The Living Will Envy The Dead

Nice, melbo. Easy peasy.

Byte

 

Ok guys...I told 'im to be careful what he asked for, didn't I?
I'm the same way, I read for pleasure and my mind corrects on the fly. Then, he asked for it...
If a proofreader is what he wants, no problem...
I'll expect my cut....when he publishes....

 

Now, can we get on with the "rest of the story"?
PLEASE?

 

Chapter Thirty-Nine

<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-comfficeffice" />
I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.
-Susan B. Anthony

In the night time, the Warriors were almost invisible.

In the night-vision goggles, they showed up clearly against the cooling landscape. They were much warmer than the surrounding air and their vehicles were warming still, marking easy targets for our sharpshooters. It was easy to see, through the goggles, that there was a certain method in their madness after all; the Warriors who were carrying burning torches – and were thus visible even in the darkness – were not leading a platoon of assaulting Warriors, but were running on their own. Ironically, the heat from the torches was confusing the goggles, although we were able to tune that out and react.

I keyed my radio, biting down the grin that was trying to plaster itself across my features. “Section One and Two, open fire on my command,” I ordered. “Single shots only; try not to miss.” I paused, watching as the enemy came closer, a swarm of hest signatures that were blending into one great mass. It was almost impossible, I was sure, for them to know where they were going – even the best NVG systems aren’t that good – and then I realised that they didn’t care. Their task was merely to seize the first wall and their orders, therefore, were just to keep going forward until they ran into it. “Fire!”

A volley of carefully-controlled shots rang out. Most of my sharpshooters, the ones I’d had equipped with night-vision gear, had had literally years of hunting experience in the surrounding area, even if they had only been taking pot-shots at rabbits. They knew just what they were doing and, more importantly, just how limited the ammunition supply actually was. They aimed for the head and, one by one, Warriors started to fall.

“We could give them a burst of machine gun fire,” Mac whispered in my ear. “In that kind of formation, they’d be mowed down like wheat.”

“Not yet,” I muttered back. I wasn’t entirely sure why the Warriors had seen fit to open their campaign in such a manner, but I didn’t want to reveal one of my surprises yet, not when it might prove decisive. The machine gun nests should be completely invisible to them until they actually opened fire. “Tell them to hold fire and wait for orders.”

“Yes, sir,” Mac said. Another round of shots rang out as the view through the NVG sets started to flicker. The Warriors were returning fire from positions all around the town, positions they’d occupied and secured under cover of darkness. Their shooting wasn't very accurate in the gloom – I guessed that they couldn’t have much in the way of night-vision gear themselves – but it forced us to try to keep our heads down. As a distraction, it worked beautifully. “I have reports from the other command posts, Ed; they’re repelling similar attacks from the surrounding area.”

“So we’re surrounded,” I said, bleakly. It wasn't that big a surprise, but it meant that there would be nowhere for us to run to if we lost the battle. This wasn't a simple FOB, or even another town, but the centre of the new government. If it fell, the Warriors would destroy, in a stroke, much of our remaining manpower. They would destroy the remaining towns within the month. “Remind them to conserve firepower as much as possible…”

“They know,” Mac reminded me. I recognised his mothering tone and nodded slightly. I had been overdoing the redundant orders, after all, and we hadn’t trained the men to be dumb cannon fodder. The best of them would have given my old Company a run for its money. “Do you hear that?”

I listened and heard the sound of vehicles revving up their engines. A moment later, they came into view on the night vision goggles, a trio of large trucks advancing towards us. A shell burst in the sky and suddenly the entire scene was illuminated in ghostly green light, sending everything into sharp relief. I pulled off the goggles, cursing under my breath, and saw a set of trucks advancing towards the first line of defences. I hadn’t expected a star shell, although in hindsight it made a certain kind of sense. They were used by the police to hunt for missing people in certain kinds of terrain. The Warriors must have looted it from a police station. My mind refused to admit the possibility that some policemen had gone over to the Warriors.

“Hellfire,” I muttered, as the vehicles came closer. The ghostly light made it easier to see just how heavily armoured the Warriors had made them, strapping on enough armour to make them reassemble some of the weirder vehicles we’d had in Iraq, after our standard vehicles had proven to be too lightly armoured for the task. Hell, perhaps the person pulling the strings had been in Iraq as well, although I didn’t want to consider that possibility either. Soldiers are generally good people, but some had broken under combat, or snapped and done terrible things. “I doubt that we can take those out with rifle fire.”

“No,” Mac agreed. The vehicles in question had once been heavy bulldozers, with similar tracks to a tank. Shooting out their wheels wasn't a possibility…and, judging from the armour, it wouldn’t be easy to kill the driver either. At least there weren't any human shields, I told myself, and sighed in relief. The Warriors either rated this entire attack force as expendable – which struck me as a bit unlikely – or they’d run out of human shields, which was also unlikely. It was fairly possible that they just hadn’t decided to bring them all the way from their bases, or maybe they were worried about a rebellion…

“Maybe they are expendable, after all,” I muttered. Daniel had given us figures that, I suspected, were at least an order of magnitude too high. We’d had enough trouble feeding four thousand men, women and children. The Warriors couldn’t have hosted and fed ten thousand men, let alone a hundred thousand, could they? I didn’t care how much they’d had in the way of stockpiled food; even a full-sized LOG would have had problems feeding that many for more than a month. I doubted that they really had more than ten thousand Warriors – after all, they had to feed the women and children as well – and if they were having problems, was it possible that they’d sent the men here to die? It struck me that they would probably see nothing wrong with a high friendly body count, after all. The men would have been killed in the service of God.

I said as much to Mac. “You’d think that they would be more efficient about it,” he said, as the lumbering vehicles came closer. I could see, now, that they had dozens of warriors sheltering behind them, using them as cover from the increasingly accurate fire from the ramparts. The Warriors providing covering fire kept trying to knock our men out with sweeps of gunfire, but they just didn’t have enough firepower to force us to keep our heads down all the time. It helped that we’d had time, now, to prepare the defences. It would take a series of lucky shots to knock out all of the first line. “They’re just killing some of those men for nothing, apart from costing us a bullet each.”

I nodded, peering through the goggles briefly at the dying men. Their bodies were cooling rapidly now that their hearts had creased to push blood around their internal organs. It would take them a while to cool off to local temperature, but there was no doubt that they were dead. I smiled, despite myself; I’d once heard about a British Apache pilot in Afghanistan who had captured top secret footage of a Afghan communal ****, of all things. He hadn’t known what he was seeing, at first, and had thought that they were up to something diabolical. In a sense, he’d been right…

It’s rather odd where my mind will go if I let it.

But the vehicles were still getting closer. “Section One, try and take them out,” I ordered, already suspecting that it would be futile. Sparks flashed in the semi-darkness – the green flare was burning out – but the vehicles came on, maybe even unaware that they were being shot at. I doubted that – if you’re inside a vehicle that is being targeted, you will know about it – but they showed no hesitation. Have I mentioned that I hate religious fanatics? “Section Three, hose them down?”

Section Three was one of the machine gun nests. I watched grimly as it opened fire, sending a stream of glowing red tracer into the lead vehicle, which was now making its final approach towards the walls. I cursed, angrily. If it were another truck bomb, I’d let it get far too close. The machine gun bullets hadn’t slowed it down either, or its two comrades, both of whom were spreading out to push against the wall. The only wounded were some of the Warriors who were trying to hide behind the trucks.

I swore and keyed my radio. “Section Seven, take them out,” I ordered. I hadn’t wanted to waste our remaining antitank weapons. We hadn’t had many of them in the first place and they were utterly irreplaceable. We could reload cartages and even produce more ammunition for pistols, rifles and machine guns, but not the antitank systems, not yet. “Remove them, now!”

The lead vehicle crunched into the wall and started to push. If the wall had just been made out of piled earth, as the papers I’d given our dear spy had suggested, that would have been disastrous. As it was, it ran into the concrete blocks and lead piping we’d strewn through the wall to secure it and jammed. I chuckled to myself, despite the growing danger; it was nice to know that the attempt to mislead the Warriors hadn’t failed completely. The Warriors adapted fast – for them. Their advance parties lunged forward, trying to get over the wall and into Ingalls, but the sharpshooters were too quick for them. Only one of them managed to get over the wall and he fell down into a minefield. Poor bastard. Judging from the explosion, his remains are currently flying around the Earth, or perhaps passing the Moon.

“Section Seven, engaging,” I heard, as the first missile was launched. The Warrior-modified bulldozers had been armoured against machine gun fire, but they hadn’t had any armour that was capable of standing up to an antitank rocket fired at close range. The delay caused by the need to get them in place had been costly, but not costly enough. I’d just had to hold the antitank weapons in reserve. “Missile away!”

The remaining two vehicles went up in a blaze of light, roasting the drivers and the men hiding behind them. I heard cheering coming from along the wall – I couldn’t blame the defenders in the slightest, even though part of me felt that it was unprofessional – as the remaining Warrior infantry fell back into the darkness. The flare burned out completely and, this time, the Warriors didn’t bother to launch another one into the air. Darkness fell across the land.

