The War After Armageddon (26 page)

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 verge 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.

Ashamed of herself, of her weakness, Sarah stopped crying and got up to wash her face. The telephone stopped her halfway down the hall.

“Hello?” Tentative. Wary of yet another harassing phone call.

It was her younger daughter, Miranda. Hysterical.

“Mom, Mom, it’s Emily . . . You’ve got to come . . . please . . .”

“Miranda, calm down. Stop it. What’s—”

“Mom, I’m at the hospital. It’s Emily. They beat her up so bad . . . Mom, I can’t even recognize her. Mom, you’ve got to come . . .”

Lieutenant General Gary Harris’s wife put some steel in her voice. “You just calm down. Right now, young lady. Do you hear me? We can’t let your father know about this.”

HEADQUARTERS, 2-34 ARMOR, EASTERN OUTSKIRTS OF AFULA

Less than fifteen minutes after the land lines had been laid to the battalion’s tactical operations center, a tank recovery vehicle backed over the wires and cut them again. While waiting for the sergeant from the signal platoon to finish the splices, Lt. Col. Montgomery Maxwell VI sipped from a cup of lukewarm, ass-drizzle coffee and tried to concentrate on the map laid out before him. He had a great deal of lost time to make up.

But his mind kept flapping away from the map and returning to roost on the leaflet his recon platoon leader had brought in. The Jihadis were firing artillery rounds filled with the slips of paper throughout the brigade sector.

The leaflet bore a photograph of crucified soldiers above the printed warning:
This death comes to all infidel Crusaders who profane the Emirate of al-Quds and Damaskus.

The reproduction quality wasn’t first-rate. But you got the message.

Annoyed at his inability to focus on the tactical problem at hand, Maxwell reached out and turned the leaflet face down. But the map before him had become a text in an incomprehensible alphabet.

“Three!” he called. “Any comms yet?”

“No, sir. Jamming’s so thick I’m surprised we can hear each other talk out loud.”

“Sergeant Escovito say anything about those goddamned land lines?”

“Not yet, sir.”

“I need to talk to every company commander the instant we’re back up.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Oh, screw this shit. Sergeant Perkins? Where’s my damned driver? Tell him to get my V-hull ready to roll.”

“You going forward again, sir?” the S-3 asked.

“They can’t hear me from here. And I need to get everybody right with Jesus.” He reached for the leaflet, flashed it, then slapped it down again. “We’re going to have soldiers wanting to take scalps and collect hides once they see this goddamned stuff.”

“Don’t you want to go out in a big boy, sir? It’s getting nasty out there.”

Maxwell shook his head. “Lieutenant MacDonald’s going to need his full platoon if we get a shit-storm around the TOC.”

But that wasn’t the true reason Maxwell didn’t want to go forward in a tank. It had more to do with the fact that, for the first time in a war zone, he’d taken off his great-grandfather’s saber and stowed it with his personal gear.

He didn’t want to be tempted to get back in the fight himself. Maxwell realized that he’d been an ass. Saber Six should’ve reached down and relieved him of his command for his shenanigans. Oh, he knew the story was already making the rounds about how he’d taken on the Jihadis with a sword. Chop-chop. The battalion’s
commander’s a real stud. Just hours before, he would’ve reveled in such admiration, calling it good for morale and letting it feed his ego.

But something had happened to him after the streetfight in Afula. As his battalion pushed through the far side of the town and ran into unexpected re sis tance that brought the order down from brigade: “Assume a hasty defense and consolidate present gains.” After he’d lost six tanks in twenty minutes of stumbling into a serious enemy defense. After the exhilaration of fighting had evaporated and left him exhausted, with countless duties left undone.

In a moment of revelation, he’d seen what a fool he’d made of himself. All that macho b.s. about leading from the front and positioning himself in the first rank of the attack . . . What it really amounted to was that he’d lost control of his battalion as soon as the fight got serious in Afula. He’d waged his own private war in the streets, losing his entire tank crew in the process. He’d had
fun.

Fun. His men had died so that he could have
fun.

And yes, it had been fun. For all the combat he’d seen over the years, he’d never felt more alive than in those streets. And then, literally “on the road to Damascus,” he’d seen himself with indisputable clarity as a fool. Unfit to be a lieutenant.

He hadn’t undergone a conversion to pacifism. Maxwell still got it down in his bones that war exhilarated the right kind of men more powerfully than anything else in their lives would ever do. He’d sensed it before he ever saw combat; it was bred into his bones. At West Point, he’d studied German just so he could read
Stahlgewitter
in the original. Ernst Juenger got it. And, more important, admitted it. To Maxwell, the great sin wasn’t enjoying the hell out of war, but pretending all the while that the stay-at-homes were right and it was all boo-hoo terrible. Soldiers didn’t re-enlist because war sucked but because they loved it more deeply than they understood themselves. And certainly more than they admitted to the wives they left behind. War was the biggest, most satisfying thing they’d ever touch. And if it wasn’t, they weren’t meant to be soldiers. No, Maxwell wasn’t sorry about killing his country’s enemies that day but about his dereliction of duty as a commander.

Now he wanted to make up for it, to be the commander he should’ve been that morning. But the perfect comms they’d enjoyed during the attack were gone. And only a few kilometers east of their main objective, they seemed to be in a different war, with a much tougher enemy.

