by B. L. Morgan
BLOOD FOR THE MASSES
OTHER BOOKS BY B. L. MORGAN
BLOOD AND RAIN
BLOOD ON CELLULOID
NIGHT KNUCKLES
BLOOD FOR THE MASSES
B. L. MORGAN
SPEAKING VOLUMES, LLC
NAPLES, FLORIDA
2011
BLOOD FOR THE MASSES
Copyright © 2008 by B. L. MORGAN
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission of the author.
ISBN 978-1-61232-021-2
This book as well as every other I write is always dedicated to my wife Judi.
Without you, I have no idea where I would be.
Without you, all of this would mean nothing.
This is also a special dedication to my Dad.
The best parts of J.D. come from you. The worst parts, well, I should have listened when I didn't. Then maybe I wouldn't have to know what I do.
Table of Contents
PROLOGUE 1966 Vietnam
PART I
CHAPTER 1 East St. Louis, Illinois April 1st April Fools
CHAPTER 2 Julio
CHAPTER 3 Women in Need
CHAPTER 4 Cats and Making Cash
CHAPTER 5 Dancing and Knuckle Dusting
CHAPTER 6 Muscle-heads & Meat-heads
CHAPTER 7 Tacos for Tom
CHAPTER 8 Doormen and Babes of All Flavors
CHAPTER 9 An Unwanted Lift
CHAPTER 10 What Wet Dreams are Made Of
CHAPTER 11 Rocking and Rolling
CHAPTER 12 Face Down on the Pavement
CHAPTER 13 Police & Lawyers
PART II
CHAPTER 15 Into the Pit
CHAPTER 16 Out of the Frying Pan
CHAPTER 17 McNuggets and the Welcome Wagon
CHAPTER 18 Rolling on Down the Road
CHAPTER 19 On the Auction Block
CHAPTER 20 Gladiator School
CHAPTER 21 Testing Day
CHAPTER 22 Oaths & Roman Hospitality
CHAPTER 23 Who Makes the Glands Dance?
CHAPTER 24 Party Time
CHAPTER 25 The Party's End
CHAPTER 26 The Alter of Slaughter
CHAPTER 27 Terry’s Tale
CHAPTER 28 Slaughter
CHAPTER 29 Rape of the Innocent
CHAPTER 30 Pulling a Train
CHAPTER 31 Close Cut
CHAPTER 32 Fighting George Foreman
CHAPTER 33 Midday Snack
PART III
CHAPTER 34 With the Dead and After
CHAPTER 35 Camping Out
CHAPTER 36 Savagery
CHAPTER 37 Micea in Flames
CHAPTER 38 On the Road
CHAPTER 39 Welcome to Rome
CHAPTER 40 Beneath the Temple
CHAPTER 41 Lost Forever
CHAPTER 42 To the Palace
CHAPTER 43 Hello Darlin'
CHAPTER 44 On the White Horse
CHAPTER 45 At the Coliseum
CHAPTER 46 Beneath the Coliseum
CHAPTER 47 The Smell of Rome
CHAPTER 48 Julio the Great
CHAPTER 49 Rioting Romans
CHAPTER 50 Through Flames
PART IV
CHAPTER 51 Under a Blood Red Sky
CHAPTER 52 November
CHAPTER 53 Back Home
CHAPTER 54 Going Home
CHAPTER 55 Nostalgia
CHAPTER 56 Kill Me
CHAPTER 57 Serious Knuckle Dusting
CHAPTER 58 Who's Worthy?
AFTERWORD
PROLOGUE
1966
Vietnam
We moved through the jungle like shadows.
Five of us, Special Forces, seek and destroy specialists.
Spread out along the trail we moved as silent as all the rest of the animals in this hot rain forest. The undergrowth was thick, but we didn’t use our machetes to chop our way through. That would make too much noise.
The heat beat down on us from all sides. The thick undergrowth and trees stopped any breezes that might be blowing out in the open spaces.
We avoid open spaces.
Our target was a prisoner of war (POW) camp that was around a half mile away.
The ground was moist and squished beneath our boots.
Mosquitoes flew in rings around our heads. When they land and bite we brush them off. Even a slap can give us away. Just one slap from any one of us, can get us all killed.
It is dark in the forest, almost as dark as night. The trees are so lush with thick green leaves that not much sunlight makes it down to ground level.
We remain alert by reminding ourselves any creak or pop or snap or any sound at all could be made by someone with a rifle pointed at our heads.
The clearing is just ahead and below us. It is still midday. We communicate using sign language.
Our faces are painted with black and green stripes and blotches to mimic the foliage and shadows we move through.
It’s a dead heat we move through out here in the jungle.
There is no breeze, no wind and no relief.
Just heat.
We carry light weapons. M-16’s with crosshair scopes and plastic explosives with radio controlled detonators.
The report is that there is a Lieutenant Colonial Ray Sharp in this POW camp. We either bring him out alive or level the whole place.
I'd rather just level the whole place and take whatever POW’s back with us that we find still alive. Our orders are to get Lieutenant Colonial Ray Sharp. They don’t give a shit about the rest of the men held in the camp. The Lieutenant Colonial is a relative of some congressman back in Washington. So his family has clout. He is important. The rest of us are just meat for the grinder.
