The War After Armageddon (2 page)

He had warned of the danger. Still, he had been appalled by how badly his generation had judged the coming wars. The overreliance on technology had troubled him for years, while his peers had dismissed him as an eccentric, hopelessly conservative, backward. His insistence on training his troops to fight on without their advanced systems had earned him the mocking nickname “Flintlock.”

Now the military he served was fighting a longer-range version of World War II, scorched by the few technologies that still worked.

Science had undone itself. Harris tried to visualize the wild electronic war playing out in the darkness, with each side canceling the other’s capabilities with hyperjammers, signal leeches, and computer plagues. Only a handful of his country’s satellites remained aloft, and the devastating effects of electromagnetic-pulse simulators destroyed every electronic system with the least gap in its shielding. Harris recalled the easy days when, as a company commander in Iraq, he could e-mail his wife on the other side of the world. Back then, generals could talk to anyone, anywhere, anytime they wished. Later, as a battalion exec, he had cursed the BlackBerry that kept him on an electronic leash. Now he longed for such a tool, but had none he could trust.

The sky pretended to be empty. But a mad duel raged on wavelengths no human eye could see. Harris turned back to the battle of metal on metal, of flesh and blood. He was waiting for the signal from Monk Morris and his Marines to send the 1st Infantry Division ashore. The 1st Cav would follow. Given the shortage of appropriate landing craft, the operation was bound to be a mess. This time, the Army had to rely on the Marines for support. Their new “get-ashore” boats were the operation’s lifeline, given that every port facility that hadn’t been destroyed remained hot from nuclear ground bursts and bombs with dirty triggers.

The Jihadis had expected his corps to land to the south, where the terrain was more inviting and Jerusalem waited. Instead, only the MOBIC corps obliged the Muslim high command, plunging ashore through the patches of radioactive debris just north of the ruins of Tel Aviv. Harris’s chosen landing zone, the Mt. Carmel sector, had been lightly defended. Relatively speaking. Monk Morris’s Devil Dogs faced rugged terrain, ambushes, and suicidal fanatics. But Monk thrived on that kind of fighting. The last message received before comms went down again had been a sitrep describing the slaughter of Druze civilians by the retreating Jihadis. According to Monk, the atrocities were the worst he’d ever seen.

And Monk had seen a great deal, from Anbar a generation before through the Saudi intervention—where they’d first served together—and
on to Nigeria. More recently, he’d brought his Marines up from Pendleton for the recovery operations after the nuclear terror attack on Los Angeles. Monk joked that he’d never need a night-light, since he glowed in the dark himself.

A volley of rockets scrawled arcs in the sky. Again, they were as in effective as holiday fireworks. But it would take only one to hit the wrong ship. Then the pyrotechnics would be a great deal more dramatic.

It was hard to resist ordering the lead brigade of the Big Red One ashore immediately, to get things moving, to push deep and hard and fast. But the narrow beachhead, with the cliffs and steep slopes shooting up behind it, would be on the verge of chaos as it was. Harris didn’t envy the beachmaster. And he could trust Monk, who knew how much time mattered. The Army, with its heavy gear, couldn’t go ashore until the roads winding into the hills had been secured.

Harris heard footsteps descending a metal ladder. A moment later, his aide, the newly promoted Major John Willing, stumbled from a hatch.

“Sir?”

“Word from General Morris?” Harris asked.

A head shook in the darkness. “No, sir. Nothing yet. But the Deuce has an update. One of the overheads got clean imagery.”

“Tell him I’ll be down in a few minutes. And tell the Three I need to know the status of the MOBIC landings down south. Even if he has to swim down there to find out.”

“Yes, sir. Got it.”

Harris liked and trusted his G-2. But the man was a little too eager to brief when there wasn’t anything vital to add to the picture. Loyal, but too demonstrative about it, he needed to learn to listen to things he didn’t want to hear. The G-3 was his opposite: taciturn, with the quiet sort of loyalty that would sacrifice life and limb but might explode if disappointed—the kind of man you didn’t dare let down.

Flintlock Harris granted himself a few last minutes of quiet. Watching the manmade lightning on the horizon, he remembered.

