“It’s all up to Bottger,” Ben replied.
“Any word from President Blanton?”
“He’s holding on. But it doesn’t look good. I think his government is on the verge of total collapse.”
“And?”
“He hasn’t asked Cecil for help.”
“Then he’s a bigger fool than I thought he was,” Ike said bluntly. Ike was no fan of Homer Blanton.
Ben didn’t want to argue with his old friend, so he said nothing. Ben did not believe Homer was a fool, but that he was a man who had surrounded himself with liberal nitwits and who had listened to them for far too long. Ben was of the opinion that people who voted the straight liberal ticket fell into one of several categories. One: people who, for whatever reasons, wanted to live under a socialistic form of government. Two: people who were basically well-intentioned but could not separate reality from dreamland. Three: people who in the South were called yellow-dog Democrats; they would vote for a yellow dog if it ran on the Democratic ticket. Four: people who wanted something for nothing; those types made up a great portion of the liberal Democratic Party’s constituents. And five: people who were so arrogant they felt they knew what was best for everybody and wanted to run everybody else’s lives from cradle to grave.
Several million people now resided in the SUSA. If an adult were healthy, that adult worked . . . or that adult got out. Period. There were, of course, those who were sick, old, or handicapped who required help, and they got it, quickly and with no hesitation on the part of so-called public servants—which in the old USA had turned into a profane joke over the years. In the SUSA, planes and trains and buses ran on time; mail was usually delivered within two days anywhere in the SUSA. The judicial system was swift . . . if a criminal lived long enough to face a judge and jury, that is.
In the SUSA, Ben Raines had brought everything back to the basics, and it worked. The problem was, liberals just couldn’t figure out how it worked without massive government interference in people’s lives. The Rebel philosophy was so unpretentious it was baffling to liberals; they just could not or, as was probably the case, would not comprehend it.
Liberals just could not understand and/or accept the fact that all people, regardless of race, creed, or color, for the most part will control their own destinies if given the chance or are forced to take the risk.
When asked to explain the Rebel philosophy, Ben was fond of saying that after raking the leaves in one’s yard, a considerate person will bag the leaves and put them out for pickup; an arrogant, stupid, and inconsiderate person will pile them up, set them on fire, and let the smoke drift into the neighbor’s house. The latter wouldn’t last long in the SUSA.
Then Ben would smile at the confusion on the questioner’s face, and walk off.
Bottger opened up the dance on a warm summer morning. Just at dawn, his artillery began lobbing in shells and his troops started moving up behind the bombardment. But Ben had ordered his people out of buildings and dug into the ground in bunkers heavily fortified with sandbags and timbers scrounged from all over the countryside. Bottger’s artillery could not reach Ben’s biggest guns, the 203mm self-propelled, which had a range, using conventional ammunition, of twenty-five thousand yards. The M110A2 can hurl a rocket-assisted round almost thirty-five thousand yards. And the Rebels possessed nearly every large artillery piece that had formerly been in the hands of the U.S. government.
When reporters first asked where Ben had gotten all his artillery and heavy armor, he replied blithely, “We stole them, naturally.”
The Rebels’ towed 155mm could hurl a projectile almost twenty-five thousand yards, and five thousand yards farther using rocket-assisted rounds. Their 105mm towed could hit a target from three miles back and with rocket-assist could extend that range out to about eight miles.
Bottger soon realized he was out-gunned and no match for the Rebels’ artillery.
When it came to rolling armor, Rebel tanks were far superior to anything Bottger had. Rebel tanks were all equipped with depleted-uranium armor plate called DU, which is almost three times more dense than steel. And Rebel tanks bristled with weapons. The Rebels’ MBTs carried a main gun of either 105mm or 120mm, plus a driver-fired M-60 and two .50 caliber machine guns. One of the .50’s could be fired when the MBT was buttoned up.
Bottger’s tanks tangled head on with the Rebels’ MBTs only once. After that, they turned tail and ran when they spotted Rebel tanks heading for them.
