The War After Armageddon

FOUR

Lost souls, they stumbled from the buses. In the distance, the sounds of war throbbed, an irregular heartbeat. The men, most of middle age, appeared bewildered, gripping suitcases or dabbing the sweat from their foreheads with fouled handkerchiefs. Their women struggled down the steps behind them, clinging to possessions gathered in haste. A few of the women led children into the chaos, but most had long since passed the fertile years. Those children who had been dragged along wept or shrank into silence. Young or old, everyone looked soiled and worn. And they stank. The buses did not stop for human needs.

Major Michael Nasr watched the human parasites surge past the guards and swarm the new arrivals. Offering food, drink, or a place to sleep. At prices that would break a rich man in a week. There were no tourists in Nazareth now, and none had come for years, but the touts hadn’t lost their persistence. They set upon the refugees like fleas.

Refugees? What could you really call them? Nasr wondered. Men and women forced from their homes by their own kind, driven toward a war rather than away from it. He tried to piece the logic of it together. Obviously, there was a purpose to the actions of the Ji-hadis. But the purpose wasn’t obvious to him.

Lifting his robe as he stepped through filth, Nasr noticed the old man again. Not a refugee, but a local. The shriveled character with the goat’s beard had popped up repeatedly to scrutinize him, then disappear again. Nasr didn’t know what that might be about, but it worried him. His Arabic had been learned at home, in a Christian émigré family in Sacramento, and his father’s Lebanese accent came as easily to him as his mother’s born-in-Nazareth dialect. He understood the dress, the body language, the insider rules. He’d fooled the officials and the mullahs, and the only problem with his Arabic was that it was too grammatical for the identity he’d chosen.

Had something given him away? A word? A gesture?

If so, the cavalry wasn’t going to ride to the rescue. A U.S. Army Special Forces major detailed to a black program, Nasr was on his own. In Indian country.

He smiled at the utterly American phrase. He never felt more American than when he was thrust into the world that had forced his parents to flee. For the crime of being Christians. And yet, the Muslim role came to him easily. As if you inherited knowledge of your enemies.

Well, he was just glad that his parents had found the get-up-and-go to get up and go. Anyone who criticized the United States of America needed to get a good whiff of the Middle East.

The old man was up to something. But then, everybody between Casablanca and Karachi was up to something. Everybody had an angle. Every seven-year-old worked a grift.

Nasr caught himself before he shrugged. He had almost moved his shoulders like a Westerner. Instead, he waved the world away with a dismissive hand. And he entered the crowd, slipping past a policeman who wore his beret straight up from his scalp, like a mushroom cap.

An unshaven man in an old tweed jacket grasped Nasr by the arm.

“Please,” he said, “please… Can you help me?”

“What do you need, brother?” Nasr asked him.

“My wife… she’s… we need…”

A volley of artillery rounds struck beyond one of the city’s ridges. Closer than the other fires had come. The refugee clinging to Nasr’s forearm flinched, almost dropping to his knees.

“Why have they brought us here? Why? Do you know?”

“Where are you from, brother?”

“Why do they bring us here? This is fitna. Madness. I’m a professor. Of physics. My wife is a teacher. What do we have to do with their war?”

“Where is your home, brother? Where did they take you from?”

A woman in the crowd began to scream.

“From Homs. From the university. Why bring us such a long way? Why bring us here? We’ll all be killed. Can you help us?”

“We must pray to Allah,” Nasr said, “and trust in His beneficence.”

The professor looked at him scornfully. Letting go of his forearm. “You’re one of them? You believe that nonsense? After all the world has seen? There is no god… none…”

“There is no god but God,” Nasr corrected him. “And Mohammed is his Prophet. Insh’ Allah, all will be well with you, brother.”

“You,” the professor said in a spiteful rage, “it’s dogs like you who’ve done this.”

Before turning away, Nasr told the professor, “Get away from this place. Or they’ll steal what little you have left. Take your wife and go to the farthest neighborhood your feet can find. Nothing is left down here.”

