Ben took his rations and coffee outside, to sit on the curb. He was surprised to see Therm stroll out of the darkness, stop while being challenged by the guards, then walk over to where Ben was sitting. The man carried his own coffee and field rations. He sat down beside Ben.
“We’ve been together for quite a while, haven’t we, Ben?” Therm said, breaking the silence.
“Yes, we have, Therm. We’ve seen a lot of battles and you’ve proven yourself many, many times. I still say you’d make a fine commander.”
“You probably know that’s why I came over this morning. I’ve done a lot of thinking since losing Santana yesterday.”
Ben hid his smile of satisfaction by lifting his coffee mug to his lips and waiting for Therm to take the conversation further.
“You’ve saddled me with Emil and his bunch, Ben. Who else do you want me to take?”
“Why . . . gee, Therm. You’ve really caught me by surprise with this request.”
Thermopolis looked at him and then chuckled. “Cut the crap, Ben. You’ve been trying to make me a field commander for a year and you know it.”
Ben smiled. “You get along well with the Wolf-pack. They like you and respect you. I’d like to put them under your command. In addition to Seven and Eight Battalions, three platoons of green troops are joining us late this afternoon. Those three platoons are yours. I’ll shift some experienced personnel around and assign tanks and other support people to you today. We can call your unit the Peace and Love Battalion.”
“Very funny, Raines. Hysterical.”
“You can paint some guitars on the sides of the tanks.”
“Now, that’s not a bad idea.”
Ben sighed. “Me and my big mouth.”
“It’s my command,” Therm reminded him.
“That it is.”
Wenceslaus, one of Therm’s people, wandered out of the darkness and Therm waved him over.
“Yo, man,” Wenceslaus said.
“At first light, get some paint,” Therm told him. “We have some tanks to decorate.”
Wenceslaus choked on his coffee. “We got to do what?” he finally gasped.
“I’ve just been made a battalion commander.”
“Say what?”
“You heard me.” Therm looked at Ben, who was smiling at the antics of Wenceslaus. The man had spilled hot coffee on his hand and was sucking his thumb. “What’s my rank?” Therm asked.
“Lieutenant colonel.”
“You’ve got to be kidding!”
“Nope. Get your people together, Therm, Meet me back here after dawn. You’ll get a quadrant assigned to you then.” Ben stood up. “You remember that line about heavy is the crown?”
“Vaguely.”
“You’ll soon see what the man was writing about.”
“Everything else remains the same,” Ben said, wrapping up the meeting. “With the exception of Colonel Thermopolis leaving us and taking his command down to secure the Hollywood-Burbank airport. We will start our move west to the Interstate and clear that while Therm is busy at the airport. The first elements of Seven and Eight Battalions are getting into position now, and West is lining out the artillery. He’ll probably begin shelling around noon. Therm, when the airport is clear, you’ll proceed down to Burbank and start neutralizing that area. We’ll push down to the Ventura Freeway and then cut over to near your position.”
Thermopolis nodded his head in understanding. He wasn’t kidding himself a bit; he knew he was being tested. He said a silent prayer to whatever God looks out for old hippies (the same one that looks out for everyone else) that he would be up to the test.
Wenceslaus walked in. “Rosebud and Swallow got those goddamn tanks painted, Therm . . . I mean, Colonel. Whatever. The tank commanders kind of like it.”
“See you in Burbank, Colonel,” Ben said. Okay, people, let’s go.”
“That’s the way it stands,” Carlos told the gathering of street gang leaders. No representative from the Believers was present. The street gang scouts had reported the battle lines being shifted and the arriving of planes from the east. They all knew something big was in the works. They just didn’t know what. “The bottom line is, we either stand together, or hang separately.”
“Oh, that’s lovely!” Brute said. “Familiar, but lovely. And I agree with you, dear boy.”
“Shiitt-it,” Carlos muttered.
