Flames from the Ashes Read online

  The remarkable combination of unique SMG and superior suppressor of Sid Garris spat silent death into the recumbent forms in the trailer. One man, alerted by the slightly noisier blast of the scout’s silenced Uzi, got to his sidearm. The 9mm pistol cracked in loud inaccuracy. One slug did pass by Tina’s head with a sharp crack. It only served to draw her attention. She cut a three-round burst that quieted the opposition.

  One American Nazi, stark naked, made a leap for the nearest window. He crashed through to the waist before his head was sieved by Evans. His legs thrashed and pounded loudly against the thin wall of the trailer. Vaguely, Tina could hear firing from the other barrack trailer. Subjectively it seemed to take forever to quell the eleven men in the trailer. Actually the firefight lasted only eleven seconds. Tina stepped outside and breathed deeply to banish the coppery smell of blood.

  “We’ll mop this place up and move on when the column arrives. Trade off scouts and set them on the road now,” she said calmly.

  “Jesus, she didn’t even turn a hair,” one of those selected to take the point said to his companion when they rode away from Fort Collins.

  “That’s the boss’s daughter,” his companion responded with a grin of pride.

  That night seemed the longest in the memory of Ben Raines. His daughter had her neck stuck way out. Colorado Springs still held out, barely. Reports of attacks on three more outposts gnawed at his patience and conscience. When he climbed from the contour chair in the mobile CP for his tenth cup of coffee, he expressed his doubts to Lt. Col. Stan Mc-Dade.

  “Bull, should I have split the command into company-sized units and sent them to every outpost even remotely likely to be attacked?”

  Colonel McDade was his usual miser with words. “It was your decision, Ben. For what it’s worth, I think you did the right thing.”

  “Enlighten me,” Ben said with a slight edge.

  “I have a gut feeling that Hoffman wants you to divide your forces. He has numbers on his side. I’ve said it before, but maybe not clearly enough. When he loses a man, he loses a man; when we lose someone, we lose combat effectiveness.”

  Ben bit off a curse, swallowed coffee instead. The RT operator who had relieved Corrie after a long, hectic ten hours turned from the console.

  “General, the Puffs have reached Pueblo. I have the command pilot on the line. He wants to know about forward air controllers.”

  “Tell him he doesn’t need any. Anything that moves down there is the enemy.” Ben looked relieved. Now things would start happening.

  * * *

  Major Alvaro Barron awakened to the drone of old piston engines. He blinked and tried to put meaning to the sound. Barron had occupied the small wooden building that had been the Pueblo, Colorado, outpost commander’s quarters. He turned on a bedside lamp to check the time.

  “Odd,” he said to himself. “We don’t have any cargo aircraft operating around here.”

  In the sky a quarter-mile from the compound, the big twin radials throttled back and the pilot touched a switch on the instrument panel. A green light flicked on and a grinning gunner swung the barrel of his electric galling down and acquired a target.

  Major Barron did not hear the metallic ring of the barrels as they began to turn, loading up with 20mm rounds. He also didn’t hear the deafening roar when the gatling opened fire at over 2,000 rounds a minute. The table lamp beside his bed had provided a perfect beacon. All Major Alvaro Barron knew about the arrival of the Rebel Puffs could be measured in the enormous shock he felt when the building around him began to disintegrate.

  Twenty-millimeter rounds turned the walls into showers of splinters and plaster dust. The one-in-three explosive rounds blew out windows and sliced the flesh from the major’s orderly, sleeping on a cot in the hall. First one, then a dozen more three-quarter-inch slugs slammed into the Nazi major and pulped his corpulent body into a red smear.

  Troops bivouacked in the open met a similar, if more grisly, fate when the 30mm chainguns belly-mounted on the second Puff raked their tents and shelter-halves with exploding rounds. Shrieks and howls of agony sounded thin and tinny in the presence of that awesome destruction.

  To Rudolfo Quintaro, a carpenter until called up by the NAL for this campaign, it sounded like a huge table router working on a piece of Brazilian iron-wood. Bemused by the comparison, he walked into a hail of steel shards from an exploding round from the swivel-mounted 75mm autocannon belly-slung on the first Puff.

