Hatred in the Ashes

by William W. Johnstone

  “I . . . guess I see. I don’t think anyone outside of the SUSA really understands how your government works.”

  “Oh, most people do. They just won’t accept it.”

  “I guess. It just seems so . . . extreme to me.”

  “It really isn’t extreme. It’s just back to the basics, that’s all. One of the oldest rights humankind has is the right to protect loved ones, self, and property. That goes back thousands of years, back to when our ancestors lived in caves. And I have never believed any legislative body or court of law should have the power to take that away from people. In the SUSA, we don’t even try. What is mine is mine, and if someone tries to take it without due process, I’m going to stop him. And if that involves the use of deadly force . . . so be it.”

  “And you don’t consider that extreme?”

  “I consider it the right of every law-abiding citizen of the SUSA . . . if they wish to exercise that right.”

  “And the crime rate in the SUSA?”

  “Practically non-existent.”

  “Then I guess that says it all, doesn’t it?”

  “I guess it does.”

  Ben parked the car at the rear of the warehouse lot, tucking it between two trucks.

  “We’ll sit here for a few minutes and wait,” he said. “If they have outside sensors, someone will be along shortly to check us out.”

  While Sandi was in her room at the motel, Ben had opened the hidden compartment in the car and had taken out a short-barreled 9mm machine pistol with sound suppressor, thirty round magazine. The weapons were designed and manufactured in the SUSA, and most special operations people carried them when the job required stealth and silence.

  Ben had placed the machine pistol on the floorboards of the backseat along with a full six magazine pouch. He reached behind him, retrieving the equipment, cradling the weapon.

  Sandi watched him in the darkness as he checked the sub-machine gun. “Interesting weapon.”

  “We like them.”

  “If the FPPS found you with that weapon during a road check, you’d be in a lot of trouble.”

  “Probably. But there would be a lot of dead FPPS people before I went down.”

  “Then you don’t mind breaking the law outside of your own nation?”

  “Not when it involves rescuing my kid, who was illegally taken from my nation.”

  “Have you considered that maybe the FPPS people guarding her don’t know who she is?”

  Ben looked at her. “Don’t talk nonsense.”

  Sandi nodded in the darkness of the interior of the car. “I guess you’re right, Ben.” After a moment of silence, she said, “May I ask a question?”

  “Go right ahead.”

  “How come the commanding general of one of the most feared armies on the face of the earth is off on a lone wolf operation all by himself?”

  “Because it’s my show. Anna is my kid. The democrat/- socialist government in power up here did it to sucker me out. All right. That’s what they wanted, so here I am. And don’t think for an instant they don’t have their best people surrounding Anna. They knew I would come after her.” He looked at his watch. A couple more minutes and then they would make their move.

  “Time to go?” Sandi asked.

  “Almost.”

  “Won’t the dome light come on when we open the doors?”

  “No. They’re fixed not to come on. Neither will the trunk light.”

  “Do you think of everything?”

  “I try. Sandi?”

  “Yes?”

  “Don’t hesitate to shoot. You said the building was soundproofed.”

  “It is. Ben, I might know some of those people in there. If they’re in there. What then?”

  “If that’s the case, I would say your friendship with them is about to come to an abrupt end. And they’re in there, Sandi, or you wouldn’t have been so insistent on coming here first. Unless you’re setting me up. And if that’s the case, you’ll go down first.”

  “I’m not setting you up, and I don’t know for sure she’s being held here. I just have a hunch, that’s all. Call it a very strong hunch.”

  “All right. It’s show time. So let’s do it.”

  Sandi opened her purse and took out a pistol: a snub nosed .38. Ben noted that she did not check the loads. Amateurs did that . . . and people in the movies. A gun is either loaded or it isn’t, and if the person carrying the pistol doesn’t know, they probably shouldn’t be carrying one around.

