D-Day in the Ashes

by William W. Johnstone

  Buddy’s team studied the scene for several moments before what lay hidden in buildings became visible to them, and only then because one of the tanks farted to life and poked the muzzle of its main gun out a window.

  “Shit!” Buddy said. “They’ve pulled in armor.”

  “You can bet the punks aren’t manning those MBTs.”

  “Creeps. We’ve run into them utilizing high-tech equipment before. And since the movement started in Europe, years ago, this bunch is a lot more savvy than any we’ve encountered stateside.”

  The special ops teams watched and noted everything that moved before them in the two cities. Later that afternoon they pulled back and sent their findings by burst transmission.

  Ben read the communiqués and told Corrie to get Georgi Striganov on the horn.

  “Georgi, start moving your 5 Batt down from Digne. We’ll hit Cannes and Nice from the north and the west. Those cities are not on the list of cities I was requested to save if at all possible.”

  Miles north and slightly east of Ben’s position, the Russian chuckled. “So our pilots finally get into action, eh, Ben? They’ve been complaining to the high heavens.”

  “They can stop complaining. Now they can show me their stuff.”

  In the cities of Nice and Cannes, and at Bottger’s headquarters deep in Germany, the mood was jovial and somewhat smug. The creeps and punks and men and women of the MEF were sure that the Rebels were about to get the surprise of their lives when they launched their assault against Cannes and Nice.

  Somebody was about to get surprised, but it wasn’t going to be the Rebels.

  Georgi moved his 5 Batt over to Col St. Martin, and Ben moved his 1 Batt to the coastal town of Frejus. The highly modified P-51E’s came roaring in at dawn, squadron after squadron, flying right on the deck at over five hundred miles an hour.

  After dropping their payloads of HE and WP, the pilots kicked the rudders, did a chandelle, and came screaming back over the cities, machine guns and cannon yammering and booming. They made pass after pass, until they had exhausted their ammo. They left behind them burning and smoking cities, the streets littered with dead creeps and punks and assorted dregs of humanity. Before the stunned occupiers of the cities could recover from the initial attack, the smoky skies were once more filled with the second wave of P-51E’s, roaring in from their base at Nimes. While the enemy was taking their second battering from the skies that morning, Ben and Georgi were rolling toward their objectives, MBTs spearheading the columns, traveling as fast as road conditions would permit.

  Before the sounds of the P-51E’s had faded into memory, two heavily supported battalions of Rebels launched their assaults against Nice and Cannes. For an hour long-range artillery softened the towns with rounds weighing up to 230 pounds. Buildings collapsed and buried crews and machinery before the tanks hidden in the old shells of brick and mortar and wood could lurch themselves free.

  Before the last rounds had impacted, ground troops were storming the outskirts of the two cities. Ben and his 1 Batt hit the western edge of Cannes and began butchering their way toward the heart of the city.

  “The law-and-order son of a bitch is not taking prisoners!” Tony Green screamed into the ear of his new ally, a robed and hooded creep.

  “You were warned,” the creep said, then turned and began fleeing for his life.

  But there was no place to run except toward the sea. Ben had ordered Buddy’s 8 Batt, the special ops battalion, to jump in between Nice and Monaco and also to fill the gap between Highways 85 and 202. Helicopter gunships and PUFFs were in the air, patrolling outside the cities, and they turned lawless living flesh into dead smoking and burned meat as the creeps, malcontents, and thugs tried to escape the burning cities.

  Those who offered to surrender were taken prisoner, but few of them elected to give up. These were the hard core of the nation’s criminals, facing the final certainty of a hangman’s noose. They chose a bullet, and Ben and the Rebels were more than willing to accommodate their wishes.

  Ben and team, fighting their way up Rue Felix Faure, toward the Casino des Fleurs, found themselves cut off from Bonelli’s company and momentarily on their own.

  “I swear you did this deliberately,” Jersey panted, flopping down beside Ben under the sill of a blown-out window.

  “Not guilty this time, Little Bit,” Ben said, ejecting an empty magazine and locking a full one into place. “What the hell is happening to Bonelli?”

