by Ralph Peters
“That hurt?”
“Naw. It just pisses me off, sir.”
“You and me both.”
“I was talking about my fingers. But I’m pissed about the rest of it, too. Go and get this clusterfuck organized. I’ll be right behind you.”
“Roger.”
“Sir? You know what this means, don’t you?”
“It means Bayonet Six isn’t going to have many of his down-for-maintenance ponies back in the race tomorrow.”
Bratty nodded. “And it means that the J’s are working our weaknesses, sir. They’ve cracked the code that our repair sites are prime targets, that we’re fighting with over-the-hill vehicles that are higher maintenance than a rich man’s junkie daughter.”
The BMO smiled. Or tried to. “What would you know about rich men’s junkie daughters, Sergeant Major?”
“Plenty. I married one.” Bratty shrugged. His shoulder hurt as if a steel plate had dropped on it. “That was a couple wives back. Just before the waitress with the broken heart. Pitch ’til you win, Captain.”
“You’re right, though,” Captain Butts said, standing up. “They’ve figured out our weak spot. Unless they picked us by dumb luck.”
“They didn’t.”
“I suppose I’ll have to figure out new security arrangements.”
A soldier in mechanic’s overalls jogged up to them, paused for a second at the sight of the spread of corpses, then said, “Sir?”
“Just a sec, Hunsicker. Sergeant Major? You know you’re going to take some razzing about that trigger finger, don’t you?”
HEADQUARTERS, III (US) CORPS, MT. CARMEL RIDGES
Harris had resolved to get five hours of sleep. To keep himself alert. But the night dragged on. No matter how willing he was to delegate authority, there were issues only the commanding general could resolve and others that demanded his emphasis. The 1st Cavalry Division commander wanted to relieve one of his brigade commanders just hours before the division was scheduled to come ashore. A medium-tonnage transport ship loaded with old Bradley infantry fighting vehicles and critical spare parts had been hit by multiple kamikaze drones and sunk. Artillery units were expending 155mm HE rounds at twice the projected rate. He had to review and sign off on the daily summary of events before it could go to Cyprus, to his next-higher headquarters, Holy Land Command, HOLCOM or, as the troops had instantly nicknamed it, “Hokum.” With HOLCOM’s embellishments — and deletions — it would go to Washington. If comms were up.
Harris had taken the document into the room designated as his office, where the staff had set up a cot for him. Sending his aide to collect any global intelligence summaries that had made it through the jamming, the general sat down, put on his reading glasses, and labored over the document.
The work was painful. He had to bring the text irritatingly close to his face. His eyes burned. The docs said it was a result of the corrosive fumes he’d been exposed to in the Nigeria campaign, and they warned him “not to put undue stress on your eyes.” But a general had to read. When he asked about the future, the military doctors sought to avoid telling him what he already knew: Before he reached age sixty, he’d be blind. Sarah’s brother, a civilian ophthamalogist, had told him the truth.
Perhaps he should’ve retired already, Harris thought. But he was vain enough to believe that he was the best man to fight this last campaign, to stand up to the madness rising around them all.
Sarah had taken the verdict on his future better than he had. At least outwardly. He often wondered what she felt inside about the prospect of a blind, aging husband. Anyway, he loved her. And wished he had a better future to offer her.
If he had received one great blessing in his life, it was Sarah. He loved his daughters dearly. But what he felt for his wife soared beyond the emotions he felt for any other living thing.
After the girls, only the Army came close.
He hated to think of the incompetencies that would come with the loss of vision. No more camping in the Tetons or Cascades. He wouldn’t even be able to get in a car and drive down for a newspaper. Worst of all, the black wall would keep him from looking at the woman he loved. And he had always loved to look at her, from the moment he first saw her: a redhead in a pale-blue blouse, eating strawberry ice cream.
By the light of two field lamps, Harris corrected the draft document. The casualty figures made him pause. Not least because he knew they would be even higher the following day.
