D-Day in the Ashes

by William W. Johnstone

  “Less than five percent going in.”

  “That’s all LZ’s combined?”

  “Yes.”

  “What wave will you be in, Ben?”

  “The first one.”

  “No goddamn way!” the doctor said.

  “You have no say in the matter, Lamar. Just have your people ready to patch up the wounded.”

  Lamar shut up about it. He and Ben had been friends for too many years, and both knew when the other would not budge on a decision.

  “When are we going in?” Lamar asked.

  “At 0600. Day after tomorrow.”

  ELEVEN

  For two days the pilots flew their modified P-51’s over selected areas of the coast of France and did nothing except look. They had a few SAMs fired at them; but since they were flying practically on the ground, the SAMs were impotent against them. The reports the pilots brought back confirmed what Rene Seaux had said. The thugs and punks and warlords had a few mortars, a lot of heavy machine guns, some SAMs, but no artillery anywhere along the coast.

  The defenders along the coast were getting nervous. For the past week the weather along the coast had been unusually calm and lovely, with clear skies and warm temperatures. The Rebels did nothing except fly those damn ol’ planes back and forth. What the punks did not know was that while their eyes were on the P-51’s, other planes had been dropping supplies just beyond the cliffs around Etretat—which, because of their steepness, were undefended.

  Bad mistake. The sheer cliffs were just the spot for Buddy Raines and his special ops people to scale and then force-march down the coast toward Le Havre, which would be under attack by the battalions of Georgi Striganov, Danjou, and Buddy’s sister, Tina.

  Rene’s resistance people had been collecting the airdropped supplies and caching them.

  Ben had been uncommonly blunt with Rene Seaux. “Get your people to round up men and women who will fight. The ones who will stand shoulder to shoulder and fight with us are the ones who are going to be in charge of France once this scrap is over.”

  Rene smiled. “And those who will not? Those who have collaborated with the enemy?”

  “Deal with them any way you see fit.”

  “It will be my pleasure, General. Do you have any objections to a firing squad?”

  “I prefer a noose for traitors.”

  By 0500 of the jump-off day, the fog had rolled in, the seas were rough, and it was pouring rain.

  “Perfect,” Ben said from the deck of the ship.

  Dan and Rebet had made the night jump just moments before the rain set in, and they were down and safe, with only a few minor injuries. Buddy and his people had scaled the cliffs at Etretat, and Ike and his people were set to strike at Cherbourg.

  “I can’t see a goddamn thing!” one of the sentries above the beach said. “Can you, Charles?”

  “There is nothing to see,” the Frenchman to his right said. “This is very stupid. The Rebels will not land here. Especially in this weather. They will be landing in Calais or Dunkerque. Not here. Those planes were a ruse, nothing more.”

  The worried sentry was not convinced. He started to lift his binoculars to his eyes, then gave that up as a bad idea. The visibility was zero. He could not see five feet in front of him. He cussed and lowered his binoculars.

  “Launch boats,” Ben said. The boats were small, with muffled engines that could scarcely be heard a dozen yards away.

  Ben was in the first boat, over the very loud and often profane objections of his batt coms. He had given orders for his people to inflate life vests as soon as they were in the boats, for the water was very cold.

  Ike’s SEAL teams were already ashore, guiding the boats in with tiny flashes that could be seen only through special lenses.

  “Almost there,” Ben said. “That water is going to take your breath away when you hit it, so be forewarned.”

  Since Jersey was barely five feet tall, Ben had, without her knowledge, arranged for a tall Rebel to stay with her and make certain she didn’t flounder in the deep water. “Just don’t grab her by the butt,” Ben cautioned the man. “She’ll think it’s Cooper and knock the piss out of you.”

  The fog was just beginning to clear when Ben and his Rebels touched French soil and made a dash for the dunes on the beach. But the rain had intensified, and that saved them from being spotted. They ditched their life vests and began crawling toward the low dunes.

  The SEAL teams, as soon as they had guided the boats in, began their deadly work on the sentries. They could not take them out prior to the boats landing because the Rebels’ communications people had found that each sentry was checking in with somebody by radio every five minutes. Failure to report would have spelled disaster for the entire operation. As it was, Ben felt that luck was fast running out for them. It was going too smoothly. Something had to break.