His S-2 and the brigade Deuce had done a quick battlefield survey of Afula. Conclusion? 2-34 armor and the rest of 1st Brigade had come up against breakthrough antiarmor systems—manned by third-rate Jihadi units. Fanatical, yes. And trained about to Cub Scout standards.

That explained a lot about the day’s fighting. And raised even more questions. Why had the J’s thrown the first half of the day’s game? Was there a trap no one could see? Who was really dancing to whose tune? Above all, what were those leaflets all about? Did the Jihadis really think that they’d scare American soldiers into quitting and running away with threats like that? Did they understand so little about Americans?

It was a day of insights. Unexpectedly, Maxwell found himself wondering how much his own kind really understood about the Jihadis.

“Sir?” It was Specialist Kito, his wheeled-vehicle driver, a young soldier from Guam with a chronic smile and the nickname “Tree Snake.” “All ready to go now, sir.”

Maxwell nodded and tossed the remnants of his coffee out on the ground. Ready to move out.

But an odd look passed over the driver’s face. “Don’t you want your big sword, sir?”

The battalion commander shook his head. “It just gets in the way.”

HEADQUARTERS, III JIHADI CORPS, QUNEITRA (GOLAN HEIGHTS)

Lieutenant General Abdul al-Ghazi of the Blessed Army of the Great Jihad drank his sweet mint tea with satisfaction. His hour as a soldier had come. The ferocity of the Crusaders who had attacked
the forces of Emir-General al-Mahdi in the south, coupled with the audacious dash across the Carmel Ridges by the American mercenary forces, had forced a hasty rearrangement of the defensive plans. But now al-Ghazi had satisfied the special requirements imposed by his superior—including the emir’s Nazareth gambit—and al-Ghazi was free to fight as professionally as he could,
Insh’ Allah.

Al-Ghazi was a man of uncompromising faith, yet clear-eyed enough to realize that his enemies considered him a fanatic because of that faith and would underestimate him. He understood the weaknesses—and the strengths—of those under his command. His Arabs and those who fought beside them were not yet fully competent to wield every military technology they possessed. They lacked the phlegmatic temperament, advanced staff skills, and even the basic trust essential to sustain complex offensive operations against opponents like the Americans. But he also knew that his men would fight well from prepared defensive positions, as long as they felt that they were being supported and not abandoned, and that their ability, however imperfect, to wield the newest military systems was greater by far than the skills possessed by their fathers and grandfathers, peace and honor be upon them. Finally, their faith would give them strength.

As for his own superior, the emir-general, al-Ghazi still worried about the extremes of passion he glimpsed in the man, nor did he feel confident that he knew how many games of chess al-Mahdi played at once. But for all that, he smelled the genius Allah had granted the emir-general, his talent for victory. And al-Mahdi shared his vision of the one great matter: The only way to buy time to rebuild the strength of the caliphate was to inflict so shocking a defeat upon the Crusaders that they would leave and lick their wounds for ten or twenty or even thirty years before invading the home of Islam again.

And they would come again. The Crusaders always came again. The defenders of the sacred places had been too weak for too long. Accustomed to centuries of easy victories, the Crusaders and their Jew masters were drawn to the lands of the Prophet’s revelation, peace be upon Him, as flies were drawn to sticky dates. Or to
blood. The Christians and Jews possessed so much, even now, that no man could count it all, but they would not leave the children of Allah in peace in one poor corner of the world.

How long had they been fighting, Muslim, Christian, and Jew? For fourteen hundred years, the sabers of Allah had dueled with the armies of Shaitan. The fortunes of war had gone back and forth, from the days when the turbaned knights of Grenada hunted Frank-ish dogs among their hovels at the Atlantic’s edge, or the Sultan’s janissaries seized the beauties of Lehistan, of Poland, for the slave markets of Asia, then on to the grim centuries when Shaitan had given the power to the Christians and finally to the Jews to heap impurity and shame upon the virtuous, the pious, and the good.

Al-Ghazi grasped full well that Islam’s struggle now was merely to survive and only later to reclaim the lost lands of the golden age. But he also believed that a new golden age would come, if only in a future century. Allah could not let it be otherwise, although there would be many tests ahead, much atonement for the corruption of the faith, for waywardness, for error. Fools had expected great results quickly. But Allah would bring victories only when He willed them, not when hotheads demanded them.

Meanwhile, Abdul al-Ghazi relished the chance to match his skills against this great American general, this Flintlock Harris. The man seemed a worthy opponent, and al-Ghazi looked forward to inflicting unexpected pain upon this Harris and those he commanded. But he also realized that al-Mahdi was correct about the greater things that must be done. The emir-general had misjudged his ability to defend al-Quds, but everything after its fall appeared to be going as he had planned it. And it was essential to work together, not to succumb to the selfishness and anarchy that had doomed generations of Arabs and Muslims. This time, let the Christians tear at one another’s throats.

“The Crusaders cannot see themselves plainly, nor can they see us clearly,” al-Mahdi had told him. “They call us ‘mad’ because we believe in Allah with all our hearts, yet they believe madly in their own misbegotten faith. We know that this life is but a sport and a pastime, yet they call us ‘fanatics.’ They imagine that devout
Muslims cannot think clearly or be wise in the ways of the world, while they let their own faith cloud their every thought. They call us ‘dogs,’ but they are the ones who bark at shadows. And believe me, my brother, when I say that we will make this dog Montfort dance at
our
command.” Al-Mahdi had smiled as if tasting the figs of Paradise. “We hardly need to defeat him. His own pride will destroy him.
Insh’ Allah.
”