“We held them,” Mac said, tightly, “but at what cost?”

“Report,” I ordered. “Sound off by sections.”

The results came in and I swore. We’d fired off too much ammunition in the battle, even though little of it had been wasted, and we’d lost seven men. It was a tiny loss, compared to the hundreds of Warriors who had been killed in the fighting, but it was still a serious matter. They had thousands of men to burn – and probably intended to get a few thousand of them killed – and we couldn’t afford to lose a single person. They were all desperately needed to help us stay alive over the coming months and years. The Warriors, like all religious fanatics, just didn’t care.

You see, that’s the point that many on the Left seem to miss. The nations that take part in the Great Game are generally careful and conservative about how they play the game. They can’t smash the board if they’re losing, or launch a nuclear attack; they know that retaliation will be swift and dreadful. Terrorists and religious fanatics, however, don’t care if they smash the board and believe me, it’s not as easy as it sounds to wreck dreadful vengeance upon a terrorist group. We can tolerate a rogue nation far easier than we can tolerate a terrorist group, no matter how nutty or trendy their cause is…because they don’t have any attachment to the world we all share. They don’t care if people suffer, as long as they get what they want? You want to know something funny? Guess – if you can – who gets the worst treatment from Al Qaida. That’s right – their fellow Muslims. It’s amazing – and horrifying – what you can do if you think that God is on your side and everything you do is justified in His name.

And the Warriors wouldn’t care if they doomed us all, them included, as long as they took us down with them.

The battle dimmed down to sporadic sniping from both sides, keeping us awake despite the hour and exhausting us. I was morally certain that some of the Warrior formations – if they actually had formations – were taking the chance to catch some rest, but we could barely take that risk ourselves. If we’d had a group of men caught napping, we might not be able to get them back into the defence line before the Warriors launched another attack. But if they didn’t rest…

“****,” I said, grimly. “Mac, pull half of the men out of the line and send them to get some rest, but tell them to keep their weapons with them. If they attack, we’ll wake them up and put them back into the line, but for now we’ll make sure they get some sleep.”

Mac nodded once and set off to carry out my orders. He would have argued if he had disagreed – I knew that he would have done that, regardless of proper protocol, such as it was – and the absence of argument meant that he agreed, but like me, he knew the risks. There’s an argument that runs that the best time to launch an attack is near dawn, when the defender is tired and disorientated – although I always wondered if that meant that the attacker would also be tired and disorientated – and I wanted the soldiers refreshed before dawn broke. The remainder weren't being abandoned either. They would have a chance to get something to drink – coffee, mainly, from our handful of remaining supplies – eat and go to the toilet, if they needed to go. I doubted that the Warriors took such good care of their people, although they might well produce sex slaves for the men to relieve themselves before they returned to the fight.

“You need to get some sleep as well,” Mac said firmly, when he returned. “Lie down on that blanket there and get some sleep, or you won’t be any good in the morning.”

“I thought that there was some…you know, authority with this position of mine,” I said, tiredly. Mac needed to sleep as well, of course, but both of us were too keyed up to sleep easily. “You shouldn’t be giving me orders.”

“Authority? What nonsense,” Mac teased. “Whatever gave you that idea?”

I laughed, yawned, and found a semi-comfortable position to sleep in on the blanket, trusting Dutch to wake us up if there was any trouble. I had long ago mastered the art of falling asleep quickly when given an opportunity to sleep, but I was no longer as young as I had been and the night was far from peaceful. The Warriors did everything from shooting random shots in our general direction to launching fireworks randomly into the air, sending new and strange noises echoing out over the land. It was an attempt to keep us awake, I knew, and it was working. It was so hard to just relax and fall asleep, these days…and I knew, now, just how some of the Generals had felt during the Iraq War. They probably had developed ulcers as well.

It felt like nothing, as if no time had passed at all, but Dutch was shaking me awake as dawn started to break. The noise hadn’t faded at all, but it was all noise, no action beyond a sharply unpleasant sniper’s duel that had been going on for the last few hours. Patty and Stacy later told me that they’d won the duel against their evil counterparts, but they’d been pushed to the limit by a very good opponent. It was a shame that not all of the Warriors were just cannon fodder.

“Wake up,” Dutch said, grimly. “Their reinforcements have arrived.”

I shook myself, swallowed a mouthful of scalding hot coffee and pushed my binoculars to my eyes. I felt as if I’d drunk myself senseless the night before, but the sight before us made me sober up in a hurry. The Warriors had brought the full might of their army to play.

“It’s the same at the other two posts,” Dutch said, grimly. “They tried to send small parties into the defences overland, but we picked them all off and killed them. This time, I think they’re going to go for the direct approach.”

“Get the remainder of the defenders on the walls,” I ordered, tightly. The ground was covered with Warriors for as far as the eye could see. Perhaps, part of my tired mind wondered, Daniel hadn’t been that far wrong after all. “And contact Richard. Tell him we’re going to need him.”

The Warriors howled their challenge and moved to the attack.


Chapter Forty

I have no problem with religion. Except when people follow them religiously.
-Jonah Fox

This time, I realised numbly, they were playing it smarter. A dozen vehicles, ranging from a pair of massive trucks to more bulldozers, advanced towards us, while a withering hail of fire forced us to keep our heads down. I swore, watching as sparks bounced off the sides of the armoured trucks, and ordered the antitank weapons to take out the bulldozers. Our last antitank rounds lanced out and destroyed the bulldozers, along with the men crouching behind them, but the remainder of the vehicles kept advancing. Two of the trucks were riddled with machine gun fire – I allowed myself to imagine a slave carefully choosing substandard armour, just on the off-chance that the Warriors would attack someone who was armed to the teeth – and sputtered to a half, but it wasn't enough to stop the remaining vehicles. One by one, they reached the first defence line…and detonated. The resulting explosion blew a hole right through the wall. A second later, three more vehicles detonated, enlarging the breech.

They really don’t care, I realised, in numb astonishment. At least a hundred Warriors had been killed by their own ****ing fire and they didn’t seem to care for an instant. The death toll among the previous assaults would have been enough to discourage any rational commander from repeating it, but it seemed that the Warriors were not rational at all. Using their makeshift tanks, they advanced closer and closer, while the effects of the breech forced us to defend the wall. They might have only covered a tractor or two with armour and mounted machine guns on the top, but they were terrifyingly impressible, not least because we had just fired off the remainder of our antitank weapons.

“Clever,” Mac said, examining the lead ‘tank.’ “We should have thought of that. I think they’ve actually taken a tractor engine out of the tractor and placed it in another vehicle entirely, just to give them the right structure for a tank.”

I had to agree. Every third person in the countryside has some mechanical knowledge, ranging from kids who don’t want to have to pay expensive repairmen to work on their cars, to experienced former tankers and maintenance officers who want to run a quiet gas station, while building their dream vehicles. The Warriors wouldn’t have had any difficulty finding people with the right set of skills to build tanks from the First World War…and hell, they might well dominate the remainder of the United States. There had to be some more modern tanks left somewhere, but God alone knew where. I had thought about sending an expedition to the USMC base at Quantico, but judging from the apparent Russian targeting pattern, the Marine Corps base had been singled out for special attention. It would be something to do later, when the war had been won and our survival was assured.

“If we get out of this alive, we’ll build some of our own,” I agreed. The concept was so simple that it should have occurred to one of us, particularly the ones who had spent most of their lives studying warfare. On the other hand, First World War tanks hadn’t had the firepower of their later siblings, nor the survivability. They might reach the minefield intact – which was looking increasingly likely – but there was no guarantee that they would survive the first mine. First World War tanks were historically weak on underbelly armour…and it was just possible that the Warriors had made the same mistake. “They’re not going to get past the mines.”

I hoped I was right as the first wave of Warrior vehicles crept up closer to the breech in the first wall and came face to face with the second wave of defences, while trying desperately to suppress our covering fire. Their armoured vehicles might be relatively safe from our rifles and machine guns, but their soldiers didn’t even have police-issue body armour, which suggested just how important they were to their superiors. They kept advancing regardless, ignoring the increasing number of their comrades who were shot down like dogs, as the tanks advanced into the minefield. There was a pause, chillingly pregnant with possibilities…and then the lead tank went up with a tremendous explosion. The shockwaves detonated other mines, sending red-hot shrapnel through the air and scything down dozens of Warriors, but the remainder held their positions.

“Section Six, you’re up,” I said. The Warriors were trying to funnel hundreds of their soldiers through the breech now, heedless of the danger from mines…or wire, or IEDs, or other unpleasant surprises, trying to push their way through by brute force. The better-trained ones were hanging back, carrying Mortars into engagement range, and preparing to bombard the trenches and our inner defences. “Hit them as hard as you can.”

