The War After Armageddon

by Ralph Peters

  “Scottie. Fire mission. Which unit of yours is closest to Nazareth, to the road into town from the south?”

  “That’s in the Fourth BCT sector. I’ve got 1-18 covering—”

  “Pat Cavanaugh’s unit. Is he the closest to the road?”

  “Yes, sir. I’ve got Quarter Cav screening and holding on to the India-Echoes, with—”

  “Jump the chain. Get on the horn with Cavanaugh yourself. Tell him to get on that road and get into Nazareth. Fast. I have reason to believe the road’s not mined. I need him to accept maximum risk.” Harris paused to choose his words. “And tell Pat he’s absolutely got to keep his men under positive control. Weapons tight.”

  “The Jihadis may still have—”

  “Trust me on this one. I want 1-18 going into town with their weapons on safe. The line doggies are going to be tempted to shoot things up. The officers, too. 1-18’s mission is to penetrate the city until… until they reach the scene of a reported war crime. They’ll know it when they see it. That’s all I can say about it for now. Just tell Pat Cavanaugh to secure the scene of any suspected war crime, to push out his perimeter and send patrols into the city. With restrictive rules of engagement.”

  “But, sir, we’re in—”

  “Just follow my orders, Scottie. And tell Cavanaugh to report directly to you. Get him on your net, and keep everybody else off it. You’ll understand soon enough. And frankly, you’ll wish you didn’t.” Harris took a deep breath. “Maximum risk, weapons tight. Get Cavanaugh moving.”

  JEZREEL VALLEY, SOUTH OF NAZARETH

  1-18 Infantry had spent much of the day taking stray Jihadis prisoner and shooting up vehicles fleeing the main battle. Pat Cavanaugh had lost one Bradley to an antitank missile, with four KIA and the rest of the squad and crew burned and busted up, but breakdowns had been a worse headache than battle damage. He’d been living vicariously by listening in on 1st Brigade’s net during the attack on Afula.

  Now things were getting surreal. With a tank platoon leading Jake Walker’s Charlie Company up the Nazareth highway in a hedgehog formation that straddled the median strip, Cavanaugh had positioned his own track as the ninth vehicle. Standing up in the commander’s hatch, he watched the M-1s in the lead traverse their turrets as they scanned for targets. Although they knew — and hated — the order that they weren’t to fire unless fired upon.

  Had the Jihadis just quit? War crime? What was that about? No details. Just the Scotsman himself on the other end, telling him to move out like the wrath of God was on his ass. Accept maximum risk. Weapons tight. A few hours before, the valley had been a slaughter house. Jihadi combat vehicles and supply trucks were still smoldering in the road. The M-1s had to slow and push them aside.

  They rolled past an intersection where a ruined rest stop and service station looked like relics of a lost civilization. Which they were, Cavanaugh figured. Ahead, the road rose up through a saddle crowned with once-white buildings.

  Nazareth. He wondered if he’d feel anything special, any hint of the sacred, when he actually entered the city. Word was that the place was a pit, an Arab town spared by the Ira ni ans in the great nuke duel because of its Muslim population. And its lack of importance.

  He lifted the visor of his vehicle commander’s helmet. The brighter world and the rush of air stung his eyes for a moment. But the wind of movement soothed his skin.

  Almost as good as a shower. Or maybe not quite.

  “This is Bayonet Six,” he said into his helmet mike. “Perfect ambush site as we get up into that saddle. Make sure everybody stays alert.”

  But no rounds challenged them as they growled up the highway. Crazy war. Last night, they were fighting to the death. Now it’s won’t-you-please-come-in. Cavanaugh didn’t trust it one bit.

  There was no sign of life from the building as they approached. Either deserted, or the locals were down in the basements holding their breath. Cavanaugh’s first sight of the city of Christ’s youth was of grubby sprawl speckled with litter.

  He listened while Jake Walker ordered the lead platoon to slow down as the building density increased. Heads and weapons popped up through the hatches of the Bradleys, scanning upper-story windows and rooflines.

  As the column approached a small plateau beyond the crest of the saddle, Jake ordered the tanks to go into overwatch. The infantry tracks would lead into the city. Maximum risk, all right.

