Crisis in the Ashes Read online

  “Some of Ben Raines’s Rebel Scouts have been reported to be on the ground north of the compound, this compound, by less than fifty miles.”

  “Fifty miles? How the hell did we let them get that close without being detected?”

  “Some sort of nighttime air drop.”

  “Why the hell didn’t our radar pick up the goddamn plane when they flew in?”

  “I can’t explain it, Claire. I’m just sifting through the day’s reports.”

  “You make it sound like we’re getting our asses kicked on all fronts, Harlan, I goddamn sure don’t want to hear that, not tonight, and not from you.”

  “I’ve always told you the truth, Claire. I’ve never lied to you.”

  She reached for the bottle of brandy and drank straight from it. “Get your clothes off!” she demanded. “I want to forget about Ben Raines and his goddamn stupid Rebels tonight. I want you to make love to me.”

  “Make love?”

  “Call it whatever the hell you want. Get your clothes off and get in this bed with me. I’m going to hump your brains out tonight. Your wife won’t have anything left for her by the time I’m done with you.”

  “I told Ellen I’d be working late.”

  “You will be, Harlan. You’ll be working late keeping the president of the USA happy. And don’t you dare disappoint me. I’m not in the mood for excuses. Get your clothes off and get into bed. You’d better be good tonight. I need a man!”

  “Please, Claire. You must understand that I have a wife at home. These repeated demands of yours—”

  “Did she want you to do her before you came over to see me tonight?”

  “Not exactly . . . but I did spend some time with her before I arrived.”

  “So did you do the bitch?”

  “Ellen isn’t a bitch.”

  “The hell she isn’t.”

  “She’s my wife. We have two children.”

  “I don’t give a damn how many rugrats the two of you have! If I wanted children, the little curtain-climbing bastards, I have alternatives. I can order any one of my bodyguards to come in here and give me some.”

  “I know, Claire. It’s just that I don’t want Ellen to suspect anything.”

  “Who gives a shit what she might suspect? I could have her shot, if I wanted to.”

  Harlan was sweating. “I sincerely hope you won’t do that, for the sake of our children.”

  “I don’t give a good goddamn about your children. Take your clothes off. I’m rapidly losing patience with you.”

  He sat on the edge of her king-size mattress and began to pull off his shoes. “I’ll do the best I can, Claire. I’ve always tried to please you.”

  “Shut up and get undressed, you wimpy little bastard. You make me madder every time you open your mouth. You’ll live a lot longer if you don’t say another damn word.”

  “This is hardly a sexually exciting thing, to hear you say that.”

  Claire scowled. “You’d better get it up for me, or I’ll have it cut off.”

  “Cut off?”

  “You heard me. I’ll have it amputated.”

  “Dear God, Claire. There are times when you can be so cold. I hardly recognize you.”

  “Shut up, Harlan. And don’t mention God to me. God is dead. If He wasn’t, He’d have let us kill Ben Raines a long time ago.”

  “I happen to believe there is a God, Claire. I believe it with all my heart.”

  “Then why would God leave Raines alive to murder citizens of the USA?”

  Harlan swallowed, more sweat forming on his brow. “This is war, Claire. God has never intervened in wars made by men. Not that I’m aware of.”

  “You idiot!” she growled, losing the warm feeling between her legs after listening to Harlan’s empty logic. “War can be made by women. I’m the Commander In Chief of the forces of the USA.”

  “I didn’t mean to be . . . gender-specific about it,” he stammered. “It was a generalization.”

  “You’ve pissed me off tonight, Harlan Millard. Put your clothes back on. I’d rather sleep with an alligator than with you, you little bastard.”

  “I’m sorry, Claire.” He glanced down at his shriveled genitals.

  “Get out! Get out, or I’ll have you shot! I want a real man in my bed tonight!”

  Harlan dutifully put his underwear, slacks, and shirt back on, and then his socks and shoes. “I really am very sorry,” he muttered as he backed away from her bed.

  “Get out!” she barked again.

  He bowed politely and turned to go, hesitating before he left her bedroom. “What orders do you want me to give General Maxwell regarding the assault troops north of the compound, Madam President?”

