Betrayal in the Ashes

by William W. Johnstone

  “The hell I’m not.”

  Homer Blanton slowly shook his head. “All my life I have wanted to be President of the United States. Now I have to say it is the shittiest job on the face of the earth. You say those people in the Midwest are not racists, Ben. They want to round up all the blacks and put them on reservations. Now, if that isn’t racist, will you kindly tell me what is?”

  “I said some of them were racist, Homer, and some of them are. But the majority are just plain ol’ Americans who will give anybody a decent shake if they think they deserve it. They were frustrated before the Great War; they’ve managed to live through the hard times, and now they see the government in Charleston going back to the same old dog-and-pony show they had to endure before the world fell apart a few years ago. They’re not going to put up with supporting what they perceive as an entire underclass. You might as well get that through your head once and for all.”

  “I might, Ben. But many of those around me won’t.”

  “Then they’re going to be in deep trouble. Oh, hell, Homer. Americans are probably the most compassionate and giving people on the face of the earth. You know that. But you also know that just before the Great War, many believed America was teetering on the brink of a race war.”

  “If that is true, and I think it probably was, it was due entirely to racism,” Homer said stubbornly.

  “On both sides of the color line, Homer. On both sides.”

  General Bodison and Son Moon had both sat silently, keeping their expressions neutral as the President of the United States and the commanding general of the Rebel Army argued.

  “Bullshit, Ben!”

  “No, Homer. Fact.”

  “Time, gentlemen, time,” General Bodison finally said since both men were getting a little hot under the collar. “You are both right to a degree. But this is not the place to discuss it.”

  Homer struggled to get his famous temper under control and Ben nodded his head and leaned back in his chair.

  “Being who and what I am,” Son Moon said softly, “I am certainly not unfamiliar with racism. But I have never experienced the terrible racism that so many blacks say they have to endure. I wonder why that is?”

  Ben smiled, and that smile infuriated Homer Blanton. General Bodison sighed, knowing the argument was not yet over.

  “Perhaps, Mr. Secretary General,” Homer said, “it is because of your education.”

  “In part. But only in part,” the Secretary General retorted. “I think by and large it is because, while I am quite proud of my heritage, as all people should be, I do not flaunt it in the face of others. My God is how I perceive Him to be. I do not sit on television shows and tell others that their God is Oriental and they must accept that as fact. I can prove my heritage; I have no need to engage in half-truths and pure myths.”

  Son Moon leaned back in his chair, folded his arms across his chest, and half closed his eyes. The inscrutable Oriental.

  Ben chuckled; General Bodison exhaled, and Homer Blanton got up and started for the door, clearly angry.

  “Homer!” Ben said. Blanton turned and faced him. “We still have a war to fight and decisions to be made. And we either make them right now or everybody goes down the toilet. Including those who put you in office and whom you believe can do no wrong.”

  “Goddamnit, Ben!” Homer flared. “You wanna get off my ass?”

  “Are you going to sit down and work with us on this matter?”

  Homer walked around the table twice, getting his temper under control, and then returned to his seat. He stared at Ben for a moment. “Have you been playing devil’s advocate in this discussion, Ben?”

  “No, I have not. I’m just trying to get you to face facts. Not myths, not lies, not half-truths, just facts.”

  But Blanton wasn’t through. “Facts as you see them, Ben.”

  “Ah, shit!” General Bodison muttered.

  Ben shrugged his shoulders. “Are you going to declare martial law and give the people the right to defend themselves against criminals, Homer?”

  “No,” Blanton said.

  “That’s firm?” Ben asked.

  “That’s firm. How you conduct this war over here is your business. How I choose to run the United States of America is my business.”

  “Do I still get those four battalions of troops?”

  “Yes.” He looked at General Bodison. “Get them moving, General.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Blanton left the room.

  “I suppose we should be grateful for small favors,” Ben said.

  “The man can separate the trees that make up the forest,” Son Moon said. “But he cannot see that each tree is different.”

