The War After Armageddon (40 page)

Monk Morris longed for the days of his youth, when men found their dev ils in wretched foreign holes, or in their sick imaginations, or in Internet lairs. Now the dev ils wore uniforms and claimed they served his country. They ran for office and won elections by landslide votes. They appeared in the night with cynical offers that left a man with no good alternatives. Monk Morris had no patience with religion of any kind, but he couldn’t help thinking of Gethsemane.

Was this what they were fighting for? This goddamned squalor? One moment, Morris saw Flintlock Harris as a brilliant commander,
shining with ethical rigor. A moment later, he saw Harris as a fool who would doom them all.

Morris wondered, yet again, who on his own staff reported secretly to MOBIC’s Christian Security Service. Who had already betrayed the Corps? The CSS had agents everywhere. Would one of their stooges take his place if he didn’t cooperate?

The situation made him clench his fists. He understood how to fight a battle, a war. But he no longer understood how to fight the men who were taking over his country.

God’s plan? This? All this? He didn’t understand how any man with eyes in his head could believe in any kind of god. After the things he’d seen in the Nigeria fighting, the horrors in Delta State, he’d abandoned his last, perfunctory religious habits. Men had to take responsibility for their own failings, their own viciousness, their own deeds. That was humanity’s one slim hope. Blaming the world’s horrors on a punitive deity or on a scheming Satan who wanted to spoil the porridge was the coward’s way out. Years back, Morris had read something to the effect that, even if there was no God, men should behave as if He existed. A lifetime of coping with what men wrought had convinced Morris that the aphorist, whoever he’d been, had got it exactly backward: If there
was
a God, men should act as if He didn’t exist and couldn’t be blamed for the messes they made themselves. Real men took responsibility. Wasn’t that at the heart of being a Marine? To shoulder responsibilities of a dreadful order when all the others fled, trailing excuses and pointing fingers toward the sky?

What was his responsibility now?

He dozed off and slept fitfully for a few hours. His aide looked in but refused to let anyone wake the general.

In the brightness of the morning, Harris reached him with a request. That he send one company of Marines into Nazareth. To help with a local crisis created by a poisoned water supply. But, above all, to demonstrate Marine-Army solidarity, in case the MOBIC command tried to force HOLCOM to order the massacre of the Arab civilians in the city.

“You sure one company’s all you need, sir?” Morris asked. Without hesitation.

“One company. With strong stomachs.”

“On the way,” Morris said.

And that was that. He didn’t bother trying to contact the MOBIC brigadier with a formal answer. With a little guidance from Jesus, they’d figure it out.

And now he stood proudly by the roadside, sucking down dust and saluting his Marines as they drove past.

Above the roar, he heard a vehicle commander shout, “Semper Fi, sir,” in his direction.

“Semper Fi,” Morris responded. But his voice was lost in the noise of the war machines.

NAZARETH

Sergeant Ricky Garcia had pulled some crappy duties in his time, but he couldn’t remember any as bad as this. First, he’d overheard the battalion XO telling Captain Cunningham that Bravo Company was being sent on a mission that would give it time to recover from the hard-luck fighting of the past few days. No company in the 5th Marines had suffered heavier losses, the XO said. He’d try to funnel them some replacements while they were in Nazareth. To bring the company back up to combat strength.

Garcia knew that he should’ve known better, but when he heard the magic name, he pictured a whitewashed village with donkey carts and women carrying water jugs like in the Bible pictures. Instead, Bravo Company dismounted at the edge of a grubby plot of apartment buildings, with a litter-strewn field on the other side of the road. An Army lieutenant colonel had been waiting for them. After some glad-handing, Garcia heard him tell the company commander, “Make sure you bury them with their heads facing toward Mecca. Keep the trench properly oriented. It’s the least we can do for the sorry sonsofbitches. And it might help calm the families down.”

But the rags hadn’t calmed down. They were still yelling and wailing after the Army fucksticks bailed, leaving Garcia and what remained of Bravo Company to keep a local with a broke-dick backhoe extending a ditch fast enough to keep up with the loads of bodies arriving. You didn’t have to understand rag-talk to know that the people on the other side of the cordon of fixed bayonets were cursing their asses off.

The little kids started throwing rocks at the Marines.