  “That’s a stupid damn question, Harlan. Tell Max to send out enough soldiers to wipe them out. Make damn sure they don’t get close to the compound.”

  “But our reports said they were already close . . . less than fifty miles away.”

  “Goddamn it, Harlan! Just tell Maxwell to get rid of the sons of bitches! I don’t give a damn how he does it, but make sure he does it soon.” She hesitated a moment, then held up her hand. “Just a minute. Didn’t we get a report from one of our spies that Ben Raines was in upstate New York last week?”

  “Yes, ma’am, but that report wasn’t confirmed. We haven’t had time to verify it yet.”

  “I don’t give a shit. I’ll teach that bastard Raines to bomb my houses. Tell Maxwell to send a squad of Black Shirts along with a trained assassin up to New York. I want Raines’s head on a platter.”

  “But Madam President, there’s an executive order forbidding assassination of political figures,” Millard began.

  Claire picked up a book from her bedside table and threw it at him, grinning as he almost fell over trying to dodge the missile. “Don’t you dare quote executive orders at me, you wimp! I’m the chief executive around here, and I said send someone to kill Raines, and do it now!” Harlan bowed again without answering and hurried out of her bedroom.

  Claire reached for the intercom button. She would have Herb Knoff in bed with her tonight, even though she would have preferred a slow screw. Knoff hammered her every time they made love, and she knew she would be sore in the morning. Perhaps thinking of Ben Raines’s death would make the experience more enjoyable.

  THIRTEEN

  Former Navy SEAL Sergeant Gerald Enger listened to the air whisper through his black parachute, guiding it down with the aid of hand stirrups toward a starlit, vacant field near the Hudson River. Eleven highly skilled assault troops came from the inky skies above him as their cargo plane, a C-130, swept back to the north at low altitude, staying off Rebel radar as much as it could, flying just above the New York treetops at dangerously low levels after the chutists made their jump from higher altitudes.

  Enger hit the ground rolling, gathering his chute cords as soon as he came to his feet. All around him, men in black shirts with blackface greasepaint hit the meadow, tumbling, making as little noise as possible despite heavy packs, automatic rifles, and explosives.

  “Down safe, so far,” he heard Corporal Bill Moody whisper, collecting his parachute only a few yards from where Enger landed.

  “Yeah. So far, so good. Get the men in those trees at the edge of this clearing. Make sure everybody’s got his chute, so there’s no telltale signs of our landing. Any son of a bitch who drops so much as a hanky, I’m gonna kill him myself. Pass the word around. The Rebels may have patrols out. We can’t let ’em find a goddamn thing.”

  “Right, Sergeant.” Moody hurried off into the night to get the assault team together.

  Enger gathered his black chute, dragging it from the meadow to a stand of oaks. They were on a special assignment for Max, General Maxwell, to hit Ben Raines personally at his headquarters, or so the reports went. No one seemed quite sure where General Raines was, despite the best intelligence the USA could gather. They’d gotten word he was recruiting so-called Freedom Fighters in upstate New York, near s
ome of the old national parks. Enger’d been told they had a spy in the area, and he was warned not to harm the operative if he could avoid it. He pulled a picture from his pocket and stared at it for a moment, fixing the spy’s face in his memory.

  Enger had only heard about Raines . . . he’d never seen him in the flesh. But if all went as planned he would get his first glimpse of Raines as a dead man, a bullet-riddled corpse—or a pile of pulpy flesh and bone, if an RPG got him first. Enger’s team carried enough firepower, RPGs, rocket launchers, and other explosives, to blow Raines out of a bunker dug halfway down to China. While other assault groups had failed recently to get Raines, Enger harbored no doubts he could accomplish his objective, and he’d said so to General Maxwell and the President herself—even though he harbored a lingering dislike for Claire Osterman. She was the kind of ball-busting woman any man could hate, a real bitch. But the pay was good, working for the USA.