“Engaging,” the reply crackled back. We’d positioned the Mortars carefully and computed all of the possible angles of attack. I hadn’t predicted the exact location of the breech, but I hadn’t needed to predict it to have the mortars prepared before the attack began. The operators opened fire at once and started to pound the Warriors as they flooded through the breech…and started to die in the minefield. “Shells away, sir!”

I watched, as dispassionately as I could, as the Warrior attack started to disintegrate. They might have been prepared for mines and rifle fire – hell, they’d brought along a very good counter to the latter, while the former could only work once – but they hadn’t expected the mortars so soon, with such accurate fire. The shells landed amongst their lead forces and blew them into bloody chunks of flesh. The survivors hesitated, caught between the devil and the deep blue sea, and then stumbled forward blindly. They ran right into the barbed wire and were rapidly caught, pinned down and unable to disentangle themselves. Their screams were nightmarish and, even though I knew it was what the Warriors wanted me to do, I gave the order.

“Stacy, Patty, take them out,” I ordered. I should have left them alive, perhaps, in the hopes that it would convince the remainder of the Warriors to give up, but the noise had been too much to bear. They died, one by one, and it was probably a relief to them, after everything they’d been though. The remainder of the Warriors kept advancing, now under the cover of their own mortars, and I realised that they were going to push through the second defence line. They had detonated almost all of the mines.

My radio crackled. “Boss, this is eye in the sky,” it said. The balloon had gone up again at first light, in more ways than one. “They’re bringing up more vehicles and hundreds more soldiers…and they’re targeting all three gates.”

I nodded, too tired to swear. The enemy strategy might have been cold-blooded and utterly ruthless, but it made an evil kind of sense. They’d pinned us down, forced us to divide our strength to defend all three of the routes into Ingalls…and forced us to expend all of our antitank ammunition. They might have problems getting the tank-like vehicles over the mines, but if they had some left when they broke through the final defence line, we would be reduced to rolling grenades under the vehicles and praying.

“If we get out of this alive,” I said, to Mac, “remind me to get the Constitutional Convention to make it a law that everyone has to have plenty of weapons and ammunition in their homes. If we’d had a much bigger ammunition dump…”

“We would have broken the Warriors like twigs,” Mac agreed. “Should we make it legal that everyone has their own tank as well?”

“You’re not helping,” I said. The thought reminded me of an old retired Marine somewhere east who’d had his own private museum of former military vehicles, all still in working order. We’d looted a set of vehicle museums and used them to outfit part of our army, but we hadn’t recovered any working tanks. There had been a set of tanks on display, but a brief examination had revealed that – owing to safety regulations – the innards had all been removed. I just hoped that the stupid bastard who’d come up with that idea had been killed in a most horrible manner when the bombs went off. He’d doomed us all. “We may have to pull back to the town itself.”

My radio buzzed. “Another truck bomb approaching, sir…”

The explosion shook the ground, blowing both a massive hole in the defences and the Warrior ranks. It was yet another display of their fundamental lack of concern for their own people, but this time, as they swarmed through the gap, they ran into a carefully-prepared minefield. This minefield didn’t explode until they were almost at the third wall, despite the presence of strands of barbed wire and other nasty surprises, and then detonated, with every mine going up simultaneously. We’d primed it just right. They lost their legs, but they survived the blasts…if only for a given value of survived. Their screams echoed out on the air.

“Poor bastards,” Mac said. The Warriors seemed almost to be wavering, as they had before, but their leaders sent another line of fanatics into the breech before their wavering could turn to outright mutiny. The two sides duelled mortars rapidly as the next set of vehicles emerged, only to be bracketed by my mortars and brought to a half, burning merrily away. If the drivers survived the first shots, they died horribly, burned to a crisp or killed when the ammunition started to detonate. “How many of the ****ers do they have?”

I keyed my radio. “CP1, CP3, report,” I ordered. “What’s happening to you?”

“Holding them at the first line,” CP1 reported. “They’re holding back, sir; they’re just keeping us pinned down!”

“They’re snared in the second line,” CP3 said. “We’re killing them by the bucket load, sir!”

“Oh, good,” I said. That meant that the Warriors, having forced a practicable breech at CP2, were concentrating their efforts on making the hole wider and breaking through. It was almost reassuring to know that they had some limits on their manpower; as odd as it might seem, I hadn’t believed it beforehand. “Mac, we may need to go nuclear.”

Mac gave me a sharp glance. “Are you sure you want to use the gas?”

“I think we’re running out of options,” I said. The Warriors were continuing to bombard us with mortar fire and their shells seemed never-ending. Their targeting wasn't that good, but as a distraction, it was hellishly effective. It was also killing our people behind the lines, despite our best efforts, and setting parts of the town on fire. It might even prove decisive in the long run. “Give them enough time and they’ll be through the walls and into the town. If that happens…”

“We’re ****ed,” Mac agreed. Even if we drove them back out of the town, the resulting damage would finish Ingalls. “Is there anything from Richard?”

“Nothing new, but he wouldn’t have sent anything,” I said. We’d agreed on a series of communications codes for transmission, if there was a problem, but the system was limited. The Warriors would probably be listening in to our transmissions and, despite our best efforts, we didn’t have a properly secure net. “We can only hope that he’s coming as we planned.”

A mortar shell landed near enough for us both to feel the wave of heat. “I know,” Mac said. “I’ll give the order at once.”

I peered through the growing haze of smoke and fire surrounding the defence line. “Wait a moment,” I said, as a line of Warriors spilled over a wall and into one of the manned positions. There was a brief and savage hand-to-hand fight, and then the Warriors were forced back out again. “Give the order to fall back to the final line now, and then order the mortars to go to rapid fire, danger close.”

“Yes, sir,” Mac said. He keyed his own radio and started to issue orders. “They’re on their way, sir.”

I nodded. Danger close is a military term for calling in a strike – air or artillery, mainly – significantly close to your own forces. It’s not something regarded as a good idea – back during the war, you needed to get authorisation at first from higher up before you could do it – because of the risk of a blue-on-blue, a friendly fire incident. It had been chancy enough in Iraq, but far more so here, without any of the precision weapons we’d deployed in the sandbox. I wouldn’t have taken the risk, but we needed time to evacuate the outer defence lines and the only way to get that time was to hammer the Warriors silly.

The explosions grew louder and more constant, hacking away at the remains of our own defences as well as the Warriors who were swarming over them, but it provided enough cover to get our men out of the area. I watched as Warriors, stunned out of their fanatical trance by the blasts, staggered around, looking as if they were wondering what the hell they were doing there. Shell-shock had probably brought them back to their senses, but in their current state, they were not going to survive long enough to rebel against their former masters. I considered, just for a moment, trying to rescue them, but it was too late. The Warriors had sent in a massive line of fanatics, pushing through the gap we’d opened for them.

I took a long breath and keyed my radio. “Section Ten,” I said, feeling as if I was going to be sick, “you are cleared to open fire. Four shells only, I repeat, four shells only.”

The problem we had faced with deploying the gas was that deploying chemical weapons of any kind isn’t quite as easy as the media makes it sound. Sure, you can pump them out of the air vents, if you happen to have air vents (we didn’t), but it’s a lot harder to deliver them by artillery fire. It’s actually worse for biological weapons. Use the wrong delivery system and you’d end up destroying your own weapon. Section Ten had a pair of specially modified mortars and I was sweating even that. A lucky enemy shot and we’d be hosted on our own petard.

“Shells away, sir,” the mortar team sent back, finally. “Holding further fire.”

I watched, as dispassionately as I could, as the gas started to billow around the Warriors. We’d chosen something simple enough – I won’t go into the details, for obvious reasons – that had to be breathed in to be effective. The chemists had claimed that they could produce a genuine nerve agent, one that would kill even if it touched a person’s bare skin, but I had rejected that concept with horror, not least because it might be just as effective at killing us. The gas we’d produced had to be breathed in and didn’t have a long life. It required a certain concentration to be effective and that wouldn’t last for long. The Warriors didn’t see the gas or didn’t recognise the danger and kept coming forward. They died in twitching agony.

“We’re going to burn for this,” I said, watching their struggles. They didn’t stand a chance. They didn’t even have facemasks, let alone any other kind of protection. Daniel had hinted that the Warriors had gas programs of their own, but they hadn’t prepared for it at all, or maybe they just hadn’t rated the Warriors they’d sent against us as worth saving. How many of them, I wondered desperately, did they want to die?

The irony was darkly amusing. I’d spent part of my career trying to ensure that such weapons would never fall into the hands of a lunatic with a grudge against America or the rest of the world, and here I was trying to use them. How could I condemn Saddam, or Kim, or one of the other bastards who turned chemical weapons on their own population when I’d used it on my fellow Americans? The only answer I found, and it wasn’t a very good answer, was that they were trying to kill me, my town and my people.

On second thoughts, perhaps it was the best answer of all.

