The War After Armageddon

FIFTEEN

“It’s too dangerous to fly,” the Air Force three-star told Harris. The blue-suiter’s deputy nodded in agreement, sliding a paper down the conference table to his boss. General Schwach, the HOLCOM commander, an Army four-star Harris had known for fifteen years, said nothing.

Harris wanted to reach across the table and smash his Air Force counterpart in the face. But he controlled himself. A complete waste of time, the face-to-face meeting had already cycled through all of the arguments, only to arrive back at a repetition of Lieutenant General Micah’s original position.

“The MOBIC air’s flying,” Harris said. “Dawg Daniels and his Marines flew.”

“The air defense environment is different in the MOBIC area of operations. And the Marine sorties were a fluke. They had the element of surprise.”

“How is the environment different? The MOBIC ground forces are approaching a linkup with my corps. The sectors are merging. The air defense envelopes already overlap. And we need air support now.”

“Our intelligence shows a different threat environment in the Third Corps area of responsiblity.”

Harris wiped a finger under his nose. “Come on. MOBIC’s flying. The Marines want to fly. And I have it on good authority that even your own Air Force pilots want to fly.”

“They don’t have the big picture. We can’t afford to lose irreplaceable, very expensive aircraft in support of purely tactical missions.”

“Why do you think the taxpayers paid for your ground-attack fighters?”

“We have to preserve our air power.”

“For what?”

“For threats to our national security.”

Harris leaned in over the table and lowered his voice, attempting to lock eyes with the Air Force general—who studiously looked down at the paper his deputy had passed to him.

“General Micah, do you understand that we’re at war? Right now? That soldiers and Marines are dying? While the United States Air Force is jerking off?”

“The Air Force is prepared to do its part. As soon as conditions permit.”

“But why shouldn’t the Marines fly, for God’s sake? If they’re willing to accept the risk?”

“The Marines don’t have the big picture. And I object to your taking the Lord’s name in vain.”

“Exactly what is the big picture? What do you have to ‘preserve the force’ for? Fucking air shows in Orlando?”

“Our decisions are based on sound intelligence and cost-benefit analysis. Unlike the Army and Marines, the Air Force is a strategic service. We have to think far into the future.”

Harris leaned back in his chair. Disgusted. And tired. They just wore you down.

“That much, I believe,” Harris said. “About the cost-benefit analysis. What benefits have the MOBIC bunch promised you? Do you or any of your brethren really believe that the Air Force isn’t next? Do you really think that, if the U.S. Army goes away, and then the Marines disappear, you’re going to get a special dispensation from the Military Order of the Brothers in Christ?”

General Schwach stiffened as Harris spoke. A decent enough officer, if no lion, the four-star looked as if he’d stacked arms on the matter. And perhaps on other matters, too. He clearly didn’t want to get into a pissing contest over the MOBIC.

“That’s enough, Gary,” his commander told Harris.

“Of course, we want to fly,” the Air Force general added. “That’s what we do for a living. We’re just waiting for the threat environment to clarify.”

“You’re full of shit. You don’t want to fly at all.”

“Are you calling me a coward, General Harris?”

“No. You’re not a coward. Cowardice at least has a certain logic. You’re a fool.”

“That’s enough, Gary,” the HOLCOM commander said. But his voice barely sounded firm. Just drained.

The Air Force general stood up. His deputy aped his action.

“This meeting has been counterproductive,” General Micah declared. His uniform was tailored as neatly as a corporate executive’s. “If you’ll excuse me, General Schwach, I have Air Force business to attend to.”

But Harris couldn’t let go. Even though he recognized the childishness, the sheer spite, in his final remark: “Mark my words: You’re destroying the U.S. Air Force. Without firing a shot.”

The HOLCOM commander made a steeple of his fingertips and rested his brow against it until the Air Force officers had left the room.

“Jesus, Gary. That didn’t help anything,” General Schwach said at last. “You’re smarter than that. You’re better than that.”

Harris leaned toward his boss. Schwach looked at least a decade older, although the age difference between them was only three years. “Sir… This is madness. You know it is. Can’t you order them to let the Marines fly? At least that? My Deuce has a foot-long list of high-value targets even tactical missiles can’t range. That’s what air power’s for, for God’s sake.”

Schwach waved his face back and forth like a flag of surrender. “It’s not General Micah. He’s just a place-holder. Gary, this order comes directly from Washington: No fixed-wing sorties.”

“But the MOBIC aircraft can fly.”

“We both know what’s going on.”

“Sir, we have to do something.”

“What?”

“Fight.”