  Cavanaugh let Walker run his company. The captain was making the right calls. So far. Pedal-to-the-metal was fine out in the great wide-open, but you had to throttle back when the road started turning through a maze of high-rises, shops, and residential compounds.

  Cavanaugh’s track was the fifth vehicle in column now. The Bradleys nosed down the far slope, torturing their brakes.

  The lead track stopped. Lurching heavily. The ramp dropped, and the squad scrambled out. Cavanaugh didn’t hear any firing. He could just see a break in the line of buildings. Beyond a row of worse-for-wear apartment houses.

  Jake Walker came up on the battalion net. He skipped the call signs. “Sir, you need to get up here. Double-quick.”

  The company commander’s voice trembled.

  Cavanaugh got on the intercom. “Ryder. Move us out. Forward. Get around those tracks.”

  The driver released the brakes, and the Bradley groaned down the road, biting into curbs that looked like they’d been bitten by bigger dogs in the past.

  The sight that waited was the worst of his life.

  * * *

  Standing in the road and staring, Cavanaugh knew he needed to get on the net and call in his unit’s discovery. But he couldn’t quite tear himself away. Beside him, Jake Walker fidgeted. The captain’s confidence had deserted him.

  When Cavanaugh believed he had his voice under control, he told the company commander, “Push out a security perimeter.”

  “Shall I start getting them down, sir? The bodies?”

  Yes. Get them down. Get them down as fast as you can. And get those goddamned flies off them.

  “No,” Cavanaugh said. “This has to be documented. Find out if any of your men packed their cameras. Start taking pictures. As many as you can.” He turned to go back to his vehicle and make his report. Hoping he could keep his voice steady. “And keep everybody off the net. No comms beyond this company. Tell the cannon-cockers and the medics what I said. And wipe your face. It’s all right, Jake. But it doesn’t help for the troops to see you like that.”

  “Yes, sir. Got it.”

  As Cavanaugh walked back toward his track, he saw an infantryman break loose and stride toward a beggar huddled into a ball on the far side of the road, the only sign of local life in evidence. The pathetic creature in Arab rags hadn’t said a word, hadn’t looked up.

  Rocking himself faintly and trembling, the beggar looked to be just about the filthiest human being Cavanaugh had ever seen.

  The soldier raised his weapon as he walked. Cavanaugh saw a thumb click off the safety.

  “Freeze, soldier,” Cavanaugh said. “You pull that trigger and I’ll drop you myself.” He found himself holding his pistol out at arm’s length.

  The soldier stopped. And looked at Cavanaugh. In disgust. His expression warned that he just might shoot anyway.

  Cavanaugh understood. But he couldn’t tell them that. He would’ve been glad to go back to the track, get his own carbine, and empty a magazine into the beggar himself.

  Just for the satisfaction of hurting something, anything, from their world.

  But he wasn’t going to do it. And the soldier wasn’t going to do it.

  Cavanaugh remembered the soldier’s name. DeSantis.

  “PFC DeSantis. Lower that weapon. Put it on safe.”

  Addressed by his rank and name, the soldier obeyed. But he continued to stare at the battalion commander. As if he hated him as much as he now hated the Jihadis. And every Arab.

  The soldier’s squad leader walked up, spoke to DeSantis, and shooed him away. Cavanaugh sensed
that the NCO had let the scene play out before he intervened.

  It was going to be hard to keep them under control. Maybe impossible.

  Even with his back turned to the field of crosses, Cavanaugh saw them. And the goddamned flies on their faces.

  No. It wouldn’t be impossible to control the troops. Because he wasn’t going to let it be impossible. That was why he drew his 0–5 pay.

  Cavanaugh walked over to the beggar hunched on the curb. Up close, the man looked badly beaten, damaged. Infirm.

  The Arab stank. He was bloody. And he reeked of urine.

  Then Pat Cavanaugh noticed what looked like a compact transmitter by the man’s side. The device looked like military hardware.

  Cavanaugh nudged the beggar with the barrel of his pistol. Unwilling to touch cloth or flesh.

  “You,” he said. “Do you speak any English?”

