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A vast emptiness stretched out before the column, seemingly void of any living thing. The Rebels had left the looted and burned city of Laayoune behind them, after doing what they could for the few thousand residents left.
It was almost unbearably hot, and to make matters worse, the Western Sahara and the bordering nation of Mauritania were in the grip of a long drought, and the sun burning every living thing. The Rebels had removed their shirts and stripped down to T-shirts in an attempt to cool off during the day; at night it was sometimes downright cold. During the day, no vehicle air-conditioning could be run because of overheating.
“Goddamn miserable country,” Jersey bitched. “Why in the name of God would anyone in their right mind willingly choose to live here?”
“You were raised in the desert,” Cooper said. “I thought you liked this?”
“That’s what you get for thinking, Coop,” Jersey came right back. “What was that last village we passed through?”
“Guelta Zemmur,” Beth told her, fanning herself with a magazine.
“We’re in Mauritania now,” Ben said. “Crossed the
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border a few miles back. Bir Moghrein is a few miles ahead.”
“Which used to be called Fort Trinquet,” Beth injected.
“A French Foreign Legion outpost?” Cooper asked.
“I guess so. The brochure doesn’t say.”
“What does it say?”
“Not a whole lot. One paragraph stating that there is nothing there.”
“How far to some vestiges of civilization?” Jersey asked.
“About a hundred and thirty miles,” Beth replied. “Give or take twenty or so.”
“And that would be? …” Anna asked.
“Zouerate.”
“Is there anything at … whatever you called it?” Corrie asked.
“Not much.”
“What a shithole,” Jersey muttered.
There was even less at Bir Moghrein than the travel brochure mentioned-nothing but the skeletons of a few dozen long dead humans, their bones bleached white.
“This place gives me the creeps,” Cooper said, looking all around him.
“For once I agree with Coop,” Jersey said.
“What do you think, Doctor?” Ben asked the Rebel doctor who had been inspecting the bones.
The doctor stood and looked at Ben and Lamar Chase, the chief of medicine, who had just walked up to stand alongside Ben. “Disease and starvation would be my guess. Possibly bad water. There are no broken bones on any of these remains. No bullet holes in the skulls; skulls have not been smashed.”
Rebels had been testing the water supply; what there
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was left of it. “Water’s bad,” they replied. “It’s been contaminated.”
“Well, let’s get the hell out of here,” Ben said. “We’ve got a long dry pull ahead of us.”
There were about five hundred people left in Zouerate, and they were all in bad shape.
“Used to be almost twenty-five thousand people living here,” Beth stated softly.
Lamar had been observing his doctors check over the people. He left the tent and walked over to Ben. “About twenty percent of these people are dead and don’t realize it,” he said. “They are too far gone for us to be of any help. Ravaged by disease, lousy diet, bad water. If the others remain here, they’ll all be dead within a year. There is just nothing we can do.”
“Very few babies and young children,” Ben observed.
“Most were miscarried or stillborn,” Lamar said. “Those that weren’t, died within a few days or weeks of birth. The mothers just weren’t strong or healthy enough to carry them to full term.”
“And you suggest we do … what?”
“Nothing. If the people insist upon staying here, we’d be wasting time and supplies.”
Ben looked at the commander of the engineer company that traveled with the column. “Can you get the locomotive running? That’s the only way we can get them to Atar.”
“Providing Atar wants them,” Chase injected.
“I think we could get it running,” the engineer replied hesitantly.
“Corrie, have you received anything out of Atar?” Ben asked.
“Nothing, boss. Flyovers show it’s not much better than this place.”
“Damn!” Ben said.
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Another Rebel walked up. “The people say they don’t want to leave here,” he said. “They’re firm about that.”
Ben shrugged. “All right. We can’t force them and I won’t stay here and nursemaid them. Let’s get the hell gone.”
“Just like that, General?” the familiar voice of Paula Preston reached Ben.
Ben turned. “Yes, Ms. Preston. Just like that. We don’t believe in helping people who don’t want to help themselves. That is part of the Rebel philosophy.”
