Free The War After Armageddon by Ralph Peters Page A

a black program, Nasr was on his own. In Indian country.
    He smiled at the utterly American phrase. He never felt more American than when he was thrust into the world that had forced his parents to flee. For the crime of being Christians. And yet, the Muslim role came to him easily. As if you inherited knowledge of your enemies.
    Well, he was just glad that his parents had found the get-up-and-go to get up and go. Anyone who criticized the United States of America needed to get a good whiff of the Middle East.
    The old man was up to something. But then, everybody between Casablanca and Karachi was up to something. Everybody had an angle. Every seven-year-old worked a grift.
    Nasr caught himself before he shrugged. He had almost moved his shoulders like a Westerner. Instead, he waved the world away with a dismissive hand. And he entered the crowd, slipping past a policeman who wore his beret straight up from his scalp, like a mushroom cap.
    An unshaven man in an old tweed jacket grasped Nasr by the arm.
    “Please,” he said, “please . . . Can
you
help me?”
    “What do you need, brother?” Nasr asked him.
    “My wife . . . she’s . . . we need . . .”
    A volley of artillery rounds struck beyond one of the city’s ridges. Closer than the other fires had come. The refugee clinging to Nasr’s forearm flinched, almost dropping to his knees.
    “Why have they brought us here? Why? Do you know?”
    “Where are you from, brother?”
    “Why do they bring us here? This is
fitna
. Madness. I’m a professor. Of physics. My wife is a teacher. What do we have to do with their war?”
    “Where is your home, brother? Where did they take you from?”
    A woman in the crowd began to scream.
    “From Homs. From the university. Why bring us such a long way? Why bring us here? We’ll all be killed. Can you help us?”
    “We must pray to Allah,” Nasr said, “and trust in His beneficence.”
    The professor looked at him scornfully. Letting go of his forearm. “You’re one of
them
? You
believe
that nonsense? After all the world has seen? There is no god . . . none . . .”
    “There is no god but God,” Nasr corrected him. “And Mohammed is his Prophet.
Insh’ Allah
, all will be well with you, brother.”
    “You,”
the professor said in a spiteful rage, “it’s dogs like you who’ve done this.”
    Before turning away, Nasr told the professor, “Get away from this place. Or they’ll steal what little you have left. Take your wife and go to the farthest neighborhood your feet can find. Nothing is left down here.”
    But the professor wasn’t listening. Fury had blocked his ears.
    “Dogs like you have done this,” he repeated.
    “And hold your tongue, brother,” Nasr warned him. “Not all Nazarenes are as patient with blasphemers as I am.”
    He scanned the shabby crowd but couldn’t spot the old man who’d been trailing him. Pushing on toward the buses, Nasr let himself take in a dozen conversations: pleas, complaints, threats,and furious bargaining, all of it reeking with the stench of shit and fear. Some of the refugees had been brought from as far away as Halab, ancient Aleppo, in northern Syria. And Nasr thought he heard Iraqi accents.
Educated
accents, all of them.
    Why on earth drive your intelligentsia—or what passed for one—into the path of an invading army?
    Did the Jihadis want them to be killed?
    Nasr stopped. Just below the derelict patch where the Church of the Annunciation had stood. His body felt sheathed in ice.
    Was that it? Did the Jihadis
want
them to be killed?
    Nasr had been inserted weeks before the invasion began, but the influx of refugees had begun just two days before a bombardment announced the landings. The Jihadis had known an attack was coming, of course, if not just when and where.
    What else had they known?
    Major Nasr sat on a broken wall. A half-block from one of Christendom’s holy places—now a ruin used as a public latrine. He wasn’t a party to the detailed