Vengeance in the Ashes

by William W. Johnstone

  “They’re going to continue following the ranting and raving of this Lytton female.”

  “Good Lord.”

  “That’s not all. She is demanding an audience with you.”

  “Send her in.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Might as well hear what she has to say.”

  She had plenty to say. “You are a heathen, Ben Raines,” Jean told him. “You have no Christian attributes. You do not understand that people who turn to a life of crime are not to be blamed for that. Society pushed them to it. They . . .”

  Ben waved her silent. “Lady, I don’t want to hear that hogwash. I didn’t believe it when governments were more or less stable, and I sure as hell don’t believe it now. So get on with something else to bore me.”

  “You are a terrible man.”

  “Go on.”

  “God will strike you dead for what you are doing to this once-great country.”

  “Is that all?”

  “No.”

  Ben sighed. “That’s what I was afraid of. Get on with it.”

  “Armageddon is looming on the horizon like a great multi-headed beast. And the heads all have your face.”

  “Could I have a snapshot of that?” Jersey asked, sitting across the room. “That’d be neat.”

  “You shut your whore mouth!” Jean told her.

  Jersey stood up and Ben waved her back. “This conversation is over, lady. Carry your butt out of here before I turn Jersey loose on you.”

  Jean stormed from the old house. After she had stalked away, those still following her falling in step with her, Jersey said, “That woman is about as dangerous as Sister Voleta.”

  “She’s a disciple of Voleta,” Ben spoke the words softly. “I’d bet on it. And she’ll link up with Hoffman. I’d bet on that, too. We’ll see her again.”

  “Striganov on the horn, General,” Corrie called from the other room.

  “Go, Bear,” Ben said.

  “I can’t make it, Eagle. Somebody has crippled the bridges in this area. I’m having to backtrack. I’ll cross over first chance I get and we’ll have to tackle the groups from the south and west.”

  Ben thought for a moment. “Oh, hell, Georgi. We’re about the same strength as DeMarco. Let’s catch him and mix it up. What do you say?”

  The Russian’s great booming laugh came over the miles. “Hell, yes, Ben! Although I think you’re up to something and the fight will be over long before I get there. All right, Ben. Yes. Let’s do it.”

  Ben stepped to the door and waved at Dan. When he had trotted over, Ben said, “We’re pulling out at first light and closing with DeMarco and his goose-steppers.”

  “Suits me. My people are spoiling for a fight. But what about General Striganov?”

  “I just spoke with him, Dan. Hell, he’s way up in Minnesota. The fight will be over by the time he even gets a good start. He knows it. And he said as much. Georgi knows I’m not to be trusted.”

  “I will admit that at times you do present an incorrigible streak, General,” Dan said with a grin. “But if everybody wants a fight, and they do, why wait until tomorrow to move? We can be within five miles of them by ten o’clock tonight. The scouts say it does not appear that DeMarco thinks he’s being followed, and security is very lax.”

  “Yeah. We could be all over them by dawn. All right, Dan. Get the people mounted up.”

  His team was already packing up what they had just unpacked. They knew Ben well.

  “All right, Jersey,” Ben said. “Say it.”

  “Kick-booty time?” she said coyly.

  Cooper threw a helmet at her and she chased him out of the room and put him under a truck. He stayed there until Ben told Jersey to let him come out unharmed. It was time to go.

  NINE

  The scouts ranged ten miles out in front of the main column as they drove north into Iowa and then turned east, heading straight for DeMarco and Jackman’s troops. By eight o’clock that evening, the column halted and the Rebels who had not followed Ben’s orders to catch some sleep in the vehicles on the way over, drivers and gunners, bedded down for a few hours’ rest. The Rebels had made very good time over the old country roads. The scouts had reported back that they were so close to the band of turncoats Americans they could practically spit on them.

  At midnight, Ben woke his people and they were on the way, route-stepping toward the showdown, loaded down with equipment. They passed homes along the way, oftentimes the man and woman and kids on the front porch, seeing what all the marching people were about.

