William W. Johnstone (7 page)

The red light came on.

“Check equipment!” James shouted.

Equipment was ehecked.

“Stand in the door!” James said to Ben.

The webbing was lowered; the door yawned into empty space.

James smiled and gave Ben the thumbs-up signal. Ben returned the smile and added a wink.

James grinned.

Ben positioned himself in the door, hands on the sides of the door, ready to pull himself out. His boots were together. His heartbeat quickened. The wind howled around him.

The green light came on. James slapped Ben on the butt and hollered, “Go!”

Ben left the plane, boots together, legs slightly bent. He grunted as the static line pulled him up short, jerked out the chute, blossoming above him. Another grunt as the slight opening shock seemingly pulled him back toward the sky.

The ground was coming up fast.

The sky was filled with chutes.

The ground met Ben’s boots. He was too heavily loaded for a stand-up landing, even with the slitted dash chutes. He rolled and popped his harness free, running, gathering up the silk, trying to keep his feet out of the shroud cords. Shouts filled the dusky air as section leaders called for their teams to gather around them.

The drop had been very nearly letter-perfect, the Rebels landing some twenty miles east of Interstate 5, between Redding and Red Bluff.

“Scouts out!” Ben called.

The recon teams took off at a run, heading west.

“Points forward!” Ben called.

The point people ran forward.

Ben waited for three minutes, then called, “Force march, route step. Let’s go!”

There was no silly, sophomoric growling or clapping of hands as the lines surged forward—this was not a game. The Rebels did not need cheerleaders. They were, to a person, professional warriors. Their arena was a battleground. The stands were filling with stars, silently watching; there would be no cheering when a Rebel died from an enemy bullet, or mine, or wire, or silent ambush. These were not paper tigers. And neither were their enemy.

Both sides were fully combat-tested.

The Rebels force-marched for fifty-five minutes, rested for five minutes, then moved out. That was the pattern they would follow until Ben called a halt.

They halted three miles from the Redding airport at a signal from the recon teams.

Ben keyed his walkie-talkie. “Talk to me.”

“IPF personnel control the airport.”

“How many additional people do you need to take them out?”

“None!” the terse reply came back into Ben’s ear. Ben grinned. The recon team leader had sounded insulted that Ben would even ask that.

“Take them out, Sergeant. Silently.”

“Yes, sir.”

The IPF guard was bored. His boredom was about to end. So was his life. Silly having to maintain such security at this place, he thought. It was so secure a gnat couldn’t penetrate their outside defenses.

He was still thinking that as a great gaping wound appeared in his throat. His blood gushed hotly down his chest. The razor-sharp knife edge withdrew and his dying body was lowered to the tarmac.

Another sentry never saw the black wire looped around his throat. He felt only the panic as air to his lungs and brain was shut off tightly. He dropped his AK assault rifle. Other hands grabbed it before it could clatter to the cement and alert the other IPF members.

The guards on the east side of the airport were quickly and silently taken out, their bodies lowered to the ground, or to the tarmac, or to the cement. It was done with about as much noise as a soft summer breeze.

A deadly, knife-wielding, black-tinted wind.

The Rebels that stealthily performed their deadly, bloody work did not attempt to take any prisoners; they did not have the additional personnel to guard prisoners, and they knew the IPF people would go to their graves without giving up any worthwhile information.

And because of that, they died.

But the recon people knew, in all probability, their luck would not hold one hundred percent that night. And when they were discovered, the night would suddenly turn noisy and very bloody.

“Hapy—Haoer!”
a voice yelled in Russian.

And the night rocked and rolled with gunfire.

A Rebel tossed a grenade into a room filled with IPF personnel. The large fragmentation grenade blew, scattering bits and pieces of IPF personnel all about the room. The Rebel stuck the muzzle of his M-16 through the screenless, open window and finished what the grenade had not.

Ben had started his people forward the instant he had given the orders to secure the airport. The Rebels at the point were running across the tarmac when the shouted Russian words reached theirs ears. The Rebels forced tired legs to churn a bit faster, to get them there a few seconds earlier.

“Try to contain the west side!” the recon leader shouted the order. He keyed his walkie-talkie and asked for Rebels on the north and south sides of the airfield. Box the IPF personnel in.

