Survival in the Ashes

by William W. Johnstone

  Again, Villar studied the map. Finally he nodded his head. “We’ll start pulling all units in Wisconsin to our position. They’ll move only at night, using slit headlamps. That will be slow, but will lessen the danger. We won’t cross into Minnesota here. That’s the first route in north of the river and that would be too obvious. We’ll make our crossing just south of Duluth. We’ll punch through and do it fast and hard. Cutting north, we’ll hit Highway Two and stay on it. Karl, tell all units south of the Wisconsin line to cut east for a hundred or so miles, then drive south just as fast as they can. Get under the Rebels’ position and cut west. We’ll make the link in Idaho. Or in hell,” he added grimly. “Whichever comes first.”

  The morning after Buddy’s return, he stepped out of his quarters, relaxed and refreshed after a good night’s sleep. He could not feel his mother’s presense so he concluded the Rebels had bought yet another day of waiting. No one laughed when Buddy talked about his being marked. The Rebels knew that even Ben Raines believed there was some truth in it.

  And they all knew why Buddy had returned.

  After breakfast, Buddy got in his Jeep and drove to the westernmost section of the city under Rebel control and parked, getting out.

  “Yo, Buddy!” a sentry called, looking around his sandbagged position. He was not there to die if Voleta attacked. Just radio in and get the hell back to friendlier lines.

  Buddy called him by name and walked over to the position. “Anything going on?”

  “Dead, man. Coffee?”

  “Yes, that would be nice.”

  Buddy took powerful binoculars and scanned the sentry’s perimeter. The terrain leaped into his view. There was nothing out of the ordinary anywhere he looked. He lowered the binoculars.

  “Did my father Claymore the area?”

  The Rebel smiled. “General Raines didn’t do nothin,’ man. That area is as clean as a needle. If Voleta attacks, I got orders to call in and bug out.”

  “He wants her to attack,” Buddy muttered. “He wants this to come to a head so he can pinch the boil and expel the corruption.”

  “That’s why he wanted you out of here, Buddy. Aw, he isn’t pissed ’cause you came back — and I got that from close to him. He just wanted to spare you the . . . you know.”

  “I know. The death of my mother. She is meaningless to me now. She is a cancer that must be cut out and destroyed. I knew that even before I left her.”

  “Did you?” The sentry shook his head. “No. Forget I even said anything.”

  “Ever think of killing her when I had the chance? Yes. Yes, I did. It was the Old Man, my grandfather, who prevented me from doing that. More than once. And I have never admitted that to anyone.”

  “It won’t go any further, Buddy.”

  “It’s all right if it does. It’s time for me to be truthful. God knows I’m going to have to face up to it all very soon. Tonight. Tomorrow night. The next night. But soon.” He faced the young sentry. “When they attack, you get out very quickly. Use the radio in the Jeep to call in. Don’t waste time staying and playing hero. And above all: don’t let any of them take you alive. The Old Man shielded me from most of what those people are capable of doing, but I saw enough to know it would be an insult to a rabid dog to call them that.”

  “I can just imagine what they would do to a Rebel.”

  “No, you can’t,” Buddy told him. “Not in your wildest screaming nightmares. My mother likes fire, and sharp knives. And she can make the act of dying much more preferable to living. She has kept many prisoners alive for days, slowing skinning them. She is pure evil — if that connection is grammatically acceptable. Her brain is pus and her heart belongs to Satan.”

  The young sentry shivered as chill bumps covered his flesh, although the day was very warm. “This Old Man you talk of . . . he helped you get away?”

  “Yes.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “She tortured him to death, so I later found out.”

  “What kin was he to her?”

  Buddy’s eyes turned cold. “He was her father.”

  FOURTEEN

  The scattered men of the terrorist armies made their night runs to the north with much caution, taking back country roads, avoiding any town that might be populated with anyone with a radio who could call into Ben Raines. And that was getting very nearly impossible to avoid.

