The War After Armageddon

He hadn’t undergone a conversion to pacifism. Maxwell still got it down in his bones that war exhilarated the right kind of men more powerfully than anything else in their lives would ever do. He’d sensed it before he ever saw combat; it was bred into his bones. At West Point, he’d studied German just so he could read Stahlgewitter in the original. Ernst Juenger got it. And, more important, admitted it. To Maxwell, the great sin wasn’t enjoying the hell out of war, but pretending all the while that the stay-at-homes were right and it was all boo-hoo terrible. Soldiers didn’t re-enlist because war sucked but because they loved it more deeply than they understood themselves. And certainly more than they admitted to the wives they left behind. War was the biggest, most satisfying thing they’d ever touch. And if it wasn’t, they weren’t meant to be soldiers. No, Maxwell wasn’t sorry about killing his country’s enemies that day but about his dereliction of duty as a commander.

Now he wanted to make up for it, to be the commander he should’ve been that morning. But the perfect comms they’d enjoyed during the attack were gone. And only a few kilometers east of their main objective, they seemed to be in a different war, with a much tougher enemy.

His S-2 and the brigade Deuce had done a quick battlefield survey of Afula. Conclusion? 2-34 armor and the rest of 1st Brigade had come up against breakthrough antiarmor systems — manned by third-rate Jihadi units. Fanatical, yes. And trained about to Cub Scout standards.

That explained a lot about the day’s fighting. And raised even more questions. Why had the J’s thrown the first half of the day’s game? Was there a trap no one could see? Who was really dancing to whose tune? Above all, what were those leaflets all about? Did the Jihadis really think that they’d scare American soldiers into quitting and running away with threats like that? Did they understand so little about Americans?

It was a day of insights. Unexpectedly, Maxwell found himself wondering how much his own kind really understood about the Jihadis.

“Sir?” It was Specialist Kito, his wheeled-vehicle driver, a young soldier from Guam with a chronic smile and the nickname “Tree Snake.” “All ready to go now, sir.”

Maxwell nodded and tossed the remnants of his coffee out on the ground. Ready to move out.

But an odd look passed over the driver’s face. “Don’t you want your big sword, sir?”

The battalion commander shook his head. “It just gets in the way.”

HEADQUARTERS, III JIHADI CORPS, QUNEITRA (GOLAN HEIGHTS)

Lieutenant General Abdul al-Ghazi of the Blessed Army of the Great Jihad drank his sweet mint tea with satisfaction. His hour as a soldier had come. The ferocity of the Crusaders who had attacked the forces of Emir-General al-Mahdi in the south, coupled with the audacious dash across the Carmel Ridges by the American mercenary forces, had forced a hasty rearrangement of the defensive plans. But now al-Ghazi had satisfied the special requirements imposed by his superior — including the emir’s Nazareth gambit — and al-Ghazi was free to fight as professionally as he could, Insh’ Allah.

Al-Ghazi was a man of uncompromising faith, yet clear-eyed enough to realize that his enemies considered him a fanatic because of that faith and would underestimate him. He understood the weaknesses — and the strengths — of those under his command. His Arabs and those who fought beside them were not yet fully competent to wield every military technology they possessed. They lacked the phlegmatic temperament, advanced staff skills, and even the basic trust essential to sustain complex offensive operations against opponents like the Americans. But he also knew that his men would fight well from prepared defensive positions, as long as they felt that they were being supported and not abandoned, and that their ability, however imperfect, to wield the newest military systems was greater by far than the skills possessed by their fathers and grandfathers, peace and honor be upon them. Finally, their faith would give them strength.

As for his own superior, the emir-general, al-Ghazi still worried about the extremes of passion he glimpsed in the man, nor did he feel confident that he knew how many games of chess al-Mahdi played at once. But for all that, he smelled the genius Allah had granted the emir-general, his talent for victory. And al-Mahdi shared his vision of the one great matter: The only way to buy time to rebuild the strength of the caliphate was to inflict so shocking a defeat upon the Crusaders that they would leave and lick their wounds for ten or twenty or even thirty years before invading the home of Islam again.