  Son Moon stood up. “I fear for the world,” he said, and then walked out.

  “I’ll get those troops moving, Ben,” Bodison said. He pushed back his chair and left the room.

  Ike McGowan, the ex-SEAL who commanded two battalions of the Rebels, entered the room and sat down, noting the glum look on Ben’s face. Ike and Ben had been friends for years and kept nothing from each other.

  “How bad is it, Ben?”

  “Just about as grim as we’ve ever faced, ol’ buddy.”

  “This push have a name?”

  “Yeah. Operation Hopeless.”

  TWO

  President Homer Blanton flew back to the United States, his feathers still ruffled. Ben started shifting battalions around and beefing up the areas he thought would be the hot spots in the upcoming days.

  Bruno Bottger launched no attacks against the Rebels. But Ben’s intelligence people reported that Bottger was making no efforts to hide the massive movement of troops, all heading straight toward Rebel-held positions. And just before nearly all of Mike Richards’ deep-cover people in Bottger-held territory were rounded up and shot as spies, Mike received one more communiqué, and it shook Ben down to his jump boots.

  “Bruno is fielding an additional ten thousand troops a month, Ben. That’s why he’s holding off attacking us.”

  “Ten thousand troops a month?”

  “You heard it right. He’s getting them from the countries he occupied. My people tell me that this movement has been going on for years. He started with the young children, just like Hitler, and force-fed them his racial hatred bullshit in the schools. About the time you were setting up your old Tri-States, years ago, Bottger was on the move. He’s been at this a lot longer than we first believed. He also took a page from you, Ben.”

  “Military training in school.”

  “Right. But while you don’t start until middle school, Bruno was starting the kids in pre-school. Four and five years old. Love of Bruno Bottger and his twisted philosophy is all they know. He went into gang-ravaged and lawless countries and stabilized them. He controls everything from the Baltic down to the Black Sea. The adults despise him while their kids love him. Just like the old Germany of sixty-odd years ago.”

  “Kids turning in their parents for treason?”

  “You bet.”

  “Drop the other boot, Mike,” Ben told his chief of intelligence.

  “I have several more boots to drop, Ben. Bottger’s movement has spread out of Europe. He has a lot of supporters in both South and . . .” Mike paused and stared at Ben. “. . . North America.”

  “Son of bitch! How much support in America?”

  “Can’t get a fix on it as yet. But he’s got at least a toehold in North America. Maybe more than that.”

  Mike stood up and walked around the room for a moment. He turned to face Ben. “At first, and for a long time, those groups in America loved you. They thought you were hard right-wing all the way. About a couple of years ago, they finally began to realize that you were really interested in protecting the rights of people of all colors as long as those people subscribed to the Rebel philosophy. The hidden groups began to slowly turn against us.”

  “So once more,” Ben said, “we have enemies front and back and on both sides of us.”
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br />   “That’s about the size of it.”

  After Mike had left, Ben muttered, “How in the hell did those race-hating groups ever get the idea I was one of them?”

  The deadline that Bruno had laid down had long passed and still he made no effort to attack the Rebels’ positions. But he did continue to move troops up near Rebel positions. The four battalions of troops from American forces arrived and were being held in reserve, far back from the front. Ben flew back to the staging area to meet with their commander, Colonel Lee Flanders, a man who had been a professional soldier since he enlisted in the army as a teenager and had worked his way up the ranks. He was a mustang, starting out as an enlisted man, and that brought him and Ben even closer together.

  Ben laid it out for the colonel, with no whitewashing of what they were up against.

  Colonel Flanders had but three words to say when Ben finished. “Jesus Christ, General!”

  Ben was amused at Lee’s reaction. “We’re only outnumbered about forty or fifty to one, Colonel. The Rebels are used to that.”

  Colonel Flanders studied Ben for a moment. “I was informed that you were a right-wing racist, General. Yet I have personally seen and spoken to men and women of all races, all creeds, and all colors in your army.”

