The War After Armageddon (46 page)

Was that reason enough to kill him in cold blood?

An almost-pretty girl with gleaming hair held her little brother by the shoulder. Still young enough to imagine that all troubles
were temporary, she appeared keen for life and full of expectations. Wide as a sofa, another woman pawed the sweat off her forehead, unsettling her black scarf as she quarreled with a bald man who would have run away had he not been her husband. The next segment in the human caterpillar read a book as he bumped forward, riveted by some useless idea, a caricature of the eternal intellectual as he swept unkempt gray hair out of his face. Children scooted up and down the line, too young for patience or to take thirst seriously, ignoring the calls of worried elders afraid to step out of line and lose their place. After shouting at a boy who marched up and down in a goose step, a mother eyed Harris as if he might draw a gun and shoot the child.

Was that really what they expected now? Or just what they were used to?

Harris was unequipped to romanticize them. He wasn’t able to assign them virtues that no random assortment of humans ever possessed. He didn’t need to ponder eternal verities to understand, viscerally, that every innocent heart in the crowd was outnumbered by those given to common selfishness.

They were human. Just that.

“Remind you of anything, Pat?” Harris asked the lieutenant colonel beside him.

“Germany, sir?”

“Yes. The Turks in that dockyard. Oh, the skins are a little browner now. And the weather’s hotter. We could use a little German rain. But I see the same faces . . . people who woke up utterly screwed. Wondering why all this is happening to them.”

At the head of the line, where the last pallet of water bottles shrank with alarming speed, two soldiers dragged an obstreperous man from the crowd and spread-eagled him against a wall.

“I’ll check that out, sir,” Pat Cavanaugh said.

Harris smiled. “Sorry for the half-assed philosophizing.”

“It wasn’t that, sir,” the younger man said quickly. “It’s just . . . The troops are a little prickly. Everybody’s fuse is short. I don’t want anything getting out of hand.”

As he watched the battalion commander march off, Harris turned back to the succession of faces. There was, in the end, a quality of disbelief about the crowd. For all their fears, their worried stares at the dwindling supply of water and their caution around the foreign men with guns, the human collective believed that, somehow, everything would work out: There would be enough water and, no matter what became of the others, the breathing, feeling, sweating “I” would be spared. It was the oddest thing, how the tribulations of the group reassured the individual.

It had to be biological, Harris decided. Long before his own experience in Germany—that inexplicable country—when Jews and Gypsies and queers and stubborn priests had waited in line for the gas chamber, tidily divided by gender, they must have felt the same narcotic hope, the identical mad conviction that “
I
will be saved.”

Harris didn’t know what to do anymore. He had briefly contemplated leaving the city, since he saw that he was only giving Mont-fort and his ilk more ammunition to use against the Army—the wicked general who cared more about protecting Muslim fanatics than about his own countrymen.

Yes, that was how Sim would present it.

But the faces captivated him. Doubtless, there were fanatics among them. Killers who needed to be shot for the common good. Pat Cavanaugh had been nervous about more stay-behind snipers seeded in the crowd. But the faces parading in front of Harris just looked thirsty and scared.

“This can’t happen,” he told himself. “We can’t do this. Sim can’t do this.”

And then he realized that, in his own rejection of what the future held, he had joined the line of optimists at Auschwitz.

Yes, Sim Montfort would do it. Wasn’t a people person, old Sim wasn’t.

Harris knew the arguments, beginning with: They’d do it to us if they had the chance. But the problem always unraveled when you got down to who “they” were. Would that woman whose face bore a constellation of black moles pull the trigger? The adolescent
girl with the hopeful eyes? The dreamy joker with his nose in his book?

These weren’t the people who pulled any major triggers. Or precious few minor ones. It was the people like Montfort . . . or Harris himself . . . or Gui or al-Mahdi . . . who gave the orders to the flunkies who pressed the fatal button.

Harris had no moral qualms about killing his country’s enemies. He still believed that Washington’s impossibly legalistic treatment of terrorists back when had played into the hands not only of the terrorists themselves but also of men like Gui and Montfort. In the real world, far from the cloistered study, some men and even women
were
your mortal enemies, and you
had
to kill them first.

But you couldn’t just “kill them all and let God sort them out.” Because you weren’t God. And no God worth believing in would want you to do it.

Sometimes, in one of his funks, Harris pictured God as a slumped, disappointed old man, propping up His gray head with one hand, eyes downcast.

Anthropomorphism. Harris understood the silliness of it. God was unimaginable to any human being. But what if that lay at the heart of the problem? The need men felt to imagine a comprehensible God, to measure Him. But God was unimaginable and immeasurable. So they did what men did: They cut the problem down to size and painted a stern old man on the church’s ceiling.

Standing in the shabby heart of Nazareth, Harris wondered if Jesus—when he was the age of that young girl waiting in line—had foreseen what would take place on
this
day in His boyhood home. Had He seen anything beyond the cross but Heaven? Was every man and woman in that fetid line lulled by his or her own vision of paradise? Of a Heaven above the clouds, or a happy marriage, or an answer to all of life’s questions hidden in a book?

Harris could have wept. At his helplessness in the face of all before him. But he didn’t weep. Instead, he pivoted on his right heel and set off after Pat Cavanaugh. To be with his own kind.

He was going to stay in Nazareth. That was a given. He wondered
if it might be useful to talk to the crowd, to get up on a vehicle and say something, anything.

He couldn’t very well reassure them.

Tell them to flee? To get out of Dodge? That was the best practical advice he could offer. Even though they had nowhere to go.

