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Crisi fired into a mass of moving bodies, her Uzi making low-pitched phfittt sounds through the new silencers as the forty-round clip emptied, jumping in her hands, spitting out its deadly loads.
Screams of pain came from the forest.
“Nice shooting, Corporal,” a soft voice said.
She turned around and found Sergeant Barry Brown standing behind her with a handheld rocket launcher.
“Thanks,” she said, ramming another full clip into the loading chamber.
“We’ll have company in the air pretty soon,” Brown said in his typically understated way. “I can’t wait to see how many of the bastards I can knock down.”
“You enjoy this, don’t you?” Crisi asked, as the rattle of automatic-weapons fire surrounded them. South of their position men were shouting, and the roar of engines filled the rain-forested hills.
“Damn right I do,” Barry said.
“I suspect you’ll get your chance to enjoy a great deal more of it,” she said, hunkered down behind a tangle of vines when the whine of stray bullets sizzled overhead.
“I hope so,” Brown whispered, his eyes turned up at blue sky above the treetops.
Above the din, Crisi heard the hammering of a helicopter’s rotor blades.
“Here they come,” she said.
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“I hear it. Just one. By the sound, it’s a Kiowa or an OH-6 Defender. This is gonna be too easy. An OH-58 Kiowa is too slow to dodge a Hellfire missile, if you aim just the right way. I’m gonna knock it down.”
His expression changed. He rested the launching tube on his right shoulder.
“Jesus, Barry. You’ve been at this too long. You’re getting a kick out of this.”
“I’m killing an enemy of the Tri-State Coalition. It’s what I’m paid to do.”
“Does General Raines pay you enough so that you like what we are doing?”
“Yeah. But I’d do it for nothing. Since the war I haven’t had anybody to shoot at.”
Brown squinted into the sights. The sounds of battle raged all around them.
“There it is,” Brown said. “A Kiowa, and the jerk at the controls is flying a straight line at just the right altitude for me. He should grab his ankles, bend over, and kiss his ass good-bye.”
“We don’t have much time,” Crisi reminded him. “Buddy said he’s calling in the Osprey to take us out of here. We’ve got less than fifteen minutes to do as much damage as we can before we pull back to the bridge.”
“It won’t take me long,” Brown said, frozen next to the trunk of a coconut palm with the launcher held fast against his shoulder.
He flipped the sight up on top of the long, tube-shaped rocket launcher, aimed, and grinned through gritted teeth as he pulled the triggering mechanism.
A whooshing sound followed a trail of white vapor toward the tops of the trees.
Crisi watched the helicopter without firing off any more Uzi rounds at the enemy. There was something about having Barry Brown standing behind her that made her nervous as hell. Brown was a psycho … a good soldier, but a crazy
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son of a bitch who enjoyed killing. She’d been on Special Ops missions with him before, and always felt unclean afterward, as if she’d swum in a swamp.
The Kiowa’s pilot must have seen the vapor trail of the missile headed toward him, for he jerked the nose of the helicopter skyward, evidently trying to avoid the deadly rocket. It did him no good, for the chopper exploded, tilting at an odd angle when the Hellfire missile struck its underbelly. Fire and smoke engulfed the body of the aircraft just as it came apart in the air. The main rotor went straight up as it was torn from the driveshaft by the rocket, continuing to spin in the air like some child’s toy launched at a July Fourth picnic.
“Adios, you dumb son of a bitch,” Brown said, his eyes glittering wildly as he loaded one more rocket into the tube. He chuckled. “It’s easy to kill a stupid son of a bitch at the controls of one of those old things.”
Crisi felt gooseflesh pimple her skin. There were plenty of war-crazed mercenaries in Ben Raines’s army, but none any worse than Barry Brown. He made Anthony Perkins, the lead actor in the old movie Psycho, seem almost normal.
The chopper began to spin crazily in a loose downward spiral, what was left of it, until it finally crashed on top of a squad of Mexican soldiers in the jungle below, causing inhuman screams of anguish and pain as a giant fireball ignited trees for hundreds of yards around.
“I wonder if the pilot shit his pants,” Barry said while he watched huge clouds of oily smoke cascade toward the sky, ignoring the shouts and screams of dying men as if they meant nothing to him.