But the professor wasn’t listening. Fury had blocked his ears.

“Dogs like you have done this,” he repeated.

“And hold your tongue, brother,” Nasr warned him. “Not all Nazarenes are as patient with blasphemers as I am.”

He scanned the shabby crowd but couldn’t spot the old man who’d been trailing him. Pushing on toward the buses, Nasr let himself take in a dozen conversations: pleas, complaints, threats, and furious bargaining, all of it reeking with the stench of shit and fear. Some of the refugees had been brought from as far away as Halab, ancient Aleppo, in northern Syria. And Nasr thought he heard Iraqi accents. Educated accents, all of them.

Why on earth drive your intelligentsia—or what passed for one—into the path of an invading army?

Did the Jihadis want them to be killed?

Nasr stopped. Just below the derelict patch where the Church of the Annunciation had stood. His body felt sheathed in ice.

Was that it? Did the Jihadis want them to be killed?

Nasr had been inserted weeks before the invasion began, but the influx of refugees had begun just two days before a bombardment announced the landings. The Jihadis had known an attack was coming, of course, if not just when and where.

What else had they known?

Major Nasr sat on a broken wall. A half-block from one of Christendom’s holy places—now a ruin used as a public latrine. He wasn’t a party to the detailed plan of invasion, but he knew this much: Even Flintlock Harris wouldn’t have the pull to bypass Nazareth. Whatever else the corps commander’s plan of operations might avoid, the early seizure of Nazareth would be non-negotiable. The vice president, the SecDef, and the MOBIC generals back in the Pentagon would make sure of that.

And the Jihadis were smart enough to figure that one out. Every Christian site would be an objective. Nazareth would be high on the list.

Then why dump their brainpower in the path of the infidel?

Were the Jihadis really so intent on turning back the clock by centuries that they wanted their professors and doctors and scientists exterminated? If so, why not do it themselves? Why go to so much trouble? When they had a war to fight?

Of course, Hitler had made time for a similar distraction. When he had a war to fight.

Nasr knew he was on to something big. But he didn’t know what it was.

There had to be more to it.

He needed to get back to his transmitter. If the damned thing was working. Sometimes the burst transmissions got through, sometimes they didn’t. But he was anxious to send off another report and hand off what he’d seen and heard. Let the brainiacs on the staff figure out what it meant.

Insh’ Allah.

Just as Nasr placed his hands on his knees to lever himself to his feet, he saw the old man again. Pointing at him. A half-dozen Arab policemen accompanied him.

There was no point in running. The only hope was to bluff.

“I tell you, he is a spy, that one!” the old man cried.

Nasr felt his guts churn. But he kept his face under control, letting innocent bafflement spread across his features.

The police surrounded him. Artillery fire landed a valley away, but it wasn’t going to help him.

Nasr touched his hand to his robe, just above his heart. “How can I help you, my brothers?”

A policeman wearing a captain’s pips struck him with his fist. Nasr staggered. The next blow put him on the ground.

“That man is a Christian,” the old bastard said. “He’s of the Gemalia. They’re all gone from Nazareth now, Allah be praised. But this one has returned. I will always recognize a Gemalia pig. I knew him by his nose.”

“We’ll take care of his nose,” the captain said. And he kicked Nasr in the face.

Sergeant Garcia listened to the battle down in the plain. Somebody was serious about busting caps on the Jihadis. Garcia would’ve liked to be in on it.

Con mucho gusto.

He didn’t quite trust the way he felt as he marched down the winding road that led off the heights. He’d had an hour or so of pretend sleep, and he knew he was wasted. But he felt like Superman. No meth involved. Just a buzz he couldn’t quite figure out.

Garcia looked behind him to make sure his Marines were maintaining a combat interval as they marched along the shoulders of the road. The Army’s tanks and shit were hogging the blacktop as they rushed into the fight. Well, let them take their turn.

A Bradley tore into the pavement as it downshifted, throwing off bits of the surface and groaning like a constipated dinosaur. Up from La Brea, Garcia thought. The Dino Gang.

