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The Rebels split up into squad-sized teams, spread out east to west, and advanced about 50 yards northward. They saw absolutely no sign of human life.

Ben and his team were on the eastern edge of Battery Park, picking their way slowly through the litter and rubble. Except for the faint cry of sea birds that circled and hovered at water’s edge in a constant search for food, there was nothing to be found but an eerie silence in the ruins.

“Come on, come on, you bastards!” Jersey muttered, just loud enough for Ben to hear the words. “Let’s mix it up.”

“Notyet, Jersey,” Ben told her. “We’re too concentrated down here. The area will start widening out when we reach Battery Place. We’ll be spread thinner. That’s when we’ll start seeing some action.”

“Third and fourth waves are ashore,” Corrie said. “Chase is setting up his hospital.”

Battery Park, situated on a landfill at the extreme south

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end of Manhattan, had not taken the pounding that other areas of the city had suffered several years back when the Rebels launched their all-out assault against Manhattan. The park consisted mostly of monuments and sculpture, and much of it was still standing, silent sentinels and tributes to the dead. The sun had not yet broken through the fog and the light mist continued to fall, giving the park a ghostly, surreal look.

Gunfire suddenly shattered the quiet and everyone hit the damp ground and lay still.

“Contact,” Corrie said. “Of the hit-and-run type. Some punks tried an ambush that didn’t work. One Rebel slightly wounded and several dead punks. To our northeast, between the park and State Street.”

“Damn fog,” Ben muttered, heaving himself up to his knees and squatting there trying in vain to see through the soup. “We’re chasing ghosts out here.”

“Meteorologists have now changed their minds,” Corrie said. “A front is moving in and colliding with another, or squeezing it, or whatever those things do. They’re predicting heavy rains today and tonight.”

“Break out the ponchos,” Ben said, disgust in his voice. “What a miserable way to start a push.”

“Scouts report movement along Battery Place and that intersection where State runs into Broadway,” Corrie said. “You called that one right, boss.”

Ben rose to his boots. “Let’s go mix it up, gang. Lousy weather or not, we came to do a job.”

The clatter of M-16s, the stutter of machine guns and the occasional boom of a grenade reverberated through the rain and the fog as the Rebels slowly began their advance. Usually, the gang members would turn tail and run when the Rebels got close. But not this time. This time, the Rebels were going to have to buy every foot of real estate they gained.

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By mid-morning, the thick, soupy fog had lifted but the rain had intensified, coming down in gray sheets. The Rebels were stretched out in a line running west to east from just south of First Place over to the Vietnam Veterans Plaza. And the punks were holding.

“Sixteen-hundred meters,” Beth said during a break in the fighting.

“Beg pardon?” Ben asked, looking over at her.

The team was crouched under the overhang of what was left of an old business establishment on the south side of Battery Place. The punks were just across the street, almost close enough to touch.

“That’s how far it is from the Hudson to the East River,” Beth replied over the drum of rain. “That’s how long the front is.”

Ben grunted and cut his eyes to Anna. She had gone off, vanishing as silently as the now dissipated fog, and returned a few minutes later with several Rebels in tow, two of them lugging a Big Thumper, two more burly Rebels dutifully toting cases of 40mm grenades. Anna thanked them and began setting up the Mark 19-3 40mm automatic grenade launcher.

“Where did you get that?” Ben asked.

“I stole it,” the young woman said matter-of-factly. “I’m going to knock a hole in that line across the street.”

“Are you now?”

“Yes, I am.”

“All by yourself ?”

Anna flashed a grin. “I might require some small amount of help, thank you. Are you volunteering, General Ben?”

“Oh, why not?” Ben replied, as the rest of his team chuckled.

The Mark 19-3 grenade launcher, affectionately known as a Big Thumper, was belt fed and could spit out approxi-

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mately 35 to 40 40mm grenades a minute, with a range of about 1750 feet and with a killing radius of about 16 feet. The cases the Rebels had lugged over for Anna contained loaded belts of M383 High Explosive grenades.

