Flames from the Ashes Read online

  “Thank you, Lieutenant,” Ben responded. He was enjoying stretching his legs outside the Hummer after a long ride. “You can lead me there right now. I want to recee the place while the R Batt gets in position. Have your men do that, if you will.”

  “Yes, sir. It’s only three miles. Uh — you plan on bringing that dog with you?”

  “Smoot? Of course,” Ben said blandly.

  “The Nazis have some pooches with them. If they get a whiff of your, ah, Smoot, they’ll set off a racket.”

  “Take us in from downwind. I only want to be close enough to check out the place through binoculars.”

  “Very good, sir. If you’ll come with me, sir?”

  Ben and team followed in the Hummer. Lieutenant Fuller’s silenced moped made not a sound as he took rutted dirt roads that led Ben’s party first away from York, then back on what Ben assumed to be the downwind side. Near the crest of a ridge that put them back close to U.S. 81, the brake light flared briefly and Cooper, now recovered from his brief experience with the hallucinogen, stopped the Hummer. Ben eased from the back of the vehicle and followed Fuller to the crest of the ridge.

  There he eased down on his chest and belly and produced a pair of light-gathering night glasses. Ben fitted the lenses to his eyes and scanned the terrain between them and the sagging corrugated metal fence around the drive-in. Amateurs, Ben thought contemptuously a few minutes later. They had failed to put out any security. Next he examined the tall structure that housed the screen.

  A few boards were missing, and others had warped enough to wrench free of their nails. The paint had faded and chipped; large, scabrous splotches had flaked off entirely. He could still make out the sign that identified it as: 81 DRIVE-IN THEATRE.

  “Looks like the Nazis have taken their families out to a movie,” Ben whispered to Fuller. “I’d like to slip along this ridge a ways and take a better look at the people inside.”

  “Nothing to it, sir,” Fuller assured him.

  Ten minutes of slow, cautious movement put them in total darkness and at an angle that exposed the occupants of the drive-in and the screen. Ben scanned the people first. They had come in all sort of vehicles. Far Eyes — Fuller — had been accurate, as well as picturesque, in his description. Rusting pickups lined up on the ridges of the drive-in beside old, spring-sagging sedans and two-ton stake trucks. Here and there a battered van stood out in blocky silhouette. The people were a shock.

  Crew-cut kids, clean and neatly dressed, sat beside equally respectable looking adults. Most of the males had crew-cuts, or shaved heads. The women wore their hair close-cropped, but in feminine styles. Most of the men wore short-sleeved black shirts and trousers. The, boys wore brown shirts and black shorts. All, men and women alike, wore the red-white-black armbands so chillingly familiar to the whole world for more than a half-century. In the center of the white circles sprawled the Hakenkreuz — literally, the bent cross, Ben reflected. Twisted was more like it. Portable generators coughed to life, and a powerful beam of light speared from a large step-van.

  Images flickered to life on the damaged screen. Against a cautionary tug from Lieutenant Fuller, Ben edged closer to get a better fix on detail. As he watched, a sea of puffy, roiling clouds filled the frame. The angle changed and the shadow of an old Fokker Tri-Motor airplane was cast on the clouds. Slowly the scene dissolved to a very-medieval-looking town.

  Tall stone buildings, gray and mossy with age, came into focus. A cathedral with Gothic arches and flying buttress supports filled the screen, sped on past below the point of view of the camera. Ben could almost hear the Wagnerian music swell and segue into the strident notes of the “Horst Wessel Song.”

  He knew this movie well. He had seen it a couple of times before the Great War. One of those had been at a film festival, could you imagine. Touted as the cinematic genius of director Leni Riefenstahl, Triumph of the Will was the title. Commissioned personally by Adolf Hitler, she had used her directorial skill to elevate to an almost-religious rite the proceedings of the 1934 Nazi Party Congress at Nuremberg.

  When Adolf Hitler deplaned on the screen and was met by an obsequious covey of sycophants, Ben pulled back. “Let’s get to my mobile CP, it should be up here by now,” he urged Lieutenant Fuller. Ben could clearly hear Fuller’s sigh of relief.

