Without warning

by John Birmingham

  In the space of less than three seconds she stood over her would-be killers. The pistol was already cocked. Two loud, flat cracks rang out and she finished off the prone figure by the wall. A slight shift in stance as she swung around, and she double-tapped the man at her feet, even though his life was already bleeding out of him. Almost no thought went into the actions. She hadn’t indulged herself in the luxury of conscious thought since the two of them had burst into the ER. She simply reacted, her mind and body running along tracks that had been laid down for her by thousands of hours of training.

  ‘Non!’ screamed a voice. Monique’s. ‘What are you? You fucking monster!’

  I’m Echelon, thought Caitlin as she took the weapon from the lifeless hand of the first man she had killed. The ER was unnaturally still all around her. Nobody had yet recovered from the shock of such extreme and unexpected violence. Her gun hand seemed to float towards the weeping French girl. A slow, inhuman movement, machine-like in its lack of compassion. Monique was no longer an asset, a resource to be exploited for the mission. She was a loose end.

  * * * *

  7

  GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, CUBA

  The Cuban officer’s salute was crisp, and his posture ramrod straight, but his eyes betrayed only confusion and anxiety. Musso returned the salute before dropping into a more relaxed posture. The two men stood in a bare office, borrowed for the meeting. Until two days ago it had been the domain of a navy lieutenant, but he had transferred back home and nobody had yet arrived to fill his berth. And five’ll get you fifty that nobody ever would, Musso thought bleakly.

  ‘Major,’ he said, to open the discussion, ‘welcome to Guantanamo Naval Base.’

  Major Eladio Nuсez bobbed his head up and down in an agitated fashion.

  ‘Would you care to sit?’ asked Musso.

  ‘Si. Thank you.’

  Nuсez dropped into a chair with some relief. His aide, a captain, remained at attention by the door. Lieutenant Colonel Stavros stood at ease by the cheap government-issue desk on which Musso had leaned back. Outside, the base was locked down on its highest alert. Two Marines in full battle gear doubled-timed past. They were ready. The question was simple enough: ready for what?

  ‘This… ah… this is very difficult, you understand,’ said Nuсez. He leaned forward, his hands rubbing together nervously. ‘We do not… I don’t…’

  ‘You’ve lost contact with Havana,’ Musso offered.

  ‘Si. But more than that. Something strange. A few miles to the north of my position – a sort of heat curtain. We can see the land behind it, through a haze, and it looks normal. But nothing, or no people, move there. There is a town, not far beyond the line, on the road north. Nothing. Not a soul.’

  Musso nodded. Nuсez was deeply agitated but Musso was not so stupid as to make any judgments about the man’s character on that basis. The major had been chosen by the Cuban military to face off a mortal enemy, squatting on the very soil of his motherland. He would be neither a fool nor a coward.

  ‘Have you sent anybody in?’ he asked. ‘To investigate.’

  The captain standing by the door moved fractionally. A tic flickered under one eye.

  Nuсez nodded. ‘Yes. I send in some scouts. They appear to, uh, to disappear in the heat haze. It was very thick, very powerful, no, near the effect? It seemed much hotter. And so my men they walk in, slowly. They…’ He groped for the right word. ‘They shimmer, yes? In the haze. And they are gone.’

  ‘Just gone?’ asked Stavros.

  Nuсez nodded vigorously. ‘Yes. Sometimes the haze seems to shift, like a curtain, just for a second, and we can see further down the road, say two hundred metres. It is like looking into a fish tank, yes, in a restaurant? It is a very strange sight. Like a curtain of air? I do not see how that can be but it… ah…’ He rolled his hands in a helpless gesture, again seeking the right words. ‘You can see this curtain. But the scouts, they never emerge on the far side. Their uniforms, they fall in a heap. Charred and smoking.’

  Musso frowned. He thought he understood what Nuсez was describing. The heat wall sounded a little like a blast wave – the front of super-compressed air that moves outwards from the point of an explosion. But in this case it wasn’t moving, or compressed. It merely hung in the air like a ‘curtain’, as Nuсez had called it.

  Musso cleared his throat. ‘Major, my own observers reported some of your men heading north…’

  ‘Si,’ he said bitterly. ‘They abandoned their posts.’

  ‘And they ran into the haze?’

  Nuсez nodded, looking almost satisfied. ‘Yes. There was no need to shoot them. They have gone too.’

  ‘I see,’ replied Musso. ‘And so what would you like us to do?’

  The Cuban shifted uncomfortably in his seat, looking around, surprised at last to find himself in the devil’s lair. He sighed. ‘We would like help. We are not a tin-pot dictator’s ship,’ he said, forcing Musso to suppress a grin for the first time that morning. ‘We nave been intercepting your satellite news services. We know this is beyond the normal. Something terrible and large is happening. We need to know what. To prepare.’

  Musso folded his arms and let his chin rest on his chest.

  ‘This “curtain” of air,’ he said after a brief moment of quiet, ‘is it stable? Is it moving, expanding, at all?’

  Nuсez appeared deeply troubled by the question. ‘Like I said. It is a giant curtain, and like a curtain, it moves as if blown by the wind, sweeping over the countryside like a curtain blows in a window.’

