freedom, to know the difference between right and wrong without having courts to tell you the difference. Everything I value, I learned from you. This is as much my fight as it is yours. Now you want to make something out of that?”
Ben laughed at her stubbornness. “Don’t get uppity with the old man, kid,” he said jokingly.
“The way you were stalking about a few minutes ago, you looked like you had your back up about something. Want to talk about it?”
Ben shrugged. “I’ll never understand women.”
“What a sexist remark.”
Ben’s smile was wry. “You and Gale will get along fine, I’m thinking. And that spelling is G-A-L-E.”
Tina laughed aloud. “Does she live up to it?”
“Damn well better believe it.”
“I’d very much like to meet her.”
“Well, so what are you waiting for? Welcome home, honey.”
“Well split up into three columns,” Ben told his senior officers. “Ike, your brigade will take Highway 79 out of here to Memphis, then get on Interstate 55 and head north. Angle slightly west and stop at Warrenton. We’ll be in radio contact at all times-everything on scramble.
“Colonel Ramos, you’ll move up Highway 65 all the way to Interstate 70. Wait there for me. I’m going to connect with Highway 63 in North Arkansas and stay with it all the way to Columbia. Well bivouac and wait until Al and Juan get their people in position, then well hit the IPF with everything we’ve got. I don’t like to think about slugging it out nose to nose, but we don’t have a choice this time around, boys. All right, we move out at dawn.”
The scene resembled a miniature replay of the staging areas of D-day, back in 1944. Hundreds of vehicles of all types: Jeeps, trucks, APC’S, cargo carriers. Just over three thousand men and women, a thousand to a brigade, milling about, creating what would look to the untrained eyes to be mass total confusion. It was anything but. The men and women of Ben Raines’s Rebels had been trained well; each person knew his job and would give it one hundred percent. But any staging area sounds chaotic.
Whistles and shouted commands and the sounds of hundreds of boots on gravel and concrete filled the early morning air. Quiet conversations between husbands and wives and kids softened the din as men and women told each other goodbye-perhaps for the last time. One more stolen kiss, a touch, a caress, an embrace.
“Keep your head down, Sid, and we’ll be thinking of you.”
““You remember to pack extra socks?”
“This one will be the last one, Mary. Well kick the ass off the Russians and then we can all settle down to live out our lives in peace.”
“I’ll be back in plenty of time for the harvest. Crops are sure lookin” good.”
And then it was time.
“Second platoon, Able Company, first battalion-over here! Group around me.”
“Goddamnit, Lewis, if you can’t keep that steel pot on your pinhead, tie the son of a bitch to your pack.”
“Fuck you, Sergeant.”
“Where in the hell is Sergeant Ward?”
“Right here.”
“Your wife just called. You forgot to take your allergy pills.”
“Shit!”
“Harrison, what in the hell are you doing with that goddamn chicken?”
“It’s our mascot, Captain.” “A chicken?”
“First platoon, Dog Company, third battalion-get over here, damnit!”
Since many of the roads throughout the nation were in sad condition-with many of them having had no maintenance in almost fifteen years-the battle tanks would not be transported on trucks. The heavy tanks would have to be driven as is, overland. The harsh rumble of the big engines firing into life added to the din. Ben was throwing everything under his command at the IPF, and he knew if he failed (and that was a distinct possibility) General Striganov and his forces would then have much more than just a toe hold in America.
81mm mortar carriers were made ready to roll. 155mm howitzers, M60A2 tanks, M48A3 main battle tanks, and M60A1 main battle tanks, each weighing between fifty-two and fifty-seven tons were cranked up, the huge V-12 diesel engines rumbling and snorting to
life in the cool predawn darkness.
Tactical and support vehicles, Jeeps and deuce-and-a-halves, pickup trucks and APC’S roared into life. M548 cargo carriers wheeled on their tracks, pointing their stubby bulldog noses to the north, preparing to move out at Ben’s signal.
On the tarmac of the airport, Jim Slater and Paul Green and a dozen other pilots checked out their planes one final time, once more went over flight plans and looked over their personal arms and equipment. They knew this was not to be an air war. Although their prop-driven planes were armed, they were not fighter planes. They were cargo and spotter planes.
Ben did have three old PU!‘S, of the Vietnam era, each plane filled with electronically fired modern-day Gatlin guns. Each PUFF was capable of killing anything and everything in an area the size of a football field. But they were slow planes, and very susceptible to attack from ground-to-air missiles. One infantryman, armed with a Dragon, an XMBLEDG guided missile, could bring down a PUFF.
Suddenly, as if on silent cue, the area quieted down. Engines idled quietly, conversation ceased as dawn began gently touching the east, gray fingers slowly opening from a dark fist to cast silver pockets of new light over the land, bringing another day to this part of the ravaged world.
Ben spoke into a walkie-talkie. “Spotter planes up. Go, boys.”
Moments later, the planes were airborne, their running lights blinking in the silver gray of early dawn.
“Dan?” Ben spoke into the walkie-talkie.
“Here, sir,” Colonel Gray called in from miles up the road.
“Scouts out,” Ben said quietly.
Miles north, with Col. Dan Gray in the lead Jeep, the scouts moved out.
“Are we in contact with the teams of LETTERRP’S?” Ben asked.
“Yes, sir,” a young woman replied. “They are on the south side of Interstate 70, in place, waiting for your order to cross.”
“Send them across,” Ben ordered. “Have them link up with Gray’s scouts already in the area.”
“Yes, sir.” She spoke to a radio operator and a state and a half straight north, teams of Long Range Recon Patrol moved out on their lonely, dangerous and dirty job. They would be the eyes and the ears of Gen. Ben Raines.
Ben was handed a steaming mug of coffee. He sipped the hot, strong brew, mostly chicory, and walked the long lines of men and women and machines of war. He knew them all, faces if not names.
“How you doing this morning, Hector?” he asked Colonel Ramos, the CO. of the third brigade of Raines’s Rebels.
“Ready, sir,” came the reply from the swarthy Hector.
“Viv raise much hell about being left behind?” “A “sangrey fuego.”
“And that means?”
“Fire and sword, Ben.”
“But wasn’t making up fun?” Ben grinned.
The Spaniard rolled his dark eyes and said, “Si-por cierto!”
Ben laughed and punched his friend lightly on the shoulder.
Ben walked on up the line. He came to a stunned and silent halt at a familiar figure.
The two men stood for a full minute, glaring at each other.
Ben shook his head and said, “Lamar, you are just too damned old for this trip.”
Lamar Chase, ex-navy doctor, was in his seventy-first year. Ben stood for a moment, looking at his friend, remembering the first time he laid eyes on the man.
He had been traveling alone, seeing what remained of the nation, talking to the survivors-those that would talk to him. Many ran in fear upon sighting him. He had driven into Colorado, the malamute, Juno, by his side in the
