Tyranny in the Ashes, page 4
Claire Osterman had a lot of faults, but lack of resolve had never been one of them. When the time came to go meet Herb, she’d lost all of her excess weight and was beginning to get some muscle definition in her arms and legs. Her belly, while still not flat, no longer hung over her belt, and she could run in place and do situps and pushups for long periods of time without becoming winded. She was ready to face her adversaries.
Claire drove to the gasoline station outside of town at ten o’clock, after it was closed for the night by the new proprietor. She didn’t want any witnesses to her meeting with Herb. He wasn’t supposed to make his appearance until midnight, but she wanted time to search the vicinity and make sure there was no one hanging around.
When Herb’s small caravan finally arrived two hours later, Claire was sitting in the station, calmly drinking a beer.
He walked into the room, a .45 in his hand and a surprised expression on his face.
“Claire?” he asked, with upraised eyebrows, clearly unsure of whether this thin, muscular woman was the one he’d known previously.
She got to her feet and walked over to him. Seeing there were men watching them through the plate-glass window, she didn’t take him in her arms as she wanted to, but stuck out her hand. “Yes, Herb, it’s the new me. I’ll give you a proper welcome later, when we’re alone,” she said as he shook her hand formally.
“Now,” she said, “show me what we’ve got to work with.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he answered, and with a grin whispered, “and I can hardly wait until later.”
He took her outside and showed her what he’d brought with him. “I’ve got three HumVees, all four-wheel-drive with diesel engines. Twenty-two men joined me, including one you know very well,” he said, pointing to the lead vehicle.
Harlan Millard opened the door and stepped out, a weak grin on his face. Claire smiled, relieved he’d been willing to come. Herb was a great bodyguard, and not too bad in bed, but she needed someone with brainpower and cunning at her side, and Harlan was a natural-born conspirator who knew all the tricks of the trade when it came to wielding power and making the most of it. She hadn’t realized how much she’d depended on him until she thought she might lose his services.
She stepped to his side quickly, her hand outstretched. “Harlan, I’m so glad you came,” she said, giving him a quick wink.
“Yes, Madame President,” he replied, smiling more broadly now that he saw he wasn’t going to get his ass chewed out by her. “I welcome the chance to do everything in my power to see that you get your Presidency back.”
As he spoke, his eyes roved freely over her body. He was clearly happy with what he saw. Claire knew she would no longer have to threaten him to make him go to bed with her. There were definite benefits to this new body she was sporting, she thought, as a tiny tingle started between her legs. Yes, she was most certainly looking forward to working very closely with both Herb and Harlan.
Herb lined the men up in front of the HumVees for Claire’s inspection. “These are all ex-Blackshirts,” Herb explained.
“Ex-Blackshirts? What do you mean?” she asked.
“That fool Otis Warner has disbanded the Blackshirt Units,” Harlan said with a sneer. “It’s all part of his kinder, friendlier administration. He says there’s no place for Gestapo tactics in a free nation.”
Claire wagged her head. “The man is even more of a fool than I thought he was. How does he expect to keep the citizens in line without a show of force?”
Harlan smiled. “He’s dumb enough to think if he does what the people want him to, like end the war with Ben Raines, they’ll suddenly jump up and do what is right.”
“The fucking people don’t have a clue as to what’s right,” Claire observed. “But enough about Warner, his time is limited anyway. Have you found a place for us to use as our base?” she asked Herb.
He nodded. “Yeah. There’s an old base at Gatlingburg that was downsized after the plague killed most of the troops there. About all that’s left is a small contingent of ex-Blackshirts who were left in place ’cause Warner didn’t know what else to do with them.”
“Will they be a problem?”
“I doubt it. They’re as pissed as these men were to have their jobs and their rank taken away from them.” He shrugged. “And if any do object, we’re more than capable of taking them out.”
“Has it got what we need?”
“Oh, yeah. The communications gear was left in place and is up to date, with all the scrambling equipment and satellite connections still usable. We should be able to talk to just about anyone in the country without Warner knowing about it.”
“Then, what are we waiting for? Let’s get moving to our new home.”
They arrived at the Gatlingburg base just before dawn, and were delighted to find several helicopters and some half-tracks and armored personnel carriers still in the hangars. There were no men present at the guardhouse at the entrance to the base, so Claire and her men just drove onto the base.
Herb led the caravan to the barracks area and parked in the middle of the street. Bradley Stevens, Jr., a third-generation soldier and the man Herb had picked to be in charge of Claire’s new order, got out of the second HumVee, followed by six men carrying automatic rifles.
In a running crouch, Bradley led them toward the barracks. He stopped, squatted in front of the door, and with a wave of his hand sent his men in a sweeping circle around the building. Once they were in place before the windows, he stood up and walked through the door.
After five minutes, when there were no shots fired, Claire and Herb entered the building. They found Bradley standing before a line of twenty men in their underwear, some still trying to wipe sleep from their eyes, but all standing at strict attention.
“I’m Major General Bradley Stevens, Jr.,” Bradley said, pacing back and forth in front of the line of men, two of his soldiers standing at port arms with their M-16’s locked and loaded.
