“You want to try for a hospital bed?”
“Tank,” Beth called. “Coming up on our left.”
Ben looked. The tank was buttoned up tight. Ben and the others carried bandoleers of 40-mm grenades for their bloop tubes, but while the M-433-round could penetrate up to two inches of armor, it would not penetrate the new armor of the Rebel tanks.
The tank slowly rumbled past.
“I sure would like to have an Armbrust,” Coop muttered.
“I’d like to have a glass of cold milk and a piece of apple pie,” Ben whispered just as his eyes caught troop movement slowly working up the street. “Back,” he whispered. “Out the back door. They’re checking every building.”
At HQ, Rosebud was frantically trying to reach the Eagle. She hit the panic button, and Thermopolis was the first to respond.
“The Eagle has dropped out of sight. No response from him or his guards.”
“Who were those guys?” Buddy radioed from just about a mile away.
“Ike sent them.”
“Bump Ike and confirm that. I have a funny feeling about all this.”
Less than a minute later, Therm and Buddy got the news. “Ike sent no one.”
“Shit!” Therm said.
“Which way did they go?” Buddy radioed.
“East.”
“Straight into a free-fire zone,” Lt. Bonelli said. “Jesus, I never suspected anything bogus about those people. Hell, neither did the general. They just fit right in.”
“From now on we confirm all new troops,” Rosebud radioed. “With no exceptions.”
“Yes, dear,” Thermopolis said.
“Someday I must get married,” Buddy said. “It surely must be a unique arrangement.”
Therm looked at him and said nothing.
* * *
The first few doors they tried were locked, and Ben didn’t want to kick his way in for that would be a dead giveaway. They moved on cautiously until they found a building that was unlocked and quickly ducked inside, careful not to disturb the litter. Ben closed the door.
They didn’t dare set up to make a stand, not against tanks; they wouldn’t have a chance against the big guns. To stand and fight would get them killed.
“If the bastards would just unbutton,” Coop said, “we could drop a grenade down the hatch.”
“If your aunt had balls, she’d be your uncle,” Jersey popped right back.
“Screw you, Jersey!”
“I have a headache, Coop. Sorry.”
“The back door leads into another alley,” Beth said. “And we’ve got people coming up the alley—this way.”
“From which end?” Ben asked.
Beth pointed.
Ben handed Corrie his Thompson and clip pouch and picked up her M-16 and took her spare magazines. He hung a bandoleer of 40-mm grenades around his neck. “This is pissing me off. I’m tired of it. You get ready to make a break for it.”
“Which way?” Corrie asked.
“Right out the way we came,” Ben replied. “And don’t wait for me. As soon as I open up, you go. And that is an order. You all understand? I’ll be all right. Just get back to our lines.”
They all nodded. “This is personal now,” Ben said. “Get ready.”
He walked to the back door and opened it a crack. Half-a-dozen men from the “sergeant”’s team were about fifty feet away, walking abreast up the street. Ben stepped out and said, “You bastards looking for me?” Then he pulled the trigger and held it back, spraying the thoroughfare from left to right until the magazine was empty, and then he fired a grenade for good measure.
Ben took off running up the alley until he came to an open doorway and stepped inside. He fitted a full mag into the belly of the M-16, then slid the tube forward, loading the launcher with a HEAT round (high-explosive antitank). Ben ran up the stairs to the roof and waited.
Cooper had given him an idea when he wished for the tank’s hatch to be open. He was taking a chance, but Ben liked to take chances and he liked to operate as a lone wolf. He just didn’t get much opportunity any more.
He’d had the time of his life a few years back after he’d escaped from a kidnapping along the Arkansas-Missouri border and spent a few weeks operating as a lone wolf against a bunch of outlaws.
He smiled in remembrance of those few weeks of intense guerilla warfare.
Then his attentions were pulled back to the present as the sound of a tank came to him. The tank commander was doing exactly what Ben had hoped he would do. The alley was wide enough for him to make it, but he had popped his hatch for a better look.
