Crisis in the Ashes

by William W. Johnstone

  “Hook ’em up,” Ben said, attaching his parachute strap to the rail running the length of the plane.

  The jumpmaster opened the door and stood next to it, watching the ready light. When it turned green he gave a thumbs up, and Ben leaned out into the darkness, his stomach doing flip-flops as he tumbled downward into the blackness below.

  President-for-Life Claire Osterman looked up from the papers she was reading, her brow furrowed. “What’s that sound?” she asked. She’d heard a loud crump off in the distance and felt a vibration go through the room.

  Harlan Millard glanced up from a chair in front of her desk, where he’d been cleaning his fingernails. He had no real duties as Claire’s second in command, other than to agree with her wholeheartedly every time she opened her mouth and to keep her satisfied physically when she desired intimacy. Claire was not one to share the reins of leadership, or anything else, for that matter. Once, when she’d heard that a woman from the secretarial pool was interested in Harlan, she’d managed to get the woman transferred to a fighting unit. Claire had yawned on hearing of the woman’s death shortly thereafter.

  “I didn’t hear anything,” he answered. Just then another loud explosion blew the windows out of the room, sending glass like shrapnel bulleting through the air.

  Millard took a large splinter in the left arm, and was literally lifted out of his chair and thrown against a far wall by the blast concussion.

  Claire, protected from most of the glass and splinters by her desk, was knocked backward out of her chair onto the floor. She scrambled on her knees to crawl under her desk, her face bowed and her hands on top of her head.

  Another blast came—so loud it was felt rather than heard—and the ceiling collapsed, sending rubble cascading down to completely bury Millard and Claire.

  By mid-evening, the bombing had ceased. Claire and Harlan had been dug out of the rubble, and Harlan sent to a nearby hospital for treatment of his wound, which was not serious except to him. He thought he was dying, and was spending a lot of time wailing about the injustice of it all.

  Claire sat in a room in one of the rare buildings still left standing on the Harrison base. In attendance were Otis Warner, her old friend and most trusted (and most unheeded) adviser; Andy Schumberger, another adviser, though Claire realized he was dumb as a post and used him mainly as a yes man to back up her ideas and plans on the rare occasions there was resistance to what she wanted to do; Captain Broadhurst, a true believer in the liberal causes of the Socialist Democrats. His military acumen wasn’t the greatest, but he could kiss ass with the best of them, and it had served to move him steadily upward in the ranks of the USA military establishment, which tended to reward political correctness far more than ability. General Maxwell, leader of the USA forces, was not on the base and would not be there until the next morning.

  Claire was furious about the attack. Her hair was mussed and still full of debris and she had a scratch on one cheek that the army doctor had assured her would leave no scar. On top of it all, she was starting her period.

  She was not a happy camper, and she intended to take it out on everyone around her, as usual.

  “Goddamnit, Captain Broadhurst, how could you allow a squadron of Rebel bombers to attack my office?” Claire asked, fixing him with a baleful stare.

  “I assure you, Madam President, those responsible for this grievous oversight will be ferreted out and summarily executed.”

  “But, how could they get this far into our territory without being blown out of the sky?” she asked again.

  “Most of our air force was involved in the missile launch against SUSA. We were expecting a missile attack in response, not one by aircraft.”

  She slammed her hand down on the desk. “Ben Raines doesn’t have the balls to fire missiles,” she growled. “A true leader does what is necessary, no matter the personal feelings. I’m personally devastated that I was forced by circumstances to fire those missiles, knowing it would mean the death of many innocent civilians. But, I did it, because I know the meaning of responsibility.”

  The men sitting in front of her nodded in agreement. They didn’t dare do otherwise. Men who didn’t show the proper respect for the president had been known to find themselves cleaning urinals from dawn to dusk in stink-holes in the desert.

  Claire glanced at Otis Warner. He had just finished talking with her Intel officers. “Otis, what’s the extent of the damage?”

