Courage In The Ashes Read online

  “Yeah. I remember that Canada didn’t have the death penalty,” Ben said. “Peace and love and all that shit.”

  “Not all of us agreed with our government’s decisions, General,” the citizen said quietly, his voice just audible over the booming of the big guns.

  “I won’t put up with criminals,” Ben told the man. “If my people fight and bleed and die for this land, our rules apply.”

  “As you wish, General. But you may find some peaceful resistance to your rules.”

  “They can peacefully resist all they want to. But when they do, they’ll find themselves on their own, without benefit of Rebel protection, medical aid, or assistance of any kind.”

  A woman in the group smiled. “He said, ‘some,’ General. That doesn’t include us.”

  Ben nodded his head. “Order the shelling stopped and the tanks to advance, Corrie,” Ben told her. “Let’s take the town and see what we have.”

  The Rebels took the town building by building, with the Canadians fighting right alongside them. And they were, to a person, tough, no-nonsense fighters, their skills honed razor-sharp by years of guerrilla fighting against outlaws, punks, and creepies, all just to stay alive in their own country.

  The leader of the group was Jon Andersen, a former official in the government of British Columbia. After several blocks of the town of Penticton had been taken, Ben found himself in a building with Jon and a few of Jon’s followers. Ben took a sip of water from his canteen and offered the canteen to Jon. The man drank deeply, then capped the canteen and handed it back.

  “We wondered when you people would get up here,” he said to Ben. “The Russian, Striganov, set up outposts over in Alberta and Saskatchewan and pretty well cleared those areas. Then he left and joined forces with you. He turned out to be a good man after all.”

  “Yes, he did,” Ben agreed. “But we had some pretty good fights before he converted.”

  A hard burst of machine-gun fire knocked paneling and plaster from the wall behind them. The slugs drove through the shattered windows of the brick home.

  Ben heard the clanking of a tank. Then the booming of a 105 ended the yammering of the machine gun. The tank clanked up, reversed its turret, and drove right through the home. The screaming of those being crushed under the treads lasted only a moment.

  After the screaming had ceased, Jon looked at Ben. “You fight a mean, nasty war, Ben Raines.”

  “I fight to win, Jon. That’s the only way to fight a war. Come on.”

  Ben’s team and those with Jon ran from the house. They hit the ground when an enemy machine gun found their range and opened up. Ben rolled, came up on his knees behind what was left of a 105-round-shattered tree, and leveled his old Thunder Lizard. The M-14 yowled and bucked on full auto, and the .308 rounds silenced the machine gun.

  Ben ran forward, chunked a Fire-Frag grenade into the bullet-pocked house, and hit the dirt. The grenade blew, and the area fell silent for a moment. Ben, his team right behind him, slammed into the house, knocking the door—which was hanging by one hinge—to the littered floor.

  A wounded outlaw, cussing and screaming at Ben, leveled a pistol at him. Cooper, Beth, Jersey, Corrie, and Ben all fired at once. The rounds tore into the man. The pistol clattered to the bloody floor.

  The Rebels and the Canadians moved on to the next block.

  Kneeling behind a row of rusted and ruined old trucks, cars, and station wagons resting on their rims, Ben said, “Get me reports from all battalions, Corrie. Let’s see what the others are doing.”

  “Gunships are converging on what is left of the Vancouver harbor,” she told him after bumping all units. “Ike has called for the gunships to concentrate on destroying all ships and boats in the harbor while his and Tina’s people blow the bridges connecting the city to the mainland. When that is done, Ike will redirect his artillery and destroy the city.”

  “Good. Cecil?”

  “He’s busted through Hope and is barreling toward the retreating outlaws. He says his people routed them; they’re running in a panic. Georgi has almost taken his objective and Rebet, West, and Danjou say they will break through no later than noon.”

  “All right. Good. Let’s get this town taken and on the road. I think Cec is turning this into a race,” Ben added with a smile.

