Apocalypse Dawn (8 page)

“What are we doing?”

“Air and troop support. Those gunships are herding jump troops. We’re also providing medical corpsmen to handle on-site wounded. Once a triage is established, the wounded that can travel will be sent back here. From what we’ve heard so far, there are a lot of casualties. Gonna be a lot more.”

Glancing at his watch, Delroy did the math. With the border two hundred miles away, give or take a handful, the trip incountry would take time. “The border is an hour and a half away.”

“An hour and twenty minutes,” Gabe corrected.

As Delroy watched the television screen, coverage shifted to Glitter City. Several of the specials about the ongoing conflict had been shot there and in the field featuring military men involved in the border patrol, and almost everybody in the ship had watched them when they aired. Over the last few tense months, Delroy-as well as the rest of the world addicted to news services-had watched the dead city rise from the dust and become a thriving if threadbare metropolis of journalists and local residents trying to make a living from the meager opportunity the media invasion had brought them. One of the newsmagazines was planning to do a special on the impact the journalists’ presence had on the area.

The camera panned down the single road that cut through Glitter City. People were panicked, some of them abandoning vehicles while others loaded gear and passengers aboard, evidently thinking they were going to flee before the missiles reached them.

In the next instant, absolute carnage tore through Glitter City.

SCUDs landed in the small town, and the resulting explosions collapsed a building.

Dwight’s voice came to Delroy in that moment. “We’re living in the end times now, Del. God is going to deliver his people from the war and strife that’s going to consume this world. We’re going to live to see the Rapture. “

Dwight had been wrong, of course. He hadn’t lived to see it. But as Delroy Harte watched the stark images relayed on the television monitor, the chaplain found the idea of the Rapture being close at hand much easier to believe.

But then, Delroy denied that, refused to believe it. This was just a military engagement, not the end times. Perhaps a war would even come of it. Men would die and he would pray for them because that was what he had signed on to do.

Turkey

A SCUD-B surface-to-surface missile’s rockets burned for eighty seconds, more or less. While in the air that eighty seconds, the SCUD-B traveled one hundred and seventy-five miles.

The distance to Glitter City from Aleppo, Syria, was less than eighty miles, less than half the distance the SCUD-Bs were capable of. When he’d gotten the call from Captain Remington, Goose had been three minutes away from the tent city that housed support personnel as well as media. Even picking up the pace in the RSOVs to the point of risking life and limb, the Rangers arrived two minutes and forty-eight seconds after the first wave of SCUDs blasted into the landscape.

Goose sat buckled into the passenger seat and peered at the huge dust cloud that had been raised around the area from the impact and detonation of the SCUDs. Bobby Tanaka whipped the vehicle hard to the left just as Goose yelled, “Something’s in the road!”

The yellow dust cloud had concealed the long steel body of an unexploded SCUD missile. Goose knew from hard experience that SCUDs didn’t always detonate. The failure rate for the Russiandesigned weapons was something U.S. military forces would never have allowed. But the thirty-foot-plus missiles remained in the Syrian army’s arsenal. And they had done their share of damage today.

The RSOV skidded wildly in the loose sand. The rear quarter panel came around and smacked the SCUD. When he heard an ear-splitting blast at almost the same time, Goose figured that he and his unit had just been blown to smithereens.

Instead, the RSOV skidded in the opposite direction from the impact as Tanaka overcorrected. The SCUD in the roadway remained a dud. It would have to be removed by bomb disposal teams later.

Glancing over his shoulder, Goose watched the second Ranger vehicle avoid the SCUD by several feet. Then realization kicked in that if the detonation he’d heard hadn’t occurred at their twenty it had to have happened elsewhere. He glanced forward again and saw a new cloud of dust curling up a hundred feet and more from the desert.

Clods of hard earth and debris tumbled back down from the sky. They drummed against the RSOV with the force of sledgehammers. The cacophony rolled over Goose, deafening him.

Holding his left forearm over his face, Goose took as much cover as he could from his helmet and Kevlar vest. Rocks and clods pinged off armor as well as flesh, leaving welts, scrapes, and bruises. Goggles protected his eyes from the grit that swirled in the air, but the yellow dust matted and stuck to the kerchief he’d pulled up over his nose and mouth. Perspiration and saliva had made the kerchief wet enough to turn the dust to mud.

The fallout from the SCUD detonation continued for a few seconds, then immediately started again as at least two more missiles struck the high ridges of broken earth that surrounded Glitter City. Ages ago, when the town had been little more than a trading post for travelers, small stone buildings had been constructed against the sides of the bowl that contained the meeting place. The surrounding hills forming the natural bowl had always protected the village and the traders from the wind and the sandstorms that sometimes rose up. The town had provided a place of relative peace, a little shade, and a natural spring that was work to get to but had provided the townsfolk with their share of cool water.

Since the arrival of the American troops and the international media, Turkish traders had opened up a market again. They offered local cuisine and trinkets for souvenirs, bartering those things for American and European products such as cigarettes, Coke and Pepsi, and even military MREs. Most American fighting men only accepted the meals-ready-to-eat when nothing else was available, but Turkish traders found a ready market waiting to sample the meals.

Several buildings had existed on those hillsides, some of them decades old. Most of them were in some state of disrepair. After the media had encamped there, local construction teams had been hired to provide more adequate shelter. With things heating up on the border, most of the reporters wanted to stay on-site rather than make the trip between Diyarbakir and Sanliurfa, the closest metropolitan cities.

The repaired buildings had filled with the international reporters, enterprising Turkish merchants, and support personnel subsidized by the spending habits of the Turkish and American troops. When members of the U.N. relief crews and peacekeeping efforts had arrived, the overflow had been set up in tents. The tents ranged from cutting-edge technology to sheets of canvas put up with sticks. All of them offered shade from the unforgiving sun.