  “Let’s just say that over the years I have gotten a lot of bad press, Colonel.”

  Grim soldier humor surfaced in both men, and they laughed. “Right, sir,” Lee said. “I do know the feeling.”

  “I’ve ordered half-a-dozen senior Rebels back here to start briefing your people on the situation and to begin indoctrination on the Rebel way of doing things, Colonel. Have you ever fought against us?”

  “No, but I have talked with men who have. To a person they all agreed that they would rather stick their hands into a sack full of rattlesnakes than tangle with Ben Raines’ Rebels. Are you really that mean, General?”

  “Let’s just say we don’t believe in taking many prisoners, Colonel.”

  “After capture, my men are trained to be as compassionate as possible to the enemy, General Raines.”

  “Have they ever fought Creepies?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Your men are going to change their minds after their first encounter with those bastards. Providing the Creeps don’t eat them before they can.”

  Colonel Flanders grimaced. “Then all the things we’ve heard about the . . . ah . . . Night People are true?”

  “Everything you’ve heard and ten thousand times more. And don’t get yourselves captured by any of these punk gangs that Bottger has recruited. In their own way, they’re just as bad. They have nothing to lose, Colonel. Nothing at all. They’re all under a death sentence by one government or another. My intelligence people believe that any who might have surrendered, have done so. Now, Colonel, I want some information from you.”

  “Sir?”

  “Tell me what you know about this rather large group of people who have surfaced out in the Midwestern section of the United States who have this wild plan to round up the nation’s blacks and put them on reservations.”

  “I’ll tell you what my people have found out about them, General. I know the leader is someone called Billy Smithson and that is his real name.”

  “Billy Smithson,” Ben repeated the name. “That has a familiar ring to it.”

  “He was a TV preacher before the Great War.”

  “Ahhh! Right.” Ben had a puzzled look on his face. “And he was a good one, too. There was never a breath of scandal about him. He wasn’t a ranter or raver and he was universally liked. But I seem to recall he was a moderate on the subject of race.”

  “Not anymore, General. He did a hard one-eighty.”

  “Why?”

  “You might recall his family was slaughtered by a gang of punks about a year before the balloon went up. His wife, kids, and mother and father.”

  “That’s right. Now I remember. It was a two- or three-car caravan. They were going to services and got caught up in a crossfire between rival gangs. Yes. The punks were caught, but Smith wasn’t happy with the sentences handed down.”

  “‘Not happy’ is an understatement, General. He left his TV ministry and dropped out of sight. Now we know what he’s been doing.”

  “Then you think he’s serious about all this?”

  “About as serious as an iron lung. We know now that he’s the one who spread the rumors about a certain section of the Midwest being hot with radiation. Even you bought the rumor.”

  “I sure did. So that’s where he’s been headquartered, building his army.”

  “That’s right, sir. And he’s got one hell of an army, too. My people tell me they are as professional as anything they’ve ever seen. It took them about six weeks to clean out Missouri, General. And I mean turn it totally white.”

  “All this was done while we’ve been over here?”

  “Smithson started his purge about two months ago . . . started it very quietly and finished it very quietly.”

  “So he’s got people in my organization?”

  “I’d bet on it. Hell, sir. He’s got people on Blanton’s staff. Why haven’t you been informed of this, General?”

  “I already knew part of what you’ve told me. But not all of it. My chief of intelligence thinks his group has been penetrated.”

  “Probably has. This Smithson is a smart one. He’s not one of these pus-gutted, pig-eyed, shit-ignorant cross-burners. He’s a highly educated, very intelligent man.”

  “You think he would throw in with Bottger?”

  Colonel Flanders’ brow furrowed in thought for a moment. He shook his head. “I don’t think he would, General. Bottger is a bloodthirsty savage. Smithson is not. When he purged Missouri, his orders were to move the blacks out, not kill them. There were very few casualties.”

  “You think he would agree to fight alongside me?”