BREMERHAVEN, GERMANY

The northern sky threatened rain. The Germans had torn the roofs from the dockside warehouses out of spite, and the vast herd of refugees waiting to board a ship to safety had no protection against a downpour beyond what they wore on their backs. The tentage the U.S. Army had brought to Bremerhaven barely met the requirement for sick wards. Half of the kids in the dockyards had diarrhea, the shitters were too few for one-tenth the number of refugees who staggered from the trains, and Doc Brodsky worried about cholera. The doc wanted the Navy to give priority to bringing in saline solution. But his claim for aircraft space was just one among many. There weren’t enough rations aboard the advance vessels to feed the refugees. A shortage of potable water meant that the throng on the wharves was dehydrating. They already smelled of death.

Harris heard gunfire. Inland. Less than a kilometer, he judged. Inside the fence. Near the railhead.

His greatest worry had been a shoot-out with the German border police, who were behaving a little too much like the worst of their ancestors. Given all that had occurred, he understood the Germans’ anger. He just couldn’t fathom their cruelty. In his more cynical moments, he wondered if it was in their DNA.

The simultaneous detonation of dirty bombs in Berlin, Hamburg, and Frankfurt, as well as in Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Milan, Rome, London, and Manchester, had been the signal for the Great Jihad. Muslim radicals told their kind that Europe had lost its will, that it needed only a push to topple and leave a new caliphate standing.

It had been all madness. The Islamists hadn’t had the numbers. The majority of their fellow Muslims in Europe wanted no part of the violence. But enough rose up to seal the fate of the rest. The Muslim rioting had been severe, with atrocities committed in the streets against any ethnic European on whom the radicals laid hands.

In less than a week, the equation shifted decisively. The anti-Muslim pogroms that followed did not distinguish between those
who had committed crimes and those who had only tried to wait out the chaos. In every country, the authorities either tolerated or abetted the revenge killings.

Within a month, the counterattacks on Europe’s Muslims spread so widely and grew so brutal that the United States led the world in demanding that Europe’s governments end it. But the governments answered to the people, and the people wanted blood. Mobs ruled, even in parliaments. It was as if the rebellion had broken a dam behind which decades of fury had been rising.

NATO dissolved amid the threats aimed at ending the butchery. Infected by the continental hysteria, the European Union—whose Islamic delegates had gone into hiding—voted overwhelmingly to expel Muslims from the continent. The United States demanded a monitoring role to ensure that the refugees were treated humanely. Of course, that was more than a year before the nuclear destruction of Israel and the terror attacks on Los Angeles and Las Vegas.

The Great Evacuation had come first. Bringing the U.S. military back to Europe for the last, brief time. From Bremerhaven to Brindisi.

With his first star on his uniform and the clouds brooding overhead, Harris turned to his forward staff and snapped, “Find out who’s shooting. Now. And get the Rapid Reaction Force out where everybody can see it.” Wind slapped canvas down along the wharf.

“Already moving, sir.”

“Hold them at the warehouse line. I just want them visible. I’ll call if I need them.”

“Sir? It’s Cavanaugh. He’s at the railhead.”

Harris drew on his headset. “This is Trailmaster Six. What’ve you got?”

The voice that answered sought to be steady and failed. “Rodeo Six Alpha. No ketchup. We had to shoot in the air to get their attention. But you’ve got to see this. The bastards.”

“Get yourself under control, Six Alpha.
Now.
I’ll be there in one-zero mikes. And I don’t want to hear any more shots unless you mean it.” Harris looked around at the what-the-hell? faces. “Let’s go.”

“Want the RRF to make a hole, sir?” That was the Three.

Harris looked out over the mass of refugees and shook his head. “They’ve already had enough of men with guns.” But he reset the holster on his thigh, a reflex action. There were radicals seeded among the refugees, those who hadn’t quite been up to suicide attacks but who were dangerous enough—and bitter that the United States, the Great Satan, had come to the aid of Muslims, queering their schemes. In Marseilles, a Marine colonel had been stabbed as he reached to lift a child, and there had been a riot on the wharves at Rotterdam, with a Navy SP beaten to death. Here, on the Bremerhaven docks, where the U.S. armed forces long had shipped out the autos of its members returning from Germany, Harris’s biggest problem had been preventing the radicals from further terrorizing their fellow Muslims.

