Battle in the Ashes Read online

  And neither will Brodermann’s people, Ben mentally added.

  But Ben couldn’t see any way to prevent that.

  “Scouts report that more and more people are leaving the area and heading north,” Corrie broke into his thoughts. “But a lot of them are joining up with John Masters and his people up in the Panhandle. He’s got quite a following, General.”

  “Estimates?”

  “Ten thousand.”

  “That’s men, women, and children. How many fighting personnel can he field?”

  “About thirty-five hundred.”

  “That’s still too many to have at our backs. Tell Buddy to regroup his Eight Battalion and get ready to strike from the norm. I’ll pull together my One Battalion and hit them from the south. We’ve got time. Brodermann is still trying to devise a battle plan. Saddle up. Let’s go deal with Mr. Masters and his hate group.”

  FIVE

  John Masters looked the part. And he played it well. He was one of those quasi ignorant, heavy-jowled, pus-gutted, piggy-eyed loudmouths who had an unshakable opinion on everything and was given to thundering Godlike pronouncements through a bullhorn, which his followers hung on breathlessly. To say his followers were just slightly less knowledgeable than John would be like saying fire is hot.

  Since the Great War, dozens of groups, large and small, made up of people who blamed everything bad that had befallen them on those who were not the same color, religion, race, or whatever, had sprung up all over the nation. If they did not get in the way of the Rebels, or draw too much attention to themselves, Ben had pretty much left them alone.

  Then groups such as Masters’s began embracing the puke from the brain and mouth of Jesus Hoffman, who preached the somewhat diluted teachings of Hitler.

  That was more than Ben Raines could take.

  “Raines ain’t a gonna do nothin’ to us,” Masters boasted, when he learned that two groups of Rebels were approaching his location, one from the north, the other from the south. “They’s too many of us. ’Sides, Raines has got his hands full tryin’ to deal with the Blackshirts, and they gonna walk all over Ben Raines and then we’ll be shut of that nigger-lovin’ bastard forever.”

  It never seemed to occur to people like Masters that armies numbering hundreds of thousands had been trying to ‘walk all over Ben Raines’ for a decade. Ben was still very much alive and very much in command.

  And as far as Ben being a “nigger-lover,” Ben didn’t place a whole lot of emphasis on the color of a person’s skin. It was what was in the individual’s heart and brain that mattered to Ben. Ben and his Rebels had fought Blacks, Whites, Hispanics, Asians, and just about any other ethic group one could think of . . . if they were stupid enough to declare war on the Rebels.

  The Rebel Army was made up of men and women of all nationalities, all religions, all races. Ben’s critics, and they were many, had accused Ben of taking the cream of the crop and ignoring the rest. That was true in part.

  For the most part, the men and women who made up the Rebel Army were a tolerant bunch who used a great deal of common sense in day-to-day dealings with their peers. Anyone could do it; most simply would not. And that included people on both sides of whatever color line was involved. Whatever the color or faith.

  So in that respect, Ben did have the cream of the crop.

  But even among Rebel ranks, many had to continually work at being tolerant of others. Sometimes tempers flared and violence followed. It was not often, but it did happen. As Ben had pointed out many times, the men and women who made up the Rebels were not perfect . . . they just tried very hard to be.

  John Masters looked at the communique handed him by a runner from his communications center. He wadded it up and tossed the crumpled note to the ground. “Brodermann says for us not to engage the Rebels. He wants us to cut and run. Hell with him!”

  “Why, goddamn, General,” a follower of Masters said. Masters insisted on being called General, even though he had no prior military training and could not even make it through the first few weeks of Boy Scout training, back when such organizations existed. He was kicked out when he said he wasn’t sharin’ his tent with no goddamn Jew-boy. “We’ll just whup Raines proper and have done with it.”

  “Damn right!” Masters replied. “Git ever’one to arms and in position around the town.”

  “How many’s comin’ at us, General?” Sonny asked.