  Musso felt a shiver that started at the base of his spine and ran up into his shoulders. The idea of this thing moving an inch was disturbing at a cellular level. ‘Major, how much is it moving?’ he asked. ‘Have you been able to determine any limits?’

  Nuсez bobbed his head up and down. ’It seems to… billow … is that your word? It seems to billow like a sail, up to fifteen or twenty metres. It seems random. Just like a curtain or the branches of a tree moving in the breeze. But if it sweeps over you – poof! You are gone.’

  ‘Well, we need to know more about it, about the parameters under which it operates. But neither of us can send any more of our people in.’

  ‘I know,’ Nuсez agreed. ‘We have watched your planes and ships, no? The pilots and sailors, they have been taken too.’

  ‘What about a Predator?’ suggested Stavros. ‘I understand there’s a unit on base. The effect doesn’t seem to interfere with electronics. Perhaps we could send one up and into the affected area.’

  Musso gave Nuсez an enquiring look. ‘How’d you feel about that, Major? We could send an unmanned drone up, but we’d be violating your airspace. I would need written authorisation from your senior officer.’ Part of him marvelled at how deeply ingrained was the ass-covering reflex, but what the hell was he supposed to do?

  ‘I am the senior officer now, General,’ said Nuсez as he began patting his pockets. ‘My colonel was in Havana, and Lieutenant Colonel Lorenz drove into the haze before we realised what it was. His car went off the road and burned.’

  Stavros handed him a pen and a notepad, and the Cuban began scribbling immediately. Nobody spoke while he wrote.

  Musso walked over to the window. It was coming on for midday and the sun beat down fiercely on the base. A flagpole across the compound cast only a short dagger of shadow, the Stars and Stripes hanging limp in the humidity. Guantanamo was not a major fleet base. It had been established as a coaling station – not the most glamorous of postings, even before it became famous as a prison camp. Down in the bay, a couple of tugs and a single minesweeper lay at anchor close to shore. It was a scene entirely normal, even banal.

  ‘Here, Colonel,’ said Nuсez, handing the slip of paper to Stavros. ‘You may countersign as a witness. I have authorised Brigadier General Musso to deploy surveillance assets into Cuban territory on a temporary basis, with myself to administratively supervise such deployments in each and every instance.’


  ‘Fine,’ agreed Musso.

  In fact there were any number of red flags sticking out of such an arrangement, but under normal circumstances Nuсez would have guaranteed himself a trip to prison, or even a blindfold and a last cigarette, by writing out such an order. If he was willing to put his nuts in the grinder, Musso could hardly quibble.

  * * * *

  ‘Goddamn.’ Lieutenant Colonel Stavros was the first to speak, and he said it all.

  ‘Goddamn is right,’ agreed Musso.

  ‘Madre de Dios,’ muttered Nuсez.

  His very presence in the situation room would have been unthinkable only hours earlier, and two heavily built MPs did shadow his every move, but Musso wasn’t expecting any trouble. Nor was he expecting any repercussions from having allowed an enemy officer into one of the nerve centres of the US military to watch some of its newest technology in action. There had been some quiet and very forceful dissent from the army’s senior representatives on base – a Military Police colonel and a Signal Corps major, no less. But they had been overruled with extreme prejudice.

  ‘Empty,’ said Nuсez. ‘Completely empty.’

  ‘Goddamn,’ whispered Stavros again. A single bead of sweat trickled down his temple even though the blue-lit room, buried thirty metres below ground, was nearly as cold as a beer fridge. Fear and sweat, sour and musky, filled the space.

  Holguin, a city of more than three hundred thousand souls, scrolled down the plasma screen in front of them. It lay nearly a hundred klicks away to the north, well within the Predator’s range. But Musso intended to push the aircraft on, deeper into Cuban airspace. It was going to go down in hostile territory. Or what had been hostile territory this morning. Musso was already thinking of it as no-man’s-land now. Quite literally.

  The sysop controlling the surveillance bird had dropped its altitude to three hundred metres, a height at which the Predator’s cameras could easily pick out very fine detail on the streets below. In fact, so low was it flying and so close had the operator pulled in the view that the real-time feed was a blur, and Musso, like the other observers, was instead examining slo-mo replays on the other monitors. In one the Calixto Garcia Park, right in the middle of the city’s downtown area, rolled into view. Another showed the giant Ceverercia Bucanero brewery, a joint venture with the Canadian brewer Labatt. It was aflame, but nobody was fighting the blaze. On other monitors, beautifully decaying Spanish colonial architecture sat cheek by jowl with aesthetically worthless cement office blocks and warehouses. Winding streets gave onto cobblestone plazas and the town’s surprisingly rich cultural district, wherein half-a-dozen museums, galleries and libraries all stood. Not a solitary human figure moved anywhere.

  Unlike the satellite images they’d been watching on the European and Asian news services, the Predator fed live video, and although the streets of Holguin were not nearly as crowded with vehicular traffic as an American city of comparable size, they were still choked with the wreckage of hundreds of cars, many of them burning, all apparently having lost their drivers at the same time. A thickening layer of smoke hung over the city, stirred only slightly by a gathering breeze.

