Vengeance in the Ashes

by William W. Johnstone

  “That’s right.” Ben began rolling a cigarette. “What’s on your mind, Mr. Banning?”

  “We saw you passin’ through back up the road about an hour ago and just thought we’d check you out, that’s all. Can’t be too careful, you know.”

  “You’re a liar, Banning,” Ben said. “You and your people have been following us all day. Your main force is about eight miles up the road. Now state your business.”

  Banning lifted his eyes and paled. Three Rebels had appeared out of the store behind where Ben and his team sat on the curb. The three Rebels were each carrying Heckler and Koch light machine guns. The H&Ks fired a 7.62 round that could make a mess out of a man in a heartbeat.

  “I guess you caught me in a lie, General,” Banning said.

  “I guess I did.” Ben lit his hand-rolled and waited.

  “What happens now?”

  “You answer a few questions.”

  “Maybe I don’t feel like answering questions.”

  “Neither did a man name of Wilbur Harris. But we convinced him to talk to us—in a manner of speaking. Where is Wilbur now, Banning?”

  “He’s with us. Back up the road.”

  “I thought as much. What did Hoffman’s people promise you, Banning?”

  “Hoffman? I never heard of him.”

  “You’re lying again, Banning. It’s not nice to tell lies. Your nose might start to grow.” Ben smiled. “Or I might decide to cut it off.”

  Banning started to sweat. This wasn’t going well at all. Raines had seen right through him from the start. “We ain’t done nothing to you, Raines. Nothing at all. It’s a free country. Me and my boys can travel wherever we damn well please to go.”

  “I’ll ask you again: What did Hoffman promise you? And before you reply, bear in mind that we know everything that was in Wilbur’s head.”

  “We’ll be leaving now, General,” Banning said.

  “Go ahead,” Ben said, surprising the man. “We won’t stop you.”

  Banning and his men started backing up slowly toward their vehicles, keeping their hands away from sidearms. The Rebels watched them drive away.

  A Rebel said, “The bumper beeper’s in place. 40.22.”

  Corrie punched in the frequency on a hand-held scanner and it came in loud and clear.

  “You think they’ll shake down their vehicles, Father?” Buddy asked.

  “I doubt it. Right now they’re so thankful they got out of here alive they’re not thinking about anything else. Give them an hour and they’ll get mad. Then they’ll start planning an attack. Corrie, check with the tower lookout. Make sure they don’t drop off anybody to spy on us.”

  “Tower reports no one has left the vehicles.”

  Ben lifted a state map and studied it for a moment. “They have two ways they could come in from the north. But only one way in for about two miles after the junction. Buddy, take your teams up the road and set up just south of the junction. I really don’t want to have my sleep disturbed by a firefight here in town.”

  His son grinned. “Sleep well, Father.” He stepped out of swinging range. “I know that a man of your advanced years needs lots of rest.”

  The running Buddy almost got conked on the head by Ben’s thrown helmet. Luckily, he sidestepped just in time.

  “Wonder how Buddy is going to handle this one?” Jersey asked. The team was again sitting outside on the curb. The night air was cool and the Rebels were enjoying the rest, having broken up into small groups, talking and gossiping a bit before turning in for the night.

  “I’m sure he’ll be very inventive,” Ben replied. “The boy has a devious mind.”

  “I wonder where he got it?” Tomas asked dryly.

  “Certainly not from me,” Ben said with a straight face. “There isn’t a vicious or deceptive bone in my body.”

  “I’m going to bed,” Beth said, standing up. “It’s getting a little deep out here.”

  Buddy and his teams had planted claymores alongside the road. The spot they had chosen was where the road dipped down, with high embankments on either side. That area ran for about five hundred feet. The claymores would explode about three to four feet up, throwing the lethal charges directly into the side windows of the Broncos and pickup trucks. After the charges blew, Buddy and his teams would hose the area down with H&Ks taken from dead NAL troops. And that should take care of Mr. Peter Banning and his turncoat followers.

