Smoke from the Ashes Read online

  Ben carefully rolled a cigarette and lit it. He took a slow drag and exhaled, his eyes on Dr. Chase. “First time Ike’s made a speech that long in years.”

  “But he’s right, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “And some of those people he described will certainly surface.”

  “I hope they don’t get near Ike. He’d probably shoot them.”

  “And you, Ben? What about you?”

  “I’d probably help him do it. Or at least want to help.”

  Chase shook his head. “Going to become very interesting around here very soon.” He poured another cup of Rebel Rouser and downed it.

  “Lamar, are you going to sit here and get drunk?”

  “That is my intention.”

  “You’re going to have a hell of a headache in the morning, old friend.”

  “Nonsense! I never have hangovers.”

  “How long has it been since you were last drunk?”

  “Oh . . . twenty years or so.” Ben smiled. “Good luck.”

  “What’s the matter with Lamar this morning?” Dan asked Ben.

  “He isn’t feeling well,” Ben said.

  Lamar was sitting in front of his tent, a cup of coffee on a small camp table in front of him. Using both hands, he managed to get the cup to his mouth and take a sip without spilling too much of it.

  “Worse crap I ever tried to drink,” Lamar bitched. “Almost pure chicory.”

  “Would you like to have a bit of the hair of the dog that bit you?” Dan called cheerfully.

  Lamar glared balefully at him. “How would you like to be circumcised without benefit of anesthesia?” the doctor growled.

  Laughing, the two men walked toward the communications truck.

  “Anything on Big Louie yet?” Ben asked the young woman Rebel manning the truck jammed full of electronic gear.

  “I’ve been putting together bits and pieces as they come in, general. I got the last transmission about twenty minutes ago. Want me to read what I’ve got so far?”

  “Please.” Ben accepted a cup of tea from Dan’s batman, Carl, and sat down. Some of the Rebels liked the strong chicory-thick crap that now passed for coffee. Ben did not. Oh, he’d drink it if there was nothing else, but he preferred tea. And the Rebels had warehouses full of tea. It seems that in their haste to loot coffee, thousands and thousands of tins of tea were passed over, as well as warehouses full of it.

  “Big Louie,” the woman Rebel read. “Age forty-eight, approximately. Real name unknown. Until recently controlled territory from Nebraska line to Topeka, south. West to Manhattan. Now has included everything east of the old Kansas Turnpike to the Missouri line . . .”

  “Very enterprising chap,” Dan said, nibbling on a cracker.

  “Yes,” Ben agreed. He looked up as Ike entered the truck.

  “What’s wrong with Lamar this morning? I said hello and he told me to go screw myself.”

  “He has a slight hangover,” Dan said.

  “Shall I continue, general?” the woman asked.

  “Please. Sorry for the interruption.”

  She gave Ike a dirty look. He grinned at her.

  She brought Ike up to date and said, “Big Louie had approximately three thousand men and women under his command.”

  “Three thousand!” Ben blurted.

  “My word!” Dan said.

  “Where in the hell did he come up with three thousand people and where in the hell has he been hiding them so we didn’t pick it up?” Ike asked.

  “Here we go again,” James Riverson spoke from the open door.

  “I’m afraid so, James,” Ben said. “Go on, young lady,” he told the radio operator.

  “The Scouts have picked up information that indicates Big Louie is a college graduate with a degree in economics from the University of Kansas. Knows this area as well as, or better, than anyone. Served in the Marine Corps. Officer. Captain. Runs his organization with military precision. His people are extremely well armed. Has enslaved the Potawatomi, Kickapoo, Sac, and Fox Indians. Uses them as forced labor on his farms. Extremely successful with farming and ranching. Has reopened schools and many area hospitals. Restored electricity and many social services.” She looked at Ben. “The last part says that his idol is Gen. Ben Raines.”

  FIVE

  “He’s a warlord! Has enslaved entire tribes of Indians and uses them for forced labor. And I am his idol?” Ben kicked a camp chair over. “Where does this son of a bitch think he’s coming from?”

