"Thanks for the tip," Valentine said. Not that he needed it. He'd visited the quiet library and reading room in one of the mall's old stores to unwind after the quick debriefing he'd undergone on his arrival yesterday afternoon. Three paperbacks, one with a duct-tape spine-the illustration of the dripping-wet bikini girl on the cover reaching up to undo her top did wonders for circulation-were already stuffed into his duty bag beneath the reports and Javelin correspondence.
They'd talked about Javelin, good and bad. When Valentine gave them his assessment for the addition of Kentucky to the United Free Republics, his interviewers had exchanged a look that didn't strike Valentine as promising.
And he hadn't even begun to describe what he had in mind for his Quisling recruits.
He saved that for the end, and they told him to take it up with General Lehman the next day.
There was another wait outside Lehman's office, and Valentine switched to American history, a biography of Theodore Roosevelt. He was experiencing the Badlands with Roosevelt after the nearly simultaneous deaths of his mother and wife when Lehman's staffer summoned him.
When Valentine finally stood before the general in command of the eastern defenses, he was surprised to see a pair of arm-brace crutches leaning against the desk and the general's right leg encased in plaster and a Velcro ankle brace on the left.
"Bomb beneath my command truck," Lehman said. "Flipped us like a flapjack."
He looked paler than Valentine remembered, thin and strained.
"Let's hear it, Valentine," Lehman said. "Don't spare me; I know I sent you out there."
Lehman dipped his little silver comb in the water glass and commenced cleaning his drooping mustache in the methodical fashion a cat might use to clean its face. It was whiter and less bushy than it had been a year ago at the planning sessions for Javelin. Cover Lehman in dust and denim, and he'd pass for a cowhand straight off a Texas ranch, but he had precise, machinelike diction, weighing each vowel and consonant of his sometimes cracker-barrel phraseology. Valentine had heard that as a junior officer he'd been in signals, communicating with other Freeholds around the world.
"Should really make you a colonel, Valentine," General Lehman said.
"What about the confirmation vote?" Southern Command was allowed to run its own affairs within the confines of its budget-and parts of it even made money by engaging in civil engineering projects or restoring machinery-but promotion to colonel and above had to be approved by the UFR's legislature.
General Lehman nodded. "The Clarion would get in a huff and their chickens in the legislature would squawk in tune and the whole list would probably be voted down. They've had a field day over Javelin. You understand."
"I do."
"Of course, there's no reason we can't pay you like a colonel."
"Under the assumed name," Valentine said. Technically, David Valentine was a wanted man and couldn't draw pay, civilian or military. Not that it would do him much good if the pay increase went through. Few colonels got rich, despite their pay-draws twice that of a major. A colonel was expected to spend most of it on entertainments for his command, and most also gave generously to families of the command who'd lost fathers or mothers. A private who was good at scouring arms and medical supplies and selling them back to the Logistics Commandoes could do better.
"There is one promotion I'd like you to make," Valentine said. "I'd like Sergeant Patel-his name is all over those reports-made a captain."
"Shouldn't be a problem. I've heard the name. Wolf, right? Twenty years or more."
Valentine noticed there were archival boxes all against the walls, and two locked file cabinets hung open.
"Moving to a new office, sir?" Valentine asked.
"That's one way to put it. You didn't hear about the election, then?"
Valentine didn't follow politics when he was in the Free Republics, beyond what filtered in to mess hall chatter and newspaper articles.
"There's been a change, as of the first week of November," Lehman continued. "President Starpe lost. Adding Hal Steiner to the ticket didn't help as much-"
"I'm sorry, General. Hal Steiner? From down south near the Louisiana border?"
"Yes. Of course, you've been out of the UFR. Sorry, it's all anyone's been talking about here. Steiner a friend of yours?"
"I met him as a lieutenant."
"Yeah, he's the one who helped keep all the Archangel forces hidden down in those swamps. The Concorde Party made a big deal about Steiner coming out of the KZ and treating Grogs like people, and between that and the bad news out of Kentucky and the Rio Grande, the New Federalists were plastered. Anyway, old DC is out and Thoroughgood is in. Once Lights's sworn in, he'll nominate Martinez to take over Southern Command, and I suspect the legislature will approve, though the Texas bloc will be voting against him, of course, because of the bad feelings about 'seventy-three."
A piece of Valentine's brain translated the political farrago.
Archangel, of course, was the operation that ousted Consul Solon and the Kurians from his brief hold on the Ozarks. In the chaos following, Southern Command seized much of Texas and Oklahoma and a patch of bled-dry Kansas.
The United Free Republics, after a messy birth, had divided into two parties, the Concorde and the New Federalists. Other than their slogans-Liberty and Justice through Thoroughgood for the Concorde, Starpe Can't Be Stopped for the New Federalists-he didn't know much about platforms and so on, though the perpetually dissatisfied Clarion supported Thoroughgood through its editorial page and its reporting.