Betrayal in the Ashes Read online

  “Corrie, have the reinforcements stretch out on the road between Hamburg and Lubeck. Tell Ike to start his pincer movement up to Kiel. Have the P-51’s and gunships ready to start strafing when the punks start running north.”

  She nodded. “All bridges now under Rebel control,” she reported to Ben.

  Ben cut his eyes to Rolf. “Pull your people back and take control of those bridges. Keep them open. We’ll take it from this point on.” He turned to Corrie. “Shut it down for the day. The people need the rest. But we’re in boogy country, so maintain a high alert.” Then he spoke firmly to Rolf: “Get the passwords and get them right. The only people who will be moving around this night will be the enemy. If anyone doesn’t know the password, kill them. Is that clear?”

  “Yes, General.”

  “I’ve arranged transportation for you and some of your people to go view what is left of those hostages my son found. I want you all, by God, to know what type of crud we’re fighting and to show them no mercy. No mercy!”

  “Yes, General.”

  “And take those two bleeding hearts I met with you. Let’s see what explanations the German Liberal Party can come up with to excuse the behavior of savages. It should be interesting.” Ben smiled. “As a matter of fact, I think I’ll go along. Coop! Let’s roll. What was that woman’s name, Rolf?”

  “Bianka Hodel.”

  “Yes. By all means, let’s find Ms. Hodel.”

  “She proved to have no stomach for combat. I assigned her to an aid station.”

  “That’s very sweet and considerate of you. Get her. And that Remington Raider who was with her.”

  Rolf sighed. “General . . . there are good people in this world who simply do not and never will have your capacity for violence. But that does not—”

  “Get them!”

  “As you wish, General Raines.”

  The smell from the waterfront warehouse spoke silent volumes of what lay inside. Bianka Hodel and Jans Rapp wrinkled their noses at the odor coming from the open doors.

  “You both said you had friends taken hostage by the punks,” Ben told them. “Some of them are probably in there. Go take a look and then tell me about how we should be more compassionate and understanding toward criminals. Move.”

  “I really don’t think this is necessary, General,” Bianka said.

  “Move your ass, lady,” Jersey told her.

  “I feel a bit queasy,” Jans said.

  “You’re gonna feel queasier before it’s over,” Jersey told him. “Move.”

  The pair moved toward the doors and disappeared into the gloom of the cavernous warehouse. Jans let out one choking cry and hit the floor in a dead faint Bianka came shrieking and wailing and flapping her arms outside in a dead run, puking down the front of her shirt. She fell in the middle of the road and promptly passed out.

  Buddy had driven up to stand by his father. Rolf blinked a couple of times at the solid bulk of the young man. Buddy looked like he ate howitzers for breakfast. Ben stood calmly by and rolled a cigarette.

  “Proving a point, father?” Buddy asked.

  “You might say that, son.”

  Jans staggered out of the warehouse, his eyes wild. He took several deep breaths of the more-or-less-fresh air and then wobbled over to Bianka and knelt beside her, bathing her face with water from his canteen.

  Ben looked at Rolf. “Your turn, Mr. Staab. Go take a real good look at what the Rebels have been seeing for years. And then come back and tell me about compassion and understanding.”

  Bianka sat up, crying, and pounded her small fists on the roadway.

  Rolf walked past them and into the warehouse. He returned a few moments later, his face pale, and approached Ben. “They . . . the Night People . . . they . . . ate parts of the hostages.”

  “That’s right, Rolf. They like to keep them alive while they’re dining.”

  “You bastard!” Bianka screamed at Ben. “We didn’t know. We didn’t know!”

  “You’re a liar, lady,” Ben told her. “European liberals and bleeding hearts are no different from your American counterparts. You both insulate yourselves from it and pretend it doesn’t happen; and when you’re forced to confront it, you make excuses for it.” He jerked the woman to her feet and shoved her toward the warehouse. “And bring that son of a bitch, too,” he called over his shoulder.

