The War After Armageddon

“Green light. Road’s open as far as Isfiya. Not one hundred percent secure, but I’d call it close enough. We’re pushing down toward Daliyat. First Battalion, Fifth Marines have been tangling with stay-behinds all night. Suicide commandos mostly. One company got hit hard up in a ville. But the Jihadis pulled back their heavy metal. Whatever isn’t broken down by the side of the road.”

“Good work. Great work. Remind me to buy a Marine a beer when this is over. How’s the beach?”

“What beach? Christ, we just put a Marine division-minus over a shingle the width of a sidewalk.”

“When do you think you can get down to Route 70?”

“Recon’s knocking on the back door right now. The Jihadis didn’t expect this one. Even after they figured out that it wasn’t a feint, they didn’t seem to want to risk their armor up here.”

“Their gear’s in even worse shape than ours. Maintenance a lot worse.”

“Well, thank God for lazy mechanics. Listen… sir… from one fancy-pants Marine to one dogface grunt… I had my doubts about this. I wasn’t really sure we could pull it off.”

“We haven’t pulled it off. Not yet. But thanks.”

“We caught them with their pants down.”

“So to speak. Okay, Monk. Good work.”

“Tell it to the Marines.”

He clicked off. Immediately, Harris returned to the wardroom. “Three. Green light. Get the Big Red One on the beach. Scotty still colocated with his Fourth Brigade?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. You tell him I want Quarter Cav headed uphill by BMNT to coordinate the forward passage of lines. We need to keep punching while the Jihadis are still reeling.”

“Yes, sir.”

The G-3 headed for the hatch, followed by his deputies.

“The rest of you can clear out,” Harris said. “Sorry I kept you waiting. Go do what you’ve got to do, then get a couple hours’ sleep. Let your subordinates earn their pay. Four, you hang back. We need to have a pow-wow.”

The staff members cleared the room, moving through air so humid the next stage would’ve been swimming.

“Okay, Real-Deal. Talk to me. How you going to make this work?”

The colonel responsible for logistics, Sean “Real-Deal” McCoy, threw up his hands in the polar-bear salute. He had worked for Harris at battalion, brigade, and division, and he still played the staff-clown role that Harris had tacitly agreed to tolerate a decade before.

“Work? We’ve got less than a quarter of the force ashore, and I’m already holding things together with chewing gum and baling wire.”

“POL?”

“Over-the-beach will keep the tanks full for three, maybe four days. Then we’re up against it. Basic physics. Once we’re down in the Jezreel, we’re not going to be able to move enough fuel over those ridges without asking the engineers to spend a year or two building pumping stations.” He waved his arms, as if the world were ending. “Eighty-four percent of the big boys and about seventy percent of the infantry tracks have been refitted with the miniaturized engines. But ‘miniaturized’ is still relative.”

“Got it.”

“Sir, I need your permission on something.”

“Talk to me.”

“The SeaBees want to play. They’re good guys.”

“And?”

“They want to suit up and go ashore at Haifa, check out the condition of whatever’s left, see if we can run any of the old pipelines…”

“You’ve seen the radiation charts. Most of Haifa’s a dead zone. It was hit even harder than Tel Aviv.”

“They’d just be in and out. Suited up. The radiation’s patchy. Or so Tolliver tells me. Once we’ve taken a bite out of the Jezreel, we might be able to run a line and keep it going with robotics.” He waved one arm, then the other, a scarecrow on a caffeine jag. “Beats trying to pump enough POL over those ridges to get us to Damascus.”

“I just want to get this corps ashore, at the moment.” Harris sighed, something he did only when he was too weary to catch himself. “All right. If the ‘High Lord of the Admiralty’ has no objections, the SeaBees can go in. And God bless ’em. But Sean…”

The Four perked up. Harris used his given name, rather than “Real-Deal,” only when things were deadly serious.

“… I don’t want you going ashore at Haifa. Not now. I need you.”

“Doesn’t sound like my kind of town, anyway, sir.”

“And ask me, before you decide to go in the future. No surprises. You hear me?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I could piss on my boots for saying this, but you’re the indispensible man on this one, Sean. We can fight blind, if we have to, and we even can fight without a plan, if it comes to that. But those soldiers and Marines can’t fight without bullets, water, POL, chow, and Band-Aids.”

“And T-and-A mags? Ah, for the good, old days of the Internet…”

“I’m serious, Sean. You know my priorities on this one: ammo, potable water, POL, then chow. As long as they’ve got something to shoot and something to drink, we’ll at least survive.”

“Loggie Basic for the Middle East, sir: warm water, cold rations, rounds in the chamber, and fuel in the tank.”

“Don’t carry this load yourself. Come to me if you need supporting fires.”

The G-4 looked at the man he had served for half of his career. “You’re not carrying a few short tons yourself?”