No one knew who had hung the sobriquet Glitter City on the place. But everyone knew the reference was to the Hollywood-style atmosphere of the place. Some news agencies had rolled out what were, in effect, microproduction companies that shot day-by-day footage of the military buildup on both sides of the border, managed day trips to local religious sites such as the Ulu Cami-the Grand Mosque of the Suljuk Turks-the brick beehive cities of Harran, and the Pool of Abraham, and interviewed anyone and everyone willing to talk to them.

During conversations with other Rangers who had visited Glitter City, Goose had learned that several newscasts now featured segments spotlighting the potential for disaster between Turkey and Syria. Several investigations had been made into the roots of the PKK and their effect on Turkey’s relations with its neighbors.

Other writers prepared books and took photographs, laying out chapters that were edited and readied for printing as soon as they were e-mailed to New York publishing houses. There were even a few releases being done about Turkey, the TurkishSyrian conflict, terrorists, and historical events and places, pieces that would be aired on the Travel Channel, The History Channel, and on the Discovery Channel, then released straight to video.

War-or at least the threat of impending war-had become big business in media, politics, and economics. Politicians used those threats to shepherd legislation through Congress and to fund budget increases for military spending. The military needed the money-U.S. troops were deployed at every hot spot imaginable, going after everything from terrorists to the bankers who financed them to drug dealers to the country’s traditional enemies.

Not every politician was pushing for more and bigger weapons and more and bigger armies. Goose had heard of a United Nations representative from Romania named Nicolae Carpathia. Surprisingly, Carpathia was pushing for disarmament in his own country. At the time he’d heard that, Goose had never thought it would happen. Romania was part of Eastern Europe, left orphaned by the failed Soviet Communist government, and host to a series of bloodthirsty dictators who had only been driven from office by equally bloodthirsty military uprisings. Most military analysts had figured that the country would be awash in political unrest and military action for decades to come. Instead, Carpathia had begun to quiet Romania down, almost as if by magic.

“Incoming!” Bill yelled from the back of the RSOV.

Instinctively, Goose looked up and saw another SCUD plunge from the air like a blunt spear. Although the missiles lacked a lot in targeting systems, this one streaked almost into the smoke-and dustcovered heart of Glitter City.

The preexisting clouds of smoke and dust prevented Goose from seeing the actual impact. But a heartbeat later, a fairly new blue van erupted into the air, turning and whirling like a child’s toy. Flames wreathed the vehicle and then the gas tank blew, ripping open the vehicle’s side.

The van reached the apex of its arc and had started earthward again, disappearing into the smoke and dust before the sonic boom of the explosion reached Goose’s ears. A moment later, a wave of concussion rattled the RSOV’s windshield.

Merciful God, Goose prayed. Spare the innocent. Because if You don’t, they’re all going to die here today.

Bobby Tanaka glanced at Goose. Fear lit the young man’s eyes. He put his foot over the brake and slowed.

“Get in there, soldier,” Goose said.

“Gonna be suicide to go in there,” Tanaka said. But he grinned a little as he pressed his foot harder on the accelerator and drove the vehicle over the edge of the bowl. “Ah, well, I always did like a wild ride.” The RSOV juked and shuddered as the tires fought for traction on the hillside. They’d run out of road, roaring out over loose layers of sand and rock.

Goose sat in the shotgun seat with his left foot braced against the dash. He cradled the M-4A1 with both hands and kept the assault rifle canted up at the ready. Closer to ground zero now, he raked his gaze across the field of destruction the SCUDs had left in their wake.

Huge craters had opened up from the bomb blasts, turning the desert floor under the shifting sands into a lunar landscape. Stone buildings lay in tumbled wrecks or nearly covered by a deluge of de bris that had slid free of hillsides. Flattened tents and flaming tents littered the area, and none had been spared. The concussions from the SCUDs had ripped the tent pegs from the ground and flung the tents around like used tissues. Cars and trucks and vans sat abandoned, blown over or apart, or wrapped in flames that sent spikes of twisting black smoke up through the dust cover.

People, dead and dying and badly broken, covered the ground. Other people hunkered in the false safety of the few remaining buildings or behind boulders on the ground and the hillsides. Several people shouted and cursed and cried out for help. Incredibly, some of the reporters were still working, standing in front of cameramen who had managed to hang on to functioning equipment.

A familiar sickness twisted greasily through Goose’s stomach. He’d been on battlefields, had scenes etched inside his skull that he knew would never leave him. Today was going to add to that library of carnage.

“Base,” Goose called over the headset.

Only white noise answered. Remington and his support staff were off-line.

Goose wasn’t surprised. Any staged attack against the American site would include strikes designed to take out the communications relays. It wouldn’t last, though. Cal Remington was nothing if not a man who planned for every eventuality. Backup systems were in place; they would be on soon. Goose believed that. Until then, though, they had their orders.

“Stop here,” Goose ordered.

Tanaka ground the big vehicle to a halt.

A single road running north and south bisected Glitter City. Everyone who arrived there was on their way somewhere else.

“Off,” Goose yelled. Raising his voice was almost unfamiliar after being accustomed to the headsets. He unbuckled and jumped to the road.

Flames crackled around the broken and battered husk of a van that had been gutted and made over into a small restaurant on wheels. A Turkish man had operated the van, parking somewhere within the vicinity of Glitter City every morning and selling the borek and doner kebab lamb rolls his wife made every night. The borek-thin rolls of pastry filled with cheese, minced meat, or spinach and potatoes-was one of Goose’s favorites and he’d always stopped by the man’s van when he was in town. The menu had also included pilaf, baklava and kadayif pastries, and thick, dark Turkish coffee.