  “The bastard has outposts all over the fucking nation,” Villar cursed Ben. “He’s stuck up a clean zone everywhere a hog roots.”

  “And it’s just as bad in Canada,” Khamsin told him. “The damn Canucks put a gun in a child’s hand practically at birth.”

  “Blame that on Ben Raines,” Kenny said. “That’s the one thing he and my father agreed on.”

  Villar consulted a map. They had miles to go and it looked like everybody that was coming in, had arrived. It was obvious that more than half of the terrorists had elected to push south. With a sigh of frustration, he flung the map to the floor and began cursing Ben Raines until he was breathless.

  Kenny read the man’s anguish accurately. “We don’t have the men to punch a hole, do we?”

  “I don’t think so. Not without losing more than we can afford to lose.”

  Khamsin spoke softly, and no one in the room doubted him for an instant. “I will never surrender to Ben Raines. I will die fighting him. Allah be praised!”

  Villar looked at him, a faint light of amusement in his eyes. “How in the hell do you justify calling on your God when you’ve spread unnecessary death and destruction all over the damn world, Khamsin?”

  “I am a believer, that’s why?” The man seemed surprised he would even be asked such a question. “There is a place in heaven for me.”

  “Horseshit!” Kenny said. “People like you fry my ass. At least me and Lan aren’t hypocrites about what we do and what we are. I got a spot in hell reserved for me, and so does Lan. And if the truth be known, so do you, Khamsin. So do you.”

  The outburst didn’t startle or upset Khamsin. He merely shrugged them off as words out of the mouth of an infidel. Like so many people of all faiths, Khamsin was smug about his convictions. He felt in his heart that when he died he would follow the golden path to sit by the side of Allah. What these two nonbelievers thought meant absolutely nothing to him. And he certainly wasn’t going to debate his beautiful religion with anyone who boasted that after death they would have a seat next to Satan.

  “I will lead the assault against the lines of the Rebels,” Khamsin said. “Show me where you wish to break through, and it shall be done.”

  Villar studied the man for a long moment, then slowly nodded his head. The fool believed he could do it, so maybe he could. Let him lose his men trying or succeeding. Villar pointed to the map. “Right here, Khamsin. Right here.”

  The Hot Wind looked at the spot. “It shall be done. Praise Allah!”

  “When nothing is heard from that bastard, Villar,” Dan spoke to Georgi Striganov, “brace yourself. He’s certainly up to something.”

  “I agree,” the Russian said. “He’s had me worried ever since he dropped out of sight.”

  “The bridges are covered on the west side and wired to blow. Villar will have guessed that. He won’t try the bridges. We have people all along the river and they report no sign of the man. My guess is that hell try to punch through between these two spots.” He pointed them out on a map. “Probably just south of Duluth. That will give him good access to this highway.”

  “That is by no means our strongest spot,” Georgi said.

  “Yes.” He glanced at his watch. A couple of hours before dark. No way he could get his people up there in that time. The Interstate was in bad shape and getting worse. But Dan knew he had to try. The assault was coming tonight; he could feel it. “I’ll take my people and pull out now. We’ll be traveling fast, so we won’t have artillery to back us.”

  “I’ll start artillery moving north now. Just in case you’re wrong about the timing.�
��

  “I pray that I am wrong. But I fear that I am correct.”

  Duluth was filled with creepies so the Rebels stayed well away from the city. They would deal with the cannibalistic creeps at a later date.

  Khamsin and his men turned west off a state road in Wisconsin and entered Minnesota on what was left of a country road, crossing over the state line about fifteen miles south of Duluth. Only two squads of Rebels were at that point and Khamsin’s men butchered them, knocking a hole in the thin line through which the terrorist armies poured into the state.

  Dan was on Interstate 35, south and west of the breakthrough when he got the news.

  Dan lost his cool and cut loose with a steady stream of profanity. Not so much that his prey had broken through, but for the men and women lost in the assault.