“Come on, you bastards,” Ben muttered. “Come to daddy, now. I have a nice little surprise for you.”
Ben slipped his fingers around the 30-round mag, using it as a hand-grip, and laid his finger along the side of the trigger guard of the M203.
“Come on, come on,” Ben whispered. “I want you closer.”
The round he was using, M-433, was both an anti-armor and fragmentation grenade; shrapnel from the fragmentation liner would turn the inside of that tank into a slaughter house . . . if he could get it down the hatch.
Ben had run past the dead men in the alley, knowing that when, or if, a tank showed up, it would not run over the bodies. The tank stopped a few feet from the sprawled bodies and the commander looked around carefully . . . but not carefully enough. The driver popped his head out of the hatch and Ben fired the grenade, then sprayed the commander and hit the deck as the tank exploded. Fire shot out of the open hatches and turned the interior into an inferno.
Ben was up and running, staying low, until he came to a rusted fire escape on the far side of the building. Before he went down, he loaded up the bloop tube with a buckshot round and smiled as he did.
Just as his boots touched the stones of the alley, three MEF men came charging out of the building. Ben emptied his bloop tube and the three men went down, mangled from the buckshot. One was kicking and screaming, both hands to his ruined face. “Your mama should have told you there would be days like this,” Ben muttered, loading up again.
Ben ducked across the alley and into an old store. He didn’t realize it, but he was still smiling.
The stench of burning flesh from the tank was strong in the late summer air. It was nothing new or different; Ben had smelled it before. He sat on the floor of the shop and ate a vitamin-packed chocolate bar from his emergency ration pack and sipped water from his canteen.
Those stalking him would be very cautious now. But they would also have to get the job done quickly, for they would know they were running out of time.
“Come on,” Ben muttered. “Let’s do it, boys.”
He waited a couple more minutes and then moved slowly toward the front of the building. He stopped when he saw shadows on the sunlit sidewalk. He heard a murmur of voices speaking in a language he did not understand. Ben moved to his left, stepping deeper into the gloom and giving himself a better angle of the area just outside the smashed show window.
He took a fire-frag grenade from his harness and slipped the pin, edging closer to the open front just as the men on the sidewalk started to move. Ben released the spoon and underarmed the fire-frag, hitting the floor just a second before it exploded about waist-high among the men. The mini-bomb spread three people over the street and sidewalk in bloody blobs of meat.
Ben had already located the steps leading upward and took them two at a time, slipping onto the roof of the two-story building just as an APC rolled up and the men started out. Ben blooped them and burned a full magazine after the 40-mm grenade had done its work.
The street and sidewalk below him was getting awfully messy.
Ben started building-jumping. When he had reached the far end of the block, he looked down. No fire escape.
“Well, crap!” he muttered. He tried a roof door. Locked. He tried another one, and it swung open. He peered into the darkness and could see that some of the steps leading downward were missing. “Wonderful.�
� He decided to try the stairs anyway.
Ben almost broke his neck twice on the rotting steps as they gave way under his weight. He managed to make it to ground level in one piece and moved toward the front of the building. It had, at one time, been a clothing store; mannequins were all over the place. One wore nothing but a wide-brimmed lady’s hat. Ben patted the stationary model on her cold unresponsive butt and moved toward what remained of the smashed window-front, briefly studying the street.
The APC was still burning, but the smoke and the dead had drawn no one to the scene.
Ben sat down on a high stool and waited in the deep gloom of the store.
Suddenly he heard a shout in accented English. “The dirty bastards have broken through! Rebels are all over the goddamn place. Fall back, fall back!”
“Fall back where?” another voice responded. “We’re completely surrounded, you idiot!”
A third voice added, “I hate Ben Raines and his Rebels.”
The group moved to the sidewalk in front of the store. Ben lifted his M-16 and listened as the punks spewed their verbal garbage.