The four-star glanced toward the door of his office. Making sure it was closed. “Gary… I don’t even know how much I should tell you anymore. This is all uncharted territory… ethically, professionally, practically.” He fortified himself with a deep breath, then continued. “Right now, I’m fighting to keep your rotary-wing assets flying. And I’m not sure it’s a fight I can win. You may even lose your helicopters. And when it comes down to it, we’re lucky the Army’s still able to fly its drones—we’ve got the Navy to thank for that, God bless ’em. They dug in their heels on the drone issue. They want you in the sky between their ships and the Jihadis.” The elder general summoned a last shred of strength and looked directly into his subordinate’s face. “Gary, I’m also fighting to prevent you from being relieved.”

That knocked the breath out of Harris’s lungs for a long moment.

“Why? What’s their excuse?”

“They don’t have one. Yet. But putting a couple of tap shots into the forehead of that Air Force flunky didn’t help your cause any.”

“But why?”

The four-star smirked. “Don’t be obtuse. You’ve been doing too well. Sim Montfort’s got a bloodbath on his hands—Gary, he’s lost nine thousand Americans killed in a matter of days. Maybe three times that number wounded. Montfort may have taken Jerusalem, but he’s lost half of the combat power in his corps.”

“It’s a big corps. The biggest that ever fought under an American flag.”

“Not big enough, though. And there you are, fighting smart, pulling off a landing that was just short of another Inchon—”

“That was Monk Morris and his Marines.”

Schwach waved off the demurral. “And you’ve committed the unforgivable sin of not bleeding enough. What’s your latest KIA figure?”

“Just over six hundred, sir.”

“I rest my case. No matter how the MOBIC publicists try to spin it back home, questions do come up. The press isn’t totally house -broken yet. And President Bingham doesn’t have the nerves of steel the vice president does. Vice President Gui and his Arkansas Inquisition have to do something fast to make Sim Montfort look like the only competent military commander in this war. The script says Montfort’s the hero, Gary.”

“Sim is competent. He’s just a butcher.”

General Schwach sighed. “Well, I want you to listen to me: Don’t get in his way. Not any more than you absolutely have to. Don’t give him any excuses to cry that he’s been betrayed by Judas Harris and the U.S. Army.”

“I won’t tolerate the massacre of civilians in my sector, if that’s what it comes down to.”

“I’d relieve you myself, if you did. But we both may have to look the other way at what goes on in the MOBIC AO.”

“It disgraces everything our nation stands for.”

Schwach nodded. “Gary, we both know what’s at stake here.”

“Yes, sir. The survival of the U.S. Army. And the United States Marine Corps.”

“And the country, Gary. Our country as we know it. As we’ve served it. The Constitution.”

“Sir, I know. Got it.”

“And I’d be dishonest if I didn’t tell you that I’m not sure we’ll win.”

“We’ll win,” Harris said. Reflexively.

Schwach slumped back in his chair. “God willing. Gary, these people make me ashamed to call myself a Christian.”

“They’re not Christians.”

“Yes, they are. They’re just a different kind of Christian. The kind that burst out of the locked chest the Jihadis banged on until the lid came off.” The HOLCOM commander rested his graying temple on one hand. “I wonder if any of our enemies ever regret un-leashing our demons. With all those whacky demands for a global caliphate. And the terror… Los Angeles, Vegas, the Eu ro pe an cities. You think they ever regret starting this?”

“No, sir. Not the ones we’re fighting. They want a showdown as badly as the MOBIC bunch do.”

“Even if they lose?”

“They don’t think they can lose. Even if they lose on Earth, they win in Paradise.

“With the hot babes of Heaven. Something to be said for their version of things, I suppose. If I were younger.”

“It’s not about that, sir. It’s about death. The greatest seductress of all. Death. We’re not fighting a civilization. Middle Eastern civilization’s gone. Finished. Basta. We’re at war with a culture of death.”

“You’re going a little too deep for me now. I’d prefer to stick with the lithe houris of Paradise. I can understand my enemy on that level.” The older general glanced down at the grain of the wood on his conference table. “How do you think this will end, Gary? Between us?”

“It won’t.”

“Won’t what?”

“End. It won’t end. Al-Mahdi’s Jihadis and Sim Montfort’s Crusaders may think this is the Battle of Armageddon, but there’ve been a lot of battles of Armageddon. The big-dog religions just take turns winning. We massacre you for Jesus. Next time, you massacre us for Allah. But there’s always another round.” It struck Harris—hard—that it was time to get back to his own headquarters, that there was nothing left for him here. It also struck him that his boss didn’t want him to leave, that his old acquaintance was desperate for someone trustworthy to talk to. “Sir, if we get down to just one of them and one of us left, the last two will go at each other with rocks. Each yelling that God’s on his side.”

