The War After Armageddon

TWO

Tracers streaked down the alley, but the shooting inside the house stopped. Sergeant Ricky Garcia heard the snap of a magazine going home.

“Ground floor clear.” Freytag’s voice. Hoarse.

“Coming in,” Garcia shouted.

“Going up.”

Garcia had lost his night-eyes several streets back, and the interior of the house was a filthy mist. Cordite and smoke cut his sinuses.

Footsteps pounded up the stairs. Freytag and Corporal Kovack. Just stay out of their way. Raise the lieutenant. Find out who’s on first.

Garcia thumbed the crud off his mike and pushed the black bead to his mouth. Huddling near the doorway. Covering the street. Guns up. All the time.

“Clear one,” Freytag yelled. Boots thumped overhead. “Go, go, go.”

“Cease fire!” Kovack yelled. As if deafened and unable to hear himself. “There’s women—”

The blast upstairs blew Garcia back through the front door. His rifle let off a round as he landed, bucking, with the muzzle inches from his eyes. Stunned, he lay on the ground like a tossed sea bag. For second after second. Many seconds. No idea how many. Then the fear buzzed him, and he patted himself down.

No wetness. Vital parts accounted for. Everything seemed to work. Tracers wasped overhead, the Jihadis shooting wildly. No fire discipline. The fucks deserved to die.

When he tried to get up and crawl back through the doorway, he was unsteady, even on all fours. Like the end of the worst drunk of his life. More tracers chased each other down the alley. He remembered, suddenly, that there should be noise to go with those lights. All he could hear was head-under-water emptiness.

Garcia flattened himself, weapon close, and counted to ten. Then he tried to make it through the door again. Arms and legs back in formation. Small miracle. The fog of dust inside was so thick he could only breathe in gasps.

“Corporal Kovack? Freytag?”

He shouted the words but couldn’t hear himself. An echo, though. Strange. More underwater follies.

“Yo? Anybody?”

He knew. No way any Marine was walking down those stairs alive. Then he realized there were no stairs anymore. Not above the first three or four. A new hole in the roof sucked in the starlight. Right through the swirls of plaster dust.

Garcia kicked something soft. Didn’t want to, but he reached down. A torso. Weight-lifter muscles. Nothing else. Just a rib cage and guts in bloody uniform cloth. Fresh meat from the butcher’s counter.

Somewhere in the mess, a kid began to wail. The buggers could live through anything. Hadn’t he? As a kid?

“Get your own fucking daddy,” Garcia told his fellow survivor. And he slipped back outside, almost in control of his balance now. Another concussion. He didn’t need a corpsman to tell him. Christ. How many could you take? End up punchy like the old guys at the gym. San Sebastian.

One more time, he scraped the minimike with his thumbnail. Like that was going to make it work. Right.

Movement. Not Jihadis. Marines.

He realized he could hear gunfire again.

One of the Marines raised his rifle.

“Belleau,” Garcia called. Hoping the other guy’s ears were in better shape than his own.

“Wood.” Gotcha, Devil Dog.

One Marine rushed across the street, keeping low, while the other covered him. Just like in training. Okay. The sprinter turned out to be Corporal Banks.

“Sergeant Garcia? Where you been, man?”

“Where’s the platoon commander?”

“Dead.”

“You know that?”

“I saw him. Headshot.”

“Shit.”

In nomini Patri… The lieutenant had been all right. But they could all feel bad about him later. Just now, there was more immediate stuff going down.

“That Barrett with you?”

“Nervous in the service. First Squad’s one street over. Hunkered down. After Staff Sergeant Twilley got hit—”

“Where’s the lieutenant?”

“I told you, he’s—”

“Where’s the fucking body?”

“Back a couple streets.”

“Can you find him?”

“Yeah. Sure. Sergeant Garcia, you’re the last—”

“Get his headset. And don’t forget to come back. I’ll be with First Squad.”

“Where’s Freytag and—”

“Just move out, Corporal.”

The platoon had walked in on a suicide company. Rear guard for the Jihadis pulling off the high ground. Bad hombres. The first thing that hit Garcia’s squad was a volley of flash grenades, blinding them through their night-sights. The headache from Hell. The new platoon sergeant went down trying to get things unscrewed, along with Sergeant diMeola. Now the lieutenant was dead. Fucking lot of good college did him. And Sergeant Twilley before him. One ambush after another. They’d caught it good. Tired as shit. And higher pushing them to keep moving.

