The Rebels had done all any of them knew to do. They were ready. Now came the hardest part: the waiting.
Cecil was commanding a battalion that was dug in Columbia. Ben knew there would be some wicked street fighting there, much of it hand to hand. Ben had tried to talk Cecil out of taking command, but the black man would not be deterred from the job.
“You’re too damned old for this job, Cecil,” Ben told him. “Let a younger man have it and back me up at HQ. I guarantee you, you’ll see all the combat you’ll want to see there.”
“I seem to recall I did a pretty damned good job at this in “Nam,” Cecil responded.
“Goddamn it, Cec, that was almost thirty years ago! Tell me about it, man-I was there too, you know?”
Cecil looked around him, his beret placed properly on his head, like the Green Beret Cecil had been. It was worn unlike Ben’s black beret, which he still wore in Ranger fashion: cocky.
“Ben, some of these kids weren’t even born when you and I did our thing in ‘nam. Damn, Ben. No, they’re going to need a calm head here.”
“A calm gray head,” Ben said sarcastically.
Cecil smiled. “I matured early for my age.”
Ben laughed, knowing he was not going to sway his old friend, and moved on down the line of Rebels.
He received the thumbs-up signal from each squad or platoon or company he passed. They were ready. These men and women nicknamed Raines’s Rebels by the press years back. They were ready for a good fight. They knew the odds were hard against them, knew casualties would be high and that many would die. They knew only too well the price of freedom came high-it never came cheaply.
They were ready to die for freedom. Theirs and anyone else’s that might be threatened.
Ready.
Back at HQ, Ben told Gale, “You will stay with Chase at the hospital. You’re a nurse, and that is where you’ll be needed. And I will not have any static from you about it. Is that clear?”
She smiled sweetly at him. Very sweetly. Too sweetly. “I have already made arrangements to do just that, General, sir. And I didn’t need you to tell me about it. Thanks just the same.”
That night, on the eve of the battle that would, although neither the Russian nor the American knew it, forever split the nation and plunge the ravaged country into a sickening slide toward barbarism, ignorance and tribal law, Ben and Gale engaged in the gentlest and most deeply satisfying love-making of their relationship. And Gale sensed with a woman’s insight on such
matters that she became pregnant.
And she knew she wanted this child more than anything else in the world.
When Ben was asleep (she could never understand how the man could quietly drop off when faced with such a monumental task as that which lay before him) she rose from their blankets to stand some distance away from Ben’s sleeping form, to stand looking up at the cloudless star-filled heavens. She spoke to and asked questions of her god, and seemed satisfied with the silent words that filled her head. As she turned to return to Ben’s side, she was startled to see a figure standing by a huge tree, gazing at her. She looked around her, curious to see if anyone else had noticed the man.
No one had, although the guards were plainly in sight all around the encampment-and that really piqued her curiosity.
Gale walked to the shadowy umbrella created by the huge limbs of the old tree and stood facing the man. She had, she concluded, never seen anything quite like him.
She studied him in silence, as he was silently studying her. “How did you get in this area without being shot?” she asked.
The old man smiled. His smile seemed to light the area around them. “You would not understand if I chose to tell you.”
“Oh yeah?” Gale looked more closely at the old man. He wore robes and sandals and carried a big stick. A staff, the word popped into her brain. His beard was long and very white. He looked older than God. “What do you want?”
The man looked at her more closely; his eyes seemed amused, then sad, or so it appeared to Gale. Finally, he said. “No, you are not the one. But you will help the man in his struggles. That will be seen to. You have my word.”
“What!” Gale reached the conclusion that this guy was not playing with a full deck of cards.
Ben and Ike and Cecil had told her about the many cults that were springing up around the torn nation. She had seen some with her own eyes during her wanderings prior to meeting Ben. This nutso had to be one of them-what else?
“I am known as the Prophet.”
“Swell,” she said dryly. “And I’m Mary. Man, you’d better be careful when you leave here. Someone could shoot you.”
