Only one man, the thought jumped into the brain of the men who sat looking up at Ben Raines.
But no one spoke the name aloud.
“Move out, gentlemen,” Ben said softly. “And good luck to you all.”
FIVE
I have passed the Rubicon; swim or sink, live or die, survive or perish with my country – that is my unalterable determination.
– John Adams
“It ain’t our fight,” the burly man told the young captain from Raines’s Rebels.
“Mister – ” then captain stood his ground, the ground in this case being just below the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in north Georgia – “if you think it isn’t your fight, if you think the IPF won’t be in here after you and your family, you’d better think again.”
The man spat tobacco juice on the ground. “When or if this Russian and his troops get here, we’ll fight. But not before.”
“By then it may well be too late,” he was told.
“Mayhaps you be right in that,” the man replied in the peculiar mountain dialect that many families still used after centuries. “But me and mine been gettin’ by in these mountains for more years than there was a nation, sonny boy. The Russians come in here and they’ll find us to be not so hospitable as we is to you and your soldiers . . . sonny boy.”
The young captain met the mountain man’s stony gaze with a look just as unflinching and unyielding. “Mister, you call me sonny boy one more time, and you’re going to be eating on the butt of this AK-47. And after I butt-stroke you, I am going to stomp your fucking guts clear out.”
“He looks and acts like he might just be able to do it, Abe,” a man called from the porch.
Good-humored laughter broke from the knot of men gathered around the troops.
Humor touched the burly mountain man’s eyes. “I do believe you’d try your best to whup me, wouldn’t you . . . Captain?”
A grin touched the corners of Capt. Roger Rayle’s mouth. “Yes, sir, I sure would.”
The mountain man laughed and shook his shaggy head. “All right, Captain. Come on up to the porch. Folks been a-bringin’ in food all morning. We eat and talk about this thing. We don’t get much outside news ’round here. Be nice to find out what’s happenin’ in the world and with these Russians.”
Abe stopped dead in his tracks and slowly turned around when Captain Rayle said, “A resurgence of Nazism, sir.”
Abe stared at him for a long moment. He blinked. “Resurgence. Good word. I believe that means – and you tell me if I’m wrong – these Russian people, the IPF, they doing the same thing that Hitler feller done back in the thirties and forties to the Jews. Am I right?”
“Yes, sir. You are exactly right. And they must be stopped.”
By now the crowd around the stone and wood house had grown to more than a hundred men and women. They stood silently.
Abe said, “My daddy was a paratrooper in that war. He helped liberate a concentration camp. Don’t rightly recall just where it was. He told me he had seen some ugly sights in his life, during the war. Hadn’t never seen nothing to compare with that. Said them people was the poorest lookin’ bunch he’d ever seen. Made him sick, so he said. Couldn’t keep nothing on his stomach for a week or better.
“Now, as for me, I don’t know many Jew folks. Them I have known, I didn’t much care for. Too pushy for my tastes. But my personal opinions don’t matter much when it comes to another man doing a deliberate hurt to a human being ‘cause of race or religion. I just don’t hold with that. What is this IPF bunch doin’ to folks?”
“They are taking everyone not of a pure white race – blacks, Hispanics, Asians, Jews, Indians – and operating on them so they cannot reproduce offspring. They are tattooing I.D. numbers on them. They are torturing them and conducting medical experiments on them. If a person does not have a high enough I.Q., regardless of race, he is being disposed of.”
“Killed, you mean?”
“Yes, sir.”
The man spat another stream of tobacco juice on the ground. “All this is fact?”
“Yes, sir.”
A long, lean, lanky man set his coffee cup on the porch railing and stood up. “Abe,” he said, “don’t you be startin’ no meetin’ ’til I get back here, now, you hear?”
“Where you be goin’?”
“To get my kin and my gun.”
