Anarchy in the Ashes

by William W. Johnstone

  “I’m afraid of that man, Lois. I will admit I am scared to death of him. He’s . . . twisted all up in his mind. He’s . . . he’s . . .”

  “Evil,” the older woman finished it.

  “Where is Peggy Jones?” Hartline asked the tortured man.

  “I don’t know.” The man gasped the reply. He spat out a mouthful of blood.

  Hartline looked at another man in the room and nodded his head. “Pull out another tooth.”

  The tortured man screamed and fought the leather straps that held him. At a silent signal from the husky man wearing a blood-splattered butcher’s apron, the victim’s mouth was pried open.

  A man wielding pliers leaned forward, a smile of satisfaction on his thick, wet lips. His crotch bulged from sexual arousal. The screaming in the small room became hideous.

  Sam Hartline left the room, disgust obvious on his face when the tortured man passed out from the intense pain. He walked down the hall to another room and opened the door.

  A dark-haired young woman was strapped to a table; the table was bolted to the floor. The woman was naked. She was strapped belly-down on the table, her legs spread wide and her ankles attached to straps run through thick metal rings bolted to the floor. Her eyes were dull from the pain and humiliation. She had been beaten, raped and sodomized. Vivid marks crisscrossed her flesh from the savage lashings with leather belts and whips.

  Hartline looked at her through cold, emotionless green eyes. “Are you ready to cooperate with us now, Miss Brinkerhoff?”

  Tears dropped from the young woman’s eyes. They splashed on the cold metal of the table. “I don’t know anything.” She choked out the words.

  A man, naked from the waist down, with a huge erection in his hand, stepped behind the woman. He penetrated her anally with one brutal lunge. She screamed in pain as he worked his way deeper.

  “I don’t know anything!” she cried.

  She was telling the truth. She did not know the whereabouts of Peggy Jones. She had never even heard of Peggy Jones prior to Hartline’s mentioning her name. She did not know anything about any resistance movement. She was a newcomer to this area. She knew nothing about any upcoming confrontation between Ben Raines’s troops and the IPF.

  Her attacker’s hairy belly slapped against her buttocks. She screamed in pain and degradation.

  Hartline and the other men in the room smiled. All were sexually aroused by the sight and sounds of the attack.

  It would have been much easier had Hartline simply given her a polygraph or PSE test; he could have used any of a number of truth serums at his disposal. But Hartline and the group of questioners – men and women – enjoyed seeing people tortured, enjoyed listening to them scream and beg and pray and promise anything and everything if only the pain would stop.

  Hartline became sexually aroused when that happened. Hartline and his group of interrogators shared a great deal in common with Hitler’s SS and Gestapo agents. Many SS and Gestapo agents used to enjoy slowly strangling young men to death. Just before the final death throes, the naked victims would usually gain an erection followed by their final climax. The SS or Gestapo agents so inclined could then take the penis in their mouths.

  So much for the master race.

  Sam Hartline would have been at his dubious glory as an SS or Gestapo officer.

  He would have experienced shivers of ecstasy had he been commandant of a concentration camp during Hitler’s reign of terror.

  Hartline would have been the perfect mate for the Bitch of Buchenwald, that lady (referring only to her anatomical gender) who made lamp shades out of human skin taken from her victims while they were still alive and conscious. Said she just loved tattoos.

  Hartline pulled the man away from the woman’s buttocks. Blood dripped to the floor from her mangled anus. He picked up a small whip from a rack and began beating her back and buttocks, smiling at her screams.

  He beat her for a few moments, dropping her almost to unconsciousness. He ordered a bucket of water to be thrown on her, reviving her.

  Smiling as he spoke, Hartline said, when he was certain the woman was conscious enough to understand, “If she hasn’t talked in twenty-four hours, take her down into Missouri where the mutants gather. Strip her and tie her to a tree. They’ll find her.”

  “No!” she screamed. She had seen the mutants before.