His smile was gentle and knowing, and rather, Gale thought, condescending. “I have no fear of death, child.”
“That’s nice, ‘cause frankly, it scares the hell out of me.”
The old man chuckled, a deep sound from his massive chest. “You have a sense of humor. Good, you’ll need it.” The old man glanced up at the sky, as if he had suddenly received some silent message.
Gale looked up, feeling rather foolish as she did so.
“As wars go,” the old man said, “this one will be small in magnitude. But it will be enormous in its ramifications. What follows will be the beginning.”
“Beginning of what?”
“The beginning, child.”
Gale was now one hundred percent certain the old boy was at least three bricks shy of a load. Best humor him. “Right.”
“The strugglings you will all endure will be, of course, right and just and moral, but they will, I must tell you, appear futile.”
Gale shook her head. Maybe the guy had found some old acid and was tripping the light fantastic in his woolly head. “Hadn’t you best be getting on back to the ward?”
The old man smiled indulgently. “I must now tell you goodbye, child.”
On impulse, she put out her hand to touch his arm, but her hand seemed to freeze in midair. She fought to move her hand. It seemed stuck.
“No,” he said gently. “That is not permitted.”
“Are you the reincarnation of Houdini?”
“I am the reincarnation of no one, child. But I am, I can assure you of that.”
“Ah, eh, you’re what?”
But he was gone.
Gale’s arm fell to her side. She lifted it, looked at it. She shook her head. Looked around her. The old boy was nowhere to be seen.
“It was a dream,” she muttered. “Had to be, I’m dreaming, sleepwalking. Couldn’t be anything else.”
She returned to the warmth of the blankets and the soled and comforting shape of Ben. When the first shell from the IPF exploded at 0600 the next morning, Gale forgot all about the man who called himself the Prophet.
For a time.
CHAPTER TWO
It was an artillery duel for the first two days of the battle, with the combatants never catching sight of each other. For the most part, the infantry troops had little to do except stay alive and maintain their sanity under the almost-constant pounding of the big shells.
For those who had never experienced shelling, it was a frightening, numbing experience. The ground seemed to shake constantly, and it appeared that anyplace one sought in safety was the wrong place.
Both the Rebels and the IPF had to constantly shift the positions of their artillery, with the exception of Ben’s big self-propelled 155’s, which could sit back miles from the front and lob destruction and terror into the IPP’S positions with terrifying pinpoint accuracy. Ben was no gentleman at war; he used chemicals, anti-personnel, high explosive, incendiary, and beehive rounds.
Ben kept his tanks in reserve, carefully concealed and camouflaged, even though the crews and commanders were chafing to get into the fight. Ben
wanted something with which to fall back on when the situation began to deteriorate, as he knew it would. That, he knew, was only a matter of time.
The third, fourth and fifth days were ground troops days,
with the infantry troops slugging it out, taking, losing, regaining and losing the same ground a dozen times.
On the sixth day, the IPF attempted to cross the interstate at six locations, sending huge numbers of troops across the concrete in what appeared to be a kamikaze-style rush of bodies.
Five sectors of the Rebels held, but the IPF broke through one line, allowing more troops to pour through and set up positions west, east and south, in the form of an open-ended box. Hector Ramos’s troops were cut off, battling lopsided odds, fighting for their lives.
In western Iowa and central Illinois, the dawning of the new day brought a fresh horror to the men and women of Juan Solis’s and Al Maiden’s troops.
A man’s scream brought Mark Terry on a flat run from his bunker, running hard up the hill to the first line of defense. A man squatted behind sandbags, his face mirroring his horror and revulsion. He seemed unable to speak. He could but point to the valley.
Hartline’s men had been unusually silent for several days, with no attempt to push past their battle lines. There had been only sporadic sniper fire from the west to keep the troops from New Africa alert-a lead reminder that Hartline’s mercs and the IPF had not forgotten them.