  Buddy and his teams settled in to wait.

  “I’m tellin’ you, Pete,” one of his men said, “I think we all ought to haul ass outta here. Maybe all the way to Canada. Forget about fightin’ Ben Raines and the Rebels. I got a bad feelin’ about this, Pete.”

  “No way, Burt,” the still-angry Pete said. “That man made a fool outta me. And no man does that to Peter Banning and lives to talk about it. It wasn’t done back when we had a government, and it ain’t gonna happen now.”

  “You best leave him alone,” Wilbur Harris spoke softly in the night. “Remember, I’ve seen first-hand what the Rebels are capable of doing.”

  “Keep your mouth out of it, Will,” Peter told him. “You ain’t got no say in none of this.”

  “Then I’ll pass on this,” Wilbur said. “I take my orders from Hoffman, not from you.”

  “You took your orders from Captain Brunner. He’s dead and his body burnt. Thanks to you and your flappin’ mouth.”

  “That sure as hell don’t make you in command. Besides, if you was shot full of dope like I was, you’d probably tell them more than I did.”

  “I doubt it. I ain’t gonna stand here and argue with you, Will. Do whatever in the hell you want to do. Mount up, boys, We’re moving against Ben Raines and them uppity Rebels.”

  “What do you want on your tombstone, Peter?” Wilbur asked.

  “Screw you, Wilbur. I hope I never have to look at your ugly goddamn face again.”

  You won’t, Wilbur thought. In about an hour, the only thing you’ll be seeing are the fires of hell.

  Wilbur sat and watched the men climb into their vehicles and pull out. He listened until he could no longer hear the sounds of their engines and then stood up, picking up his pack. He was going back up the road where he’d stashed the radio he’d found intact by the side of the road back in that death town and call into his contact up in North Oklahoma. Captain Ohida was just about the only one left that Wilbur knew of. He knew there were more, but didn’t know how to contact them. He’d tell Captain Ohida that he could scratch Peter Banning and his bunch. They were as surely dead as the night was dark.

  “One mile away,” Buddy said, after his forward man bumped him. “Get set. Damn!” Buddy cussed. “They’re leaving their vehicles and walking the rest of the way.”

  “Staying in the road?” a team member asked.

  “So far. Let’s see if they’re as stupid as they are ugly.”

  “That’s asking a lot,” a woman said, her grin evident in the darkness.

  “It’s going to be a real mess in the road when those claymores go,” a team member said. “Like yukk city.”

  “Yes,” Buddy agreed. “But at least we’ll have some more four-wheel-drive vehicles. Pass the word, observe noise discipline from now on.”

  The Rebels waited on the cool dewy grass. All were startled when the sounds of voices reached them. Peter Banning certainly had loose discipline. But the Rebels were hard-core professional fighting people, not play soldiers.

  “I need to take me a piss ’fore we start killin’ Rebels,” the voice reached them.

  “Well, piss then and catch up,” Banning told the man with a full bladder. “Jesus Christ, can’t you guys do nothin’ right?”

  The Rebels waited in silence and without any movement except for their eyes.

  “Hey, you guys,” the urinating man called. “Wait up, will you?”

  The night was suddenly split wide open by explosions, and before the booming echoes had died away, the wild screaming of dying men shattered the stilln
ess. Shrapnel from the claymores virtually shredding most of Banning’s men. The few who were left alive were quickly disposed of by automatic-weapons fire. Seconds later, the only one left alive stood in shock in the middle of the road, his M-16 slung on one shoulder and his dick in his hand. He looked up to see several Rebels standing on the top of the embankment, looking down at him.

  “Hi, guys,” he said weakly. “Can we talk about this?”

  “Put your dick back in your pants,” a woman told him. “It is definitely not a turn-on.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” the would-be survivalist said meekly.

  “This is all he knew?” Ben asked, after listening to the cassette tape of the interrogation.

  “That’s it,” the spook from intelligence said. “And he wasn’t lying. He was so scared he’d have turned in his own mother . . . if he had one that would claim him.”

