Flames from the Ashes

by William W. Johnstone

  Hoffman gestured to his most junior aide to refill his teacup. Thank you, Herd. You have greatly restored my vigor for the continuation of this contest with that barbarian, Ben Raines. Now, what can you tell me, my old friend, Joaquin, to make my day even better?”

  Col. Joaquin Webber rose and dusted his palms together. He spoke from memory. “Indications are that morale has disintegrated in Mexico. The scorched-earth policy of both sides has left the peons starving. They are ripe to join whoever it is that first offers to fill their bellies.” He paused, eyed the delicate bone china teacup, and wished it was filled with schnapps. “The Rebels, under Ben Raines, have completed the eradication of those pockets of resistance south and east of Kansas.”

  “Where is Ben Raines?” Hoffman coldly asked his G-2. His short stature, puffed-out chest, Hitlerian mustache, and lock of black hair over his left eye made Hoffman a ludicrous caricature of the former master of the Third Reich. Although no one would dare to tell Hoffman that.

  “In company with a reinforced battalion, screened by scouts, Raines has outstripped the main Rebel advance, General. He has raced a third of the way across Kansas and then turned north. It is believed that concentrations of our American allies can be found in what was Nebraska and South Dakota, headed our way. Reins must be after them.”

  “Well, he can’t have them,” Hoffman snapped petulantly.

  “He won’t, sir,” the G-2 assured him. “Peter Volmer has departed your headquarters to make personal visits to these American units. He will contact you by secure radio net following this staff meeting.”

  “Go on.”

  “By our best estimates, the Rebels have broken off contact with General Payon to the south, and are spread on an entirely too thin line across the Midwest and Plains states. It is our estimate that they now constitute no immediate threat to us, nor in the near future.”

  Hoffman cut him a gimlet eye. “You’re sure of this? Your predecessor made the mistake of underestimating Ben Raines too often. You know the near disaster that caused.”

  Webber bristled. “I made a careful study of Ben Raines, Herr Feldmarschall. I am certain I know his quirks far better than the officer who held my post previously.”

  “Then pray continue,” Hoffman said coolly.

  “There is little more,” Webber advised, and launched into the minutiae of the intelligence analysis.

  The G-3 came next. He gave information on the status of training and condition of equipment. He also suggested tactfully that Hoffman announce his strategic and tactical requirements soon so that plans could be drawn and orders cut. Hoffman said he would, after he talked with Brodermann and Volmer.

  Food supplies and fresh water were the subject of the G-4. He noted that the stripping of farms had provided ample fresh meat for all troops, as well as eggs, butter, and milk for the staff. In all, Hoffman felt quite pleased with their accomplishments. Smiling, he passed around the plate of fancy tea cakes.

  A strident beep-beep! on the command net advised Corrie that she had an incoming message. The Hummer whizzed along the cracked, uneven surface of U.S. 81 at an acceptable speed of 45 mph. Corrie keyed the mike and spoke quietly.

  “This is the Eagle’s Nest, go.”

  A built-in scrambler unit converted the twitters and chirps into understandable language to which Corrie listened for five seconds before switching on the speaker unit. “It’s Overseer,” Corrie identified the Headquarters Company Intelligence radio-intercept van. “They’re picking up a lot of traffic on Nazi freqs, General,” she explained before the voice of the distant radio operator cut into the rumble of the Humvee.

  “. . . seem to be gathering in large numbers along a line from Geneva to Silver Creek. Best estimate, if they ever got together, some five thousand. There’s more to the north, in old South Dakota. Over.”

  “What’s the nature of the traffic? Over,” Ben queried.

  “Mostly pep talks. There’s something about some big wheel coming to give them the word from on high. We haven’t been able to figure that one out as yet, Eagle. D’you want a verbatim?”

  “Not at this time, Overseer. I’ll get a briefing from the Two Shed later,” Ben dismissed. “Anything hot comes along, bump me like yesterday.”

  “Roger that, Eagle. Oh-oh, have something priority one coming in now. There’s a fix on it, seems to be coming from somewhere around close to you.”

  FMJ rounds rattled off the armored sides of the Hummer to emphasize the words of the radioman from G-2. “There seems to be some hostile intent — ”

  “That’s a rog-O, Overseer,” Ben said dryly over the trashcan-lid clangor of the light auto fire.

