Triumph in the Ashes Page 10

  More automatic rifle fire came from the jungle undergrowth behind his soldiers’ lines. He shoved a fresh clip into his gun, cupped one hand around his mouth, and yelled an order to turn and fight the enemy approaching from the rear.

  As he prepared to shout his orders in the Bantu tongue, a bullet from a CAR—Colt automatic rifle—entered his chest, cracking open his rib cage. He staggered backward, feeling incredible pain shooting through his entire body. He tried to move, to run for cover, but his arms and legs would not obey his commands.

  He slumped to the ground on his knees as though he meant to pray, still holding his 9mm in his right fist. A thousand strange thoughts passed through his mind at once, and he feared he might be dying.

  When his knees would no longer support his weight, he went to the ground face-first, his vision blurred.

  He opened his eyes, but his vision blurred as helicopter gunships began to strafe the positions his men held along the banks of the Zambezi River. All around him his soldiers were screaming, dying. Everything had gone wrong and Binda, his lead scout, was to blame.

  A fuzzy shape appeared above him. He blinked in spite of his terrible pain. He saw a hazy apparition.

  “You must be General Mabota,” the figure said softly, smiling as if they were at a formal tea at the embassy, showing rows of even white teeth. “Before I open you up for the ants and hyenas to begin feeding, I want you to see, that your little ambush did not work as well as you’d hoped.”

  Mabota could barely hear the words with the chopper blades thumping over the river and the banging of guns, yet he understood that the phantom speaker seemed to be enjoying himself when he told him his plan had failed. And now, he meant to kill him.

  He tried to speak. “How . . . did . . . you . . . know?” he gasped, finding it hard to breathe.

  “All too simple, General. You did the most obvious thing, trying to attack us where we’d be forced to cross the Zambezi. Any child could have figured this out.”

  “What? A child?”

  The apparition gave him a mirthless smile. “Enough talking, General. We have a river to cross, as soon as we annihilate every soldier you have . . . those who haven’t already run away to hide in the jungle.”

  A hand came down suddenly, and Mabota felt a blade tear open his flesh. His eyelids batted closed, and he began the long sleep of his Zambian forefathers.

  THIRTEEN

  Colonel Marsh wiped the blood off his hands, using the pants leg of his fatigues. He stared down at the corpse of General Mabota, his thickly muscled ebony body still quivering with death throes.

  The jungle and river bottom still rang with battle sounds, the chatter of machine guns and the occasional roar of a diesel engine as another tank maneuvered its way across the float bridge after the damaged tank was towed away. A pontoon supporting the bridge in one spot was damaged, but still able to provide flotation until it could be repaired, she hoped.

  Bob Warren, his aide, came walking into the shadows provided by the camouflage netting, his CAR rifle dangling from his right shoulder by a strap. He nodded to Marsh as mosquitos swarmed around them. He batted the bugs away from his face as a mortar thudded close by.

  “We lost one Apache, and just one tank,” he said, staring at the dead guerilla leader briefly.

  “Yeah.” Marsh sighed. “But the tank was one of our Abrams. It shouldn’t have been the first to cross, and I want to know who the hell’s responsible.”

  “Probably Duckworth, seein’ as he’s in charge of armored lineup.”

  Bob’s southern accent was thick, easily recognizable even in the dark when he couldn’t see his face.

  “I’ll have his ass.” Marsh said it bitterly, for an Abrams tank was too precious for his weakened unit to lose now.

  “One of the M48A3s broke down at the head of the column,” Bob said. “One track sheared a gear, or somethin’. I heard somebody talkin’ about it.”

  “That’s no excuse,” Marsh snapped. “We can’t afford to lose a single Abrams.”

  Bob tried to change the subject. “This must be the big bad General Mabota, the bastard who was gonna destroy us before we got out of Zambia, accordin’ to the secretary to Zambian President Chiluba.”

  “That was him. He isn’t going to win any more battles after today.”

  “He’s an ugly bastard. Biggest head I ever saw in my life, an’ flat as a board. So much for all the bullshit we heard about him bein’ the toughest warlord we’d face crossin’ Zambia. Him an’ his Zulu mercenaries just sat here waitin’ for us like ducks frozen to a lake.”