  Back with his team, he found Jersey fidgety. No doubt she was miffed at being left behind. He’d rarely gotten away with that since the Battle for New York. As he had anticipated, the big eighteen-wheeler that served as his mobile command post rolled in and hissed air brakes to stop short of a ridge that concealed it from the Nazi mob in the drive-in. Quickly he outlined what he had observed.

  “Our black-shirt friends are having a night at the movies. There’s about seven hundred of them in there now. I suggest we wait and see what conies next.” He consulted the aviator’s chronometer on his wrist. “We have a while until Stan McDade gets R Batt in position. Corrie, get on the horn and tell Dan to hold Three Battalion where it is. Then bump Buddy and tell him I want him here with me.”

  “Right away, General.” She began muttering softly into the mike.

  What happened next was that six more generators wound up and the area in front of the screen, in the old days a playground for the kiddies to while away the time until darkness and the movie, lit up in bright lights. An old World War II carbon-arc searchlight illuminated the large stage constructed there.

  A military band of boys eight to fourteen lined the back of the stage. Their drum major, who was a good three years shy of having to shave, raised his long baton with its ball and tip of gold, and chrome shaft. He brought it down sharply and the musicians struck up. The boys, all towheaded and crew-cut, with clear eyes, from cobalt to cerulean, their thin lips set in lines of concentration, each in the brown shirt and black shorts of the youth uniform, slammed sticks to drumheads and tootled trumpets and fifes. A glockenspiel tinkled merrily. Ben scratched his memory and identified the music as “Die Jugend Marchiert,” anthem of the Hitler Youth, Adolf’s junior hate league.

  “Damn them,” Ben swore vehemently. “Damn them all for what they are doing to those children.”

  When the music ended, a tall, lean, deathly pale man crossed the stage in the cone of actinic light from the carbon-arc and stopped at the podium behind a bank of microphones. Cheers and shouts of “Sieg Heil!” came from the darkened recesses of the drive-in. The man, in the ebony uniform of the SS, raised his hands to silence the crowd.

  “Many of you know me. For those who do not, I am SS Hauptsturmbannführer Peter Volmer.” He pronounced his first name Pet-ter. “I command our glorious American SS Leibstandarte Hoffman. I come to you in the name of racial purity. I come to you in the name of a nigger- and Jew-free America. I come to you in the name of Feldmarschall Hoffman of the New Army of Liberation. To bring you good news!”

  At a near-hysterical pitch, the chanting of “Sieg Heil!” rose in monstrous waves into the Nebraska night. When the mob, which is what they had become, quieted, Volmer went on with his message of hate and Aryan supremacy. By that time, Buddy had arrived and the R Batt was deployed.

  “What do you have laid on, Pop?” Buddy asked irreverently. He had come to take a liking to British idiom while they had fought in England.

  “We have a nest of some seven to eight hundred American Nazis in that theater. Less than three days ago, it is believed they slaughtered several hundred of their neighbors who didn’t buy the super-race crap.”

  “I know. We saw some of Bull’s scouts covering the grave,” said a subdued Buddy.

  “I think they need a lesson in friendly neighborhood relations,” Ben went on glibly, in an effort to contain his outrage.

  “In other words, kick-ass time,” Jersey translated.

  FOUR

  Buddy studied the interior of the drive-in with his own long night glasses. He turned back to Ben with a drawn expression. “What about the kids?”

  “Yeah, General,” Beth said softly in
that particular way of hers. “What about those kids?”

  The ball had settled solidly in Ben’s court. It was his call. He knew it and didn’t like it. Then the images of those small, twisted bodies in that charnel pit outside Bellville rose behind his eyes. Hadn’t enough kids died? Then, as though she had divined his thoughts, Jersey spoke up.

  “What about all those kids around Concordia and Bellville?” she asked. “Good Rebel kids.”

  Renewed outrage choked up in Ben Raines. “I owe them,” he declared before he could stop himself. A shrug and he went on. “I — we — the Rebels promised them a safe place to live and grow up.”

  He raised his field glasses again and studied the set faces of the juvenile Nazis in their band formation. They are all so squeaky-clean, Ben thought. And so proud of their uniforms. Are they as proud of their cause? he wondered. He lowered the binoculars thoughtfully.