  “A pocket of creeps ambushed them,” Corrie called. “They’re pinned down tight. Just like us,” she added.

  “We got the bastard!” The shout came over a lull in the fighting. “Ben Raines is in that building right there. I seen the son of a bitch!”

  “Bloop that group,” Ben said.

  Cooper and Jersey started lobbing 40-mm grenades toward the sound of the excited voice. Jersey put one right through the smashed remains of a window, and the explosion blew an arm out the opening. The severed arm lay on a pile of bricks, the fingers clenched into a fist.

  “Goddamn you, Ben Raines!” a furious shout erupted from the building directly in front of Ben and team.

  “Now he’s going to tell us about his deprived childhood,” Jersey said, sticking a piece of gum into her mouth.

  Ben smiled. He didn’t know much about Jersey’s background, but he did know that she came from a grindingly poor family in the Southwest and never had a store-bought dress until she joined the Rebels as a teenager. But all that did not propel her into a life of crime. Jersey had even less use than Ben for those who blamed society for their problems.

  Ben had once heard Jersey tell a minority gang member taken prisoner, “You think you had a hard time, asshole? I grew up on a goddamn reservation in the desert. My playmates were rattlesnakes, Gila monsters, and scorpions. I didn’t know what running water and indoor plumbing were until I was ten years old. So fuck you and the horse you rode in on—prick!”

  “Two rockets about to be fired,” Corrie called from across the room. “Armbrust.”

  The bottom floor of the building housing the punks exploded in flames as the rockets impacted.

  “Tell Bonelli thanks,” Ben said.

  “Not Bonelli, boss,” Corrie replied. “Free German Resistance fighters.”

  “Then tell them danke schoen.” Ben stood up. “Let’s take this damn city.”

  Mop-up is always the worst job. It means dealing with snipers and mines and booby traps and the fanatical hard-core enemy. But this time when the Rebels found a sniper hidden in a building, they called up tanks and poured on the artillery. A .30-06 is no match for a 105 mounted on the turret of a main battle tank. But two of the gang leaders got away: Tony Green and Tuba Salami. They took with them about 150 members. But nearly 4000 others lay buried in a mass grave between Cannes and Nice.

  Cannes and Nice not only broke the back of the punks in France, it also astonished the hell out of Bruno Bottger and lit a fire under him. He had been sure the ambush would work. He was positive that the Rebels would drive right into it and that would have been the end.

  Bruno Bottger had a lot to learn about Ben Raines.

  Bottger gathered his generals and listened to their plans and theories about how to deal with Ben Raines and the Rebels. Bottger listened and then made up his own mind as to what strategy would be best.

  “The Rebels are weary of the cold. So I believe Ben Raines will split his Rebels into two forces. One force will leave immediately, attempting to take the southern route through Italy, staying to the south until spring. Then they will cut north and attack Germany from the east, while the second force will push through from the west.” Bottger stood up and walked to a huge wall map, picking up a pointer. “The push from the west will, in all likelihood, be on three points. They will jump off from Brussels, Luxembourg, and France. I am certain that Raines himself will be in command of the troops attacking Germany from the east. That attack will be two-pronged. They will attack from these two points
: Salzburg, and drive toward Munich, and Passau, staying north of the Danube, and push toward Regensburg. I am convinced that this is the way Raines will think.”

  He was met with enthusiastic applause.

  Bottger tossed the pointer to the table and glared at his people. “And then again,” he said, his voice thick with sarcasm, “Ben Raines might do none of those things.” He placed both hands on the polished table. “Listen to me, gentlemen. There is one thing about Raines that we must all acknowledge. He is unpredictable. No one, no one, can second guess the man. I can’t, you can’t. None of us will know what Ben is going to do until he puts his plans into action.” Bottger sighed heavily and sat down. “That means we must be ready on all fronts. We must be ready to defend our homeland from the north, the south, the east, and the west.”

  “We can do that, General,” one of his younger commanders said. “For we have something that Raines does not.”

  “Oh?” Bottger questioned, arching one eyebrow. “And what might that be?”

  “God is on our side.”

