She hit the gas, edged closer in the green tunnel.
Valentine crawled across the top of the armored car, the little cylinder of the grenade held carefully in his lips and teeth, like an oversized cigar butt. Overgrowth ticked off his legworm leathers.
Weirdly, he thought of the saunas he sometimes took in the winter up in Minnesota. The locals up there liked to hit each other with birch branches, claimed it brought the blood up to the skin and was good for the circulation. A bunch of naked men flogging away at each other in a stone-heated room made an impression on him as a preteen, and he'd tried a branch on his arm. It felt like this thresher of a green tunnel.
He tapped Duvalier, pointed at the forward armored car. She nodded, pulled up close enough for him to see the hinges on the forged steel grids over the rear lights.
Valentine waited for a gap in the growth above-he didn't want to be knocked by a tree limb under Duvalier's wheels-and leaped.
He landed hard, and badly, with the wind knocked out of him and the grenade rolling away. He somehow ignored the instinct to hold on with both hands and tried to retrieve it, and missed. It rolled up against the gunner's ring, wobbled there as though deciding which way to go, and he picked it up this time.
Ring out, lever off-he got around the gunner Duvalier had nearly decapitated and underhanded the grenade toward the end of the driver's compartment.
"Grenade!" he heard someone shout within. So there was a third man in this car.
The driver looked over his shoulder.
Valentine showed him the grenade ring.
The driver got one arm out, then the explosion launched him like a champagne cork.
Valentine found himself atop a careening armored car. It bounced off a tree root.
Duvalier was braking, hard.
The world tipped on its side and Valentine felt momentarily weightless, before he landed, painfully and like tricky old Br'er Rabbit, in a thorny tangle.
When he regained his bearings he felt the warm sensation that meant the pain would come in a minute or two. He cautiously moved each limb and looked down at his body. He felt like Scarecrow after the monkeys had finished tearing the straw out of him.
Duvalier appeared, smiled through a mask of drying blood, and held out a hand.
"I think we're each down one of our lives," she said. She helped him to his feet.
They sure build these things tough, Valentine thought. Typical Control quality.
They found the driver of the first armored car, bleeding and unconscious. She drew her skinning knife.
"No. We can take him with us as a prisoner. He's good, and he's lucky. I've never seen someone blown out of a vehicle like that still living.
They spent ten minutes working on the driver's injuries-abrasions and contusions, luckily for him-and secured him with a plastic restraint. Then they took a look at the vehicles.
He learned why they were hustling back to the camp so quickly to tell their news. The vehicle on its side was rigged for long-range radio. The antenna, designed to lie flat atop the armored car, had been torn away somewhere or other.
"The base still doesn't know about us," Valentine said.
"Unless there's a Reaper prowling around," Duvalier said. "I checked out the interior of ours. Either the previous users had really big feet or the car carried a Reaper recently. Long, pointed boots with the climbing toe."
The Wolves, pounding down the road in a double line, caught up to them.
"Lieutenant Carlson says a couple of platoons left camp in trucks and a command car, sir," the sergeant in charge reported.
The dead driver from Valentine's car looked clownish now, in that big white hat and gold-rimmed aviator glasses. Like Carlson, he was black. Valentine had an idea.
With tow cables, a stout tree, and some judicious driving by one of the Wolves, they managed to right the tipped armored car. They drove back to headquarters at a much more cautious pace, with Valentine and Duvalier tucked inside the front one, tending to each other's scrapes and cuts.
"Lieutenant," Valentine said, upon their return. "Do me a favor. See if that hat fits." He handed Carlson the hat and sunglasses.
"The glasses are prescription, but I can manage," Carlson said.