  “Kids can run fast. And they have good reactions,” he allowed. He turned his back, shut off the sight of those files of cherubic faces in back of the podium. He signaled for Lt. Col. Bull McDade and Lt. Fuller to join himself and Buddy. “Stan, set up the mortars and instruct the gunners to walk the rounds in from the back. Frag rounds and willie peter.”

  “Yes, sir,” Bull McDade delivered in an easy drawl.

  “One Apache up to dust off that place.” McDade nodded. “Fuller, I want scouts in the lead at each exit to that place. Full assault gear for everyone. I want to wipe out this Nazi scum here and now.”

  “I already have them in place, General,” Fuller informed Ben.

  “Buddy, I want you and your light company to come with me.”

  “Not still mother-henning me, are you, Pop?”

  Tension and stress narrowed Ben’s eyes. “You know better than that, son. I’ve saved the hardest job for you. I need you to make for the stage and terminate this Peter Volmer. Intel says he ranks second only to General Brodermann now. Make that Brigadeführer; Volmer’s even got Hoffman using the old SS titles.”

  “How can a sickness like this take such deep root?” Buddy asked.

  “Ours not to reason why, son,” Ben quipped, pulled out of his earlier doldrums by the prospect of action. “Ours but to kick ass.”

  “One people! One State! One world!” Peter Volmer roared in conclusion.

  “Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!” screamed the assembled Nazis.

  “Open the dance if you please, Bull,” Ben Raines spoke into the mouthpiece of Corrie’s handset.

  Twin turbines spooled up in the squat AH-64 Apache and the main rotor began to turn. It rapidly became a blur. Then the heavily armed craft lifted off, tail-high, its nose appearing to sniff the ground like a bloodhound. The pilot in his right-hand seat leveled the bird and it whop-whopped away toward the theater.

  Rebel mortar rounds thunked and their fins shivered spines with their ringing sound as they exited the tubes. With feathery whispers they arched high in the night sky and turned end over, to plummet into the 81 DRIVE-IN THEATER. Deadly blossoms opened over the heads of the occupants, white at the center, then pale yellow and duller orange on the edges.

  The Cobra peeked over the top of the screen housing and opened up with two 40mm rocket pods and a pair of 20mm chainguns. The red lines of tracers terminated in exploding projectiles that set off new horror among the Nazis. The chorus of “Sieg Heils” cut off in midfrenzy.

  Screams of terror replaced it. Passenger cars, pickups, and stake trucks made fiery ascent as gas tanks ruptured and exploded in a scalding rain of white phosphorus. Body parts went skyward with them. Ben Raines gave the go-ahead and the Hummer raced toward the nearest exit. Buddy’s multiwheeled light scout vehicle bounded along beside. Rebel scouts appeared out of the dark brush near the unlighted gate and rushed to block passage. Ben and team, with Buddy, charged inside. The flash from the last mortar rounds had barely faded when they reached the scene of bloodshed and devastation within.

  “Out,” Ben clipped his command.

  “Everyone unass this thing,” Cooper elaborated.

  Ben’s team exploded into pandemonium. Wounded people screamed and writhed on the ground. Others, blood streaming from shrapnel wounds, ran by with blank faces and glassy eyes. Ben learned that the Nazis had not come unarmed when a bullet cracked by his head. He swung up the Thompson one-handed and bucked out a five-round burst.

  Fat .45 slugs slammed into flesh and sent the offending Nazi into a giddy dance of death. He had not been alone, Ben noted, as the “Supermen” began to fight back. Individual shots came to Ben as little more than pops and crackles. His mind concentrated on the overall rhythm of battle.

  Somehow this one played like an orchestra without a conductor. One hoarse-voiced man shouted down the mindless shrieking of a dozen Nazis and began to organize the resistance. Ben pointed and Jersey knew what he wanted.

  Together they cut three-round bursts into the gathered enemy. American crapheads fell to left and right. Satisfied at the level of confusion that had been restored, Ben chanced a glance toward the stage and podium.

  Peter Volmer was no longer there. A Walther P-38 in his left hand, he stood at the edge of the stage, firing into the air and bellowing for his Nazi horde to rally around him.

