The War After Armageddon

Harris looked at him. For a moment, he considered shutting the Germans inside the boxcar with the corpses and locking it shut. He would’ve loved to do it. And he wasn’t worried about protests. He would’ve faced a court-martial without blinking. But he realized that anything further done to the German guards would simply be taken out on other Muslims before the next train entered the compound.

“Give them back their weapons,” he told the captain. “Unless you have evidence of their direct involvement.”

“But, sir, we—”

“Just execute the order, Captain.” He turned to the German first lieutenant. “You have the formal apology of the United States Government for this misunderstanding. Now get out of here before I have you shot.”

The lieutenant kept up his smirk as he met Harris’s eyes.

“Three,” Harris said, turning back to business, “I want them put in body bags and taken out for burial at sea. They will not be buried on German soil.”

“I’ll have to get the doc to sign off. They might be infectious and—”

“They will not be buried on German soil. Work it out, Three. Cavanaugh?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Walk with me.”

“Yes, sir.”

Harris led him back toward the docks. Just far enough for privacy. And shy of the open-air latrine. “Look. I understand. I understand what you’re feeling. But an officer focuses on his mission. And our mission is to evacuate the living.” Harris gestured toward the sea of discarded humanity as the sky began to spit rain. “Focus on them. There’s nothing we can do for the dead. Got it?”

“Yes, sir.”

He didn’t get it, of course. Not completely. But he’d be all right. Harris had been through his own moments years before, as a company commander in Diyala. Plenty to make a man sick, to make him angry. But a good soldier just kept marching and did his duty.

It seemed to him the world was going mad. His intel officer had just briefed a report that concluded that the top Islamist extremists in Europe had never expected their uprising to succeed. The whole purpose had been provocation, to deepen the split between Islam and the West, to make coexistence intolerable. They wanted all this to come to pass. Even Iraq and all that had come after had not prepared him for the irradiation of cities, the rabid slaughter of the innocent, and Europe’s reverting to the continent’s age-old habits — such as the German tendency to stuff unwanted minorities into boxcars. Of course, the French were behaving worse, according to the daily updates. And of all people, the Italians had gone maddest. Maybe it was the destruction of the Sistine Chapel, but the dolce vita Italians had turned out to be militant Catholics, after all. They put down their espressos and killed with gusto.

When Harris had been a young officer, pundits had warned of “Eurabia,” of a Muslim demographic takeover of Europe. Looking out over the terrified thousands for whom he was responsible, those warnings seemed a wicked, sickening joke. Strangers were never welcome, in the end. All men wanted was an excuse to kill.

Even before the attacks on his own country began, Harris sensed that this wasn’t an end, but a beginning.

Without waiting for his staff to catch up with him, Harris plunged back into the mass of refugees. That night, typhus broke out.

* * *

So much had happened in the five years since he looked into that boxcar that the world in which he now led troops to war seemed unrecognizable. Dreamers had changed the world, but their dreams were grim. The great American effort to evacuate Europe’s Muslims had turned into a debacle. None of the states from which their ancestors had come would accept the refugees. Islamist firebrands declared that all that had transpired in Europe had been an American plot to oppress Muslims. Overcrowded ships lay at anchor in the Mediterranean or in the smack-down heat of the Persian Gulf. Arab governments took their cue to blame Washington for the suffering, unwilling to welcome Muslims who had lived in Europe amid liberal ideas. American counterarguments were mocked. The global media accused the United States of making pawns of the refugees. When a riot aboard a converted cruise ship turned deadly, the European pogroms were forgotten as if they had been an embarrassing soccer match. All agreed that Washington was the true enemy of Islam.

When the refugees were landed by force in Alexandria and Beirut, in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf sheikhdoms, the local governments let them perish on the docks until, with tens of thousands dead and headlines blazing, they belatedly opened their arms to their fellow Muslims “to save them from America.”