Hawthorne was grinning as we left General Paylor's office. "So where do we start, sir?"

I thought a moment. "Is Paylor going to speak again this month? That was more words than she's ever uttered to me!"

"Actually, sir, she's a chatterbox amongst her staff. She only gets quiet when she's really pissed. Which is how she was yesterday, sir."

"Fair enough. So what I want to do, is put a team together here."

"Mind if we eat and meet, sir?"

"Let's.". I sat down to chow on that turkey sandwich. Hawthorne grabbed a biscuit and a bowl of some kind of stew.

"This tastes like smoked turkey. And I don't recognize the flavor."

"It's pecan wood, sir. They grow wild in District Ten. Folks smoke all sorts of meat with it there."

"And there's some spice to it, too."

"That's sheepolay pepper. They pick the peppers, sir, then they dry them and smoke them with the pecan wood. The General's family in Ten are in the meat business, and they made sure we got plenty of smoked meat. When I was on the march with General Gray, all we had was corned beef from some ranch in Ten that had a big pile of soda niter from an old fertilizer factory that blew up ages ago. Beef soaked in brine and soda niter turns red. The stuff didn't spoil but it got a little boring to eat. "

"How'd you get transferred to Paylor's command?"

"I got wounded, sir, and sent to Seven to heal up. Lieutenant Jackson, who drove you in this morning, was wounded too. We went through reconditioning together, and Paylor needed armored infantry to occupy Two. Several more wounded from the Appian Way campaign were in reconditioning, and Jackson persuaded them all to volunteer for it. Jackson came up with our name, The Buffalo Soldiers, in the Appian Way campaign, and it stuck. I became squadron commander, and captain of Troop A, until we get more vehicles and train more drivers. Also, the General recommended me for promotion to Commander, so First Squadron, Buffalo Soldiers, will have a commander in command, sir."

"Who's commanding the regiment?"

"That would be Commander Talbot, sir. His intelligence unit is becoming Second Squadron, Buffalo Soldiers. A lot of people he recruited in District Two, can drive. So Second Squadron has two missions, logistics and situational awareness. Now that we govern the whole country, our drivers haul everywhere and meet a lot of people, so they will help us keep a running list of people's complaints and what's being done about them. The people in the Districts aren't used to sharing information with the government, because in the Snow days, the Capitol was looking for ways to take more from the Districts and leave us with less, and the less they knew, the better off we were. But General Paylor made a point of helping anyone who helped us, and the word spread, sir."

"I noticed. She has a way with words. Building trust, where there was none, sounds like a good use for a bunch of unemployed spies. They might prevent problems from starting. If this government listens to the people and actually helps, people won't see the problems we grew up with."

"Sir?"

"When I was a kid in Nine, every problem we had, the only way to fix it was to overthrow Snow, then figure out how to fix it ourselves. It will feel strange in the Districts, to have a government that actually works for folks, instead of against them."

"One idea I suggested to General Paylor, was that we get some idled hoverplanes and crews, and have two squadrons that do air transportation and support. If a bridge washes out somewhere, we can keep vital supplies moving. If we have a mutt outbreak or something, we arm the planes and go mutt hunting. Otherwise we do logistics, sir."

"What did the general say?"

"She asked me if I'd put the unit together, sir."

"And you said you would?"

"Yes, sir, and that's when she recommended me for promotion, sir."

I began piecing together what Paylor the horse doctor must have intended. She wants Hawthorne in line to command this air mobile armored infantry regiment, meaning she wants him to make Colonel and run it, whenever Levias Talbot retires. They will be first responders to any District that asks the Army for help. They'll have a network of Talbot's veteran spies around the districts, keeping track of little problems before they blow up into big problems. Chances are, if a government worker gets too lazy to work or starts acting surly to the District people instead of giving good service, Talbot's spies will pass the word that we need to fire the bum. And they feed themselves in the woods. And they know how to fight, if required. So the preventive medicine Paylor is practicing here is a little sneaky. Basically, she leaves Cassius Gray and his cronies in place, but puts the best troops she's got, into this regiment Hawthorne dreamed up, that will actually respond to any emergency the government faces. Gray can hang around until he wants to retire, but won't have any serious duties at which to screw up. Any emergency that a District needs the Army to help fix, actually gets Hawthorne's Buffalo Soldiers because they will arrive first. Brilliant plan. My appreciation for General Paylor just increased. She gets the job done, in spite of what Plutarch, Coin, or Gray might foul up. Coin will overthink a problem instead of asking for help. Gray will underestimate a problem because he's clueless about the complexities. Plutarch Heavensbee will milk a problem for publicity. All three are skilled at explaining failure. Hawthorne's record speaks for itself. He came, he saw, and he got the job done. Repeatedly. Just like Paylor, only taller, I thought.