Was that priest at Megiddo included in the KIA column? Or had his death come too late to make the count?
Harris initialed the report and gave himself a moment to think about the priest and his sacrifice. His thoughts were such that it would not have done to mention them to anyone aloud. Not now. When everyone played politics for God and spied for Jesus. But he longed to talk to someone — he realized he would have to be careful not to take up too much of Monk Morris’s time with bullshitting.
Harris couldn’t get the priest out of his head. For all the wrong reasons.
It struck him that, when all was said and done, the priest had been a suicide bomber. On the side of the angels, but, nonetheless, a suicide bomber. Deserving of the Medal of Honor he couldn’t receive in the current political climate. Magnificently heroic. Self-sacrificing. Admirable. And a suicide bomber.
What else could you call it? Oh, he’d limited himself to a military target. And his sacrifice had saved many lives. Given. But how different the thing looked when the man with the bomb, rushing to his death, was one of your own.
Harris never succumbed to the notion that all men were alike. The Jihadis were barbarians. But based on the initial reports from the Jerusalem Front, he wasn’t sure the MOBIC troops were much better. It had been bad enough when the militant fanatics had been on one side only. Now, the fanatical excesses and threats in which Islamic extremists had indulged over the decades had finally provoked a like response. To Harris, the war in which he was leading the U.S. Army’s remnants made no geopolitical sense. It wasn’t like the Nigeria Intervention. It was a massive crime of passion.
But his role was to fight his country’s war, no matter what he thought of it. And to ensure that America’s Army survived, however starved and battered.
No more time for reveries, he told himself abruptly. But he thought, again, about the fate awaiting him in five years. Perhaps sooner. It was already too painful for him to read the history books he loved. He’d never had time for frivolous scribbling, for novels and that sort of thing. But all his life he’d studied his profession, past campaigns, leaders, international affairs, economics, religion…
Harris had never been one for golf or tennis or season tickets. Or for extramarital affairs. Or for much of anything beyond the Army, his family, daily five-mile runs, and the ramparts of books that filled “his” room at home.
Now the books were already lost to him. Although he took pains that no one but his aide knew that his sight was failing. And he believed he could trust young Willing, the son of a retired general who had mentored Harris early in his career. The Army was a small tribe, in the end.
Major Willing knocked on the office door. His knock was always recognizable. Respectful, just a bit timid. Young Willing’s fault, if he had one, was a lack of self-confidence. General’s sons were like that. Either they thought themselves entitled to every deference, or they feared not living up to a father’s standards. Or both.
Harris rose from the cot and told the younger man to come in.
“Sir? I’ve got the global INTSUM from the Two shop.”
Harris just wanted to take off his boots and sleep. But he said, “Good. Hold here, John. I want to make a last stop by Plans.” He pulled on his body armor and picked up his helmet to walk down to the building where the planners had set up.
The planning-cell officers had not bothered to take down the Druze posters and framed photographs on the walls of the house allotted to them by the headquarters commandant. They were a good team, Harris knew, oblivious t
o anything but their work.
“We’re moving right along, sir,” Lieutenant Colonel Marty Rose said, by way of greeting.
“Give me the condensed version, Marty.”
“Sir… if you’ll step over to the map… It’s easier to see this than it is on the monitor…”
“I know the map. Talk to me.”
Marty Rose never needed a second invitation to talk. Harris saw his lead planner as brilliant but uneven, the intellectual equivalent of a manic-depressive. Once, Harris had taken the lieutenant colonel aside to tell him, “Please, Marty… a little less Clausewitz and a little more common sense.”
The other thing that both Harris and his G-3 both recognized was that Marty Rose tended to put more effort into his own vision of future operations. It was a constant struggle to get him to devote equal energy to the potential courses of action raised by others. Even when the “other” was the corps commander.
But the care-and-feeding was worth it. Rose delivered.