“They’re still coming,” Mac said. I swore. The gas was dispersing already, but the Warrior preachers were still driving the Warriors onwards to battle, despite their increasingly desperate resistance. I was watching the entire Warrior movement coming apart in front of me, but it might yet take us down with it. A pair of truck bombs drove right into the gassed area and detonated, scattering the gas far and wide, dispersed too much to be dangerous. “****!”

Another wave of Warriors appeared, lunching at the final defence line. This was it, the final battle. My people sensed it as clearly as it did, launching every weapon they had into the midst of the enemy force, no longer caring about running dry as they struggled to kill the Warriors before they killed them. The Warriors kept coming, climbing over the dead bodies of their comrades in a desperate attempt to get at us, piling up their own dead like matchwood. It was madness, unholy madness; they were killing themselves just to bring us down with them…

“It’s been nice knowing you,” Mac said, as he unslung his assault rifle and prepared to go join the final defence. The stink of burning flesh reached us as a flamethrower did its evil work. “I wouldn’t change anything for the world.”

“I would,” I said, darkly. Mac blinked at me. “I would have brought more weapons here.”

The Warriors howled as they broke into our lines, slashing into the midst of the defenders…

And then the cavalry arrived.


Chapter Forty-One

No proceeding is better than that which you have concealed from the enemy until the time you have executed it. To know how to recognize an opportunity in war, and take it, benefits you more than anything else. Nature creates few men brave, industry and training makes many. Discipline in war counts more than fury.
-Niccolò Machiavelli

There are only two ways to defeat an army composed of fanatics; kill them all, or break their faith. We’d employed both in Iraq. An army that has a sublime belief in a certain overwhelming victory, regardless of the losses and setbacks, can only be broken by being broken of that belief, or by being annihilated. The Warriors of the Lord, I had decided after the defeat near Summersville, could be broken if we could hit them hard enough. The trick had been hitting them hard enough to break their faith in victory and their leaders.

You’d have thought that their rough handling at the FOB, their treatment of prisoners and their own treatment by their leaders would have broken their soldiers’ faith in them, but they’d had terrifying lives ever since the bombs had fallen. They weren't the type of people to complain about bad treatment – it was better than trying to survive on their own, or becoming a slave for the Warriors – and hell, there were rewards. As for the treatment of prisoners, particularly female prisoners…so what? They didn’t have any fear of possible future consequences, while the consequences for not joining in the mass rapes and punishment sessions would be severe. It was one of the many reasons why the idea of an overarching legal code to cover warfare was doomed from the start. There was nothing that a vague future court could threaten the soldiers with that could contrast with their suffering in the here and now. Alone, placed in extreme danger, they did as they were told and didn’t worry about the rightness of their cause…and, after all, if they won the war, they would write the history books. I never liked the theory of war crimes anyway. The war criminal is only a war criminal if his side loses. How is he to know what is a war crime and what was a perfectly legitimate tactic? Answer; the other side would tell him, once they’d won the war. How could that be fair or legal?

“They’re here,” Mac said, in relief. They’d arrived in the nick of time. “The Warriors are going to be ****ing broken!”

We’d prepared as many vehicles as we could and sent them to Stonewall, accompanied by our best drivers and gunners. (We hadn’t thought of primitive tanks, though; that had been a Warrior innovation.) They’d waited there, behind the walls in the sealed vehicle park that also held some armoured trucks that had been used to transport prisoners, in happier times. They’d been armoured to levels that made some of the military vehicles I’d seen look unprotected, just to ensure that the prisoner’s friends couldn’t liberate him on his way to the courtroom for the umpteenth appeal. It had been known to happen. Richard had been given command of the detachment with instructions to bring the vehicles right into the flank of the Warrior lines, supported by assaults from high above. We were throwing everything we had into one final battle.

The noise was terrifyingly loud as the vehicles opened fire, raking great streams of tracer into the massed ranks of the Warriors. They’d lost their caution, such as it was, when they’d pushed their way into the final defence lines and their men had been lined up like cattle, hundreds of them. They were easy targets for the machine guns mounted on the vehicles and most of them didn’t even hit the ground or try to defend themselves.

I keyed my radio. “Rose,” I said, “bring up the women.”

The noise grew louder as the women emerged from their revenants to join the defenders, who were pushing the Warriors back as they realised that they’d been outflanked. I couldn’t believe that they hadn’t even bothered to watch for threats from outside Ingalls, but perhaps they had and the message had simply gotten lost in the confusion. Someone historian would probably draw up a complete plan of the battle and swear blind that I had had a definite battle plan, rather than something I’d just pulled together in a hurry. The Warriors would probably find themselves the heroes, then the villains, and then the heroes again. That’s how historical revisionism works.

“They’re breaking,” Mac shouted, in delight. We could see it now; the massed ranks of the Warriors, once so united for a purpose, were breaking apart. The dead and dying littered the battlefield everywhere as their lines collapsed into bloody chaos. Here and there, holdouts were still fighting desperately, but they knew that it was a losing game, even if it were the only one left to them. They probably expected that we would kill them on the spot. Others were running for their lives, doubtless fearing that we would put a shot through their backs if they didn’t run fast enough, although I wondered where they would go. I doubted that the Prophet would be so happy to see them after they had lost the war.

I found myself humming Jonnie Cope under my breath and forced myself to stop.

“Good,” I said. The disintegration process was growing rapidly as other warriors attempted to surrender, throwing down their guns and putting their hands in the air. Several of them were shot down by their preachers for daring to surrender, but a single burst of machine gun fire sent most of them to their lord. I was sure that he had prepared a warm welcome for them, after everything they’d done in his name. I keyed my radio and called Richard. “Richard, hit them with the surrender demand, now.”

“Yes, sir,” Richard replied. His voice boomed out over the battlefield. “SURRENDER NOW. THROW DOWN YOUR GUNS, KEEP YOUR HANDS IN THE AIR AND YOU WILL BE SPARED!” The noise had to be heard to be believed. Some of the Warriors had probably been struck deaf by the racket, if they hadn’t been deaf already firing their weapons. “SURRENDER AND YOU WILL LIVE!”

The fighting was starting to die down as the pockets of resistance were quickly eliminated. Hundreds of warriors – former Warriors, I guessed – wanted to surrender, allowing us to wipe out the pockets of hardcore fighters quickly and brutally. Some of their preachers, I wasn't surprised to see, had broken along with their men, pleading for mercy and fearing that it would never come. Others had tried to flee and had been shot in the back. I liked to think, later, that some of their own soldiers had killed them as they fled. The hardcore fighters had probably accounted for most of them.

(The Warriors who were attacking the other two positions melted away when they realised that we had broken the main attack. They were a persistent pain in the ass – bandits and insurgents – for the next few years. On the other hand, plenty of people earned their spurs fighting them.)

“We won,” Mac said, astonished. The dead and dying littered the battlefield; hundreds of bodies, thousands of lives lost or ruined. “I thought that we were about to die bravely on the battlefield.”

“Me too,” I admitted. We shared a laugh for a long moment. It felt damn good to laugh after all the horrors we’d seen. We had broken the Warriors of the Lord and they wouldn’t have time to regroup before we completed the task of destroying them. “I suppose we’d better deal with the prisoners.”

I was tempted just to herd them all together and turn the machine guns on them – the reports from everywhere they’d occupied had been roundly unpleasant – but human decency prevailed. The prisoners looked utterly terrified now that their faith had been broken, a handful muttering away to themselves, others just staring at us as if they couldn’t believe how stupid they’d been. Part of me felt a little sorry for them, part of me remembered their victims and resolved that it would be a long time before I trusted them enough to let them go back to being free men.

Richard passed me the megaphone and I put it to work. “Attention,” I said, loudly enough to be heard right down the valley towards Summersville. We were going to have to go there next, once we’d secured the prisoners and seen to our wounded, just to liberate them and keep pushing the Warriors until they broke completely. “Listen very carefully. It will keep you alive. You were captured in battle and we have a perfect right to shoot you out of hand if you cause trouble. Obey our orders, answer our questions, and you might just live to rebuild your lives. Disobey and we’ll kill you and move on to the next prisoner.”

I wasn't bluffing, either. One by one, the prisoners were frisked under guard, their pockets emptied of everything from spare ammunition to tiny bibles, including one apparently written by the Prophet Zechariah himself, their hands secured and sent to sit in a field. Yes, it was rather cruel, but I wasn’t in the mood to take chances with men who had proven themselves to be dangerous, very dangerous, to their victims. Some of them, broken of the brainwashing and conditioning, might make useful citizens later on, but they had to prove themselves first. We weren't going to take chances. A pair of men stood up to protest their treatment – they must have been lawyers before the war, I decided; only lawyers would have been so dumb – and were promptly shot down. The remainder, after feeling the blood splashing over their bodies, decided to shut up. It was wise of them.

“Separate the preachers from the rest of them and move them up to Stonewall,” I ordered. “Put them through a rigorous interrogation program and compare their answers; feel free to hurt them as much as you need to get them to talk.” Richard nodded. “Send anything important, such as the number of remaining Warriors of the Lord, down to us through the radio. Biggles will relay it if necessary, but we can’t stay here, not now that they’re on the run.”

