“Yes, sir.”
“I’ll be damned. Did Ben get hit during the fight?”
“No, sir,” Cooper said. “That clown didn’t land a single punch.”
Lamar shifted his gaze over to where the medics were working on Dick Bogarde. The man’s face was a mess from Ben’s blows. He would carry the cuts and bruises from Ben’s fists for quite some time.
The mood of the moment was broken by a shrill voice coming from some distance away.
Chase took one look and said, “I’m out of here, boys and girls. See you later.”
The lines of Rebels began parting like the Red Sea under Moses’ command.
“General, my General!” the voice called. “I have come to your assistance.”
“Oh, my God!” Ben said.
“Who is that little man?” Cassie asked.
Emil Hite came rushing up to the recent scene of conflict, and his boots hit the churned up and muddy ground. “Whoa!” he hollered, flailing his arms as he slipped and slid across the area, looking very much like a crazed ballet dancer attempting to dance the tush-push to the mental strains of the 1812 Overture.
“Get out of the way!” Ben yelled, two seconds before Emil impacted against him, and both of them went to the ground in a sprawl of arms and legs.
Sitting on top of Ben, his helmet drooped over one side of his face, Emil cried, “Are you hurt, General Raines?”
“Only my composure, Emil. Now get off of me!”
Emil climbed off Ben, only managing to step on him about five times in the process. Cooper and Jersey finally jerked the man off Ben and helped Ben to his boots.
Cassie was nearly doubled over with laughter. Ben brushed and wiped the mud off his BDUs and said, “Emil, what the hell are you doing here?”
“To be truthful, General,” Emil said, “I think I was beginning to get on Thermopolis’s nerves. I got the first small inkling of that yesterday when he suddenly started screaming and chasing me around the camp with an baseball bat. I truly believe Therm was having some sort of temporary breakdown. I decided that my talents were no longer needed in that vicinity, and thought I might be of more help here.”
“I can’t begin to tell you how much I appreciate that gesture, Emil.”
Emil beamed. “I knew you would feel that way, General. I brought my entire flock with me.”
“That’s . . . wonderful, Emil.”
“What important assignment do you have for me, General?”
Ben thought about that for a couple of seconds, then smiled. “Emil, I want you and your . . . flock to act as rear guard for this column. I’m expecting a sneak attack as we work our way up the coast, so this is a very important move. You’ve got to be on guard constantly. You think you can handle that assignment?”
“With the diligence of a trained Doberman, my General.”
Ben thought a basset hound might be a more apt description, but he kept that to himself. He pointed to a Rebel sergeant trying to hide behind a HumVee. “The sergeant over there will get you all set up, Emil. We move out in the morning.”
“Oui, mon General!” Emil gave Ben a French salute, palm out.
As Emil was being led away by a reluctant Rebel sergeant, Cassie said, “You certainly have some strange people with your organization, Ben.”
“Have you ever met Thermopolis?” Ben asked.
“I haven’t had the pleasure.”
“Hummm,” Ben said with a smile.
With Rebels closing in from the west and the north, and Ben’s 1 Batt coming up from the south, the thugs who had gathered along the way fled northward, paused briefly in Narbonne (very briefly, for the citizens left in the small city started shooting at them with recently dug-up rifles and shotguns), and fled on up the highway to Beziers. They received a less than warm welcome in Beziers and kept on traveling, with Ben’s 1 Batt closing the distance.
At Montpellier the thugs turned and made their stand. To a person they had vowed to die rather than surrender and be tried and probably, for most of them, hanged, either in France or back in America.
“Corrie,” Ben said, as his battalion waited at the edge of the old university city of Montpellier. “You have contact with this bunch?”
“Affirmative.”
“What’s the name of the leader, if any?”
“Mahmud the Terrible,” Corrie said with a straight face.
“From Toronto?”
“Right.”
“The Lion of the Desert?”
“Affirmative.”
“Lawrence of Somalia?”
“Right.”
“The one with the silly hat?”
“That’s the one.”