  Hartline tossed the short whip to the floor and turned his back to the woman. He walked out of the room. Her screaming intensified as the perversion gained new heights.

  Gen. Georgi Striganov knew of Hartline’s inclination toward torture. One of the reasons he wanted the man on his team. Striganov was not opposed to torture, he just did not personally want to be a party to it. He had found, years before, when he worked for the KGB, that drugs were much more effective and a great deal neater. And one did not have to listen to the shrieking and yelling or put up with the vomiting and all that other disagreeable mess that was associated with physical torture.

  Georgi had known many men and women who enjoyed administering torture. He had closely observed them during the act: the quickened breathing, the glazed eyes, the sexual aspects of the torture act itself. He did not want to become one of those perverted types of people.

  Besides, physical torture made him ill.

  The Russian compartmentalized the issues before him, and took from one section of the mind the matter of Ben Raines, placing the matter of Sam Hartline in another niche. A darker corner of the mind, where the mercenary could squat and pick at himself.

  Ben Raines worried the Russian. Georgi knew the man was going to make a military move against him. He had placed informants in the ranks of Raines’s civilians and Emil Hite’s idiot grouping months back – but their information was sketchy, at best. And nothing of any use had come out of the camp of Emil Hite. Which was, according to the Russian’s way of thinking, perfectly understandable. In his mind, Georgi had already written off Hite and his foolish band. They might be of some limited use at a future date, but the Russian could not possibly think of how that might come to pass.

  What kind of move was Ben Raines planning? When would it take place? And how would Raines go about it?

  He didn’t know.

  He did know his IPF personnel were much stronger in number than anything Raines or Solis or Malden could put together, and they were better trained and equipped, for the most part. So Raines was probably contemplating some sort of guerrilla action. He knew Raines and the ex-SEAL, McGowen, were both trained in guerrilla warfare and highly decorated during the Vietnam war. And Raines was an ex-mercenary to boot.

  Guerrilla warfare. That was what the Russian feared the most from Raines, for that would mean his IPF forces would have to be spread all over three or four states, and his selective breeding program would have to be placed on the back burner for the duration. Things had been coming along so very splendidly – especially that new program his doctors had suggested.

  “Goddamn it!” he cursed, slamming a fist on his desk top. “Goddamn Ben Raines.”

  He picked up the phone on his desk and punched savagely at the buttons. He snarled, “Get me Colonel Fechnor — quickly.”

  The first intelligence reports back to Tri-States were grim and very much to the point:

  “Tell General Raines the IPF is mounting up, getting ready for what looks to be a big push – south.”

  Ben read the copied message. “Damn!” he said. He turned in his chair and looked at Ike. “Now we don’t have a choice in the matter, buddy. It’s been decided for us.”

  Ike nodded. “We’ll have to meet them head-on.” There was a grimness to his voice. “And they’ll have us outgunned and outmanned.”

  “But we can’t stay boxed in here,” Cecil said. Like Ike, the black man was spoiling for a good fight. An ex-Green Beret, he had earned his CIB in Vietnam. “They’d sit off our borders and lob heavy artillery in on us, and eventually kill us all.”

  “Give me your votes,” Ben said, lo
oking at Colonel Gray, the only person present who had yet to speak.

  “Take the fight to them, General,” the Englishman said. “If we are going to die, then let us prepare to die for liberty.”

  Ben smiled. He knew without asking that would be the reply of all his people. He looked at Ike.

  “I’m with him,” Ike said, jerking his thumb toward Dan. “I just can’t say it as pretty.”

  “That line came, in part,” Dan said, “from a Romberg opera. When the street rabble were preparing to do battle for King Louis against the crown of Burgundy. They were ultimately successful in their efforts.”

  “Do tell,” Ike said.

  “Cretin,” Dan said with a smile.

  “Smart-ass,” Ike responded.

  Laughing, Ben glanced at Cecil.

  “Take the fight to them, Ben. Let’s kick their asses all the way back to Iceland.”