“I understand,” Richard said. I had wondered if he would feel resentment at me for taking over his flying column – the 7<SUP>th</SUP> Cavalry, as I had mentally dubbed it, although the original 7<SUP>th</SUP> Cavalry had been wiped out at Little Big Horn – but he was eager to get the prisoners under control. We’d taken over three hundred prisoners and killed perhaps ten times that number; minor, on the scale of World War Two, but hellishly significant compared to the number of people left alive after the Final War. “Good luck, sir.”

I mounted one of the armoured cars – Mac had quietly, but firmly prevented me from climbing into the lead vehicle – and we set off down the road back down towards the FOB…and Summersville. We were all on tenterhooks, tired, but very aware of the possibility that we might win the war in the next few hours, and that gave us strength and determination to continue. We passed a handful of Warriors on the run as we drove down, mainly preachers who had abandoned their men, and asked for their surrender. A pair of preachers tried to fight and were promptly gunned down; the remainder surrendered, were cuffed, and left by the side of the road. We’d pick them up later.

“Take a swing around the FOB,” Mac suggested, and I nodded. The FOB might have been in enemy hands, but there might well be some mines and other unexploded surprises in the surrounding area. The engineers who had prepared the defences had been left behind at Ingalls, deemed too important to risk. They’d been furious about it, but I hadn’t budged at all. They were going to be a damn sight more important than me in the coming days. “Dutch, want to take a look up there?”

Dutch nodded and the pair of them led a company of men back to the FOB. I had to wait for the all-clear before the remainder of the force went up to the position we’d held with stubborn determination, but all we found was a handful of prisoners and several dead preachers. They hadn’t been killed fighting, either; they’d been killed after surrender, once we found the girls. The oldest of them couldn’t have been more than fourteen. What happened to them I wouldn’t have wished upon my ex-girlfriend.

“Bastards,” I said, once I’d seen the bodies. They still haunt me today, those terribly small and broken bodies. “Next time, make them dig their own graves first.”

We paused to take pictures of the sight – I wasn't going to have some bastard of a revisionist historian claiming that the Warriors had been the good guys, like they did for pretty much every other evil set of bastards in history, not if I could help it – and returned to our vehicles, speeding down the road towards Summersville. We dismounted close to the defences we’d helped them build, back before we had even a vague idea that the Warriors existed, and advanced carefully. Mac, again, wouldn’t let me take the lead.

I had feared that we were advancing into a ghost town, like some of the burned-out ruins we had scavenged in, back before we’d discovered the Warriors, but there were a small number of defenders left in the town. It gave me that sense of Déjà vu all over again; back when we had confronted CORA, we had had to rescue prisoners who had been held in a group of warehouses. We’d passed the mass graves on the way, but I hoped that some of the town’s population would have survived. The Warriors wouldn’t have killed them all, would they?

We stopped when a fifteen-year-old girl appeared, holding what passed for a white flag on the end of a stick in her hand. It was actually a piece of ladies underwear, but we understood the message clearly. I allowed Roshanda to talk to her, girl to girl; beside, Roshanda should have understood what the poor girl had been through.

“Hi, honey,” Roshanda said, gently. “What do they want you to say for them?”

The girl could barely speak. I traced out bruises and marks on what I could see of her flesh and felt my anger growing inside my heart. My men had similar feelings. The mutterings behind me were growing darker and darker by the minute. They’d beaten her, treated her as a slave and probably raped her as well. They would be lucky if we just killed them once we had our hands on them. No one deserved that sort of treatment, no one. Not for the first time, I cursed the politicians who had gotten us into the war.

“They said to tell you that they could kill everyone here like they killed daddy,” the girl said. It was a little girl’s voice, hardly the mature confident voice of an assertive American teenage girl. She might not have spent long under their control, but it had been long enough to break her, body and soul. “They said that they wanted safe conduct and if you agreed not to kill them, they would let us all go.”

They must have had a radio link to their army, I thought, angrily. I hated hostage situations. I don’t know a single law enforcement officer who doesn’t hate them. This one was worse; we had to have those women and children back, just to give birth to more children. We needed them desperately.

“Very well,” I said, reluctantly. “Go back and tell them that if they come out now, without weapons, I won’t kill them.”

She nodded and turned to trot back towards their defences. I followed her with my eyes, spying out the enemy locations. I wished that I had had time to question her properly, but she had been too fragile for any such harsh questioning. It would also have risked her life. I doubted that the Warriors would have spared her if they had suspected we’d had time to question her. She vanished inside and there was a long pause.

”Damn it, Boss,” Mac said, very quietly. “You’re not going to let them get away with this, are you?”

“Hell, no,” I said. I already had a plan, such as it was. Maybe it was just my growing sense of the battlefield, but I was increasingly sure that we had broken the main body of the Warrior army. “Once we deal with this lot, we keep moving southwards and deal with the rest of them.”

The lead Warrior stepped out, hands held in plain sight, followed by a handful of others, all preachers. There were no real fighters amongst them, much to my relief, just a handful who turned out to have been left to mind the broken town while the army moved on to new conquests. They looked terrified as they saw our faces, but as they remembered the bargain, they started to look more confident. What could we do to them, they wondered, that wouldn’t break the agreement?

I stepped into their quarters and was nearly sick. I had known that it would be bad, but the conditions were appalling. The women and children, over three hundred of them, had been kept in a warehouse, in conditions that I wouldn’t have wished upon anyone, even my worst enemy. I won’t describe it, but leave it to your imagination. I’d bet ten dollars that you won’t imagine anything worse than what we saw. There were hostages in Iraq who were kept in better conditions than this. We took a moment to check that they hadn’t left any nasty surprises behind, and then called up the nurses to help tend to them. It would be touch and go for some of them. They might not survive the year.

We stepped back outside. The Warriors still looked cocky, if slightly nervous, but I was in no mood for games. “Take aim,” I ordered. The men lifted their weapons and took aim at them. They stared at us for a moment, and then they started to shout, everything from pleading to frantic denials. “Fire.”

Yes, I broke my word. I admit it.

But they deserved it.

Just ask their victims.

 

Oh, I may be a sadistic bas***d, but I do love the sweet taste of revenge...even if it isn't mine!
Now, is this the last chapter?
or more yet to come?
Good reading!
Congrats on the whole!

 

Chapter Forty-Two<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-comfficeffice" />

Only the dead have seen the end of war.
&shy;-Plato

The next fortnight passed very quickly.

We advanced, quickly and brutally, against the Warriors wherever we found them. Using the interrogation results from the various prisoners, all of whom proved surprisingly willing to talk even without being tortured, we located and invested a dozen towns that had been overrun and occupied by the Warriors, even as we moved southeast towards their stronghold. The story was always the same, although the level of devotion kept changing. One town had successfully rebelled against the occupation and killed all of the Warriors in the town, another had tried to rebel, failed, and had been burned to the ground. We saw more bodies in the fortnight than we had seen ever since we had started to creep out of Ingalls to explore the surrounding area.

I was determined not to give them a chance to recover after the destruction of their main army – indeed, their only army. They’d made their best attempt at crushing us early on and had lost most of their army trying, with the remainder surrendering or fleeing into the surrounding area to become bandits. I was fairly sure that we would wipe them out fairly quickly, as long as they didn’t have a chance to recover. It was unlikely that they would get that chance. Unlike some insurgent groups, they were hated beyond words by most of the people who had to live with them, who were just waiting for a chance to stick a knife in their backs. The further south we pushed towards New Jerusalem – as they had come to call their fortress - the more the chaos spread, with Warriors being defeated and crushed by their slaves. My army swelled ever larger as we assimilated the remaining rebels and brought them into the fold. They wanted revenge as much as we wanted it, with a little extra determination to avenge their lost families…and their lives. They would never have had a chance to survive and prosper under the Warriors and they knew it.

We saw strange and horrific sights as we proceeded into what had once been called Kentucky. The Warriors hadn’t hesitated to push their social system as far forward as they could and the results had been devastating. There were entire communities set up to push forward the Warriors message on innocent male kids, stolen from their relatives at an early age and brought up among fanatical believers. The kids who would become the Taliban, I recalled reading, had been treated the same way. They’d been kept apart from girls, taught that females were always subordinated to the men, and naturally they’d believed it. The results had been horrific and, if we hadn’t nipped it in the bud, would have come to America. The perverted religion would have been different, but the result would have been the same.

Give me the child at five and I will shape his life…

Others hadn’t been so lucky. We encountered mass graves, dug by slave labour and used for rebels, dissidents and Muslims, along with a handful of others who had refused to renounce their prior religion. The Warriors God was a jealous God, it seemed, and the Warriors had devastated any area that refused to bend the knee to them. The women had been worst off of all. The lucky ones had become wives of the Warriors and treated reasonably well – but always subordinate to the men, always homemakers, nothing more – while the unlucky ones had become whores, or worse. They’d copied us, insofar as pregnant women got the best food, but past that…the treatment of women had been terrifying. In primitive societies, women always get the short end of the stick, sometimes literally. The feminists who talk about how Adam and Eve had been equals in the Garden of Eden have no perspective at all. Their lives, in the dark ages, would have been nasty, brutish and short.