We set up observation posts in the trees back away from the perimeter of the POW camp. Far enough away so they won’t see us, but close enough where we can watch them.
From up high in my perch in my tree, I can look down on the entire camp. I watch through hooded binoculars.
The camp is made up of bamboo and wood huts in a rough semicircle. Around that is a wide space, wide enough for jeeps to be driven around the edge of the camp. Around that is a high barbed wire fence. Two guards walk the fence. They smoke cigarettes and appear to be half asleep.
Inside the semicircle of huts are bamboo cages sitting on the ground. Anywhere between ten and thirty men are stuffed into five cages. The cages do not look to be large enough for the men to be able to stand up. They are probably only tall enough for the men to move around on hands and knees.
A soldier walks by the cages swinging a stick.
He says something and spits on one of the prisoners. He jabs the stick at the prisoner and laughs when the prisoner scurries away on all fours.
“Now, there’s a son of a bitch that’s just got to die,” I say silently to myself.
The afternoon wears on.
The hours pass slowly.
The bugs keep me company buzzing around my head. The other men are too far away in their own perches so we converse using sign language. I take a long slow count of how many soldiers I see individually around the camp. From watching them go through their normal duties for the day I estimate there to be around twenty five soldiers in the camp.
A lizard, looking something like a gecko, crawls out off a limb and onto the back of my hand.
“What’s up?” I ask him in a whisper. He rolls his eyes at me. “Thanks for inviting me to your home,” I tell him.
“You belong here. You’re green and cold blooded, just like this place.” I catch my own reflection in the lenses of my binoculars. My face with its black and green stripes blends in with the tree trunk be
hind me.
“Well, what-a-ya know,” I tell the lizard. “Maybe I belong here too.”
Down in the camp near the largest building there's some activity going on. What looks like a square nailed together is in reality the entrance to a tunnel. The end rises up and a large man, much larger than the Viet Cong soldiers, emerges from below.
From my perch even with the binoculars, I can’t make out any details about the man’s appearance. His size alone identifies him as a non-oriental.
A Viet Cong officer comes out of the tunnel behind the large man. The two are friendly. They pass a bottle back and forth as they walk to where the cages sit in the dust.
The large man pulls out what appears to be a machete. He walks around the cages inspecting the men inside. The officer and the large man talk and laugh gesturing toward the prisoners. The large man keeps slapping the blade of the machete against the bamboo bars of the cages. He stops and points to one of the prisoners, then moves to another spot and does the same to another prisoner. He says something to the officer.
The officer shouts and four soldiers run up.
They drag the two prisoners out of their cages.
The two American soldiers stand bowed over from being in the small cages for so long.
Other Viet Cong soldiers are gathering around. They form a large circle around the pair of prisoners. The large man walks back and forth in front of the prisoners. He has a soldier give him his canteen. He lets the prisoners drink from it.
What the hell is going on? I ask myself. My question was not long in being answered.
The prisoners were separated. With rifles pointed at their heads each was handed a machete. The large man motioned the two toward each other to fight.
The jungle seemed to get suddenly hotter, if that was possible, as I watched the two POWs. They stood frozen; looking at each other for a moment that seemed like it went on forever.
The large man shouted something at the two prisoners. One of the POWs shouted something back and threw down the machete. It looked like he gave the large man the finger.
The large man laughed and snatched away a soldier’s rifle. He fired four shots into the prisoner’s chest. The prisoner went down in a spray of his own blood.
His body was dragged away.
The large man went back to the cages and pointed to another prisoner. This one was hauled out of his cage screaming.
When the prisoner was handed the machete he immediately charged the other POW slashing and shouting curses as he came at him. He had the look of someone who'd lost touch with his sanity. He came in with wild cuts and slashes meant to dismember and disembowel.
The other POW calmly side-stepped and back-peddled from his attacker. When the crazy prisoner missed a particularly vicious stroke and threw himself off balance, the other stepped forward. He thrust his machete through the crazy prisoner’s throat.
With no change of facial expression, he pulled his blade free and watched as the other prisoner on his hands and knees coughed his life’s blood out in the dirt.
The large man took the machete away from the victorious prisoner. He clapped him on the shoulder. It seemed almost like a congratulations.
At gunpoint the prisoner was forced down through the trapdoor into the tunnel beneath the ground.
The large man gave something to the officer and followed the others down into the earth.
We stayed in our perches until night came. What we had witnessed made no difference to our mission. We came to get Lieutenant Colonial Ray Sharp. That is what we were going to do.
Night came.
Under the cover of darkness we cut holes in the fence and cut the throats of the sentries walking the perimeter.
Using stealth tactics we planted plastic explosives under all the huts.
The plan was to distract the guards at the cages by blowing up the huts. Then kill them from the other direction before they knew where we were coming from.
The plan worked like a charm. Except for one detail, we didn’t plan on the true viciousness of the Viet Cong.