"So Paylor sees the Buffalo Soldiers as point-of-the-spear?"

"Yes she does, sir. Buffalo Soldiers move on.". Hawthorne was grinning.

"But you don't have any engineers."

"Actually, sir, my plan is to split up the Seventh Engineers into three squadrons. Fourth Squadron will be an airborne unit who parachute, rapell, and use hoverplanes and hovercraft for hoisting and mountaineering. Fifth Squadron will have the heavy equipment and will move by truck or rail. And Headquarters Battalion will do the major equipment maintenance and support functions, sir."

"What does Jacob Talbot think of all that?"

"He says he's glad to get a few days off to go to jump school, but I think he also wants to give Paylor some time to cool off, sir."

"If he doesn't learn to feather properly he'll march home soaking wet, from his first jump, and he'll be more than just cool when he crawls out of the swamp. What did the General say to him, anyway?"

"Paylor had gotten a call from Captain Salmon, at the Third Engineers, about a fire they were trying to put out and a water main that had a leak. Salmon's kind of a hardass. He was with Col. Lewis at the Bridge, I've heard. So when Salmon gave us a second call a half hour later, asking for an artillery barrage to knock down some burning buildings he could bury with bulldozers to extinguish, because the water pressure was even lower and unusable, Paylor put Bellamy and me on it. Bellamy reports back that our bulldozers are gone. I get through to Jacob Talbot and he says, 'Wait two minutes '. And then calls back, asking if the water pressure is back on. I asked what the fuck he did, and he says he flooded a mutt tunnel by blowing a water main with a satchel charge, that he just turned off again at the gate valve. So let me guess, do you have all the bulldozers, too? And he asks how I knew about the dozers".

"I take it that General Paylor wasn't pleased with that news."

"I recall her asking Bellamy if he had any turpentine, for her neutering kit, sir".

"He should be glad she only wanted to castrate him, because in veterinary school, she also learned how to lobotomize brains."

"I agree, sir."

"I remember being shocked that you and Katniss Everdeen both found time to get in jump school in Thirteen. How are she and her mom holding up?"

"Not well, sir. Katniss Everdeen just got out of the hospital and reconditioning, fought her way to the Presidential Palace, watched Prim get killed. She doesn't say much. Neither does Mrs Everdeen, sir."

"It's rough to lose family. I lost my dad when we made a run for it, in Nine. The shitheads killed him. Somehow, I had the presence of mind to sit still and hang on to our only pair of night goggles, and made my way to Thirteen. They captured my mom. Levias Talbot sent me a note last month, that she was still alive in the Capitol, an Avox at the tribute training center. If I can catch up with his data, I'd like to look her up."

"I'll ask when I see him, sir."

"Thanks for that, Captain. "

"So who commands the squad you brought with you, sir?"

"Laecania Boggs is my class orderly sergeant from Thirteen. She graded your multiple choice exams, and I did the essay questions. She knows her way around our ordnance very well. Also is accustomed to laboratory work, as you remember. She kept the place humming while you and Beetee brainstormed. Her second is Lief-Corporal Talbot. Portia and Levias younger son. They both saw action with me, during the missile attack on Thirteen, you may recall. We were outside, the missiles hit, the recon hovercraft flew in to assess the damage, we brought them down with Beetee specials. They worked well together and know their stuff, so I got them both. The other eight grunts all worked in the lab in one capacity or other. I let Beetee pick them, because right now, they are his eyes, ears, and hands on the scene. I'm replaceable. They're replaceable. Beetee is a one of a kind asset. So is Portia Talbot. We are not about to put them anywhere that they might stumble over a live pod or get eaten by mutts. We send soldiers who've worked well with them."

"Do you need them all in the field, sir?"

"I want to have half of them in camp and half in the field. They'll rotate. The unit resting up in camp, need a room with a table and chairs, and good lighting, also a data feed back to Thirteen that will accommodate 3D video. I want them examining the mutt remains we brought in, preserving samples for shipment to Thirteen. The rest deploy with two Buffalo crews and go mutt hunting. How's the supply of Pave Pat Blue here?"

"Plenty of it, sir."

