Betrayal in the Ashes

by William W. Johnstone

  “It’s your city,” Ben told her. “I’m here with one battalion of troops. You can’t expect us to neutralize a city of this size—unless you want us to destroy it. We can do it that way, if that’s what you want.”

  The same scene was being played out down the battlefront.

  Some of the men in the small crowd smiled; most thought Ben Raines’ plan was only fair. A few were openly indignant.

  “We are not warriors, sir,” a man spoke up.

  “You will be in a few days,” Ben told him. “You people are going to know what it’s like to smell the stink of battle, smell your own fear-sweat, and see friends torn to pieces by machine-gun fire. This is not our country; these are not our homes. It’s your country and your homes. Fight for them.” He let that sink in and then said, “From this moment on, you are freedom fighters. So get ready for it. Get back to your people and tell them what’s happening. Be back here with them tomorrow morning at 0600 hours for the beginning of your very brief training cycle. Right now, Sgt. MacNally—that’s her over there—will escort you to where you’ll draw uniforms and boots. From this point on, you do not wear civilian clothing—”

  “Why?” the same woman questioned.

  “Yes,” the man beside her echoed. “Why?”

  Ben smiled. “So you won’t accidentally get mistaken for the enemy and get a bullet up your ass. Understood?”

  “You don’t have to be crude,” the man said.

  Jersey laughed and Ben cut his eyes to her. A slight nod of his head and Jersey stepped forward and faced the man.

  “You want crude, you candy-assed dickhead?” Jersey demanded. “I’ll give you crude. I’ll put a boot up your cherry ass and show you crude. Now you bow your back and get your big feet movin’ and get your civilian ass over to those trucks and draw uniforms, you goddamn sissy-fingered, rear-echelon mother fucker. Move, goddamnit, move!”

  “Isn’t she sweet?” Cooper whispered.

  “Most of the civilians are eager to assist us,” Raul Gomez, commander of 13 Batt, told Ben by radio that afternoon. “However, there are a few who became quite upset by the orders. But we quickly showed them the error of that kind of thinking.”

  Ben did not ask exactly how Raul had accomplished that. He had a pretty good idea. The mental picture of Little Jersey’s trotting along behind the two civilians that day, herding them toward the trucks, snapping and growling and cussing as they ran, came immediately to mind. Jersey could be quite persuasive when she put her mind to it.

  “How much time are we going to have to train these people?” Mike Post asked.

  “Seventy-two hours max,” Ben told them all. “Quite a lot of them have had some military training. They can help the others. Each unit will have Rebel leaders, so it’s not going to be as bad as it’s going to appear the first day out. Don’t push them too hard. Just see that they know how to use a weapon and can follow orders. We’re not expecting perfection, just some help in dealing with the situation. When we enter the contested areas, we put the civilians at a spot and tell them to hold until they are ordered to move up. We take it house by house, block by block. Just keep shoving the punks and creepies back.”

  Rolf Staab was the leader of the civilian group attached to Ben’s small unit. Rolf had some military experience and was a good, solid, steady, middle-aged man. He was also quite taken by Jersey . . . not in any sexual way, for Rolf was happily married with several children and grandchildren—he was just simply fascinated by her.

  “Now that,” he told Ben, as Jersey walked by them the next morning, “is a woman!”

  “Yes, she is,” Ben said with a chuckle. “But really, no more so than Beth or Corrie or any other Rebel. But, male or female, we all have years of bloody combat experience behind us and don’t have much patience with those who won’t fight for freedom. The woman who was appalled at my orders to fight, what political party did she belong to before the Great War?”

  Rolf smiled. “In America, I believe it was called the Liberal Democratic Party.”

  “That figures,” Ben said drily. “The man with her?”

  “Same party. I, and my entire family, on the other hand, belonged to the party that compared to your Republican Party.”

  “I knew there was some reason I liked you,” Ben said with a grin.

  No one knew how many punks made up the gangs who now virtually controlled the sprawling city. When the gangs had descended upon the city, really startling the citizens—for they had experienced a period of relative peace under Bottger’s rule—the men and women had been practically powerless to defend hearth and home, for Bottger had, long ago, seized all weapons except for a few shotguns and .22 caliber rifles. The punks were well-armed, thanks to the MEF.