“I’d like to take this M-16 and stick it up Ben Raines ass and pull the trigger,” one said.
“I wouldn’t like that.” Ben spoke from the darkness of the store.
The group of career criminals whirled around, and Ben eased the trigger back and held it until the thirty-round mag was empty. Most of the Rebels had reworked their M-16’s, eliminating the three-round-burst pattern and making the weapons fully automatic. Five punks did a macabre dance for a moment and then lay in sprawled death in front of the store.
“Pricks,” Ben muttered, slipping a full mag into the M-16.
Ben heard the main guns of several MBT’s boom and decided to stay put until his people smashed through to his position. He wisely concluded that now would not be a good time to step out onto the street.
A few minutes passed before Ben heard familiar voices speaking in English.
“In here, boys and girls!” Ben called. “Don’t get itchy trigger-fingers.”
“General?” an anxious voice called.
“In the flesh. Coming out.” Ben stepped out onto the bloody sidewalk and looked into the concerned faces of a squad of Rebels.
“You boys and girls missed all the fun,” Ben said with a grin.
* * *
“Fun!” Buddy and Tina both yelled at their father.
Ben had taken a bath to wash away the smell of death and sweat and was sitting behind his desk in the old palace.
Doctor Chase stormed into the office. “Goddamnit, Ben!” Lamar roared.
Batt Coms from all over the place had been on the blower, raising hell about how Ben had been duped into a near-fatal tour of the city.
Ben drank a cup of coffee and ate a thick sandwich, remaining silent, letting everyone else vent their spleens.
Emil Hite came rushing in, sputtering and stuttering, all in a flap. His boots slipped on the marble floor, and he went spinning and sliding across the room.
“Oh, no,” Ben said, grabbing his sandwich and keeping it out of harm’s way.
Emil came to an abrupt halt on top of Ben’s desk, his nose about two inches from Ben’s face. “Are you all right, my General?” Emil said.
“I was until this moment, Emil. Now will you kindly get your ass off my desk and your fingers out of my coffee cup?”
Buddy lifted the little man off the desk and set him upright. Then he thought better of it, picked him up, and placed him in a chair, away from Ben.
“Thank you,” Emil said.
“Think nothing of it,” Buddy replied.
Ox! Emil thought.
Idiot! Buddy thought, although in a way he did like the little con artist.
Corrie brought Ben’s old Thompson back to him and retrieved her M-16. “That is one hell of a weapon, Boss,” she said.
“You’re right. I heard you had to use it.”
She smiled. “As I said, that’s a hell of a weapon.”
“All right,” Ben said. “All of you. Get the hell out. I have a lot of work to do. Move! Go. Go. Go!”
Doctor Lamar Chase remained seated, watching Ben with traces of amusement in his eyes. When everyone had left, except for Ben’s personal team, who were always near, Lamar said, “You just can’t give it up, can you, Ben?”
Ben met his old friend’s eyes and shook his head. “No, to be honest, I can’t.”
“You’re a step slower than you were ten years ago, Ben.”
“I know that better than you, Lamar.”
“You set the age rules for a cut-off for combat, Ben.”
Ben smiled. “That’s the nice thing about being the boss, Lamar. Nobody can fire me.”
“The field is going to kill you, Ben,” Lamar said seriously. “I know I just had this conversation with you a short time ago, but it’s worth repeating.”
“Lamar,” Ben said, leaning forward and putting his elbows on the desk, “I’ve been in and out of combat since I was just a kid. I’ve spent the last ten years in combat. I’ll quit when somebody zips up the body bag containing what’s left of me. Now, I’ll do the paperwork and all the rest of this happy bullshit that lands on my desk. But if I get a chance to mix it up, I’ll take it, and nobody is going to stop me.”
Lamar smiled and stood up. “Oh, I know it, Ben. But I have to keep bitching at you about it from time to time. If I didn’t, you’d think I was sick.” He walked to the door and turned around. “I’m not sick, Ben. But I am right. And you’d better give that some thought.” He grinned and tossed Ben a deliberately sloppy salute and left the room.