“I’d sure hate to have to tangle with these Rebels,” Billy Smithson told one of his batt coms.
“God forbid we should ever have to” came the reply.
Billy looked up as an MBT rumbled by. The black commander smiled and gave him a smart salute. Billy returned the smile and the salute, following the tank with his gaze until it rounded a curve.
“What’s the matter, sir?” the batt com asked, noting the strange look on Billy’s face.
“We made a mistake,” Billy admitted. “We should have followed Ben Raines’ lead and kept the best and booted out the rest—whites included.”
“Some of the boys wouldn’t like to hear you say that.”
“Some of the boys can go right straight to hell,” Billy replied. “And probably will.”
The batt com watched him walk away. “No, sir,” he muttered, frowning. “They are not going to like those words at all.”
The artillery duel kept up for three days and nights, then the fire began to fade away from Bottger’s side. Not one of Bottger’s men had succeeded in breaching Rebel-held lines. Rebel P-51E’s screamed over Bottger’s lines and reported dozens of burned-out artillery pieces and tanks. And Bottger’s troops were backing up, out of the scope of Ben’s long-range artillery, crewed by highly trained experts who had honed their deadly skills on battlefields around the world.
“Stalemate,” Ben said. “He can’t go west; we can’t go east.” Briefly he considered the only alternative. “Both of us have to push forward.”
“This is boring, Chief,” Jersey bitched. “Sure isn’t like the old days.”
Geneva had not had a round fired at it during the artillery duel. Bottger had troops a few miles outside of the city, but launched no assault. He held the town of Annemasse only a few miles away, and his troops also occupied the town of Nyon, just north and east of the city on the lake. But not one shot had been fired at the Rebels occupying Geneva, and that puzzled Ben.
“I don’t think they want to mix it up with us,” Cooper said.
Ben cut his eyes to his driver, a germ of an idea floating around in his brain. “Why, Coop?”
Cooper shrugged his shoulders. “Because every time they hit us before, we kicked butt.”
“For a fact, Coop,” Beth said. “But I think it’s more than that.”
“What do you think it is, Beth?” Ben asked, moving to the large wall map. He studied the division locations, waiting for her reply.
“I don’t know, Chief. But it’s strange. Up and down the line, not one major city attacked.”
“So he wants the cities intact,” Ben mused. “But why? Some noble thought on his part? I don’t think so.” Ben fell silent, deep in thought. He was flung back in memory to Vietnam.
“Now, why would I think of Vietnam at this juncture?” he mused. “It certainly isn’t because of the terrain.”
He picked up a disturbing report from Mike Richards. His intelligence network in Bottger-controlled Europe had been destroyed, with dozens of deep-cover agents ferreted out and killed.
One or two or three would have been acceptable . . . but dozens? And even had some of them broken and talked, they would have been unable to finger another agent, for Mike had set it up so one did not know the other.
Then what had happened?
Vietnam.
“What about ’Nam?” Ben thought, irritated at that constant that would not leave his mind.
Vietnam.
“Damn it!” Ben said aloud.
“What’s the m
atter?” Jersey asked.
“I don’t know, Little Bit. But something damn sure is.”
Vietnam.
There it was again. But why now? He rarely thought of those terrible days in ’Nam. So why now?
He cut his eyes to Cooper, who was spreading something on a thick slice of fresh-baked bread. “What do you have there, Coop?”
“Honey from back Stateside. You want some?”
Ben shook his head. “Not now. Thanks.”
Vietnam.
Honey.
“Now put it together,” Ben whispered. “What does it mean? Why do you think it means anything?”
Honeycombed.
Tunnels.
He motioned for Jersey to come with him, and they stood outside in the street.
“What’s up, Boss?”
“How many Southwest Indians in our ranks could you get a hold of, Jersey? Those that still speak the language?”
“Oh, ’bout a dozen or so, I guess. Apache, Navaho, Pima. What’s the matter?”
“You get on a radio and bump them, in Apache. Tell them to reply only in their native tongue. Can you understand Navaho and Pima?”