We detonated the explosives set beneath the huts and one after another all of the buildings in the compound went up in balls of flame. What few men survived the explosions could be heard screaming as they roasted inside the huts. The smell of burning wood and burning flesh was in the air.
Confusion reigned among the guards at the cages. But before we could take advantage of the confusion, one of the guards emptied his rifle into the cages. The other guards followed his example and started shooting the helpless prisoners.
The guards made easy targets in the open middle of the compound. We took them out as quick as we could, but there weren’t too many of the prisoners left alive by then.
We hadn’t lost even one man from our five man Special Forces unit.
One of our guys threw a hand grenade down into the entrance to the tunnel that we’d seen the large man come out of and go into. After doing a mop up on the compound to make sure no soldiers were still alive, we started looking for Lieutenant Colonial Ray Sharp.
Two American soldiers were still alive. One had a sucking chest wound. We gave him some atropine and made him comfortable. He wouldn’t last long. The other had been shot through the legs. His wounds were extremely painful but if he could make it to a morning helicopter pick up, he just might make it back home alive.
There was no Lieutenant Colonial Ray Sharp among the dead in the
cages.
We searched the entire compound. He was not there. Our surviving rescued soldier was still conscious and we questioned him about Lieutenant Colonial Ray Sharp.
Ray Sharp was the one the large man had taken down into the tunnel.
Our NCO in command was Staff Sergeant Robert Olson. The son of a bitch hated me with a passion ever since I’d started fucking a Vietnamese nurse who dropped him. One night after I’d given the nurse a two hour American internal meat massage, I asked her why she stopped seeing Olson.
She told me, “He no got long dong like you. Not enough for me.”
So naturally, I told just about everybody on base about Sergeant Olson's shrunken member.
That might have been why he sent me down into that hole to see if Lieutenant Colonial Ray Sharp was down there. Going down into the tunnels in Vietnam was usually a suicide mission. The tunnels were small, tight cramped spaces with all kinds of twists and turns. A Viet Cong soldier could be hiding around any of the corners and you wouldn’t know it until you’re nose to nose with him.
I looked down into the pitch blackness and realized this might be the last time I’d ever be above ground. What the hell, I thought, you got to die sometime. Let’s get this over with. With my flashlight in my left hand and my M-16 in my right I went down into the earth.
With the flashlights beam cutting through the dusty darkness I saw right away that this was a different kind of tunnel than the ones I’d encountered before. Usually there's a ladder leading down to a roughly level crawlway that was too small to stand up in.
I walked down on stone stairs. The ceiling was high enough so I’d have to reach up over my head and stretch up to touch it. Going down, I passed the spot where the grenade had detonated on the stairs. Except for a few chips of stone knocked loose, there had been no damage done to the tunnel. In fact, the tunnel going down seemed to have enlarged so much that I was starting to feel like I was in the darkened stairway of a large building.
I wasn’t counting my steps as I went down, but after a while of moving steadily downward, I realized I had to be a long way under the ground. Somewhere between seventy and ninety steps is what I must have taken before the stairway came to an end and I stepped on level ground.
Going so deep into earth was disorienting. My mind couldn’t quite get a grip on it. Up above was a rain forest. That meant the ground was almost a swamp. I shined the flashlight around me. On both sides were brick walls. The bricks were of varying sizes, mortared together. The bricks were cold and lightly moist to the touch.
The ceiling was a good ten feet from the floor.
In front about thirty paces was a large steel door. I went to the door expecting it to be locked.
It was not.
I opened the door onto a scene that could have come right out of Dante’s Inferno. There were no living people here. But there sure were a lot of dead ones.
It was a huge chamber that I stepped into.
Estimating the chambers size would be hard because of the surprise of finding an opening of this size down here. The floor of this chamber covered roughly the same area as a high school football field. The height of the chamber was impossible to judge. It was so high that the ceiling was lost in blackness.
This was an ancient temple of some sort. The floor was obsidian black, polished to a highly reflective sheen. Torches burned from pedestals all around a central ceremonial alter. The ceremonial alter had a large stone slab platform that a man was strapped to. His chest had been ripped open. When I moved closer I saw his chest cavity was vacant. His heart and lungs had been pulled out. This man was Oriental, definitely not Lieutenant Colonial Ray Sharp.
There were two piles of similarly mutilated dead men and women, one on each side of the ceremonial altar. I estimate there were around thirty bodies. None fit Ray Sharp’s description.
In back of the ceremonial alter was a huge stone statue of a hellish looking god of some pagan religion that I’d never heard of and didn’t want to. The statue had the body of a man, except for having six arms. The two arms extending from its midsection ended in lobster pinchers.
The head of the stone idol was that of an elephant, except it had the horns of a bull sticking out of its forehead. It must have been a trick of the light caused by the flickering torches, but the idol’s eyes seemed to be following me when I moved around the room.
In between the stone alter, where the man with the ripped open chest lay and the elephant god statue, there stood upright an oval of stone. Strange hieroglyphs were carved into it that reminded me of astrological signs, but they were in no language I’d ever seen before. The oval formed a standing upright ring, large enough for a man to step through its center easily.
I had no idea what that oval might be for and I really didn’t want to know.