“A General Holtz.”
“Walt Holtz. Another good man. I knew him in Vietnam when he was a shavetail lieutenant. He’s also by-the-book. Division three?”
“General Tom Thomas.”
Ben sighed. “All good decent men. No bad guys among them, unless it’s this General Paul Revere. And I never heard of the man. Has intelligence come up with anything on him?”
“Nothing that hasn’t been passed along to you, sir.”
“Which so far amounts to nothing.”
“When are we going to tangle with them, General?” she asked.
“Ike is in that vicinity with West and Striganov. That’s up to him. Get him on the horn while I get a cup of coffee.”
“Go, Ben,” Ike said a moment later.
“How’s it look?”
“Grim. We’re not going to be able to stand and slug it out with these people. Too many of them. My latest intel says a minimum of three divisions, sixty thousand men, and probably a backup division, or two. The only crossings open for several hundred miles are Thunder Bay, one south of Winnipeg, and another south of Regina.”
“All right, Ike. You take the Thunder Bay crossing. I’ll shift Dan, Rebet, and Greenwalt south of Winnipeg. I’ll take Jim Peters and Jackie and plug up south of Regina. Good luck.”
Ben turned to Corrie. “Let’s roll. Break camp.” He looked over at Jersey.
She smiled. “Kick ass time, General.”
“Yeah,” Ben said. “But whose ass is going to get kicked?”
* * *
While Ben and the others raced to get in position, the remaining nine battalions were to be spread out along I-94, from St. Paul west to Miles City in Montana. Artillery was rolling northward day and night. Special Operations people were working planting explosives on bridges.
“I want teams sent into Canada to blow every bridge they can,” Ben ordered. “We’ll cut Revere’s supply lines. We know he has only limited aircraft. That will hurt him. I want every bridge blown between Medicine Hat in Canada south down to West Yellowstone and from Duluth down to Madison. And I mean every bridge. We’ll hold until that is done. Then we’ll start slowly falling back until we reach I-90. Revere will be unable to go east across the Mississippi, and unable to go west. He’s not going to go north. There is nothing up there Blanton wants. He’ll have but one direction: south. We’ll be harassing him all the way. And that’s just over two hundred and fifty miles from the border to I-90. He’s going to pay in blood for every mile he gains. I-90 is the line, people. We’re going to hold there for as long as we can. By the time his divisions reach that line, we’ll have cut them down significantly.” I hope, Ben silently added.
“Now then,” Ben continued taping the orders for burst transmission. “We’ll have Creeps and punks all around us. So we’re going to be fighting on all sides. We don’t know who we can trust, so trust no one. Don’t take any food or water from civilians. Watch yourselves at all times. As they used to say in the movies, this is it. Good luck.”
Ben walked to a wall map and stared. He shook his head. “Fifteen short battalions stretched out along a nine hundred mile front,” he muttered. “I’ve got to find us an edge. But where?”
“Our spies in the States say that Raines is moving his people up to I-90,” Paul Revere was informed. “He’s blowing bridges east and west.” He used a grease pencil to mark the locations on a map.
“He’s putting us in a box,” Revere said. “But he can’t believe he can contain us there. He’s stretched too thin. That’s almost a thousand miles. He’s pulling something. It’s a ruse. But what kind of a ruse?”
But Paul Revere was getting ahead of himself. He was seeing things that weren’t there; trying to think like Ben. Which is exactly what Ben wanted him to do. Ben wanted the man off-balance and unsure.
“What the hell is Raines up to?” Revere muttered, staring at the map.
Waiting, in a small town sixteen miles south of the Canadian border. Ben had spread his three battalions out, stretching them thin and digging them in deep, then daring them to move. If he could pull the ambush off, General Tom Thomas was going to learn the hard way about the dirty art of guerrilla warfare . . . and that was something Ben knew the man was not schooled in. Actually, none of the division commanders knew much about ground combat. General Holtz was Army aviation for most of his career, Matt Forrest was in the Pentagon, tied to a desk, and Tom Thomas was basically an artillery officer, but like Matt, had been assigned to the Pentagon for years.
Ben didn’t like doing this. He found the idea of fighting true Americans repugnant. But somehow those three fine officers had been persuaded to join Blanton’s team.
Ben sighed in frustration. Blanton himself was more than likely a good man, believing strongly that what he advocated was the right way for the battered nation and its equally battered citizens. But Blanton was a true liberal, right down to the core, believing in more government control of people’s lives, while Ben believed in a minimum of government interference in the lives of citizens.
