Vengeance in the Ashes

by William W. Johnstone

  “I heard that,” Dankowski called from a few tents away. “It’s Batman, not Superman.”

  “Whatever,” Jersey said. “Now everybody shut up, I’m tired.”

  Ben closed his eyes and drifted off to sleep with the ease of the professional soldier, wet butt and all.

  The morning was unusually cool for this time of the year and the rain continued coming down. Those factors did not improve the mood of the Rebels as they prepared themselves for another day’s battle with the turncoats. Seven o’clock that morning found the Rebels facing DeMarco’s men across the cracked blacktop of an old road in the southern part of the forest.

  “They’ll be anticipating smoke and expecting us to come across head-on,” Ben said. “So we’ll give them lots of smoke and cross on their flanks. I want ten people spread out right here lobbing lots of smoke. The rest of us will split up and cross at my signal. Move out.”

  The cool wet morning was suddenly shrouded in swirling, vision-limiting grayness as smoke grenades began spewing out cover for the Rebels. Rebel machine gunners on the south side of the road began spraying the area immediately in front of them with lead, keeping their fire directed into the thick smoke while Rebels crossed the road and set up east and west of the enemy’s positions.

  Across the river, Buddy and his people had crossed the road and were advancing steadily, pushing the troops of DeMarco back. Buddy’s plan was to shove them north until they reached a long bend in the river, where only a few hundred yards of forest remained for concealment. He had already bumped part of Dan’s contingent and they were waiting on the west side to spring an ambush.

  Holcomb had already radioed DeMarco that it appeared they were cut off and could only fight a last-ditch stand in the timber. Some of his people had already attempted to flee the timber, only to be cut down by hidden teams of Rebels.

  “I told you,” Jackman said in a dull voice. “I tried to warn you about the Rebels. They’re the sneakiest bunch of bastards and bitches I have ever seen. They don’t fight by rules, Robert. They fight to win and they don’t give a damn how they do it.”

  DeMarco was getting tired of Jackman’s constant bitching and complaining, but he was forced to agree with the man’s assessment of the Rebels. Everything he had thought the Rebels would do, they didn’t do. They didn’t fight in any way he had ever studied. Raines seemed to delight in breaking all the rules.

  “Sir, large groups of Rebels are moving into position along the south end of Davis’s territory,” DeMarco was told. “They’re spreading out from Alton to Doniphan, all along Highway 160.”

  “Where in the hell did they come from?” DeMarco almost screamed the words.

  “Texas,” Jackman said. “That means they’ve cleaned out that state. You better hope that’s not Ike McGowan’s bunch. He’s just as bad as Ben Raines.”

  DeMarco ignored Jackman as best he could and studied a map. “If they move up Highway 21 north, we can cream them. We’ll have them pincered.”

  “They won’t,” Jackman said. “We’re not dealing with a bunch of amateurs. That was my mistake.”

  DeMarco lost his temper. “Well, what the hell would you have me do, Jackman?”

  “The way I see it, we have two choices: Get the hell out of here. Break up our people into small groups and start farming. That’s one choice. The other is to pitch in with Raines if he’ll let us.”

  “Have you lost your mind? Fight against Hoffman?”

  Jackman shrugged his shoulders. “Hoffman isn’t here. Ben Raines and the Rebels are.”

  “Holcomb says he’s lost contact with those men on the west side of the river in sector one,” the radio operator said. “He believes they walked into an ambush.”

  DeMarco sat down beside Jackman and waited for what he now knew were the inevitable words from the man’s mouth.

  He was not disappointed.

  “I told you,” Jackman said.

  “Buddy reports inflicting heavy casualties on the enemy,” Corrie said. “Fighting has died down to almost nothing. He says that by tonight, everything west of the river between 14 and 76 will be in Rebel hands.”

  “Ike?”

  “He is in position and getting ready to shove off. Striganov and West are ready to make their push and link up with us, north to south.”

  Ben smiled. “Okay, folks. Let’s pull even with that rogue son of mine.”

