The Last Rebel: Survivor (27 page)

Bev and Jim smiled broadly.

“Matt is going to join us heading north to meet up with the main Rebel force.”

“Great. And glad to meet you,” Garrett said, extending his hand. “Duke has some good things to say about you, Jim.”

Jim nodded.

“I understand you were with the general when he died.”

“Yes, I sure was. Heck of a guy.”

Garrett smiled.

“They don’t come any better. I’m very sorry that he’s gone, but we’re going to continue on without him. He would have wanted that.”

Jim nodded.

“We were lucky to meet you,” Kindhand said. “How did you know we were on this road?”

“Sometimes the radio would work, and sometimes it wouldn’t. We did catch a transmission that you guys were around here,” Garrett said.

“You were in the Chicago area, right?” Kindhand said.

“That’s right. DesPlaines, so we just headed this way.”

“How was the trip?”

“A bit hectic,” Garrett said. “We had a couple of skirmishes, one with a group of Rejects and another time a freelance band of marauders.”

“Lose anyone?” Kindhand asked.

Garrett’s eyes darkened.

“Yeah, we lost one trooper in battle. Art Mannion. Great loss.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Kindhand said. “I knew Mannion.”

“I was sort of aware of that,” Garrett said.

“Yeah, we went back a long way.”

“I know.”

There was a pause.

“A lot of Rebels died from the plague,” Garrett said.

“Any from your unit?” Kindhand asked.

“Fifty-eight.”

“That’s still below the average, “Jim said. “You were lucky, if that could be said. Maybe it’s gone. We had a guy here for a while a reporter for Rolling Stone magazine. He said the plague is gone.”

“That’s great if it’s true,” Garrett said. “It’s bad for everyone but I think the average grunt really feels frustrated that he can’t fight it. It’s an enemy that doesn’t carry arms, but it surely is devastating.”

They all nodded.

“How are you doing with equipment?” Kindhand asked.

“Well, certainly we look better than you guys,” Garrett said, laughing, and Jim and Kindhand joined in.

Indeed, the uniforms that the men in Kindhand’s unit wore were very worn versions of their original uniforms, and some articles had been replaced with others. Garrett’s men obviously had found replacement uniforms, because they were still the rich green that were the standard Rebel issue now.

“How are your supplies?” Kindhand asked. “I got the general’s list of where the Reb supply depots are.

“We don’t need ’em right now. Got plenty of guns and ammunition and explosives and the like.”

“Everything working well?” Kindhand asked.

This was a standard question, and one that Ben Raines had encouraged his men to ask. If equipment went bad, it was important that the information be shared with all the units. In some cases, individual units would be able to tell others how to correct the problem, if it was correctable. Or, if it wasn’t, everyone should know that, too.

“Well,” Garrett said, “we had trouble with the MIK-19. It was failing in critical spots. So a couple of the men had to tear down and reassemble the thing, and the other .50-caliber gunners did the same. But it didn’t take long before they knew the cause of the problem. It was the fragile linkage system that held together the belts of 40mm grenades that the gun fired. The solution was simply to replace the can of rounds with a new one and the weapon was ready to go.”

“Listen,” Kindhand said, “do you have any spare helmets? My guys, as you can see, aren’t wearing any.”

“Yes,” Garrett said, “we do, and one for Jim and the lady.”

“Great,” Kindhand said, “just great.”

Bev and Jim also thanked him.

“And let me ask you something,” Garrett said.

“Sure,” Kindhand said.

“Do you have any candy?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

Garrett smiled for the first time since Jim and Bev had met him.

“That seems to be rarer than hen’s teeth. These guys are ready to kill for a Hershey bar!”

They all laughed.

“Have you heard anything about the Rejects and the Believers?” Kindhand asked.

“Well, I did hear something but it’s in the category of rumor.”

“What’s that?”

“That things have heated up to the point where only a major assault is going to solve them—by the Believers.”

“Where did the intel come from?”

“We ran into a couple of Believers who had dropped out of that life and they said that the word was that the Believers were, in the not-too-distant future, to come at the Rejects with everything they have.”

Over the next ten minutes, helmets were found for Jim and Bev, who put them right on. Fifteen minutes later, Kindhand—who automatically, because of his rank, which Jim and Bev found out for the first time was a general—took over and gave instructions for the force to mount up. It was a happy, heady group. Most of them got the feeling that nothing could stop them now.

Kindhand put his arm around Garrett. Jim was nearby and could hear him. For the first time since they had met him, Kindhand showed the depth of his emotion.

“The dream,” he said to Garrett, “is still alive.”

“Believe it,” Garrett said.

TWENTY-FIVE

Alex Szabo had not gotten to be premier of all the Rejects in the United States by virtue only of his ability to terrorize others because of the bottomless cruelty he seemed capable of. He was also smart and innovative. Or, as one opponent termed it, “cunning.”

The adoption—or the way he used it—of the Universal Global Positioning System, an outgrowth of the GPS developed years earlier, was one of his major triumphs, something that occurred when he was only third in command of the Reject force, at the time when a man named Owen Foster was premier and his next in line was James Harold. But one day Harold, who was to succeed Foster if he died, had been found impaled on some sharp rocks at the bottom of a cliff, and word was that he had fallen off the cliff, an accidental death. Still, investigators who probed the accident said that the circumstances of his death seemed “suspect,” meaning Harold might have had a little help getting off the cliff, but no one was charged with any crime. But like so many other things in life, the common man, in this case the troopers, knew what happened. As one of them said: “V offed his ass.”

