Val thrust the entire head of his pike into the shell and did an impressive imitation of a man scrambling a barrel full of eggs. The fingers made it hop one final time before curling up tight—one caught Scour’s foot and he howled.
“That ought to do it,” Valentine said, lost in the process of extracting his pick from the mess in the shell.
Duvalier dropped to the ground, drew her butterfly knife and went to work on the clinging fingers. They’d torn through the Bear’s boot and reduced his foot to pulp from the heel forward.
It would be a long, painful limp home for the Bear.
“So, are we scrubbed?” Duvalier asked.
“Scour’s the handle, Cat,” Scour said through gritted teeth.
“Yeah, we’re scrubbed,” Valentine said. “The Kurians will slip away.” Valentine was shaping a branch with a good, solid ninety-degree spur into a crutch for the Bear.
“Why do they want Kentucky so much, Val? You’re the big staff college strategist.”
“I was court-martialed before I could attend a single class,” Valentine said flatly. He’d never been quite the same since, Duvalier noted. He’d risked everything, for so little reward, only to have his own command turn on him to score a few crap political points with some Kansas Quislings who’d undoubtedly done worse than Valentine ever had before they learned to shave… .
A good man, more or less ruined by his own people. Who needs Kurians when you have a few enemies in your own high command?
“I know you have all of Seng’s old workbooks and so on. I’ve seen you up late studying. So tell me. They weren’t doing much of anything with it before. Raising low-grade meat and hog feed. You can feed a hundred times as many with the Rio Grande valley, and they hardly put up a fight over that. It’s not people, either. The legworm clans never offered up lives, and even if you took all of them it wouldn’t be much more than a small city’s worth.”
Valentine handed the crude crutch to Scour. “I used to think it was because Kentucky’s a schwerpunkt—centrally located. Key ground. You can hit the Ordnance, the East Coast, or Nashville and the Georgia Control using it as a base. But we haven’t done any of those things, or begun to lay the foundation for doing them, and with all the spies they probably have crossing the bluegrass, they know it. Has to be something else.”
“So they know something about Kentucky we don’t.”
“That’s my conclusion,” Valentine said.
“This is all very interesting,” she said, “but it’s not getting us a step closer to either Kentucky or that hotel.”
“You think something’s still to be gained?” Scour said.
“Only if we move quickly, while they’re excited with the column on the run,” Duvalier said.
“I hate running with my tail between my legs,” Valentine said.
“We could still get at them. It might be easier than ever now,” Duvalier suggested. “They’re going to have every man they can trust with a gun after our column, either on them or moving to cut them off from the Ohio. It’s a big hotel, there, and I know a way a small team could still get in. We need a couple of Wolves who can drive a truck and a Bear team.”
“They wouldn’t expect us, not with us on the run,” Scour said. “How about the old bringing-in-wounded-prisoners trick?”
“No,” Valentine said. “Nothing out of the routine. Ali, you’ve been watching the hotel. What’s possible, keeping in the ordinary?”
“It’s a big building,” Duvalier said. “Lot of mouths. Lot of laundry and garbage.”
Valentine stood silent for a moment. Then his face went poker-hand blank, a sure sign to Duvalier that something was in the offing. “We need a couple of teams of Bears who don’t mind getting a little stinky,” Valentine said.
“Garbage would be an improvement on some of those guys,” Duvalier muttered under her breath, making sure her head was turned away from Scour even so. “Ears like a wolf” was a twenty-first-century aphorism, after all.
By dawn they were in a garbage truck turning off the road and crossing the rail stop that had once, and now again, shuttled passengers to the great resorts.
“Garbage truck” was, of course, a polite term for it. It was, in fact, a much-overhauled farm tractor pulling a big, multiwheeled flatbed that had been converted into a sort of a vast wagon. The workers could drop any of the sides or the back to shovel on or shovel off garbage. Or just tip it over.
Duvalier rode high on the back, balancing on one corner with the aid of a little loop of knotted line, wearing what the Bears called her “scalp.” One of the garbage workers had been a stocky female with short brown hair hanging out of her hat. Duvalier decided she must have long ago given up on the appearance of her hair, or it would have been in some kind of protective bandanna under her cap. As it was, she knife-cut it off the prisoner when the Wolves presented the garbage haulers and taped it in her hair after the clothing strip. She didn’t quite fill the bulky woman’s overall, but a towel doubled and draped across her shoulders gave her the appearance of more heft. Her garrison belt with its assorted components filled out the waistline nicely.
As for the men in the farm tractor, it had a cracked-up vintage windshield polarized against the glare of the sun. Between the tinting, ample dirt, tiny cracks, and accumulations of grease that might have something to do with the loads it hauled, it was a wonder Valentine and the other Bear in the cab could see to drive, never mind being recognized.
Two Bear teams, twenty Bears in all, rode in the garbage. They’d rigged camouflage netting above themselves and tossed a few of the larger, lighter pieces of garbage onto the netting, allowing for a more comfortable, but still smelly, ride underneath. Most of them sat or knelt or squatted on pieces of cardboard or trash can liners.
If they were stopped and searched, the poor bastard Indiana Patrol or Ordnance Guard would be in for a dreadful surprise, she thought. With luck they’d be taken prisoner quietly; they were now near enough for the outer hotel guards to hear shooting.