Terror in the Ashes

by William W. Johnstone

  Ben nodded his head. “You want to take your battalion on back to the States, Ike?”

  Ike looked startled, then laughed out loud. “Oh, hell, no, Ben. But you know me; you ask me a question, I’m going to tell you the truth. I just never could shake the knowledge that it was their ancestors who ate Captain Cook.”

  Ben laughed at his friend. “Now, Ike, history says they killed them. I don’t whether they ate him or not. Anyway, our ancestors burned people at the stake as witches.”

  Ike tried his best to look hurt. He didn’t make it. “Not mine, Ben. Mine just planted cotton down in Mississippi.”

  Order was very quickly restored on the islands. None of the new groups of citizen-soldiers brought back any prisoners from the interior, and Ben said nothing about it. Neither did he say anything when men and women who had collaborated with the outlaws and pirates were executed. The Tahitians had learned a hard lesson about justice when the criminal element had taken over, and Ben felt that episode would not be repeated.

  Rebel engineers worked side by side with Tahitian engineers to restore power to the islands, and communications were established with Base Camp One in the States. Three weeks after the Rebels sailed in, they sailed out, heading for the Marquesas. Those islands would be their last stop before they launched their assault on the Hawaiian chain.

  And Ben made it clear to his people that the assault on the Hawaiian chain was going to be a piss-cutter. This time they could not stand back and punish the enemy with artillery fire. They were going to have to go in from the git-go and slug it out. The Rebels were going to take casualties, and they probably would be high.

  Ben never lied to his people, so they knew that when he told them the battle was going to be a tough one, it would be.

  The trip to the Marquesas was a short one, and the convoy approached the small islands and slowed to a crawl.

  “The pirates are getting antsy, General,” Corrie told him. “There is a lot of nervous chatter going on.”

  “I’d be nervous, too, if I was in their shoes,” Ben said. “Corrie, tell communications to advise those outlaws on the islands I will give them one chance to surrender. If we have to come ashore fighting, there will be very few prisoners taken.”

  The sight must have been both awesome and terrifying to those on the small islands. The outlaws and pirates and thugs paled at the sight of the huge ships with thousands of Rebel troops on board.

  Corrie listened for a moment, then smiled. “General . . . they have no stomach for a fight. They’re packing it in.”

  “Well, shit!” Jersey said. “Are we ever going to see any action?”

  Once again, the Rebels assumed the role of administrators and set about bringing order and justice back to the people of the small island chain. The only Rebel blood that was spilled came from the bite of a vicious little sand gnat called the nono fly. The bite is painless, but scratch it — and scratch it you will — several hours later, and the welt will burst, bleed, and become infected unless immediately treated.

  “Irritating little bastards!” Ben muttered, mightily resisting the urge to scratch.

  “I’d rather be fighting people,” Cooper bitched. “At least you can see them.”

  Ben left the fate of the prisoners to the Marquesans. And as happened on Tahiti, the islanders dealt with them quickly. Ben did not ask what they did with the bodies. However, not all were hanged or shot, for the island’s structures and roads needed rebuilding. Many prisoners were put to work, under heavy guard.

  “These people also practiced cannibalism,” Ike said, reading from a book. “Or their ancestors did, rather.”

  Ben smiled and slapped at a gnat. “Don’t worry, Ike. There isn’t a pot on this island big enough to put you in.”

  Dr. Chase stood by the railing beside Ben as the convoy began its last leg, toward Hawaii. “What will it be like here fifty years down the road, Ben?” His eyes were on the island, now rapidly fading from view.

  “As isolated as they are, Lamar. God only knows. They are the most remote islands on the face of the earth. But, with Tahiti once more with order and law, the old link will probably be restored. It’s up to them, now.”

  Corrie walked up. “General, Communications says we have distress signals, in English, coming from American Samoa, and the same from the Fijis. The captain wants to know what course to set.”

  Chase laughed at the expression on Ben’s face. “It’s still part of America, Ben.”

  “Yeah. I know. All right, Corrie. Let’s go see Pago Pago. How far is it, anyway?”

  “A little over two thousand miles,” Beth told him.

