The War After Armageddon (9 page)

The seductive landscape spread before him was nothing but one mass grave.

“All right,” Harris said, turning to business. He stretched out his right hand to orient his companion. “The glimmer at the end of the valley’s Afula. The sprawl up on those hills to the left is Nazareth, although the old town sits down in a bowl. The gum-drop shape straight on is Mt. Tabor. Just out of sight, you have the Jordan Valley to the right and the Sea of Galilee—Lake Kinneret, if
you prefer—to the left. The line of mountains in the distance is Gilead. Where I am told there is no balm.”

Morris looked at him with narrowed eyes. “You’ve been here before?”

“We all have,” Harris said.

NARAZETH

Lost souls, they stumbled from the buses. In the distance, the sounds of war throbbed, an irregular heartbeat. The men, most of middle age, appeared bewildered, gripping suitcases or dabbing the sweat from their foreheads with fouled handkerchiefs. Their women struggled down the steps behind them, clinging to possessions gathered in haste. A few of the women led children into the chaos, but most had long since passed the fertile years. Those children who had been dragged along wept or shrank into silence. Young or old, everyone looked soiled and worn. And they stank. The buses did not stop for human needs.

Major Michael Nasr watched the human parasites surge past the guards and swarm the new arrivals. Offering food, drink, or a place to sleep. At prices that would break a rich man in a week. There were no tourists in Nazareth now, and none had come for years, but the touts hadn’t lost their persistence. They set upon the refugees like fleas.

Refugees? What could you really call them? Nasr wondered. Men
and women forced from their homes by their own kind, driven toward a war rather than away from it. He tried to piece the logic of it together. Obviously, there was a purpose to the actions of the Ji-hadis. But the purpose wasn’t obvious to him.

Lifting his robe as he stepped through filth, Nasr noticed the old man again. Not a refugee, but a local. The shriveled character with the goat’s beard had popped up repeatedly to scrutinize him, then disappear again. Nasr didn’t know what that might be about, but it worried him. His Arabic had been learned at home, in a Christian émigré family in Sacramento, and his father’s Lebanese accent came as easily to him as his mother’s born-in-Nazareth dialect. He understood the dress, the body language, the insider rules. He’d fooled the officials and the mullahs, and the only problem with his Arabic was that it was too grammatical for the identity he’d chosen.

Had something given him away? A word? A gesture?

If so, the cavalry wasn’t going to ride to the rescue. A U.S. Army Special Forces major detailed to a black program, Nasr was on his own. In Indian country.

He smiled at the utterly American phrase. He never felt more American than when he was thrust into the world that had forced his parents to flee. For the crime of being Christians. And yet, the Muslim role came to him easily. As if you inherited knowledge of your enemies.

Well, he was just glad that his parents had found the get-up-and-go to get up and go. Anyone who criticized the United States of America needed to get a good whiff of the Middle East.

The old man was up to something. But then, everybody between Casablanca and Karachi was up to something. Everybody had an angle. Every seven-year-old worked a grift.

Nasr caught himself before he shrugged. He had almost moved his shoulders like a Westerner. Instead, he waved the world away with a dismissive hand. And he entered the crowd, slipping past a policeman who wore his beret straight up from his scalp, like a mushroom cap.

An unshaven man in an old tweed jacket grasped Nasr by the arm.

“Please,” he said, “please . . . Can
you
help me?”

“What do you need, brother?” Nasr asked him.

“My wife . . . she’s . . . we need . . .”

A volley of artillery rounds struck beyond one of the city’s ridges. Closer than the other fires had come. The refugee clinging to Nasr’s forearm flinched, almost dropping to his knees.

“Why have they brought us here? Why? Do you know?”

“Where are you from, brother?”

“Why do they bring us here? This is
fitna
. Madness. I’m a professor. Of physics. My wife is a teacher. What do we have to do with their war?”

“Where is your home, brother? Where did they take you from?”

A woman in the crowd began to scream.

“From Homs. From the university. Why bring us such a long way? Why bring us here? We’ll all be killed. Can you help us?”

“We must pray to Allah,” Nasr said, “and trust in His beneficence.”

The professor looked at him scornfully. Letting go of his forearm. “You’re one of
them
? You
believe
that nonsense? After all the world has seen? There is no god . . . none . . .”

“There is no god but God,” Nasr corrected him. “And Mohammed is his Prophet.
Insh’ Allah
, all will be well with you, brother.”

“You,”
the professor said in a spiteful rage, “it’s dogs like you who’ve done this.”

Before turning away, Nasr told the professor, “Get away from this place. Or they’ll steal what little you have left. Take your wife and go to the farthest neighborhood your feet can find. Nothing is left down here.”

But the professor wasn’t listening. Fury had blocked his ears.

“Dogs like you have done this,” he repeated.

“And hold your tongue, brother,” Nasr warned him. “Not all Nazarenes are as patient with blasphemers as I am.”

He scanned the shabby crowd but couldn’t spot the old man who’d been trailing him. Pushing on toward the buses, Nasr let himself take in a dozen conversations: pleas, complaints, threats,
and furious bargaining, all of it reeking with the stench of shit and fear. Some of the refugees had been brought from as far away as Halab, ancient Aleppo, in northern Syria. And Nasr thought he heard Iraqi accents.
Educated
accents, all of them.

Why on earth drive your intelligentsia—or what passed for one—into the path of an invading army?

Did the Jihadis want them to be killed?

Nasr stopped. Just below the derelict patch where the Church of the Annunciation had stood. His body felt sheathed in ice.

Was that it? Did the Jihadis
want
them to be killed?

Nasr had been inserted weeks before the invasion began, but the influx of refugees had begun just two days before a bombardment announced the landings. The Jihadis had known an attack was coming, of course, if not just when and where.