  He frowned. He knew she wasn’t going to like his report. “Most of the base here is destroyed. Certainly all of the above ground facilities are flattened. The building in downtown Indianapolis where the legislature meets has been completely blown apart. Luckily, only a handful of senators and representatives were working at the time.”

  Claire snorted. “Hell, those bastards spend more time sucking on the taxpayers’ tits or playing golf than working.”

  Otis had to restrain himself from mentioning perhaps it was because Madam President ignored most of what they did and managed the country pretty much on her own whims. Though Otis was an independent thinker, he was not suicidal, so he kept his mouth shut.

  “There is some more bad news, Claire,” he added, glancing down at the clipboard in his lap.

  “What could be worse than having my offices and the offices of the legislature destroyed?”

  “I’m afraid the building that houses your personal residence was also targeted, as was your estate on Lake Mississinewa.”

  “What?” she screamed, coming straight up out of her chair. “You mean that bastard Raines has destroyed my houses, too?”

  Otis nodded, not wanting to risk speaking when she was in one of her moods.

  She began to rant and rave and pace around the room, calling Raines and his Rebel cohorts every name she could think of. “That son of a bitch is going to pay for this!” she yelled.

  Otis started to ask what more she could do than she’d already done, but thought better of it and clamped his lips tight together, hoping to ride out her rage.

  “Somebody get Harlan in here. He ought to have a Band-aid on his wound by now. He has to get busy finding me a new place to live.”

  Otis breathed a sigh of relief. He’d been afraid she was going to call for a rain of nuclear missiles on SUSA. Thank God even she was not so stupid as to do that . . . at least not yet.

  He made a mental note to have someone find General Maxwell and get him here as soon as possible. Though he was every bit as bloodthirsty as the president, at least he knew the rudiments of military policy, and perhaps he could keep her from doing something monumentally stupid, like escalating the war with nuclear missiles. If only she’d listened to him when he’d advised her not to use the biological weapons against the Rebel forces. It was a good thing Raines hadn’t retaliated in kind . . . and he could only hope someone in charge of this war would eventually come to their senses!

  SIX

  The jumpmaster and his helpers shoved large wooden crates out the door, alternating equipment drops with the jumps of Ben’s team so the materiel would land within easy reach of the rebel forces. Finally, only Coop and Jersey were left in the big C-130.

  Coop gave a low bow, sweeping his hand to the side. “After you, my pet,” he said with a sardonic leer, glancing at the way Jersey’s battle fatigues fit snugly over her buttocks.

  “Pervert,” she said, noticing where his eyes were fixed. “Have a good look, ’cause that’s all you’ll ever get!”

  She hooked her chute cord on the overhead line and bent to step out of the doorway. Just before she jumped, the Big Bird hit an air pocket, suddenly lurched, and dropped fifty feet straight down.

  Jersey was thrown out the door, tumbling uncontrollably in the updraft as the plane plummeted earthward. Her chute deployed, and was immediately snagged on the tail fin of the airplane, ripping to shreds and streaming behind her as she fell.

  “Shit!” screamed the jumpmaster, leaning out to watch her fall. He turned an ashen face to Coop. “She’s a
goner.”

  Coop whipped out his K-Bar and slashed his chute line. “Uh-uh, pardner, nobody dies tonight,” he yelled, and dove out of the door after her.

  He tucked his chin onto his chest and put his hands tight against his sides to minimize drag and blinked his eyes against the hundred mile an hour wind as he arrowed downward, desperately trying to catch sight of Jersey’s black silk against the darkness.

  Jersey tumbled, her arms loose and flopping like a rag doll’s, unconscious from the jolt she’d received when her chute was ripped apart.

  This saved her life, as she fell much more slowly than Coop did, and he caught up with her in a matter of seconds. When he came up to her, he spread his arms and legs to slow his fall, and grabbed the tangled shreds of her chute, wrapping his hands around the silk.

  He took a deep breath, grabbed the D ring of his chute release, and jerked. When his parachute opened, the jolt nearly took his arms off, and he felt as if both his shoulders were dislocated by the force of the sudden slowdown.

