again, he was leaving. She couldn’t explain what she was doing, for fear Hartline would torture the truth out of Ed- that’s her husband. Ed walked out the day before yesterday, took the little boy, left the daughter behind. I wish it had been reversed. Sabra’s told me Hartline is looking at Nancy … you know what I mean.”
“How old is the girl?” Ike asked.
“Fifteen. Takes after her mother. She’s beautiful.”
“Hartline is, ah, somewhat perverted, is he not?” Dawn asked.
Roanna snorted in disgust. “To put it quite bluntly, Dawn, he’s got a cock like a horse and doesn’t care which hole he sticks it in.”
“Jesus Christ, lady!” Even Ike was shocked, and to shock a Navy SEAL takes some doing.
Ben resisted a smile and said, after looking at the reporter for a moment, “You have any objections to taking a PSE test, Miss Hickman?”
“Not at all,” Roanna replied. Then she smiled, and her cynical reporter’s eyes changed. She was, Ben thought, really a very pretty lady. “What’s the matter, General, am I too liberal for your tastes?”
“Liberals are, taken as a whole, just too far out of touch with reality to suit me,” Ben said, softening that with a smile.
“I’d like to debate that with you someday, General. Yes,” she mused, “that might be the way to go with the interviews. Hard-line conservative against liberal views.”
“I’m not a total hard-line conservative, Miss Hickman,” Ben informed her. “Although many have branded me as that: unfeeling and all that other garbage. How could I have been a hard-line conservative and advocated women’s rights, abortion, the welfare of the elderly and children… and everything else we did in Tri-States?”
“Yes,” Roanna said. “There is all that to take into consideration. But you did shoot and hang people there.” She fired the reporter’s question at him.
“We sure did.” Ben’s reply was breezy, given with a smile of satisfaction. “And we proved that crime does not have to exist in a society.”
“But not to the satisfaction of everyone, General.”
“But to ours, Miss Hickman, and that was all that mattered.”
“Still miss the hustle and bustle of big-city living and reporting, Roanna?” Ben brought them both back to the present.
“Yes, and I’m looking forward to the day when it will return.”
“It will never return, Roanna.” Ben dashed her dreams with a splash of hard reality. “Civilization, as we have known it, is over.”
“I have running chills up and down my spine when you say that, General.”
“It’s truth time, Roanna-and I have spoken the hard truth.”
“But you can’t know that for certain, General. That must be a personal opinion, nothing more.”
“It’s over, Roanna. From this moment on, either learn to adapt or die.”
“I believe I shall continue to cling to my dreams, General.”
Ben’s smile was sad. “Your option, Roanna. But while you’re clinging to them, use the other hand to cling to a gun.”
“Goddamn jungle bunnies fight better than I thought they were capable of,” Sam Hartline remarked to one of his field commanders. “I just didn’t believe the niggers had it in them.”
The men stood on a bluff overlooking the scene of two days of very fierce fighting between Al and Mark’s troops and the IPF and Sam’s mercenaries. The IPF and Hartline’s mercenaries had been unable to punch through the black troops dug in on a far ridge, a small valley between the opposing forces.
“For a fact,” the young mercenary replied. “For a sure fact. The niggers got more guts in them than I figured.”
Hartline suddenly laughed, an idea shaping into solid form in his twisted mind. “I got an idea,” he said. “Oh hell, yes-a damn good one, too. Max!” he called. His X.o. walked over.
“Yeah, Sam?”
“Get on a plane and go back to Wisconsin, with a side trip to Minnesota. I want you to bring me fifty of the best-looking coon gals we got-including Peggy Jones. Then round up about fifty or seventy-five old niggers, the older the better.”
The executive officer looked at Hartline, a curious glint in his eyes. “What have you got cookin’ in that brain of yours, Sam?”
Hartline laughed. “Just a damn good idea, Max-a
sure-fire way to shorten this little action. I’m going to strip the nigger gals buck-assed naked and tie them on the front of the APC’S full of our troops. We’ll mix in the old niggers with our troops coming up withand behind the APC’S. I just don’t believe the coons on that ridge over there will shoot their own kind. I think we can drive right through them and put them all to rout. Yes, indeed. Be fun to see the expression on their monkey faces, too.” He turned to another mere. “Pat, I want you to go back with Max. Round up fifty or so good-lookin’ senoritas and about seventy-five or so old greasers. Take them all over to the west front to Colonel Fechnor; tell him what I’m planning but to wait for my signal, and don’t tell Striganov. He’d nix the plan. We’ll coordinate this. I think, by God, we can shorten this fight considerably.”
“I like it, Sam,” the X.o. said. “Oh yeah, I like the hell out of it.”
“I seen me a spic gal last week,” Pat said. “Must have been about thirteen or fourteen. She looked prime. Little titties just bu.in’ out. Nipple just a-stickin’ out of the raggedy blouse. You mind if I get me a taste of that pussy “fore I send her west?”
“Hell, Pat, I don’t care. I imagine she’s been spayed, don’t you?”
“Probably so. She sure looked old enough to bleed to me.”
“Sure, go ahead. Make her suck your cock before you fuck her. Those little spic gals can suck a cock best I ever seen.”
Staying south of the interstate, using state and county roads, Ben made one final inspection of his
troops on the eve of the battle. They were stretched far too thin. But it was the best Ben could do. Two things his troops were not short on were ammunition and weapons. Stretched out all along the 140 mile battle front were .50-caliber machine guns mixed in with M-60 machine guns. Each squad had two of the big .50’s and all the ammo they could use.
Working around the clock, they had fortified their positions, digging bunkers and sandbagged foxholes; mine fields were carefully laid, using thousands of the deadly Claymores. Mortar pits were dug, sandbagged and camouflaged. Supplies were brought up and cached.
The Rebels had done all any of them knew to do. They were ready. Now came the hardest part: the waiting.
Cecil was commanding a battalion that was dug in Columbia. Ben knew there would be some wicked street fighting there, much of it hand to hand. Ben had tried to talk Cecil out of taking command, but the black man would not be deterred from the job.
“You’re too damned old for this job, Cecil,” Ben told him. “Let a younger man have it and back me up at HQ. I guarantee you, you’ll see all the combat you’ll want to see there.”
“I seem to recall I did a pretty damned good job at this in “Nam,” Cecil responded.
“Goddamn it, Cec, that was almost thirty years ago! Tell me about it, man-I was there too, you know?”
Cecil looked around him, his beret placed properly on his head, like the Green Beret Cecil had been. It was worn unlike Ben’s black beret, which he still wore in Ranger fashion: cocky.
“Ben, some of these kids weren’t even born when you and I did our thing in ‘nam. Damn, Ben. No, they’re going to need a calm head here.”
“A calm gray head,” Ben said sarcastically.
Cecil smiled. “I matured early for my age.”
Ben laughed, knowing he was not going to sway his old friend, and moved on down the line of Rebels.
He received the thumbs-up signal from each squad or platoon or company he passed. They were ready. These men and women nicknamed Raines’s Rebels by the press years back. They were ready for a good fight. They knew the odds were hard against them, knew casualties would be high and that many would die. They knew only too well the price of freedom came high-it never came cheaply.
They were ready to die for freedom. Theirs and anyone else’s that might be threatened.
