“Why not?” he snapped. “What choice did any of us have? Do you remember back before the Great War? Remember how the government conspired in acts of genocide against the white race?”
“What are you talking about?” Tina asked, truly ignorant of where this might lead.
“Quota hiring, for one thing. Had to be a nigger to get a job. Got hired ahead of more-qualified white men. Look at the welfare fraud. Black bitches gettin’ fat and sassy on money taken out of our pockets. Lived in better places than most whites. There was quotas for school admissions, too. My kid couldn’t go to medical school because some jigaboo who couldn’t add two and two and come up with four thought he wanted to be a doctor. The last straw for me, lady, was when the courts, even the Supreme Court, issued decisions that implied one could not discriminate against whites. That what would be considered discrimination against other races was the just deserts of white men. And the unrestricted flood of foreigners brought in, put up, and supported on welfare, free medical treatment, taking jobs, taking places to live, and spreading all sorts of exotic diseases everywhere. And no one dare complain.”
Tina had heard it all before, in one version or another. What pained was that she, like her father, agreed on some issues. Where these whiners and complainers differed from the Rebel way was in the solutions they had chosen to apply. She told this specimen as much.
“Then why do you not leave these degenerate, race-mixing Rebels and join the only True American Way?” he demanded, the capital letters evident in the zeal with which he delivered his words. “We’re going to win, don’t you know that? Sieg Heil!”
Stifling a shudder as though she had touched something slimy, Tina turned a cold stare on the American Nazi and gestured to a Rebel trooper nearby. “Take him away and . . . do the usual.”
“Away where?” the Nazi demanded.
“We’re going to process you like we do all other enemy prisoners who refuse to be enlightened,” Tina told him blandly.
“How’s that?”
“By firing squad,” Tina stated with a calm, composed face.
SEVENTEEN
Silence had held over the immediate area for a good fifteen minutes. Ben Raines took the handset from his ear and peered thoughtfully at the patch of blue sky visible through the rubble-guarded entrance to the vault where they had taken shelter. The news he had received appeared to have energized him.
“Looks like we can get out of here soon. Estimates are we have pacified about two-thirds of the triangle. I have to tell you,” he went on, grumping at the circumstances that had put them there, “I feel like an idiot, sitting it out in here while everyone else does the fighting.”
“Look at it this way, General “Jersey appealed. “It gave you a chance to test your theory that the Rebel army would function equally well without you.”
“Don’t get cheeky with me, Jersey,” Ben growled. “Dammit,” he exploded a second later, “I’m getting to sound like an old fogey. All right, they clobbered my bodyguard platoon and had us pinned down here. Nothing we could do about that. Too many reinforcements coming in for the black-shirts. So why am I so pissed?” Ben gave a lopsided grin and came to his feet. “Let’s pull up stakes and go find someplace where there’s still some action.”
Cooper made it to the top of the ramp of dirt and debris that led to the breech in the wall. His head had barely cleared the opening in the three foot thick slab of concrete and rebar when he dropped flat, mouth open in shock.
“Holy shit, there’s about five hundred screaming Nazis out there.”
“What? Let me see,” Ben demanded.
He crept up the incline on hands and knees. Slowly he raised his head for a clear sight. Ben’s eyes widened as he took in the swarming scene in the parking lot. More black-shirts had somehow gotten in behind the Rebel advance into the Cheyenne triangle. Now they boiled over from the streets and the interstate onto the cracked and frost-heaved blacktop of the parking lot. Quickly, Ben lowered his head.
Not fast enough, he discovered when a shout roused the milling Nazis outside the bank vault. “Over there, I just saw something move.”
“A rag,” some unseen black-shirt ventured. “Or a wild dog.”
“No. It looked like a head, with a helmet on it.”
“A dead guy?” a distinctly Boston accent asked.
“No, it moved, I tell you. I’m gonna go see.”
“Well cover you,” his fellow Nazis offered.
Bootsteps crunched over long-ago-broken glass and the crisp weeds of summer, to grow louder as they approached the cavelike opening into the vault. Ben eased his Thompson into position, then thought better of it. He slid the Desert Eagle .50 caliber out of his holster and thumb-slipped the safety. A head, shoulders, and torso flashed through his field of view too quickly to make note of characteristics. Then disembodied camo-covered legs filled the space. Ben tensed.
