Without warning

by John Birmingham

  ‘Well,’ he began, ‘what I knew when I caught the chopper back this afternoon…’

  * * * *

  By the time Bret finished, Lohberger’s first sergeant had fetched the squadron’s commander and command sergeant major.

  ‘Sweet mother of God,’ grunted Sergeant Major Bo Jaanson, a gnarled stump of old wood who looked like he might well have seen off the Nazis at Bastogne. Melton had given them the super-concentrated version of the hours he’d spent plugged into the European and Asian news feeds, finishing up with the news of the primate discovery – fresh when he’d stepped off the tarmac in Qatar, but probably superseded by some new madness in the hours since.

  The leadership cadre were otherwise speechless. Outside the slowly billowing walls of the tent in which they stood, the squadron continued to gather its strength. Yesterday it had seemed utterly formidable. Now, Melton felt like an ant sitting on a mound kicked over by laughing, moronic gods.

  ‘Thanks anyway,’ said Lohberger at last. ‘It’s been hard not knowing anything.’

  Bret shrugged helplessly. ‘I’m only telling you what I got off the satellite feed and the web. I wouldn’t call it gospel, but… you know…’

  The men were all younger than him, the platoon commanders by a considerable margin. Some of them would have young families of their own. Lohberger, at thirty, was something of a grand old man. He sucked in a deep breath and looked at the map as though he’d found some kind of nasty porn stash in his daughter’s bedroom.

  ‘Okay. There’s nothing we can do about it from here, not right now anyway,’ the captain declared. ‘We know a lot more than we did ten minutes ago, but nothing that changes what we have to do in the next couple of hours.’

  His voice and manner were hard. Melton observed a stiffening of postures and facial expressions among the other men in the room, a turning away from anxiety and doubts, as men jammed them down somewhere deep, at least for the next little while.

  ‘Do you mind if I ask what’s gonna go down here?’ said Melton.

  ‘Nope,’ Lohberger replied. ‘You’re gonna be in on it soon enough.’

  He jabbed a finger at the map table. Melton read the map plan, named Oplan Katie. It looked like someone’s joke, a Cold War-era forward defence at Fulda Gap write-up. He started to feel ill.

  ‘Saddam’s moving towards us. He’s pulled a lot of his guys out of those useless fucking trenches they dug, and put them on the road heading this way.’

  ‘Holy shit.’

  ‘Yeah. Like we don’t have enough to think about.’

  Melton leaned forward to examine Oplan Katie on the transparent acetate. The basic plan had all Coalition forces moving forward out of Kuwait as originally planned. On the map was one phase line, a graphic control measure called Phase Line Katie, that ran through the Sulaybat Depression. All of the units in the Coalition were to hold that phase line and attrit any Iraqi force approaching it. The Brits with the 1st UK Division were still assigned the chore of dealing with Basra. Melton choked back any criticism of the plan. Getting into an urban fire fight, especially now, didn’t seem to make any sense at all. It negated almost all of the Coalition forces’ technological and military advantages. The 5-7 Cav’s objective was Jalibah Airfield, marked as Objective Marne three hundred and seventy klicks south of Baghdad. The Mog all over again, he thought. It explained why everyone in the tent looked pale and sweaty

  What idiot came up with this plan? But he kept that question to himself and asked a different one. ‘Any idea which units?’

  Command Sergeant Major Jaanson volunteered the answer. ‘The crap ones – militia, Fedayeen, reserve forces. A couple of Republican Guard units as well, but from the way they’re moving, they look like their job is to keep a gun at the back of those other guys heading into the meat grinder.’

  The Army Times reporter glanced at Lohberger for confirmation and received a brusque nod. ‘We’ve seen a couple of fire fights break out within the Iraqi ranks. Guard units chewing over militia who tried to break off the advance.’

  Melton couldn’t help it. He pointed at Phase Line Katie. ‘Surely you’re not going to attack them, are you?’

  Captain Lohberger shrugged as his squadron commander, a lieutenant colonel, left the tent for a meeting with the brigade commander. ‘Well, the Kuwaitis don’t want us fighting on their soil,’ he explained. ‘So that is why we’re moving forward. They are taking positions on the Coalition’s western flank, inside Iraqi territory, just on the other side of Wadi al Batin. These base camps are not the best defensive positions anyway, so we may as well follow the first tenet of warfare.’

  ‘Engage the enemy as far forward as possible,’ Melton said, nodding.