Now what was left of the platoon was his. Until company sent down somebody with a higher rating.

He wasn’t ready for this.

Garcia followed Corporal Banks back across the alley. Machine-gun fire chased them. The Jihadi on the trigger didn’t know how to lead a target.

“Barrett.” He slapped the lance corporal’s shoulder as he passed him. “Come on. Let’s go.”

“Where we—”

“Move. Follow me.”

He didn’t want this. Not now, not yet. Goddamned Jihadis. Maybe the MOBIC pukes were right. Only good Muslim…”

“Belleau.”

“Wood.”

“Coming in.”

“Hold for covering fire!” Corporal Gallotti. Head screwed on right. In a moment, several guns were up and nailing the darkness to the night.

“Go!” Garcia told Barrett. He followed. Splashing through muck that smelled like every sewer pipe in the country had broken at once.

The squad was too bunched up. Waiting for somebody to give an order. Gallotti was the natural leader but didn’t have the rank. Everything going to hell.

“Listen up,” Garcia said. Loud enough to be heard. But not too loud. Anyway, the Jihadis were making a noise like Cinco de Mayo in the Plaza de Armas. “We’re going to get our asses unfucked. Right now. Corporal Gallotti’s in charge of this squad. Because I said so. Corporal, get the roofs covered. Both sides.”

“Pullman’s topside, Sergeant.” He pointed across the street. “With Jamal.”

“I said both sides. This is it. We’re not moving back one goddamned inch from here. We’re fucking Marines. We’re going fucking forward, if we go anyplace.”

“Yo, Sergeant Garcia? Anybody ever tell you that you got a limited vocabulary.”

Laughter. That was okay. If they could laugh, they could fight.

“Buy me a dictionary. Now, check your ammo.“

Banks scrambled up along the wall.

“Corporal Gallotti,” Garcia continued, “get your squad set up with proper fields of fire. No more monkey-fucking. Banks, give me that.”

Banks handed over the platoon commander’s headset and drop transmitter. Garcia wrapped it around his skull, feeling the plastic scrape the bristles at the nape of his neck.

Before he could transmit, figures ran up behind them. The right helmet silhouettes and body-armor shoulders. Marines.

It was Captain Cunningham.

“Third Platoon?”

“Yes, sir,” Garcia said.

“Who’s in charge?”

“I am, sir. Lieutenant Delaney’s—”

“Well, take charge. You’ve got a squad and a couple of strays a block back playing with their dicks. We’ve got to clean this shithole out now. So the Army can go for a Sunday drive.” The captain paused for a moment. Looking at Garcia in the flickering light. “You’re the last E-5 in this platoon?” As if he doubted what he’d been told. Or doubted the man in front of him.

“I’m it, sir.”

The captain nodded, but hesitated. As if something in his head wouldn’t come clear. “Well, you know the mission,” he said at last.

“That a question, sir?”

After another flash-to-bang delay, Garcia realized that the captain wasn’t really thinking about him at all. He was thinking about his losses. One of his platoons shot to shit. Maybe thinking about the mission, maybe about his own future. It was a revelation Garcia would have preferred to postpone, but he saw to his bewilderment that officers had no special magic, after all. The captain was as shaky as he was. And struggling just as hard to hide it.

“No,” the captain said. His voice was firmer now. “It wasn’t a question. You’ve got the platoon. And the mission.”

A mortar round shrieked in. Everybody flattened. It struck in a courtyard behind high walls, close enough to give the earth a shiver. Another screamed toward them, falling short and biting into the street. Shrapnel stung the air.

“They’re bracketing us,” Garcia yelled. “Get out of here, sir. I got it. Just get us some mortars on that line of buildings up on the crest, if you can.”

“Fires on the way in five. Semper Fi.”

“Semper Fi, sir.”

Gallotti looked at him. The corporal’s eyes caught the glow off a fire down-range. “You still want us to—”

“No. Round ’em up and move out. Forward. Bring some heat on those sonsofbitches. No Navy Crosses, just keep ’em busy.”

Where did plans come from? The Virgin of Guadalupe? He knew exactly what he was going to do and how he was going to do it. So the Army could go for its Sunday drive.

Buy me a candy-apple-red, extended-cab pickup when I get back…

He told Corporal Banks and Barrett to stay with Gallotti and then hustled back to round up the rest of his platoon. His platoon. Wasn’t the way it was supposed to happen, but life was tough in the big city.