  “For the Reich! For the Reich!” he screamed. “Stand by me.”

  Armed American hatemongers began to gather at the foot of the stage. So far, Ben saw nothing of Buddy. Worry lines creased his forehead. The battalion could take care of itself, he reasoned. Already they would be jumping off to mop up this vast collection of slime. Buddy was another story. He had spread out his company to sweep from front to rear of the parking area. Only three of his scouts accompanied him on his mission to scoop up Volmer.

  He would have to fend for himself. Ben let go as more Rebels began to pour through the points of egress. The sweet-faced boys in the band produced shiny-bladed daggers, complete with spread-winged eagles and swastikas on the pommels, and made ready to die for Führer and fatherland. They formed a skirmish line between Buddy and Volmer. Ben bit his lip and shot the oldest of them, who had an SKS assault rifle in his hands.

  On full auto, it ripped holes in the sky as the junior Hitler died from three .45 slugs in the chest. Suddenly four men appeared amid the smoking wreckage of mangled cars. Snarling their hate, they leapt into an attack on Ben Raines.

  “Would you shoot our kids, now, you yellow bastard,” one of them accused in a County Armagh accent.

  Funny, he sounded more like IRA material than a Nazi. Maybe he was both, Ben considered in the flash of time it took him to swing the long barrel of his Thompson 1927 A-1 subgun and smack the nearest of the quartet in the side of his head.

  The man rubber-legged his way into the side of an overturned Mustang and pitched headfirst through the window into the space behind the front seat. A bullet, from close range, jerked the beret off Ben Raines’s head, and he shot the assailant with a tight trio of .45 justice.

  To his right, Ben heard the chatter of Jersey’s M-16 and a shriek of pain from her target. Beth held her own on Ben’s left. She had two men down on their knees, hands laced behind their heads. With a neat wing shot, she cleared a charging Nazi off the hood of a car. Another gas tank exploded and the searchlight went out with a blue-white flash and plume of smoke.

  “Hold fast,” Volmer exhorted his followers. “Hold them here.”

  “Where’s Buddy?” Ben took time to ask, worried that Volmer remained operational.

  “I have him on the honk,” Corrie said from behind Ben. “He says that with all of the lights out, he can’t find Volmer.”

  “Tell him to keep trying.” Then with a father’s concern, “And to keep his head down.”

  Corrie spoke and laughed. “He says he can’t do both.”

  “Smart-mouthed whippersnapper!” Ben said in an old-codger voice.

  Peter Volmer had never before heard the sound of incoming mortar rounds. Their fluttery passage through the air could not be distinguished at first, o
ver the chanting of the crowd. When he became conscious of the first few, they produced a brief whuffle-BAM! The effect was enough to make an impression he would keep the rest of his life.

  Terror grew within Peter Volmer as rapidly as the white-hot flashes of exploding rounds. They began in the back and the screams of his people marched forward with them. A warm wetness spread at Volmer’s crotch and he felt the trickle of liquid down his leg.

  “Incoming!” shouted someone in the audience with more experience than himself.

  Incoming what? Volmer wondered. Then one of his SS officers grabbed his arm and yanked him toward the far side of the stage. “Someone — the Rebels are mortaring us. We gotta get out of here.”

  Peter Volmer stared at a shower of smoking white globs that splattered across the roofs and hoods of cars, where they ignited instant flames. Fountains of blazing orange geysered from split gas tanks. Behind him the young musicians added shrill pandemonium. Concussion shattered the incandescent bulbs of floodlights. From above and behind him, Volmer heard the whopping sound of rotor blades, and a stream of tracers streaked past and sought out targets among the crazed mass of people. Then armed men in ballistic helmets appeared in the exits. Seemingly without provocation, they opened fire on the terrorized Party members. A detached arm flew into the air less than halfway to the stage.

  “No — nooooo,” Volmer moaned.

  Another insistent tug set him in motion. He reached the center of the stage when an exploding gas tank took out the searchlight and plunged the theater into darkness. He had a fleeting impression of more men pouring into the drive-in. Suddenly the mortar shelling ceased. The crackle of small-arms fire punctuated the eerie scene that remained imprinted on the retinas of Peter Volmer’s eyes.