  “Our Intelligence from Mike Post warned that Mabota would have Russian pocket rockets. That part was right. I hate it we lost Jimmy and his Apache chopper. Jimmy Stone was a helluva good soldier, and one of the best gunship pilots in any battalion we have.”

  “I know,” Bob said. “I liked Jimmy a lot. General Raines ain’t gonna be happy to hear we lost him.”

  “Ben understands the casualties of war better than any man on earth. He’ll understand. We could easily have lost a lot more good soldiers to Mabota if he hadn’t been so stupid, to set up for us here.”

  “He wasn’t too much in the smarts department, that’s for sure. A river is the first place we expected him. Can’t figure how come he wouldn’t know that.”

  Marsh watched another fifty-five ton Abrams commence the crossing, teetering dangerously when it came to the weak spot in the bridge.

  “These African warlords are smart in many ways, but they haven’t had much experience in modern warfare. We had him badly outgunned, too, if it hadn’t been for those rockets Bottger sent him. The one that hit Jimmy sounded like our TOW Dragons, the way it hissed. I was pretty close to the spot where it was launched.”

  “I got a glimpse of the rocket that got our Abrams. Just like our HEAT antitankers, only maybe a little weaker. Dave Boyd an’ Sammie Watkins were inside. Good Armored Division men, only Sammie never was feelin’ just right after he got bitten by that poisonous snake. Said he felt sick to his stomach all the time after that.”

  Marsh watched the tank crawl out on the far river-bank as the blasting gunfire died down along the Zambezi River valley. A pair of APCs entered the bridge when the tank was clear.

  “We’ve all endured a lot of hardship on this campaign,” he said, a note of sorrow in his voice he couldn’t control. “We’ve lost a lot of good friends in Africa, and it isn’t over yet. Ben thinks Bottger will come at him hard when he sees Ben’s forces pulling back toward the coast. Let’s hope he does. Ben and everybody else has worked hard to make this appear to be a retreat, or a pullout.”

  “O’Shea radioed in from 510. They aren’t meetin’ any resistance to speak of.”

  “They haven’t gotten out of Zaire into Angola yet. That’s where Ben expects things to get tougher. We’ll be facing some of The New World’s best troops and war machinery in Angola, if Ben is right.”

  “General Raines is nearly always right.”

  Marsh gave Bob a faint smile. “That’s why he’s in command of the Rebel Army, Captain Warren. He knows more about guerilla war than any soldier in uniform. His record speaks for him.”

  “I’ll say. Ten years or more of civil war, and now this here African campaign for SUSA. So many before this one, too. We’ve seen our share of battles, in nearly every place anyone can think of.”

  “Ben believes in what we’re doing. The concept is what he is fighting to protect, where people must take responsibility for their own actions, and that includes paying the price if they break the law. I agree with Ben,” he said, after a moment. “Society isn’t to blame for what had happened before the war. It was people—liberal politicians—and a bunch of damn civil rights legislation that let a criminal get better treatment than some individual who’s honest and works for a living. I’m glad all that has changed in our part of the world.”

  The chatter of an automatic rifle crackled from a spot in the jungle, and someone screamed. Upriver, the deadly
whisper of a grenade launcher warned of the explosion immediately following the launcher’s noise. Trees and undergrowth were ripped to shreds, and there was more screaming following the concussion of the grenade.

  Marsh could see shadowy figures running away from the river. What was left of General Mabota’s mercenary army was in full retreat.

  Then it seemed the battle sounds virtually stopped, with only a rare gunshot or two along the river’s edge. Only the hum of the helicopters’ rotors filled the silence, and the rustle of forest leaves from the downwash of the props sounding quietly in the background.

  “Looks like it’s nearly over,” Bob remarked.

  Marsh was watching one of his Scouts, Sergeant Peters, make his way through a dense rain forest grove with a prisoner.

  Peters held a gun to the back of the man’s head, shoving him violently a couple of times when he slowed down.

  “Why is Peters bringing this guy in?” Marsh asked, thinking aloud. “We aren’t taking any prisoners. Those were Ben’s last orders.”

