Escape from the Ashes

by William W. Johnstone

  “Yeah,” Burkett said. “What the hell does that have to do with anything?”

  “I know what he’s talking about,” Tamara said. “And under the circumstances, I agree with him. In fact, it may be the only way we are going to be able to bring Ben Raines down.”

  “What?” Burkett asked in exasperation.

  “What he is saying is, let the people who are out looking for him now wear Raines down. Your chances of getting him are a lot better when he has been bled a little.”

  “You’re pretty sharp,” Doyle said to Tamara. That’s right, that is exactly what I’m thinking.”

  “Oh,” Cain said, now understanding the analogy. He smiled. “Yeah, I see what you are talking about now. What about you, Burkett? You still in the dark?”

  “Nah, I know what you’re saying,” Burkett said. Then, to change the subject, he added, “About that redhead you took to your room last night.”

  “Her name is Kelly, not ‘that redhead,’” Tamara said. “What about her?”

  “I was just thinking, if you would send her to my room one time, I’d make a straight woman out of her.”

  Tamara laughed. “I pity the woman who would sleep with you, Burkett. One night with you and even someone like Cleopatra would have been turned away from men.”

  Armed now, and fully aware that, for some unknown reason, he was a target, Ben continued his journey more alert than before. Although it was warm enough during the day, it got quite cool during the night, so he knew that his first priority was to find a way to stay warm. That presented somewhat of a problem, because he had no cave to stay in, which meant he would be unable to build a fire, for fear of it being seen by his adversaries.

  Those were the conditions facing him on this, his second night in the woods. Drinking water from the bear-stomach flask, and eating a supper of bear jerky, he set about making his camp for the night.

  Ben knew, without knowing exactly how he knew, that he could find warmth from the chemical reaction of decomposing vegetable matter, so wrapping himself snuggly in the bearskin, he burrowed down into a bed of old pine needles. To his relief, he realized that he could spend the night quite comfortably.

  Sleep came more quickly than he would have thought, and with sleep, the dream returned. Once more Ben found himself, or at least his dream-self, in the town of death and destruction he had visited in last night’s dream.

  In his sleep-conscious, part of him knew this wasn’t real, knew it was a dream. And yet, that same sleep-conscious also knew that there was a basic authenticity to these sleep memories.

  He went from store to store collecting the essentials of survival . . . medical supplies, food, weapons and ammo, gasoline, and a wide-band shortwave radio.

  Returning to his home, he began to plan his next move. After much thought and much bourbon, he resolved to travel around the country to see if there were other places like the town of death he had just visited. If so, he would use his skills as a writer to leave a detailed account for posterity of what he found.

  His mission clear, he packed up his pickup truck and headed north, intending first to find out what happened to his family, to find those who survived, and to bury the rest. *

  *Trapped in the Ashes

  THIRTEEN

  Base Camp One

  Mike Post sat drumming his fingers on his desk, drinking his third cup of coffee this morning, as the others filed into his office. He had called a staff meeting to discuss the situation with regard to Ben Raines.

  Buddy sat next to Mike’s desk, while Coop and Jersey drew themselves each a cup of coffee and sat next to each other on the leather sofa against the wall. Harley and Anna came in together.

  Mike selected a pipe from the pipe stand on his desk, took some tobacco from the humidor, and tapped it down into the bowl. He was doing it all slowly, and very deliberately, and everyone knew that he was formulating what he was going to say. Nobody interrupted him.

  Finally, with the tobacco tamped down, he lit it, drew in several puffs until clouds of tobacco curled about him. Only then did he begin to speak.

  “Day before yesterday, as of nineteen hundred hours British Columbia time, the airplane Ben had chartered was declared missing,” Mike said.

  “What?” the others gasped. The general’s plane is down?”

  “Presumed down,” Mike replied.

  “This happened day before yesterday and you are just now getting around to telling us?” Jersey challenged. “Why did you wait so long? Didn’t you think we would be interested in knowing this?”

  “Jersey, do you really think I would keep something like this from everyone? I didn’t find out about it myself until a few minutes ago,” Mike replied. “If you remember, this whole mission was kept secret. The authorities in Canada didn’t know who to notify. I only found out about it when I called to check on the status of the flight.”

  “Oh,” Jersey said contritely. “Oh, of course, I should have known that would be the case. Listen, I’m sorry, Mike, I had no business shooting off my mouth like that. I’m just . . . just . . .” Jersey pursed her lips and blew out a stream of air. Tears began flowing down her cheeks, and she made no effort to hide them. No one commented about her tears, because all were fighting the lumps in their own throats.

  “You don’t have to apologize, Jersey. I know how upsetting this is for you. For all of us. It just doesn’t seem real.”

  “Well, do we know anything more about it?” Coop asked. “Was there a last known position? Any eyewitnesses to a crash? Anything?”

  “No, not at this point. We don’t even really know that the airplane is down,” Mike said. “They only know it is missing.”

  “If it’s missing, that means it’s down, doesn’t it?”

  “Not necessarily. They could have landed at some private field somewhere. Don’t forget, the general is very resourceful. If he got later information, I am sure he would react to it.”

