The second strongpoint was found abandoned. A halfhearted attempt to blow up the tracks had been attempted, but the railroad-working Grogs knew their business. An entire train car was devoted to railroad equipment, and they simply took rails and ties from a siding and transferred them to the main line.
They found a looted warehouse with a pair of fresh Grog cairns behind.
"Looks like word is spreading, my David," Ahn-Kha said. "I think those are Missouri Valley clans."
They found Grog Point defended, but not by Grogs. A hasty line of defenses was drawn up in a hummock between two hills that might charitably be called a pass, but it was hardly Thermopylae.
They backed the train out of sight and Valentine dropped out of the armed flatbed, field glasses in hand to take a closer look.
Valentine could make out red caps among the hastily constructed head logs and machine gun positions.
He deployed his Grogs and set up the light artillery. He sent a screening force forward to probe, with instructions to fight, then return and report what kind of troops they faced. His real infantry strength he kept back with the train and guns.
Pellwell tried to convince him to wait and let her ratbits explore the lines-they could get an exact count of men and machine guns-but Valentine wanted to probe and attack before they could be reinforced. They were so close to the Mississippi they could practically smell it, and the flotilla was waiting downriver for him to radio that the town had been cleared.
Firing broke out all along the line of fortifications. Sustained, panicky firing.
His probe pulled back as though they'd touched an unexpected flame, without firing. No need to reveal positions to the wildly firing machine guns. A grenade detonated somewhere in the middle and Valentine saw a rabbit run for the hills.
High-pitched cheering broke out along the defensive line. They went up and over their fortifications, some calling the others forward, others waving them back. They had camouflage ponchos, so oversized they looked like caftans, pulled over black uniforms.
"They're advancing?"
"Send the Grogs forward. Bring the train up for cannon support," Valentine told Chieftain.
Chieftain was getting along like a house aflame with the Grog Warriors. He pushed and shoved, showed his blades to get the toughs to back down, and head-butted others to laugh off a mistake.
The main force of Grogs went forward and a few confused seconds of shooting broke out. The ponchos didn't retreat, they ran. The armored train came forward and the cannons opened up on the fortifications. Explosions and black plumes rose from the machine gun positions.
They went forward cautiously. There were still a few sporadic shots from the head logs, but careful Gray One fire silenced the snipers.
They advanced into horror. They'd been fighting children, in neat, unblemished black school uniforms and red kepis. They lay in windrows, a fragile, fallen fence.
"Poor kids," the Wolf communications tech said.
Chieftain took the hat off one, ran a gentle hand through a boy's sun-white hair. "We just killed the local choir," Chieftain said.
There were a few disarmingly sweet, freckled female faces among the dead.
"What the hell are those?"
"Now what was the point of that?"
"Who are they?" Pellwell asked.
"Youth Vanguard. Jesus."
Two had survived their wounds. They were all nine- to fourteen-year-olds, the next generation out of the Ringwinners and Quislings in Iowa, proving their worth to the Kurian Order.
"Patch 'em up and take them along," Valentine said, taking his youngest POWs, ever.
Grog Point was theirs.
Valentine learned from the wounded that a military school in southeastern Iowa had turned out, and been rushed to Grog Point to keep order. They were supposed to be joined by Illinois troops and some artillery coming across the river, but the Illinois men never showed up. The school had either been sacrificed uselessly with lies, in the hope that they'd hold long enough for men to come downriver, or been caught up in a Kurian Zone double cross between rival Iowa and Illinois factions.
It took all the sweetness out of seeing the rest of his charges arrive and start to board the river barges. Valentine spent the next thirty-six hours with a bilious taste in his mouth, working like a fury to get the population organized and into the boats.
They'd put together quite a river fleet. Three huge, multibarge tugs under Captain Mantilla protected by six armed craft, plus the firefighting tug rigged out with a few guns, to do double duty as a close-in armed boat and emergency tug, if the need arose. The flotilla was under overall command of Captain Coalfield, a veteran Mosquito Fleet boatman whom Mantilla tempted out of retirement with the prospect of the biggest riverine operation Southern Command had ever launched.