EIGHT
1-18 INFANTRY FORWARD MAINTENANCE SITE, MT. CARMEL RIDGES EAST
“With all due respect, sir,” Command Sergeant Major Dilworth Bratty told the battalion maintenance officer, “I’d like to see more security out.”
“Can’t do it, Sergeant Major,” Captain Butts said. “Can’t spare any more mechanics. Bayonet Six wants these tracks up by zero-dark-thirty.”
CSM Bratty understood. But he didn’t like it. For all the activity down along the road, 1-18’s forward maintenance site seemed exposed. An elephants’ graveyard of broken-down tanks, infantry tracks, V-hulls, and recovery vehicles, it flickered with shocks of light as walking-dead mechanics plunged through blackout curtains. The noise was at the demolition-derby level.
Bratty stood in silence before the BMO. Giving the captain his disapproving command-sergeant-major face. Calculated to give any officer through the grade of major an irregular heartbeat. Even when the officer couldn’t see it properly.
“Tell you what, Sergeant Major,” the BMO said suddenly, “I know you’re right. Tell Sergeant MacKinley I said to free up two more men and put them out on perimeter with the others. Any word on the XO?”
“Mr. Culver believes it’s dysentery, sir. I blame the Navy food. One of life’s great disappointments.”
“He’s going to be pissed as hell at missing the war. So . . . I guess I’ll be seeing more of you, Sergeant Major.”
“Yes, sir. Colonel Cavanaugh’s asked me to look after the maintenance side of things. Until Major Lincoln’s back up and running.”
“He holding up okay? Bayonet Six?”
It wasn’t a question for a captain to ask a battalion command sergeant major about their commander, but Bratty realized it was meant sincerely.
“Lieutenant Colonel Cavanaugh’s just fine, sir. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll get with Sergeant MacKinley and—”
A volley of rocket-propelled grenades whooshed through the night. In quick succession, three of them found targets. The blast and dazzle shocked.
A rush of air tried to push Bratty over. Automatic weapons fire pursued the explosions.
When the BMO didn’t react instantly, Bratty yelled, “Sir! Go back and get folks organized. I’ll hold here.”
But there was no time. Tracers hunted them like flashlight beams. Muzzle flashes approached at a run.
The captain dropped to one knee and raised his carbine.
Good. That was fine. Fighting was better than floundering. Bratty dashed into the maze of vehicles occupying the level bits of ground. He grabbed a running soldier. Unable to recognize the man in the dark, the sergeant major shouted, “Get down. Right here. Shoot any bastard in front of you.”
He found two mechanics paying out rounds behind the front of a V-hull. Beyond them, a soldier lay still, glistening with blood in the rips of light.
He heard the voices then, calling on Allah.
“Just keep shooting.”
Bratty leapt across the dead soldier and nuzzled the wheels of a tank whose track had been stripped. Lifting his carbine and crossing his fire with the bursts from the two soldiers he’d just passed. He thought he downed a Jihadi. The wildness made it impossible to be sure.
The J’s hurled grenades. Hollering their hey-look-at-me cries of “Allah!” and “Allah is great!”
More firing. Behind him. Various calibers. The Jihadis had made it deep into the site.
Bratty scrambled back to the two soldiers. One was reloading, the other aiming and shooting single rounds.
“Osterholz?”
“It’s me, Sergeant Major.”
“Who’s with you?”
“Bracey.”
New man. But he was fighting.
“Both of you. Fix bayonets. Stay here and hold. One of you cover the rear at all times. But don’t shoot to the rear unless you’re damned sure of the target. You fixed for ammo?”
A blast in the center of the work site hurled wreckage into the sky. It looked like a volcano erupting.
As soon as the metal thunked back to earth, Bratty ran toward the explosion’s ghost. Fixing his own bayonet.
Rounding the front of a Bradley, he nearly collided with two Jihadis trotting ahead of him. He gave each one a burst in the back and kept moving.
“Rally on the high ground,” he shouted to any soldiers who might be listening. “Rally back on the high ground.”
Face to face with a Jihadi bronzed by firelight, Bratty shot first. The J’s finger locked on his trigger, spraying errant rounds.
Correcting his path to avoid being silhouetted by flames, Bratty passed a soldier whose head had been hacked off.
Meeting a pack of J’s, he almost fired. Before he realized that two of his soldiers, taken prisoner, were in the center of the group.