Leroy said, “I ain’t tossin’ in with no honky motherfuckers. ’Specially I ain’t with that goddamn Rich and his Klucker-gang.” He looked at Rich. “Why don’t you carry your white ass back to Georgia and burn a cross or something?”
“Fuck you, Leroy,” Rich told him.
“Let’s don’t be too hasty about this,” Sally of the Mixers said. “Carlos is right. All the way right. We don’t stand a chance if we fight these people separately. But united, we’ve got them outnumbered.”
“She’s right,” Fang said, and Chang agreed with him, as did most of the others.
Ishmal and Junkyard stayed firm with Leroy.
“Talk about me being racist,” Rich said.
“Shut up,” Bull of the Busters said. “Everybody just shut up for a minute.”
“Oh, I just love it when he becomes authoritarian,” Brute said.
Bull looked at Brute, open dislike in his eyes. “That goes for you, too, fruit-boots. Now listen up. The way to do this is to take a vote. If the majority agrees to band together, we do it that way. The way it works is like this. Any who don’t agree to pull together is out — all the way out. That means you don’t get no help from any of us who band together to fight Ben Raines. No help a-tall.”
“I’d sooner have to listen to somebody yodel hillbilly music all day than fight alongside some racist motherfucker like Rich,” Leroy said.
“Shut your goddamn mouth, Leroy!” Bull shouted at him. Bull stood and stared Leroy down. Leroy ran the biggest gang in the southern California area, but he respected Bull — as much as he could respect any white man — and feared him. Bull was a huge man, and a very powerful and cruel man. He liked to torture prisoners, enjoyed hearing them scream in pain.
“Speak your piece then,” Leroy said sullenly.
“Thank you. Now listen up. Raines has got maybe, tops, five or six thousand troops — and a lot of them is cunts, and everybody knows most cunts can’t fight worth a shit.”
“Fuck you too!” Sally yelled at him, reaching for a pistol. Ruth and Carmine were dragging iron.
“I didn’t mean you broads!” Bull quickly yelled, breaking a light sweat. These women would shoot him in a heartbeat and he knew it.
The women holstered their pieces and stared at him.
“Okay,” Bull continued. “We got Raines’s people outnumbered ten to one, easy. I ain’t sayin’ this fight will be no cakewalk, but we can whip him. If — if — we pull together. Now just think about this, people. We whip Ben Raines and his army, and we rule the nation. Think about that. The whole country out there” — he waved his hand — “will be ours.”
That got everybody’s attention. Even Leroy and his followers. Leroy smiled and said, “That would mean I could start up a real New Africa and none of us would ever have to look at no ugly white motherfucker again. I like that.”
“Yeah,” Rich said with a nasty grin. “I like it too. That happens, then I could invade your New Africa and put all you jive brothers back in the cotton patch, where you belong, workin’ for whitey.”
Leroy and Rich got nose to nose, both of them cussing and shouting threats. Bull jerked them apart. “Cool it, goddamnit!” he yelled. “Somebody make a note that when we line out battle stations, we keep these two bastards as far away from each other as possible.”
“I’ll put your ass in the grave, honky!” Leroy said to Rich.
“I’ll cut your nuts off, coon!” Rich replied. “And feed them to the hogs!”
“We still haven’t talked with the Believers,” Carmine of the Women pointed out, after Rich and Leroy were
dragged to opposite sides of the room.
“They’ll go for it,” Bull said confidently. “They ain’t got no choice in the matter. And even if they didn’t, who gives a damn? We don’t need them. They need us.”
“Disgusting people,” Brute said.
“We agree on something,” Bull said reluctantly.
“You have a plan, Bull?” Chico asked.
“Oh, yeah,” Bull said with a smile. “Yeah, I do.”
The mighty machine of war called the Rebels surged forward at first light, pushing hard behind the spearheading tanks. And hit no resistance.
Therm stood in the middle of the Hollywood Burbank airport terminal and scratched his head. Not one shot had been fired from either side.
Ike rammed all the way down to Malibu on Highway N1, burning as he went, but encountering no resistance.