  Jans was pulled to his feet and shoved toward the doors of the warehouse. He tried to run, but Buddy blocked him. Jans took one look at Buddy and changed his mind.

  “This is inhuman!” Bianka screamed.

  “No, lady,” Ben said, a firm grip on the woman’s arm. “What was done to those people in there was inhuman. And those who did it deserve no mercy, no pity, no compassion. Now get in there and start I.D.ing those folks.” He looked back at Lt. Bonelli. “Find every damn reporter you can round up. Get them over here.”

  “Yes, sir!” Bonelli said with a grin. “A whole shit-pot full of them arrived about an hour ago.”

  “The more the merrier. Not that it will do any good,” Ben muttered. “They’ll just come up with some excuse—it wasn’t the creepies who did it, it was their knives. People don’t kill people, guns do.”

  Inside the warehouse, a few yards from the pile of naked, half-eaten remains, Beth said, “To quote Lewis Carroll, ‘But answer came there none—And this was scarcely odd, because they’d eaten every one.’”

  “You bitch!” Bianka shouted at her. “You heartless bitch!”

  Beth shrugged that off.

  About a half hour later, the street in front of the death-house was filled with choking, puking, gasping, and teary-eyed men and women from the Fourth Estate. Ben walked among them.

  “It’s going to be very interesting to read about this,” he said. “What excuses will you come up with for this type of behavior? Let’s see. Oh, yes! How about ‘They were spanked as children’? That’s always a good one. Or ‘Their mommies and daddies smoked cigarettes and that retarded their brain cells’? Oh! And let’s not forget, ‘They were poor.’ I’ve always liked that one.”

  “Goddamnit, General!” a reporter from a major network said.

  “Yes, Mr.—ah, whatever your name is? Have you come up with a new excuse for the behavior of savages? I’d love to hear it. Share it with me, please.”

  But the reporters were not going to play Ben’s game this time. They were in the country only because there were now so many of them that Ben couldn’t keep track of them all, so he said to hell with it. But they knew they had damn well better report the facts and report them accurately without slur or innuendo, for Ben Raines had—from their point of view—a nasty little habit of knowing everything that was reported back home. They also knew that Ben held most of them in the highest, or lowest, of contempt. What they didn’t know was that Ben was fully cognizant of the fact that most of them did not deserve that contempt. But that was Ben’s secret.

  “A bunch of chickens,” Ben said to the group, then turned and walked off.

  “Asshole,” one reporter said, but not loud enough for Ben to hear.

  There was a new reporter among the bunch, one who had never encountered Ben Raines before—Bobby Day. Bobby was young and he was brash and he was arrogant and he was also not that long out of what had passed for institutions of higher learning during the years after the Great War . . . most of those small colleges carefully tucked and hidden away and staffed by people who felt that if you left the keys in your car and it was stolen, that was your fault, not the fault of the thief, and heaven forbid anyone should have the right to shoot the thieving son of a bitch. The reporter was also a liberal democrat and with that title comes the awesomeness of thinking—all the time, without question—that he knew what was best for everybody in the whole wide universe.

  “When do you plan on going in and stabilizing Africa, General?” Bobby called out. “If killing everyone you encounter can be called stabilizing.”

  “Oh, shit!” Jersey muttered.
/>   FIFTEEN

  Ben turned around to face his questioner. “Your name?”

  “Bobby Day.”

  “You’ll have to take that up with the Secretary General of the United Nations. We work for them. When they tell me to go in, I’ll take my people in.”

  “You’re not going to give me a lecture on my questioning your tactics on ‘stabilizing a country,’ General?”

  Ben smiled. “I don’t give a damn what you think of my tactics, sonny-boy. Does that answer your last question?”

  “It’s my understanding, General,” Bobby called, “that the U.N. has no plans to go into Africa. Care to comment on that?”

  “I don’t know what the U.N.’s long-range plans are. Right now, I’m concerned about Europe. I’ll worry about Africa when the time comes.”