Bratty dropped to one knee and fired four perfect shots. As if he’d been the demonstrator on the rifle range at Ft. Bliss.
A hammer blow pitched him forward.
“Look out!” one of the soldiers cried. Late.
Bratty rolled to the side and thrust up the bayonet.
His attacker backed off at the sight of the blade. He’d slammed Bratty with an unloaded grenade launcher.
Bratty pulled the trigger.
Nothing.
The Jihadi swung the launcher at Bratty’s carbine, knocking the bayonet from his path.
One of the soldiers who’d just had his ass saved grabbed a dead Jihadi’s rifle and shot Bratty’s attacker.
“You okay, Sergeant Major?”
“Get the fuck away from me. Get out of the line of fire.”
The soldiers moved. But they were unsure where to go. Shaken.
“Police up their ammo. Do it. Hurry!” Bratty jacked a new mag into his carbine.
The firing didn’t slacken. But there were no more blasts.
“Follow me.”
He nearly led them into a crossfire. With rounds pinging off the armored flanks of deadlined vehicles.
“Get back. Move.”
The two soldiers trailed him back to the display of Jihadi corpses. Bratty’s shoulder seemed to pull him toward the ground, and his arm obeyed orders only sluggishly. The Jihadi had given him a good whack.
Something broken?
Find out later.
“Stay down,” Bratty said. “Okay. We’re going in behind those guys back there. We’re going to roll them up. But when I stop, you stop. Nobody runs out into friendly fire, understand? Understand?”
“Yes, Sergeant Major.”
“You. Hanks. On my left. Burton, on my right.”
The soldiers obeyed. Willingly. Glad of clear orders. But Bratty could feel that they were still jittery.
The general chaos had settled into local patches of disorder. They headed toward the loudest exchange of gunfire.
The light of a burning Bradley helped them out as they maneuvered. This time, the J’s were silhouetted. With all their attention fixed on the targets to their front.
“Halt. Fire. Give it to the fucks.”
Bratty and one soldier dropped to their knees. The PFC to his left stood as he aimed and fired. Bratty clicked his weapon onto singleshot mode and picked his targets. In the confusion, the Jihadis didn’t realize they were being fired on from the rear for what seemed like a very long time. Although it was only seconds.
Voices shrieked in Arabic. Some of the J’s were closer than Bratty had realized. A half-dozen rose to charge them.
The PFC went down.
Bratty aimed his rounds as long as he could, but events moved at lightning speed. He rose and led with his bayonet. Still firing.
Weapons swung through the air. Bratty shot one man in the face, then parried another who was using his weapon as a club, out of ammunition. The melee became a hypermotion tangle of killing. Abruptly, Bratty sensed that he was fighting alone. He kept on slashing with his bayonet, while managing to work the weapon’s butt plate into an approaching jaw.
Screaming “Allah is great!” a Jihadi raised a sword and brought it down.
Bratty got his weapon up to block the blade. In time. It cost him two fingers.
With magical clarity, he watched the stubs of flesh fly toward the firelight. Time to sell the old Gibson Hummingbird.
Pumping blood, he yanked his weapon around to shoot his attacker. The last of them. But his trigger finger was missing. When he managed to get another finger in place, the magazine was empty.
The Jihadi cut the air with the sword again. Somehow, Bratty managed to cling to the slimed carbine, to slap it up to meet the blade. Then, with all the strength left to him, he jammed the stock into the Jihadi’s neck.
The man staggered. Before he could lift the sword again, Bratty plunged his bayonet into the center line below his ribs.
The Jihadi looked at him in astonishment. Open-mouthed. Bewildered that life was what it was, and no more.
Bratty had stabbed him so hard that the command sergeant major couldn’t extract the bayonet before the Jihadi collapsed. The dead man pulled the weapon and Bratty after him.
Shoving his boot into the dead man’s rib cage, Bratty yanked on the carbine. His hand slipped. The weapon was slick with his own blood. Coated with it. Two stumps where his right index finger and middle finger had been leaked blood at an impressive rate.
“Shit, goddamnit,” Bratty said.
He managed to free the carbine in time to reload and shoot a restless wounded man in the face. It wasn’t a night for random acts of kindness.
Except for sporadic shots, the firefight was over. The voices calling out spoke English now. His side had won. No. Prevailed. The mess around him hardly counted as a win.
Bratty sat down with his back to a shot-up tire. Clumsily, he dropped his ban dage pack into the dust. After he got it open, he balled up the cloth and pressed it against the stumps of his fingers.
