Battle in the Ashes Read online

  Ben squatted down in the shade of a truck and rolled a cigarette. “We’re all standing on the darkened and scorched edge of history,” Ben muttered. “Waiting for the flames to destroy it all.”

  “Beg pardon, sir?” Corrie said.

  “Nothing, Corrie. Just talking to myself. When is that damn Nazi son of a bitch going to make his move?” he said irritably.

  “General Ike says if you don’t get your butt in gear and get out of here, he’s going to come down here personally and kick it for you,” Corrie said, after ten-fouring a transmission.

  “Tell Tubby to watch his own ass,” Ben replied. “He’s got a lot more to look after than I do.”

  Ike was a bit on the stocky side. The ex-Navy SEAL was another who had been with Ben since the beginning.

  “Shark,” Corrie radioed, “the Eagle is just about to fly.”

  Ben smoked his cigarette, thankful that Dr. Chase was miles to the north and not standing here bitching and raising hell about Ben’s few cigarettes a day.

  “General,” Corrie’s voice held a different note. “Scouts report Hoffman’s Blackshirts are moving north. All columns on the roll.”

  “Tell the Scouts to bug out and rejoin us here,” Ben said quietly, standing up. “Tell them to push it.” When Corrie had radioed the orders, Ben said, “Advise all units Hoffman is moving. Tell Ike to blow everything from San Diego to El Paso. We’ll make those goose-stepping bastards work for every damned inch of American soil they choose to be buried in.”

  “Is anybody going to say, ‘well, this is it?’” Cooper asked.

  “You do, and I’ll hit you, Coop,” Jersey warned. “I swear I will.”

  Herr General Field Marshall Jesus Dieguez Mendoza Hoffman stood several miles south of the Mexico/U.S. border, felt the ground tremble beneath his polished boots, and watched the huge clouds of dust rise into the air. The dust clouds stretched for as far as the telescope-assisted eye could see. The Blackshirts of the NAL could all accurately guess what had just happened.

  Hoffman was not impressed. His cold black eyes were startling to see beneath his very blond hair and pale skin. Many of the NAL were a mixture of Spanish and German blood. Hoffman lowered his binoculars and let them dangle from a leather strap. “Bridges and roads,” he said. “So we will be delayed for a few days in crossing. Does the famous General Ben Raines think this action will strike fear into our hearts? Nonsense. What are the very latest intelligence reports from our friends north of the border?” he asked an aide.

  “Still very confused, Field Marshal. No one seems to know just what Ben Raines is planning. He has spread his forces all over several states, from small units to large ones.”

  “I personally think it is some sort of trick,” a senior aide spoke up.

  “What kind of trick? Be more specific, Karl.”

  “I don’t know, sir. But his actions make no military sense. They run contrary to every rule of engagement.”

  Hoffman smiled. What Raines was doing made perfect sense to him. He was going to wage a campaign of terror and harassment against the NAL. A purely guerrilla action just as soon as they crossed the border. No matter. They would amount to no more than a stinging bee.

  But what Hoffman didn’t know was that the Rebels were pure killer bees, not for the most part docile honey bees. The NAL was about to learn a hard lesson concerning Ben Raines’s Rebels.

  “Order patrols across,” Hoffman said. “Let’s see if the famous Ben Raines has the courage to face us.”

  But Ben was heading straight up Interstate 35 toward a preset destination some sixty miles from Laredo. Ned Hawkins and a contingent of his New Texas Rangers had laid down a trail a drunken city slicker could follow, heading up Highway 83 toward Carrizo Springs. Buddy and his people had taken off toward Freer, and Tina and a contingent had left quite a trail as they headed toward Hebbronville.

  Twenty miles away from each of their positions, other contingents of Rebels lay waiting. Twenty miles further on, yet another ambush was lying wait . . . and so on for a hundred miles in all directions.

  Hoffman’s patrols reported back by radio. “We are across into North America. No resistance. Both cities are deserted.”

  “Surely everything is booby-trapped?” Hoffman questioned.

  “Nothing is booby-trapped,” his people radioed. “We have found nothing. But large forces of Rebels have scattered in all directions, using all the highways leading out.”