Ben had finally realized that the two philosophies could never peacefully coexist. One side had to dominate. And Ben was determined to be on the winning side.
Revere’s forces were now openly transmitting, and the Rebels’ scanners were monitoring them constantly. Ben now knew exactly where Revere’s forces were going to enter the States, and what they planned to do. Revere’s divisions had tanks and artillery; the Rebels had better tanks—although not as many—and longer range artillery.
Ben’s dug-in and camouflaged troops were equipped with antitank weapons and mortars. The troops of Revere’s third division, under the command of General Tom Thomas, were only a few hours away from learning some hard lessons about tangling with Raines’s Rebels.
“Crossing the border,” Corrie said softly.
Ben nodded his head. He did not have to ask if everyone was in place and ready. He knew they were. This time, no one bitched about Ben’s being in the middle of the action. They all knew Ben would not have paid the slightest bit of attention to their protests.
As the first tanks approached the presumably deserted little town, the tank commanders did not button up. The town had been checked out by Revere’s recon the day before when it really was deserted, and reported that back.
The tanks rumbled through without incident.
Just north of the town flowed a creek, running high now because of the spring rains. Once that bridge was gone, there would be no crossing for miles in either direction. Ben smiled as the men and equipment of the third division took the bait and swallowed the hook.
The members of Ben’s personal team looked at him; they knew that smile. It was the smile of an eagle about to sink its talons into prey.
The minutes ticked past and the rumble of tanks and trucks continued.
“Fire,” Ben said.
Corrie spoke into her headset and the two-lane bridge north of town blew into hundreds of chunks. Two trucks carrying troops were caught on the bridge and the men and equipment disappeared into the running waters of the creeks.
Dozens of rockets were fired and impacted against their targets. Mortars began thudding out rounds. One third of Thomas’s division was caught on the south side of the creek, most on the open road, some in the town. They didn’t have a chance.
Tanks and trucks erupted in an inferno of fire as flame and fuel-air rockets struck their targets. These rounds spewed highly flammable liquid all over their target upon impact, then the explosives blew, creating a deadly, hellish nightmare. Snipers, using .50 caliber Haskins rifles, laying back a mile and more, created more havoc. Some of the Rebel snipers were using special rounds, with a hardened tungsten-carbide penetrator inside the projectile, capable of penetrating four inches of armor and then blowing up.
If there was a dirty trick the Rebels didn’t know, it was because it hadn’t yet been thought of.
All General Thomas could do was stand on the north side of the overflowing creek an
d watch and listen as his forward units got creamed.
“That dirty, sneaky, ambushing bastard!” Thomas said.
Thomas was learning about Ben Raines. The hard way.
TWELVE
As the other forward units of Revere’s forces entered U.S. territory, they got a short, bloody, and very brutal lesson in Rebel ferocity.
Revere quickly shut them all down and told them to dig in and wait for orders.
“What the hell is happening out there?” Blanton shouted into the mic, just moments after receiving the first battlefield reports.
“I tried to warn you about Raines, Mister President,” Revere spoke calmly from his CP, a couple thousand miles away. “But you wouldn’t listen. You just simply cannot fight the Rebels on any type of conventional basis and expect to win. It isn’t possible.”
Blanton was silent for a moment, which for him was nothing short of a miracle. He’d been in love with the sound of his own voice for years.
“Go to scramble, Mister President,” Revere said. “The Rebels are listening.”
“They’re going digital,” Ben said.
“I’ve got it,” Corrie said.
“Hearts and minds, Mister President,” Revere said.
“What do you mean?”
“Bluntly put, sir, it means give me your hearts and minds or I’ll burn your house down and kill your firstborn.”
“You mean,” the president said, “kill all of Ben Raines supporters?”
“That’s it exactly.”
“Yes, yes!” Harriet Hooter shouted. “Destroy all those right-wing, gun-loving jerks.”
“Isn’t this exciting?” Blush Lightheart cooed.
“But what about the children?” Blanton asked.
“Who cares?” Senator Ditto said. “Little rednecks grow up into big rednecks.”
“That’s right,” Representative Crapums said. “The only way we’ll ever have peace in this nation is to kill everyone who owns a gun. Except those on our side, that is,” he quickly added.
“Kill all those racist bastards!” Representative Rivers shouted.
Blanton was again silent. Order and stability had to be restored in the nation. My goodness, me. Just let a little war break out in the country and look what happened: the people actually started to believe that they could run the nation without politicians. That just wouldn’t do at all. The American people couldn’t govern themselves. That was ridiculous. They were actually shooting people out there for stealing and other silly little things like that. He’d heard that rapists were being castrated. How awful. Made him nauseous for hours. Caused him to spit up his Twinkie. No, no, no, no! The American people could not govern themselves. They had to have a firm hand on the reins of government. His hand, naturally. He was born to lead. Everyone told him so. Even his wife. Occasionally.
