The Warriors' Ends- Soldiers of the Apocalypse

by Keith T Jenkins

  “Roger that!” says the walkie. “In three, two, one . . .” and when another second passes, the lamps light up, there is a low crackle, at each of the lamps, like a car battery being connected to another. A line of power extends from each of the lamps to the next. That crackling sound snaps all of a sudden, into a continuous Frankenstein coil noise, a dozen times as dense, then a hundred, as a curtain of light – sparkling, flashing, light from the midst of the air – rises up from the lamps, to about twenty feet.

  Tommy takes up the hammer in his hand, throwing it at the sparkly light curtain, and there is a series of a thousand crackles, as the hammer strikes the curtain, and it strikes back, but the hammer does nothing. I mean there is nothing of the hammer with which to do anything. It is, quite simply, gone. “Don’t worry, we won’t need that hammer again.”

  “Bring it down,” shouts Tommy into the walkie, and in about five seconds, the curtain is gone.

  “Where’s the hammer?” asks one of the youth.

  “There is no more hammer,” says Tommy. “This is a particle defense system, capable of disassembling things at a sub-atomic level, just redistributing the protons, electrons, and neutrons, as free radicals. At five percent, this wall could eat a thousand grenades per second, or three million bullets from an AK47. You can shoot at it with a tank, or an RPG, and we are safe behind its awesome power.”

  “What about from above?” ask Rita.

  “When it turns up to thirty percent, it creates a dome effect, coning together about ninety feet up, or so the plans say.”

  “So, it’s never been tested?” asks Mark.

  “I have no idea,” says Tommy. “I sure didn’t test it ‘til just now. But I know that if we turn it up to twenty or thirty, someone will know we are here.” He points a finger toward the sky, saying, “We’re not the only ones with access to satellites.”

  “I don’t give a shit about Allah!” says Smotritel to Rashid. “The whole world is under attack from no one and we are sitting on our hands.”

  “Intel says that the threat comes from somewhere on the Colorado-Utah border. The sub had launched at a specific target, and the carrier was sending planes and rockets in their direction, but we need to recover their data before we can give a solid target,” says Rashid’s advisor.

  “Did the ships not have clearance from above?” asks Sasha.

  “Yes, sir!”

  “So, why not get the original firing solution from the officers who approved that clearance?” Aleksandr Smotritel shouts, no longer cuddly enough for anyone to call Sasha. “This isn’t Ameristan, asshole. Get it done.”

  The advisor leaves the room in a hurry, anxious to return to the relative safety of his office, away from the angry monster-men. He picks up a phone, dialing his direct military attaché, and asks the question. The response is, “I will have that location sent to your tablet.” This is all he wants . . . a firm location.

  “People act like everyone gets to do whatever they want to, whenever they want around here,” Smotritel is fuming. “We run a military operation around here, not a covert terror-cell based government.”

  “It is the way my people have had to work for a hundred years, so they do,” Ayatollah Rashid concedes.

  There is a knock, the door opens, and in waddles, at a great pace, the advisor, excited to have an answer. He opens his tablet, tapping the message in his notification bar, which opens a map, with an exact location, along with a satellite image, which is six months old.

  “This is a farm!” shouts Smotritel. “We are looking for a military installation.”

  “This is the location from which everything is emanating. It is all we have, sir.”

  “How large is the target area?” asks Rashid.

  “The total space of the hilltop is about ten or twelve acres.”

  “Contact our comrades in the US, tell them to send a dozen fighter bombers to destroy that hilltop. I want to know that not even a rat can survive. Understand?” Smotritel slaps his palm on the man’s forehead for emphasis.

  “I understand, sir,” says the advisor, snapping to attention, slapping his heels together, and then looking to Rashid for approval; he gets a nod.

  “Less than a week away from purging the world of Israel, and we get this, this . . . this crap, from the middle of nowhere.”

  “You know that ending Israel is not the same as ending Israel, don’t you?” asks Smotritel.