  Yellowish flickers spurted from the weapons in the hands of camo-clad figures on the ATVs that raced across a pasture toward the highway and the Hummer that made so tempting a target. Already Jersey had her M-16 pointed out the window and cut off crisp, three-round bursts. More of the snarling, balloon-tired little vehicles appeared on the opposite side of U.S. 81. Ben unlimbered his old faithful .45 Thompson and let go on full rock-and-roll from the fat drum magazine.

  Flame rippled from the slots of the compensator as the subgun spit fat .45 slugs at a line of five advancing ATVs. Ben watched one Nazi get flung away from the back of the three-wheeler as he and the driver took rounds that ripped and tore. Undirected, the racing all-terrain vehicle crashed into the one on its left.

  It upset, the gas tank ruptured, and the hot engine did the rest. A huge balloon of red-orange flame engulfed both rigs. A screaming human form, wrapped in a blanket of fire, ran from the conflagration. Ben ended his agony with a quick three-shot burst.

  “Awh, shit, there’s more of ’em, General,” Cooper advised as he crested a low swale and saw a roadblock of old, rusted cars ahead.

  Ben checked it out, gritted his teeth. “Crash through it, Coop.”

  “Yes, sir.” Cooper didn’t question the ability of the beefed-up Humvee to do as General Ben Raines wanted. He’d done it all too often before.

  Bullets splattered against the thick windshield and Cooper gave brief thanks for the R&D staff at Base Camp One who had come up with a passable substitute for Lexan. Only trouble was that after a month or so in the field, it tended to pit and spider web when hit by fast-moving slugs. Now he would have to look around the edges and guide the hurtling Hummer in the bargain.

  Some bargain, Coop thought as another slash of incoming opaqued the whole right side of the windshield. “Everybody brace; we’re gonna hit hard,” he sang out a moment before the welded I-beam that had replaced the usual bumper slammed into corroded metal. It yielded like a willing woman to her lover. Back when they were producing these things, Cooper thought frivolously, the Japs must have made the body panels out of old beer cans.

  Then the obstruction that flung jagged bits into the air gave a lurch and screeched past. Beside him, Beth had her window down and cut off precise bursts with her H&K 7.62x42 assault rifle. Behind her, Jersey’s .223 M-16 chattered steadily. Already corpses, the results of their efforts, did grisly dances of death.

  Ben let the thunder roll from his Thompson, the muzzle oscillating in an upward-right oval. Impacted by two, sometimes three 230-grain .45 slugs, bodies flew to left and right. A tiny corner of Ben’s mind kept note of the uniforms this unexpected enemy wore. So very like the camo gear of his Rebels. A short distance further to the west of the highway, Ben watched a man rise to a kneeling position, a long, flat green tube over one shoulder. RPG!

  Before the Nazi could trigger the rocket-propelled grenade, Ben swung his Thompson to blitz the blitzkrieger into eternity. The Chicago piano chopped out five rounds and the bolt racked back in the open position. Empty. Ben Raines fought against time, a battle he was certain he would lose, to slide the drum from its keepers and insert a fresh one. He had wound up two before departing from the reinforced battalion that traveled with his headquarters. That might prove the deciding factor.

  Sharp barks from the front seat halted Ben’s hand.
Cooper, his window down, fired an H&K P7M10. Chambered for the S&W .40 Magnum round, it spat a nasty slug. “Jeez, it’s bad enough I got to drive through this mess, I’ve gotta do the shooting, too,” Cooper complained with a quick wink over his shoulder to Ben.

  “Thanks, Coop,” Ben said tightly. “I owe you one.”

  “All in a day’s work, General,” Cooper said brightly, steering blind down the highway while he checked his handiwork with the rocket gunner.

  The cammo-clad Nazi lay sprawled in the weeds and sunflowers. His unfired weapon rested across his chest. Ben inserted the magazine and rested the muzzle on the window frame in the sudden silence that washed over the Hummer. He noticed Jersey staring at him, openmouthed.

  “What are you gawking at?” Ben asked in mock irritation. “Can’t a man load his weapon in peace, without the distaff element of this team commenting?”

  “Ben — General, that Nazi creep almost blew us away,” Jersey squeaked.

  “Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades, Jersey,” Ben admonished jokingly.