A sergeant major without a goddamned trigger finger. The stuff barracks jokes were made of. And his guitar-picking days were over. He’d never really hated the Jihadis before. He just did his duty and enjoyed doing it well. But now that they’d taken two of his fingers, and his trigger finger at that, he damned them to Hell.
He could already hear the jokes. “What do you call a sergeant major who has to pull the trigger with his pinkie?” “How does a sergeant major lose his trigger finger?” The possibilities were endless.
Captain Butts walked up to him. The last firing had ceased.
“Taking it easy, Sergeant Major?”
“Just relaxing my ass off, sir. You?”
“Never been better. I enjoy these quiet nights.”
“Shit, sir.”
“Yeah. Shit.”
They looked at the dead Jihadis and the two dead Americans. With burning vehicles as a backdrop.
“I hope you downloaded those suckers,” Bratty said.
“You were right about the security, Sergeant Major.”
“Nothing to do now, sir, but keep on marching. Any sense of how many—”
“Jesus Christ! Your fingers. Medic!”
But the lone medic still alive was busy. Bleeding from the fore-head himself, the BMO knelt down and used his own ban dage to tie off Bratty’s stumps as best he could.
“That hurt?”
“Naw. It just pisses me off, sir.”
“You and me both.”
“I was talking about my fingers. But I’m pissed about the rest of it, too. Go and get this clusterfuck organized. I’ll be right behind you.”
“Roger.”
“Sir? You know what this means, don’t you?”
“It means Bayonet Six isn’t going to have many of his down-for-maintenance ponies back in the race tomorrow.”
Bratty nodded. “And it means that the J’s are working our weaknesses, sir. They’ve cracked the code that our repair sites are prime targets, that we’re fighting with over-the-hill vehicles that are higher maintenance than a rich man’s junkie daughter.”
The BMO smiled. Or tried to. “What would you know about rich men’s junkie daughters, Sergeant Major?”
“Plenty. I married one.” Bratty shrugged. His shoulder hurt as if a steel plate had dropped on it. “That was a couple wives back. Just before the waitress with the broken heart. Pitch ’til you win, Captain.”
“You’re right, though,” Captain Butts said, standing up. “They’ve figured out our weak spot. Unless they picked us by dumb luck.”
“They didn’t.”
“I suppose I’ll have to figure out new security arrangements.”
A soldier in mechanic’s overalls jogged up to them, paused for a second at the sight of the spread of corpses, then said, “Sir?”
“Just a sec, Hunsicker. Sergeant Major? You know you’re going to take some razzing about that trigger finger, don’t you?”
HEADQUARTERS, III (US) CORPS, MT. CARMEL RIDGES
Harris had resolved to get five hours of sleep. To keep himself alert. But the night dragged on. No matter how willing he was to delegate authority, there were issues only the commanding general could resolve and others that demanded his emphasis. The 1st Cavalry Division commander wanted to relieve one of his brigade commanders just hours before the division was scheduled to come ashore. A medium-tonnage transport ship loaded with old Bradley infantry fighting vehicles and critical spare parts had been hit by multiple kamikaze drones and sunk. Artillery units were expending 155mm HE rounds at twice the projected rate. He had to review and sign off on the daily summary of events before it could go to Cyprus, to his next-higher headquarters, Holy Land Command, HOLCOM or, as the troops had instantly nicknamed it, “Hokum.” With HOLCOM’s embellishments—and deletions—it would go to Washington. If comms were up.
Harris had taken the document into the room designated as his office, where the staff had set up a cot for him. Sending his aide to collect any global intelligence summaries that had made it through the jamming, the general sat down, put on his reading glasses, and labored over the document.
The work was painful. He had to bring the text irritatingly close to his face. His eyes burned. The docs said it was a result of the corrosive fumes he’d been exposed to in the Nigeria campaign, and they warned him “not to put undue stress on your eyes.” But a general had to read. When he asked about the future, the military doctors sought to avoid telling him what he already knew: Before he reached age sixty, he’d be blind. Sarah’s brother, a civilian ophthamalogist, had told him the truth.
Perhaps he should’ve retired already, Harris thought. But he was vain enough to believe that he was the best man to fight this last campaign, to stand up to the madness rising around them all.
Sarah had taken the verdict on his future better than he had. At least outwardly. He often wondered what she felt inside about the prospect of a blind, aging husband. Anyway, he loved her. And wished he had a better future to offer her.