Bent low, the young Nazi peered into the rent in the vault wall. His eyes went wide and he opened his mouth to yell. “By god, there’s someone here, all ri — ”
Ben’s .50 Desert Eagle made an enormous roar and cut off the hail to the other black-shirts. The fat slug entered the Nazi’s head through one cheekbone and splashed the inside of his helmet with the contents of his skull. The body had barely fallen to one side before the ground around erupted into geysers of dirt. A crackle of small-arms fire followed. Ben propelled himself backward to land hard on the floor of the strongroom. Two slugs impacted at the spot where his head had been a moment before.
“Bring a grenade,” one Nazi demanded. “Hurry. Place may be full of them.”
Trapped. The entire team had last, individually characterized, thoughts.
Betrayed, Jersey thought. Screwed by the fickle finger of fate. I’ll never get to know if Ben Raines has any feelings for me besides trust and loyalty.
It isn’t right to die like this, Beth fought against destiny. I wanted children, a home.
Fuckin’ Nazi scum, Cooper blazed in his helpless anger. I hate having shit like that finish me off.
Well, hell, we should have moved out earlier, Ben blamed himself. Then the crackle of static on Corrie’s radio distracted his thoughts. Eagerly he reached for it while his team kept up sporadic fire to discourage any close approach by the Nazis.
“This is Eagle,” Ben said, dry-throated.
“Eagle, this is your Magic Dragon,” came the laconic voice of Chuck, the C-47 jockey. “Officially that’s Tango Alpha One, with two little chicks at my side. We be one minute out. Any idea what we should do?”
“That I do, Dragon.” Quickly Ben gave a heading that would take the Puffs obliquely along the mall and parking lot.
“Make that two-zero seconds, Eagle.”
Ben could already hear the drone of the big radial engines. The sweetest sound in the world, he rejoiced. Jersey ran her magazine dry and searched for a fresh load. Ben put the Thompson to work in loud, punishing bursts. Half a heartbeat later the world turned into bedlam.
Steel, copper, and lead rained down from the Puff. It cut a swath high, wide, and handsome through the press of enemy personnel. Its deadly armament hammered and yammered. Body parts levitated and fell back to smoking ground. American Nazis died in generous quantity, screaming in hate and pain to the very end. When the cacophony of Rebel shells ended, only the cries of the dying could be heard. Chuck’s call was answered at once by Ben.
“We, ah, managed to suppress your problem, Eagle. We’re gonna go over and he’p out your friends. Then we be gone from here back to Base Camp One, by way of Wichita to give these crates a drink. It took a long time to patch holes in them and then the icing started when we rolled them out of the hangar. Oh, say, ice storm and snow on its way here from Laramie. ETA about twenty minutes. Y’all take care, now, hear?”
Big white flakes descended in undulating curtains on the hushed expanse of the parking lot. Odd, Ben Raines thought, only the first week of October and it looked to be a heavy snowfall. He recalled t
he old, hackneyed barb about Wyoming. “I’d like to spend the summer there this year, but I’m busy that weekend.”
Already a pristine blanket of white settled on the cooling corpses of the Nazi aggressors. Ben surveyed the astonishing number of dead lying in fan-shaped rows, the narrow part nearest the vault he and his team had so recently occupied. He didn’t need close calls like that. Engine racing, a Bradley sprinted up and halted sharply, to rock briefly on its undercarriage. The vehicle commander levered his way up through a hatch.
“General Striganov’s compliments, sir. The triangle is secured. Prisoner count is taking place now. Oh, and the general found this in the headquarters CP. It’s addressed to you.”
Ben took the flat, rectangular package from the sergeant and studied it. His name had been written in precise strokes on one surface. Whoever had put it there was an accomplished calligrapher. Then he saw that the “s” in Raines looked like an “f’ with the back half of the crossbar broken off. German script, Ben recognized.
“Thank you, Sergeant,” Ben returned to the matter at hand. He opened the parcel and frowned. It contained an old videotape. “Do you know whether General Striganov found the equipment to operate this thing?”
