Apocalypse Burning

by Mel Odom

  The lion shall lie down with the lamb. The thought came unbidden to Remington. He was irritated that the biblical phrase should even occur to him. Religion was not his deal. All his life, all he’d ever had to believe in was himself. And in the military, all the belief in the world wouldn’t save a man from superior weapons or superior tactics. All these people thinking about God were wasting time they should have been using to develop plans of action. The Syrians were coming. If there was a God, He’d shown no sign of stopping it.

  Surprisingly, Baker wasn’t at the pulpit that someone had fashioned from ammo crates covered with a sheet of plywood. One of the Ranger chaplains stood there leading the prayer as another man dunked a soldier into the large metal water container. A line of men obviously waiting their turn for a dunking stood to one side of the container.

  The religious convictions of Baker’s followers had created friction among the Rangers as well as among the other military units. Most of those who were baptized by Baker or one of the chaplains seemed to believe that they were somehow divinely protected. Remington had seen one instance himself, though he noticed that those men died just as readily as any other soldier in his command.

  But their belief in the hereafter—that they were going to survive somewhere else even if they were killed in the city they held on to by the skin of their teeth and bled dry to keep—offended other soldiers. Remington believed that having someone constantly in the next trench harping about saving his immortal soul simply reminded a fighting man that he could be dead in the next heartbeat.

  And where do you go once you are dead?

  Remington hated that the question was even formed in his mind. Death would catch him someday, but until that moment he intended to live like he was going to live forever. He wouldn’t allow himself to get distracted by Baker or his converts. They were all idiots, all soldiers too weak to face death and spit in its eye. They were spineless.

  Turning away from the tent, Remington made a mental note to check on Corporal Joseph Baker’s hours. Maybe there was a way to cut into Baker’s free time even more. That’d disrupt the church schedule. Then Remington focused his thoughts on his upcoming meeting. If everything worked well, he’d have a chance to strike back at the Syrians within the next few days, maybe even the next few hours.

  And maybe he’d be able to work out his situation with First Sergeant Samuel Adams “Goose” Gander at the same time. After all, the holding position in Sanliurfa was all about acceptable losses. Somebody was going to have to take them. And Remington knew just who he was going to toss into the next desperate situation.

  United States 75th Army Rangers Temporary Post

  Sanliurfa, Turkey

  Local Time 0611 Hours

  “First Sergeant.”

  Startled, totally engrossed in what he was reading and struggling to make sense of, Goose looked up from the Bible. His mind reeled from the prophecies contained in the book of Revelation, partly because of how huge and sweeping they were, and partly because he had trouble understanding many of them.

  Corporal Joseph Baker stood in the doorway of the makeshift barracks. At six feet eight inches tall and built like a Kodiak bear, the corporal was both a threatening and an awe-inspiring man. His face was round beneath his blond crew cut, and his china blue eyes held innocence as well as fatigue. Bruises from the fighting he’d survived still marked his face, but they were green and yellow with age now. He wore BDUs and carried an M-4A1. He hung his helmet by its strap over one broad shoulder.

  Goose dragged his feet from the small cot and dropped them to the floor. He wore his boots, though he had taken the time to change his socks. Going without his boots wasn’t something he was prepared to do, but, as a soldier, he knew fresh socks meant he had less chance of catching athlete’s foot or some other bacterial infection. In a battle zone, an infantryman without healthy feet was only one quick step away from being a dead man.

  “Corporal,” Goose said in greeting.

  The building the Ranger contingent was using now as their barracks had been a grain mill for a hundred years or more. Located near the heart of the city, because Sanliurfa had been around in one incarnation or another for hundreds of years, the mill offered the Rangers a good central location from which to deploy troops.

  The Rangers bunked in the basement. There were no windows—one of its greatest advantages in the current situation—so light came from electric lanterns and torches run by generators. The noise from those generators constantly hammered and chugged to create a solid racket that underscored every conversation. But the building’s walls were a couple feet thick and offered a lot of protection against the artillery shelling the military expected to resume once the Syrians took up their assault on the city in earnest again.

  The sweet smell of the milled grain accumulated through the centuries thickened the air to the point that men with asthma or sinus conditions hadn’t been able to stand it. Fine particles floated in the air, filled every nook and cranny, and coated every surface. Goose knew that grain dust could be explosive, and though he’d been assured by the demolition guys that the concentrations in the basement weren’t anywhere high enough to be dangerous, he still worried.

  Dozens of beds were spread over the basement floor, but all of them were organized to provide aisles for rapid evac if the troops were called into a firefight.

  The Rangers didn’t really rest in this room, Goose knew. The men collapsed, passed out, and gave in to fatigue or injury. Most of them sleeping or lying in the beds now bore light wounds. These wounded were just the tip of the iceberg. The hospitals overflowed with more critically wounded. To Goose it didn’t seem like an hour could go by without somebody—soldier or citizen—succumbing to his wounds.

  They were bleeding to death slowly in Sanliurfa, and Goose knew it.