He longed for the con ve niences of his youth, the easy communications, even the scrutiny of the media. Where were the cameras now? His nation’s enemies, when they shot down every satellite they could and corrupted the rest, had only assured that their deaths would go unrecorded. They had robbed his kind of the ability to talk freely across oceans but had failed to understand the resilience and ingenuity the West applied to warfare when it sensed its back was against the wall.

When the people of Nazareth died, their epitaph would be written by their killers.

How would Sim have it done? By death squads?
Einsatzkommandos
, the way the Nazis did it? Another blood-orgy like Jerusalem? Or just order out the remaining American troops and start shelling and bombing? Then send in the cleanup crews to root out the woman with the moles from her hiding place in the cellar?

Harris felt a childish impulse to step up to the nearest figure in line and tell him or her, “
You
are not my enemy.” But he knew it would only bewilder the already frightened.

As Harris approached the head of the line, he saw that only the bottom layer of the pallet remained. And the sweat-drenched soldiers on distribution duty were breaking into that. Behind them, Pat Cavanaugh stood erect in his body armor. As if attempting to inspire a confidence he didn’t feel himself.

Yet, as Harris edged up to him, the younger man grinned. “Pardon me for saying so, sir,” he told the general, “but this is one assignment I’m not going to thank you for.”

The attempt at banter fell flat. Cavanaugh’s smile was one of despair.

“We just have to focus on the immediate problem,” Harris told him. “Do what’s doable. Right now, we need to do everything we
can to prevent any further outbreaks of violence, anything that certain senior officers might be able to describe as ‘an armed rebellion’.”

Cavanaugh nodded. He was about to say something when his battalion command sergeant major marched up.

“Sir?” he said to Cavanaugh. “Division wants you. On the land line.”

Cavanaugh glanced at Harris. The general nodded: Go see what they have to say.

The sergeant major didn’t leave with his commander. Tired and mentally sluggish, Harris had to eye the man’s uniform to remind himself of his name.

“Fun, travel, and adventure. Right, Sergeant Major Bratty?”

“All I can stand, sir.” He looked at the general, sizing him up, man to man. Then he added, “Don’t this suck shit, though?”

“That’s a pretty good summation.”

Bratty drew off his helmet, wiped his forehead and scalp with a rag drawn from his battle-rattle, patted the excess sweat from the helmet’s interior padding, then set it back down on his skull and snapped the chin-strap together again. He didn’t have to fuss with the headgear to resettle it: He had the drill sergeant’s gift of getting it right the first time.

Harris noticed, again, that the NCO had a bandaged hand. But he sensed that asking about it would be the wrong kind of small talk with the man standing next to him.

“I expect you’ll be getting an order to withdraw from the city,” Harris said instead.

Bratty shrugged. It was the old, standard-issue NCO shrug that attempted to deflect any suspicion of emotion. But it didn’t work this time.

“Yesterday, I would’ve been ready to go, sir. To tell you the truth, I’d just about had it. But just look at these poor buggers. A man hates to just walk away . . .”

“Yes,” Harris said. “A man does.”

“Well, I’m going to make the rounds, sir. Got some Marines up
in those buildings across the square, watching the crowd. Don’t want ’em to feel the Army’s neglecting them.”

“Mind if I accompany you, Sergeant Major?”

“You’re the corps commander, sir.”

Harris began to tell the man, “No, I’m not. Not anymore.” But there was no point. There’d be too much else to say. He’d made the situation clear to Pat Cavanaugh, but the battalion commander had either forgotten to tell his sergeant major or just hadn’t had the opportunity. Or, Harris realized, had chosen not to tell him. Or anyone. Yet.

He was sorry that he’d gotten Cavanaugh into this. But somebody had needed to do it. And Cavanaugh had been a logical choice. You didn’t become a soldier just for the good missions.

“After you, Sergeant Major. I’ll try not to get underfoot.”

And they walked up the line, the endless line, of faces. A young woman with an infant, sensing that the water would run out before her turn, glittered with tears.

At the sight of Harris and the sergeant major, a fat man waved his arms, complaining noisily in Arabic. His neighbors in the line had been cowed, though. Instead of adding their voices to back him up, they shied away.

The fat man shouted after Harris’s back. The words were incomprehensible, but his meaning was clear: How can you do this to us?
Why?

Harris stiffened his posture as he walked away. As if on a parade ground for a change of command.

When the general was halfway through the crowd, a young man with a beatific expression stepped from the line and rushed up to embrace him.

Sergeant Ricky Garcia slept four hours, deep and hard. He dreamed of his mother. She was alive and healthy and smiling like always in the old days, so full of love the supply never ran out. Garcia was a grown man in the dream, but still a boy, too, and the sun shone
on a perfect L.A. day, on a city just the way it was when he was a kid, long before the bombs, when a trip across town to the beach at Santa Monica had been a journey to the other side of the world, and his old man, who hadn’t left yet, had to lay out so much cash to park they couldn’t afford to eat. But that wasn’t in the dream. The dream was just all good, only a little disconnected. The kitchen was at the front of the house, where the room with the TV should’ve been. He tried to explain, but his mother didn’t care. She just hugged him. And hugged him.

When he awoke, kicked in the sole of his boot by Lieutenant Niedrig, who was the acting company commander now and babbling about nukes, Garcia felt as if something had been stolen from him—something that he would never be able to get back. It was as if his mother had been right there, alive, happy. Just fat enough for her kids to tease her. And now she was dead again, and the way he had to remember her was lying in a crummy bed in one of those old motels they turned into what they called hospices for all those sick with radiation. And her so thin and frail he was afraid to touch her and hurt her.

After the lieutenant moved on to bother somebody else, Garcia shuffled off to take a dump. But really to be alone for a few minutes. To get a grip. To remember. To stop remembering.