Ralph Peters - The War After Armageddon

Garcia signalled Cropsey to clear to the bottom of the stairs. The kid had it figured out. Without being told, he hugged the right wall. In case any friendly fire came in the front.

Nice and quiet. Nice and easy. Cat-foot the rubble. Take it nice and slow.

Garcia wasn’t sure if he hated what he was doing, loved it like sin, or both. But he wasn’t tired anymore. Zooming on body chemicals. Aware of every breath sucked down in the world.

Then he heard it. A voice speaking Arabic. Whispering. Not the way a man talked to himself or cursed, but the way he spoke to someone else nearby.

Shit . But better to know it now.

Cropsey was looking at him. Kid had it figured out, too. But he needed to be looking everywhere else.

Garcia motioned for him to be ready. Then Garcia put his rifle on burst, switched it to his left hand, and gripped the first grenade.

Carefully, he thumbed out the pin, keeping the lever clasped death-grip tight to the curve of the metal. And he started up the stairs. Back to the wall. Ready. But already dead, if any fuck was watching from a back room up there.

Again, he heard a whisper in Arabic, followed by a rip from the machine gun.

One last split second prayer to the Virgin. And Garcia stepped up high enough to peer over the lip of the second floor.

His head struck something, and he froze. Unsure if the noise amplifed inside the helmet was equally loud to anyone else.

Silence.

Were they onto him?

The hand that held the grenade was sweating. Bad shit. Didn’t want it slippery when he threw it.

Artillery fire had torn loose an iron railing, leaving it dangling over the staircase. A twist of its metal had scratched his helmet.

Don’t let this goddamn-it-to-death grenade cook off. Please .

He heard more Arabic whispering. Too loud for them to be worried about anyone hearing.

He saw the pattern now: Whisper, then shoot. When the machine gun kicked out the next burst, he used the noise and its echo to scoot under the railing.

A wedge of exterior light shone through a doorway, leading his eye to the blown-out window frame where the machine gun perched. But he couldn’t make out the gunner or his companion, who were out of his line of sight and and wrapped in darkness.

As Garcia placed his foot on the next step, it creaked.

He threw the grenade over the railing, hoping it would go through the door and not bounce back at him. Then he fired toward the front room, double bursts, as he plunged for cover.

The blast was doomsday loud. The wall that shielded him shook. But Garcia was going full throttle now. He leapt back to his feet, charged forward, and hurled the second grenade into the room an instant before diving behind another wall.

He hit his elbow hard. Bitch hard.

The explosion seemed powerful enough to tear the house apart. But that was just the confined-space effect.

“Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit ,” he barked. Cradling his elbow.

“Sergeant?”

“Shut the fuck up. Stay there.”

He flipped magazines and edged back toward the room where the machine gun and at least two Jihadis had been at work. He wasn’t going to mess it up now. No hot-dogging. Human being could live through a lot. Even two grenades.

At least one of them was cooked to serve. The second blast had blown the Jihadi halfway through the door. Dead meat.

That left at least one more.

Garcia heard a moan. Sounded real. But the bastard could be faking it.

He put a short burst into the room, then ducked back.

Fucker groaned again. Like he was trying to take a last shit before dying.

Garcia went in, ready to lay down another burst. By starlight and fireglow, he saw a figure gleaming with blood, propped against a wall in the settling dust. The man was alone, and his eyes were ablaze with the struggle for life. He was dying, but he wasn’t quitting.

Garcia knew what he was supposed to feel. Pity. Compassion. All that shit. But he didn’t feel it. Instead, he saw his mother dying of radiation sickness, her skull bald and raw, her body bent like a witch’s in a cartoon and her skin loose over Popsicle-stick bones.

He walked over to the Jihadi, got his attention, then put a bullet into his forehead.

“That’s for the City of Angels,” Garcia told him.

Lieutenant Colonel Patrick Cavanaugh just wanted to get off the beach. With all of his men and all of their gear. But the gentlest word that came to mind to describe the scene before him was “clusterfuck.”

“Nothing’s ever easy in the Big Red One,” the battalion command sergeant major said.

It was a popular saying among the junior enlisted troops. Typical soldier talk. But it was jarring to hear Sergeant Major Bratty even whisper anything that might be construed as critical of the Army he seemed to have joined at birth.

The sergeant major spat on a rock. “Brigade-forward’s somewhere up the road, sir. And the buggers down at the division forward CP wouldn’t even talk to me. ‘No time now, Sergeant Major.’ Like I was six years old.”

Cavanaugh smiled. Ruefully. “Well, nobody at the beachmaster’s set-up has time for a lowly lieutenant colonel. They haven’t done this in a while.”

“Neither have we, sir.”

“Neither have we.”

“But we’re not belly up.”

“No, we’re not.” But Cavanaugh wasn’t so sure they wouldn’t be belly up soon, if things didn’t start moving again.

“Think I’ll stroll on down and see if Sergeant MacKinley’s ever going to get Charlie 14 off that beach.” But the sergeant major didn’t stroll. He marched double-quick into the confusion roiling below, heading for the broken-down track.

Cavanaugh remained by the side of the road. The surface was already breaking up under the armored traffic. He glanced up along the line of Charlie Company’s Bradleys, vehicles more than twice the age of their drivers. Three times older, in some cases. Idling wasn’t good for them. The battalion had already had two go down before they left the beach. And spare parts were as rare as thoroughbred unicorns.

Captain Walker came up to him. Again.

“Any word about what’s holding us up, sir?”

“Jake, nothing’s changed since you asked me that ten mikes ago. You’re on the battalion and brigade nets. I don’t know anything you don’t.”

Have to watch Walker for nerves. But Cavanaugh understood. The desire to get up into the hills, to get into the fight, to go anywhere, just to move. Instead of sitting here, vehicles nose-to-butt because the one road that wound off the beach was backed up with traffic that had come to a dead stop and nobody knew why.

The maps, engineer briefings, and old sat photos showed a steep two-lane blacktop that could be blown out at dozens of points. One big boy broken down on a hairpin curve would be enough to stop the entire brigade.

Add to that the screw-up in the landing and march tables, with the brigade put on hold after 1/4 Cav went ashore so that two artillery battalions and an attack-drone squadron could be rushed forward. Followed by a jerk-the-leash resumption of the brigade’s landing operation.

And the Jihadis had a lock on them now. Waiting offshore in a made-to-sink “get-ashore boat,” one of the infamous GABs designed badly and built in haste, Cavanaugh had watched successive waves of drones pop up over the ridges and bluffs. He’d caught himself hoping only that none would hit the GABs carrying his battalion, as if wishing the fate on comrades outside of 1-18 Infantry.