The sentry found his voice as he handed Mark binoculars and pointed to the valley. “Nobody could be that low,” he said, his voice choked with anger and frustration.
Mark felt his guts churn and his breakfast fight to lunge from his stomach as he lifted the long-range glasses to his eyes. Like the sentry, he was, for a moment, speechless. He felt the blood rush from his head, and for a moment, thought he would pass out from the sheer horror of the sight in the valley below.
“The dirty bastard!” he finally found his voice.
Al had joined him on the ridge, pulling field glasses to his eyes. “Oh, my God!” he blurted. “Oh, my God, no!”
The IPF and Hartline’s troops were on the march, moving up behind armored personnel carriers. On the front of each APC, strapped to the sloping front of the carrier, a naked woman was positioned, her legs spread wide, ankles and feet secured to the lugs near the base of the Ml13. Her arms were out-flung, wrists tied to the headlight brackets. The machine gun mounted to the front of the APC was only inches from each woman’s head, guaranteeing a savage muzzle-blast burn to the side of the woman’s head.
When the troops on the ridges saw what was coming up behind the APC’S, to a man, they openly, unashamedly wept.
A hundred or so old people were being herded in front of and mixed with the mercenaries and the troops from the IPF.
The elderly black men and women were crying from fear and humiliation as they stumbled along, prodded by the rifle barrels of the mercs and the IPF troops.
The elderly men and women had been stripped naked and were barefooted.
The IPF troops and Hartline’s men were moving ever closer, and so far no shots had been fired from the troops on the ridges. All eyes were fixed unbelievingly on the scene before them. Weapons had been forgotten, hanging loose in their hands.
“They have to be stopped.” Mark was the first to speak, his words hoarse-sounding, pushed from his tight throat. “We have to stop them; there is no one else to do the job.”
Up and down the thin and battle-weary line of defenders of liberty, the troops looked first at each other, and then to Al and Mark for orders. But for many, the decision had already been made in their minds.
From the lead APC, still much too far away to be heard by any of the resistance fighters, Peggy Jones was screaming.
“Fire!” she screamed. “Shoot your guns! For God’s sake-shoot!”
The IPF troops in the APC laughed at her words.
“I can’t fire on those people,” a man said, tears in his eyes. “I can’t shoot, I might hit some of the old people or the women. I can’t do it.”
“Fire!” Mark screamed the command. “Goddamnit, people, they have to be stopped regardless of the cost. Fire, goddamn you!”
The enemy moved closer.
Now the troops on the ridges could hear Peggy’s screaming, very faint, but audible.
“Shoot,” she screamed. “For God’s sake, shoot!”
The machine guns on the front of the APC’S began singing their lethal songs, spitting out lead. One woman’s
hair caught fire from the fierce heat of the muzzle; her screaming was hideous.
“Pick your targets,” Al yelled to a rifle squad. “Shoot around the old people.”
The snipers tried, but the troops in the APC’S were crouched low, and almost impossible to hit. Bullets struck one naked young woman in the stomach; she cried out in pain. Several old people were struck by the lead from the men on the ridges. They fell to the earth, screaming in pain and confusion. A Jeep ran over one; an APC crushed the legs of another. Yet another elderly man tried to grab the rear of a Jeep. He was dragged over the rocky ground for several hundred feet until life and strength left him.
Most of the guns on the high ground fell silent. They could not be blamed for that.
“Fall back!” Mark yelled, knowing his position was nearly hopeless. “First and second companies regroup. First company to the right flank, second company to the left, come in behind them.”
But it was too late; Hartline’s men and the IPF were too close. They had already begun executing an end-around sweep. The defenders on the ridges were cut off.
“Goddamn you!” Peggy yelled her rage at the men on the ridges. She tried to anger them into firing. “Can’t you niggers do anything right? You have to leave everything up to whitey?”
Hartline’s mercs thought that hysterically amusing.
