The War After Armageddon (8 page)

“I’d have to measure him against an old girlfriend or two,” Morris, a lifelong bachelor, said.

“Well, Marines do have peculiar tastes. But don’t ever sell Sim Montfort short. Behind all the Bible verses and the Crusader rhetoric, he’s smarter than a billionaire televangelist cross-bred with an entire faculty of Jesuits. Write him off as a nut, and you’ll get blindsided. And you won’t get back up on your feet again.”

“But
is
he nuts? I’ve known my share of men who were brilliant and utterly crazy at the same time. Not least, in this neck of the woods.”

“I’d call him ‘obsessive’.”

“To the point of being nuts?”

“Monk, did anybody ever tell you that you even
look
like a bulldog? You make Chesty Puller look like a beauty queen. No, Montfort’s not nuts. He can project a quality of madness. But you never know how much of it’s calculated.”

“Doesn’t sound like much of a drinking buddy.”

“He was a model cadet, Sim was. Monk, I realize you think
I’m
nuts for dragging you up here like this. When we’ve both got plenty to do. But our staffs can handle things for an hour. Commanders need to step back. Talk a bit. Catch their breath.” He grunted. “If I wouldn’t be setting a poor example, I’d take off this goddamned body armor.”

The path steepened just as Harris finished speaking.

“Hell of a way to catch your breath,” Monk said. Then he grinned. “You did
not
just hear a Marine complain. It was your imagination. Anything else? On Montfort?”

Harris thought about the absent figure for a few steps. He didn’t
want to put devils in Monk’s head. But he owed Monk honesty. As much as the moment would bear.

“Sim was one class behind me at VMI. By his second year, upper-classmen had learned to fear him, and even the faculty handled him carefully. Which didn’t stop him from being elected to every office he wanted. Or from being the faculty’s darling.” Harris smiled, not fondly, at the memory. “Sim had one big advantage over the rest of us. We were teenagers, with all that goes with the package, barracks discipline or not. But Sim was born with the mind of a forty-year-old. From day one, he knew what he wanted and concentrated on getting it.” Harris snorted. “It’s probably an exaggeration to say he
never
let anything distract him from his goals. He was an infuriatingly handsome man. Women chased him from one end of the Shenandoah Valley to the other, then followed him back home at Christmas. We were all jealous as hell.”

“That mean he took your girl?”

Harris laughed. “No woman on Earth could’ve been attracted to both Sim and me. That may have been the
only
thing that wasn’t a point of contention.”

The smell of death strengthened. Harris glimpsed a break in the trees. He could feel the high ground waiting.

“So . . . You’d categorize him as pure ambition?”

Harris smiled. “No ambition’s pure, Monk. It’s always muddled up with something.”

“And that should tell me?”

“There’s a kind of ambition . . . a form of ambition that needs something to believe in. It’s incomplete, unfulfilled, without a cause.” The corner of Harris’s mouth twisted into his cheek. “I don’t mean that Sim Montfort can’t be cynical, when cynicism works. Just that he found his cause, and his cause found him. One feeds off the other, empowering the other. Men like Sim
need
a great cause to allow their ambition to unfold, to bloom. Their ambition has to have a rationale greater than themselves. And that doesn’t mean that they don’t truly believe in the cause they take up. The human capacity for belief is a very adaptable thing.”

“Sounds almost like you respect him. Despite all his preaching and screeching.”

Harris stopped and flashed a look of utter frankness. “No, Monk. I don’t respect him. I fear him.”

They walked on in silence, approaching the wall of light beyond the trees. The bodyguards on point fanned out more widely. You could feel their hyperalertness notch up yet another degree.

Monk Morris changed the subject. “Your G-2 sent my intel shop some interesting reports this morning. Haven’t seen ’em. Just got a verbal. But I’d like to know what you make of it.”

“About the refugees? The lack of them, I mean?”

“No sign of any heading out of Afula or Nazareth. Or leaving any other Arab towns.”

“The local commanders are probably under orders not to let them leave. Civilians as hostages. The Jihadis have been doing that since you and I were kids playing Army.”

“I played ‘Marines’.”

“Well, at least neither of us played Air Force. They’re probably just trying to complicate our operations. Figuring we’re still jumpy about dead civilians.”

“
Those
days are gone. Good morning, L.A., good night, Las Vegas.”

“It’s like that defensive position at Megiddo. They’re testing us. Seeing how far we’ll go.”

“I can understand that. But what about the reports of civilians being bussed
into
Nazareth? Seems like a lot of trouble to go to, when you’ve got military convoys to move over those roads.”

“The reports might be wrong. Val Danczuk’s relying on one special operator we’ve got in place up there. In Nazareth. The overheads don’t necessarily corroborate his messages about bussing in civilians. Those buses could’ve been full of troops. But we’re watching it.” He smiled. Wryly. “Val’s the most forward-leaning Two I’ve ever known. Problem is restraining him when he starts painting scenarios with invisible colors.”

“Sir?”

“Monk, can’t you call me ‘Gary’? When we’re not onstage?”

“Marine habit. And, to tell you the truth, you never struck me as a ‘Gary’.”

“It’s the only name I’ve got.”

“Except ‘Flintlock’.”

Harris shook his head. “Never cared for that one, myself. Always sounded like a cartoon character to me.”

They marched through the last stretch of shade, and Monk Morris changed the subject: “You didn’t really mean that, did you? About being afraid of Sim Montfort?”

Harris stopped and looked into the other man’s eyes. As deeply as he could.

“I meant it.”

