36

Gabe Trasher keyed the mike and spoke directly to the head-honcho Nazi himself. “We found him, ah, Field Marshal. We sure as fuck found Ben Raines. Over.”

A long hiss of static did well to convey the mood of Jesus Hoffman. “Positive identification? Why wasn’t he eliminated?” the CO of the NAL asked icily.

“Well, shit, we wasn’t tol’ to -ah … er - that is, our orders were to locate and identify, report in, and wait for instructions, Field Marshal Hoffman.”

Gabe could almost see the icy smile of that smug bastard. “Excellent. You are learning to be a soldier, Mr. Trasher. Discipline, order, unity. They are what we, as you Americans so crudely put it, are about. Very well. You will stand by for orders. My adjutant will give them to you.”

“Oh, one other thing, Field Marshal. This Ben Raines ain’t such hot crap nohow.”

Recalling his recent and almost endless string of disasters, Jesus Hoffman framed his question in a dangerous purr. “Oh? How is that?”

“When they hit that land mine, Raines and his personal team got jumped by a bunch of loonie-tunes.”

“What do you mean, ah, loonie-tunes?”

“Some kind of druggies. Smashed on something, all of them doin’ their own weird thing. Three of them

37 was done up like Injuns, only they were blond and as pink as you or me. Real stoner assholes, ‘cause they were carryin’ rubber tomahawks.”

“What has this to do with the military capability of Ben Raines?” Hoffman bit off. Talking with this untermensch was like rolling in slime.

“Mfaoys who was watchin’ said they got out of their vehicle -not an armored job, at that -and went sightseeing. Then the freakos showed up and nearly creamed their asses.”

“But Raines came out of it unscathed?”

“Un-wkatP Oh, if you mean he didn’t wind up with his nuts in a sack, yeah. Him an’ those chicks with him blew away all the stoners. His driver …” Gabe paused to chuckle, kept the mike open. “His driver got wasted on the same shit those freaks were takin’. Came back to the Hummer glassy-eyed and giggling. Raines about had a cow.”

Field Marshal Jesus Dieguez Mendoza Hoffman tried to envision Ben Raines giving birth to a bovine. Disgusting animal, this Trasher. But these motorcyclists were highly mobile, ai^d they did manage to obtain detail in their observations. He cleared his throat.

“My adjutant has specifics on your area of operation, but I can tell you to hold back on Ben Raines for the time being. Maintain visual contact, but do not, I repeat, do not engage. Do you understand, Mr. Trasher?”

“Uh-yeah, yeah I do. Thank you, Field Marshal.”

After receiving map coordinates of their AO, resupply points, and medical facilities friendly to the Nazis, Gabe Trasher had his fill of the sneering superior attitude of his South American allies. He signed off and set the mike aside. He turned a seething snarl on Numb Nuts Nicholson.

“You watch and see. One day I’m gonna fix the clock for that simpering Nazi cunt.”

“But first we gotta take care of Ben Raines, huh,

38 Gabe?” Numb Nuts gobbled.

A faraway look came to Gabe Trasher’s eyes. “Yeah. First we finish off Ben Raines.”

Corrie passed the handset to Ben. “Got an update from Far Eyes, General.”

Ben had been patting the head of Smoot, his full-grown Siberian husky who had been brought up with the reserve Hummer. The armored vehicle purred along the pothole-studded U.S. 81 at a steady 40 mph. “Thanks, Corrie.” Ben keyed the mike switch. “Eagle here.”

“The blackshirts have moved out, Eagle. They’re makin’ good time north on 81 toward York. That’s seventy-three miles north of Bellville, Kansas. Over.”

Ben frowned. He still outranged the R Batt by a good five miles, but he had plans for these particular Nazi scum. “Eagle copies that, Far Eyes. Keep visual contact and report every hour on the half-hour. How’s the road up your way? Over.”

