by Ralph Peters
“Yes, sir.”
“Okay, that’s part one. Part two: Mike, I want both the 1st Cav and 1st ID to task-organize down into battle groups with all the combat units that had no radiation exposure. I’ll accept maximum risk to our front — if the J’s want to counterattack through hot zones and what’s left of the MOBIC forces, let ’em. We’re going to attack. To the north. We’ll adjust Marty Rose’s left-hook plan on the march.”
“Marines in the lead?”
“You got it. They were the farthest from the nuke impacts, so they should be able to move out without any holdups. As soon as you pass on the other orders, get Monk Morris on the line for me. I want to talk to him myself.”
Harris stood up. “Gentlemen, we’re going to Damascus. We’re going to hit the J’s before they can reorganize themselves. And we’re going to do it before Washington can go nuclear.” He considered the other men, then said, “Everyone from the vice president on down is going to want revenge. Maybe from the president on down. I don’t know any more. But I want our lead elements to reach Damascus before it can be targeted.”
“Why save Damascus?” Val Danczuk asked. “After this…”
“Because it’s all we have left of who we are. Once this spins completely out of control, it’s going to be the worst bloodbath in human history.”
“Their blood, not ours, sir,” the G-3 said.
Harris shook his head. “Past a certain point, it’s just blood.” He shifted his attention to the G-2. “Val, see if our STARK YANKEE assets can figure out what’s become of Sim Montfort. Alive? Dead? I need to know.”
“Yes, sir.” The Two looked as if he were coming back to life. “Sir, I’m sorry I didn’t listen on the nukes and—”
“I said, ‘Forget it’.”
“Sir… I’ve got to ask you one thing, though. How did you know? How did you know they were about to go nuclear?”
Harris decided it was time for complete honesty now. About many things. He rose and made his way back to the map.
“Before my vision began to fail, I read history. All I could. Enough to recognize the attachment my enemies might feel to past events, places, symbols… enemies and, for that matter, allies. Sim Montfort, for example, allowed himself to become obsessed with Biblical sites. Gospel sites, above all. For all his reported fanat i cism, alMahdi has a more conventional sense of history — or so you’ve been telling me, Val.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And who did you tell me al-Mahdi tries to emulate?”
“Saladin.”
Harris made a pistol out of his fingers and pointed it at the G-2. “Exactly. We knew that. And yet we didn’t see this coming.” He bent toward the map, straining until he found the small black letters. “Kefar Hittim. Westernize the name for me. Anybody?”
Nobody.
“Hattin,” Harris said. “The Horns of Hattin. I don’t know exactly how he set it up, but al-Mahdi just repeated Saladin’s greatest victory over the Kingdom of Jerusalem, when he lured the greatest army the Crusader states ever fielded to just that battlefield, the Horns of Hattin. Where Saladin surrounded and destroyed the Christian knights, the militant orders, virtually all of them. Utterly destroyed.” Harris looked at the G-2. “You’re not the one who should’ve seen this coming Val. I should’ve figured it out.”
“What happened after the battle?” his aide asked.
Harris smiled. Sadly. “Jerusalem fell.” Then he bucked back up. “But the King of Jerusalem didn’t have us backstopping him. It’s time to get back in the fight, gentlemen.”
“But why didn’t he use nukes to stop us? If he had so many in his pocket?” the G-3 asked.
Harris summoned his smile back from its grave. “Because we’re only the Lesser Satan, Mike. The Military Order of the Brothers in Christ is the Great Satan. Destroying the MOBIC corps was more important to al-Mahdi than winning this war. Both Sim Montfort and al-Mahdi see this as a final battle of faiths. We’re just a sideshow, a distraction. To both of them.”
“And now?”
“Find out if Sim Montfort’s alive or dead.”