  “Maybe Sergeant Peters thinks this guy knows somethin’ real important,” Bob said. “He wouldn’t be bringin’ him to you, otherwise.”

  “Maybe.” Marsh hoped Bob was right about his guess, that a reason existed for bringing in a prisoner.

  Sergeant Peters ushered a slender black boy wearing faded green fatigues and sandals over to the command post. The kid looked frightened, his hands clasped behind his neck as Peters had ordered.

  “Got somebody for you, Colonel,” Peters said around a plug of chewing tobacco. “Listen to what this boy has to say. He speaks real good English, like most of ’em here in Zambia we run across.”

  The boy said nothing at first, looking at Marsh with a strange expression on his face.

  “Speak up, asshole!” Peters growled, “or I’m gonna put a big tunnel through your head.”

  Peters was well known for his penchant for violence. He seemed to enjoy the killing, and he was one of Jackie’s most reliable Scouts.

  Scouts were made up mostly of the same kind of men who were known as LRRPs in Vietnam, pronounced Lurps. The letters stood for Long Range Reconnaissance Patrols, and the Rebel Scouts were made up of the most violent trouble-hunting men and women on the face of the earth.

  Like the LRRPs, the Rebel Scouts prided themselves on being the elite of the elite when it came to murder and mayhem.

  “Many soldiers from New Order come soon,” the boy stammered, his English accented by his Bantu upbringing.

  “How do you know this? And which direction are they coming from?” Marsh asked.

  “General Mabota says so. Big German come to talk to him, and he say sending many soldiers from another place this week. Come down from the north, he say.”

  “Was the big German’s name Bruno Bottger?”

  “I did not hear his name,” the kid replied quickly, his arms and lips trembling with fear the minute he recognized the body of General Mabota lying behind Marsh and Bob. Mabota was no longer quivering, or breathing, and the flow of blood had slowed when his heart finally stopped beating.

  Marsh judged the boy was probably only fifteen or so, and it would be a shame to execute him, as his orders said he must. But he needed to know if he knew anything else of importance to the Rebels.

  “What else did General Mabota or this German say?”

  The young soldier’s eyes went askance for a time, then he looked up. “General Mabota say you all die when big airplanes come. He say we stay other side of Zambezi River after next week, when airplanes come with bombs.”

  “On the other side?” he asked.

  The boy nodded.

  “But that was based on his belief that he’d be able to stop us here,” Marsh said.

  Now the young teenage soldier shrugged. “That’s what General Mabota say to us. We go across and not come back until after big bombs. We hide in jungle.”

  Peters spoke. “Can’t trust what anybody told Mabota,” he said, “’specially if it was Bottger. Bottger wouldn’t mind droppin’ bombs or napalm on his own hired mercenaries, if it suited his purposes. He ain’t got no loyalty to nobody, even these boys who fought on his side.”

  “That’s true,” Marsh said.

  He turned to Bob. “Radio General Raines with the information we just heard. Encode it with the Beta filter transmission. Ask the general what he thinks this means, if it’s propaganda. He may want to change our orders.”

  “I’ll get it off right away,” Bob said, wheeling to leave the canopy netting.

  “One more thing,” Marsh added. “Inform him that we have cleared the crossing, and that General Mabota is dead. We’ll continue across, unless we get different orders.”

  “Gotcha,” Bob said, taking off in a trot for the truck hauling their specialized radio gear moving with the column to the bridge.

  Marsh glanced up at a pair of Apache gunships hovering up and down the river at low altitude, making sure no enemy soldiers with rocket launchers got close to the bridge while the battalion was crossing. The choppers were equipped with twin 40mm cannons and M60 machine guns, making them deadly war machines during an assault.

  All week they’d been expecting to sight Hind M24 D&E Russian helicopter gunships, the best attack helicopters the Nazis had in Africa. But nothing had been picked up on radar, not even a spy plane or a fighter.

  “Are you done questionin’ him?” Peters asked, punching the rear of the boy’s head with the muzzle of his Beretta 9mm.

  “No more questions,” he said.