No doubt was cast on whether or not Szabo “offed” Harold when Foster also passed away, this from a strange, apparently natural malady that acted very much like arsenic ingestion. But when an autopsy was done by a small commission investigating Foster’s death, nothing criminal could be found. Alex Szabo was anointed premier, and not surprisingly no one complained about his ascendancy.

Once he become premier, Szabo solidified the reputation he had known among his troops, his “warriors from hell” as he put it—known for his savagery, his leadership, and his cleverness in developing things that would win him battles. His clever addition to the problem of escaping prisoners was to buttress this reputation. Over the past six months prior to his tenure in office, seventeen prisoners had escaped. And then he told the Rejects about the UGPS, or Universal Global Positioning System, and how it could be used in cutting back on escapes.

He had explained it to them one day in the compound that the UGPS consisted essentially of twenty-four earth-orbiting satellites that allowed any person who owned a UGPS receiver to determine his or her precise longitude, latitude, and altitude anywhere on the planet.

For example, Szabo pointed out that he once knew an ex-helicopter pilot who used a GPS receiver on his boat to navigate his way home in foggy weather. The same machine could be taken the next day to calculate his progress and distance to a particular destination. And then he could use the same technology on his car.

In the years that had followed its invention, UGPS technology had developed, like most technology, by getting smaller. So small, in fact, that it was no larger than a dime, and could be sewn into the lining of a prison uniform, or in the sole of a shoe, a procedure that Szabo suggested be done with “profile” prisoners, such as scientists or military people they had captured, particularly attractive women that were used as sexual slaves.

And it was a short step, he explained, for Reject soldiers to install the sending mechanism into their own gun belts and holsters. Then, if they got lost, it was relatively simple for base command to locate them and give them instructions on how to find their way back to base camp, or wherever. And it also served as a way for base camp to know where they were in case they had been attacked and killed or were otherwise incapable of communication.

And this, too: it enabled them to know where the enemy was if they stole their guns. And the fact was that every single one of the escape unit soldiers had a transmitter built into and hidden in his equipment. If just one soldier’s equipment had been taken, that would have been enough to track them. But after the Rebel firefight with the escape unit the weapons of twenty members of the unit had been taken by the Rebels and, undiscovered, all had had transmitters built into their equipment and were transmitting locations back to Alex Szabo. The plain fact was that they could have been in China and he would have been able to locate them. His only regret was that Rosen had not taken something with a transmitter in it.

Now he was assembling a force with which to track them down. According to Otis Williams, there were only eight people, six soldiers, Rosen, and Beverly Harper, who shouldn’t be a problem. To be on the safe side, he was assembling a force of some hundred men, the very best he had.

From his command post inside the compound, he had been able to pick up their location immediately. It was apparent that they were traveling along back-country roads, heading north through Wyoming. It was apparent to Szabo that they could get close to the Rebel location by vehicle, and then make the final assault on foot. In other words, they did not have to make any cross-country journey to intercept them. They could cut considerable time off their arrival time.

Based on the time, it was not clear whether or not they would launch the attack in daylight or darkness. It didn’t matter to Szabo. His night-vision equipment was, if not the best in the world, close to it. In fact, he had loved the example used by the supplier who sold it to him.

“Imagine,” he had said, “a situation where a Norwegian rat is in some warehouse area, hunched down, gnawing on bread covered with peanut butter, courtesy of one of the area’s workers who dropped it there. Things couldn’t get much better for the rat—peanut butter is five-star cuisine—except when it’s having intercourse on one of its regular 750 times a year!

“But what the rat doesn’t know is that crouched in a doorway across the street about thirty yards away is a big orange tomcat. One would assume that the cat couldn’t see the rat very well. After all, the night is starless, maroon, a rainy sky. But its eyes, normally slits, are dilated to the size of dimes, and it’s using all available light to see the rat, though in black and white rather than color.

“That’s the way our equipment works. It magnifies the ability to see at night twenty times what you’d normally be able to see.”

“Sounds good,” Szabo had said, “and what would happen between the cat and the rat?”

“Well,” the salesman said, “at one point the cat bursts across the street and the rat takes off for a hole in a doorway ten yards away, but he doesn’t make it. The cat ends up eating the rat.”

Szabo had howled. “And who ate the rest of the peanut butter sandwich?”

The salesman felt lucky to make the sale, but even luckier to make it out alive. That Szabo guy was a real fruitcake.

Szabo didn’t care. Day or night, it would be like shooting fish in a barrel. Or rats.

TWENTY-SIX

If the Believers could read his mind, Rosen thought, they would probably nail him to the cross. In the few days that he had spent among them, he had noted that their quintessence was fanaticism. And for this reason, when they launched an attack against the Rejects they would be difficult to defeat. People who would be willing to die for a cause, Rosen thought, were far more dangerous than those men who would think twice before giving up their lives.

Rosen, who was sitting in the Believer mess hall drinking a cup of coffee, looked around him. The women were all dressed in white, the men in gray. And all had that long-gone look in their eyes. And everywhere you looked there were pictures of Jesus Christ and medallion symbols. What did they do when they had sex? Pray for a good orgasm?

Down through history there had always been fanatics like this. What came to Rosen’s mind were the Japanese. He had once done a story that involved him looking at all aspects of Japanese life, getting to know the people well, and when he was finished he told his editor, “I wonder how come the Allies were able to beat the Japanese in World War II. This is one crazy bunch of dudes. Guys who take off in airplanes and crash on the deck of an aircraft carrier; a culture where if someone in a family is disgraced they have “‘family suicides.’”