  “Gonna lick this Hoofman feller, General?” a man called.

  “We’re going to kick his butt all the way back to wherever in the hell he came from,” Ben told the local.

  “Stick him in the butt with a bayonet for me!”

  “That’s a scabby bunch up the road, General,” another called. “They rolled through here yesterday. Trash if I ever laid eyes on some.”

  “We’ll take care of them,” Ben assured the people. “You’re all part of the Rebel outpost here, aren’t you?”

  “You better believe it,” a woman called. “God bless you boys and girls.”

  “This makes it all worthwhile,” Cooper said. “Makes me feel good that we’re helping the law-abiding folks who just want to rebuild and be good citizens.”

  “I won’t argue that, Coop,” Jersey said. “That almost makes up for you hitting me with a helmet.”

  “Thanks, Jersey,” Cooper said.

  “I said almost.”

  “That means you’re still in trouble, Coop,” Ben told him.

  “When am I not?”

  “Noise discipline from here on in,” Ben told Corrie. “Pass the word. The scouts are one mile from here.”

  Scouts had radioed back that the town was an old deserted one. They could attack without fear of harming any locals. Unless some locals collaborated with Jackman and DeMarco, and if that was the case, it didn’t make any difference.

  “One mile right up this road, General,” a scout told Ben. “They have sentries posted around the town, but none climbed the water tower. Hawkins here just came back in from town and he says they’re careless and overconfident. Smoking on guard duty, talking, and just generally not professional at all.”

  “Mines and booby traps?”

  “None, sir,” Hawkins said. “They parked their vehicles all over the town; just wherever they happened to find a spot.” He smiled in the night. “Those trucks are loaded with explosives. It’s going to be a really big bang.”

  “I certainly plan on it being that and more. Corrie, pass the word: rest for one hour. Then start moving around the town and work in to about five hundred meters. Mortar crews are setting up the 60s now. We’ll mop up what the rocket attack leaves alive. Flares will go up the instant the attack begins and they will continue to light the night. By now the drivers have caught a few hours’ sleep and are on their way here. They’ll lay back about a mile behind us and deploy at the first pop and circle the town with Big Thumpers and machine-gun fire. Now, folks, these people are traitors. I am not particularly interested in seeing a lot of prisoners.”

  No Rebel had to ask Ben to elaborate on that.

  “Take a rest,” Ben finished it.

  That nearly twenty-five hundred Rebels could completely surround the town without being detected could be broken down into two reasons: the skill of the Rebels and the laxness of DeMarco and Jackman. That laxness would cost them their lives.

  Ben and his team silently worked their way into position. They were a few hundred yards from a two-story building right on the edge of town. A dozen vehicles were parked in front of and around the structure.

  Ben looked at the luminous hands of his watch. Five minutes to blowdown. He lay on the cool ground and studied his darkened surroundings. Not one unnatural sound could be heard. As a matter of fact, nothing could be heard. That should have been a dead giveaway to the turncoats, Ben thought. They might be skilled woodsmen,
but they weren’t worth a damn when it came to urban warfare.

  Corrie was listening intently to her headset. Finally she smiled and whispered, “All teams in place, General.”

  “Any second now,” he returned the whisper.

  The first 60mm mortar fell right on a truck that was loaded with explosives. The explosion completely destroyed the building the truck was parked in front of and sent a gasoline fireball several hundred feet into the night sky. Flares began popping in the skies, beginning their slow parachute drop downward.

  Then two dozen 60mm rounds fell on the old town and the earth trembled under their impact. Hummers roared into position all around the outskirts of the town and the gunners began firing 40mm grenades into the confusion, the Big Thumpers spitting out death and fire.

  Trucks and Jeeps were exploding inside the town, sending out death-dealing and maiming shrapnel for hundreds of yards. Those Americans trapped inside the old town soon discovered that they had no place to run. When they tried to flee the flames and explosions, the hidden Rebels lying a few hundred meters out cut them down. The fires from the burning town could be seen for miles in any direction. And they were seen. Several hundred members of the loosely knit Rebel outpost nearby stood on their front porches and in their lawns and watched and listened to the destruction of those who had turned their backs on America and who would enslave them under Hoffman’s directives.