  A radio voice squawked in Corrie’s ear. “Overseer wants to know if we made contact, General.”

  Ben chuckled softly. “Tell that mother hen that his warning wasn’t quite timely enough. Those jokers made a mess out of my Hummer.”

  TWO

  A terrible stench rose from the pit — an odor so foul that it gagged Ben Raines, who had hunted down the creepies, up close and ugly. An awful sorrow and rage welled up in Ben’s chest. These had been good people, peaceful farmers, their wives and children. Slaughtered for no more reason than someone figured them to be “racially inferior” to the Nazi monsters who put them here.

  “The rest of R Batt will be along in a couple of hours. Close this . . . grave, and have the padre say some words. Small comfort for these folks . . .” Ben concluded with an absent stare. Then he slammed a fist that would have served as a fielder’s mitt into the side of the Humvee. A wild light glowed in his eyes. “I want to find those Nazis that Far Eyes told us about. We’re heading north.”

  “With this windshield, I’ll be lucky to make ten miles an hour,” Cooper protested.

  “Then transfer us to another,” Ben growled.

  “It won’t be armored. The spare’s with R Batt,” Cooper reminded, referring to the reinforced battalion that accompanied the Rebel headquarters.

  It had begun life as Ben’s One Battalion and consisted of the usual three infantry companies, one heavy-weapons, augmented by a company of M-1 Abrams tanks on lowboys, and a pair of Hughes AH-64 Apache gunships. Their main rotor blades could be extended and locked in place, the helicopters ready for takeoff from their transport trucks, in fifteen minutes. Then, alone or together, they could rain terror from the sky on anyone below. That is, anyone without IR heat-seeker SAMs.

  “No time,” Ben snapped, conscious of the stress put on him by the ambush and the carnage of the martyred farm families. “Get to humping, Coop.”

  Ten minutes later, Ben’s mobile headquarters had been transferred to an available Hummer. The motor warmed and ready, Cooper took the squat, ugly, wide-wheelbased vehicle out of there, headed, he well knew, into a bloody confrontation with the Nazi butchers.

  “This is Alien Secretions,” a husky voice crackled through on what Field Marshal Hoffman’s intelligence thought to be a secure channel.

  Fifty miles away, the young Rebel on enemy traffic watch in Overseer glanced over at his friend on the duty desk. “What the hell have we got here?”

  “Sounds like the name of a studded-metal band,” the buddy suggested.

  “Go ahead — ah — Alien Secretions,” a Teutonic accent, faded by distance, responded.

  “We had — ah — a hostile contact with one of the target’s vehicles. No idea who was in it, but they fought like fiends. Broke through the roadblock and killed a bunch of my people.”

  A feathery whisper of chuckle came back. “You can’t make an omelet, as they say. Have you made a positive identification on the main target? Over.”

  “Negative, it’s not just that they’re usin’ code names, the Rebels have every transmission scrambled.”

  “Then get out there and use your eyes, you stupid American schwein!”

  Gabriel Trasher slammed the microphone stand hard on the Formica tabletop. “Gawdamned South American kraut,” he snarled.

  “You’re the one wanted to throw in with these Nazis,” Numb Nuts Nicholson, Trasher’s second-in-command, reminded.

  Trasher’s close-set, beady eyes flared with anger. He had so far held his band of outlaw bikers together by sheer force of personality. Hugely gross, his belly slopped over the thick black belt that held up grubby jeans so grease-impregnated they could not rot away.

  “I don’t need you to tell me that.” Trasher worked thick, wet lips, exposing crooked, yellowed teeth that sported a green fringe. “What choice did we have? It was that or face Ben Raines and the Rebels on our own. Goddammit, I hate Ben Raines.” It would have done no good to tell Gabe Trasher that those who had spoken that phrase numbered in the thousands. He moved his lard butt with two grunts and a sharp gasp. The tumbledown farmhouse his Alien Secretions used as a flop and shelter for their Harleys had been furnished with items scavenged elsewhere. It stank of mildew, and the ceiling leaked in half a dozen places. Yet most of the city-bred members of the gang preferred it to sleeping out on the ground. There were snakes and other crawly things outside. Not to mention mosquitoes big enough to carry off a fair-sized man.

  From another room came pitiful cries of anguish and horror. Some of the boys were punking out that peach-fuzz-faced farm kid they had snatched along the way. Give him a week, Trasher thought, and he’d be beggin’ for it.

