The two battalions of Rebels who had gone north with Ike stayed back of the artillery and waited to go in. When the gunners were finished, they would begin the job of mopping up anything that might be left alive in the smoke and fire and rubble.
Ike pounded the Ninth Order relentlessly, using everything from 81mm mortars to 200-pound 203mm high explosive rounds, each round containing 104 M43A1 grenades.
“Goddamn you all to hell!” Voleta’s voice screamed over the radio.
“The bitch is still alive,” Ike muttered.
“I’ve got her location pinpointed,” Ike was told. “She’s in that old mansion in sector five.” He handed Ike the coordinates.
Ike quickly marked his map and gave the orders. “All artillery, repeat: all artillery concentrate on sector five, map coordinate Charlie Charlie niner. Repeat sector five, Charlie Charlie niner. Let’s finish it, people.”
Voleta sat in the basement and listened to the Rebels’ open transmission. She knew, then, that nothing would stop them. Not in America, not in the world. They were too powerful and still growing in strength. Through the madness that stained and rotted her brain, a moment of lucidity came to her. The Rebels would never be stopped. Never. Ben Raines’ army would continue to grow, and he would conquer the world, stamping out lawlessness wherever he led his troops. It would take him years of brutal fighting in dozens of countries, but he would do it.
“I hate you, Ben Raines,” Voleta whispered, “I loathe you and despise you. I hope you contract some horrible disease and you die slowly and painfully.”
Artillery rounds began falling close to the mansion. The stone structure took a hit, and part of the second floor blew apart. The building shuddered as the rounds impacted. Tile and dust and dirt were knocked loose and fell from the ceiling of the basement rooms.
“Goddamn you to hell, Ben Raines,” Voleta cursed the man she had once idolized, the man who had fathered their son.
Hundreds of miles south of the burning mansion, eyes studied Ben as he sat behind his desk and listened to the raging of war far to the north.
Men and women began screaming as a HE round collapsed part of the first floor, the debris falling into the basement, pinning members of the Ninth Order under beams and stone. The generator was knocked out, plunging the basement rooms into darkness.
“I’ll see you in hell,” Voleta screamed. “I’ll make a pact with Satan and torment you for eternity. That’s a promise, you son of a bitch . . .”
A round struck the mansion dead center, setting the mansion on fire as shards of Willie Peter were flung in all directions, burning into the dry wood.
“. . . My son will lie in torment beside you, Ben Raines,” Voleta squalled. “I’ll have the devil’s minions torture him for all eternity for betraying me. You and Buddy will suffer in agony for all eternity for this . . .”
The entire ground floor of the mansion took half a dozen 102-pound HE rounds. The mansion blew apart. The first floor collapsed into the basement, crushing everything in the basement rooms. Several tons of marble fell on Voleta; she became as one with the steel of her chair as the spokes of the wheels drove into her body and the imported marble smashed her as flat as the concrete floor on which she lay.
The barrage kept up for another ten minutes, until there was nothing left of the once huge and beautiful mansion except fire and smoke and rubble and ashes.
“Move in and secure the area,” Ike ordered.
“Prisoners, sir?” a company commander asked.
“If they choose to surrender, take them alive. They’re all certifiably nuts.”
The Rebels moved onto the smoking grounds.
“Voleta must have really gone off her bean this time,” a Rebel remarked. “She pulled everybody into about a five hundred acre estate. What a stupid move.”
They came upon a robed man, sitting on the edge of what had once been a very elaborate outdoor fountain. He was weeping openly and he had no weapon.
A medic ran over and began checking the man out. The man was babbling incoherently and it was obvious to all around him that he had soiled himself. The odor was foul.
The medic broke open a vial and waved it under the man’s nose. The man fought the odor but his eyes began to clear. “She was in the basement of the mansion,” he said, still weeping. “We wanted her to surrender. But she refused.” He pointed to the house. “That will be her monument.”
“Don’t bet on it,” a Rebel said. They had orders to find Voleta’s body and cremate it.
Ike wasn’t taking any chances this time. He wanted to personally eyeball the body.
Intelligence had estimated Voleta’s strength at more than five thousand. But Rebels could not find anywhere near that many bodies. More like five hundred.
“They ran away,” a very subdued member of the Ninth Order told them. “They deserted our glorious Sister Voleta and fled for their lives.”
“Your glorious leader is squashed flat as a pancake over there in what’s left of that mansion,” a Rebel told him bluntly.
“No!” the man wailed.
“Yeah. We got prisoners who saw it happen. We’ll be diggin’ her out as soon as we get some heavy equipment in here.”
“Then kill me!” the man screamed. “Put an end to my life. All is lost. Kill me now. I would rather die than live without my Voleta.”
A Rebel said, “I surely do wish I could oblige you, nut-brain, but we got orders to get you people to an institution.”
“Why?” the man questioned, looking from Rebel to Rebel. “What have we done wrong?”
The Rebels glanced at each other and shook their heads. Voleta and her Ninth Order had tortured, mutilated, enslaved, and murdered thousands of people from one end of the nation to the other.