  “Wonderful,” Ben said dryly. “There is nothing like an ocean cruise to clear one’s head. How’s Cooper?”

  “Down below,” Jersey replied. “Puking.”

  The convoy turned west. But this time, unlike the long voyage around the Horn, they began seeing ship after ship, long dead in the water. Teams boarded the ships, inspecting them and returning with the logbooks.

  Ben held the decade-old log of a freighter, turning it around and around in his hands. His thoughts were not of the logbook, however. They were of the old tourist pamphlet he’d read that morning. About American Samoa.

  “Corrie, are we still receiving distress signals from Samoa and Fiji?”

  “Yes, sir. Those people must really be taking a pasting to have held on this long.”

  Dr. Chase looked at him. “What’s on your mind, Ben?”

  “It’s a trap,” Ben said, tossing the log to a Rebel. “We’re being set up.”

  “Those calls sound pretty damned sincere to me,” Chase said.

  “Oh, I’m sure they are. But from whom? Look, at the start of the Great War, the entire population of those islands was only about thirty-five thousand. Disease, pirates, outlaws, all those things would have taken a toll. These calls are coming from Pago Pago, right, Corrie?”

  She nodded.

  “A decade ago, three thousand population. Say it’s still that, although doubtful. Five hundred would be men able to fight. Holding off hordes of invaders all these days we’ve been at sea, Lamar? Not likely.”

  “But how would they fool us long enough to get us ashore once we’re there and have seen it?” Jersey asked.

  “Mock battles, at first. Then, as soon as we storm ashore, the so-called enemy would retreat. We’d follow, and they’d have us in a trap. Corrie, I want Communications to press those beleaguered people for details. I want numbers, how many are defending, how many attacking. How long they’ve been under attack, wounded, food and ammo supplies left, where they want us to land, the whole nine yards.”

  “Right, sir.”

  “And get all the batt comms on this ship, pronto.”

  “Right, sir.”

  Ben smiled. But it was not a pleasant thing to witness. “They want to play deadly games? I can do that.”

  Fifteen

  Ben read the reports and knew he’d been right. They were sailing into a trap. The answers to the questions Communications had asked were too pat, too quick, and too obviously a lie.

  “Eyes in the skies,” Ben ordered. “Turn them into flying gas tanks if you have to, but I want them ranging out as far as they can safely go. We’re either being followed or closely tracked electronically, or they’ve got attack vessels tucked away behind some of these tiny islands. You can bet your bippy on that.”

  “Maintain course and speed?” the Captain asked.

  “Right. Stay with it. Ike, you and Dan get your special ops people ready to go in. Use your minisubs and underwater delivery vehicles. Dan, your people go in silently and in blackface.”

  Both men nodded and left the room.

  Ben lifted the reports and read them again. “Bastards,” he muttered.

  “We get some action this time, huh, General?” Jersey asked.

  “You bet, Jersey. This will warm us up for Hawaii.”

  “This going to take long?”

  “It might take l
onger than we think. But the big island is only about fifty square miles. Shouldn’t take us too long.”

  “Are we going to this Fiji place?”

  “I don’t know, Jersey. I just don’t know.”

  Corrie stuck her head inside the room. “Bingo, General. Choppers found some ships all tucked in nice.” She moved to the wall map. “Around this little bit of an island here.” She pointed. “Choppers veered off just as soon as the ships were sighted. The spotters were using powerful binoculars, so there is a good chance they weren’t seen.”

  “Good. We’ll keep monitoring their distress calls to see if there is any change in voice timbre.” He looked up as Buddy and Rebet walked in. Ben pointed to the map. “When we get here, sometime late tomorrow, we’ll slow speed down to dead slow or whatever it’s called and launch our night attack from that point. We’ll go in right behind the special ops people. One hour before dawn.”

  “Who will be leading the assault?” Buddy asked.

  Ben looked at him and smiled.

  The pirates later confessed that they were sure Ben and the Rebels would just sail right into Pago Pago’s deep-sheltered harbor, which is guarded by a twenty-one-hundred-foot peak called Matafao. Once there, the pirates planned to use fast little torpedo boats to sink some of the Rebel ships and block the harbor. How they planned on eventually removing the huge sunken transports was something to which they had not given any thought at all.

