The War After Armageddon

Al-Ghazi got up and straightened his uniform as he walked to the full-length mirror leaning against the wall. Yes, all was in order. He looked as a soldier should look. As a general should look. The emir-general looked like a holy man masquerading as an officer, with his unkempt beard and scholar’s rounded shoulders. Yet, al-Mahdi was right about so many things.

There had to be hatred. Al-Mahdi understood that. The hatred had to cut so deep that Shaitan would never again be able to insinuate himself with the lie that Muslims could live side by side with those of other faiths. An Islam that did not rule was not Islam. An Islam that was not free of impurities was not Islam. An Islam sick with infidels and their practices was not Islam. Look what “cooperation” and “tolerance” had wrought: nothing but misery and betrayal for the children of Allah.

As for all those who had argued for “building bridges” and “peace through understanding,” the falsely educated, the Westernizers, the traitors, al-Ghazi would’ve been pleased to kill them by his own hand. But the emir was right about that, as well.

Better to let the Americans do it.

His aide knocked. Al-Ghazi posed himself, standing, behind his desk.

“Come in!”

The door opened. Colonel al-Tikriti, his personal intelligence officer and a cousin by marriage, spread his mustache with a great smile, answered by a smile of al-Ghazi’s own. The general stepped out from behind the desk, opening his arms in greeting. He knew exactly how many paces it took to make a guest feel welcome according to his station. Al-Tikriti would need to come two-thirds of the way across the room to meet him.

After they embraced and kissed, the colonel’s smile disappeared. And when he spoke, it was in a whisper.

“The emir is up to mischief with the Crusaders. He’s been in contact with one of them for months.”

Al-Ghazi stepped back. As if he had embraced a man covered in plague sores.

“How could you know this?” he demanded.

Colonel al-Tikriti smiled. It was a smaller, harder smile this time.

“Cousin, when I was a young man in Iraq… when we both were younger men… an American officer gave me a long lecture about the uselessness of torture during interrogations.” The smile grew slightly larger. “He was wrong.”

THIRTEEN

HEADQUARTERS, III (US) CORPS, MT. CARMEL RIDGES

Flintlock Harris tried to look into each face crowded into the ad-hoc briefing room. All of the assembled staff officers and subordinate commanders were overdue for showers, and the closed space stank like a gym during a janitors’ strike. Weary hands brushed away flies. It had been impossible to control the news about the crucifixions in Nazareth. Harris could feel the danger, as palpable as sweat, that the behavior of his soldiers would degenerate into savagery.

Which was, Harris figured, what more than one party involved wanted.

The murmurings had quieted the instant Harris got to his feet. Now the loudest sound in the room was the pop-back of a plastic water bottle squeezed too hard. Beyond the walls of the shabby house, spikes of noise reported the commotion attendent to jumping the command post to a new location. More disruption, at a bad time. But staying in one place too long made the headquarters an easy target.

Harris had stripped his field headquarters by almost two-thirds of its personnel from the old, fat days in Saudi or Nigeria. But moving it still reminded him of a circus leaving town.

Time to speak. He’d wasted enough time already. Harris wished he were better with words.

“All right,” he said abruptly. “Listen up. We are not going to do anything stupid, and we’re not going to do anything immoral. Or illegal under present laws and conventions.” He stared fiercely into the faces before him. “And I don’t give a damn what anyone else does. The units under the control of this corps inherited two hundred and fifty years of U.S. Army and Marine Corps traditions. We are not going to shit on those traditions.” He scanned the room again. Not everyone was a happy camper. “Everybody got that?”

Harris took a deep breath, aware that not every head had nodded enthusiastically. “I’m as revolted and disgusted and angry as anybody by what those sonsofbitches did in Nazareth. But we’re dealing with an enemy who wants us to respond in kind. They’re praying for it. And we are not going to do it. We will not answer crimes against humanity with our own war crimes.” A fly nearly the size of an attack drone flirted past his face. “The soldiers and Marines under my command are going to fight ferociously to destroy our enemies. I don’t want anyone who takes up arms against us to have a second chance to do so. But once an enemy is our prisoner, he will be treated with decency. With appropriate rigor, but with human decency. And we will not kill or otherwise harm civilians, if it can be helped. We’re soldiers and Marines, not a lynch mob.”