  “All right, that’s it. Pull back your people from Iowa. Those that were meeting with Lois Peters. I hate to leave what resistance there is up there defenseless, but I can’t risk losing anybody at this stage of the game.

  “Gear up. I want the people mobilized and moving within forty-eight hours. Contact Juan and Al and have them get their troops moving – en masse. Right now. Juan will take his people in from the west, Al from the east; we’ll go straight up and in.

  “Let’s do it people.”

  TEN

  “No!” Ben said. “And that is final, Gale. You are not going north with the column.”

  Out came the chin. “I’d by God like to know why the hell not?”

  “Because this is war, Gale. War. Full-scale warfare. You have no idea what war is like. It’s dirty, bloody, awful, dangerous. Can you get that through your head?”

  She glared at him. Rose to her full height. All five feet.

  “Can you, Gale?”

  He towered over her; she glowered up at him.

  “When do we pull out, Ben?”

  “Goddamn!”

  “I better get us packed.”

  “Jesus Christ!”

  “Do you want me to pack any long underwear for you?”

  Ben stalked from the house, muttering. He was still muttering as he walked up the street. Tina pulled in next to the curb, motioning him into the Jeep.

  Ben kissed his adopted daughter and smiled at her. He had not seen her in several months and had missed her. “When’d you get in?”

  “Late last night. I stayed with friends.”

  Father and daughter looked at each other. Tina touched her father’s face with her finger tips.

  “I’ve missed you, kiddo,” Ben said.

  “How much?” She initiated the game they had played when she was young.

  “Oodles and gobs.”

  “Good. Well . . . I thought it was best if I stayed away for a time. Dad, I have something to tell you.”

  Ben knew what it was. And he thought Tina probably knew he did. Very little escaped Ben’s attention in Tri-States.

  “Oh?”

  “I met this real nice fellow.”

  “He better be a nice fellow,” Ben said jokingly. He knew the young man was. He knew all about the young man.

  “His name is Robert Graham. Bob. We’re farming down in Louisiana.”

  “We’re farming?”

  “Yes. I . . . Dad, I live with him.”

  Ben had never objected to that. With the world having taken such a beating, marriage was getting rare. Sometimes a few words were spoken, but oftentimes not, they were spoken by a friend of the couple, and not a minister.

  Varying religions were now almost non-existent, especially in Tri-States. Baptist, Christian, Methodist, Catholic, Lutheran, Jew, all the others, now were, at least in Tri-States, combined. No longer was there the arrogance of one church maintaining that if one did not belong to that particular church, one was doomed to suffer the fires of the pits of hell.

  It had taken a worldwide nuclear and germ holocaust to bring the factions together.

  Ben smiled. “Thinking about getting married, maybe?”

  “Could be. Just as soon as this mission is concluded.”

  Ben stiffened beside her. He had lost his wife, Salina, and their son, Jack, back in the battle for the old Tri-States. He did not want to lose Tina. For a few seconds, he was flung back in time.

  Just seconds after Salina had kissed him and told him goodbye, she had been bayoneted in the stomach by a paratrooper. Ben had killed the young soldier and then knelt down beside Salina’s side. She had smiled up at him, then died.

  Moments later, Jack had been killed by a machine gun burst. Tina had lobbed a hand grenade into the machine gun emplacement, killing the gunners.

  “What are you thinking, Dad?” Tina brought him back to the moment.

  “Salina. Your brother, Jack.”

  “That’s what I thought. Did you love her, Dad?”

  “No. No, I didn’t. But I cared a great deal for her and was always faithful to her.”

  “Have you ever truly been in love, Dad?”

  “I don’t believe I have, honey. Maybe someday.” He did not feel any guilt about having said that, for Gale knew that thought there was a closeness between them, physical as well as emotional, Ben did not love her.

  She touched his hand, this man she loved as her own father.

  “Anyway,” Ben said, “who said you were going on the mission?”

  She squeezed his hand. “I’m a Rebel, Dad. You taught me to be a soldier. You taught me to love liberty and freedom, to know the difference between right and wrong without having courts to tell you the difference. Everything I value, I learned from you. This is as much my fight as it is yours. Now you want to make something out of that?”