It was easy enough to locate New Jerusalem; the freed slaves and labourers were more than happy to point us in the right direction. I wasn't about to launch an unplanned assault, however, not when they’d had years to prepare for any attack. They might have expected the Federal Government to launch an assault – according to some elements of the religious right, Christianity is the most persecuted religion in pre-war America, which is ludicrous when you think about it – or someone like us to come along in the early days after the war, but New Jerusalem was armed to the teeth. They had believed, as an article of faith, that the apocalypse would come…and it had come, in the form of a nuclear war. They’d had the advance knowledge the rest of us wish we’d had. Score one for religious fundamentalists…

And yet, if they had been kind and decent, as Jesus had taught, they could have reshaped the country gently, in their image. They could have organised relief, fed the refugees and pushed them into helping themselves. They had had enough guns and food to ensure that their agenda would dominate the new America, but instead they’d built a theocracy that was collapsing as we pushed east, it’s belief in its own supremacy utterly crushed. The news of the defeat had moved south-eastwards at the speed of light, quite literally, and the Warriors had been broken. I half-hoped that they would surrendered quickly and put an end to the war.

“I might have made a mistake,” I admitted to Mac, as we studied the defences from what we fervently hoped was a safe distance. The walls of New Jerusalem were strong, against both friend and foe, and any assault would be incredibly costly. “If we had treated the surrendering Warriors as we had promised, it might be easier to convince this merry lot to surrender.”

“I don’t think that they would have lasted long in any case,” Mac said. “Did you see the look on some of their victims’ faces?”

I nodded. Some of them had been in shocked, too emotionally withdrawn to notice that something important had changed, but others had been determined to extract revenge. They’d been blatantly preparing to tear the captives in two towns apart, despite my request that they be held for labour duties later, and it was hard to blame them. The women were particularly inventive. As the Afghanis say, never let them give you to the women. They'd been raped, beaten, and turned into slaves. Was it any wonder that they wanted to get their own back? I just hoped that they could live with themselves afterwards.

“It’s hopeless for them,” I decided, after we had surveyed New Jerusalem. It might have been intended as a mighty city, but apart from the original buildings at the centre, it was a smelly dump. The slaves we had liberated had explained that the Prophet had been intent upon building a new town, a shining city on a hill, and worked hundreds of refugees to death trying to do just that. I doubted, looking at it through my binoculars, that New Jerusalem would survive for long without constant maintenance. It looked as if it would be lucky to survive the winter. “I wonder if we should bother to demand a surrender, or if we should wait for them to starve.”

“If we wait, they’ll kill and eat all the slaves,” Mac predicted, glumly. “At the very least, they’ll starve the poor bastards to death just to keep their Warriors fit and healthy for a few days longer.”

“True,” I agreed. I didn’t want to take the place by storm, but I had an uneasy feeling that I was being pushed into that decision by circumstances. The military issue of tackling a siege is simple; the enemy soldiers, who are the ones with the guns, will eat first. They’re in charge by means of brute force. The unarmed civilians would eat last, if there were anything left for them, and if there was nothing…well, tough. And, in the last war, world opinion would have blamed us for their suffering. Now, that hardly mattered. The generation that rebuilt a new America would take a harder line towards such slanders from the media. “I wonder if…”

The explosion took us all by surprise, a massive thunder-crash that blasted through one of the gates facing us, shattering the defences with surprising ease. I gaped for a long moment, then realised, in a moment of awe, that the slaves had rebelled against their masters, buying us a chance to take New Jerusalem with their lives. I looked up at Mac and saw that we shared the same thought. Attack.

“Dutch, Brent, move,” I ordered. The two of them commanded the point companies, the heavily armed assault force. I had come to think of them as my hard entry specialists, although we had barely had the chance to train them to anything like pre-war standards. These days, we would have to think in terms of applying extra firepower, rather than subtle assaults. “Get your men up there, now! Mac, take the vehicles and get them some support!”

The two companies advanced on the double, taking terrible risks to try to seize the way into the town. It was a close-run thing; the slaves didn’t have many weapons and they had no body armour. I don’t know why, but despite their work, they were almost completely naked. I guess it was intended to rub their new status into their minds. They’d been on the verge of breaking, having triggered an IED to give us the change to get in, when the lead company rushed into the area and pushed the Warriors back out. They might not have gone through a Boot Camp, or Hell Week, but they took the gates like old pros and cleared the Warriors out of that entire section. Hundreds of slaves, thin and emancipated after months of mistreatment, came forward to greet us, but we had to push them to the rear. We had to push our advantage before the remainder of the Warriors rallied and tried to push us back out of the town.

New Jerusalem had been built, mainly, of wood – and again, I don’t know why. Fire spread from house to house as the inner circle of the Warriors – their preachers and the bureaucrats (and now I knew they were the bad guys) and some others, whose roles remained uncertain – fought desperately against us, and their slaves. It was a nightmarish fight, multi-sided as such battles tend to be, with nurses turning on their charges, maids stabbing their employers in the back and worse. A band of slaves who were being sold on the auction block – I kid you not – turned on their masters and ripped them apart, before rampaging through the houses and destroying everything they found that reminded them of their servitude. We even found ourselves in the odd position of protecting some surrendered Warriors – mainly women and children – from their former slaves, who wanted to wipe them all out, root and branch. I wasn't unsympathetic to their demands, but I wasn't going to kill kids, not if it could be avoided. They could be brought up better in the future. The men were largely killed on sight before they had a chance to escape the inferno and reach our forces.

“They’re falling back on the main fortress,” Dutch reported, as his force advanced down towards the main building complex. Unlike the rest of New Jerusalem, it was built out of heavy stone, intended to stand off a major assault. We launched a flanking assault from two directions at once and were thrown back by a volley of coordinated fire. “Sir…?”

I stared at the building, hating it. If I’d had a B52 with a JDAM onboard, I would have called it in and then picked up the remains of the Prophet with tweezes. The single aircraft I did have didn’t have the firepower to do more than make the inhabitants rather unhappy. As long as they could fire freely, taking it was going to be costly…and we’d already lost more men than I cared to think about, to say nothing of the former slaves.

“Get the mortar teams up here,” I ordered, once we’d cleared the remainder of the city. The prisoners, such as they were, were escorted out of the ruins of their homes and taken outside the city. They would have to be dealt with later. “We’ll blow the rats out of their nest.”

The teams arrived once we’d finished sealing off the area and took up positions behind enough cover – I hoped – that snipers in the fortress couldn’t pick them off before they could open fire. I had managed to round up a few slaves who had seen part of the innards, but none had seen more than a tiny section of the complex, while the girls they’d taken right inside had never emerged again. I didn’t want to think about what they probably meant, although I knew that it meant that they had probably killed the girls, or kept them trapped inside.

“We’re ready, sir,” Gary reported, finally. He'd been a professional before retiring to Ingalls and knew how to make a mortar sit up and dance. “Permission to open fire?”

“Blow them to hell,” I ordered, tightly. The first mortar opened fire, followed rapidly by the remaining weapons, smashing shells down on the building. If we were lucky, one of them would slip through the firing holes and explode within the building, but the bombardment alone would be an unpleasant experience for them. The noise alone would force them to consider surrender. I watched as one of the shells exploded right on top of a firing port, close enough to send fragments of hot metal inside the building – I couldn’t hear any screams, but we might well have hit their defenders – and then another shell landed right inside. The results were spectacular. Tongues of fire emerged from every firing port in the building and the entire side of the bunker slowly disintegrated.

“Hold fire,” I ordered. “Dutch, it’s all yours.”

I wanted to be with them as Dutch led his company across the rubble and right into the building, charging into a rat’s nest of enemy fighters…if any of them had survived the blast. One of our shells must have detonated an ammunition supply, I decided, as they probed deeper into the complex. The noise of firing rocketed upwards, quickly, and then faded down again. The Warriors of the Lord had to have come to the end of their endurance, unless there was a long escape tunnel somewhere in the building. I doubted that that would have been their first choice. If the Prophet and his men came up outside the building, they were likely to be torn apart by their former slaves.

And I wanted the bastard. I wanted to take his neck in my hands and squeeze really hard.

“They’re trying to surrender,” Dutch called back. “Do we accept?”

“Take them prisoner,” I ordered, coldly. We would sort out who we had in our hands – and who was responsible for what – before we did anything else, and then we would mete out justice. If I’d thought about keeping them alive, perhaps as slave labour, those thoughts had faded after seeing the results of their short rule over their section of America. “Have you captured the Prophet?”

“Yes,” Dutch said, after a moment. “I’m sending him out now.”