I can do this, he thought. Fuck, yeah. Go, Marine.

“Okay, Deuce,” Lieutenant General Harris said as he dropped into his chair, “talk to me.”

The G-2, Colonel Val Danczuk, stood up and made his way through the packed wardroom until he reached the screen.

“Sir,” he addressed Harris, “we had a solid imagery feed for almost a half hour. The Third Jihadi Corps has definitely been pulling back and—”

“Plan, or panic?”

“I’d say ‘panic.’ The deception worked. They were locked and cocked to defend south of the ridges. Thought we’d come ashore between Netanya and Caesarea, right on the flank of the MOBIC assault. Now they’ve abandoned Hadera, and it looks like they’ll tie in a new forward line of defense on the Megiddo-Qiryat Ti’von line.”

“Main line of defense?”

“Afula-Nazareth-Shefar’am.”

Harris nodded. “You sure they didn’t stop jamming the overhead link on purpose? To show us what they wanted us to see?”

The G-2 took a quick chaw on his lip. Tall and blessed with the sort of good looks that gray hair only improved, Colonel Danczuk looked like a general from the casting office. It amused Harris, who was five-eight and as plain as a church supper, to think that, if you took off their rank and put the entire staff in a line-up, any right-thinking civilian would pick out the Deuce, not him, as the corps commander.

“No, sir,” Danczuk said. “I wouldn’t ever want to underestimate an enemy, but I don’t think this was on purpose. The highways feeding back into the Jezreel Valley looked like a giant clusterfuck.”

Harris turned to the senior Air Force officer in the room. “And you boys still aren’t flying? We used to call that a target-rich environment, back in the days of the horse cavalry.”

The brigadier general reddened. “Sir… We’d like to be flying… We will fly… You’ll get your support… But right now, the jamming…”

Harris’s entire corps had just a few more artillery tubes than a division would have fielded a generation earlier. The Air Force was supposed to be the Army’s flying artillery, delivering precision munitions on any enemy foolish enough to fight. Except that now, the smart bombs didn’t work, and the airplanes couldn’t fly.

Harris mastered his temper. Maybe the zoomies would deliver down the road. And the blue-suiter looked sufficiently beaten up. “Yeah, I know. Wipes out your computers. Gonna take up a collection and buy you boys a squadron of old Phantoms from the Paraguayans—Deuce, the Paraguayans still have Phantoms?”

Danczuk took the question seriously. “Sir, I don’t think they ever… I mean, maybe some old F-16s. I can check…”

“Forget it, Deuce.” He turned back to the Air Force officer. “I still love you, Hank. We all love you. But I’d like to put some hot metal on those bad boys before doomsday. Which reminds me,” he shifted his attention back to the G-2, “tell me if I’m coughing up fur balls, but Meggido’s Armageddon, correct?”

“Roger, sir. The tel’s one of the most important archaeological sites in the—”

“And our Muslim friends are digging in there? It’s just about high enough for an Egyptian spear-carrier outfit to control a chariot crossing.” Harris got it, but he wanted the others to see the logic on their own, if they could. “Why do you think they’re digging in at Megiddo, Deuce?” He scanned the crowded, steaming hot room. “Anybody? Any ideas?”

A Navy captain sitting in for the admiral raised his hand. “It’s a protected site. They figure we’ll be reluctant to attack an archaelogical treasure and—”

“Bingo!” Harris said, pointing a gun made of fingers at the captain. The general turned to his senior Artilleryman. “Chris, I want everybody in this room to hear me giving you this order: If the Jihadis use Meggido Hill as part of their defenses, I want you to hit it so hard that there’s nothing left but a smoking hole. Got that?”

“General,” the pol-mil rep from State jumped in, “we can’t do that, that’s one of the most important sites in the entire Middle East… in the world, really…” He looked as if he were fighting seasickness. And probably was.

“Cultural Understanding 101,” Harris said. “On my first tour in Iraq, as a lieutenant, we were under orders never to enter a mosque. Know what that accomplished? It guaranteed that mosques were going to be used as insurgent bases and safe houses and to hide arms caches. Because we failed to take down one mosque at the outset, we turned a thousand of them into sanctuaries.” He snorted. “As for Meggido… two things: First, if they’re really there—you get me confirmation, Deuce—they’re not going to be there long. Our Jihadi friends are going to get an education in what happens when a commander picks a lousy defensive position just because he thinks we’ll be too limp-dicked to hit it. After that, I suspect we’ll see fewer historical sites occupied in the future. Second,” he looked around, wondering, as he always had to now, which of the officers present were reporting to the MOBIC’s internal intelligence unit, “I want everyone to be absolutely clear on one thing: I will not sacrifice one American soldier or Marine to save a single pile of sacred rocks between here and the Pacific Ocean.” He shook his head. “We’re going to win this campaign. And there’ll be plenty of history left over. Okay, Deuce, one more question. Same one as always: Any sign of nukes?”

