Crisis in the Ashes

by William W. Johnstone

  Within twenty minutes, all of the attacking soldiers were either dead or severely wounded and out of action. Ben told Corrie to radio Anna and Beth to join him at the farmhouse, and he started down the hill.

  Just as Ben and his team arrived at the site of the battle, the door to the farmhouse opened and people began streaming out, most holding automatic rifles or pistols in their hands.

  Several of the men in the group began to check on survivors among the soldiers, disarming them so they would be of no further danger.

  The last person out of the door was a woman, and the sight of her made Ben stop in his tracks. He felt as if he’d been kicked in the chest by a mule.

  It was Lara Walden.

  Ben’s mind raced. He’d been in love only a couple of times, and he wasn’t at all sure what he felt for Lara was love, but it was stronger than infatuation. He was stunned. It was like looking at a ghost, a wraith that haunted his dreams and even his waking thoughts much of the time.

  As she caught sight of him her hand went to her mouth, while her eyes lit up like a child’s on Christmas morning.

  “Ben! Oh, Ben . . .” she cried and ran toward him, throwing the M-16 she was carrying to the ground.

  Beth, Anna, and Corrie looked at each other, astonishment in their eyes. “Jesus, she’s alive,” Corrie whispered.

  “Is that her?” Anna asked, examining the lady her dad had been in mourning over.

  “It must be—look at his face,” Beth answered.

  Ben crushed Lara in his arms, his eyes wet with unshed tears. “Lara . . . I thought . . . they told me . . .”

  She stroked the back of his head with her hand as they hugged, and whispered in his ear, “I know, Ben, I know.”

  Finally, he held her out at arm’s length and studied her. She had a fine, white, hairline scar running from her forehead down through her eyebrow and continuing on her left cheek. Her nose had a bump and curve to it that hadn’t been there the last time he’d been able to see her.

  He traced the scar with a fingertip. “Were they very hard on you?” he asked, his voice husky.

  She shrugged. “Not as hard as they should’ve been. One of our men on the inside managed to get a weapon smuggled in to me. After killing two of the bastards who were torturing me, I managed to escape—with some help.”

  Ben glanced over at the group of men checking the wounded soldiers and recognized several of them from the cell Lara had belonged to. “It looks like just about all of them made it out,” he said.

  “All except Jimmy Smathers. He died trying to keep them from taking me.”

  “The seventeen-year-old?”

  “Yeah. What is it they say? The good die young.”

  Ben nodded. “I’m glad you made it, Lara. The world was a sadder place when I thought you weren’t in it any longer.”

  She took him by the hand. “Introduce me to your friends. We need to get a move on before reinforcements get here.”

  Ben made the introductions, telling his team only that it was Lara. They knew the rest without his having to explain.

  Chuck Harris, the leader of Lara’s cell, walked over and shook Ben’s hand. “Thanks, Ben. We were having a pretty rough time of it until you and your team showed up.”

  “Don’t mention it, Chuck. Lara tells me we need to make tracks out of here pretty fast. Do you have transportation?”

  Chuck inclined his head toward the barn. “Yeah. We’ve got an SUV parked in there. How about you?”

  Ben pointed back over his shoulder. “Just over the hill there. We’ll saddle up and follow you guys to a safe place.”

  “Okay.” Chuck glanced at the few survivors lying on the ground nearby. “Any message you want to send back to army headquarters?”

  “You’re going to leave them alive?” Ben asked.

  “Sure. It takes three or four men or women to care for a wounded soldier, along with medicines and food, which are getting scarcer and scarcer in the USA. It only takes one to bury the dead ones.”

  Ben nodded. “Smart thinking.”

  Chuck grinned. “Plus, it does wonders for the other soldiers’ morale to see their fine army friends brought back on stretchers after a run-in with us ragtag freedom fighters.”

  Ben laughed. “I see what you mean. It never hurts to let the enemy know who they’re dealing with, and how tough war can be.”

