Escape from the Ashes Page 16

  “Good. Did you get the keys to the buses?” Owen asked.

  “Yes,” Nelson answered.

  “All right, men, let’s load up!” Owen shouted. “We’re going to the police station.”

  “Lieutenant Jenkins, we don’t have any communications,” Sergeant Quinn said, sticking his head into the squad room. Raines City’s finest were lined up for shift change. They were standing in neat rows, uniforms clean and pressed, shoes shining, as the watch commander and patrol sergeants pulled their inspection.

  “Telephone or radio?” the lieutenant asked.

  “Both are out,” Quinn replied.

  Lieutenant Jenkins sighed. “That’s strange that both of them are out. All right, as soon as watch mount is over, I’ll look into it.”

  Out on the floor, one of the watch sergeants, pulling the change-of-watch inspection, put his finger on a policeman’s shirt-pocket flap.

  “You are about to lose this button,” he said. “Get it sewed on tight.”

  “Yes, Sergeant.”

  Suddenly a dozen men burst through the doors with machine guns firing.

  Owen led his Shock Squads as they fired at the confused and shocked policemen. He enjoyed the feeling of the gun bucking and exploding in his hands as his bullets tore into the flesh of the helpless policemen.

  Sergeant Quinn had the keys to the arms locker in his pocket.

  “Follow me to the arms room!” he shouted, and the lieutenant and half a dozen other policemen who escaped the initial onslaught hurried back to the arms room with the desk sergeant.

  Lieutenant Jenkins and two others knelt just outside the arms room, firing back toward their attackers, using only their pistols.

  “Hurry, Sarge!” Jenkins shouted. “We can’t hold them off much longer!”

  “I can’t get the arms rack unlocked!” the desk sergeant called back. “The son of a bitch is—” That was as far as he got before he was cut down.

  Within moments, everyone in the police station was dead, most of them dying before they could return one shot. The blue uniforms, which had been inspection-pristine but seconds before, were now splattered with blood and soiled with feces and urine as veins spilled blood and bowels and bladders emptied.

  In less than two minutes of concentrated firing, every policeman in the building was dead.

  “All right, men, to the cars!” Owen shouted. “You know what to do!”

  Under the cover of the police cars, the SS troops fanned out through the city to continue their campaign of death and destruction. Owen and Roberts returned to the airport, and the waiting C-130, for the flight back.

  Although Owen had made no official count, he would have been pleased to learn that, as of this moment, the death count stood at 115 SUSA civilians and officials dead, two SS men dead.

  Control Group Headquarters, Alberta

  After leaving Carrie, Ben retraced her path to the headquarters building.

  He had to admit it. He was impressed by their digs. It had the look and feel of a resort hotel, completely encircled by wide porches and fronted by a landscaped lawn and curving driveway. The driveway curved around a circle of white stones at the center of which was a flagpole. At the top of the flagpole, a bit of orange cloth hung limply in the high, thin air. No doubt this was a flag of some sort, though it wasn’t one that Ben recognized.

  Ben stayed hidden for a long moment, making a careful survey of the situation. He waited until he had the layout of the building and grounds memorized before he made his first move.

  There were guards posted around the outside of the building, but he had already observed their walking routes, so he was able to move through them without being noticed.

  Since he had been shot down, Ben’s personal weapons inventory had improved considerably, growing with each additional man he took out. In addition to the pistol he had left with Carrie, he was carrying an Uzi in one hand, and a K-Bar knife in the other. The plan was to use the knife, but it was nice to have the Uzi in case he had to fall back on it.

  As Ben slipped through the darkness, he caught the scent of cigarette tobacco. Someone was just ahead. Holding the knife palm up, blade projecting forward, he moved more slowly and more carefully through the night until he saw him. The guard was leaning against a tree, smoking and looking out into the dark woods. He had an AK-47 hanging over his shoulder, and as he took a puff of his cigarette, Ben could see the man’s ugly face in the orange glow.

