The War After Armageddon

Cavanaugh strode down from the roadway and across the rutted dirt strip that led to the beach. It struck him out of the blue that he had not had anything to eat since the middle of the night. Without slowing his pace, he fished a ration fruit bar from his pocket, tore it open, and chomped on it as if biting into a living thing he meant to kill.

The GABs were coming in, all right. Goddamn it. Somebody with a stopwatch trying to keep to a schedule that no longer made any sense.

On most days, he loved being in command. On others — not least, today — he felt like an impostor. Pat Cavanaugh realized full well that he would not have gotten his early promotion to lieutenant colonel or a prompt command billet had it not been for the migration of so many field-grade officers to the MOBIC side.

He’d never considered such a move himself. Cavanaugh was all Army. As for religion, he went to Mass on most Sundays and checked that block. He believed that he believed in God, he had doubts about the Vatican, and he had meant his marriage vows to a wife who dumped him for one of his Leavenworth classmates who switched to the MOBIC side early on and got a double jump, from major to colonel. He hoped Mary Margaret was happy. And eating ground glass.

She’d blindsided him utterly. And Pat Cavanaugh was determined that no one would ever do that to him again.

His kids. With that shit-faced ass-kisser. And his wife.

Whenever he came up against the MOBIC types, they made him uneasy, as if he were being sold a thing it made no sense to buy. He had no patience with “car-lot religion,” as his sergeant major put it. Maybe he wasn’t a real believer, after all. He certainly wasn’t one by MOBIC standards.

He’d thought seriously about killing the man who stole his wife.

What was left to believe in? Not “reclaiming the Holy Land.” He was here because he believed in the U.S. Army, which had never let him down. And he believed in Flintlock Harris. Who should have booted him out of the Army as a captain in Bremerhaven, back before it all went nuts. Instead, he’d gotten a glowing efficiency report and a private, undocumented counseling session that left him with invisible third-degree burns.

Cavanaugh’s front boot reached the pebble-and-sand mix that passed for a beach. Just as he came alongside a burned-out Marine track, the alarm sounded.

Drone attack. He hadn’t seen a single manned aircraft from either side, except for a couple of friendly helicopters risking low-level flights from ship to shore and back. But the drones ruled the skies.

He ran back toward his lined-up vehicles, unable to do one damned thing to help them except be with them. He watched machine guns swivel up, despite the risk that they’d draw kamikaze drones down on top of themselves. Then he saw the wave of drones break over the ridge, chased by angry surface fire and a few hapless ground-to-air missles.

Even as he ran, he could pick out the various shapes and sizes against the hard blue of the sky. All Chinese-built, bought in large quantities before that country slipped into turmoil. Less sophisticated, but sturdier and more dependable than anything his own military fielded, the unmanned aircraft were deadly. The informal motto he’d adopted for his battalion applied: “Fuck Finesse.”

The escort drones came in high, with the hunter-killer drones behind and below, accompanied by a swarm of “expendables” programmed to detect ground fire and dive into it.

The Navy’s robotic interceptors had been up much of the morning, covering the landing. But they were nowhere to be seen at the moment. And the Army’s air-defense drones still didn’t seem to be operational.

Soldiers who weren’t manning weapons or buttoned up in armored vehicles ran for any cover they could find: ditches, overhangs, blasted buildings by the roadside. Cavanaugh heard the first explosions but kept on sprinting, weapon clutched in both hands, body armor lightened by the adrenaline rush.

Couldn’t even let a man eat a fruit bar in peace.

The gunfire aimed skyward sounded like a full-scale battle. Which it was. Cavanaugh worried about the rounds falling back to earth. Multiple deployments to the Middle East had taught him the danger of that. The locals shot automatic weapons into the air as a substitute for getting laid. People died at random.

Whatever programs the Jihadi drones were running, they were shielded well enough to punch through all the jamming and erasure signals his own side was putting up. Manned aircraft had become as delicate as teacups, but hardened, mission-programmed drones had become the terror of the battlefield for both sides. The situation was especially tough on the Army, since its air defenses had been neglected for decades as the Air Force assured Congress it could sweep the skies.

We could use a little sweeping now, Cavanaugh thought, as the blasts at his back chased him.