  Peters jerked the young mercenary around by his shirt collar, and before Marsh could utter a word Peters’s gun exploded three times at the base of the boy’s skull.

  Pieces of the soldier’s face flew off as the slugs exited through his nose and one eye socket. A shower of crimson went splattering over the ground as the boy tumbled forward, landing on his chest, his pulverized features scarcely resembling those of a man.

  Marsh did not flinch. In his years with the Rebel Army he had seen death in every possible form. In the beginning it had bothered him a little, especially when one of his own soldiers was killed in action. But no longer.

  But that was long ago, when the global conflicts first began, and now he was hardened. He was the commander of a crack army strike force, and there was no room for sentiment of any kind. He had a job to do, and he was damn good at it.

  “Make sure the mop up is complete,” he told Peters as he prepared to walk down to the floating bridge to have a word with Sergeant Duckworth about losing a valuable Abrams tank.

  “Don’t you worry none,” Peters replied, heading back into the jungle. “There ain’t gonna be none of the sons of bitches left by the time we’re done. By the way, Commander . . . nice job cuttin’ up that General Mabota. Couldn’t have done no better at it myself.”

  The remark caused Marsh to pause, and to look back at what he had done to Mabota.

  After a moment, he shook his head. “Screw it,” he said out loud. “I don’t have time for this shit!”

  He turned and walked rapidly toward where his troops were gathered. “Duckworth, I want your sorry ass front and center, now!” he yelled.

  FOURTEEN

  Ben and his team, along with several hundred men of his unit, were in the lead C130 transport flying over Angola.

  Grabbing the intercom mike hanging over his head, Ben said, “Captain, could you descend to as low an altitude as you’re comfortable with for a while? I’d like to see what the countryside looks like below us.”

  A tinny voice answered, “Sure, General, ’cept I’m worried about SAM missiles. These birds are big and slow, and make a tempting target for any hostiles down below.”

  “Don’t worry about that, Captain. My Intelligence assures me there are no hostiles, and damn near nobody else, left alive in Angola to fire on us.”

  Beth grabbed her ears, a pained expression on her face as the big aircraft went nose down in a rapid dive. “Jesus, it feels as if my ears are g
oing to explode.”

  Anna handed her a stick of chewing gum. “Here, Beth. Chew this. It’ll make you swallow and equalize the pressure in your eustachian tubes. That’ll stop the pain.”

  “Thanks.”

  Ben leaned to the side and stared out the small porthole sized windows in the C130. Hair on the back of his neck stirred, and gooseflesh appeared on his arms at the sight below.

  As far as the eye could see were thousands of buzzards and other carrion eaters, feasting on the millions of carcasses spread over the landscape below. As they rose and flew and settled again, it gave the appearance of giant waves on a black ocean, roiling in the wind.

  He turned to Dr. Lamar Chase, sitting on the hard bench next to him. “Doc, are birds immune to anthrax?”

  “Yeah, usually. Why?”

  “Take a look out your window.”

  Chase turned his head and peered below for a moment, then turned back to face the interior of the aircraft, his face pale. “Dear God, I hope I never have to see anything like that again.”

  “Well?” Ben asked.

  “It seems that the particular bacterial agent Bottger used, whether it be anthrax or something similar, affects only mammals. Birds, reptiles like crocodiles and monitor lizards and snakes, and insects don’t seem to be affected.”

  Ben shook his head. “I guess it’s a good thing. Otherwise, those bodies would be there for years, fouling the environment irretrievably.”

  Chase glared at him through red-rimmed eyes. “There is another possible benefit. If the carrion eaters consume the bodies, perhaps the bacteria won’t have time to form spores, and someday the area will be suitable for human habitation again.”

  Ben’s eyebrows raised. “What do you mean?”

  Chase leaned his head back against the wall of the airplane. “In World War II the allies spread anthrax bacteria over some islands near the Scottish coast that were inhabited by Nazis. The bacteria formed spores, which can last for hundreds of years in the right climate and then reawaken, so to speak, to become infectious once again. After the war it took over twenty-five years and hundreds of millions of dollars for the government to eradicate the infection and make the islands livable once more. And that was only a few hundred square miles of area.”