Warriors from the Ashes

by William W. Johnstone

  He must have done something, however, for the gunship changed course slightly, pointed its ugly-looking snout at him, and dived.

  He could see the three barrels of the 20mm cannon belching fire and flame as the helicopter roared at him out of the sky at ninety miles an hour.

  The windowsill and the walls on either side of Juanito dissolved in a maelstrom of debris and splinters as three hundred 20mm slugs tore across the building. Juanito was thrown backward against a far wall, a row of red flowers blooming on his chest where the slugs had stitched a line across his body.

  He groaned, blood bubbling from his lips. His last thought was to wonder if the general had finished his breakfast yet.

  Lieutenant Colonel Pedro Vega had his driver pull closer to the outskirts of Cardenas. He’d learned from the previous commander of Perro Loco’s troops, who’d been killed in his staff command car by a land mine while riding point, not to stray too close to the front until most of the action was over with. Vega kept his HumVee well to the back of the forward line of his troops.

  The action had slowed to an occasional pop as another sniper or hidden defender of Cardenas was found and dispatched by Vega’s men. All of the sandbagged outposts and gun emplacements had been destroyed. In fact, most of the inhabitants of Cardenas had been killed along with the soldiers defending the town. The streets were littered with bodies of women, children, old folks, and even cats and dogs. No one had been spared by the invading army.

  Vega stepped out of his HumVee and stood next to the scorched sandbags and melted, destroyed fifty-caliber machine gun, still red with Carlos’s coagulated blood on it.

  Vega walked over and leaned his arm on the bent and twisted metal. “Miguel,” he said to his driver. “I am ready.”

  Miguel Hernandez took the colonel’s digital camera from a bag hanging by a strap around his neck and quickly snapped off a couple of shots.

  “Be sure to get the bodies on the street in the background,” Vega ordered, adjusting his stance a bit.

  Miguel shifted to the side, sighted through the viewfinder, and snapped two more times.

  Vega nodded. “Good. Now get on the radio and have the tanks level the town.”

  “But, Colonel Vega,” Miguel protested mildly, “all of the soldiers have been killed or already have run away to the fields to hide.”

  Vega fixed his driver with a steely stare. “Miguel, do you enjoy the privilege of driving for me?”

  “Sí, mi comandante!” Miguel snapped smartly.

  “Then please do not argue with my orders. I want this town leveled to the ground as a lesson to the other towns that stand between us and Mexico City. Tonight, after we bivouac for the evening, I will print up hundreds of copies of the pictures and have one of the helicopters fly ahead and drop them on the towns to the north of us.”

  Miguel nodded, as if he understood what his commanding officer was saying and the advanced reasoning behind it. He did know that every night the colonel downloaded the pictures that had been taken of him in various leadership roles to a laptop computer and printed them out for his scrapbook.

  Miguel thought this quite silly, but then he knew little of the thought processes of officers and their need for constant aggrandizement.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Herman Bundt, who, unlike Colonel Vega, flew in the lead helicopter, leaned forward and stared through the Plexiglas of the front windshield of the big Chinook chopper.

  They were only a few miles from the neighboring towns of Luchitan and Salina Cruz that lay on the shores of the Gulf of Tehuantepec.

  His eyes, experienced in the art of warfare, noted that though the region was mountainous and jungled inland, it leveled out into a relatively flat area near the shores of the gulf. It was a perfect staging point to test his mercenary troops in their first under-fire battle under his command.

  He leaned over and pointed downward to the pilot. “Drop us off right there, where the jungle thins out and becomes a sandy plain on the outskirts of Luchitan.”

  “Roger,” the pilot said, nodding his understanding. He spoke briefly on the ship-to-ship radio to let the other pilots know the plan.

  “Have the Kiowas fly low over the town to draw any fire while we unload the troops. That’s our most vulnerable time,” Bundt ordered.

  The pilot nodded, and relayed his orders to the pilots of the Kiowa gunships accompanying them.

  The pilot grabbed Bundt’s arm and pointed toward the west. Three dark shapes rose like huge buzzards from a tiny airstrip north of the town.

  “Skids,” the pilot said over the intercom.

