Judgment in the Ashes, page 19
“I suppose you’re right about that,” the doctor grudgingly admitted.
“If he wanted to be found, he’d send us a signal of some sort. Amid all the horsing around with this colonel, Ben managed to give us his name so our intel people can put together a dossier.”
“I’ve been in the military all my adult life, Ike. I can truthfully say I have never met a man quite like Ben Raines.”
“Neither has this Colonel Runkel,” Ike said, a grimness behind his words. “And he’s about to find that out the hard way.”
Ben slept well that night, despite his going to sleep with only a cold supper, no coffee, and no fire to warm him before he crawled into his blankets.
He was up long before the sun and in position about two hundreds yards from the enemy camp an hour later. If he could get lead into Colonel Runkel . . .
A slight movement to his left put an end to Ben’s musing.
Well now, Ben thought. Either the man is so good I missed him coming in, or he’s up to take a leak, and I suspect the latter.
“Rolf?” the softly called question came from the sentry that Ben had spotted about twenty-five yards ahead and just to his right while getting into position.
“Yes. Time to tighten our perimeters. You’re the last one to come in, and you’re late.”
“My watch must be slow. I have eight minutes to go.”
“No one has seen anything this night,” Rolf said, moving closer. “We are playing a fool’s game, I think.”
“I certainly think so. This Raines person would not deliberately warn us of his attack plans. The colonel is overreacting, I believe.”
Ben lay on the dew-damp new spring grass and smiled in the darkness. You just keep on believing that, boys. Right up to the time I put a bullet in you.
The problem is, I’m not sure what this Colonel Runkel looks like. And if he’s any good at all, and he probably is very good, he will be wearing no insignia and his men will not salute. And he won’t necessarily be an older man.
“No word yet on our reinforcements?”
“Nothing. They’ll be here, don’t worry about that. Come on, let’s tighten it up before the colonel has a fit.”
Ben heard soft laughter and then the whisper of boots as the sentries moved away, closer to the camp.
Reinforcements on the way, Ben silently mulled that over. But how the hell are they getting here? Ben gave that some thought.
They have to be coming in from the north, that’s where our lines are the thinnest, manned only by a small force of American and Canadian militia. That is the only way a force of any size could get through. They’re jumping in. HALOing, probably, in small teams. Free-falling thousands of feet and walking in. I’ve got to get that word to Ike . . . somehow. But I don’t know how many or when. Hell, they might already be on the ground, probably are, and making their way south.
Shit!
Does this, should this, change tonight’s plans? Ben thought about that. No, he concluded. If anything, I’ve got to make it succeed, with better results than I originally planned.
Suddenly, there was activity in the camp. Dark forms began stirring around, stretching, yawning, getting the kinks out of muscles stiff from sleeping on the ground. Ben could just imagine the soft grumbling of the men just awakened.
He stole a glance at his watch. About forty-five minutes before good light. He cut his eyes to the east. Already there were silver shards appearing, streaking the sky.
He decided to move in a few yards closer and by the time he had closed the distance fifty yards, it was light enough for some shooting. Ben uncapped the scope and sighted in. He would be shooting slightly downhill, and he compensated for that. He saw an older man that he pegged as a senior sergeant; he just had that look about him. Ben sighted him in.
A second later the man was on the ground, kicking out the last of life. Ben worked the bolt, shifted the muzzle, and drilled another man, dusting him from side to side. Two on the ground.
Ben spotted a leg sticking out from behind a tree and blew the knee into a sackful of pebbles. He could hear the man screaming from a hundred and fifty yards away.
Another man grabbed a rifle and came charging up the hill, throwing all caution and training to the wind. Ben shot him in the gut and the man folded over as if he’d been hit with a sledgehammer.
Ben quickly reloaded and shifted to a position he’d picked out while settled into his first firing post.
But there were no more targets. Runkel’s men had dropped behind good cover and were not moving. But Ben had cut the odds down even more. Now it was time to get the hell gone. Ben vanished into the brush and timber.
With a soldier’s intuition, Runkel sensed when Ben had left. The colonel carefully stood up and surveyed his camp. It was a grim sight that greeted his eyes. Three of his men dead or dying and one crippled. Runkel softly cursed Ben Raines, but there was grudging respect behind the vile oaths.
Hugo Runkel had been a professional soldier for thirty-five of his fifty years, having served in various armies, under various flags, all around the world. And he knew that he was up against a solid professional warrior.
“All right, General,” he whispered. “Now we know each other well. The ground rules have been laid. No quarter, no mercy expected from either side. So be it.”
Runkel looked at the aid man, working on the one man still alive. “How is Raiser?”
“He’ll never walk again, Colonel. That round shattered the knee.”
More wounded men, Runkel thought. Runkel knew well, as did all combat men, that a wounded man took at least two able men to care for and carry.
“Do we pursue, Colonel?” one of his men asked.
Runkel shook his head. “No. That is probably what Raines hopes we’ll do. He’s out there, lying in wait, to ambush any who follow.” Runkel stood silent for a moment, then he waved at two men. “You two, head out to pick up his tracks. But slow and easy and with the utmost of caution. Let’s try to throw a net around the general. Once we’ve done that, we can start closing the noose.”