  Striganov and West drove down hard from the north, and Ben and those Rebels in his contingent shoved off and hit hard. Mortars would cream an area and then the Rebels would come hard-charging in under cover of smoke. They would secure that sector and then wait, catching their breath, until the mortar crews had moved up, set up, and were firing for effect several thousand meters ahead of them. The scene was repeated a dozen times that day, from the north and from the south.

  Ben’s people pushed ten miles north that day, while the Russian and the mercenary pushed ten miles south. Now all that remained of Holcomb’s forces in sector one were contained inside a pocket of land just about three miles wide and six miles long.

  Ike split his command and sent two companies in from the west side of sector two and two companies in from the east side, those on the east side staying on the west side of Current River, keeping the river between themselves and sector three.

  “Son of a bitch!” DeMarco cussed when he heard that. “I had Bishop all primed to set up ambushes. Just one time I’d like to see some damn Rebel commander make a mistake. Just one is all I need.”

  “You can count the mistakes they ever made on the fingers of one hand,” Jackman said, after taking a slug of moonshine.

  “And I’m getting tired of your mouth, too,” DeMarco told him.

  “You won’t have to listen to it much longer.”

  “Now what the hell does that mean? Are you leaving?”

  “No. But if we stay here, we’ll soon be dead. That’s what I mean.”

  DeMarco didn’t say it, but he tended to agree with the man. He sighed and paced the room. If he was going to make any broad-ranging decisions, he knew he’d damn well better make them now.

  As if reading his mind, Jackman said, “Forget Davis in sector two. That’s Ike McGowan in there after him. McGowan is an ex-Navy SEAL and he fights with a SEAL mentality. I still got men straggling in here and can muster about six hundred. Get Bishop and Anderson on the horn and get them up here and let’s get gone from this damn place.”

  DeMarco stopped pacing, sat down at the table, and stared at Jackman for a moment. “All right, Jackman, I’m listening. Go where?”

  “Minnesota, Wisconsin . . . somewhere up there. If you want to continue fighting for Hoffman, okay, I’m in. But we are no good to him dead.”

  DeMarco had to admit that Jackman was finally making some sense. They weren’t going to stop the Rebels here. To stay and fight was only to commit suicide. He slowly nodded his head and rose from the chair.

  “Get your people together, Jackman. I’ll give the orders to pull out.” He shook his head. “It took us years to get this place just the way we wanted it. We pretended to be settlers and so forth, who just wanted to be left alone, and we never had a minute’s problem with the locals. All for nothing!”

  “Booby-trap the buildings.”

  “No time for that. Besides, we may come back here someday.”

  Jackman capped the old whiskey bottle full of moonshine and left it on the table. He stood up. “No more of that for me. I got to get back in shape, mentally and physically. I want to be ready when Field Marshal Hoffman comes across that southern border. I got me a heavy debt that I’m going to collect from one General Ben Raines.”

  “That’s the Jackman I used to know!” DeMarco slapped him on the shoulder. “Come on, old friend. We got some packing to do and not a whole lot of time left to do it.”

  The Rebels picked up the signals down in Mountain Home and transmitted them at once to Ben’s temporary CP and from there they went out into the field.

  �
�DeMarco is pulling out of sector five,” Corrie told him. “He’s ordered his people in three and four to pack it up and get moving.”

  “To where?”

  “We don’t know. They’ll keep monitoring.”

  “What about his men in sector two?”

  “I guess this DeMarco person is leaving that bunch to be slaughtered.”

  “The caliber of people we’re fighting continues to worsen,” Ben said.

  “It never was much,” Cooper said.

  “Every now and then he makes sense,” Jersey said.

  “Thank you.” Cooper smiled at her.

  “I said every now and then, Coop. That means not often.”

  Then Corrie received another message that wiped the smiles from their faces. She laid aside her headphones and said, “That was Therm. General Payon just reported a mass attack by Hoffman’s people. Thousands and thousands of black-shirts hit him hard. He can’t hold. He’s backing up to try to save as many of his people as possible.”

  “Well, it won’t be long now,” Ben said. “There will be no pursuit of DeMarco. Advise Ike of that. We’ll finish up here and then start packing up to head back. We’ve got a lot of planning to do.”

