The helmet of the soldier manning the machine gun on the half-tack disintegrated under the impact of dozens of slugs from Harley’s weapon; then the thick glass in the front windshield of the tank shattered and exploded inward as Harley’s bullets stitched a line of pockmarks down the front of the half-track.
The vehicle began to waver, turning back and forth as the driver ducked to avoid the ricocheting slugs as they entered the inner compartment of the half-track. One of the bullets must have hit the ammo inside, for suddenly the vehicle exploded with a mighty roar, its sides buckling outward like a tin can that had been stepped on, greasy black smoke pouring from the wreckage.
Coop grabbed Harley’s shoulder. “Come on, big guy, Corrie’s got the Osprey on the way. Time to go home.”
Harley’s finger eased off the trigger, his chest heaving as he tried to catch his breath after fighting the big M-60’s recoil, his eyes lit with a fierce light.
Hammer punched his shoulder. “Harley! Get your ass in gear, son, time to boogie.”
Harley nodded and followed Coop and Hammer as they ran for the bridge and safety.
Once they had cleared the end of the bridge, Corrie depressed a button on a small black box she was holding and the bridge exploded, collapsing into the canyon below.
When the three men got to her, she shouted, “Raines and the Osprey are on the way. We got to hurry. They say a couple of Apaches are headed this way and the pilot doesn’t want to have to duke it out with them.”
Anna ran up and threw her arms around Harley. “Are you all right?” she shouted.
Harley draped his arm around her shoulder, walking beside her. “Yeah, just another day at the office,” he said as they headed for the pickup spot.
FORTY-TWO
General Jaime Pena jumped to attention when Perro Loco, followed by Jim Strunk and Paco Valdez, entered the Commanding Officer’s office at the Mexican Army base at Villahermosa. Pena had pulled his troops back to this location after the disaster on the Pan American Highway.
“Buenos dias,” Pena said, saluting smartly.
Loco gave him a look, his eyes flat as he sat behind the desk in the office.
“General Pena, would you ask your second in command to come in, please.”
“Certainly, comandante.”
Pena stepped to the adjoining door, which led to the officers’ wardroom, and called, “Colonel Gonzalez, would you come in here?”
A tall, swarthy man with a handlebar moustache, and a knife scar on his right cheek that coursed down his face to the corner of his mouth, entered. He nodded at Perro Loco and stood at attention, his back to the wall.
“Now, General Pena, please be so kind as to explain to me why you failed in your mission to take Mexico City,” Loco said calmly.
Pena looked from Strunk to Valdez, who were standing behind Loco on either side.
“But, comandante, there is only one serviceable road northward through this miserable country, and it was heavily mined and defended.” He spread his arms wide. “I needed more air support, but the Mexicans had ground-to-air missiles and shot the few helicopters I had at my disposal out of the air.”
Loco nodded, then glanced at Strunk. “Jaime, how much does a helicopter cost?”
“Several millions of dollars, comandante.”
“And an APC or a HumVee?”
“Many thousands of dollars, comandante.”
“And a portable mine detector?”
Strunk smiled, shaking his head sadly. “Only a few hundred dollars, comandante.”
“Why did you not think that the road might be mined, General, and take appropriate precautions? Surely, losing a few men with mine detectors would have been preferable to losing . . .” He bent his head and studied a sheaf of papers on the desk. “Two helicopters, four APCs, three HumVees, and four hundred and fifty-six soldiers, not to mention General Juan Dominguez.”
Pena, sweat beginning to bead on his forehead and run down his cheeks to drip off his chin, lowered his head. “We moved so fast, comandante, I did not think the Mexicans would have had time to mine the road.”
Loco sighed heavily. “That is the truest thing you’ve said today, General,” he said. “You did not think!”
“I am sorry, comandante,” Pena said, his eyes on the floor in front of him.
Loco slipped a .45 caliber automatic out of his pocket and aimed across the desk.