“And if one of them knocks the other down and kills him? Doesn’t that undo your theory? Isn’t he the winner, the last man standing? Or if they kill each other, what then?”

“In the latter case, the monkeys win. Until they evolve. And start creating new theologies to explain that they were never monkeys at all. That God X created them from sandalwood and spices.”

“That’s pretty cynical. Coming from you, Gary. I thought you were a devout Christian yourself.”

“I’m a Sermon on the Mount Christian. Sim Montfort’s a Book of Revelation Christian.”

“It’s hard to square the Sermon on the Mount with being a soldier.”

Harris smiled. “That’s where faith comes in. ‘I know that my Re-deemer liveth.’ But I can’t claim to know it intellectually. I believe in the mercy of Jesus Christ with all my heart and soul. My head just has to catch up. But I don’t happen to think He wants human skulls piled up at his feet. Sir, I’d better pull pitch. I’ve got a war to fight.” He rose from his chair. Surprised by the stiffness in his back and legs. Too much sitting. The long helicopter flight. The b.s. session that solved nothing. Age. And another flight to come.

“Gary?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I need you to have faith in me. I need you to do something for me.”

“Sir?”

“You’re going to have to chop a brigade to Montfort as soon as his bunch effect the linkup. He was demanding a full division. I held him to one brigade. For now.”

Harris opened his mouth to protest. But the beaten face of his superior stopped him. That, and an idea that made him smile.

“All right, sir. I’ll give old Sim some shit about it on principle. But he’ll get his brigade. Thanks for the top cover.”

The older man looked unmistakably relieved that Harris hadn’t put up a fight.

“Vaya con Dios, Gary.”

Harris paused for a farewell salute. Snapped from the end of his right eyebrow.

“He’s busy, sir.”

Harris crunched a stale chocolate-chip cookie and regretted not bringing his aide along. Major Willing had remained behind at corps to put the day’s paperwork in order for Harris’s return. He’d made the flight with a single bodyguard. But Willing was responsible for his care and feeding. His aide would’ve seen to some chow—Harris had realized belatedly that he was as hungry as a bear at his first springtime wake-up call. So the general had just grabbed a couple of care-package cookies from a box by a coffee urn as he left the HOLCOM headquarters for the flight line.

“Get any chow, Sergeant Corbin?” Harris asked the NCO riding beside him in the back seat of the sedan. First my mission, then my men…

“I’ll eat when we get back, sir.”

“Cookie?”

The NCO seemed to avoid looking at him. “Thanks, sir. I don’t eat sweets.”

“Well, you’re not missing anything. Mom sent last year’s leftovers. You feeling all right, Sergeant Corbin?”

The vehicle sped along the dark runway apron, outracing the cast of its blackout lights. As the sedan rounded a wall of blast barriers, the moonlight revealed a brand-new UH-80 just ahead.

Only the MOBIC forces had the new helicopters. Harris’s old Black Hawk was nowhere to be seen.

The UH-80 was being fueled by a tanker parked close behind it.

“What’s going on here?” Harris tossed the last bite of cookie on the floor.

The officer riding shotgun up front turned around. With a pistol in his hand. Sergeant Corbin grasped Harris by the upper arm. The SF NCO had a mighty grip.

“Sir,” the officer twisting over the front seat said, “you need to do exactly what I tell you to do. You need to trust me.”

“I tend not to trust people who point guns at me.”

The officer didn’t waver. “Then don’t trust me. Just do as I say.”

The vehicle squealed to a halt. Too near the helicopter. The crew chief stepped back.

His bodyguard kept a tight grip on Harris’s arm.

“Listen to me, sir,” the officer with the pistol said. “I need you to climb into that helicopter. Then you’re going to climb right out the other side. The door will be open. You will then low-crawl to the fuel truck. You will crawl around the front end, then enter the cab of the vehicle. You will crouch down on the floor, out of sight. Sergeant Corbin will be right behind you.”

“Who are you?”

“Major Daniel Szymanski, sir. U.S. Army Special Forces. Just do as I say right now. You’re welcome to court-martial me later.”

“And if I don’t follow your orders? What are you going to do? Kill me, Major?”

“No, sir. We’re trying to keep you alive. Our MOBIC friends intend to kill you. That helicopter is going to explode twenty minutes into its flight, over open water. Theoretically, with you aboard. Now I need you to move out sharply, sir. Or Sergeant Corbin and I will have to drag you along. And flight control might spot us. Even if they don’t kill you, you’ll never make it back to your command.”

