Terror in the Ashes Read online

  “Hawaii.”

  “General,” Corrie called from her radio. “Forward people report that all of a sudden Jack’s troops found some backbone and are putting up a stiff fight along a lot of fronts. They’re really putting up a scrap.”

  “That’s odd,” Chase said.

  “Not really,” Ben told him, pouring a cup of coffee. “I’ve been expecting it. I’ll make you a wager he’s getting ready to bug out for England.”

  Conversation stopped in the big room. All eyes shifted to Ben. His son asked, “And you’re going to let him go?”

  “We’ve got a city full of creepies to deal with, Buddy. And we’ve got to wait for a few weeks after that to provision up for the assault against England. We’ll be going up against a much larger force there than we met here. English resistance groups report as many as a hundred thousand hostiles on that island, all coming together to fight against us.”

  Lamar Chase whistled softly. “A hundred thousand, Ben?”

  “Yes. And it’s going to be a long, tough campaign. England is over fifty thousand square miles and before the Great War had a population of more than fifty million people. Its coastline alone is more than two thousand miles. We’ve got to have everything we need stockpiled here in Ireland before we jump off. It’ll be probably mid- or late summer before we’re ready to strike at Britain. We’ve got to set up training bases to refresh our paratroopers, because without them going in first to secure some territory and raise hell, those going in by sea would get the shit shot out of them before they established a beachhead. All I’ve got is tentative plans drawn up. Beth, put out the word for all jump-trained personnel to give their names to their company commanders and then forward that list to me.”

  “We’re all jump trained, father,” Buddy pointed out.

  Ben smiled. “That’s right, son. We sure are.”

  “Now, you wait just a damn minute, Raines!” Dr. Chase stood up.

  “Oh, sit down, Lamar,” Ben told him. “I didn’t say I was going in first wave with the jumpers, did I?”

  “Well ... no.”

  “So relax. We’ve got Dublin to clean out first, and you all know firsthand how savagely the creepies fight. They’ll give us a hell of a lot more of a scrap than Jack Hunt’s people ever did. As far as letting Hunt’s people go, I don’t have much of a choice in the matter. We can’t shell the docks because we’ll need them intact for our own invasion.” He smiled and let those in the room wonder about that ... they’d find out in a few weeks. “We’ll just have to take the chance that Jack won’t destroy them. And in order to minimize that, we keep the pressure on, day and night. When he does bug out, and I’m thinking that moment is very close, we re going to be nipping at his heels. So we’ll just keep up what we’re doing now.”

  The Rebel artillery kept up its savage pounding on the lines of Jack Hunt’s soldiers. When Hunt’s people would fall back a mile, the Rebel lines would immediately close the gap.

  Rebet and West took the town of Drogheda and then made a lightning-fast commando move against the breeding and storage farm of the creepies located just south of there, freeing hundreds of men and women and children the creepies were breeding and fattening for food. The creepie guards did not attempt much of a fight. Instead they fled to the city to prepare against the Rebel attack they knew was inevitable.

  Dan and Striganov busted through the lines and took the second breeding camp of the Believers, located about fifteen miles south of the city. Danjou, and Tina punched through to the coast just south of them, and Thermopolis and his battalion broke through to Wexford and secured the town and the harbor. Now it didn’t make any difference if Hunt did blow the facilities at Dublin., the Rebels had a secondary jumpoff point at Wexford.

  With the entire Rebel Army and the men and women of the Free Irish less than five miles from Dublin, Jack Hunt was frantically loading his people and what equipment they would take on board ships.

  And the Night People, those who called themselves Believers, whom the Rebels referred to as creepies, were digging in for a long and bitter fight of it. Jack was leaving behind tons of equipment, and the creepies would make use of every scrap of it in the fight against their most hated enemy: Ben Raines and the Rebels.

  “Let them go.” Ben gave the orders to advance no further until Jack and his people were clear of the city. “What do our recon planes report?”

  “Near panic,” Beth told him. “I can’t believe you’re just going to let them go, General..”