A soft chuckle answered him. “Better than where you are. The Nazis are makin’ fifty miles per. They must have scrounged up every rust-bucket and junker in five states. We can follow them from ten miles off by the blue smoke.”

“Hang in there, Far Eyes. If they go to ground, mark the place and fall back. Our ETA for York is an hour-forty. Eagle out.”

Ben returned the handset to his lovely RT operator and resumed petting Smoot. “I’m glad you’re here, girl.” Then he added for Jersey what she already knew: “She can smell dope at a hundred yards since that dog handler worked with her while I was away. There may be more of those unfortunates around. Stirred up by Hoffman’s Nazis, no doubt. Or their American counterparts moving northwest.”

During the long run north, Ben Raines spent the silence in a review of what he knew of Field Marshal

39 Jesus Dieguez Mendoza Hoffman. Hoffman had a sound background in military customs and tradition, that much was obvious. He also had a solid knowledge of tactics-on a battalion commander’s level at least. The man had a hard time thinking strategically. Too often he let his arrogance get in the way of the facts.

Hoffman had committed a light brigade to the initial invasion of the U.S. and had lost them nearly to a man. From there on, he had reacted rather than initiating positive action to negate the hit-and-run tactics Ben had relied upon. In so doing, he suffered losses in divisional size. Hoffman was subject to rages, Ben noted. Question: Were they real or self-induced in emulation of his hero and god, Adolf Hitler?

Ben’s days with the CIA and before had made him wise enough to recognize that Hitler’s rug-chewing episodes were figments of American and British propaganda. The opinion makers had taken a German idiomatic expression for being furious and translated it literally. Thus, Hitler “chewed the rug” when he got bad news. Ben accepted as fact that the Fiihrer did not drop on the floor and gnash his teeth in the carpet. But did Hoffman?

Interrogations of prisoners indicated that Hoffman frequendy threw objects against the walls of his mobile headquarters, dashed fine china to the floor in a rage. One defecting general had even recounted how a direct, insulting exchange with Ben himself had sent Hoffman to the floor to kick his feet and pound his fists on the carpet like a three-year-old with a temper tantrum. No doubt Hoffman played the game with a few cards missing from the deck. But that didn’t make him any less dangerous. Ben sighed and looked out the armor-glass window of the Hummer.

Desolation greeted him. The American Nazis were burning fields as they advanced northward. Other signs of their contemptible behavior began to appear. Grease-stained food wrappings littered the verge of

40 the highway, lifted into the air by the passage of the Humvee. Boxes and scraps of cardboard lay where they had been dropped. Here and there he saw cast-off items of clothing and some toys. Obviously the loot from the unfortunate people of the Concordia and Bellville area.

When things came too easily, Ben knew, people quickly got bored. Back before the Great War, far too many of his fellow Americans had fought to get a free ride. Welfare fraud and fraud against Social Security Disability were rampant. Ben recalled with grim humor a report on a commentator’s noontime radio program one day.

It seems this fellow reported to the police that his Cadillac had been broken into and vandalized. When the officers arrived, the man gave a list of missing items. Included were an expensive CD player/stereo system and the contents of his glove compartment: $600 in food stamps. Then there was the example of the bears in Yellowstone.

They had been raiding garbage cans and getting handouts from the visitors for several years. A new park administrator decided to put an end to this. He had the bears humanely trapped and transported far away from the public areas of the park. Those who did not find their way back to their soft-hearted benefactors simply sat down and died. They had been on the dole too long to be able to return to a normal way of life.

The “Gimme!” creed and “Me first” mindset, coupled with a wimpy, bleeding-heart toleration of outrageous criminal activity, had created a deficit for the nation that tolled its death knell long before the lunatic politicians in America and abroad became tempted beyond restraint to put their fingers on the buttons … and push. For all its horrors, the Great War had been a cleansing for a sick society. By god, you’re becoming a cynic, Ben chided himself.

Beyond the window, the countryside rolled past.