Beth crawled over and positioned herself on the left side of the Big Thumper, and locked a belt into place. Ben backed off a few feet to avoid getting hit by die ejected casings and waited.

“Everybody ready?” Anna asked.

“Let it bang,” Ben said, an amused look on his face. The kid was certainly inventive, he thought, and didn’t mind at all taking the initiative.

Anna sure as hell let it bang. She thumbed the trigger, working the muzzle left to right, and began clearing half a block of real estate.

“Open fire!” Ben shouted, and all along the line, Rebels opened up with weapons on full auto.

“Jesus friggin’ Christ!” someone yelled from across the street, the shout filled witfi panic, as every Rebel within firing distance opened up.

Through the hard falling rain, the Rebels could see indistinct shapes-those that were still able to move-running and crawling away from the lethal hail of grenades and bullets that seemed to be coming at them as fast as the rain was falling.

“Smoke!” Ben yelled. Then, to Corrie, “Both ends move out and flank as soon as the smoke is thick enough. This weather will keep it close to the ground.”

The Rebels started hurling smoke grenades. A few minutes later, the punks along Battery Place were on the run, having no stomach to fight angry Rebels close up and personal. The Rebels to the east used the same tactics and within minutes everything south of a line stretching from First Place over to Bowling Green Park and then to the Vietnam Veterans Plaza was in Rebel hands, the punks’ first

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line of defense was broken, and the punks were running for their lives.

“No pursuit!” Ben told Corrie, and she quickly radioed the message. “This could be a planned move on their part. Although I doubt it. We’ll hold what we’ve got and wait.”

Two hours later, the rain had stopped coming down in sheets; now it was a slow and steady fall. Scouts had moved forward and found no trace of the creeps or the punks; they had pulled out when the incoming got hot.

Ben gave the order and the Rebels rose from their positions and slowly began their advance. They encountered no resistance in their cautious move forward. Fifty yards, a hundred yards; Ben and his team were moving straight up Broadway, pausing and then climbing over the piles of rubble and using the many burned-out and mangled hulks of automobiles for cover.

A block south of Exchange Place the punks made their second stand of that day, and this time they held. From West Thames Street on the Hudson River side over to Old Slip to the east, the gangs of punks held firm and stopped the Rebel advance cold … and wet.

Ben had ordered in as many snipers as the other battalions could spare just for moments such as this. He told Corrie to get on the horn and get the longdistance shooters into place and start taking out punks.

Artillery was a terrifying experience for the Grunt; the sniper surely came in a very close second. One second you were whispering to a buddy and, depending on the type of weapon the sniper was using, the next second your buddy’s head was splattered all over you and you were wiping off blood and brains. Heavy artillery was demoralizing; a mine field was terrifying; a sniper could cause brave men to shit their pants. And Rebel snipers were the best in the world.

One of Dale Jones’ gang members stuck his head out

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of cover to take a peep and a 7.62 match ammo round, fired from 800 yards away, took him in the throat and sprayed the punk crouched next to him with blood. A punk from Dave Holton’s gang stuck his head out from behind a pile of rubble and a sniper using a specially built .50-caliber rifle blew half his head off from a hidden position almost 2500 yards away. The punk was dead and cooling before the sound of the rifle’s report reached those punks who had shared the pile of rubble with him.

For two days prior to the assault, Ben had asked for the punks’ surrender by voice and by leaflets dropped from planes. He had warned them repeatedly that once the assault began, surrender would not be an option. The punks who didn’t believe that did not know Ben Raines very well. Ben would give almost anybody a second chance, providing they took his initial offer to surrender. If he had to chase them all over North America before they decided that surrender just might be a good idea, they suddenly found the offer withdrawn. It had been oftentimes repeated by the press-back when there was a press-that when it came to war, Ben Raines was not a nice person.