Ben poured a fresh cup of coffee and returned to his desk, a real desk this time. He stared down at the papers for a time, but his mind was not on them. Lamar was right, of course. Ben couldn’t deny it. He realized he was middle-aged, but he also knew he was still a strong and virile man. There was gray in his hair, yes. And he was a step slower than men younger than himself. Maybe two steps, he acknowledged. But there was something that Lamar did not realize: When the time came that Ben felt he was endangering others by his being in the field, he’d quit. Right then, with no hesitation and damn few regrets.
He also knew that that time was still a few years away. And he would know when it had arrived. He would not kid himself.
He looked over at Corrie. “Corrie, has anyone figured out how those bogus Rebels got so close?”
“Pure luck and a lot of brass on their ass, Boss. They just walked right in and no one questioned them. Rosebud says that from now on, everybody will have verifiable orders and they will, by God, be checked.”
“All right. Beth, make that a standing order.” Ben sighed and leaned back in his chair. The Rebels had always operated loosely; now it was time—way past time, really—for that to change. They had become too large a force.
Ben could vividly—and longingly—recall the days when he knew everybody in the Rebel Army and could call them by name. But, he sighed, many, if not most, of those men and women were gone—either retired from combat or dead.
Corrie broke into his thoughts. “Replacements are coming in at the airport, Boss.”
Ben rose. “Let’s go greet them personally.”
“We’re going to have lots of company,” Jersey said, standing up. “Buddy and Tina threw a security blanket around you. And it’s a tight one. Bonelli is under orders not to let you out of his sight for a second.”
“My kids the only ones who gave those orders, Corrie?”
“No. President Jefferys did.”
“Who bumped him?”
Corrie shrugged her shoulders.
“Shit!” Ben said, and sat back down. Somebody was always trying to rain on his parade.
SIX
Two days after Ben’s little adventure, as Lamar called it, Prague was declared clean, with many of the former residents returning, and the Rebels prepared to move on eastward. Ben planned on heading toward Brno, in Moravia, as it was called before the Grea
t War. Not much was coming out of that part of the old Czech Republic and Ben did not know what sort of reception the Rebels were going to receive.
And he still had heard nothing from Mike Richards. It had been weeks since he’d seen the man. He had no firm idea where he was, but Ben was making silent bets with himself as to Mike’s location. And if he were there, when he returned, he would bitch nonstop about it.
Ben split up his forces, sending Buddy and Dan toward Hradec Kralove, while Tina and Therm’s batts went with him.
To the north, Colonel Wajda had pushed into Central Poland, meeting little resistance. The Polish people had taken quite enough from punks and street gangs and roaming bands of criminals and had begun to deal with them quite effectively before General Wajda and his forces arrived.
To the south, Ike and his forces weren’t meeting with much resistance, but he reported that many of the people were sullen and not at all cooperative.
“They want our medicines and arms, but then want us to leave” Ike reported.
“Then do just that,” Ben said shortly. “I’ll be goddamned if I’ll put up with uncooperative people we’re only trying to help. Piss on it. Back off and head for the Austrian border and sit tight until I work something out.”
“That’s ten-four, Ben. More than happy to do it.”
“Ike? What about this ‘ethnic cleansing’ that was going on before the Great War?”
“I think that’s why they want us out, Ben. I believe the cleansing process has been successful and the victors don’t want us to find the mass graves. The few people who will talk to us say it was really bad down in Bosnia and Herzegovina.”
“What about all those resistance groups who agreed to work with us?”
“I guess they changed their minds.”
“I’ll see what Son Moon has to say about it and get back to you.”
“Shark out.”
“It’s going to get rougher and rougher from here on,” Ben muttered.
“What happens when we hit Russia?” Coop asked.
Betrayal in the Ashes Page 17