Midway through the briefing, Harris said, “Good work, Marty. But I also want you to give me an option where the main effort’s a wide swing to the north. Left-flank Schwerpunkt. In case we can’t get there from here. And I want you to start thinking beyond the Golan Heights. You need to be thinking ‘Damascus’.”
“Yes, sir,” Rose said, disappointed that his cell’s efforts hadn’t satisfied the boss. Harris realized that the planners were weary and frazzled, running on nerves. But they were going to have to keep producing. Harris needed someone thinking seriously while the rest of the corps was fighting.
“Sir… your instructions about avoiding contaminated zones… If we shift north, we’ll come up against—”
“Work it out. If we have to pass through any of the dead zones — if we have no choice — we’ll move fast. My point, Marty, was that I didn’t want anybody lingering where there’s residual radiation. But we’re going to do whatever it takes to win.”
“Yes, sir. As for Damascus… I understand the mission. But do you really think the MOBIC corps is going to let us make the grand entry?”
“Marty, just draw up the plans. I’ll worry about Sim Montfort and his gang.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And stay in bed with the Four. And with the Marines. If we do swing north, we may have to do more over-the-beach log. And when we get to Damascus, whether it’s a week from now or a year from now, I want every subordinate command to know exactly which areas of the city remain habitable and which ones are still glowing. No mistakes.”
Rose looked at him. “You know, sir… I never figured out why the Israelis didn’t just wipe Damascus off the map, why they just went small-yield on the government sites. After they erased just about every city in Iran.”
“My guess,” Harris said, “is that they planned to come back. And Damascus is a lot closer to Jerusalem than Qom or Tehran. Besides, they’d shot most of their load on the Shias before the Sunni Arabs figured out that a nuked Israel was an invitation to the dance. Speaking of nukes, Marty: I want every plan you concoct to have a nuclear-defense variant.” The general knew that every officer in the plans cell had been listening all along, but he raised his voice slightly and peered around the room, giving official notice to them all. “If the Jihadis do pop any nukes, I want us to be able to act, not just react. Fast. Everybody got that?”
They nodded and murmured. Harris knew the entire staff thought his concern about a last few nuclear weapons in Jihadi hands was evidence of early-onset senility. And he possessed sufficient self-awareness to recognize that he’d allowed it to become at least a mild personal obsession. But his guts just contradicted the intelligence.
And gut instincts had saved his life more than once. Even if they hadn’t saved his eyes.
* * *
After Harris cleared their area, Marty Rose said, “All right, back to work.”
A major asked, “How far north does he want us to plan?”
Rose shrugged. “Fuck, I don’t know. Look at the road networks. Identify a close option and a long-march option. Then do the branches and sequels. You’re all SAMS grads, aren’t you? Just do it. Reichert, you’ve got the lead. I’m going out to take a dump.”
When Rose, too, had gone, one major said to another, “Guess Big Marty didn’t get his daily ration of praise from Flintlock.”
“Want to know what I think?” his comrade said. “I think Flintlock Harris is losing it. Nukes on the brain. He wants to worry, he ought to worry about Montfort. That Bible-thumper’s going to eat old Flintlock for breakfast.”
* * *
As Harris dragged himself back toward his room, the deputy G-3 ambushed him, excited. There had been two rear-area attacks. That hardly seemed a surprise to Harris, who’d expected more raids and sabotage by now. Proud of himself, the deputy Three told the general that he’d sent out a message by land line, warning all subordinate units to increase their security posture.
Harris almost told the lieutenant colonel that his message was all well and good, but what about the units still not up on land line? Instead, he just folded his arms over his body armor, pressing it into his sweat-damp uniform. The deputy Three was a talker, and Harris knew he wasn’t going to get off lightly.
The poor bugger’s just trying to do his best, the general reminded himself.
“And lastly,” the deputy Three said, “the division surgeon from the Big Red One reports thirty-seven confirmed cases of amoebic dysentery.”
“Navy food,” Harris responded. “Good night, Bruce.”
