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Dan sent several of his platoons racing north on the west side of the forest, while Striganov sent several of his platoons hard-charging up the east side. Every few miles a squad would be dropped off, with plenty of food, water, and ammo. They spread out, quickly dug in tight and right, and kept their heads down. They would not be used unless any of DeMarco’s men inside the old national forest tried to make a run for it. Those trying to flee would be in for a very unpleasant surprise. Each squad had at least one M-60 machine gun, a mortar, and all M-16s were equipped with bloop tubes.

Inside the thickly-grown-up forest, with its sometimes impenetrable brush, the Rebels were advancing very slowly, and meeting stiff resistance every foot of the way.

Ben spat out a mouthful of dirt and twigs and rotted leaves, and cussed as the bullets sang deadly songs over his head. “I am getting just a little bit tired of this,” he said, then bellied down tight against the ground as another burst of heavy machine-gun fire cut the air.

Several Rebels tossed grenades and the machine

310 gun was silenced. Moaning filled the air. “Oh, God, help me! Somebody come help me!”

No Rebel moved or spoke.

“I’m a soldier. I got rights accorded me,” the voice called.

Ben looked over at Jersey, lying a few feet from him. “Nobody said it was going to be easy,” the little bodyguard cracked.

“I heard that,” the wounded turncoat said. “It ain’t right for you to make jokes while I’m bad hurt.”

“Who’s making jokes?” Jersey asked.

“Bitch!”

She yawned. “I think I’ll take a nap, General. It’s so nice and cool here.”

“You come help me!” the wounded man shouted. “I’m bleedin’ real bad.”

“It has been a long day,” Ben said.

“If you don’t come help me pretty damn quick, I’m gonna die!” the man yelled.

“I wish you’d do it quietly,” a Rebel called.

“He’s up to something,” Cooper whispered, crawling up to Ben’s side.

“I agree. Pass the word to watch for a grenade.”

Coop looked at Jersey. “Are you asleep?”

“If I was, Coop, you just woke me up.”

“I hate all you bastards and bitches,” the wounded man called. “You’ll win a few battles, but you won’t win the war. Not this one. You’re dead and beat and you don’t have enough sense to realize it.”

“He doesn’t sound wounded to me,” Corrie said.

“Nor to me,” Beth said. She took a grenade from her battle harness and pulled the pin. She released the spoon and tossed it. It was a good throw, landing right in the center of the gun emplacement.

There must have been two or three hundred pounds of high explosives the wounded man had

311 wired to go in the hole, for when the grenade blew, the following blast knocked birds’ nests out of trees, nuts off branches, and shook the ground for a five-hundred-meter radius.

“Jesus Christ!” Ben said, shaking his head and getting to his knees, peeping over the small rise of earth. There was a huge hole in the ground and bloody pieces of people scattered all over the place. The twisted metal of a machine gun lay about fifty feet from the hole.

“He was waiting for some of us to come to his aid and he was going to take a few Rebels with him,” Jersey said, sticking a finger in one ear and wiggling it around.

“Buddy on the horn,” Corrie said, handing Ben the receiver.

“Go, boy.”

“What the hell was that explosion?” his son asked. “We heard it clear over here.”

“A human bomb. How’s it going in your sector?”

“Slow. We’ve reached a go0d spot to call it a day and I’ve got people digging in.”

“Sounds like a good idea to me. I think we’ll make camp here. Bump you later. Eagle out.”

Ben looked over at Jersey. Her face was streaked with dirt and she looked more like a very pretty wayward street urchin playing at being a soldier rather than the extremely dangerous and highly skilled combat veteran Ben knew she could be. She was also sound asleep.

On this, the first full day of fighting, most of the Rebels advanced slightly more than three miles. Others units could have gone further, but did not want to outdistance their own and get cut off and in a

312 hard bind. Those waiting outside the forest maintained their silent vigil and stayed down.

Ben had perimeters laid out, rigged up booby-trapped trip wire, strung up perimeter bangers, and posted sentries, making the encampment as secure as possible. Both sides knew where the other was, so there was no point in not heating rations and having coffee. The food was bad enough even when heated, and after eating the goop, while relaxing and feeling the battle tension slowly leave one’s body, coffee or hot chocolate was like a good friend come to call after too long an absence.

Corrie’s highly sophisticated radio was easily capable of picking up transmissions from Mountain Home-and much further than that with properly strung antenna-so Ben spent several minutes that evening going over and sending replies to the messages for him from Therm, down in Texas.

The huge hole in the ground had been cleaned up of the gore and twisted metal, and Ben used that fora roost for the night. It was plenty big enough for him and all his personal team members. Before supper was over, the skies opened and a light rain began to fall. Shelter halves were buttoned together and poles were quickly cut to make braces for the waterproof tarps.