  “Damn right,” Lara said. “I hate to interrupt all this man talk, but we’re burning night time, and we’re gonna need all we have to get to where we’re going before sunup.”

  “Point taken,” Ben said as he hurried up the slope toward where they’d left their Jeep.

  Coop came awake without really knowing what had caused it. He lay there on the pile of pine needles he’d fashioned for their bed, blinking, trying to clear the fog from his brain. All of Ben’s team was experienced in combat and used to being awakened in the middle of the night, usually to danger from some quarter. Without changing his bodily position, he slowly moved his arm to find his CAR where it was always lying when he retired, right next to his bed. He curled his fingers around the pistol-like grip, ready for immediate action.

  As he moved his eyes without moving his head, looking for anything out of the ordinary, he became aware of Jersey, lightly snoring, pressed against his back.

  Slowly, he slid away from her, trying not to awaken her needlessly. He crouched at the entrance to their lean-to and searched the darkness for enemies, tracking each quarter with his CAR, the safety off.

  The snoring stopped and Jersey was instantly awake, evidently sensing his excitement.

  “Coop, what’s goin’ on?” she asked in a whisper as she scrambled to her hands and knees, moaning once when she put weight on her injured right ankle.

  “I don’t know, Jers,” he answered, doubt in his voice. “Something woke me up . . . but—” Just as he was about to continue there came a flash of light and a distant booming sound, off to the southeast.

  “There,” he pointed, “that must have been it.”

  “Sounds like somebody’s kicking some major league ass,” Jersey mumbled, sleepy again since the battle seemed far away and of no immediate concern to them.

  “Yeah,” he answered, slowly, thinking about it as he watched the light display and listened to the explosions over the horizon. “And if there’s an ass-kickin’ going on, it means Ben Raines is probably behind it.”

  Jersey fluffed up a small pile of pine needles and lay back down, yawning. “You think that’s the team over there?”

  “Must be. Ben said there weren’t any other major anti-government forces up here, so it’s got to be us that’s raisin’ a ruckus.”

  “How far?”

  He shook his head. “From the look of the explosions, it’s got to be ten, fifteen miles.”

  Jersey yawned again and lay back, closing her eyes. “Too far to think about tonight. Let’s get some shuteye and head that way in the A.M.”

  He put his CAR down and lay next to her, cuddling against her back, his arm draped over her. He was surprised when she didn’t make a sarcastic comment about his hand lying on her breast, but figured she must’ve been already asleep.

  Unseen by Coop, Jersey gave a small smile, enjoying the warmth of Coop’s touch and the feel of his hard body against her as she drifted off.

  NINE

  Captain Alexi Federov was deeply concerned—worried. In all his years as a hired mercenary since leaving the former Soviet Union, he’d never encountered anything quite like this.

  His men were spread out across muggy, pine-laden hills in the state known as Pennsylvania. A seek-and-destroy mission in this terrain was about as tough as it could get. He led a force of Black Shirts, the special assassination troops trained in guerilla warfare by the elite USA Subversive Corps. Black Shirts were only sent into a war zone for highly specialized assignments. Alexi commanded one of these units, made up of mercenaries from around the world. Only the toughest and most bloodthirsty of the mercs were chosen
to serve with the Black Shirts . . . men who had little concern for the niceties of morality or compassion, who killed as easily and with as little thought as wild animals.

  General Maxwell had directed him to halt an attack force of special SUSA troops reported to be in these hills. No sign of them had turned up anywhere . . . not so much as a single footprint. A nuclear blast fired in years past, during the original World War, had wiped out the citizenry of this region, leaving only a few farm animals and wild creatures, all with various forms of cancers and skin growths, marking them as survivors of a nuclear attack by long-ago enemies of the old USA.

  Federov spoke to his sergeant, Sergei Larinov, another highly skilled Soviet guerilla fighter, whispering to him in the fog of an early spring morning near a town that had been known as Hershey in the days before the war.

  “Nothing. We were given bad information by General Maxwell about these Rebels. They are not here. Otherwise, we would have found something . . .”

