Mahmud, the Lion of the Desert, if he didn’t smarten up, was only moments away from meeting the biggest cat on the block.

  “Hey, asshole!” Ben yelled. “You with the stupid-looking hat. You hear me?”

  Two short blocks away, Mahmud frowned.

  “I think he talkin’ to you, Mahmud,” one of the Lion’s men said.

  “Yeah, I think he just insulted your hat,” another of the Lion’s men said. “You gonna let him get away wit’ that?”

  “You leave my hat out of this!” Mahmud hollered. Again he frowned, as the sounds of a tank clanking into position reached him. “Ummm, shit!” Mahmud said. He and his men had the opportunity, years back, to steal several tanks that had been abandoned. Trouble was, the modern tank had so many computers in them, none of the Lion’s kitties could figure out how to drive the goddamn thing. One of his men had flipped a switch or pulled a lever or done some damn thing and the turret swung around, the barrel of the 105-mm main gun knocking the Lion to the ground, sprawling ass over elbows. That was the last time any of them ever fooled around with a tank. Too complicated, man.

  The tank that was clanking into position for a shot was a M60A3, with a 105-mm main gun. Mahmud peeked around the corner of the building just as 105 was lowering.

  “Hit the trail!” Mahmud hollered, and took off at a lope just as the 105 belched fire and smoke and one side of the old building blew apart.

  “Shhiittt!” Mahmud’s second in command, Abdul, squalled as bricks rained down on him.

  The sounds of car and truck engines roaring laboriously away drifted to Ben and his people. Rebels worked their way up the street to check it out. Ben leaned up against the Hummer and rolled a cigarette.

  “Sorry-assed firefight,” he bitched.

  “It’ll get better,” Jersey said. “I got a hunch this bunch was way off their turf—just checking things out.”

  “West wants to know where in the blankety-blank, blankety-blank, blankety-blank hell we are,” Corrie said.

  “Tell him we’re all right,” Ben said. “Mount up, everybody. Let’s stay on this old road until we reach the expressway and take that on in. I think things will begin to pick up very shortly.”

  They certainly did pick up, just about three miles farther down the road.

  “Pull over and duck in between those old buildings over there, Coop,” Ben said, pointing. “That intersection up there just looks too clean to suit me.”

  Corrie was busy telling the company of Rebels and armor behind them what was happening. When she finished, Ben said, “Get me Nick on scramble, Corrie.”

  “Nick, I’m not far from the expressway on Lake Ontario. I don’t even know what road this is. What can you tell me about it?”

  “What the hell are you doing down there, Ben?” Nick came back. “From Pickering on in is strong creepie country. Get the hell out of there!”

  “He’s beginning to sound like all the rest of the batt coms,” Copper remarked.

  “Yeah,” Ben said with a grin. “I do believe Nick has finally found a home.” He keyed the mic. “Negative on pull-back, Nick. We’re too far in for that. How is your advance?”

  “Slow, Ben. The punks and the creeps smartened up and are giving everybody one hell of a fight. I just got off the blower with Georgi. He’s stopped cold for a time. You watch your ass down there, Ben.”

  “Will do. Eagle out.”

  Ben studied the scene in front of him for a moment. “Corrie, bring the tanks up.”

  The lead tank commander popped the hatch and said, “What’s up, General?”

  Ben pointed out the buildings ahead. “Just for luck, put three or four rounds into each of those buildings.”

  “Will do.”

  Another tank pulled up, and a few seconds later great holes were blown into the old buildings.

  All hell broke loose.

  “Mortars coming in!” a Rebel shouted, then dove for cover.

  The mortar rounds didn’t do any harm, but they caused everybody to hunt for cover. Ben dashed for the phone on the tank and told the commander, “Bring those goddamn buildings down, son.”

  In seconds 105 and 155 rounds began knocking holes in the building. The third rumbled up and began pouring HE rounds into the buildings. Whoever was in the building on the north side of the road—and no one was sure whether it was creepies or punks—must have used the place for an fuel dump, for about a minute after the firefight began, the whole building blew up in a wall of flames and smoke. The explosion shook the ground for a mile in any direction and sent debris flying high into the clear blue sky. And that debris included various body parts.