  So the mill basement wasn’t a place of rest or hope. It was a staging area, where men took brief respite and hoped and prayed they and their friends weren’t going to be the next to die. The healthy Rangers occupied the few bars or restaurants open throughout the city. At least those places provided his men with a comforting façade, a place where they could pretend for a moment that everything was going to be all right.

  Goose had taken to splitting his time between the bars, the taverns, and the temporary barracks. As a first sergeant, he pushed himself to maintain a high profile. Other soldiers leaned on his ability to keep himself up and going. He felt frayed and ragged now, and his interpretation of the book of Revelation was building a solid fear in his heart and mind. It wasn’t his only source of unease, either. Goose’s talk with Icarus and his decision to let the man go remained constantly in the first sergeant’s thoughts.

  “Am I interrupting you?” Baker asked.

  “No,” Goose replied. “I’m due back in the field at 0700.”

  Remington had issued standing orders that every man was supposed to be in the rack for five hours a day until the next round of Syrian attacks. That wasn’t enough sleep to keep a warrior healthy or sane, but it was something.

  “Have you slept?” Baker entered the room and nodded hello to several of the men who called out to him.

  Other men, Goose noted, rolled over in their beds and turned away from Baker. The corporal was something of a messiah and a pariah these days. His church was one of the only areas that didn’t move on a regular basis.

  Remington had objected to the permanent placement of the tent church but hadn’t chosen to fight a battle over it yet. Baker’s argument for staying put was that the soldiers and the citizens stranded in Sanliurfa needed to know the location of the church. And he had a point, Goose figured. Word of Baker’s ministry had spread throughout the city by word of mouth, although a few stories about him had aired on the media.

  “I’ve slept some,” Goose answered.

  “Should I try to speak with you at another time?”

  “Now’s as good a time as any. What do you need?”

  Baker glanced around and picked
up a folding chair that looked incredibly small compared to his massive bulk. “I don’t need anything, First Sergeant. But I’ve noticed you coming around more than normal. I thought perhaps you might need something.”

  Goose considered that. He’d wanted to talk to Baker after finishing up with Icarus the previous day, but there hadn’t been time. Baker had been assigned to help clear debris because he had been a heavyequipment operator prior to his army career. The loud earthmovers hadn’t provided Goose a chance to discuss anything that was on his mind. Later, Baker had gone directly to his church and joined the service.

  “I saw you,” Baker said, “at the church. You came in, stayed for a while, then left.”

  Goose nodded. The church hadn’t been the place to talk either. Unable to relax, Goose had borrowed a Bible from one of the ammo lockers Baker had established for people to share the Word of God. He’d felt guilty that he didn’t carry a Bible of his own.

  When Goose had first joined the military, Wes Gander—his father—had packed one into his things without telling him. His dad had also added a half-dozen decks of playing cards, a memory book filled with pictures, a cribbage board, an extra pack of underwear and two extra packs of socks. Wes Gander had always been a caretaker. He’d been a Green Beret in Vietnam during some of the hottest parts of the war. He’d been the first to tell Goose about the importance of dry socks, even if a man couldn’t get clean ones.

  “I thought maybe you had something on your mind,” Baker said.

  Goose did, but he didn’t know how to approach the subject. Upon further reflection, Icarus’s statements about Nicolae Carpathia being the Antichrist had seemed too far-fetched to even speak about. Carpathia was all over the news yesterday and today, so it was no surprise that Icarus had chosen the Romanian president to fixate on.

  Icarus hadn’t been in any better shape than Goose was. The man hadn’t had any sleep for days, was suffering from wounds he’d received at the hands of the vengeful PKK terrorists, and was paranoid from being hunted by the CIA and by Remington’s handpicked dirtytricks squad. The man was hallucinating, obviously trying to find a way to make sense of everything that was happening to him.

  “It’s nothing that can’t wait,” Goose said.

  Baker nodded, then pointed his chin at the Bible Goose held. “Reading?”

  “Yeah.” Goose marked his place in Revelation, closed the Bible, and put it on the bed beside him.

  “You developed a sudden interest?” Baker asked.

  “Maybe.” Goose hesitated. “We’re in the middle of the country where all of this took place.”

  “Most of the Old Testament, sure.” Baker indicated the Bible. “May I?”

  Uncomfortable with the attention Baker was paying to his newfound interest, Goose said, “Yeah.”

  Baker scooped the Bible up in one huge paw. He flicked the golden sash that marked Goose’s place. “Revelation.”

  Goose really didn’t want to get into this discussion. Too many questions and challenges crowded his mind. He needed to remain focused on the mission.

  “This part of the Bible, First Sergeant, happens everywhere. Not just in Turkey.”

  “I know.”

  Baker replaced the Bible on the bed. “That particular book is one that has puzzled sages and laymen for centuries.”

  “I can understand how,” Goose admitted. “The reading goes pretty hard.”

  “There’s a basic precept in the book of Revelation that people forget.”

  “What’s that?”

  “God didn’t lay out the end times so everyone could understand them. Those words are warnings, signs, portents. They are not a concrete blueprint of what’s going to happen and what a man should do about it. They’re guideposts for choosing how to live, and they’re not meant to be clear. God wants you to have to work at it. He wants you to read it and think about it. Prophecy is like that. Like John says in Revelation 1:3: ‘Blessed is he who reads and those who hear the words of this prophecy, and keep those things which are written in it; for the time is near.’”