“I am certainly glad we know each other well,” Beth said dryly, as the rain pelted the tarp.

The team was all stretched out, side by side, all against one wall of the hole.

“I think it’s romantic,” Cooper said, knowing that would provoke an acid response from Jersey.

Ben, sitting between Beth and Jersey smiled in the night and waited for Jersey’s reply.

“Cooper,” Jersey said. “We are sitting in the middle of a battleground, in a blasted-out hole in the

313 ground, with our butts wet, and you think it’s romantic? I worry about you, Cooper. I really do. And if you don’t get your hand off my leg, I’m gonna smack you right in the mouth.”

“Isn’t it great to be back together again?” Corrie asked. “Gee, what fun!”

Ben chuckled as the rain pelted the tarp.

“I’m warning you, Cooper,” Jersey said. “I’m gonna hurt you.”

“I’m only trying to find a comfortable place,” Coop said.

“Why don’t you go sleep with Dankowski and Simmons?” Jersey suggested. “You can read yourself to sleep with their Superman comic books.”

“I heard that,” Dankowski called from a few tents away. “It’s Batman, not Superman.”

“Whatever,” Jersey said. “Now everybody shut up, I’m tired.”

Ben closed his eyes and drifted off to sleep with the east of the professional soldier, wet butt and all.

The morning was unusually cool for this time of the year and the rain continued coming down. Those factors did not improve the mood of the Rebels as they prepared themselves for another day’s battle with the turncoats. Seven o’clock that morning found the Rebels facing DeMarco’s men across the cracked blacktop of an old road in the southern part of the forest.

“They’ll be anticipating smoke and expecting us to come across head-on,” Ben said. “So we’ll give them lots of smoke and cross on their flanks. I want ten people spread out right here lobbing lots of smoke. The rest of us will split up and cross at my signal. Move out.”

The cool wet morning was suddenly shrouded in swirling, vision-limiting grayness as smoke grenades

314 began spewing out cover for the Rebels. Rebel machine gunners on the south side of the road began spraying the area immediately in front of them with lead, keeping their fire directed into the thick smoke while Rebels crossed the road and set up east and west of the enemy’s positions.

Across the river, Buddy and his people had crossed the road and were advancing steadily, pushing the troops of DeMarco back. Buddy’s plan was to shove them north until they reached a long bend in the river, where only a few hundred yards of forest remained for concealment. He had already bumped part of Dan’s contingent and they were waiting on the west side to spring an ambush.

Holcomb had already radioed DeMarco that it appeared they were cut off and could only fight a last-ditch stand in the timber. Some of his people had already attempted to flee the timber, only to be cut down by hidden teams of Rebels.

“I told you,” Jackman said in a dull voice. “I tried to warn you about the Rebels. They’re the sneakiest bunch of bastards and bitches I have ever seen. They don’t fight by rules, Robert. They fight to win and they don’t give a damn how they do it.”

DeMarco was getting tired of Jackman’s constant bitching and complaining, but he was forced to agree with the man’s assessment of the Rebels. Everything he had thought the Rebels would do, they didn’t do. They didn’t fight in any way he had ever studied. Raines seemed to delight in breaking all the rules.

“Sir, large groups of Rebels are moving into position along the south end of Davis’s territory,” DeMarco was told. “They’re spreading out from Alton to Doniphan, all along Highway 160.”

“Where in the hell did they come from?” DeMarco almost screamed the words.

315 “Texas,” Jackman said. “That means they’ve cleaned out that state. You better hope that’s not Ike McGowan’s bunch. He’s just as bad as Ben Raines.”

DeMarco ignored Jackman as best he could and studied a map. “If they move up Highway 21 north, we can cream them. We’ll have them pincered.”

“They won’t,” Jackman said. “We’re not dealing with a bunch of amateurs. That was my mistake.”

DeMarco lost his temper. “Well, what the hell would you have me do, Jackman?”

“The way I see it, we have two choices: Get the hell out of here. Break up our people into small groups and start farming. That’s one choice. The other is to pitch in with Raines if he’ll let us.”

“Have you lost your mind? Fight against Hoffman?”

Jackman shrugged his shoulders. “Hoffman isn’t here. Ben Raines and the Rebels are.”

“Holcomb says he’s lost contact with those men on the west side of the river in sector one,” the radio operator said. “He believes they walked into an ambush.”

DeMarco sat down beside Jackman and waited for what he now knew were the inevitable words from the man’s mouth.

He was not disappointed.

“I told you,” Jackman said.

“Buddy reports inflicting heavy casualties on the enemy,” Corrie said. “Fighting has died down to almost nothing. He says that by tonight, everything west of the river between 14 and 76 will be in Rebel hands.”

“Ike?”

“He is in position and getting ready to shove off.

316 Striganov and West are ready to make their push and link up with us, north to south.”

Ben smiled. “Okay, folks. Let’s pull even with that rogue son of mine.”