  “Yes, but destroying the nation of Israel is the primary step, bringing an end to their homeland, and then we can hunt down every Jew in the world. We can finally kill all these monkey people, ridding the world of their stench, once and for all.”

  “Damn, you must really hate . . .”

  “Allah demands! It has nothing to do with hate, Little Sasha. It is simply what must be done.” But then, in a moment of candor, Rashid allows, “But, or course, since Allah hates them all, so do I. It is only rational.”

  Phase Last Begins

  He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty.[32]

  E-Day Minus 1 Day

  President Harrison receives his orders to destroy the hilltop at the coordinates given. The news breaks and there is a new torrent of malice on the airways. Even the national news media is aflood with reports of the scandalous flow of cash to the hands of all the leadership of every developed and developing nation. Harrison is a little less worried than some, because the whole world knows that he was very wealthy to begin with, mostly saying that he bought the presidency; and maybe he did. But what they used to say will not matter much very soon. Back to today, and today, he has orders.

  “Walid! Get me some specs on this hilltop,” he shouts into his intercom.

  Walid comes quickly with recent satellite intel on the site, presenting it to the President. “The Russians have old intel, sir.” He lays the satellite photos on the desk before President Harrison.

  “What the hell is that?” asks William Harrison. Strangely, this William Harrison has been president for nearly thirteen years, being in the middle of his second term when the Great Disappearances began. Previously, William Henry Harrison was president for only thirty-one days before dying of pneumonia, so men named William Harrison hold both the longest and shortest terms of Presidency. Hmm.

  He points to a circle of objects surrounded by a thin, linear ring of some sort, encircling a house and what looks like it may be a cave.

  “That appears to be a combination of Presidential motorcoaches and some high level command vehicles. And, from what the Pentagon knows, that circle is a defense curtain, but they don’t know what it does. Apparently, the hard-drives in that part of their servers have all been wiped with a DOD level cleaner. They called it the Hillary/PacMan tool.”

  “Oh, yeah! I heard of that.” The President shook his head in sympathy for their loss, still wondering, “What the hell can be done with a bunch of motorcoaches.”

  “If you want, we can order a strike, as suggested.” Walid pauses a moment, allowing the suggestion to sink in. “We have plenty of planes within strike range, and we could attack from several directions. But, it should be known . . .” he pauses again, not knowing if the President wants to hear it, “they were attacked already and it didn’t work out so well.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Yesterday, a sub commander gave the order to land a missile there, and a flight-deck commander sent a sortie, neither of which went as planned.”

  “What does that mean?” asks the President.

  “It means that both ships went down and the aircraft were lost.”

  “How did that happen without my approval?”

  “Some of the men,” confesses Walid, “are more . . .” he cannot choose his words carefully enough.

  “More what?” demands the President.

  “Well, sir,” he stutters a half second, “their allegiances are not fully with you.”

  “Why am I just now hearing about this?” Harri
son slams his pen down on the desk, standing up, he says, “Was I going to have to get this all from the news?”

  “The news only has a training accident with a rocket in the wilderness, and an accidental disaster in the Bay.”

  “That was this!?!”

  “Yes, sir. The missile fired from the sub destroyed the sub, several planes were sent from a carrier, and they were destroyed, as was the carrier . . . by its own onboard missiles.”

  “How the fuck does that happen?”

  “We don’t know, Mr. President,” says Walid, shaking his head, “we only know that it did. We can probably assume it was either a mutinous act of a sailor, or maybe . . . a computer hack.”

  He fumbles through his stuff, finding his tablet, saying, “The attack on the carrier was captured by dozens of individuals in Frisco, using their cell phones. And, fortunately, they all had California mandated encryption and security on their phones, so we got that footage. As soon as their phones auto-loaded to the cloud, our systems found the footage, determined it a military matter, and copied the videos to our evaluation servers; erasing the copies on their cloud service, and on their phones, in about ten minutes.” He was smiling when he said, “Wanna see?”

