The War After Armageddon

by Ralph Peters

  And I need an ice-cold Bud, Garcia told himself.

  “Roger. Moving now.”

  He waved at the remainder of the two squads he’d rounded up and brought this far. Several streets away, Corporal Gallotti’s squad was still laying down look-at-me fire. Less of it, though. Which was righ teous. No need to waste ammo. Anybody left alive in those buildings was going to play dead until he had somebody in his sights point-blank. Unless his nerves got him. Then he’d fire too soon.

  Yeah, triggerman, Garcia thought. We’re coming. Just give me a sign. Squeeze one off early. Just one.

  The Marines worked their way forward, with Larsen and Cropsey acting as flankers where the ridge dropped off toward Indian country, the two of them disappearing into the shadows. Twice, Garcia held back when he wanted to bitch at the way his Marines were moving. Perfection wasn’t in the cards. They were all five-o’clock-Sunday-morning tired, running on pure nerves.

  He was getting jumpy, thinking too much, he told himself. When it was down to the bone like this, you didn’t get through by thinking. The streets had taught him that much. You had to trust what you felt.

  Cold Bud really would do the trick, though. Or a rat-piss Corona, for that matter.

  They were good for another thirty meters, Garcia figured. Working their way up the rutted chute that pretended to be a street. Then it was going to go nuts. It was just too quiet. Every back-on-the-block nerve in his body said that the Jihadis left alive were just waiting for them. Watching them. There wasn’t even any crying from their wounded — which would’ve been a sign that the Jihadis had lost their grip on the situation. The battalion Two had briefed that the suicide commandos cut the throats of their own casualties to keep them quiet. So the quiet meant that the bad hombres were still in control.

  Garcia wondered if he could do that. To one of his Marines. Cut his throat, if the mission required it. Truth was, you never knew. Until the moment came.

  Plenty of shooting farther down the ridge. In another battalion’s sector, maybe another regiment’s. His thighs and back ached from humping all the way up from the beach, a march that, physically, had been worse than the fight. Clambering up those slopes gave you the burn.

  Pay attention! he told himself. Jolting himself back from the mind-drift.

  Gunshot. No. Lance Corporal Polanski kicking a brick. Lamest Marine in the platoon. But the noise charged Garcia’s battery.

  “Everybody down. Now!” he called. Loud. So anyone whose headset was busted would still hear him. “Guns up!”

  The Marines scrambled for cover. As they did, a machine gun opened up. From a second-floor window. Or the hole where a window had been.

  Too much return fire. Weren’t going to get him that way, unless it was pure luck.

  “Aimed fire only!” he said into the mike. “Tell your buddy. Don’t piss away your ammo. Larsen, Cropsey. You read me?” he said into the mike.

  No answer.

  “Larsen? Cropsey?”

  “Yeah, Sergeant.” Cropsey. A kid like a coiled snake. Attitude problem.

  “Larsen with you?”

  “Roger.”

  “You see that machine-gun position?”

  “Just the tracers.”

  “Hold where you are. I’m coming around behind you. Everybody else, stay alert. Let that asshole on the machine gun get Nervous. And no firing to the left flank, unless you’ve got a one-hundred-percent positive ID. Don’t want no blue-on-blue.”

  A few murmurs, plenty of static. Half the headsets were broke-dick. He just had to hope that the rest of them would figure it out. Hate to take a nail from another Marine.

  Garcia slipped back into the darkness, then worked around behind a compound wall. At the rear of somebody’s private world, the sloped dropped off sharply. He felt the steepness even more than he saw it in the murk. Working his way carefully, back to the masonry, he ground his heels into the earth as he sidestepped along. Like a duck in a shooting gallery at some rat-bite fair down in Durango, at his grandmother’s. Anybody firing at him now was going to win the prize at the fiesta.

  He paused for a stolen moment to kiss the sleeve covering his left forearm. Under the cloth, the Virgin of Guadalupe prayed for him.

  “I’ll do the prayers right later,” he told her. “I promise. But you know what I need right now.”

  He got around the far corner of the wall. To reasonably level ground.

  “Cropsey? Where are you, man?”

  “By the twisted-up tree.”

  “That’s an olive tree.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Coming in. On your six.”