  “They’re probably not creepies,” Jersey said matter-of-factly. “The parts I can see aren’t wearing robes. Although we have fought a few who dressed like normal people.”

  But the punks weren’t anywhere near through. Heavy machine-gun fire began coming from concealed gun emplacements on both sides of the old cracked road.

  Several Rebels had climbed up onto roofs and were surveying the scene through binoculars. One yelled, “Back those tanks up! The bastards have Dragons!”

  The tanks quickly sought protection behind buildings.

  “Mortars up,” Ben said. “Let’s zero in and neutralize those people.”

  The rooftop FO’s began calling out range and the Rebel mortars began dropping in short and walking in. The heavy machine guns were well hidden but not bunkered against mortar attack. One by one the machine guns fell silent as the mortar crews used a wide variety of rounds to still them.

  While all that was going on, two platoons of Rebels had been flanking the ambush site. As soon as the mortars ceased their bombardment, the Rebels moved in for the kill.

  “Neutralized,” Corrie said to Ben when the rattle of gunfire had ceased.

  “Let’s go see what we were up against.”

  Lieutenant Bonelli met Ben at the crossroads. “Mixed bag of punks, sir. We’ve got several prisoners over there.” He pointed.

  Ben walked over to the ditch and looked at the prisoners, their hands tied behind them. He guessed they were in their mid to late twenties. They would have all been in their mid to late teens when the Great War blew the world apart and toppled all vestiges of law and order.

  “Talk to me,” Ben told the small group.

  “Fuck you,” one said.

  “Stick it up your ass, man,” another said.

  “Death to all niggers and Jews,” yet another popped off.

  “Long live the Movement,” the last one said.

  “What movement?” Ben asked.

  “The Movement, man. Ever’body knows about the Movement.”

  “Sorry. I never heard of the Movement. Why don’t you tell me about it?”

  “Don’t tell him nothin’!” the first punk shouted defiantly.

  “Recon reports it’s clear all the way down to the expressway,” Corrie said. “But from there on into the city, the place is crawling with punks.”

  “Barney Holland,” the last punk said. “He’s the leader of the Movement.”

  “Shut your damn mouth, Eddie!”

  Ben turned to Bonelli. “Take Eddie and see what you can get out of him.”

  Eddie was jerked to his feet and marched off, while the other three shouted obscenities at him. Then they turned their vulgar mouths on Ben and let him have it. They cursed Ben until they were breathless.

  During the cussing, they managed to give away quite a lot about Barney and the Movement. The Movement, so it seemed, was directed toward the total annihilation of all minorities and anyone else who didn’t agree with the preachings and teachings of Barney Holland.

  “Same old song, different jukebox,” Ben said.

  “What do you want to do with these bastards?” Ben was asked.

  Ben looked at the Rebel for a moment.

  “Right, sir.”

  Eddie had been taken to a small building that had suffered only minor damage during the shelling. Bonelli was stepping out of the building as Ben approached. He shook his head.

  “We untied Eddie to treat his wounds and he swallowed some sort of pill, General. He was dead a minute later.”

  “Well, members of the Movement obviously have enough sense to manufacture pharmaceuticals. So we’re not dealing with total idiots. Did he say anything of value?”

  “The Movement is one of the largest gangs in the area. The other large gang is the Mau Maus.”

  “Oh, shit!” Ben said. “Let me guess: They hate all whites.”

  “Right, sir. That first bunch we ran into is a part of the Mau Maus. A group headed by a guy who calls himself Mahmud the Terrible. The Lion of the Desert.”

  “If he’s the Lion of the Desert, what the hell is he doing in Toronto?”

  “Beats me, sir. Mahmud claims to be a direct descendant of Gandhi.”

  “Gandhi?”

  “Yes, sir. Gandhi.”

  “How wonderful for him. Let’s move out.”

