Chaos in the Ashes, page 21
“Forget it, Raines,” Doctor Chase told Ben as he stood in the doorway to Ben’s office, located in a home some twenty-five miles south of Toledo. He had caught Ben pacing the office like a caged animal.
Ben slowly turned to face his old friend. “Do you now have the ability to get into my mind, Lamar?”
“No.” The doctor poured a cup of coffee and sat down. “I just know you too well. You want to be out there with Buddy and Dan and all the other special ops people, slithering around on the ground with your face painted and a cammo rag around your head, cutting throats.” He pointed a finger at Ben. “If you try it, Ben, I’ll order you into the hospital, and I mean it.”
Ben smiled and sat down. He knew Chase meant it. In any army, anywhere, the doctors had the last word, and it made no difference if one was a general or a private. If Chase ordered him into the hospital, Ben would have to go. “Yes, I’d like to be out there, Lamar. But I’m not going. That isn’t to say I couldn’t do a good job. But this time I’ll leave it to younger fellows.”
“Even that old fire-breathing warhorse Dan Gray is staying back overseeing the operation,” Chase said. “And he’s a few years younger than you.”
Ben chuckled. “I’ll admit something, Lamar—I really don’t mind being middle-aged. I thought I would hate it, but I don’t. I think because I really haven’t slowed down that much. I’m a step slower. But I’ve learned to compensate for that.”
“We were a couple of firebrands when we first met those long years ago, weren’t we, Ben?”
“A couple of revolutionaries with a wild dream and two dozen or so followers.”
Both men chuckled for a moment, recalling memories that went back over a span of a dozen years.
Anna stuck her pretty head into the office. “Reports coming in from the field, General Ben. Buddy’s people really raised some hell last night. They killed about a dozen of Zandar’s personal troops, cut off their heads, and stuck them up on poles.”
“Jesus, Ben!” Chase said.
Ben shook his head. “You know I didn’t order that done, Lamar.” He looked up as Corrie joined Anna in the doorway. “Are you in contact with Buddy?”
“Negative. His last transmission said he would be out of pocket for about forty-eight hours.”
“He planned that well,” Ben remarked sarcastically. “That devious—” He bit that off.
“I wonder where he got it from?” Lamar questioned drily, getting to his feet and moving to the door. He paused and looked at Ben. “I meant what I said, Ben.”
Ben smiled. “You can’t prevent me from inspecting my own troops, Lamar. No matter where they might be. That is any commander’s right.”
“Raines,” the doctor said, knowing Ben had him on that point. “You’re a prick!”
At the time, Ben really had no intention of visiting Buddy, or any of the other special ops troops. He just wanted to stick the needle to Lamar. But the more he thought about traveling over to Indiana, the better the idea sounded.
Zandar had approximately four divisions of twenty-five hundred troops per division. Eyes in the Sky reported that about two thousand of Cugumba and Mobutomamba’s troops had stayed with Zandar. Twelve thousand troops spread out north to south over about three hundred miles, along Highway 31.
“Let’s end it,” Ben muttered. “Zandar is not going to quit.” He called for Corrie. “Pull in Ike, West, and Georgi. Get the tanks rolling. Put all fixed-wing and chopper gunships on alert. Order Dan and Buddy to cease immediately all guerrilla action, form up their battalions, and start gradually falling back. Prepare to throw up a defensive line along Interstates 69 and 65. Buddy’s 8 Batt at the top, Georgi’s 5 Batt to the extreme south end. The placement will be Buddy, Dan, us, Rebet, Danjou, Ike, West, and Georgi. I’m tired of dicking around with this guy, Corrie. Let’s go bump heads.”
Zandar had ordered the guards tripled at night—and still the infiltrators were slipping through and doing their deadly work. But it was not demoralizing his people. Zandar personally saw to that. Then the throat-cutting abruptly stopped.
Zandar was filled with hate, but he was far from being a stupid man. Actually, his IQ was very high. He just never did much with that intelligence . . . except hate white people.
