find the rotting bastard—you bring it back.”
“Wild country out there, Mr. Cody,” the FBI chief was reminded.
“I am well aware of that.”
“And still full of Rebels,” another agent said.
“Take as many men as you need. Do it. Find the son of a bitch and bring it back. I want it on public display. The people have to learn that this is a law-and-order society. Anarchy will not be permitted.”
The agents left the office and drew weapons. They called their wives and girlfriends and told them they were going on assignment.
No, they did not know when they would be back.
They boarded a plane at Byrd Field and headed westward. The agents were in high spirits. Hunting traitors was the name of the game. They were loyal to the red, white, and blue, Ben Raines and his Rebels were all traitors and anarchists, and that was that.
It was all cut and dried. No gray area between the white and the black.
By tomorrow at this time, all the agents would be dead.
“We hit them here,” Colonel Hector Ramos told his Rebels. He thumped a wall map and smiled grimly, a big predatory cat on the trail of a blood scent. Ramos had lost his entire family to government troops back in ‘98. His wife and daughter had been raped and tortured and then cut open like pigs, left to die in the sands like hunted animals.
Ramos looked at his people. “Our informants in Richmond said the agents left two hours ago. A planeload of them. Fifty agents, all heavily armed. They are to find General Raines’s body and return with it to Richmond; put the body on public display…”
A hand shot up.
Ramos said, “Captain Garrett?”
“Let’s not kill the pilots, sir,” the young captain suggested.
“Oh?”
“No, sir. Let’s send the agents back in the plane. All sitting up very nicely in the seats. All dead.”
“I think General Raines would approve of that, Captain,” Ramos said. “Thank you. A very nice touch, indeed. I would like to see Director Cody’s face when his men return.”
Just as their cousins and uncles and fathers and mothers had done years before, many people of the United States, instead of turning in their handguns and heavy-caliber hunting rifles, had wrapped them carefully and buried them. Then they had formed underground networks of small cells of dedicated men and women, all with one goal in mind: To keep Ben Raines’s dream alive. To restore America, not to what she was before the bombings, but something better; something very much like Tri-States. And just as their relatives had done before them, if they had to die to preserve that dream of a government truly “Of and for the people”… so be it. They were prepared to do so.
“Will you get your ass back into bed!” Chase shouted at Ben. “Good jumping Jesus Christ.”
Ben bit back the pain and said, “Hector Ramos on the horn. It’s big, the operator said. I’ll just talk for a minute then back to bed. That’s a promise.”
“Hard-headed son of a bitch!” Chase yelled at him.
“You shouldn’t talk to the general like that,” a young Rebel said, speaking before he thought.
“I’ll talk to him any goddamn way I please to talk to him!” Chase roared.
He was still roaring at the young man when Ben slipped on the headset in the communications tent. “Go, Hector.”
“How’ya doing, General?”
“I’m alive, Hec—but don’t ask me how.”
Ramos brought him up to date on the flight of the agents. Ben smiled a toothy tiger’s smile as Ramos told him the plans. “I like the captain’s plan, Hec. Can you carry it out?”
“No sweat, General. They’ll land at the new Air Force base just outside Flagstaff late this afternoon. My people will be in position when they come in. We’ll hit them as they deplane, then ship the bodies back the same day.”
“What about the personnel at the base?”
“Just a skeleton crew. My people took care of them about two hours ago.”
Ben sighed, his pain momentarily forgotten. “All right, Hec. But this commits us past the point of no return; your people aware of that?”
“Yes, sir. To a person.”
“Good luck, Hec.”
Ben slowly removed the headset and handed it to the operator. The young man looked at him, questions in his eyes. “From now on it’s open warfare, isn’t it, General?”
“Yes, it is, son. It sure is.”
Chase stuck his head in the tent. “Now will you get your ass back to bed?” he shouted.
“I know what you’re thinking, Ben,” Jerre said, when Ben was once more in bed.
He looked at her. “Oh?”
“You’re wondering if you’re doing the right thing. You’re thinking some of those agents were just kids when the bombings occurred; they might not even remember what it was like before. And some of them might not really go along with Al Cody and President Addison, but they’re just doing their jobs.”
“You do have a way of getting inside my head,” he said dreamily, half asleep.
“I should,” she smiled. “After all, you screwed me when I was only nineteen, you dirty old man.”
“So am I doing the right thing, Jerre?”
“You know you are, Benj,” her words held a hollow, echoing sound as he drifted off into sleep.
He was remembering how they met, ten years back…
He had seen her walking slowly down the road—trudging was more like it—just north of Charlottesville, Virginia. It was just a few weeks after the world had exploded in germ and nuclear warfare. Frightened, she had jumped across a ditch and hurt her ankle. Ben found himself looking down the barrel of a small automatic pistol.
He had finally convinced her he meant her no harm, and she allowed him to look at her ankle, finally convincing her she should soak the ankle in a nearby creek.
She had been in college in Maryland when the bombs hit. She’d been sick for a week. The whole experience had been “Gross, man. The absolute pits.”
They had talked the afternoon away, and she came to trust him. That night, she came to his bed, young and coltish and smelling of soap, fresh from her bath.
They had traveled the country, growing fonder of each other. But she had told him she would leave when she felt the time was right, ‘cause right now, he thought she was cute; but that cute would get old pretty damn quick, she thought.
He had taught her as much as he could in their time together—teaching her, he hoped, to survive.
“But,” he had told her, “it might help improve your shooting if you would open your eyes.”
He had left her just south of Chapel Hill.
He still had the letter she had written him.
The agents walked blindly into a murderous ambush at the Air Force base. As they deplaned, they thought nothing of the Air Police sitting around the airport in Jeeps. The M-16s in their hands and the M-60 and .50-caliber machine guns mounted on the Jeeps were nothing out of the ordinary. The agents paid little attention to them.
They also paid little attention to the AF captain and sergeant who boarded the plane when the last agent got off.
The pilot felt the cold steel of a .45 pistol pressing into his neck. He did not turn around. He just listened to the low voice explain how it was his option whether to live or die.