Raines’s Rebels got in the first bloody, savage lick of the newly declared guerrilla war. The column of IPF troops and equipment was on a bridge in south central Iowa, crossing the Des Moines River when hundreds of pounds of carefully hidden high explosives were electronically detonated. One full company of troops was killed when their trucks plunged nose-first into the cold, dark waters of the river. Fifty were killed when the bridge exploded, hurling men and equipment and assorted arms and legs high into the air, to plunge and sink into the river.
The LRRP teams had allowed several IPF trucks to cross the bridge before activating the charges, cutting them off from the main convoy. The IPF troops were chopped to bloody rags of flesh and splintered shards of bone by mortar and heavy machine gunfire from the Rebels hidden in the thick brush that now grew alongside the roads and interstates of the once-most-powerful nation in the world.
By the time the IPF could backtrack and cross the river, coming up to the point of ambush, the Rebels were long gone, fading silently and quickly into the countryside, their gruesome jobs efficiently and effectively done.
Colonel Fechnor, who was commanding the troops spearheading the assault south, smiled a humorless grimace of grudging respect for the men and women of the scouts and LRRPs, and for Gen. Ben Raines.
This one action – even if there were no more, and Fechnor knew there would be many more – had succeeded in its initial objective: slowing down the advance of the IPF. Now every bridge, no matter how small, would have to be inspected and inspected very carefully. Fechnor knew the Rebels would have ambush teams at every bridge and overpass along the way. If just one out of every five teams Fechnor sent out returned, he would consider that good odds.
No, Fechnor mused, this President-General Ben Raines was not going to roll over like a whipped puppy and give up. If Raines went down at all, it would be with a snarling, biting, savage action.
For the first time – the very first time – Colonel Fechnor felt that just maybe the International Peace Force had bitten off more than they could chew or swallow safely.
But, Colonel Fechnor thought, mentally shaking off the thought of defeat, he could not think that – that was treason. He was a soldier, and as a soldier he obeyed orders. He did not question whether they were right or wrong. He simply obeyed. Fechnor was the epitome of the universal soldier.
A type found in all armies. The type without which no army could exist or function. Without them, there could be no wars.
Fechnor ordered his dead buried. He stood with an impassive soldier’s face as this was done.
Then the colonel made his second mistake of that day.
“What do our scouts report on the conditions in Ottumwa?” he asked an aide.
“The city is deserted, sir. They say it is a ghost town. They don’t know where the people went. First reports of several weeks ago stated the city had several hundred residents.”
They probably left to join Ben Raines, the colonel said to himself, and he was right in that assumption. “Very well. No need to change course. Drive right on through the city.”
Ottumwa was anything but a ghost town.
Colonel Gray’s people had sealed the bypass around the city with old semi-rigs, carefully placed so it looked as though there had been a terrible accident months before and the wreckage never cleared.
There was about to be just that. But what was about to occur to Col. Valeska Fechnor’s IPF troops was to be anything but an accident.
The old highway ran through the center of the once-thriving little city, and on both sides of the main drag of town, waiting behind dusty and broken
windows, crouched on rooftops and hidden in ground-level old stores, were the trained troops of Gray’s Scouts. They waited, hands gripping weapons, their only movement the shifting and blinking of eyes.
“Convoy approaching the city limits, sir,” a forward-placed LRRP radioed back to Dan Gray.
“Received,” Colonel Gray’s aide radioed back. She turned to Dan. “Convoy coming in, sir. And it’s a big one.”
“Good, good.” Dan smiled and rubbed his hands together. “Excellent, dear. Now we shall teach the bloody arrogant bastards a hard lesson about life. Or,” he laughed, “the loss of it.”
She returned the soft yet hard laughter of the professional fighter.
The lead scout APC cautiously turned the corner and swung onto the main street.
“Hold your fire,” Dan whispered into a walkie-talkie. “Let them get clear; our lads south of the main area will bloody their knives on the scouts.”
Colonel Fechnor felt it first. An experienced soldier, he felt that anticipatory tingle on the short hairs of his neck. He looked around him. His entire convoy stretched out behind him on the main street of town.
Where were the dogs? he thought. There should be mangy dogs slinking about. Birds, too. But the street was void of all life.