  “What?” Bundt asked, not familiar with the term.

  “Skids. Old Huey helicopters, the kind that flew in Vietnam. They must’ve picked us up on their radar.”

  The pilot spoke again into his radio, and Bundt saw the Kiowas that were escorting them peel off into attack formation.

  “Those ships must be forty years old,” Bundt said. “Our Kiowas will make short work of those antiques.”

  The pilot turned his head to glance up at Bundt. “Don’t be too sure. The skids are big, slow, and clumsy, but they’re tough to bring down. ’Bout the only way to down one is to hit the prop or to kill the pilot and copilot.”

  “How are they armed?” Bundt asked, more out of curiosity than out of any worry about the Kiowas.

  “Main weapon is a fifty-caliber machine gun in the side hatchway. The gunner is strapped to the chopper walls so he won’t be thrown out when the chopper dives and banks,” the pilot answered shortly.

  As the Chinooks hovered feet above the ground and the assault troops bailed out of them like ants from a disturbed mound, Bundt couldn’t help but stand and watch the air battle taking place in the skies over Luchitan.

  The Hueys moved forward in a modified-V formation, with the two lead choppers flying almost sideways so the big fifty-caliber machine guns in their hatches could be brought to bear, while the back chopper at the apex of the V gave them cover on their flanks. Evidently the men flying the big helicopters were experienced in combat, unlike the men Bundt had flying his Kiowas, who were barely out of flight school.

  First Lieutenant Gunter Kalb, pilot of the lead Kiowa, saw the lumbering Hueys and almost laughed. “No need to waste one of our missiles on those,” he said on the intercom to his copilot. “I’ll just rake him with our Minigun and blow him out of the sky.”

  The copilot, Hans Gruber, laughed into the mike. “Look how slow they are,” he said. “It’s a wonder they don’t fall from the sky like bloated cows.”

  Kalb jerked up on the collective in his left hand and advanced the throttle, and the Kiowa put its nose down and screamed through the air at the Hueys, who were going so slow they almost seemed to be hovering, as if waiting to be slaughtered.

  When he got within range, Kalb depressed the trigger on the 20mm Minigun in the Kiowa’s nose, and grinned at the vibration from the gun as it spewed forth death at a thousand rounds a minute.

  Kalb felt an almost sexual thrill as he saw the tracers in his ammo stitch a line of holes across the body of the Huey, expecting it to burst into flames and fall from the sky.

  His thrill turned to panic as he saw the Huey shudder under the impact but remain otherwise unaffected.

  As his ship rapidly closed on the Huey, he jerked back on the collective and tried to turn, but it was too late.

  He could almost see the gunner’s teeth in the wide-open hatchway of the Huey as he grinned and opened fire with his big fifty.

  The gun jumped and shook in the gunner’s hands, flame shooting from the barrel along with hundreds of molten lead bullets that had the Kiowa’s name written on them.

  The Plexiglas windshield of the Kiowa shattered, sending hundreds of razor-sharp shards of plastic into Kalb’s and Gruber’s faces and eyes.

  Kalb let go of the collective and the throttle to cover his ruined face just as the stream of fifty-caliber bullets tore into the Kiowa’s fuel tanks.

  The choppe
r exploded in a ball of flame and smoke, sending pieces of the ship and its pilots floating toward earth.

  “God damn it!” Bundt screamed on the ground when he saw the ship disintegrate above him. “You stupid bastards,” he growled to himself, “use your missiles.”

  Almost as if the other pilots heard Bundt’s plea, they peeled off from their attack and climbed out of range of the other Hueys’s machine guns. They made a wide circle overhead, able to stay out of range due to their crafts’s superior airspeed.

  Viktor Lassinov, a Russian pilot who’d hired on with the mercenaries under Bruno Bottger, vowed not to make the same mistake his friend, Gunter, had. He lined the lead Huey up on his mast-mounted sight and flipped the switch arming his missiles. When he pressed it, the ship shuddered as the missile was launched, and he could see the smoke of its trail as it arrowed toward the Huey.