“The one who claims to be bulletproof?”
“Right.”
“Shit!” Ben said. “This is part of the bunch who commandeered that ship and killed all the crew members.”
“Affirmative.”
“Tell Mudpie the Terrible he has ten minutes to surrender. If he chooses to fight, I will wipe out his entire gang of punks, and I will show no mercy.”
Corrie relayed the message, listened for a moment, then said, “And the same to you, too, asshole!” She smiled sweetly and turned to Ben. “Mahmud the Terrible, Lion of the Desert, Lawrence of Somalia, and one mean motherhumper said to tell Ben Raines to kiss his ass.”
“Really?”
“That’s what he said.”
Ben smiled. “Take the town.”
By the afternoon of the second day, the punks had been forced into the downtown area, and they had suffered terrible losses in their retreat. The weather had turned bitterly cold, too cold for it to snow, and while the Rebels were equipped in the finest gear for cold weather operations, the punks were not. Dozens of bodies, frozen in the most macabre positions, littered the streets of the old city.
Most of the residents who remained had fled when the hordes of punks descended upon the city, and Ben had his people take time to clean out shelters for them and to supply blankets, food, and camp stoves for cooking and heat. Those survivors were mostly the very old and the very young, with little in between. But they were not a beaten people. They were the survivors, and Ben was proud of every one of them and told them so.
On the other side of the coin, Mahmud the Terrible, Chief Doo-Da and Poo-Pa of the Mau Mau gang was finished, and even he had sense enough to realize that. He had never been so cold and so hungry in all his life.
And like nearly all of his ilk, the thought never once crossed his mind that he and he alone was responsible for the predicament he was now in.
It was somebody else’s fault. Liberals had told him that before the Great War; he’d heard countless news programs that supported their claims. All his friends said that society owed them something, and if society wouldn’t give it (whatever it might be) then by God they’d just take it. Which was exactly what he’d been doing since long before the Great War. And it had been a great war to Mahmud’s mind. Ever since the Great War he could rob and rape and assault and kill and all that other good stuff and not have to worry about the cops.
Then along come Ben Raines and screwed it all up.
Maybe he could use that “you owe me” approach with Ben Raines? It was worth a try.
“You can hang that shit up,” Abdul told him after Mahmud suggested it a short time later. “Ben Raines don’t play that game.”
“Then how come all them people told us it was true years back?”
Abdul was stumped for an answer to that question. ’Cause he felt the same way Mahmud did about it. “Must be that Ben Raines was born in Mississippi or Louisiana or some other damn redneck nigger-hatin’ southern state.”
“That’s it! Has to be,” Mahmud agreed.
Actually, Ben was born in the Midwest and did not hate anyone for the color of their skin. If Ben had used the term “nigger” while living at home, his mother would have slapped him out of the chair, and then his father would have taken a belt to his behind and used it so thoroughly that B
en would have been able to heat his own bathwater simply by sitting in it.
But Ben’s mother and father had no patience with people who would not work and who wanted something for nothing. They had both lived through the terrible years of the Great Depression and knew firsthand, and for a fact, that people could survive on a lot less if they would just put their minds to it.
Ben learned without being told (at a very early age) that each individual controlled their own destiny . . . and no one else. And Ben didn’t give a damn what liberal sob sisters and hanky-stompers preached. It was all up to the individual. You could fritter your life away and be nothing. And if you did, that was your own fault and to hell with you. But Ben knew that one had to become somebody before they could become anybody. Work, study, learn, and continue doing that all your life. Ration your spare time. Read. Ben had little patience with people who did not read. That was why for years he had forbidden television in any Rebel-controlled area.
And Ben knew that he who stands alone is the strongest.
Mahmud stood up and walked away from the fireplace to stand by a window and look out at the cold winter’s day, windy and gray and unfriendly. Death lay all around him. And death was called the Rebels.
Mahmud had never seen anything like the people in Ben Raines’s army. Mahmud had always thought himself to be the meanest motherfucker in the world until he came head to head with the Rebels. These men and women put a new meaning to the word mean. He turned and looked back at Abdul, who was staring into the flames.