  The firing to the right, back down in the street, came in short bursts followed by Nervous quiet. Each side daring the other to really open up.

  “Cropsey?” he whispered to the form ahead of him.

  “I’m Larsen, Sergeant. Cropsey’s over there.”

  “Listen up. Either of you got grenades left?

  “One.”

  “Same here.”

  Shit. He’d used all of his own in the street fighting. Two grenades wasn’t much to clear that house. And whatever else was waiting for them.

  “Give them to me. You’re going to keep everybody off me while I’m laying these eggs. You can’t see it, but the gunner’s in the second building up there. We’re almost behind him here. And we’re going to try to come in right behind him. But we’re going in there figuring he’s not feeling lonesome.” Garcia fit the grenades to his armored vest. “Larsen, you’re on point until we get to the back wall. Then you’re tail-gunner on the outside. Cropsey, you’re first in. But don’t open up unless you’re damned sure there’s something to open up on. No yelling, no grab-ass. I want to smell that motherfucker before I throw any of these. You’ll have the first deck. I’ll take the stairs. Now move out.”

  Larsen was a good shot, just short of sniper level, but this wasn’t a rifle range. It was going to be all close quarters. And Larsen was clumsy as an Anglo on the dance floor. He could watch their backs when they went in. Cropsey was a mean little bastard, though, born for a razor fight in a closet. Almost crazy mean. But not stupid. The kind of Marine who spoiled your Saturday night when the duty officer took a call from the San Diego cops. But good when the killing started.

  Garcia gave his sleeve another furtive kiss. He’d taken a lot of grief about the tattoo. But he was still alive. Half the punks he went to high school with were dead. Before the Day of the Dead came early.

  He tapped the bottom of his magazine, making sure he had a tight lock. Nervous habit. Everybody had one. Trick was not to let people see it.

  They moved up between black trees, trip-me stumps, and small boulders. Everything in this world seemed disordered, messed up. Crazy people. Who started all this. For what? The nuclear blast hadn’t reached his hood in East L.A. But the radiation did. He’d been on Okinawa. His family had been home.

  Now the Jihadis were going to get their shit handed to them.

  The machine gun sent another burst into the night. Exploring. Limited field of vision from where he was hunkered down, Garcia figured. Dude was probably shit-scared. No matter what he believed in, he had to be scared in a hole like that. The hunted, not the hunter. Death comes knocking.

  We’re coming, amigo, he told his invisible enemy. Your old pal Ricky Garcia is coming to the party. Just for you.

  Larsen reached the rear wall of the building, with Cropsey just behind him.

  Garcia whispered into his mike, still worried about friendly fire. He told the Marines down in the street, “We’re up his ass. Just hold his attention.”

  Larsen edged along the rear wall of the line of ruined houses. Garcia wondered how many more Jihadis might be inside, just waiting for a Marine to walk up and wave.

  Only hand signals now. Time to stay real quiet.

  Lit by starlight, Larsen leapt past the rear door. Then he crouched, ready to fire at anyone who appeared from the far side.

  Garcia waved Cropsey forw
ard. The lance corporal crunched down like a boxer who liked to hit below the belt. Weapon jutting out at crotch level.

  The machine gun fired. Different sound from behind. Like being the safety NCO on the range. Better than being in front of it.

  Cropsey looked back for the go-ahead to enter. Garcia put a finger to his lips, then signaled “Go!”

  One piece of luck: They didn’t have to break down any doors. The rear entrance gaped, blown out by the mortars and artillery.

  Cropsey was good. Garcia had never known an Anglo kid who could move like that. He was already inside, quiet as the confessional on Saturday night.

  Garcia checked the grenades, then moved forward.

  Inside the masonry house — what was left of it — a burst from the machine gun rang impossibly loud. Still no sign of any back-up protection for the gunner.

  Garcia signalled Cropsey to clear to the bottom of the stairs. The kid had it figured out. Without being told, he hugged the right wall. In case any friendly fire came in the front.

  Nice and quiet. Nice and easy. Cat-foot the rubble. Take it nice and slow.

  Garcia wasn’t sure if he hated what he was doing, loved it like sin, or both. But he wasn’t tired anymore. Zooming on body chemicals. Aware of every breath sucked down in the world.