REAR HEADQUARTERS, I MOBIC CORPS, COMMANDER’S SANCTUM
Simon Montfort woke in slime. He had soiled himself again. Yet, it wasn’t a burst of filth that had ruptured his sleep. The mess beneath him was already cold. Nor was it the troubling, already vague dreams that had come to him. Something beyond the walls, beyond the afflicted self, had summoned him back to reality. Something great and terrible. As if the world had fractured. As if a trumpet had called the dead from their graves.
A small light glowed in the corner of his room. Steady. Unlike his bowels. Yet, he felt a difference in himself now, as if the sickness were only fighting a vicious rear-guard action. As he lay unmoving in his slops, he felt his mind sharpening. Beyond the closed door, a distant hubbub rose and fell. It was too much noise for the depths of the night.
What was wrong? Something was wrong. What was it?
Still weak of limb, he reached for the buzzer rigged to the castiron headboard. But his fingers no sooner located the little cyst of plastic than he drew them away again. Determined to rise on his own. To cleanse himself. Unwilling to let his body’s weakness shame him.
As he rose from the bed, caked with shit and dripping, the door opened. The light clicked on.
His chief of staff stared at Montfort for an instant, then looked away.
“What is it?” Montfort asked. “What’s wrong?”
The chief of staff could not bring out the words.
“What is it, man?”
“Sir… the Jihadis… nukes… They’ve used nuclear weapons on us… They used nuclear weapons…”
Montfort sank back onto the fouled mattress. But he refused to do more than sit. He had to be strong now. To clutch back the pieces of his soul that seemed to be exploding beyond his grasp. He understood that one clear thing: He had to remain strong.
“How bad?”
The chief of staff seemed to shrink as Montfort watched him. “Bad. We don’t know. Communications… We can’t talk…”
“How bad?”
“Sir, they must’ve had ten or a dozen nukes hidden… They hit us… they hit us everywhere…”
“Where? Where’s ‘everywhere,’man? Be precise.”
“Across the front… all across the front… and the crossing sites… Jerusalem…”
Al-Mahdi had betrayed him. He’d been a fool. An ass. A dupe. But instead of worsening his condition, the chief of staff’s news jolted Montfort back into command of himself. He already saw the first things that would need to be done.
“I see a betrayal in this,” he said, his voice a perfect combination of self-righteous anger and confidence in his own judgment. “Don’t you see it yourself, man? General Harris is behind this. He’s been conspiring with al-Mahdi, with the Jihadis, the infidels. To stop us. It’s obvious.”
“Yes, sir.” But the chief of staff seemed unsure, weak.
“This could never have happened without Harris’s complicity. That much is plain as can be. Why didn’t al-Mahdi use his nuclear weapons on Harris and his Philistine Army? Why save them for use against us? General Harris has made a deal with the dev il. And we needn’t keep it a secret.” Montfort straightened his back, overruling the cramps in his abdomen. “Listen to me: I want you to do everything in your power to find out how bad the situation is, the condition of our units. They must keep fighting. We can’t stop.”
“Sir… The only reports we have… The attacking units appear to be combat in effec tive… the level of destruction…”
“Initial reports are always exaggerated. We’ll reorganize. The Jihadis will pay. This is the work of the Anti christ, a sign that we truly are in the final battle. The Lord will not abandon us.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Go and do as I say. And send in my doctor. Wake him if he’s asleep.”
But when the chief of staff had gone, shutting the door behind him, Montfort slumped. Unsure if the
nausea he felt arose from his sickness or from the shock of the news.
How could God let this happen? Hadn’t he been doing the Lord’s work? Why had God blinded him to this treachery? Why had He permitted His armies to be shattered?
Why had he let himself be fooled? Imagining that his own schemes must prevail? Putting his trust in an infidel. Was he being punished for his pride?
Montfort forced himself across the floor to the portable sickroom toilet positioned just beyond the foot of the bed. Unsure whether to kneel and vomit, or sit down on it. The energy he had summoned in front of the chief of staff was all gone now, replaced by an unreasoning terror. Had all of his exertions, his sacrifices, come to no more than this?
He settled himself on the flimsy apparatus, sulfuring the room with his waste. And then, when he was sick and empty and broken in spirit, he saw.
