Flames from the Ashes

by William W. Johnstone

  “No, sir.”

  “Thank goodness for that. We’ll get on with this. Georgi, you will advance northward, rolling up the Nazis all the way to the Canadian border. Use I-25 as your main line of communication. I want the entire northern sector closed off and secured with units on every east-west road within two weeks.”

  To Colonel West, he instructed, “You are to continue west on I-80. It is obviously the best supply line open to Hoffman due to the weather. Spread out, and whenever contact is made with the enemy they are to be reduced. Don’t worry about getting spread too thin. Within three days, Colonel Danjou’s French Canadians will be in position to assist you.”

  This time, Corrie and Beth came to Ben’s side. They wore worried frowns and held a commo flimsy. Ben noticed them and reached for the message form.

  “What now? Oh,” he cut off at notice of a familiar name. Silently he read on. A shake of his head accompanied a heavy sigh.

  “More bad news, it seems. Is this the complete text?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir. As much as came through. The transmission was from a long way off and badly broken up,” Corrie explained.

  “I’ll read it,” Ben told his commanders. “‘Hoffman’s Nazis have hit us hard, many losses. Moving north.’ It’s from General Payon down in Mexico. I gather he means Rasbach when he says Hoffman, but it’s all one in the same. We have to do something.” He paused, thinking earnestly while muttered conversation ran though the subordinate commanders. At last Ben raised his head, jaw set firmly in a sign of decision.

  “Corrie, have the team ready for immediate departure. Stan,” he said to R Batt commander McDade, “I want R Batt ready to move out in half an hour. Level Three alert status.” To the curious, concerned expressions of the rest, he enlightened them. “I’m going south to help out my old friend, General Raul Payon.”

  BOOK TWO

  While the man who called himself Führer of the Western Hemisphere and the Fourth Reich, Field Marshal Jesus Dieguez Mendoza Hoffman, played hide-and-seek with the Rebel army of Ben Raines, the older and wiser General Frederich Rasbach fled the United States for sanctuary in South America. General Rasbach found conditions markedly changed in the months they had been gone.

  In Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Chile, the people had risen up and overwhelmed the State Secret Police (Servicio Secrete) — which Hoffman had wanted to call the Geheime Staats Polizei (Gestapo); fortunately, as Rasbach saw it, the Reich Bundestagen of all Nazi countries didn’t agree — and the civilian government. For a while anarchy reigned in the streets of Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Valparaíso, Montevideo, Asuncion, and Sucre.

  General Rasbach’s return at the head of a division and a half of seasoned troops quickly ended that. Over the next two months, he set about restoring Nazi authority, although his heart was not in it. For all the posturing of his father and grandfather before him, Frederich Rasbach had always harbored a secret belief that Nazism, like all socialist regimes was essentially flawed. His grandfather had been high up in ODESSA (Organisation der ehemaligen SS-Angehörigen), as had his father. Their arguments for racial purity and the superiority of the Aryan race failed to convince young Frederick.

  But he was a loyal and dutiful son. He joined the youth organization, later the Secret Army Organization (SAO), which became the National Army of Liberation. Now, duty dictated that he must restore order, fill the ranks of the New Army of Liberation, and return to extricate Jesus Hoffman from the consequences of his folly. General Rasbach quickly noted an oddity in his dual role.

  Restoring Nazi power and recruiting an army seemed to work at cross-purposes. No sooner had his storm troopers subjugated the people of one metropolis and recruited fighting men, to move on with the army, than the campesinos rose up again and ousted the Nazis in government. His black-shirt divisions received such a hot reception in several areas that General Rasbach was forced to write them off. At least temporarily, he told himself.

  In the end, he had rallied scattered troops, to add to recruits, put together three divisions, with armor and artillery support. Popular sentiment still waxed so strongly against the Nazi regime that Rasbach took ship at once, to land in Nicaragua.