  After four devastating passes, the winged death duo lined up in formation and made a run directly over the compound. Oblong gray objects dropped from their open doors. Battered and benumbed, the survivors of the initial onslaught stared upward in fascination while the containers descended upon them. When the first one hit in a long skid, spewing a trail of flaming napalm, their bewildered state ended in pandemonium and the screams of the dying.

  Now the Puffs targeted vehicles. Trucks, utilities, APCs, and tanks erupted in fountains of blast and flame. They maintained a steady carpet of slugs of several calibers. At one point not a single inch of the ground did not have a bullet strike. After their final pass, huge halogen floodlights sprang to life and bathed the scene of slaughter in unearthly white.

  “Tango Alpha Six, do you seen anything moving down there? Over.” the command pilot asked his wingman.

  “Negative, Tango Alpha Three. We really creamed them. Over.”

  “Roger that, Six. Lights out and turn to course two-niner-five. We’ll go pay the Springs a visit. Over.”

  “Tango Alpha Six, roger. These birds are gonna need a drink soon. Over.”

  “It’s all downhill from the Springs. Tango Alpha Three, out.”

  They came in at treetop level and demolished the tanks first. Turrets leapt into the air under the reign of terror from the 75mm autocannon. Ammo magazines added to the overall effect. At a distance of twenty miles from Colorado Springs, the radio crackled to life with a stranger’s voice.

  “Tango Alpha Three, this is Lone Wolf.”

  “Go ahead, Lone Wolf,” the command pilot spoke.

  “We’re in the bunker at the Springs. We’re still alive and well down here. We can mark targets for you with willie-peter mortar rounds. Over.”

  “Good show, Lone Wolf. Hang in there; company’s coming fast. Tango Alpha Three out.”

  Grinning at the tenacity Rebels always showed, the pilot contacted his wingman and they began a rapid descent. “Well make one flyby, Six, let ’em know we’re there, then look for the white spots.”

  Reacting to the pyrotechnic showers of smoking white dots of phosphorus, the Puffs unloaded everything they had left. It gave new meaning to the old Vietnam-era slogan “Death from the Skies.” Somewhere in the middle of the hell-on-earth, panic developed among the black-shirt troops. While men ran shrieking with blobs of WP burning through their flesh, others began to just run.

  Walleyed with terror, they rammed vehicles into one another and scrambled in manic haste to be anywhere else than Colorado Springs. The surviving Rebels in the compound added their carefully horded supply of ordnance to the inferno of flying steel spit out by the Puffs. Incredibly, Capt. Victor Sanchez realized, a counterattack would carry the field. Laughing wildly, he ordered it.

  Ben Raines heard the first good news from the three new hot spots. “They’re pulling back, General. It looks from here as though it was only a probing action.”

  “You’ve made my day,” Ben responded dryly. “Keep a close watch on the enemy. This might be a ruse.”

  A soft, relaxed chuckle answered him. “They’re five miles down the road, sir, and not slowing down. There’s not a black-shirt within sight of the compound.”

  Similar reports came from the other two. Then the stunning news came that Captain Sanchez had led a counterattack that had driven the surviving Nazis out of the Colorado Springs area. Ben reached into his desk and retrieved a disreputable bottle that contained Base One brandy. He poured a dollop into his coffee and sat grinning, an
unlighted cigarette in one corner of his mouth.

  Ben went to bed when the RT operator announced, “The Puffs are turning final to land at Wichita and refuel.”

  TWELVE

  Bone china flew in tiny fragments from the wet spot on the wall of the Oregon ranch house. The saucer followed the cup and General Field Marshal Jesus Dieguez Mendoza Hoffman shrieked in outrage.

  “I can’t believe he did this!”

  “In all due respect, General Field Marshal, it seems that the Rebels have done exactly that,” Colonel Webber stated dryly.

  “He won’t get away with this! I want Ben Raines dead — dead — dead!” Hoffman ranted.

  “Ben Raines was nowhere near our, ah, ignominious defeats, General Field Marshal,” Webber reminded him.