  The two of them walked across the rear parking lot, their shoes making crunching sounds in the gravel. There was no other sound except for the traffic noise on the street in front of the warehouse.

  “Not much traffic for the nation’s capital,” Ben remarked in a whisper.

  “Never is,” Sandi replied. “There is nothing here to see. Not like Washington used to be.”

  They heard the sounds of a back door opening, and hit the ground fast, only a few yards from the rear of the building.

  Ben figured they were only a few seconds from a wild shoot-out, but the man who opened the back door did not see them. He stood for a moment, framed in the dim light, until a woman’s voice called out.

  “Shut the damn door, Marsh,” she said in a commanding voice. “Are you crazy?”

  “Hell, Barbara, there’s no one out here,” Marsh replied. “There isn’t one chance in a million any damn Rebel will show up after that bitch.”

  “Don’t be so damn sure of that, Marsh. Now get your ass back in here, pronto.”

  “All right, all right,” Marsh said irritably. “Keep your pants on.”

  “Oh, don’t worry about that, I will,” Barbara said with a laugh.

  Marsh turned and started back inside.

  Beside him, Sandi waited just a couple of seconds before she started to lunge to her feet. Ben stuck the muzzle of the 9mm spitter in her ribs. “Don’t do it,” he whispered. “You waited just a heartbeat too long.”

  She hesitated, and then Ben heard her open her mouth and suck in air to yell just as the door closed behind Marsh with a solid sound.

  “Relax,” Ben told her. “It’s a little late for yelling, don’t you think? You said it yourself—the building is soundproofed.”

  “You son of a bitch!” she hissed at him. “You won’t get out of here alive.”

  “Maybe not, but neither will you.”

  He felt her relax. “How did you—” She bit off the remaining words.

  “I’ve suspected all along. It was a really clumsy approach back at the motel. Very amateurish of you.”

  “Now what? You going to kill me in cold blood?”

  “Why not? That’s exactly what you were going to do to me, isn’t it?”

  “Only if you resisted.”

  Ben chuckled softly. “And you think I wouldn’t have? How much reward has Madame President put on my head?”

  “How—” Again she bit back the words. Then she hissed, “You bastard.”

  “A guess. Just a very educated guess. Get up and walk back to the car.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  “I’ll kill you right where you lie.”

  “I don’t think you will, Ben. I don’t think you can kill in cold blood.”

  “Then you don’t know me very well, Sandi. I would advise you not to push your luck.”

  She looked at him in the very dim light from the street lamps that reached the rear of the warehouse. “You’re bluffing, Ben. That’s all.”

  “I seldom bluff.”

  “Maybe this is one of those times.”

  “It isn’t, Sandi.”

  “Help!” she suddenly yelled, jumping to her feet. “It’s Ben Raines. In the parking lot. In the rear—”

  Ben shot her.

  The only sound was the rapid working of the bolt on the lethal little spitter. Sandi fell face forward on the gravel. She trembled once, then was still.

  “Stupid,” Ben muttered. “Just plain stupid.”

 
Ben got to his feet and looked around him. Her yelling had not attracted any attention that he could detect, This was mostly a warehouse district, with only a couple of small convenience stores, farther on up the block. There were some cars and pickup trucks parked in front of the stores, but he could see no one in the parking area of either store.

  “Lucked out again, Raines,” he muttered.

  Ben walked leisurely toward the rear of the warehouse. He knew that a running figure attracted more attention than a person just strolling along.

  A couple of trucks, big rigs, rumbled past on the street in front of the warehouse. A car drove along slowly. Ben could hear the radio playing loudly. A talk show commentator was running his mouth and flapping his gums about something, arguing hotly with somebody. Ben picked up a few sentences before the car drove out of hearing range.

  “It’s communist, that’s what it is!” a woman said. “America has turned communistic. I saw this coming years ago. And you’re a damn communist!’

  “Madame, I am a registered Democrat!” the talk show host angrily replied.