  “Brodermann says two Rebel battalions. That’s about fifteen-sixteen hundred Rebels. I figure each battalion’s got at least three-four hundred women and niggers and Jews and spies and the like. They can’t fight and ever’one knows it. So that means we’re prob’ly lookin’ at no more’un a thousand people. It won’t take us long to deal with this. I just can’t figure how come ever’body is so scared of the Rebels.”

  For years, Masters and his hate group had been isolated in one corner of the panhandle of Texas. They had grown their crops, maintained the oil rigs and refineries in the area, and kept their heads down. They had communications equipment, but had never been able to break even one of the Rebel codes. Masters and his people had no knowledge of burst transmissions and no concept of military tactics. Their slogan was Stay White And Pure. SWAP. It was a mystery to Ben how Masters and his SWAP people were going to get along with Hoffman and his mixed bag of fighters. But since few radical racists had the ability to see past the ends of their noses, that small obstacle had probably never occurred to Masters.

  Masters and his fearless fighters grabbed their guns and got behind barricades, ready to defend their wimmin an’ child’en against the dark hordes of racial equality, common sense, and justice.

  Ben and his son Buddy pulled their battalions up to within a mile of the town and circled it, out of range of anything Masters had in the way of armament.

  Behind the barricades, General Masters stood, a green beret on his head—he had taken it away from a little boy years back—and his trusty .30-.30 at hand. “Our moment of glory is here, men!” he shouted. “We’ll go down in history as the first to defend our right to live white and free and pure.”

  Actually about a half a million had gone down under the guns of the Rebels. Six feet down in most cases. Mass graves.

  “Stand ready to repel the charge!” Sonny shouted. He remembered that line from his high school lit class.

  “Aw, shit, Sonny,” Bubba said. “I was gonna say that.”

  But no charge came.

  Ben leaned against the fender of his Hummer and viewed the town through long lenses. Paul Blair, a Cherokee Indian and a graduate of the University of Tennessee stood beside Ben. Paul was a company commander in Ben’s One Battalion. He had found a chicken feather and stuck it in his cowboy hat.

  “Take plenty scalps this day,” Paul grunted, a twinkle in his eyes. “Paint face and dance. Then count coup.”

  Ben looked at him. “What are you going to use for a coup stick, O Great and Noble Red Man, your economics degree or your minor in education?”

  Paul grinned and showed Ben a child’s rubber tomahawk he had found amid the rubble of an old five and dime. “Will this do?” It was surprisingly realistic.

  Ben laughed at the man. “That thing is going to get you in trouble someday, Paul.”

  “The dossier on John Masters says he hates Indians.”

  “Masters hates everybody. What else is new?”

  “I want to get close to the man, wave this tomahawk, and yell some Cherokee words at him.”

  “I wasn’t aware you knew any Cherokee.”

  “I know how to say ‘good morning’ and ‘it looks like it might rain.’” He pulled out several tubes of lipstick and knelt down, looking at his reflection in the outside mirror of the Hummer. He began carefully streaking his face with purple and red and orange.

  Jersey looked at him and slowly shook her head. “How come One Battalion always gets the people who are full of shit?” she questioned.

  Paul cut his eyes. “Look, Little Bit, you’re about a qua
rter-breed Apache, yourself.”

  “You’re right,” Jersey said. “Let me use that lipstick when you’re through.”

  “Jesus,” Ben muttered. “You people better start taking this seriously. John Masters is a certifiable nut, but his guns are very real.”

  “Buddy on the horn, sir,” Corrie said.

  “Go, Rat,” Ben said.

  “What’s the poop, Pop?”

  Ben chuckled. His kids took every opportunity to take as many liberties as possible, knowing that Ben didn’t mind and the other Rebels got a kick out of it. “We wait. Intell says there are lots of children in there and I want to keep collateral damage to a minimum.”

  “That’s a big ten-four, Big Daddy. Rat out.”

  “A whole battalion of jokers,” Ben muttered. “Corrie, order snipers up with their .50s. Start picking off SWAP people on sight.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  When Ben turned around, he was momentarily startled. Paul Blair had taken off his shirt and had painted his chest with the lipstick.

  “Are you going to take off your shirt, too, Jersey?” Cooper asked, standing well away from her.

  Jersey told him to go commit an impossible act upon his person.