The punks had plenty of mortars and rounds for the tubes, but they were useless against snipers, for the longdistance shooters were unseen; sudden death coming out of the gray falling rain followed only the crack of a rifle heavily muffled by the lousy weather.

The Rebels sat behind piles of rubble, behind what was left of the walls of burned-out and blown-up buildings, behind long-rusted hulks of trucks and automobiles, and sipped water, ate field rations, smoked cigarettes or chewed gun and let the snipers work.

And as had been the case in wars since the beginning of time, the Rebels found puppy dogs with whom they shared their rations and dried off with a spare shirt or towel, then tucked inside their field jackets to make pets

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out of them. Ben had long tried to discourage that practice, but without much enthusiasm on his part or success in the field. Soldiers will do what soldiers will do. Besides, Ben loved dogs.

As he watched a Rebel-veteran of a hundred countless battles on several continents-feed and pet a small dog he’d found among the ruins, he thought of his own beloved Huskies, the dogs that Ray Brown had brutally killed back at Base Camp One. Ben stared through the silver falling rain and once more silently vowed that he and he alone would deal with Ray Brown.

Ben looked forward to beating the man to death with his fists.

“Punks beefing up their lines,” Corrie said, breaking into Ben’s dark thoughts.

“We have all the time in the world,” Ben replied. “Let the snipers have fun.”

For two hours, the Rebels rested and stayed out of the rain under whatever cover they could find and let the snipers-some of them shooting from almost three quarters of a mile away-pick their targets and bring down their quarry.

“They’re pulling back,” Corrie said. “They’ve had enough of this long-range shooting.”

“How many kills?” Ben asked.

“Sixty-one confirmed. ‘Bout a dozen unconfirmed.”

“Let’s move out.”

Rebels moved north, pausing only briefly to look at the dead punks sprawled in the dirt and rubble and rain. Crews moved in right behind the main body, collecting weapons and ammunition, searching the bodies for maps of the punks’ location, scraps of paper that might contain strength numbers, anything that could aid them in this fight. The bodies were then carried to a predesignated

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area for disposal. Usually they were buried, but in Manhattan they would be burned.

The Rebels crossed over into what was left of the financial district, pulling up and digging in as best they could on the south side of Wall Street.

The Rebels were surrounded by devastation; the few tall buildings remaining had huge holes knocked in diem from Rebel artillery of a few years past. Some of the piles of rubble on the sidewalks and in the streets were higher than the Rebels’ heads, and behind each pile might be an ambush waiting to be sprung.

Ben halted the slow advance when the ruins of the World Trade Center came into view. “I’m guessing that in the bowels of those buildings is where we’ll find the first of our creepies, gang. Send scouts up to take the nose test.”

Scouts advanced slowly toward the ruins, expecting an ambush from the punks. None came.

“Another sign that we’ve entered creepie territory,” Ben said.

“Reports from our left and right flanks indicate the punks split up just soudi of our present location,” Corrie said, after listening to her headset for a moment. “They avoided this area and cut east and west, then cut north two blocks from here.”

“That confirms it,” Ben replied.

“Scouts report a strong odor coming from the ruins,” Corrie added a moment later. “Rubble had been moved and entranceways cleared.”

“Oh, boy!” Jersey muttered, grimacing. “Nightmare time.”

For once Cooper didn’t have a smart-assed reply. To a person, the Rebels hated fighting the creepies. The smell alone was enough to cause a goat to puke.

“We halt our advance right here, people,” Ben said, surprising his team. “Contact Base Camp One and have

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an engineer battalion gear up. I want them up here ASAP. Tell them to bring all the three-inch pipe and hose they’ve got. And all the heavy duty pumps.

“Pumps?” Corrie questioned.

“Pumps,” Ben repeated. “We know the punks and the creeps have gas masks, so we can’t use gas to drive them out. We’ve got the Hudson on one side and the East River on the other. Plenty of water.” He laughed. “We’re going to give the creepies a bath!”