Valentine's Exile (4 page)

“Out!” Valentine shouted.

The trio looked up at the roof, apparently transfixed by the harmless scrabbling noises. Meadows' hand went to his sidearm, and the private fumbled with his battle rifle. In seconds they'd be dead, fragmenting brain tissue still wondering at the strange raccoonlike noise—

“Out!” Valentine said again, bodily pushing the private to the stairs with one hand, and pulling the communications officer from her chair with the other. She came out of her chair with her headset on; the headset cord stretched and unplugged as though it were as reluctant to leave its post as its operator. Meadows moved with dramatic suddenness as the realization of what might be happening on the roof arrived, and grabbed for the handle on the thick metal door to the stairway.

“I'll get it,” Meadows said. Valentine, keeping touch with both the private and the communications officer, hurried down the stairs.

One flight. Two flights. Meadows' clattering footsteps on the stairs a half floor above . . .

The
boom
Valentine had been expecting for ten anxious seconds was neither head-shattering nor particularly loud, and while it shook peeling paint from the stairs and knocked out the lights, the three weren't so much as knocked off-stride.

Meadows joined them, panting. “The door must have held,” he said.

Or physics worked in our favor,
Valentine thought. An explosion tends to travel along the path of least resistance, usually upward.

“Maybe.” Valentine said.

The impact of three more explosions came up through the floor—bombs striking Love Field somewhere.

“Orders?” Valentine asked.

“I'm going back up,” Meadows said. “They might think they finished the job with one bomb. The radio antenna's had it for sure, but the field lines might still be functional.”

“You two game?” Valentine asked the private—an intelligent soldier named Wilcox, who was the military equivalent of a utility infielder: he could play a variety of positions well. Ruvayed, the lieutenant with the headphone jack still swinging at the end of its cord just below her belt, nodded.

Valentine clicked his gun off safety and brought it to his shoulder. “Me first, in case they crawled in.”

Meadows brought up the rear going back up the stairs. Valentine reached the security door. Dust had been blown from beneath the door in an elegant spiked pattern, and he smelled smoke and the harsher odor of burning plastic. He turned the handle but the door wouldn't budge.

A kick opened it. The air inside had the harsh, faintly sulfurous tang of exploded dynamite.

As he swept the room over the open sights on his gun, Valentine saw naked sunlight streaming in from a hole in the roof big enough to put a sedan's engine block through. Older air-traffic consoles and the Razors' newer communications gear were blackened and cracked; the transformation was so thorough it seemed it should have taken more time than an instant.

The glass held, though it had cracks ranging from spiderwebbing to single fault lines. The quality of the stuff the old United States used to be able to make made Valentine shake his head in wonder yet again. Outside the planes still turned, swooped, and soared, engines louder now thanks to the hole in the roof.

But he kept his eyes and ears tuned to the new skylight, his cut-down Atlanta Gunworks battle rifle ready. Another tiny plane buzzed by, the noise of its engine rising fast and fading slowly over the other, fainter aircraft sounds.
Who the hell are these guys?

Meadows pressed binoculars to his eye, scanning the ground in the direction of Dallas. “Not even mortar fire. It's not a breakout.”

“Bad intelligence?” Ruvayed asked. “They thought
we
had planes?”

Another ribbon of fire blossomed against the parking garage facing the runway to the southwest. Valentine wondered about Ahn-Kha and Will Post. Both were probably at the hardpoints around the garages . . . why did they keep hitting that side of the airport? It faced the train tracks running out of the city, but the lines were torn up for miles.

Another of the tiny, fast scout planes buzzed low over the overgrown airstrip there. Save for his speed, it looked as though he might be on a landing approach. The plane jumped skyward to avoid a stream of tracer.

“I wish we had some ack-ack guns here,” Meadows said, binoculars trained up at some big multiengine transport circling the field. “All the high-angle stuff is close in to the city.”

“Colonel,” Valentine said. “Southwest. Look southwest, hitting hardest there.”