One IPF man made it to the radio room and got off part of a message to the IPF headquarters on the coast, near the King Mountain Range, some one hundred and fifty miles away.

“Rebels attacking airport. Need help. Almost overrun by—”

A bullet to the head ended the message before it could be completed.

Striganov was furious.
“What
airport?” he screamed.

“I don’t know, sir,” the radio operator said. “I’m contacting them all now.”

Striganov waited, and paced the floor.

At the airport in Red Bluff, the battle was almost over. The small contingent of IPF personnel were overrun by Raines’s Rebels. Half a dozen very valuable cargo planes were seized along with tons of supplies: food and weapons and ammo.

Ben stepped into the bloody radio room and slipped on the headset, sitting down at the radio. He could manage a few words in Russian, and hoped the upcoming transmission was brief.

“Red Bluff!” the voice cracked out of the speaker.

“Red Bluff,” Ben radioed back.

“Are you under attack?”

“Nyet.”

“Have you heard of anyone under attack by Rebels?”

“Nyet.”

“Stay alert, Red Bluff.”

“Da.”

The set went silent.

Ben leaned back, a smile on his face. By the time Striganov learned the truth, the airport’s supply depot would have been stripped bare and the planes ferried back to the forward base camp of the Rebels.

The speaker crackled again. “Red Bluff.”

Ben recognized the voice. Striganov.

“Red Bluff,” Ben radioed.

“This is General Striganov. Is everything all right?”

“Da, cynapb.”

“Speak English, you fool.”

“Yes, sir,” Ben replied, muffling his voice with a handkerchief.

“The airport is secure?”

“Yes, sir. Very quiet.”

Ben could hear the Russian’s sigh. “Very well. Go to full alert for the remainder of the night.”

“Yes, sir.”

The set went silent.

Ben leaned back in the blood- and brain-splattered chair and laughed.

Ben told the radio operator to get on the scramble horn and order a planeload of pilots to be at the airfield by dawn, to ferry captured aircraft back to the base camp.

He ordered half his personnel to rest for an hour, the other half to start loading equipment on the planes and trucks and other vehicles found at the airport.

He called his platoon leaders together. “How many did we lose?”

“One dead, three wounded.”

“Bury the dead. We’ll send the wounded back with the planes in the morning.”

Ben looked toward the south. He wondered how Ike was doing.

Ike was cutting a throat, the hot blood of the Russian IPF man bathing his right hand in thick stickiness.

“Yukk!” Ike muttered, lowering the body to the ground. He wiped his blade clean on the Russian’s shirt, then wiped his hands clean.

The southernmost outpost of Striganov’s IPF forces had been neutralized without a single Rebel getting so much as a scratch.

He turned to his XO. “We’ll neutralize everything between 101 and Interstate 5,” he said. “I don’t wanna get trapped with the ocean to our backs and no place to cut and run. Six-man teams …” He looked at a woman sergeant and grinned.
“Six-person
teams. Get ‘em moved out pronto. We’re gonna be stretched pretty thin, but what the hell? So is everybody else.”

“How about the civilians?”

“They’re either with us, or agin’ us,” Ike drawled. “And if I have to explain that, you’re in a heap of trouble, boy.”

His XO grinned. He was just old enough to remember that TV commercial. He saluted and left.

Ike’s eyes turned toward the north. He wondered how Dan was doing.

“My good fellow,” Dan said, looking at the IPF colonel. “You must realize you are in a perfectly dreadful situation.”

The Russian’s eyes were as cold as his heart.

Dan held out the map his Rebels had seized from the colonel’s quarters. “These outposts you have X’ed. They are still operational?”

The Russian said something terribly vulgar.

“How crude! And to the best of my knowledge, physically impossible. Is that all you have to say, Colonel?” It was.

Dan turned to Tina Raines, Ben’s daughter and a longtime member of Gray’s Scouts. “Shoot him.”

Tina shot the Russian between the eyes, the.45 slug swelling his head before it exited out the back, removing part of the man’s brain as it traveled.