  Hoffman smiled. “Oh, Ben Raines. You are a devious devil, you are. You want me to head straight up your Interstate system and then you and your Rebels will fall in behind us and attack from all sides. I see your plan. It is a good one, but I am too smart for you.”

  All his aides and flunkies and gofers smiled and nodded their heads. Field Marshal Hoffman would never fall for something so obvious.

  “Four battalions across the river,” Hoffman ordered, picking up a map. “Each battalion to be backed up by armor.”

  “Gunships, Field Marshal?”

  “No,” Hoffman said drily. He had sent a dozen gun-ships across the Rio Grande a few days before to harass the Rebels. He discovered then that the Rebels had the most sophisticated surface-to-air missiles known to the world. Even better than his own. Everything from Stingers to the SA-14 Gremlin. None of his gunships had returned. “We shall keep them on the ground for the time being.”

  The Rebels had reached their destinations and were working furiously to get into position, hoping that the Blackshirts would fall for this ruse.

  Hoffman had his trailer pulled up, and he sat with his boots off, feet up, sipping tea and relaxing. His people were resting, all certain that in a few hours, the battalions would report back—victorious, of course.

  Miles down each road, Rebel Scouts lay concealed, waiting to signal their friends of the approaching Black-shirts.

  “Hoffman may be a jerk-off,” Ben said to his team, as they waited for word of pursuit. “But his troops are seasoned veterans. We don’t ever want to make the mistake of selling them short. What happens on this day is going to make the rest of his people very cautious.”

  Ben had ordered his people to ground several miles outside of the deserted town. This was brush country, at one time the site of many ranches and farms. Now it was all grown up. The Blackshirts would be expecting an ambush in the towns; they would not be expecting Rebels to pop up out of the ground in open fields and meadows and start hurling rockets at them—Ben hoped.

  The Rebels had the finest rocket launchers, everything from the German Armbrust to the American TOW. They had AT-4s, Carl Gustafs, and Milans. And they were skilled in their use.

  They waited.

  “Everyone is in position,” Corrie reported. The ambush sites were all approximately the same distance from Laredo, the furthest one being sixty-eight miles, the nearest one fifty-six miles. But the nearest one was located on the worst road, so the Blackshirts should arrive at all sites within a couple of minutes of each other.

  At least that’s the way Ben planned it.

  The Rebels were still outside their hastily dug holes, and Ben looked over at Jersey and smiled. She had turned her ball cap around, bill to the back, and looked about fifteen years old.

  These kids, he thought—and they were kids, at least to Ben—have seen precious few moments of joy and peace in their lives. Take those guns and knives and grenades and battle harnesses from them, and they’d look like young people on their way to a square dance. But Ben knew these young men and women were among the most brutal, savage and skilled fighters in all the world. And their loyalty toward him borderlined on the fanatic.

  Cooper was chewing on a weed. “Coyote probably came along right before we got here and peed on that thing, Coop,” Jersey told him.

  Cooper spat out the weed and gave her a dirty look.

  Beth was writing in her journal, and Ben knew it would be in the neatest handwriting he had ever seen, and very concise. Corrie was dressed in jeans and pullover shirt, an ea
rth-tone bandanna tied around her head. She felt Ben looking at her and smiled at him. He winked at her.

  “Jersey,” Ben said. “What time is it getting to be?”

  She grinned. “Kick-ass time, General!”

  “Damn right,” Ben said.

  The Rebels were dug in 250 meters from the interstate. Their vehicles hidden about a mile away. Ben did not want to risk hiding them in the town, for fear the Blackshirts would first shell the town.

  Ben looked across the way and chuckled softly. Those Rebels who were in sight certainly did not appear worried about facing a force of Blackshirts that would outnumber them ten or twenty to one. Several of them were sleeping, their ball caps or cowboy hats over their faces. Others were reading old paperbacks or hardcover books. Several were working crossword puzzles.

  “Large force, approximately battalion size, just passing by the Scouts’ position,” Corrie said.

  “Head’s up!” Ben called to his people. “Give it all to me, Corrie.”

  “Open and canvas-covered trucks, deuce and a halves, escorted and trailed by main battle tanks.”