“Field phones are shot,” Ruvayed reported.

“Wilcox, hustle us up a portable radio,” Meadows said. The private disappeared down the stairs.

The colonel searched the southern and western approaches to the airport. “Goddamn.”

“I'd like to see what's happening in the garage,” Valentine said.

“Go ahead. Pass the word that I'll be on the maintenance frequency, if I can get a radio up here. Send up a couple of messengers.”

Valentine handed his gun and ammunition harness to Ruvayed. “Keep an eye cocked to that hole. And watch the balcony,” he said. The control tower had an electronics service balcony just below the out-sloping windows. Nothing but birds' nests and old satellite dishes decorated it, but it would be just like the gargoyles to land carrying a couple of sniper rifles.

“Yes, sir,” Ruvayed said.

“Tell everyone to keep their heads down, Major,” Meadows said. “Maybe this whole attack is a Kurian screwup. The mechanics moved a couple of stripped passenger craft the other day—from a distance it could have looked like we had planes ready to go.”

“Yes, sir.” Valentine nodded. He turned for the stairs. Meadows didn't care one way or the other about salutes.

“Goes doubly for you,” Meadows called after him.

The violent airshow going on outside must have been running short on fireworks; only one more small explosion sounded during the endless turns down the stairs. The elevator to the control tower was missing and presumed scavenged—nothing but shaft ran up the center of the structure.

Valentine double-timed through the tunnel system and up to the first floor of the terminal. He trotted past empty counters under faded signs and motionless luggage carousels—the only part of the main terminal in use was a small area in front of the bronze Ranger statue (ONE RIOT, ONE RANGER read the plaque) where the consumables for the Razors were delivered every few days.

“Major!” A voice broke through the sound of his footsteps. A corporal with his flak jacket on inside out called from the other end of the terminal, “They're hurtin' on the west approach.”

“Thanks. Tell the Bears to find Captain Post and be ready to counterattack if they hit us from the ground. Send messengers and a new field phone up to the top deck. Right away.”

The corporal nodded and ran for the stairwell.

Valentine crossed over to the huge parking garages by scuttling under the concrete walkway to the upper deck of the lot. A wheelless ambulance in the center of the parking garage served as an improvised command post for the airport's close-in defense.

The air was full of smoke and a fainter, oilier smell Valentine recognized as burning gasoline.

Wounded men and burned corpses lay all around the ambulance. Captain Martin, a Texas liaison for the Razors, helped the medics perform the gruesome task of triage as he spoke to a pair of sergeants.

Valentine listened with hard ears as he approached. Enhanced hearing, a gift from the Lifeweavers dating back to his time as a Wolf, made each word sound as though it were spoken in his ear. “Everyone to the dugouts but the observers, ” Martin said. “Yes, treat it like a bombardment. We'll worry about an assault when we see one.”

Martin recognized Valentine with a nod. “Weird kinda visit from Dallas. How did they pull this off?”

“I doubt they're from Dallas,” Valentine said. “We would have seen them taking off.”

More distant explosions—a series of smaller cracks that made up a larger noise like halfhearted thunder.

“I'm putting the men in the shelters,” Martin explained.

“Good,” Valentine said, not wanting to waste time explaining that he'd already overheard the orders given. “I'd like to take a look at the field south and west of here. Is there still an operational post where I can do that?”

Valentine saw Ahn-Kha approaching from a forward garage stairwell, a man draped on each powerful shoulder. Ahn-Kha's arms, longer than but not quite as thick as his legs, held the men in place in a strange imitation of the classic bodybuilder's pose.

Blood matted his friend's golden shoulder and back fur, Valentine noted as his old companion set the men down near the ambulance.

“He's worth three Texans,” Martin observed. Martin was still new enough to the Razors to watch Ahn-Kha as though half fascinated and half worried that the Grog would suddenly sink his ivory fangs into the nearest human. “Ten ordinary men, in other words.”