  He had intended to transit the Panama Canal and come up the west coast of Mexico and the United States, securing territory for Field Marshal Hoffman as he went. He found the canal in the hands of anti-Nazi partisans. So on to a more-sympathetic climate. Which he found among the former Sandinistas of Nicaragua. He landed there while the Rebels with Ben Raines recovered and resupplied after their final onslaught against allies of Hoffman’s NAL. His hosts greeted his army warmly, if a bit apprehensively. They, too, had maintained a cadre from the old days and schooled their children in Marxist revolutionary theory. After tactful negotiations, they easily accommodated the differences between Marxism-Leninism and National Socialism. Gen. Frederich Rasbach had found a new home.

  One that he used as a staging area for a return to Mexico. His forces sailed from Puerto Cabezas, around Cabo Gracias a Dios, and on to Veracruz, Mexico. There he landed against slight resistance while Ben Raines chased Nazis westward across Kansas and Nebraska.

  “I am not a Zachary Taylor,” he announced, knee-deep in the surf during the initial assault landing. “We are going to keep this country for ourselves.”

  Spearheaded by armor, General Rasbach’s divisions made a blitzkrieg slash across the narrow waist of Mexico. With secure bases on both coasts of the country, his army turned north. While the American Nazis fought desperately against the attacking Rebels at Cheyenne, General Rasbach spread his forces out on the Plain of Guerrero to face the army of General Raul Francisco Payon.

  Monumentally courageous in their defense of the homeland, the soldiers of General Payon offered stiff resistance. In the first day of fighting, General Rasbach lost two regiments of relatively green troops. Staggered by the carnage, he drew back and formulated a new plan. Sending all of his armor and a third of the remaining troops eastward, General Rasbach swung them into position to make a flanking attack in depth against Payon.

  Two days went by with only minor skirmishes and probing actions. Then Rasbach’s two tank regiments and three of infantry worked their way westward. Traditionally, General Rasbach opened the engagement with artillery. The Mexicans fought as well as they could, trading round for round of heavy shells. When counter-battery radar located the Mexican emplacements, Rasbach ordered his massed armor to move on them and roll up the Mexican positions.

  “Por Dios y patria!” the Mexican troops cheered, and threw themselves onto their attackers.

  By nightfall of that day, Cheyenne had been surrounded. The Mexican defenses south and west of Mexico City crumbled. Through personal charisma and brilliant planning under stress, Gen. Raul Payon maintained a large degree of order over the withdrawal. For all of their haste, the retreating Mexican army left devastation in their wake. The enemy would get little benefit from what they took.

  General Rasbach pursued relentlessly. Accepting a calculated risk, General Payon elected to halt the army’s flight on the Plain of Chapultepec. General Rasbach’s advanced units arrived three hours later. The Mexican artillery, already disturbingly low on ammunition, opened at once. When General Rasbach, a student of history, heard of this, he marveled at the similarity to that long-ago battle in the same place against the American invaders under Taylor. He made mention of it at his staff conference early the next morning.

  “Well, gentlemen, if the Mexicans insist on playing out an historic battle from a century and a half ago, the least we can do is oblige them. If only we had some Marines.”

  “Pardon, my general?” his G-3 asked diffidently.

  “Marines,” Rashbach was reported as replying. “The American Expeditionary Force sent the Marines against the Mexican defenders of Chapultepec Castle in 1847. Beat them rather severely, or so the history books say. I rather expect that we shall do even better.”

  They did so, and quic
kly. By late afternoon Chapultepec had fallen and the victorious soldiers of General Rasbach blew through the decimated ranks of General Payon’s Mexicans and headed out of Mexico City on a rapid drive for the border.

  “And Caesar’s spirit, ranging for revenge . . . come hot from hell, shall in these confines with a monarch’s voice cry ‘Havoc!’ and let slip the dogs of war . . .”

  Wm. Shakespeare,

  Julius Caesar,

  Act III, Scene 1

  ONE

  Back in the saddle, and running true to form, Ben Raines made plans on the fast drive to the Denver AO. Denver was weak, barely holding against the Rebel might Buddy Raines threw against it. It would fall in a day, Ben estimated. He would be there to see it.

  But not to stay for long. Colorado Springs was back in Rebel hands; Pueblo no longer existed. That left all points south yet to consider. Beth handed Ben the latest intel sheets and he thumbed through them quickly, speed-reading the highlights.