The APC’S and Jeeps were roaring up the small inclines, the ring-mounted .50’s on the Jeeps and APC’S spitting and hammering out death.
Al Maiden lifted his M-16 and shot one machine
gunner in the face. A second later a hard burst from an M-60 spun him around and tore his chest open. He danced grotesquely and then fell to the cool earth, his blood soaking into the ground.
The mercenaries and the IPF troops crested the ridges and were over the top as the troops who had pulled the flanking maneuver sealed off much of the rear escape route. The black troops fought well and bravely, but the better-fed, better-trained and better-equipped IPF and mercs soon overwhelmed the small force on the ridges.
Mark Terry shot the driver of one APC in the head and dropped a grenade into the carrier. The grenade exploded, sending bits of human flesh and brains flying out of the APC. He slashed at Peggy’s ropes, freeing her. He jerked her toward a Jeep, bodily picking her up and throwing her into the back seat. A bullet slammed into the fleshy part of his shoulder, spinning him around and dropping him to the ground. He pulled himself into the driver’s seat with his good arm and jerked the Jeep into gear, racing back to the main encampment, to his command post. But Hartline’s flankers were well ahead of him, and he could see the battle was almost over. Hartline’s men were shooting the wounded in the head.
Cursing, Mark floorboarded the Jeep and headed for the timber. Driving deep into a forest, away from the battleground, he pulled over, off the old dirt road, and switched off the engine.
Mark removed his field jacket and gave it to Peggy. He could see that the woman had been beaten and tortured. Despite that, she was still beautiful.
Mark poured raw alcohol onto his shoulder wound
and bandaged it hurriedly. Peggy crawled into the front seat beside him.
“We’re beaten,” she said flatly.
“Not yet,” Mark said grimly. He slammed the heel of his hand against the steering wheel. “Goddamnit!” he cursed. “I just didn’t count on Hartline doing anything like that.”
Her bitter laugh lifted his eyes toward her. “You can count on Hartline doing almost anything,” she told him. “He is brilliantly insane and perversely twisted; and so are a great number of his men.”
“You sound like you know him well.”
The sounds of battle were coming to a cl
ose, with only an occasional shot being fired far in the distance. Mark felt like a traitor for running out on his men. But there was still a chance he could regroup some of his people. But it was a slim one and Mark knew it. And he didn’t know if he wanted to see those who refused to fire. He thought he might try to kill them.
The taste of defeat was brass-bitter on his tongue. The word coward kept coming to him.
But Mark knew he was no coward; he had faced too much adversity in his life to be a coward. He just wished he could have done more.
As if reading his thoughts, Peggy said, “That battle was lost before it began back there, and Sam Hartline knew it. Said as much. There was nothing you could have done to change any of it. What is your name?”
“Mark. Mark Terry.”
“I’m Peggy Jones. Yeah, I know Sam Hartline.” The words rolled harshly from her tongue. “I was his … house nigger for a time, reporting back to Lois Peters, and she to the resistance. But he knew what I was doing
all along and the information he gave me was deliberately false. I … got away from him-don’t ask me how-but he finally tortured Lois until she gave away where I was hiding. I can’t blame her for that. He tortured her to death. It was … terrible what he did to her. I will never get that picture of her out of my mind.
“Then,” she sighed, “he had a high old time with me. I… really don’t want to say what he did to me. It was sexual, most of the time. I will never be able to bear children. The IPF people… fixed me.” She lifted her arm and pulled back the sleeve of the field jacket, showing Mark the tattoo on her arm. “Hartline and a lot of his men and the IPF people as well are perverted. They enjoy inflicting pain, and Hartline likes to do it in a sexual manner. And that is all I’m going to say about that.”
Mark touched her hand. “You don’t have to say anything, Peggy. Some of the refugees that came into our area told us a lot about Hartline. What the women said was … sickening.”
Her eyes, filled with the horror of what had been done to her, touched his eyes. “We need to get to a safer place, Mark, and I need to fix up that shoulder of yours.”
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