by William W. Johnstone
The enemy say that Americans are good at a long shot, but cannot stand the cold iron. I call upon you instantly to give a lie to this slander. Charge! -
This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
PROLOGUE: A NEW BEGINNING
It looked good.
Yes, Ben Raines thought as he drove the area of the nation known to a few as the new Tri-States, it did look good. As he drove he gazed out at the fertile land that would soon bring forth beans and cotton and corn and the many hundreds of small gardens that would feed the people.
Ben smiled.
For the first time since the arrival of Ben and his Rebels in portions of Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi, Ben felt some degree of optimism for the future of those who chose to follow his dream.
The spring of 2001 was, Ben felt, a long way from what most science fiction writers of his generation had envisioned. Those writers envisioned robots doing much of the tasks formally relegated to the unskilled. They imagined numerous space shuttles to faraway worlds, an easing of the world’s hunger, great strides and breakthroughs in the field of medicine-and so very much more.
Instead, the world now hung by a slender thread: on one side a chance for civilization to flourish; on the other, anarchy, barbarism, a return to the caves.
We’ve got to make it, Ben mused as he drove. Some group of people must show the rest of the world that civilization and order can once more prevail over chaos.
We’ve got to make it.
It’s up to us, and I know it. But I don’t have to like the heavy yoke of responsibility that hangs like that stinking albatross about my neck.
But, he sighed, we almost made it. We came so close, so very close to crawling out of the ashes of nuclear war. 1988 was not the end. It could have been a glorious new beginning. But 1988 blew up in our faces and very nearly destroyed the entire world.
His thoughts drifted back to the beginning of his dream: Tri-States, a section of America in the west, after the horror of germ and nuclear war; a society of free men and women of like mind, like dreams, like hopes. A society where people of all races could live and work and be content. And live free of crime. And Ben Raines and his Rebels did it. Social scientists and social anthropologists and assorted liberals and bleeding hearts had always maintained it could not be done, but Ben and his people had proved them incorrect. Grossly incorrect. Those men and women who were the founders and the foundation of Tri-States had succeeded against all odds. They had made their dream work.
And for almost a decade they had lived in peace and harmony and contentment, in a land where good schools-free of nit-picking and government interference
and unions and leniency-had done what schools were meant to do: educate the young, mold their minds, teach them reading and writing and math and science and discipline and respect.
Tri-States had shown the world-that world which remained-that a government does not need to be top-heavy with bureaucracy and dead weight and hundreds of unfair and unworkable laws and pork-barrel projects and scheming politicians and massive overspending and dead-heads.
But the Central Government-then located in Richmond, Virginia because D. C. had taken a nuke dead-on back in ‘88-witha lunatic at the helm of state, could not bear the success of Ben Raines and his people. President Hilton Logan had ordered the destruction of Tri-States-and all its inhabitants.
Only three years ago, Ben thought, waving to a Rebel standing by a fence, talking with a neighbor. The men returned the wave.
“Hi, General!” they called. Both men wore side arms belted around their waists. And they would have automatic weapons close by, not just because they were citizen soldiers, regulars in the Rebel army, but because the world was still tumbling about in fear and chaos and violence and near-anarchy.
Citizen soldiers, Ben thought, driving past the talking men. That is why we survived and so many others did not. I insisted that all my people be a part of the armed forces, with all the training and discipline contained therein. And we survived the holocaust, came through it, due in no small part to the fact the people were armed and trained and disciplined.
That should tell the world something.
But what world is left to hear it?
So much has happened in only three years.
Ben wondered, if history were ever written abut this tragic period of the world, if anyone would believe that one man, Ben Raines, could go from novelist to guerrilla leader to the founder of a separate nation within a nation back to guerrilla leader, and from there move on to the office of the president of the United States, and once more back to guerrilla leader-all in the short span of only twelve years?
Unbelievable.
Ben smiled. It would have made a hell of a book, he thought, the writer in him once more surfacing. He missed writing, missed the long hours of solitude, missed the exercising of his mind as he grappled with plot and dialogue, missed the deadlines he used to curse.
Reading, he thought, the smile still on his lips. That’s the key. That is what we have to stress with the young people. The nation, Ben knew, had begun slipping in the reading department-really took a beating from 1960 to the big blow-up of ‘88. Can’t let that happen again. Got to stress reading and math and science. For those will be the keys to picking up the pieces of civilization and putting them back together once more.
Thank God the mindless inanity of much of prime-time TV was gone. His smile turned grim. The only good thing to come out of being nuked.
Ben lost his smile as his eyes picked up the reflection of his constant shadow in the rear-view mirror of his pickup: his bodyguards.
Sgt. Buck Osgood would be at the wheel of the rear
vehicle. With another Rebel riding shotgun, armed with an automatic weapon, and a third Rebel in the rear of the vehicle, ready to grab the big .50-caliber machine gun.
By nature a loner, Ben could never become accustomed to the idea of having a babysitter wherever he went-not even after all these years.
And ranging a half mile ahead of him, always trying to stay out of his sight, for his bodyguards knew how Ben felt, would be another Jeep or APC, with more Rebels in it, all heavily armed.
What price fame? Ben silently mused, the mental question laced with sarcasm.
But Ben knew the precautions were necessary, for there had been sightings of mutants. However, the mutants for the most part left humans alone as long as they were not provoked. In addition, there was the need to guard against roaming gangs of thugs and paramilitary groups. At least several times a month they would attempt to slip into the new Tri-States, to steal or rape or burn or kill, or all of those things.
They would be put down hard; if not killed on the spot, they would be hanged the next day.
For that was the order of day now-around the battered globe. Nowhere else that the Rebels knew of was there social order-only the new Tri-States, which set rules and behavior and morals.
In this late spring of 2001, worldwide, it had come down to the survival of the fittest. Humankind had reverted very nearly back to the caves. And in some cases, had indeed returned to the caves, although Ben and his people would not learn of that for months to come.
For now, in the new Tri-States, Ben Raines and his six thousand survivors, men, women, and children, were