Danczuk shook his head. “Sir, as I’ve briefed—”

“I don’t want ‘as you briefed.’ I want right now. Listen, Val, you’re doing great.” He swept the room with the commander’s gaze he’d mastered over the years. “You’re all doing great.” He turned back to the G-2. “But I want you to watch for any sign of nukes. Any least hint. Maybe they’re just an urban legend… but I want you to watch for them.”

“Sir, the DIA and the CIA are both convinced that the Jihadis have no nuclear weapons. The last Ira ni an weapons were expended in the exchange with Israel, and the made-in-Pakistan arms were all detonated during the war with India and in the subsequent terror attacks on the United States. We’ve never seen any indicators of more nukes, sir. None.”

“Yet, the rumors continue.” Harris nodded to himself. “Two, maybe three. Held in deep reserve. Watch it for me, Val.”

“Sir, they would’ve used them on the MOBIC landings down south. If they had them.”

Harris wiped a hand across his jaw. “Maybe. Speaking of MOBIC, what’s the latest you got, Three?”

Colonel Mike Andretti, the G-3 operations officer, swapped places with the G-2. “Two divisions already over the beach, sir. Sounds like a bloody mess, but they’re pushing ahead. The latest situation report—the last one that came through from MOBIC—has their forward elements fifteen clicks up the Jerusalem highway.” The colonel shook his head. “It’s all just hey-diddle-diddle, straight up the middle.”

Harris did what he could to suppress his disgust. Regulars or MOBIC troops, he didn’t believe in wasting American lives.

“Casualties? Any numbers?”

His aide, Major Willing, rushed in. “Sir? General Morris is on the horn.”

Harris jumped up. “Secure or nonsecure?”

“We have him secure, sir. He wants to talk to you ASAP.”

Harris scanned the room. Quickly. “Excuse me, gentlemen. Just hold in place.”

The general hurried to the commo cell next door, footsteps slapping metal. A staff sergeant held out a headset. Harris motioned for everyone to clear the room.

“Monk?”

“Green light. Road’s open as far as Isfiya. Not one hundred percent secure, but I’d call it close enough. We’re pushing down toward Daliyat. First Battalion, Fifth Marines have been tangling with stay-behinds all night. Suicide commandos mostly. One company got hit hard up in a ville. But the Jihadis pulled back their heavy metal. Whatever isn’t broken down by the side of the road.”

“Good work. Great work. Remind me to buy a Marine a beer when this is over. How’s the beach?”

“What beach? Christ, we just put a Marine division-minus over a shingle the width of a sidewalk.”

“When do you think you can get down to Route 70?”

“Recon’s knocking on the back door right now. The Jihadis didn’t expect this one. Even after they figured out that it wasn’t a feint, they didn’t seem to want to risk their armor up here.”

“Their gear’s in even worse shape than ours. Maintenance a lot worse.”

“Well, thank God for lazy mechanics. Listen… sir… from one fancy-pants Marine to one dogface grunt… I had my doubts about this. I wasn’t really sure we could pull it off.”

“We haven’t pulled it off. Not yet. But thanks.”

“We caught them with their pants down.”

“So to speak. Okay, Monk. Good work.”

“Tell it to the Marines.”

He clicked off. Immediately, Harris returned to the wardroom. “Three. Green light. Get the Big Red One on the beach. Scotty still colocated with his Fourth Brigade?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. You tell him I want Quarter Cav headed uphill by BMNT to coordinate the forward passage of lines. We need to keep punching while the Jihadis are still reeling.”

“Yes, sir.”

The G-3 headed for the hatch, followed by his deputies.

“The rest of you can clear out,” Harris said. “Sorry I kept you waiting. Go do what you’ve got to do, then get a couple hours’ sleep. Let your subordinates earn their pay. Four, you hang back. We need to have a pow-wow.”

The staff members cleared the room, moving through air so humid the next stage would’ve been swimming.