  Ben smiled mysteriously. “How many ships are now in the Irish Sea, Corrie,?”

  “twelve, sir. All heavily loaded.”

  “And Thermopolis reported ships in good shape laying outside of Wexford?”

  “Yes, sir. As soon as Dublin is clean, he’s preparing to bring them up.”

  Ben chuckled. “Launch the Apaches with their antitank missiles. Tell the pilots to stay well back and out of range of the ships’ guns. Let’s see what these tank-killers can do against ships.”

  Everyone in the room smiled. To a person they had all held the belief that there was no way Ben was going to just sit back and let Jack and his people sail blissfully off to Merry Old England.

  The Apaches’ missiles have a range of almost four miles and they can penetrate any known tank armor. Each Apache carries sixteen antitank missiles, seventy-six 2.75 folding-fin aerial rockets, and three hundred and twenty rounds of 30mm ammunition. It is a deadly fighting machine.

  “Jack’s people probably need baths,” Ben said, leaning back in his chair. “And I have a hunch that many of them are going to get wet this day. Those that don’t go down with the ships, that is.”

  “Apaches airborne, sir,” Corrie called.

  “Have fun, boys and girls,” Ben said.

  “I hate Ben Raines,” Jack said glumly, standing by the railing of the old cargo ship. Dublin was behind them and they were heading for the docks at Liverpool. “I hate that son of a bitch more than I ever hated any being in my entire life.” He paused as his eyes picked up dots in the sky. “What the hell are those things?” He pointed.

  “Helicopters!” a lookout called.

  “Get the SAMs ready!” Jack hollered.

  “They’re staying well out of range of anything we got, Jack. No good.”

  “Jesus Christ!” the lookout yelled. “Those are tank-killers. Apaches. They’ve launched missiles.”

  The Hellfire travels very fast. The chilling words had just left the lookout’s mouth when the wheelhouse exploded, killing all in there; the bow was shot off; five missiles struck midship, and Jack was knocked off his boots. He landed hard on his butt and for a moment was unable to move.

  The engine room exploded in smoke and flame and the ship was dead in the water. The convoy was taking a terrible pounding from the missiles. No ships were sinking yet, but all were badly damaged and most were dead in the water.

  Jack crawled to his boots, very conscious that the deck was warm and getting warmer from the increasing fires in the holds beneath his feet.

  “Is this goddamn tub sinking?” he hollered.

  “Not yet,” one of his men said. “But we’re on fire and dead in the water.”

  “He tricked me,” Jack said. “The bastard tricked me. The low-life son of a bitch had this planned all along.”

  Another missile struck and the sixty-year-old former World War Two Liberty ship shuddered.

  “She’s breaking up!” Those words were screamed out just as Jack was watching a ship slowly roll over belly-up like some great dead prehistoric water creature and begin to sink into the cold depths of the Irish Sea.

  “Lower the lifeboats,” Jack said bitterly, knowing he was finished as any type of military commander. He’d been neatly suckered into this, and this would be his final command. Even if he made it to shore, he couldn’t get a job washing dishes in a mess hall.

  Jack Hunt was not concerned about the loss of equipment, for England was filled with war supplies. What he was worried
about was staying alive in lifeboats, for he now knew for an ironclad fact that Ben Raines was a hard and ruthless man who would stop at nothing to destroy an enemy.

  “All ships hit,” Corrie called. “Two are sunk and two more are sinking. All of them are dead in the water. Pilots report crews are abandoning ship.”

  Pat O’Shea was watching Ben closely. He wanted to see if the rumors about him were true; he wanted to witness firsthand just how hard this legendary soldier was.

  “Finish it,” Ben said. “Tell the pilots to go in and strafe. It’ll be that many less that we’ll have to deal with in England. And it’ll damn sure give those over there something to think about.”

  Pat O’Shea smiled a grim warrior’s smile. Ben Raines was the hardest man he had ever met.