  Thomas entered the squad tent and Ben gave him the message. Thomas paled and swore in Spanish for a moment. “If my general is retreating, it means the situation down there is now completely and totally hopeless. General Payon is very much a man like you, General Raines. He is not a man to back up.”

  “There is that line about discretion and valor. It takes a smart man to know when to apply either. All right, here it is. We don’t have time for any type of delay. Corrie, order all the mortar crews we have to set up and start lobbing rounds into this section where we have them boxed. Order Ike to launch a night attack, using the same methods. We’ll mop up in the morning. Rest while you can, folks. It’s going to be a noisy night.”

  SEVEN

  When the shell-shocked night broke free of darkness and light spread over the countryside, the strip of land that had held the last of DeMarco’s men was a smoking ruin of twisted and torn trees and craters from the impacting 81mm and 60mm mortar rounds that had been hurled into the area nonstop for hours. Those men who survived the attack came staggering out, their hands in the air. The Rebels then shifted their attentions toward sector two and began claiming the acreage by walking in mortar rounds from all directions. For forty-eight hours, the mortar barrage into sector two was relentless. With a range of nearly fifty-two hundred yards, the Rebels manning the 81mm mortars could lay back and drop in their rounds with little fear of any type of retaliation from DeMarco’s troops.

  On the morning of the third day of the assault, Corrie received a message of surrender.

  “Cease fire,” Ben ordered.

  The land fell quiet and the Rebels waited in the now seemingly unnatural silence. DeMarco’s men began staggering out of the smoking timber, their hands over their heads. They were rounded up, their hands tied behind their backs, and tossed into trucks.

  “DeMarco said we would be victorious,” one of the prisoners told Buddy.

  “He lied,” Buddy told him, then bodily picked up the man and heaved him into the bed of a truck.

  “Are you going to shoot us?” another asked Ike.

  “I ought to,” Ike told him. “That’s what you deserve.”

  “Lord have mercy!”

  One of Ike’s special-ops people held out a Nazi flag. Ike looked at the flag, spat on it, and then looked at the prisoner. “You fly this damn thing and then call on the Lord? Get him out of here.”

  “What are we going to do with all these prisoners?” West asked Ben at a meeting of batt comms after sector two had been declared secure.

  “I don’t know. What concerns me most is what happened to the black-shirts who pulled out of Mountain Home? I thought they linked up with this bunch of crap?”

  “For about a day,” Striganov said. “Prisoners I have personally interrogated say the black-shirts moved on further north. They say they don’t know where they were heading. And I think they are telling the truth. I’m not at all certain the black-shirts trust this pack of rabble.”

  The batt comms were meeting in a large old home on the outskirts of Van Buren. Better communications had been set up, and Corrie was now able to talk directly with HQ down in Laredo.

  “What’s on your mind, Ben?” West asked. “I can tell something is troubling you.”

  “NAL paratroopers,” Ben replied.

  “We don’t have any intel about them,” Ike said. “We don’t even know if Hoffman has enough of them to be effective.”

  “He’s got everything else,” Ben countered. “Why not have a division of jumpers that he’s keeping out of sight? Or two or three divisions, for that matter. I’m not going to sell him short. Say he does have a full division of paratroopers. His infantry keep us occupied in south Texas and he sends jumpers in behind us. As short as we are, we’d have a hell of time shifting enough people around to be effective.” Ben shook his head. “I don’t like it. DeMarco is behind us now, and so are the black-shirts who were in Arkansas. And we don’t have any idea how many others are north of us who support Hoffman. Five hundred or five thousand. Or more. We can’t concentrate all our forces in south Texas.”

  Ben stared out the window for a moment. “Ike, I want you to assume command of the forces in Texas. Georgi, you, Rebet, and Dan will stay up here with me. Corrie, order all personnel from my One Battalion, and all of Three, Five, and Six Battalions, to gear up and get up here. I want armor and artillery with them. Find out from Tina and Raul how many personnel from Mexico have joined us and how the training is progressing. Also, get me the latest from General Payon.” He smiled at her. “That ought to keep you busy for a few minutes.”

