Courage In The Ashes

by William W. Johnstone

  “I had several divisions,” Khamsin said “Thousands of the finest fighting men in all the world. Now I have perhaps one company left of my original force. I had ships. Now Raines’ people have them on the east coast and are refitting them. The bastards and bitches will use my ships to transport them to Europe. And here we sit, waiting to die. I held out my hand to Allah and he allowed Ben Raines to shit in it!”

  Ashley chuckled. “People like you swell my ass, Khamsin—to use an old Louisiana expression. You’re a barbarian and nothing more. You’ve spilled blood all over the world and claim it to be in the name of Allah. At least Ben Raines doesn’t claim that what he’s doing is in the name of God.”

  “You’re disgusting, Ashley!” the Hot Wind told the man. “I should cut your tongue out for defiling the name of Allah. You are not worthy to speak his name.”

  “You couldn’t cut a piece of baloney, Khamsin. You’re a paper tiger. You have no army, no following, nothing. You’re here only because we,” he jerked a thumb toward Lan, “allowed you to tag along. Nobody gives a rat’s ass for your so-called religious mumblings. This isn’t a holy war and it never has been. We—and that certainly includes you—are nothing more than dregs of society trying to stay alive against a force whose time has come. So fuck you and fuck the camel you rode in on.”

  Lan laughed at the expression on the Libyan’s face. Khamsin stalked out the room, his dark face even darker with rage.

  “You sure didn’t make any brownie points with those remarks,” Parr said.

  “At this stage of the game,” Ashley said with a shrug of his shoulders, “what possible difference does it make?”

  The events in Alaska were being monitored as closely as possible by many in the United States. Ben had deliberately ordered all but the most secret of transmissions to be broadcast on unscrambled frequencies. He wanted the outlaw element to hear what was taking place. He had his communications people broadcast a daily progress report back to Base Camp One and to the many outposts throughout the lower forty-eight.

  All over what had once been the United States of America, men and women were giving up their careers in crime and picking out little parcels of land to farm and raise cattle and hogs and chickens and live as quietly and as decently as possible. It was either that or get put up against a wall and shot by the many Rebel patrols that crisscrossed the country.

  Men and women who for the past decade and a half had looted and raped and murdered and in general raised hell in their sectors were keeping a very low profile. Except in a very few areas, the Rebels were firmly in control. Their laws were few, but break one and the penalty was harsh.

  In the lower forty-eight, for many, life was returning to normal very quickly. Outlaws simply had no place left to run. Once caught, there was no throwing oneself on the mercy of the courts, no plea bargaining, in most cases no long legal maneuvering. Hardened criminals got a bullet or a rope. Drug dealers were executed practically on the spot. An arrangement of common sense had taken the place of a complicated unworkable judicial system.

  There were many who did not like it. There were more who did. Those who did not like the system did not have to live under the rules of the new order. Anyone was free to choose his or her own lifestyle as long as no existing laws were broken. But those who did not subscribe to the Rebel way received no help from the Rebels, no help of any kind. And the Rebels had a habit of moving into areas who opposed their way and looking things over very carefully. If children were found to be abused, uneducated, mistreated, neglected, malnourished, the Rebels took them to raise as their own.

  Legal under the old system? No. Morally right? Probably. The Rebels had a saying: “If you don’t like it, take it up with Ben Raines.”

  Georgi pushed hard up to Fairbanks, pausing only once to inspect a small town just south of the city. North Pole, Alaska was located just fourteen miles south of Fairbanks and was in pretty good shape, considering the fact that outlaws had called it home for more than a decade.

  Georgi set up his CP in the old mall and walked to communications. “Get my helicopter squadron commanders, please,” he requested. “Do a flyover of Fort Wainwright,” he ordered. “Then report back to me once that is accomplished.”

  The old Army fort had been picked over, looted, and much of it destroyed, the chopper pilots radioed back.

  “Return to base,” Georgi told them. “And report to me immediately upon touchdown.”