“You wanna give it up, Abdul?”
“They gonna hang us if we do.”
“Yeah. I know. Prob’ly. And they gonna shoot us or blow us up if we don’t.”
“We ain’t done nothing here in France. So that means we gonna be shipped back to Canada for trial. We busted outta jail ’fore.”
“Yeah. That a truth.” Mahmud turned to once more stare out of the window.
“I’m hungry. I’m cold. I’m tired. My head hurts and my feets hurt. I ain’t had me a good night’s sleep in so long I can’t ’member when. Even my eyes hurts. I want a hot cup of coffee so bad I can taste it.” He sighed dejectedly. “We was lied to somethin’ fierce back in the States, Mahmud. All them years we was flat out lied to.”
“How you mean?”
“Don’t nobody owe us nothin’. It don’t make no difference what happened to our granddaddys or such. That ain’t got a goddamn thing to do with me and you. Not here and now, not back before the Great War. It was all up to us, and we was too goddamn stupid to understand it. But, brother, I see it now.”
“But it be too late, don’t it?”
“Yeah. I guess so.” He shook his head. “Maybe not.”
“What you got in mind?”
“Talkin’ to Ben Raines.”
“You think that’ll do any good?”
“I don’t figure we got anything to lose by tryin’.”
EIGHT
“Show them in,” Ben said.
He was sitting in a comfortable chair, behind an antique desk. A fire was crackling in the huge fireplace. A pot of fresh coffee and sandwiches were on another table. Mahmud and Abdul were shown into the warmth of the room, and Ben had to hide a smile. They were two of the most woebegotten-looking people he had ever seen.
The Lion of the Desert wore an expression like he’d been thrown from his camel, had his tent set on fire, and his harem had turned frigid . . . and Abdul looked even worse.
Ben pointed to the coffee pot and the sandwiches. “Help yourselves.”
The pair quickly consumed about a dozen sandwiches and slurped two mugs of coffee before they sat down in front of Ben’s desk. Jersey watched every move they made, and that unsettled them both.
“That’s a mean-lookin’ woman over there, General,” Mahmud remarked.
Ben ignored that and asked, “All the gangs in the city ready to pack it in?”
“Most of ’em, yeah . . . ah, yes, sir,” Abdul said.
“You understand that you all will be placed under arrest and processed? If you have committed crimes in France, you will be tried here.”
“We understand,” Mahmud said, defeat in his voice.
“How many gangs are represented here?”
“’Bout eight. Tony Green, Tuba, LaBamba, and Richardo done pulled out on they own,” Abdul confessed. “There ain’t but about four hundred of us left. The rest is dead.”
Mahmud looked slyly around the large room. Back in the old days, he had always been able to elicit a great deal of sympathy for himself from other people . . . especially from dumb-assed honky liberals. He couldn’t find the first trace of sympathy from anybody in this room. Ben Raines’s eyes were hard as flint. That foxy, sorta Indian-lookin’ bitch had a mean light in her eyes. There were two more fine-lookin’ honky cunts in the room, but fine stopped at their eyes. Mean and hard. The other man in the room was about the same age as the women, and he had the same look in his eyes as the others. Mahmud sighed and shook his head. No help here.
Then Ben Raines shook him down to his boots when he said, “It won’t work here, will it, Mahmud?”
“Whut you mean?” Mahmud managed to ask through his fright. Could the man really read minds like some said he could?
“You know damn well what I mean, so don’t play dumb with me. All your poor childhood crap. All that bullshit about society holding you down because of your color and forcing you into a life of crime. It won’t wash with us, Mahmud. We’ve proven it to be what it is: pure crap invented by liberals.”
“You a mean honky son of a bitch, Ben Raines!” Mahmud blurted, glaring hate at him.
Ben smiled. Sort of. “I’m a realist, Mahmud. And I can spot crap from the mouth faster than shit through a goose. Now get on that radio over there in the corner and tell your people to surrender.”