  With the tanks spearheading and the outlaws now knowing they could not win against a better-equipped and much more highly motivated force, the city was in Rebel hands by noon. Jon Andersen and his people stayed out of the way and watched, wondering what Ben Raines was going to do with the prisoners, including Gene Booker, the murderer, rapist, mugger, thief and slave-trader.

  But Ben passed that buck to Jon.

  “You mentioned that you and your people wanted to live in this town; you wanted this town to be an outpost,” Ben told him. “Fine. You’re in charge.”

  “And if I decide to spare his life?” Jon asked.

  “We’ll make the next town an outpost. Or the next, or the next.”

  “And us?” Jon waved his hand, indicating the others in his group.

  “You’re on your own.”

  Gene Booker laughed at the expression on Jon Andersen’s face.

  Jon ignored that and stared at Ben, leaning up against his Chevy, rolling a cigarette. “Maybe our two nations, maybe the world, needs a man as hard as you, Ben Raines. Whether that’s right or wrong, we’ve got you, don’t we?”

  “That’s right, Jon.’’ Ben lit his smoke and stared at the Canadian.

  “Shit,” Booker said. “I’m a free man already. That pussy don’t have the nerve to pop a cap on me.”

  “Do they get a trial?” Jon asked.

  Someone in the Rebels ranks laughed at that.

  “The rule of thumb is this, Jon: we offer adversaries surrender terms. If they refuse, they’re dead.”

  “Come on, Andersen!” Booker taunted Jon. “Come on, come on. Hell, Jon, you might as well take off your pants now and let me fuck your ass. You know I’m gonna do it sooner or later.”

  “You’re filth,” Jon told him. “Filth. Maybe you don’t deserve to live. Maybe we were wrong.”

  “Aw, Jon, me boy,” Booker said. “You know you can’t kill me. I was an abused child. I was born into poverty. The other kids made fun of me.”

  “So were a lot of us,” a Rebel spoke from the ranks. “Save that shit for somebody else. Not that you’re going to have the time to find anyone that stupid.”

  Jon cut his eyes to Ben. “What Booker says is true. I know that for a fact.”

  “So what?”

  “Your system of justice does not take that into consideration?”

  “No. We don’t kill children or certifiable idiots. Those are the only two exceptions.”

  Gene looked around him. His gaze stopped on Thermopolis, “A hippie? Here? Now?”

  Therm shrugged his muscular shoulders. “Like Popeye: I yam what I yam.”

  “Jon,” Gene Booker said in all seriousness. “I was struck on the head by a constable when I was a boy. It affected me. You know it did. You remember what the court-appointed psychiatrists all said about me.”

  Ben laughed and toed out the butt of his cigarette. “Damn, Booker, you sure know all the right words, don’t you. I bet you were a real jailhouse lawyer.”

  “Fuck you, Raines!” Booker said. “You’re the savage here, not me.”

  “There are those who will certainly agree with that, Booker,” Ben admitted. “But fortunately, we’ve got them outnumbered and outgunned.”

  Booker’s eyes touched upon the collar of a chaplain. “You’re a Catholic priest, right?”

  “Either that or an Episcopalian, Presbyterian, or an over-zealous Methodist,” the priest said with a smile.

  “And you’re not going to interfere in this!”

  “Oh, my, no,” the priest said. “But I will give you a very proper Catholic burial.”

  “You got to hear my confession!”

  “Oh, no. I just ate
lunch. You see, son, the Catholic Church has changed since the Great War. I don’t have the inclination to tell you and you certainly don’t have the time to hear all about the rebirth of Catholicism and all the changes it’s gone through. I will say this: we no longer believe that an individual can live a life of crime and on his or her deathbed confess to all and be granted entrance to Heaven. In plainer terms, suffice it to say that this priest thinks that right now, Gene Booker, you are in a world of shit, boy.”

  Booker stared bug-eyed at the chaplain. “I ain’t believin’ this!” he hollered. “I want to see your Monsignor!”

  “Oh, I am a Monsignor,” the priest told him.

  “Shit!” Booker said.

  “Get it done,” Ben told Andersen.