“Okay, Real-Deal. Talk to me. How you going to make this work?”

The colonel responsible for logistics, Sean “Real-Deal” McCoy, threw up his hands in the polar-bear salute. He had worked for Harris at battalion, brigade, and division, and he still played the staff-clown role that Harris had tacitly agreed to tolerate a decade before.

“Work? We’ve got less than a quarter of the force ashore, and I’m already holding things together with chewing gum and baling wire.”

“POL?”

“Over-the-beach will keep the tanks full for three, maybe four days. Then we’re up against it. Basic physics. Once we’re down in the Jezreel, we’re not going to be able to move enough fuel over those ridges without asking the engineers to spend a year or two building pumping stations.” He waved his arms, as if the world were ending. “Eighty-four percent of the big boys and about seventy percent of the infantry tracks have been refitted with the miniaturized engines. But ‘miniaturized’ is still relative.”

“Got it.”

“Sir, I need your permission on something.”

“Talk to me.”

“The SeaBees want to play. They’re good guys.”

“And?”

“They want to suit up and go ashore at Haifa, check out the condition of whatever’s left, see if we can run any of the old pipelines…”

“You’ve seen the radiation charts. Most of Haifa’s a dead zone. It was hit even harder than Tel Aviv.”

“They’d just be in and out. Suited up. The radiation’s patchy. Or so Tolliver tells me. Once we’ve taken a bite out of the Jezreel, we might be able to run a line and keep it going with robotics.” He waved one arm, then the other, a scarecrow on a caffeine jag. “Beats trying to pump enough POL over those ridges to get us to Damascus.”

“I just want to get this corps ashore, at the moment.” Harris sighed, something he did only when he was too weary to catch himself. “All right. If the ‘High Lord of the Admiralty’ has no objections, the SeaBees can go in. And God bless ’em. But Sean…”

The Four perked up. Harris used his given name, rather than “Real-Deal,” only when things were deadly serious.

“… I don’t want you going ashore at Haifa. Not now. I need you.”

“Doesn’t sound like my kind of town, anyway, sir.”

“And ask me, before you decide to go in the future. No surprises. You hear me?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I could piss on my boots for saying this, but you’re the indispensible man on this one, Sean. We can fight blind, if we have to, and we even can fight without a plan, if it comes to that. But those soldiers and Marines can’t fight without bullets, water, POL, chow, and Band-Aids.”

“And T-and-A mags? Ah, for the good, old days of the Internet…”

“I’m serious, Sean. You know my priorities on this one: ammo, potable water, POL, then chow. As long as they’ve got something to shoot and something to drink, we’ll at least survive.”

“Loggie Basic for the Middle East, sir: warm water, cold rations, rounds in the chamber, and fuel in the tank.”

“Don’t carry this load yourself. Come to me if you need supporting fires.”

The G-4 looked at the man he had served for half of his career. “You’re not carrying a few short tons yourself?”

Harris smiled. “That’s what I do for a living, Real-Deal. Beats working. Try to get some sleep yourself, all right? I don’t want to see a thousand-mile stare at tomorrow night’s briefing.”

“Which will be where, exactly?”

Harris smiled. “In the Land of the Bible, as our MOBIC brothers put it. Now, march, soldier.”

Flintlock Harris signed nine papers, then dismissed his aide and walked two bulkheads down to his stateroom—which reminded him of a room in a motel bypassed by the Interstate in the last century. The moment he shut the hatch, he let his shoulders sag. And he closed his eyes where he stood, touching them lightly, as if probing for damage.

After washing his face and brushing his teeth, Harris took off his uniform blouse to sleep. He kept his trousers on, though. In case he had to move fast. But before he dropped onto the bunk, he got to his knees, just as he had done since his childhood.

His prayers were never long, but always earnest. This night, he was as brief as he had ever been and didn’t even pray for his wife and two daughters. He just said:

“Dear Lord, give me the strength to see what’s right and the strength to do what’s right. Help me be a just man. Amen.”

A male form emerged from the burning house and ran toward the Marines.

“Peace! Peace!” he cried. “America good!”

“Halt!” Sergeant Garcia yelled. “Stop!”

The man kept running through the darkness, shifting his course to head straight for Garcia and repeating, “America good!”

“Halt!”

Garcia pulled the trigger at the same instant the suicide bomber detonated himself. He felt the shock wave, but the bomber had not gotten close enough to do any damage. Garcia hoped.

