The War After Armageddon - Hardcover

Peters, Ralph

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0765323559 ISBN 13: 9780765323552

Verlag: Forge, 2009

Inhaltsangabe

The best-selling author of The War in 2020 imagines a post-apocalyptic war launched by America in retaliation against Islamic extremists who have used nuclear weapons to destroy Los Angeles, Israel, and parts of Europe, a battle that is complicated by anti-Muslim Christian zealots.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ralph Peters is a retired Army lieutenant colonel and former enlisted man, a controversial strategist and veteran of the intelligence world; a bestselling, prize-winning novelist; a journalist who has covered multiple conflicts and appears frequently in the broadcast media; and a lifelong traveler with experience in over seventy countries on six continents. A widely read columnist, Ralph Peters' journalism has appeared in dozens of newspapers, magazines and web-zines, including The New York Post, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The Washington Post, Newsweek, Harpers, and Armchair General Magazine. His books include The Officers’ Club, Endless War, and Red Army. Peters grew up in Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, and studied writing at Pennsylvania State University. He lives and writes in the Washington, D.C. area.

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ONE

OFF THE COAST OF THE FORMER STATE OF ISRAEL, NOW THE EMIRATE OF AL- QUDS AND DAMASKUS

He stood on the deck in the darkness, stealing a moment to discipline his thoughts. A few blind missiles streaked across the sky, desperate shots that fell between the waiting ships. A killer drone exploded in orange freworks, stopped short by antiaircraft guns. Ashore, on the horizon, artillery fre lifted the night’s skirt. The Marines were pushing inland, beyond the crest of Mt. Carmel. But Lieutenant General Gary "Flintlock" Harris remained intrigued by the war he couldn’t see.

He had warned of the danger. Still, he had been appalled by how badly his generation had judged the coming wars. The overreliance on technology had troubled him for years, while his peers had dismissed him as an eccentric, hopelessly conservative, backward. His insistence on training his troops to fght on without their advanced systems had earned him the mocking nickname "Flintlock."

Now the military he served was fghting a longer- range version of World War II, scorched by the few technologies that still worked.

Science had undone itself. Harris tried to visualize the wild electronic war playing out in the darkness, with each side canceling the other’s capabilities with hyperjammers, signal leeches, and computer plagues. Only a handful of his country’s satellites remained aloft, and the devastating effects of electromagnetic- pulse simulators destroyed every electronic system with the least gap in its shielding. Harris recalled the easy days when, as a company commander in Iraq, he could e-mail his wife on the other side of the world. Back then, generals could talk to anyone, anywhere, anytime they wished. Later, as a battalion exec, he had cursed the BlackBerry that kept him on an electronic leash. Now he longed for such a tool, but had none he could trust.

The sky pretended to be empty. But a mad duel raged on wavelengths no human eye could see. Harris turned back to the battle of metal on metal, of fesh and blood. He was waiting for the signal from Monk Morris and his Marines to send the 1st Infantry Division ashore. The 1st Cav would follow. Given the shortage of appropriate landing craft, the operation was bound to be a mess. This time, the Army had to rely on the Marines for support. Their new "get- ashore" boats were the operation’s lifeline, given that every port facility that hadn’t been destroyed remained hot from nuclear ground bursts and bombs with dirty triggers.

The Jihadis had expected his corps to land to the south, where the terrain was more inviting and Jerusalem waited. Instead, only the MOBIC corps obliged the Muslim high command, plunging ashore through the patches of radioactive debris just north of the ruins of Tel Aviv. Harris’s chosen landing zone, the Mt. Carmel sector, had been lightly defended. Relatively speaking. Monk Morris’s Devil Dogs faced rugged terrain, ambushes, and suicidal fanatics. But Monk thrived on that kind of fghting. The last message received before comms went down again had been a sitrep describing the slaughter of Druze civilians by the retreating Jihadis. According to Monk, the atrocities were the worst he’d ever seen.

