The War After Armageddon by Ralph Peters Read Free Book Online Page A

drivers. Three times older, in some cases. Idling wasn’t good for them. The battalion had already had two go down before they left the beach. And spare parts were as rare as thoroughbred unicorns.
    Captain Walker came up to him. Again.
    “Any word about what’s holding us up, sir?”
    “Jake, nothing’s changed since you asked me that ten mikes ago. You’re on the battalion and brigade nets. I don’t know anything you don’t.”
    Have to watch Walker for nerves. But Cavanaugh understood. The desire to get up into the hills, to get into the fight, to go anywhere, just to move. Instead of sitting here, vehicles nose-to-butt because the one road that wound off the beach was backed up with traffic that had come to a dead stop and nobody knew why.
    The maps, engineer briefings, and old sat photos showed a steep two-lane blacktop that could be blown out at dozens of points. One big boy broken down on a hairpin curve would be enough to stop the entire brigade.
    Add to that the screw-up in the landing and march tables, with the brigade put on hold after 1/4 Cav went ashore so that two artillery battalions and an attack-drone squadron could be rushed forward. Followed by a jerk-the-leash resumption of the brigade’s landing operation.
    And the Jihadis had a lock on them now. Waiting offshore in a made-to-sink “get-ashore boat,” one of the infamous GABs designed badly and built in haste, Cavanaugh had watched successive waves of drones pop up over the ridges and bluffs. He’d caught himself hoping only that none would hit the GABs carrying his battalion, as if wishing the fate on comrades outside of 1-18 Infantry.
    Well, at least the Marines had fought to build the boats, as shoddy as they were. Cavanaugh gave the Corps, the Army’s eternal rival, credit for figuring out fast that the old days of exploiting existing port facilities had ended when Israel’s coastal cities vanished under a dozen mushroom clouds.
    Two GABs bearing old Marine M-1 tanks had taken on water and sunk when the pumps failed. Without any help from the attack drones or blind missiles. But without the landing craft, crappy as they were, the entire operation would’ve been impossible.
    Thus far, all of 1-18’s allotted GABs had stayed on top of the water, where they belonged. With only Delta Company and the ash-and-trash from HHC still waiting to come ashore.
    At the moment, there was no place to put them.
    Out in the haze, the closest Navy ships were distant smudges, but the near waters roiled with GABs, fast boats, picket boats, beachmaster craft, and oceangoing tugs dragging barges loaded with God-knew-what or towing floats to be rigged as temporary docks. Buoys ringed the spots where GABs had gone down under drone attack, and enough debris bobbed on the mild waves to start a cargo cult.
    But the real pandemonium had broken loose on the narrow shingle between the water’s edge and the elevated road where Cavanaugh stood. With even local comms heavily jammed and erratic, petty officers, Marine loggies, and Army engineers trotted about with megaphones, snarling tinny commands. Vehicles splashed ashore through shallow water, churning the pebbled seabed into mud that sucked at their tracks until one vehicle in every four or five had to be winched onto the beach. Stevedores worked mobile cranes or manhandled supplies into little mountains waiting to be hauled forward. As Cavanaugh watched, a burdened forklift listed in the sand and toppledonto its side. Then there were the burned-out vehicles not yet cleared away and, near the beachmaster’s op center, four long rows of dead Marines in body bags, laid out reverently at perfect intervals. More and more casualties were coming down from the hills, evacuated along firebreaks by all-terrain vehicles.
    Thousands of people were doing their best, he knew that. But Cavanaugh still wanted to punch something. A commander had to appear stoic, to control his emotions, to set the example. At times, that seemed