Runkel’s men lost Ben within a half mile after leaving camp. Ben had found a rocky piece of ground at the base of a mountain and stayed with the rocks, being very careful where he placed his boots. When the rocks ended and grassy ground took over, Ben turned toward the mountain and started upward. After climbing for about a hundred yards, he turned again, onto a level space filled with scrub brush and hardy mountain vegetation, and once more stayed with the rocks for half a mile, all the while steadily but gently climbing. After an hour, he was forced to stop for a rest. He was recovering from his fall, but was still not a hundred percent, and suspected it would take several more days before he was fully back to snuff.
Nestled amid the rocks, safe from being spotted, except by aircraft—and he was reasonably sure that Runkel did not have any of those—Ben sampled some of the field rations he’d taken from the dead soldiers. They tasted the same as the rations issued to the Rebels: edible, and that was about all one could say for them. But they filled his belly. Ben had refilled his canteens from a spring that morning, and dropped in purification tablets. He washed the rations down with water and dozed as the sun rose higher in the sky, warming him and lulling him into sleep.
He awakened after about an hour and uncased his binoculars, carefully scanning the terrain below and on both sides of his location. He could see nothing. Either Runkel’s men had given up, or they were following the false trail that Ben had laid out for them the day before. He smiled, hoped it was the latter, for if that was the case, unless those tracking him were highly skilled and very, very careful, they were soon going to be in a world of hurt . . . or very dead.
For Ben had booby-trapped the trail he had so carefully laid out. There were man-traps all along the trail he had made through the timber.
Ben picked up his weapons and started down the rocky slope. He headed east, not west, deeper into the wilderness. Tonight he would give Colonel Runkel a bump and bait him some more, all the while alerting his own people to the infiltrators coming in.
Ben smiled. Then he would really start making this game interesting.
EIGHT
Runkel looked down at the body of one of the men he’d sent out to track Raines. He was headless, having been decapitated by a grenade, set chest-level along the trail, tripped by a boot catching on a vine strung ankle-high.
What remained of his team began looking nervously around them. This Ben Raines was truly a devil.
Runkel pointed toward two men. “Find Bergman,” he ordered in a low voice. “Since he’s not responding to my radio calls, I can assume he’s dead.”
Gingerly, the men began moving up the trail.
“The rest of you bury the corporal,” Runkel said, a weariness to his voice.
Runkel’s team was slowly and insidiously being whittled down. But it wasn’t the loss of men that bothered him so much as it was the toll Raines’s actions were taking on morale.
His men were becoming sullen and tense, and worse, they were afraid. He could see the fear in their eyes, and that infuriated him. One man out there, having fired no more than ten or twelve shots all told, had done what an entire platoon had not been able to do.
But so far, Raines had not attempted to attack any of the three other teams in the wilderness. Only Runkel’s. The colonel softly cursed. He lifted his walkie-talkie.
“Team two?”
“Colonel,” came the almost immediate response from team two, working an area about five miles away, to the north.
“You have seen no sign of the general?”
“Nothing, sir.”
“Team three?”
“Negative, Colonel,” came the response from the team working the area to the south. “No sign of the man.”
“Team four?”
“Nothing, Colonel,” was the reply from the team working the area to the west.
“Well, where is the son of a bitch!” Runkel snarled. “If he is working his way east, why is he doing it? The nearest Rebel troops in that direction are hundreds of miles away. What in the hell is the man doing?”
The late spring winds sighed in reply, ruffling the newly budded leaves and gently moving the rapidly growing grass just beyond the tree line.
The beauty of Mother Nature’s reply was lost on Colonel Runkel.
Runkel slowly turned, doing a three-sixty, his eyes searching all around him. “Where the hell are you, Raines?” he whispered. “And what in the hell are you up to?”
Ben had listened to the radio calls while resting in a copse of trees. So there were three more full platoon-sized teams looking for him. Say . . . a hundred men, all told. Maybe more—probably more. Standard company-sized. Not very good odds, Ben had to admit.
But the radio calls had not given him any indication of the areas the other teams were working. He would have to guess and play that loose until he could be sure. Runkel would never think, not at first, that Ben would head east, so it was easy to assume that one team was working to his west, preventing, or attempting to prevent, Ben from returning to his own lines in that direction.
So that left two teams working north and south of his location. It was an educated guess on Ben’s part, but he had no way of knowing just how accurate his guessing was.
Not yet, anyway.
Assuming, and that was a lousy word for a soldier to use, his guessing was correct, what to do about it?
Well, first thing was to warn Ike of the infiltrators, and then to lead Runkel and his men deeper into the wilderness. If he could somehow convey his plans to Ike while putting the needle to Runkel, and if Ike caught on, he would then drop teams behind the infiltrators and catch them from the rear.
If. Biggest little word in the dictionary, Ben’s father used to say.
“Hey, gooberlips!” Ben’s voice startled the radio tech. “You, Runkel-Funkel, whatever your name is. Are you listening?”
With only a slight narrowing of his eyes and his suddenly stiff back expressing his true inner feelings, Colonel Hugo Runkel picked up the mic. “I’m here, Raines.”