If he had received one great blessing in his life, it was Sarah. He loved his daughters dearly. But what he felt for his wife soared beyond the emotions he felt for any other living thing.
After the girls, only the Army came close.
He hated to think of the incompetencies that would come with the loss of vision. No more camping in the Tetons or Cascades. He wouldn’t even be able to get in a car and drive down for a newspaper. Worst of all, the black wall would keep him from looking at the woman he loved. And he had always loved to look at her, from the moment he first saw her: a redhead in a pale-blue blouse, eating strawberry ice cream.
By the light of two field lamps, Harris corrected the draft document. The casualty figures made him pause. Not least because he knew they would be even higher the following day.
Was that priest at Megiddo included in the KIA column? Or had his death come too late to make the count?
Harris initialed the report and gave himself a moment to think about the priest and his sacrifice. His thoughts were such that it would not have done to mention them to anyone aloud. Not now. When everyone played politics for God and spied for Jesus. But he longed to talk to someone—he realized he would have to be careful not to take up too much of Monk Morris’s time with bullshitting.
Harris couldn’t get the priest out of his head. For all the wrong reasons.
It struck him that, when all was said and done, the priest had been a suicide bomber. On the side of the angels, but, nonetheless, a suicide bomber. Deserving of the Medal of Honor he couldn’t receive in the current political climate. Magnificently heroic. Self-sacrificing. Admirable. And a suicide bomber.
What else could you call it? Oh, he’d limited himself to a military target. And his sacrifice had saved many lives. Given. But how different the thing looked when the man with the bomb, rushing to his death, was one of your own.
Harris never succumbed to the notion that all men were alike. The Jihadis were barbarians. But based on the initial reports from the Jerusalem Front, he wasn’t sure the MOBIC troops were much better. It had been bad enough when the militant fanatics had been on one side only. Now, the fanatical excesses and threats in which Islamic extremists had indulged over the decades had finally provoked a like response. To Harris, the war in which he was leading the U.S. Army’s remnants made no geopolitical sense. It wasn’t like the Nigeria Intervention. It was a massive crime of passion.
But his role was to fight his country’s war, no matter what he thought of it. And to ensure that America’s Army survived, however starved and battered.
No more time for reveries, he told himself abruptly. But he thought, again, about the fate awaiting him in five years. Perhaps sooner. It was already too painful for him to read the history books he loved. He’d never had time for frivolous scribbling, for novels and that sort of thing. But all his life he’d studied his profession, past campaigns, leaders, international affairs, economics, religion . . .
Harris had never been one for golf or tennis or season tickets. Or for extramarital affairs. Or for much of anything beyond the Army, his family, daily five-mile runs, and the ramparts of books that filled “his” room at home.
Now the books were already lost to him. Although he took pains that no one but his aide knew that his sight was failing. And he believed he could trust young Willing, the son of a retired general who had mentored Harris early in his career. The Army was a small tribe, in the end.
Major Willing knocked on the office door. His knock was always recognizable. Respectful, just a bit timid. Young Willing’s fault, if he had one, was a lack of self-confidence. General’s sons were like that. Either they thought themselves entitled to every deference, or they feared not living up to a father’s standards. Or both.
Harris rose from the cot and told the younger man to come in.
“Sir? I’ve got the global INTSUM from the Two shop.”
Harris just wanted to take off his boots and sleep. But he said, “Good. Hold here, John. I want to make a last stop by Plans.” He pulled on his body armor and picked up his helmet to walk down to the building where the planners had set up.
The planning-cell officers had not bothered to take down the Druze posters and framed photographs on the walls of the house allotted to them by the headquarters commandant. They were a good team, Harris knew, oblivious to anything but their work.
“We’re moving right along, sir,” Lieutenant Colonel Marty Rose said, by way of greeting.
“Give me the condensed version, Marty.”
“Sir . . . if you’ll step over to the map . . . It’s easier to see this than it is on the monitor . . .”
“I know the map. Talk to me.”
Marty Rose never needed a second invitation to talk. Harris saw his lead planner as brilliant but uneven, the intellectual equivalent of a manic-depressive. Once, Harris had taken the lieutenant colonel aside to tell him, “Please, Marty . . . a little less Clausewitz and a little more common sense.”
The other thing that both Harris and his G-3 both recognized was that Marty Rose tended to put more effort into his own vision of future operations. It was a constant struggle to get him to devote equal energy to the potential courses of action raised by others. Even when the “other” was the corps commander.
