Warriors from the Ashes Read online

  After the group ran out of sight, Jersey and Coop emerged from hiding and wrapped the hands and feet of the unconscious men with the plastic tie-downs, then followed the scouts up the trail.

  As the commandos rounded the bend in the trail, two dark figures dropped from trees next to the path onto the last two men in the group, slapping the back of their necks with vicious karate chops as they landed.

  Jersey and Coop caught up with them just as Hammer and Harley finished securing the men’s arms and legs with tie-downs.

  “Four down, six to go,” Harley grunted with a smile as he tightened the final tie-down.

  “What about Anna?” Jersey asked.

  “She’s okay,” Hammer said, consulting a map of the region Bergman had given them. “She’s waiting for us up ahead, near where the trail splits and goes in two different directions.”

  “How’ll we get to her?” Coop asked. “The commandos are between us and her.”

  “We go this way through the jungle,” Harley answered, pointing to the left. “The left-hand trail bends back this way and we can cut straight across and meet her ahead of the enemy force.”

  Coop glanced at what looked like impenetrable jungle. “We’re going through that?” he asked.

  Harley smiled. “No pain, no gain,” he said, as he melted into the undergrowth.

  * * *

  Ronald Watanabe, the leader of the commandos, stopped and looked behind him. “Where are the others?” he asked.

  His men glanced around. Lieutenant Johnson, his second in command, shook his head. “We’re missing four men, sir.”

  “I can see that, you imbecile,” Watanabe almost shouted. “Where are they?”

  Johnson, sweat beading on his forehead in the thick humidity of the jungle, shrugged. “I don’t know, sir. If they’d been shot, we would’ve heard their flak jackets go off.”

  “Damn!” Watanabe exclaimed. “These recruits are better than I thought. Keep together and let’s move slower. I don’t want to lose any more men.”

  They moved less than a hundred yards before coming to a wide, shallow river flowing sluggishly through the undergrowth.

  “Be careful, men,” Watanabe said as he held his rifle over his head and waded out through rushes and weeds into the stream. “These rivers are full of crocs and snakes.”

  On the opposite bank, Anna stepped out and fired a quick burst, then turned and ran away again.

  “Go, go, go!” Watanabe shouted, splashing and firing his M-16 as he struggled against the slow current to cross the river.

  With his men’s attention in front of them, none noticed the four figures rise silently out of the water behind them, bamboo breathing tubes in their mouths.

  Four hands rose and fell, knocking four more commandos unconscious and taking them back into the rushes at the water’s edge.

  Watanabe and Johnson scrambled out of the water onto the opposite bank, their rifles held before them, looking for the elusive Anna, who was nowhere to be seen.

  “Goddamn!” Watanabe said, wiping water out of his eyes as he turned to check his men.

  “Shit!” he almost yelled, seeing no one behind him except Johnson. “What the hell’s going on here?” he asked his lieutenant.

  Johnson looked around, his eyes widening in fear at the sight of the empty water behind them. “You think crocs got ’em?” he asked.

  “If it wasn’t, those bastards are gonna wish they had been eaten when I get through with ’em.”

  Watanabe slammed a fresh clip in his M-16 and began to move up the trail, his eyes searching the bushes for enemies, his finger itchy on the trigger.

  Johnson followed, his head swiveling as he continually checked his back trail.

  Twenty minutes later, they heard what sounded like the deep growl of a jungle cat, followed by the high-pitched scream of a woman in danger.

  “Shit!” Johnson said. “That sounded like a panther, an’ all we got with us are blanks.”

  Watanabe nodded. They’d lost two men to the big cats during training, and he wanted no part of facing one without live ammo in his rifle.

  “Let’s get the hell out of here,” he said. “I ain’t gonna get killed for no training exercise.”

  They began to jog back down the trail, looking back over their shoulders as the sound of a panther again rang out through the jungle.