“Resting on your ass savoring past glories, Colonel? That’s about all you’ve got left, isn’t it. Since you started pushing me east, you’ve struck out every time we’ve met.”
Miles away, Ike’s listening posts had begun both taping the conversations and taking notes.
“I am not driving you east, Raines.”
“Well, I sure as hell can’t go west, now, can I,” Ben responded. “I’d run smack into more of your people. That would be rather stupid on my part, wouldn’t it?”
“You’re doing all the talking, Raines. Are you getting lonesome out there all by yourself?”
Ben laughed. “Not at all. I’m having too much fun killing more of your men each day. Oh, by the way, Sunkel, my people have captured or killed most of those infiltrators that were coming down from Canada to link up with you.”
“You lie, Raines. I spoke with . . .” Then Runkel realized what Ben was doing and bit back his words The son of a bitch had tricked him.
Runkel knew then that Raines’s people had set up listening posts around the area and were monitoring everything he said.
“Good-bye, Raines,” the colonel said. “We shall speak no more.”
Ben clicked off the radio to conserve the batteries. Runkel had finally caught on. Well, it had gone on longer than Ben had felt it would when he began. He only hoped that the Rebels manning Ike’s listening posts—that’s if they were even set up and operating—had taped it all. If they had, Ike could act immediately and the infiltrators would be in a fight for their lives . . . which they would lose.
But for now, Ben shifted positions and searched until he found a suitable place to spend the night. He brewed his coffee while he ate some rations, and then smoked a cigarette and went to bed. He wanted to whittle down the odds a bit more come the morning.
Ike listened to the tape and smiled. A minute later, he ordered every helicopter gunship and fixed-wing aircraft that could fly up and searching for the infiltrators.
“All that is very good, but Ben gave us no indication where he is,” Dr. Chase bitched.
“He feels he can do more good out in the field, Lamar. Obviously, he’s taking a toll on the enemy troops out there.”
“He’ll run out of rations before long. If he hasn’t already.”
Ike couldn’t argue with that. But he had a hunch that Ben was taking field rations from the enemy soldiers he killed. Still, he wished he could think of a way to get Ben resupplied. The techs at the listening posts were triangling each signal, and Ike had a pretty good idea where Ben was . . . in a rough sort of way. But any air drop would give away Ben’s position.
“When he gets hungry, he’ll let us know, Lamar. Ben’s not going to miss many meals.”
“It wouldn’t hurt you to miss a few,” Chase popped right back.
Ike sighed.
Chase held up a hand. “All right, all right, Ike. I’ll get out of your hair. But I’ll leave you with this: When is Ben going to get it through his head that he is the commander of a huge army, not a one-man wrecking crew?”
“Age will take care of that, Lamar. All in good time.”
“Providing he lives that long,” Chase came right back, then walked out.
The soldier’s foot stepped into the punji pit, the stakes ripped into his calf, and Ben was out of cover and on him like a hungry puma, stilling the man’s panicked cries of pain before they could get out of his mouth. Ben wiped the bloody blade of his knife on the dead man’s shirt and quickly fanned the body, taking the man’s grenades and field rations: food for another day. But Ben knew that, sooner or later, Runkel would catch on to what he was doing and start sending his people out with no rations.
Ben left the body where it was and slipped away, moving silently as a puma through the brush . . . Ben smiled at that thought. Well, an older puma, at least.
But this test of Ben’s endurance and effectiveness in the field was proving one thing: Ben still had what it took to survive in the field. And he doubted Ike or Chase or anyone else would argue that point with much enthusiasm.
Ben squatted down at the edge of a meadow, staying well inside the timber and surveyed the terrain. He could see nothing out of the ordinary, but knew that meant nothing. He also knew that he had been awfully lucky so far. One misstep on his part and he would be dead, cooling meat, and that was not something he relished.
He decided not to try the meadow and slipped back into the timber and brush. Since the Great War, there had been a virtual explosion of growth in the nation’s wilderness areas, and natural cover was abundant . . . if one knew how to use it effectively, and Ben certainly did.
Ben checked his watch—almost noon, and his stomach was telling him to put something in it. He crawled into a thick stand of brush and made himself comfortable. He peeled the wrapper off a hi-energy bar and slowly ate it, washing it down with sips of water. On a hunch, he slipped the earplug into one ear and turned on the radio, letting it scan. He was both surprised and pleased to hear Ike’s voice fill his head.
“Colonel Runkel, I repeat, this is General Ike McGowan. We have stopped your infiltrators and to continue this fight will be pointless on your part. If you surrender, I give you my word you will be treated in accordance with the rules of the Geneva convention and shipped back home. Please respond to this message, Colonel.”
“This is Colonel Runkel, General. I’m listening.”
“You can’t win this fight, Colonel. Give it up.”
“I may well die out here, General. But the odds of my taking your General Raines with me are slowly swinging over to my side. And I think you are well aware of that.”
So Ike got my message and chopped up the incoming reinforcements, Ben thought. Well, my people probably got many of them, but I bet a few got through.
“Ben is an ol’ curly wolf, Colonel. Don’t ever sell him short.”
