The War After Armageddon (12 page)

Monk Morris wondered if he’d been a fool. Too macho. Too damned pigheaded to be trusted with the lives of United States Marines. Green-lighting those air attacks. Maybe the Air Force knew what it was doing, after all.

He ached for news. He knew that, in the great scheme of the war, seven aircraft didn’t amount to much. But two Marines who counted on him flew inside each one of them. And Dawg Daniels would’ve put his best men in the seats.

Dawg was a can-do Marine. Monk Morris saw himself the same way. Maybe it was a poor combination, he thought. Maybe, at this level, you needed somebody sensible enough to put on the brakes.

He stepped back inside his forward command post and asked, in a voice not quite so firm as he wanted it to be, “Any word on those air missions?”

Dawg Daniels left the nuclear ruins of Haifa behind, burning sky through the gap and bursting into the Jezreel Valley. So green it hurt the eyes. With clouds of artillery smoke thinning as they rose and spread into the atmosphere.

Big sky, little bullet. He hoped. He’d insisted that the artillery missions continue during his run, figuring that a cessation would alert the Jihadis that something was up. Only the defenses around Afula would be spared. Long enough for him to get clean imagery.

More rounds impacting at two o’clock. Somebody was getting a serious clobbering. Dawg didn’t like the idea of taking shrapnel from a Marine 155.

Well, you pays your money, and you takes your chance, he told himself.

He gave the old aircraft every last bit of juice, popping to 4,800 feet AGL. If the bad guys were going to get him, it was going to be now. While he was riding high enough to get the panoramic imagery that corps wanted.

In planning the mission, he’d rationalized the risk in terms of how many lives good intelligence could save in the coming assault on Afula; he figured an attack on the crossroads town was inevitable. But now he was flying on nerves, not reason, and living second to second. Hoping the pod cameras worked. And that the downlink functioned. And that his WSO wasn’t asleep at the wheel.

The aircraft roared over Afula and banked north. That quick. Pulling so many G’s that Dawg imagined rivets flying off the fuselage like popcorn. He dropped to 500 feet, as low as he could go in the broken terrain. With hills coming up fast, he pulled the aircraft up to 800, then 900.

Getting too old for this, he told himself. But in truth, he felt magnificently alive.

The plan was to leave the downlink—an uplink, really—turned on until they’d cleared Nazareth on the way out. Then no more emissions until they were wheels-down.

Mount Tabor on the right. Gotcha. Here we go. Hold on, ladies and gentlemen.

“One more flyboy visits Nazareth,” Dawg told an invisible audience.

The city sprawled out of a deep bowl, covering the surrounding hillsides with shabby high-rises and haphazard slums.

Every caution light in the cockpit seemed to go off at once. Dawg punched out the flares and switched on the active countermeasures. Nothing else to be done. They had him. It was going to be allemissions, all-the-time now. And some wicked metal.

An explosion rocked the aircraft.

They were still flying.

Come on, baby. Gimme some juice. Let’s go, sweetheart.

Whoomf.

The aircraft shook as if a furious giant had crunched it in his fist and meant to shake out any loose change.

His helmet display died.

Just fly, he told himself.
Just fly.

Had to get more altitude. Take that risk. Or he was going to plow a field for Farmer John. Dawg could see the Haifa Gap and, as he climbed, he glimpsed the sea beyond. But he was speeding down a broken road on four flat tires.

The aircraft began to go to bits around him.

Not going to make it, ladies and gents.

He pulled back on the stick until it refused to go any further, altering course to head straight for the Carmel Ridges. Struggling to hold the aircraft together for just a few more seconds. Through sheer willpower. And praying the ejection mechanism was still in working order.

As Dawg pulled high, he imagined his wings coming off. Or maybe it wasn’t his imagination. He tried to level off to eject. But the aircraft was unstable, uncontrollable now, gimp-twitching.

“Eject, eject, eject!”
he called over the intercom. Unsure if he was speaking to a living human being.

He punched out. It felt like going through an automobile windshield at a thousand miles an hour. Yank on the neck. His shoulder took a whack.

A reassuring jerk told him his chute had opened.

HEADQUARTERS, THIRD JIHADI CORPS, QUNEITRA

“The Americans are attacking! With aircraft. They’re everywhere!”

Lieutenant General Abdul al-Ghazi remained calm. Someone had to remain calm. The excitability of his staff filled him with a cold, white anger. Would Arabs never learn discipline?

“With
manned
aircraft, you mean?”

“Yes, yes! Everywhere at once.”

“Then they’re fools. Shoot them down.”

“We
are
shooting them. Everywhere! Dozens of them. It was only that we were surprised.”

“Then we’ve been surprised twice in three days. When will we stop being surprised?”

The chief of staff calmed down. Slightly. “
Insh’ Allah
, we soon will drive them back into the sea.”

“But first you will shoot their aircraft from the sky—am I correct?”

“Insh’ Allah.”

“Allah expects us to help. Go back and learn what is truly happening. Their aircraft are not ‘everywhere.’ Are they here, then? Why do I not hear their bombs?”

“I mean to say . . . that they are attacking at many places. Not everywhere.”

“Find out
exactly
where. And if you are told that any of their aircraft have been shot down, you will confirm it. I want no more panic. Men with weak nerves are no use to me.”

“Yes, my brother. I only meant—”

“I am not your brother. I’m your commanding officer. If you cannot do your job, another can.”

“Yes, General.”

“Now leave me.”

When he was alone again, Abdul al-Ghazi, the sector commander, thought of two things. First, he thought that he would have very little time to redeem the general situation before the rage of his own superior, Emir-General al-Mahdi, fell upon him. Second, he wondered if the reports that the Crusaders had already reached the
suburbs of Jerusalem were true. If that were so, al-Mahdi’s anger might be uncontrollable.