  In the few days the civilians were receiving training, Ben had swung Ike’s 2 Batt and Dan’s 3 Batt around and stretched them out from Hamburg to Lubeck, cutting off any escape except to the north. Troops from Denmark had stretched out along the border, waiting for any fleeing criminals. Ben’s plan was simple, for the more complicated the plan, the more chances of screwing it up. Ben planned to drive the punks toward the north, toward the border with Denmark, and box them in. Any who surrendered would be dealt with by the Germans, in any way they saw fit.

  On the evening after the third day of intensive training, Ben told the civilians, “We push off at dawn. Get a good night’s sleep and say your prayers, for some of you won’t be around this time tomorrow.”

  “You’re such a cheerful soul, General,” Rolf said with a grin.

  Ben grunted and returned to his CP.

  “Ike and Dan are in place,” Corrie told him.

  Ben nodded and sat down, looking at a map. At dawn, the entire Rebel force would strike at targets stretching for hundreds of miles. In Germany, the cities that would be hit simultaneously were Hamburg and Lubeck in the north, then, working south, Bremen, Hannover, Kassel, Frankfort, Darmstadt, Mannheim, Karlsruhe, Freiburg. Then they would swing down into Switzerland and Italy. If the Rebels could pull it off, they would have very nearly cut Germany in half.

  “Ready to see some action, gang?” Ben asked, looking up from the map.

  “Hell, we’ve been ready, Boss,” Jersey said.

  “We’ll see it tomorrow,” he assured them. “The city is filled with punks and creeps. The punks are arrogant and stupid, but the creeps know the game is over for them. They will have been in radio contact with fellow creeps over in Lubeck and know we’ve boxed them in. It’ll be a fight to the finish with them.”

  “I can hardly wait,” Beth said, her tone dripping with sarcasm. She spoke for every Rebel, for they hated to tangle with the creepies. They weren’t afraid of the creeps; they loathed the stinking cannibalistic Night People.

  “If we had the time, I’d throw a net around the city and let the creepies turn on the punks and eat them first, then go in,” Ben said, only half-joking. “But as usual, we don’t have the time.”

  “But it was a very nice thought,” Corrie said.

  And she wasn’t kidding a bit.

  In the city, the Night People had prepared themselves for their final battle, for they knew the Rebels did not take prisoners of their kind. The punks, being what they were, were confident of victory when the Rebels came at them. Most of them, that is. A few of the punks who had faced the Rebels in France and managed to escape were glum. They knew there was no way in hell they were ever going to defeat the Rebels; but they had no choice except to fight, for they were all wanted on a multitude of charges, including dozens of counts of murder. They faced a death sentence any way they turned.

  Sitting in a sacked-and-looted department store, a punk who called himself, when translated into English, Cool Johnny, looked at his Austrian girlfriend, a woman with the street name of Shady. “You believe in God, Shady?”

  She cut her eyes to him. “I just right then realized something about you, Johnny.”

  “Yeah, what?”

  “You’re a stupid fuck!”


  “Where do you get off callin’ me stupid, you goddamn road whore?”

  She did not take umbrage at his name-calling. “Yeah. Sure. I believe in God. Do you?”

  “Sure, I do. You believe in Hell?”

  “I guess.”

  “You think that’s where we’ll end up?”

  She sighed. “To tell you the truth, Johnny, I never gave it much thought. But yeah, I think we’ll both burn in hell.” Shady started crying, the tears running silently down her grimy face.

  “What the hell’s wrong with you?”

  “I wish Ben Raines would give me another chance to surrender,” she blubbered.

  “Why?” another punk sitting with his back to a counter asked. “Even if you lived ten days after the trial, which is doubtful, you’d just fuck up again. We all would. Nobody made us what we are. We chose it.”

  “Who made you a goddamn expert on anything, Hans?” Johnny asked.