He replayed the scene in the house again and again: the grenades and the gunfire, the rush, and the dead Jihadis. And he just felt good. All that crap about how you were supposed to feel bad after killing people. Who made that shit up? Bigger lies than Maria Escobar told in the confessional. To that priest she was hot for. For the priest and everybody else.

Maybe he’d feel bad about it all later. Maybe all the guilt would kick in, the way they said it did. But for now, he just felt like the conquistadores must’ve felt.

It was like sex, man. You just wanted to do it again.

Did that mean he was all dicked up inside? Because all he wanted to do was kill the fuckers who made L.A. glow like a year-round Christmas decoration? And his family so hot with radioactivity you could’ve used them to cook enchiladas in Ensenada. Watching them blotch up, go bald, get skinny, and die. And his mother worrying about him all the time she was dying.

When the captain had come down to ask if the platoon needed to be pulled off the line for a day or two, Garcia had looked at him in shock, then fear, then suck-on-this annoyance. All in the space of ten seconds.

“Naw, sir. We’re, like, just getting into the motion, you know? We’re cruising.”

“Your Marines okay? You sure?”

His Marines.

“Hey, sir. They’re Marines. They’re good to go.”

“The platoon’s at sixty-five percent.”

Garcia stared at the other man. At this man who threatened to take away his platoon. Who wouldn’t say shit when battalion sent down some hotshot to take over. Staff Sergeant McCullough, maybe. Or some gunny who wanted to play lieutenant for a week.

“They’re feeling a hundred percent, sir,” Garcia told him. “We just need an ammo drop.”

He knew he wasn’t speaking for every one of his Marines. Some of them wanted to move out and mix it up, while others would’ve been glad for any excuse to go below decks and sleep until it was all over. But this was what they’d signed up for. He wasn’t going to let anybody just walk. They had business to do.

It was screwy, but he felt two ways at once. Since the fight in the village the night before, he felt closer to his Marines than ever before. And he felt apart from them, too. Separate. In a new way.

Down in the valley, some tanks were duking it out. The 155s were dropping closer in now. Garcia couldn’t see the fight as he walked, but smoke rose and thinned, veiling the horizon. His back hurt pretty bad. But you just kept on humping. His elbow was half-fucked, too. It didn’t matter. He felt like calling cadence, like singing out. Un poco loco.

Well, the platoon was too spread out to hear him. With the big boys clanking in between them. He called cadence to himself, anyway.

A wave of tiredness hit him, almost stopping him cold. Then the buzz came back. Just like that. But his damned back hurt. Too loaded down. Lugging all your stuff around, like some homeless bum back on the block. He looked, enviously for once, at the Army grunts riding by, sticking up through the hatches like Mexican kids standing behind the cab of a pickup.

Same exhaust stink, too.

Garcia just didn’t want to come out of this with any kind of injury that would put him out of the Corps. Instinctively, he lifted his forearm to kiss the Virgin of Guadalupe tattoo underneath his sleeve. But he caught himself. And just made like he was wiping the sweat from his face and resetting his helmet. Dying would be okay. He could handle that. He had what the skinny redhead instructor bitch at the community college called “Latin fatalism.” Like the name of some perfume you paid five bucks for off a street vendor. To give to some chica so new to the hood she still thought in pesos and didn’t know perfumes were all about serious labels.

Yeah, Latin fatalism. Splash it on me, dude. Just don’t let me end up a geek crapping himself in a VA hospital.

He knew now that he didn’t ever want to leave the Corps. Since the nukes came down, the Corps was his only home. He sure wasn’t going to take off his boots for very long down at his grandmother’s. If anybody else wanted to be a full-time Mexican for a living, let them. He was an Angeleno. Even without his city.

And he was a Marine.

He saw the firelit face of the Jihadi he’d shot. Clear as any photograph. Clearer. And he just wanted to pull the trigger again.

Garcia wondered if he was some kind of psycho. Were you supposed to get this buzzed?