  The colonel was clearly startled at that question. “Goddamn, General, you don’t mind stepping up and shaking hands with the devil, do you?”

  “Not if it helps me defeat Bottger.”

  Flanders thought about that for a moment and then smiled. “Of course, if you could get Smithson to split his forces—say, half over here and half back home—then when this is over here, he’d be more easily defeated, right?”

  “Why, Colonel, what a terribly devious mind you have!”

  Ben sent Mike Richards back Stateside to try to set up a meeting with Billy Smithson, but he did not inform President Blanton of his plans. Ben was having serious doubts as to how long Blanton and his government were going to be able to stay in power. There were dangerous cracks already appearing in Blanton’s hold on the new White House.

  “I feel sorry for the man,” Ben said to Ike. “He’s basically a really decent person who was handed a lot of bad advice over the years.”

  Ike grunted. The ex-SEAL was not nearly so taken with Blanton as Ben was. Ike not only didn’t trust liberals, he had absolutely no use for them.

  Ben smiled at his long-time friend. “I’ve seen you risk your life many times to get a dog or a cat or a horse out of the line of fire, Ike.”

  “That doesn’t make me a liberal, Ben. Just an animal-lover. Besides, I’ve seen you do the same damn thing.”

  Ben laughed and looked at the room full of Batt Coms and resistance leaders from more than half-a-dozen countries. “This is probably going to be the last meeting for a long time, people. Bottger is gearing up for a push.” He sighed. His smile faded, and his shoulders slumped for a moment. “And there is no way in hell we’re going to be able to hold against over a quarter-of-a-million troops.”

  “Have you heard anything from this Billy Smith-son, Dad?” Tina asked.

  “No. Well . . . only that he doesn’t really trust me.”

  The room rocked with laughter. “I certainly can’t imagine why that would be,” Dan Gray, the former British SAS officer, said.

  “Me, neither,” Ben said innocently. “After all, I was a Bo
y Scout.”

  “Before you got kicked out for stealing a boat and trying to navigate your way down the river to the Girl Scout camp with two cases of beer and several quarts of whiskey,” Dr. Chase said.

  “Not true,” Ben said. “It was six cases of beer and no whiskey.”

  “Did you make it, Dad?” Ben’s son, Buddy, asked.

  “No. The damn boat hit some rocks and sank.”

  “Damn landlubber,” Ike said. “Can’t even navigate a rowboat down a river.”

  Colonel Flanders smiled at the easy camaraderie among the men and women. It was easy for his soldier’s mind to grasp why the Rebels were such an effective fighting force. In the short time he’d been on the continent, he’d watched them closely. The Rebels moved with the precision of a ten-thousand-dollar watch. Lee Flanders would admit to anyone that he was in awe of them.

  But could they stop a quarter-of-a-million fanatics? No. Even Ben Raines readily granted that.

  “You’re deep in thought, Lee.” Ben’s voice cut into his musings.

  “Yes,” the colonel acknowledged. “I was thinking about Bottger and his troops.”

  “As we all are,” General Vanderhoot of the Free Dutch said.

  René Seaux of the French Resistance Forces looked at Ben, standing on the stage of the hotel meeting room. “When we are pushed back to the sea, General . . . what then?”

  “You would think of that,” General Matthies of the German Resistance said acidly.

  Seaux and Matthies held a very deep and profound dislike for one another.

  Seaux looked at him and said, “Fuck you!”

  The two men started for each other and had to be physically restrained. That ended the meeting.

  “You’re wanted over at the comm shack, Chief,” Jersey told him.

  Ben looked down at the diminutive and very lovely Jersey, his self-appointed bodyguard. How many years had it been since she, about seventeen or eighteen at the time, showed up one day out of the ranks and took her position beside him? Seven years, at least. “Lead the way, Jersey.”

  The rest of his team fell in with them as they walked along. Cooper, his driver. Beth, the records-keeper. Corrie, who handled the radio. She had Ben’s husky, Smoot, on a leash.