The War After Armageddon (32 page)

“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.”

NAZARETH

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.”

HEADQUARTERS, III (US) CORPS, MT. CARMEL RIDGES

The first thing Flintlock Harris heard when he walked into his headquarters well after midnight was his G-3, Mike Andretti, telling General of the Order Simon Montfort, “That’s an unlawful order. This corps will not obey it.”

The second thing Harris heard was cheering, followed by applause. It took him a moment to understand that the accolade was for him, not for the defiant operations officer.

The officers in the briefing room stood up. Yelling their heads off. Greeting Harris. Electrified, despite the wretched hour.

The welcome gave him an additional shot of adrenaline, reaching down into the part of his soul that would always be a soldier. Yet, Harris found himself behaving calmly. Unexpectedly so. During the wave-skimming flight in the black-ops helicopter, he’d felt a killing rage, imagining variations of revenge. Now, with his subordinates behaving like children who had just been informed that Christmas wasn’t canceled after all, Harris simply wanted to take care of business.