The War After Armageddon

herself into while her husband was assigned to the Pentagon and she, a K Street lawyer, felt slighted by his dedication to his work? The affair had been as physically disappointing as it was emotionally repellent. Its end had been an abortion. And her husband, off on one of his TDY trips, had come home and barely noticed she was cranky.

But he was a good man. Perhaps that had driven her into the affair. With a fellow K Street slimeball. Because Gary was just so damned good, so virtuous. All of the goddamned time. A Boy Scout whose sterling qualities would’ve pissed off the other Boy Scouts. His goodness had humiliated her back then.

Before she surrendered to him. To loving him. To really loving him. A mother was supposed to love her children above all, but she wondered if she did.

Now she just wanted her husband to come home. To take off his uniform. To be done with it. Surely, they’d let him alone then.

Wouldn’t they?

She checked the house hold message center, but there was nothing. She wanted to hear from him, to hear his voice. But he was an ass when it came to playing by the rules. He wouldn’t tie up some precious communications line, not even to tell his wife he loved her.

But he did love her. She knew that. He loved her, and he loved their daughters. And his damned religion. And his country. And his goddamned Army. How could he have that much love in him? Without taking it away from her?

For all that, she was grateful, and she knew it. And she was proud of him. With the kind of pride you had to learn over years. Over decades. She was proud of all the things about him that made her want to snap at him, to mock him. And now she was afraid for him. He simply didn’t understand what men and women were really like.

Had he even understood her? Her selfishness? Venality, even? Maybe he did. And he still loved her. And that was something else to be furious about. There was something downright degrading in being loved so generously.

She snorted again, her least ladylike habit. The sound always made Gary laugh. That was something none of them understood about him: how he laughed. He loved to laugh, full of jokes in private, when he could drop his mask. She walked past his sprawling leather chair — a monstrosity she’d yearned to get rid of for years. The discolored heap of lumpy cushions made her see him as vividly as any present being could have been. Smiling at her with that crooked, country-boy smile of his and putting on a cracker accent to tell her, “Honeybunch, I love you like a moonshiner loves a new set of tires.”

He loved her more than that. She felt it. She had the love of a good man. Of the best man.

Why couldn’t they see? What he was really like? Why didn’t they appreciate what he stood for?

She found herself on the verge of tears again. Sarah Colmer-Harris, the iron-nerved lawyer, lately of the public defender’s office. Until the office, with a backlog of almost seven hundred cases, let her go. “Sarah, there’s just not enough work to keep you on…” That Baptist swine. Who’d pawed her in the hallway until she punched him — Sarah didn’t slap — and threatened to tell his wife. Publicly. In their church on Sunday morning.

Why were they doing this? They were winning anyway. Why did they have to do this to Gary? To all of them? Why couldn’t they just shriek their hymns and leave everybody else alone? They had the power now. What more did they want?

To punish people like her. And poor, decent, blind, brave, pigheaded Gary. Because they were all sinners. No forgiveness in the Reverend Jeff Gui’s Christianity. Protestants didn’t even leave room for penance. Did they?

And Emily. Her eldest daughter. A fighter. Like Gary. “Asked” to leave Johns Hopkins medical school “for her own safety.” Of course, she’d refused. But her sister, Miranda, had taken the threats to heart, breaking off her undergraduate studies at Texas A&M and going north to be close to her sister.

Why hadn’t she come home instead? I need her, too. Who’s here for me?

Sarah sat down in her husband’s chair and let herself cry. Something she would’ve been too proud to do in his presence.

Gary, let them have it all. Just let them have it. They’ll take it anyway. Come home.

But he wouldn’t come home, of course. He’d do his duty. The thought of it made her sick to her stomach and shrieking mad at the same time.

What was happening to their world? And Sim Montfort. Gary didn’t know about that one, either. How that sonofabitch had tried to lay her when Gary was off fighting in Saudi Arabia. Well, old Sim hadn’t gotten very far. Sim, the pretty boy. She couldn’t think of him without summoning the word “motherfucker.”

Now Sim had religion. Some said he was America’s coming man. Well, he hadn’t come in her. That was one thing. Better a scumbag lawyer than Sim Montfort. She’d never trusted him an inch. Even before he showed up at her door and got it slammed in his preening snout.

Ashamed of herself, of her weakness, Sarah stopped crying and got up to wash her face. The telephone stopped her halfway down the hall.

“Hello?” Tentative. Wary of yet another harassing phone call.

It was her younger daughter, Miranda. Hysterical.

“Mom, Mom, it’s Emily… You’ve got to come… please…”

“Miranda, calm down. Stop it. What’s—”

“Mom, I’m at the hospital. It’s Emily. They beat her up so bad… Mom, I can’t even recognize her. Mom, you’ve got to come…”

Lieutenant General Gary Harris’s wife put some steel in her voice. “You just calm down. Right now, young lady. Do you hear me? We can’t let your father know about this.”

HEADQUARTERS, 2-34 ARMOR, EASTERN OUTSKIRTS OF AFULA

Less than fifteen minutes after the land lines had been laid to the battalion’s tactical operations center, a tank recovery vehicle backed over the wires and cut them again. While waiting for the sergeant from the signal platoon to finish the splices, Lt. Col. Montgomery Maxwell VI sipped from a cup of lukewarm, ass-drizzle coffee and tried to concentrate on the map laid out before him. He had a great deal of lost time to make up.

But his mind kept flapping away from the map and returning to roost on the leaflet his recon platoon leader had brought in. The Jihadis were firing artillery rounds filled with the slips of paper throughout the brigade sector.

The leaflet bore a photograph of crucified soldiers above the printed warning: This death comes to all infidel Crusaders who profane the Emirate of al-Quds and Damaskus.

The reproduction quality wasn’t first-rate. But you got the message.

Annoyed at his inability to focus on the tactical problem at hand, Maxwell reached out and turned the leaflet face down. But the map before him had become a text in an incomprehensible alphabet.

“Three!” he called. “Any comms yet?”

“No, sir. Jamming’s so thick I’m surprised we can hear each other talk out loud.”

“Sergeant Escovito say anything about those goddamned land lines?”

“Not yet, sir.”

“I need to talk to every company commander the instant we’re back up.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Oh, screw this shit. Sergeant Perkins? Where’s my damned driver? Tell him to get my V-hull ready to roll.”

“You going forward again, sir?” the S-3 asked.

“They can’t hear me from here. And I need to get everybody right with Jesus.” He reached for the leaflet, flashed it, then slapped it down again. “We’re going to have soldiers wanting to take scalps and collect hides once they see this goddamned stuff.”

“Don’t you want to go out in a big boy, sir? It’s getting nasty out there.”

Maxwell shook his head. “Lieutenant MacDonald’s going to need his full platoon if we get a shit-storm around the TOC.”

But that wasn’t the true reason Maxwell didn’t want to go forward in a tank. It had more to do with the fact that, for the first time in a war zone, he’d taken off his great-grandfather’s saber and stowed it with his personal gear.