  When the pilots had reported in, the Russian offered them coffee, seated them, and pointed to a map. “I want you all to start ferrying troops to these three locations.” He thumped the map with the tip of a pointer. “Livengood and Chatanika to the north, on Highways 2 and 6, and Nenana to the south, on Highway 3. As soon as we start our assault against Fairbanks, there will be those who will run.” He smiled a warrior’s smile. “We don’t want them to be able to run very far.”

  Georgi took a sip of coffee, grimaced (he’d forgotten to honey it), looked around for the jug, found it and sweetened his coffee. Several of his pilots laughed at his expression and Georgi laughed with them. “You all can carry eight, but let’s take into account food and supplies for a week and cut that back to six with supplies. That’s seventy-two personnel per trip. I want a full company in each location. Get together and work out the arithmetic. Just get the troops in position ASAP. Then start ferrying in spare parts, mechanics, fuel and ammo and rockets for your machines. I want two Hinds in place with each company. That’s it, people. Take off and good luck.”

  Far to the south, Ike was briefing his people. “I’m not going to risk our attack helicopters until we know for sure whether the crud in that city have SAMs, So the artillery will pound the hell out of the place and then we’ll take it like we used to: house to house. There’s only one way in and that’s straight in. I’m not going to fly troops down to block off any escape on Highway 1. That would be too great an opportunity for Villar and his crap and crud to come up from behind and put them in a box. So for a fact, we’ll have a lot of work cut out for us on the peninsula dealing with those who cut and run from the city.

  “Now, then, we’ve got to pound our way in to here,” he hit the map with a pointer, “Muldoon Road, then spread out south and start working in to the west. Me and my bunch will go in on Highway 1, pushing straight toward downtown. Therm, drop down and take Debarr Road. Rebet, Lights Boulevard. Danjou, Tudor Road.” He looked at his watch. “Artillery starts in one hour. We go in at dawn.”

  FOURTEEN

  All afternoon the big attack choppers ferried troops, while to the south and west of Fairbanks artillerymen laid out rounds ranging in weight from 42 pounds to 200 pounds. The 155’s would throw the M692 antipersonnel shells. Each shell contained 36 antipersonnel mines. The eight-inch guns, the 203mm monsters, would hurl the 200-pound M404 HE rounds. Each round contained 104 M43A1 grenades.

  When they all started firing, it sounded like hell had unleashed its demons.

  To those in the city, hell had unleashed its demons.

  The artillery was set up from just south of Highway 2 over to near Fort Wainwright, and they started dropping their rounds in just to the west of the Steese Expressway, working them in toward the heart of the city.

  Fairbanks had once been a city where a person could walk shoulder to shoulder with miners, Indians, Eskimos, mushers, pioneers and merchants. It was a transportation hub serving the North Slope oil fields and Arctic villages. All that was before the Great War; after that, the outlaws moved in and took over.

  Fairbanks once had a rich cultural life, with writers, painters, weavers, sculptors, poets, musicians, and actors. The outlaws killed them or made slaves out of them.

  One outlaw had made his CP in the old Log Cabin Visitor Information Center on 1st Ave. It used to be a pretty place, with its sod roof, huge stone fireplace, and varnished logs. It took a direct hit from a 155, and the place blew apart, killing all inside.

  Fairbanks, at one time, was a very interesting city, whe
re modern hotels and shopping malls stood beside log cabins and historic wood-frame buildings. When General Georgi Striganov ordered in WP rounds, the city started burning and the outlaws went into a panic.

  None of them really understood what they had chosen to go up against. They might have thought Raines’ Rebels were no better equipped than themselves, with small arms and machine guns and a few mortars. They did not expect artillery that could stand back eighteen thousand yards and hurl two-hundred-pound rounds in on them. The outlaws had guessed wrong, and they died for it.

  They also misjudged Ben Raines’ cold contempt for anyone who elected to follow a life of crime, who chose to trample upon the rights of law-abiding citizens—a contempt that bordered on raw hatred.

  Georgi ordered the shelling stopped. “Tanks in,” he ordered, “Troops behind them. Move out.”