  “Have you heard that several senators and representatives back home have gone on hunger strikes protesting the U.N.’s lack of concern about Africa?”

  “No, I have heard nothing about that. Who are they?”

  “Rita Rivers, former Vice President Harriet Hooter, Immaculate Crapums, and Wiley Ferret are among the group.”

  “They could all stand to lose a few pounds.”

  A number of the reporters laughed at that, surprising Ben.

  “I can quote you on that?”

  “Certainly.” Ben looked up at the sky. He figured about one hour before dusk. “Get settled in for the night, people,” he said, only his own Rebels catching and smiling at the double entendre. “This city is still crawling with creepies, and they might be hungry.” As Ben walked away, he whispered to Corrie, “Bump our intel people. Find out everything you can about Bobby Day. And find out about that Africa rumor.”

  Bobby had left the group of reporters and was attempting to get to Ben. He found the way blocked by Lt. Bonelli’s troops. Bobby gave up and returned to the reporters, who were being herded onto trucks for the ride back to safe quarters. Ben had finally relented and assigned troops to guarding the reporters . . . at night; during the daylight hours they were on their own.

  “Smug arrogant bastard,” Bobby said, climbing into the back of a deuce and a half. “I’m going to bring him down off that high horse.”

  “Before you do that,” a reporter said, “give us the name and address of your next of kin, will you?”

  Bobby thought that was really funny. Looking around him, he wondered why he was the only one laughing.

  * * *

  Conditions back in America were improving dramatically for those who were interested in working toward a common goal. President Blanton had not done a one-eighty in his political leanings, but what he had done was return to the middle of the road and become a moderate. He had begun to realize that with the exception of how justice should be meted out, he and Ben Raines were really not that far apart They both wanted many of the same things; it was the direction and means taken to achieve them that set them apart.

  Blanton ordered a massive rebuilding policy for the nation and set up programs similar to the old WPA and CCC camps of the Depression era; and for a career politician, Blanton had turned uncommonly blunt.

  “You want to eat, you go to work,” he told the people via his weekly radio broadcast.

  Much to the chagrin of the liberal wing of his party, Blanton put the military in charge of overseeing the massive construction projects . . . at least temporarily. A few of the newly reorganized unions set up a howl at that, but the vast majority of union members saw the need for it and went back to work.

  Since Ben and the Rebels had destroyed most of the cities in North America, Blanton ordered new cities to be built in close proximity to the old. It was a massive undertaking, and one that would take decades to complete; but it was a start, and a damn good one.

  Slowly, slowly, the states that were still in the Union began to shake off the ashes of defeat and despair and climb first to their knees, then to their feet.

  A census was underway, and it soon showed that millions had died during and after the Great War; the populations of entire towns had simply vanished.

  To sort out what belonged to whom, batteries of lawyers emerged from the rubble, briefcases in their hands and mumbo-jumbo in their mouths. Banks that had not been in operation in years began reopening and demanding payment for debts a decade old.

  “Oh, no,” Blanton said when he heard that news. “No way. We’re starting over. Fresh. Anew. Debts owed before the Great War are wiped out. Null and void.”

  “That’s unconstitutional and against the law!” hordes of bankers and lawyers screamed at him.

  Blanton smiled and took a line from Ben Raines. “Fuck you!” he told them.

  The nation was starting from scratch.

  The SUSA was, of course, left strictly alone. And true to his word, President Blanton let Billy Smith-son’s Free State of Missouri stand. He knew it couldn’t survive alone . . . not for long. It was just a matter of time before the people there would ask to join either the USA or the SUSA, and Blanton had a strong hunch which one it would be.

  Harriet Hooter and her imitators stopped their hunger strikes, and their new political party began to flounder as its members elected to go back to work. Actually, they didn’t have much choice in the matter if they wanted to eat. Blanton had stopped nearly all government giveaway programs. Hooter and those who aligned with her left Charleston, vowing they would be back.

  “They will be, too,” Blanton said to his advisors. “They still have a lot of followers out there.”