  He jerked up his mic. “Rebet and Danjou join up with me,” he ordered. “General Striganov, they have broken through. When Voleta hears of this, she’ll attack.”

  “I’ll start my people moving south to beef up the forces in Missouri,” the Russian radioed. “Do you want the artillery I sent to continue following you?”

  “That is ten-four, General. The logical route for Villar to take is Highway Two-ten, so I’m betting he’ll cut north and take Highway Two. I’m taking my people and Rebet and Danjou’s forces and taking two-ten. I’ll stay under him and try to cut him off somewhere along the way.”

  “That is affirmative, Colonel Gray. I will have the artillery cut east, following you. Godspeed.”

  “It was a friggin’ piece of cake,” Villar said to his driver. “And I let that goddamn Libyan take it. Ill never hear the end of it.”

  The driver wanted to say: So what? We got across, didn’t we?

  But he didn’t.

  They crossed the Interstate, picked up Highway 33, and took that to Highway 2, cutting west.

  Villar had no illusions: he knew that Dan Gray would be hot after them. Only one thing would stop Colonel Gray, and that was death. Villar also felt that if there was some sort of existence after death, if Dan Gray didn’t get him in this life, he would in the next.

  Villar knew something else, too; something that he had not shared at length with the others: there was no way they were going to win this fight, or any other fight against Ben Raines and the Rebels. Raines had thought it all out and had it perfected. The son of a bitch had spent years going all over the nation, collecting every tank, every piece of artillery, and hauling it off to only he and God and a few Rebels knew where. And no one was going to win against Ben Raines without long-range artillery and tanks. And to make matters worse, Raines had done the same thing with cars and trucks too. He was more than a warrior. He was a thinker, a planner, a teacher, a philosopher, and a doer.

  “We’re going to look this situation over with Malone,” Villar said. “We might even stay awhile. But we’ll eventually pull out.”

  “To where?” his driver asked.

  “The one place that, to the best of my knowledge, Raines had never shown any interest in.”

  “And that is?”

  “Alaska!”

  “Here they come!” sentries all up and down the line shouted into their mics as Voleta’s army began advancing toward Columbia and Jefferson City.

  “Fall back!” the order from Ben went up and down the line.

  The sentries on the east side of the river beat it back across the bridge and watched as Voleta’s forces took control of the airport.

  “Airport’s in their hands, now,” they radioed to Ben’s CP.

  “Let them have it,” Ben said, as much to himself as to the others in the room. “They won’t do anything with it. They damn sure don’t have any planes and if they try to cross that river at night, we’ll be waiting for them when they step ashore.”

  In Columbia, as Ben had done in Jefferson City, West had pulled his battalion into the center of the city. Tanks had been rammed inside buildings and hidden, the muzzles of the 90mm and 105’s lowered to the max. The .50-caliber machine gun emplacements were set up and heavily fortified with sandbags. Each Rebel had food enough for several days and boxes of ammo, grenades, rockets and mortar rounds.

  In both cities, the Rebels waited.

  Voleta halted her troops on the outskirts of the suburbs and called for a meeting of her commanders.

  “Not a shot has been fired,” she said. “Have we been mislead? Is Ben Raines even in the city?”

  “He’s there,” she was told. “And we have not been mislead.”

  “Then why is he doing nothing?”

  “Perhaps the man has lost his mind,” another commander offered that. It got him a dirty look from Voleta but she let him continue. “He’s placed himself in a death trap. He can’t cross the Missouri River. Our people have taken control of the airport and Highway Fifty-four. . . .”

  What the commander failed to realize was that Ben had heavy artillery up and down West Main and Capitol Avenue, and it was slightly less than two miles from there to the airport. Ben could annihilate Voleta’s forces across the river at any time he so desired.

  “. . . As far as I can see, Sister, General Raines has put himself in a box and nailed the lid shut . . .”