“I see.”
“I doubt it.” Ben turned his back to her and said, “Mount up. We’re out of here.”
Atar was like a beautiful garden flourishing in the middle of nowhere. There were gardens on every patch of ground that would grow anything, and the date palm groves were well kept. When Ben told the local militia commander of the situation in Zouerate, the man merely shrugged.
“We know,” he said, and let it go at that.
Ben did not press the point. It was not his country and certainly none of his business.
The commander was a former army officer who, before the Great War, was stationed at the military base in Atar, and who still wore part of his old uniform, with the rank of colonel on the collar. He sensed Ben’s plight and smiled apologetically. “At this stage, General, we can only help those who will make some sort of effort to help themselves. To do more would be a waste of our time and our precious resources.”
“I agree wholeheartedly, Colonel. I think you and I are going to get along. How about joining me for some hot food and conversation?”
“It would be both a pleasure and an honor, sir.”
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The airstrip at Atar was long enough and in good enough shape to handle cargo planes. The town had several doctors, and all the people needed was medical supplies, and that did not take long. Considering all that had happened, the citizens were in relatively good shape.
The Rebels soon shoved off toward Nouakchott, on the coast.
The colonel had warned Ben that conditions in the capital were grim: “Ahundred, a thousand times worse,” to use his words, than before the Great War. And Ben knew from studying old reports that they had been dismal even then.
When it became the nation’s capital back in 1960, it was an extension of the old walled city. The city was originally designed for about fifteen thousand people. By the time the Great War came, the population had swelled to about half a million. The colonel had told Ben the population now was probably over a hundred thousand.
But it was nothing more than a place for people to come and die, and the stench could be smelled for several miles.
Ben studied the Scouts’ reports on the city for several minutes, after listening to taped transmissions from the pilots doing flyovers.
“Corrie, what do the ships’ captains say?”
“They’ve had to beat back boarders,” she reported. “Finally they had to leave the harbor and head out to sea to avoid being overwhelmed.”
Ben glanced at Dr. Chase. “Give me your opinion, Lamar. It’s going to be a medical decision … at least in part.”
The chief of medicine grimaced. “The humane thing to do, the moral thing, the right thing, I suppose one could say, would be to enter the city and start seeing people. But we’re going to lose troops if we do that.
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How many looters and thieves did the sentries have to threaten, warn, and finally shoot last night?”
“About a dozen.”
“Multiply that by about a hundred thousand and you have the story.”
“Your autopsies showed what, Lamar?”
“The people are ravaged by disease. TB and cholera are rampant. The water is bad, they have no sanitation facilities, bodies are rotting in the streets. Rabies has reached epidemic proportions. If we did manage to get in without losing five to ten percent of our own people attempting to beat back those rioting for food, we would only be prolonging the inevitable. It’s my opinion that in a year, it’s going to be a dead city … no matter what we do.”
Ben nodded his head wearily and looked at a Scout. “Can you get us around the city, without getting too close?”
“Yes, sir. We’ve found a route that misses the city by miles. We won’t get anywhere close to it.”
“All right,” Ben said with a sigh. “Let’s head for Senegal. There is nothing we can do here.”
“Wise decision, Ben,” Lamar said, and headed back to the center of the column.
No one had much to say for an hour after bypassing the city. It’s not easy to leave over a hundred thousand men, women, and children to die, not even for the battle-hardened Rebels of Ben’s 1 Batt. But the Rebels realized they had no choice in the matter. The situation in Nouakchott was hopeless.
The change in landscape was subtle at first, but there was a definite change as the long column crossed over into Senegal, heading for the city of St. Louis, which
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was once the capital of Senegal and Mauritania, until the countries officially split in the 1950s.
There was a good port on the west side of the island, and the airport was usable, after some cleaning up. Scouts radioed back that the situation there was nothing like what the Rebels had found in Nouakchott.
“Let’s radio the city we’re on our way in,” Ben said.