  “Why would anyone fight to hold this useless territory?” Sergeant Larinov asked. “What strategic value could it possibly have?”

  “Who knows? I’m beginning to wonder about the competence of leadership under this Osterman woman. No one seems to know what they’re doing.”

  Larinov glanced up at cloudy skies. A silence blanketed the valley below them. “No airplanes. No rockets. Not a shot has been fired.”

  “It may be too quiet,” Federov warned. “Remember what Leonid said about silence when we went through our training in Mongolia. Silence can be a deadly thing . . . a warning. I have never been in a place as quiet as this. It is far too still to suit me. Even the animals seem afraid to make a sound.”

  “Nor have I seen a place so quiet,” Larinov agreed, sweeping the pine-studded valley with field glasses. “If these American Rebels intended to challenge us over this place, they would surely send up aircraft in order to have our position. Even the quietest surveillance airplane flying at high altitude makes some noise.”

  “They may not be able to get a fix on us,” Federov said. “We don’t know how well-equipped this General Ben Raines and his armies are. We have ten rocket launchers, and only thirty men for them to find. If these Rebels are here, we will certainly have them overpowered by weaponry . . . and skilled guerilla fighters.”

  “At the very least, we have good men,” Larinov said, with a glance behind him. “Our Soviet and Yugoslav assault teams are the best in the world. I have absolutely no doubts about it. All we have to do is find the enemy.”

  Federov let out a sigh. “What good will it do us, or this cause championed by General Maxwell and President Osterman, if they have sent us to the wrong place? There are times, like now, when I question the value of their intelligence reports on enemy activities.”

  “General Maxwell sounded so sure. A unit of the Rebel’s crack assault troops was coming north by way of this old road, to launch an attack on the USA’s capitol in Indianapolis. No one had any doubts, according to the general.”

  “I have my doubts now,” Federov said. “This is nothing but vacant farms . . . empty fields . . . a few wandering cows and some pigs beyond that hilltop. There are no enemy soldiers here. We have wasted our time on a dangerous night parachute jump, based on inaccurate information. No one . . . not even a civilian, is here now.”

  “We were ordered to wait.”

  Federov scowled. “Yes. To wait for the enemy. But as you can see, there is no enemy, unless we intend to wage war against pigs and cows.”

  “According to General Maxwell, we will be paid no matter what we find.”

  “I’m beginning to wonder,” Federov added, turning the focus knob on his field glasses. “I hear rumors that the USA is going broke . . . that they have very little money left after attacks on Rebel strongholds. Most of them failed miserably, which only makes me wonder more about their leadership.”

  “I have heard the same thing,” Larinov said. “If this is true, we will be forced to take our money from them at gunpoint.”

  “I was told the Bosnians have not been paid in silver or gold, as General Maxwell promised. They were given paper currency that is worthless. None of the stores in any of the towns in the USA will take this paper money.”

  “Until General Maxwell breaks a promise to us, we have no choice but to follow his orders. If anything he has told us is not true, including the amount and type of money we will be paid, then I will kill him personally.”

  Larinov was watching something behind them. “I heard a noise, Captain.”

  Federov jerked around. “What kind of noise?” he whispered, when all seemed quiet at the rear, to the north of their present position.

  “A cry . . . like the crying of a small child, but very soft and far away.”

  “Who the hell would be crying in this wilderness? There are no children here. We haven’t seen anyone since we crossed that ridge miles behind us.”

  “It may be nothing,” Larinov said, although he continued to keep an eye on a hilltop roughly half a mile away, north and west of them. “I could have imagined it, I suppose.”

  Federov went back to his field glasses, sweeping the valley again. “Nothing,” he hissed, clenching his teeth. “But I have the distinct feeling that something is wrong, and my gut instincts have never failed me before.”

  “Look!” Larinov exclaimed, pointing to a grassy slope to their rear. “It is Yarimer! What is he doing out in the open like that?”