  “There’s that question of belief,” Goose said. “My daddy talked about that a lot.”

  Interest flickered in Baker’s eyes. “Your father was a preacher?”

  “No. He was a soldier, and after that he was a lot of things. Never found a true calling after the military, but we made do with the odd jobs he held. One of the things he spent a lot of time at, even though it didn’t pay, was teaching Sunday school. I learned a lot about the Bible and about God while I spent time with him.” Goose glanced at the Bible. “I wish now that I’d paid better attention.”

  “Why? So you’d know what heaven is going to be like?”

  Goose thought of Chris and silently hoped that was where his young son was. “Nah. I don’t think that’s meant for us to know. The book of Revelation isn’t exactly a tour guide of heaven. It’s more focused on the troubles here on earth.”

  “Yeah. Revelation describes things that are yet to come to us humans. The good things and the bad things. It talks a little about heaven, but mostly it concerns itself with what comes after the Rapture.”

  Nodding, Goose said, “I never really noticed that before when I read it. I thought the message was always about what you could look forward to in heaven.”

  “No. It’s a war map for the final battles with Satan and his minions.” Baker shifted and the chair creaked threateningly. “I’ve been talking about Revelation quite a lot in my services.”

  “I’ve heard some of it,” Goose admitted.

  “But you weren’t drawn into it enough to join in discussion?”

  “I’ve had my own war to fight here. It’s kept me busy.”

  Baker picked up the Bible again. “And now?”

  Goose took in a deep breath and released it. He knew he couldn’t tell Baker anything but the truth. “Now I’m beginning to think that the war I’m fighting and the war that’s described in Revelation may be the same conflict.”

  “Does that scare you?”

  “Yeah,” Goose said without hesitation. “It scares me a lot.”

  “Because you’re afraid of dying and losing your immortal soul?”

  “That, too. But mostly I’m concerned about the guys that I keep sending into battle. I’m afraid that most of them don’t know what’s truly at risk.”

  “To begin with, First Sergeant, I don’t see you sending anyone into battle. You lead your men. That’s why you’re respected.” Baker paused. “If anything, we were poised on the edge of all these conflicts—and I’m talking about the one described in the book of Revelation as well—and we got drawn into the eye of it. At least, we’re in the eye of the storm brewing in the Middle East.”

  “It’s not the first time biblical history was made here with all-out war. You read the Old Testament,” Goose said, “and you find that a lot of wars, a lot of the people who fought them in the Bible, came from right here, and they fought and died right here. This land has been a biblical battlefield almost from its beginning.”

  “That’s the reason these countries are called the Holy Lands.” Baker shifted again. “Modern science and the Word of God differ on a lot of issues. If you study your Bible and pay attention to the sciences, you’ll find that out quickly. But one thing—one of many things, actually—that they both agree on is that civilization started near here.”

  “The Tigris and Euphrates Rivers.” The answer came easily to mind from all the history classes Goose had taken in high school.

  “Exactly. Sanliurfa has its history in the Bible as well. Abraham was born here. Several other prophets named in the Bible were drawn here at one time or another. That’s why the locals call Sanliurfa ‘The City of Prophets.’”

  “I knew that,” Goose said. “But I didn’t know it until we got here and I heard it on the news.” He looked at Baker, feeling increasingly uncomfortable about the corporal’s interest. He wanted to tell Baker about Icarus and about the claims the rogue CIA agent had made. But
Baker had come here; Goose hadn’t sought Baker out. It followed that Baker wanted something from Goose. “You didn’t come here to discuss ancient history. What do you need?”

  Baker looked puzzled. “I don’t understand.”

  “You came here for a reason, Corporal. Maybe we’d better get to it.”

  Shaking his head, Baker said, “No. I’m not due back till 0700 myself. I’d intended to speak to more of the men at the church, to allay their fears as much as I can.” The big man was silent, and his tiredness showed on his face. “They carry on as best they can, but they feel they’re hovering on the brink of disaster.”

  Goose didn’t comment. Every professional fighting man—from U.S. troops to U.N. military to Turkish army—knew that the Syrians were gathering strength for a final push against the city. And anybody with any knowledge of military tactics and the concentration of resources on both sides of the line was pretty sure which side was going to win. It didn’t take a genius right now to predict that the Syrians’ chances of rolling over them were pretty good.

  “The men are afraid,” Baker said.

  “I know.”

  “They see how we’re burying our dead here,” Baker said. “They know that those fallen warriors aren’t going home to families so those people can grieve more properly. That knowledge is putting more pressure on our warriors to survive.”

  “We’re marking the graves,” Goose said. “Later, when we get this thing cleaned up, the military will return for those bodies and bring them home.”

  “That time—if it ever comes—is a long way off. They know that.”

  Goose knew that too. With all the disappearances and the outbreak of so much violence, the American military was seriously undermanned.

  “Once Syria invades this country, even if they hold only Sanliurfa and the southern part of Turkey, it’ll be years before we take these lands back. If we ever do.”