  It did. Just as a special op made his knife thrust, the sentry turned and the blade struck jawbone and glanced off. The sentry screamed, and the cold rain was suddenly warmed up considerably with gunfire.

  Ben pulled himself to one knee and gave the flashes from a machine-gun nest a full clip of .45-caliber slugs. The machine gun fell silent. Ben rolled behind a small dune and slipped in another clip. Corrie flopped down on the wet sand beside him.

  “Ike is facing heavy resistance in Cherbourg,” she panted. “Dan and Rebet just blew through Bayeux and are pushing hard to get here. General Striganov reports he has a toehold in Le Harve.”

  Ben leaned close to be heard over the rattle and roar of gunfire. “Tell Raul to push in from the right flank, Jackie to push in from the left. Just as soon as the flanking maneuver is complete, tell Greenwalt we’re going over the top at my command.”

  “That damn Scolotti grabbed me by the ass,” Jersey bitched, falling down between Ben and Cooper.

  “Felt good, didn’t it?” Cooper said, coughing up seawater.

  “Cooper,” Jersey said, shaking the sand off her M-16, “one of these days . . .”

  “Promises, promises,” Cooper said.

  Fire from a heavy machine gun stopped the conversation for a moment. A Rebel tossed a Fire-Frag grenade and the machine-gun nest went silent.

  Ben was up and running, zigging and zagging, his team right behind him. Those Rebels who could see Ben surged forward, gaining another twenty or so yards.

  “If we’re on this beach at sunrise, we’re dead meat!” Ben shouted over the gunfire and explosions.

  “Jackie and Raul are moving inland, flanking,” Corrie returned the shout.

  “Getting light in the east, boss,” Beth said.

  Ben rose to his knees. “Let’s go!” he shouted. “Follow me. Go, go, go!”

  With a roar of defiance, the Rebels moved forward. The defenders of the coastline must have thought there were many more Rebels than there really were, for when they saw the misty shapes moving toward them, many of the defenders broke and ran. They crossed the coastline highway and hotfooted it to the east.

  Those that stayed died.

  When the rain had changed to a drizzle and then finally stopped, and first faint rays of the sun broke through the grayness, the Rebels were in command of Omaha Beach.

  Before the Great War, Cherbourg had been a busy town of about fifty thousand people. Most of the population had been driven off, and it was now a haven for modern-day pirates and slavers. Ike and his people established a toehold in the harbor and began driving inland, with Pat O’Shea cutting away from the main group to take the airport a few miles outside of the city.

  Dan Gray and Rebet had roared through the town of Bayeux, putting the few defenders there into a rout. They had commandeered anything with wheels on it, including motor scooters and bicycles, and were now driving, rolling, and pedaling toward Ben’s position on the coast.

  Georgi Striganov and his forces were in a hard battle with creepies. Le Harve, once the second largest port in France, and a major city of more than two hundred thousand, was proving to be
a tough nut to crack. Buddy and his special ops people, at Striganov’s orders, had angled off and set up just outside the town of Bolbec, and spreading down to the small town of Pont de Tancarville, closing off any escape by the creepies. For the next two days it would be search and destroy for Georgi’s 5 Batt, Danjou’s 7 Batt, and Tina’s 9 Batt.

  Ben and his people had moved inland and were nearing the town of Bayeux, linking up with Dan and Rebet and members of the French Resistance Forces. The FRF. Greenwalt and his 11 Batt had stayed on the beach to oversee the off-loading of tanks and trucks and other supplies from ships now approaching the coast.

  “We’ll push down to within a few miles of Caen and hold up there,” Ben told his people. “We don’t want to get too far ahead of the others. Caen is filled with creeps, so we’ll have to dig them out. But we’ll wait for armor before we do.”

  “Ike and Georgi have taken the harbor areas and are ready for supplies,” Corrie said. “The airports at both cities are ready to receive planes from England.”

  “Get them airborne. I want all battalions on the Continent as quickly as possible. I want every MASH unit we’ve got set up ASAP. I want to know what types of diseases we’re facing over here and our people inoculated. Where is Doctor Chase?”

  “He’s ashore and should be here in a few minutes.”

  “Make sure every Rebel has a Pro-kit. I’ll court-martial anyone who comes down with a venereal disease. Make goddamn sure they all know that.”

  “Right, boss.”

  “There are venereal diseases over here that our medical people have never even seen before. Make sure that everybody knows that!”

  “Right, boss.”

  “In other words,” Cooper said, “all the men keep their peckers in their pants and all the ladies keep their legs crossed.”

  “I couldn’t have stated it better, Coop,” Ben said, to the groans of Beth, Corrie, and Jersey.

  Duffy Williams had argued for months for the major gang leaders to come together. It took a Rebel invasion to finally accomplish that.

  The leaders of the eleven biggest gangs in France and several dozen leaders of smaller gangs met in Tours to attempt to map out some sort of strategy. Just a month before, they had been a swaggering, arrogant bunch. Now they sat silent as Duffy walked to the front of the room.

  “We can do one of three things,” Duffy said. “We can run, we can surrender, or we can fight. But we’d better, by God, make up our minds one way or the other today. Because we’re running out of time.”

  “Run where?” Tom Spivey asked.

  “That will be a problem,” Duffy said. “I’ve learned that members of the FRF have already begun printing up wanted posters on all of us. Quite frankly, we’re not going to have any place to run.”

  “If we surrender, they’ll hang us,” Guy Caston said. “That is something we’d all better fix in our minds right now.”

  “But we’ll get a trial,” a gang leader said, standing up. “Won’t we?”

  That got him a lot of dirty laughter. He sat down.

  Marie Vidalier, a man-hater from years back, who ran one of the most vicious gangs in all of France, stood up. “I cannot surrender. I was wanted by the gendarmes even before the Great War. I have no choice but to fight.”

  “The same for me,” Eddie Stamp said. Eddie was a former IRA member who was wanted for murder in a half dozen countries.

  Most of the other gang leaders reluctantly admitted that for them, surrender was also out of the question.

  “We outnumber the Rebels,” Duffy said. “We have thousands more fighters than they do.”

  “They also have tanks, planes, attack helicopters, and long-range artillery,” Paul Zayon pointed out. “We have machine guns and rifles and grenades. Those damned prop planes are flying so low our SAMs are useless against them. And they’re flying about 550 miles an hour. By the time our people get machine guns to bear on them, they’re gone.”

  “And what has happened to our informants in the FRF?” Ned Veasey asked.

  “Rene Seaux polygraphed everyone in his groups and ferreted out the plants. He shot them. All of them,” Duffy said. “Personally. I hate that ex-foreign legion son of a bitch.”

  Everybody present took a few moments to give Rene Seaux a sound cussing. It didn’t help their situation a bit, but it did make them feel better for a few minutes.

  “We fight with what we have,” Duffy said, when the hubbub had died down. “A lot of us are ex-military. We know organization. And I think I have a plan that will buy us some time. Let the Rebels have everything north of a line from Chateaulin to Paris. They’ll spend weeks digging out the cannibals in that city alone. That will give us time to form up battalion-sized units and put together a plan of action. We’ve got to separate the Rebels. We don’t have a chance if we face them en masse. But if we can meet them unit to unit, spread out all over the country, we might have a chance. All right. There it is. What do you think?”

  “Do we have a choice?” John Monson asked. “I think no. So I say we band together and fight. Now we must elect a leader, and we must agree to follow his or her orders. Duffy, you have successfully fought the FRF for years. I cast my vote for you.”

  “I’ll go along with that,” Robert Fryoux said.

  “Oui,” Philipe Soileau said. “I vote for Duffy Williams to command this army.”

  Duffy was expecting Marie Vidalier to put up a howl over his nomination to lead the forces. But she was the next person to vote for him. When the voting was complete, the count was unanimous. Duffy Williams found himself the commander of thousands of punks, thugs, rapists, murderers, thieves, and worse.

  Duffy’s chest swelled with pride. It was quite an honor.

  TWELVE

  “Scouts report nothing,” Corrie called to Ben, after receiving the last of field reports from recon.

  Ben wasn’t surprised at the news. But Rene Seaux was. “What are those worthless bastards and bitches up to?” the leader of the FRF asked.

  “They got smart,” Ben said, swiveling in his chair to look at the wall map of France. “They elected themselves a leader and banded together. How far out did our people go, Corrie?”

  “From Avranches over to Dreux, and from Rouen over to Beauvais then down to the outskirts of Paris. They hit no resistance at all. Nothing.”

  Ben looked at the map for several moments. “Have our pilots start fly-bys over this line.” He took a grease pencil and drew a line from Chateaulin over to Rennes, then from Rennes to Le Mans. He added another line from Le Mans up to Chartres and then to the outskirts of Paris. “If I’m right, whoever is now commanding the punk army is not stupid. But he’s still a punk. Divide and conquer. He’s going to split us up and take us that way.” Ben smiled. “He thinks.”

  Ben started battalion numbering the map, starting with Rebet at the coastline above Brest, and ending with Pat O’Shea at Dunkerque. “When we get these battalions shifted around, have Pat and Tina start a push down to Highway 29 and stop. Danjou and Georgi have already secured their sectors. When that’s done, Ike’s 2 Batt and my 1 Batt will move down to this point, Caen and Saint Lo. Dan, West, and Rebet will hold what they have. When everything is clear behind us, we’ll start our major push inland. When Rebet reaches Quimper and West reaches Rostrenen, they’ll cut east and eventually link up with Dan’s 3 Batt, which will be holding, hopefully, at Montauban. By that time, Ike will have advanced down to Avranches. The opposition will either have been destroyed or backed up to Rennes. Then we’ll start squeezing them as we move toward Paris.”

  “But Paris is under the control of the cannibals,” Rene said.

  “That’s right. The punks won’t dare enter the city. They’ll be forced to cut south or retreat eastward. If they head south, they’ll be stopped by the Spanish army at the border. I’m betting they’ll opt to back up toward the east. That’s where our other battalions will be. Waiting for them.”

  Rene looked at Ben in amazement. “How long did it ta
ke you to devise this plan, General?”

  “About a minute and a half,” Ben said. “Count on punks to always do one of three things: the obvious, the illogical, or the totally absurd. It comes down to a game of point/counterpoint.” Ben grinned. “Besides, our people are fully prepared to fight in winter’s cold. I’m betting the punks are not. Let’s see how they do in the snow and ice and below-freezing temperatures trying to fight with frozen feet and hands.”

  Rene grunted. “I have to say that you are not a very nice man, General.”

  “You’d be right. Let’s start shifting those battalions around, Corrie.”

  “What is that son of a bitch doing?” Duffy muttered, standing in front of a huge wall map. “I can’t figure out what the hell is going on. He’s not attacking.”

  “Our spies say the Rebels are liberating all these towns and villages north of us,” Guy Caston said. “They appear to be in no hurry. They are providing food and medical aid to the people.”

  “Goddamnit! It’s going to be dead-ass winter in another six weeks. We’re not equipped to fight in snow and ice.”

  “But the Rebels are,” Marie Vidalier said. “That’s Ben Raines’s plan. That rotten bastard!”

  “I have an idea,” one of Duffy’s henchmen said. “Let’s kill Ben Raines.”

  “Jimmy,” Duffy said, “people have been trying to do that for years. No one has even come close.” Duffy did not tell any of those present that many believed Ben Raines was a god. That he possessed supernatural powers. Many of Duffy’s followers were jumpy enough without adding that.

  “Maybe they didn’t have the right plan,” Jimmy said.

  “And you do?” Marie challenged him.

  “I don’t know,” Jimmy admitted. “But it might be worth a try.”

  “I’ll listen,” Duffy said. But he suspected that nothing would come of it, and as it turned out, nothing did.

  Back stateside, Emil Hite, the little con artist who had turned Rebel, was still miffed at being left behind. He was sure it had not been done on purpose. Purely an oversight on the part of somebody. Emil had been a part of the Rebels for years, ever since Ben Raines had found him and his followers along the bayou banks of Louisiana (where Emil had convinced a large number of people that he was the earthbound representative of the great god Blomm).