The man would not reply. He just clenched his teeth and shook his head.
Ben grimaced. “All right. To hell with you, then.” He turned to an officer. “Take their heavier weapons and ammo. Leave them .22s and shotguns for hunting, Let’s go.”
“Wait!” the man called as Ben started to walk off. Ben stopped and stared at the man. “It’s a free country, General.”
“It was briefly. Until the politicians and federal judges and bureaucrats took control. Then the Great War struck us. I don’t know what to call it now. Pockets of anarchy all over the place. You really want to live the way you have been? Your kids aren’t receiving medical care, the place stinks like an open cesspool.”
“Blanton’s gonna fix all that. He done promised he would.”
Ben smiled. “A chicken in every pot, huh? I don’t see any black folks among your group. You have something against black folks?”
“We don’t have nothin’ to do with niggers,” the man said sullenly. “But you must love ’em. I see coons scattered amongst your soldier boys and girls.”
“Mount up!” Ben called. “Let’s leave these good folks to their beliefs.”
“Wait!” the spokesman yelled. “We got sick.”
“That’s your problem,” Ben said, without breaking stride. He was the last one into the Hummer. “Drive, Coop.”
“With pleasure,” Cooper said, and headed out, leaving the sad-looking group behind.
“They never learn,” Ben muttered. “They just never learn.”
To the north and east, Blanton’s army had been bloodied and they held against Revere’s just-tested new short division. No winners, no losers; both sides had fought to a draw. Out west, Big Foot Freddie had tested General Taylor’s very weak and stretched-out lines and still the gang leader’s troops had the shit kicked out of them. Far to the south, Jake Starr could not penetrate the Rebel lines Cecil had thrown up. Carlos Medina had tried twice to buck the Rebel lines in the southwest and after sustaining heavy losses finally said to hell with it and ordered his people back home.
“See if you can work out some sort of a peace agreement with him,” Ben told General Taylor. “Tell him we’ll leave him alone if he does the same for us.”
Carlos agreed to that and one gang threat was averted. Taylor immediately pulled his people back to face Big Foot Freddie’s people.
“Shit!” Freddie said. “That damn spic done give up on us. He turned yeller.”
Not yellow at all, Carlos just accurately read the writing on the wall and wisely bowed out. He told his people, “I think we can live with the Rebels. They’re willing to try if we do. So let’s try.”
In Illinois, Ben had smashed all the way up to I-70 and was preparing to move against the town of Paris. Al Rogers was just about finished and the man had sense enough to know that. He called for a meeting with Ben Raines.
There was both defeat and undisguised hatred in Rogers’s eyes as Ben sat down at the table opposite him. They were meeting in a classroom in the old high school building.
“Speak your piece, General,” Al said broodingly.
“Not much to say, Al. Just stop fighting us and don’t throw in with Blanton or Revere or the punk gangs out west.”
Al’s eyes widened in disbelief. “That’s it?”
“That’s it. Live the way you want to live. I won’t interfere unless you cause trouble for me or my people.”
“You know I don’t like certain folks.”
“I don’t care anymore, Al,” Ben told him. “If you and your kind want to hate people for the color of their skin or the way they sincerely worship . . . have at it. But if you ever attempt to come into the Southern United States and try it, you’ll find yourself dangling from the end of a rope.”
“What you’re doin’ don’t seem right, Ben Raines. The south is gonna be a mixture of white and nigger and spic and Jew. Robert E. Lee is probably spinnin’ in his grave.”
“I doubt it, Al. I really doubt it. You should read more about the life of Lee before you start making statements like that.” Ben stood up. “Our war is over, Al. Make sure it remains that way. Because if I have to come back, I’ll kill you.” Ben and his team walked out the door and into the clean, fresh air. It was welcome. Al Rogers didn’t smell very good. In more ways than one.