“I understand you men were once part of a Blackshirt Unit.”
A soldier on the end of the line nodded.
“Speak up, son, I can’t hear a nod,” Bradley barked.
“Sir, yes, sir!” the man yelled back.
“That’s good. That means you know the meaning of the word discipline.”
“Sir, yes, sir!” the men all hollered in unison.
“Well, boys, here is your Commander in Chief, President Claire Osterman.”
As Claire stepped up to the men, they all stared at her as if they were seeing a ghost.
“Yes, boys, I am alive,” she said, stopping to stand directly in front of them. “The present so-called leaders of this country tried to assassinate me and take over the government illegally. My question to you men is, are you going to work with me to regain my Presidency and carry on the war against the Southern United States of America?”
As if they were robots, all programmed with the same responses, the men shouted, “Ma‘am, yes, ma’am!”
She nodded, looking them each in the face for a second. “Good. General Stevens, will you see to the disposition of the men while my associates and I go to the Admin Building?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he answered, giving Claire a smart salute as she and Herb and Harlan walked out of the barracks.
“I told you, Claire, once a Blackshirt, always a Blackshirt,” Herb said. “I believe we’ll be able to get as many men as we need if we scour the countryside for ex-Blackshirts and ex-FPPS men.”
Claire stared at him as she climbed into the HumVee. “Don’t tell me Warner has disbanded the Federal Prevention and Protective Service, too.”
Harlan answered from the backseat. “No, but he’s severely curtailed their authority. Now they are subject to the same laws and restrictions as the regular police are.”
“You mean they have to get search warrants and let a suspect talk to a lawyer and things like that?” Claire asked incredulously.
“Yes, ma’am.”
She shook her head. “The way that idiot’s running the country, I won’t have to do anything and he’ll be overthrown in six months.”
“That’s what I mean, Claire. If we tell people we’re going to reinstate the old order and give them back their jobs and their authority over the citizens of the USA, we’ll have plenty of soldiers and Blackshirts and FPPS men clamoring to join us.”
She nodded, thinking. “Yes, I can see that. But we’ve got to keep a very low profile until we’re strong enough to repel any attempt by Warner and his minions to kill us. Now, get me to the Admin Building so we can get started on my plan.”
Claire moved right into the old base commander’s office and gathered her administrative staff around her, which consisted at the moment of Herb and Harlan and General Bradley Stevens.
“Did you bring me the file on Perro Loco?” she asked Harlan, leaning back in the chair and putting her feet up on the desk after removing her shoes.
“Yes, ma’am,” Harlan answered. “It’s complete up to the last time we had contact with him, but hasn’t been updated in several months.”
So,” Claire said, leaning forward and massaging her swollen feet. “We don’t have current radio frequencies on him?”
“No, ma’am.”
“General Stevens, I want you to pick two men you can trust and we’ll send them down to Belize to make contact with Loco. He’s a crazy bastard, but he’s got lots of men to throw at Raines and keep him busy and out of our hair while we work on getting rid of Warner and the rest of those traitors he’s got with him.”
“I know just the two men, Madame President. Both speak excellent Spanish and know the southern areas well. They shouldn’t have any trouble crossing Mexico and getting to Belize.”
“How long do you think it will take them to get there and make contact?”
He shrugged. “In one of the HumVees with all the necessary papers and passes, if they’re lucky enough not to get caught by the Rebels before they cross the border into Mexico, they should be able to make the trip in less than two weeks.”
“Good. Get them what they need and give them the scrambler codes and frequencies we’re going to use here and get them on their way. Make sure they take a portable satellite transmitter and keep in touch with us so we’ll know their progress. The sooner we find out if he’s willing to help us, the sooner we can take steps to regain my Presidency.”
“Yes, ma’am,” the general replied.
“And Bradley,” she called to his back as he was leaving the room.
“Yes, ma’am?”
“Don’t waste any time. While they’re on the way to Belize, I want you and a team of men to go out into the surrounding countryside and see if you can recruit some more men for us from the other bases in Tennessee and the adjoining states. We’re going to need all the men we can scrape together if we’re going to succeed.”
“You got it, Madame President.”
Six
Randy Grimes pulled the HumVee off the road into a stand of mesquite trees after he crossed the border at Reynosa, Mexico. The only signs of life he and Arnold Mendoza had seen for the past two hundred miles driving across the backcountry of Texas had been a few scraggly cattle, some javelinas, and a family of white-tail deer.
Arnold, whose real name was Arnoldo, climbed in the back of the HumVee and cranked up the portable satellite transceiver. As it warmed up, he activated the Unitel Model 602 scrambler attached and dialed in the code numbers to the matching scramblers at the base in Gatlingburg.
Grimes, who had carrot-colored red hair, stood outside the HumVee applying sunblock to his freckled, fair skin. “I tell ya, Arnold, if I don’t git skin cancer from all this here sun it’ll be a flat miracle,” he said in his deep grits-and-gravy southern accent.