Suddenly, Fechnor knew he had been suckered.
Sitting ducks! he thought. “Floorboard it!” he yelled, startling his young driver. “Get the hell off this street and out of town.” He grabbed up his mic. “Ambush!” he shouted. “Ambush!”
The driver jammed the pedal to the floorboards and the car shot forward just as a building exploded to Fechnor’s right. A second later the building on the opposite side of the street blew, just as two buildings far down the street erupted in rubble-filled fury, effectively blocking both ends of the street and sealing the IPF column.
Fechnor’s armored car just barely escaped the carnage only heartbeats away.
“Cut to the right!” Colonel Fechnor screamed. “Head to the west.”
The frightened young man obeyed instantly as the sound of automatic weapon fire and grenades reached their ears.
The taste in Colonel Fechnor’s mouth was sour and ugly as his frightened young driver found Highway 34 and roared toward the west. Toward safety, the young man feverishly hoped.
On the main street of Ottumwa, the troops of the IPF were being brutally slaughtered, many of them taken by such surprise they were unable to fire their weapons before slugs chopped them to death.
Using M-16s, M-16A2s, .50-caliber and M-60 machine guns, AK-47s, anti-tank rockets and grenades, the Rebels cut and slashed at the IPF personnel. Screams from the frightened and the wounded and the dying echoed off the buildings, mingling with the yammer of rapid fire and the booming of grenades and rockets. The air was filled with gun smoke and concrete dust from the shattered buildings. Small fires had broken out, the smoke adding to the confusion of the ambushed IPF troops.
The fire-fight was over in five minutes. Those men and women from the IPF who had managed to jump from the trucks and run inside the buildings, seeking safety there, were riddled with bullets from the Rebels waiting for just such an action.
Col. Dan Gray’s Scouts and LRRPs took no prisoners. Teams went to each fallen IPF member to deliver the coup de grace: a bullet to the back of the head.
“Gather up all the weapons and equipment,” Colonel Gray instructed his people. “Every piece of equipment that is workable, every vehicle that will run, anything we can possibly find some use for, take it. We’ll head south and cache it.”
The smell of blood and urine and relaxed bowels from the dead that littered the shattered streets was foul in the air.
And the dogs had returned, warily, sniffing at the dead.
“What about the bodies, Colonel?”
Colonel Gray looked at the dogs, then carefully smoothed his trimmed moustache with a finger tip. “Leave them. The dogs appear hungry.”
The sounds of the long, blacksnake whip cutting into flesh was followed by the cries and screams of the man being beaten and the sobs of the naked woman who was being forced to watch. The woman was held by two men: occassionally one or the other of the men would carelessly reach out to fondle some part of her nakedness. She had resigned herself to this humiliation and no longer struggled when one of them touched her. In the background, a huge wooden cross had been erected, its butt jammed into a hole in the ground and secured. It was blazing, sending shimmering waves of heat into the coolness of the autumn air.
Tears streaked the woman’s face. “Please stop,” she implored the men. “You’re killing him. For the love of God – stop it.”
“Naw, we ain’t neither,” a white-robed man casually informed her, not taking his eyes from the naked man being beaten. “We jist markin’ him up some; teach him a lesson furst, then we’ll get to you, seein’ as how you lak’ niggers so much.” He laughed. “Yeah, we got a right nice treat in store for you, missy.”
The long, leather whip whistled and sang its painful tune as it hummed on its way to impacting with bare flesh. The impact was a cracking slap, blood leaping from the cut. The young man screamed as the pain tore through his body. He sagged against the post where he was bound. His crotch rubbed against the rough wood of the post.
“Lookee there!” another white-robed man called as he laughed. “Nigger-lover looks lak’ he a-tryin’ to fuck that there post. Hunch agin’ it, boy!”
The woman averted her eyes from the sight of her husband.