What else had they known?

Major Nasr sat on a broken wall. A half-block from one of Christendom’s holy places—now a ruin used as a public latrine. He wasn’t a party to the detailed plan of invasion, but he knew this much: Even Flintlock Harris wouldn’t have the pull to bypass Nazareth. Whatever else the corps commander’s plan of operations might avoid, the early seizure of Nazareth would be non-negotiable. The vice president, the SecDef, and the MOBIC generals back in the Pentagon would make sure of that.

And the Jihadis were smart enough to figure that one out. Every Christian site would be an objective. Nazareth would be high on the list.

Then why dump their brainpower in the path of the infidel?

Were the Jihadis really so intent on turning back the clock by centuries that they wanted their professors and doctors and scientists exterminated? If so, why not do it themselves? Why go to so much trouble? When they had a war to fight?

Of course, Hitler had made time for a similar distraction. When he had a war to fight.

Nasr knew he was on to something big. But he didn’t know what it was.

There
had
to be more to it.

He needed to get back to his transmitter. If the damned thing was working. Sometimes the burst transmissions got through, sometimes they didn’t. But he was anxious to send off another report and hand off what he’d seen and heard. Let the brainiacs on the staff figure out what it meant.

Insh’ Allah.

Just as Nasr placed his hands on his knees to lever himself to his feet, he saw the old man again. Pointing at him. A half-dozen Arab policemen accompanied him.

There was no point in running. The only hope was to bluff.

“I tell you, he is a spy, that one!” the old man cried.

Nasr felt his guts churn. But he kept his face under control, letting innocent bafflement spread across his features.

The police surrounded him. Artillery fire landed a valley away, but it wasn’t going to help him.

Nasr touched his hand to his robe, just above his heart. “How can I help you, my brothers?”

A policeman wearing a captain’s pips struck him with his fist. Nasr staggered. The next blow put him on the ground.

“That man is a Christian,” the old bastard said. “He’s of the Gemalia. They’re all gone from Nazareth now, Allah be praised. But this one has returned. I will always recognize a Gemalia pig. I knew him by his nose.”

“We’ll take care of his nose,” the captain said. And he kicked Nasr in the face.

MT. CARMEL RIDGES

Sergeant Garcia listened to the battle down in the plain. Somebody was serious about busting caps on the Jihadis. Garcia would’ve liked to be in on it.

Con mucho gusto
.

He didn’t quite trust the way he felt as he marched down the
winding road that led off the heights. He’d had an hour or so of pretend sleep, and he knew he was wasted. But he felt like Superman. No meth involved. Just a buzz he couldn’t quite figure out.

Garcia looked behind him to make sure his Marines were maintaining a combat interval as they marched along the shoulders of the road. The Army’s tanks and shit were hogging the blacktop as they rushed into the fight. Well, let them take their turn.

A Bradley tore into the pavement as it downshifted, throwing off bits of the surface and groaning like a constipated dinosaur. Up from La Brea, Garcia thought. The Dino Gang.

He replayed the scene in the house again and again: the grenades and the gunfire, the rush, and the dead Jihadis. And he just felt
good
. All that crap about how you were supposed to feel bad after killing people. Who made that shit up? Bigger lies than Maria Escobar told in the confessional. To that priest she was hot for. For the priest and everybody else.

Maybe he’d feel bad about it all later. Maybe all the guilt would kick in, the way they said it did. But for now, he just felt like the
conquistadores
must’ve felt.

It was like sex, man. You just wanted to do it again.

Did that mean he was all dicked up inside? Because all he wanted to do was kill the fuckers who made L.A. glow like a year-round Christmas decoration? And his family so hot with radioactivity you could’ve used them to cook enchiladas in Ensenada. Watching them blotch up, go bald, get skinny, and die. And his mother worrying about
him
all the time she was dying.

When the captain had come down to ask if the platoon needed to be pulled off the line for a day or two, Garcia had looked at him in shock, then fear, then suck-on-this annoyance. All in the space of ten seconds.

“Naw, sir. We’re, like, just getting into the motion, you know? We’re cruising.”

“Your Marines okay? You sure?”

His
Marines.

“Hey, sir. They’re Marines. They’re good to go.”

“The platoon’s at sixty-five percent.”

Garcia stared at the other man. At this man who threatened to take away his platoon. Who wouldn’t say shit when battalion sent down some hotshot to take over. Staff Sergeant McCullough, maybe. Or some gunny who wanted to play lieutenant for a week.

“They’re feeling a hundred percent, sir,” Garcia told him. “We just need an ammo drop.”

He knew he wasn’t speaking for every one of his Marines. Some of them wanted to move out and mix it up, while others would’ve been glad for any excuse to go below decks and sleep until it was all over. But this was what they’d signed up for. He wasn’t going to let anybody just walk. They had
business
to do.

It was screwy, but he felt two ways at once. Since the fight in the village the night before, he felt closer to his Marines than ever before. And he felt apart from them, too. Separate. In a new way.

Down in the valley, some tanks were duking it out. The 155s were dropping closer in now. Garcia couldn’t see the fight as he walked, but smoke rose and thinned, veiling the horizon. His back hurt pretty bad. But you just kept on humping. His elbow was half-fucked, too. It didn’t matter. He felt like calling cadence, like singing out.
Un poco loco
.

Hey, ma, I wanna go,
Right back to Quantico . . .

Well, the platoon was too spread out to hear him. With the big boys clanking in between them. He called cadence to himself, anyway.

A wave of tiredness hit him, almost stopping him cold. Then the buzz came back. Just like that. But his damned back hurt. Too loaded down. Lugging all your stuff around, like some homeless bum back on the block. He looked, enviously for once, at the Army grunts riding by, sticking up through the hatches like Mexican kids standing behind the cab of a pickup.