  His men were veterans of other wars, regional conflicts, some as far back as Viet Nam. Older, seasoned, experienced, they would not make the same mistakes made by the younger mercenaries President Osterman seemed to prefer. The hotshot Russians had been particularly stupid in Pennsylvania, allowing a Rebel band to close a circle around them, blowing them to bits in less than ten minutes when Black Shirts under Captain Federov walked into a deadly trap. Word was the Rebel Scouts were really good . . . good and merciless, sort of like the LURPs in Viet Nam had been—men picked to work behind enemy lines with little or no support. Well, if all went well, he’d soon find out just how good they really were.

  A figure came dashing toward him. As a reflex, Enger swung the muzzle of his AK 47 up, ready to blow the man away unless he identified himself with a code word.

  “The men are in position, Sergeant,” Corporal Martin Davis said, out of breath. “We’re waiting for orders.”

  “Your forgot the goddamn code word, Davis!”

  “Bluebird! Bluebird!”

  “The Rebel stronghold is over that eastern ridge. Fan out in a line, Davis. Pass the word down the line, and this time, remember the goddamn code word!”

  “Bluebird, Sergeant.”

  “A mistake like that can get you killed, Davis. Don’t make it again.”

  “Should I leave two men back as a rear guard, Sergeant Enger?”

  “Of course, you damn fool. How many times have we been through this drill? Send McKinney and Jones back. They know what to do.”

  “But Sergeant,” Davis stammered, “Bill McKinney can’t see a damn thing in the dark.”

  Enger turned back on Davis with his jaw clenched. “Corporal McKinney can smell an enemy at a hundred yards. Never question my orders again. I picked Bill McKinney myself, because he doesn’t make dumb mistakes . . . like forgetting the goddamn password on a mission.”

  “Yes, Sergeant. Sorry. I’ll pass the word down the line right away.”

  Enger forced himself to relax. Davis was right . . . McKinney’s eyesight was failing some. But a soldier with experience didn’t need to see like an eagle to know who to kill, or when. Davis was too young, too green, to understand. Davis had been his last choice for the Black Shirt mission, when no more experienced men were available.

  Corporal Moody came back with his automatic rifle slung from his shoulder on a leather strap. “The men are ready to advance, Sergeant.”

  “Move out. It’s an abandoned-looking farmhouse, not an underground bunker, according to our intelligence reports. It’ll look perfectly ordinary, except for the communications equipment. Look for radar installations, and listen for the sound of the motors. They make just enough noise when they rotate, on a quiet night like this, so we should be able to hear them moving. And tell everyone to be on the lookout for tracks on the roads. They’ll be using vehicles to move back and forth, and those leave tracks.”

  “Do we take them out, Sergeant?”

  “No. Not until the other explosives are in place. They will have perimeter guards. We don’t know how many of them to expect, or how well-armed they are. Expect landmines and electronic sensors. We take out the guards first. And tell every man it has to be done quietly. No goddamn noise, unless there isn’t a choice.”

  “I’ll get the word down the line, Sergeant. But landmines are gonna be a problem. We don’t have any sweepers, to keep our backpacks as light as we could. Maybe we should have brought at least one.”

  “We have no choice but to gamble, Corporal. If somebody steps on a mine, then all hell’s gonna break loose. We will have lost the element of surprise.”

  “What about dogs, Sergeant?”

  “They’ll be our biggest problem . . . if they have the right kind of dogs. Add this to the orders—if you hear a dog, kill its handler and the animal. Use the silencers. Once the shooting starts, we’ll launch RPGs into the air vents and blow Raines out of his hole in the ground. I’m gonna enjoy watching him sprout wings.”

  “Right,” Corporal Moody said, swinging off at a trot to deliver Enger’s instructions.

  The night in the upstate New York woods was as black as any Gerald Enger had ever seen. Not a breath of air moved among the trees. A man could be heard sneezing or farting at five hundred yards, an advantage for his men—and a disadvantage, if one of them made a mistake.

  He waved a silent signal across the grassy meadow. In the blackness of shadows below the oak forest canopy, darker shapes began to move toward the crest of a wooded hillside, hard to see in the night, harder to hear because these men were well-trained in the art of night combat. Enger would allow no greenhorns on his hand-picked assault force. Davis had been a necessary exception.