  Of course, the President wants to see, but when he sees, he wishes he had not. After the first planes departed the carrier Clinton, the phones began to record. They saw the second wave of planes leave the deck, and while waiting to see if another sortie would be launched, the alacrity of the viewers turned to terror, with squeals of women. They saw the missiles head their direction, and most videographers quit filming. Those who continued to shoot footage saw, to their joy and amazement, the missiles turn about, and ducking below the waterline, just yards away from the ships, and with a gigantic belch, the bottom of the ship was seemingly removed. Like the brittle edges of a pork rind, the metal above the waterline shattered under the abrupt distress.

  The intense jostle of the collective explosions rocks the deck of the ship, bouncing planes that are at the ready, landing them harder than they are able to withstand. Jump jets, winding up for vertical takeoff, suddenly with no ground below, slide down the toppling surface of the ship as it lowers into the Bay. Those planes brake their wings off on the decks, sliding and sparking their spilling fuel, descending toward the water as a ball of aluminum and flame, engines screaming in acceleration for lift that would never sufficiently develop. One of the pilots has the good sense to punch out, and although he will later be recovered, his launch only takes him about fifteen hundred feet into the air, descent from which drags his parachute open only enough to get its canopy half full, before he strikes the surface of the water. It will save his life, but not his spine.

  Other video is taken by people who simply do not turn off the recording function of their phone as they run for cover, recording jostled and jumpy, sweeping and swinging video of wildly running crowds, often running over one another, pushing and shoving their way clear, wanting only their own safety, others be damned.

  CCTV, constantly on the watch, caught it all, and, once recovered by the government, is thoroughly erased. With quiet eagerness, Walid watches hundreds die in what Islam considers the wickedest city in the world – or at least that is what San Francisco is called when the subject arises.

  Transglobally, there is an attack of Biblical proportions. Over 200,000,000 soldiers have moved to the northern borders of Israel, and armed with tanks and trucks, rocket launchers and rifles, planes and more, they are driving at breakneck speed. The vehicles are going between 30 and 60 mph, while the foot soldiers are dragging up the rear in haste, averaging about 8 mph overall. As the horde passes through Syria, northern Jordan, and Lebanon, all manner of men get out of their way. Some know that the army is heading for Israel, and in their personal hate, they will join it, eager for the kill. It is about now that the planes are launched from the Clinton. In a few hours, the matters in the US will be on hold, awaiting Presidential decision, but on this front, the march presses onward.

  Trucks carrying racks full of missiles are speeding toward their delivery points, jeeps with soldiers armed with shoulder launched rockets are racing into position, and the foot soldiers are steadily advancing on the Land. In the center of the valley rests a single tank, engine off, waiting for a conflict. On the southern edge of the Megiddo Valley, there lay a trap, with amazing ability to repel, but the numbers are so vastly overpowering, it would take a miracle to find victory.

  In the sixties, there had been a lone tank in this same position, and the commander of the enemy said to his subordinates, “It must be a trap,” and so, he waited. While he waited, the entire Israeli armored force came to meet them. This time, today – in the Valley of Megiddo, the stall and divert tactic is done on purpose.

  Swarming across the valley comes the trucks first, and as the first one gets off a single missile, there rains down upon them, a volley of three hundred rounds from tanks on the crest of the southern exit, two hundred mortar rounds, and a few dozen RPG’s. Three seconds pass, another volley flies to their targets, hammering the trucks, half-tracks, radio rigs, and more. The staggered reloading causes the barrage to become a steady shower of destruction, pelting the Chinese forces in their nearest three miles. The single missile from the Chinese launching truck struck the tank, with the same piece-of-crap Katyusha rockets that had been raining down on Israel for a century, and as usual, it broke apart upon impact, with a detonation nearly twenty yards beyond the turret. The incoming artillery from the south fell with less precision, but with far greater devastation. About one in five rounds hit a target, but almost everything gets hit within four or five volleys. The ground is now so pitted and cratered, like the surface of the moon, that the foot soldiers have an arduous schlep, even without interference from weather, which will arrive shortly. First, there is hell raining down, as the helpers from America have sent down another dozen satellites, as firepower from above.