  Gabe Trasher spoke from experience. He had been introduced to the far-from-subtle aspects of the drop-the-soap game long ago. It had been in juvenile hall at the tender age of twelve. He had punched out a teacher and stolen a car for a joyride to make himself feel better. The pigs had caught him and hauled him in to juvie.

  He had never known fear until he ran into the older studs in that place. They’d had their way with him; and Gabe, over the years he’d spent behind bars, had taken his own share. Let the guys have their fun, he thought with a shrug. They had something important to do.

  “Look, we’ve been given the assignment to track Ben Raines by the big honcho himself, Field-fucking-Marshal Hoffman. “We’d best perform. I hate to give that prissy kraut dork credit, but he’s right. We gotta get out of here, whiz around the countryside, and make an ID on one General Ben Raines. Then we report it and wait for orders.”

  Short and stocky, with black hair and bluish-green eyes, Numb Nuts Nicholson showed the world a blank bulldog face that clearly revealed that his ship had sailed without him. “Whaddaya suppose they’ll have us do next?” he asked in a vacant voice.

  “Probably go terrorize some sissy-pants farmers, burn their crops so the Rebels won’t have ’em,” Trasher theorized.

  A grotesque, choking whinny came from Numb Nuts, what passed for him as a laugh. “Oh, I like that. Maybe they’ll have some cute little daughters,” Nicholson slobbered.

  Trasher winced. He knew what Numb Nuts meant by “cute” and “little”: girls of eleven or younger. Not to say that when he’d been a long time without, ol’ Gabe didn’t enjoy a little lusty buggering, but when it came to women, he wanted them full-blown, busty, and with the legs of an acrobat. The obvious need to regain the upper hand goaded Gabe Trasher to action.

  “Tell those horny fucks in there to leave the kid alone for a while. Have them get out and about and find me Ben Raines.”

  At least satisfied with the performance, Cooper tooled the Hummer north along the dilapidated U.S. 81, now crossed over into Nebraska. With the big run-flat tires giving off pops and snaps, they entered the rubble that had once been Chester, Nebraska. Although they had seen it a thousand times, the occupants of the Humvee rubbernecked over the ruins.

  More than curios
ity motivated them. In their haste to contain and crush the loathsome creepies, the Rebels had flattened a lot of towns. Some of the noxious, cannibal monstrosities may have escaped in cellars, linked by networks of tunnels. If they or any other undesirables — by Rebel standards — existed in the piles of plaster and masonry, Jersey and Beth wanted to be aware of it long before it became a problem.

  “Looks clean, so far, boss-man,” Jersey sang out with obvious relief.

  Cooper kept his eyes fixed on the narrow lane through the jumble of crumbled houses and downed power poles. To his right, Beth kept watch and spoke from the side of her mouth.

  “There’s a time to count chickens, and a time not — ” Her barbed quip ended in a loud wham, that came from under the front right wheel.

  Blast shock slammed Beth’s head into the roof of the GP vehicle despite her seat belt and shoulder harness. Cooper white-knuckled the steering wheel and cursed hotly when his nose made violent acquaintance of the hub.

  “Gawdamned mine,” he shouted, mush-mouthed over the ringing explosion.

  Ben found himself in a heap on the floor of the Hummer, with Jersey astraddle him and Corrie folded in half beside her, bootheels on the backrest. Fortunately good luck held. The Hummer came with a scatter shield as well as run-flat tires, Ben sorted out of his racing thoughts.

  “Get us the hell out of here,” he barked to the back of Cooper’s neck.

  “Can’t, General. That sucker blew the wheel clean off.”

  “Corrie, get yourself upright and radio our situation to R Batt.”

  “Yes, General,” her voice came tiny and distant.

  A lot of wriggling produced the desired effect. Jersey made a production out of apologizing to Ben. He tut-tutted and endured it as he helped her to the seat cushion. Then he unraveled himself. Corrie had the window down by then and bumped the RT operator at R Batt.

  “Yeah, Falcon, we hit a flogging mine. Disabled the Hummer,” Corrie said in a decidedly stronger tone. “We’re in Chester, just across the line. What’s your ETA?” Her earphone squawked and she cut her eyes to Ben. “Falcon says two hours, General.”