A spray of AK-47 fire from the roadway sent Crisi and Barry ducking lower for cover.
“They spotted you,” she said needlessly.
“Give ‘em a little dose of lead,” Brown replied, still watching the sky in spite of the bullets shredding jungle vines and
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leaves all around them. “I hear another big bird coming our way.”
Crisi swallowed hard. It was one thing to be on a team with good professional soldiers. But when you had a killing psycho in your unit, everything changed. Some of these old warriors like Brown never left a battlefield in their minds … They were still fighting the conflict inside their heads, and nothing would change them.
“It’s an old Huey … probably a UH-1,” Brown said. “Easiest damn ship to knock down there is. Slower than my granpaw’s piss on a cold morning.”
“I’ll cover you,” Crisi said, just before another land mine went off near the highway. Seconds later a man was shrieking in agony.
“I wonder if it blew his balls off,” Brown said, sighting into the rocket launcher. “Sure does sound to me like he’s in a lot of pain.”
“Dear God,” Crisi whispered, suddenly feeling sick to her stomach. Barry Brown was a madman. She had a fleeting thought that if she ever became like that, she hoped someone would put a bullet in her brain.
“Here it is,” Brown said, when the noises from the chopper were almost directly above the jungle canopy. “Watch this, baby doll. I’m gonna show you how to kill a stupid pilot and turn an old Huey into scrap metal.”
The dark outline of a helicopter appeared over the treetops, its rotor swirling leaves and undergrowth below while the staccato of machine-gun fire moved along the Pan American Highway from the south. A lone figure could be seen in the open hatchway of the chopper, leaning over a fifty-caliber machine gun, looking for targets to kill.
Brown fired a rocket. “It’s a heat-seeker,” he said with what might have been pride in his voice. “Watch this. See how quick it goes down.”
Crisi didn’t want to watch what would happen next, but
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she was drawn to the missile’s vapor trail during a brief lull in the shooting.
The missile headed straight for the helicopter’s big turbine exhaust pipe, darting into it like a mouse headed for home. The green-painted chopper came apart with a thunderous roar. Scraps of metal exploded outward in a huge fireball and then began falling toward the jungle, spinning a sparkling in late afternoon sunlight like confetti at a parade.
“Got the bastard,” Brown said.
Bits of the main rotor swirled into the treetops as flaming fuel fell like yellow rain on the Oaxaca forest, igniting the green palm leaves like old newspaper.
“Ain’t that pretty?” Barry asked.
“Beautiful,” Crisi replied, swallowing a mouthful of bitter bile.
The regular rhythm of machine-gun fire came from all sides now. She knew if she didn’t get away from this creature, she was going to shoot him in the head.
“It’s time to pull back for the bridge,” Crisi said, putting another clip into her Uzi. “We sure as hell don’t want to miss that Osprey.”
“I wouldn’t mind,” Brown said in a distant voice, still watching the last pieces of the Huey crash into the jungle along the highway. “I could stay here the rest of my life and shoot down helicopters.”
“You’ve only got two Hellfires left,” Crisi observed. “We need to start moving toward that bridge.”
Brown stood up. “All right. I don’t hear any more birds,” he said, clearly disappointed.
“Let’s go, Barry,” Crisi cried above the hammering of machine guns and the explosion of another Bouncing Betty somewhere to the south.
“They must be low on helicopter fuel,” Brown said, scanning what he could see of the skies. “Otherwise, they’d have sent more than two birds for air cover at the front of this attack squad.”
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“Get down, Barry!” Crisi said. “They’re shooting at anything.”
“Screw ‘em,” Barry said, with a distant look in his deep blue eyes.
Crisi was about to reach for Barry’s wrist when his body jerked backward.
“Barry!” she yelled. “Get down!”
Sergeant Barry Brown from Fort Worth, Texas, turned his back on Crisi. She saw a huge hole in the back of his camouflage shirt.
“I’m shot!” Brown stammered. He began to sink to his knees next to the palm tree.
A piece of flinty white bone jutted out of the hole in his back. Blood pumped from his wound, keeping time with the beat of his heart.
“Oh, no,” Crisi sighed, watching Barry slump to the floor of the jungle with his rocket launcher pinned underneath him in a growing pool of blood.