“Enough to get by, sure.”
“Tell them to get ready for an attack. Tell them to start moving all HQ’s and CP’s out of the city and to stay off the radios. Send out runners to the resistance leaders with instructions for them to do the same. Do it quickly, but without any panic or haste. We don’t want to tip off Bottger’s people.”
“Tip them off?”
“Bottger has either made some sort of unholy alliance with the Night People or he’s using their old tunnels. They’re under us, Jersey. Right beneath our feet. That’s why he won’t shell the cities. The bastard took a page from the Viet Cong. That’s how our intel people were found out. Every major city is honeycombed with tunnels. Get to it. Use the radio in the Hummer.”
“The attack could come at any minute, Boss!”
“Any second. Move!”
SIX
Ben walked back into his CP and whispered to Corrie. She nodded and stood up, holding a finger to her lips and motioning for the others to follow her. They did, with confused looks on their faces. Ben had waved to other Rebels outside and they quickly entered, walking silently, and began rigging charges to doors. As the news spread, the Rebels began working very fast booby-trapping the buildings they had occupied. Whether it be creepies or Bottger’s men in the tunnels under the city, they were going to be in for a very rude surprise when they came up out of their holes.
The Rebels kept up a constant, meaningless chatter as they worked clearing out of the buildings and rigging booby traps as they went. Then they faded back toward the outskirts of the city.
What civilians there were had already been evac’d out of the city. Within an hour, those Rebels who were leaving, were gone.
The same scene was being played out up and down the Rebel front, and those in the tunnels beneath the cities did not have an inkling as to what was going on. They could hear lots of chatter, but no one among them spoke any Indian languages. They were thoroughly baffled.
The troops of the MEF radioed back to Bottger’s HQ. “Something is going on.”
“What?” Bruno asked.
“We don’t know” was the reply.
“Idiots!” Bruno said. “If they don’t know what is going on, how do they know anything is going on?”
But spotters in the mountains using high-tech equipment radioed to Bottger that something was definitely going on in the city.
“Ask them what,” Bruno said wearily.
“Lots of activity.”
Before Bottger could utter some sarcastic comment, reports began coming in from other spotters around other cities. Something was definitely wrong.
The consensus was that the Rebels were about to go on the offensive.
Bruno shook his head. “I don’t think so. Raines is a chance-taker, not a fool.”
“Then . . .”
“We wait and see. It may be time for us to take the cities. Yes. It just might be our time.”
Ben, much to the disgust but not to the surprise of his batt coms, had not left the city for the safety of the countryside. He waited with his team for whoever was under the city to make a move.
Ben ordered the Indian talkers to stand down and the radio operators to return to English . . . and keep the transmissions military without giving away anything of importance. Empty Rebel trucks rumbled back and forth, giving the impression—Ben hoped—that all was normal.
“I think,” Bruno said, “they were testing some new code. And if that was it, they had certainly succeeded. What damn language was that?”
No one knew.
The spotters reported that everything in the cities appeared to be back to normal.
Bruno paced the floor of his office. He was well aware that the longer he waited to use his underground troops, the greater the chances of their being discovered. After the Rebels’ intelligence officers capture and execution, Raines certainly knew that Bottger had people in place within his organization and he would be testing those in the know. When nothing was found, he would look elsewhere and begin to put things together.
“Strike!” Bruno ordered. “Strike now! And kill that goddamn Ben Raines!”
Hundreds of Bottger’s troops came charging up to the surface and went racing toward death’s door. The troops were so glad to be finally getting out of those stinking damn tunnels, they were careless. The first ones rushed into the lower levels of buildings, threw open hidden passageways, hit ankle-high black wires, and were blown into bloody chunks of meat and shattered bone. Others entered rooms where no wire was stretched and ran up stairs and threw open doors and got blown into oblivion.
Ben and his team waited across the street from his command post. When the first explosions trembled the concrete beneath his boots, he knew he’d been right.
The troops of the MEF stepped over the bloody remains of their comrades and rushed onto ground level.