But the ceasing of the infiltrators puzzled him. Why go to all that trouble, and then suddenly pull back?
His forward teams had reported that the Rebels were pulling back. They had withdrawn to Highway 15 and were still falling back toward the east.
Why?
Was Raines giving up?
Despite his shining arrogance, Zandar considered that highly unlikely.
An aide broke into his thoughts. “Sir? Ben Raines has made contact with us. He wishes to speak to you.”
Zandar stared at the aide for a moment, then stood up and walked to the communications room.
“Hey, Zandar! Are you there, asshole?” The voice of Ben Raines sprang out of the speaker.
Zandar froze in shock. Nobody spoke to him in such a manner.
“Hey, prick-face.” Ben’s voice was taunting. “Pick up the damn mic and speak. Oh, you have to press that little button on the side to talk, in case you haven’t figured it out yet. And as stupid as you are, you probably haven’t.”
Zandar snatched up the mic and shouted, “This is Colonel Zandar!”
“Colonel?” Ben’s voice was filled with sarcasm. “Colonel? Hell, boy, you wouldn’t make a pimple on a real colonel’s ass. You’re nothing but a goddamn sleazy street punk.”
“What do you want, Raines?” Zandar shouted.
“Your black ass, boy.”
Hundreds of miles away, Issac was listening to the transmission. “He’s deliberately taunting you, Zandar. And you haven’t got enough sense to understand that. You’re a damn fool if you fall for this trick.”
“You honky son-of-a-bitch!” Zandar shouted.
“I have about a hundred acres of cotton down south that needs pickin’. I figure that’s about all you’re good for. I’ll feed you lots of greens and fatback and cornbread.”
“Fuck you, Raines!” Zandar was livid with rage.
Cugumba and Mobutomamba were also listening to the transmission. They exchanged glances and both shook their heads. Ben Raines was playing Zandar like a puppet on a string.
“I’ll kill you, Raines!” Zandar screamed out his rage.
“How?” Ben responded. “You gonna hit me with a chitlin’, boy?”
Zandar finally got it. He had almost fallen for Ben’s taunting. He took several deep breaths and calmed himself. He keyed the mic. “Very good, Raines. Excellent. You had me going there for a time. But I won’t fall for your race-baiting. You are not a racist, Raines. I know that for a fact. I hate your guts, but you are not a racist. Now what do you want?”
“Very well, Zandar, or whatever the hell your name is. We can do this easy, or hard. It’s up to you. Lay down your arms and disband your army. Make a life for yourself and your followers. Live a long time. This is the only warning I’m going to give you. Butt heads with me, and you’re a dead man. You understand all that?”
“Raines, go right straight to hell. I’m going to destroy you.”
“Then you really are a fool, Zandar. Better men than you have tried that. I’m still around.”
“I will meet you in combat and defeat you, Raines.”
“OK, sucker. Come on.”
Ben broke the transmission.
“Arrogant son-of-a-bitch!” Zandar said.
Ben handed the mic to Corrie and winked at Jersey.
“Kick-ass time!” Jersey said.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Zandar was soldier enough to see that if he pulled his troops together en masse and smashed through any part of the Rebel line, Ben’s troops would just fall in behind him and he’d be no better off than before. Ruefully, Zandar realized he had to meet Ben Raines on his terms.
Both armies were now facing each other in company-sized groups, or smaller.
Ben had placed his heavy artillery well back from the several miles of No Man’s Land that separated the two armies, and the Rebel tanks were close in and carefully placed and camouflaged.
The Rebels waited for Zandar to make the first move.
But Zandar had turned suddenly cautious. Ben Raines had called his hand and was waiting for him to either bet his cards or fold.
It was purely unintentional, but Zandar and Ben were facing each other at the junction of Interstate 69 and Highway 18, just east of Marion, Indiana.
“That’s Zandar facing us,” Corrie said to Ben. “Scouts just confirmed it.”
Ben nodded his head then checked his watch. “Wonder what he’s waiting on? It’s well past dawn.”