She crept over to him. “Barry? Can you hear me?”
Brown’s eyes were glazed.
“I can’t carry you all the way to the bridge,” Crisi said. “We don’t have any medics.”
Brown’s lips moved, but no sound came from them.
“Jesus, Barry. I told you to get down,” Crisi said, her eyes filling with tears. She didn’t like Barry Brown, but he was a member of her squad and she’d known him for years, since General Raines formed the Special Operations Brigade with a select group of soldiers.
Off in the distance another series of explosions announced the ignition of more Bouncing Bettys.
Crisi knew it was time to get the hell out of there before Comandante Perro Loco’s troops began scouring the jungle for the soldiers responsible for this ambush.
She looked down at Barry. He was still alive.
He turned distant eyes glazed with pain on her. “Don’t let them take me, Crisi,” he mumbled through lips covered with
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bloody foam. “You got to do it for me, girl, I can’t feel my arms.”
She agreed. The only merciful thing to do was to end his suffering.
Crisi drew her silenced Beretta, rolled him to the side where he wouldn’t see it coming, and quickly fired three bullets into Sergeant Barry Brown’s brain … She wouldn’t allow herself to think about what she was doing.
She slipped away from the tree and made her way toward the bridge where the Tri-State Osprey would pick them up and get them out of southern Mexico.
At least for now, the Mad Dog’s assault on Mexico City had been halted.
It was an odd sight, an airplane with engines that tilted upward, the Boeing/Bell V-22 Osprey, a VSTOL, vertical-takeoff-and-landing plane for combat search and rescue.
The sweet sound of the tilt-rotor, hybrid fixed-wing aircraft filled Crisi’s ears as it came down on a stretch of old asphalt highway north of the bridge.
A demolitions team was set to blow the bridge after they took off.
Buddy Raines came over to Crisi.
“The only team member we can’t account for is Sergeant Brown,” he said.
“He’s dead,” Crisi told him. “Took a bullet in the chest and it broke his spine.”
“I don’t suppose one casualty is all that bad,” Buddy said as he gazed south along the empty highway. “It could have been a helluva lot worse.”
She left out the rest, that she had killed Sergeant Brown to spare him any more suffering. She felt sure there was nothing else she could have done.
The Osprey settled onto the roadway.
“Get aboard that V-22, Corporal Casper,” Buddy said. “We
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need to get the hell out of here and pick up Harley Reno’s team before they’re cut off.”
“Yessir,” she mumbled, stumbling toward the plane, shutting everything else from her mind.
She was, after all, a soldier.
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Harley Reno had shown Ben Raines’s team how to plant the Bouncing Bettys and Claymore mines so they’d do the most damage.
“You bury them in a large pattern like this,” he said, drawing a > in the caliche with a stick. “That way, the entire column is inside the pattern before the point man sets off the top mine. When it explodes, the men in line behind him will scatter to the sides, causing them to set off the other mines alongside the trail.”
“In other words,” Coop said, “You get more bang for your buck.”
Harley nodded. “Exactly. Now, in about twenty-four hours, they’re gonna run into the stuff Buddy Raines and his men set out. When that happens, a lot of the more undisciplined troops will turn around and run like hell for the rear lines to get out of danger. That’s where we come in. We’re gonna be waitin’ for ‘em with mines and machine guns.”
Coop shook his head. “The poor bastards will feel like rats in a trap.”
“Yeah,” Hammer Hammerick said, his voice and face showing no sympathy, “war is hell, ain’t it?”
Within twenty-four hours, Harley and his team had planted several hundred mines. The Bouncing Bettys, which were primarily antipersonnel mines, were buried alongside the Pan American Highway, where troops were likely to be walking. The older Claymore mines, used for vehicles and APCs, were
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dug into the road itself to catch any HumVees or jeeps or APCs heading back southward.
After planting the mines, Harley had the team dig in, placing them along a ragged line stretching across the highway just north of a wooden bridge over a deep canyon. He’d rigged the bridge with explosives.
“Once we’ve done as much damage as we can, or if the numbers become too overwhelming, we’ll retreat back across the bridge and blow it. That should slow ‘em down enough for us to get airlifted out of here.”