  “But wouldn’t he call us? I mean, he does have a satellite phone,” Anna said.

  “Anna, you know your father as well as any of us. He is mission-oriented. Accomplishing what he set out to accomplish would be more important than keeping in contact with us. Especially if trying to establish contact would complicate things for him.”

  “That’s true,” Anna admitted. “But even knowing that does not keep me from worrying about him.”

  “Hell, Anna, you don’t have dibs on that. We’re all worrying about him,” Harley said.

  Coop stood up. “Yeah, well, I’m going to quit worrying and start doing something. I’m going up there,” he said.

  “No,” Mike said quickly.

  “What do you mean, no?” Coop demanded angrily. “What am I supposed to do? Just sit around with my thumb up my ass, waiting to see what happens?”

  “Coop, do you think it’s easy for me to stay here?” Buddy asked. “If I thought I could do some good up there, I’d be on the next plane. Hell, I’d walk if I had to. But if you go up there now, where would you go? To Port Hardy? And what would you be doing there, if not sitting around with your thumb up your ass?”

  “Damn it!” Coop said. “Damn it, damn it, damn it!” He kicked his chair halfway across the room, then retrieved it and sat down.

  “Are you through?” Mike asked calmly.

  “Yeah, I’m through,” Coop answered.

  “Coop, you know I’m right. You know there is nothing you can do up there.”

  “I know, I know,” Coop replied. He sighed. “It’s just not in my nature to sit around and do nothing.”

  “Oh, I don’t expect you to do nothing,” Mike said. “In fact, I very much expect you to do something.”

  “What do you want me to do?” Coop asked. “Tell me, and I’ll do it.”

  “The general went up there to find the people who blew up the school and robbed the bank,” Mike said.

  “Die Kontrollgruppe.”

  “You know damn well they didn’t pick a middle school in Louisiana by random.
They had to have local sources to set things up for them. I want those people found.”

  “After we find them, what?” Coop said.

  “Extract whatever information you can from them, then close the file on them . . . with extreme prejudice,” he added.

  Coop smiled and nodded. “You’re damn right I will,” he said.

  “What can I do?” Buddy asked.

  “Buddy, it may be that folks are going to start looking to you to carry on in your father’s behalf,” Mike said.

  “I thought you said—” Buddy began, but Mike held up his hand to interrupt him.

  “I know. I said I believed the general was still alive. And I do believe that. But we must also face the possibility that he isn’t. And if he isn’t, there are certain operational functions that you will need to assume. I think you should start preparing yourself for that.”

  “All right,” Buddy said. “If you say so.”

  * * *

  Northwest Canada

  Ben sat in the V of a tree. His face was mottled in green and brown as a result of the natural dyes and stains he had extracted from nuts and berries. There were branches and leaves tied about his body so that someone staring at him from no more than ten yards away would not see him.

  He chewed on a piece of jerky, then took a drink of water. His hunger and thirst satisfied, he found a comfortable position and waited. He still didn’t know who he was, or why people were trying to kill him, but he knew there would be more. And when more appeared, he would be ready for them.

  At that very moment, no more than half a mile from where Ben was waiting, four more DK soldiers were on his trail.

  Kenner, the leader of the group, had a radio and he broke squelch. There was a little rush of static before he spoke.

  “Mad Dog Team, this is Turtle, do you copy? Over.”

  “Copy, Turtle,” a voice replied.

  “You picked up any sign?”

  “No. You’ve got to hand it to him, this son of a bitch is good.”

  “Yeah. That’s why there are four of us on his ass.”

  “Have you seen anything yet?”

  “Not a blessed thing.”

  “Call if you spot him.”

  “Will do.”

  Kenner turned the radio down, then looked at the others. “It’ll be a cold day in hell before I call anyone else,” he said. “We’re cuttin’ the reward thin enough with the four of us. No way I’m going to split it with anyone else.”

  “Yeah, well, if he’s as good as they say he is,” one of the others said.

  “We’ll do what? Call everyone else in and say, ‘Help, the big bad Ben has us outnumbered’?” Kenner asked with a snarl.

  The others laughed.

  “No, nothin’ like that.”

  “Then what would you do?”

  “Nothin’, I guess. I just don’t think we ought to underestimate this guy. Look what happened to Logan and Purvis.”

  “Yeah, well, he must’ve got the jump on them. But I figure if we’re on our toes, there’s no way he can do that to us.”

  Suddenly, and totally unexpectedly, Ben dropped down onto the trail in front of them. The apparition they saw before them was terrifying, let alone that his sudden appearance had startled them. He looked like some sort of forest-green monster, a cross between man, beast, and tree.

  “What the hell?” Kenner shouted in alarm.

  “Are you friend or foe?” Ben asked, perfectly willing to cooperate with them if they declared themselves to be his friend.

  “Shoot him!” Kenner shouted, bringing his gun up. “Shoot the son of a bitch!”

  “Well, I guess that answers that question,” he said, squeezing off a shot from the Uzi he had taken from one of the first two men he killed. His bullet smashed into Kenner’s forehead, making a small puncture in the front of his head but, with hydrostatic pressure, blowing out a half-dollar-sized exit wound in the back. Kenner fell, dead before he hit the ground.