Zandar was pacing the ground. His people were in place, waiting for his orders. The time was now. He could not wait Ben out; he didn’t have the supplies for that. Many of his people were living off the land as it was and supplies were critical. The realization came to him in a rush: Ben Raines knew all that. The Rebels were well-fed, well supplied, and waiting like a fat cat for a mouse to come out of its hole.
“The son of a bitch!” Zandar cursed.
Another hot rush of realization flooded Zandar. If he ordered his troops forward, it would be suicide. The Rebels would chop them to bloody pieces. Zandar looked up into the blue of the Indiana sky. No planes, no helicopter gunships. Oh, hell, no. Raines was holding them back until Zandar ordered his people across the three miles of empty, then they would swoop down like huge mechanical carrion birds, spitting out death.
Zandar was many things. But he was no fool. There was no way for him to win. Just . . . no . . . way . . . at... all.
Zandar sat down on a camp stool and put his face in his hands. He just could not give the orders to sacrifice his troops. The punks and thugs he’d gathered along the way had vanished like smoke in a breeze when the Rebels started their murderous nighttime guerrilla tactics. Those bloody death-grinning heads up on poles had really done it for the punks. They had disappeared in a rush after one look at that hideous sight. Just recalling it left Zandar with a queasy feeling in his stomach.
Zandar finally admitted something else, too: from the moment he first saw those bloody heads stuck up on poles, he had known the war was lost, had realized then he was not going to defeat the Rebels. All his talk had been just that: so much hot air from the mouth.
“When do we attack, sir?” An aide broke into his thoughts.
Zandar looked up at the young man. He shook his head. “We don’t,” he whispered.
“Sir?”
“Order all troops to stand down. I’m not going to turn this ground red with our blood. It’s pointless. Get me Ben Raines on the horn.”
“Zandar on the blower, boss,” Corrie said, handing Ben the mic.
“Colonel,” Ben said.
“General Raines. If we lay down our arms, will you let us surrender in dignity?”
“Of course, I will. I’ll do more than that. We’ll help you get settled in somewhere and help you out with food for the coming winter.”
“You would help us with all that?”
“Sure. Why not? We’re no longer enemies, are we?”
Zandar felt his eyes burn with a mist. He keyed the mic. “No, General Raines. No. We are no longer enemies.”
“Good. Have you had breakfast?”
“Why ... ah, no, I haven’t.”
“I’ll send a Hummer over for you. We’ll talk about getting you folks settled in over a hot meal.”
“I’ll be waiting.” After Ben had signed off, Zandar stood for a moment. Finally, he shook his head. “I just don’t understand that man. I wonder if anybody really knows what Ben Raines is all about?”
In the span of twenty-four hours, the state of Missouri was reborn and became a part of the SUSA, Zandar and his troops began making plans to resettle all over the Midwest (with many of them expressing a desire to relocate in the SUSA), and a major battle was avoided without having to fire a shot.
Indiana was declared clean and another state was added to President Altman’s NUSA.
“Ben Raines can do more in three months than the entire federal government could do in three decades,” Paul Altman remarked.
The western third of Ohio had been purged of the criminal element (for the most part) but the eastern two-thirds was quite another matter. The punks and thugs and assorted human crud, including the Night People, were running out of places to hide, as the advancing Rebels were slowly pushing them back into the northeast corridor.
“It’s been relatively easy so far,” West, the mercenary and commander of 4 Batt, remarked at a meeting of batt coms. “But now comes the hard part.”
“What about West Virginia?” Jim Peters, commander of 14 Batt asked. “It’s a damn battleground.”
“I don’t want to get bogged down in that state,” Ben said. “That’s the last thing I want. Old blood feuds erupting, race wars popping up all over the place, old union members against old non-union factions shooting at each other. It’s madness. I know there are thousands of good, decent people living there—existing is probably a better word. But we’ll just avoid that state for the time being.”
“How about this winter, Ben?” Ike asked.
