Two more Grogs ran up to the bonfire, each with a huge kettledrum on its back. They were beautifully fashioned, carved so the different woods and metals looked as though they'd grown together. A third Grog with a pair of club-size drumsticks began to beat out a rapid-fire tattoo.
The pounding rhythm gave Valentine a welcome primal thrill, heating the cold sour ache in his belly. The drumming intensified until he felt the earth shake with the Golden Ones' stamps. Even the muzzle flashes from the distant watchtowers paused while the drums boomed. Then it slowed to a steady, ominous beat.
The sound galvanized the Grogs. Without a word, they knelt and rapped their weapons against the pavement, ears pointed up and out like the horns on a Viking's helmet. The drumbeat intensified, and its tempo increased as did the clatter of rifle butts hitting concrete. As a people, they tilted their heads back and began to bellow and howl to the stars.
Valentine took in the crescendo and he trembled for their enemies.
The Cave: Strategic Air Command's old headquarters at OjfuttAir Force Base has seen better, and worse, days. Better when it was a buzzing hive of planes and blue uniforms, jet exhaust in the air, and the camaraderie of men who know that they're the best in the world at what they do. Worse in the summer of '22, when the nukes came, thundering blossoms of thermonuclear heat that reshaped the landscape. They turned sand to glass and flattened anything that wasn't built to bunker specifications in a hurricane of wind, pushing first out from the blast and then rushing back toward the mushroom clouds of the MIRV warheads.
Now some of the great hangars have been rebuilt, SAC's old underground catacombs reoccupied. A new general has come, with men in strange uniforms; the swastika flag flies, its spiderish black-and-white design stark and forbidding against the blue of Omaha's skies.
Thirty-six hours after the bonfires died, Valentine, Ahn-Kha, and a strong young Grog named Khiz-Mem watched the shadows lengthen across the old base south of Bellevue.
Ahn-Kha selected Khiz-Mem after the flame-lit night in the ghetto.
Valentine remembered the rest of the revolt as little but a confused series of impressions. The Twisted Cross barracks aflame. Screams of Man and Grog. The endless drumming. Gunfire clattering in the distance, dying off, then starting up again. Fresh ash lifted skyward, turning the wind bitter.
Valentine had stayed out of the struggle at the request of his friend, who feared that in the confusion, some Golden
One would shoot him down as a one of their Twisted Cross overseers.
The killing did not stop until after dawn, when the last guards in the watchtowers outside the walls either fled or were brought down by snipers. The towers inside the walls unexpectedly revealed major structural faults as the revolt got going, and they came crashing down at a signal of one of the Golden One engineers. The Golden Ones shot as far and as well as their Gray One brethren, many of whom lay dead in the upper floors of the Great Hall and in the little barrack houses outside the two gates of the ghetto.
With a few hours' rest and some warm food inside him, Valentine decided to push on southward. He knew the Twisted Cross would not take the Golden One revolt lightly, and that they'd be back soon with everything the General had. Ahn-Kha shared Valentine's fear of the coming threat and refused to be parted from him.
"Ahn-Kha, your people need you more than I do."
"My David, here I am just one more set of hands. With you, I am half of the first alliance joining Golden Ones with the Freeholders, honored to stand at the side of a friend. In which role can I help my people more?"
Valentine wanted to go to the General's Cave and throw a little sand in the gears of the Twisted Cross war machine before it could return to Omaha and quash the Golden One rising. But now it would take more than blowing up a few hundred feet of bridge. In preparation, he and Ahn-Kha "liberated" flamethrowers and explosives from the Hall's armory.
Khiz-Mem made the pair a trio after Ahn-Kha drafted him to serve as packhorse and guide. Ahn-Kha assured Valentine that the young Grog knew every corner of the aboveground part of the old Strategic Air Command base. Khiz-Mem, in the full flush of his twenty-something strength, shouldered the weight of flamethrower, satchel charges, food, as well as his own pistol and rifle. Ahn-Kha carried the other flamethrower and a slightly lighter load. Valentine had an additional satchel full of grenades-white phosphorous incendiary grenades among the others.
Ahn-Kha examined one of the cylinders as they walked out of the ghetto. "With these, they burn the houses of those they would punish. I should like to give the Hooded Ones a sample of their own flame."
The Cave was a little more than a long day's walk south of the ghetto, but Valentine did not want to move straight down the rails connecting the base with the city center.
What was left of the Twisted Cross ghetto-police had taken that route; discarded equipment lay at the edge of the rail line like markers. They were probably holding some intermediary point, waiting for their own chance at vengeance.
So the trio took off west before turning south, retrieving Valentine's submachine gun and pack from the little cache. Picking its way south with Valentine scouting well ahead, sweeping the smugglers' trails of Omaha with his ears and nose, the party took its time. He wished he had another few days to look for Duvalier, they weren't very far from the rendezvous point.
The day had a hint of autumn to it; even the afternoon heat had a cool quality to it that the summer days had lacked.
They spotted a scout plane midday. If the little ship was not the ill-omened red-and-white one from the Dunes, it was its twin sister. It flew up from the south and circled the city above the Golden One ghetto. As they watched it from a halt, Valentine explained to Ahn-Kha the story of its use in the Dunes.
"So that means they will attack soon," Ahn-Kha said.
"Yes, they'll hit your people before the Golden Ones can get organized."
"Our people, my David, our people. From this day forward, you will always be accounted a member of our clan, and welcome in the Hall."
"I hope there'll be a Hall-and people to do the welcoming," Valentine said, studying the little plane.
At another break, in the roofless ruins of a warehouse, Ahn-Kha showed Valentine how to use the flamethrower. It consisted of three tanks on a backpack frame, a small one with compressed air and two larger tanks containing gasoline with a thickening agent. The mixture was fired by what amounted to a heavily built garden hose attached to a wide-mouthed insecticide sprayer. It fired the jellied gasoline a good thirty yards with a frightening roar of flame.
"I saw some burnt-out ruins in Wisconsin once where the Kurians had been doing some kind of training under the supervision of the Reapers. I wonder if they were teaching their men how to use these things? None of us could figure out how so much damage could be done without explosives."
"You must be careful with your trigger finger, my David," Ahn-Kha said. 'This pack is half-empty now. You must use very short bursts, and even then you have only a few. Why do we carry these all this way?"