  Then he heard it. A voice speaking Arabic. Whispering. Not the way a man talked to himself or cursed, but the way he spoke to someone else nearby.

  Shit. But better to know it now.

  Cropsey was looking at him. Kid had it figured out, too. But he needed to be looking everywhere else.

  Garcia motioned for him to be ready. Then Garcia put his rifle on burst, switched it to his left hand, and gripped the first grenade.

  Carefully, he thumbed out the pin, keeping the lever clasped death-grip tight to the curve of the metal. And he started up the stairs. Back to the wall. Ready. But already dead, if any fuck was watching from a back room up there.

  Again, he heard a whisper in Arabic, followed by a rip from the machine gun.

  One last split second prayer to the Virgin. And Garcia stepped up high enough to peer over the lip of the second floor.

  His head struck something, and he froze. Unsure if the noise amplifed inside the helmet was equally loud to anyone else.

  Silence.

  Were they onto him?

  The hand that held the grenade was sweating. Bad shit. Didn’t want it slippery when he threw it.

  Artillery fire had torn loose an iron railing, leaving it dangling over the staircase. A twist of its metal had scratched his helmet.

  Don’t let this goddamn-it-to-death grenade cook off. Please.

  He heard more Arabic whispering. Too loud for them to be worried about anyone hearing.

  He saw the pattern now: Whisper, then shoot. When the machine gun kicked out the next burst, he used the noise and its echo to scoot under the railing.

  A wedge of exterior light shone through a doorway, leading his eye to the blown-out window frame where the machine gun perched. But he couldn’t make out the gunner or his companion, who were out of his line of sight and and wrapped in darkness.

  As Garcia placed his foot on the next step, it creaked.

  He threw the grenade over the railing, hoping it would go through the door and not bounce back at him. Then he fired toward the front room, double bursts, as he plunged for cover.

  The blast was doomsday loud. The wall that shielded him shook. But Garcia was going full throttle now. He leapt back to his feet, charged forward, and hurled the second grenade into the room an instant before diving behind another wall.

  He hit his elbow hard. Bitch hard.

  The explosion seemed powerful enough to tear the house apart. But that was just the confined-space effect.

  “Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit,” he barked. Cradling his elbow.

  “Sergeant?”

  “Shut the fuck up. Stay there.”

  He flipped magazines and edged back toward the room where the machine gun and at least two Jihadis had been at work. He wasn’t going to mess it up now. No hot-dogging. Human being could live through a lot. Even two grenades.

  At least one of them was cooked to serve. The second blast had blown the Jihadi halfway through the door. Dead meat.

  That left at least one more.

  Garcia heard a moan. Sounded real. But the bastard could be faking it.

  He put a short burst into the room, then ducked back.

  Fucker groaned again. Like he was trying to take a last shit before dying.

  Garcia went in, ready to lay down another burst. By starlight and fireglow, he saw a figure gleaming with blood, propped against a wall in the settling dust. The man was alone, and his eyes were ablaze with the struggle for life. He was dying, but he wasn’t quitting.

  Garcia knew what he was supposed to feel. Pity. Compassion. All that shit. But he didn’t feel it. Instead, he saw his mother dying of radiation sickness, her skull bald and raw, her body bent like a witch’s in a cartoon and her skin loose over Popsicle-stick bones.

  He walked over to the Jihadi, got his attention, then put a bullet into his forehead.

  “That’s for the City of Angels,” Garcia told him.

  THREE

  “DAYTONA BEACH,” EMIRATE OF AL-QUDS AND DAMASKUS

  Lieutenant Colonel Patrick Cavanaugh just wanted to get off the beach. With all of his men and all of their gear. But the gentlest word that came to mind to describe the scene before him was “clusterfuck.”

  “Nothing’s ever easy in the Big Red One,” the battalion command sergeant major said.

  It was a popular saying among the junior enlisted troops. Typical soldier talk. But it was jarring to hear Sergeant Major Bratty even whisper anything that might be construed as critical of the Army he seemed to have joined at birth.

  The sergeant major spat on a rock. “Brigade-forward’s somewhere up the road, sir. And the buggers down at the division forward CP wouldn’t even talk to me. ‘No time now, Sergeant Major.’ Like I was six years old.”

  Cavanaugh smiled. Ruefully. “Well, nobody at the beachmaster’s set-up has time for a lowly lieutenant colonel. They haven’t done this in a while.”

  “Neither have we, sir.”

  “Neither have we.”

  “But we’re not belly up.”

  “No, we’re not.” But Cavanaugh wasn’t so sure they wouldn’t be belly up soon, if things didn’t start moving again.

  “Think I’ll stroll on down and see if Sergeant MacKinley’s ever going to get Charlie 14 off that beach.” But the sergeant major didn’t stroll. He marched double-quick into the confusion roiling below, heading for the broken-down track.

  Cavanaugh remained by the side of the road. The surface was already breaking up under the armored traffic. He glanced up along the line of Charlie Company’s Bradleys, vehicles more than twice the age of their drivers. Three times older, in some cases. Idling wasn’t good for them. The battalion had already had two go down before they left the beach. And spare parts were as rare as thoroughbred unicorns.

  Captain Walker came up to him. Again.

  “Any word about what’s holding us up, sir?”

  “Jake, nothing’s changed since you asked me that ten mikes ago. You’re on the battalion and brigade nets. I don’t know anything you don’t.”

  Have to watch Walker for nerves. But Cavanaugh understood. The desire to get up into the hills, to get into the fight, to go anywhere, just to move. Instead of sitting here, vehicles nose-to-butt because the one road that wound off the beach was backed up with traffic that had come to a dead stop and nobody knew why.

  The maps, engineer briefings, and old sat photos showed a steep two-lane blacktop that could be blown out at dozens of points. One big boy broken down on a hairpin curve would be enough to stop the entire brigade.

  Add to that the screw-up in the landing and march tables, with the brigade put on hold after 1/4 Cav went ashore so that two artillery battalions and an attack-drone
squadron could be rushed forward. Followed by a jerk-the-leash resumption of the brigade’s landing operation.

  And the Jihadis had a lock on them now. Waiting offshore in a made-to-sink “get-ashore boat,” one of the infamous GABs designed badly and built in haste, Cavanaugh had watched successive waves of drones pop up over the ridges and bluffs. He’d caught himself hoping only that none would hit the GABs carrying his battalion, as if wishing the fate on comrades outside of 1-18 Infantry.

  Well, at least the Marines had fought to build the boats, as shoddy as they were. Cavanaugh gave the Corps, the Army’s eternal rival, credit for figuring out fast that the old days of exploiting existing port facilities had ended when Israel’s coastal cities vanished under a dozen mushroom clouds.

  Two GABs bearing old Marine M-1 tanks had taken on water and sunk when the pumps failed. Without any help from the attack drones or blind missiles. But without the landing craft, crappy as they were, the entire operation would’ve been impossible.

  Thus far, all of 1-18’s allotted GABs had stayed on top of the water, where they belonged. With only Delta Company and the ash-and-trash from HHC still waiting to come ashore.

  At the moment, there was no place to put them.

  Out in the haze, the closest Navy ships were distant smudges, but the near waters roiled with GABs, fast boats, picket boats, beachmaster craft, and oceangoing tugs dragging barges loaded with God-knew-what or towing floats to be rigged as temporary docks. Buoys ringed the spots where GABs had gone down under drone attack, and enough debris bobbed on the mild waves to start a cargo cult.

  But the real pandemonium had broken loose on the narrow shingle between the water’s edge and the elevated road where Cavanaugh stood. With even local comms heavily jammed and erratic, petty officers, Marine loggies, and Army engineers trotted about with megaphones, snarling tinny commands. Vehicles splashed ashore through shallow water, churning the pebbled seabed into mud that sucked at their tracks until one vehicle in every four or five had to be winched onto the beach. Stevedores worked mobile cranes or manhandled supplies into little mountains waiting to be hauled forward. As Cavanaugh watched, a burdened forklift listed in the sand and toppled onto its side. Then there were the burned-out vehicles not yet cleared away and, near the beachmaster’s op center, four long rows of dead Marines in body bags, laid out reverently at perfect intervals. More and more casualties were coming down from the hills, evacuated along firebreaks by all-terrain vehicles.