I wasn't sure what I had expected. Perhaps an impressive figure, with a beard that rivalled Santa Claus, or a diabolical John Simms-like figure, but the man in front of me was pathetic. He was short, squat and growing what looked rather like a beer belly. Judging from the way he was blinking incessantly, he'd been down in a bunker for too long, or maybe he’d lost a pair of glasses somewhere back during the battle. The Prophet was, I decided, a huge disappointment. This man – this ugly insignificant man – had brought us to the brink of defeat? It didn’t seem creditable, somehow…

But I remembered what Reverend Thomas had said, weeks ago. A man with a brain and a gift for public speaking could go far when the world had been turned upside down. Hitler hadn’t been a very impressive figure either, but he'd managed to set the world on fire, turning Germany from a beaten state into a world-challenging power, and then taking it a step too far and seeing it all burning down around him. Hitler had never expressed any remorse either. He'd thought in terms of tactical mistakes, not the ultimate mistake of starting the war in the first place.

Or perhaps the Prophet, whatever his real name had been, had been bullied at school.

“Mercy,” he said, softly. It was so soft that I could barely hear him. “Mercy and I’ll give you whatever you want…”

“No,” a voice shouted. “No!”

I spun around. A girl, naked apart from a pair of sheer panties and a harem shirt that left nothing to the imagination, was running towards him. She held a piece of cut glass in her hand, held out towards him. I could have stopped her at any moment, or any of us could have stopped her, but we did nothing. She plunged the makeshift knife into his throat and collapsed as the blood started to spill out. The Prophet died on his knees.

“I couldn’t take any more,” the girl said, between sobs. “I just couldn’t take any more.”

“It’s all right,” I said, as comfortingly as I could. How could I blame her for killing her tormentor? It was justice, after all, of the same kind as the Prophet had meted out to others. He deserved every moment of suffering. “You can make a new life for yourself now.”

Before we left, we burned the remainder of New Jerusalem to the ground.

It seemed the right thing to do, somehow.


Chapter Forty-Three


Adrian Veidt: I did the right thing, didn't I? It all worked out in the end.
Dr. Manhattan: 'In the end'? Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends.
-Watchmen

Robert McClellan Stalker was born, by an odd coincidence, on the day the new Constitution was finally ratified into existence. It had taken months of arguing, debating – publicly and privately – and threats of secession before we all ended up with a compromise that we all could believe in. Ben-David’s new constitution, slightly modified by the events of the past few months, had been approved by the vast majority of the population and turned into law. The New United States had been born.

I had been oddly reluctant to fly the Stars and Stripes before we voted the new Constitution into power, despite protests from both sides of the political spectrum. That had changed when we created the new/old nation and brought the new America to life, even though we had already determined that it was merely a continuation of what had existed prior to the Final War. The battles with the Warriors of the Lord, the desperate struggle to raise enough food to see us through the winter, the careful monitoring of every pregnancy to catch complications before they arose…all had finally led towards the new government. In some ways, it was a better society than what had gone before…

But had it been worth the cost? I knew roughly how many people had died in West Virginia and the surrounding states and I hated to think about how many more had died outside the areas we’d contacted, or outside the United States. Places like France and Germany would have been caught in the centre of the atomic whirlwind and utterly devastated, far worse than the United States, and I didn’t want to think about how badly we’d hammered the Russians, or how badly they might have hammered the Chinese and Turks, their other hereditary enemies. The new society had come at the price of well over a billion deaths and our ultimate survival was far from certain. Had it really been worth the cost?

I shook my head, dismissing the thought. It hadn’t been a price I had decided to pay, although I had been forced to pay it along with most of the remaining survivors, who might as well have been lottery winners for all the luck they’d had in surviving, but one I had had to pay. I hadn’t heard anything from the remaining members of my family, or Uncle Billy, or anyone else who might have been related to me. The handful of stories we’d heard from New York had been horrific, with nuclear devastation bringing down the city and trapping thousands of people in the death zone surrounding the metropolis. Mac had lost cousins somewhere in the war zone in Europe, and a second cousin somewhere in Afghanistan. That was something else I didn’t want to think about, I had decided long ago. Ingalls had been bad enough, but Afghanistan would have been a nightmare for those westerners unlucky enough to be caught up in the general area. It would be years before the United States became a superpower again – God alone knew what was happening outside our borders – but I no longer doubted that we would do it. It might take years, or centuries, but we would be back.

Rose looked up at me tiredly from where she was holding my – our – son. He looked so small and frail in her arms, but I felt a protective rush of tenderness every time I looked at him. I hadn’t liked children very much when I’d been an unmarried man, but now…I just looked at Robert and knew that he would be part of my life. I’d bring him up – with Rose, of course – and teach him how to survive in this world. He wouldn’t have the memory of what the world had been like before the war to hold him back, or to distract us with grief in an unguarded moment; the brave new world would be his. I’d make it his even if I had to kill every last surviving Warrior or bandit out there in the wastelands surrounding the New United States.

“Ed,” she said, tiredly. “What are you thinking?”

“I was thinking that he’s my son,” I said, honestly. I hadn’t shown her – at least, I thought I hadn’t shown her – but I’d been terrified that she would have miscarried, or given birth to a mutant. We had only one surviving mutant child and she – a little girl born with only one eye in the centre of her forehead – might not survive the next few years. I honestly wasn't sure if we were doing her any favours allowing her to survive at all, but her mother wanted to keep her and Kit refused to even consider a mercy killing. There had been a time, years ago before the war, when even thinking such thoughts would have been…well, unthinkable, but now…now they came too frequently. It bothered me from time to time. What sort of monsters were we becoming in this brave new world. “I was thinking that perhaps he’d like a little sister.”

“Get away with you,” Rose said, waving a weak arm in my direction. “I’m not having another kid until I’ve recovered from this one.”

“We could adopt,” I suggested. Thanks to the Warriors – and their mad social policies – there were thousands of kids running around without parents, often without even the slightest idea of where they’d come from in the first place. Most of them had been adopted pretty quickly, but there were still huge imbalances…and yes, some exploitation of the kids by farmers and others. I’d had to hang a farmer for abusing his adopted daughter two months ago and the whole episode still left a dirty taste in my mouth. “There are plenty of kids around…”

“Not yet,” Rose said, tiredly. She leaned back on the bed and closed her eyes. “I’m tired. If I’d known my mother had put so much work into bringing me into the world, I would have been…”

Her voice slurred and she fell asleep. Kit appeared, as if from nowhere, and carefully picked up little Robert from her arms, transferring him into his own as if he weighed almost nothing. Perhaps he did, to him. I’d held my son earlier and the baby had felt almost weightless.

“You should leave us to take care of her,” Kit said, as one of the nurses appeared. We had hundreds more nurses now – Rose’s own social policies had been paying off, although it was surprising how many had become pregnant in the last few months – and there wasn't one of them who wouldn’t look after Rose’s child as if it were her own. The discovery of the male-dominated Warrior society and their treatment of their women had concentrated quite a few minds; indeed, many of the small businesses in the area were owned and operated by women. “I’ll call you back as soon as something changes.”

I couldn’t help myself. I had to ask. “Doctor,” I said, “is she going to be alright?”

Kit’s ‘you’re a stupid idiot’ look would have done credit to a Drill Sergeant. “Women have been giving birth since the human race evolved from monkeys,” he said, his voice perfectly dry. “Rose is a strong and healthy mother, the strongest we’ve had for quite some time, who took good care of herself. She will be tired and cranky for the next few days – and you’d damn well better be tolerant of that – but she’ll be fine. I wouldn’t advise sex for a week or so anyway…”

“Thank you,” I said, before he could break into an increasingly sardonic attack on our personal lives. For a noted homosexual, Kit could be surprisingly blunt at times, although I knew that he’d donated some of his own sperm to the community. “I’ll call back in a few hours.”

“Out,” Kit said, firmly.

I stepped out of the hospital and smiled to myself as I took in the sights of Ingalls. Hundreds of men and women thronged around, many of them wearing newer clothes woven in town, or scavenged from the surrounding area. It astonished me how many vital items had just been abandoned in the area, items that most people didn’t consider to be useful, but were items we desperately needed. In the next few years, we’d either have to start making such items for ourselves or go without, but for the moment we had an embarrassment of riches. It showed, too, in the renovation of Ingalls. The damage caused by the Warrior attack had been repaired and a new monument, a tribute to those who had falling in the Warrior War, had been erected in the centre of town.

My feet had taken me, unbidden, to the military headquarters, a building that had once belonged to a wealthy corporate agent as a tax dodge – or so I suspected – before the war, after which it had been taken over by the military I’d worked to build. The guard at the main entrance checked my ID before allowing me to enter – with so many newcomers in the community, we had to be more careful about ID cards, even though we lacked the ability to make foolproof systems – and waved me inside, allowing me to walk up to my office. I was only saluted by a handful of people as I passed through the main office. I might have been their General, the uniformed head of the New American Army, but I disliked being saluted when it wasn't strictly necessary. It wasn't my only innovation. The officers in the headquarters were all there for a few months, in-between postings to actual combat units, just long enough to be useful without infecting them with the political disease. The old Pentagon had been full of soldiers who hadn’t been worthy of the title. My new headquarters would have officers who had actually been there and done that. It wasn't as if I didn’t have plenty of combat vets to choose from when it came to manning the handful of desks.

