“Neat job of sidestepping, General,” Les said. “Actually, none of those things you mentioned fits Pasco either. He’s really a lot like you. He just places a lot more value on human life — even the degenerate type — than you do.”
“And how many times has Pasco been burned believing that? How many of his followers have been killed or wounded or assaulted because of that belief?”
Les smiled faintly. “More than one.”
“I don’t intend to subject my people to that danger, Les. Let’s run it down. Pasco sets up a little empire and isolates his commune from the outside world. The only type of music they will listen to is so-called protest music from thirty or more years ago — not that there is anything wrong with that, I just find it a bit restrictive — their debates are so old and out of step with reality they creak with age. Their generation began and glorified the drug plague that nearly overwhelmed the nation a decade back, and none of them will admit they had anything to do with it. No, Les, Pasco and I have nothing in common.”
Les shrugged his shoulders. “He’s also afraid that you’ll find out where he and his people live and come in after them.”
“He’s paranoid too. Do you think I would do something like that, Les?”
“No. And I told him so. You’ve let the Underground People and the Woods Children alone. I pointed that out to Pasco. He wasn’t convinced.”
“Then to hell with him,” Ben said flatly. “I’m not going to bother Pasco and his followers as long as they leave me alone. There are probably several hundred — or more — communes scattered around the nation, people who just want to be left alone. And I intend to do just that. I most definitely will leave them alone. One hundred percent totally alone and on their own in all respects.”
“You won’t help them at all?”
“That is correct, Les. Back when the world was functioning, more or less, I had nothing but contempt for dropouts who, for example, when they needed medical attention suddenly decided that maybe they could conform just a little and oh, so magnanimously on their part allowed the conforming taxpayers to pick up the tab. And then they went back to their communes, or living under bridges, or wherever, and laughed and poked fun at the very people and the system that had just helped them by paying their bills. Sorry, Les. People like Pasco and his followers aren’t contributing a damned thing to the rebuilding of this nation. They want to step out every now and then and eat the fruit, but they don’t want to help in the hard work of cultivating it. To hell with them.”
Ben walked away, and Les and the other men looked at Beth and Cooper, standing nearby. “I guess if I say that Ben Raines is a hard man, you’re going to tell me that hard men are needed in hard times.”
Beth winked at him. “And hard women too, Les.”
Thermopolis and those who had gone with him to visit Pasco returned the next day. Ben noticed the long-haired and colorfully dressed Therm seemed withdrawn and silent.
Ben walked over and sat down beside him on the tailgate of a truck. “What’s wrong, Therm?”
Thermopolis cut his eyes. “You’ve been a bad influence on me, Ben. With Pasco and his people, I found myself in the unenviable position of defending you and the Rebel movement.”
“You didn’t have to do that.”
“Oh, I know that. But the thing that bothers me is, in many cases — not all, but many — I wanted to.”
“I’ve told you before, Therm, there is not fifteen cents worth of difference between us. We both want peace and a chance to live out the remainder of our lives in some degree of happiness and security. The difference between us and people like Pasco is that we’re willing to fight and sacrifice for it.”
“Maybe you’re right,” Therm said with a sigh. “But I’ll always maintain that Pasco is a good person.”
“I won’t argue that. I’m sure he has many good qualities just like I have many bad ones. But Therm, nice guys don’t win wars. SOBs like me win wars. Real nice gentle sweet people don’t make good cops or good CEOs or Chairmen of the Board. Real nice idealistic folks can’t run the governments of nations. It takes a person with a certain amount of hard-ass in them to do that. And I knew you had it in you after I’d talked with you for five minutes.”
Therm stared glumly at the ground for a moment. “That doesn’t say much for me, then.”
“That depends on who is doing the viewing, buddy.”
Ben gave the orders for Ike to continue down the coastline highway and for Cecil to split off and take 101 down to Ukiah. He told Colonel Gray to take his people down the Interstate, while Ben and his contingent split off and headed down Highway 99, through Chico, Oroville, Yuba City, and Marysville, then finally over to the old AFB. Five and Six Battalions, under the command of Striganov and West, would continue their sweep for survivors and link up with Ben on Interstate 80, northeast of Sacramento.