  The Rebels crashed across the Chena River and across the Steese Expressway and barreled into the city, crushing anyone who dared stand in their way. None of the several thousand outlaws offered to surrender. They knew better than to try that. The Rebels had warned them that they would take no prisoners.

  Buddy stepped into the lobby of a hotel on First Street and lifted his Thompson, clearing the lobby of crud and crap. With a squad behind him, he began clearing the floors of human flotsam, using a .45 caliber sweeper.

  Dan led a team into an apartment complex that smelled like hogs had been using it for years and began cleaning it out—with grenades. When the interior of the building was burning to his satisfaction, he and his Rebels moved up the street.

  Georgi, not one to stand back and let others do the fighting, ducked into what had once been a restaurant and, with his AK-47, began serving up hot lead to those gang members who had chosen to fight from that location. Georgi tossed in a grenade for dessert and stepped back out into the street.

  The Fire-Frag mini-Claymore blew and spread brains and blood all over the filthy restaurant. “Nasty bastards,” the Russian muttered, and looked around him to see what other mischief he could get into. It didn’t take him long to discover he had outdistanced his personal team and was pinned down in what had once been a dress shop.

  Georgi made himself comfortable behind a counter and got ready for a good fight. An outlaw ran screaming through the back door, and Georgi dusted him with his AK. The outlaw had been carrying a twenty-round drum-fed machine shotgun, and two other drums dangled from his shoulder. Georgi laid aside his AK and checked out the 12-gauge magnum shoulder buster.

  “Interesting,” he said. “What a mess a person could make with this monster.” He got his chance before he could pull his next breath; the entrance of the shop filled with wild-eyed outlaws. Georgi leveled the machine shotgun and cleared out the whole kit and caboodle of the crud, hurling and throwing and spreading parts of the outlaws halfway across the littered street as the magnum-pushed buckshot tore into and mangled and shredded flesh and bone.

  “Oh, I like this!” Georgi said, inserting another drum into the belly of the machine gun shotgun.

  “General!” his sergeant-major called.

  “In here,” Georgi yelled over the din of battle. “Come see what I found.”

  The sergeant-major stepped over and through all the gore on the floor and looked at the buckshot-throwing machine gun his general held. He shook his head in awe.

  “Find me some more shotgun shells, Paul,” Georgi said with a grin. “I like this weapon.”

  “Go!” Ike ordered his troops.

  Before them, the city of Anchorage was smoky from the fires started by the artillery rounds.

  Ben had wanted to save as many artifacts and remnants of the past as possible from the two largest cities, and the other commanders agreed with him, so the artillery barrage had been cut short and the city would be taken by Rebels, working block by block.

  The battalions split up as they hit Muldoon Road. Danjou’s battalions raced south, following the lead tanks down to Tudor Road. All four battalions were stalled cold when they tried to push further west.

  “We’ve got to take Parkway by nightfall,” Ike radioed. “We’ve got to be firmly established by nightfall or we’re in trouble. All units get their Big Thumpers up and start knocking holes in the enemy’s defenses.”

  40mm grenade launchers were brought up, belts snapped in, and the Big Thumpers started chugging out M430 HEDP (High Explosive Dual Purpose) grenades. The automatic grenade launchers had an effective range of about 1,700 yards and could spit out grenades at about 40 rounds per minute. With every Big Thumper available chugging out rounds, the areas in front of the Rebels soon turned into a wall of destruction and fire. The outlaws, having never faced anything so destructive, began falling back. Within an hour, with main battle tanks adding their cannon to the howling Big Thumpers, the Rebels had advanced all the way up to Boniface Parkway, stretching out north to south from Oil Well Road down to Bicentennial Park.

  Ike halted the advance and ordered the Rebels to dig in, with every available tank up close and looking over their shoulders. And the Rebels had taken a lot of prisoners. They didn’t want to, but many of the men and women representing the outlaw faction simply threw their weapons aside and sat on the ground, their hands in the air. When the enemy offered no resistance and most of them were bawling and squalling with tears and snot dripping, the Rebels just could not shoot them.