  TWELVE

  FT. HOOD, TEXAS

  She tried to ignore the protesters. At a glimpse of her windshield decal, the gate guards waved her on the post, and she left the shouts and hoisted signs behind. But their words — and their underlying message — gripped her.

  U.S. Army Delays, Christian Soldiers Die. Flintlock Harris, Friend of Islam. And the one that stabbed so deeply it drew tears of fury from her eyes: General Harris: Traitor To Christ And Country.

  Sarah Colmer-Harris drove straight to Quarters One, wiping the wet from her eyes with an index finger. The trip into Killeen had been a mistake. On her arrival at the garage that had serviced her car since her husband took command, a supervisor denied that she’d made an appointment. When she asked to make one, she was told there wouldn’t be an opening for months.

  Good Christians all, she thought bitterly. Feeling her personal disgust with religion vindicated. It had been one of the few issues on which she and her husband had always disagreed: He still prayed like a child, on his knees. And so many passages in his take-along Bible had been underlined — with a ruler, another child’s habit — that it looked like a text belonging to the most conscientious grad student in history.

  She snorted as she parked. The noise was animal. If the “Christians” protesting saw that Bible, she decided, they’d probably attack him for defacing a sacred book.

  No. They wouldn’t. Their masters would. A trial lawyer, once successful, she had sufficient acuity left to realize that those perfectly lettered signs outside the gates had been made well in advance.

  Why couldn’t Gary see it? Why wouldn’t he see any of it? Why was he so blind?

  Yes, blind. The thought of the man she loved with all her heart made her so angry that she wanted to lash out at him. Going blind? He’d been blind for years. With his naïve faith that his country was indestructible and that his beloved Army would always remain the institution it once had been.

  She knew that, technically speaking, her husband was a killer. He’d killed men in close combat, although he never spoke of it. The citations did. And his friends. His ever-fewer friends. But he was a gentle man at heart. And a gentleman. Blind, willfully blind, to what was going on.

  The other blindness, the loss of vision he so dreaded, wouldn’t be so bad, she didn’t think. He’d make the best of that, too. He’d probably be the first blind Olympic marksman. But his blindness to evil, to the evil that had been growing up around him, was unforgivable.

  “The Army will always be there,” he’d told her. “After all the rest of them have come and gone.”

  Would it?

  And did it matter, anyway? What good was his cherished Army without the law? When “God’s law,” as interpreted by a Bible-thumping huckster from the Ozarks, superseded the Constitution? Wasn’t that what they’d always accused those Muslim terrorists of doing? Setting themselves up as the voice of God and the arbiter of His laws?

  You’re thinking like a lawyer, she told herself. And Gary thinks like a soldier. We’re both fools. There’s no place for either of us anymore.

  Why couldn’t Gary see it?

  The closest he had come to despair had been on the day the new Congress passed a law removing women from the armed forces. Shaking his head, he’d told her, “We’re becoming our enemies.” But even then, he shrugged it off moments later and repeated, “Well, the Army will always be here. We’ve been through worse.”

  She had to watch her tongue with the other wives. More than a few were hedging their bets nowadays. And there were always spies. She wanted to lash out, to demand of them all, “What’s Christian about what’s happening? Where does it say in the Gospels, ‘Kill thy neighbor’?” But enough of her upbringing lingered, of the parochial-school lessons and the catechism, to let her see that Gary’s tormentors had nothing to do with Christ — that silly man who believed that the wealthy would share with the poor and that the poor would manifest virtue. Vice President Gui and all his self-righteous hangers-on were about as Christian as al-Mahdi. If not less so. They were creatures of the Book of Revelation, of spectacular stunts of hatred, every one of them afraid of the Whore of Babylon next door, presumably got up as a cheerleader. Christ would’ve puked.

  Oh, what did she know? Maybe they were right, after all. Perhaps God did exist, and His par tic u lar genius was revenge. Was she paying, now, for the one error she regretted in her adult life? A brief affair she had lulled herself into while her husband was assigned to the Pentagon and she, a K Street lawyer, felt slighted by his dedication to his work? The affair had been as physically disappointing as it was emotionally repellent. Its end had been an abortion. And her husband, off on one of his TDY trips, had come home and barely noticed she was cranky.