  “His was the mind behind them. His is the evil genius that is disrupting my plan. His will be the life that pays for it.” Hoffman stalked around the room in long, slouched strides, hands behind his back. “I want to go to the front. I want to see with my own eyes how he accomplished the impossible.”

  “It’s hardly advisable for you to do so, General Field Marshal. The situation at the front is, ah, fluid, sir.”

  “‘Fluid? It’s a goddamned flood tide! Then send Volmer. Where is he, by the way?”

  “Outside where Denver used to be, General Field Marshal,” Gen. Kurt Kreuger answered.

  “Have him go, make a full report to me by this afternoon.”

  “At once, Herr General Field Marshal,” Kreuger assured him with clicking heels.

  “Then I want him to come up with plans for capturing Ben Raines,” Hoffman added, eyes glowing with madness.

  At 0320, the convoy led by Tina Raines reached the airport on the edge of Laramie. Scouts had located only six storm troopers in the administration building. They appeared to be regulars, not some of the American traitors. That gave Tina an idea.

  “We’ll use a bit of a ruse,” she explained to Lieutenant Novak. “What we need are some of those Nazi flags to put on our radio antennas. Hoffman’s regulars can’t possibly know all of the American traitors who have joined their ranks. And, if you’ve noticed, the American Nazis wear the same pattern cammies that we have. We’ll just drive up as a reinforcement column, then jump them when they’re off guard.”

  Lt. Kelly Novak nodded his understanding. The longer they avoided a firefight, the better their chances of remaining undetected. At least until the Puffs arrived to refuel.

  So it was that the Rebel vehicles rolled into the airport twenty minutes later and dispersed to their required locations. Tina, Lieutenant Novak, and three scouts went to report to the ranking Nazi. He turned out to be a swarthy senior sergeant, with a moon face and pronounced Indian features.

  He greeted them somewhat condescendingly and with a puzzled attitude. “I do not understand,” he complained in Spanish. “Nothing came on the radio about reinforcements.”

  Tina almost blew their cover then, answering in the banter of veteran soldiers. “You know these rear-echelon types. Probably out slopping down beer when he should have been transmitting orders to you.”

  For a brief moment, suspicion flared in the sergeant’s eyes. “Yes, I know them only too well,” he replied agreeably at last, then added in his native Paraguayan idiom, “Te confieso que no puedo verlos ni en caja de fósforos.”

  What the man had said was that he confessed he could not stand the sight of them. Translating it literally, Tina couldn’t understand why the man would not have them in a box of matches. She did understand that the time had come to end this farce. By now the key players would be in position. Swiftly she raised the suppressed Sidewinder and plopped a three-round burst in the chubby sergeant’s chest.

  His eyes went round and filled with wonder. Full lips formed an “Oh” that never got said. The other two in the room with him reacted in confusion to the unfamiliar sound of the cycling action and the clack of empty casings hitting the tiled floor. Their hesitation cost them their lives.

  Lieutenant Novak cut down one with a suppressed Uzi. The second caught another three-rounder from Tina. Reflex continued his draw and his sidearm — an Argentine copy of the old Walther P-38 — clattered to the floor. From outside came the sound of a scuffle and a scream chopped off short.

  “We now have us an airport,” Tina said lightly. She went out of the administration building and located her RT operator. “Bump Eagle and tell him we are in control of the Laramie municipal airport.”

  General Field Marshal Hoffman received better news when he entertained his minister of information (propaganda) at breakfast the next morning. Over sweet rolls, juice, and coffee, the minister acquainted Hoffman with a new project his office had been working on during the conquest of Rebel outposts.

  “We have obtained some video cameras, General Field Marshal. Also the equipment necessary to use the products of their employment. I have had specialists recording what your troops and interrogators have done with the Rebels who fell alive into our hands.” He produced a brief, neat, vulpine smile. “Copies are being made to be sent to every place your intelligence man — ah — Webber thinks Ben Raines might happen to go.”

  General Field Marshal Hoffman considered a moment the torture and degradation to which captive Rebels had been subjected. “I should think that would make General Raines absolutely furious, Keller. Raving mad, in fact.”

