“Sir, they must’ve had ten or a dozen nukes hidden… They hit us… they hit us everywhere…”
“Where? Where’s ‘everywhere,’man? Be precise.”
“Across the front… all across the front… and the crossing sites… Jerusalem…”
Al-Mahdi had betrayed him. He’d been a fool. An ass. A dupe. But instead of worsening his condition, the chief of staff’s news jolted Montfort back into command of himself. He already saw the first things that would need to be done.
“I see a betrayal in this,” he said, his voice a perfect combination of self-righteous anger and confidence in his own judgment. “Don’t you see it yourself, man? General Harris is behind this. He’s been conspiring with al- Mahdi, with the Jihadis, the infidels. To stop us. It’s obvious.”
“Yes, sir.” But the chief of staff seemed unsure, weak.
“This could never have happened without Harris’s complicity. That much is plain as can be. Why didn’t al- Mahdi use his nuclear weapons on Harris and his Philistine Army? Why save them for use against us? General Harris has made a deal with the dev il. And we needn’t keep it a secret.” Montfort straightened his back, overruling the cramps in his abdomen. “Listen to me: I want you to do everything in your power to find out how bad the situation is, the condition of our units. They must keep fighting. We can’t stop.”
“Sir… The only reports we have… The attacking units appear to be combat in effec tive… the level of destruction…”
“Initial reports are always exaggerated. We’ll reorganize. The Jihadis will pay. This is the work of the Anti christ, a sign that we truly are in the final battle. The Lord will not abandon us.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Go and do as I say. And send in my doctor. Wake him if he’s asleep.”
But when the chief of staff had gone, shutting the door behind him, Montfort slumped. Unsure if the nausea he felt arose from his sickness or from the shock of the news.
How could God let this happen? Hadn’t he been doing the Lord’s work? Why had God blinded him to this treachery? Why had He permitted His armies to be shattered?
Why had he let himself be fooled? Imagining that his own schemes must prevail? Putting his trust in an infidel. Was he being punished for his pride?
Montfort forced himself across the floor to the portable sickroom toilet positioned just beyond the foot of the bed. Unsure whether to kneel and vomit, or sit down on it. The energy he had summoned in front of the chief of staff was all gone now, replaced by an unreasoning terror. Had all of his exertions, his sacrifices, come to no more than this?
He settled himself on the flimsy apparatus, sulfuring the room with his waste. And then, when he was sick and empty and broken in spirit, he
Simon Montfort had a revelation. He understood, with wrenching power, that God had chosen
But God had kept him here. Because the
But the Lord had warned him as well. Punishing him with the destruction of his army. For bartering with al- Mahdi, consorting with an agent of Satan. The Lord was telling him that he’d been too meek, a creature of too little faith to put his trust in the Lord. Instead, he had put his faith in men and allowed himself to be soft.
Had Joshua’s Israelites spared the inhabitants of Ai after the Lord commanded their destruction? Joshua had obeyed his Lord, but Simon Montfort had let Harris protect the infidels in Nazareth.
“For Joshua drew not his hand back, wherewith he stretched out his spear,” Montfort quoted to himself, “until he had utterly destroyed
The enemies of the Lord God had to be exterminated from the Earth to purify it. Harris had embraced abomination. And this abomination was repugnant to the Lord.
Nazareth would only be the beginning. Now was come the Day of Reckoning, the final battle at the End of Days.
His doctor came in, followed by two orderlies. Montfort looked up from the corruption of his body and said, “I need to speak to Vice President Gui.”
TWENTY-TWO
They arrived all through the night. Some still crewed their vehicles, but most stumbled in on foot. Shocked, panicked. A few maintained a fragile haughtiness, outraged by what had been done to them. But the surprise of their defeat, of their catastrophe, left the MOBIC troops undone. Howling Scripture, a captain stood in the middle of a trail, threatening to shoot the enlisted men passing him by if they refused to fall in and resist imaginary pursuers. The soldiers sensed he was talking to himself, stunned by God’s unpredictability, and they kept walking. The captain did not shoot, and his arm grew weary. At last, he stopped waving his pistol at Heaven and slumped into the general retreat. Men who had bragged the day before of their invincibility begged water or food from Maxwell’s soldiers. Not all responses were courteous, even when rations were shared. And in the terror that had gripped them, the MOBIC troops had forgotten how to pray, but not how to curse.
Lieutenant Colonel Monty Maxwell had stayed busy through another sleepless night. The first problem had been blue-on-blue shootings. His own men had quick trigger fingers after the infiltrations and close combat of the previous night. Even withdrawn to a tactical assembly area well behind the battle, the bleary-eyed tankers of 2-34 alerted at every unexpected sound. Grudges influenced decisions.
For his part, Maxwell did what he could to support the MOBIC officers attempting to impose order on the situation. Not only didn’t he want the fleeing MOBIC troops to spread the contagion of panic, he also remembered his training from bygone years: Troops exposed to significant doses of radiation, as the front-line fighters had been, had to limit their exertions drastically, to let their systems concentrate on fighting the intrusion on their bodies. Those wild men running down roads and trails in search of impossible safety were killing themselves. As little as he liked anybody or anything affiliated with the Military Order of the Brothers in Christ, Maxwell didn’t want them dead of radiation sickness. He hated what they stood for, but they still were his own kind.
Craving sleep, Maxwell had clamored over the land line for dosimeters to measure the exposure of his own soldiers. But his voice had been only one among dozens of commanders, and most of the division’s slight nuclear- defense resources had been sent north in support of the Marines road-marching through dead zones.
In the early morning hours, an order had come down from brigade to organize a demi-battalion from 2-34 Armor’s functional vehicles — those that still had working electronics.
“Be prepared to move, on order, not later than 0700.”
Maxwell yearned for a few hours of sleep. And his men were as tired as he was. Or wearier. But as soon as his operations officer tracked him down and relayed the order, Maxwell rallied to the task, enlivened by the prospect of getting back in the fight. He gave up trying to persuade stray MOBIC troops to halt where they were and rest and started ruthlessly sorting through his battalion’s companies, culling the systems and soldiers he judged capable of fighting on. No one wanted to be left behind, but Maxwell understood the order on a visceral, warrior’s level: There wouldn’t be time to communicate from tank to tank with hand signals and handkerchiefs. The task force that rolled out of the assembly area had to be lean, mean, and ready.
Where would they be heading? The FRAGO hadn’t included routes or objectives or other control measures: just “Be prepared to move.” Maxwell couldn’t believe they’d be ordered up through the nuked dirt the MOBIC survivors had fled. So that meant road-marching north, or maybe south, for a wide flanking attack.
What was happening in the great world beyond the range of his thermal sights? And where was the fuel