  Ben looked over at Jersey. “Kick-ass time,” she said.

  TWO

  The battalion commander of the Blackshirts rode in an open scout car, behind several main battle tanks, which were not buttoned up. The BC was an experienced soldier, a veteran of many, many battles and a devoted follower of Hoffman and his wacko philosophy. The BC was also a very arrogant man who believed that the Blackshirts were invincible in battle. After all, they had never really lost a battle. True, they had experienced some setbacks against General Payon’s forces, but in the end, had been victorious. And they would be victorious against these stupid Rebels as well. He firmly believed that.

  His final thought was that no force on earth could defeat the Blackshirts. He took that thought with him into eternity as a slug from a .50-caliber sniper rifle blew away most of his head. The BC’s brains splattered all over the driver and in a horrified panic he spun the wheel just as a rocket struck the vehicle and turned it into a burning, smoking, twisted mass of junk.

  Some of the tanks were rendered inoperable as rockets blew the treads off; others took hits that exploded the fuel tanks and set off the ammunition storage bins, turning the inside of the tanks into a man-made hell.

  The troops riding in the trucks had no chance at all as rockets blew them to bloody chunks and heavy machine guns chopped up what was left. Eight hundred men and women of the Blackshirts’ infantry and eight tanks and crews were killed, badly wounded, or frightened out of their wits in less than thirty seconds.

  “Mop it up,” Ben ordered. “And bring me any prisoners.”

  Ned Hawkins and his New Texas Rangers turned the highway outside of Carrizo Springs into a smoking mass of twisted metal and broken bodies. They began gathering up what weapons and equipment were still useable and stripping the bodies of boots. At Ben’s orders, they took what uniforms were not burned or shot or blown to bloody rags. Ned did not have the foggiest notion why the General wanted the uniforms, but he was not about to question Ben’s orders.

  “Help me!” pleaded one Blackshirt with both legs blown off.

  “There ain’t nothin’ I can do for you, partner,” a Ranger told the man. “I’m not gonna waste pain-killers on you.”

  “You’re devils!” the man gasped.

  “No,” the Ranger corrected. “We’re Americans. And you fucked up bad comin’ here.”

  Outside of Freer, Texas, Buddy and his teams gave the Blackshirts a very deadly surprise and left their broken, burned, and bloody bodies on the road and shoulders and ditches. On the east side of Hebbronville, Tina and her Rebels ripped into the Blackshirts’ column with the ferocity of a pack of angry wolverines. So complete was the ambush, not one Blackshirt in any of the four columns had the chance to get off a single radio transmission to warn Hoffman what was happening.

  The four Rebels teams piled up the bodies, poured gasoline on them, and set them afire, to disguise the fact they had stripped the bodies of uniforms, then slipped back to their vehicles and drove away.

  In the once lush lower Rio Grande valley, Rebels had set fire to everything that would burn. They left a smoking, charred, and burning hell behind them, leaving nothing of value for Hoffman and his Blackshirts. So intense were the flames that the advancing forces of the Field Marshal had to back up and cut west in the hope of finding another way across the river.

  In his lushly appointed trailer, Hoffman sipped tea and waited for news.

  Worried aides haunted the radio operators for reports that never came. All the frantically working operators could pick up were the undecipherable slurping sounds of burst transmissions from Rebel units.

  “An entire regiment simply does not vanish from the face of the earth!” a colonel yelled at a frustrated and browbeaten radio operator.

  “I know, Colonel. I know. I’m doing all I know to do.”

  It fell on the shoulders of Hoffman’s top aide to carry the silence to Field Marshal Hoffman. The aide was not looking forward to this—at all.

  To the north, west, and east of Hoffman’s position, great black carrion-eating birds were ceasing their endless circling and gliding to earth for a feast.

  “You have good news at last, my friend?” Hoffman asked with a smile.

  “I . . . have no news, sir.”

  Hoffman stared at the man.

  “We cannot make contact with any of the battalions.”

  “What you are saying is impossible.”

  “We have lost contact, sir.”

  Hoffman slowly pulled on his boots and stood up, straightening and buttoning his uniform. “Ridiculous!” he snorted, and opened the door, stalking out of the trailer.