They tied his hands behind his back and he was led away, ranting and raving.
“How many left alive?” Ike asked, arriving after the grounds had been secured.
“Seventy. And some of them won’t last the night.”
“We’ll start digging for Voleta at first light. I want this place sealed off so tight a flea couldn’t get through. If that bitch is still alive—which is damned doubtful—” He paused and looked at the rubble that was once the mansion. “I want to see her body and have a positive I.D.”
The Rebels worked for a week, using cranes and bulldozers and pure muscle and sweat. Ike paced up and down and walked the grounds countless times before the call came.
“We’re about ready to lift the slab of marble floor out of the basement, General. I don’t know that you’ll be able to I.D. anything, though. Whatever is under that slab is mashed flat as a piece of paper.”
“We’ll try,” Ike told her.
Ike stood on the edge of a huge hole, grim-faced and silent, watching as the cables were attached to the slab of marble flooring. The stench was horrible. Those working on the basement floor wore gas masks.
The slab was hoisted out and lowered to the ground outside the hole. Ike had already seen the flattened form of the wheelchair and the grotesqueness of the body that was embedded into the metal of the chair.
“A woman,” a doctor called from the pit, as he stood over the body. “Both legs amputated and horrible burns all over her body.”
Ike nodded and walked to the communications van. He bumped Ben and told him the news.
“Scrape her out and cremate the remains,” Ben said. “This chapter is closed.”
NINE
Ben drove to the edge of the huge training grounds and got out of the jeep. He was not alone—Ben was never really alone—but his bodyguards were giving him enough room so that he could at least have the experience of solitude.
He looked out over the quiet land just moments before dawn would be breaking. Since the news of the fall of the Ninth Order, Voleta’s death, and her cremation, he had been alternating between jubilation and the strange sensation of discontent. Was that the right description for the feeling? He wasn’t sure. But he knew what was causing i
t.
America was free of terrorism, free of outlaws, free of roaming gangs of punks and crud and other human flotsam. He and his Rebels had been fighting for over a decade. And it had ended with not a bang, but a mere whimper.
Now the Rebels faced, as Jersey had put it, the unknown. That was the problem. Ben knew that in Europe the Believers—the cannibalistic Night People—ruled the cities and the war lords and their ilk roamed the countryside. The Rebels had faced that here in America; in Europe it was to be a thousand times larger than here in the States. But what else would the Rebels face in Europe? How many armies would they be forced to fight?
Could the Rebels pull it off?
Should they attempt to pull it off?
Ben’s intelligence people said yes, they should. Hit them hard, hit them with everything Ben could, grind them down, before they could mass and strike here.
All his commanders agreed with that assessment. And Ben, in his heart, knew it had to be. But the cost in human life . . . ?
He shook his head. He could not dwell on that.
He walked back to his jeep and drove to the depot where the tanks were parked in neat rows, the little M-42 Dusters looking almost dainty parked next to the huge MBTs. They were about as dainty as a sledgehammer.
As dawn was breaking, Ben drove out to the airfield, gazing at the squadrons of helicopter gunships, silent but deadly-looking in the gray dawn.
He drove over to where the drivers had parked the monster self-propelled guns: the M109s, which fired the 155mm rounds, and the huge M110A2s, which could hurl a 203mm round, which weighed over two hundred pounds, many miles away and strike with amazing accuracy.
Ben sighed. He was the commander of the largest, most highly motivated, and best-equipped army in all the world. And he knew that for a fact, having listened to hours of taped broadcasts from all over the world.
He looked up at the sky. “I know the age of miracles is long past, God,” he whispered. “But if you could just stay with my people during this next campaign, it would certainly be appreciated.”
The eastern sky broke open at that moment, the sun shooting golden rays all over the horizon, and it was the most beautiful dawning Ben had ever experienced.
“OK,” Ben smiled and whispered. “Message received.”
“They’re looking good, Dad,” Tina told her father. “We’ve leaned them down and they’re walking tall and proud. The dropout rate has been surprisingly low.”
“Much less than we anticipated,” Buddy said. “We’re going to come out of this with three very strong battalions.”
Ben moved to an organizational chart on the wall of his CP and penciled in the three new battalions of infantry. That brought them up to just over ten thousand infantry personnel. The Rebels now had five more squadrons of helicopter gunships and two dozen more fully qualified tank crews. They would be leaving behind more than enough Rebels to defend Base Camp One and nearly anything—short of a large, full-scale invasion—that might pop anywhere else in the United States; and the States were once more united.
Rebel patrols were still wandering the countryside, finding and rooting out very small pockets of outlaws who refused to accept the surrender terms of the Rebels. They chose death instead, and the Rebels obliged them.
Christmas was three weeks behind them, the climate extremely cold, and training in Kansas had been cut back due to the inclement weather. In South Carolina, Ike and Therm and Emil reported amazing progress in the readying of the ships.
Ben turned around, looking at his commanders. “Start moving half the tanks toward the docks on the East Coast, Get them ready for loading. How about tankers?”
“Five are ready in Louisiana, Father,” Buddy said. “We’ll rendezvous with them at sea.”