  ‘General Musso, sir?’

  ‘Yes, son,’ Musso answered without looking away from the eerie scenes.

  ‘I have PACOM on line for you, sir.’

  Musso accepted a pair of headphones with a mike attached, fitting them on and walking over to a far corner. ‘This is Musso,’ he said quietly.

  ‘General,’ came a brusque reply in a rather refined New England accent, ‘Admiral James Ritchie here. Glad to hear you’re still with us. You seem to be on the front line of this… phenomenon.’

  ‘Close enough, sir. It’s touched down about seventy klicks north of here. Looks like a weird storm front. Admiral, if you don’t mind me asking, do you have information about the situation in CONUS? All we’re getting is the news feeds out of Europe and Asia.’

  ‘No,’ complained Ritchie. ‘We’re not doing much better. Some of my people have managed to take control of the Keyhole over Havana – that’s what I’m pushing through to you now-but we’ve got nothing from home yet. I take it there’s no chance we’ll get a real pair of eyeballs on this today?’

  Musso shook his head, holding the earphones in place as he did so. The set was way too small for him and kept slipping off. ‘No, sir. Whatever this thing is, it’s specifically targeted for an anti-personnel effect. We lost a few people to it before we realised. The Cubans lost a lot more, for what it’s worth. But there seems to be no interference with electronic signals or equipment. I guess it’s something akin to a neutron bomb – takes out the people and leaves the infrastructure in place.’

  Even as he said it, the rational part of his mind rebelled. He was talking about his wife and children. They were part of the ‘anti-personnel effect’. They had to have ‘shimmered away’, just like all of Nuсez’s men. Just like everyone north of here. They’ll be fine, he repeated over and over. They’ll be fine and they’ll be home soon.

  Ritchie’s voice crackled in the headset and Musso wondered if he’d spoken too soon about signals interference, but the audio came good again.

  ‘Okay, well, have a look at the video my people are sending you. There’s about twelve minutes’ worth. Then we’ll talk again. I’m going to call a videoconference of the… the available theatre commands in twenty minutes.’

  The admiral sounded like an old man. He’d have family at home, too. But this was even worse than losing a family. Much, much worse.

  * * * *

  The videoconference, hosted out of Pearl Harbor, drew in high-level participants from all the theatre commands, including himself as the senior officer ‘available’ from NORTHCOM. That’s how they were putting it: not ‘surviving’, just ‘available’. For Musso, the fact that he was sitting in was a bad, bad sign.

  He was enthroned behind the desk of the ‘unavailable’ commander of Guantanamo Naval Base, in a small, bare office just off from the base war room. Beads of moisture sweated from grey concrete walls and no personal touches softened the utilitarian space. Even the Sony plasma screens on the desk had been set up by a couple of Navy techs ten minutes earlier, to give him some privacy during the link-up. One panel was layered with multiple windows running civilian news feeds and restricted military data channels. In one of these windows he saw live top-down footage of Washington, with English-language subtitles laid in over the original Cyrillic script. There was no explanation for the Russian source material. It may have been hacked, purchased or simply offered for free. Another small riddle to add to the all-enveloping mystery of why the city in the satellite footage was entirely devoid of human life. At least half of Washington was visible in the pop-up window. Musso could see dozens of fires burning out of control, unattended by a single soul. It was amazing how the human mind could adapt to the most irrational, outrageous insults. He’d already accepted, down in his bones, that what had happened was real, and there would be no reversing it. But his balls still tried to crawl up into his belly as he considered the vision of a depopulated American capital. Perhaps it was the Russian captioning.

  ‘Links secure.’ The disembodied female voice could have originated anywhere, but Musso supposed it belonged to a comms specialist somewhere in Pearl.

  The screen devoted to the conference divided in two, with the face of Admiral James Ritchie taking up half the real estate, while four smaller windows carried the heads or acting heads of the unified theatre commands. Apart from General Jones, the Marine Corps officer in charge of US forces in Europe, Musso didn’t know any of them personally. But of course he knew of Tommy Franks, the CENTCOM boss. The long, weathered face was famous the world over as commander of the Coalition arrayed against Saddam Hussein. Musso could only imagine what sort of pressure he must have been under right now. Franks had a naturally melancholy appearance to begin with, and Musso thought it even more deeply lined and puffy-eyed than usual.

  By way of contrast, a fre
sh-faced woman, Lieutenant Colonel Susan Pileggi, occupied the frame set aside for the senior ‘available’ officer of the Southern Command. With SOUTHCOM’s main HQ in Miami lying well behind the event horizon, seniority fell to her as acting commander of Joint Task Force Bravo in Honduras. She was based at Soto Cano Air Base, about ten miles south of Comayagua. Like Musso himself, and Admiral Ritchie, whose superior, Admiral Fargo, had been in Washington this morning, Pileggi had found herself thrust into the rumble seat by the absence of her own boss back in the US. It reminded him of war games in which he’d had a very minor part back at the start of his career, role-playing a massive Soviet nuclear strike that all but destroyed the United States and her government.