Pena glanced up, his eyes widening and his mouth opening to protest as Loco fired. The pistol exploded and the bullet entered Pena’s forehead, snapping his head back and blowing the back of his skull out, showering the wall behind him with blood and brains. Pena’s body collapsed in a heap in front of Loco’s desk.
Loco cut his eyes to Colonel Gonzalez. “What is your first name, Colonel?”
Gonzalez swallowed, the scar on his cheek pulling the corner of his mouth up in a caricature of a grin. “Enrique, comandante.”
“Enrique Gonzalez, you are now promoted to general and will be in charge of our forces in Mexico. Is that satisfactory?”
Gonzalez glanced at Pena’s body on the floor, trails of smoke still rising from his empty skull. He nodded rapidly. “Sí, comandante.”
“And you are aware of the penalties for failure?”
Gonzalez continued to nod, unable to take his eyes off Pena’s corpse and its right foot that was still twitching. “Sí, comandante.”
Loco stood up and holstered his weapon. “Good. Then let us go to the communications room and contact President Osterman of the United States. I fear we are going to need some of her more modern equipment to take Mexico City.”
President Claire Osterman hung up the phone after over an hour’s discussion of how Perro Loco’s forces had been stymied on their journey toward Mexico City due to lack of air support and stronger than expected resistance from the Mexican forces.
“Jesus,” she said, “God save me from Central American desperadoes who think they’re generals.”
She looked at her team of advisers arrayed before her. General Stevens, Harlan Millard, and Herb Knoff were sitting in chairs in the Commanding Officers’ quarters of Fort Benjamin Harris in Indianapolis.
She winced as rumbling sounds and vibrations shook the ceiling. “Herb, can’t we quiet that infernal noise?”
He shook his head. “Madame President, you ordered the removal of the wreckage of the building overhead yourself. The bulldozers cannot do that without making some noise.”
“All right, all right,” she said testily. She was still pissed off that Otis Warner and General Joe Winter had been allowed to escape the attack on the fort the day before.
“How is everything going with my resuming command of the country?” she asked Stevens.
General Bradley Stevens, Jr., nodded. “Very well, Madame President. The Armed Services have all acknowledged your right to continue as head of the government, and the rank and file of the Army is behind you one hundred percent. A few of the officers whose loyalty was questionable have been replaced with men I can trust, but overall, it’s going just fine.”
“And the country?”
“A massive propaganda campaign has been undertaken,” Millard said. “All of the media are cooperating, as usual. We are informing the people that the coup attempt to overthrow you was orchestrated by Otis Warner with the complicity of Ben Raines and the SUSA. In the absence of any voices telling them otherwise, I think they’ll buy it.”
“Good,” she said. “Now we have two things to do in addition to restarting the war against the SUSA. One, we have to transport some equipment to Perro Loco down in Mexico. He has control of the Navy base at Pariso near his command at Villahermosa. General Stevens, we need to send a transport ship down there with some helicopters, tanks, APCs, and whatever else he needs. I’ll leave the coordination of that to you and your men.”
“Yes, Madame President.”
“The second thing I’ve got to do is get him some help with his soldiers and command structure. He’s jus
t too damned stupid to run a war.”
“How do you propose to do that, Claire?” Millard asked.
She glanced at a folder on her desk which read Top Secret, Intel, on the cover. “I have here an intel report on Bruno Bottger.”
“Bruno Bottger?” Stevens asked. “I thought Raines killed him in Africa a few years back.”
She shook her head. “No, as it turns out, Bottger escaped to the island of Madagascar. He stayed there for a year or so, recovering from wounds he’d received in his escape. Then he made his way to South America. Intel has found out he’s used his vast fortune to hire an army of mercenaries with the idea of reattacking Ben Raines at some point in the future.”
Stevens shook his head. “I don’t know, Claire. Getting involved with Bottger will be risky. The man is a zealot and a Nazi. He will be very tough to control.”
“That’s the beauty of it, Brad. We won’t have to control him. He hates Ben Raines so much he’ll jump at any chance to get revenge on him. I plan to get him and his mercenary army to join Perro Loco by promising him unlimited access to our weapons and technology. I’ll also promise him he may have Mexico as a prize for his new Nazi state if he manages to conquer it.”