  As they rounded a bend, Harley and Hammer jerked on a vine they’d laid across the trail, sending Johnson and Watanabe sprawling onto their faces. Before they could look up, they were knocked unconscious by blows to the back of their heads by Jersey and Coop.

  Anna strolled up to the group just as they were finishing placing the tie-downs on their victims.

  “Jesus, Anna,” Coop said. “That cry sounded so real it made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.”

  She smiled. “Fooled you, huh?”

  “Damn straight!” Coop said.

  Harley stood up from immobilizing Johnson and Watanabe. “It fooled them too. Now, let’s get back to camp and see what Herr Bergman has to say about our performance.”

  “Are we just going to leave these men out here in the jungle with their hands and feet tied?” Anna asked, a worried look on her face.

  “Yep,” Harley answered. “Maybe it’ll teach ’em not to fuck with us in the future.”

  “That’s if the snakes and jungle cats don’t eat them first,” Coop said, looking around at the dense undergrowth with a shudder.

  SIX

  Otis Warner and General Joe Winter sat down across from Ben Raines in his office.

  “Good morning, gentlemen,” Ben said. “Can I offer you some coffee?”

  “No, sir,” Otis said. “We’ve already eaten breakfast.”

  Ben leaned back in his chair and crossed his hands behind his head. “Then, what can I do for you?”

  “We want to know what you plan to do about Claire Osterman’s illegal takeover of the USA,” Otis said, a challenging note in his voice.

  Ben smiled and shrugged. “Nothing.”

  “But, General Raines,” Winter began.

  “Hold on a moment, General,” Ben interrupted. “In the first place, what Claire did was not illegal. As far as I’ve been able to find out, she is merely performing the job to which she was legally elected by the people of the United States.”

  “But . . .” Otis said.

  Now Ben leaned forward, his elbows on his desk. “No buts, Otis. The only illegal act I’m aware of is the one in which you and your general here attempted to assassinate the elected leader of your country and take over her position.”

  “But, General Raines, we did it for the good of the country . . . and the world. You know what Claire was up to. If she’d stayed in office she would have continued the war against you and the SUSA until the United States was completely destroyed,” Otis said.

  “The woman is a complete psychopath!” Winter added, a look of extreme distaste on his face.

  Ben smiled and nodded. “Oh, I agree with you, gentlemen, and I must say I agreed completely with what you did when you took her out and took over her presidency. But, now that she’s managed to take it back, it’s not my job to rid your country of its elected leader. If the people of the U.S. are too spoiled by the welfare state she’s set up to see what kind of woman is leading them, then I think they deserve what they get.”

  “It’s not the people’s fault, General,” Otis said. “She has a massive propaganda machine in place that misleads the people as to what is going on in the world.”

  “Bullshit!” Ben exclaimed. “President Lincoln said it best over a hundred and fifty years ago . . . you can’t fool all of the people all of the time—not unless they want to be fooled.”

  “What do you mean, want to be fooled?” General Winter asked, a puzzled look on his face.

  “You know exactly what I mean, General. In your country, men and women don’t have to work if they don’t want to, ’cause your government is predicated on the principle th
at everyone is completely equal and deserves the same share of the country’s wealth.”

  “What is wrong with equality?” Otis asked belligerently.

  “Nothing,” Ben said shortly, “except it’s not true now and never has been. Men are not created equal, except under the law. There are workers and there are slugs who prefer to live off the sweat of other people. Your country has chosen to treat them all as equals, and that is why your productivity has fallen to record low levels since Osterman and her socialist/democratic government took over.”

  “What do you do with your citizens who are unable to work?” Otis asked. “Let them starve?”

  Ben shook his head. “No. Those who because of sickness or ill health cannot work are taken care of. But those who refuse to work out of laziness or perverseness, are not. Usually, when they get hungry enough, they find the inner strength to go back to work. We haven’t had anyone voluntarily starve themselves to death since I’ve been here.”

  “That’s barbaric,” Otis said.