  The entire Rebel contingent had made themselves busy in other parts of the camp when Ben started yelling. All except Ike, Dan, Lamar, and James. They sat and watched and waited while Ben vented his spleen.

  Lamar grimaced as Ben yelled. He took two more aspirin.

  “Where is this bastard’s HQ?” Ben yelled.

  “Topeka,” Ike told him.

  “Well, the guy must be crazy! What was it that girl with the orange and green hair told us? That he liked to burn people alive!” He pointed a finger at Dan. “I want as much intel as your Scouts can get me. Troop placement, location of farms and ranches, condition of the people inside his territorial claims, the whole ball of wax.”

  “Right away, sir.”

  “I’m glad the kids aren’t here,” Ben said, calming down a bit. “They’d want to go in there as my eyes and ears.”

  He thought of Lora and wondered how she was getting along. He had grown very fond of the little girl.

  “Ike? Tell the people to eat and sleep and check and clean their weapons carefully. I want a full report on our ammo situation. Anything that we might need flown in from Base Camp One, order it done so, immediately.”

  Ike nodded his head. “Damn sure can’t have a two-hundred-mile gap in our outpost system, can we, Ben? Especially one running right smack through a warlord’s territory.”

  “We sure can’t, Ike.”

  Ike walked off, shouting for his aides.

  “Kick-ass time again, huh, Ben?” James asked.

  “Looks that way, James. How’s morale?”

  “High. Of course, they thought they were going home. But they’ll follow you anywhere you lead, Ben.”

  “Explain the situation to them, James.”

  The command sergeant major nodded and walked off, a huge man, so big his M-16 looked like a toy in his hands.

  “Want a drink, Lamar?” Ben said, his good humor returning — slowly.

  “Hell with you, Raines! You gonna start barking orders at me, too?”

  “If I have to tell you what to do, you old goat, I’m in real trouble.”

  “I’m too short of everything for a full scale battle, Ben. I’ll get on the horn to Base Camp One and tell Cecil to start shipping me supplies. Where’s the LZ going to be?”

  “I don’t know, yet.” He looked at a map of Kansas. “We’re sitting right on the edge of Big Louie’s territory. I don’t want to go as far south as El Dorado; that’d put us too far off center. Well, shit on it! We’ll knock down the telephone poles and land them in the road. On Fifty-six, somewhere between Herington and Council Grove. Tell Cec I’ll call in the LZ in the morning; soon as I have Scouts check it out.”

  “And away we go,” Lamar said, rising from his chair and groaning from his hangover.

  “Jackie Gleason,” Ben said with a grin.

  After Lamar had gone, alternately bitching and moaning, a young Rebel touched Ben on the arm.

  “Sir?”

  “Yes, son?”

  “Who’s Jackie Gleason?”

  The young man had crossed into Indiana, met up with a group of pretty nice people and stayed with them for a day, listening to them talk.

  Gen. Ben Raines, they had heard, was returning East, victorious after his defeat of the Russian and the mercenary, Sam Hartline. They were on their way to Ben Raines Base Camp, in North Georgia. Would the young man like to come along?

  No. He thought he’d head west. Any idea where Ben Raines might be about now
?

  Colorado. Maybe as far as Central Kansas.

  The young man pulled out before dawn. Heading west. He carried a .45 autoloader on each hip. A knife on his side and another one in a sheath on his right boot.

  He was square jawed and tanned, very heavily muscled. His hair was dark and curly. His eyes could be warm or friendly, or deadly cold. Usually they were expressionless. The young man was quite handsome; but not in the pretty-boy manner. His was a rugged handsomeness.

  He wore no riding helmet; only a red bandana tied around his head. A bandoleer of clips for his weapons was slung over one shoulder. Clips for the weapon he carried in a leather boot on the motorcycle.

  The weapon was an old Thompson submachine gun.