  “Bring him in to me.”

  The only survivor of the previous night’s ambush stood in front of Ben and shook with fear. He’d been forced to walk, and sometimes wade, among what was left of his buddies in the road before the Rebels brought him into town, and that sight had just about done him in.

  “Now, what am I going to do with you?” Ben asked, leaning back in an old cane-bottomed, straight-backed chair.

  “General Raines, sir,” the man said. “My name is Chester Higgins. I run a grocery store ’fore the Great War. And I never was in any trouble with the law. I—”

  “Shut up!” Ben told him. “I am not interested in your personal history. What I want to know is this: Should I shoot you or turn you loose?” Actually, Ben had already made up his mind to turn him loose.

  “Lord God, General, don’t shoot me. You turn me loose and I swear you’ll never hear no more from me again. And that’s a promise.”

  “You won’t join up with another group who have plans on fighting me?”

  “I might join a church, if I can find one! After what I seen and walked through last night, I don’t need no army to join. What I need is salvation in the worst kind of way. I need to talk with the Lord.”

  “You just about met Him face to face last night,” Ben reminded the man.

  That got Chester’s knees shaking so bad he had to sit down before he fell down.

  “So you have religion now, is that it?” Ben asked.

  “It’s about time, don’t you think?” Chester put his trembling hands under his legs to contain them.

  Ben chuckled. “All right, Chester. Get out of here. And if I see you again, you’d better be the most peaceful man in all the world.”

  Chester hit the door and was gone.

  Buddy walked in, poured a cup of coffee, and sat down in the chair Chester had recently vacated. He smiled at Ben. “That, Father, is one scared man. You should have seen him tiptoeing through the gore last evening, alternately barfing and praying. If we’d have had music it would have been a ballet . . . of sorts. I thought that was a nice touch to cap off a very successful evening.”

  Ben looked at his son and shook his head. “You, boy, are going to be harder than I am.”

  “I certainly had a good teacher, Father. Where do we go from here?”

  “Let’s go check out those other groups that Wilbur and Chester told us about.”

  Corrie called from the other room. “A company-sized force has just been reported down in the Ouachita National Forest. Ten miles south of here.”

  “Hostile?” Ben asked, walking over to stand in the open door.

  “Scouts don’t know, sir. They did not make their presence known.”

  “Get the people mounted up, Buddy. Let’s go see if they’re friend or foe.”

  A few miles to the north, Wilbur Harris was radioing in.

  TWELVE

  Ike and his people stayed busy rendering large portions of roadway impassable and blowing every bridge in their sector. The area assigned to Ike and his people was so large that planes and helicopters were in use transporting the teams from place to place. Ike and his people had encountered very few hostiles. The word was spreading among those in North America who had aligned with Hoffman that they had better stay the hell away from those prowling teams of Rebels. To mix it up with the Rebels was not a wise thing to do.

  South of the border, teams of Mexican soldiers sent out by General Payon were herding those who wished to go north across the border. Many did not wish to leave their homes. The soldiers didn’t argue the point with them. There just wasn’t time.

  Once across the border, the people were interviewed, given medical exams, and those fit to fight were asked if they wished to do that. Not a one refused.

  Tina and Raul had their hands full setting up training schedules for the new people.

  Back at Base Camp One, Cecil had the factories working twenty-four hours a day, making everything from uniforms to ammunition.

  In the HQ Company building, Thermopolis often wished he was back in the field. Things were a lot less hectic.

  South of the border, Hoffman’s forces mustered to move against General Payon’s troops and found very quickly that nearly everything they drove across, touched, or put their boots on was going to blow up. Hoffman had not counted on this. And he was not prepared for any type of assault from the sea. He ordered his troops back across the line, and the push toward Mexico City was halted, for a time.

  At the edge of the Ouachita National Forest, Corrie acknowledged the message and said, “Hoffman just tried a push across the no-man’s-land. He obviously thought it was a bad idea, for he immediately pulled his people back.”