But the care-and-feeding was worth it. Rose delivered.
Midway through the briefing, Harris said, “Good work, Marty. But I also want you to give me an option where the main effort’s a wide swing to the north. Left-flank Schwerpunkt. In case we can’t get there from here. And I want you to start thinking beyond the Golan Heights. You need to be thinking ‘Damascus’.”
“Yes, sir,” Rose said, disappointed that his cell’s efforts hadn’t satisfied the boss. Harris realized that the planners were weary and frazzled, running on nerves. But they were going to have to keep producing. Harris needed someone thinking seriously while the rest of the corps was fighting.
“Sir . . . your instructions about avoiding contaminated zones . . . If we shift north, we’ll come up against—”
“Work it out. If we have to pass through any of the dead zones—if we have no choice—we’ll move fast. My point, Marty, was that I didn’t want anybody lingering where there’s residual radiation. But we’re going to do whatever it takes to win.”
“Yes, sir. As for Damascus . . . I understand the mission. But do you really think the MOBIC corps is going to let us make the grand entry?”
“Marty, just draw up the plans. I’ll worry about Sim Montfort and his gang.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And stay in bed with the Four. And with the Marines. If we do swing north, we may have to do more over-the-beach log. And when we get to Damascus, whether it’s a week from now or a year from now, I want every subordinate command to know exactly which areas of the city remain habitable and which ones are still glowing. No mistakes.”
Rose looked at him. “You know, sir . . . I never figured out why the Israelis didn’t just wipe Damascus off the map, why they just went small-yield on the government sites. After they erased just about every city in Iran.”
“My guess,” Harris said, “is that they planned to come back. And Damascus is a lot closer to Jerusalem than Qom or Tehran. Besides, they’d shot most of their load on the Shias before the Sunni Arabs figured out that a nuked Israel was an invitation to the dance. Speaking of nukes, Marty: I want every plan you concoct to have a nuclear-defense variant.” The general knew that every officer in the plans cell had been listening all along, but he raised his voice slightly and peered around the room, giving official notice to them all. “If the Jihadis do pop any nukes, I want us to be able to act, not just react. Fast. Everybody got that?”
They nodded and murmured. Harris knew the entire staff thought his concern about a last few nuclear weapons in Jihadi hands was evidence of early-onset senility. And he possessed sufficient self-awareness to recognize that he’d allowed it to become at least a mild personal obsession. But his guts just contradicted the intelligence.
And gut instincts had saved his life more than once. Even if they hadn’t saved his eyes.
After Harris cleared their area, Marty Rose said, “All right, back to work.”
A major asked, “How far north does he want us to plan?”
Rose shrugged. “Fuck, I don’t know. Look at the road networks. Identify a close option and a long-march option. Then do the branches and sequels. You’re all SAMS grads, aren’t you? Just do it. Reichert, you’ve got the lead. I’m going out to take a dump.”
When Rose, too, had gone, one major said to another, “Guess Big Marty didn’t get his daily ration of praise from Flintlock.”
“Want to know what I think?” his comrade said. “I think Flintlock Harris is losing it. Nukes on the brain. He wants to worry, he ought to worry about Montfort. That Bible-thumper’s going to eat old Flintlock for breakfast.”
As Harris dragged himself back toward his room, the deputy G-3 ambushed him, excited. There had been two rear-area attacks. That hardly seemed a surprise to Harris, who’d expected more raids and sabotage by now. Proud of himself, the deputy Three told the general that he’d sent out a message by land line, warning all subordinate units to increase their security posture.
Harris almost told the lieutenant colonel that his message was all well and good, but what about the units still not up on land line? Instead, he just folded his arms over his body armor, pressing it into his sweat-damp uniform. The deputy Three was a talker, and Harris knew he wasn’t going to get off lightly.
The poor bugger’s just trying to do his best, the general reminded himself.
“And lastly,” the deputy Three said, “the division surgeon from the Big Red One reports thirty-seven confirmed cases of amoebic dysentery.”
“Navy food,” Harris responded. “Good night, Bruce.”
He walked off to his office-bedroom. Wondering at the kind of sensibility that would build a mansion-sized home such as this, then furnish it with bare, dangling bulbs.
His aide stood up as Harris entered. He looked the general over and asked, “Want me to hold this stuff until morning, sir?”
“No, John.” He dropped onto his cot a little too heavily and immediately began unknotting his left boot. “Sing me to sleep.”