  Ben laughed at her stubbornness. “Don’t get uppity with the old man, kid,” he said jokingly.

  “The way you were stalking about a few minutes ago, you looked like you had your back up about something. Want to talk about it?”

  Ben shrugged. “I’ll never understand women.”

  “What a sexist remark.”

  Ben’s smile was wry. “You and Gale will get along fine, I’m thinking. And that spelling is G-A-L-E.”

  Tina laughed aloud. “Does she live up to it?”

  “Damn well better believe it.”

  “I’d very much like to meet her.”

  “Well, so what are you waiting for? Welcome home, honey.”

  “We’ll split up into three columns,” Ben told his senior officers. “Ike, your brigade will take Highway 79 out of here to Memphis, then get on Interstate 55 and head north. Angle slightly west and stop at Warrenton. We’ll be in radio contact at all times – everything on scramble.

  “Colonel Ramos, you’ll move up Highway 65 all the way to Interstate 70. Wait there for me. I’m going to connect with Highway 63 in North Arkansas and stay with it all the way to Columbia. We’ll bivouac and wait until Al and Juan get their people in position, then we’ll hit the IPF with everything we’ve got. I don’t like to think about slugging it out nose to nose, but we don’t have a choice this time around, boys. All right, we move out at dawn.”

  The scene resembled a miniature replay of the staging areas of D-day, back in 1944. Hundreds of vehicles of all types: Jeeps, trucks, APCs, cargo carriers. Just over three thousand men and women, a thousand to a brigade, milling about, creating what would look to the untrained eyes to be mass total confusion. It was anything but. The men and women of Ben Raines’s Rebels had been trained well; each person knew his job and would give it one hundred percent. But any staging area sounds chaotic.

  Whistles and shouted commands and the sounds of hundreds of boots on gravel and concrete filled the early morning air. Quiet conversations between husbands and wives and kids softened the din as men and women told each other goodbye – perhaps for the last time. One more stolen kiss, a touch, a caress, an embrace.

  “Keep your head down, Sid, and we’ll be thinking of you.”

  “You remember
to pack extra socks?”

  “This one will be the last one, Mary. We’ll kick the ass off the Russians and then we can all settle down to live out our lives in peace.”

  “I’ll be back in plenty of time for the harvest. Crops are sure lookin’ good.”

  And then it was time.

  “Second platoon, Able Company, first battalion – over here! Group around me.”

  “Goddamnit, Lewis, if you can’t keep that steel pot on your pinhead, tie the son of a bitch to your pack.”

  “Fuck you, Sergeant.”

  “Where in the hell is Sergeant Ward?”

  “Right here.”

  “Your wife just called. You forgot to take your allergy pills.”

  “Shit!”

  “Harrison, what in the hell are you doing with that goddamn chicken?”

  “It’s our mascot, Captain.”

  “A chicken?”

  “First platoon, Dog Company, third batallion – get over here, damnit!”

  Since many of the roads throughout the nation were in sad condition – with many of them having had no maintenance in almost fifteen years – the battle tanks would not be transported on trucks. The heavy tanks would have to be driven as is, overland. The harsh rumble of the big engines firing into life added to the din. Ben was throwing everything under his command at the IPF, and he knew if he failed (and that was a distinct possibility) General Striganov and his forces would then have much more than just a toe hold in America.

  81mm mortar carriers were made ready to roll. 155mm howitzers, M60A2 tanks, M48A3 main battle tanks, and M60A1 main battle tanks, each weighing between fifty-two and fifty-seven tons were cranked up, the huge V-12 diesel engines rumbling and snorting to life in the cool predawn darkness.

  Tactical and support vehicles, Jeeps and deuce-and-a-halves, pickup trucks and APCs roared into life. M548 cargo carriers wheeled on their tracks, pointing their stubby bulldog noses to the north, preparing to move out at Ben’s signal.