He walked off to his office-bedroom. Wondering at the kind of sensibility that would build a mansion-sized home such as this, then furnish it with bare, dangling bulbs.
His aide stood up as Harris entered. He looked the general over and asked, “Want me to hold this stuff until morning, sir?”
“No, John.” He dropped onto his cot a little too heavily and immediately began unknotting his left boot. “Sing me to sleep.”
The remark, often repeated, was a private joke that Harris never explained to his aide — who simply accepted it as a peculiarity of the general’s speech. Harris long since had thought, without satisfaction, that the two of them resembled Saul and young David. And Saul’s was not a role Harris wished to play.
Well, better than Abraham and Isaac, Harris told himself. Or blind Tobit.
As the general drew off his boots and socks, the major said, “Sir, the big out-of-area headline is that the Turks demolished St. Sophia’s in Istanbul. Blew it to rubble.”
Harris looked up. And?
Major Willing continued, reading now: “With the Imperial Russian Expeditionary Force fighting in the Galata District of Istanbul, Turkish army engineers destroyed St. Sophia’s, St. Irene’s, and at least a dozen other Byzantine-era structures. In Moscow, Czar Grigori and the Orthodox patriarch denounced the Turkish actions as a crime against humanity and vowed that those responsible for the wanton destruction—”
“You know, John,” Harris interrupted as he loosened his belt to make his uniform comfortable enough to sleep in, “when I was a lieutenant — back when Turkey started down the path to extremism — there was a bestseller and a follow-up movie in Turkey predicting a U.S. invasion that would ultimately be repelled by Russian intervention on Ankara’s side.” Harris grimaced. “So much for the ability of the creative consciousness to predict the future.”
Recalling many a history text he’d plowed through in years past, he added, “I always wanted to visit Istanbul. And Aya Sofya. The greatest surviving monument of the first thousand years of Christianity. I couldn’t go, because of my security clearances.” He sighed. “Now it’s gone.”
“You always say you don’t care about buildings and archaeological sites, sir.”
“That’s not exactly right, John. I just don’t think they’re more important than living human beings. But I might’ve made an exception for St. Sofia’s. It must’ve been impressive — you know the history? What happened on the day it fell to the Ot
tomans?”
“No, sir.”
“Well, we’ll save that for another time. But Sim Montfort and every legislator behind him is going to have a field day with this one. Anything in the summary about the Russian and Armenian forces in eastern Anatolia?”
“I didn’t see anything, sir. Not today.”
“Our alliance talks with the Russians?”
“Sir, there might’ve been something in the MOBIC news releases. Do you want me to check?”
Harris waved the thought away. It all could wait. He lay back on his cot. “Excuse me, John. You see before you a general in decline. What’s next?”
“Sir, the only other major item is on China. The Army of the Han Messiah has taken Chongging. And the Beijing government bombed Hong Kong again.”
“Well, I suppose we’ll be eating General Tso’s chicken on the spot if we finish with the Jihadis in time. Onward Christian Soldiers.”
Harris saw his aide wince.
“Don’t worry, John. I promise I won’t say such things in public. Any domestic news get through?”
“Yes, sir. The Nevada National Guard and the Mormon Militia have been sent into the Providential Communities to quell the rioting.”
“Rioting over?”
“The USG press release says the riots are being staged in support of the Jihadis we’re fighting.”
Harris snorted. “More likely over bad food and worse treatment. John, one day we’re going to be unspeakably ashamed of ourselves for what we’ve done to our own citizens. Again.”
“Sir, some Muslim-Americans were terrorists…”
“Less than a hundred, John, less than a hundred. And we put — what, four million people into camps in the desert? Shame on us. What else?”
Harris caught the hesitation in the air.
“Nothing really significant, sir.”
“Come on, John. You’re my aide, not my censor.”
“That law passed. By a better-than-two-thirds majority. Declaring the United States… Let me check the final wording, sir… ‘a Christian, God-fearing nation and Providential Asylum for the Jewish People’.”