D-Day in the Ashes Read online

  D-Day In The Ashes

  The Ashes Series: Book #20

  William W. Johnstone

  This nation will remain the land of the free only so long as it is the home of the brave.

  - Elmer Davis

  Laws that forbid the carrying of arms . . . disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes . . . Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.

  - Thomas Jefferson

  PROLOGUE

  Long before the United States of America collapsed under the sheer weight of liberal programs, as the touchy-touchy, kissy-kissy group took over Washington, there were millions of people who were looking for a way out of the morass caused by our elected ninnies and nannies in Congress. Political correctness was the order of the day. Fat people could no longer be called fat; now they were calorically adventurous persons—thanks to liberals. There was no such thing as true juvenile justice, so consequently many kids could and did thumb their noses at law and order, discipline, and respect—thanks to liberals. Minors could kill in cold blood and know that if caught, they wouldn’t spend much time in the bucket—thanks to liberals. The public schools went to shit—thanks to liberals. It wasn’t that teachers couldn’t teach, for this country had the most qualified teachers of any country in the world. But when teachers are in fear for their lives, how the hell can they be expected to teach? Teachers could no longer spank due to restrictive legislation, the parents couldn’t spank for fear of being hauled into court on child abuse charges, so discipline went right out the window—thanks to liberals. The minority-elected president and his nonelected czarina went on television—and to the surprise of those who knew the facts—declared that guns were the nation’s number-one health hazard. Really? According to the latest statistics available for the year that piece of liberal Democratic hysteria-inducing bullshit was uttered, motor-vehicle accidents were number one with 40,300 deaths, falls were number two with 12,400 deaths, poisoning was number three with 5,200 deaths, drowning was number four with 4,300 deaths, fires and burns number five with 4,000 deaths, suffocation by ingested objects number six with 2,700 deaths, and firearms were number seven with 1,400 deaths. So much for the accuracy of mush from the mouth of the president.

  Long before the fall of what had once been the greatest nation on the face of the earth, liberals saw to it that cops could no longer effectively enforce the law. Sensitivity training was the order of the day. If a court decision went the wrong way (to the viewpoint of some), certain minority groups took to the streets in a mindless rampage of savagery and barbarism and looted and burned and killed and assaulted, and then certain minority leaders went on TV and stated that it wasn’t their fault. Really? That’s right. It was the fault of those of us who work seven days a week, obey the law, pay the majority of taxes in this country, try to raise our children right, and do everything else that we were taught was right and correct and moral. And the liberals? What side did they fall on . . . ? Well, you know the story by now; no point in belaboring it.

  There were many who saw the direction in which the nation was heading. They wrote letters to their elected dunder- and danderheads in Washington (letters that were, in most cases, read by some little twitty self-righteous aide), they phoned (their calls were noted, and the elected officials went right ahead and voted party lines and to hell with the views and opinions of the people that they supposedly represented). The majority of the people demanded the death penalty for certain crimes (that sometimes happened—usually about fourteen years and millions of dollars of taxpayer money after the crime—thanks to you-know-who).

  Then the gun-grab happened. It was predictable, for liberals are scared to death of guns. They pee their lace-trimmed drawers and stomp on hankies at just the thought of a gun. Liberals are so colossally ignorant, they cannot understand that guns don’t kill, it’s the person who pulls the trigger who kills. A gun can do absolutely, positively nothing until someone picks it up. Liberals are so stupid they actually believe that a gun has a brain (that might be because liberals don’t have a brain).

  There were those Americans who tried to point out certain facts to the liberal gun-grab people. Naturally they were ignored by the Washington crowd, belittled and scorned and depicted as nuts and kooks by TV news departments (anybody know of a true conservative who is a major news anchor?).

  Toward the end of the millennium, the liberals got their way—all guns were banned, except for those in the hands of the police and the military and certain elected and appointed government officials. Thousands and thousands of gun owners carefully sealed their weapons in airtight and watertight containers and buried them rather than give them up, even though liberals passed legislation that called for the death penalty for anyone found with a handgun or an assault rifle . . . unless you were a member of certain minority groups, an elected government official (and their families, aunts, uncles, brothers-in-law, and close liberal friends), a member of the liberal press, certain talk-show hosts, fans of Jane Fonda, and anyone who voted for President Blanton. Anyone who was found with a Reelect Nixon, Join the NRA, God, Guns & Guts bumper sticker, or belonged to the Charlton Heston fan club was to be put to death immediately.

  “There now,” spake Vice President Harriet Hooter and Representative Rita Rivers. One bore a remarkable resemblance to a Shetland pony and had just about as much sense, and the other reportedly actually offered to screw one for a hundred bucks (business had been sort of slow on the streets that night). “That ought to show those nasty Republicans that we mean business.”

  “Right on, sister!” Rita said. “Hot damn! Power to the people. Get down and boogie!” She turned up the volume on her Walkman and did a few steps while listening to her favorite rap group: I Be’s Cool & You Ain’t Shit You Honky Mother-Fucker.

  “Isn’t that cute?” the president’s wife said.

  “Does anybody have a Twinkie they can spare?” the president asked. “I’m hungry.”