“Yes, sir, he did.”
“Wait one, then. We’ll get saddled up and follow you back to the enemy CP.”
Twenty-seven minutes of dodging burning Nazi equipment, shell holes, and other obstacles brought Ben and team to the former black-shirt command post. Gen. Georgi Striganov greeted his commander affably and directed him inside. Jersey took her usual position, eyes sharply gauging every possible trouble spot. Georgi pointed to a relatively normal looking television set, although as a breed they had been effectively extinct for ten years. A slight oddness in the position of the controls, and a brand name as foreign to Ben as the language in which it was written, revealed its South American origin. Beside it sat a VCR.
“When I saw these, I figured from the weight that you had received a videotape, Ben. I left it up to you to find out what it contained.”
“Then we’d better get to it,” Ben said as he approached the equipment and inserted the tape in the slot.
Memory served Ben as he turned on the television and VCR. He set the recorder and TV to channel 3 and punched the play button. Nothing but black-and-white snow. He tried channel 4. Same result. On inspiration he tried 13. Blue sky and the rugged terrain of Wyoming came onto the screen.
“How did you figure that out?” Striganov asked. In the days before the Great War, when VCRs were plentiful, only members of the nomenkultura were permitted to own them in the old Soviet Union.
“You need a neutral channel for VCR feed,” Ben explained, as Nazi troops flashed onto the monitor. Then he snorted with amusement. “I figured that since in the bad old days the Latinos would rather die than copy anything American, they would go to the opposite end of the channel selection.”
Ben put the tape on hold and gestured to the manned communications station. “Oh, before we get into this, do you have a link to Base Camp One?”
“Of course.”
“Good. Have your RT bump Cecil Jefferys for me.” The call went through quickly. “Cec, this is Ben. The Puffs are on their way home. They did a fantastic job. Pulled my spuds out of the fire for sure. I want you to have a bottle of your special, rare, hundred-proof, twenty-year-old bourbon waiting for the command pilot and his crew when they reach there.”
“It pains me to part with it,” Jefferys joked. “But, considering the circumstances, I think I can make the sacrifice. Good news on Cheyenne. Georgi has already advised me.”
“You do that, Cec. And how’s the exercises going?”
A spate of profanity followed. At last Cecil Jefferys gathered his breath to snap, “You don’t want to know. I twisted an ankle on the treadmill yesterday, and it took a threat to send the doctor off to Alaska to keep from being shoved into a bed again. I’ve already started the wheels turning for resupply. If you have secure airfields, you can expect the first within nine hours.”
“Good. We need that,” Ben responded. “You take care of yourself, Cec. Eagle, out.” He turned back to the television and started the tape.
Cold outrage grew by the minute as those inside the CP watched. The firing squads and hangings for captured Rebels they expected. When it got to the garrottings, General Striganov exploded with fury.
“Borjemoi! Kotorohye solip’shim!”
White-lipped with rage, Ben spoke tightly. “They’re sons of bitches all right, Georgi Alexandrovich. And it’s about time we treated them like the rabid dogs they are.”
Scenes of torture and degrading forms of execution followed. They so upset Beth and Corrie that they excused themselves from the command post. When the Nazis started in on Rebel women and children, even Ben, hardened though he was, felt the hot bile rising in his throat. Hoffman’s minister of information had in mind provoking Ben Raines into making some rash, ill-conceived blunder.
Far from that, what he accomplished was to awaken the fires of hell in Ben’s eyes. Very carefully, conscious will at maximum to control his demeanor and words, Ben sifted alternatives and courses of action.
“Prisoners? How many do we have?” he asked in a choked voice.
“Close to six hundred eighty,” Striganov answered. He had trimmed down some in the last few weeks, Ben noted idly. His broad Ukrainian face reflected all the anguish that racked Ben.
“Terminate them all. Every last one. No. Save enough to drive truckloads back to Hoffman.”
“Ah, General, there were some women and children among the survivors. Families of the officers,” Colonel West offered cautiously.