  Nine

  Butch Smathers was among dozens of other warlords from around England who had gathered in Liverpool after receiving the news of the attack to listen firsthand to the survivors’ stories. Less than two hundred men had survived the attack on the ships. Butch and others had sent small boats out during the night to pick up the nearly hysterical men and bring them to shore.

  Several of the older and wiser of the bunch quietly slipped away and vanished in the English countryside. They wanted no part of Ben Raines and his Rebels.

  Butch had seen them leave and knew what they were doing was probably the wisest thing for them. But for the most part, the street punk/outlaw /to-hell-with-you mentality is formed early — perhaps even at birth – and Butch and those remaining really had no overwhelming inclination to do anything other than what they had been doing for a decade, and for most, for many years prior to that.

  “We got to have a meet, boys,” Butch said. “And I mean do it quick and get this thing settled.”

  “What you mean?” a punk called Joey asked.

  “You all heard what happened in Los Angeles, over in America. All them gangs there operated independent of each other when Raines come. So I heard. They didn’t have no central commander givin’ the orders. They all died. We can’t let that happen here.”

  “Nobody gives my boys orders but me,” a young man said.

  “Same here,” another said.

  “Jack didn’t make it,” one of the survivors said. “I seen him floatin’ on a piece of wreckage, with half his head blowed off. Didn’t none of the battalion commanders make it, neither. But Butch is right – you guys operate without a strong central leader, and you’re dead meat.”

  “Hey, man!” a punk who called himself Maddy piped up. “We got tanks, guns, rocket launchers, explosives, mortars – everything them Rebels has got. We been operatin’ just fine without no one man givin’ orders.”

  “No, you ain’t got everything the Rebels has got,” the survivor told him. “You don’t have training and experience. You don’t have leadership. You don’t have your moves down pat. And you don’t have the drive or the spirit of the Rebels. And more important, you don’t have someone like Ben Raines.”

  “Ben Raines ain’t shit!” a punk sneered.

  “Wrong,” the voice came from the shadows of the cavernous room where the creepie had been standing silently.

  The group fell silent. Although the various warlords and street punk leaders cooperated with the Night People, they did not like them and were just a bit scared of them. Too many of their kind had crossed the Believers and then just one day disappeared never to be seen again. Everyone knew where they had gone: into the bellies of the Night People.

  The Believers almost never came out in the daylight, and many of them lived under ground, especially in London, in the bowels of the city. They were fierce fighters and backed up for no one. The punks provided them with live human beings in exchange for getting along with them.

  The creepie said, “Ben Raines and his Rebels are the greatest guerrilla fighters and tacticians on the face of the earth. They can fight conventionally or nonconventionally. They have no equal, certainly not among the rabble I see before me now. You must make up your minds to fight them as a group, taking orders from one man, or the Rebels will chew you up and spit you out like meat from a grinder.”

  “I gotta see it to believe it,” a punk said.

  “You won’t live that long,” the Believer told him, then stepped out into the night and vanished.

  Nearly a fourth of those who survived the missile attack and the strafing that followed were from Frankie’s battalion. Frankie had not survived, but his plan lived on in the minds of those who did.

  After the meeting had broken up into small groups of punks and warlords, each group arguing about who was to be the leader, the remnants of Frankie’s command assembled outside the huge warehouse.

  “This bunch will fight, but Raines will win,” one man said.

  “Yeah,” another one agreed. “The Night People will give the Rebels the stiffest resistance. But what about us?”

  “Let’s check out the harbor and see what’s floating. I got me a sudden yen to see hula girls and palm trees.”

  The men grinned and walked off.

  The creepies in Dublin had not been surprised to hear and witness the demise of Jack Hunt’s army at the hands of Ben Raines. They had been following Ben Raines – by shortwave radio – for years. No one had to tell them how ruthless the man could be. He had virtually wiped out their kind in America and if he had his way would do the same thing in Europe.

  The creepies dug in and prepared themselves mentally for a fight to the death against the Rebels.

  Outside the city, Ben and his commanders met for one last time before they began their assault against Dublin.