  “Shit!” Ike said, when informed of the surrender.

  “What in the devil are we going to do with them?” Danjou radioed to Ike.

  “Hell, I don’t know,” the commanding general of 1st Section radioed back. “Find some place over at Fort Richardson and guard them, I reckon. Damn!”

  “I’m hungry!” a woman prisoner bellowed.

  A female Rebel showed the woman the muzzle of her M-16, up close—against the woman’s forehead, in fact. “You open that fly trap of yours one more time and you’ll never have to worry about being hungry again, bitch!”

  The prisoner peed her pants and shut her mouth.

  “What are you going to do with us?” a prisoner asked Ike. Although Ike wore no insignia, the man knew from the way the other Rebels treated him that he was a part of high command.

  “I don’t know,” Ike said honestly. He looked down at the man, who was sitting on the ground with his hands behind his head. Ike had left his command in the capable hands of his XO and driven over to Fort Richardson to personally eyeball the several hundred prisoners. They were a sorry-looking sight.

  Ike walked away and found a Rebel doctor. “Pull every fifth one out, male and female, and run blood tests on them. Let’s see what they’ve got that we don’t want.”

  The reports soon came back.

  “Every type of venereal disease you can name,” the doctor told Ike. “We’d exhaust our readily available supply of antibiotics before we even made a dent in containing the diseases. That is, if the diseases would respond to treatment. And some of them won’t.”

  Ike cussed, kicked at an aluminum can that some asshole had tossed on the ground years back and that would still be bright and shiny and kickable five hundred years down the road, and started considering options. There weren’t very many of them.

  He waved to a Rebel officer assigned to guarding the prisoners. “Keep this pack of crud isolated from the troops,” he said with a sigh. “Feed them. We’ll clean out the city and then decide what to do with this bunch.”

  After the first day’s fighting, many outlaws began leaving the city. They had only one way to go: south, and they exited in that direction, carrying what food and weapons they could pack in their cars and trucks.

  After questioning many prisoners—those coherent enough to talk—and discovering that the outlaws did not have surface-to-air missile capabilities, Ike ordered his Apache, Cobra, and Huey gunships up, telling them to turn the road south into a graveyard. The pilots accomplished that mission in only a very few runs, leaving the highway south blocked with dozens of burning cars and trucks. The Rebels could easily pus
h the vehicles aside when they made their move south, but for the outlaws in the city they formed an impassable barrier, leaving them trapped with no place to go and nothing to do but die.

  By noon of the second day, the Rebel line had advanced up to within four blocks of the downtown area. Using long range artillery, Ike had disabled all the roads leading south out of the city except for one, the Seward Highway—and he had that blocked with tanks and troops at the intersection of O’Malley Road. He had then worked north from that point, lining both sides of the highway all the way up to Diamond Boulevard with Claymores. The outlaws in the city were trapped.

  “How many got out before that goddamn ex-SEAL plugged the hole?” Lan Villar asked the question seated behind his desk in his CP south of the besieged city.

  “Just under a thousand,” he was told. “And they’re still shaking in their boots.”

  “And McGowan is doing what with those trapped in the city?”

  “He junked the original plan to save as much of the city as possible and is systematically destroying the city with artillery, block by block, working east to west toward the bay.”

  “What is the situation for the outlaws up in Fairbanks?” Lan asked, even though he knew perfectly well what the man’s reply would be.

  “Grim.”

  The three battalions of Rebels in Fairbanks had fought their way into the downtown area, stretching out north to south along Cushman Street from the river down to Twenty-first Avenue. Tanks and troops blocked intersections, playing a deadly game of wait-and-see with the outlaws trapped in the city.

  One of the last three major bastions of lawlessness left on the North American continent was ready to fall. The outlaws had tried to run; they had retreated on the highways they thought were still open to them and were slaughtered by Rebel troops and Hind gunships. The roads leading out of the city were dogged with burned-out vehicles and bloated bodies.