Garcia and the other survivors of his platoon took the first shift of unloading bodies from the Army haulers and the civilian vans that had been put to use. Corporal Banks didn’t want to touch the bodies, which were wrapped in bedsheets and blankets. Garcia gave him some personal instruction on how to get the fuck over it.

Then it was just sweat and flies and the smell of the corpses and the sting of the dust that rose from each shovel of lime thrown into the trench.

“Hey, Sergeant Garcia,” Tyrrell yelled. “Can’t we take off our helmets and body armor? While we’re doing this, like?”

“Ask your squad leader.”

Tyrrell repeated the question to Corporal Gallotti.

“Sergeant?” Gallotti asked Garcia in turn. “Take ’em off?”

“No fucking way. You know better.”

The grumbling that followed was okay. And that stopped when a rock hit Gallotti on the back of the helmet and knocked him into the trench. He climbed out dusted with lime and gasping.

“You okay, Corporal?”

“Yeah. Yeah, fine. I love this shit, Sergeant.”

“You should’ve studied harder in school,” Garcia said. “Got a real job.”

“Hear that?” Tyrrell said in a fake whisper. “Sergeant Garcia made a joke. I think he’s learning English.”

Garcia grasped the upper torso of another body. “None of you appreciate,” he said, “that the Marine Corps is teaching you valuable job skills.” A small stone bounced off his armored vest. “Hey, Staff
Sergeant Thomas! Is 2nd Platoon going to get those kids under control, or what?”

But the Marines working the cordon line were taking more stones and rocks than the body handlers.

After an hour, the first sergeant ordered Garcia’s platoon to swap duties with 2nd Platoon. Garcia didn’t question the order, although his platoon had a dozen fewer Marines. You executed the mission. Period.

As they fixed bayonets and moved up to relieve 2nd Platoon, Garcia saw the first sergeant’s point. 2nd Platoon needed a break. Every single Marine coming off the line was bleeding or limping.

Was that how it was when they stoned people in the Bible? All of them yelling like nuts? Except that they all would’ve been picking on some lonesome
chica
who’d gotten the wrong gang tattoo.

Right thing to do, rotating platoons, Garcia told himself again. Leave one platoon up front too long, and something bad was going to go down on the block.

Garcia trooped the line. “Hold your ground. I want everybody’s weapon on safe. Let ’em yell if they want to. You’re Marines.”

“I wish I’d joined the Navy,” Private Crawford said. “Crawford! Shit! You
can
talk. That’s the first word I heard you say since we got off the boat, Marine.”

“First time I had anything to say, Sergeant.”

Garcia dodged a good-sized rock. Older, bigger kids were throwing them now. Garcia got that, too. Street rules. First, see how much the other side will put up with. Then, up the ante.

“I’m going to kill one of those shitbirds,” Corporal Banks said.

Just then, an old man stepped forward, breaking free of the crowd. Unshaven and bent at the shoulders, he wore a baggy Goodwill Store suit and a V-neck sweater over his shirt despite the heat. Stepping across the broken ground, he headed for Garcia. As if he sensed where the power lay. The barrage of rocks paused.

“Man, I can’t wait to hear this,” Banks said. “I guess they want us to surrender or something.”

Behind the platoon, another truck delivered more corpses.

Up close, the old man wasn’t really so ancient. Just grubby. And
jumpy. Scared. Beat-looking. And angry, too. With his stained, bought-from-a-street-vendor tie, he looked like a rummy professor.

“Who is the general?” he demanded. Close enough to Garcia to show his uneven, yellow teeth. “Are you the general?”

“No, sir. I’m a sergeant. There aren’t any generals around here.”

“Then you will give my message to the general. Tell him why you poison us, I don’t know. We are not making jihad. We are educated peoples. Why America will poison us?”

“Maybe somebody’s been feeding them our rations,” Banks said. “I’d be pissed, too.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, sir,” Garcia told the old man. “And I don’t know anything about any poison.”

The old man swept his hand toward the trench, toward the stink, the dust, and the sunlit day beyond. “This is the poison making us dead. The poison you bring us. Why? Why? There are no guilty peoples here. Why? Why?”

“Look, sir. I don’t know what you’re talking about. I mean, I have no idea. And I don’t know anything about any poison. I’m sorry, but you’ll have to move out of our way. For your own safety,” Garcia said.