  “Nobody. But I know this much: We had a chance to live decent after the Great War. We didn’t. We had a chance to join Bruno Bottger’s bunch and didn’t. Ben Raines has been asking us to surrender for three goddamn days now, and here we sit.”

  “I wish I’d listened to my mother,” Shady said, the tears starting again.

  Johnny looked at her as if she’d lost her mind. “Jesus, Shady, you stabbed your mother nine times!”

  “Ten,” Shady blubbered. “I wish I hadn’t done that, either.”

  “There is no hope for any of us.” The voice came from the stairwell off to one side, the smell following the words.

  Shady wrinkled her nose. “I wish I’d never gotten involved with you stinkin’ bastards either.”

  “But you did. You gave us live human flesh to eat and now you sit and cry and babble about God and Jesus and Heaven and Hell. Well, I will tell you something. Tomorrow you shall get your chance to meet the devil. His name is Ben Raines.”

  FOURTEEN

  The Rebels and the civilians moved into the suburbs of Hamburg just at dawn, walking behind the spearheading tanks and APCs. They knew from experience that many of the punks would be in the suburbs, the creepies holed up in the city proper.

  The civilians soon discovered why the Rebels were so successful and why they were so feared: The enemy was offered a chance to surrender—if possible, given a couple of days to consider it. But if they refused, the Rebels moved in, careful and ruthless, destroying everything and everybody in their path.

  The Rebels laid down an advancing covering fire that was a deafening, killing roar; everything from M-16’s to chain guns and sometimes the big guns on the MBTs. Resistance from the enemy was futile.

  Rebel and friendly forces were treated at the MASH units first, then the wounded enemy was tended to—if they had not died before the doctors got to them. If war ever had any niceties to it, Ben had removed them all.

  A punk female came running out of a burning house, screaming in English and firing an automatic weapon at the advancing Rebels. “You dirty cocksuckers don’t give nobody a chance.”

  Beth lifted her CAR and stopped the running and silenced the screaming and the cussing. She did so with absolutely no change of expression. She popped a piece of gum into her mouth and kept on walking.

  Ben was once more carrying his old Chicago Piano, the .45 caliber-spitter that had become almost as much a legend as the man behind it. Ben saw movement from a house they were passing and turned, firing the Thompson from the hip and fighting the rise of the powerful old weapon. The .45 caliber slugs sang and whined, and two punks by the window danced their way into darkness as the slugs impacted with flesh and bone.

  Killing machines, Rolf Staab thought as he watched the Rebels do their deadly work. As finely precisioned as a great watch. A violent ballet with real blood and real pain and suffering. He walked on with the Rebels behind the tanks that were roaring out fire and smoke and death with their main guns. On either side of him, Rebels darted left and right, mopping up anything that might be left alive.

  Rolf tried not to think about the fact that the Rebels seldom exited the houses with any prisoners.

  As if reading his thoughts, Ben said, during a lull in the battle, “They had their chance, Rolf. They blew it.”

  Rolf took a drink of tepid water from his canteen. “No second chance, hey, General?”

  “Most of those people have had dozens of chances, Rolf. And you know it They’ve been fuck-ups all their lives. They hold society’s laws and law-abiding people in contempt. They feel they are above the law, so we put them below the ground.”

  “And do it quite well, I might add,” Rolf said drily.

  “We try,” Ben said with small smile. “We do try.”

  By mid-afternoon the Rebels had secured dozens of blocks. Those gang members and street punks who survived the ruthless and seemingly unstoppable advance were sent retreating into the city proper.

  “Incredible,” Rolf said as he watched Rebel burial crews come in just moments after a block was secured and gather up and toss the bodies of dead punks into the beds of trucks to be hauled off and buried in mass graves which were being scooped out by earth-moving equipment even as the battle raged. “And people talk about Germanic efficiency,” he muttered.

  “We do it for health purposes,” Cooper told the man.

  “Indeed,” Rolf said.

  By late afternoon, when Ben called a halt to the advance, the Rebels controlled all the suburbs and the Rebel line was complete between Lubeck and Hamburg. The punks had nowhere to go except north toward the border of Denmark. Georgi Striganov and his 5 Batt were ripping through their objective and, as soon as that was accomplished, would move toward Hamburg to beef up Ben and his 1 Batt.