  “Buying us a little more time,” Ben said. “Every additional day makes us stronger and better prepared to meet him when he does try to cross our borders.”

  “Scouts up ahead,” Cooper said.

  “We think they’re hostile,” the team leader told Ben. “They know we’re here but have made no aggressive moves toward us. About a hundred and fifty of them. They’re well-armed and seemed to be very well trained. Nothing like that shit group Banning ran. Their camp is clean and so are they.”

  “You have a fix on radio frequency?”

  “That’s a ten-four, sir.”

  “Give it to Corrie, please.” Ben turned to another scout. “You find us a good defensive position?”

  “Yes, sir. We could stand off a battalion in the place I picked.”

  Ben saw his teams get into position for the evening and told Corrie to contact the group camped in the forest. “Let’s see if they want to talk with us.”

  “We’re minding our own business, General,” came the reply. “We don’t want anything to do with you or your army. So just leave us alone.”

  “Want to come over for coffee?” Ben asked, a strange smile on his lips.

  “No.”

  “Downright unfriendly,” Cooper said. “I smell a stinking rat, General.”

  “Yeah. So do I, Coop. But if they are linked with Hoffman, why didn’t they pull out? Surely they knew we were coming in this direction.”

  “They knew,” Beth said, walking up. “Corrie just got a fix on some of the frequencies they’re using. They’re transmitting in code. That spook says he wasn’t trained in cryptology and can’t break it. That guy is weird!”

  Ben smiled at that. He knew it went with the territory. He turned to the leader of the scout team. “How good are these people?”

  “Real good, sir. They’ve got the forest around their camp covered with trip wires. I went a little ways, but it’s a real maze in there. I didn’t go in far. Just far enough to know these guys are plenty good. They’re not cornballs.”

  Ben looked off into the distance for several moments. “Why?” he finally tossed the question out, to no one in particular. “Why would they go to such lengths knowing that we were on the way here and would surely stop and check them out? And more than that, once we did check them out, and received such an unfriendly reply to any questions, we would immediately become suspicious of their motives.”

  “Because t
hey want us to linger for a couple of days,” Buddy said.

  “That’s correct, son. Now tell me why they want us to do that.”

  Buddy looked puzzled for a moment, then said, “So they can contact a much larger force and wipe us out.”

  “Very good, son. But you’re forgetting something. What about the statements of Wilbur Harris and Chester Higgins? They both stated that there were no large forces anywhere near here. Wilbur was drugged and Chester was so badly frightened it was impossible for him to tell a lie.”

  “Those two were low-level personnel,” Jersey said. “They wouldn’t know all about the placement of Hoffman’s troops.”

  “Right,” Ben said. “So now we are facing a dilemma. What to do?”

  “We would have no trouble against this bunch here,” Buddy said. “Or very little trouble. But against a much larger force, with no hope of ambush . . . I don’t know, Father.”

  “I don’t either. So until we make up our minds, I think that we shall behave as Riffs and fold our tents and slip quietly into the night.”

  “It isn’t night and I don’t know what in the hell a Riff is,” Cooper said.

  “Your education is sorely lacking, Coop,” Ben said, putting an arm over the young man’s shoulders. “You’ll have to listen to The Desert Song sometime. It’s really quite an entertaining light opera.”

  Cooper looked up at Ben. “What’s an opera got to do with us hauling our asses out of here, General?”

  “You’ll have to listen to it to discover that, Cooper.”

  “Cooper and opera,” Jersey said, shaking her head. “This I got to see.”

  “And hear,” Ben added.

  “Wonderful,” Jersey said. “Me and my big mouth.”

  ***

  The Rebels slipped out just after dark. Since their encampment was several miles from the other camp, and Ben was reasonably sure that they were not being spied on, the pullout was done easily enough. They backtracked several miles and then turned west, pulling over in a town that was so small it wasn’t even on the old state maps they were using. There were just enough old homes and stores in the town to hide the Hummers and the newly acquired Broncos. Even then it was a tight fit.