  Even though the Ranger parachutes were specially made for low level drops, they weren’t designed to hold two people at once, and Coop and Jersey fell with alarming speed through the night.

  Coop gritted his teeth and bent his knees slightly, hoping he’d be able to hit and roll without breaking a leg, or even worse, his neck. “Mama always said there’d be days like this,” he muttered to himself.

  In a stroke of great good fortune, Jersey and Coop plummeted into the outer branches of a giant sugar maple tree, its limbs slowing their fall enough to cause them to suffer only minor bruises and cuts.

  As soon as he could untangle himself from the lines of his chute, Coop took a quick inventory of his body. No major bones seemed to be broken and—other than a deep gash on his left thigh, which he wrapped with a piece of silk from his chute—he seemed in fair condition.

  When he was satisfied that the bleeding from his leg was controlled, he scrambled through the darkness to where Jersey lay, still unconscious.

  He gently unwrapped her from the shroud of silk covering her and spread her out on the ground. He was running his hands over her limbs and body, checking for major wounds or broken bones, when she opened her eyes and stared angrily at him.

  “Just what the hell do you think you’re doing?” she asked, propping herself up on her elbows.

  Coop sat back on his haunches. “Just coppin’ a quick feel, darlin’,” he answered, more relieved that she was all right than he cared to show.

  “Well, unless you want to pull back a nub, keep your hands to yourself, Coop.”

  He grinned. “Yes, ma’am,” he said, holding his hands out palm up. “Whatever you say, Jersey.”

  “What happened?” she asked, and tried to stand up, collapsing when she put her weight on her right ankle, which was already swollen to almost twice normal size.

  He leaned forward and took her leg in his hand, untied her combat boot and pulled it off, causing her to shout in pain.

  “Hold on there, big boy,” she said. “What’re you trying to do, pull my foot off?”

  He gave a low whistle when he saw her ankle. It was black and blue and grossly misshapen. Slowly, he moved it through a complete range of motion, again bringing tears of pain to her eyes.

  “I don’t think it’s broken, but you’re not going to be walking on it any time soon,” he said.

  As she stared at him, her eyes glistening with moisture in the half moonlight, he explained what had happened, and how her chute had fowled on the tail fin of the C-130.

  “Damn!” she exclaimed, looking heavenward.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “Now I owe you my life, and I can’t think of a worse thing to have happen.”

  “Oh, things could be worse.”

  “How?”

  “I could be scraping your body up with a spatula about now,” he answered.

  She snorted. “I don’t know if that would be worse or not.”

  He leered at her, “Oh, don’t make such a big thing of it,” he said. “I figure you did this on purpose, so we’d be marooned alone out here in the woods, like we were in Africa.”

  He shook his head. “Hell, you didn’t have to go to all this trouble to be alone with me . . . all you had to do was ask.”

  She kicked at him with her injured ankle, then moaned in pain. “Don’t flatter yourself, pervert. I’d sooner be alone with a snake than with a lecher like you.”

  “Speaking of being alone, why don’t you try to bump Corrie on your headset? Mine got ripped off when I sky dove to catch up with you.”

  Jersey reached up to trigger the speaker on her headset, only to find it smashed to pieces, hanging uselessly around her neck.

  “Damn. No can do, Coop. Looks like we really are alone. Do you have any idea where we are, or where the rest of the team is?”

  “Don’t have a clue. After the plane hit the air pocket, we could have turned in any direction. There is no way of telling where we are, at least not until daylight.”

  Jersey glanced at the chronometer on her wrist. “It’s about one A.M. now, so that gives us at least five hours until dawn.”

  Coop got to his feet and dusted his pants off. “I’ll cut some branches and make us some sort of shelter against the cold. We can use the silk from the chutes to form a windbreak, and maybe we won’t freeze to death before the sun comes up.”