  Ben ordered all units to fall back to a line that stretched west to east, following Highways 57 and 87, from Eagle Pass to Victoria, Texas. There was now a long, loose Rebel line stretching from California to the Gulf of Mexico, and Hoffman’s Blackshirts were beginning to realize they had one hell of a fight facing them. Reports poured in to Hoffman’s CR.

  “That’s sixteen hundred or so miles!” Hoffman stormed. “It’s impossible. Raines doesn’t have that many troops. It’s a damn trick. And where in the hell are those four battalions I sent out? Have any patrols reported back?”

  “Not yet, sir. We’re expecting word any minute.”

  It came. And Hoffman appeared to be in mild shock. He stood for a moment, speechless, his mouth open. “All of them?” he finally spoke.

  “All of them, sir,” the radio operator said softly. “All four battalions destroyed.”

  “Survivors?”

  “A handful. They are being transported back here as quickly as possible.”

  Field Marshal Jesus Hoffman stared at the man, his black eyes burning with fury. “Give me the actual number of personnel lost.”

  “Over twenty-three hundred, sir.”

  Hoffman sat down hard in a chair, clearly stunned. A handful of Rebels had wiped out four full battalions of top combat-seasoned troops along with their escorting armor. Impossible. But it had happened. How was the problem Hoffman knew he had to solve. And how to prevent it from ever happening again.

  “Hoffman has ordered an immediate halt to all advancing troops,” Ben was told. “They moved up to a line about thirty miles inside our borders and stood down.”

  Ben nodded. “He’s busy working out mind-problems. He’s trying to figure out what his best move would be and he’s not going to commit any more troops until he does. We clearly won the first round, but let’s not get cocky about it. Hoffman’s people are going to kick the shit out of us before this is over.” Ben paused for a moment, and those around him knew he wasn’t through. He tapped a folder lying on the battered old table in the dining room of the once fine home about thirty miles outside of San Antonio, just off Interstate 35. “Bad news, people. This is the final analysis of months of intelligence work by our people. They conclude that thousands and thousan
ds of Americans, all of them living outside of Rebel zones, have gone over to Hoffman’s side. Copies of this report have been sent to all of our batt coms. From this moment on, we don’t know who to trust.”

  “But we damn sure know the types of people who rolled over,” Ned Hawkins said. “At least, I do. I used to be one of them. I can spot them at five hundred yards without binoculars.”

  Ben smiled. “Yes,” he said drily. “So can I, Ned.”

  The Rebels all knew the type. Their numbers were made up of people of all colors, who, before the Great War, blamed everyone except themselves for the problems facing themselves and the nation. Whites who hated blacks. Blacks who hated whites. People of all colors who wanted something for nothing. Give me money for doing nothing. I demand this and I got a right to that. All niggers is lazy, they stink, and they’re cowards. All honkies is racist and out to get us brothers and sisters. The only good Indian is a dead Indian. We were here first, the land belongs to us and by God we want it and to hell with everybody else. I demand more social services from the government but I want big government to stay out of my life. I got more bills than I can pay, I done it knowin’ I was doin’ it, I had a fine time doin’ it, so now I’ll just declare bankruptcy and to hell with my creditors. I got a right to party down and screw anybody I wants to screw, and if I get pregnant, the taxpayers can just damn well pay my medical bills and support my child’en from cradle to grave and give me welfare. I got a right to eat, I got a right to have proper housing, I got a right to have money in my pocket, and you can’t make me work if I don’t want to. Give me money, money, money. For if you don’t, I’ll boycott, I’ll picket, I’ll disrupt services, I’ll blow up your house or your store, I’ll burn a cross on your lawn. I demand government subsidies for this, that, and the other thing. I ain’t gonna send my kids to school with no goddamn nigger or spic or Jew. I don’t want my kids to associate with a lot of racist honkies. All niggers is bad. All whites is good. All Blacks are good. All whites are bad. You’re picking on me. I’ll sue you. Just ’cause you caught me breakin’ into your home, that don’t give you the right to use force against me, and if you do, I’ll sue you and there are sure as hell a lot of lawyers around who’ll take my case and win it. On and on and on.