Ben nodded his head. “All right. Get half the gunships up as soon as weather permits and get them moving toward the East Coast for loading.”
Ben looked at Beth. “Give us the latest on what we might expect to find in Ireland.”
“Broadcasts indicate that Northern Ireland is pretty much a battleground between Catholic and Protestant factions . . .”
“Hell, that’s been going on for centuries,” Ben said. “I doubt those doing battle even know what they’re fighting for after all these years. There must be nothing left of the towns and cities in that area.”
“That’s about right, sir,” Beth said. “Not much left there except hate.”
“It’s been that way for as long as I can remember. All right. As it stands now, I have no plans to get involved in some damn so-called religious war . . . all the suffering and killing done in the name of God, of course. We’ll see about the Republic of Ireland, see if they’d like to join in a program something like our outpost system, and then cross the Irish Sea to England. After that, we’ll just have to play it by ear.
“We’re not going in totally blind. Our intelligence sections have been in almost daily contact with people in Ireland and England—they need our help, they want our help, and they will assist us once we’re there. We’ll be facing pretty much the same type of crud over there that we faced here: warlords, outlaws, punk street gangs; the same type of human puke we had to contend with here.”
“It’s when we hit the continent that we’ll really start having problems,” Dan said.
“Right,” Ben said. “The Irish and the English are overwhelmed with outlaws, punks, and Night People; but they really don’t have the huge armies that we’ll encounter in Europe. But we will get our bloody initiation on foreign soil there.”
“What are their thoughts on saving the cities?” Striganov asked.
Ben grimaced. “They would like to save them if possible. Our people have told them that we will try to do that. However, if I have to make the choice between saving a building and saving a Rebel life, the building is going to go.” He looked at Dan.
The Englishman stood up. “Of course there are pockets of armed resistance in Ireland and England. Secure zones filled with people who will help us in any way. I have informed them that we do not intend to be gentle; if they cannot accept the Rebel philosophy of warfare, there is no need in our coming.” He smiled. “The people over there are so weary of crime and lawlessness the leader of one secure zone told me she would shake hands with the devil to get back to some degree of normalcy.” He laughed out loud. “I told her that when we landed to slip on a pair of asbestos gloves.” He waited until the laughter had subsided, then added, “She did not really see the humor in it.”
Buddy raised his hand and Dan pointed at him.
“I don’t know if this question can be answered,” the young man said. “But I have to ask it: why has there not been someone like my father rising up from the ashes in all those countries overseas and forming an army such as the Rebels?”
Ben shook his head. “I can’t answer that question, son. And nobody else can either. I’m sure there were men and women much more qualified that I to do just that. Perhaps the criminal element found them and killed them before any such movement could get started. I just don’t know. But I do know this: gun laws were much more restrictive in Europe than in America. Of course the criminals never paid any attention to gun laws; only the law-abiding citizens did that. So the criminals always had access to guns. When the Great War came, the unarmed citizens were easily overpowered by the criminal element.”
The young man had a confused look on his handsome face. “Why would anybody want to disarm law-abiding citizens? That doesn’t make any sense to me.”
West chuckled. “If you could have seen the ninnies and the yoyos the American people elected to high office, you would know the answer to that, Buddy.”
“But why did the people keep electing them if they were so bad?” Buddy persisted. “I thought the old form of government was of the people, for the people.”
“It looked good on paper, son,” Ben said. “It read well. But it didn’t work the way our forefathers meant it to work. I suspect that politics was always a dir
ty business; but toward the end of the last millennium it got worse. Very few citizens—elected or otherwise—were interested in what was good for the majority of the people. If a person spoke their mind, they might look out their windows the next morning and see a hundred other people boycotting their business. If a person went against the grain of the national press, the reporters could turn on them viciously and tear their lives apart.”
“Then the people who reported the news and wrote the columns and hosted the information shows and so forth, they led exemplary lives—were role models for others?” Buddy asked.
That got a good laugh from the older members in attendance.
“I imagine many of them certainly thought they were,” Ben said. “What is this? History 101? Come on, people. We’ve got troops to train and wars to fight.”
“And history to write,” Buddy said solemnly.
“No, son,” Ben told him. “We won’t write the history. But what we will do is shape it.”
Ben and his personal team flew over to South Carolina, and for the first time, Ben walked the busy docks and was clearly in awe at what he saw.
Ben counted twenty huge ships tied up at the docks, with workers scrambling all over the vessels. Ike met him on the docks and shook his hand.
“They’re beauties, aren’t they, Ben?”
Ben was slightly less enthusiastic than Ike. “Yeah, great, Ike.” He eyeballed one ship that appeared to be about the length of a dozen football fields. “What the hell is this monster?”
“Transport, Ben. It’s called a ro-ro.”
“Do you have something caught in your throat, Ike?” Ben asked.
Ike laughed and whacked him on the back. “No. That’s short for ‘Roll-on-Roll-off.’ See the big ramp there?” He pointed. “We can just drive the trucks, tanks, whatever, right on and secure them. Then when we dock, we just drive them off.”
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