  Khamsin sat in his headquarters in South Carolina and listened to his field commanders as they reported. The Libyan terrorist-turned-general sat on a pillow. The wound in his ass, compliments of Ike McGowan, still bothered the man.

  “We could break out at any time we wish,” a man said. “The Rebels’ positions along our borders are thinly manned.”

  “So they would have you believe,” Khamsin said. “But behind them they have heavy artillery, missiles, and rockets. Oh, they’d let us break through. Then as soon as we were inside their territory, they’d put us in a box and destroy us. You all are far too confident. The black person commanding these troops while Ben Raines is out West is Cecil Jefferys. And Raines did not put him in charge thanks to some renewed program of racial equality. General Jefferys is in command because he is an excellent soldier. No, brothers, no. The Rebels are accustomed to facing and fighting and winning against superior numbers.” He looked at an open folder on his desk. “Each Rebel is trained and mentally conditioned to neutralize five of the enemy. Kindly bear in mind that the people who initially set up the Rebels’ training program were Special Forces, Rangers, Marine Force Recon, Seals, SAS, and French Foreign Legion personnel. And kindly bear in mind that six, six Rebels wreaked havoc upon this very HQ, killed several hundred of our best troops, and stole a prisoner from under our noses. Six!”

  And wounded me in the ass! Khamsin thought bitterly.

  How humiliating!

  “General Khamsin,” a commander said. “Allah has blessed The Hot Wind.”

  Allah is not down here getting His butt kicked, Khamsin thought. Then he silently said a short prayer, asking for forgiveness for his thoughts.

  “It is useless to send coded messages to our scouts in the field,” another commander said. “The Rebels break the codes routinely.”

  “Do we have any intel on who is in charge of that section?” Khamsin asked.

  “A person by the name of Lansky,” he was informed.

  “Naturally,” Khamsin said. “Will we forever be cursed with those wretched people?”

  No one offered a reply to that. Another six thousand years certainly seemed feasible.

  Sister Voleta sat alone in her house. She had gradually gotten over the shock of her only son’s leaving. Now, looking back, she realized that she should have seen the signs.

  He was just too much like his father: too opinionated, bullheaded. He never wanted the power she could have given him; too concerned about the needs of others — and he had consistently rejected her teachings. This was not the first time he’d left her.

  Even when the world was whole the boy had been too curious about what lay beyond the next hill. He possessed a brilliant mind, but she could never channel it exactly to her liking. Stubborn little bastard! she thought.

  But in her own crazied sort of way, she did love him.

  But she didn’t wish him well at all.

  For she had a pretty good idea where he might be heading. And if the two of them ever got together — she didn’t like to think about that at all. The possibilities were just too staggering in scope.

  She answered the knock on her door.

  “The old man is ready,” she was informed.

  “Gather everybody,” she ordered. “I want them all to see what happens to traitors.”

  “The old man is singing some Christian song. He has no fear.”

  “He’ll have plenty of fear when the flames sear his flesh, and his singing will take on a different note. I assure you of that.”

  “We had best curtail any further burning,” Big Louie said. “We have been discovered by Ben Raines and his Rebels. I expect them to come charging in here at any time. Pity. I do so like to hear the screaming.”

  “Yes, sir, Your Majesty,” the aide said, bowing. He left backing up.

  Most of the intel received on Big Louie was correct — as far as it went.

  Big Louie did earn a degree in economics. However, he never received it. When he learned that he had failed to maintain a four-point grade average, he tried to burn down the administration building.

  He was not convicted of that. The only witness to the crime died in a dorm fire.

  Big Louie was in the Marine Corps. But he was not an officer. He was a buck-assed private. He was dishonorably discharged after he burned down a barracks. He did some stockade tune for that, too.

  He changed his name and went to work on Wall Street for a brokerage firm. He was charged with insider trading and almost came to trial. But all the evidence against him was destroyed by fire. Including the man who caught him.

  Then the Great War erupted worldwide.