41 Twilight lingered a scant hour away when Ben’s spearhead rendezvoused with his headquarters scouts. They met in a copse of cottonwood trees to the east of U.S. 81. Lt. Bob Fuller, the section leader, made a crisp report.

“Colonel Gray is holding his Three Batt short at the intersection of Nebraska 15 and 1-80. Now, the enemy, sir. They’re on the outskirts of what used to be York, Nebraska, General. About six hundred of them. There are more coming in all the time. Men, women, and kids. Some sort of meeting, like down south. They’ve occupied an old tumbledown drive-in theater. We can lead the battalion there within twenty minutes of their getting here.”

“Thank you, Lieutenant,” Ben responded. He was enjoying stretching his legs outside the Hummer after a long ride. “You can lead me there right now. I want to recee the place while the R Batt gets in position. Have your men do that, if you will.”

“Yes, sir. It’s only three miles. Uh -you plan on bringing that dog with you?”

“Smoot? Of course,” Ben said blandly.

“The Nazis have some pooches with them. If they get a whiff of your, ah, Smoot, they’ll set off a racket.”

“Take us in from downwind. I only want to be close enough to check out the place through binoculars.”

“Very good, sir. If youil come with me, sir?”

Ben and team followed in the Hummer. Lieutenant Fuller’s silenced moped made not a sound as he took rutted dirt roads that led Ben’s party first away from York, then back on what Ben assumed to be the downwind side. Near the crest of a ridge that put them back close to U.S. 81, the brake light flared briefly and Cooper, now recovered from his brief experience with the hallucinogen, stopped the Hummer. Ben eased from the back of the vehicle and followed Fuller to the crest of the ridge.

42 There he eased down on his chest and belly and produced a pair of light-gathering night glasses. Ben fitted the lenses to his eyes and scanned the terrain between them and the sagging corrugated metal fence around the drive-in. Amateurs, Ben thought contemptuously a few minutes later. They had failed to put out any security. Next he examined the tall structure that housed the screen.

A few boards were missing, and others had warped enough to wrench free of their nails. The paint had faded and chipped; large, scabrous splotches had flaked off entirely. He could still make out the sign that identified it as: 81 drive-in theatre.

“Looks like the Nazis have taken their families out to a movie,” Ben whispered to Fuller. “I’d like to slip along this ridge a ways and take a better look at the people inside.”

“Nothing to it, sir,” Fuller assured him.

Ten minutes of slow, cautious movement put them in total darkness and at an angle that exposed the occupants of the drive-in and the screen. Ben scanned the people first. They had come in all sort of vehicles. Far Eyes -Fuller -had been accurate, as well as picturesque, in his description. Rusting pickups lined up on the ridges of the drive-in beside old, spring-sagging sedans and two-ton stake trucks. Here and there a battered van stood out in blocky silhouette. The people were a shock.

Crew-cut kids, clean and neatly dressed, sat beside equally respectable looking adults. Most of the males had crew-cuts, or shaved heads. The women wore their hair close-cropped, but in feminine styles. Most of the men wore short-sleeved black shirts and trousers. The, boys wore brown shirts and black shorts. All, men and women alike, wore the red-white-black armbands so chillingly familiar to the whole world for more than a half-century. In the center of the white circles sprawled the Hakenkreuz-literally, the bent cross, Ben reflected. Twisted was more like it. Porta-43 ble generators coughed to life, and a powerful beam of light speared from a large step-van.

Images flickered to life on the damaged screen. Against a cautionary tug from Lieutenant Fuller, Ben edged closer to get a better fix on detail. As he watched, a sea of puffy, roiling clouds filled the frame. The angle changed and the shadow of an old Fokker Tri-Motor airplane was cast on the clouds. Slowly the scene dissolved to a very-medieval-looking town.

Tall stone buildings, gray and mossy with age, came into focus. A cathedral with Gothic arches and flying buttress supports filled the screen, sped on past below the point of view of the camera. Ben could almost hear the Wagnerian music swell and segue into the strident notes of the “Horst Wessel Song.”