  It was all moot anyway, as a pirate on guard turned to a friend in the darkness. It was an hour before dawn. “Cigarette, Marcel?” he asked.

  Marcel did not reply. It would have been nothing short of a miracle had he said anything.

  “You asleep, hey, mon ami?” the pirate asked. He touched his friend on the shoulder and the man fell over. The pirate dropped to his knees in the gloom and touched the man’s neck, feeling for a pulse. What he found was stickiness. His friend’s throat had been sliced. He jumped up and opened his mouth to yell. A wire was looped around his throat and jerked tight, cutting off the shout. He died a moment later as a knife was jammed into his stomach and ripped upward, cutting the heart. His body was lowered to the ground.

  Two of Ike’s SEALs smiled at each other and moved on.

  All around the edges of the U-shaped harbor, dead pirates lay in their own blood, their throats sliced wide open.

  Pirate commanders began to feel a chill as their radio operators could not contact guardposts. “Find out what’s happening. Contact the lookouts on the bluffs above the harbor.”

  Silence greeted their calls. Dan’s Scouts had moved through the town like wraiths, climbed the bluffs, and eased into position. Ten minutes before the assault boats carrying the Rebels were to shove off from the mother ships, they went about their deadly business.

  Then both special ops teams began blocking roads. There is only fifty miles of paved highway on the island, and once the intersections were blocked, travel by vehicle was severely hampered.

  Tension grew on the island and many pirates began to panic, looking wildly around them as the silence grew.

  “Assault craft approaching the coast!” one of the few lookouts left shouted. “Jesus Christ, I never seen so many boats. They’s thousands of troops.”

  His words were a prelude to dying as a special ops member tossed a fire-frag grenade into the room and ducked as the lookout was splattered on the walls.

  Charges planted by the special ops teams were detonated, the explosions rocking the pre-dawn. Rebels stormed ashore and set about their deadly trade.

  “Squad one here,” Ben called. He pointed to a stone fence. “Set your machine gun there. You two put some rockets into that house right in front of us.”

  The house erupted in shattered wood and stone and body parts. Heavy machine gun fire hammered the cool darkness.

  The pirate in charge, who was later identified as a thug named Leo, screamed out orders, trying to rally his forces. But his forces were demoralized and scared, and many of them were already dead as the Rebels’ advance was sudden and merciless. They took very few prisoners. If anyone greeted them with a gun in hand, they were dead on the spot. There were a lot of dead in a very short time.

  Ben’s team was on the move, and his platoon was having a hard time just keeping up with him. Ben grabbed up a pale and badly frightened little boy. The child trembled in his arms. “Where are your parents, boy?”

  “Dead, sir,” the child replied. “I’m the slave of Leo. I jumped out the winder when the shootin’ began.”

  “You’re nobody’s slave,” Ben told him, then handed the child to a medic. “Check him over and get him back to safe lines. Come on, people.”

  “God damn it, Father!” Buddy yelled from behind him. “Will you slow down and hunt a hole?”

  “No,” Ben called over his shoulder. “You either lead, follow, or get the hell out of the way.”

  “I’m trying to follow,” his son yelled.

  Everybody hit the ground as several heavy machine guns opened up, the lead howling and whistling over their heads. Ben and his people rolled for the safety of walls.

  “Grenades on three,” Ben called. “Pass the word.”

  The count went down and two dozen grenades blasted the grayness of dawning in the small town. The machine-guns fell silent. Moaning drifted to the Rebels.

  Ben was up and running for a grocery store — or what had once been one. He ran through the empty doorframe, his CAR-15 rattling as shapes spun around in the gloom, weapons lifting. It was 9mm slugs that spun them around. Ben dropped to one knee, giving those behind him room to fire. The old store trembled as M-16’s, M-60’s, and Stoners roared and clattered. The rear wall of the store was slick with blood and pocked with bullet holes.

  Ben ran up the short block and ducked into another store just as hostile fire opened up from the second floor of a building across the street. A dozen M203 grenade launchers thumped in the dawning and the entire second floor was blown apart.