  Big Louie soon learned that a great gift of gab was not enough to keep him alive. One had to be tough and hard as nails. For the very first time he was grateful for his Marine Corps training. His only regret was that he hadn’t paid more attention.

  And he soon learned that many people were willing to do anything, anything, to stay alive.

  And if you threatened to set them on fire, everybody was willing to do anything to stay alive.

  When the Tri-States had finally opened their borders to the outside, Big Louie was among the first to go in and look around — being very careful to stay out of trouble while inside those borders. Ben Raines and his Rebels weren’t like the law outside of Tri-States. Fuck up inside Tri-States and the law there would either shoot you right off the bat — or wait and hang you later.

  And they didn’t have any crime within those borders, and that fascinated the crazy mind of Big Louie. The whole world was staggering around trying to create some semblance of order out of the ashes, and Ben Raines and his people were just as content and orderly and happy as that bug in the rug.

  It was, to Big Louie’s mind, and to the minds of most everybody else, flat, flippin’ impossible to do what Raines and his people had done.

  But by God! They had done it.

  Big Louie soon began to recognize and appreciate what Ben Raines had done. And he began to realize that if one didn’t go quite as far as Raines had gone, and sort of reversed some of it, that would work, too.

  If one took a certain type of person — not the type that Ben Raines had selected to live in Tri-States, but the less desirable types — and promised them free medical care, schools for the kids, enough to eat, and other social amenities, why the silly shits would do almost anything for you in return. Including turning their heads to certain, shall we say, extremes or excesses on the part of those in command.

  After the second and seemingly final collapse of the government of the United States, Big Louie put his plan in operation. And it just tickled him to no end to discover that it really would work.

  And what was so simple and amusing was that anyone who didn’t like what Big Louie did — why, just set them on fire and listen to them holler.

  And Big Louie had one very large and very dark ace in the hole that only he and a very few others close to him knew about. And if Ben Raines fucked around with him too much, why he’d just push the button and let them birds fly!

  Big Louie sat on his throne and laughed and laughed at that.

  Yep, ol’ Ben Raines was the bull of the woods, all right — and he could go on being bull of the woods; as long as the woods he was bull
of wasn’t anywhere near Big Louie’s territory.

  “What we’ve got, general,” Dan Gray said, “is a collection of some of the most despicable people in the world gathered around this Big Louie character.”

  It was not yet dawn, yet Ben and his commanders had been up for several hours, going over gathered material on Big Louie.

  And no one had found a thing to like about the man or many of the people who resided within his territory.

  “Let’s give them the benefit of the doubt,” Ben said, adding, “for the moment, that is. This Big Louie character has, or so it seems, set up a workable form of government, complete with shops, stores, trading areas, farms and ranches, and his own currency backed by a gold reserve. Fashioned, in a way, after our Hi-States. Okay, we all see that on the surface. Let’s dig for some dirt.”

  “The first spadeful contains the fact that he has enslaved four different Indian tribes,” Dan said.

  “Playing devil’s advocate,” Ben said, “I see the next shovel containing the fact that he has set up schools and hospitals and some sort of a food-for-all program.”

  “He kidnaps women to keep his army happy,” Chase said.

  Ben couldn’t think of anything else good to say about the man, so he kept his mouth shut.

  “He burns folks alive for amusement,” Ike said. He looked up as the sounds of rain hitting the canvas overhead intensified. “Shit! Cec said his weather people say this storm is gonna last two or three days. And the pilots ain’t real thrilled about flyin’ some of our old birds in bad weather; gonna be a lot of lightning with this storm.”

  “Let’s get back to Big Louie,” Ben suggested. “Anybody got anything else good to say about the man?”

  No one did.

  “Dan,” Ben said. “We’re not going to be able to do much until this storm blows out of here and we get resupplied. So tell your people to get me some prisoners. See if they can’t penetrate just inside the borders and jerk some fat cats out of the nicer homes. Caution them not to kill anybody — unless they absolutely have to. We still don’t have any really solid evidence to go on about this Big Louie character. And I’m not going to commit our people on hearsay.”