  Bottger stared at the young officer for a moment, his eyes mirroring total disbelief at such an absurd statement. “Shit!” he said.

  TWELVE

  For several weeks Ben let his troops relax. His engineers repaired the airport, and transport planes began flying into Nice and Cannes day and night. Ben ordered that each Rebel, and each member of the various resistance groups fighting with the Rebels, was to be given three days of R&R in the warm clime of the south of France. They relaxed on the beaches under the sun, swam in the warm waters of the Mediterranean, read, slept, ate three hot meals a day, and let the war be only a memory for a few days.

  During that time, Ben met with his field commanders to map out strategy for the spring campaign: Vanderhoot of the Free Dutch, Rene Seaux of the FRF, Matthies of the German Resistance, Roche of Belgium, Plaisance of Luxembourg, de Saussure of the Swiss Resistance, Randazzo of the Italian Freedom fighters.

  Mike Richards and some of his people had wandered back in after a two-week absence, and the chief of intelligence was sitting in on the meeting. Mike had reported massive troop movements inside Bottger’s claimed territory, which included much of Switzerland, all of Germany, all of Northern Italy, and parts of what used to be known as Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Austria, and Yugoslavia. Mike was not sure just how far eastward Bottger claimed as his own.

  “Too damn far,” Ben had said with a grunt.

  At the meeting Ben said, “Bottger has no idea where we’re going to attack. He’s shifting troops all over the damn place. And I am sure he is fully aware that by his doing so, he is weakening vital cross-points. But he has no choice in the matter.” Ben pointed to General Roche of the Belgian Resistance, who had stirred restlessly in his chair.

  “We must not forget that Bottger has thousands of civilian fighters aiding him, General. There are that many people in the countries he occupies who wish a return to the old ways . . . or at the very least, a change from the present. We’re going to be outnumbered fifty to one.”

  Ben smiled. “The Rebels are always outnumbered, General Roche. I can’t recall a campaign when we weren’t. The trick to defeating our enemy is to be smarter, tougher, meaner, and twice as ruthless.”

  Roche smiled and said very dryly, “So I have noticed, General.”

  “So where do we launch our offensive, General Raines?” General Randazzo of the Italian Freedom fighters asked.

  Ben shrugged. “I haven’t the vaguest idea,” he admitted.

  * * *

  Stateside, Cecil Jefferys, president of the SUSA, smiled at the latest domestic news. The economy of the SUSA and those western states who had aligned with the SUSA was booming; they were hard-pressed to fill the many jobs that were being created daily. A few companies had tried the Rebel philosophy—but had found it either too open or too harsh to suit them or too mystifying in its simplicity for them to comprehend—and had pulled out, heading back to Blanton’s crumbling-around-the-edges-quasi-socialistic rule. But for every company that pulled out, ten stayed and ten more wanted in.

  Blanton’s Justice Department had, of course, informers within the SUSA, reporting to their superiors. Cecil was well aware of that and didn’t particularly give a damn . . . as long as they did not try to stir up trouble. It was amusing to Cecil that the informers were scared to death every minute of the day and night that they might be found out.

  Cecil looked at the men and women seated in his large office. They had come to the SUSA to look it over and try to understand what made it so attractive to other companies, and why so many people were flocking to it in droves, and some were frantically leaving.

  “Mr. President,” a lady from one of the newly emerging Fortune 500 companies said, “I don’t understand your system of health care here. I spoke with a woman who was taking her family and moving out of the SUSA. She told me she had been refused medical care.”

  “I’m not familiar with the case, but I find it difficult to believe that any resident of the SUSA was denied medical care.”

  “She had a cut finger.”

  Cecil blinked at that. “A cut finger?”

  “Yes. She asked to see a doctor and was instead shown to some sort of para-medical person.”

  “That’s common practice here. We have aid-stations all over the SUSA, staffed by EMTs and trained medics. They handled minor medical problems: stitching up cuts, tending to non-life-threatening wounds. That keeps emergency rooms clear for real emergencies.”

  “Some people might wish to see a physician instead.”