  “No, Mr. Warner, it’s realistic. It’s the reason my country, a tenth the size of yours, outproduces yours every year and has kicked your butt every time you’ve attacked us.”

  General Winter laid his hand on Otis’s arm to shut him up. “We’re getting off the subject here, General,” he said to Ben. “Do you plan to help us get rid of Osterman or not?”

  Ben once again leaned back in his chair and tried to calm himself. He always got overexcited when he heard the same tired old arguments supporting socialism, a form of government that had never in the history of the world worked for very long.

  “Of course I’ll help you, General Winter,” he said. “I will give you all the logistic support you require to attempt to take your government back from the crazy lady.”

  “What do you mean, logistical support?” Otis asked.

  “I’ll see that you are taken back to the U.S. and set up with funds and equipment to start a revolutionary movement within the country. If, as you say, the people are truly tired of the way Osterman has been running the country, you shouldn’t have any problem getting recruits to join your movement. But, on the other hand, if the citizens are satisfied with the status quo, then you will fail, as you should.”

  Otis glanced at General Winter and shrugged. “That’s fair enough.”

  “Good. Then I’ll arrange to have one of my pilots fly you into the country under their radar and put you down wherever you want, along with some money and whatever else you need to get started.”

  After Warner and Winter left his office, Ben asked his secretary to get Mike Post to his office as soon as possible.

  Mike entered a few moments later. “Hey, Ben. What’s up?”

  “I’ve changed my mind about the supplies Osterman is sending down to Perro Loco.”

  Mike grinned. “You mean you’ve decided to take out the freighter?”

  Ben pursed his lips. “Not exactly. That would cause too much political backlash between us and Mexico.”

  “Then just what’ve you got in mind?”

  “I thought we might send a SEAL team in, under cover of darkness.”

  “Boss, it doesn’t matter if we sink the freighter with a missile or with a SEAL team,” Post argued. “The president of Mexico is still gonna be pissed off.”

  “I don’t want the SEAL team to sink the ship,” Ben said. “Get them in here and I’ll explain.”

  Captain Michael Kevin Fitzpatrick had been sailing on ships for most of his fifty-one years. Called Fitz by everyone on shipboard, he had promised to share with the crew the bonus Claire Osterman was paying them to sail into Mexico. They’d been loaded down with aircraft, munitions, vehicles, and just about every other type of war weapon he’d ever heard of—and some he hadn’t—at Portsmith, Virginia.

  The plan was for them to sail around the southern coast of Florida, turn west, and cut across the Gulf of Mexico toward the Mexican Navy base on the eastern coast of Mexico. When Fitz had initially refused to put his ship in danger by sailing into a war zone, the president had laughed and told him she had it on good authority there would be no attack.

  “The Mexican president doesn’t have the balls to do his job,” she’d said with a sneer. “He thinks if he ignores us, we’ll go away quietly and not bother him anymore, the stupid bastard.”

  “The Mexican president may be chickenshit, but Ben Raines isn’t,” Fitz had countered. “How do I know he won’t send his planes after us?”

  “Raines will do what President Jeffreys tells him to do,” Claire had said, “and my spies say he’s ordered Raines to lay off for the present.”

  After some haggling back and forth, Claire finally promised Fitzpatrick and his crew a bonus of fifty thousand dollars for the trip, if they got the matériel to Mexico safely.

  It was just after midnight when Lieutenant Jerry Roberts, who went by the nickname Water Dog, loaded his five-man crew of Navy SEALS into a Zodiac fitted with an electric motor. They were all dressed in rubber wet suits, and had Scuba gear ready in the boat, along with six limpet mines and other assorted assault weapons.

  The moon was covered by a scattering of low-lying clouds, and there wasn’t much ambient light to spoil their attack on the freighter they’d picked up on radar from the patrol boat that had carried them into the Gulf of Mexico from Corpus Christi, Texas.

  The motor hummed as it pushed the Zodiac over the six-foot swells of the Gulf at five knots. Unless the men on the freighter were very alert, they’d never know what hit them.