  Ben couldn’t hear the woman’s reply to that, but he could just about guess what it was, and that made him smile.

  He reached the raised platform at the back door and stepped up on it. He took several deep breaths and tried the doorknob. It was locked.

  Saying a short prayer to the Almighty that Anna was in the building and all right, Ben kicked the door open and stepped inside.

  “Knock, knock,” he said to the group of men and women sitting at a long, folding type table.

  They all reached for guns.

  Ben opened fire.

  Seventeen

  The first burst from Ben’s spitter knocked the man called Marsh backward, the front of his shirt bloody and pockmarked. Ben jumped to one side just as another man leveled an auto-loader in his direction and pulled the trigger. As Ben was hitting the floor he gave the group half a magazine of 9mm rounds. The man throwing lead at him with the big semi-auto went down, several of Ben’s rounds taking him in the throat and face.

  “Kill the son of a bitch!” Barbara screamed, ducking behind a filing cabinet.

  “It’s a million bucks if we take him alive!” Ben heard a man shout.

  “Hell, it’s a million bucks if we kill him!” another shouted.

  Ben rolled to one side and leveled his spitter. He figured he had about twelve to fifteen rounds left in the magazine. He let the weapon rock and roll, silently praying it would not jam up on him.

  Two men went down, cussing him as they died. Ben quickly ejected the empty and slipped in a full mag as the room fell silent.

  Barbara’s pistol jammed on her, and she screamed in rage and hurled the weapon at him. Ben ducked and closed the distance between them, sticking the muzzle of the spitter in the woman’s face. She abruptly closed her mouth, her eyes widening in momentary fright.

  “Anna,” Ben said. “Where is she?”

  “She isn’t here. See for yourself.”

  “Where is she?”

  “You’ll never get that information from me, Raines!” she sneered at him.

  “Oh, I’ll bet I do, lady.” Ben hit her with a big fist that turned her lights out. She dropped to the floor in a slackened heap.

  Ben quickly checked the living quarters. Nothing, and no sign that Anna had ever been there.

  Two of the FPPS agents were dead, two more were dying. Ben grabbed up a set of handcuffs from the table and quickly secured Barbara. He ignored the wounded men and picked up Barbara, slinging her over one shoulder and headed out the back door to his car.

  Using duct tape from an emergency roadside kit, he taped her mouth, dumped her in the trunk (she damn sure was no lightweight) and quickly headed out. He kept his speed down to the legal limit as several unmarked FPPS cars, dash-mounted red lights flashing, roared past him in the other lane, heading for the warehouse. Somebody had reported the sound of shooting.

  Ben did not return to the motel. He had already memorized a way out of the city, using Sandi’s map. Fifteen minutes later, he drove past the city limits sign on the east side of the capital and cut down a blacktop road, staying on it for several miles. Then he cut north on another road. He drove it until he found the ruins of a ramshackle old farmhouse. He cut down the gravel driveway and tucked the car in close to the rear of the old house.

  Ben opened the trunk and jerked the woman out, dumping her on the ground on her butt. She grunted through the tape as her ass impacted with the hard ground.

  Ben dragged her up the steps, through the back porch, and into what had once been the kitchen. He righted an old chair and then ripped the clothing from the woman, leaving her naked. Using the roll of duct tape, he secured her to the chair and then ripped the tape from her mouth and stepped back.

  “Now you listen to me, lady,” Ben said. “I don’t have chemicals to make this easy on you.” He pulled a very sharp, lock-back folding knife from his back pocket and showed it to her in the faint light. “I can guarantee you more pain than you have ever experienced in your life. I don’t want to have to do this, but I will. I want my kid, and I want her right now. It’s all up to you.”

  “Fuck you, Raines. I don’t think you’ll do it.”

  “Then that makes you a fool.”