And Monk had seen a great deal, from Anbar a generation before through the Saudi intervention— where they’d frst served together—and on to Nigeria. More recently, he’d brought his Marines up from Pendleton for the recovery operations after the nuclear terror attack on Los Angeles. Monk joked that he’d never need a night- light, since he glowed in the dark himself.

A volley of rockets scrawled arcs in the sky. Again, they were as in effective as holiday freworks. But it would take only one to hit the wrong ship. Then the pyrotechnics would be a great deal more dramatic.

It was hard to resist ordering the lead brigade of the Big Red One ashore immediately, to get things moving, to push deep and hard and fast. But the narrow beachhead, with the cliffs and steep slopes shooting up behind it, would be on the verge of chaos as it was. Harris didn’t envy the beachmaster. And he could trust Monk, who knew how much time mattered. The Army, with its heavy gear, couldn’t go ashore until the roads winding into the hills had been secured.

Harris heard footsteps descending a metal ladder. A moment later, his aide, the newly promoted Major John Willing, stumbled from a hatch.

"Sir?"

"Word from General Morris?" Harris asked.

A head shook in the darkness. "No, sir. Nothing yet. But the Deuce has an update. One of the overheads got clean imagery."

"Tell him I’ll be down in a few minutes. And tell the Three I need to know the status of the MOBIC landings down south. Even if he has to swim down there to fnd out."

"Yes, sir. Got it."

Harris liked and trusted his G-2. But the man was a little too eager to brief when there wasn’t anything vital to add to the picture. Loyal, but too demonstrative about it, he needed to learn to listen to things he didn’t want to hear. The G-3 was his opposite: taciturn, with the quiet sort of loyalty that would sacrifce life and limb but might explode if disappointed— the kind of man you didn’t dare let down.

Flintlock Harris granted himself a few last minutes of quiet. Watching the manmade lightning on the horizon, he remembered.

BREMERHAVEN, GERMANY

The northern sky threatened rain. The Germans had torn the roofs from the dockside ware houses out of spite, and the vast herd of refugees waiting to board a ship to safety had no protection against a downpour beyond what they wore on their backs. The tentage the U.S. Army had brought to Bremerhaven barely met the requirement for sick wards. Half of the kids in the dockyards had diarrhea, the shitters were too few for one- tenth the number of refugees who staggered from the trains, and Doc Brodsky worried about cholera. The doc wanted the Navy to give priority to bringing in saline solution. But his claim for aircraft space was just one among many. There weren’t enough rations aboard the advance vessels to feed the refugees. A shortage of potable water meant that the throng on the wharves was dehydrating. They already smelled of death.

Harris heard gunfre. Inland. Less than a kilometer, he judged. Inside the fence. Near the railhead.

His greatest worry had been a shoot- out with the German border police, who were behaving a little too much like the worst of their ancestors. Given all that had occurred, he understood the Germans’ anger. He just couldn’t fathom their cruelty. In his more cynical moments, he wondered if it was in their DNA.

The simultaneous detonation of dirty bombs in Berlin, Hamburg, and Frankfurt, as well as in Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Milan, Rome, London, and Manchester, had been the signal for the Great Jihad. Muslim radicals told their kind that Europe had lost its will, that it needed only a push to topple and leave a new caliphate standing.

It had been all madness. The Islamists hadn’t had the numbers. The majority of their fellow Muslims in Europe wanted no part of the violence. But enough rose up to seal the fate of the rest. The Muslim rioting had been severe, with atrocities committed in the streets against any ethnic Europe an on whom the radicals laid hands.

In less than a week, the equation shifted decisively. The anti-Muslim pogroms that followed did not distinguish between those who had committed crimes and those who had only tried to wait out the chaos. In every country, the authorities either tolerated or abetted the revenge killings.

Within a month, the counterattacks on Europe’s Muslims spread so widely and grew so brutal that the United States led the world in demanding that Europe’s...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Forge
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2009
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0765323559
• ISBN 13: 9780765323552
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 382
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar