Baltic Gambit: A Novel of the Vampire Earth (3 page)

Within twenty-four hours they had the Bears in place at Staging Beta, the final campsite, just a two-hour fast-march from the hotel. Lambert and Major Valentine had worked the contingencies ever since she confirmed that there was some important activity at the hotel in French Lick and set Clay running with his pipe still warm in his pocket.

It would be her job to lead them to Staging Omega, the point where the Bears would make visual contact with the hotel, for the assault.

The column moved well, covering the distance in hard, hour-by-hour hikes with ten-minute rests. Captain Patel’s doing, though he wasn’t on the op—he’d remained in command back at Fort Seng—his march discipline training showed. They ate nuts and dried fruit as they walked, and took water at the rests.

She guided the Wolves, who chose the trail for the rest of the column. She’d had to give one briefing to the Bears. As much as she liked Wolves, the Bears made her uncomfortable. They sounded ready to kill every soul in the hotel, even the laundry staff and the recuperating soldiers. Most fiddled with their blades, guns, and explosives gear while she talked. They looked as though some sorcerer had taken the word “war” and made from it flesh.

She walked down the line, following Valentine a pace behind and just to his left, suppressing the twitchy anxiety the calculating glances from the Bears brought. Savage fighting dogs watching a meat cart pass would show less naked interest.

Supposedly, all Bears wore the same uniform in the form of a combat vest with a patch sewn over the name on the right breast and black knit stocking caps. Only about half wore even one of the items. Most adorned themselves in a mix of bullet-stopping Kevlar panels and Reaper cloth.

They had a flair for atavism that would have brought disciplinary trial in the old U.S. Army. Reaper teeth, finger bones, ears, jewelry taken off those they killed, all sorts of juju hung off their bodies and weapons. Most were scarred and went out of their way to show off the wounds. Strangest of all was their hair. The fighting men of Southern Command were famous for their beards and mustaches, but the Bears took outlandish grooming to new heights of hair control, tattooing, and other body modifications. Sideburns trimmed like scythes, long ponytails dipped in tar, Mohawks, curiously wrought war picks or other oddball hand-to-hand weapons—the display made her think it was a defiant affront to fate itself, as if the Bears were challenging Death to come and take them, and if Death tried, He might just come off the worse from the encounter.

They tended to operate in small groups, and these groups usually modified their uniform in some small manner to match up with one another. A specific style of boot, a headband, a type of feather, trophies taken off dead Reapers… Such atavistic touches added colorful detail to the legend.

Bears growled, quarreled, and shifted from a placid sleepiness to
murderous rage—not always at appropriate times in battle. They had a reputation across Southern Command and the United Free Republics as a vicious bunch of brawlers; they were usually garrisoned as far from civilian population as possible, with a few brave souls providing a simulacrum of civilian entertainments outside their bases.

Many of them had up and quit Southern Command, crossed the Mississippi, and followed the numerous supply and communications trails to the newly formed Kentucky freehold. And not a moment too soon. She’d never heard of Oliver Cromwell, but had she been forced to phrase the sentiment of many in Missouri and Arkansas, she would have used something similar to Cromwell’s address to the Rump Parliament:
Depart, I say; and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!

The Bears had been trained in reducing lifesign. They didn’t care to do it, usually, preferring to let their presence draw the Reapers within swatting range.

On this operation, however, they had to infiltrate. Getting thirty Bears to the spot in the hills she’d chosen.

The Wolves she could rely on. When the balloon went up, they would cut off road traffic. Nothing but an armored column would get through once they set up their machine guns, light mortars, and grenade launchers covering the road.

She led the Wolves and Bears in a staggered double file down the trail she’d picked out, an old fire road that still seemed to see a little traffic, probably as part of Ordnance training. Just behind her the Bear company commander, a Carolinian who went by the name of
Gamecock, walked with his communications tech at his heel like a well-trained dog. The pack radio was functional but silent; the Ordnance might be startled by strange radio traffic picked up by listening posts. Gamecock was well named—he had a swagger to him that his fellow Bears liked. Duvalier thought him the most pleasant of his kind she’d ever known; he was mannered and soft-spoken and moderate in his habits, remarkable enough in a soldier with his combat record, damn near miraculous in a Bear.

Radio silence or no, the Bears would blow it. She’d been on three of these combined raids in her early years as a Cat, and every time a couple of torqued-up Bears ended up attacking enemy posts that had nothing to do with the objective, just to get some fighting in. Two scrubs, and on the third time they went ahead with the attack and were burned. After that she started working Oklahoma and Kansas alone.

Fourth time’s the charm. Maybe
.

“What’s that, Miss Duvalier?” Gamecock asked.

Shit, she’d been muttering under her breath again. “About four hours of dark left,” she improvised. “We’re a little ahead. Maybe call a halt here, while we’re still clear of their pickets?”

Gamecock half smiled. “Sure.” He turned to his top sergeant. “Pass the word down the line. We’ll stop just below the notch, there.”

Duvalier gave a coyote yip to signal the wolves ahead and on the flanks, and made a hand gesture for a halt.

Valentine, moving with the middle of the Bear column, came up at the halt to go over her sketched-out map of the hotel and its grounds, and compared it to a couple of photos of French Lick they’d managed to extract from old tourism brochures.

She pulled Val aside after the conference. He was wearing his battle dress of Southern Command uniform and legworm leather. Not anybody’s idea of dashing, and between the scar by his eye and his off-kilter jaw not many would consider him classically handsome. His hair, which she always considered his best asset, was still thick and black, with a few flecks of gray at the temples. She had the urge now and then to run her fingers through it, and a few times he’d even accepted a scalp massage.

Once, he’d been on his way to an important staff position in Southern Command, but a general he’d crossed swords with saw to it that a court-martial wrecked him. Even now he was technically only a corporal in the auxiliaries, though everyone under Lambert’s command at Fort Seng called him by his old rank of major.

“I’d no idea you’d moved so many men and gear to Beta. I thought it was just a couple of squads of Wolves.”

“I had a feeling about this one,” Valentine said. “Lambert wanted the Bears out of her hair for a while anyway. They tore up the strip on a rampage.”

Major David Valentine had a sixth sense of some kind. She’d seen it in action too many times not to be a believer. When she’d been looking into him before choosing to train him as a Cat (what seemed like a lifetime ago), his comrades in the Wolves had spoken of a “Valentingle” he’d get when Reapers were around. But it went further than that—he could smell both trouble and opportunity in the wind.

“Let’s hope they can keep it zipped up for another couple hours,” she said.

“Gamecock knows his business. We’ll move fast the last two kilometers. That’ll keep their minds on the West Baden.”

The Wolves took two sets of prisoners as they approached French Lick: about a dozen civilians who lived at a remote roadside who’d heard there was a bunch of new Reapers in the neighborhood and decided to relocate to some relatives’ west of Bloomington, and an Ordnance off-road motorcycle scout training unit that had camped out for the night and hadn’t bothered to set a watch on what they’d considered an overnight joyride. The cycles would make a great addition to the motor pool at Fort Seng, and the soldiers could be put to some useful work in Evansville or Western Kentucky.

Walking the motorcycles, guarding the prisoners and civilians to the point where the civilians could not do much harm even if they told the Kurian Order everything they’d seen and heard, and the usual scouting duties of a column moving in enemy territory meant that a quarter of their Wolves weren’t in communication with the column. Even the least experienced platoon meant a substantial loss of manpower.

“Only take a couple of guys to guard the bunch and the cycles,” Gamecock suggested at the informal council of war at the halt to reorganize.

“All that lifesign bunched up this close?” Captain Patel, in charge of the Wolves, said, leaning on his cane. “Can’t risk it. If we have to run back the way we came, they’d slow us up.”

Gamecock put a hand on his pistol. A silencer rode in a little pocket attached to the holster.

A glance passed around the group. “No, nobody’s shooting anyone captured by Southern Command’s uniform,” Valentine said.
“We can manage without the Wolves. Duvalier, would you mind helping scout the trail? I know you’ve been busy and on edge for four or five days, but we miss a stillwatch, we’re in for it.”

Valentine’s deference irritated her. Hadn’t she proven she was as tough as any? “As long as I can do it alone,” she said.

She was moving along the fire trail that ran just below a ridgeline. Even with thin moonlight, the view of the rolling forest was spectacular. The night was alive with birdsong. It comforted her—birds always either went too quiet or shrieked when disturbed, and most birds found Reapers as disturbing as humans did.

The only tracks she’d come across were from motorcycles, probably the group the Wolves had captured.

The linen-tearing sound of gunfire and the heavier chatter of machine guns startled her.

Two figures—no, three—struggled up the hill. She moved down to intercept.

It was Valentine, with a Wolf and one of the Bears. She knew the Wolf, a veteran corporal named Winters. The Bear had a long, narrow face with close-trimmed full beard and curly hair. He reminded her a bit of a poodle.

“Let’s move,” Valentine said, with his old rank-of-major authority.

David Valentine had a bad leg, ever since a Twisted Cross bullet blew through his thigh, clipping the bone. Duvalier always wondered if there were some remaining fragments hurting a nerve, or if something had been irreparably severed. In any case, he limped, but could
still keep up a hard, mile-eating run when he chose. She fell in beside him, and the Bear ran behind, heading northeast. Wolf scouts could be seen intermittently through the thick trees.

“It’s a staggered fallback. The Bears counterattacked while the Wolves set up for firing. Then the Bears dropped back behind the Wolves—that’s when I grabbed Scour here.”

That’s how Duvalier learned the name of the Bear.

“You abandoned—”

“We can hit back. Maybe. This many Reapers has to mean Kurians nearby.”

“Twisted Cross, maybe,” Duvalier said.