Prologue

      The soldier did a flip over the slab of cracked, pockmarked stone, heartbeats ahead of the slashing rain of incoming fire. Bullets hammered the rock with incessant fury, trying to reach the flesh that had escaped them only moments before. Glancing around, he realized he was in a bad situation, surrounded on all sides by grim, determined enemies. Rubbing his gravel-stung cheek, he saw the shell of an old building, but his enemies, armed with grenades and assault rifles, would blow him out of that ruin easily, if they didn’t slice him in two in the first place. This was nothing new to the grizzled veteran, muscles drawn tight as he prepared for yet another brutal clash.

      He pulled the clip from his Uzi and saw it had only five shots left. He poked up his head, but his enemy was out of sight. He narrowed his eyes, knowing that they were gathering courage to make their move.

      “You might as well give it up! You’re surrounded and outgunned!” the invisible enemy called out.

      “Bring it!” It was a simple invitation.

      That’s when he heard the pounding footsteps. Weapons sounded on the other side of the stone, cries ringing as the enemy charged.

      He had to time it exactly right.

      The weapons stopped popping and the soldier rose, swinging his Uzi. The pause in the shooting, he hoped, was the end of their supply of ammo and they’d have to reload. Five shots, one for each pull of the trigger, flew out of the barrel. One, two, three enemies went down, screaming as their chests were stitched, but one was still left charging, struggling to recharge his rifle on the run, feet pumping as he surged forward.

      “Hey, you kids!”

      The illusion was broken in an instant. The paintball sailed wide and to the right as the pistol snapped off its pellet.

      Liev de Toth was no longer a soldier pitting his might against the forces of evil; he was just a teenaged boy on the West Bank, playing with his friends. The jolt of reality was ice water, cooling him off from gleeful excitement. As he was on the downward surge of play-induced adrenaline, fear cut in and spiked him up again.

      Old Man Strieber had to have heard the gas-powered sound of the paintball guns as they spit their pellets. Liev snapped his head around and picked up his scratched and battered Uzi. It looked like a real soldier’s weapon with duct tape and tattered cloth around the stock. The scratches only added to its character.

      Strieber was getting closer, moving as quick as his bum knee could carry him, which was still quick. He’d taken a bad fall and tore the ligaments while a paratrooper in the army. When he wasn’t busy growing apricots in the field, he still exercised and trained his farmhands and whoever else would come to learn the art of using a rifle. The old soldier didn’t approve of paintball gunning, said it wasn’t a safe way to train, but Liev and his friends liked the fun of it. The fact that Liev hadn’t been shot in a half dozen sessions, even against huge odds, added to the teenager’s feeling that running and gunning with the paintball guns was of vital usefulness.

      “C’mon Liev! Let’s go!” Raffi shouted, and Liev raced away from Strieber’s equipment shack and back toward the settlement in the valley.

      “We almost got you today, man,” Jan spoke up as Liev joined the knot of friends.

      Liev took their shared gym bag and threw his gun in with the rest of them. “When I sign up, I’m going to be one hell of a soldier. Look out Hezbollah!”

      Liev was going to say more when he felt a deep rumbling in the ground. He paused, looking back at the Strieber farm.

      One at a time, the five teenaged boys stopped, looking back at the three churning trails of dust snaking and writhing into the sky. There was something familiar about them that eluded the youths for a moment, but the accompanying sound, akin to some metallic beast incessantly clearing its throat, brought the knowledge to life.

      “Tanks?” Liev asked. “Here?”

      “Maybe it’s maneuvers,” Jan said, unconvinced even by his own argument.

      “That doesn’t make sense,” Michael answered. “They’re coming from the south. Why are they going that way? They should be taking the main road.”

      Noah gave his friends a small push. “Look!”

      The tanks weren’t skirting the orchard; they were plowing through the center of it. Liev’s jaw dropped as they spotted the trio of tanks tear through the small grove of apricot trees, smashing their trunks to splinters under their grinding steel treads.

      “That’s insane! What do those idiots think they’re…” he shouted.

      Suddenly gunfire began flashing from the turret.

      Old Man Strieber had a half dozen farmhands on the porch of his squat ranch house, watching in shock as the orchard was ground to sawdust and pulp. They had no idea what was going on until the first muzzle-flashes erupted. Coaxial guns swept them with sheets of lead. Three undulating threads of slaughter ripped through the ranch house’s aluminum siding and flesh alike, the aluminum bursting and popping open neatly, gutting insulation and shards of wood underneath. The six men were not so neat and tidy as flesh and bone exploded, blood spraying across the front of the building, bullets continuing through, unabated by their time in a human body, to smash and puncture yet more aluminum and wood.

      Strieber came running up the other side of the road. It was impossible to believe that only heartbeats earlier, Strieber had driven the boys away from the pile of stones and rotted wood he kept behind his equipment shed, where the boys had been feigning war. Feigning the hellfire that was now hammering real death, blood and thunder to the drumbeat of heavy machine guns.

      The top hatch on the right-most tank popped open. Liev tried to make his mouth move, to scream a warning to Strieber. His throat had turned to a cracked riverbed, dry and burning as he tried to get more than a hoarse whistle past his tonsils. The gunner in the commander’s cupola spun the machine gun mounted there, swung it down on Strieber and tapped off a long burst.

      Liev watched in disbelieving horror the atrocity going on before his eyes. Strieber disintegrated under the storm of .50-caliber rounds.

      “Run!” Liev shrieked, finally forcing words past his lips with Herculean effort. His friends took off, legs pumping, like bats out of hell.

      The ranch house detonated into oblivion under the impact of the tank’s main gun.

      The shock wave gave Liev an extra bit of push.

      Steel damnation was on its way.