  “Ike reporting one of the canneries is ours and the second one is under hard attack by Rebet,” Corrie said.

  Buddy had rallied a full platoon and came running up to flop down beside his father, as the other Rebels fanned out around Ben’s position.

  “Where have you been, boy?” Ben asked, a smile on his lips. “Resting?”

  “Very funny, Father. Quite amusing. What are your plans now? Other than playing the hero, that is.”

  Ben chuckled. “Taking the old hotel, one block over and just up the street.”

  “Now, if you have never before been here, as you said, just how do you know that?”

  “I looked at a map, son. Let’s go!” Ben was up and running, his team right behind him, Buddy and the platoon bringing up the rear, with Buddy doing some pretty fancy cussing, all of it directed at his father.

  A line of pirates tried to run across the street. Ben and his team cut them down and left them flopping as they jumped over the bodies and headed for the old Rainmaker Hotel. Every ground floor window suddenly bristled with guns and the Rebels hit the streets, rolling and ducking for cover.

  “Launch the gunships,” Ben spoke to Corrie. “Take the hotel down. All Rebels, back off a block. Now. Move!”

  The Rebels pulled back as the choppers came hammering in, unleashing their terrible array of weaponry.

  Within seconds, the old hotel was burning from the rocket attack and pirates were running outside for safety. Had they come out weaponless, they would have been taken alive. But they chose to come out shooting. That lapse in judgment got them Rebel bullets and very quickly dead. The choppers headed for the airport to give Striganov and his battalion a hand. Just over an hour later, Pago Pago was, for the most part, in Rebel hands.

  By the end of that day, it was apparent that the pirates had killed a large part of the population of the island.

  “They were very cruel people, General,” a man introduced as Paale said. He had been in the House of Representatives before the Great War. “They tortur
ed and raped and mutilated for the fun of it. When they wanted to have target practice, they used the old and the sick for targets.”

  “Western Samoa?” Ben asked.

  “The same. It will not be so easy over there. Those are two big islands. Twenty times our size.”

  “We’ll secure it,” Ben assured the man.

  “How about trials and punishment for those taken alive?”

  “That’s up to you people.”

  Paale smiled, excused himself, and went off to aid in the hunt for fugitive pirates. Ben had a hunch that justice was going to come down very quick and very final.

  He turned to Corrie. “Have Thermopolis, West, Danjou, and Dan’s battalions establish a beachhead on Upolu. We’ll clean up here and join them in the assault on Savaii.”

  “Right, sir.”

  Within minutes, the big ships had ceased their slow circling and were heading for Western Samoa.

  “That wasn’t no fair court of law!” a pirate protested, his hands tied behind his back. “You can’t just take me out and hang me.”

  “You want to bet?” a Samoan asked him, prodding him along with the muzzle of a rifle.

  The pirate spotted Ben. “Hey! Soldier boy. You can’t let them do this to me. I’m American. Just like you.”

  “There is nothing about you that is like me,” Ben told the man. He looked at Jersey. “Now he’s going to tell me he was abused as a child.”

  “Right,” she said.

  “I was abused as a child!” the pirate said. “Society made me do all them things I done.”

  “Poor fellow,” Beth said. “My heart just goes out to him.”

  Buddy looked at her. “I can see that you are awfully upset about it.”

  Beth took a bite of sandwich and washed it down with water from her canteen. “Sure,” she said.

  The Rebels were ice-cold emotionally when it came to criminals. Whenever one of them wanted a good laugh, Ben always kept copies of books and newspapers and magazine articles for them to read. The books and articles were collected souvenirs from the 1970s, and ’80s, all written by so-called experts on the subject of crime. The Rebels thought it hysterically funny when they read the theories about why people turn to a life of crime and do horrible things to other people. It cracked them up when they read that because a coach wouldn’t let a kid play, the kid immediately went out and hacked his grandmother to death and then got off without serving any time, or at best, a few months or years. Hack your grandmother to death in any Rebel society and you might have time to pray (but do it quickly) before somebody slipped a noose around your neck and stretched it.