And it was all Ben Raines’s fault. Every bit of it. Goddamn rabble-rousing, right-wing, redneck peckerwood.
Blanton opened his mouth to speak and then remembered he first had to key the mic. He always forgot that. Too many other pressing matters on his mind. “All right, General Revere. Do it your way.”
Revere smiled. “Thank you, Mister President. Thank you very much.”
“Hearts and minds,” Ben said. “Now it gets rough, folks. If I let it. Corrie, get me Blanton on the horn. No! Forget that. I don’t want him to know that we have equipment capable of descrambling every transmission they send.”
“Surely he has enough sense to realize that?” Jersey added.
“Don’t bet on it,” Ben replied with a smile.
All along three fronts, General Revere’s forces had been stopped cold by the Rebels. Those few who managed to escape the initial three-pronged ambush and return to their lines told tales of absolute horror and terror.
“It just seemed like the Rebels were part of the earth,” one said. “They just rose up out of the ground and turned everything into an inferno.”
“I’ve never seen such accuracy with artillery and mortar,” another said.
“I never so much as got a glimpse of the Rebels,” a platoon leader wrote in his report. “They were like ghosts. The fire was not centralized, but came from all around us. How they managed to do that without hitting their own forces is a mystery to me.”
Paul Revere called for a meeting with his three division commanders. Revere either did not realize it, or did not care, that this move was only giving Ben time to strengthen his own lines.
“The president has given us carte blanche in dealing with the Rebels,” Revere told the men. “Hearts and minds, gentlemen. That’s the way to defeat Ben Raines.”
“General Revere, these are Americans we’re fighting,” General Holtz pointed out. “Now, while I strongly agree that this nation must be reunited, killing civilian supporters of Ben Raines is repugnant to me and could easily backfire.”
“President Blanton okayed the killing of civilians?” General Thomas asked.
“He has put the order in writing and that paper is being couriered to me at this moment.” Revere knew the “hearts and minds” program was a dangerous one to put to these generals. While many of the troops were solidly loyal to him, many of them loyal to Blanton and his idealistic concept of government, still others were loyal to Generals Thomas, Holtz, and Forrest. “But before we implement the program,” Revere said smoothly, “flyers are being printed and will be distributed throughout the nation, air-dropped by light plane. They will tell the long-suffering American people that we are not the enemy. Ben Raines is. Raines offers aid and comfort only to those who support him. We offer aid and comfort and amnesty to all people. We are not going in willy-nilly, killing women and children. I want that understood.”
The three generals relaxed. Those were the words they wanted to hear.
General Holtz said, “The American people should be advised that we did not start this war. Raines’s Rebels ambushed us.”
“Exactly!” Revere said. “The American people must understand that we did not come here as invaders, but as liberators. Raines and his Rebels are the oppressors, not us. Now, we will have to kill some civilians. And I don’t like that one little bit. No, sir. I’m going to shed some tears before this campaign is over. I see that. Some of these poor, misguided fools who support Ben Raines will fight us, and we’ll have to fight them. I hate it. And I’ll be giving the orders with tears in my eyes. But . . .” He held out his hands and shrugged. “America must be reunited. This great nation cannot be allowed to dissolve into warring factions. It must be restored, and if spilling civilian blood is the only way, then so be it.”
Hearts and minds. And the first three he hooked were men who should have known better.
A scout brought Ben a leaflet, a disgusted expression on his face. “You want to read some shit, sir,” he said. “This is it.” He handed Ben the leaflet.
A MESSAGE TO ALL AMERICANS FROM THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, HOMER BLANTON (A CHRISTIAN MAN AND A TRUE GOOD OL’ BOY IF THERE EVER WAS ONE): MY FRIENDS, I WISH I COULD SIT DOWN AND HAVE A PERSONAL CHAT WITH EACH AND EVERY ONE OF YOU. BUT THAT IS IMPOSSIBLE. THE FORCES OF EVIL THAT PROWL THIS GREAT NATION UNDER THE COMMAND OF BEN RAINES PREVENT ME FROM DOING THAT. BEN RAINES, THE GREAT SATAN (AND A REGISTERED REPUBLICAN, TOO), AND HIS ARMY OF MALCONTENTS CALLED THE REBELS, HAVE PUT ME UNDER A DEATH SENTENCE. THIS HANDFUL OF REDNECKS AND BEER-BELCHERS AND GUN-FREAKS HAVE PARALYZED THIS NATION, SPREADING FEAR AND HATE WHEREVER THEY GO. BEN RAINES AND THE REBELS PREACH WAR WHILE I SPEAK SOFTLY OF PEACE, BROTHERHOOD, FREEDOM, AND A CHICKEN IN EVERY POT (ALWAYS REMOVE THE SKIN BEFORE YOU COOK IT; THE SKIN IS NOT GOOD FOR YOU. MY WIFE TOLD ME THAT).