“It must be a peace without victory. . . . Victory would mean peace forced upon the loser, a victor’s terms imposed upon the vanquished. It would be accepted in humiliation, under duress, at an intolerable sacrifice, and would leave a sting, a resentment, a bitter memory upon which terms of peace would rest, not permanently, but only as upon quicksand. Only a peace between equals can last.”
- Woodrow Wilson
BOOK THREE
ONE
Ben sat alone in his makeshift office and read and reread those words from Wilson’s address to the U.S. Senate. He had found a battered old copy of John Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations and had thumbed through it. He was thinking of what would happen when this conflict was over. Ben was a dreamer, but a realist at the same time. He knew what his people were capable of. There was no way the punks were going to defeat the Rebels, no way Revere/Stafford was going to defeat the Rebels, and there sure as hell was no way that Blanton’s army would defeat the Rebels. The troops of Blanton and Stafford were going to give the Rebels a hard time, a run for the money, but in the end, the Rebels would win. Ben didn’t give a damn for the feelings of Paul Revere/Nick Stafford, but in a strange way he liked Homer Blanton, he’d seen a drastic change in the thinking of Senator Hanrahan, and Blush Lightheart was not a bad fellow—for a liberal.
Ben stood and stretched his muscles. He stood for a moment, listening. He frowned and turned out the gas lamp. He picked up his Thompson and walked to the door leading to the outside and cracked it just a bit. He listened intently. Nothing. No night birds singing, no crickets, no squirrels chattering. He gently closed the door and walked swiftly to the front room of the old house.
“Heads up, people,” he said softly. “We’ve got company, and they’re real good.”
Corrie immediately got on the horn and put everybody on what the Rebels called QFA: quiet full alert.
“Nobody could have slipped through our security,” Jersey bitched in a whisper. “That ain’t possible.”
“Revere’s got men with him that are just as good as we are, Jersey,” Ben returned the whisper. “Believe it. Some of the gang members have had hard military training in elite outfits. We’re not perfect.”
Jersey muttered something terribly profane under her breath and Ben smiled in the darkness.
“Now, now!” Cooper chided.
“Kiss my ass, Coop!” Jersey told him, then groaned, knowing what was coming right back at her.
“Any time, any place, dear.”
“Screw you!” Jersey popped back, then shook her head, knowing she had just made it worse.
“I could fit you in tomorrow night,” Coop replied.
Jersey cussed him softly.
“Incoming mortars! Grab some ground!” a Rebel yelled from the outside, just about two seconds before the fluttering round from an old tube exploded.
“Light up the night,” Ben ordered. Seconds later, flares blew the skies into light. “Jesus!” Ben said. “The place is crawling with bogies.”
Ben spun around as the back door was kicked in and leveled his old .45 caliber Chicago Piano. He held the trigger back, fighting the powerful old Thompson as it struggled to climb up and right. Ben put half a dozen invaders on the floor, on the ground, and dead and dying as the fat slugs tore flesh and shattered bone.
“With me, Jersey,” Ben said. “The rest of you hold the front.” We’ve got spies in camp, Ben thought, as he took up position at a window. At least one and quite possibly two of those on guard this evening were in Revere, or Blanton’s, pocket. As much as he hated the thought, it had to be.
Then he had no more time to think about that as the action abruptly shifted to a fever pitch.
Tho
se attacking the camp were wearing the same type of BDUs as the Rebels, making it doubly difficult to tell friend from foe. But that was also working against the attackers.
Jersey’s M-16 rattled and two more of the unknown enemy went down in a sprawl. “Some of our own people are fighting against us, General,” she called.
“That’s what I was afraid of, Jersey.” Ben leveled the old Thompson and sent a knot of invaders screaming, stumbling and falling as the .45 caliber slugs stitched them hip to head, working left to right. He popped a fresh clip in, his eyes busy in the flare-lit night.
“They’re falling back,” Corrie called from the other room. “Pursuit?”
“Affirmative. Small teams. Find out where they go.”