  The punks and creeps were leaving Windsor like rats from a sinking ship. The guns of the Rebels across the river, using HE and WP, in addition to the Rebel planes dropping napalm, had turned the city into an inferno. The winds were blowing west to east at about twenty miles an hour and that only served to fan the flames. The punks and creeps ran toward the east and ran right into roaming P-51’s. The souped-up fighters turned the highways into death pyres. Cobras and Apaches came in behind them and finished the job.

  Those gangs in London monitored shortwave sets and went into a panic. They began fleeing toward Toronto.

  “Give them a clear corridor,” Ben ordered. “Planes and choppers are not to fire on them. They’re heading for the city, so let them. They’ll be easier to handle there. Let them all bunch up in the city. Let every gang and creepie in every city west of Toronto get to the city. Then we’ll close off the corridor and finish it.”

  The creepies already knew how ruthless Ben Raines was. The gangs of punks were about to find out.

  At Ben’s orders, Ike began slowly swinging his battalions south, closing off any escape to the west. It was the classic pincher movement, and the creeps and punks ran right into the trap.

  Ben halted his battalions’ forward movement at noon. “Hold what you have,” he radioed. “Give Ike and Georgi time to close it up.”

  Ben’s northern battalions had moved down into East Gwillimbury, the westernmost battalion linking up with Georgi’s easternmost troops.

  Ike was driving hard, pushing his people to the max, nipping at the heels of the retreating punks and creeps, herding them into the trap.

  Ben had sealed off everything north to south, running from the intersection of Highway 11 down to the lake. By midafternoon, Ben told his people to secure for the night and get some food and rest.

  Inside the city it was chaos. Thousands of creeps and punks and warlords and assorted street slime had converged in Toronto.

  “I was ‘bused as a child,” one gang leader bitched to Mahmud the Terrible, the Lion of the Desert. “My daddy whupped me and whupped me somethin’ awful. I didn’t have no choice ’ceptin’ to turn to a life of crime. Dat’s what de social workers tole me over and over. Dey be right, I’m shore.”

  “My daddy whupped me, too,” Ahmed Popov said. It was rumored that Ahmed got his last name from a vodka bottle . . . after he killed a tourist in Miami to get it. “He whupped me ’cause I wanted to hang wit’ the homeboys ‘stead of goin’ to school and listen to a bunch of shit.”

  Actually, when the Great War struck, Ahmed was eighteen years old, had been arrested 122 times—for everything ranging from rape to grand theft auto, but thanks to liberals, he never served more than two hours at a time behind bars.

  “We got to make peace with the niggers,” one of Barney Holland’s lieutenants said. “We got to stand shoulder to shoulder with them jungle bunnies and fight the Rebels.”

  “I’ll be goddamned if that’s so,” Barney said. “They can stay on their side of the city and we’ll stay on ours.”

  “We got to talk about makin’ peace with them goddamn honkies over there,” Ahmed said to Mahmud. “We can’t win fightin’ Ben Raines separate.”

  “There ain’t no way I’ll shake hands with that cross-burnin’ fool!” Mahmud said.

  “Then we got to fall back into the city and make friends with the cannibals, Barney.”

  “Shit no!”

  “We gots to make friends with the Night People, Mahmud!”

  “Is you crazy? You want to end up on their supper table along with the greens and the grits?”

  “Then we gonna lose, Mahmud, an’ that’s a fact.”

  “We ain’t never lost no fight yet, has we?”

  “No.”

  “Then what you so worried about?”

  “We ain’t never fought Ben Raines.”

  Six

  All that afternoon and all during the night, the sounds of tanks and self-propelled artillery being moved about was heard north, east, and west of the city. The Rebels knew exactly what Ben was doing; they’d seen this played out many, many times.

  The punks didn’t have any idea what was about to happen. But the creeps did.

  “We must flee,” the leaders were told.

  “There is no place to flee,” was the response from the Judges. “Every exit has been sealed tight. We will die, but our movement will live on. We are finished here, but all over the world our kind flourish. And Ben Raines does not know that others like us have adapted to modern ways. They have tanks and heavy guns and almost everything that Ben Raines has. We must accept our fate and fight to the finish.”