  The attack had been planned for the hours between midnight and four in the morning, the dog watch when men were typically least alert.

  The Zodiac homed in on the ship at a forty-five-degree angle until the rubber sides of the small craft brushed up against the rusted iron of the freighter.

  Tommy Harris leaned over the bow of the Zodiac and affixed a magnetic clamp to the iron sides of the freighter, letting it hold the Zodiac in place alongside the ship as it slowly made its way through the darkness toward Mexico.

  The SEALs donned their Scuba gear and made ready to drop over the side, the most dangerous part of the mission. Each man had a line attached around his waist to the Zodiac, for they were going to be working in almost total darkness very close to the huge twin propellers of the freighter, which would try to pull them into their turbulence.

  “Remember,” Water Dog advised in a hoarse whisper before they dropped into the sea, “we need to make sure the mines take out the propeller shaft and the rudders without making a hole in the ship’s belly. We don’t want to sink the bastard, just disable it.”

  His men nodded, their grins visible behind the Plexiglas of their masks. This was just the sort of dangerous task they lived for, and had trained for months to carry out.

  Once in the water under the ship, where they couldn’t be seen from above, the men snapped on underwater lights and fanned out, kicking furiously with their fins against the turbulence of the props.

  Three of the men swam toward the port rudder and propeller shaft, and three toward the starboard ones. Once in place, they clung to the metal like so many water bugs, looking tiny against the size of the propellers.

  Limpet mines were taken from pouches and placed against the metal shaft and rudders, the magnetic clamps in the mines holding them fast.

  Finally, when he saw all of his men ready, Roberts blinked his light three times, a signal to set the mines.

  Each man reached up and twisted a knob on his mine in three complete circles, setting the timers for a forty-five-minute delay.

  Now came the trickiest part of the mission, trying to fight against the turbulence and return to the Zodiac. Even the strongest swimmer couldn’t make headway against the pull of the big bronze propellers, so the SEALS pulled themselves along their lines toward the Zodiac.

  All went well until the line connected to Harry Parrish got snagged on a cluster of barnacles growing on the bottom of the ship. When he tried to jerk it loose, the razor-shar
p edge of one of the barnacles sliced through the nylon line as if it were kite string.

  Water Dog turned his head when he heard Parrish scream, just in time to see his body tumbling head over heels through the water, unable to fight the awful pull of the propellers.

  Water Dog reached down to disconnect his own line and go to Parrish’s aid just as the SEALS’s body hit the propellers and was shredded into a thousand pieces, sending scarlet blossoms of blood that looked black as ink into the water.

  The lieutenant choked back bile as he turned back toward the Zodiac and continued on his way, thankful that he’d only lost one man to this job.

  Captain Fitzpatrick came out of a dead sleep when he felt the jolt as the limpet mines detonated, followed by the sudden horrible vibration that shook the ship the way a cat shakes a mouse.

  Fitz jumped out of his bunk and rushed to the phone on his wall. He dialed the engine room and shouted, “Shut the engines!”

  After slipping into his clothes, he rushed up the metal ladder to the deck of the ship and leaned over the aft-side rail, trying to see what was wrong with the propellers.

  As he stared into the inky blackness, the captain of the watch ran up to his side.

  “What the hell happened?” Fitz asked. “What did we hit?”

  “I dunno, Cap’n,” Tom Johnson answered. “There was nothing on radar or sonar to indicate a reef or another ship. We were just cruising along when suddenly there was this bump and everything went to hell.”

  Fitz glared at him. “There aren’t any reefs in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico, you idiot! The only thing we could have hit was another ship.”

  “Cap’n, I promise you, there hasn’t been another ship anywhere near for over an hour.”

  Fitz turned to another sailor standing nearby. “Jimmy, get below and make sure we’re not taking on water, see if the hold was breached.”

  As the freighter slowed without power and began to drift on the prevailing winds, rocking heavily as the swells hit it broadside, the captain shook his head.