The War After Armageddon

TWELVE

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 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.”

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.”

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.”

There remained a great deal to be done to spring the great trap, of course. Much could still go wrong, and al-Ghazi refused to succumb to the fantasies and wishful thinking that had haunted too many failed champions of Islam. But he had regained his self-assurance since the day before, when he had wondered if the Crusaders would manage to destroy all civilization this time, to return the Dar al-Islam to enslavement and barbarism. Based on the recent moves of this “Military Order of the Brothers in Christ,” it now seemed clear that al-Mahdi understood his opponent with the insight that Saladin had brought to bear on those proud knights of the Kingdom of Jerusalem.

May these Crusaders perish as miserably, al-Ghazi thought.

And Harris? Did they understand him, too? The American general seemed such a simple man. Dull, even. No man with whom to share a pleasant evening. Yet, he had a reputation as a great soldier. Al-Ghazi didn’t intend to underestimate him as the pig Montfort, the Butcher of al-Quds, underestimated the emir-general.

Let them come, al-Ghazi thought, and we will give them their catastrophe, Insh’ Allah.

He buzzed for his aide. The young officer rushed in, as if afraid of being lashed. He was as pretty as a girl from the mountains above Suleimaniye.

“Is there any word from Nazareth?” al-Ghazi asked. “About the American reaction?”

“No, General. Nothing. Nothing yet.”

“Then leave me.”

“Excuse me, please, General.”

Al-Ghazi raised one thick eyebrow.

“Colonel al-Tikriti has been waiting for you,” the aide continued. As nervous as a virgin on her wedding night. “I told him you were not to be disturbed. But he said that it was important, that he would wait.”

“For Colonel al-Tikriti, I always have time,” al-Ghazi lied. “Send him to me. In a moment. First, leave me and shut the door.”

Al-Ghazi got up and straightened his uniform as he walked to the full-length mirror leaning against the wall. Yes, all was in order. He looked as a soldier should look. As a general should look. The emir-general looked like a holy man masquerading as an officer, with his unkempt beard and scholar’s rounded shoulders. Yet, al-Mahdi was right about so many things.

There had to be hatred. Al-Mahdi understood that. The hatred had to cut so deep that Shaitan would never again be able to insinuate himself with the lie that Muslims could live side by side with those of other faiths. An Islam that did not rule was not Islam. An Islam that was not free of impurities was not Islam. An Islam sick with infidels and their practices was not Islam. Look what “cooperation” and “tolerance” had wrought: nothing but misery and betrayal for the children of Allah.

As for all those who had argued for “building bridges” and “peace through understanding,” the falsely educated, the Westernizers, the traitors, al-Ghazi would’ve been pleased to kill them by his own hand. But the emir was right about that, as well.

Better to let the Americans do it.

His aide knocked. Al-Ghazi posed himself, standing, behind his desk.

“Come in!”

The door opened. Colonel al-Tikriti, his personal intelligence officer and a cousin by marriage, spread his mustache with a great smile, answered by a smile of al-Ghazi’s own. The general stepped out from behind the desk, opening his arms in greeting. He knew exactly how many paces it took to make a guest feel welcome according to his station. Al-Tikriti would need to come two-thirds of the way across the room to meet him.

After they embraced and kissed, the colonel’s smile disappeared. And when he spoke, it was in a whisper.

“The emir is up to mischief with the Crusaders. He’s been in contact with one of them for months.”

Al-Ghazi stepped back. As if he had embraced a man covered in plague sores.

“How could you know this?” he demanded.

Colonel al-Tikriti smiled. It was a smaller, harder smile this time.

“Cousin, when I was a young man in Iraq… when we both were younger men… an American officer gave me a long lecture about the uselessness of torture during interrogations.” The smile grew slightly larger. “He was wrong.”