The remark, often repeated, was a private joke that Harris never explained to his aide—who simply accepted it as a peculiarity of the general’s speech. Harris long since had thought, without satisfaction, that the two of them resembled Saul and young David. And Saul’s was not a role Harris wished to play.
Well, better than Abraham and Isaac, Harris told himself. Or blind Tobit.
As the general drew off his boots and socks, the major said, “Sir, the big out-of-area headline is that the Turks demolished St. Sophia’s in Istanbul. Blew it to rubble.”
Harris looked up. And?
Major Willing continued, reading now: “With the Imperial Russian Expeditionary Force fighting in the Galata District of Istanbul, Turkish army engineers destroyed St. Sophia’s, St. Irene’s, and at least a dozen other Byzantine-era structures. In Moscow, Czar Grigori and the Orthodox patriarch denounced the Turkish actions as a crime against humanity and vowed that those responsible for the wanton destruction—”
“You know, John,” Harris interrupted as he loosened his belt to make his uniform comfortable enough to sleep in, “when I was a lieutenant—back when Turkey started down the path to extremism—there was a bestseller and a follow-up movie in Turkey predicting a U.S. invasion that would ultimately be repelled by Russian intervention on Ankara’s side.” Harris grimaced. “So much for the ability of the creative consciousness to predict the future.”
Recalling many a history text he’d plowed through in years past, he added, “I always wanted to visit Istanbul. And Aya Sofya. The greatest surviving monument of the first thousand years of Christianity. I couldn’t go, because of my security clearances.” He sighed. “Now it’s gone.”
“You always say you don’t care about buildings and archaeological sites, sir.”
“That’s not exactly right, John. I just don’t think they’re more important than living human beings. But I might’ve made an exception for St. Sofia’s. It must’ve been impressive—you know the history? What happened on the day it fell to the Ottomans?”
“No, sir.”
“Well, we’ll save that for another time. But Sim Montfort and every legislator behind him is going to have a field day with this one. Anything in the summary about the Russian and Armenian forces in eastern Anatolia?”
“I didn’t see anything, sir. Not today.”
“Our alliance talks with the Russians?”
“Sir, there might’ve been something in the MOBIC news releases. Do you want me to check?”
Harris waved the thought away. It all could wait. He lay back on his cot. “Excuse me, John. You see before you a general in decline. What’s next?”
“Sir, the only other major item is on China. The Army of the Han Messiah has taken Chongging. And the Beijing government bombed Hong Kong again.”
“Well, I suppose we’ll be eating General Tso’s chicken on the spot if we finish with the Jihadis in time. Onward Christian Soldiers.”
Harris saw his aide wince.
“Don’t worry, John. I promise I won’t say such things in public. Any domestic news get through?”
“Yes, sir. The Nevada National Guard and the Mormon Militia have been sent into the Providential Communities to quell the rioting.”
“Rioting over?”
“The USG press release says the riots are being staged in support of the Jihadis we’re fighting.”
Harris snorted. “More likely over bad food and worse treatment. John, one day we’re going to be unspeakably ashamed of ourselves for what we’ve done to our own citizens. Again.”
“Sir, some Muslim-Americans were terrorists . . .”
“Less than a hundred, John, less than a hundred. And we put—what, four million people into camps in the desert? Shame on us. What else?”
Harris caught the hesitation in the air.
“Nothing really significant, sir.”
“Come on, John. You’re my aide, not my censor.”
“That law passed. By a better-than-two-thirds majority. Declaring the United States . . . Let me check the final wording, sir . . . ‘a Christian, God-fearing nation and Providential Asylum for the Jewish People’.”
Harris studied the flies on the ceiling, fighting the thought that the Lord of the Flies was triumphant. After a bit, he said, “I’ll miss the First Amendment. And the exiled children of Israel had better look out when we start using the word ‘providential’ on their behalf. In the dictionary, it comes just before ‘provisional’.”
“Sir . . . May I ask you something? Kind of personal?”
“Majors don’t ask generals personal questions. But I suppose we can make a war time exception. Shoot.”
“You are a Christian believer. Right, sir?”
“Hoping Jesus will have me, and trusting in His mercy. What’s the question behind the question?”
“Why has this amendment bothered you so much? I mean, I’m just trying to understand . . .”
Closing his eyes, Harris said, “A nation that’s Christian in its heart doesn’t need to write it into law. Now go get some sleep yourself.”