“But Claire,” Millard protested. “You’ve also promised Mexico to Perro Loco.”
“Yes, I have, haven’t I?” she said, a smile curling her lips. “Well, in the event they are successful, they’ll just have to fight it out to see who ends up on top down there.”
Stevens nodded, seeing where she was headed. “Yeah, and after they’ve weakened each other fighting it out, we’ll step in and take over from whoever’s left.”
Claire grinned. “Brad, you’re a man after my own heart.”
FORTY-THREE
Bruno Bottger sat on his terrace overlooking the ocean on the Ilha de Sao Sebastiao, a small island two hundred miles south of Rio de Janeiro. He gently rubbed oil into the burn scars on his face, trying to keep the shiny skin supple so it wouldn’t crack.
Rudolf Hessner, his trusted bodyguard, stepped onto the terrace with a bottle of beer, frost droplets gathering on the glass in the humid sea air.
Bruno took the bottle and took a deep draught.
“Is the pain bad today, Herr Bottger?” he asked, a concerned look on his face.
Bruno gave a short laugh. “The pain is always the same, Rudolf. It is a constant reminder of the debt I owe Ben Raines.”
Rudolf sat across a small glass table from Bruno. “Have you decided what to do about the American President’s offer?”
Bruno looked at Rudolf. “I do not fully trust the woman, Rudolf, but if we take her offer of help, it will cut years off my timetable for retaliation against Ben Raines.”
“But Herr Bottger, you would have to share command with the Nicaraguan, Perro Loco.”
Bruno snorted through the holes in scar tissue that used to be a nose. “If I cannot outsmart a little brown man, who is not much better than the blacks that are taking over the world, then I do not deserve to lead the New World Order.”
“So, you’ve decided then?”
“Yes, Rudolf. It is time to avenge myself against Ben Raines. This time I will not stop until he is dead!”
Otis Warner and General Joe Whiter sat in Ben Raines’s office, along with Raines, Mike Post, and General Ike McGowen.
“I tell you, Mr. Raines, Claire Osterman is going to start another war with the SUSA. The woman is obsessed with killing you and your country,” Warner said.
“But Mr. Warner,” Mike Post said, “your country is severely weakened by the beating you took last year. We just don’t think it’d make sense for her to resume hostilities now.”
General Winter shook his head. “You don’t understand, sir. Claire Osterman cares not one whit for the USA or what’s best for the people. She is a madwoman who is only concerned with her pride. She will do anything, sacrifice anyone, and risk everything to bring down Ben Raines. It is like an illness within her. The hatred is eating her alive and the only cure, in her mind, is to defeat Ben Raines.”
“But, General Winter, you and I both know she has no chance of doing that with her present resources,” Mike continued. Ben Raines interrupted. “I agree with General Winter, Mike. Claire is not the type to give up, or to ever do what is rational. Hell, look at the way she joined forces with Perro Loco.”
“But Ben,” Mike argued, “Perro Loco’s army is a joke. You stopped him in his tracks with less than thirty people.”
“Nevertheless, Mike, I’ve got a gut feeling we haven’t seen the last of Claire Osterman, or of Perro Loco, and my gut is rarely wrong.”
In the next book in the Ashes series, Warriors from the Ashes, Ben Raines finds that his gut feeling was correct. He is faced with fighting a war on two fronts. From the north, Claire Osterman resumes the USA’s war against the SUSA, while from the south, Perro Loco’s army, invigorated by the infusion of thousands of mercenaries under the command of Bruno Bottger and fresh equipment from the USA, manages to take Mexico City and move northward toward the SUSA’s southern borders.
Realizing that no country has ever won a war fighting on two fronts, Ben must use all of his knowledge and bravery to combat the massive forces arrayed against him.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2000 by William W. Johnstone
Cover design by Open Road Integrated Media
ISBN 978-1-4976-3065-9
This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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New York, NY 10014
www.openroadmedia.com
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Tyranny in the Ashes Page 28