“There were almost a million people in Sacramento when the Great War hit us,” Ben told his immediate team as they rode slowly southward toward Chico. Every little town they passed through showed signs of having been abandoned recently, and in one hell of a hurry. “Flyovers using heat-seekers have shown a very large concentration of people in the city. Leaflets we dropped telling them to identify themselves have been ignored. Prisoners have told us the city is filled with creepies. So far this push into California has been a cakewalk. But all that is about to change, people.”
“How big was Chico?” Cooper asked.
“A little over twenty-five thousand,” Beth said from the center seat of the big wagon. She sat with Jersey. Corrie and Linda were in the third seat of the wagon, Corrie with her radio jacked into the antenna on top of the wagon. “But Leadfoot radioed that the town is deserted.”
“How about San Franciso?” Linda asked.
“We’ll take it,” Ben said. “But we’re going to have to get close to do it. We won’t be able to stand on the east side of the Bay and shell it — the Bay is too wide. Our 155 SPs have a range of about twelve miles. We’ll be able to shell in from the north and south ends, that’s all. Once we soften up those areas, the rest will be block by block and, in many cases, hand to hand.”
“Sacramento?”
“We’ll be able to surround it and shell it, for the most part. L.A. is going to be a real bastard, though.”
“Huge, sprawling place,” Beth said. “About sixty miles wide and forty miles deep.”
Cooper whistled softly. “No way in hell we can surround that place.”
“Not completely,” Ben said. “But we can split our forces and attack from three sides. But it’s going to be a very long, bloody, and drawn-out process.”
“Is it going to be like the taking of New York City?” Linda asked. “I’ve heard so many Rebels say that was a real tough one.”
“L.A. is going to be worse,” Ben said.
The advance teams of Rebels waved them through the deserted and eerily silenced Chico, then pulled in behind the convoy as a new advance team took their place; it was on to Yuba City. Like Chico, the once-thriving town of nearly twenty thousand was a ghost town. In more ways than one. Just before the outlaws and thugs had pulled out, they’d killed all their prisoners rather than have to drag them along. The bodies of dead men, women, and kids were piled in heaps on the sidewalk in the main drag.
“You’re seeing another reason why we don’t take many prisoners,” Ben said to Linda, as he helped her out of the wagon to stand in the deserted street.
A few moans came from the blood-soaked bodies. She jerked away from his grasp and ran to get her medical kit.
“She’s got a lot to learn about punks,” Jersey said, leaning up against the wagon. “But I imagine she will. If she lives long enough.”
The Rebels buried the dead, and chaplain read a short non-denominational service. The wounded were loaded onto trucks for transport on down the road, where Chase would set up a MASH unit for the evening.
Linda was silent as the long convoy of trucks and tanks and sel
f-propelled artillery and Jeeps and Hummers and APCs and Light Armored Vehicles (LAV) named Piranhas rumbled on through the town.
Had any outlaw been so foolish as to remain behind, at the sight of all the Rebel might he probably would have curled up in a nice tight ball and wished for the safety of his mother’s womb.
But the Rebels met with no resistance as they rolled through the town and out onto Highway 99.
“Horrible,” Linda finally said, gazing out the window at the silent landscape that seemed utterly void of life. “What kind of degenerates are we dealing with?”
“The kind that won’t be around much longer,” Ben assured her.
Since Thermopolis had already checked out Oroville and found it to be deserted, Ben pressed on toward Marysville and Beale AFB.
Leadfoot had established a CP for Ben on the old base, and he met the convoy bitching. “If there’s anything worth takin’ on this base, General, I wish you’d show me where it is. This place has been picked over a thousand times.”
Ben laughed and patted the biker on the shoulder. “Come on.” He walked over to a concrete building about fifty feet long and thirty feet wide.