  “How else can we fuck up the taxpayers’ lives?” Senator Benedict asked.

  “I have a better idea,” Senator Arnold said. “Let’s go after all these goddamned right-wing Republican reactionary writers of paperback pulp that have been belittling this administration.”

  “Oh, good show!” Representative Fox said.

  “Right!” VP Hooter said. “Especially that right-wing, gun-loving, Republican bastard Ben Raines!”

  Federal agents and agencies began putting the squeeze on any writer who dared question the administration’s policies. Several adventure writers were shot to death, “resisting arrest,” according to the field reports of the federal agents. But that tactic quickly backfired. Much to Blanton’s surprise, the ACLU took the side of the writers and started filing lawsuits, even though many of the writers despised the ACLU and told them so bluntly.

  Blanton called off his two-legged federal Dobermans.

  Then federal taxes went up again, thanks to the likes of representatives and senators like Rufus Dumkowski, I. M. Holey, Wiley Ferret, Immaculate Crapums, Zipporah Washington, and men and women of equally liberal ilk.

  But their reign was, thankfully, short-lived. A third party was formed, and their candidate took much needed votes away from the Republican candidate, and the nation once more had a minority-elected president. Shortly after Blanton was elected to a second term, the whole world blew apart in war. Within a few days of limited nuclear and germ warfare, there was not a stable government left intact anywhere on the face of the earth . . . especially in what had once been called the United States.

  Which suited Ben Raines j
ust fine.

  The long years of combat take their toll on even the toughest men and women, and those who fought in the Rebel army were no different. Some of the men and women who had been with Ben the longest were through campaigning. They would never stop being Rebels, but they would not embark on this Canadian campaign against General Nick Stafford, a.k.a. Paul Revere. Those men and women—who for whatever reason—had elected to stay behind would train new recruits, join the Home Guard, raise families, and be good citizens of the Southern United States of America.

  Ben had spent months revamping and realigning his armed forces. His air force was small but lethal, flying a variety of planes, mostly reworked and highly modified prop jobs. His attack helicopters were the fastest, deadliest, and most heavily armed of any choppers in the world.

  Ben was fond of saying: “There might be larger armies in the world, but when it comes to mean, the Rebel army takes the prize hands down.”

  He was right. When it came to mean, there wasn’t an army on the face of the earth that came anywhere near the capabilities of the Rebels. Each Rebel was trained in a dozen different schools by instructors who were experts in the dirtiest, most savage, low-down mad-dog mean fighting tactics known anywhere. The Rebels were all jump-qualified. They could climb mountains, live in the swamps, jungles, deserts, or timber, drive a dog sled, and strike from land, sea, or air. Each was qualified with dozens of weapons, from crossbow to machine gun.

  There was a good reason for the readiness and willingness of the Rebels: The SUSA was their home. They believed in the Southern United States of America, they believed in the concepts set forth by Ben Raines, and they believed in Ben Raines.

  Many of the Rebels were too young to really remember when liberals took command of the government and began what many Americans believed was their unconstitutional legislative rampage toward total control of every aspect of every American’s life, from cradle to grave. But many Rebels were old enough to recall the insidious takeover, and they vowed never again to return to that form of government. They would die first—and many had over the bloody years since worldwide collapse and the formation of the Rebel army. Thousands had died fighting for the Rebel cause. But for every one that died, three stepped forward to take their place, thus ensuring that the Rebel dream would never die.

  Many people believed, and liberals fervently prayed, that Ben Raines would never live long enough to see his dream come true. But Ben Raines proved very hard to kill and the Rebel concept of government even harder to destroy. Both survived and flourished, and the Southern United States of America was built out of the ashes of war and over the wild, ranting objections of the nation’s liberals.

  What many fair-minded people could never understand was why liberals despised Ben Raines. For even though Ben was hard-line in some areas of his philosophy, he was more liberal than a liberal in many others. People who came into the SUSA with some trepidation soon discovered that living in the SUSA was much easier and simpler than living outside of it.

  In the SUSA law-abiding citizens had almost complete control over their lives and destinies, with very little government interference. The average life expectancy of a criminal in the SUSA was about an hour, for the SUSA—which took in the states of Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, Tennessee, North and South Carolina, Alabama, Georgia, and Florida—was an armed camp. In the SUSA a citizen had the right to protect self, family, pets, and property by any means at hand, including deadly force, without fear of criminal prosecution or civil lawsuit by the dead punk’s family. Consequently there was no crime. None. It just wasn’t tolerated. The same thing could have been done years before when the United States was whole, but the liberals wouldn’t permit it. Ben Raines had always believed that liberals placed more value on the lives of punks than they did on the lives of decent, tax-paying, law-abiding citizens. Within the borders of the SUSA, it was decidedly the other way around, which didn’t take the criminal element long to discover.

  Lawyers who came into the SUSA learned quickly that legal mumbo jumbo didn’t cut it there. Everything was straightforward and aboveboard, spelled out plain and simple. Medical attention was free and offered to all residents. People who once clogged emergency rooms with bullshit ailments quickly learned not to do so in the SUSA. Ben Raines set up aid-stations all over the SUSA for the treatment of minor injuries, and no town was without medical facilities.