Dan spread the map out on a table and studied it. “This is going to make our mission infinitely easier.” He began assigning teams to sectors. When he was finished, his teams fanning out, he turned to Tina. “We haven’t got enough personnel to neutralize all these outposts, so I’m going to have to contact our northern teams. We test the mettle of the woods-children now.”

“They’ll stand,” Tina opined.

“Oh, I have no doubt of that. It’s these underground people I’m a bit uncertain of.”

He was thoughtful for a few seconds.

“If I could just
see
them perhaps I’d feel better.”

“You want to bet they’re not looking at us?” she tossed the challenge at him.

“I think I’ll pass, Tina.” But he did look around him, at the dark forest with its deep timber.

Did something move in there?

Dan wasn’t certain. But he thought his eyes had picked up a flash of earth-colored clothing flitting through the vegetation.

“I saw it too, Dan,” Tina said.

“Yes. But
what
did we see?”

“A friend,” she said, adding, “I hope.”

Dan picked up his submachine gun. He looked at Tina. “Good luck, Tina.”

She smiled and winked. “Yeah. Let’s go kill a commie for mommie.”

Dan laughed, loud and long. “Where in the world did you ever hear that, Tina?”

“I read it, back when I was just a kid.” Tina was every bit of twenty-three.

“Oh?”

“Yeah. In one of Dad’s books.”

The young IPF soldier was so frightened he forgot his English and spoke in Russian.

Gray’s Scout looked at Ro and Wade and the other woods-children who had captured the young IPF soldier. The young people’s eyes were as cold as a glacier.

“He’s asking for mercy,” the Scout said softly.

Wade glanced up at the Scout. “Mercy? Ask him how many children, both male and female, he has had sexually. Ask him how many men and women not of his race or color he has helped capture and transport to the Russian for butchering.”

The IPF soldier could speak perfect English. He dropped his eyes, refusing to meet the eyes of Wade or any of the others around him.

“Ask him,” Ro said, “how many times he’s killed men and women and children who refused to accept the IPF’s demands. Ask him how many of Ben Raines’s Rebels he has killed. And ask him if he will tell us the location of every IPF outpost in our sector?”

The Russian soldier shook his head. Ro met the Scout’s eyes. “Would Ben Raines let him live?”

“No,” the Scout replied in a low tone.

Wade reached down, jerked the soldier’s head up, and with one quick cut sliced the man’s throat. The body flopped on the ground and then was still.

The Scout’s face and eyes remained impassive. He had been warned just how savage these young people could be, and that they all, to a person, had good reason to hate the IPF and any warlord.

“We’ll rest here for a time. While we’re taking a break, I’ll assign sectors.” He walked off.

A young girl stood off to one side, but close enough to have seen the entire execution and its method. She was among the youngest of the woods-children. She was eleven. The carbine she carried was very nearly as large as she. Her name was Lora. She did not know her last name. She did not know if she even had a last name.

She was dressed in patched jeans and a man’s flannel shirt, way too big for her, the sleeves pinned back. She carried a.38 caliber pistol in a holster belted around her slim waist, right side. A very sharp hunting knife in a sheath on her left side.

She had joined Ro’s group of woods-children when she was eight, after being seized and raped repeatedly by a gang of roaming outlaws. She had managed to escape from them after a particular savage night of drinking and lust. With her blood streaking her inner thighs, so sore she could hardly walk after being raped and sodomized, Lora had slipped away from the sleeping circle of men and made her way deep into the timber of Kentucky.

But not before she killed the man who had last taken her. She had calmly and viciously, with all her strength, driven a sharpened wooden stake through his right eye, penetrating the brain.

Lora shoulder-slung her carbine and walked off to sit by herself in the shade of a huge old tree. The butt of the carbine almost dragged the ground as she walked.

Seated on the ground, she ate some berries she had picked that morning and sipped water from her canteen. Then she opened her rucksack and took out a ragged magazine she had found back in one of the buildings at the airport in the old Tri-States.

It had such pretty pictures in it. Pictures, in
color,
of kids about her own age, she guessed. But they were dressed so fine, and all of them seemed so happy. And they were so clean, with shining hair and pretty rings on their fingers. They had little gold and silver and shiny things on the bottom part of their ears.