“There ain’t nothin’ in that place, General,” Leadfoot said. “Me and the boys done checked it out.”
“And the girls,” Wanda reminded him.
“Right.”
“Follow me,” Ben said, and the others trooped after him. At the smashed door, he said, “See anything unusual about what is left of this door?”
“It’s a sure enough big-ass door,” Wanda said. “Big enough for a truck.”
“That’s right, Wanda. Exactly.”
Inside the building, Ben pointed to the roof. “See anything unusual about that roof?”
His personal team, with the exception of Linda, had seen it all before. They knew what he was pointing out and remained silent.
Linda looked up. “Why would anybody build a roof like that? Look at those heavy steel beams.”
“See those huge eyebolts?” Ben asked, pointing. “Cooper, bring a deuce-and-a-half up here and run me some chains, please.”
The others stood in silence and watched as Ben, on a ladder, threaded the ends of the heavy chain through the eyebolts, then hooked the chains into two holes in the floor.
Leadfoot got down on his hands and knees and looked. “Well, hell! There’s heavy steel rods embedded in the concrete. I’ll be damned.”
“Everybody outside!” Ben yelled. “As soon as that slab is lifted, since we’re going to violate SOP in opening it, knockout gas will be released. It won’t kill you, but it will drop you to the ground for about an hour. We have to use generators to pump out the tunnels before we enter. Back the truck up, Coop. Let’s open it up.”
Everyone backed outside and, at Ben’s orders, slipped into gas masks. Cooper put the big deuce-and-a-half in grandma and backed up, the chains tightening, and the concrete slab howled in protest at being opened after all these years.
Generators were brought up and the tunnel was pumped out. Ben, flashlight in hand, led the way down the steps into a cornucopia of supplies. Hundreds of crates, sealed tightly and dated, lined both sides of the wide corridor, floor to ceiling, further than Ben’s flashlight beam could reach.
“Take what we need for this run,” Ben ordered. “Then we’ll reseal the opening and cover it, and pick up the rest on our way back.”
“How many more of these caches are there?” Linda asked, after having found a long floor-to-ceiling row of medical supplies.
“Several hundred that I know of,” Ben said. “I’ve only found the need to open a few of them.”
“How many rounds of ammo you reckon is in here, General?” Wanda asked.
“Several million, I would imagine.”
“Jesus!” Beerbelly, one of Leadfoot’s men yelled, from a dark end of the corridor. “We got Jeeps and trucks and all sorts of vehicles down here.” He walked back to the group. “The big door you pointed out.”
“Right. Of course, there are fifty buildings just like this one on the base. Deliberately so.”
“How did you know which building to come to?” Wanda asked.
Ben grinned. “I didn’t. I guessed!”
Up long before dawn the next morning, Ben, coffee mug in hand and Jersey with him, as usual, went down to the highway to look over the newest addition to the Rebel army. The Piranha LAV, one nasty fighting machine. The Marines had had them in use for a few years prior to the Great War, and scrounging Rebel patrols had found where they had been warehoused. Hundreds of them.
This campaign would be the first Rebel combat test of the LAVs.
The “main reason the Rebels had not fielded the Piranhas prior to this was that the crews had to be trained from scratch on the machine. Not only were the Piranhas deadly instruments of war, they were also sophisticated machines, and could carry six infantry personnel into battle in addition to their crew of three.
Some Piranha mounted a 25mm automatic cannon, others were equipped with a 90mm cannon, and still others were refitted with 30mm Gatling guns. The Piranha had eight wheels and four axles, and that made it an 8x8. It could travel on hard surfaces at speeds up to sixty-five miles an hour, hit rivers at speeds up to thirty miles an hour, and swim along at nearly seven miles an hour.
Ben grinned in the predawn darkness. He patted the armor-plated side of the Piranha. “Slick, huh, Jersey?”
Jersey reserved comment; she had something else on her mind. “Since I know damn well you’re going to get right in the thick of any battle, General, how many of these things are you assigning to us?”