The first roadblocks the Rebels encountered were miles from the city, manned by some sort of home guard: the first line of defense against the roaming gangs. The home guard was protecting their fields, which were planted with vegetables of all sorts.
“Day and night, General,” a well-spoken, middleaged man who was commanding this detachment said. “The people try to steal what is not theirs to take. We don’t want to shoot them, but warning shots no longer have any effect.” He shook his head. “We have to survive.”
“I understand,” Ben told him. “And if you let one in, soon there will be one million storming the gates, so to speak.”
“That is correct, General. And then no one will survive. We are strong enough to keep the hordes out, but not strong enough or well armed enough to go out into the countryside in force to hunt down and kill the gangs.”
“We can help you solve that little dilemma,” Ben later told a group of civic leaders, after the problem was repeated to him at a meeting. “But let me make one thing very clear: we are not peacekeepers, ladies and gentlemen. When we go after an objective, we don’t play war games with rules. We smash the enemy, we grind them down into submission, and we take damn few prisoners.”
That was met with broad smiles and affirmative nods.
Ben returned the smiles, thinking: Now we get down to doing what we do best. “Consider it done,” he assured the group.
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“We hunt them down,” he told his company commanders, “and we kill them. We take prisoners only as a last resort. We will not offer them surrender terms. The only thing to do in this country, and probably every country we visit, is to rid them of the gangs that are the major stumbling blocks toward their rebuilding. We came here to help those who have the desire to help themselves. So let’s do it.”
The Rebels trapped the first bunch of thugs and hoodlums in the ruins of a village about thirty miles from the city. After the helicopter gunships did their thing with rocket and machine-gun fire, the Rebels moved in and finished the job. They took no prisoners but did leave two very frightened gang members alive, cowering among the torn and mangled dead.
Ben stood over the two men and stared down at them. Through an interpreter, he told the men that if they wanted to stay alive, they’d better run far and fast, don’t ever come back, and warn other gang members if they wanted to live, to do the same.
The two men took off running and did not look back.
“Count the dead,” Ben ordered.
Nearly two hundred were tossed into a shallow mass grave scooped out by ‘dozers.
The Rebels moved on.
With Mike Stafford swinging his 18 Batt around north to south near the border, and moving west, Ben and his 1 Batt working east, the gangs could either go north into the desert, or south. Or they could stand and face the Rebels and make a fight of it … and die.
Most chose to run south.
All over the top of North Africa the same scene was
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being repeated. The gangs of criminals were meeting a force unlike anything they had ever encountered. A force of savage warriors who seemingly operated without rules, killed without emotion, and took very few prisoners. Bruno Bottger had not warned them about the Rebels.
Within two weeks, the area between St. Louis and Matam was declared clean of gangs … and the residents slowly began moving out of the crowded cities and towns and back into the countryside, in an attempt to pick up their lives and begin anew.
Ben and his 1 Batt headed south, toward Dakar, hugging the coast, while Mike Stafford and his 18 Batt worked south toward Bakel, following the river that separated Senegal and Mali.
Dakar, Ben was warned, was a mixture of gangs and decent citizens, all trying to survive through the hard times: the former through criminal activities, the latter by legal means.
All that was about to change with the arrival of the Rebels.
“The Yoff Airport is in pretty good shape, all things considered,” Ben was told, after receiving reports from Scouts and from flyovers. “A day’s work and we can have it up and operating. The port is in good shape.”
“Gangs?”
“About a hundred different gangs operating out of the city. Protection, extortion, slavery, strong-arm stuff-you name it and they’re doing it. And doing well with it.”
“Will the locals work with us in bringing a halt to it?”
“Doubtful, General. Just like the old days back in the States, they’re scared to cooperate.”
“Well, then,” Ben said with a smile. “I guess we’re going to have to show them how it’s done.”
The Scout laughed. “Somehow, sir, I just knew you’d say that.”
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“Yes, I know who the hoodlums are,” the merchant spoke through an interpreter. “Every one of them. All of us along this block know their identity. But if we cooperate with you, they will kill our families. No, sir. I cannot do it.”
