The War After Armageddon

He had warned of the danger. Still, he had been appalled by how badly his generation had judged the coming wars. The overreliance on technology had troubled him for years, while his peers had dismissed him as an eccentric, hopelessly conservative, backward. His insistence on training his troops to fight on without their advanced systems had earned him the mocking nickname “Flintlock.”

Now the military he served was fighting a longer-range version of World War II, scorched by the few technologies that still worked.

Science had undone itself. Harris tried to visualize the wild electronic war playing out in the darkness, with each side canceling the other’s capabilities with hyperjammers, signal leeches, and computer plagues. Only a handful of his country’s satellites remained aloft, and the devastating effects of electromagnetic-pulse simulators destroyed every electronic system with the least gap in its shielding. Harris recalled the easy days when, as a company commander in Iraq, he could e-mail his wife on the other side of the world. Back then, generals could talk to anyone, anywhere, anytime they wished. Later, as a battalion exec, he had cursed the BlackBerry that kept him on an electronic leash. Now he longed for such a tool, but had none he could trust.

The sky pretended to be empty. But a mad duel raged on wavelengths no human eye could see. Harris turned back to the battle of metal on metal, of flesh and blood. He was waiting for the signal from Monk Morris and his Marines to send the 1st Infantry Division ashore. The 1st Cav would follow. Given the shortage of appropriate landing craft, the operation was bound to be a mess. This time, the Army had to rely on the Marines for support. Their new “get-ashore” boats were the operation’s lifeline, given that every port facility that hadn’t been destroyed remained hot from nuclear ground bursts and bombs with dirty triggers.

The Jihadis had expected his corps to land to the south, where the terrain was more inviting and Jerusalem waited. Instead, only the MOBIC corps obliged the Muslim high command, plunging ashore through the patches of radioactive debris just north of the ruins of Tel Aviv. Harris’s chosen landing zone, the Mt. Carmel sector, had been lightly defended. Relatively speaking. Monk Morris’s Devil Dogs faced rugged terrain, ambushes, and suicidal fanatics. But Monk thrived on that kind of fighting. The last message received before comms went down again had been a sitrep describing the slaughter of Druze civilians by the retreating Jihadis. According to Monk, the atrocities were the worst he’d ever seen.

And Monk had seen a great deal, from Anbar a generation before through the Saudi intervention — where they’d first served together — and on to Nigeria. More recently, he’d brought his Marines up from Pendleton for the recovery operations after the nuclear terror attack on Los Angeles. Monk joked that he’d never need a night-light, since he glowed in the dark himself.

A volley of rockets scrawled arcs in the sky. Again, they were as in effective as holiday fireworks. But it would take only one to hit the wrong ship. Then the pyrotechnics would be a great deal more dramatic.

It was hard to resist ordering the lead brigade of the Big Red One ashore immediately, to get things moving, to push deep and hard and fast. But the narrow beachhead, with the cliffs and steep slopes shooting up behind it, would be on the verge of chaos as it was. Harris didn’t envy the beachmaster. And he could trust Monk, who knew how much time mattered. The Army, with its heavy gear, couldn’t go ashore until the roads winding into the hills had been secured.

Harris heard footsteps descending a metal ladder. A moment later, his aide, the newly promoted Major John Willing, stumbled from a hatch.

“Sir?”

“Word from General Morris?” Harris asked.

A head shook in the darkness. “No, sir. Nothing yet. But the Deuce has an update. One of the overheads got clean imagery.”

“Tell him I’ll be down in a few minutes. And tell the Three I need to know the status of the MOBIC landings down south. Even if he has to swim down there to find out.”

“Yes, sir. Got it.”

Harris liked and trusted his G-2. But the man was a little too eager to brief when there wasn’t anything vital to add to the picture. Loyal, but too demonstrative about it, he needed to learn to listen to things he didn’t want to hear. The G-3 was his opposite: taciturn, with the quiet sort of loyalty that would sacrifice life and limb but might explode if disappointed — the kind of man you didn’t dare let down.

Flintlock Harris granted himself a few last minutes of quiet. Watching the manmade lightning on the horizon, he remembered.

BREMERHAVEN, GERMANY