  “That’s up to the medic at the aid-station. They won’t tackle anything they’re not qualified to handle. But many of them are so close to being doctors, I’ve seen doctors defer to them. Most of them have had years of treating combat wounds. There is very little they can’t handle.”

  “So if someone had a burst appendix, they could operate?” a man asked.

  “They could . . . and have. But unless they felt the patient would die before they could get to a hospital, they wouldn’t. It’s a judgment call for them.”

  “I’m not sure I would like to live in such a society, Mr. President,” the man replied.

  “It’s strictly up to you, sir,” Cecil said with a smile. “But before you make any decisions, why not visit those aid-stations and talk to our doctors about them?”

  “Good idea. I shall.”

  “I don’t understand the laws in this society, President Jefferys,” another man spoke up. “People who have moved in here boast that this is basically a commonsense form of government. I’m baffled as to just what that means . . .” He shook his head.

  Cecil started to speak, and the businessman held up a hand. “Please, sir. Allow me to elaborate.”

  “Go right ahead.”

  “I’ve subscribed to several of your newspapers for some months now, not trying to understand what is so special about this place but trying to understand it, period. I haven’t seen a police officer since we arrived here several days ago. I see an occasional army Jeep or HumVee, with uniformed soldiers, but no police. Do you have police?”

  “Yes. But not the kind you are accustomed to seeing. Mr., ah . . .” Cecil consulted a paper. “Mr., ah, MacKensie. We just don’t need a massive showing of police in the SUSA. People who don’t obey the law here don’t last long. We either escort them to the nearest border and tell them not to come back, lock them up and throw away the key, or somebody shoots them. We’ve brought it all back to the basics here. My oldest and dearest friend, Ben Raines, used to put it this way: ‘A smart person rakes his leaves, bags them, and takes them to the nearest landfill for disposal. A very stupid person, and the kind we don’t tolerate here, rakes them, sets them on fire, and lets the smoke drift into his neighbor’s window.’ Cecil smiled. “Now, Mr. MacKensie, if you don’t understand all the meaning behind those words—”

  Again, MacKensie held up his hand. “Oh, I do, Mr. President. Are you telling me that shou
ld that occur, someone might pick up a gun and shoot the offending neighbor?”

  “Oh, not the first time it happens,” Cecil replied with a straight face. “We give everybody one mistake.”

  “What?” MacKensie blurted.

  The woman seated to MacKensie’s left smiled and then burst out laughing. MacKensie turned to her, irritation on his face. “Linda, I fail to see the humor in any of this.”

  “Robert,” she said. “He’s having fun with you. Can’t you see that? I suspect the people who request to live in the SUSA are very conservative, law-abiding, and considerate. And they are fully aware of the unwritten laws in this nation. Isn’t that correct, Mr. President?”

  “Absolutely, Ms. Lambard.”

  “I’m still confused,” MacKensie said.

  Cecil said, “Mr. MacKensie, back before the Great War, I read of an account in New York City where a cop shot a thief and the thief sued and won something like three or four million dollars. Do you remember that incident, or one similar . . . of which there were many?”

  “Yes, I do. So?”

  “That has about as much chance of happening here as the possibility of my being able to flap my arms and soar with eagles. This is a law-and-order society. We teach it in schools. Public schools. There are no private schools in the SUSA. None, and there never will be any. There are no church-run elementary, middle, or high schools in the SUSA. None, and there never will be any. Every student receives the same type of education here. The finest in the world. We do have schools for exceptional children, on both ends of the spectrum. There is no such thing as social promotion. And there never will be. Our vo-tech schools are the finest in the world and so are our institutions of higher education. There are no crap courses. No easy courses. There are no sorority or frat houses, no basketball, football, or baseball teams. And as long as Ben Raines is alive, there never will be. Learning comes first. There is no such thing as a party school in the SUSA or in any of the states aligned with us. And there never will be. That is not to say the kids don’t have fun, because they do. They have their beer busts and spring breaks and so forth. I even heard there was a panty raid at one not too long ago. When I mentioned it to Ben, he smiled and said, ‘Things are getting back to normal, aren’t they?’