  Booker started cussing the man. He cussed the man, his wife, his kids, his mother and father, and everyone else that he could think of that might be remotely related to the man.

  Jon ended the cussing with a single shot, sending the bullet into the man’s brain.

  He looked at Ben as he holstered his pistol. “The others?”

  “We’ll deal with them. Put your people to work clearing the airfield outside of town. We’ll be bringing supplies in for you very shortly. Welcome to the Rebels, Jon Andersen.”

  The Rebels began once more rolling north, but not too far north, for Ike and Tina were going to have a good two or three days work clearing out the suburbs around Vancouver, and other battalions did not wish to get too far north of them in case of a counterattack.

  Cecil halted his advance at a tiny town called Spuzzum. Georgi called a halt on the north side of Coquihalla Pass and set up camp for the night. Ben stopped his advance at Summerland. Rebet called it a day at Castlegar, and West and Danjou made camp just south of Mount Fisher.

  Before turning off the lantern that evening and crawling into the double sleeping bag placed on the inflatable air mattress, Linda asked, “How far to Alaska, Ben?”

  Ben chuckled. “Oh, about two thousand miles. It’ll go faster than you think once we’re past Prince George.”

  “Alaska going to be rough?”

  “I don’t really know. It’ll be a fight, for sure. And there is no way we’re going to touch base with those towns past road’s end.”

  “I don’t understand. And don’t tell me I should have paid more attention in geography class.”

  Ben laughed. “No, I won’t. I will admit I was pretty dumb about Alaska until I started studying maps. You might say that anything west of a line running south to north from Cook Inlet to Prudhoe Bay will be an area that we won’t investigate. There are no roads.”

  “Where is Nome and how do you get to it.”

  “It’s on the Seward Peninsula and you have to fly there. Unless you want to take a dog sled. It’s the trail’s end, or it used to be, for the thousand-mile Iditarod Sled Dog Race. That used to start in Anchorage and end in Nome.”

  “So we won’t be going there?”

  “No. There are a lot of places in Alaska we won’t be visiting.”

  “The Trans-Alaska Pipeline?”

  “Oh, we’ll see it.”

  “No. I meant, what about it?”

  “It was my understanding that the entire operation was shut down right at the start of the Great War. If that is true, I don’t intend to reopen it.”

  “If that is true, Ben, how are the people living there getting fuel to heat their homes and run their vehicles?”

  “I think it’s open to a limited degree. This is guesswork, Linda. We’ll know for sure once we get there. And when we get there, we’ve got to strike hard and fast and have it over with by fall. Then we’ve got to get the hell gone south.”

  “The Eskimos, the Indians up there?”

  “The crud and crap may have killed them all. But I’d think they just moved west into uninhabited areas and went right on doing what they’ve been doing for thousands of years surviving. They did quite well before the white man came along and fucked up their lives, and they can go right on living as they damn well please after we’ve left.”

  “You don’t intend to impose Rebel law on them?”

  “No. I don’t have the right to order a culture change. Our worlds are not going to clash, Linda. The bear and the whale and the seal have returned; the tribes will never grow so large as to wipe them out. The white man did all that.”

  She turned out the lamp, crawled in beside Ben, and giggled.

  “What the hell’s so funny?” Ben asked.

  “Pretend we’re Eskimos and rub noses with me.”

  “Is that all you want me to do?”

  “I’m sure you’ll think of something else.”

  She was right.

  FIVE

  The Rebels waited until Ike and Tina’s troops had neutralized Vancouver and left the city—and any outlaws who might still be alive in it—burning and isolated, before they pushed off on another leg toward Northstar.

  Moments before they were due to shove off, Corrie received a communiqué. Communications had intercepted a message from an outlaw group in Prince George. She taped the message and took it to Ben.

  Ben listened to the communiqué and nodded his head. “They’re smartening up. They know they can’t defend the cities and towns against us, so they’ve decided to pack it up and head for Alaska. If—and it’s a big if—we can believe the communiqué. Corrie, go to scramble and get me all unit commanders on the horn.”