  The other three watched with shock as their leader went down. Not until then did they react, and by then it was too late. With shouts of anger and fear, they began firing at the form before them, or rather, they began firing at the place where the form had been.

  The woods and nearby mountainsides echoed and reechoed with the staccato sound of their shooting, and nearly one hundred bullets buzzed like angry hornets across the gap, slamming into tree trunks, cutting leaves, ricocheting off rocks, and whining as they spun off into the distance.

  But not one bullet found its mark, for even before they squeezed their triggers, Ben leaped through a bordering bush and disappeared.

  “There!” someone shouted. “Fire into that bush!”

  The three swung their submachine guns toward the bush and continued to fire. The bullets chewed away the leaves, clipped off the limbs until, after a moment of sustained fire, the bush was cut away as cleanly as if they had gone after it with a bush hog.

  Finally, they quit firing, not because they had accomplished their mission, but because they had exhausted their ammunition. Three banana clips, each holding 120 rounds, had been expended. In the distance, they could still hear the last reverberating chatter of machine-gun fire.

  Then it grew quiet, deathly so, for the machine-gun fire had stilled the animals of the forest.

  “What the hell happened to him?” someone said. He pointed to the bush. “He was right there, I saw him.”

  The bush was gone, and there was nothing behind it.

  “Hell, nobody could’a lived through what we just poured in there,” one of the others said.

  The third one, who had yet to speak, put in a new banana clip, then started forward for a closer examination. The other two reloaded as well, and waited.

  Ben had planned his ambush well. The moment he went through the bush, he rolled several times to his left, winding up at the base of the same tree he had been waiting in. Even as his three assailants were firing nonstop at the bush, he was climbing the tree, regaining the position he had occupied while he waited for them. Now, with their guns silent, he untied a hanging vine, wrapped his left arm through it, then cradled his rifle, with the safety off, in his right arm.

  Suddenly a memory returned to him. It wasn’t a memory that would tell him who he was, though it was a memory from his childhood. It was the memory of Tarzan’s yell. Smiling broadly, he pushed himself off the limb, then, holding on to the vine, made a long, arcing swing down across the path.

  “Ayieeeeeeayahahyeee!” he screamed in an imitation of Tarzan’s yell.

  “There he is!” one of the three assailants yelled, and they spun back toward him, but it was too late.

  As Ben swung out across the trail, he squeezed the trigger of his Uzi. This time he had it on full automatic, and he swung the barrel back and forth as he fired, watching with satisfaction as the bullets slammed into the chests of his three attackers.

  It wasn’t until that moment that he noticed the chest of one of the three had breasts. One of his would-be assailants was a woman.

  Ben let go of the vine and dropped down the path, then hurried over to look down at the three. He had hoped to be able to get some information from at least one of them, but he was too late. All three were dead, including the woman.

  Ben stared down at her. She was an attractive young woman, and had he seen her in a bar somewhere, he might have been tempted to buy her a drink, strike up a conversation, and see where that would lead.

  But he hadn’t met her in a bar. The first and only time he had ever met her, she was trying to kill him, so instead of buying her a drink or striking up a conversation, he had killed her.

  Should he feel bad about killing a woman? Even if she had been trying to kill him, shouldn’t he feel some remorse?

  Ben realized that he did not feel any remorse, and as a result, knew that he had been in similar situations before. Shrugging his shoulders, he reloaded his weapon, then continued on his way, leaving to the buzzards the bodies that lay on the trail beh
ind him.

  Now, the memories were beginning to return, even in his waking moments, and while Ben still didn’t know who he was, he found that he was able to pick up with memory where the dream had left off.

  The memory was vivid and detailed, but was this a memory of a real thing, or was this merely an extension of the dreams he had experienced on the previous two nights?

  Along the way, Ben began meeting the citizens of this brave new world . . . or at least, what few were left. The level of destruction he encountered was staggering, far beyond anything he had seen in that first, small town.

  The major cities were gone. Washington, D. C., was hot, radiating death, and no longer part of the map. And while other parts of the country were physically intact, the death toll was unbelievable. Chaos reigned, and bands of dangerous men far outnumbered the few survivors who were trying to pull themselves out of the ashes. Ben learned to shoot first and ask questions later, and he wondered why it always seemed that the violent and vicious triumphed and reveled in disaster.

  The lack of authority and order had created a hell on earth. The America he had known was an armed camp*

  *Trapped in the Ashes

  Ben still didn’t know who he was, or where he was from, but he was beginning to believe that the sort of thing he was going through right now was a routine part of his life. Apparently, he was used to people trying to kill him, and more importantly, had developed great skills, not only for staying alive, but for overcoming his adversaries.

  Ben was glad that while details and specifics of his life were not familiar to him, for some reason those military skills had survived.

  FOURTEEN

  Port Hardy

  With the Parker brothers’ airplane officially declared missing, what air assets there were available in the region gathered at Port Hardy to begin the Search and Rescue operation. Since they now knew that the destination of the flight was supposed to be Edson, SAR operations were being conducted from that location as well.