  “Request permission to take some of my people in after dark, sir,” Paul said.

  “Your people being those of Indian heritage, I’m sure,” Ben replied.

  “Well . . . that’s a possibility.”

  “Permission granted. Now get out of here.” He looked at Jersey. “And, no. You’re not going.”

  “The thought never entered my mind, General.”

  “What the hell are they waitin’ on?” a SWAP member asked, wiping his sweaty hands on his britches. “They’re just standin’ out there lookin’ at us. All they’ve done is call for our surrender.”

  “And General Masters told them what they could do with that, didn’t he?” his buddy replied.

  “Damn shore did.”

  That was the last thing he would ever say. A sniper’s bullet took him in the center of the face and blew out the entire back of his head. The force of the .50-caliber slug slammed him backward and knocked his body into a staring, horrified, and blood and brain-splattered SWAP member. He dropped his rifle to the street and it went off, the bullet striking a man in the knee and sending him howling to the ground in pain. His rifle clattered to the street but did not discharge.

  “Goddamn!” a team leader yelled. “Fire at them Rebs. Far, goddamnit, far!”

  “Far, hell!” a SWAP member hollered. “Far at what? I can’t see nobody to far at?”

  With good reason. The sniper teams, laying a mile to a mile-and-a-quarter out of the city limits, were using ten-power scopes and firing the .50-caliber Haskins M500. A monstrous powder charge blows the 1.5-ounce slug out of the muzzle with five to six times the energy of a 7.62 mm NATO round. Using various types of rounds, the Haskins can deliver slugs that will either pierce four-inch armor or explode on contact, turning the steel body into flesh-shredding shrapnel. The bullet arrives at its target long before the sound of the rifle can be heard, and at that distance, sometimes it is not heard at all.

  “Order the sniper teams to use armor-piercing rounds,” Ben ordered. “Let’s liven up the day for the SWAP members.”

  The streets of the town had been barricaded with old junked cars and trucks, rusted out and useless. The .50-caliber armor-piercing rounds blew right through them and tore great gaping holes in the flesh of the defenders crouched behind the rusted hulks, sending the. SWAP members hollering and racing for better cover.

  “Sir,” Beth said to Ben. “Sergeant Hanks requests permission to speak to the General.”

  “Beth,” Ben said. “What is with all this sudden formality? We’ve never stood much on . . . Jesus Christ!” Ben yelled, as he turned and eyeballed something that looked straight out of an African jungle movie.

  “Easy, General,” Sergeant Hanks said, jerking off his grotesque wooden mask. “It’s me, Hanks.”

  Ben stepped back and looked at the man. He was speechless. The black sergeant from upstate New York was naked except for a loincloth and a whole bunch of chicken feathers he had glued to his body. He held the sun-bleached skull of a cow in one hand and a horribly ugly ceremonial mask in the other. He was smiling at Ben.

  Ben found his voice. “Robert . . . what in the name of God is going on around here?”

  The words had just left his mouth when the sounds of tom-toms reached him. He listened for a moment, looking all around him as the sounds drifted through the early summer air.

  Corrie spoke into her headset and said, “Buddy wants to know if you’re having a dance over here and why he wasn’t invited?”

  “Oh, that’s Captain Blair, sir,” Hanks said. “He’s got about a dozen of his Indian buddies with him and they’re doing a war dance. I thought I’d dress up like a witch doctor—I found this mask in a house down the road—and do some psychological warfare on the folks in the town. They’ve got nothing in that town that will reach this far.”

  Ben knew that for a fact. His Scouts had already gone in, scratching themselves and hawking snot on the ground, cussing blacks and Mexicans and Jews and everybody else they could think of. They had looked around, had a meal, and sized up the situation. Small arms only, and that was not unusual.

  Years back, Ben and his people had swept the nation clean, seizing and storing weapons of all descriptions. They had left very little for others.

  Wild yelling and chanting came over the sounds of the tom-toms.

  “Where in the hell did Captain Blair get tom-toms?” Ben asked.

  “Oh, those are fifty-five gallon drums, General,” Hanks said. “We fooled around with various levels of water in them to get just the right sound. Pretty good, huh?”