  “I tend to accept the communiqué as legitimate, Ben,” Georgi Striganov radioed his response. “But with these reservations. One: these outlaws up here are the most intelligent we are to face in this last campaign. They are survivors from many battles against us. They know our tactics well. Two; they will surely set up ambush points along the highway, and there is only one highway we can take to Northstar. Three: they have done this knowing we will suspect an ambush and that it will slow us down, giving them time to set up and be waiting for us when we reach our objective.”

  “I agree with Georgi’s assessment,” Cecil said.

  The others agreed with the Russian, and so did Ben.

  “OK,” Ben said. “We’re agreed on that. Now then, we know they don’t have any form of SAMs. They have ground-only rocket launchers, heavy machine guns, and mortars—I’m talking about the outlaws here in BC. I don’t know what we’ll be facing in Northstar. I recommend we use our choppers to range out and act as forward recon.”

  They all agreed with that, and Ben ordered the helicopter gunships up.

  “Let’s hit it, people,” Ben signed off.

  At Summerland, a town that once boasted a population of nearly ten thousand, Ben was met by a sad-looking group of about two hundred citizens, all of them wandering aimlessly about.

  “Former slaves,” Ben said, before he even talked to any of them. “Pull over there, Coop,” he pointed. “Let’s see what we can do for them.”

  “The outlaws left yesterday,” a man told him, his face bearing the bruises of a dozen recent beatings. “They took our younger men and women with them . . .”

  Ben guessed the average age of this group to be around fifty years old.

  “. . . It’s been hell up here for a long time, General. We fought and fought well for several years, all the time on the run. But we just didn’t have the firepower to hold out. The outlaws overran us a long time ago.”

  “I understand,” Ben said, and he did. Canadian gun laws were much tougher than those in the United States—back when such rules were enforced. But like the U.S. Government, the Canadian powers-that-be never seemed to realize that criminals don’t pay any attention to rules and regulations and laws. The only group of people who are punished by restrictive gun laws are the law-abiding citizens.

  “Get some of these vehicles left behind running so these people can join Jon Andersen’s group south of us,” Ben ordered. “Have the medics check these folks out and then issue them arms and equipment. This will beef up Jon’s group and give us one hell of an outpost.”
/>   “Not all of these people wish to participate in your outpost network, General,” the spokesman for the survivors said.

  “Then point them out and send them on their way,” Ben told him. “There is no middle ground here.”

  “We have a right to our opinions,” a woman told Ben. “And we chose not to join your organization.” The man beside her nodded his head in agreement, as did about a dozen others standing near.

  “That is certainly your privilege, madam,” Ben replied. “So goodbye.”

  He turned to walk away.

  “Wait a minute!” the man beside the woman yelled.

  Ben turned around.

  “What about us?” the man demanded.

  “What about you?” Ben countered.

  “We need food and clothing and medical attention.”

  “I would say you have a problem.” Ben’s words were as icy as the arctic in the dead of winter.

  “You’ll just leave us, to fend for ourselves?”

  “That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

  “Well . . . yes. I suppose it is. But the Christian thing for you to do is to help us first.”

  “The Lord helps those who help themselves. Good luck to you all.”

  “You’re a son of a bitch, Ben Raines!” the woman shouted.

  “Actually, my mother was a very nice lady. A Christian lady. She would work tirelessly to help those who needed it; but she didn’t believe in something for nothing. She was compassionate but tough. I once saw her pick up a shotgun and threaten to blow the head off of a hunter who was trespassing on our farmland. She was a lady of very firm beliefs. She also believed in applying the belt to the butts of her children when any of us deserved it. And we usually did—on a daily basis.”

  “I’m sure you led the list of getting spanked,” Therm said with a smile.

  “I believe I did set a family record for lickings one summer,” Ben admitted.

  “God will damn you to hell for deserting us!” the woman yelled.

  “I doubt it. Let’s go, people!” Ben yelled. “We’ve got miles ahead of us.” He turned to the spokesman of the group who was heading south to join Andersen’s people. “Can you leave them behind?”