“They can’t kill your families if they’re not alive,” Ben told the man.
The merchant stared at Ben for a long moment. “That would be the only way this city will ever know peace and prosperity again, General.”
“That’s the way we operate. We don’t play games with criminals.”
“They have guns and grenades,” the merchant said, but Ben could tell he was wavering.
“We have bigger guns and more powerful grenades.”
The merchant suddenly smiled. “I will do as you ask, General. And so will the others along my block.”
The back door suddenly burst open and Jersey and Cooper threw a young man inside. He slid on the floor on his face. He was butt-ugly before he hit the floor, so the slide really didn’t hurt his looks any.
“You will die for this, you coward!” he hissed at the merchant.
The interpreter told Ben what the punk had said and Ben kicked the hoodlum in the face with the toe of his
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boot. Several teeth abruptly left the young man’s mouth and went bouncing around on the floor.
A policeman stood by watching the scene very nervously. The local police, those that weren’t on the take, were largely ineffective.
Ben smiled down at the hoodlum who was looking up at him, blood leaking from his mouth. “Oh, I don’t think so, bub.”
There were three Rebels in every store along a five-block downtown area, both sides of the street. They had slipped in earlier and taken up positions. Two were armed with M-16’s, the CAR version, the third armed with a pump-action, sawed-off, twelve-gauge shotgun, loaded with 00 buckshot, three-inch magnums.
A prearranged hand signal had been settled upon to warn the Rebels when a gang member entered the shop. It wasn’t a long wait for Ben, Jersey, and Anna, in the back room of one shop. Ben’s company commanders did not like the idea of him being right in the middle of things, but he was the boss, and they knew better than to argue with him.
Ben didn’t need the hand signal to tell him a punk had entered the store. Ben could smell the bastards from a hundred yards away.
Jersey listened to her headset for a moment, then whispered, “Corrie says gang members are entering every store along the way. Guess the shopkeepers were leveling with us: this is collection day.”
“This is the day they get sent right straight to hell,” Ben returned the whisper.
Anna smiled, a strange savage moving of the lips. The young woman could be almost bloodthirsty at times. But, as Ben often had to remind himself, she grew up fighting gangs of punks and hoodlums and other types
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of human slime. She hated punks just as much as Ben did, and that was saying a mouthful.
Ben clicked the shotgun off safety.
The punk facing the shopkeeper shook his fist at the man and the two with him laughed. Then the punk jerked out a pistol. Ben didn’t have to understand the language to know the shopkeeper was being threatened and cussed. Ben stepped from behind cover and gave the hoodlum a full load of 00 buckshot.
From a distance of about fifteen feet, the load of buckshot nearly took the thug’s head off. The impacting lead knocked him out the front door. He sprawled in front of the store in a pool of blood.
Jersey and Anna stepped around Ben and gave the other two bursts from the weapons. They joined their friend outside, in front of the store.
All up and down the block the sounds of shotguns and M-16’s could be heard, roaring and clattering. It lasted for no more than a minute, then a strange silence followed.
Ben stepped past the shocked shopkeeper and walked outside, looking up and down the street. Rebels were dragging bodies out of the stores, dumping them unceremoniously in the gutter. Several Rebel deuce-and-a-halves appeared. Using local help, the bodies were tossed into the covered beds of the trucks and hauled off to the mass grave that had already been scooped out of the earth, well outside the city.
Ben carefully rolled a cigarette and lit it. The shopkeeper appeared by his side. “Friends of the dead thieves will stop by for a visit later tonight. They will attempt to burn my shop in retaliation for this.”
“We’ll be here,” Ben assured him.
“Others will be back tomorrow,” the shopkeeper persisted.
“We’ll be here then, too,” Ben said.
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The shopkeeper smiled. “Is this the way they do it in America?”
“No,” Ben told him. “But it’s the way we do it in my part of America.”
The Rebels stayed in the city for ten days, Chase and his medical personnel keeping busy seeing people, Ben and his people keeping busy dealing with punks.