  No one felt an ounce of pity for the traitors.

  “Mortar crews stand down,” Ben ordered.

  The night ceased its rocking and trembling. The crackling of unchecked fires, the popping of burning ammunition, and the screaming of the wounded filled the firelit, leaping, dancing night.

  “Move in,” Ben ordered.

  The Rebels worked closer. When they were within range of rocket launchers and bloop tubes, Ben halted forward motion and ordered his troops to pour it on those still left alive in the now-ruined town.

  So complete was the murderous attack, so total the destruction and so massive the confusion, the forces of Jackman and DeMarco might have gotten off a hundred rounds maximum at the nearly invisible Rebels. Not one Rebel was killed or wounded by hostile fire.

  “Hold your positions,” Ben ordered. “Do not advance. Shoot anyone carrying a weapon. If they come out of that inferno with their hands in the air, take them prisoner.”

  When dawn finally lightened the eastern skies, and the fires in the town were burning down, the Rebels had taken twelve prisoners, and two of them were so shell-shocked they were reduced to near-babbling idiots.

  Two of the prisoners were Jackman and DeMarco.

  “I’ll make a deal with you,” Ben said. “Tell me everything you know about Hoffman’s army—and I mean everything—and I’ll let you live. If you choose not to cooperate, I’ll hang you right here and now.” He pointed to a huge old tree with two nooses dangling from a branch.

  “Fuck you, Raines,” DeMarco said. “Heil Hitler!”

  “Hang him,” Ben ordered.

  Two minutes later DeMarco was kicking his last.

  Jackman watched through horror-filled eyes. This just didn’t happen in America. America gave you trials and appeals and free lawyers and free psychiatrists and lots of good press coverage from pissing and sobbing hanky-stomping reporters and all that stuff. In America you could drag out criminal trials—at the expense of overburdened taxpayers—and sentencing for years.

  “The second noose is for you, Jackman,” Ben told him.

  “I want a lawyer!”

  The Rebels gathered around laughed at that.

  “Sorry, Jackman,” Ben told him. “We put lawyers out of business.”

  “This ain’t legal!”

  “Who says so?” Ben challenged. He looked at his watch. “It’s time for breakfast, Jackman. I’m hungry. You have one minute to make up your mind.”

  Jackman looked at the body of DeMarco, slowly twisting in the freshening breeze. Overhead, storm clouds were gathering. He looked at the pretty little Rebel somebody had called Jersey. “Help me!” he pleaded.

  “Hell with you,” she told him, and took a bite out of an apple from a nearby orchard. Cooper had gotten it for her in hopes of making up. What he didn’t know was that Jersey had never been mad at him. But she wasn’t going to tell him that. As long as Coop thought that she was mad at him, his behavior was exemplary.

  “But you’re a woman!” Jackman hollered. “Like my mama.”

  “If I’d been your mother,” Jersey told him contemptuously, “I’d have aborted you.”

  Jackman looked at her, disbelief in his eyes. These Rebel women ranged from pretty to plain, but one thing for certain: they all were tough as a boot. There wasn’t an ounce of pity or mercy in the eyes of any of them. His shoulders sagged in defeat as his eyes once more touched the body of DeMarco. “All right,” Jackman said. “Whatever you want to know, I’ll tell you.”

  Ben smiled. “I felt sure you’d see it our way.”

  The Rebels did not bury the dead. They just collected all the guns that were usable and then blew what was left of the town over the dead, covering them with tons of brick and stone. Then the long columns turned and headed south. Georgi had cut south after talking with Ben. That Ben had jumped the gun and tackled the turncoats without waiting for him came as no surprise. The Russian had expected that.