Hand signals relayed back from the head of the column. Take ten. Garcia passed it on. But he didn’t want to stop. He was exhausted. Beat. But he didn’t want to stop.

He walked back to check on each of his Marines and told Barrett to change his socks. Barrett got blisters just looking at a combat boot. And Garcia made sure everybody had water.

Dodging back between two Abrams tanks that would’ve qualified for antique-vehicle plates, Garcia dropped to the ground. And as soon as his ass hit the grass, he knew he’d made a mistake. The weariness came over him like a drug. First, he’d been riding the cosmic meth; now, the downers had him.

He made himself breathe deeply. And got just fumes. The column of vehicles had come to a halt. A tank idled in front of him.

The crew had given the big boy a name, painted down the gun tube: “Compton’s Revenge.”

Garcia looked up at the turret. The tank commander was a black dude. Couldn’t see his rank. But he looked right off the block.

Probably a lieutenant, Garcia figured. The Army didn’t have standards like the Marines.

Garcia threw the TC a home-boy sign. Just to check him out.

The TC hesitated. Then he grinned big and threw it back.

Garcia smiled and nodded. They understood each other. Let bygones be bygones. Compton, Watts, they were all gone now.

Garcia gestured toward the fighting below and signed again: We’re going to give them a fucking they’ll remember.

The TC signed back: Righ teous.

The column of vehicles began to move again. The Marines up ahead rose from their spots by the roadside, rolling to their feet, top-heavy, readjusting packs and straps before gripping their rifles at the ready again.

There was no alarm, no warning. Nobody heard the drones coming in. Until they shrieked as they plunged into the column. Garcia watched the tank with the TC from Compton get hit and explode.

Two Bradleys got it farther down the slope. A burning soldier leapt from one, then fell. Marines rushed to roll him over. But he was a crisp.

The Army didn’t screw around. Say that for them. They pushed the burning vehicles out of the way and kept on moving.

All in all, Garcia decided he’d rather walk.

“For God’s sake, Avi,” Harris said, “you’ll get your chance.” He snorted to himself. “You’re going to get more chances than you want.”

“I still protest. As commander of the 10th Israeli Armored Brigade, I had the right to lead the first assault.”

Harris had to discipline himself. He needed sleep, and his temper was on a short fuse.

“That’s bullshit, and you know it. We needed an infantry-heavy force to get up on the heights. Tanks wouldn’t have gotten off the beach. The road wouldn’t—”

“And now? My brigade is still in your ships. And the battle has moved into the Jezreel.”

“First of all, they’re not my goddamned ships. Second, you know you’re scheduled to go ashore tonight. There’ll be plenty of Jihadis left for you and your men. What’s this really about, Avi?”

“I protest.” The brigadier from the Israeli Exile Force pointed at the letter he had laid on Harris’s desk. “My brigade had a moral and military right to take precedence. We’ve been treated with prejudice.”

“Jesus Christ,” Harris said, instantly wishing he’d chosen different words, “your brigade would’ve been shot to bits going up that single goddamned road. The operation would’ve been a disaster. And I would’ve been accused of using your brigade as cannon fodder. Along with sixteen kinds of anti-Semitism. And you damned well know it. Now, to hell with rank. Man to man, I want you to tell me what this is all about.”

“You have my letter.”

Harris picked up the letter and crumpled it, then pitched it toward a wastebasket. He missed. The uneven ball meandered across the deck.

“Go back to your ship. Just get your brigade ready to go ashore. You’re going to get all the fighting you want. And if you deviate one inch from your written orders, I’ll relieve you and distribute your battalions among the 1st ID’s brigades. You understand me?”

Avi Dorn saluted, turned, and marched out of the compartment.

When the hatch had closed behind the Israeli exile, Harris dropped into a chair. What in the name of God was that all about?

He took a long drink of bottled water, then went to check on his staff’s preparations to move operations to a command post ashore.

As he was ferried back toward his transport ship, Brigadier Avi Dorn closed his eyes. Shutting out the day and his personal history and the memory of his ruined nation. He just thought about Harris. With regret.

