"Are you under attack?"
"Nyet."
"Have you heard of anyone under attack by Rebels?"
"Nyet."
"Stay alert, Red Bluff."
"Da."
The set went silent.
Ben leaned back, a smile on his face. By the time Striganov learned the truth, the airport's supply depot would have been stripped bare and the planes ferried back to the forward base camp of the Rebels.
The speaker crackled again. "Red Bluff."
Ben recognized the voice. Striganov.
"Red Bluff," Ben radioed.
"This is General Striganov. Is everything all right?"
"Da, cynapb."
"Speak English, you fool."
"Yes, sir," Ben replied, muffling his voice with a handkerchief.
"The airport is secure?"
"Yes, sir. Very quiet."
Ben could hear the Russian's sigh. "Very well. Go to full alert for the remainder of the night."
"Yes, sir."
The set went silent.
Ben leaned back in the blood- and brain-splattered chair and laughed.
Chapter Eight.
Ben told the radio operator to get on the scramble horn and order a planeload of pilots to be at the airfield by dawn, to ferry capturedaircraft back to the base camp.
He ordered half his personnel to rest for an hour, the other half to start loading equipment on the planes and trucks and other vehicles found at the airport.
He called his platoon leaders together. "How many did we lose?"
"One dead, three wounded."
"Bury the dead. We'll send the wounded back with the planes in the morning."
Ben looked toward the south. He wondered how Ike was doing.
Ike was cutting a throat, the hot blood of the Russian IPF man bathing his right hand in thick stickiness.
"Yuck!" Ike muttered, lowering the body to the ground. He wiped his blade clean on the Russian's shirt, then wiped his hands clean.
The southernmost outpost of Striganov's IPF forces had been neutralized without a single Rebel getting so much as a scratch.
He turned to his XO. "We'll neutralize everything between 101 and Interstate 5,"
he said. "I don't wanna get trapped with the ocean to our backs and no place to cut and run.
Six-man teams ..." He looked at a woman sergeant and grinned. "Six-person teams. Get 'em moved out pronto. We're gonna be stretched pretty thin, but what the hell? So is everybody else."
"How about the civilians?"
"They're either with us, or agin" us," Ike drawled. "And if I have to explain that, you're in a heap of trouble, boy."
His XO grinned. He was just old enough to remember that TV commercial. He saluted and left.
Ike's eyes turned toward the north. He wondered how Dan was doing.
"My good fellow," Dan said, looking at the IPF colonel. "You must realize you are in a perfectly dreadful situation."
The Russian's eyes were as cold as his heart.
Dan held out the map his Rebels had seized from the colonel's quarters. "These outposts you have Xed.
They are still operational?"
The Russian said something terribly vulgar.
"How crude! And to the best of my knowledge, physically impossible. Is that all you have to say, Colonel?"
It was.
Dan turned to Tina Raines, Ben's daughter and a longtime member of Gray's Scouts. "Shoot him."
Tina shot the Russian between the eyes, the .45 slug swelling his head before it exited out the back, removing part of the man's brain as it traveled.
Dan spread the map out on a table and studied it.
"This is going to make our mission infinitely easier." He began assigning teams to sectors.
When he was finished, his teams fanning out, he turnedto Tina. "We haven't got enough personnel to neutralize all these outposts, so I'm going to have to contact our northern teams. We test the mettle of the woods-children now."
"They'll stand," Tina opined.
"Oh, I have no doubt of that. It's these underground people I'm a bit uncertain of."
He was thoughtful for a few seconds.
"If I could just see them perhaps I'd feel better."
"You want to bet they're not looking at us?" she tossed the challenge at him.
"I think I'll pass, Tina." But he did look around him, at the dark forest with its deep timber.
Did something move in there?
Dan wasn't certain. But he thought his eyes had picked up a flash of earth-colored clothing flitting through the vegetation.
"I saw it too, Dan," Tina said.
"Yes. But what did we see?"
"A friend," she said, adding, "I hope."
Dan picked up his submachine gun. He looked at Tina. "Good luck, Tina."
She smiled and winked. "Yeah. Let's go kill a commie for mommie."
Dan laughed, loud and long. "Where in the world did you ever hear that, Tina?"
"I read it, back when I was just a kid." Tina was every bit of twenty-three.
"Oh?"
"Yeah. In one of Dad's books."
The young IPF soldier was so frightened he forgot his English and spoke in Russian.
Gray's Scout looked at Ro and Wade and the other woods-children who had captured the young IPF soldier. The young people's eyes were as cold as a glacier.
"He's asking for mercy," the Scout said softly.
Wade glanced up at the Scout. "Mercy?
Ask him how many children, both male and female, he has had sexually. Ask him how many men and women not of his race or color he has helped capture and transport to the Russian for butchering."
The IPF soldier could speak perfect English.
He dropped his eyes, refusing to meet the eyes of Wade or any of the others around him.
"Ask him," Ro said, "how many times he's killed men and women and children who refused to accept the IPF'S demands. Ask him how many of Ben Raine's Rebels he has killed. And ask him if he will tell us the location of every IPF outpost in our sector?"
The Russian soldier shook his head.
Ro met the Scout's eyes. "Would Ben Raines let him live?" "No," the Scout replied in a low tone.
Wade reached down, jerked the soldier's head up, and with one quick cut sliced the man's throat. The body flopped on the ground and then was still.
The Scout's face and eyes remained impassive. He had been warned just how savage these young people could be, and that they all, to a person, had good reason to hate the IPF and any warlord.
"We'll rest here for a time. While we're taking a break, I'll assign sectors." He walked off.
A young girl stood off to one side, but close enough to have seen the entire execution and its method. She was among the youngest of the woods-children. She was eleven. The carbine she carried was very nearly as large as she.
Her name was Lora. She did not know her last name.
She did not know if she even had a last name.
She was dressed in patched jeans and a man's flannel shirt, way too big for her, the sleeves pinned back. She carried a .38 caliber pistol in a holster belted around her slim waist, right side. A very sharp hunting knife in a sheath on her left side.
She had joined Ro's group of woods-children when she was eight, after being seized and raped repeatedly by a gang of roaming outlaws. She had managed to escape from them after a particular savage night of drinking and lust. With her blood streaking her inner thighs, so sore she could hardly walk after being raped and sodomized, Lora had slipped away from the sleeping circle of men and made her way deep into the timber of Kentucky.
But not before she killed the man who had last taken her. She had calmly and viciously, with all her strength, driven a sharpened wooden stake through his right eye, penetrating the brain.
Lora shoulder-slung her carbine and walked off to sit by herself in the shade of a huge old tree. The butt of the carbine almost dragged the ground as she walked.
Seated on the ground, she ate some berries she had picked that morning and sipped water from her canteen. Then she opened her rucksack and took out a ragged magazine she had found back in one of the buildings at the airport in the old Tri-States.
It had such pretty pictures in it.
Pictures, in color, of kids about her own age, she guessed. But they were dressed so fine, and all of them seemed so happy.
And they were so clean, with shining hair and pretty rings on their fingers. They had little gold and silver and shiny things on the bottom part of their ears.
She wondered what those things were.
But what really grabbed her attention and held it, was the fact that none of the kids carried a gun.
Not even a knife.
That seemed very odd to Lora.
And some of the girls wore fancy dresses.Lora thought she might have had a dress one time in her life. She seemed to have that memory. But she couldn't bring the memory into full light of consciousness. But she thought she had had a dress on sometime.
Maybe it was Before.