  Ben destroyed hundreds of smaller towns in the SUSA and pulled people into workable-sized communities—not so large that a person could get lost and not so small that a person could not have privacy. There were many very good reasons for that, one of which was that they were easily defended.

  Ben began destroying the cities and bulldozing the rubble. There were no slums in the SUSA. There was not a neighborhood in any town that was not safe to walk in at any time of the day or night. It was not that difficult to accomplish—Ben just got rid of the people whose propensity was toward breaking the law.

  In the SUSA the educational system was the finest in the world, with emphasis on learning. Verbal and physical attacks on teachers were nonexistent because kids were taught at home to respect their elders, and teachers led exemplary lives, on and off campus. Kids had ten hours of hard physical exercise each week, and games were intramural, with emphasis placed on teamwork.

  Everybody over fifteen and under sixty who lived in the SUSA was in the army. Everybody. If people didn’t like that, they got out of the SUSA. Some military unit, somewhere within the eleven states, was in training at all times. Hundreds of thousands of people, men and women, were fully trained and combat ready.

  Many of President Blanton’s senior people had left him, opting to live and work in the SUSA, and Blanton was decidedly shorthanded when it came to people with any degree of common sense. Dick Penny had left him and sought asylum in the SUSA. Ben immediately named the career diplomat as secretary of state. Senator Hanrahan, a reconstructed liberal, and several more senior people had left Blanton’s administration and joined the growing number of people in the SUSA—Blush Lightheart included. His decision had come when Rita Rivers insisted upon replacing “The Star-Spangled Banner” with “God Bless America.” Blush had no objection to “God Bless America” . . . but not sung in Rap.

  Visitors were amazed at the number of minorities who chose to live in the SUSA. Cecil Jefferys, a black man who had been overwhelmingly elected as president of the SUSA, cleared that right up.

  “Black people are beginning to realize that here is the only place they can truly get a fair shake if they are willing to conform and work hard—expecting no free rides or handouts. Racism isn’t tolerated here. From either side of the color line. Liberalism didn’t help the blacks. It made too many excuses when the black man needed equal footing, not a pat on the head or the bending of laws. Here the law applies equally to all, probably for the first time in the history of the world. In the SUSA skill and the ability to get along with others is what gets you a job and keeps you working, not color.”

  “President Jefferys is a white man’s nigger,” Rita Rivers was fond of saying to President Blanton.

  President Blanton had to resist the temptation to tell the woman to get fucked. Last time he said that to her, she offered to take him on.

  Blanton shuddered at the thought.

  BOOK ONE

  ONE

  Ben walked the long, seemingly endless lines of Rebels. Battalion after battalion of Rebels stretched out before him—and these were the ground troops. The MBTs and Dusters had long since departed the SUSA for the north, transported by Lo-Boys. Tanker trucks filled with diesel and gasoline stretched out for miles and rolled day and night toward the north.

  Dan Gray’s 3 Battalion, Georgi Striganov’s 5 Battalion, Jackie Malone and her 12 Battalion, and Ben’s son, Buddy, and his special operations group were already on the ground in Maine at the staging area.

  Ben was filled with a strange mixture of pride and sadness as he passed in front of the
long full ranks of Rebels. There was a time when he knew the name of every Rebel. No more. Now there were thousands and thousands of dedicated men and women ready to give their lives at Ben’s command. It was an awesome feeling, and Ben had never been entirely comfortable with it.

  Ben’s personal bodyguard, the lovely, diminutive, and deadly Jersey, walked a couple of steps behind him, her M-16 at the ready. Ben saluted his batt coms as he passed.

  “Ike, you old bastard,” Ben called in a stage whisper to his longtime friend, a former Navy SEAL and commander of 2 Battalion. “You ought to be in a rocking chair.”

  “Screw you, Ben,” Ike returned the stage whisper. “You’re older than I am, you old goat.”

  Both men were middle-aged.

  Ben laughed and kept walking.

  Ben returned the salute of the mercenary, West. “Ready to go, Colonel?”

  “As always, Ben,” West called. West’s 4 Battalion was made up exclusively of mercenaries who had come over to the Rebel side. To say they were mean dirty fighters would be a clear understatement.

  Ben gave a thumb’s up to Rebet, commander of 6 Battalion, and returned the salute from the French-Canadian, Danjou, commander of 7 Battalion.

  He winked at his daughter, Tina, who was in command of 9 Battalion. Pat O’Shea, commander of 10 Battalion, gave him a salute that was indescribable at best. Ben laughed and waved at Greenwalt, commander of 11 Battalion. Raul Gomez, commander of 13 Battalion, snapped to and Ben returned the crisp salute. Jim Peters, whose 14 Battalion was filled with men from the New Texas Rangers, saluted as he walked past. Buck Taylor was the new CO of 15, Mike Post CO of 16, and Paul Harrison the CO of 17 Battalion.

  Ben walked back to the center of the huge parade field, where his personal team was waiting: Beth, the record keeper and the person who kept the team running; Cooper, the wisecracking driver; Corrie, the radio operator.