Simon Montfort had a revelation. He understood, with wrenching power, that God had chosen him, even as the Lord had seen fit to warn him that he must rise above all weakness of the spirit. God, not al-Mahdi, had sent this sickness to him. Had the mortal flesh not kept him here, he would’ve been forward with his Christian soldiers, consumed by the Hellfire of Satan, slain in a nuclear inferno.
But God had kept him here. Because the Lord had chosen him, and because he was chosen of the Lord. He had been saved in body as in soul so that he could continue to labor in the bloody vineyards of Midian.
But the Lord had warned him as well. Punishing him with the destruction of his army. For bartering with al-Mahdi, consorting with an agent of Satan. The Lord was telling him that he’d been too meek, a creature of too little faith to put his trust in the Lord. Instead, he had put his faith in men and allowed himself to be soft.
Had Joshua’s Israelites spared the inhabitants of Ai after the Lord commanded their destruction? Joshua had obeyed his Lord, but Simon Montfort had let Harris protect the infidels in Nazareth.
“For Joshua drew not his hand back, wherewith he stretched out his spear,” Montfort quoted to himself, “until he had utterly destroyed all the inhabitants of Ai… and Joshua burnt Ai, and made it an heap forever, even a desolation until this day.”
The enemies of the Lord God had to be exterminated from the Earth to purify it. Harris had embraced abomination. And this abomination was repugnant to the Lord.
Nazareth would only be the beginning. Now was come the Day of Reckoning, the final battle at the End of Days.
His doctor came in, followed by two orderlies. Montfort looked up from the corruption of his body and said, “I need to speak to Vice President Gui.”
TWENTY-TWO
ASSEMBLY AREA, 2-34 ARMOR, VICINITY AFULA
They arrived all through the night. Some still crewed their vehicles, but most stumbled in on foot. Shocked, panicked. A few maintained a fragile haughtiness, outraged by what had been done to them. But the surprise of their defeat, of their catastrophe, left the MOBIC troops undone. Howling Scripture, a captain stood in the middle of a trail, threatening to shoot the enlisted men passing him by if they refused to fall in and resist imaginary pursuers. The soldiers sensed he was talking to himself, stunned by God’s unpredictability, and they kept walking. The captain did not shoot, and his arm grew weary. At last, he stopped waving his pistol at Heaven and slumped into the general retreat. Men who had bragged the day before of their invincibility begged water or food from Maxwell’s soldiers. Not all responses were courteous, even when rations were shared. And in the terror that had gripped them, the MOBIC troops had forgotten how to pray, but not how to curse.
Lieutenant Colonel Monty Maxwell had stayed busy through another sleepless night. The first problem had been blue-on-blue shootings. His own men had quick trigger fingers after the infiltrations and close combat of the previous night. Even withdrawn to a tactical assembly area well behind the battle, the bleary-eyed tankers of 2-34 alerted at every unexpected sound. Grudges influenced decisions.
For his part, Maxwell did what he could to support the MOBIC officers attempting to impose order on the situation. Not only didn’t he want the fleeing MOBIC troops to spread the contagion of panic, he also remembered his training from bygone years: Troops exposed to significant doses of radiation, as the front-line fighters had been, had to limit their exertions drastically, to let their systems concentrate on fighting the intrusion on their bodies. Those wild men running down roads and trails in search of impossible safety were killing themselves. As little as he liked anybody or anything affiliated with the Military Order of the Brothers in Christ, Maxwell didn’t want them dead of radiation sickness. He hated what they stood for, but they still were his own kind.
Craving sleep, Maxwell had clamored over the land line for dosimeters to measure the exposure of his own soldiers. But his voice had been only one among dozens of commanders, and most of the division’s slight nuclear-defense resources had been sent north in support of the Marines road-marching through dead zones.
In the early morning hours, an order had come down from brigade to organize a demi-battalion from 2-34 Armor’s functional vehicles — those that still had working electronics.
“Be prepared to move, on order, not later than 0700.”