“What about the crew? You don’t think they’ll notice all these shenanigans? You’re asking me to take a lot on faith, Major.”

“The MOBIC crew has been… incapacitated. It was a volunteer suicide crew, by the way. That’s a special-ops crew you’re looking at, our guys. They’re going to take off, set the autopilot, then bail out once the bird’s out of sight of land. They’re just going to get a little wet tonight.”

“And what am I supposed to do, Major? After I climb into your truck? Assuming you’re not full of shit and pulling a MOBIC stunt yourself?”

“We’re going to put you aboard an LOH-92 out at our black site. The radar cross section’s hardly bigger than a seagull. It’ll be just you, the pilot, and a long-range fuel tank strapped on—which will make you look like a particularly fat seagull. We’ll get Sergeant Corbin back down to you later. But the first thing, sir, is to get you back to corps. General Montfort’s already on his way to take Command.”

“Even if this isn’t complete bullshit, how did you—”

“You need to move out, sir. Right now. As for how we cracked this, let’s just say there’s at least one former Special Forces officer who wishes he’d never jumped to the dark side. And more than one who’s sick at what he sees going down these days.”

Harris shifted to get out of the vehicle as ordered. Trusting his instincts. And not seeing much of an alternative.

Sergeant Corbin released his grip on the general’s upper arm. “Got to move, sir,” the NCO said. “Major Szymanski’s telling you the truth.”

Harris stopped. Turning back to the major one last time. “Who else knew? That I was going to be killed?”

After a second’s hesitation, the major said, “General Schwach.”

Seconds after he found the bodies in the darkness, Command Ser-geant Major Bratty came under fire.

“Action, right!” he shouted. Turning into the ambush. His battle instincts raced far ahead of his conscious thoughts.

Instead of ordering the fire team that had dismounted with him to charge the gunmen, Bratty yelled, “Aimed fire only. Two targets. Three o’clock. Between those high-rises.”

He wasn’t sure his headset was functioning, given the renewed jamming, but the whirr of the Bradley’s turret reassured him. The automatic cannon began pumping out rounds, putting on a fire-works display. Ripping into the building facades adjacent to the gunmen’s positions. The dismounted soldiers swelled the volume of fire, streaking the night.

This is pure bullshit, Bratty decided. In less than a minute.

“Cease fire! Cease fire! Now!”

The shooting trailed off, then stopped. Leaving a no man’s land of silence beyond which the war hammered on.

Just as Command Sergeant Major Dilworth Bratty expected, there was no more incoming fire. And not, he figured, because the Bradley gunner had found the targets.

“Sergeant Tisza,” Bratty said into his headset mike. “Dismount the rest of your squad. Charlie Eight, close on Charlie Seven and kick out your dismounts. I want a three-sixty perimeter set up. And don’t hug the Bradleys. Break, break. Bayonet Six, do you copy?”

Nothing. The jamming was so fierce that Bratty couldn’t reach his battalion commander across the narrow bowl that cradled the old city. He tried to relay a situation report through the battalion Three, but that was another no-go. No comms beyond the two Bradleys he’d brought along.

Maybe it wasn’t a bad thing, Bratty decided. He needed time to think this one through.

He got to his feet and walked toward the bodies again. “Just checking out the corpses in the moonlight,” he sang to himself, “and thinking of the Sheikh of Araby…” Now that would be a mighty fine country song, he decided. G-major. Strum it and gum it. Then he remembered his missing fingers and that he wouldn’t be picking any guitars in the near future.

He sauntered. Upright. Daring anyone watching to take a shot at him. As he expected, nobody pulled a trigger. The gunmen who’d splashed a few magazines in their direction were long gone. Just howdy, folks, then adios.

Sergeant Tisza came up beside him.

“Pretty limp-dick ambush, Sergeant Major,” the buck sergeant said.

“That wasn’t an ambush. That was a pull-the-trigger-and-scoot, half-assed, hearted-hearted pretense at an ambush. And they get a no-go for authenticity. Fuck it. You take the left side of the road. I’ve got the right. Count the bodies as you go.”

“We haven’t checked to see if they’re all dead.”

“They’re all dead,” Bratty told the buck sergeant.

And mutilated. Uniforms torn off, sometimes the trousers, sometimes the body armor and blouses. A couple of severed heads. The most popular technique had been to slice off the genitals and shove them into the mouths of the dead—in one case, between the lips of a severed head. Jagged crosses had been carved into pale chests.