“Done.”
Ben walked to the radio and picked up the mic. “This is Eagle. All batt coms double the guards and count heads. We’ve been infiltrated.”
“We don’t know how many of the dead were actually working for Blanton or Revere,” Dan said the next morning at first light. “But what we do know is that forty-five of our regulars are missing. And many of those were on sentry duty last night.”
“But we have no way of knowing how many others who are in Blanton or Revere’s pocket are still in camp,” Buddy added.
“We will before long,” Mike Richards said, walking into the room.
Everyone turned to look at the chief of Rebel intell. “How so?” Ben asked.
“We caught three of our people trying to sneak out,” Mike said, pouring a cup of coffee, adding sugar. “My people are chemically interrogating them now. We should know something by mid-morning.” He looked at Ben. “You were right, Ben. Denise is one of them.”
Ben grunted. “Yeah. I figured she was a plant. It was just too easy.”
No one in the room spoke for a moment. Buddy broke the silence. “What, ah, do you intend to do with them, Father?”
Ben cut his eyes to him. “Spies are usually shot, son.”
Late that afternoon, Ben visited the three spies, all from Blanton. He had placed Denise in Revere’s army and the other two were planted several years back in the Rebels. The three were worn and haggard looking from the chemically induced interrogation. But they were still defiant.
Denise stared daggers and hate at him. “I assume we are to be executed?”
“You assume correctly,” Ben told her.
“You will never defeat us,” she said. “The democratic party will rise like a phoenix from the ashes to once more rule this nation and bring order and peace and justice for all.”
“Don’t forget a chicken in every pot,” Ben replied. “Skinless, of course.”
She spat at his boots.
“When is the sentence to be carried out, General?” one of the two men asked.
“Tomorrow. Dawn. I have chaplains standing by for you.”
“Any chance we can make a deal?” the third man questioned.
“Maybe.” Ben glanced at a guard, and the man was taken from the room.
Ben looked at Denise and the other man. “Anything else either of you want to say to me?”
“Go to hell!” Denise told him.
“Long live the party of the people,” the man said.
Ben looked at him. “I never really understood that. How can it be the party of the people when at least half the people don’t subscribe to your philosophies?”
“Because we know what is best for all,” Denise answered the question.
At that most arrogant of statements, Ben left the room.
* * *
Denise and the man were buried side by side in unmarked graves. For a very brief moment, Ben actually contemplated finding a headstone and having the words, WE KNEW WHAT WAS BEST FOR EVERYBODY chiseled into the stone. But he quickly put that thought out of his mind.
The Rebels in the central part of the nation waited and read reports sent in by recon teams in the east. Blanton’s troops were very slowly giving up ground to the superior forces of Revere. Fighting was intense at times, and Blanton’s army was putting up much more of a fight than either Revere or Ben had thought them capable of doing.
“If that stiff-necked Blanton would ask us for help,” Ike remarked to Ben one morning. “Would you still give it?”
“I don’t know, Ike. A few weeks ago, I would have. Now, I just don’t know. Probably not, since he sent those troops against us.” He shook his head. “I just can’t figure the man. He’s supposed to be such an intelligent person, but he can’t see that hundreds of thousands of people are violently opposed to returning to his type of government. He wants a return to the form of government that was slowly bringing this nation to its knees . . . if the Great War hadn’t come along and hastened the process. He can’t see that there isn’t one nation in the entire world that is returning to the form of government they had before the Great War. He’s living in the past and I don’t know how to jar him out of that.”
“Well, if Revere’s army won’t, nothing will,” Buddy offered.
“I’m afraid you might be right, son.”
Blanton had been moved south, to a deep bunker a few miles north of the North Carolina line. His troops were beginning to show the signs of weeks of heavy combat without relief, and Homer Blanton finally got it through his head that his people were not going to win this war. But no matter how passionately his generals pleaded with him to do so, he adamantly refused to ask Ben Raines for assistance.