Maxwell yearned for a few hours of sleep. And his men were as tired as he was. Or wearier. But as soon as his operations officer tracked him down and relayed the order, Maxwell rallied to the task, enlivened by the prospect of getting back in the fight. He gave up trying to persuade stray MOBIC troops to halt where they were and rest and started ruthlessly sorting through his battalion’s companies, culling the systems and soldiers he judged capable of fighting on. No one wanted to be left behind, but Maxwell understood the order on a visceral, warrior’s level: There wouldn’t be time to communicate from tank to tank with hand signals and handkerchiefs. The task force that rolled out of the assembly area had to be lean, mean, and ready.
Where would they be heading? The FRAGO hadn’t included routes or objectives or other control measures: just “Be prepared to move.” Maxwell couldn’t believe they’d be ordered up through the nuked dirt the MOBIC survivors had fled. So that meant road-marching north, or maybe south, for a wide flanking attack.
What was happening in the great world beyond the range of his thermal sights? And where was the fuel going to come from? The reduced battalion could get through one good fight with the ammo on board, but Maxwell worried about water and chow resupply, given that his tankers had been handing out their rations, however reluctantly, to the MOBIC survivors.
A pair of his mechanics opened fire on MOBIC troops attempting to steal a vehicle, killing one man and wounding three. Then word came up that the Bravo Company first sergeant had died of an apparent heart attack. The Bravo Company and Charlie Company commanders got into a pissing contest over four replacement radios that had been delivered and dumped by a signals team from division. The spat had grown so acrimonious by the time Maxwell arrived that he threatened to relieve both men — and gave all four of the radios to Alpha Company.
It occurred to him that he should be grateful that the situation wasn’t worse. Worn down as they were, his soldiers just needed an enemy to fight. He wouldn’t have wanted to be the Jihadi outfit that got in their way.
As the first skirmish line of light attacked the horizon, Maxwell wondered where he and his men would be at sunset.
HEADQUARTERS, III (US) CORPS, MT. CARMEL RIDGES
“We’re rolling,” Monk Morris said over the land line. “We look like the raggle-taggle gypsies, but we’re driving east with everything we’ve got.”
“Good work, Monk. Just don’t stop. Bypass resistance whenever possible. We’ll clean up behind you. I need your Marines to get deep into the J’s before al-Ghazi can pull his units back together and put up another real fight. We need to keep them off balance now.”
“Got it, sir. How much time do you think we’ve got?”
Harris paused, then said, “I honestly don’t know. But we’re running against two clocks. As you know. As
far as the J’s go, my hunch is that al-Ghazi — and, for that matter, al-Mahdi — will expect us to respond in kind. With nukes, not a ground offensive. And don’t discount the psychological effect of their own nuke use on the Jihadi forces. The prospect of a nuclear battlefield focuses any man’s attention. Even the guy who was first to yank the lanyard. They’ll all be nervous-in-the-service, expecting retaliatory strikes. I don’t think al-Ghazi will rescind his dispersal order until he’s got solid confirmation that we’re all over them. Nukes are his big worry now. And even after he gives the order to establish defensive positions, they won’t just snap to attention. Given the age and condition of some of their gear, I’d bet those nukes did more damage to their comms than to ours.”
“Guesstimate, though? On how much time we’ve got, sir?”
“I’d say you’ve got all day today. Into the early-morning hours. Before even their best units can transition to a coherent defense. I don’t expect to see much more than local efforts for the next twenty-four hours. If your recon elements push hard, you should be able to drive right through the gaps. Beat them piecemeal.”
Morris laughed. “Now you’re telling me how to suck eggs, sir. When do you expect to have 1st Cav falling in behind me?”
“One brigade’s already moving. Should be a divison-minus on your six by 1500. Everything the road net can support. We’ll lay down a division boundary once we get east of the Golan — my planners are working it right now. Which follow-on mission do you want, Monk? Turn south to block and envelop? Or keep pushing straight for Damascus?”