  Ben stepped up in front of him, appearing before the man as suddenly, and unexpectedly, as if he had been beamed down from some spaceship.

  “Hey, what the hell? Who are—” the man began.

  That was as far as he got before Ben made a quick slashing motion across the man’s throat. That severed his jugular, cut his windpipe, and destroyed his vocal cords. He died, gushing hot blood but making no sound.

  Ben stepped over the body, then looked around for other guards. Seeing no one else, he crouched low and ran across the circular driveway to the edge of the porch. He went up the steps, then let himself inside.

  The bottom floor had probably been a hotel lobby at one time, but now it was clearly a bar. Except for a lighted clock on the wall beside the fireplace, the bar was dark. The clock said it was one-fifteen in the morning, and the bar was nearly deserted. Nearly, because there were two men sitting at a table on the far side of the bar. They were talking and drinking beer.

  “I’ve gotta take a piss,” one of the men said, and he stood up and walked toward the rest room.

  Ben stepped up against the wall and moved quietly down the wall, keeping in the shadows, until he reached the rest room. Opening the door, he stepped inside. A man was standing at the urinal, with his back to the door.

  “What’s the matter, Al, don’t you think I can piss by myself?” the man asked. “What do you want to do, hold my dick for me?” He laughed.

  “Not particularly,” Ben said.

  The man at the urinal turned quickly, and seeing Ben, inhaled deeply in order to call out. But Ben plunged his knife into the man’s heart while, at the same time, putting his other hand over the man’s mouth to keep him from calling out.

  Ben held him aloft until life left his body, then pushed him backward. The man slid to the floor, but remained in the seated position, as his head fell over into the pool of urine he had just made.

  When Ben stepped back out of the rest room, he saw that the one called Al was still sitting at the table. Ben walked directly toward him, through the shadows.

  “You didn’t pee on your shoes, did you?” Al asked, laughing at his own joke. When Ben got close enough for him to see clearly, Al gasped.

  “Where is Gil? Who are you?” Al asked, surprised to see a stranger in what he knew was a well-guarded headquarters.

  “Gil has been detained,” Ben said. “He asks that you join him.”

  “Join him? What do you mean?”

  Once more, Ben put his knife to work with a quick, deadly slash across Al’s throat. Al fell forward onto the table, knocking over his glass of beer. Beer and blood mingled freely, then ran from the table to drip onto the floor below.

  Ben thought about using the elevator, but decided against it, choosing the stairs instead. On the next floor up, he moved down the hallway, listening to the snoring and loud breathing of the people in the rooms off to either side of the hall.

  Ben opened the door to the first room and saw that, while it had originally been a large, comfortable room for a visiting guest, it was now converted into a bunking area, with six bunk beds in three stacks of two.

  Putting his hand over the mouth of one of the sleepers, Ben cut his throat. Surprised, his victim opened his eyes, looked up in horror, then bled to death, his pillow turning dark with his blood. The blood was black, though Ben knew it would be crimson if there was light to see it.

  The first man he killed was on the bottom bunk. The next man was on the top bunk, and the third was on the bottom.

  Leaving that room with h
alf its occupants dead, Ben moved down the hall and slipped into the other rooms to leave his grizzly calling card. Sometimes he killed only one in the room, sometimes he killed none, and on one occasion he killed everyone in the room.

  When he exited the hotel an hour later, he left behind fourteen bodies. He was pretty sure that he would get their attention.

  As Ben left the grounds, he smelled a terrible odor and, investigating, saw what it was. There was no sewer system for the building, but there was a huge septic tank. What he was smelling was the septic tank vent.

  Just after daybreak, a loud yell awakened everyone on the second floor.

  “Ah!!! What is this? What the hell is going on? They’re dead! They’re dead!”

  As the shout spread through the hotel, waking up others, they raised their own voices in shock and terror as they discovered the dead among them. Within moments, the hotel was a house of panic.