  Federov turned his binoculars on the slope. Yarimer Hecht, an old friend from Russia, was staggering down the hill holding onto his belly. And now Alexi heard the crying sounds, too, for they were distinct in the silence surrounding them.

  “What the hell is that he is dragging behind him?” Larinov wanted to know, focusing his field glasses on the man in a black shirt and black beret stumbling toward them, pulling what looked like coils of rope dangling between his legs.

  Alexi sighed, reaching for his AK47 automatic rifle. “He is dragging his intestines, Sergeant. Someone has cut his belly open.”

  Larinov tensed, reaching down for his own automatic rifle. “Then they are here,” he whispered.

  The sudden staccato of automatic weapons fire thundered from the hills north of them. Yarimer Hecht went down in a heap as if he’d been struck over the head by a heavy hammer, blood squirting from a number of wounds across his back and sides, his head coming apart in a spray of blood and bone and tufts of his long black hair.

  “Son of a bitch!” Federov hissed, looking for the source of the bullets. “How the hell did they get behind us?”

  “It is not possible,” Sergeant Larinov said as more and more gunfire erupted from trees to the north and west of their position.

  The endless blasts of large-bore guns echoed across the Pennsylvania valley. Men in black vests and berets tumbled out of pine thickets, shooting at unseen targets to their rear before they were gunned down.

  “They have us cornered,” Federov exclaimed. “We have no choice but to pull back to the south, and that is all open country.”

  “To hell with this,” Larinov shouted as the gunshots came closer, lead slugs whistling through the air above their heads now.

  He came to a crouch and took off at a run, keeping low to make as small a target as possible.

  Captain Federov had cupped his hands around his mouth to warn his sergeant against such a retreat when he felt the earth shudder beneath him.

  Sergeant Larinov stepped on a landmine less than thirty yards downslope. He was blown skyward, arms windmilling, his AK47 flying into the air only fractions of a second before his legs were severed from his body. Pulpy bits of bone and flesh swirled away from his torso, and as he met his appointment with death he let out a bloodcurdling scream.

  Federov did not watch his sergeant land in pieces around a deep crater where the landmine had been planted. All he could think of now was making it out of that place with his skin intact.

  Men were screaming across wooded ridges behin
d him, and he had proof the land south of his position had been mined . . . his trusted sergeant’s body decorated the dark green grass running into the valley below him.

  “How the hell did they slip up behind us without any of my men knowing about it?” he wondered aloud, inching backward until he was protected from flying bullets by a ledge of rock jutting from the hill.

  It was not possible, and yet the shrill cries of wounded and dying men made it all too clear his squad was in deep trouble in the pines.

  Federov saw two of his men break from a stand of trees at a dead run, spraying automatic weapon fire in their wake as they ran toward safety.

  A mortar thudded somewhere on a hillock west of the valley, and then an earsplitting explosion blew his Black Shirt squadmen away, leaving nothing but flying dirt and clods of grass where they had been only moments before the blast.

  To hell with this, he thought, bending low to make a run to the east, where no guns riddled the slopes. He dashed across the low side of the ridge with his AK47 cocked, ready to unleash its deadly load should any target present itself before he reached the apparent safety of a pine grove nestled in a swale between two hills.

  Too late, he caught a glimpse of a shadowy figure in the pines, and the glint of early morning sunlight off the barrel of a rifle.

  Federov threw himself flat in the grass, bringing his rifle to bear on the shape.

  The pounding of rapid fire filled his ears, and he felt a stinging sensation spread across the top of his head and his right shoulder.

  The sky above him began to spin, and he lost his bearings for a moment.

  “What the hell . . . is happening?” he groaned, feeling a wet substance flow out of his mouth when he spoke.

  He looked down at the grass below his chin. A crimson stain spread between his elbows, and pain raced through his skull unlike any pain he’d ever known.

  I am shot, he thought dully as he felt himself spinning in widening circles. Tiny pinpoints of light flashed before his eyes as the world around him darkened.