Ready.
Back at HQ, Ben told Gale, “You will stay with Chase at the hospital. You’re a nurse, and that is where you’ll be needed. And I will not have any static from you about it. Is that clear?”
She smiled sweetly at him. Very sweetly. Too sweetly. “I have already made arrangements to do just that, General, sir. And I didn’t need you to tell me about it. Thanks just the same.”
That night, on the eve of the battle that would, although neither the Russian nor the American knew it, forever split the nation and plunge the ravaged country into a sickening slide toward barbarism, ignorance and tribal law, Ben and Gale engaged in the gentlest and most deeply satisfying love-making of their relationship. And Gale sensed with a woman’s insight on such
matters that she became pregnant.
And she knew she wanted this child more than anything else in the world.
When Ben was asleep (she could never understand how the man could quietly drop off when faced with such a monumental task as that which lay before him) she rose from their blankets to stand some distance away from Ben’s sleeping form, to stand looking up at the cloudless star-filled heavens. She spoke to and asked questions of her god, and seemed satisfied with the silent words that filled her head. As she turned to return to Ben’s side, she was startled to see a figure standing by a huge tree, gazing at her. She looked around her, curious to see if anyone else had noticed the man.
No one had, although the guards were plainly in sight all around the encampment-and that really piqued her curiosity.
Gale walked to the shadowy umbrella created by the huge limbs of the old tree and stood facing the man. She had, she concluded, never seen anything quite like him.
She studied him in silence, as he was silently studying her. “How did you get in this area without being shot?” she asked.
The old man smiled. His smile seemed to light the area around them. “You would not understand if I chose to tell you.”
“Oh yeah?” Gale looked more closely at the old man. He wore robes and sandals and carried a big stick. A staff, the word popped into her brain. His beard was long and very white. He looked older than God. “What do you want?”
The man looked at her more closely; his eyes seemed amused, then sad, or so it appeared to Gale. Finally, he said. “No, you are not the one. But you will help the man in his struggles. That will be seen to. You have my word.”
“What!” Gale reached the conclusion that this guy was not playing with a full deck of cards.
Ben and Ike and Cecil had told her about the many cults that were springing up around the torn nation. She had seen some with her own eyes during her wanderings prior to meeting Ben. This nutso had to be one of them- what else?
“I am known as the Prophet.”
“Swell,” she said dryly. “And I’m Mary. Man, you’d better be careful when you leave here. Someone could shoot you.”
His smile was gentle and knowing, and rather, Gale thought, condescending. “I have no fear of death, child.”
“That’s nice, ‘cause frankly, it scares the hell out of me.”
The old man chuckled, a deep sound from his massive chest. “You have a sense of humor. Good, you’ll need it.” The old man glanced up at the sky, as if he had suddenly received some silent message.
Gale looked up, feeling rather foolish as she did so.
“As wars go,” the old man said, “this one will be small in magnitude. But it will be enormous in its ramifications. What follows will be the beginning.”
“Beginning of what?”
“The beginning, child.”
Gale was now one hundred percent certain the old boy was at least three bricks shy of a load. Best humor him. “Right.”
“The strugglings you will all endure will be, of course, right and just and moral, but they will, I must tell you, appear futile.”
Gale shook her head. Maybe the guy had found some old acid and was tripping the light fantastic in his woolly head. “Hadn’t you best be getting on back to the ward?”
The old man smiled indulgently. “I must now tell you goodbye, child.”
On impulse, she put out her hand to touch his arm, but her hand seemed to freeze in midair. She fought to move her hand. It seemed stuck.
“No,” he said gently. “That is not permitted.”
“Are you the reincarnation of Houdini?”
“I am the reincarnation of no one, child. But I am, I can assure you of that.”
“Ah, eh, you’re what?”
But he was gone.
Gale’s arm fell to her side. She lifted it, looked at it. She shook her head. Looked around her. The old boy was nowhere to be seen.
“It was a dream,” she muttered. “Had to be, I’m dreaming, sleepwalking. Couldn’t be anything else.”
She returned to the warmth of the blankets and the soled and comforting shape of Ben. When the first shell from the IPF exploded at 0600 the next morning, Gale forgot all about the man who called himself the Prophet.
For a time.
CHAPTER TWO
It was an artillery duel for the first two days of the battle, with the combatants never catching sight of each other. For the most part, the infantry troops had little to do except stay alive and maintain their sanity under the almost-constant pounding of the big shells.
For those who had never experienced shelling, it was a frightening, numbing experience. The ground seemed to shake constantly, and it appeared that anyplace one sought in safety was the wrong place.
Both the Rebels and the IPF had to constantly shift the positions of their artillery, with the exception of Ben’s big self-propelled 155’s, which could sit back miles from the front and lob destruction and terror into the IPP’S positions with terrifying pinpoint accuracy. Ben was no gentleman at war; he used chemicals, anti-personnel, high explosive, incendiary, and beehive rounds.
Ben kept his tanks in reserve, carefully concealed and camouflaged, even though the crews and commanders were chafing to get into the fight. Ben
wanted something with which to fall back on when the situation began to deteriorate, as he knew it would. That, he knew, was only a matter of time.
The third, fourth and fifth days were ground troops days, with the infantry troops slugging it out, taking, losing, regaining and losing the same ground a dozen times.
On the sixth day, the IPF attempted to cross the interstate at six locations, sending huge numbers of troops across the concrete in what appeared to be a kamikaze-style rush of bodies.
Five sectors of the Rebels held, but the IPF broke through one line, allowing more troops to pour through and set up positions west, east and south, in the form of an open-ended box. Hector Ramos’s troops were cut off, battling lopsided odds, fighting for their lives.
In western Iowa and central Illinois, the dawning of the new day brought a fresh horror to the men and women of Juan Solis’s and Al Maiden’s troops.
A man’s scream brought Mark Terry on a flat run from his bunker, running hard up the hill to the first line of defense. A man squatted behind sandbags, his face mirroring his horror and revulsion. He seemed unable to speak. He could but point to the valley.
Hartline’s men had been unusually silent for several days, with no attempt to push past their battle lines. There had been only sporadic sniper fire from the west to keep the troops from New Africa alert-a lead reminder that Hartline’s mercs and the IPF had not forgotten them.
The sentry found his voice as he handed Mark binoculars and pointed to the valley. “Nobody could be that