  A ripping explosion sent Martin Davis into the air like a wounded buzzard, flapping his useless arms like broken wings, his AK 47 erupting in a spray of gunfire.

  Dogs began to bark. Someone shouted, “It’s a goddamn pair of Dobermans! Shoot the bastards.”

  The chatter of an AK 47 filled the night. A dog snarled in the distance, then a man began screaming—“He’s got me by the damn throat! Shoot the son of a bitch!”

  Gerald Enger swore. Things had suddenly gone all wrong. Davis had stepped on a mine, and now everyone inside the farmhouse knew they were under attack.

  Squatting down, he cocked an RPG and sent the grenade flying high above the roof of the compound. It was sure to be a direct hit . . . until something else went wrong.

  The charge detonated fifty feet in the air, blasting trees and undergrowth around the compound’s roof with shrapnel. Corporal Moody’s shrill scream echoed across the forest as he sank to his knees, clutching his face with both hands in the brief flash of exploding gunpowder.

  “I’m hit! Help me, Sergeant!”

  “Screw you, Moody,” Enger muttered. “A paid soldier has to learn how to help himself, you idiot.”

  He watched the bunker for signs of movement. Other than the fleeting shadows of racing dogs released in the woods, he found nothing to shoot at.

  The element of surprise was lost, all because Martin Davis had been so dumb as to step on a landmine. A voice inside Gerald Enger’s head had whispered that he shouldn’t take a man like Davis along on a mission this sensitive . . . however, good men were getting harder and harder to find in the USA’s ranks lately, and his choices had been nil on such short notice.

  Enger’s first priority was to assassinate Ben Raines, at any cost. But how was he to find Raines in the dark like this, with men shooting and dying all around him?

  He crept away from the thick oak trunk where he’d been watching the failing assault on the Rebel stronghold, inching forward, hoping for a shot at Raines. He only knew him from an old photograph General Maxwell had shown him, taken years ago when SUSA was formed.

  Staying low, listening to the hammering of automatic gunfire on all sides, he moved toward the compound with all the stealth he could muster. If Gerald Enger could manage one thing well after his years as a Navy SEAL, it was stealth before he made a kill.

  He paused at the edge of a clearing less
than a hundred yards from the bunker, listening, watching, craning his neck to see what was happening to his assault troops. His men were being slaughtered, from the sound of it . . . not that he gave a shit about anyone other than himself. One lesson he had learned over years of fighting was the value of his own life. It didn’t mean a damn who else died. Staying alive was priority one.

  Someone behind him spoke. “You looking for anyone in particular?”

  Enger froze . . . he did not recognize the man who spoke to him now, but it could be Private Jones, the southerner from Alabama who stayed back with McKinney.

  He risked a glance over his shoulder. “Is that you, Jones?” he asked.

  “I’ve been called Jones. Smith is one of my favorites, but I stopped using it a long time ago.”

  A cold chill ran down Enger’s spine. The man talking to him wasn’t Private Jones, or any other soldier in his company of Black Shirts.

  “Nice shirt you’re wearing,” the man said, coming from a dark stand of trees only a few feet behind him. “Not one of my favorite colors, black, but it’s a nice shirt.”

  Enger tensed, ready to make his move with his AK 47. “Who are you?” he asked.

  “Ben Raines. I’m sure I’m the one you’ve been sent here to kill.”

  How the hell had Raines gotten behind him? “There must be some mistake. We came here to join up with the Rebels.”

  “No mistake,” the voice said. “Unless you count letting me get behind you. That was a helluva mistake.”

  “Would you shoot a man in the back?”

  “I’d shoot a sorry son of a bitch like you in the balls if the light was better. But just for the hell of it, I’m gonna give you a chance to turn around before I pull the trigger.”

  Gerald Enger wheeled, sweeping his AK 47 barrel toward the trees as his finger tightened on the trigger.

  He was lifted off his feet by a hail of lead tearing through his body.

  Raines squatted and looked at his wounds close up. “You’ve only got a few minutes, soldier. Any last words?” he asked.