it there for him anyway. Ahn-Kha stood in the door.

“Good news,” Ahn-Kha said. Nothing more. The Grog turned and went upstairs.

Valentine walked out the oversized doors, still on their hinges despite the shellfire. The soldiers stood in ranks, not neat, lines not dressed, and nothing but a proud expression was uniform, Post, Styachowski and Beck to the front.

“Thank you, men,” he said, blinking back tears. “How many smart ones were there?”

“Nineteen,” Styachowski reported. “Two were wounded. None of them women; they all wanted to stay.”

Valentine saw a bright bandanna in the back.

“Couldn't get anyone to carry you out, Narcisse?”

“Didn't want to run again,” she called. “Haven't had much luck with that; only have one arm left, sir.”

Dr. Brough appeared with the case of bourbon. “Company commanders, to me. We've got some bottles to distribute.”

“Okay, you dummies,” Post said. “Back to business. Let's disperse, no point in getting killed all at once.”

Valentine pulled the youngest member of his command aside as they dispersed.

“Hank, you sure you're fit to rejoin your outfit?” Valentine asked.

“Yes, sir.”

Valentine disagreed. Hank looked sick.

“How's the hand?” Valentine said through gritted teeth. His nose picked up a faint, sweet smell from Hank's bandaged hand.

“Not so bad.”

“Report to the doctor. If she says you're okay, you can get back to Captain Styachowski. She needs quick feet at the battery.”

Hank turned away, dejected. Valentine whistled, and the boy turned.

“Hank, of all the men who stayed up here tonight, I'm proudest to have you with me.”

 

The Crocodile opened up on them again as soon as the sun disappeared. The Grogs upped their rate of fire to three shells an hour, every hour. Their firing was wild at night, though the air-cutting shrieks and earth-churning impacts made sleep impossible. When dawn returned they began reducing Solon's Residence to rubble.

The men began to go as mad as Max the German shepherd.

One snuck out of his dugout at dawn and was spotted by an observer standing atop a heap of rubble, arms outstretched as though welcoming a lover's embrace as the sun came up in thunder.

Later they found a boot, Post reported, his incipient beard now going gray as well.

Sergeants had to put down furious brawls over nothing. The precise timing of the shells tightened everyone's nerves into violin strings as they waited for the next howl and explosion, leaving flung dirt floating like a cloud atop Big Rock Hill.

Valentine was coming up the stairs from the generator floor, where he'd been checking fuel feeds damaged by the shelling, and passed Styachowski in the stairwell when the 15:20 struck, burying its nose in the ground deep—and near—enough to cause a collapse at the floor above. Valentine threw himself at Styachowski, pushing them both into a notch under the stairs—unnecessarily as it turned out—and the lights flickered and died just as he smelled her hair and the feminine musk coming up from her collar.

They scooted up against an intact wall, Valentine covering his head as well as he could, and he felt a wave of dust hit him in the dark.

“You okay?” he asked, hearing rubble fall somewhere up the stairs. It sounded strangely far-off and muffled.

They sat there as the air settled. Valentine thought he heard a shout from above, but there wasn't a hint of light.

“I'll be dead soon, I think. It works on the mind. I'm smelling food, growing plants, coffee being warmed up. Listening to everyone.”