  The pilot of the Huey, who must have seen the missile streaking toward him, turned the big, clumsy Huey almost on its back in a desperate attempt to dodge the missile, but his ship was just too slow.

  Seconds after the missile launch, the Huey disappeared in a ball of smoke and flame, and its wreckage soon joined that of its previous victim on the ground next to the jungle below.

  The other two Hueys, seeing they were outgunned, turned tail and raced to the northwest, toward the neighboring town of Salina Cruz on the coast.

  When the Kiowas turned to give chase, Bundt grabbed the mike through the window of the Chinook and ordered them back.

  “Leave the bastards alone,” he cried. “We need you to cover our attack of the town.”

  The Kiowas dutifully gave up the chase and flew back down over the outskirts of Luchitan, raking the defenders’ emplacements with fire from their Miniguns and blowing a couple of ancient tanks up with their missiles.

  Bundt wasted no time. He spread his hundreds of troops out to the right and left and ordered them forward, to attack the town.

  All in all, Bundt felt his men acquitted themselves rather well. Though this was their first test under his command, most of the mercenaries had seen action many times before, for many different commanders. They fought not out of patriotism or any conviction for one sort of government over another, but out of greed. And Bruno Bottger was paying them very well indeed for their loyalty.

  Most of the men carried Kalashnikov AK-47’s, or the Chinese equivalents of them, and they poured a murderous fire into the defenders of the town of Luchitan.

  A seaside port city, it wasn’t built for defense from a land-based attack, most of its buildings being situated near the wharves and waters of the gulf, from which almost all of its citizens earned their meager livings.

  Wisely, perhaps, the Mexican government hadn’t wasted much equipment or manpower on such a small, unimportant village, so the defenders were mostly men and boys of the village who had little or no battlefield experience.

  Nevertheless, they never gave up, but fought to the last man with a ferocity only those defending their homes could show. In the final event, the scouts and rangers of Bundt’s force had to go door to door to root out the men who were fighting them. Bundt figured he lost more men to snipers than to the sandbagged outposts at the edge of the village.

  By nightfall, all of the male inhabitants of Luchitan were dead or lying severely wounded in the streets. Most of the females were also, but the men had managed to capture quite a few. They shot the old and ugly ones, and saved the young, pretty girls for their nighttime entertainment.

  As Bundt sat at a table in the mayor’s office, where he’d set up his radio to contact the base at Villahermosa, he could hear the screams and pleas of the women as they were being beaten and raped repeatedly by the mercenaries.

  He shook his head. Sometimes he felt this was what most of the men signed up for, rather than the money they were paid. Where else could you get a license to rape and pillage and be above any law other than God’s?

  Bundt was, on the other hand, a professional soldier, and he despised what was happening now in the town he and his troops had conquered. But he was also a realist, and he knew if he tried to stop what the men were doing, he’d end up with a bullet in the back before the campaign was half over.

  No, better to let the animals have their fun as a reward for their fighting. After all, he reasoned to himself, one couldn’t win a war fighting with choirboys.

  He keyed the radio on the frequency General Enrique Gonzalez had given him.

  “General,” he said when Gonzalez was on the line.

  “Yes, Colonel Bundt.”

  “Luchitan is ours,” Bundt said simply.

  “And your losses?” Gonzalez asked.

  “One Kiowa, and thirty troops.”

  “And Salina Cruz?”

  “We advance on it tomorrow at first light,” Bundt said.

  “Good. Our men are having similar success. Perhaps it will not be as difficult as we thought to take Mexico City.”

  “Good night, General,” Bundt said. He didn’t bother to tell the man these faraway towns had been practically ceded by the Mexican government, and that the closer they got to the capital, the fiercer the fighting was going to be. The man ought to know, without me telling him, that the leaders of this country are not going to give up their positions of power, prestige, and wealth without a hell of a fight, Bundt thought.

  Bundt hung up the radio mike and leaned his head on the table. He was desperately tired, and smelled of cordite and gunpowder and blood and excrement. He wondered if he could find the energy to bathe before he ate supper.

  He raised his head and saw a bottle of whiskey on the sideboard in the mayor’s office. He got up, picked up the bottle, and walked slowly back toward his bunk in the next room.