Al-Ghazi prided himself on being a professional soldier, trained in the old Jordanian fashion, as well as being a soldier of jihad. And al-Mahdi worried him. Clearly, Allah had touched al-Mahdi with a kind of genius. But al-Mahdi had been touched with madness, too. He could not escape the thrall of the past, and he saw everything through the lens of history, as if there could never be anything new in war or this war-torn landscape. Al-Mahdi’s plan of defense had been built upon bleeding the Americans, on the assumption that they would not bear great casualties. But all the reports from the Jerusalem front told of masses of dead and of relentless attacks over corpses.

Was this to be the end of civilization? With the Crusaders returned to rule with fire and sword?

The incompetence in his own ranks outraged him. And he couldn’t fully trust al-Mahdi’s judgment. Hadn’t any of them learned that the way to fight Westerners wasn’t by fighting in the Western way? Despite his formal training, al-Ghazi had little faith in mechanized infantry battalions and tank brigades, in the end. You had to strike the Crusaders where they were weak, not where they were strong.

Still, he was a soldier. He would carry out the mission he had been given. He would make the Crusaders pay a terrible price for staining the soil of the emirate with their boots.

But a part of him asked again: Was this to be the end of civilization? One of the orders given to him bit into his blood like a viper. Would nothing be left for which praise might be offered to Allah? Would the Crusaders destroy everything?

Lieutenant General Abdul al-Ghazi did not mean to let that happen. No matter what strange measures might be required.

He pushed an old-fashioned button on his desk. A moment later, an aide-de-camp appeared.

“Go,” al-Ghazi told him, “but go quietly, and learn if my instructions have been carried out regarding the American taken in Nazareth.”

ASSEMBLY AREA, 77TH MUJAHEDDIN ARMORED BRIGADE

The explosions in the Jenin assembly area continued for an hour after the last of the Crusader planes had departed. No one had been prepared, too much had been done in haste. Stocks of ammunition rent the earth and tore the sky as they exploded. Vehicles burned, and men burned as well. A blackened man with no arms ran about madly, white teeth gleaming where his lips had been, until he dropped over dead.

“We have been betrayed,” Colonel al-Masri told his deputy. It was the only idea that came to him. Saying it aloud made him feel better.

MONTEZUMA FIELD, CYPRUS

A lone F/A-18 landed on the strip at the old British airfield on Cyprus. And then there was nothing.

Major Jenks climbed out of his cockpit, followed by his weapons systems officer. Down on the apron, the two of them just bent over, hands on their knees. As if about to vomit.

One aircraft out of seven. Lieutenant Colonel Randall “Wicked” Wilkes, the group’s XO, decided, with galling bitterness, that the blue-suiters had been right. It was impossible to send manned aircraft into that electronic stew.

Wilkes watched as Jenks sat down on the tarmac and buried his face in his hands. The XO decided to give him one more minute, after which he would tell him to get up, grow up, and act like a Marine.

One crew out of seven. Jenks was a lucky bastard. Him and his goddamned buddy on the self-pity express.

Then a miracle occurred. Four dots appeared in the heavens. Moments later, four F/A-18s flew over the airfield in perfect formation, taking a victory lap. They disappeared, reappeared, and came down one after the other, clean as if they were landing at an air show.

“Get on the link to General Morris,” the XO shouted. Then he
lowered his voice again. But he couldn’t stop smiling. “If we’re up secure, tell him we’ve got five crews back out of seven. We’re in business!”

Now if only Dawg Daniels would show his ugly mug.

MT. CARMEL RIDGES

“Welcome to the 1st Battalion, 18th Infantry, Colonel. Glad y’all could drop in.”

The young officer’s face was streaked with camouflage paint that sweat and wear had smeared. He nonetheless qualified as one of the top five most-beautiful human beings Dawg Daniels had ever seen—and the only male on the list.

“We picked up your buddy, too,” the lieutenant continued. “He broke his leg.”

“Well, we’re not supposed to lose our jets.”

“Yes, sir . . . Sir, if you don’t mind me saying . . . y’all flying like that . . . I mean, God bless you.”

Daniels took a deep, wonderful, glorious, gorgeous breath. “We Marines have never been accused of an excess of intelligence,” he said. “I’d be grateful for a drink of water, if the Army has any to spare.”

NAZARETH

Every living thing got out of his way. Nasr limped and staggered up the lanes of Nazareth, dried blood lurid on his clothing. His face was so swollen it limited his field of vision. The people he encountered stared at him for an alarmed instant, then quickly looked to the side and veered from his path. Only the children, silent under the sound of the distant guns, kept their eyes on him: the bogeyman.

Yet, more than a few of the local children were little bogeymen, deformed by radiation in the womb. During the Great Jihad, Nazareth had lain within the fallout zones of Haifa to the West and Zefat to the north.

Nasr was in no condition to feel much sympathy. He kept thinking of the old Army expression, “a world of hurt,” repeating it to himself almost hypnotically. Although he’d taken a round in the hip in Nigeria, the only part of his body Nasr had worried about in the past had been his knees, which had gone a few hundred jumps beyond their warranty. Now everything seemed to hurt. His testicles ached so badly that he imagined himself walking like a sailor
in an old cartoon. His ribs punished him with every breath. Back and front, right and left, everything seemed to be broken. Pains flashed through his abdomen, as regular as warning beacons. His head was the least of it. That was just a matter of weird vagueness, as if a few inches of the air around his skull had become a no-man’s-land.