  It was messy, but it didn’t take all that long. She had told Ben where Anna was being held, and the pain had been intense enough to guarantee she wasn’t lying. The woman wasn’t that hurt or disfigured but she was in a lot of pain, and most of the bluff and bluster had been taken out of her. She slumped naked in the old rickety chair, weeping as the sweat glistened on her body—sweat mixed with blood. She had also pissed on herself.

  “Damn you to hell!” Barbara gasped the words at him. “You’re a monster!”

  “Just a man who wants his kid back.”

  “I hope you’re captured and hanged, Raines. I hope they leave your body dangling from the gallows until it rots!”

  “I wish you well, too, Barbara.”

  “Fuck you, Raines, you . . . you goddamn Republican!”

  Ben had to lean against the old kitchen counter and laugh at her words. The more he chuckled the angrier the woman became, some of her bluster returning.

  “Your kingdom won’t last much longer. In a few months the SUSA will be history. Destroyed!”

  “Oh, I rather doubt that. That’s just another wild-eyed, democrat socialist pipe dream.”

  She hissed and spat at him, some of the spittle dribbling down her chin.

  “How ladylike of you, Barbara.”

  She cursed him until she was out of breath.

  “Are you quite through, now?”

  “I hope your kid’s been gangbanged, Raines. Shagged front and back. I hope she’s been forced to suck the cock of every agent that’s guarding her.”

  Ben sighed and shook his head in the darkness, wondering how much hate one person could have—and why. Why did these dedicated followers of Millard and Osterman hate the SUSA so intensely?

  “Why do you people hate the SUSA so much? That baffles me.”

  She cursed and spat at him until she was bug-eyed and panting for breath.

  “What’s the matter, can’t you tell me? Can’t you give me a valid reason?”

  “You’ve destroyed the Constitution and The Bill of Rights, Raines. That’s why.”

  Ben stared at her, unbelieving, in the dim light. “We’ve destroyed The Constitution and The Bill of Rights? I can’t believe I’m hearing those words from you, from a damned socialist.”

  “We do what is best for the people. The people don’t always know what is good for them. They have to be shown. That’s government’s job.”

  “Well, there is a lot more to it than that. But the sad thing is, you really believe that crap.”

  She began babbling the party line, right out of the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Ben listened for a few seconds before waving the woman silent.

  “Enough, lady. Good Go
d, be quiet. You’re giving me a headache. Besides, I don’t have time for all that socialistic shit. You should be able to get yourself free in a few hours, if you work real hard at it. Seeing you wandering around naked ought to give some man a real thrill; I’m sure some dedicated and true blue democrat socialist will stop and help you. However, if that doesn’t please you, there is another option—I can always just shoot you right here and now. That certainly would uncomplicate matters for me. The choice is yours.”

  Barbara closed her mouth and kept it closed. She had discovered—quite painfully—that Ben Raines would do exactly what he said he would do. She sat silently and glared wild hate at Ben.

  “No comment?”

  “I would like to live, General,” she said.

  “Wise choice. I commend you. All right. Don’t go anywhere.” He chuckled at the sudden expression on the face of the trussed-up woman. “I’ll be right back. You can entertain yourself while I’m gone by reciting the words of Karl Marx or Sugar Babe Osterman.”

  Ben returned a few minutes later with a small first aid kit and placed it on the table he had shoved out of the way before he went to work on the woman. “There’re iodine, bandages, tape, and aspirin in there, along with some other items. When you get free you can doctor yourself. What’s left of your clothing is on the back porch. OK?”

  She stared at him, not believing what she was hearing. “First you cut me, now you provide me with first aid materials. What the hell kind of man are you, Raines?”

  “Well, lady, I guess you could say I’m what used to be known as a Tri-Stater. Back before your wonderful government crushed the movement . . . for a little while, that is.”

  “I’ve heard that term before. I don’t know exactly what it means.”

  “I don’t have time to explain it now. You just work at getting yourself free. Let’s hope we’ll never see each other again.”

  “That would suit me just fine, Raines.”