The War After Armageddon

And mutilated. Uniforms torn off, sometimes the trousers, sometimes the body armor and blouses. A couple of severed heads. The most popular technique had been to slice off the genitals and shove them into the mouths of the dead — in one case, between the lips of a severed head. Jagged crosses had been carved into pale chests.

“Those sonsofbitches,” Sergeant Tisza said from the far side of a shot-up four-wheel-drive. “Even MOBIC shits don’t deserve this.”

Bratty didn’t respond. Too much to think about. He’d realized immediately that they were in deep kimchi when the battalion Commander got back to the TOC, already aware that he’d poked the pooch by getting into a pissing contest with the MOBIC CHART. Busting the straw boss’s jaw, then telling them to get out of Dodge.

Cavanaugh had still been hot when he got back. But smart enough to know he’d blundered. Bratty’s worry meter pegged out immediately. He liked Cavanaugh. Who was one of the most decent and most competent officers with whom he’d served. But Cavanaugh was a man with a temper. A mick to his bones.

“Sir, those bozos will probably end up in Baghdad,” Bratty had told him. “Let me go after them. I’ll find ’em. We’ll corral ’em for the night and send ’em home to mama in the morning.”

Cavanaugh had just nodded. With a grateful look on his face. But the bring-’em-back mission had been delayed by the arrival of the trucks to carry the crucified bodies to the rear. Time-sensitive mission, but that didn’t lessen the paperwork. And the escort tracks had clogged the narrow street. It had taken Bratty almost an hour to get on the road.

Tracking the CHART vehicles hadn’t been hard. Bratty just looked at the map and asked himself which route the dumbest-ass lieutenant he’d ever met would choose. Sure enough, they found the MOBIC vehicles and the bodies in the middle of the road on the western ridge, along a route that headed straight for friendly lines.

Bratty squatted down by a corpse that had been castrated and fed its own meat. The J’s were setting a pretty high standard for atrocities. First the crucifixions, then this. Just asking for it. And Dilworth Bratty had no objections to giving it to them. But something about the scene made him want to take a chaw of snuff and scratch his ass for a couple of minutes.

Sergeant Tisza came around the front end of a vehicle and stood before him. Boots in the moonlight.

“This stinks like white-trash pussy on Sunday morning,” Bratty said.

“Sergeant Major?”

“I said, ‘This stinks.’ That fake ambush. Supposed to make us think we’d wandered into the same kill zone, facing the same enemy that did all this. Now, you tell me, young sergeant, why the J’s didn’t make even a half-assed effort to hit anything when they opened up on us.”

“Because they wanted us to find the bodies?”

“Congratulations. You are ready for your E-6 board. This isn’t just a massacre. It’s a display. Now let’s see if you’re ready for your Smokey-the-Bear hat. If this is a calculated display, what does that tell you?”

“That it was planned?”

“You are a go at this station, Sergeant Tisza. But if it was planned, what was the one piece of critical information the J’s needed to make it happen?”

The buck sergeant thought for a moment. A fly did a touch-and-go landing on the corpse that lay between them.

“That somebody’d be coming this way.”

“Proceed directly to the Sergeants Major Academy. Somebody knew these poor sonsofbitches were coming this way. In sufficient time to set up an ambush, execute it, disfigure the bodies, then un-ass the AO. Except for Mutt and Jeff, who stayed behind to fire a couple of clips at us before running away as fast as their little legs could go.”

“Okay, I follow you.”

“Then let’s move on to the Sergeant-Major-of-the-Army test question, young sergeant: What’s wrong with this ambush? Not the potshots they took at us. I mean the first one. The one that left these poor buggers with their nuts stuffed down their throats.”

The buck sergeant thought it over. This time, he was stumped.

“No blasts,” Bratty said at last. “No mine craters. No signs of a roadside bomb. No blown-up vehicles. No evidence of any weaponry heavier than a machine gun used on them. And look at the bodies, for Christ’s sake. Look at all the head shots. Head shots. In the dark. And the J’s can’t shoot for shit. What does that tell you, Sergeant Tisza?”

“They were shot at close range.”

“And how do you get shot at close range? With no sign that you’ve put up a fight? Smell their weapons. Where are the shell casings from the turret MGs? How do you get yourself executed at close range?”

A fly settled on a dead eye.

“You surrender,” Sergeant Tisza said.

“And from what you know of the MOBIC troops… They may have their faults, but how many of them do you think would surrender to the J’s without a fight?”

“So they didn’t surrender, you mean? I don’t get it.”