The old man smiled indulgently. “I must now tell you goodbye, child.”
On impulse, she put out her hand to touch his arm, but her hand seemed to freeze in midair. She fought to move her hand. It seemed stuck.
“No,” he said gently. “That is not permitted.”
“Are you the reincarnation of Houdini?”
“I am the reincarnation of no one, child. But I am, I can assure you of that.”
“Ah, eh, you’re what?”
But he was gone.
Gale’s arm fell to her side. She lifted it, looked at it. She shook her head. Looked around her. The old boy was nowhere to be seen.
“It was a dream,” she muttered. “Had to be, I’m dreaming, sleepwalking. Couldn’t be anything else.”
She returned to the warmth of the blankets and the soled and comforting shape of Ben. When the first shell from the IPF exploded at 0600 the next morning, Gale forgot all about the man who called himself the Prophet.
For a time.
CHAPTER TWO
It was an artillery duel for the first two days of the battle, with the combatants never catching sight of each other. For the most part, the infantry troops had little to do except stay alive and maintain their sanity under the almost-constant pounding of the big shells.
For those who had never experienced shelling, it was a frightening, numbing experience. The ground seemed to shake constantly, and it appeared that anyplace one sought in safety was the wrong place.
Both the Rebels and the IPF had to constantly shift the positions of their artillery, with the exception of Ben’s big self-propelled 155’s, which could sit back miles from the front and lob destruction and terror into the IPP’S positions with terrifying pinpoint accuracy. Ben was no gentleman at war; he used chemicals, anti-personnel, high explosive, incendiary, and beehive rounds.
Ben kept his tanks in reserve, carefully concealed and camouflaged, even though the crews and commanders were chafing to get into the fight. Ben
wanted something with which to fall back on when the situation began to deteriorate, as he knew it would. That, he knew, was only a matter of time.
The third, fourth and fifth days were ground troops days, with the infantry troops slugging it out, taking, losing, regaining and losing the same ground a dozen times.
On the sixth day, the IPF attempted to cross the interstate at six locations, sending huge numbers of troops across the concrete in what appeared to be a kamikaze-style rush of bodies.
Five sectors of the Rebels held, but the IPF broke through one line, allowing more troops to pour through and set up positions west, east and south, in the form of an open-ended box. Hector Ramos’s troops were cut off, battling lopsided odds, fighting for their lives.
In western Iowa and central Illinois, the dawning of the new day brought a fresh horror to the men and women of Juan Solis’s and Al Maiden’s troops.
A man’s scream brought Mark Terry on a flat run from his bunker, running hard up the hill to the first line of defense. A man squatted behind sandbags, his face mirroring his horror and revulsion. He seemed unable to speak. He could but point to the valley.
Hartline’s men had been unusually silent for several days, with no attempt to push past their battle lines. There had been only sporadic sniper fire from the west to keep the troops from New Africa alert-a lead reminder that Hartline’s mercs and the IPF had not forgotten them.
The sentry found his voice as he handed Mark binoculars and pointed to the valley. “Nobody could be that low,” he said, his voice choked with anger and frustration.
Mark felt his guts churn and his breakfast fight to lunge from his stomach as he lifted the long-range glasses to his eyes. Like the sentry, he was, for a moment, speechless. He felt the blood rush from his head, and for a moment, thought he would pass out from the sheer horror of the sight in the valley below.
“The dirty bastard!” he finally found his voice.
Al had joined him on the ridge, pulling field glasses to his eyes. “Oh, my God!” he blurted. “Oh, my God, no!”
The IPF and Hartline’s troops were on the march, moving up behind armored personnel carriers. On the front of each APC, strapped to the sloping front of the carrier, a naked woman was positioned, her legs spread wide, ankles and feet secured to the lugs near the base of the Ml13. Her arms were out-flung, wrists tied to the headlight brackets. The machine gun mounted to the front of the APC was only inches from each woman’s head, guaranteeing a savage muzzle-blast burn to the side of the woman’s head.
When the troops on the ridges saw what was coming up behind the APC’S, to a man, they openly, unashamedly wept.
A hundred or so old people were being herded in front of and mixed with the mercenaries and the troops from the IPF.
The elderly black men and women were crying from fear and humiliation as they stumbled along, prodded by the rifle barrels of the mercs and the IPF troops.
The elderly men and women had been stripped naked and were barefooted.
The IPF troops and Hartline’s men were moving ever closer, and so far no shots had been fired from the troops on the ridges. All eyes were fixed unbelievingly on the scene before them. Weapons had been forgotten, hanging loose in their hands.
“They have to be stopped.” Mark was the first to speak, his words hoarse-sounding, pushed from his tight throat. “We have to stop them; there is no one else to do the job.”
Up and down the thin and battle-weary line of defenders of liberty, the troops looked first at each other, and then to Al and Mark for orders. But for many, the decision had already been made in their minds.
From the lead APC, still much too far away to be heard by any of the resistance fighters, Peggy Jones was screaming.
“Fire!” she screamed. “Shoot your guns! For God’s sake-shoot!”
The IPF troops in the APC laughed at her words.
“I can’t fire on those people,” a man said, tears in his eyes. “I can’t shoot, I might hit some of the old people or the women. I can’t do it.”
“Fire!” Mark screamed the command. “Goddamnit, people, they have to be stopped regardless of the cost. Fire, goddamn you!”
The enemy moved closer.
Now the troops on the ridges could hear Peggy’s screaming, very faint, but audible.
“Shoot,” she screamed. “For God’s sake, shoot!”
The machine guns on the front of the APC’S began singing their lethal songs, spitting out lead. One woman’s
hair caught fire from the fierce heat of the muzzle; her screaming was hideous.
“Pick your targets,” Al yelled to a rifle squad. “Shoot around the old people.”
The snipers tried, but the troops in the APC’S were crouched low, and almost impossible to hit. Bullets struck one naked young woman in the stomach; she cried out in pain. Several old people were struck by the lead from the men on the ridges. They fell to the earth, screaming in pain and confusion. A Jeep ran over one; an APC crushed the legs of another. Yet another elderly man tried to grab the rear of a Jeep. He was dragged over the rocky ground for several hundred feet until life and strength left him.
Most of the guns on the high ground fell silent. They could not be blamed for that.
“Fall back!” Mark yelled, knowing his position was nearly hopeless. “First and second companies regroup. First company to the right flank, second company to the left, come in behind them.”
But it was too late; Hartline’s men and the IPF were too close. They had already begun executing an end-around sweep. The defenders on the ridges were cut off.
“Goddamn you!” Peggy yelled her rage at the men on the ridges. She tried to anger them into firing. “Can’t you niggers do anything right? You have to leave everything up to whitey?”