  It took several minutes for the three colonels to restore some calm, and they ordered everyone to gather downstairs until they could figure out what was going on.

  “You don’t have to be all that smart to figure out what has happened here,” Tamara said.

  “Well, I’m glad you have the smarts to know the answer,” Doyle said. “Because I don’t have an idea in hell what it is.”

  “You just named it,” Tamara said. “It was hell.”

  “What? What are you talking about? Make sense, will you?”

  “It’s our own private hell,” Tamara said. “It’s obvious, isn’t it? Ben Raines paid us a visit last night.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  Raines City, C.D.

  The headquarters building was surrounded by hastily erected sandbag bunkers and machine-gun emplacements. Armed men and women in battle dress utilities were manning the posts and standing guard at the doors and windows. Jersey was driving the Humvee, and she drove across the sidewalk all the way up to the sandbags nearest the front door before she and Coop got out.

  One of the guards came over to challenge them, then, seeing who it was, came to attention and saluted. Coop and Jersey returned the salute.

  “Mike inside?” Coop asked.

  “Yes, sir, I think so,” the guard answered. “Are we at war?”

  “Son, from the time this nation started, we have never not been at war,” Coop replied.

  Like the guard, Coop and Jersey were wearing BDUs. Jersey’s uniform was custom-tailored to her body, and though it emphasized that she was a very good-looking woman, she was, as Coop once explained, like a coral snake. Beautiful, but deadly.

  They passed half a dozen other guards inside the building before they reached Mike’s office. With Ben missing and Buddy dead, Mike Post was now acting as president and commander in chief. When Coop and Jersey reported to him, they stopped in front of his desk and saluted.

  “Knock it off,” Mike said, waving the salute aside. “I’m just temporary and you know it.”

  “Temporary or not, you’re in command,” Coop said. “I just hope you are ready for it.”

  “Yeah, you and me both,” Mike replied. He sighed, then leaned back in his chair and looked up at them. They had been through a lot together, but always before, Ben had been there to see them through. And alive or dead, he wasn’t here now and the situation was critical.

  “What do we know so far?” Mike asked.

  “They arrived last night on International Flight 371,” Coop said. “The plane landed at the airport, then taxied off the runway and unloaded in the dark.”

  “How do we know that?” Mike asked.

  “We got that information from one of the flight controllers,” Coop replied.

  “We had a survivor? I thought everyone at the airport was killed.”

  “Yeah, so did the bad guys,” Coop said. “But we found one of the controllers still alive this morning.”

  “How badly is he hurt? Is he going to survive?” Mike asked.

  “He’s not hurt at all. He managed to get away from them.”

  “What? How can that be?”

  “When he heard the shooting downstairs, he hid in an equipment locker.”

  “Good for him. Though it would have been nice if he had thought to call the police after they left,” Mike said.

  “He tried to,” Harley replied. “But the phones were out. And get this. We know why the phones were out.”

  “Why?”

  “Our esteemed chief of police sabotaged them,” Harley said.

  “What?” Mike asked.

  “That’s what the controller said. He overheard the bad guys talking.”

  Mike stroked his chin. “That would answer some questions,” he said.

  “Like what?” Anna asked.

  “The communications were knocked out . . . from inside, before the attack. And when the attack came, the cops couldn’t get their weapons out because the locks on the arms racks were frozen with acid. They were butchered.”

  “Damn. No wonder the bad guys were so successful.”

  “What’s the latest count of our losses?” Coop asked.

  “I think the count is close to three hundred now,” Mike answered. “That’s counting the people at the airport, police, military, and some civilians who were killed at random. What about the bad guys?”

  “We’ve killed twenty of them,” Coop answered.

  “Which leaves seventy-eight to go,” Jersey added. She walked over to the window and looked outside. More sandbag bunkers were being erected around key buildings, the telephone building, a TV station, and the hospital.

