Hartline laughed. “Just a damn good idea, Max-a
sure-fire way to shorten this little action. I’m going to strip the nigger gals buck-assed naked and tie them on the front of the APC’S full of our troops. We’ll mix in the old niggers with our troops coming up withand behind the APC’S. I just don’t believe the coons on that ridge over there will shoot their own kind. I think we can drive right through them and put them all to rout. Yes, indeed. Be fun to see the expression on their monkey faces, too.” He turned to another mere. “Pat, I want you to go back with Max. Round up fifty or so good-lookin’ senoritas and about seventy-five or so old greasers. Take them all over to the west front to Colonel Fechnor; tell him what I’m planning but to wait for my signal, and don’t tell Striganov. He’d nix the plan. We’ll coordinate this. I think, by God, we can shorten this fight considerably.”
“I like it, Sam,” the X.o. said. “Oh yeah, I like the hell out of it.”
“I seen me a spic gal last week,” Pat said. “Must have been about thirteen or fourteen. She looked prime. Little titties just bu.in’ out. Nipple just a-stickin’ out of the raggedy blouse. You mind if I get me a taste of that pussy “fore I send her west?”
“Hell, Pat, I don’t care. I imagine she’s been spayed, don’t you?”
“Probably so. She sure looked old enough to bleed to me.”
“Sure, go ahead. Make her suck your cock before you fuck her. Those little spic gals can suck a cock best I ever seen.”
Staying south of the interstate, using state and county roads, Ben made one final inspection of his
troops on the eve of the battle. They were stretched far too thin. But it was the best Ben could do. Two things his troops were not short on were ammunition and weapons. Stretched out all along the 140 mile battle front were .50-caliber machine guns mixed in with M-60 machine guns. Each squad had two of the big .50’s and all the ammo they could use.
Working around the clock, they had fortified their positions, digging bunkers and sandbagged foxholes; mine fields were carefully laid, using thousands of the deadly Claymores. Mortar pits were dug, sandbagged and camouflaged. Supplies were brought up and cached.
The Rebels had done all any of them knew to do. They were ready. Now came the hardest part: the waiting.
Cecil was commanding a battalion that was dug in Columbia. Ben knew there would be some wicked street fighting there, much of it hand to hand. Ben had tried to talk Cecil out of taking command, but the black man would not be deterred from the job.
“You’re too damned old for this job, Cecil,” Ben told him. “Let a younger man have it and back me up at HQ. I guarantee you, you’ll see all the combat you’ll want to see there.”
“I seem to recall I did a pretty damned good job at this in “Nam,” Cecil responded.
“Goddamn it, Cec, that was almost thirty years ago! Tell me about it, man-I was there too, you know?”
Cecil looked around him, his beret placed properly on his head, like the Green Beret Cecil had been. It was worn unlike Ben’s black beret, which he still wore in Ranger fashion: cocky.
“Ben, some of these kids weren’t even born when you and I did our thing in ‘nam. Damn, Ben. No, they’re going to need a calm head here.”
“A calm gray head,” Ben said sarcastically.
Cecil smiled. “I matured early for my age.”
Ben laughed, knowing he was not going to sway his old friend, and moved on down the line of Rebels.
He received the thumbs-up signal from each squad or platoon or company he passed. They were ready. These men and women nicknamed Raines’s Rebels by the press years back. They were ready for a good fight. They knew the odds were hard against them, knew casualties would be high and that many would die. They knew only too well the price of freedom came high-it never came cheaply.
They were ready to die for freedom. Theirs and anyone else’s that might be threatened.
Ready.
Back at HQ, Ben told Gale, “You will stay with Chase at the hospital. You’re a nurse, and that is where you’ll be needed. And I will not have any static from you about it. Is that clear?”
She smiled sweetly at him. Very sweetly. Too sweetly. “I have already made arrangements to do just that, General, sir. And I didn’t need you to tell me about it. Thanks just the same.”
That night, on the eve of the battle that would, although neither the Russian nor the American knew it, forever split the nation and plunge the ravaged country into a sickening slide toward barbarism, ignorance and tribal law, Ben and Gale engaged in the gentlest and most deeply satisfying love-making of their relationship. And Gale sensed with a woman’s insight on such
matters that she became pregnant.
And she knew she wanted this child more than anything else in the world.
When Ben was asleep (she could never understand how the man could quietly drop off when faced with such a monumental task as that which lay before him) she rose from their blankets to stand some distance away from Ben’s sleeping form, to stand looking up at the cloudless star-filled heavens. She spoke to and asked questions of her god, and seemed satisfied with the silent words that filled her head. As she turned to return to Ben’s side, she was startled to see a figure standing by a huge tree, gazing at her. She looked around her, curious to see if anyone else had noticed the man.
No one had, although the guards were plainly in sight all around the encampment-and that really piqued her curiosity.
Gale walked to the shadowy umbrella created by the huge limbs of the old tree and stood facing the man. She had, she concluded, never seen anything quite like him.
She studied him in silence, as he was silently studying her. “How did you get in this area without being shot?” she asked.
The old man smiled. His smile seemed to light the area around them. “You would not understand if I chose to tell you.”
“Oh yeah?” Gale looked more closely at the old man. He wore robes and sandals and carried a big stick. A staff, the word popped into her brain. His beard was long and very white. He looked older than God. “What do you want?”
The man looked at her more closely; his eyes seemed amused, then sad, or so it appeared to Gale. Finally, he said. “No, you are not the one. But you will help the man in his struggles. That will be seen to. You have my word.”
“What!” Gale reached the conclusion that this guy was not playing with a full deck of cards.
Ben and Ike and Cecil had told her about the many cults that were springing up around the torn nation. She had seen some with her own eyes during her wanderings prior to meeting Ben. This nutso had to be one of them-what else?
“I am known as the Prophet.”
“Swell,” she said dryly. “And I’m Mary. Man, you’d better be careful when you leave here. Someone could shoot you.”
His smile was gentle and knowing, and rather, Gale thought, condescending. “I have no fear of death, child.”
“That’s nice, ‘cause frankly, it scares the hell out of me.”
The old man chuckled, a deep sound from his massive chest. “You have a sense of humor. Good, you’ll need it.” The old man glanced up at the sky, as if he had suddenly received some silent message.
Gale looked up, feeling rather foolish as she did so.
“As wars go,” the old man said, “this one will be small in magnitude. But it will be enormous in its ramifications. What follows will be the beginning.”
“Beginning of what?”
“The beginning, child.”
Gale was now one hundred percent certain the old boy was at least three bricks shy of a load. Best humor him. “Right.”
“The strugglings you will all endure will be, of course, right and just and moral, but they will, I must tell you, appear futile.”
Gale shook her head. Maybe the guy had found some old acid and was tripping the light fantastic in his woolly head. “Hadn’t you best be getting on back to the ward?”