The War After Armageddon

Cavanaugh plunged ahead. Striding up the lane. Toward the site where the Church of St. Gabriel once stood. He’d stopped by earlier. Briefly. The rubbled lot had been turned into an open-air latrine, and the below-ground cavity where Mary’s well lay hidden was a cesspit.

A short block up the hillside, Cavanaugh found a squad of MOBIC soldiers unspooling white tape printed with black crosses, cordoning off the area.

None of them paid the least attention to the corpse lying in the center of the plaza. The dark blood on the paving slabs shone fresh. The dead man was an elderly Arab.

Cavanaugh tightened his grip on his carbine.

Two MOBIC troops glanced up at his approach. Then they dropped their spool of tape and rushed toward him, holding up their hands like old-fashioned traffic cops.

“Stay where you are. Don’t enter this site.”

“Get out of my fucking way.”

The scattered MOBIC soldiers alerted. They began to close toward the center of the plaza. Slipping their rifles from their shoulders. An officer hurried toward Cavanaugh.

Cavanaugh heard Sergeant Rodriguez and his men entering the plaza behind him.

As the officer approached in the weakening light, Cavanaugh read his rank: a major.

“What do you think you’re doing here, Major? No one’s authorized to enter this—”

“I’m in charge here, Colonel. This is now a reclaimed Christian Heritage site, praise the Lord. You’re violating a sacred area.”

“It’s a fucking latrine. Who the fuck are you?”

“Major Josiah Makepeace Brown. The commander of CHART 55. And you have no further authority here.”

“How’d you get here.”

“The Lord showed us the way.”

“He tell you to shoot that old man?”

“The heathen?”

“Yeah, the heathen. The old man. Him. Which one of you shot him?”

“I did.”

“Why? Jesus Christ, he was probably just coming to take a leak.”

“You don’t believe that those who profane this holy ground, who sow filth amid the lilies of the field, need to be punished?”

“You shot an old man. And I don’t see any goddamned lilies. You have no right to be here.”

The MOBIC officer maintained an infuriatingly calm voice. As if speaking to a child. But there was an unmistakable threat in his tone, too.

“Colonel, you and your men will have to leave. Immediately. Or I’ll be forced to arrest you. In the name of Jesus Christ, our Lord, and the Military Order of the Brothers in Christ.”

Cavanaugh broke the major’s jaw. It was an awkward punch, with the fist forming only after it left the handgrip and trigger-well of the carbine. But Cavanaugh was comfortable doing a dozen reps on the bench with 280 pounds. He didn’t aim with great precision, but the blow landed perfectly, and the jaw snapped with the sound of a broomstick broken over a thigh.

The MOBIC troops weren’t well-trained. When the major fell, a few began to point their weapons, but Cavanaugh’s men, outnum bered three to one, quickly disarmed them. So roughly that Cavanaugh had to tell them to ease up. He even began to worry that one of his men would pull a trigger. All of the day’s anger, the rage at the sight of the crucified soldiers, had transferred onto the MOBIC troops, who were hated by the rank-and-file for their priviliges and the preference they got in equipment and promotions.

“Hey, sir,” Sergeant Rodriguez said. “What do you want us to do with these shitbirds?”

Cavanaugh turned to the next-ranking MOBIC officer, a first lieutenant. “You. Get that body out of the square. Put him over on that bench.”

The lieutenant turned to give orders to two of his soldiers.

“I said ‘you’,” Cavanaugh told him. “Take one man to help you, Lieutenant.” He looked down at the major, who lay on the ground moaning. Cavanaugh wondered if he’d screwed up. But it had felt good. Almost as good as decking his wife’s new, smite-the-Moabites, bullshit husband might have felt. And his orders covered him.

No. That was bullshit. He wasn’t going to hide behind orders. He’d called it, and he’d stand by his call.

Cavanaugh faced the distinctly unhappy group of MOBIC soldiers. He was tempted to have them tied up and to leave them just where they said they wanted to be. In the middle of the mounds of shit that covered the site of the old church.

“Treat that body with respect,” Cavanaugh snapped at the lieutenant and the MOBIC soldier helping him. “Then I’m going to give you fifteen minutes to get out of Dodge.”

The lieutenant turned his face toward Cavanaugh, features vivid with fear. “Sir… Can we wait until daylight? Please, sir? It’s getting dark, and we might not be able to find our way back now… We could get shot in the dark by mistake.”

Cavanaugh extended his wrist and looked at his watch.

“Fourteen minutes,” he said. “The Lord will show you the way.”

FOURTEEN

ARAQAH, FORMER WEST BANK

The Arab girl was pretty enough to make Sergeant Garcia jumpy. Fourteen, maybe fifteen. Muy caliente. And walking around like she knew it. So much, he figured, for all that Muslim modesty stuff.