“Everybody okay? Check your buddy.”

No casualties. This time.

“Drink some water. Everybody. Now. If you’re out of water, piss in your hand and drink it.”

Bad enough to lose good Marines to the Jihadis. Garcia wasn’t going to lose them to dehydration. But the fact, which he did not broadcast, was that his own camelback was empty. He figured most of his men were in the same boat.

Drink it, if you got it.

They had flanked the Jihadi positions on the ridge as mortar rounds, then serious artillery fire, thumped down on the houses the Mussies had turned into rent-a-forts. In the flame-scorched night, twisted rebar scratched the air, and the block-shaped buildings looked like the faces of junkies with their teeth knocked out.

The street bums back home. So far gone on one drug or another that even their families didn’t want any part of them. Could’ve joined that outfit, too. One more road Garcia had never gone down. No gang tattoos, either. Just the Virgin of Guadalupe. And she’d done okay by him so far. Patron saint of the Marine Corps. From the Halls of Montezuma. The brass just hadn’t figured that one out.

“Larsen, Cropsey. Take the flank. Move out!” Garcia pointed toward the backside of the ridge.

The Marines worked forward, maintaining good combat intervals. No one fired at them. But Garcia had his street sense turned on. There were still bad guys up in that mess, behind the remaining walls. Armed and dangerous. The human body was loco. You could trip on the sidewalk and die, or live through an artillery barrage dumped on your head.

“Sitrep?” he heard through his headset. The captain. Solid again. Mr. Annapolis.

“Rounds on target. Moving in now.”

“Re sis tance?”

“There’s gonna be. It smells like it smells.”

“Keep moving. Battalion needs that ridge cleared.”

And I need an ice-cold Bud, Garcia told himself.

“Roger. Moving now.”

He waved at the remainder of the two squads he’d rounded up and brought this far. Several streets away, Corporal Gallotti’s squad was still laying down look-at-me fire. Less of it, though. Which was righ teous. No need to waste ammo. Anybody left alive in those buildings was going to play dead until he had somebody in his sights point-blank. Unless his nerves got him. Then he’d fire too soon.

Yeah, triggerman, Garcia thought. We’re coming. Just give me a sign. Squeeze one off early. Just one.

The Marines worked their way forward, with Larsen and Cropsey acting as flankers where the ridge dropped off toward Indian country, the two of them disappearing into the shadows. Twice, Garcia held back when he wanted to bitch at the way his Marines were moving. Perfection wasn’t in the cards. They were all five-o’clock-Sunday-morning tired, running on pure nerves.

He was getting jumpy, thinking too much, he told himself. When it was down to the bone like this, you didn’t get through by thinking. The streets had taught him that much. You had to trust what you felt.

Cold Bud really would do the trick, though. Or a rat-piss Corona, for that matter.

They were good for another thirty meters, Garcia figured. Working their way up the rutted chute that pretended to be a street. Then it was going to go nuts. It was just too quiet. Every back-on-the-block nerve in his body said that the Jihadis left alive were just waiting for them. Watching them. There wasn’t even any crying from their wounded—which would’ve been a sign that the Jihadis had lost their grip on the situation. The battalion Two had briefed that the suicide commandos cut the throats of their own casualties to keep them quiet. So the quiet meant that the bad hombres were still in control.

Garcia wondered if he could do that. To one of his Marines. Cut his throat, if the mission required it. Truth was, you never knew. Until the moment came.

Plenty of shooting farther down the ridge. In another battalion’s sector, maybe another regiment’s. His thighs and back ached from humping all the way up from the beach, a march that, physically, had been worse than the fight. Clambering up those slopes gave you the burn.

Pay attention! he told himself. Jolting himself back from the mind-drift.

Gunshot. No. Lance Corporal Polanski kicking a brick. Lamest Marine in the platoon. But the noise charged Garcia’s battery.

“Everybody down. Now!” he called. Loud. So anyone whose headset was busted would still hear him. “Guns up!”

The Marines scrambled for cover. As they did, a machine gun opened up. From a second-floor window. Or the hole where a window had been.

Too much return fire. Weren’t going to get him that way, unless it was pure luck.

“Aimed fire only!” he said into the mike. “Tell your buddy. Don’t piss away your ammo. Larsen, Cropsey. You read me?” he said into the mike.

No answer.

“Larsen? Cropsey?”

“Yeah, Sergeant.” Cropsey. A kid like a coiled snake. Attitude problem.