  On the way back south, Ben sent teams out to touch base with the survivors along the way, warning them of the approach of Hoffman and his goose-steppers. Some of the people who were not part of the Rebel outpost system merely shrugged their shoulders and said they didn’t give a damn. Hoffman or Raines—one was just as bad as the other.

  The Rebels’ usual response was, “Mister, have you got another thought coming about that.”

  But most of the survivors who had not yet linked up with the Rebels took this opportunity to do so. While many of them did not like what they considered to be too-harsh Rebel law, they knew that life under Hoffman would be intolerable, and that compared to the Nazis, the Rebels were angels from heaven.

  Ben returned to Mountain Home and was pleased to see the town running smoothly and normally—as much as possible under the circumstances—now that the hordes of turncoats were gone.

  Hoffman was steadily pushing northward, with Payon and his troops—now all split up and working in small teams—retreating toward the border, blowing bridges as they fell back.

  And the ranks of the Rebels were swelling with new members, the Rebels hard-pressed to give them all the necessary training needed before Hoffman’s forces struck the border.

  Ben flew down to Laredo to meet with his batt comms and to meet with General Payon.

  “We did the best we could, General Raines,” General Payon said. “I am sorry we could not contain them on our soil.”

  “You did just fine,” Ben assured the man. They were both about the same age. Ben had been a writer before the Great War, General Payon had been a TV news anchor in Mexico City. Neither man had wanted the job of leader of great armies. But the people had insisted they lead. So they did.

  “Together we have quite a force, General,” Ben told him. “I believe we can stop Hoffman. But it’s going to be a long and bloody campaign.”

  “We will eventually stop this madman,” Payon agreed. “But the cost will be heavy and God alone knows what our countries will be like when it’s over.”

  The leaders of two of the three largest known armies on earth began planning for what both hoped would be the war to end all wars. But both knew they were old enough to have remembered that line from history class. And both now sensed that the war to end all wars would be the conflict that would end life on earth and still the pens of history forever.

  TEN

  The army of the Rebels and those men and women aligned with it had grown to immense proportions. Gone were the days when Ben knew, if not the name, at least the face of every man and woman who fought with him. Ben’s regular Rebels alone now numbered more than twelve th
ousand. If the conflict that faced them dragged on, food was soon going to present a problem. The Rebels had seized the food rations from all the garrisons of Hoffman’s troops they had overrun; that gave them several months more of field rations, as well as ammo. But it was not going to be enough.

  “Whole blood is going to be a problem,” Doctor Chase told Ben.

  “Medicines?” Ben asked.

  “We have enough. For several months. We can’t ask those at Base Camp One to work any harder. They’re working around the clock now.”

  Ben looked at the large room filled with people. Used to be a time, he thought, when the commanders of all Rebel forces in North America could sit around a card table and plan the next campaign. Now I don’t even know some of these people. Thousands and thousands of men and women and all depending on me to lead them.

  God give me the strength and wisdom to do so.

  “Where is Hoffman now?”

  “One week away,” Thermopolis answered. “If he continues his present advance.”

  “He will,” Ben said quietly.

  They still did not have a firm plan on how best to meet Hoffman’s advance, and Ben’s patience was running out. It was unfair for them to sit and stare at him. He shook away that thought and turned to face the window looking outside. No, it wasn’t unfair, he amended that. He’d been calling the shots for years, so why now should he expect all that to change?

  He turned around and once more looked at the faces of the men and women. Well, he thought, by God, we did it. Red, yellow, black, white, and tan, there they sit. If we didn’t accomplish anything else, at least thousands of people of all colors and creeds managed to come together as one, without hate, to fight the common enemy. Yeah, he thought, there they sit. All looking at me as if I was the Messiah.

  “Georgi,” Ben said to the Russian. “You commanded one of the greatest armies ever to march on this earth. Don’t just sit there. Help me. General Payon, you’ve led your people for years. Dan, you were a commander in the SAS. Jump in here. West, you commanded the finest group of professional soldiers to fight anywhere; so pull your finger out of your butt and lay a plan on the table. Rebet, Danjou, Ike—come on people. Give me some help in this thing.”