“He looks and acts like he might just be able to do it, Abe,” a man called from the porch.
Good-humored laughter broke from the knot of men gathered around the troops.
Humor touched the burly mountain man’s eyes. “I do believe you’d try your best to whup me, wouldn’t you…Captain?”
A grin touched the corners of Capt. Roger Rayle’s mouth. “Yes, sir, I sure would.”
The mountain man laughed and shook his shaggy head. “All right, Captain. Come on up to the porch. Folks been a-bringin’ in food all morning. We eat and talk about this thing. We don’t get much outside news “round here. Be nice to find out what’s happenin” in the world and with these Russians!”
Abe stopped dead in his tracks and slowly turned around when Captain Rayle said, “A resurgence of Nazism, sir.”
Abe stared at him for a long moment. He blinked. “Resurgence. Good word. I believe that means-and you tell me if I’m wrong-these Russian people, the IPF, they doing the same thing that Hitler feller done back in the thirties and forties to the Jews.
Am I right?”
“Yes, sir. You are exactly right. And they must be stopped.”
By now the crowd around the stone and wood house had grown to more than a hundred men and women. They stood silently.
Abe said, “My daddy was a paratrooper in that war. He helped liberate a concentration camp. Don’t rightly recall just where it was. He told me he had seen some ugly sights in his life, during the war. Hadn’t never seen nothing to compare with that. Said them people was the poorest lookin’ bunch he’d ever seen. Made him sick, so he said. Couldn’t keep nothing on his stomach for a week or better.
“Now, as for me, I don’t know many Jew folks. Them I have known, I didn’t much care for. Too pushy for my tastes. But my personal opinions don’t matter much when it comes to another man doing a deliberate hurt to a human being “cause of race or religion. I just don’t hold with that. What is this IPF bunch doin” to folks?”
“They are taking everyone not of a pure white race-blacks, Hispanics, Asians, Jews, Indians-and operating on them so they cannot reproduce offspring. They are tattooing I.d. numbers on them. They are torturing them and conducting medical experiments on them. If a person does not have a high enough I.q., regardless of race, he is being disposed of.”
“Killed, you mean?”
“Yes, sir.”
The man spat another stream of tobacco juice on the ground. “All this is fact?”
“Yes, sir.”
A long, lean, lanky man set his coffee cup on the porch railing and stood up. “Abe,” he said, “don’t you be startin’ no meetin’ “til I get back here, now, you hear?”
“Where you be goin”?”
“To get my kin and my gun.”
Raines’s Rebels got in the first bloody, savage lick of the newly declared guerrilla war. The column of IPF troops and equipment was on a bridge in south central Iowa, crossing the Des Moines River when hundreds of pounds of carefully hidden high explosives were electronically detonated. One full company of troops was killed when their trucks plunged nose-first into the cold, dark waters of the river. Fifty were killed when the bridge exploded, hurling men and equipment and assorted arms and legs high into the air, to plunge and sink into the river.
The LETTERRP teams had allowed several IPF trucks to cross the bridge before activating the charges, cutting them off from the main convoy. The IPF troops were chopped to bloody rags of flesh and splintered shards of bone by mortar and heavy machine gunfire from the Rebels hidden in the thick brush that now grew alongside the roads and interstates of the once-most-powerful nation in the world.
By the time the IPF could backtrack and cross the river, coming up to the point of ambush, the Rebels were long gone, fading silently and quickly into the countryside, their gruesome jobs efficiently and effectively done.
Colonel Fechnor, who was commanding the troops spearheading the assault south, smiled a humorless grimace of grudging respect for the men and women of the scouts and LETTERRP’S, and for Gen. Ben Raines.
This one action-even if there were no more, and Fechnor knew there would be many more-had succeeded in its initial objective: slowing down the advance of the IPF. Now every bridge, no matter how small, would have to be inspected and inspected very carefully. Fechnor knew the Rebels would have ambush teams at every bridge and overpass along the way. If just one out of every five teams Fechnor sent out returned, he would consider that good odds.
No, Fechnor mused, this President-General Ben Raines was not going to roll over like a whipped puppy and give up. If Raines went down at all, it would be with a snarling, biting, savage action.
For the first time-the very first time-Colonel Fechnor felt that just maybe the International Peace Force had bitten off more than they could chew or swallow safely.
But, Colonel Fechnor thought, mentally shaking off the thought of defeat, he could not think that-that was treason. He was a soldier, and as a soldier he obeyed orders. He did not question whether they were right or wrong. He simply obeyed. Fechnor was the epitome of the universal soldier.
A type found in all armies. The type without which no army could exist or function. Without them, there could be no wars.
Fechnor ordered his dead buried. He stood with an impassive soldier’s face as this was done.
Then the colonel made his second mistake of that day.
“What do our scouts report on the conditions in Ottumwa?” he asked an aide.
“The city is deserted, sir. They say it is a ghost town. They don’t know where the people went. First reports of several weeks ago stated the city had several hundred residents.”
They probably left to join Ben Raines, the colonel said to himself, and he was right in that assumption. “Very well. No need to change course. Drive right on through the city.”
Ottumwa was anything but a ghost town.
Colonel Gray’s people had sealed the bypass around the city with old semi-rigs, carefully placed so it looked as though there had been a terrible accident months before and the wreckage never cleared.
There was about to be just that. But what was about to occur to Col. Valeska Fechnor’s IPF troops was to be anything but an accident.
The old highway ran through the center of the once-thriving little city, and on both sides of the main drag of town, waiting behind dusty and broken windows, crouched on rooftops and hidden in ground-level old stores, were the trained troops of Gray’s Scouts. They waited, hands gripping weapons, their only movement the shifting and blinking of eyes.
“Convoy approaching the city limits, sir,” a forward-placed LETTERRP radioed back to Dan Gray.
“Received,” Colonel Gray’s aide radioed back. She turned to Dan. “Convoy coming in, sir. And it’s a big one.
“Good, good.” Dan smiled and rubbed his hands together. “Excellent, dear. Now we shall teach the bloody arrogant bastards a hard lesson about life. Or,” he laughed, “the loss of it.”
She returned the soft yet hard laughter of the professional fighter.
The lead scout APC cautiously turned the corner and swung onto the main street.
“Hold your fire,” Dan whispered into a walkie-talkie. “Let them get clear; our lads south of the main area will bloody their knives on the scouts.”
Colonel Fechnor felt it first. An experienced soldier, he felt that anticipatory tingle on the short hairs of his neck. He looked around him. His entire convoy stretched out behind him on the main street of town.
Where were the dogs? he thought. There should be mangy dogs slinking about. Birds, too. But the street was void of all life.
Suddenly, Fechnor knew he had been suckered.
Sitting ducks! he thought. “Floorboard it!” he yelled, startling his young driver. “Get the hell off this street and out of town.” He grabbed up his mic. “Ambush!” he shouted. “Ambush!”