The War After Armageddon

“My guess,” Harris said, “is that they planned to come back. And Damascus is a lot closer to Jerusalem than Qom or Tehran. Besides, they’d shot most of their load on the Shias before the Sunni Arabs figured out that a nuked Israel was an invitation to the dance. Speaking of nukes, Marty: I want every plan you concoct to have a nuclear-defense variant.” The general knew that every officer in the plans cell had been listening all along, but he raised his voice slightly and peered around the room, giving official notice to them all. “If the Jihadis do pop any nukes, I want us to be able to act, not just react. Fast. Everybody got that?”

They nodded and murmured. Harris knew the entire staff thought his concern about a last few nuclear weapons in Jihadi hands was evidence of early-onset senility. And he possessed sufficient self-awareness to recognize that he’d allowed it to become at least a mild personal obsession. But his guts just contradicted the intelligence.

And gut instincts had saved his life more than once. Even if they hadn’t saved his eyes.

* * *

After Harris cleared their area, Marty Rose said, “All right, back to work.”

A major asked, “How far north does he want us to plan?”

Rose shrugged. “Fuck, I don’t know. Look at the road networks. Identify a close option and a long-march option. Then do the branches and sequels. You’re all SAMS grads, aren’t you? Just do it. Reichert, you’ve got the lead. I’m going out to take a dump.”

When Rose, too, had gone, one major said to another, “Guess Big Marty didn’t get his daily ration of praise from Flintlock.”

“Want to know what I think?” his comrade said. “I think Flintlock Harris is losing it. Nukes on the brain. He wants to worry, he ought to worry about Montfort. That Bible-thumper’s going to eat old Flintlock for breakfast.”

* * *

As Harris dragged himself back toward his room, the deputy G-3 ambushed him, excited. There had been two rear-area attacks. That hardly seemed a surprise to Harris, who’d expected more raids and sabotage by now. Proud of himself, the deputy Three told the general that he’d sent out a message by land line, warning all subordinate units to increase their security posture.

Harris almost told the lieutenant colonel that his message was all well and good, but what about the units still not up on land line? Instead, he just folded his arms over his body armor, pressing it into his sweat-damp uniform. The deputy Three was a talker, and Harris knew he wasn’t going to get off lightly.

The poor bugger’s just trying to do his best, the general reminded himself.

“And lastly,” the deputy Three said, “the division surgeon from the Big Red One reports thirty-seven confirmed cases of amoebic dysentery.”

“Navy food,” Harris responded. “Good night, Bruce.”

He walked off to his office-bedroom. Wondering at the kind of sensibility that would build a mansion-sized home such as this, then furnish it with bare, dangling bulbs.

His aide stood up as Harris entered. He looked the general over and asked, “Want me to hold this stuff until morning, sir?”

“No, John.” He dropped onto his cot a little too heavily and immediately began unknotting his left boot. “Sing me to sleep.”

The remark, often repeated, was a private joke that Harris never explained to his aide — who simply accepted it as a peculiarity of the general’s speech. Harris long since had thought, without satisfaction, that the two of them resembled Saul and young David. And Saul’s was not a role Harris wished to play.

Well, better than Abraham and Isaac, Harris told himself. Or blind Tobit.

As the general drew off his boots and socks, the major said, “Sir, the big out-of-area headline is that the Turks demolished St. Sophia’s in Istanbul. Blew it to rubble.”

Harris looked up. And?

Major Willing continued, reading now: “With the Imperial Russian Expeditionary Force fighting in the Galata District of Istanbul, Turkish army engineers destroyed St. Sophia’s, St. Irene’s, and at least a dozen other Byzantine-era structures. In Moscow, Czar Grigori and the Orthodox patriarch denounced the Turkish actions as a crime against humanity and vowed that those responsible for the wanton destruction—”

“You know, John,” Harris interrupted as he loosened his belt to make his uniform comfortable enough to sleep in, “when I was a lieutenant — back when Turkey started down the path to extremism — there was a bestseller and a follow-up movie in Turkey predicting a U.S. invasion that would ultimately be repelled by Russian intervention on Ankara’s side.” Harris grimaced. “So much for the ability of the creative consciousness to predict the future.”

Recalling many a history text he’d plowed through in years past, he added, “I always wanted to visit Istanbul. And Aya Sofya. The greatest surviving monument of the first thousand years of Christianity. I couldn’t go, because of my security clearances.” He sighed. “Now it’s gone.”

“You always say you don’t care about buildings and archaeological sites, sir.”