“Those sonsofbitches,” Sergeant Tisza said from the far side of a shot-up four-wheel-drive. “Even MOBIC shits don’t deserve this.”

Bratty didn’t respond. Too much to think about. He’d realized immediately that they were in deep kimchi when the battalion Commander got back to the TOC, already aware that he’d poked the pooch by getting into a pissing contest with the MOBIC CHART. Busting the straw boss’s jaw, then telling them to get out of Dodge.

Cavanaugh had still been hot when he got back. But smart enough to know he’d blundered. Bratty’s worry meter pegged out immediately. He liked Cavanaugh. Who was one of the most decent and most competent officers with whom he’d served. But Cavanaugh was a man with a temper. A mick to his bones.

“Sir, those bozos will probably end up in Baghdad,” Bratty had told him. “Let me go after them. I’ll find ’em. We’ll corral ’em for the night and send ’em home to mama in the morning.”

Cavanaugh had just nodded. With a grateful look on his face. But the bring-’em-back mission had been delayed by the arrival of the trucks to carry the crucified bodies to the rear. Time-sensitive mission, but that didn’t lessen the paperwork. And the escort tracks had clogged the narrow street. It had taken Bratty almost an hour to get on the road.

Tracking the CHART vehicles hadn’t been hard. Bratty just looked at the map and asked himself which route the dumbest-ass lieutenant he’d ever met would choose. Sure enough, they found the MOBIC vehicles and the bodies in the middle of the road on the western ridge, along a route that headed straight for friendly lines.

Bratty squatted down by a corpse that had been castrated and fed its own meat. The J’s were setting a pretty high standard for atrocities. First the crucifixions, then this. Just asking for it. And Dilworth Bratty had no objections to giving it to them. But something about the scene made him want to take a chaw of snuff and scratch his ass for a couple of minutes.

Sergeant Tisza came around the front end of a vehicle and stood before him. Boots in the moonlight.

“This stinks like white-trash pussy on Sunday morning,” Bratty said.

“Sergeant Major?”

“I said, ‘This stinks.’ That fake ambush. Supposed to make us think we’d wandered into the same kill zone, facing the same enemy that did all this. Now, you tell me, young sergeant, why the J’s didn’t make even a half-assed effort to hit anything when they opened up on us.”

“Because they wanted us to find the bodies?”

“Congratulations. You are ready for your E-6 board. This isn’t just a massacre. It’s a display. Now let’s see if you’re ready for your Smokey-the-Bear hat. If this is a calculated display, what does that tell you?”

“That it was planned?”

“You are a go at this station, Sergeant Tisza. But if it was planned, what was the one piece of critical information the J’s needed to make it happen?”

The buck sergeant thought for a moment. A fly did a touch-and-go landing on the corpse that lay between them.

“That somebody’d be coming this way.”

“Proceed directly to the Sergeants Major Academy. Somebody knew these poor sonsofbitches were coming this way. In sufficient time to set up an ambush, execute it, disfigure the bodies, then un-ass the AO. Except for Mutt and Jeff, who stayed behind to fire a couple of clips at us before running away as fast as their little legs could go.”

“Okay, I follow you.”

“Then let’s move on to the Sergeant-Major-of-the-Army test question, young sergeant: What’s wrong with this ambush? Not the potshots they took at us. I mean the first one. The one that left these poor buggers with their nuts stuffed down their throats.”

The buck sergeant thought it over. This time, he was stumped.

“No blasts,” Bratty said at last. “No mine craters. No signs of a roadside bomb. No blown-up vehicles. No evidence of any weaponry heavier than a machine gun used on them. And look at the bodies, for Christ’s sake. Look at all the head shots. Head shots. In the dark. And the J’s can’t shoot for shit. What does that tell you, Sergeant Tisza?”

“They were shot at close range.”

“And how do you get shot at close range? With no sign that you’ve put up a fight? Smell their weapons. Where are the shell casings from the turret MGs? How do you get yourself executed at close range?”

A fly settled on a dead eye.

“You surrender,” Sergeant Tisza said.

“And from what you know of the MOBIC troops… They may have their faults, but how many of them do you think would surrender to the J’s without a fight?”

“So they didn’t surrender, you mean? I don’t get it.”

Bratty tested his whis kers with the remaining fingers on his right hand, feeling them bristle around his chin strap and catch on the ban dage, which already smelled like old socks.

“I’m just an old country boy,” Bratty told his subordinate. “But I can tell you one thing: A moonshiner only stops for someone he trusts.”