Coop noticed Anna watching Harley with adoring eyes as he spoke. Well, he thought, he couldn’t blame her too much. The man certainly knew his stuff.
By midafternoon the next day, they began to hear distant explosions from the area where Buddy and his team had been dropped off. Soon, several helicopters came roaring overhead, heading for the area to give tactical air support.
Harley walked along the line of his troops. “I figure in about three, four hours we’ll start seeing the first of the troops as they decide it’s too hot up there and head back here. If you can stand another MRE, it’s time to eat it. You’re gonna need some carbos in your body when the fightin’ gets goin’.”
General Juan Dominguez was riding in an open-topped HumVee about fifty yards back from the head of his column of troops when the first mines went off. He could see the Bouncing Betty throw its tomato-sized can five feet in the air before it exploded, cutting four men almost in half with its load of razor-sharp shrapnel.
“Vamos! Rapido!” he screamed. “Let’s get the hell out of here … now!”
His driver jerked the steering wheel of the HumVee to the side and moved the vehicle off the road in a sweeping U-turn. The right front tire rolled over a Claymore mine that’d been set off from the road for just such a reaction.
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The front of the HumVee was lifted off the ground and blasted to pieces in a giant fireball that consumed Dominguez before he knew what had happened. All the men in his car were killed, along with fifteen troops that’d been walking alongside it.
Men began screaming, both in pain and fear, and hundreds of troops and vehicles turned around and began running for their lives back the way they’d come. Some dropped their weapons in fear, others running off the road into the nearby jungle, hoping for safety there.
When he was radioed the news of Dominguez’s death and the trap set up ahead of his troops, General Jaime Pena called for a general retreat until he could call in air support to destroy the ambushers.
He watched in horror as the first two helicopters on the scene were shot out of the sky by GTA missiles. Grabbing the radio, he shouted angrily, “Goddammit, send me some pilots who have combat experience. We’re blocked here until you get me some help!”
The air traffic controller at the Villahermosa base they’d taken over said he’d send some Apaches right away. “They won’t be so easy to kill,” the man said.
General Pena told his squad commanders to pull the men back five miles or so until the Apaches arrived.
Hammer Hammerick climbed down from the tree he’d been in, watching the horizon through his binoculars. “They’re on the way, Harley,” he said, putting the binoculars in a leather case and picking up his Mini-Uzi. “Looks like the dance is about to begin.”
Harley nodded, his lips pulled back in a savage grin. “Good. Let’s see if we can’t strike up the band.”
Within a half hour, the advance troops and jeeps and APCs reached the line of mines the team had planted. Explosions began to blossom along the Pan American Highway like
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deadly flowers, sowing seeds of death and destruction among the scattering troops. Vehicles could be seen lifted and blown into scrap metal along with bodies tossed in the air and torn apart like rag dolls.
When the screaming, running, shouting men neared Har-ley’s line of defense, he stood up from behind a fallen log and held his Uzi out in front of him. It began to jump and chatter in his hands, spewing 9mm messengers of death among the running men.
The rest of his team followed suit, not bothering to aim, just spraying the Uzis back and forth like garden hoses into the mass of soldiers racing toward them.
The line of advancing men stopped under the onslaught, some dropping to the ground and returning fire, others turning tail and running back the way they came into the certain death of the Bouncing Bettys.
Explosions and fireballs and gunfire mixed with the screaming, shrieking, and shouting of men wounded and dying to produce an almost unbelievable din of destruction.
The smell of cordite, gunpowder, blood, and excrement wafted on the air like some malevolent fog to burn the noses and eyes of Harley’s team, until they were forced to begin to draw back from the carnage.
“Pull back to the bridge!” Harley shouted as he bent and opened the box at his feet.
As Coop and Jersey and Corrie and Anna began to withdraw, Coop looked back over his shoulder to see Hammer standing next to Harley, his Uzi bucking and jumping in his hands as he ejected clip after clip and continued firing into the crowd of men still coming at them.
Suddenly an armored halftrack with a fifty-caliber machine gun on its turret pushed through the soldiers, bearing down on Harley and Hammer.
Coop grabbed Corrie by the shoulder. “Get on the horn and get that Osprey down here as fast as they can make it. We don’t have much longer.”
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“What are you gonna do?” she asked as she unlimbered her radio set.