At the end of the week, the Rebels had brought the reign of lawlessness and near anarchy to a stop, putting nearly two thousand punks in mass graves.
New city officials had been elected in fair elections (replacing the old corrupt officials-some of whom had been promptly hanged by extremely irate citizens, after very short and highly emotional trials) and the police force had been completely revamped.
Rebel political officers had worked closely with the local hierarchy and trade agreements had been signed establishing trade between the SUSA and the country of Senegal.
Gangs of punks, thugs, and various other types of human vermin had fled the city in droves aftxjr the first seventy-two hours of retribution, knowing if they stayed their future was going to be very short, with a very abrupt cessation of life coming at the end of a rope or a bullet.
For the first time in years, Dakar was a peaceful city.
“Your concept of justice is rather harsh, General,” Paula said to Ben on the evening before the column was due to pull out. She had poured a mug of coffee and seated herself across from him. It was the first time she’d had anything to say to him in a week, which suited Ben just fine.
“But it works,” Ben said shortly, hoping to end the conversation before it could get started.
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His remark didn’t faze her. Paula stared at him for a moment, then sugared and creamed her coffee and slowly stirred it. “If what I’ve seen so far is your method of dealing with the poor unfortunates who are forced into a life of crime, I don’t want any part of it.”
“I can arrange for a plane to pick you up in the morning,” Ben said quickly.
She didn’t blink. “Forget it. I’m here for the duration. I am going to report you to the United Nations, General.”
Ben laughed. He wiped the tears from his eyes and said, “Lady, I don’t care who you report me to. Send out as many reports as you like.”
“Oh, I have, General. I have sent dispatches to all the major newspapers outside of the SUSA. They are sending reporters ASAP.”
“Are they, now?”
“Yes. I want the world to see the conditions here in Africa and especially your methods of dealing with unfortunates.”
“Oh, my!” Ben smiled at her.
“You think it’s funny, don’t you?”
“Sort of, Ms. Preston. Tell me, who is going to provide food and water and shelter and protection for these guardians of the Constitution?”
“They’re bringing everything they need,” she said smugly.
“Are they, now?”
“Yes.”
“Well, that takes a real load off my mind. My goodness, I was worried about their welfare. I certainly wouldn’t want anything to happen to any of them. I don’t know if I could endure that.”
“Your humor is grotesque.”
“Thank you.”
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“My God, General, I didn’t mean that as a compliment.”
“Oh? Well, sorry about that.”
She narrowed her eyes and stared at him for a moment before realizing that he was putting her on. She sighed and took a sip of her coffee. “I’m beginning to believe you cannot be insulted, General.”
“It’s been tried by the best, Ms. Preston.”
“I can just imagine. Whatever happened to Ben and Paula?”
Ben smiled. “You got all stiff and formal on me, Ms. Preston.”
“For that, I apologize, Ben. But I won’t apologize for calling the press in.”
Ben shrugged his indifference. “I think most of them know by now they’ll be on their own here. I won’t nursemaid them.”
“Those two or three reporters who write favorably of you probably won’t be along on this trip.”
“I know. I’ve been advised of that.”
“You were advised? …” She spoke softly and let that trail off into a moment of awkward silence. “Then you knew all along that I had alerted the press?”
“Sure.”
“And you just let me ramble on?”
“Why not?”
She flushed. Cleared her throat. “Does anything happen in the Rebel Army that escapes your attention?”
“Not very much, Paula. Tell your reporter friends to link up with us in Banjul, Gambia. I’ll have my people alert them when the airport is secure and they can come in. I’ve already had the ship captain who is bringing their vehicles and supplies over alerted to hold off attempting to dock until he receives word that the dock area is safe and secure. He’ll lay a safe distance offshore until he gets word.” Ben pushed back his chair and
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stood up. “We’ll be pulling out of here at dawn tomorrow. Nice talking with you, Paula.”
Ben walked away and Dr. Chase sat down, a smile on his face.
“What are you grinning about?” Paula asked.
“You’ll learn not to try to get sneaky with Ben Raines, Paula. The man invented the word.”