Then the generals began to talk quietly among themselves, as Ben had suspected (and hoped) they would.
“Maybe six weeks if we’re lucky,” General Holtz said, just back from the front.
“Or unlucky,” General Forrest added.
“A month, max,” General Thomas said.
“I can’t move the president,” Holtz said, toying with his coffee cup.
“He hates Ben Raines that much?” Forrest asked.
Holtz shrugged his shoulders. “Hate? No, I don’t think he hates him. I think Blanton is a raging liberal whose idea of government is meddling in everybody’s business and running their lives from cradle to grave, and Raines is a hard conservative who believes that it’s up to the individual to sink or swim on their own, and when you fuck up you pay the consequences.”
Thomas smiled. “And never the twain shall meet.”
“You got that right.”
“So? And?” Forrest asked.
“I swore allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. But we don’t have a United States. Those spies that Blanton planted deep in the Rebel movement were uncovered and shot.”
“How do you know that?”
“Raines intelligence section sent me a message.” He reached into his pocket and tossed three sets of dog tags onto the table. What he didn’t know was that the owner of the third set was alive and well and being groomed for use as a double agent, if necessary.
“What now?”
“I just can’t bring myself to betray the president. I thought about it. Hard. But I can order him physically moved to safer ground . . . if it comes to that.”
“It will,” Thomas said. “It will.”
Ike had dealt swiftly with Jeb Moody, scattering his people all over the place. Tina and Pat O’Shea had brutalized Carl Nations, and the Russian Bear had dealt quite harshly with Shazam. None of the leaders had been killed, but their troops had been demoralized and for the most part, ineffective. When that had been accomplished, Ben had ordered all battalions, with the exception of 13 and 11, who were attached to General Taylor, to start forming an L-shaped line, running straight south along the Ohio/Indiana line. The bottom of the L stretched out eastward from roughly Evansville, Indiana over to the West Virginia line.
All the Rebels knew what General Raines was doing: he just could not bring himself to fire against the American flag. At least, not yet. He was going to Blanton’s aid, whether the man wanted it or not.
Corrie got General Holtz on the horn, on scramble, and handed the mic to Ben.
�
�General? Ben Raines here. We need to talk about defeating Revere. We can settle our differences, if any, at a later date. After Revere is finished.”
A deep sigh is difficult to scramble. Depending on the system used, it sometimes comes out sounding like a fart. “I agree with that, General.”
“Just let me lay out my plan to you, and I think you’ll like it. I give you my word this is not a trap.”
“General Raines, I know it isn’t a trap. I also know that you are a man of honor. All right, I’m going to catch hell from President Blanton, but let’s meet.”
General Holtz, commanding General of Blanton’s Army, and General Ben Raines of the Rebels met clandestinely in a lonely forest in Kentucky. Each man brought one platoon of troops and their personal aides.
Holtz was shocked and showed it when Ben told him how he had repositioned his Rebels. “But my intell didn’t inform me of this!”
“Your intelligence people probably don’t know it was done,” Ben said calmly. “We can be very quiet about things when we so desire.”
Holtz studied the map and nodded his head. “I think I know what you have in mind, General, and if I’m right, it’s brilliant. Regardless of what Blanton says, we’ll go along.”
“Good. When you’re in place, we’ll force Revere to fight on four fronts. He doesn’t have the people to do that.”
The two men smiled and shook hands. “For the record, General Raines, I think our two societies could coexist very nicely together.”
“Oh, they will, General Holtz. They will. Just give us time.”
TWO
“Never!” President Homer Blanton shouted. “I will never agree with this.”
“You don’t have any say in the matter,” General Holtz bluntly informed the president.
“I am President of the United States!” Homer hollered.
“That’s right!” VP Hooter sounded off.
“Down with the military! Up with people power!” Rita Rivers stuck her lip into the matter.
Treason in the Ashes Page 20