“I’m gonna join the party. It looks like the last dance is about to begin.”
He ran back to stand next to Harley and Hammer just as Harley pulled out his M-60 machine gun and draped a cartridge belt over his shoulder.
Harley jacked the loading lever back and held the large gun at waist level, aiming it at the halftrack that was bearing down on them.
As the 9mm shells from Coop’s and Hammer’s Uzis bounced harmlessly off the half-inch armor plate of the big vehicle, and its fifty-caliber machine gun began to target them, chewing large chunks of wood out of the trees around them, Harley let go with the M-60.
After the silenced firing of the Uzis, the explosion of the M-60 was deafening. Harley’s arm muscles bulged as they tried to control the recoil of the big gun. It jumped and bucked and shook as it pumped hundreds of shells per minute at the halftrack.
The helmet of the soldier manning the machine gun on the half-tack disintegrated under the impact of dozens of slugs from Harley’s weapon; then the thick glass in the front windshield of the tank shattered and exploded inward as Harley’s bullets stitched a line of pockmarks down the front of the halftrack.
The vehicle began to waver, turning back and forth as the driver ducked to avoid the ricocheting slugs as they entered the inner compartment of the halftrack. One of the bullets must have hit the ammo inside, for suddenly the vehicle exploded with a mighty roar, its sides buckling outward like a tin can that had been stepped on, greasy black smoke pouring from the wreckage.
Coop grabbed Harley’s shoulder. “Come on, big guy, Cor-rie’s got the Osprey on the way. Time to go home.”
Harley’s finger eased off the trigger, his chest heaving as
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he tried to catch his breath after fighting the big M-60’s recoil his eyes lit with a fierce light.
Hammer punched his shoulder. “Harley! Get your ass ii gear, son, time to boogie.”
Harley nodded and followed Coop and Hammer as the ran for the bridge and safety.
Once they had cleared the end of the bridge, Come de pressed a button on a small black box she was holding an< the bridge exploded, collapsing into the canyon below.
When the three men got to her, she shouted, “Raines an( the Osprey are on the way. We got to hurry. They say a coupli of Apaches are headed this way and the pilot doesn’t wan to have to duke it out with them.”
Anna ran up and threw her arms around Harley. “Are yoi all right?” she shouted.
Harley draped his arm around her shoulder, walking besid< her. “Yeah, just another day at the office,” he said as the headed for the pickup spot.
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General Jaime Pena jumped to attention when Perro Loco, followed by Jim Strunk and Paco Valdez, entered the Commanding Officer’s office at the Mexican Army base at Villahermosa. Pena had pulled his troops back to this location after the disaster on the Pan American Highway.
“Buenos dias,” Pena said, saluting smartly.
Loco gave him a look, his eyes flat as he sat behind the desk in the office.
“General Pena, would you ask your second in command to come in, please.”
“Certainly, comandante.”
Pena stepped to the adjoining door, which led to the officers’ wardroom, and called, “Colonel Gonzalez, would you come in here?”
A tall, swarthy man with a handlebar moustache, and a knife scar on his right cheek that coursed down his face to the corner of his mouth, entered. He nodded at Perro Loco and stood at attention, his back to the wall.
“Now, General Pena, please be so kind as to explain to me why you failed in your mission to take Mexico City,” Loco said calmly.
Pena looked from Strunk to Valdez, who were standing behind Loco on either side.
“But, comandante, there is only one serviceable road northward through this miserable country, and it was heavily mined and defended.” He spread his arms wide. “I needed
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more air support, but the Mexicans had ground-to-air missiles and shot the few helicopters I had at my disposal out of the air.”
Loco nodded, then glanced at Strunk. “Jaime, how much does a helicopter cost?”
“Several millions of dollars, comandante.”
“And an APC or a HumVee?”
“Many thousands of dollars, comandante.”
“And a portable mine detector?”
Strunk smiled, shaking his head sadly. “Only a few hundred dollars, comandante.”
“Why did you not think that the road might be mined, General, and take appropriate precautions? Surely, losing a few men with mine detectors would have been preferable to losing …” He bent his head and studied a sheaf of papers on the desk. “Two helicopters, four APCs, three HumVees, and four hundred and fifty-six soldiers, not to mention General Juan Dominguez.”
