William Johnstone - Fire in the Ashes

A very blond-haired lady put up a hand. Ben realized then where he’d seen the woman. In Penthouse . He’d seen quite a lot of the lady in that spread. Although he knew her name, he said, “Name, please?”

“Bellever. Dawn Bellever.” She couldn’t believe the general was as old as people said he was. Except for his gray-streaked hair, he looked… well, kind of boyish. “What’s to prevent the president from sending in the Air Force and bombing us here in the park?”

“The president is not our enemy,” Ben said. “President Addison is a good, fair man—even if he is a liberal…”

That brought a roar of laughter from not only the new people but from Ben’s seasoned Rebels.

When the laughter had died down, Dawn asked, “I don’t understand, sir. Are you saying that all the rumors we’ve been hearing; by we, I mean the press—about Vice President Lowry really being the man in power, are true?”

“That is correct, Ms. Bellever.”

Ike and Cecil looked at Ben, then at each other. In all their years of association with Ben, neither had ever heard him use Ms. toward any lady.

“Would you explain, sir?” she asked.

“Gladly,” Ben smiled.

“Oh, shit,” Ike muttered. He ignored the look he received from Ben.

“Poor Jerre,” Cecil muttered.

Ben looked at him. “What is this, a conspiracy?” he asked softly.

Both men looked straight ahead, in strict military fashion.

“We must maintain military decorum, General,” Cecil said with a straight face.

“Comedians,” Ben muttered. He turned his gaze to Dawn. Very easy to look at. “Yes, we have proof that VP Lowry was really the man behind President Logan. That should not be difficult to believe—the man was a fucking idiot.”

Again, roars of laughter from the troops.

Ben said, “After Logan’s death at the hands of one of my Zero Squad members—Badger Harbin—Lowry, with the help of selected members of both houses of Congress, wormed his way into the second spot, and the second phase of Lowry’s power play was complete. Unfortunately for the American public, we have a number of people in Congress who are interested only in looking out for themselves and the devil with the citizen. It is my intention to dispose of those so-called ‘public servants’ when the government is wrested from the hands of those now in power and restored to the people.”

“What do you mean, General?” Steve Mailer asked. “Dispose of them?”

“I intend to try them for treason and shoot them,” Ben replied.

“Jesus,” someone among the ranks of the new people muttered.

A young man stepped forward and faced Ben. The young man—no more than a year or two out of his teens—had the look of a boy born into poverty and never finding his way out of it.

“Jimmy Brady, sir. Tennessee. When do our trainin’ start?”

“It’s started right now, son.”

“No, sir—I mean the killin’ part.”

Ben smiled. “You want to explain that, Jimmy?”

Jimmy spat a brown stream of tobacco juice on the ground. “Hartline’s men come to my momma and daddy’s house once they learned I was a part of the Rebel underground. They raped my momma and dragged her off. I still don’t know whether she’s alive or dead. My little sister, Lou Ann… well, was only eleven. They raped her, too. She bled to death in the dirt where they throwed her down when they finished. They tortured my daddy and then hung him. That tell you what you want to know, General?”

“Yes, Jimmy, it does. You a good shot, Jimmy?”

“As good as any man in this camp, sir. I can knock the eye out of a squirrel at a hundred yards.”

Ben looked around and found a sergeant. “Sergeant, take this man and see what he can do with a sniper rifle.”

Questions were hurled back and forth for another hour. Ben finally called a halt to the session. “You people take it easy for the rest of the day—get something to eat. P.T. and field training begins tomorrow, at 0600. I’ll see you then.”

Ben walked back to his bunker and opened a can of field rations. He ate slowly, his thoughts many. He thought once of Jerre, and again wondered why she had refused to accompany him east. She’d been moody and irritable of late.

“Probably needs to meet someone her own age,” he muttered. He could not help but think of her as a kid, even though a decade had passed since their first meeting. “God knows, the kid hasn’t had an easy time of it.”

He lay down on his bunk and closed his eyes. He was asleep in two minutes.

“I kind of backed into this thing,” a young man was saying. A small group of the new arrivals were sitting in the shade, talking.

“How do you back into being branded a traitor?” he was asked.

“Chain of events,” the young man grinned. “I was going to school at the University of Virginia. This would have been my senior year. Pre-med. I was walking down the street one Saturday afternoon with some friends; we were all laughing and joking. But not disturbingly so; not vulgar or even boisterous. I bumped into this federal cop. That’s all—I swear it. Just bumped into him. He grabbed me and tossed me against the building. Scared the hell out of me. Called me a punk… called me all sorts of names. I just couldn’t believe it. That’s when it all came rushing to me. A police state. This is really a police state.

“I looked at the cop and I said, ‘Hey, man—just fuck you!’ He hit me and I hit him back; I mean, I really knocked the snot out of him. Knocked him flat on his butt. Other cops came and arrested me. They… uh… well, they worked on me some in my cell. Stripped me and… it got pretty embarrassing and perverted, if you know what I mean.

“Well, that damned judge gave me five years for hitting that cop. Five years. I got a chance to make a break for it and took it. Hid out for several weeks until a group of young people found me and took me to Memphis. You all know the rest.”

The Rebels were a strange cross-section of Americana. College students and professors, lawyers, clerks, doctors, truck drivers, pipeliners, engineers, artists, musicians, writers—a hundred other professions that made up not just the field units of the Rebels, but people whose jobs were to stockpile and cache food, clothing, weapons, ammo, bandages, boots, socks, jackets, tents, blankets, sleeping bags, fuel, lanterns, rope and wire, tools, and the hundreds of other items essential for guerrilla warfare.

And they were becoming more skilled in hiding their true occupations from the always-seeking eye of Big Brother; from Hartline’s mercenaries, and from Cody’s agents.

It was infuriating to VP Lowry.

“I told you to lean on the families of those suspected Rebel sympathizers,” Lowry said, his face ugly and mottled with rage.

“And just as Alice Tyler predicted, it backfired,” Cody replied. “It just made the people turn against the government that much quicker. I stopped it.”

“I also told you to put a lid on the press.”

Cody’s chuckle was totally void of mirth.

Hartline sat in the VP’s office. So far he had said nothing.

Cody said, “This is America, Weston—not South America. We’ve had a free press in this country for several centuries; that isn’t something that can be squelched overnight. I…”

“I can censor the press,” Hartline said quietly. “You just give me the green light—and a written promise you’ll back me up—and watch me go to work. I’ll muzzle them so goddamned fast they won’t know what hit them.”

“How?” Lowry asked.

“Same way we did in… ah… certain countries in South America and Africa back in the mid-eighties.”