  Ben was in a box, all right, but it was a box of his own construction. Over the years, the Rebels had become not only the most feared guerrilla fighters anywhere in the nation — and probably around the globe — but they had also become highly expert at urban warfare. Voleta’s army was made up of dedicated men and women, but damn few true, disciplined soldiers among the bunch. They outnumbered the Rebels in this battle, but the Rebels were used to being outnumbered. They would have felt they were taking advantage of the enemy if they were on a par.

  “. . . Before you halted the advance, Sister, our troops in Columbia had penetrated well into the city limits and had met no hostile action. The city appears deserted . . .”

  Columbia was anything but deserted. Like Jefferson City, it was a deadly trap waiting to be sprung. West, limping around with a cast on his foot, had laid out his battle plans well. His mercenary troops lay still as death’s touch, waiting.

  “. . . We have intercepted radio messages that tell us the Russian is on his way south, to beef up General McGowan and his troops. Sister, without Ben Raines, the Rebels will fall apart. If we are to succeed, we must strike now, and strike hard!”

  There was truth in what the man said, but still Voleta was not convinced. She knew Ben too well; knew him for the fanged poisonous snake that he was; knew how treacherous the man could be. If Ben Raines had put himself into a box, he had a hole from which to escape. She would bet her brassiere on that. If she wore a brassiere. Which she didn’t.

  And Ben had guessed accurately on another point. He had guessed that after the debacle in the Northwest, where Voleta’s troops had taken a battering, she would be low on mortar rounds. And she was. She still had plenty of ammo for light weapons, but practically no rockets or mortars.

  “Get those damnable motorcyclists up here,” she ordered.

  The leader of the bunch, Satan, stepped into the tent moments later. He didn’t like this bitch, and knew she didn’t like him. But for Satan’s bunch, it was the best game in town, so he’d take orders from her . . . for a while longer, anyway.

  “I want a recon team sent into the city, Satan. I want them to penetrate as far as Southwest Boulevard. Here!” she showed him the map. “And report back to me.”

  “That ain’t no sweat, lady,” the huge, evil-looking biker said. “I don’t even think Ben Raines is in the damn city.”

  “There is one way to find out,” she said, smiling as sweetly as was possible for her. Her smile held all the warmth of a striking cobra. “Go in and look.”

  Satan stood his ground. “You know what I’m gonna do when all this shit is over, lady?”

  “I couldn’t possibly imagine,” she replied. “Or care,” she added.

  “Oh, you’ll care, all right. You an ugly whore, but I think you got a coupl
e more good fucks in you. When this is over, me and you is gonna get it on.”

  She spat in his face and flung out a hand just in time to prevent the others in the tent from shooting the biker.

  Laughing, Satan left the room. “Yeah, baby,” he called over his shoulder. “I might even let you get some lipstick on my dipstick.”

  “That is the most disgusting creature I have ever encountered, Sister,” a commander said. “Why don’t you let me shoot him?”

  “Because while he is a loathsome being, we do need him,” she said sourly. “At least for a little while longer.”

  “Or some stain on my thing!” Satan hollered from the outside.

  “Ashley was a coward,” a woman said. “But at least he would show some respect for you.”

  “Ashley was a fool,” Voleta said, as the sounds of motorcycles leaving the camp roared into her ears. “But I have to admit, he was a pleasant fool.”

  “Leave the light on, baby!” Satan screamed as he roared past. “I might decide to jolly you tonight.”

  Voleta grimaced and gave the voice the finger.

  FIFTEEN

  “Don’t fire on the bikers,” Ben warned his people. “Don’t make a sound. Keep your heads down and let’s see how far they penetrate.”

  The Rebels burrowed deeper in the homes and buildings and dark alleyways. Most had changed from lizard and tiger-stripe to dark urban BDUs. With the moonless night, they were almost invisible.

  The team of bikers split up, some traveling on Highway 50, others turning onto Stadium Boulevard and then onto Edgewood, with all of them stopping at Southwest Boulevard. Satan waited at the intersection for his bikers to regroup.