Pena, sweat beginning to bead on his forehead and run down his cheeks to drip off his chin, lowered his head. “We moved so fast, comandante, I did not think the Mexicans would have had time to mine the road.”
Loco sighed heavily. “That is the truest thing you’ve said today, General,” he said. “You did not think!”
“I am sorry, comandante,” Pena said, his eyes on the floor in front of him.
Loco slipped a .45 caliber automatic out of his pocket and aimed across the desk.
Pena glanced up, his eyes widening and his mouth opening to protest as Loco fired. The pistol exploded and the bullet entered Pena’s forehead, snapping his head back and blowing the back of his skull out, showering the wall behind him with blood and brains. Pena’s body collapsed in a heap in front of Loco’s desk.
Loco cut his eyes to Colonel Gonzalez. “What is your first name, Colonel?”
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Gonzalez swallowed, the scar on his cheek pulling the corner of his mouth up in a caricature of a grin. “Enrique, comandante.”
“Enrique Gonzalez, you are now promoted to general and will be in charge of our forces in Mexico. Is that satisfactory?”
Gonzalez glanced at Pena’s body on the floor, trails of smoke still rising from his empty skull. He nodded rapidly. “Si, comandante.”
“And you are aware of the penalties for failure?”
Gonzalez continued to nod, unable to take his eyes off Pena’s corpse and its right foot that was still twitching. “Si, comandante.”
Loco stood up and holstered his weapon. “Good. Then let us go to the communications room and contact President Osterman of the United States. I fear we are going to need some of her more modern equipment to take Mexico City.”
President Claire Osterman hung up the phone after over an hour’s discussion of how Perro Loco’s forces had been stymied on their journey toward Mexico City due to lack of air support and stronger than expected resistance from the Mexican forces.
“Jesus,” she said, “God save me from Central American desperadoes who think they’re generals.”
She looked at her team of advisers arrayed before her. General Stevens, Harlan Millard, and Herb Knoff were sitting in chairs in the Commanding Officers’ quarters of Fort Benjamin Harris in Indianapolis.
She winced as rumbling sounds and vibrations shook the ceiling. “Herb, can’t we quiet that infernal noise?”
He shook his head. “Madame President, you ordered the removal of the wreckage of the building overhead yourself. The bulldozers cannot do that without making some noise.”
“All right, all right,” she said testily. She was still pissed
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off that Otis Warner and General Joe Winter had been allowed to escape the attack on the fort the day before.
“How is everything going with my resuming command of the country?” she asked Stevens.
General Bradley Stevens, Jr., nodded. “Very well, Madame President. The Armed Services have all acknowledged your right to continue as head of the government, and the rank and file of the Army is behind you one hundred percent. A few of the officers whose loyalty was questionable have been replaced with men I can trust, but overall, it’s going just fine.”
“And the country?”
“A massive propaganda campaign has been undertaken,” Millard said. “All of the media are cooperating, as usual. We are informing the people that the coup attempt to overthrow you was orchestrated by Otis Warner with the complicity of Ben Raines and the SUSA. In the absence of any voices telling them otherwise, I think they’ll buy it.”
“Good,” she said. “Now we have two things to do in addition to restarting the war against the SUSA. One, we have to transport some equipment to Perro Loco down in Mexico. He has control of the Navy base at Pariso near his command at Villahermosa. General Stevens, we need to send a transport ship down there with some helicopters, tanks, APCs, and whatever else he needs. I’ll leave the coordination of that to you and your men.”
“Yes, Madame President.”
“The second thing I’ve got to do is get him some help with his soldiers and command structure. He’s just too damned stupid to run a war.”
“How do you propose to do that, Claire?” Millard asked.
She glanced at a folder on her desk which read Top Secret, Intel, on the cover. “I have here an intel report on Bruno Bottger.”
“Bruno Bottger?” Stevens asked. “I thought Raines killed him in Africa a few years back.”
She shook her head. “No, as it turns out, Bottger escaped
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to the island of Madagascar. He stayed there for a year 01 so, recovering from wounds he’d received in his escape. Ther he made his way to South America. Intel has found out he’s used his vast fortune to hire an army of mercenaries witt the idea of reattacking Ben Raines at some point in the future.”