  “Incredible,” Rolf Staab said for about the fifteenth time that day.

  “We’ve had lots of practice at this,” Jersey told him. “Once the enemy knows his adversary is not going to cut him one inch of slack, you’ve got half the battle won. It works.” She walked off to join her team.

  “I should say so,” Rolf said.

  Jersey paused and turned around. “But the hard part comes in the morning. When we meet the creeps. “You’ll see.”

  Later that afternoon, Rolf found Ben sitting in a cottage eating field rations and reading an old paperback book he had found. Cooper had found a girlie magazine and was pointing out various attributes of the ladies to a disinterested Jersey, who was trying to take a nap.

  “You’re not showing me anything new, Coop,” she told him. “Now shut up and leave me alone.”

  Corrie was talking to someone from 8 Batt, and Beth was writing in her journal.

  The peaceful scene was warped to Rolf’s mind. The smell of gunsmoke and death still hung heavy over the area, yet these people appeared as unconcerned as if they were sitting in their own living rooms relaxing after a day of work at the office.

  “Do you really think your General Striganov is going to clear all the criminals out of a city the size of Bremen in two days?” Rolf asked.

  “Of course not. Just like we won’t clear all the punks out of this city,” Ben said as he wiped his mouth with a piece of cloth that looked suspiciously like part of an old BDU shirt. “But we’ll cripple them so badly their strength will be broken. After that, it’s up to the local people.” Ben looked at the man for a moment. “Sorry about that friend of yours. What else can I say?”

  Rolf shook his head. “That wasn’t why I came over. It’s . . . well, a lot of people were shocked at the, ah, brutality of the Rebels.”

  Ben arched an eyebrow. “What brutality? My people don’t torture or brutalize.”

  “No. I don’t mean that. I’m sure that doesn’t happen. But, General, the wounded of the enemy were the last to get treated at your mobile hospitals.”

  “So?” Ben’s eyes flashed a clear warning signal—to anyone who knew him—that Rolf was treading on very shaky ground.

  Rolf must have caught something in Ben’s tone, for he said nothing.


  When Ben spoke, his voice was as cold as the grave. “If you think for one instant I would allow a Rebel soldier to suffer one second longer so my doctors can work on some goddamn worthless snakehead, you are badly mistaken, mister.”

  “I can see why the United Nations picked you for this job, General. You and your people are perfectly suited for it.” He offered a slight bow as only the Germans could do. “I bid you a very pleasant gute nacht, sir.” He left the room.

  “Same old song, different jukebox,” Cooper said. He picked up his girlie magazine and said, “Great God, Jersey. Would you look at that!”

  She looked, reluctantly, then fixed him with a baleful gaze. “Cooper, if you show me another picture of a naked woman, I am going to dropkick your nuts all the way back to Paris!”

  Cooper wisely closed the magazine.

  The Rebels struck at the city proper at dawn. Ben had called in Buddy’s spec ops people, 8 Batt, and they began hammering a path through the waterfront district, slowly working their way in a circling movement on the west side while Ben and his people worked their way on the east side of the city. Now, the advancing was reduced to a crawl for the creeps knew they had no place to run and nothing to do but die.

  “Buddy’s people found what was left of the hostages,” Corrie said. “Looks like the creeps had a snack before they pulled out.”

  One of the civilians nearby puked all over his boots at Corrie’s comment.

  Ben looked at Rolf, his eyes hard. “Just remember this, Mr. Staab, the next time you start feeling all warm and gooey toward the punks: It was the punks who gave those civilians to the creeps.”

  Tight-lipped, Rolf nodded his head in understanding.

  To Corrie, Ben said, “Mark the building so the dead can be properly buried,” then walked away muttering, “what’s left of them, anyway.”

  Only a few blocks of the city were cleared that bloody day, with the Rebels clawing for every inch of it. Georgi reported that Bremen was seventy-five percent clean and the airport in firm Rebel hands; reinforcements and supplies were coming in there and he was sending two full companies, supported by tanks, to assist Ben.