Ben had pushed his people south on 170 down to the Ventura Freeway, and none of his people had fired a shot. But they had put everything behind them to the torch.
Cecil had turned his column and was now halted, standing on the edge of what appeared to be a deserted Glendale, wondering what in the hell was going on.
Georgi had pushed over to the center of Pasadena, and there the Russian had halted his advance, sensing a trap not far ahead. “Get Ben on the radio,” he ordered. “Get all commanders on the horn.”
The commanders on network, Therm asked, “What the hell is going on, Ben?”
“For whatever reason, they’ve pulled back. Everybody just hold what you’ve got. West, are you ready to commence shelling?”
“Sitting on go, Ben.”
“Start dropping them in while we assess this situation. But I think they pulled back to band together.”
“That’s ten-four, Ben,” the mercenary replied. “Seven and Eight Battalions are trickling in, getting in place to our rear.”
“Give the punks a great big incendiary kiss, West.”
“Will do, Ben,” the mercenary said with a laugh.
From miles away, the 8-inch howitzers and the 155’s began laying down a killing field of fire. With each gun capable of a round a minute, the earth began to tremble with rolling thunder. Buildings exploded and flames leaped into the air.
“All right, people,” Ben ordered. “Let’s take some more ground. Corrie, order all the tanks and mortar crews to start shelling.”
On a line stretching east from Malibu to the Orange Freeway, Rebel gunners began opening up. Everything with any range at all was put into service, the shells and rockets pounding the earth until the trembling resembled a never-ending earthquake.
Ike had advanced to just west of Topanga Beach, and had still not encountered any resistance. He pulled up and ordered his people to hold up and burn the town.
Ben had vowed he would not commit troops until the area in front of each unit was pounded into fiery mush.
The Rebels began encountering resistance as they advanced, but the relentless artillery barrage was driving the street punks back. The smoke from hundreds of fires had brought visibility down to zero in some areas. The Rebels put on gas masks to help in combating the choking and blinding smoke. The street punks had forgotten that little item.
“All units forward two blocks,” Ben ordered, and Corrie relayed the orders.
The Rebels moved out, walking behind tanks and APCs, mopping up what was left of the gangs in the battered and burning sectors. Those street punks who had been assigned the suburbs began pulling back, cursing Ben Raines as they retreated. In the city, the creepies had no place to go. They dug in deeper and waited for the artillery they knew would be coming as soon as General Ike McGowan got into position.
The Rebels’ policy was to shell several blocks, using incendiaries, and then stand down and watch it burn. When the flames had subsided to the point where they could advance, they would move forward, establish a new position, and resume their shelling of another sector.
It was slow work. But doing it this way greatly reduced the number of Rebel dead or wounded. And it was frustrating to the enemy, because the Rebels presented few targets. The street punks might catch a glimpse, through the smoke and fire and dust, of a running Rebel as he or she darted from cover to cover, but even that was rare, and the punks rarely scored a hit on a Rebel in that situation.
At the end of the third day of the assault against southern California, Ike had moved into shelling range of west Los Angeles. Ike was using what long-range artillery he had, and using it effectively, standing back miles from the target and dropping them in.
The street punks were being slowly pushed back, but in the city proper, the creepies had no place to go; they could do nothing except die. It was going to take weeks, possibly even months, for the Rebels to win the battle this way, but the one thing the Rebels had was time.
“Goddamn Ben Raines!” one of the Judges, the leaders of the Night People, cursed after days and nights of relentless shelling. The smoke from the hundreds of fires, most of them burning out of control, was thick and choking.
The damn Rebels seemed to be everywhere at once. How Ben Raines managed that, with so few under his command — few, compared to the thousands who were, at least so far, unsuccessfully fighting him in southern California — was a bewilderment to the enemy. The street punks had sent people around to flank the Rebels from the east. They ran into Seven and Eight Battalions, dug in deep and heavily armed, and were thrown back time after time. Rebel snipers, or so it seemed to the punks, were everywhere, and their fire was deadly.