  “Right,” Ben said. “And I suppose you have several more of your buddies of . . . color to assist you in this, ah, witch-doctor dancing?”

  Hanks grinned.

  “Oh, go on,” Ben said, doing his best to hide a smile. “While you’re at it, see if you can conjure up a plate of fettuccine for me.”

  “General Masters!” an aide yelled, busting into Masters’s house. “They’s a whole bunch of damn nigger witch doctors a-whoopin’ and a-hollerin’ on the road. Shakin’ skulls at us!”

  Masters spilled his coffee all down the front of his shirt. He heaved his fat ass and his pus gut out of the chair and lumbered after the man. Using binoculars, he viewed the scene.

  “By God!” he breathed. “Them’s real Africans out yonder. They’s callin’ down some curses on us.”

  “Do they work?”

  “How the hell do I know. Folks say they do. That voodoo’s some powerful stuff, boy.”

  Sergeant Bob Hanks and a few of his buddies had a really nice dance step all worked out. Sergeant Hanks had to threaten to shoot two of his friends before they’d agree to do it. And they was a good thing they all wore old Halloween masks, for they hid their embarrassed grins.

  The four men, all nearly naked except for loincloths and chicken feathers, would take three steps forward, hold up cattle skulls in the direction of the town, shout “Ugh!” and back up.

  “This is terribly repetitive,” one of the men said. “Not to mention embarrassing.”

  “Just shut up and go ‘Ugh!’” Bob told him.

  “Boy, that’s playin’ dirty,” John Masters said. “I mean, that’s dirty even for Ben Raines.”

  “I don’t feel good,” a SWAP member said. “My stomach hurts. I think they done caused me to come down with some terrible disease.”

  A doctor among the group looked at the men in disgust. “Don’t be stupid!” he admonished them. “Just ignore all that ranting and raving. It can’t hurt you.”

  Then the sound of tom-toms reached the defenders of SWAP. Wild Indian yells followed that.

  “What the hell is that?” Masters demanded.

  “Injuns!” he was told. “Look through these here field glasses and you can
see ’em. All painted up and doin’ a war dance.”

  Cooler and more intelligent heads among the SWAP forces tried to prevail. But it was no use. Ignorant and misinformed to begin with, bitter and hate-filled long before the Great War, now isolated for years, with little emphasis placed on learning, many of the SWAP people began to unravel. Children began crying and that only added to the confusion.

  “Shut them goddamn kids up!” Masters hollered. “I cain’t hear myself think with all that catterwallin’ goin’ on. I got to think, y’all. Damn!”

  A sniper’s bullet slammed through a concrete block and sent stone splinters into Masters’ face and neck. He bellowed in fright and pain, hit the ground and flattened out. As much as his pusgut would allow.

  Hanks and his dancers were really getting into the rhythm of it, and getting very innovative. The tom-toms were banging and Blair’s Indians were yelling.

  Ben was sitting in a camp chair by his Hummer, drinking coffee and thinking this was a hell of a way to fight a war.

  Both Buddy and Ben had sent some of their Scouts in close and they were now flitting among the buildings on the edges of the town. In a hour’s time, the Scouts had grabbed about sixty young kids and passed them back to their lines, turning them over to the medics.

  “The kids are in pretty good shape, physically,” a Rebel doctor reported to Ben. “But they’re filled with hatred toward anybody not of their color. It’ll take a long time to bring them around.”

  “I’m not going to try,” Ben said, surprising those gathered around him. “Base Camp One is very nearly overwhelmed now. And we’ve only had limited success in working with the kids of outlaw and hate groups. When this is over, we’ll reunite them with their mothers and let them go. It’s the best we can do under the circumstances.”

  He stood up and again looked at the town through binoculars. He scanned the town for a few seconds, then lowered the field glasses and turned to face his team, a hard look in his eyes. “Beth, tell Blair and Hanks to knock it off. They’ve had their fun, now it’s time to get serious. Corrie, tell Masters to send out the women and kids. We don’t want to hurt them. Get the mortars set up.”