“Ol’ Henry there is an expert with the blacksnake,” one of the men holding her said. He reached across and pinched a nipple. The woman bit her lip to keep from crying out. The man grinned at this. “For a nigger-fucker, missy, you got nice titties. Yep, I seen ol’ Henry make a whuppin’ las’ for near’bouts three hours once. I believe that were back in ninety-six. ‘Course hit were a nigger buck we was whuppin’then – bigger and some tougher than your little man. Built up better, too. I can see why you like nigger meat so much; your man ain’t got no cock on him at all. Never could make that nigger beg. So after we whupped him rawer ‘an a skinned pig, we strung him up.” He pointed to a tree. “Rat over there. We choked him to death. Took ’bout a hour. That was fun, watchin’ that nigger dance. We lowered him a dozen times, let him suck air. Man was lak’ an animal.” He grinned lewdly. “Had him a cock lak’ a horse. Way you lak’ nigger meat, missy, you’d have cummed jist a-lookin’ at that nigger’s whork.”
The woman shook her head and sobbed out her reply. “I have never had sex with a black man. Only with my husband.”
“You a lie!” another man told her, walking up to the nude woman. His robes were satin, much more ornate than any of the others. “You nothin’ but white trash, woman. We caught you travelin’ with niggers.”
“We were only helping them escape!” the woman screamed. “I’ve told you people that. Why don’t you believe us?”
“‘Cause you a lie, ’at’s why.” The man turned away from her. He looked for a moment at the beating, then called, “ ’At’s enuff, Henry. Don’t want to kill the boy. Cut him down. You, Richie, you go get that nigger buck, drag his monkey ass out to the circle.”
A slender black man was dragged into the circle of robed men and women. He was naked. His eyes were blazing with fury and shame. “You people had no right to do this,” he told the Klansmen. “This man and woman were merely helping me and my wife to escape from the IPF.”
That got him a crack across the mouth from the Klan spokesman. “Shut your nigger mouth, boy. You stay in your place, you hear? ’Round here, boy, niggers talk when spoken to.”
The horsewhipped man was cut from the whipping post and dragged into the center of the circle. “Dump some water on his ass,” the spokesman said. “We want him to watch this.”
A bucket of creek water was poured on the sobbing, bleeding man. He struggled to sit up on ground and at the same time cover his nakedness.
“You wastin’ your time a-tryin’ to cover that little
thing of yourn,” a man leered at him. “You must have to stick it up your wife’s asshole afore she even knows you got anything in her.”
That brought hoots of laughter from the circle of men and women. More than one Klan woman had her eyes on the genital area of the naked black man.
“ ’At there’s not a bad idea,” the spokesman said. “Luther, you go get Big Jim and brang him over here. We’ll have us a show ’fore we let the nigger buck and the white bitch have at it.”
Within moments a huge white man entered into the circle of the white-robes. That the man was mentally deficient was obvious at first glance. His eyes were dull and his face wore the slackness of the near-insane.
“Big Jim,” the spokesman said. “I want you to shuck outta your pants. Now, you go on and do ’er now, boy, show us all your equipment.”
Big Jim dropped his ragged jeans to the dirt. He wore no underwear. Many of the Klan women licked their lips at the sight of his enormous penis.
“Go git the nigger’s wife,” a man was ordered.
A well-shaped and pretty light-skinned woman was dragged naked and weeping into the circle.
“That‘un got more’n her share of white blood in her,” Henry said. “Big Jim gonna have him a high ol’ time with her, awright.”
“Missy,” the spokesman told the white woman. “You crawl over there and jack off Big Jim; git him up good and hard.”
She refused at first. Several hard slaps across her face changed her mind. Reluctantly and with revulsion on her face, she complied.
Big Jim soon became more than enormous. He was deformed. The woman released him and was dragged back to the hard hands that held her.
“Tear that nigger gal’s pussy up, Big Jim,” the spokesman said with a laugh.
The young black woman’s screaming soon echoed around the circle gathered around the burning cross. When Big Jim left the woman, she was huddled in a ball of hurt on the dirt. The grinning man was pointed out of the circle. He left carrying his pants.
Anarchy in the Ashes Page 24