I HAVE SENT THE UNITED STATES ARMY, UNDER THE COMMAND OF GENERAL PAUL REVERE (AND YOU KNOW WHO HIS GREAT-GREAT-GREAT-GREAT-GREAT GRANDDADDY WAS) TO FREE THE GOOD CITIZENS OF AMERICA FROM THE TERRIBLE GRIPS OF ANARCHY. THEY BRING WITH THEM FOOD AND MEDICINES AND HOPE AND CONDOMS AND ALL SORTS OF OTHER REAL NEAT STUFF. AND IT’S FREE. YOURS FOR THE ASKING. OF COURSE, YOU’LL PAY FOR
IT LATER WHEN I RAISE YOUR TAXES, BUT WE DON’T HAVE TO TALK ABOUT THAT RIGHT NOW.
WE NEED YOUR HELP, GOOD CITIZENS OF AMERICA. WE NEED YOUR SOLID MIDDLE-CLASS MINDS AND VALUES TO HELP US DEFEAT BEN RAINES. BEN RAINES IS A REAL SHIT-HEAD, AMERICANS. HE’S A BABY-KILLER. HIS REBELS RAPE AND PILLAGE AND PLUNDER AND DO ALL SORTS OF OTHER REAL BAD THINGS. BEN RAINES DOESN’T EVEN GO TO CHURCH AND HE HATES RAP MUSIC. HE LISTENS TO THAT OL’ CLASSICAL STUFF. YUKK! BEN RAINES IS A HEATHEN AND HIS REBELS ARE THE HORDES OF EVIL. THEY MUST BE STOPPED. AND WITH YOUR HELP, BEN RAINES AND THE REBELS WILL BE STOPPED. GOD IS ON OUR SIDE. I REALLY, REALLY, REALLY BELIEVE THAT. CROSS MY HEART AND HOPE TO DIE.
GENERAL PAUL REVERE AND THE UNITED STATES ARMY WILL BE ADVANCING THROUGHOUT THIS NATION, STOPPING ALONG THE WAY TO TALK WITH YOU AMERICANS, TO SEE WHERE YOU STAND IN THIS STRUGGLE FOR FREEDOM AND EQUALITY FOR ALL, AND TO TAKE YOUR COMPLAINTS AND TO OFFER YOU FOOD AND MEDICINE AND HOPE FOR THE FUTURE. PLEASE COOPERATE WITH THESE SOLDIERS OF FREEDOM. AND DON’T BE ALARMED IF SOME OF YOUR NEIGHBORS AND FRIENDS ARE TOTED OFF IN HANDCUFFS. I PROMISE YOU THEY WON’T BE HARMED. BUT IT IS OUR STRONG BELIEF THAT ANYONE WHO AGREES WITH THE PHILOSOPHIES OF BEN RAINES AND THE REBELS HAS A REAL MENTAL PROBLEM. WE MUST ATTEMPT TO RE-EDUCATE THESE MISGUIDED SOULS AND BRING THEM BACK TO THEIR SENSES. THOSE UNFORTUNATE PEOPLE WHO FOLLOW BEN RAINES HAVE BEEN BRAINWASHED. THEY ARE TO BE PITIED AND THEY ARE TO BE HELPED.
I PLEAD WITH ALL TRUE AMERICANS TO STAND BESIDE YOUR PRESIDENT AND HELP US DEFEAT THE EVIL GREAT SATAN BEN RAINES AND HIS ARMY OF BUTCHERS AND BABY-RAPERS AND OTHER STUFF TOO AWFUL TO MENTION HERE.
HOMER BLANTON, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES.
Ben shook his head and handed the oversized leaflet back to the scout. “You raped any babies lately, Sergeant?” he asked with a smile.
“Are you kidding, sir!” He held up the paper. “This guy is a nut.”
“No, not really. He just has very bad advisors. He always did. He listens to the wrong people and obviously is still listening to the wrong people.” Ben pointed to the leaflet. “How many of those things were dropped?”
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