Ben laughed softly. “Three of them, Jersey. So rest your mind. 25mm, 90mm, and one with 30mm Gatling gun.”
Jersey, using a penlight, jotted that down. “I’ll hold you to that, General.”
Ben chuckled at her antics. She was looking after his safety and he knew it and appreciated it.
“Let me get this straight,” Jersey said, flipping a page in her notepad. “This thing we’re standing next to has the 25mm Bushmaster cannon, right?”
“That’s right.”
“It can be fired single shot, or full auto, up to two hundred rounds per minute.”
“That’s it. Impressive, huh, Jersey.”
“We’ll see. And I imagine we’ll see up close. In addition it has one 7.62 machine gun, one .50-caliber machine gun, and two M257 smoke grenade launchers.”
“You got it.”
“That’s a lot of firepower, General.”
“I had the personal safety of my team in mind when I ordered them up, Jersey.”
Jersey closed her notepad, looked at Ben, and burst out laughing. She walked away, still laughing.
Smiling, Ben called, “See, this is what I get for being such a nice guy!”
That brought on another round of laughter from Jersey. She waved a hand and kept on walking, heading for the coffeepot in Ben’s CP.
The commander of the LAV walked up, a cup of coffee in his hand.
“How do you like the Piranha?” Ben asked him.
“Love it. We put them through their paces on the way out here, General. It’s a fine machine and they’ll do everything they’re built to do.”
“Did you have a firefight?”
“Several of them. Bunch of punks hit us in Kansas. We blew them clean off the highway. That 30mm Gatling gun is one mean son of a bitch.”
“What was your best fuel-conserving hard-surface speed?”
“About forty five miles an hour. At that speed, we can range about four hundred miles a tank. But we’re limited in their use because of the lack of crews for them.”
“I understand. We’re training as fast as we can.” Ben thumped the side of the LAV. “Did our engineers beef up this armor?”
“They sure did. We caught a 14.5 rocket and it didn’t even leave a dent. Just rocked us some inside.”
Ben nodded his approval. “Get the others ready to go. We’re pulling out at 0500.”
The LAV commander was anxious to show his stuff. “Are we spearheading, General?”
“Some Piranhas are. But don’t worry, you’ll get to see plenty of action.”
“How’s that, sir?”
“You’re with me.”
“All right!” the LAV crew chief said. “All right!”
FIVE
“Where are the eastern units?” Ben asked Corrie.
“Set to go. Colonel West has swung around and is in place just south of the city. General Striganov is holding at Placerville, waiting for orders.”
“Ike and Cecil?”
“General Ike is just north of Santa Rosa and General Jeffreys is waiting just north of Napa. All units are ready.”
“Get everyone in the wagon.”
“They’re ready, sir.”
“All right, let’s do it.”
The long column was stretched out on Highway 70. Scouts and other forward recon units were already in place just north of the city, with West’s people in place just south of Sacramento.
Ben got in the wagon and shut the door. He looked behind him. Smoot was curled up on the center seat, between Beth and Jersey.
“Give the orders to move out, Corrie. Let’s go, Coop.”
“What’s our position this time, General?”
“Right behind the spearheaders. Get around all these others.”
“And here we go,” Beth muttered.
Breaking dawn found all Rebel units outside their objectives and ready for the attack. Ben got out of the wagon to stand for a moment in the cool, early morning air. The start of the most ambitious campaign ever undertaken by the Rebels was only seconds away from kicking off.
“Corrie, what does Leadfoot and his bunch report about the airport?”
“Filled with stinking creepies.”
“Tell him to take the field.” That transmission sent and received, Ben said, “Tell all units to launch attack.”
Rolling thunder split the morning as artillery batteries opened up north, south, and east of the city. To the west of Sacramento, Ike and Cecil began their attacks, softening up their objectives with waves of artillery. The ground trembled under the boots of the Rebels as the artillery pounded the city with HE, WP, and napalm, the shells whistling and humming overhead.
Fury in the Ashes Page 5