  But he was a good man. Perhaps that had driven her into the affair. With a fellow K Street slimeball. Because Gary was just so damned good, so virtuous. All of the goddamned time. A Boy Scout whose sterling qualities would’ve pissed off the other Boy Scouts. His goodness had humiliated her back then.

  Before she surrendered to him. To loving him. To really loving him. A mother was supposed to love her children above all, but she wondered if she did.

  Now she just wanted her husband to come home. To take off his uniform. To be done with it. Surely, they’d let him alone then.

  Wouldn’t they?

  She checked the house hold message center, but there was nothing. She wanted to hear from him, to hear his voice. But he was an ass when it came to playing by the rules. He wouldn’t tie up some precious communications line, not even to tell his wife he loved her.

  But he did love her. She knew that. He loved her, and he loved their daughters. And his damned religion. And his country. And his goddamned Army. How could he have that much love in him? Without taking it away from her?

  For all that, she was grateful, and she knew it. And she was proud of him. With the kind of pride you had to learn over years. Over decades. She was proud of all the things about him that made her want to snap at him, to mock him. And now she was afraid for him. He simply didn’t understand what men and women were really like.

  Had he even understood her? Her selfishness? Venality, even? Maybe he did. And he still loved her. And that was something else to be furious about. There was something downright degrading in being loved so generously.

  She snorted again, her least ladylike habit. The sound always made Gary laugh. That was something none of them understood about him: how he laughed. He loved to laugh, full of jokes in private, when he could drop his mask. She walked past his sprawling leather chair — a monstrosity she’d yearned to get rid of for years. The discolored heap of lumpy cushions made her see him as vividly as any present being could have been. Smiling at her with that crooked, country-boy smile of his and putting on a cracker accent to tell her, “Honeybunch, I love you like a moonshiner loves a new set of tires.”

  He loved her more than that. She felt it. She had the love of a good man. Of the best man.

  Why couldn’t they see? What he was really like? Why didn’t they appreciate what he stood for?

  She found herself on the v
erge of tears again. Sarah Colmer-Harris, the iron-nerved lawyer, lately of the public defender’s office. Until the office, with a backlog of almost seven hundred cases, let her go. “Sarah, there’s just not enough work to keep you on…” That Baptist swine. Who’d pawed her in the hallway until she punched him — Sarah didn’t slap — and threatened to tell his wife. Publicly. In their church on Sunday morning.

  Why were they doing this? They were winning anyway. Why did they have to do this to Gary? To all of them? Why couldn’t they just shriek their hymns and leave everybody else alone? They had the power now. What more did they want?

  To punish people like her. And poor, decent, blind, brave, pigheaded Gary. Because they were all sinners. No forgiveness in the Reverend Jeff Gui’s Christianity. Protestants didn’t even leave room for penance. Did they?

  And Emily. Her eldest daughter. A fighter. Like Gary. “Asked” to leave Johns Hopkins medical school “for her own safety.” Of course, she’d refused. But her sister, Miranda, had taken the threats to heart, breaking off her undergraduate studies at Texas A&M and going north to be close to her sister.

  Why hadn’t she come home instead? I need her, too. Who’s here for me?

  Sarah sat down in her husband’s chair and let herself cry. Something she would’ve been too proud to do in his presence.

  Gary, let them have it all. Just let them have it. They’ll take it anyway. Come home.

  But he wouldn’t come home, of course. He’d do his duty. The thought of it made her sick to her stomach and shrieking mad at the same time.

  What was happening to their world? And Sim Montfort. Gary didn’t know about that one, either. How that sonofabitch had tried to lay her when Gary was off fighting in Saudi Arabia. Well, old Sim hadn’t gotten very far. Sim, the pretty boy. She couldn’t think of him without summoning the word “motherfucker.”

  Now Sim had religion. Some said he was America’s coming man. Well, he hadn’t come in her. That was one thing. Better a scumbag lawyer than Sim Montfort. She’d never trusted him an inch. Even before he showed up at her door and got it slammed in his preening snout.