“Wait, wait,” Ben cautioned his team. “Let them hit the sidewalks.”
Bottger’s men ran through the lobby of the old building and, meeting no resistance, raced outside, breathing deeply of the clean, fresh air.
Those were their last breaths.
Ben lifted his old Thompson and let it roar, the heavy .45 caliber slugs tearing into flesh and shattering bone. From Nijmwegen in the north all the way down to the sea, some eight-hundred kilometers away, the Rebels’ surprise was successful.
In less than fifteen minutes, Bottger lost nearly ten-thousand troops.
Before the echo of the first shot fired had faded, P-51Es came screaming in right on the deck over Bottger’s territory, unleashing a maelstrom of terror and death. The planes dropped napalm, fired cannon and rockets, and were shrieking off into the distance before the troops of the MEF could react.
Under cover of smoke and fire and artillery and utter confusion on the part of the enemy, Ben’s Rebels surged across the rivers and streams and meadows and forests. Caught flatfooted, certainly not expecting that Ben would take the offensive, Bottger could do nothing except order a retreat that soon turned into a rout in many areas as main battle tanks spearheaded the drive, crushing and destroying anything and anybody that happened to be in their way.
Separatists and racists the men of Billy Smithson’s division might well be, but they proved their courage in battle that day as Smithson’s troops leaped out ahead of the rest of the long line. It was irritating to a small percentage of those troops that black tank-commanders were leading the way.
The highly vocal rancor among some of his men was mildly amusing to Billy.
Before Ben halted the push late that day, Ben’s stabilization forces had advanced twenty-five miles into Bottger’s claimed territory, pushing his troops back, killing, wounding, and capturing hundreds more.
“Shut it down and dig in hard,” Ben ordered with about an hour of daylight left. “I want reports fro
m all batt coms right now.”
The field reports began coming in fast. Smithson had pushed off from Nijwegen, Eindhoven, Maastricht, Liege, and from just north of Luxembourg. His northernmost battalions, along with contingents of the Free Dutch and Free German forces, were on the road to Hengelo and Enschede when Ben called for a halt. His central and southernmost force had not made as good time and were fairly well lined up with Second Division.
Second Division had shoved off from Luxembourg, Metz, Nancy, Epinal, and Vesoul and had driven inward almost twenty-five miles.
Ben’s command had jumped off from Geneva and southward all the way down to the sea and driven hard toward the east, making nearly the same distance.
But no one was under any illusions about their successes. Even the most inexperienced soldier knew that Bottger would stop, turn around, and make his stand sooner or later. Just when that would be was the joker in the deck.
“That’s what all that goddamned jibber-jabber was about,” Bruno said, angry to the core. “Setting up the offensive.” He calmed somewhat, took several deep breaths. “I must learn not to attempt to second-guess Ben Raines.”
Bruno did not linger long on how Ben had discovered his troops in the tunnels. It was done, over, and there was no point in dwelling on it. He also revised his opinion of Billy Smithson’s troops, did a one-eighty on their fighting ability: They were almost as good as the Rebels.
Bruno’s anger at his troops’ retreat faded when he began reading field reports that evening. Half a division was missing, presumed dead, wounded, or captured. The Rebels’ attack had been so unexpected, so swift and hard, Bruno could not sustain his anger toward his troops.
“Nor,” he muttered, staring at a map, “can we make a stand here.” Until reinforcements arrived, the MEF would have to continue giving up ground to the Rebels.
“Distasteful business,” Bruno muttered, then turned off the field lamp and went to sleep.
“We’ll continue pushing them,” Ben ordered, “but we’ve got to be careful not to outdistance our supply trucks.” He tapped the map. “And we’ve got to start spreading out north.” He was talking to himself; something his team had long grown accustomed to. “We’ve got a hundred-kilometer gap between the North Sea and our troops advancing toward Almelo. And look at this mass of towns around Dusseldorf. That’s where Bottger will turn and make his stand. Bet on it.”
Betrayal in the Ashes Page 5