"No, all the rolling motor stock is dispersed," she said, slurping coffee. "Unless it's hidden. I saw a few entrances to underground garages that were guarded with armored cars and lots of wire and kneecappers."
The latter was a nasty little mine the Kurians were fond of. When triggered, it launched itself twenty inches into the air like a startled frog and exploded, sending flechettes out horizontally that literally cut a man off at the knees.
"I don't suppose you saw any draft articles of surrender crumpled up in the wastebaskets, did you?"
She made a noise that sent a remnants of a last mouthful of masticated egg flying. "Naah."
"Now," Valentine said. "If you'll get out of my bed-"
"I need a real bath. Those basins are big enough to sit in. How about your waterboy-"
Hank perked up at the potential for that duty.
Valentine hated to ruin the boy's morning. "You can use the women's. There's piping and a tub."
Such gallantry as still existed between the sexes in the Razors mostly involved the men working madly to provide the women with a few homey comforts wherever the regiment moved. The badly outnumbered women had to do little in return-the occasional smile, a few soft words, or an earthy joke reminded their fellow soldiers of mothers, sweethearts, sisters, or wives.
"Killjoy," Duvalier said, winking at Hank.
* * * *
The alarms brought Valentine out of his dreams and to his feet. For one awful moment he hung on a mental precipice between reality and his vaguely pleasant dream-something to do with a boat and bougainvillea-while his brain caught up to his body and oriented itself.
Alarms. Basement in Texas. Dallas siege. The Razors.
Alarms?
Two alarms, his brain noted as full consciousness returned. Whistle after whistle, blown from a dozen mouths like referees trying to stop a football brawl, indicated an attack-all men to grab whatever would shoot and get to their shooting stations, plus the wail of an air alert siren.
But no gongs. If the Kurians had dusted again, every man who could find a piece of hollow metal to bang, tin cans to wheel rims, should be setting up as loud a clamor as possible. No one wanted to be a weak link in another Fort Worth massacre that caused comrades to "choke out."
Valentine forced himself to pull on socks and tie his boots. He grabbed the bag containing his gas mask, scarves, and gloves anyway and buckled his pistol belt. Hank had cleaned and hung up his cut-down battle rifle. Valentine checked it over as he hurried through men running every which way, or looking to their disheveled Operations officer for direction, and headed for the stairs to the control tower, the field's tactical command post. He took seemingly endless switchbacks of stairs two at a time to the "top deck"-the Razors' shorthand for the tallest point of Love Field.
He felt, then a second later heard, explosions. Worse than mortars, worse than artillery, and going off so close together he wondered if the Kurians had been keeping rocket artillery in reserve for a crisis. The old stairs rattled and dropped dirt as though shaking in fear.
"Would you look at those bastards!" he heard someone shout from the control tower.
"Send to headquarters: 'Rancid,"" Valentine heard Meadows shout. "Rancid. Rancid. Rancid."
Another explosion erupted in black-orange menace: the parking garage-the biggest structure on the field.
Valentine followed a private's eyes up and looked out on a sky filled with whirling planes.