Flashback

The phone-computer screen was on and winking. There was a new message from Val. Nick set the iodine and alcohol bottles and knife on the counter and tapped open the message.

It was as brief as all Val’s e-mails were. He was coming back from Boston with a southwest-bound convoy in March and would like to see the Old Man if he was still going to be at the San Antonio Rangers Company D barracks. If not, next time through. How was Leonard doing?

Leonard was doing pretty damned good, thought Nick, thanks to an aortic valve surgery that would cost Nick almost thirty thousand dollars. Texas dollars. He was paying the bill a little each month out of his lieutenant-detective Ranger salary. There were a few years of installments still ahead.

It was worth it.

An e-mail from the poet Danny Oz was waiting. Oz was going back to Israel—that radioactive wasteland that used to be Israel—in the Big Push in May. The Japanese and Republic of Texas forces were bringing 1,100,000 Jews—some expatriates, many from America and other countries—back to the Mideast this summer.

The beachhead had been cleared by American and Japanese conventional forces, but the returning Jews would have to hold it. And expand it. Oz wrote that his cancer was in remission and even if it were not, he’d be returning with the Big Push and let cancer and the Caliphate do their worst.

Nick was sure the Caliphate would.

But their worst might not be as bad as it would have been a few months earlier. The new Shogun of Nippon had warned the core Islamic states of the Caliphate that any use of nuclear weapons on the Caliphate’s part would be met by an instantaneous gee-bear and nuclear retaliation, but not, at least initially, on their crowded cities. The Shogun had specified that the seven holiest Islamic shrines would be destroyed—each after twenty-four hours’ evacuation warning—should the jihadist forces ever use weapons of mass destruction against anyone again. To show his new allies’ earnestness in this promise, the Shogun had given twenty-four hours’ warning and used fifty gee-bears to vaporize a minor Shi’ite shrine in Basra as an example.

If Al Jazeera coverage was to be believed, more than a billion citizens of the Caliphate literally went into convulsions and foamed at the mouth at this sacrilege. More than fifty thousand people died in urban riots.

But no weapons of mass destruction had been used by the Global Caliphate against the beachhead near where Haifa used to be.

Next year in Jerusalem! Oz had written at the end of his note. Nick knew that it was a serious invitation.

Well, why not? Professor Emeritus Dr. George Leonard Fox was going. The old man with his new cloned heart valve—friskier than ever, in his own words—would be there on the beachhead with 1,099,999 other Jews.

Dara had never told him that her father was a Jew. It must have slipped her mind.

Nick wouldn’t be going to the New Israel any time soon. Starting today, his Ranger division—12,000 men and women strong—was moving across the border into New Mexico with more than 200,000 men and women in the Republic of Texas Sam Houston Army.

The armored forces were tasked with clearing out the last of the “foreign presence” in the once and future states of New Mexico, Arizona, and southern California. Then the armored divisions would sweep south, at least as far as Monterrey and Torreón and Culiacán. They would decide about Ciudad de México later.

To those who cried “Imperialism!”—and there were many of those kind left in what were now being called the Timid States of America—the answer was “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of your neighbor’s kitchen.”

The last e-mail was from Dr. Linda Alvarez, a woman Nick had met at a Christmas party on the Riverwalk and with whom he’d spent quite a lot of time since New Year’s. He would open that e-mail later.

I’ll tell you more about her later, Dara.

When he’d been using flashback, Nick had never sent mental e-mails to Dara. He hadn’t really thought about her much in those days. He hadn’t needed to, since he was reliving hours and days with her constantly. But those were frozen memories. Now, without flashback, his thoughts turned to Dara often—even as the immediacy of her touch and look faded for him—and he sent her a daily mental e-mail. They were brief, but not as brief as Val’s two-sentence notes.

We have to learn to accept our losses. It was not a pseudo-profound thought that Nick was generating, but something Major Trevors had said in the Company D briefing the day before. The losses for the Texas Rangers should not be too dear—they were following the army as a civilian infrastructure and police force.

But one never knew.