He knew this movie well. He had seen it a couple of times before the Great War. One of those had been at a film festival, could you imagine. Touted as the cinematic genius of director Leni Riefenstahl, Triumph of the Will was the title. Commissioned personally by Adolf Hitler, she had used her directorial skill to elevate to an almost-religious rite the proceedings of the 1934 Nazi Party Congress at Nuremberg.

When Adolf Hitler deplaned on the screen and was met by an obsequious covey of sycophants, Ben pulled back. “Let’s get to my mobile CP, it should be up here by now,” he urged Lieutenant Fuller. Ben could clearly hear Fuller’s sigh of relief.

Back with his team, he found Jersey fidgety. No doubt she was miffed at being left behind. He’d rarely gotten away with that since the Battle for New York. As he had anticipated, the big eighteen-wheeler that served as his mobile command post rolled in and hissed air brakes to stop short of a ridge that concealed it from the Nazi mob in the drive-in. Quickly he outlined what he had observed.

“Our blackshirt friends are having a night at the movies. There’s about seven hundred of them in there

44 now. I suggest we wait and see what comes next.” He consulted the aviator’s chronometer on his wrist. “We have a while until Stan McDade gets R Batt in position. Corrie, get on the horn and tell Dan to hold Three Battalion where it is. Then bump Buddy and tell him I want him here with me.”

“Right away, General.” She began muttering softly into the mike.

What happened next was that six more generators wound up and the area in front of the screen, in the old days a playground for the kiddies to while away the time until darkness and the movie, lit up in bright lights. An old World War II carbon-arc searchlight illuminated the large stage constructed there.

A military band of boys eight to fourteen lined the back of the stage. Their drum major, who was a good three years shy of having to shave, raised his long baton with its ball and tip of gold, and chrome shaft. He brought it down sharply and the musicians struck up. The boys, all towheaded and crew-cut, with clear eyes, from cobalt to cerulean, their thin lips set in lines of concentration, each in the brown shirt and black shorts of the youth uniform, slammed sticks to drumheads and tootled trumpets and fifes. A glockenspiel tinkled merrily. Ben scratched his memory and identified the music as “Die Jugend Marchiert,” anthem of the Hitler Youth, Adolfs junior hate league.

“Damn them,” Ben swore vehemently. “Damn them all for what they are doing to those children.”

When the music ended, a tall, lean, deathly pale man crossed the stage in the cone of actinic light from the carbon-arc and stopped at the podium behind a bank of microphones. Cheers and shouts of “Sieg Heil!” came from the darkened recesses of the drive-in. The man, in the ebony uniform of the SS, raised his hands to silence the crowd.

“Many of you know me. For those who do not, I

45 am SS Hauptsturmbannfuhrer Peter Volmer.” He pronounced his first name Pet-ter. “I command our glorious American SS Leibstandarte Hoffman. I come to you in the name of racial purity. I come to you in the name of a nigger-and Jew-free America. I come to you in the name of Feldmarschall Hoffman of the New Army of Liberation. To bring you good news!”

At a near-hysterical pitch, the chanting of “Sieg Heil!” rose in monstrous waves into the Nebraska night. When the mob, which is what they had become, quieted, Volmer went on with his message of hate and Aryan supremacy. By that time, Buddy had arrived and the R Batt was deployed.

“What do you have laid on, Pop?” Buddy asked irreverently. He had come to take a liking to British idiom while they had fought in England.

“We have a nest of some seven to eight hundred American Nazis in that theater. Less than three days ago, it is believed they slaughtered several hundred of their neighbors who didn’t buy the super-race crap.”

“I know. We saw some of Bull’s scouts covering the grave,” said a subdued Buddy.

“I think they need a lessor* in friendly neighborhood relations,” Ben went on i glibly, in an effort to contain his outrage. \

“In other words, kick-ass time,” Jersey translated.