The map in front of me, updated daily, showed little to be concerned about at the moment. The bandits had been largely wiped out by us, or the Warriors, or had come in from the cold. There were still isolated groups of Warriors out there, too hardcore to just surrender, who still posed a threat to convoys, but we’d wipe them all out eventually. They could hide from us, but we were expanding our patrols constantly, often led by their former slaves. They were very motivated to hunt down the remainder of the Warriors, not least because it would give them that vital ingredient for citizenship, military service. There were reports and hints of further populations to the south, east and north, but we’d meet up with them in time. The teams I had sent to the bigger cities, keeping well aware from the hot zones, had reported that most of them were completely empty, or inhabited only by Last Men. A handful of them had come to join us, but others…others had refused even to recognise our existence. They had been right on the verge of madness.

There was a knock at the door. “Come in,” I shouted. One thing I had turned down was a secretary, although that might have been a mistake; I had too much for one person to handle, without assistance. Mac stepped into the room and winked at me. He was dressed in what had become our standard uniform – a pair of homemade trousers and a shirt – and looked surprisingly happy. His wedding had been the largest such affair in Ingalls since the Final War.

I smiled. “Mac,” I said, “ready to return to duty?”

“Maybe just a little,” Mac agreed, with a wink. He wore the insignia of a Colonel on his shirt, although we hadn’t bothered with dress uniforms, not least because it would have made him a target. I intended to try to avoid the fruit salad displays of some senior officers who had never seen a battlefield in their lives. “You didn’t tell me that being married was so much fun.”

“It was a cunning plan to keep you from getting cold feet,” I said, baiting him gently. He did look better than he had the last time I saw him. “Married life seems to suit you.”

“Well, apart from the nagging, the whining, and the baby on the way…” Mac began. I rolled my eyes at him. “Nah, it’s a great time that I’m having.”

“Splendid,” I said. “I don’t know about you, but I’m getting bored in this office. Perhaps we should start planning an exhibition down to the south, or maybe northwards towards New York.”

Mac frowned. “I don’t think that we might find anything useful,” he said, doubtfully. We’d explored the remains of the USMC base at Quantico a few months after we’d crushed the Warriors, and could afford to spare a hundred heavily armed men from the farming efforts, and we’d found nothing, but ruins. The Russians had had a real mad-on for the base and pounded it several times, destroying most of the complex. There had been a few survivors, helping to assist in a handful of barely-functional towns, but little had been left of the infrastructure. “Remember Washington?”

I nodded, doubtfully. One of Biggles’s flights had taken him near Washington, now little more than ruins, a dead city on unstable ground. The Russians had hit the city with at least five warheads, according to our best estimate, and the results had been devastating. If there was anyone still alive down there, near the black craters that marked the site of a set of ground-busts next to where the White House had been, they hadn’t been in evidence. We hadn’t sent a ground party into the city. It would only have upset us.

“That’s not the point,” I said, seriously. “I want a full record of everything that happened since the war.”

Mac nodded, but then, he understood my reasoning. If we could construct a photographic record of everything that had happened, it might become harder for future ‘academics’ to deconstruct everything we had done, or cast a dark slant over it. I had founded the museum myself, using photographs of the atrocities committed by the Warriors as the basis of the history section, although some parents had complained about it not being family-friendly. I had always thought that that was a little odd. They might not think that it was ‘right’ for kids to see such sights, but it was ‘kids’ that it had happened to, back before we had broken the Warriors. Privately, I gave it ten years before the revisionists got to work and started claiming that the Warriors had been the real victims. I guess that distance doesn’t always lend perspective, after all.

“You do get to rest from time to time,” Mac said. “I thought that you were going to be running for President next year.”

I laughed. “President,” I said, shaking my head. “I’d sooner be dead.”

***​

And that, more or less, is the end of my story. Ingalls and the New United States had been firmly established and we would survive, although not easily. There would be other challenges in the future, with new threats and new enemies waiting for us just over the horizon, but the seeds of the reconstruction had been firmly sowed. I could write about those, but that’s not my story to tell…and besides, I want you to buy other books from the aftermath of the Final War.

I won’t attempt to justify myself any further. I have explained my reasoning for everything I did, as best as I could. There are general histories of the New United States or the Reconstruction Period that provide a less personal overview, if that is what you are seeking. I did the best I could…and I – we – kept civilisation alive. The world you live in, today, is the one I built. If you can stand up and question what we did, well…I know I did a good job.

(They told us that we won the Final War. If what we lived through was victory, I don’t ever want to know defeat.)

I’d like to close this memoir with a quote from one of my old commanding officers, who was asked, back in 2003 when the world was a kinder, gentler place, what we Marines should do if we were confronted with an anti-war protester. I may have the exact words wrong, but I think the sentiment shines though.

“You should shake his hand, and thank him for exercising the rights you fought to defend, and wink at his daughter.”

Edward Stalker.

Staff Sergeant, USMC (Ret.)
General, NUSA Army (Ret.)


Epilogue


From: Edward Stalker: A Political Reassessment. (Dominic Beethoven, Professor of Post-Modern Peace Studies, University of New Clarksburg, 2100.)

In a more civilised word, there is little question that Edward Stalker would be considered a criminal; a mass murderer, a tyrant and a monster who ran roughshod over every principle of common decency known to man. He may have started life as a US Marine, with a honourable career behind him when he was wounded and retired from the Corps, but his future life was doomed to be controversial. Given an opportunity to shape the future of a world that had been brutally reshaped by the Final War, Stalker didn’t hesitate. Indeed, although he downplays this aspect in his memoirs, the survival of the population of Ingalls, the unification of the Principle Towns into the New United States and the defeat of the Warriors of the Lord are largely down to him.

Stalker described himself as little more than a talented amateur at the art of war, but his achievements are unquestioned. So, alas, are his failures and what we may consider atrocities. There is no doubt, as he himself makes clear, that he decided to cold-bloodily murder over two thousand inhabitants of the Stonewall Maximum Security Prison. There is also no doubt that he effectively enslaved the remaining prisoners and used them to construct defences, dig mass graves and much else, in stark defiance of the Revised Constitution. (See Ben-David Singleton and the Making of the New United States, Chapter Nine, for further details.) He even added to the work gangs with other prisoners, starting with ordinary criminals from Ingalls and the surrounding area, and continuing with surviving Warriors and bandits. While it must be acknowledged that the reformation rate of ex-prisoners has been much higher than pre-war statistics, one may find it inhumane that prisoners were expected to work under conditions of considerable danger.

That was, but the least of his actions. He had refugees blocked from entering Ingalls and used deadly force, where necessary, to prevent them from entering the town. He used torture to make a prisoner – later, additional prisoners – talk and tell him what he needed to know. He deployed poison gas against the Warriors of the Lord and, finally, executed many of the higher-ranking Warriors personally. What can one make of such a man?

Finally, Edward Stalker instituted a form of democracy that was, by intent and design, considerably limited. The results of this linger on today. It is not clear who was truly to blame. The person who suggested the core idea – a vote in exchange for military service, later broadened out to a handful of other occupations – remains unknown. (The original idea came from Robert A. Heinlein, who was clearly not present at Ingalls on the grounds he was dead at the time - an excellent alibi.) Edward Stalker has been blamed for that by his detractors and has never, significantly, denied it. There can be little doubt, however, that Stalker was one of the main voices pushing for the implementation of such a scheme and with so many veterans of the Warrior War in the area, it was pushed through with ease.

And yet, did Stalker have any other choice? We look back from our safe world and try to imagine what it was like back in those days. We have it easier than many others do – we have the records taken and saved by Stalker himself, among others – but we cannot imagine the true level of numbing horror. We see the ruined cities, the areas that are still too hot to enter, and the charred remains of thousands of bodies, but we do not grasp the horrors. How can we? It is as beyond our experience as some of our developments would have been beyond Edward Stalker and his comrades.

Was Edward Stalker a monster, as some have suggested, or a man forced by circumstances to do what he had to do to preserve some form of American civilisation? The question, I fear, remains in your hands. I await your answers with interest.

The End

 

And that is the complete story. If you liked it, please comment and tell your friends.

Chris

 

And if you liked this story, why not check out The Cowards Way of War?

 

Loved it Chris, will post links.
The makings of a classic.

This would make a hell of a movie....

 

I liked it !!

 

A really good read. No over use of technical descriptions of guns and gear; just good solid story telling.
Thanks again.

 

I'll do that later today.

Chris

 

Story attached in PDF.

 

I enjoyed the read immensely!
Thank you!