He liked Harris and respected him. And he knew that every word the general had spoken was true. But if the rebirth of Israel meant sacrificing one American general, it would not be the first sacrifice. Nor, Dorn thought, the last.

A renegade spray of salt water slapped his cheek. He opened his eyes again.

Just let them wait until the fighting’s done, Dorn thought. He wanted Harris calling the shots until the shooting stopped.

All he could taste was blood.

Teeth could be replaced, Major Nasr told himself. He’d lost a canine on the upper left and two teeth below it. A couple of others were loose. But he’d had loose teeth before. He tried to keep his tongue from testing them.

And noses could be fixed. He knew that from experience. Which is why it was bullshit that anyone could recognize him by the nose that ran in his mother’s family. Anyway, he’d had his father’s nose. Broken twice—once playing football in high school and once in Nigeria, in the most desperate brawl of his life. He still had please-wake-me-up-now dreams about that one.

Ribs, too. Just tape ’em up. As long as your lungs weren’t punctured.

Don’t think like that, he told himself. Don’t start thinking like that.

His balls hurt, too. And they’d beat him until his bowels gave out. Which, he figured, just made him stink like their entire goddamned city.

“Holy Nazareth.” Personally, he would’ve been glad to let the Ji-hadis have it. Even Jesus had packed up and left as soon as he cleared the back orders at the carpentry shop.

The police team came back in. One of them turned Nasr over with his boot. Shining a heavy flashlight in his face. Nasr had gotten intimately familiar with that flashlight.

What surprised him was how crude they were. He would’ve expected more sophisticated forms of torture. But his captors were content just to beat the hell out of him.

“Who are you?” the officer with the deeper voice asked. For the hundredth time.

“My name is Gemal. I come from Sidon. I was only looking for work. In the lands Allah has given back to his people.”

The boot tip found a soft spot in Nasr’s back. And it went in hard. Twice.

Kidneys were not so easy to fix as noses.

“You shit-eating dog. Are you laughing at us? You think we don’t know who you are? You piece of filth.”

“Allah knows the truth of what I say. I swear—”

The boot went into his ribs. More blood came up. Nasr gagged, choked, finally spit out the clot. Or whatever had come loose.

“You’re a Christian spy. We know this. Speak the truth. Maybe we’ll let you live.”

“Brothers… My name is Gemal. I come from Sidon. I—”

A fist rebroke his nose, smashing the back of his head into the concrete. Nasr didn’t want to go out. To lose consciousness was to lose control.

He almost laughed. At himself. As if he were in control.

“You understand,” the deep-voiced officer said, “that we’re only preparing you. The men who will question you seriously are on their way. Better to tell us the truth. What they do to a man isn’t decent.”

The other laughed. “And what they’ll do to a Christian… I don’t like to think of such things…”

“Get him up,” Deep Voice commanded.

Through the ringing and hammering inside his skull, Nasr heard a door open. Or thought he did. Then he dreamed that an overhead light went on and several figures stood over him.

“You asses,” a new voice said. “Who gave you permission to do this? To an innocent man?”

Deep Voice tried to stutter out an answer. Shocked. Or just confused.

Through one badly swollen eyelid, Nasr thought he saw one man strike another.

“I should do the same thing done to you,” the new voice said. Then, in a tone of still greater disgust, he told the others, “Bring him out. And bring a doctor.”

Nasr was utterly confused. Were they speaking about him? Was there another captive in the room?

Heavy arms lifted him to his feet. But he couldn’t stand.

“Hold on to him,” the new voice commanded. “Or I’ll have the flesh stripped from your bodies and fed to your children.”

Out in the corridor, as they dragged him along, Nasr was able to make out a few things. White walls. Daylight through smudged windows. A scarred floor. And the old man who had been his accuser. He was being dragged in the opposite direction.

The old man was slopped with blood, and he whimpered. His nose had been cut off. It made him sound like a cartoon character.