Terror in the Ashes Read online

  The Rebels waited until the town had been blanketed with troops from one end to the other, then just kicked in doors and started shooting. Caught totally by surprise, the pirates and assorted thugs and no-goods were chopped up like liver.

  Ben’s M-14 covered a pirate who was reaching for a rifle. “No!” the man yelled, swinging the rifle around.

  “Oh, yeah,” Ben told him, then pulled the trigger.

  The force of the slugs lifted the pirate off his knees and he staggered back, falling through a window.

  Many of the pirates and slavers never had a chance to do much more than open their eyes before a machete, wielded by a man or woman who, for years, had been abused by them, neatly decapitated the thug. When the Rebels saw human heads sitting on the porch, eyes open in shock and lips pulled back in a macabre grin, they knew that house was clear. They saw a lot of houses with those bloody statements on the porch.

  “Find all the vehicles that’ll run and get them moving toward the edge of town,” Ben told his people. “That way.” He pointed to the west.

  Jersey’s M-16 rattled and two more pirates went down, kicking out their lives on the shoulder of the road.

  The Rebels’ taking of the town was swift, and by the old rulebooks of war, savage. Initially, they did not give the pirates a chance to surrender. Only when the mopping up began, by Rebels held back in reserve for just that purpose, would the slime be allowed to give it up.

  Buddy kicked in a door just as a man was frantically calling on a radio. “The goddamn Rebels are here, I’m tellin’ you. Can’t you hear the damn shootin’? I ...”

  Buddy ended the transmission, the pirate’s life, and the usefulness of the radio with .45 caliber slugs from his Thompson. He jerked a frightened woman off the soiled sheets of the bed and slung her toward the porch. Half a dozen citizens were waiting there, stony-faced and hard-eyed. It would not be a pleasant night for those who had chosen to collaborate with the criminal element on the island.

  “They’ll kill me!” the woman wailed.

  “That’s your problem,” Buddy told her, then stepped off the porch and went trouble-hunting in the night.

  There wasn’t that much more trouble to be found in town. Most of the pirates who’d escaped the initial attack had fled into the night. And that was not terribly smart of them, for hundreds of islanders waited in the thick vegetation, machetes and axes in hand. The island would run red with criminal blood by the time the sun’s light touched it several hours from now.

  Calling in those Rebels left in reserve to secure the town and the harbor just a few miles from it, Ben and his battalion headed out in commandeered vehicles, racing up Highway 460 toward the Molokai airport on Mauna Loa Road.

  All along the route, they saw islanders standing by the sides of the road, all of them smiling and waving, and many of them with bloody machetes and axes in their hands. Only a few held hunting rifles, pistols, or shotguns.

  In less than one hour, the Rebels had seized control of the largest town on the island and two harbors, and with the taking of the big airport, they would be firmly entrenched on Molokai.

  On the islands of Oahu, Kauai, Hawaii, and Maui and in isolated pockets on Molokai, the thugs and outlaws and pirates who more or less were in command screamed out orders and generally accomplished nothing — mainly because none of them really knew what the hell was going on.

  There were thousands of criminals scattered all over the Hawaiian Islands, but they really had no plan of defense against an all-out attack from the sea. They had spent hundreds of hours, in small groups, discussing it, without ever coming up with anything.

  Now they were facing the most highly trained, disciplined, and motivated army in the known world. There were others to match the Rebels in size and discipline and fighting ability, but they had not yet surfaced. But they would — soon.

  “Where the hell did they come from?” a thug screamed into a mic. “Why in the hell didn’t our lookouts spot them? Are these really Ben Raines’ Rebels? God damn it, will somebody get off his ass and answer me?”

  Everybody with a radio started talking at once, each profane and panicked signal walking all over the other. Consequently, the criminal element on the islands managed to accomplish nothing of substance in these crucial first hours of the battle. And that was exactly what Ben Raines was counting on.

  “Northern and southern harbors secure, General,” Corrie told Ben. “The airport on the Kalaupapa Peninsula is in Rebel hands and attack choppers are coming in from the ships.”

