The War After Armageddon

Harris didn’t buy Montfort’s logic, of course. But he had to admit that Sim forced him to think. What alternatives did he have to offer? In place of Montfort’s vision of hypergenocide? What strategy could he lay out as a substitute? Just an endless muddling through? More of the same? A succession of wars that only bought time at a terrible cost in blood? Was it true… irrefutably true… that religions were programmed for violent competition, that ac-commodation was an illusion for soft-minded dreamers? Was it, in the end, us or them? And not just on the battlefield?

Harris dreaded what the coming days and weeks and months and years would bring.

Old Sim was right about one thing, though: Right now, they had a war to fight.

So what was to be done? Harris asked himself. What could he do to bring victory on the battlefield? Without sacrificing the fundamental humanity he still ascribed to his country? And without delivering that country to his own faith’s Jihadis?

Keep it rigorous. By the book. Don’t make any big mistakes. Keep the Army clean. Prevent the MOBIC command from grabbing the Marines. Deliver the goods.

Okay. Sim and his boys were about to assume the leading role in the attack. Given the new determination the Jihadis were showing, that promised to be a bloody mess. Especially given Montfort’s evident impatience. Harris hoped that his old acquaintance, the man who’d succeeded at virtually everything he’d ever undertaken, wouldn’t fall into the trap of overconfidence now. The combination of overconfidence and impatience had defeated no end of generals in the blood-soaked terrain in which they found them-selves.

Harris rose. Stiff. Old. He bent to rummage through the kit bag his aide had placed by the foot of his bunk. His body seemed to him a rusty machine, hammered into action. Fishing out an emergency ration stashed for times like this, the general sat back down and began to eat a foil packet of chicken a la king. Cold. The spoon came up with solid white grease. But Harris didn’t care.

Where was Willing? He was usually so prompt. Had he fallen asleep himself? Or was he in the field latrine with the runs? Like half the G-3 shop.

A weary fly scouted the ration pouch. More from an insect’s sense of duty than from real interest. Harris’s shooing gesture was equally halfhearted.

How much sleep could he allow himself? The window of his room had been blackened and blastproofed by his security detail, but Harris sensed the sky lightening beyond the walls. Three hours? He knew he needed four to keep on functioning on overdrive. But he didn’t want to miss his own morning briefing. And rescheduling it just screwed everybody else.

Everything was on track. He could let Mike Andretti run the show. They’d come get him if any critical issues came up.

Or would they just let the old man sleep? He could hear the G-3 saying, “He’s been through a lot.”

Harris didn’t want anybody’s pity. Three hours. He’d make do with that.

If Willing didn’t turn up soon, he wouldn’t even get that.

Killing a billion people. Sim was certainly ambitious. And utterly mad. But history was made by madmen.

Would his own kind really attempt such a thing? Or was Sim more interested in the process, in the ambitions a lengthy struggle might fulfill? How much did Montfort really mean? Even now? And how much was sheer calculation?

With the acid clarity at the end of a sleepless night, Harris realized that Sim Montfort was a great man and he was not. Montfort certainly wasn’t a good man. He reeked of evil. But Montfort was, undeniably, a great man. And Harris knew that he lacked greatness himself. He was a competent soldier and a first-rate commander. As dutiful as anyone could ask. And honest. Or so he liked to think. But there was no greatness in him, and he recognized, ruefully, that a part of him was jealous of Sim Montfort.

But it was only a small part of him. The rest of Lieutenant General Gary “Flintlock” Harris just wanted to see the mission he’d set himself through to the end: The preservation of the U.S. Army and the defense of the Constitution of the United States.

He laughed at himself. With a weary, broken laugh that ended with a sour burp of grease. Who did he think he was? To assign himself such grand ambitions? Flintlock Harris, Savior of the Army and the Constitution?

Putting it in those terms made him feel like a fool.

Had he been as vain, in his way, as Sim Montfort?

And yet. Somebody had to do it. Didn’t they? Who else would have even tried? Poor old Schwach? Who was left to fight them, on both fronts? Here, in the shooting war. And in dubious battle on the plains of the Washington Mall, if not Heaven.

So many had fallen by the wayside. So many of his comrades had just quit. There was so much darkness now. And not just the shade that was slowly eroding his vision, but the darkness that infected souls and defined entire ages.