  “This will be the toughest nut to crack,” Ben told his people. “I’ve come up with and rejected a dozen plans. I thought about circling the city and starving them out. But we know the creeps hold hundreds of prisoners in there. They could last for years. Pat O’Shea says there are no civilians in the city who are there willingly. When the creepies surfaced, the citizens moved out. Those that learned of them in time, that is. I suspect the rest got eaten,” he added.

  To a person, those gathered around shuddered and grimaced. There was no way to express what the Rebels felt toward the Night People. Hate would be far too mild a word.

  Ben’s eyes swept the group. “I don’t have to say this, but I will anyway. No prisoners. None. No compassion shown them. No pity, no mercy. Just a bullet. We’re going to do this slow and do it right, with a minimum of casualties. Now we all know that even if we shelled the city down to rubble, we’d still have to go in and dig the creepies out of their underground homes. So we’re going to take the city house by house, street by street. I want everyone in body armor and helmets. No berets, no bandanas. This campaign has pretty much been a picnic since Galway. Well, now the picnic has been invaded by fire ants, and the bastards are resistant to just about everything except being stepped on and squashed. So that’s what we’ll do. We’re lucky in that Dublin, while once a major city, is a compact place and fairly easy to learn how to move about.” Ben grinned. “It also once held over a thousand pubs.”

  “My kind of city,” Rebet said.

  “Yeah,” Ike agreed. “Maybe we’ll get lucky and find a warehouse full of Irish whiskey.”

  “Dream on,” Ben told him. “All right, people, we hit the city at dawn tomorrow.”

  Ben shoved open the door to the home on the outskirts of town and looked inside. The place had been trashed, and trashed more than once. At first glance, no one had occupied this dwelling for a long time. But the Rebels had learned from hard and bitter lessons that that was the way the creepies liked to leave things. Ben stepped inside, his team moving in swiftly behind him and fanning out.

  “Jesus, what a mess,” Cooper said, looking around him. Then he stopped and sniffed the air. He cut his eyes to Ben.

  Ben nodded his head. He, too, had caught the unmistakable odor of unwashed flesh, the telltale sign that Night People were close.

  “Cellar,” Ben said. “Find the door, inside
and out. Coop, take your Stoner and cover the outside.”

  Beth found the inside door to the basement and sniffed at it. “Phew. Rotting flesh, General.”

  Ben slung his CAR-15 and took a fire-frag from his battle harness and pulled the pin, holding the spoon down. “Open the door.”

  Beth jerked open the door and Ben tossed the mini-Claymore into the rank darkness. The smell of rotting human flesh and the unwashed bodies of creepies struck them all as they stepped to one side.

  The fire-frag blew and screaming began from the depths of the darkness. Coop’s Stoner began howling as light filled the cellar and creeps threw open the outside exit and tried to run. One came charging up the steps, screaming hate at the Rebels, an AK-47 sputtering in his hands.

  Beth slammed the door closed just as the creep reached the landing and ran into the door, the impact knocking him tumbling back down the steps.

  “Nice touch, Beth,” Ben said with a grin.

  She opened the door and gave the basement a hosing with her M-16. There were no more sounds of life from the cellar. Just to make sure, Beth tossed another grenade into the stinking cellar and closed the door.

  “First block cleared,” Corrie said, after receiving reports.

  “Only about five hundred to go,” Ben said. All around them, the early morning air was filled with gunsmoke and the booming of grenades.

  Thousands of Rebels, moving forward behind tanks and APCs, were starting on clearing the last major objective in Ireland.

  “Corrie, have platoon leaders warn their people again about booby traps,” Ben said. “If the creepies run true to form, the closer we get to the heart of the city, the more likely the chances of that.”

  By noon of the first day, the Rebels had cleared only a few blocks of the suburbs, but they had sustained no deaths or injuries, and Ben planned on keeping it that way. As they broke for lunch, Ben’s eyes continually returned to a large, very stately home located on a corner.

  “What’s the matter, Ben?” Linda asked. “You’re not eating. You feel all right?”