“Why? Why America brings us poison in the water?
You have done this!
You are
seen
doing this. We know. We hear. We are told. You put this poison in the water. But we are not Jihadis. There is no need to poison us. We are friends.”

“Yeah, you’re my fucking best pal,” Banks said.

“Shut up, Banks.”

“Why does he call me ‘fucking’? This is a bad word. What do I do that is fucking? You take my daughter. My little daughter. To this place. Look at this!” Again, he waved his arm toward the trench, the backhoe, the sacks of flesh thudding into the pit. “You take my daughter away, so I cannot bury her! You kill my daughter, now you take her body.” He began to weep. Exploding with tears. “You do this to my daughter, put her with strangers, with men she does not know. For all the times. This is a bad thing, you understand?”

Garcia caught the flash of complete misery in the man’s eyes. It spooked him for a moment.

“Listen, sir . . . I’m sorry for your troubles. I mean, whatever you’re
talking about. I’m sorry if anything happened to your daughter, man. But we’re just trying to do our job. You can’t just leave bodies laying all over. You’d all get sick. Do you understand that? You understand ‘sick’?”

Garcia wondered what it had been like when they went through and disposed of all the bodies in Los Angeles. At least his mother had lived long enough to be buried right.

“I know this word, too,” the old man said. “I know every word. But why do you do this? For the Jews? You do this for the Jews, I think? We ask only for the good burial . . .”

Garcia was out of things to say. But he decided to keep the man talking, after all. The rocks weren’t flying as long as the talking went on. The other rags seemed to respect the guy. Garcia considered sending a man to bring up the first sergeant or Captain Cunningham.

And then Garcia heard the shot. Distinct and enormous, standing out with perfect clarity against the distant, lessened sounds of war.

He turned about in time to see Marines rushing toward a fallen figure.

His own Marines were down on their knees, weapons up, scanning.

“Anybody see where that came from?”

“Negative.”

“Negative, Sergeant.”

“Corporal Gallotti. Your squad covers those windows. Corporal Banks. Your squad has the crowd.”

The sniper’s second shot killed Captain Cunningham as he jogged toward Garcia’s position. It was fired from the crowd. Then the real killing started.

ASSEMBLY AREA, 2-34 ARMOR, VICINITY AFULA

Lieutenant Colonel Monty Maxwell watched the last MOBIC element leave 2-34’s assembly area and head toward the reignited
battle. He felt a mixture of relief, jealousy, and fury toward the departing vehicles.

Division or corps had dropped the ball on coordination and terrain deconfliction. 2-34 Armor’s assembly area had been invaded first by fuel trucks from the Corps Support Command, then by a succession of MOBIC combined-arms “Martyrs” battalions of the ilk Army regulars had nicknamed “the MOBIC Mujaheddin.” The confusion and crowding offered the Jihadis a perfect target, although they never seemed to have identified the site, since no artillery fire landed and no drones swooped in. But the glitch over turf was only the start of the problems.

Several fights had broken out while the MOBIC soldiers loitered about, waiting for their vehicles to be topped off. The MOBIC troops mocked Maxwell’s tankers for their lack of progress while they themselves had swept into Jerusalem, on to Jericho, then up the Jordan. The language used by both sides fell short of the Christian ideal.

Maxwell had to sort through complex emotions himself. On one hand, any Armor officer had to admire the power and depth of the MOBIC advance, which seemed to have been one long cavalry charge. On the other hand, nothing Maxwell had heard about MOBIC behavior charmed him. And he had yet to see one thing in this godforsaken landscape worth fighting for.

He also had mixed feelings when he looked at the MOBIC war machines queuing to take on fuel, then ammunition. The unit sucking tanker-tit just then had been reduced to half strength, with its remaining vehicles battered and crusted with dust. From the apparent casualty count and the visible damage, it was clear that the NexGen tanks and infantry fighting vehicles had been a huge disappointment, their electronic armor next to worthless. Maxwell realized full well that his battalion had been lucky by default when it had been condemned to go to war with its ancient M-1 tanks instead of the “wonder weapons” that had devoured the Army budget and enriched defense contractors for the past two decades. Yet, for all that, a part of him couldn’t help feeling spiteful
at the way the Military Order of the Brothers in Christ had been able to commandeer all of the latest and, in theory, best equipment the Army had held in its inventory.