The two generals stepped out of the trees into glaring light. Beyond an empty parking lot, a ruin crowned the mountaintop. Beside the ruin lay a pile of corpses. The bodies were naked. The stench announced that the dead had been rotting for days.

“Welcome to Mukhraka,” Harris said.

Someone had taped out a perimeter around the ruins. Harris’s lead bodyguard was deep in an argument with two men in Army uniforms.

Then Harris spotted the black crosses sewn onto the left breasts of the officers who were giving his point man a hard time.

“What the hell?” Harris said. He looked at Monk Morris.

“I have no idea,” the Marine said. “We didn’t have any MOBIC troops with us. Just the two liaisons at headquarters.”

In the background, other soldiers wearing the MOBIC black cross puttered in the ruins.

Harris strode up to the scene of the argument. A MOBIC major, supported by a captain, waved a finger in the face of the Special Forces sergeant first class who was second-in-command of the general’s personal security detachment.

“What’s going on here?” Harris demanded.

Before his NCO could speak, the major turned on the general. “This is a Christian heritage site. It’s been reclaimed. No one can enter without authorization.”

“Do you know who I am?” Harris asked. In the quiet voice he used when truly angry.

“Yes, sir. You’re Lieutenant General Harris.”

“And who are
you
, Major?”

“Major Josiah Makepeace Brown, commander of Christian Heritage Advance Rescue Team 55.”

“There are no CHARTs authorized in this corps sector at present.”

“We have authorization orders from General Monfort.”

“Lieutenant General Montfort does not command this corps. I believe you’ll find him a couple of hours south of here.”

To Harris’s bewilderment, the major wasn’t the least bit intimidated, but seemed to be talking down to him.

“You’ll have to take this up with General Montfort, sir. We have our orders.”

Harris was tempted to arrest the lot of them. He was angry enough. The team’s presence was a violation of painstaking agreements and published orders. But you had to pick your battles. And Harris didn’t believe for an instant that Montfort had slipped CHARTs into his area of operations just to preserve Biblical heritage. The atmosphere was paranoid enough to make him wonder if his old classmate were trying to draw him into an act that could later be used against him.

“Major,” Harris said, trying a different approach, “we all have our missions. My mission is to defeat the Jihadi corps facing us. I’m sure you’ll agree that the Jihadis are our mutual enemies. We’ve come up here to have a quick look at the terrain because we have to refine the next phase of our operation. Now, if you don’t mind, we’re going to spend about ten minutes up on that pile of bricks where the church used to be.”

“This is the site,” the major announced, “where God used the Prophet Elijah as his instrument to shame the priests of Ba’al and slay them.”

“And we’re trying to slay the Third Jihadi Corps. May we pass, Major?”

The major eyed them as if he were a drill sergeant examining two suspect recruits. “Are you both Christians?”

Again, Harris restrained himself. “Yes, Major. We’re both Christians.”

“Your bodyguards will have to remain outside the perimeter.”

The SF sergeant jerked his head around. Harris made a sign for him to keep quiet.

“That’s fine. Whose bodies are those?”

“The monks. They were living up here secretly, even after the forces of the Anti christ conquered this dwelling place of the Lord. The local infidels protected them. Probably for mammon. But a Judas betrayed them. We found them.”

“Piled up like that?”

“No. Crucified.”

Morris said, “I would’ve liked to knock that little prig’s teeth down his throat.”

“Not worth it, Monk. Pick your battles. That CHART’s bait. Although I’m not quite sure what Sim Montfort’s fishing for. But look at this.”

They had picked their way past the toppled statue of Elijah and climbed as high as they could on the remains of a staircase hugging a scorched wall. Harris truly didn’t intend to stay long. The Jihadis would have observers watching the site from across the valley—they would’ve been crazy not to keep an eye on such a vantage point. And Harris didn’t intend to become anyone’s free target.

But he had needed to see this. And he wanted Monk Morris to see it, too. The splendor of the Jezreel Valley.

“Well, fuck me,” the Marine said, with a short, sharp whistle. “Nuclear war, rampage, and neglect,” Monk said, “and it is
still
one beautiful place.”

“Always has been,” Harris said. “God knows, it shouldn’t be. So much blood has been spilled down there for so many centuries
that the whole place ought to sink under the weight of all the death.”

“Well,” the Marine said, “we’ll see how much more weight we can add.”

And yet, the scene before them was strangely unwarlike. Despite the thousands of military vehicles dug in or creeping about and the distant eruptions of smoke, a stillness wrapped the mountaintop, a sense of standing briefly apart from time. The artillery fire and the complaints of hundreds of gear boxes shifting on mountain roads might have been echoes from a parallel world.

“You know, Monk, I’ve never believed that God cared about dirt, that He valued one patch of soil more than another. Years back, when I was a lieutenant, I read an article that said America was blessed because God didn’t lay claim to any real estate in our country. I always thought that was true, that we were lucky to be free of the need to tie God down to some patch of dust like Gulliver.” He looked away from the splendor before him, lowering his eyes to the rubble. “Now here we are.”

“People are always going to find something to fight over, sir. That’s why we’ve both got jobs. If it isn’t about the name you give God, it’s about what you called their sister.”

“But ‘Holy War,’ Monk? I can’t think of a greater contradiction in terms.” He raised his eyes again and saw the glory of the sun upon the valley. The earth gleamed in the April light, and the puffs of smoke where artillery struck in the distance seemed no more than small, low clouds. He hated the thought that his country had sent him and his soldiers to fight here.