Followed by his forward staff, Harris jounced down to the dock and pushed beyond the cordon of soldiers and sailors that kept the command ship from being stormed by desperate human beings. He walked fast, with his face set hard to warn off anyone with a complaint or petition. He had no time now for the dead-eyed women picking the lice from their children’s hair, or for the shattered fathers struggling to put together a few words of beggar’s English. Most were ethnic Turks, their pride broken, as recognizable by their somber looks as by the olive tinge to their pale complexions.

The wind filled his nostrils with a smell that made him think of concentration camps.

A few hands reached toward him, some voices called. But these were people who had learned fear and learned it suddenly. Only those who had lost their last grip on reality cried out for his attention.

Even aboard the ships putting in—most of them contracted freighters—there wouldn’t be enough of anything. The makeshift showers wouldn’t suffice, nor would the medical care. The entire effort had been cobbled together so swiftly that even the rules of engagement remained in dispute, with the EU reps venomously obstructionist.

Europe, the continent of peace.

Harris saw a thin girl in a headscarf standing up amid the thousands huddled on the gravel. She wore jeans, an orange sweater, and a red plaid cape, and she watched him as if he were an alien being. He figured her for a rape victim. Given the Muslim obsession with chastity, rape had been a common sport in the retaliatory pogroms.

He refused to think too much. There would be time for thinking later on. He had to keep his head and make things happen.

His pace quickened to a range-walk. Flipping his headset to “talk” he said, “Rodeo Six Alpha, Trailmaster Six. We okay?”

The voice did not respond so quickly as he would’ve liked. Then the captain, who had struck Harris as solid since the day they docked, repeated, “You’ve got to see this . . .”

“Your location in five.”

The sea of refugees parted as he advanced.

He turned a warehouse corner and passed a plot used as an open-air latrine, as foul as anything he had ever smelled. Before him, at the railhead, a half-dozen
Bundesgrenzschuetzen
sat on the ground by a line of boxcars. The German border police no longer had their weapons, and they looked extremely unhappy. U.S. Army Infantrymen stood over them with their rifles ready.

Harris ordered himself to maintain his self-control, not to judge before he had the facts. But young Captain Cavanaugh would need a damned good explanation for this one.

Wiping his face, the captain trotted toward him. Harris realized the man had been crying.

“What going on, captain?”

“Sir . . . You’ve got to see this.”

“You told me that. Twice. What do I have to see?”

“You’ve just got to see it.” The captain turned back toward the rust-colored boxcars with the white letters “DB” on their sides.

“Sergeant Z,” the captain called. “Help me.”

The sergeant shouldered his rifle, reluctantly, and moved toward the first boxcar.

They opened the door. And the stench hit everyone like a fist. Even the Germans winced.

The corpses rose almost to the middle of the car’s interior. Men.
Women. Children. Stiff. Wide-eyed. Mouths agape. Even a day or two into death, they retained their Turkish pallor. Hands had literally clawed themselves to the bone in their last, desperate moments.

As Harris watched, a woman’s corpse broke from the mass and began to slide, accelerating as it dropped to the ground. Dead bones broke.

One cold raindrop struck Harris on the lips.

“They thought it was funny,” the captain said. His voice had broken to a child’s tone. “Somebody closed all the air vents. They suffocated. And the Krauts thought it was funny.”

Harris allowed himself a long look. He needed time to master himself.

When he felt ready, he strode over to the Germans. Half of them looked worried. The rest smirked.

“Who did this?” Harris asked an
Oberleutnant
, the highest ranking figure he could see among them.

“I don’t speak pig English,” the officer said. With quite a good accent. He made a spitting sound.
“Ihr sind doch alle Rassenverraeter.”

A
Feldwebel
spoke up. “We have nothing to do with this. They are dead a long time. Days. We only make the
Sicherheitsdienst
here. Nothing with the trains.
Da ist die Bahnpolizei verantwortlich
.”

“They knew,” Cavanaugh said. “They knew. They were laughing about it.”

The German officer decided to speak English, after all. He snickered and said, “Maybe Osama bin Laden is in there.
Was meinst du, Herr Brigadegeneral? Nach dreissig Jahren!
Maybe you should look. If you Americans love these
Dreck-Muslimen
so much. But you have no right to take away our weapons. It is against the agreement. I will make a protest.”