  “The hell with eating,” he muttered as he twisted the cap off the bottle and put it to his lips.

  Perhaps if he drank enough, it would drown out the sounds of women’s screams and the hoarse shouts of men having their way with them.

  TWENTY-TWO

  “Well,” Mike Post said to Ben Raines, “it looks like the stuff has finally hit the fan.”

  Ben looked up from the papers on his desk. “You mean Perro Loco has started his move northward?”

  Mike took the pipe out of his mouth. “Yeah. We have reliable reports his forces leveled the town of Cardenas just north of Villahermosa. Word is they left nothing in the town alive, not even the animals.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Uh-huh. Our German friends have started a similar move on the western coast, taking out Luchitan and beginning an attack on Salinas Cruz on the Gulf of Tehuantepec.”

  “Any word yet on who their big man is?”

  Mike nodded. “Yeah, and you’re not gonna like it. Seems some of the natives in Brazil speak of a man with a thick German accent. They have a name for him in Portuguese which translates roughly as ‘man with no face.’”

  “No face?”

  “Sounds like he’s got some terrible burn scars that have left him without much expression.”

  “Burn scars, huh? I guess it could be our old friend Bruno Bottger after all.”

  “That certainly ties in with our team down there finding out they’re working on BW. Bottger was always a fan of better killing through chemistry.”

  “What’s the word on Jersey and Coop?”

  “The SEALs are taking the ship out to sea and are going to steam at full throttle toward us. Meanwhile, Doctor Buck is on the way down there in one of our Ospreys.”

  “But there’s no place for an Osprey to land at sea,” Ben said.

  Mike grinned. “Buck wouldn’t take no for an answer. He says he’ll parachute into the sea and let the SEALs pick him up. He wants to see the cultures firsthand, and wants to make sure Jersey and Coop are getting the care they need.”

  Ben laughed. “Can you imagine Doc Chase doing that?” he asked. “There’s something to be said about having a young hotshot as our medical officer.”

  Mike nodded. “And, be
st of all, Buck’s no fool. He’s having all the information he’s gathered forwarded to Doc Chase at his quarters. He says there’s no one else in the world with as much experience with BW as Lamar.”

  “We’re going to need both of them if we’re going to manage to get a vaccine in time for it to do any good.”

  “What about our plans for the U.S.?” Mike asked. “I’ve also gotten reports from Pat O’Shea and Dan Gray that Osterman’s troops are starting to move southward toward our borders.”

  Ben nodded and glanced at the reports on his desk. “Yeah, but no real battles yet, just some movements suggesting that Osterman plans to try and keep us busy so we won’t have time to help Mexico if they ever ask us to.”

  “What’s the Mexican president say?”

  “The fool still thinks he can handle Loco by himself. I personally think he’ll hold off asking for our help until they’re knocking on his door . . . and then it’ll be too late to save Mexico City.”

  “So, we just sit and wait?” Mike asked.

  “Oh, no. I’ve just sent Jackie Malone and a couple of hundred of our best scouts up to our northern border with the U.S. They’re going to parachute in and start to play some games with Osterman on her own turf. I imagine she’ll be plenty pissed when Jackie starts raising hell up there.”

  “Sounds like things are starting to get interesting. What are your plans personally?”

  “I’m going to manage things from here for right now. When my team gets back, we’ll decide where the hottest spot is, and then I’ll go down there and see what we can do.”

  “Don’t you think it’s about time to heed Doc Chase’s recommendation and stay out of the field?” Mike asked.

  Ben shook his head. “I’m not that old yet, Mike. And I hate being an armchair quarterback. I’ve got to be involved in the action to see how things are going.”

  Mike held up his hands. “Okay . . . okay, don’t get your panties in a bunch.”

  Ben laughed. “Believe me, Mike, I’ll know when it’s time to hang it up.”

  Jackie Malone stood in the cargo bay of the big C-130 plane and looked behind her. Her second in command on this mission was a small man named Tiger Tanaka. He stood only five feet four and had a slim body that belied the muscles that rippled under his skin. He was an advanced sensei of several martial-arts schools, and was second to none in hand-to-hand combat.