and can do the most good. If I feel the need to go into the field, I shall do just that.” He stood up. “And that settles the matter. Do we have any further questions concerning this operation?”
There were questions by the score on each man’s tongue, but they checked any vocal arguments. They all knew better than to cross Ben when his mind was made up.
“Tina is well-trained in this business of guerrilla warfare,” Colonel Gray asked the question without it being put as such. “I know, I helped train her.”
“Then by all means, use her,” Ben said, no expression on his face. “No one among us is indispensable.”
Only one man, the thought jumped into the brain of the men who sat looking up at Ben Raines.
But no one spoke the name aloud.
“Move out, gentlemen,” Ben said softly. “And good luck to you all.”
CHAPTER FIVE
I have passed the Rubicon; swim or sink, live or die, survive or perish with my country-that is my unalterable determination.
-John Adams
“It ain’t our fight,” the burly man told the young captain from Raines’s Rebels.
“Mister-was the captain stood his ground, the ground in this case being just below the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in north Georgia-“if you think it isn’t your fight, if you think the IPF won’t be in here after you and your family, you’d better think again.”
The man spat tobacco juice on the ground. “When or if this Russian and his troops get here, we’ll fight. But not before.”
“By then it may well be too late,” he was told.
“Mayhaps you be right in that,” the man replied in the peculiar mountain dialect that many families still used after centuries. “But me and mine been gettin’ by
in these mountains for more years than there was a nation, sonny boy. The Russians come in here and they’ll find us to be not so hospitable as we is to you and your soldiers … sonny boy.”
The young captain met the mountain man’s stony gaze with a look just as unflinching and unyielding. “Mister, you call me sonny boy one more time, and you’re going to be eating on the butt of this AK-47. And after I butt- stroke you, I am going to stomp your fucking guts clear out.”
“He looks and acts like he might just be able to do it, Abe,” a man called from the porch.
Good-humored laughter broke from the knot of men gathered around the troops.
Humor touched the burly mountain man’s eyes. “I do believe you’d try your best to whup me, wouldn’t you… Captain?”
A grin touched the corners of Capt. Roger Rayle’s mouth. “Yes, sir, I sure would.”
The mountain man laughed and shook his shaggy head. “All right, Captain. Come on up to the porch. Folks been a-bringin’ in food all morning. We eat and talk about this thing. We don’t get much outside news “round here. Be nice to find out what’s happenin” in the world and with these Russians!”
Abe stopped dead in his tracks and slowly turned around when Captain Rayle said, “A resurgence of Nazism, sir.”
Abe stared at him for a long moment. He blinked. “Resurgence. Good word. I believe that means-and you tell me if I’m wrong-these Russian people, the IPF, they doing the same thing that Hitler feller done back in the thirties and forties to the Jews.
Am I right?”
“Yes, sir. You are exactly right. And they must be stopped.”
By now the crowd around the stone and wood house had grown to more than a hundred men and women. They stood silently.
Abe said, “My daddy was a paratrooper in that war. He helped liberate a concentration camp. Don’t rightly recall just where it was. He told me he had seen some ugly sights in his life, during the war. Hadn’t never seen nothing to compare with that. Said them people was the poorest lookin’ bunch he’d ever seen. Made him sick, so he said. Couldn’t keep nothing on his stomach for a week or better.
“Now, as for me, I don’t know many Jew folks. Them I have known, I didn’t much care for. Too pushy for my tastes. But my personal opinions don’t matter much when it comes to another man doing a deliberate hurt to a human being “cause of race or religion. I just don’t hold with that. What is this IPF bunch doin” to folks?”
“They are taking everyone not of a pure white race-blacks, Hispanics, Asians, Jews, Indians-and operating on them so they cannot reproduce offspring. They are tattooing I.d. numbers on them. They are torturing them and conducting medical experiments on them. If a person does not have a high enough I.q., regardless of race, he is being disposed of.”
“Killed, you mean?”
“Yes, sir.”
The man spat another stream of tobacco juice on the ground. “All this is fact?”
“Yes, sir.”
A long, lean, lanky man set his coffee cup on the porch railing and stood up. “Abe,” he said, “don’t you be startin’ no meetin’ “til I get back here, now, you hear?”
“Where you be goin”?”
“To get my kin and my gun.”
Raines’s Rebels got in the first bloody, savage lick of the newly declared guerrilla war. The column of IPF troops and equipment was on a bridge in south central Iowa, crossing the Des Moines River when hundreds of pounds of carefully hidden high explosives were electronically detonated. One full company of troops was killed when their trucks plunged nose-first into the cold, dark waters of the river. Fifty were killed when the bridge exploded, hurling men and equipment and assorted arms and legs high into the air, to plunge and sink into the river.
The LETTERRP teams had allowed several IPF trucks to cross the bridge before activating the charges, cutting them off from the main convoy. The IPF troops were chopped to bloody rags of flesh and splintered shards of bone by mortar and heavy machine gunfire from the Rebels hidden in the thick brush that now grew alongside the roads and interstates of the once-most-powerful nation in the world.
By the time the IPF could backtrack and cross the river, coming up to the point of ambush, the Rebels were long gone, fading silently and quickly into the countryside, their gruesome jobs efficiently and effectively done.
Colonel Fechnor, who was commanding the troops spearheading the assault south, smiled a humorless grimace of grudging respect for the men and women of the scouts and LETTERRP’S, and for Gen. Ben Raines.
This one action-even if there were no more, and Fechnor knew there would be many more-had succeeded in its initial objective: slowing down the advance of the IPF. Now every bridge, no matter how small, would have to be inspected and inspected very carefully. Fechnor knew the Rebels would have ambush teams at every bridge and overpass along the way. If just one out of every five teams Fechnor sent out returned, he would consider that good odds.
No, Fechnor mused, this President-General Ben Raines was not going to roll over like a whipped puppy and give up. If Raines went down at all, it would be with a snarling, biting, savage action.
For the first time-the very first time-Colonel Fechnor felt that just maybe the International Peace Force had bitten off more than they could chew or swallow safely.
But, Colonel Fechnor thought, mentally shaking off the thought of defeat, he could not think that-that was treason. He was a soldier, and as a soldier he obeyed orders. He did not question whether they were right or wrong. He simply obeyed. Fechnor was the epitome of the universal soldier.
A type found in all armies. The type without which no army could exist or function. Without them, there could be no wars.
Fechnor ordered his dead buried. He stood with an impassive soldier’s face as this was done.
Then the colonel made his second mistake of that day.
“What do our scouts report on the conditions in Ottumwa?” he asked an aide.
“The city is deserted, sir. They say it is a ghost town. They don’t know where the people went. First reports of several weeks ago stated the city had several hundred residents.”
They probably left to join Ben Raines, the colonel said to himself, and he was right in that assumption. “Very