  One of the fastest growing newspapers in the nation was the paper that Bobby Day worked for, the Voice of Reason. The owner, Simon Border, also owned a number of radio and TV stations. Simon was an avowed and unrepentant liberal—or so he said—who hated Ben Raines and everything Ben stood for.

  “Simon Border,” Ben said, when his intelligence people gave him the report a few days after Ben’s questioning by Bobby Day. “I’ll be damned. I thought he was dead.”

  “You know him, Boss?” Jersey asked.

  “Oh, yes. We’re just about the same age. He was a writer before the Great War—very successful. He sold millions of books and also had a newspaper chain and a broadcasting empire. And he managed to do all that before he was forty years old. Simon also always had political aspirations. Homer Blanton better be on guard, for Simon Border is a force to be reckoned with. And he’s coming on strong.”

  “Is he a threat to us?” Cooper asked. “The SUSA, I mean.”

  Ben smiled. “Nobody is a real threat to us, Coop. We are the strongest nation with the most stable economy in the world. But Simon would very much like to bring us down.”

  “Why?” Corrie asked, turning from her radio.

  “Oh, a number of reasons, Corrie. Simon was one of those journalists who turned on me before the Great War, accusing me of preaching sedition. He just never could understand that I didn’t want violent overthrow of the government, I just wanted change. I wanted tax relief for the people and a return to a more common-sense approach to government and to law and order. Simon was, and still is, I’m sure, a total gun-control advocate. Not just handguns—all guns. He wanted America disarmed, right down to BB guns. I called him a goddamn nut one time at a writers’ conference and invited him to step outside and settle our differences, mano a mano. He refused and has hated me ever since. He made a thinly veiled public statement later that he would see to it that I was silenced and put in prison for sedition.” Ben smiled.

  “Simon was in tight with the administration in Washington at that time and he did cause me some grief, but nothing I couldn’t handle. Unlike the Rebel form of government, which believes that each person controls their own destiny, Simon believes the central government should control each person’s destiny.”

  “That’s communism,” Beth said.

  “Sure it is. But Simon and others of his ilk prefer to call it something else. They have a dozen different labels for it. But put them all in a pot and they’ll boil down to the same thing
; they are socialist to the core.”

  Ben tapped the folder on his desk. “According to this, Simon opened a small college right after the Great War, tucked away in the mountains of Colorado. Hell, we know now there were dozens of communities and small institutions of learning hidden from us while we were fighting to clear the States of the lawless. But we weren’t looking for peaceful settlements; we were hunting gangs of killers and rapists and warlords.”

  “And this Bobby Day is a graduate of Simon Border’s college.” Jersey guessed.

  “Yeah, he is. Brainwashed right down to his socks.”

  “What are you going to do about him, Chief?” Corrie asked.

  Ben shrugged his shoulders. “Nothing. He has a right to his opinion. That’s the great difference in us: I think he has a right to his opinion, but he doesn’t believe I have a right to mine.”

  “Boss,” Jersey said, a puzzled look on her face. “This Simon Border and his people, his followers, if you will, they had to have fought off outlaws and gangs and warlords and street crap, just as we did. If they don’t believe in owning weapons, how did they do it?”

  Ben laughed. “Well, you see, Jersey, that’s the rub. People like Simon Border and a great many others who preach about gun control and so forth . . . that doesn’t apply to them. They want the masses disarmed.” Ben chuckled. “One of the most vocal gun-control advocates shot and wounded an unarmed teenager who was in his back yard . . . and he used an unregistered gun to do it. The old society was full of hypocrisy, gang. Riddled with it. We haven’t done away with hypocrisy and injustice completely in the SUSA . . . but by God we’ve damn sure tried.”

  “I wonder why President Jefferys didn’t pick up on this Simon Border character?” Cooper asked.

  “Oh, I’m sure his intel people did. He just didn’t want to worry me with it. Not much gets past Cecil.” Ben glanced at his watch. “We’ll give Cec a bump in a couple of hours and I’ll sound him out about Simon.”