“Larsen with you?”

“Roger.”

“You see that machine-gun position?”

“Just the tracers.”

“Hold where you are. I’m coming around behind you. Everybody else, stay alert. Let that asshole on the machine gun get Nervous. And no firing to the left flank, unless you’ve got a one-hundred-percent positive ID. Don’t want no blue-on-blue.”

A few murmurs, plenty of static. Half the headsets were broke-dick. He just had to hope that the rest of them would figure it out. Hate to take a nail from another Marine.

Garcia slipped back into the darkness, then worked around behind a compound wall. At the rear of somebody’s private world, the sloped dropped off sharply. He felt the steepness even more than he saw it in the murk. Working his way carefully, back to the masonry, he ground his heels into the earth as he sidestepped along. Like a duck in a shooting gallery at some rat-bite fair down in Durango, at his grandmother’s. Anybody firing at him now was going to win the prize at the fiesta.

He paused for a stolen moment to kiss the sleeve covering his left forearm. Under the cloth, the Virgin of Guadalupe prayed for him.

“I’ll do the prayers right later,” he told her. “I promise. But you know what I need right now.”

He got around the far corner of the wall. To reasonably level ground.

“Cropsey? Where are you, man?”

“By the twisted-up tree.”

“That’s an olive tree.”

“Whatever.”

“Coming in. On your six.”

The firing to the right, back down in the street, came in short bursts followed by Nervous quiet. Each side daring the other to really open up.

“Cropsey?” he whispered to the form ahead of him.

“I’m Larsen, Sergeant. Cropsey’s over there.”

“Listen up. Either of you got grenades left?

“One.”

“Same here.”

Shit. He’d used all of his own in the street fighting. Two grenades wasn’t much to clear that house. And whatever else was waiting for them.

“Give them to me. You’re going to keep everybody off me while I’m laying these eggs. You can’t see it, but the gunner’s in the second building up there. We’re almost behind him here. And we’re going to try to come in right behind him. But we’re going in there figuring he’s not feeling lonesome.” Garcia fit the grenades to his armored vest. “Larsen, you’re on point until we get to the back wall. Then you’re tail-gunner on the outside. Cropsey, you’re first in. But don’t open up unless you’re damned sure there’s something to open up on. No yelling, no grab-ass. I want to smell that motherfucker before I throw any of these. You’ll have the first deck. I’ll take the stairs. Now move out.”

Larsen was a good shot, just short of sniper level, but this wasn’t a rifle range. It was going to be all close quarters. And Larsen was clumsy as an Anglo on the dance floor. He could watch their backs when they went in. Cropsey was a mean little bastard, though, born for a razor fight in a closet. Almost crazy mean. But not stupid. The kind of Marine who spoiled your Saturday night when the duty officer took a call from the San Diego cops. But good when the killing started.

Garcia gave his sleeve another furtive kiss. He’d taken a lot of grief about the tattoo. But he was still alive. Half the punks he went to high school with were dead. Before the Day of the Dead came early.

He tapped the bottom of his magazine, making sure he had a tight lock. Nervous habit. Everybody had one. Trick was not to let people see it.

They moved up between black trees, trip-me stumps, and small boulders. Everything in this world seemed disordered, messed up. Crazy people. Who started all this. For what? The nuclear blast hadn’t reached his hood in East L.A. But the radiation did. He’d been on Okinawa. His family had been home.

Now the Jihadis were going to get their shit handed to them.

The machine gun sent another burst into the night. Exploring. Limited field of vision from where he was hunkered down, Garcia figured. Dude was probably shit-scared. No matter what he believed in, he had to be scared in a hole like that. The hunted, not the hunter. Death comes knocking.

We’re coming, amigo, he told his invisible enemy. Your old pal Ricky Garcia is coming to the party. Just for you.

Larsen reached the rear wall of the building, with Cropsey just behind him.

Garcia whispered into his mike, still worried about friendly fire. He told the Marines down in the street, “We’re up his ass. Just hold his attention.”

Larsen edged along the rear wall of the line of ruined houses. Garcia wondered how many more Jihadis might be inside, just waiting for a Marine to walk up and wave.

Only hand signals now. Time to stay real quiet.

Lit by starlight, Larsen leapt past the rear door. Then he crouched, ready to fire at anyone who appeared from the far side.

Garcia waved Cropsey forward. The lance corporal crunched down like a boxer who liked to hit below the belt. Weapon jutting out at crotch level.

