The War After Armageddon

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.

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.

FOUR

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.