"Good. I brought two dozen cans with me, freshly packed. We'll swap those out with your oldest stock. I want the tankers equipped with three cans apiece, and three apiece for each of my squad. That's eighteen total cans. Everybody deploys with a gas mask. The Buffalo has great air filtration. But if it takes damage and leaks, I need everyone masked up and alive, not twitching and gagging and hunting for the atropine. Also I brought fresh atropine. Just in case someone's gas mask leaks. Swap that out as well, so we use up Paylor's old stock and replace it with fresh. Six atropine injectors for each soldier, in case a mask fails. Or some asshole shoots us while we're poisoning mutts. Or some civilians inhale a whiff of Pave Pat Blue and start twitching and gagging. Better prepared, than not. "

The kid is a natural. He read everything he could get his hands on, when he first got to Thirteen. That was after he did the survivors of the Capitol firebombing of Twelve a solid favor. As Boggsy explained it, "Gale Hawthorne is the reason why there are survivors of the firebombing of Twelve". After looking at the recon pictures, I agreed. There's no way anything survived firebombing that intense, if it had stayed until the hovercraft attacked. And Hawthorne was the only person in the whole district, to figure out the attack was coming. He managed that, with no military training. Now that he got some training and some combat experience, he's one of the best we've got.

"Sir, if we're done planning, I need to see Lt Jackson about some spare parts, and then we can move out. Fourteen hundred good for you, sir?"

"All right, let's saddle up at fourteen hundred."

Hawthorne showed me an empty room for my squad to use as a staging area. I left Laecania Boggs in command to get the place squared away, then met with Captain Bellamy, who was commanding Headquarters Battalion, Buffalo Soldiers. The guy had a good head for logistics, and seemed to have a photographic memory for details. We sorted out the stock of Pave Pat Blue, a wonderful concoction I worked on once, that delivered a burst of Sarin gas along with some stabilized ozone, trapped on fumed silicon dioxide. The stuff was packaged in cans. A soldier would pop the can open, the contents would mix, and a blue cloud would form as the ozone slowly desorbed from the silica. When the blue color is gone, all the ozone is liberated, and there's just enough ozone to completely destroy the Sarin gas in fifteen minutes. What's left is phosphate, which is fertilizer, and ordinary sand. Meanwhile, anything with nerves and muscles, that inhaled the Sarin, forgets how the hell to breathe and drops dead waiting for oxygen to arrive via the bloodstream.

Bellamy seemed familiar with Pave Pat Blue. He wasn't from Thirteen. So I asked him about it.

"I was supply officer for the Black Devils, sir. They used five hundred cans of it to fight off a tracker jacker attack at the Bridge, during the Appian Way campaign, and it worked very well, sir."

Which explained why he had a red arrow in his ribbon row. Everybody who was in Col Gus Lewis' regiment got awarded one. The hundred and fifty who survived, actually wear them on occasion. The other five hundred fifty are buried at Lewis' Bridge, where they fell, holding the damned bridgehead until General Gray finally reached it. It's an ugly dammed story of a complete cluster fuckup, a mission badly conceived and a plan badly executed, in my view. Boggsy put it a little more briefly...Eight days into the battle, his take on General Gray's performance, was "If there's a way to fuck it up, Gray will find one". I know better than to ask the grunts who were actually there. It is a subject they don't discuss.

So I took Bellamy to be a bit more talkative than most.

"How many tracker jackers hit your guys?", I asked.

"Probably half a million, sir."

"All killed? "

"Yes, sir, every tracker jacker that attacked, died of Sarin poisoning. Another two hundred thousand or so, burned to death in a pre-emptive strike the night before, sir."

I decided not to press my luck. Like most guys who fought for Gus Lewis at the bridgehead, Bellamy will not say much about the fight.

Tracker jackers weren't much use in the winter. If they flew more than a minute or so, the cold put them to sleep until Spring. If we find a mutt lab hidden here, it might have millions of tracker jackers waiting for us. And then there are lizard mutts, which we're here to wipe out, I thought.

Just then, I heard the roar of Buffalo engines rolling up.

Captain Hawthorne entered the room, hatless, and nodded at us. Laecania Boggs was directly behind him. I wondered if they would put their caps on and have to salute me, if it were raining. Then I wondered if I would remember how to return a damned salute.

Bellamy gestured. "Your Pave Pat Blue and atropine is right there, Gale, along with twenty boxes of fifty caliber rounds, four satchel charges, and ten tubes of Xyex".

"Thanks, Mister Bellamy."

Laecania had our squad grabbing up the cargo and hauling it out. I spotted Lindsay Woolsey and Johanna Mason also coming in and carrying the munitions out.

"Ready, Colonel?", asked Hawthorne.

"Let's move out.", I said.