  “Ben,” West said. “If Hoffman gets between us, you’re going to be cut off and running.”

  “That’s the idea. We’re not going to be able to contain Hoffman at the border. But right now, his supply lines are stretched awfully thin. The further north he progresses, the thinner they’ll become. When he moves into Texas, I want Payon to have teams ready to do an end-around on both flanks, and come up behind Hoffman. I want his supply lines harassed and disrupted. And I want to make that son of a bitch have to fight on three or four fronts. After reading the reports from every available source, one things stands out clear: Hoffman has never fought a guerrilla-type war. He’s relied on brute force and massive troop movement to win what he’s got. The Rebels have been fighting a guerrilla-type war for years. We know how; they don’t. Hoffman has people who do know how, but so far they are not making the decisions.

  “You all know where we have supplies cached. We have enough supplies hidden around this country to fight a guerrilla-type war for years. And it’s going to come to that. Believe it. Ike, when you reach the point where you can’t hold out, bug out. No last-ditch efforts. Keep in mind the guerrilla motto: He who fights and runs away, lives to fight another day.”

  When the laughter had died down, Ben said, “Take off, people. Good luck.”

  Striganov had eyed Ben suspiciously after the others had left the room. He poured a cup of coffee and sat back down with Dan and Rebet. Outside the sounds of engines filled the air as those batt comms leaving pulled out. “Now you can tell us what you really have in mind, Ben,” the Russian said, a half smile on his lips.

  Ben grinned, the boyish smile taking years from his face. “You don’t really think I’m going to leave Jackman and DeMarco at our backs, do you?”

  “I did wonder about that,” Dan said.

  Rebet nodded his head. “Yes. I wondered also. But I think I know the answer to General Striganov’s question, now.”

  “Oh?” Ben asked, freshening his coffee.

  “Just as soon as Ike and the others are on their way back to Texas, we take off after DeMarco and Jackman. You probably had it in your mind that you were going to do it alone. Forget it, General.”

  Ben l
aughed and sugared his coffee. “I did have the latter in mind, but I didn’t hold out much hope of it flying.”

  “Perish the thought,” Dan said.

  “We all go,” Striganov grumbled.

  “What’s the plan?” Rebet asked.

  “We destroy Jackman and DeMarco,” Ben said quietly.

  DeMarco and Jackman moved out very quickly, and they weren’t at all neat about their leaving. Scouts were on their butts almost from the outset. The scouts laid back and kept Ben and the others notified whenever the long columns of troops made a move.

  Ben sent Striganov and Rebet and troops racing to the north, while he and Dan pulled in behind the scouts and poked along, always staying a full half day behind the turncoats. As yet, no word had gone out over the air as to exactly where Jackman and DeMarco had in mind. But Ben fell they would slip up eventually, and on the third day out, they did.

  “Bingo!” Corrie said, after receiving a message from the scouts. “DeMarco and Jackman are heading for northern Wisconsin. Up in the Nicolet National Forest.”

  “Pull over and string an antenna,” Ben ordered. “We’ve got to tell Georgi so he can get in place.”

  “Scouts report the enemy column is pulling over and seem to be calling it a day,” Corrie said.

  “That’s even better,” Ben said. “I could use a break.” They were in northern Missouri, paralleling DeMarco’s column over in Illinois.

  The antenna strung and scramble on, before Corrie could bump Georgi, Ike roared on. “Goddammit, Ben. Where in the hell are you?”

  “We found out where the escaping hens are going to roost and we will be slipping into the henhouse like foxes in a few days.”

  “That doesn’t answer my damn question! What the hell does all that mean?”

  “Relax, Ike. I’m not alone. Now get off the air so I can talk to Georgi.”

  “Jesus, Ben, I swear to God, I can’t leave you alone for ten minutes without you getting into trouble. Will you, for Christ’s sake . . .”

  Ben turned down the volume and said to Corrie, “When he winds down, get Georgi on the horn, will you?”