“And if I don’t?”
Ben picked up a .45 autoloader from the desk and pointed the muzzle at Mahmud’s head. “I’ll blow your goddamn worthless brains out!”
Abdul started shaking in his chair. Fear sweat popped out on his face; his eyes were wide. “He mean it, Mahmud. Do it, man. He’ll kill you.”
Ben cocked the .45, the cocking very loud in the suddenly quiet room.
Mahmud cut his eyes to Jersey. She was smiling at him. Smiling! Bitch mus’ be crazy! Whole damn bunch was crazy! Mahmud had never run into nothin’ like this in his whole entire life. “I be gettin’ up now, General,” Mahmud said very cordially. “An’ goin’ to the radio. I’ll tell my people to give it up.”
“You do that.”
Ben had known all his adult life that the way to win the war on crime was to be twice as mean and nasty as the criminals. Thugs and punks and street slime did not respond to compassion, because they possessed none. It was an unknown emotion for them. They respected and responded only to brute force and strength.
Half a minute after Ben de-cocked the .45, the battle for Montpellier was over.
Ben halted the advance at a small town just about halfway between Montpellier and Nimes. He was beginning to range too far ahead of the north to south line of Rebels. Located deep in Germany, Bruno Bottger’s spies were reporting all this to Bruno, and he was reviewing it through cautious and knowing eyes. He now realized that he had made a terrible blunder by not attacking the Rebels when they went into Geneva. But he made no mention of it and neither did any of his people. To question any decision of the new führer was not terribly wise.
Bruno leaned back in his chair and was thoughtful for a time. It just might work. Ben Raines was alone between Montpellier and Nimes with just one battalion of ground troops and some armor. And Bruno had the planes and French-speaking troops to pull this off. Yes. He smiled. It would work.
Ben figured his battalion was a full week ahead of the other battalions, so he told his people to take it easy until the other batts grew even on a north/south line.
There were still several thousand gang members roaming around France—at least that
many—but the thugs had been so reduced in numbers that now they were only a minor thorn in the side of the Rebels.
The Night People were quite a different matter.
The creeps, Ben knew, unlike the gangs of punks, were highly organized and would fight to the death. Ben was expecting some sort of attack from the creeps at any moment. And while to civilian eyes his people seemed relaxed and unconcerned, the Rebels were ready for any attack. They just seemed to be 100 percent at ease.
Even Emil Hite had stopped joking around and had put his little group of followers on high alert. Ben didn’t worry about Emil when push came to shove. The little man and his group could be as ferocious as badgers when cornered.
But it was Bruno Bottger that worried Ben.
Mike Richards’s people inside Germany had confirmed that Bruno’s army was massive . . . probably at least 125,000 to 150,000 strong with another 100,000 or so civilians armed and ready to fight on the side of their new leader. The majority of Germans were appalled and disgusted by Bruno Bottger and his followers, but due to many countries blindly, and as it turned out, stupidly following the socialistic leanings of the United States under the misguided mumblings of the liberals in the ruling Democratic party they had been totally disarmed long before the Great War rocked the world and were helpless to do anything except watch in horror as Bruno purged the country of “undesirables.”
“And here I sit with one battalion and some armor,” Ben muttered softly. “Wide open for attack.”
Sitting at his desk in a lovely old home, Ben suddenly felt that old familiar warning grabbing at his guts. Warriors cannot describe how they know danger is imminent—they just know. Perhaps it was some cultivated sixth sense, nurtured over the years. But they were usually correct.
The mood jumped from Ben to his team in a matter of seconds. Ben lifted his eyes. All members of his team had stopped what they were doing and were looking at him.
“Tonight, boss?” Cooper asked.
“Yeah,” Ben replied. “Tonight.”
Thousands of miles away President Homer Blanton tossed his pencil to the desk and leaned back in his chair. He supposed things could conceivably get worse in what was left of the United States, but damned if he could figure out how.
D-Day in the Ashes Page 19