“We’ll keep going as long as we can. But our meteorologists are predicting a bad winter here in the north. Shifting over to a more pleasant subject, Cecil tells me he’s received documents from Simon Border detailing a non-aggression pact and an agreement of cooperation and trade between our two nations. North America just might be headed toward the road to peace after all.”
“You always did predict we would break up into nations within a nation,” Jim Peters said. “Even before the Great War, that was the way you said we’d eventually go.”
Ben smiled at that. Those books he’d written before the Great War had gotten him into trouble with the federal government. The FBI had put him on their subversives list and launched an investigation on him that had still been on-going when the Great War toppled every government on the face of the earth. That investigation had the FBI snooping and prowling into every aspect of his life, from the cradle on. One friend who had been interviewed several times by the Feds told Ben the Bureau had a dossier on him that was about six inches thick. Such was the paranoia of the liberals in power at the time. At one point in the investigation, the Bureau strongly suspected that Ben was the leader of a huge underground army of guerrillas, whose goal was to undermine and finally overthrow the government.
When Ben learned of that, he was amused for days.
With the nation awash in every type of crime imaginable, the government had spent several million dollars investigating a writer of popular fiction.
Ben had once pointed out the absurdity of that to the FBI agents who visited him.
The Bureau had not been amused.
The Rebels began their march toward the Northeast, but now it was much slower going. The thugs and punks knew they were being pushed up into a box from which there was little chance of escape, and they were fighting like cornered wildcats.
Cecil had the ring of missiles around the SUSA fully operational and the home guard was once more built up and ready to defend the SUSA should the rabble try again to overrun their borders—something no one believed would ever again occur. He released the battalions that had been stationed in the SUSA and Batts 16, 17, and 21 joined the Rebels in the field.
Just as Ben’s I Batt and four other battalions were getting into position to strike against the ruins of Cleveland, Akron, and Canton, winter reared up several weeks early and laid a blanket of ice and snow over the land.
“Dig in and stay warm,” Ben told his troops. “It’ll warm up before long. This storm is a freak of nature. It’s far too early for it to last.”
But Ben also knew the punks would take the opportunity to split. The gangs they were dealing with now were the more intelligent ones: smarter, tougher, larger, better-equipped. They had lasted for years, and for most of the gangs, that was not based on luck, but on brains. Ben knew that most criminals, had they applied their intelligence to legal and legitimate endeavors, would be highly successful men and women.
“From now on,” Ben said to his team one freezing cold day in late October, “it’s going to be down and dirty. Scouts are reporting the three cities are virtual ghost towns. Except, of course, for you all know who.”
Mass groans greeted that.
“That’s right,” Ben said. “Our old friends, the creepies. We can always count on them to be very predictable.”
Cincinnati, Dayton, Columbus, Springfield—all had been deserted cities when the Rebels pushed through—except for bands of creepies.
“Ben,” Ike stood up. “What’s this about you and your 1 Batt heading down south and pushing east through Wheeling?”
“That’s my plan. Why?”
“Well, Ben, in case you haven’t looked at a map lately, Wheeling is in West Virginia. And Wheeling, according to Scouts, is a battleground.” Ike was one of only a few officers who could talk to Ben in such a manner.
Ben laughed at the expression on Ike’s face. “I’m going to Pittsburgh, Ike. And I’m going to come up from the south. Dan is going straight in from Weirdton, and Buddy is coming in from the north. If the bands of malcontents in Wheeling want a fight, we’ll give them one. Right now, let’s start clearing out the creeps in Cleveland.”
Corrie stuck her head into the room. “We got a problem, boss. Emil Hite is missing.”
“Missing? He’s supposed to be inspecting playgrounds. What’d he do, get tangled up in a swing?”
“He probably wishes he had. Seems as though Emil found a bunch of his old followers, among others. They decided that we might need some help up here—”
“Oh, shit!” Ike muttered.
“The last anyone heard from him, he and his . . . ah... well, followers had crossed the border into West Virginia. By the way, the group is about two hundred strong and call themselves the Rainbow Warriors.”