  “Very good,” Ben said. He and his team were riding along in an old Cadillac stretch limo. Leave it to Cooper.

  “Emil Hite thinks he might stay on this island,” Corrie said with a smile, after listening to a transmission. “He just fell in love.”

  “I wouldn’t wish Emil on anybody,” Ben said. “Tell Thermopolis that I order Emil to fall out of love and get back to Rebel business.”

  Bullets pocked the windshield and nearly tore the steering wheel out of Cooper’s hands. “Jesus Christ!” Cooper hollered. He managed to get the limo off to the side and it slid into a ditch, Ben and his team piling out into the dewy-wet vegetation.

  “Someday, Coop,” Jersey said. “I keep hoping you’ll learn to drive.”

  “Are there snakes in Hawaii, General?” Cooper asked, looking around him.

  “I don’t think so, Coop. I don’t believe reptiles ever made it here. Anybody spotted that machine gun?”

  The machine gun opened up from across the road. A few of those Rebels who had been following Ben’s limo chunked in grenades and the machine gun fell silent.

  Buddy flopped down beside Ben. “Perhaps now, Father, you might realize that you are not invincible and allow someone else to take the point?”

  Ben stared at him for a few seconds. “You know, son . . . nobody likes a smart-ass.”

  Then they both broke out in laughter.

  Buddy took the point, leading the way to the airport.

  All that night and into the next day, the Rebels fought and clawed their way to the airport and beyond, with more and more pirate reinforcements arriving from the other islands to beef up the badly demoralized thugs on Molokai. The pirates sent old and reworked torpedo boats and small armed cruisers out to try to sink the huge convoy. They couldn’t even get close. The Rebels’ attack helicopters creamed them almost before they got away from port. Even if the helicopters had not been able to fly, the huge guns that Ike had ordered placed on most of the ships would have knocked out the smaller craft long before they became a threat.

  The pirates gave up that idea as a very bad one.

  When the huge cargo and transport ships came in to off-load supplies, their escorts were Apache gunships and PT boats that Ike had ordered brought along from England. The PT boats had been reworked and refitted with the most up-to-date weaponry.

  It had been a long and sometimes very rough ride for the skippers and crews of the patrol boats, but they’d made it and were now proving invaluable.

  Finally, on the afternoon of the second day of the invasion of the Hawaiian Islands, the pirates stopped them, so they thought, and were jubilant about it. The pirates had pulled back to a line running north to south, about five miles west of the airport. What they didn’t know was that Ben had stopped the attack for reasons of his own.

  “All right,” Ben told his commanders. “It’s time to hit the other islands and start arming the citizens. I want special operations teams on every island, organizing resistance and pestering the crap out of these pirates. I want to make their lives a living hell. Everytime they turn around, I want something blowing up in their faces. Find out who the leaders are and start waging urban warfare against them. Pure terrorist tactics. Anything goes.” The commanders all grinned at that. If the Rebels were better at one thing than another – and they were experts at all types of combat – it was guerilla warfare.

  Ben looked at each batt comm. “At the conclusion of this meeting, I am going
to take my battalion and Pat O’Shea’s Free Irish, and we are going to go down to the lines the crud have withdrawn to, and kick the shit out of them. We are going to run their asses right back into the sea. And then we are going to hoist the new American flag all over this island.”

  The flag displayed huge red and white and blue stripes, with an American bald eagle in the center. It had been designed by an elementary class back at Base Camp One . . . in honor of all the Rebels who had fallen in battle.

  It took some getting used to, but Ben and the others had been so moved by the efforts of the kids, the flag had been adopted.

  “And then, people,” Ben said, “we are going to free these islands, and then we’re going back home.”

  That brought a round of applause from the multinational commanders, who had all adopted what was left of America as their home.

  Georgi Striganov, a big bear of a man, stood up. The Russian looked over at Jersey and smiled.

  She returned the grin. “Yeah,” she said. “Kick-ass time!”

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  Copyright © 1992 by William W Johnstone

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  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or events is entirely coincidental.

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  ISBN: 978-0-7860-2022-5

  Notes

  1 A military term used to signify civilian deaths, among other things