  Hoffman’s regulars of the NAL, a good half of Brodermann’s SS, and a pestilence of American Nazis had established nests in Santa Fe, Santa Rosa, and Alamogordo, New Mexico. From there, they cut a line to El Paso, Texas. They also controlled Raton Pass from Trinidad, Colorado, through the mountains to Raton, New Mexico. A damn lot of territory. And all of it, until recently, secure Rebel country.

  “Hoffman’s worse than a plague,” Ben muttered to himself.

  “What’s that, General?” Beth asked.

  “Oh, ah, nothing, Toxic,” Ben responded, using the nickname that had become an in joke between them.

  Recently, Ben had blundered upon Beth alone in a copse of southern Missouri birch. She had been trying on long-forgotten civilian clothing. The cut and styling was blatantly feminine. When Beth saw Ben, she let out a startled yelp, then recovered quickly.

  “Trixie McGuire at your service, sir,” said Beth coyly, batting her eyes. “Would you buy a girl a drink, mister?”

  The incident had been all but forgotten by both. Trixie had stuck. Now, Beth produced a mocking pout and indicated the yellow pad on which Ben scribbled. Ben sighed and nodded.

  “Just deciding how many Nazis we are going to have to kick hell out of to reach Raul Payon. The answer is simple. Too damn many.”

  Beth cut eyes to the situations map on one wall of the mobile CP. “You got that right, General. If Hoffman hadn’t picked up so much of this American crud, we could walk through them in three days.”

  Ben smiled gently at her confidence. Her belief in the Rebels notwithstanding, general and specific knowledge was what made the difference between private soldiers and generals. Given the best possible scenario, Ben knew, it would take more like two weeks with the forces he would have at his disposal.

  “Maybe so,” he offered tentatively. “If we had the whole Rebel army at our backs.”

  “Coffee, boss?” Jersey put into the conversation.

  “Yes, gladly. When we shift to the Hummer, that’s one luxury I’ll miss. Coffee from a thermos, rather than hot and fresh,” Ben lamented.

  He sipped gratefully and immediately set to marking down the force he would organize in Denver. The R Batt of course, with its five companies, one of M-1A Abrams tanks, plus the two Apache gunships on trailers and six 4-inch mortars on BFVs. In Denver he would send Buddy’s command, three full battalions, southeast, around the mountains on Colorado 71 to Rocky Ford and La Junta, then come at Trinidad from the northeast, on U.S. 350. The R Batt, and a third of Ike’s command, would proceed south on I-25, toward Trinidad, while Ike would leave a small force to hold Denver and take the rest south on U.S. 287 into Oklahoma, then turn west to take Raton. With the pass secured, they would join forces and advance on the Mexican border.

  It would do, Ben decided. Barely.

  General Field Marshal Hoffman could barely contain his fury. Not only had they lost Cheyenne, but his incompetent intelligence people had lost contact with Ben Raines. Where had he gone? How many of the cursed Rebels went with him? Where would he show up next?

  “This is an impossible situation. Get Hauptsturmbannführer Volmer here at once. Fly him here,” General Field Marshal Hoffman demanded.

  “Immediately, mein Führer,” Col. Herd gulped.

  A nervous runner from the communications van appeared in the doorway. “A message, mein Führer,” he blurted. “Denver is under attack.”

  “What!” Hoffman exploded. “Impossible. There aren’t enough Rebels out there to overwhelm us at Cheyenne and immediately assault the Denver area of operation.”

  “The message, sir,” the uncomfortable Gefreiter, or private, muttered as he extended the flimsy.

  Colonel Herd snatched it from him and handed it to Field Marshal Hoffman. His dark eyes scanned it quickly. “Light probing actions,” he read aloud. “Sporadic sniping. Patrols ambushed.” He turned a glittering gaze on the other staff officers. “It appears to me to be nothing more than guerrilla action by some of the survivors of the Rebel outpost. If it is no worse than this, we can ignore it for the time being.”

  Col. Joaquin Webber cleared his throat. “I beg your pardon, mein Führer, but it was yourself who told us that we could never, never ignore anything involving Ben Raines.”

  Hoffman looked thoughtful for a moment. “Yes, of course. Our primary objective is to locate Ben Raines. Then eliminate him. That is why I want Volmer here. He has a plan, he says, that should work perfectly. While we pursue that, we can afford not to worry about Denver.”

  Ben Raines knew all about the Nazi defenses in the Denver area before he got there. So, his orders were brief and to the point. “Reduce them,” he stated coldly. “No quarter. None are to escape if at all possible.”

  Buddy Raines and Ike McGowan spent a day covertly positioning their battalions. Then they struck with a ferocity not seen since the campaign against the Night People. Artillery shells made railroad ripples through the pale blue sky to crash into the mountain-rimmed valley that once housed the major population center of the entire state of Colorado.

  One would think that with the destruction forced on the Rebels by the creepies, nothing would be left that could burn. Not so. Piles of rubble took flame, as did Nazi vehicles and three ammunition dumps. These latter soon erupted in thunderous explosions that rocked the basin. The vaunted Mile High City became a charnel house.

  For the Nazis trapped there, it more resembled a crematorium. High-explosive rounds alternated with incendiary projectiles. Then, right on the heels of the walking barrage, yowling Rebel soldiers charged the remaining black-shirt positions.

  “We’re making headway, Ben,” Ike McGowan reported delightedly. “Another hour and well have suppressed all resistance.”

  “Good. Keep at it,” Ben responded from the Hummer. “We’re following R Batt into the southern sector.”

  “Keep your head down,” Ike advised. Ben’s soft chuckle answered him.

  A blackshirt-manned MBT spun on one tread around a low mound and braked abruptly. The turret motor whined and the main gun swung to engage the target. The gyro-stabilizer kept the image in the sight steady although the carriage of the tank still rocked from the sudden maneuver and equally rapid braking. Carefully the gunner tightened the focus and lined the crosshairs exactly on the low, squat vehicle that darted across open terrain ahead of the tank. His thumb reached for the fire button that would blast the Humvee out of existence.

  Only a fraction of a second of consciousness remained to the gunner after his brain recorded a loud, metallic clank against the side of the tank. Then a stream of molten metal and fiery gases blew into the turret from an inch-diameter hole that had been forced through the skin by the shaped charge of the ERIX antitank missile, fired by an alert Rebel.

  Blobs spun around the circular walls of the cupola, and the ammunition stores ignited with a tremendous roar. The main gun slammed up and down an instant before the entire turret took off like an ungainly vulture. Inside the Hummer, Jersey lightly tapped Ben on one forearm.

  �
�I think that kid out there just saved our bacon, General.”

  Attracted by the explosion, Ben eyed the demolished tank and nodded slowly. “If we were into the practice of giving out medals, he’d get one,” the Rebel general remarked.

  “Right now, I’d like to take him by the ears and hang a big ol’lip lock on him that would use all his pucker power,” Jersey informed the team.

  Cooper wanted to say something about preserving that on tape for posterity, but his unexplainable timidity around Jersey prevented it. Ben suffered from no such compunction.

  “Why, Jersey, I thought you only kissed cows.”

  “There’s a lot you don’t know, bossman,” Jersey quipped back. The high planes of her face, accented by a frame of dark hair, glowed with mischief and once more reminded Ben he suspected she had some Apache blood in her background.

  “Cooper, take us somewhere from which we can see the action,” Ben commanded.

  “After that tank, General, I think we’re close enough to the enemy. Maybe go higher? That knob ahead looks good.”

  “Do it,” Ben accepted.

  There had been houses there once. Expensive, exclusive suburban homes of the elite of Denver’s upper-level executive class. A cracked roadway led to a cul de sac that had accommodated five houses, two on each side and one at the apex of the circle. A decorative fountain had one time sprayed water in the center of the paved drive-around. No doubt small children had splashed in its basin on hot summer days, Ben surmised. While their older brothers and sisters cavorted in the quartet of swimming pools that gave evidence of their former existence by crumbled tilework and depressions in the ground behind four of the demolished houses.