The War After Armageddon

The wind filled his nostrils with a smell that made him think of concentration camps.

A few hands reached toward him, some voices called. But these were people who had learned fear and learned it suddenly. Only those who had lost their last grip on reality cried out for his attention.

Even aboard the ships putting in — most of them contracted freighters — there wouldn’t be enough of anything. The makeshift showers wouldn’t suffice, nor would the medical care. The entire effort had been cobbled together so swiftly that even the rules of engagement remained in dispute, with the EU reps venomously obstructionist.

Europe, the continent of peace.

Harris saw a thin girl in a headscarf standing up amid the thousands huddled on the gravel. She wore jeans, an orange sweater, and a red plaid cape, and she watched him as if he were an alien being. He figured her for a rape victim. Given the Muslim obsession with chastity, rape had been a common sport in the retaliatory pogroms.

He refused to think too much. There would be time for thinking later on. He had to keep his head and make things happen.

His pace quickened to a range-walk. Flipping his headset to “talk” he said, “Rodeo Six Alpha, Trailmaster Six. We okay?”

The voice did not respond so quickly as he would’ve liked. Then the captain, who had struck Harris as solid since the day they docked, repeated, “You’ve got to see this…”

“Your location in five.”

The sea of refugees parted as he advanced.

He turned a warehouse corner and passed a plot used as an open-air latrine, as foul as anything he had ever smelled. Before him, at the railhead, a half-dozen Bundesgrenzschuetzen sat on the ground by a line of boxcars. The German border police no longer had their weapons, and they looked extremely unhappy. U.S. Army Infantrymen stood over them with their rifles ready.

Harris ordered himself to maintain his self-control, not to judge before he had the facts. But young Captain Cavanaugh would need a damned good explanation for this one.

Wiping his face, the captain trotted toward him. Harris realized the man had been crying.

“What going on, captain?”

“Sir… You’ve got to see this.”

“You told me that. Twice. What do I have to see?”

“You’ve just got to see it.” The captain turned back toward the rust-colored boxcars with the white letters “DB” on their sides.

“Sergeant Z,” the captain called. “Help me.”

The sergeant shouldered his rifle, reluctantly, and moved toward the first boxcar.

They opened the door. And the stench hit everyone like a fist. Even the Germans winced.

The corpses rose almost to the middle of the car’s interior. Men. Women. Children. Stiff. Wide-eyed. Mouths agape. Even a day or two into death, they retained their Turkish pallor. Hands had literally clawed themselves to the bone in their last, desperate moments.

As Harris watched, a woman’s corpse broke from the mass and began to slide, accelerating as it dropped to the ground. Dead bones broke.

One cold raindrop struck Harris on the lips.

“They thought it was funny,” the captain said. His voice had broken to a child’s tone. “Somebody closed all the air vents. They suffocated. And the Krauts thought it was funny.”

Harris allowed himself a long look. He needed time to master himself.

When he felt ready, he strode over to the Germans. Half of them looked worried. The rest smirked.

“Who did this?” Harris asked an Oberleutnant, the highest ranking figure he could see among them.

“I don’t speak pig English,” the officer said. With quite a good accent. He made a spitting sound. “Ihr sind doch alle Rassenverraeter.”

A Feldwebel spoke up. “We have nothing to do with this. They are dead a long time. Days. We only make the Sicherheitsdienst here. Nothing with the trains. Da ist die Bahnpolizei verantwortlich.”

“They knew,” Cavanaugh said. “They knew. They were laughing about it.”

The German officer decided to speak English, after all. He snickered and said, “Maybe Osama bin Laden is in there. Was meinst du, Herr Brigadegeneral? Nach dreissig Jahren! Maybe you should look. If you Americans love these Dreck-Muslimen so much. But you have no right to take away our weapons. It is against the agreement. I will make a protest.”

Harris looked at him. For a moment, he considered shutting the Germans inside the boxcar with the corpses and locking it shut. He would’ve loved to do it. And he wasn’t worried about protests. He would’ve faced a court- martial without blinking. But he realized that anything further done to the German guards would simply be taken out on other Muslims before the next train entered the compound.

“Give them back their weapons,” he told the captain. “Unless you have evidence of their direct involvement.”

“But, sir, we—”

“Just execute the order, Captain.” He turned to the German first lieutenant. “You have the formal apology of the United States Government for this misunderstanding. Now get out of here before I have you shot.”

The lieutenant kept up his smirk as he met Harris’s eyes.

“Three,” Harris said, turning back to business, “I want them put in body bags and taken out for burial at sea. They will not be buried on German soil.”

“I’ll have to get the doc to sign off. They might be infectious and—”

“They will not be buried on German soil. Work it out, Three. Cavanaugh?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Walk with me.”

“Yes, sir.”

Harris led him back toward the docks. Just far enough for privacy. And shy of the open-air latrine. “Look. I understand. I understand what you’re feeling. But an officer focuses on his mission. And our mission is to evacuate the living.” Harris gestured toward the sea of discarded humanity as the sky began to spit rain. “Focus on them. There’s nothing we can do for the dead. Got it?”

“Yes, sir.”

He didn’t get it, of course. Not completely. But he’d be all right. Harris had been through his own moments years before, as a company commander in Diyala. Plenty to make a man sick, to make him angry. But a good soldier just kept marching and did his duty.

It seemed to him the world was going mad. His intel officer had just briefed a report that concluded that the top Islamist extremists in Europe had never expected their uprising to succeed. The whole purpose had been provocation, to deepen the split between Islam and the West, to make coexistence intolerable. They wanted all this to come to pass. Even Iraq and all that had come after had not prepared him for the irradiation of cities, the rabid slaughter of the innocent, and Europe’s reverting to the continent’s age-old habits — such as the German tendency to stuff unwanted minorities into boxcars. Of course, the French were behaving worse, according to the daily updates. And of all people, the Italians had gone maddest. Maybe it was the destruction of the Sistine Chapel, but the dolce vita Italians had turned out to be militant Catholics, after all. They put down their espressos and killed with gusto.

When Harris had been a young officer, pundits had warned of “Eurabia,” of a Muslim demographic takeover of Europe. Looking out over the terrified thousands for whom he was responsible, those warnings seemed a wicked, sickening joke. Strangers were never welcome, in the end. All men wanted was an excuse to kill.

Even before the attacks on his own country began, Harris sensed that this wasn’t an end, but a beginning.

Without waiting for his staff to catch up with him, Harris plunged back into the mass of refugees. That night, typhus broke out.

* * *