“The observation post?” Valentine reminded the captain, as Ahn-Kha checked the dressings on the men he had just set down. Enormous, double-thumbed hands gently turned one of the wounded on his side.

“Second floor of the garage, back of an old van. It's still wired to the phone network.”

Valentine remembered. “I know it. Ahn-Kha!”

The Golden One nodded to one of the Razor medics as she wiped her hands on a bloodstained disinfectant towel and squatted beside the latest additions to the swamp of bleeding men. “Yes, my David?”

“Get your puddler and meet me at OP 6.”

Ahn-Kha's “Grog gun” had become famous, a 20mm behemoth of his own design that resembled a telescope copulating with a sawed-off kid's swing set. The other name came from a skirmish the Razors fought outside Fort Worth, where Ahn-Kha reduced an armored car commander to a slippery puddle of goo outside his hatch at six hundred yards.

“Yes, my David.” Over seven feet of muscle straightened. “I had to leave Corporal Lopez at the stairwell exterior door. He's dead, or soon will be,” Ahn-Kha informed the captain.

“What the hell, Major?” Martin asked. “What's so goddamn important about blowing us off the planet?”

“We'll know sooner than we'd like, I expect,” Valentine said.

Another bomb shook dust onto the wounded.

“Christ,” Martin said, but Valentine was reminded of something else.

“Make sure the men have their dust gear in the shelters, ” Valentine said. He ran down a mental list of what else the Razors might need to stop a column, and the two reserve regimental recoilless rifles could be useful. “Get Luke and John operational up here too, with plenty of shells. But the dust gear first.” Matthew and Mark were vehicle-mounted, and probably smoldering with most of the other transport between the terminals.

“You'd think we'd be drowning in it. Makes me think—”

“They're probably on their way already.”

Valentine offered a salute. Martin's mouth tightened as he returned it—the Texans weren't big on military rigamarole, but there were ordinary soldiers present and the Razors knew a salute from their operations chief meant that the half-Indian major didn't expect you to speak again until you were ready to report on his orders—and hurried to the central stairway.

Valentine went up a floor to the last garage level before the exposed top and hurried to the rusty old van, parked just far enough from the open edge of the parking lot so the sun would never hit it. Though wheelless and up on blocks, missing even its headlamps and mirrors, the Razors kept it clean so that the carefully washed smoked-glass windows at the back and sides wouldn't stand out from the dirt and Texas dust of the nonlethal variety.

Valentine called out his name and entered the van through the open side door. Two Razors looked out on the Dallas skyline and the roads and train tracks running along the western edge of the airfield. Their ready dust-hoods hung off the backs of their helmets like bridal veils. Dropped playing cards lay on the van's interior carpet, the only remaining evidence of what had probably once been plush fixtures for road-weary vactioners.

“I've never seen so many planes in my life, that's for sure,” one said to the other, a bit of the Arkansas hills in his voice. Valentine knew his face but the name wouldn't come. “Howdy, Major.”

“Hey, Major Valentine,” the other said, after relocating a piece of hard candy on a tongue depressor that the soldiers called a “postsicle.” Captain Post had a candy maker somewhere in his family tree, and the men liked to suck on his confections to keep the Texas dirt from drying out their mouths. “We got hit after all, huh.”

“I'm glad somebody noticed. Did it break up a good card game?”

“Depends. Lewis was winning,” the Arkansan said.

“Sorry to hear that, Lewis,” Valentine said. He vaguely knew that the tradition of canceling all wins and losses in an unfinished game had sprung up during the siege at Big Rock Mountain the previous year, and was thus hallowed into one of the battalion's unwritten rules.

“What do these aircutters got against the Razors, is what I want to know,” Lewis said.

Valentine scanned the approaches to the airfield, then the sky. A larger plane, its wingspan wider than its body length, caught the sun high up.

Whoever's up there knows
.

The second phase of the attack came within five minutes, as Valentine reported to Meadows through a field phone line patched into the portable radio now installed in the control tower.

“Holy Jesus!” Lewis barked.