  “As you say,” the combat leaders said, and bowed and left the stinking lairs of the Judges.

  Ben slept well and rose refreshed; he never needed more than a few hours of sleep. It was still several hours before dawn, and the morning was cool. Ben got his coffee and walked outside. He did not have to look to see if Jersey was with him. She always was. Ben sat down in an old chair on the front porch, sat his coffee mug on the floor, and rolled a cigarette.

  Corrie stepped out, a steaming cup of coffee in her hand. “Artillery is in place,” she spoke softly. “The crews are catching a few hours sleep.”

  “We’ll commence the barrage at good light. That should be about 0700.”

  “Where do we go when this is over, boss?” Cooper asked, stepping out of the house.

  “I guess we go back home and settle down for a time. This has been the shortest campaign I can remember.”

  “It’s gonna be kind of dull, isn’t it?” Beth, the last of Ben’s personal team, said as she joined the group in the darkness on the porch.

  To many people, combat produces a high unlike any other sensation. Stay in it long enough, and one either cracks, learns to live with it, or begins to enjoy it in a strange way. Many of the Rebels, including Ben, enjoyed the high of combat.

  Ben finished his first mug of coffee and stood up. “Let’s wander down to the mess tent and get some breakfast.”

  The camp was beginning to stir as Rebels rolled out of beds and blankets and cots and sleeping bags. The shower area was sending up clouds of steam in the cool air. Ben had to smile as he recalled how the Rebel army began to rebuild after the fall of the Tri-States. Only a tiny handful of men and women had, over the years, turned into thousands.

  Ben spoke to a few of the Rebels as he walked. Most gave him a wide berth, both out of respect and out of fear, for many Rebels still believed that Ben was very nearly a god. Ben had tried for years to dispel that nonsense but soon learned that the harder he tried, the less successful he was. And the old Thompson he carried was right up there with Ben. Many Rebels refused to touch it, even though there was not a single piece or part of original equipment left. Ben had tried other weapons, but always returned to the old Chicago Piano. It took a man to control the .45-caliber spitter, especially with a fully loaded drum hung under it, but even at middle age, Ben was still very much one hell of a man.

  Ben lingered over breakfast, then refilled his coffee mug and returned to his CP. The sky was beginning to lighten in the east when all his batt coms began radioing in.

  “We’re sitting on ready,” Corrie called to Ben.

  There had been no mention of calling for the surrender of the punks and the creeps in the city. That time had passed. Ben could not ask for the women and children to come out, for the Rebels had learned that the creepies had a nasty habit of including their own perverted women in the bunch. But many women who had aligned themselves with the punks and thugs and street slime had left the city, and the Rebels had let them go . . . after taking the younger children from them. The surviving Canadian people had opened their arms to the young.

  Ben looked at the luminous hands of his watch. “A few more minutes.”

  Cooper sat on the steps of the porch, his eyes closed, dozing. Jersey sat on the porch with her back to the front of the house, her M-16 across her knees. Beth was inside, writing in her journal. Corrie was at the radio.

  Ben drained his coffee mug and placed it on the floor of the porch. “All right, Corrie,” he called. “Bring the city down.”

  Fifteen seconds later the sky was split with bright flashes as the big guns roared. The first rounds began landing on the city, and they included everything from the 105-mm rounds to the huge projectiles from the M110A2, the big 203-mm (8-inch) self-propelled howitzers, which could lay back some 24,000 yards and lob conventional rounds in and put rocket-assisted rounds in from a distance of nearly 34,000 yards. But its rate of fire was slow, about four rounds every three minutes, due to the weight of the projectiles, since each round weighed just over two hundred pounds. But the damage it caused was awesome.

  President Blanton had sent several civilian observers up to Ben’s position (they had arrived the day before) and were still sleeping in their quarters when the big guns began to roar. They rushed outside to see the gray horizon pocked with fire and smoke. The three women and three men ran out into the street, slightly disoriented, and walked the short distance to Ben’s CP. They were startled to find him sitting calmly on the front porch, reading a Dan Parkinson novel of the West and sipping coffee.