And when the Rebels moved out of a position, they left nothing behind them except burned-out foundations and ashes. There was no place for the enemy to hide or to launch an attack. At night, the Rebels sent up flares at the most unexpected of times, catching the punks as they tried to advance through the ashes, and cutting them down with heavy machine-gun fire.
A bug-out was a possibility, but one that offered little hope to those in the sprawling area. The mercenary, West, had moved his people closer to the city. He was now stretched out, in strategic areas, north to south along Highway 57, with Seven and Eight Battalions moving with him, protecting his rear. It was a very, very thin line, and had the street punks possessed any military knowledge at all, they could have busted through at almost any point. Why they did not was something no Rebel commander could understand.
Perhaps it was because West and Seven and Eight Battalions never gave the punks a chance to rest. The mercenary was savage in both his defense and his attack, burning and destroying as he went. Bridges and overpasses were blown; block after seemingly endless block of long-deserted businesses and homes were burned or still burning. Mines had been laid, from the insidious pressure mines to the horribly devastating Claymores.
And the big guns of the Rebels boomed day and night.
Ben Raines had taken a terrible chance by spreading his forces so thin, but so far, it appeared to be working.
The street punks finally began to realize that while it might take the Rebels six months to smash through, destroying everything and everybody in their path, they would eventually do just that. Ben Raines was not going to come nose to nose with them — not yet. He was going to lay back and use his awesome artillery to pound them to pieces and then send troops in to mop up.
The street punks and the creepies also realized that while they had been terribly shortsighted as to their future, Ben Raines and the Rebels had carefully looked at the long-range picture. They had worked out their battle plans over years of actual combat, and the Rebels made few mistakes.
The booming of artillery never stopped. The cannon and mortars lashed out death and destruction twenty-four hours a day, the rolling thunder becoming a constant.
“I didn’t think we could do it,” Ben admitted. “I was wrong.”
“Chisel that in stone,” Doctor Chase said. “Because you might never hear it again. However,” he added, “I must admit that we were all wrong.”
Few of the Rebels had believed that laying back and using
artillery would have worked within such a massive area as they were assaulting. And while they were delighted that it was working, none could understand why those so loosely trapped were not making more of a fight of it.
“They could bust out anytime, at any place they choose,” Tina said, studying a huge wall map of the southern California area. “Yet they don’t. Why?”
“Maybe they don’t know they can,” Therm finally said, after the others had looked at each other and shrugged their shoulders.
“Go on, Therm,” Ben urged. “Elaborate, please.”
The ex-hippie (or perhaps hippie-turned-warrior-hoping-to-become-a-hippie-again-once-this-crap-was-over) was fast becoming a respected commander of troops. He was more cautious than Ben, but he got the job done, and that was all that mattered in the final run.
“For one thing,” Therm said, “they can’t see us. And with the constant hammering of artillery, they probably believe that their initial estimates of our strength were way off the mark. But there might be another reason. They just don’t know what to do.”
“Or a combination of both,” Buddy said, picking it up. “They’ve never faced anything like the Rebels before. They’ve had their own way for so long, they just don’t know what to do against such a large and well-organized army.”
Ben rose from where he’d been sitting on the edge of a scarred old desk and walked to a boarded-up window, to look toward west Los Angeles. He could see nothing but black smoke rising from the ruins of the burning city. Ike and his people had pushed east to Santa Monica Boulevard and his artillery was pounding the city mercilessly. West had moved in from the east and had put everything behind him to the torch, with the exception of a two-block area running north and south that was under the control of Seven and Eight Battalions. When West advanced a few more blocks, Seven and Eight would put their sector to the torch, then move out behind him. West was now in control of the John Wayne Airport in Orange County.
It’s too easy! That thought jumped into Ben’s head. There is just too much going for us that has come too damn quick and too damn easy.
Fury in the Ashes Page 14