Stevens shook his head. “I don’t know, Claire. Getting involved with Bottger will be risky. The man is a zealot and a Nazi. He will be very tough to control.”
“That’s the beauty of it, Brad. We won’t have to control him. He hates Ben Raines so much he’ll jump at any chance to get revenge on him. I plan to get him and his mercenary army to join Perro Loco by promising him unlimited access to our weapons and technology. I’ll also promise him he may have Mexico as a prize for his new Nazi state if he manages to conquer it.”
“But Claire,” Millard protested. “You’ve also promised Mexico to Perro Loco.”
“Yes, I have, haven’t I?” she said, a smile curling her lips. “Well, in the event they are successful, they’ll just have to fight it out to see who ends up on top down there.”
Stevens nodded, seeing where she was headed. “Yeah, and after they’ve weakened each other fighting it out, we’ll step in and take over from whoever’s left.”
Claire grinned. “Brad, you’re a man after my own heart.”
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Bruno Bottger sat on his terrace overlooking the ocean on the Ilha de Sao Sebastiao, a small island two hundred miles south of Rio de Janeiro. He gently rubbed oil into the burn scars on his face, trying to keep the shiny skin supple so it wouldn’t crack.
Rudolf Hessner, his trusted bodyguard, stepped onto the terrace with a bottle of beer, frost droplets gathering on the glass in the humid sea air.
Bruno took the bottle and took a deep draught.
“Is the pain bad today, Herr Bottger?” he asked, a concerned look on his face.
Bruno gave a short laugh. “The pain is always the same, Rudolf. It is a constant reminder of the debt I owe Ben Raines.”
Rudolf sat across a small glass table from Bruno. “Have you decided what to do about the American President’s offer?”
Bruno looked at Rudolf. “I do not fully trust the woman, Rudolf, but if we take her offer of help, it will cut years off my timetable for retaliation against Ben Raines.”
“But Herr Bottger, you would have to share command with the Nicaraguan, Perro Loco.”
Bruno snorted through the holes in scar tissue that used to be a nose. “If I cannot outsmart a little brown man, who is not much better than the blacks that are taking over the world, then I do not deserve to lead the New World Order.”
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“So, you’ve decided then?”
“Yes, Rudolf. It is time to avenge myself against Ben Raines. This time I will not stop until he is dead!”
Otis Warner and General Joe Winter sat in Ben Raines’s office, along with Raines, Mike Post, and General Ike McGowen.
“I tell you, Mr. Raines, Claire Osterman is going to start another war with the SUSA. The woman is obsessed with killing you and your country,” Warner said.
“But Mr. Warner,” Mike Post said, “your country is severely weakened by the beating you took last year. We just don’t think it’d make sense for her to resume hostilities now.”
General Winter shook his head. “You don’t understand, sir. Claire Osterman cares not one whit for the USA or what’s best for the people. She is a madwoman who is only concerned with her pride. She will do anything, sacrifice anyone, and risk everything to bring down Ben Raines. It is like an illness within her. The hatred is eating her alive and the only cure, in her mind, is to defeat Ben Raines.”
“But, General Winter, you and I both know she has no chance of doing that with her present resources,” Mike continued. Ben Raines interrupted. “I agree with General Winter, Mike. Claire is not the type to give up, or to ever do what is rational. Hell, look at the way she joined forces with Perro Loco.”
“But Ben,” Mike argued, “Perro Loco’s army is a joke. You stopped him in his tracks with less than thirty people.”
“Nevertheless, Mike, I’ve got a gut feeling we haven’t seen the last of Claire Osterman, or of Perro Loco, and my gut is rarely wrong.”
318 In the next book in the Ashes series, Warriors from the Ashes, Ben Raines finds that his gut feeling was correct. He is faced with fighting a war on two fronts. From the north, Claire Osterman resumes the USA’s war against the SUSA, while from the south, Perro Loco’s army, invigorated by the infusion of thousands of mercenaries under the command of Bruno Bottger and fresh equipment from the USA, manages to take Mexico City and move northward toward the SUSA’s southern borders.
Realizing that no country has ever won a war fighting on two fronts, Ben must use all of his knowledge and bravery to combat the massive forces arrayed against him.