  Mike looked over at Jersey. “What do you mean that leaves seventy-eight? That’s a pretty precise number, isn’t it? How can you be so sure it is seventy-eight?”

  “Because just before he died, one of them was gracious enough to share that information with me,” Jersey said. She turned back toward Mike and let her hand rest on the handle of her knife.

  “Yes, I can see how he might have cooperated,” Mike said. “So, what did you learn?”

  “That this was a special operation of the FPPS, personally commanded by Derek Owen.”

  “The head of FPPS,” Mike said. “Then he is the one we really want.”

  Jersey shook her head. “He flew back right after the initial attack. He and his second in command, Carl Roberts.”

  “Leaving the rest of them here?”

  “Yes. According to the information, they will be operating in two-man teams.”

  “I’m sure they aren’t in any kind of uniform,” Mike said.

  “No. By now, they have shed their uniforms and are dressed in civilian clothes, or worse, police or military uniforms,” Coop said.

  “Any idea on how best to handle them?” Mike asked.

  “I’ve put out the word to check and double-check everyone’s ID,” Harley said. “The word to our men is, if they find someone they aren’t sure about, and if the suspect can’t find a local citizen to vouch for them, we will assume they are the enemy and deal with them accordingly.”

  Mike laughed. That’s a little like profiling, isn’t it?”

  Coop laughed with him. “You’re goddamn right it’s profiling.”

  The phone rang and Mike grabbed it. He listened a moment, then replied, “We’ll be right there.”

  “What is it?” Anna asked.

  “We’ve got Adams.”

  Chief Rick Adams was standing on the grass in front of the bronze plaque upon which the Tri-States Manifesto had been embossed. There were several armed soldiers around him, backed up by a rather substantial crowd of angry citizens.

  Nobody dared approach Adams, because he was holding a gun to the head of a six-year-old child. The child was his own.

  Coop’s Humvee stopped just outside the circle of citizens and soldiers and he, Jersey, Mike, Harley, and Anna climbed out. They walked up to the front of the circle, and Mike took one step farther in.

  “No!” Adams shouted. “Stop right there!”

  “Rick,” Mike called. “Rick, you don
’t want to do this.”

  “How do you know what I want to do?” Adams replied.

  “That’s your own child. Let him go,” Mike said.

  “It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” Adams said. “They said it would be a quick, painless coup. Then the country would be reunited again.”

  “Who told you this? Claire Osterman?”

  Rick laughed, though there was no humor in his laugh. “Not her,” he said. “She’s probably dead by now. Like General Raines. Don’t you see? The only way we could reunite, the only way we could become one nation like we once were, was to get rid of the two leaders. Then we could start over. But what happened last night . . . all the killing of civilians . . . that wasn’t supposed to happen.”

  Mike took another step toward him.

  “I told you, don’t come any closer!” Adams shouted.

  “We can work this out,” Mike said.

  “No, we can’t work it out.”

  “Sure we can.”

  Adams looked at Mike, then raised the pistol to his own temple.

  “Rick, no!” Mike shouted, but it was too late. Adams pulled the trigger, and blood, brain, and bone matter exploded from the opposite side of his head.

  Headquarters Building, Alberta

  “You look to be pretty athletic,” Ben said to Carrie. “Can you run?”

  Carrie chuckled. “Two years ago I won the gold medal in the New Olympics.”

  “Damn,” Ben said. “I’m impressed.”

  “Why did you want to know if I can run?”

  “Because I saw that they have a septic tank back at their headquarters building.”

  Carrie laughed. “You want me to run because you saw a septic tank? How bad is it?”

  “It’s pretty bad,” Ben said. “But that’s good for us.”

  “Why?”

  Ben told her his plan.

  * * *

  Ben waited on the south side of Die Kontrollgruppe’s headquarters building. He checked his watch, then got ready. At exactly nine o’clock, Carrie began firing from the north side of the building. Several DK soldiers came through the front door to investigate, and as they did, Ben opened fire, killing two of them. The other two ran back inside.