The machine gun fired. Different sound from behind. Like being the safety NCO on the range. Better than being in front of it.

Cropsey looked back for the go-ahead to enter. Garcia put a finger to his lips, then signaled “Go!”

One piece of luck: They didn’t have to break down any doors. The rear entrance gaped, blown out by the mortars and artillery.

Cropsey was good. Garcia had never known an Anglo kid who could move like that. He was already inside, quiet as the confessional on Saturday night.

Garcia checked the grenades, then moved forward.

Inside the masonry house—what was left of it—a burst from the machine gun rang impossibly loud. Still no sign of any back-up protection for the gunner.

Garcia signalled Cropsey to clear to the bottom of the stairs. The kid had it figured out. Without being told, he hugged the right wall. In case any friendly fire came in the front.

Nice and quiet. Nice and easy. Cat-foot the rubble. Take it nice and slow.

Garcia wasn’t sure if he hated what he was doing, loved it like sin, or both. But he wasn’t tired anymore. Zooming on body chemicals. Aware of every breath sucked down in the world.

Then he heard it. A voice speaking Arabic. Whispering. Not the way a man talked to himself or cursed, but the way he spoke to someone else nearby.

Shit. But better to know it now.

Cropsey was looking at him. Kid had it figured out, too. But he needed to be looking everywhere else.

Garcia motioned for him to be ready. Then Garcia put his rifle on burst, switched it to his left hand, and gripped the first grenade.

Carefully, he thumbed out the pin, keeping the lever clasped death-grip tight to the curve of the metal. And he started up the stairs. Back to the wall. Ready. But already dead, if any fuck was watching from a back room up there.

Again, he heard a whisper in Arabic, followed by a rip from the machine gun.

One last split second prayer to the Virgin. And Garcia stepped up high enough to peer over the lip of the second floor.

His head struck something, and he froze. Unsure if the noise amplifed inside the helmet was equally loud to anyone else.

Silence.

Were they onto him?

The hand that held the grenade was sweating. Bad shit. Didn’t want it slippery when he threw it.

Artillery fire had torn loose an iron railing, leaving it dangling over the staircase. A twist of its metal had scratched his helmet.

Don’t let this goddamn-it-to-death grenade cook off. Please.

He heard more Arabic whispering. Too loud for them to be worried about anyone hearing.

He saw the pattern now: Whisper, then shoot. When the machine gun kicked out the next burst, he used the noise and its echo to scoot under the railing.

A wedge of exterior light shone through a doorway, leading his eye to the blown-out window frame where the machine gun perched. But he couldn’t make out the gunner or his companion, who were out of his line of sight and and wrapped in darkness.

As Garcia placed his foot on the next step, it creaked.

He threw the grenade over the railing, hoping it would go through the door and not bounce back at him. Then he fired toward the front room, double bursts, as he plunged for cover.

The blast was doomsday loud. The wall that shielded him shook. But Garcia was going full throttle now. He leapt back to his feet, charged forward, and hurled the second grenade into the room an instant before diving behind another wall.

He hit his elbow hard. Bitch hard.

The explosion seemed powerful enough to tear the house apart. But that was just the confined-space effect.

“Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit,” he barked. Cradling his elbow.

“Sergeant?”

“Shut the fuck up. Stay there.”

He flipped magazines and edged back toward the room where the machine gun and at least two Jihadis had been at work. He wasn’t going to mess it up now. No hot-dogging. Human being could live through a lot. Even two grenades.

At least one of them was cooked to serve. The second blast had blown the Jihadi halfway through the door. Dead meat.

That left at least one more.

Garcia heard a moan. Sounded real. But the bastard could be faking it.

He put a short burst into the room, then ducked back.

Fucker groaned again. Like he was trying to take a last shit before dying.

Garcia went in, ready to lay down another burst. By starlight and fireglow, he saw a figure gleaming with blood, propped against a wall in the settling dust. The man was alone, and his eyes were ablaze with the struggle for life. He was dying, but he wasn’t quitting.

Garcia knew what he was supposed to feel. Pity. Compassion. All that shit. But he didn’t feel it. Instead, he saw his mother dying of radiation sickness, her skull bald and raw, her body bent like a witch’s in a cartoon and her skin loose over Popsicle-stick bones.

He walked over to the Jihadi, got his attention, then put a bullet into his forehead.

“That’s for the City of Angels,” Garcia told him.