Striganov and West drove down hard from the north, and Ben and those Rebels in his contingent shoved off and hit hard. Mortars would cream an area and then the Rebels would come hard-charging in under cover of smoke. They would secure that sector and then wait, catching their breath, until the mortar crews had moved up, set up, and were firing for effect several thousand meters ahead of them. The scene was repeated a dozen times that day, from the north and from the south.

Ben’s people pushed ten miles north that day, while the Russian and the mercenary pushed ten miles south. Now all that remained of Holcomb’s forces in sector one were contained inside a pocket of land just about three miles wide and six miles long.

Ike split his command and sent two companies in from the west side of sector two and two companies in from the east side, those on the east side staying on the west side of Current River, keeping the river between themselves and sector three.

“Son of a bitch!” DeMarco cussed when he heard that. “I had Bishop all primed to set up ambushes. Just one time I’d like to see some damn Rebel commander make a mistake. Just one is all I need.”

“You can count the mistakes they ever made on the fingers of one hand,” Jackman said, after taking a slug of moonshine.

“And I’m getting tired of your mouth, too,” DeMarco told him.

“You won’t have to listen to it much longer.”

“Now what the hell does that mean? Are you leaving?”

317 “No. But if we stay here, we’ll soon be dead. That’s what I mean.”

DeMarco didn’t say it, but he tended to agree with the man. He sighed and paced the room. If he was going to make any broad-ranging decisions, he knew he’d damn well better make them now.

As if reading his mind, Jackman said, “Forget Davis in sector two. That’s Ike McGowan in there after him. McGowan is an ex-Navy SEAL and he fights with a SEAL mentality. I still got men straggling in here and can muster about six hundred. Get Bishop and Anderson on the horn and get them up here and let’s get gone from this damn place.”

DeMarco stopped pacing, sat down at the table, and stared at Jackman for a moment. “All right, Jackman, I’m listening. Go where?”

“Minnesota, Wisconsin… somewhere up there. If you want to continue fighting for Hoffman, okay, I’m in. But we are no good to him dead.”

DeMarco had to admit that Jackman was finally making some sense. They weren’t going to stop the Rebels here. To stay and fight was only to commit suicide. He slowly nodded his head and rose from the chair.

“Get your people together, Jackman. I’ll give the orders to pull out.” He shook his head. “It took us years to get this place just the way we wanted it. We pretended to be settlers and so forth, who just wanted to be left alone, and we never had a minute’s problem with the locals. All for nothing!”

“Booby-trap the buildings.”

“No time for that. Besides, we may come back here someday.”

Jackman capped the old whiskey bottle full of moonshine and left it on the table. He stood up. “No more of that for me. I got to get back in shape,

318 mentally and physically. I want to be ready when Field Marshal Hoffman comes across that southern border. I got me a heavy debt that I’m going to collect from one General Ben Raines.”

“That’s the Jackman I used to know!” DeMarco slapped him on the shoulder. “Come on, old friend. We got some packing to do and not a whole lot of time left to do it.”

The Rebels picked up the signals down in Mountain Home and transmitted them at once to Ben’s temporary CP and from there they went out into the field.

“DeMarco is pulling out of sector five,” Corrie told him. “He’s ordered his people in three and four to pack it up and get moving.”

“To where?”

“We don’t know. They’ll keep monitoring.”

“What about his men in sector two?”

“I guess this DeMarco person is leaving that bunch to be slaughtered.”

“The caliber of people we’re fighting continues to worsen,” Ben said.

“It never was much,” Cooper said.

“Every now and then he makes sense,” Jersey said.

“Thank you.” Cooper smiled at her.

“I said every now and then, Coop. That means not often.”

Then Corrie received another message that wiped the smiles from their faces. She laid aside her headphones and said, “That was Therm. General Pay on just reported a mass attack by Hoffman’s people. Thousands and thousands of black-shirts hit him hard. He can’t hold. He’s backing up to try to save as many of his people as possible.”

“Well, it won’t be long now,” Ben said. “There will be no pursuit of DeMarco. Advise Ike of that.

319 We’ll finish up here and then start packing up to head back. We’ve got a lot of planning to do.”

Thomas entered the squad tent and Ben gave him the message. Thomas paled and swore in Spanish for a moment. “If my general is retreating, it means the situation down there is now completely and totally hopeless. General Payon is very much a man like you, General Raines. He is not a man to back up.”

“There is that line about discretion and valor. It takes a smart man to know when to apply either. All right, here it is. We don’t have time for any type of delay. Corrie, order all the mortar crews we have to set up and start lobbing rounds into this section where we have them boxed. Order Ike to launch a night attack, using the same methods. We’ll mop up in the morning. Rest while you can, folks. It’s going to be a noisy night.”