“I’m beginning to think you’re right, Lamar.”
Lamar’s grin faded and his eyes grew serious. “Paula, warn your reporter friends not to cross Ben. Ben doesn’t like the press, and he believes strongly that the press has no business anywhere near a war zone. He’s not going to cut them any slack. If they get into trouble, they’re on their own. I’ve gone over the list of reporters Ben’s people intercepted from your State Department transmissions. As far as I can tell, they’re all a pack of whiny left-wingers who pee their lace-trimmed drawers at the sight of a gun and fall into a foaming fit of indignation when some punk gets shot. Paula, he’s shot reporters for filing a biased story.”
Paula’s smile quickly faded at that. “You and Ben think quite a bit alike, don’t you, Lamar?”
“Quite a bit, Paula. We’ve been together a long time.”
“These men and women will report what they see.”
“Will they, Paula?” Lamar questioned. “Or will they report what they want to see?”
“Well, we’re beating the rainy season,” Ben said, when the column was about an hour’s drive from the Gambian border. “But not by much.”
“17 and 18 Batts are reporting the roads are in really bad shape,” Corrie said. “Slowing them down to about ten miles an hour, tops.”
“They’ll get worse, much worse,” Ben warned. “The
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rainy season is not far away. And when that happens the roads will turn into a quagmire of red mud.”
None of the team asked how Ben knew that. They did not inquire into Ben’s past … although all knew that Ben had done contract work for the CIA as a young man just out of the service, and some of that work had been in Africa.
“The column’s going to have to stop,” Corrie announced. “There is some sort of old military truck stalled in the road ahead.”
“Let’s get out and stretch our legs,” Ben said, opening the door and stepping out onto the road.
He leaned against the big wagon and rolled a cigarette. All around him lay creeks and swamps, foreboding looking even in the midday.
A strange stillness lay over the land, and Ben puzzled about that, for this area was known for its chattering monkeys and squawking parrots.
“Jersey,” he said softly.
“Yeah, boss?”
“Tell Corrie I said to put everybody on high alert, but to do it quietly and easy. I’ve suddenly got this real bad feeling about this place.”
“You are not alone, boss.”
Corrie quietly issued the orders and the Rebels began unassing from the trucks, nonchalantly appearing, but all the while they were seeking out the best defensive positions along the road. Tank commanders were talking on another frequency, ready to button up and swing their turrets, staggered left and right.
Ben reached into the big wagon and pulled out a rucksack containing several dozen filled magazines for his CAR and for his team. He had already picked out a good position in a ditch just a few yards from the road, and with his eyes had told his team where they were going when trouble started.
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Jersey stepped close and stuck a stick of chewing gum into her mouth. “Wagon’s going to get full of holes, boss.”
“Better it than us,” Ben said with a smile. He cut his eyes to Cooper. “What’s Coop looking so worried about? An ambush is nothing new for any of us.”
“He’s worried about his recently acquired collection of filthy magazines. He picked diem up back along the way. Really nasty ones. They’re in the truck right behind our wagon.”
Ben chuckled. “These real juicy magazines, hey, Jersey?”
“Filthier than any I’ve ever seen him read. And Cooper has some real gross magazines.”
Before Ben could reply, Anna said in a whisper, “Movement in the swamp, in front and behind us.”
“I wonder who they are?” Beth questioned, getting ready to jump into the ditch in front of them. “Gangs usually aren’t this smart.”
“We’ll question any prisoners we take,” Ben replied.
“If we take any,” Anna said.
“There is always that to consider,” Ben agreed.
Out in the swamp, someone got anxious and rose up from behind a log. A Rebel stitched him with a burst from his M-16 and the fight was on.
Ben and team jumped for the ditch.
“Well, crap!” Beth said, from her position on the far left side of the line. “I landed right in a pile of shit!”
“Probably monkey shit,” Ben told her.
“Thanks a lot,” Beth replied.
Then there was no more time for talk as the as yet unknown enemy opened up from both sides of the swamp.