  Artillery continues to fire to the south, and some of the stuff is much better than the first. The newer stuff pulling to the northern edge of the conflict can fire on the run, and has an effective-ish range of nearly three hundred miles. As they pull into the conflict, dodging their own hardware that is stalled or burning, they half-track to mid valley and begin launching their hardware. It flies in low trajectory, striking Yerushalayim and south.

  “Can we get that Star Wars thing over to help Israel?” asks Mike.

  “No ma’am, but we don’t really need to,” says Culver. “There’s one over Moscow that could be redirected in a few minutes.”

  “Do it.”

  “Boot! Can you get in here and shoot something for Mike?” Culver asks, knowing the answer.

  “Damn Skippy!” says Boot. Culver shows him where the satellite is and what she wants him to shoot, so in a minute his query is, “Big shoot or small shoot?”

  “What does that mean?” asks Mike.

  “Well,” squirms Boot, “I can shoot a watermelon or I can shoot something five miles square, or something in between. Shoot big? Shoot small?”

  “Shoot big, Boot. Very big.”

  “Where big?”

  With all the fingers of her hand, she designates a targeting area of the Megiddo Valley, saying, “Give them a chance to get in here.”

  Boot is nodding as he asks Tommy if he has a Twizzler. Culver looks at him in disbelief as Tommy passes the candy.

  “The weather is turning,” says a Lieutenant to his Commander of the Armored in Israel. “There is a storm blowing in from the west, sir.”

  “That could be to our advantage, son,” the old General tells him. “We can do a great deal of damage from here and there,” he says, pointing to his secondary forces on Carmel. “Elijah was outnumbered 250 to one, and he pulled it off.”

  “He had help, sir,” is the Lieutenant’s reply.

  “So do we, son. Never stop believing that.”

  “Take the fight to them,” comes the order from Moscow, “Run them down on foot if you
have to, but kill every last one of the infidels.” Rashid is pissed. The generals carry the orders to the captains, to the sergeants, to the footmen and horsemen.

  Unknown to Moscow, the Chinese sent twenty four teams of ten men (and or women) to attack the twelve power stations that provide Israel with their electricity in stealth. Though these are amazingly well prepared people, they meet up with even more amazing resistance, and only seven of the power stations are destroyed. One of the effects is that the Iron Dome is running on less than one-quarter power, and the generators are not sufficient to make the difference.

  The missiles are pouring into Israel, with half of them being deflected by the remnants of the Iron Dome, but that means that half are hitting something. It is almost as if they are not even aiming, other than to hit some form of population. Be’er Sheva is becoming a crater of its own, and the blast damage in Yerushalayim is terrifying. The Temple mount is one of the few things that seems bulletproof, but even that is taking some damage from things outside blasting inside – so to speak.

  Suddenly, as the storm comes gathering from the Med, the vast forces of China descend on that lonesome valley, called in the Scriptures, Har Megeddon – Armageddon in the English. It is the Valley of Megiddo, and it is filling with soldiers of all kinds, from lancers to riflemen, men on horseback and on electric horses by Chinese design. Not quite able to travel full speed because of the course terrain. Still, there is a steady separation of men as speed allows some to get far ahead of others, but the effect is as if they have been smeared in a torrent of flesh and steel, like peanut butter across the far-reaching valley.

  As the motorcycles and jeeps reach the southern quarter of the valley, dodging, ducking, and leaping through potholes and craters, there comes thousands of rounds per second, thirty and fourty-five caliber, courtesy of electric mini-guns, mounted on top of every Israeli transport vehicle and armored unit. Behind those vehicles are rows of mortars, each feeding a shell down the tube every ten to fifteen seconds, firing devastation on the enemy, providing their families and friends with the effervescent preservation of their State. The IDF soldiers are ebullient in their success, though limited it may be.