  After he’d fashioned a lean-to from maple branches and strung pieces of their parachutes around them, he scraped together a mound of pine needles into a makeshift bed underneath, out of the wind.

  He helped Jersey to her feet, putting his arm around her to support her weight.

  She took his hand where it lay against the side of her breast and moved it down on her rib cage. “And don’t try that old standby about using our body heat to stay warm,” she said.

  He shrugged. “It worked in the jungle, didn’t it?”

  She glared at him. “I seem to remember you promised never to mention that night again,” she said with some heat.

  “That was before I knew what lengths you’d go to in order to spend another night with me,” he answered as he lowered her into the lean-to.

  She lay on the pine needles, her back to him as he gently covered her with a piece of parachute silk. “Wake me when it’s dawn,” she mumbled, already almost asleep.

  “Women,” he whispered as he lay next to her, “can’t live with ’em, and can’t kill ’em.”

  Later, just as he was dozing off, he felt her turn and wrap her arms around him, spooning against him to get warm, her breath stirring the hairs on the back of his neck and causing thoughts he knew he’d never dare mention to her.

  She moaned once, and her breathing slowed as she fell asleep, leaving him wide awake and acutely aware of her breasts pressing against his back.

  Ben gathered his team together at the drop site. As they wrapped their parachutes into tight balls so no trace of their presence would be visible, he noticed Coop and Jersey were not present.

  “Anyone seen Coop or Jersey?” he asked.

  The other members of the team shook their heads.

  “They were the last to jump,” Beth said, a worried frown on her face.

  “Corrie, bump the pilot of the Big Bird and see if you can find out what happened,” Ben said as the team gathered around their communications expert.

  “Eagle One to Big Bird, come in,” Corrie said into her microphone as she fiddled with the dials to find the agreed-upon frequency to the C-130.

  A burst of static followed, followed by the faint words, “Big Bird to Eagle One, over.”

  “Jim, we’re missing two of the team. Any news?”

  “Eagle One, I must advise. They had some trouble with the exit. Two members jumped late, one with chute trouble. Doubtful in extreme they made it. Over,” the pilot replied.

  “Damn!” Ben exclaimed, placing his hand on Corrie’s shoulder and squeezing until it hurt. “That’s unacc
eptable.”

  “We need additional info,” Corrie said, wincing from the pressure of Ben’s grip on her arm.

  “Female’s chute fowled on tail fin, and she had a streamer. Boss, I’ve never seen anything like it. The male cut his line and went after her. I never saw his chute open. That’s all we have, Eagle One. Getting busy up here,” he added, as the team members watched trails of two SAM missiles streaking upward through the clouds from somewhere off to the south.

  “Ten-four, Big Bird. It looks like you’d better get back to the nest. Over and out,” Corrie said, regret in her voice.

  “If they jumped late, they must be off to the northwest,” Ben said, his eyebrows knit in thought. “Point your antenna in that direction and see if you can bump them on their headsets,” he ordered.

  Turning to the others, he said, “There’s nothing else we can do while Corrie tries to raise them, so let’s see if we can gather up the equipment drops and get it all together. From the location of those SAM launches, we don’t have more than an hour or so to get out of this area or we’re gonna be covered up with USA troops or Black Shirts.”

  Beth and Anna joined Ben as they spread out to pick up the crates of materiel that’d been dropped with them. The crates contained explosives, ammunition, extra weapons, and a compact Jeep-like vehicle with a small trailer they planned to use to transport themselves and their supplies away from the drop site.

  It took them a little over thirty minutes to load up what they could find. One crate of ammunition had been smashed beyond recognition when it fell on top of a large boulder. They pulled the Jeep into the clearing, where Corrie was still trying to raise Coop and Jersey on her radio. One look at her face told them what they feared most—she’d had no contact with the missing team members.

  “OK, guys. Let’s load ’em up and move ’em out,” Ben said, casting his eyes toward the northwest. “Since it doesn’t make a whole lot of difference which way we start off, let’s go that way,” he said, pointing toward where they figured their friends were.