Ben’s icy stare unnerved the mercenary colonel. “The kids nine and under go back to Base Camp One. All the others . . .” Ben started to pronounce their death sentence, then plucked out a possible advantage they might represent. “They can accompany the drivers back to Hoffman. What they have to tell the other wives and children could prove useful to us.” He paused to suck in a deep chestful of air. “My initial order stands: no prisoners, no quarter, no mercy for all of Hoffman’s goddamned army. No exceptions.”
“That might be a bit rough on the Latinos among the rank and file,” West probed again.
“Let it be!” Ben snapped. “They can either assassinate that son of a bitch and return to their own countries peacefully, or die with the rest. Because, gentlemen and ladies, I intend to make Field Marshal Jesus Dieguez Mendoza Hoffman pay more dearly for this than even that sadistic kraut bastard can imagine.”
EIGHTEEN
Immediately, Ben Raines settled into a command conference. He scribbled notes on a Base Camp One version of a yellow legal pad while the various unit commanders assembled. In consideration of size, the meeting convened outside the Nazi CP. After receiving verbal reports on the condition of men and equipment, status of supplies, and preliminary results of prisoner interrogations, Ben consulted his lines of squiggles and began to outline the new plan of action.
“It appears we will be able to conduct the major portion of the game plan as devised. From here on, we hit on the flanks. Roll up the enemy lines in fast, hard strikes. To assist that, I’m calling up all gunships, Puffs, and two-thirds of our fixed-wing air-ground support and interceptor aircraft. Each of you is to designate and fully brief forward air guides and controllers to liaise with them. Questions so far?”
“What about food and medical supplies?” Dr. Lamar Chase asked.
“On the way. We hold everything east of here, and now the Cheyenne and Laramie airports. Expect the first cargo flights in — ” Ben glanced at his watch. “Seven hours forty minutes, give or take fifteen minutes. Lowboys will be leaving to bring up additional tanks, to be employed in the southern half. These mountains don’t make good armor country.”
“What about the weather?” That from West.
“Our best guess is that the snow is of short duration. Higher altitudes may be another story. There is no snow, a
ccording to Ike McGowan, from Denver south. Real Indian summer weather through all the central and southern plains. Back to the high passes. We’ve secured Medicine Bow, but it is blocked westward by drifts. If you’ve no further questions, we can get on to troop dispositions.” No one made a comment. Ben looked at his notes and began again.
“Take note of this one change. Headquarters Company is staying on the assault. Therm, I want you to take your company, Leadfoot’s bikers, and Emil’s followers and push on to Shoshoni on US 20/26. There, half, under Leadfoot and Wanda, are to turn south on State 135 to secure the Riverton area. Make a note and respond accordingly. There is a Shoshoni/Arapaho reservation near the town of Riverton. Any people still there may or may not be friendly to the Rebel cause. If you can recruit them, more than better.” Ben paused and refreshed himself from a bottle of crystal-clear cola that bore a South American brand name.
“General, are you going to be with us?” Thermopolis took the opportunity to ask.
“No. My plans now are to head south toward the Denver area of operation and link up with Ike McGowan. I can coordinate from there with good commo and be able to move with R Batt as a quick-reaction force where needed.”
Thermopolis frowned. “Then what are the rest of us to do?”
“Ah, here comes the best part,” Ben said brightly. “Thermopolis, you will take the other half of your command and proceed from Shoshoni north, pushing the remnants of the SS ahead of you, to the town of Thermopolis. That’s right,” Ben added with a chuckle, “Thermopolis is going to Thermopolis.”
“There ain’t no justice,” Thermopolis wailed.
Beth appeared at Ben’s side. “Bad news, General. Colonel Gray’s vehicle struck a land mine just outside the Denver AO. Dan survived, but he is reported as severely concussed, and has six broken ribs and a dislocated hip. A Doctor Hutchinson at the MASH unit says that the colonel is out of it for the duration.”
Ben’s scowl could have melted titanium. “Dammit. Of all times.” He sucked in air. “All right. Buddy to take command of Dan’s battle group, and becomes XO to General Ike. They are to proceed as ordered. I will be in Denver within two days. Anything else, Beth?”
Flames from the Ashes Page 17