Arnold shook his head, smiling. He liked Randy, even though he was a cracker from Georgia and about as hick as they come. Arnold, who’d grown up in a household where English was rarely spoken, could speak better English than his bubba friend Randy could.
“Well, Randy, why don’t you get back in the Hummer and out of the sun then, you redneck idiot?”
“I’m damn shore gonna be a redneck ’fore this here assignment’s over, that’s fer sure.”
As the satellite transceiver hissed and crackled with static, trying to connect to the TelStar Satellite overhead, Arnold pulled out a cigarette and stuck a match to it. “Say, Randy, I never asked before, but how in the hell did a nice southern boy like you learn to speak Spanish?”
Randy’s face blushed even redder than it already was. “My papa, after he divorced my mama, married a Mexican. She’d been our maid, an’ was twenty year younger’n my daddy, but he up an’ married her anyways. I’s only four or five at the time, so I jest kinda naturally picked it up over the years.”
Arnold took a deep drag of the cigarette, letting the smoke trickle from his nostrils as he replied, “It’s a damn shame you didn’t pick up English the same way.”
“Huh?” Randy said, a puzzled expression on his face.
“Never mind,” Arnold said, turning to the radio. “It’s time we checked in.”
“You tell ‘em we made it through Texas an’ now we’re headed for Monterrey and then Sautillo. We can pick up what passes for the Mexican freeway, the Camino Real, at Monterrey, an’ then it’s clear sailin’ all the way down to Costa Rica.”
Arnold shook his head. Randy was always trying to tell him what he already knew. Still, the boy had a good heart and he wasn’t too bad to travel with, other than the fact he snored like a buzz saw. Arnold had taken to stuffing his ears with cotton so he could get some shut-eye.
Ben Raines was jogging down one of the roads around headquarters, Jodie running alongside him, when his personal SUV pulled up.
He stopped, leaning over with his hands on his knees blowing air, while Coop stuck his head out of the window. “Hey, Bossman, you’re gonna kill yourself, running at your age.”
Between breaths, Ben managed to say, “You think you young studs can keep up with me, come on out next time and give it a try.”
Coop smiled, shaking his head. “Some men just don’t know when it’s time to hang it up and sit by a fire and clean their false teeth.”
Ben straightened up and held up his hands. “Okay, you’ve got your digs in. Now what’s so important that you interrupted my quality time with Jodie?”
Coop’s face sobered. “Corrie’s intercepted some radio transmissions she thinks you’ll be interested in.”
“Oh? From the USA?”
Coop shook his head. “No, but a couple of names cropped up that might just get your attention.”
“What names?”
“Claire Osterman and Perro Loco.”
“Get in the back, Jodie,” Ben said, opening the rear door to the SUV “We gotta go home.”
Ben found his team gathered in the main meeting room of his headquarters suite of offices. Corrie was rewinding a tape recording she’d made of the transmissions.
“How did you manage to intercept these?” Ben asked as he sat at a desk and wiped the sweat off his face with a towel.
Corrie grinned. “I patched into the old NSA computers that are still in use up north, the ones the old USA used to spy on everyone around the world. Those dumbbells in the present USA either don’t know they’re there, or aren’t smart enough to use them properly. They can hear virtually every radio transmission around the world.”
Ben nodded. “I know that, but so do most of the other governments, so they all scramble their transmissions.”
“These were scrambled.”
“Then how did you manage to understand them?”
“The idiots were using the old Unitel Model 602 scrambler. It has a distinctive whistle to its interference, so I managed to find one in a closet and hooked it up.” She grinned. “Hell, that model’s ten years old and I didn’t even know there were any around, much less still in use.”
Ben pointed at the tape recorder. “Okay, genius, let me hear what you got.”
As he and his team listened to the recording, Ben’s heart began to beat faster and he felt sweat pop out on his forehead. He realized he wasn’t yet through with that bitch Claire Osterman, and the thought chilled him to the bone.
When the recording was over, Ben got up and began to pace around the room, as he often did when he was thinking a problem through.
“First, get Mike Post in here,” he said, referring to his Chief of Intelligence and second in command of the Rebel Army. “He needs to hear this.”
Corrie picked up a phone and began dialing.
“What do you think it means?” Jersey asked. She was sitting on the edge of Ben’s desk, slowly running the edge of a K-Bar assault knife over a whetstone. Jersey was part Apache Indian, which may have explained her penchant for killing with a knife when silence was required.
Ben stopped walking. “Obviously, Claire Osterman is not dead, as we were told.”
“Do you think the transmission could be a fake, one designed to make us think she’s still alive?” Beth asked.
Ben shook his head. “There’d be no point in that. No, I think someone in Warner’s administration tried to take her out, and failed. Now she’s out there working to get control of the government back.”
“What about this Perro Loco they keep mentioning on the tape?” Coop asked.
Ben shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve never heard the name.”
From the doorway, Mike Post said, “I have.”
“Oh, hi, Mike,” Ben said. “Glad you could make it.”
Mike smiled wryly. “Oh, the mention of Claire Osterman and Perro Loco got my attention right away.”
“We know Claire. Why don’t you tell us about this Loco guy,” Ben said.