  “Precisely what we had in mind, General Field Marshal,” Minister Keller responded with another flick of V-shaped smile.

  “He has already killed to the last man the troops sent to Pueblo, Colorado. Driven the others from Colorado Springs. And my experts tell me that he is only mildly annoyed. To what good purpose do we drive him into a rage?”

  Keller shot the wolfish grin again. “Our psychologists suggest that were he to become unmanageable in his outrage, actually lose touch with his reason, he might be likely to do something rash and unplanned, and thus expose himself.”

  Beaming in anticipation of such an event, Hoffman patted Keller affably on one shoulder. “My dear Minister Keller, you are balm for frayed nerves. I think that a simply marvelous idea. I will see to it that your technicians have anything they need to further this brilliant scheme of yours. My day is brighter for hearing this. Come, let me get the brandy and we’ll take our coffee royal.”

  Static came from the speaker set up in the old control tower at Laramie Municipal Airport. Tina Raines stood behind the only intact piece of tinted glass in the tower’s full run of windows. Binoculars to her eyes, she searched the sky to the southwest. A particularly loud hiss of background noise came to her ears, then words, broken up by the steady bellow of two radial engines.

  “Laramie Approach, this is Tango Alpha One. Do you copy? Over.”

  “Roger, Tango Alpha One. How do you read us?”

  “Five-by, Laramie. Do you have us on radar?”

  “Negative, Tango Alpha. Funny man. Nothing works here except our tactical radios. We don’t have you in sight, either. What’s your ETA? Over.”

  “About five minutes, give or take five. It’s a bitch-kitty navigating by railroad tracks and highways. I’d sell my soul for a VORTAC that worked. I’ve got a panel full of instruments that aren’t worth a pinch of coon puckey, except on approach for Base Camp One.”

  Tina turned from the window a moment and shook her head. She knew the pilot, a chatty sort who took almost as much pleasure from his long-winded stints as he did from flying. He was also one of the best dead-reckoning navigators in the small fleet of Rebel aircraft. She indicated to the radio operator that she wanted to take over. When a break came, she spoke crisply.

  “Chuck, can it for now. We’re in the middle of outlaw country down here. I suspect we’ll be under attack the minute you land. So make it a straight-in and hold the landing gear until you cross the threshold. We don’t want landing lights advertising your presence from five miles out.”

  “Tina? That you?”

  “You got it, Chuck. See you on the
ground. Approach out.”

  Tina’s estimate of the situation proved to be almost exact. Both C-47s had landed and rolled out to turn onto the taxi lane before activity began in the Nazi encampment two miles from the airport. There the commanding officer’s curiosity got trucks loaded with a platoon of storm troopers.

  They rolled past Tina’s outer screen of security because of her admonition that the longer it took for anyone to find out something was up, the better. The lead truck turned through the gateway to the airport terminal before a well-placed projectile from a rocket launcher put a finish to the vehicle and its occupants.

  A huge ball of flame marked the spot. The second driver slammed on brakes and got rear-ended by the third. Alarmed, the troops started jumping over the tailgates. That brought them into lines of crisp, measured fire from light machine guns. A couple of grenade launchers made hollow blooping sounds and whizzing shards of piano wire soon filled the air. The initial encounter ended after 93 seconds, with 43 men lying dead on the ground or converted to crispy critters in the burning truck. Not a Rebel received a scratch.

  “We won that round,” Tina said to the worried-looking pilots. “But they’ll be back. After that, I’m sure of it.”

  “We can’t have three-inch hoses running av gas into our wingtanks in a firefight,” Chuck protested to Tina.

  Tina’s stubborn streak surfaced. “That’s exactly what you’ll have to do if you want to complete this mission today. Because, Chuckie baby, we’re going to get hit by those Nazi bastards any second now.”

  “One hot round and it’ll blow those fuckin’ aircraft into confetti.”

  “There’s one hangar that’s in good condition,” Tina offered. “Can you refuel in there?”

  “If it’s very well vented,” Chuck persisted, understandably overprotective of his precious birds.