  ‘Hooah, Rangers lead the way.’

  Lohberger had a Ranger tab on his uniform and thus, in Melton’s mind, the right to talk like one. Still, Bret winced anyway while Lohberger continued.

  ‘The plan is that Coalition air power will conduct the air war as before, going for command and control. They’ll take out the bridges as well, which should make our life a bit easier. Close air will stomp anyone who gets over those obstacles, then our arty engages them. Whatever is left is our meat, Bret.’

  Melton didn’t ask the obvious question – why?

  Why the hell did any of them have to be here now? Saddam was no longer a threat to America, was he? And if the wing-nuts were right, and it was all just about the oil and fattening up Halliburton’s balance sheet so that Dick Cheney could retire in comfort… well, again, so what? Cheney was gone. And Bush. And the hundreds of millions of Americans they said they were defending. Melton had to shake his head to clear the buzz of conflicting thoughts crowding each other out. Why the hell didn’t they just pack up and leave the whole sorry mess behind?

  Of course, that begged the question of where they might go. Hawaii? Alaska? The Pacific Northwest? Frankly, he couldn’t see anyone staying there if they could find a way out. Not with that hungry fucking bubble buzzing away just down the road.

  Lohberger finished and let the air force liaison start his portion of the briefing. Bret found his thoughts drifting once the ALO, a major who liked to dip Oreos in his scotch, had taken over. His private thoughts, a tangle of confused memories and fresh trauma, were interrupted by Jaanson and Euler.

  ‘You all right, sir?’ Sergeant Major Jaanson asked.

  The briefing was over. Melton blushed at having been caught out so badly. He’d seen plenty of others zoning out through the day. Men and women just standing, staring into the middle distance, eyes unfocused and faces slack. The worst ones looked like they’d come out of a session of electroconvulsive therapy. It was a mild form of shock, he supposed, as the rational mind shut down its higher functions to let the hindbrain deal with the violation it had experienced. In millions of years of evolution, humans had never been confronted by a threat like the energy wave. It was going to take some adapting, some getting used to – assuming the goddamn thing didn’t end up swallowing the whole world, of course.

  ‘Sorry,’ he replied. ‘It’s been a helluva day. I’m a bit out of it.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ said Lieutenant Euler, who looked to have recovered a good deal of his composure since their conversation on the way to the tent. ‘You’ll have time to shower, change and get some food into you, sir. Then you’ll need to get your gear together and find my Bradley. We’re on thirty minutes’ readiness, but I want my guys ready to rock in ten.’

  ‘Outstanding.’ Melton’s voice was flat with weariness and just a touch of sarcasm. The meeting was breaking up around them as Lohberger’s men set to their duties with almost discernible relief that they had something to keep them busy.

  ‘I’ll send someone to get you from the reporters’ billet, Mr Melton,’ said Jaanson. ‘Don’t stray from there, okay?’

  ‘Okay. I won’t take long. I was already packed to move anyway.’

  As they left the tent he could see that a change had come over the camp. The activity he�
��d noted on arriving had greatly intensified. Hundreds of men, all of them in full combat harness, hurried about in regimented groups, raising thick clouds of dust. The rattle of their equipment and the dull thudding of boots was loud enough to nearly drown out the shouts and curses of their NCOs. Nearly, but not quite. Humvees snarled and rumbled and a flight of jet fighters turned long, lazy circles high overhead.

  Melton hurried back to his tent. He’d spent more than enough time in camp to move with confidence through the organised bedlam and located the six-man canvas shelter without trouble. Inside he found that his colleagues had already departed. There was a note from Patricia Mescalon on his cot, but otherwise nothing to show for the small civilian community they’d built up over the weeks. He slumped down on the bed and allowed himself a few moments of rest. He would need to eat, and a quick shower wouldn’t be a bad idea. It might be weeks before he could wash again. Instead of moving, however, Melton found himself immobilised by a bone-deep lassitude.

  What the fuck is the point of any of it now?

  His throat tightened up and he felt tears beginning to well. Sitting up quickly, he rubbed the moisture from his eyes and sucked in a deep breath. Now was not the time to be falling to pieces. Chances were, things were gonna get a shitload worse in the next few weeks. Even if that bubble didn’t move an inch, you couldn’t punch a hole in the world like that and expect life to continue as normal. How long could the military hold together, for instance? They couldn’t be resupplied for very long. And who was going to pay for them? Who was going to pay for him?

  His paper was gone. He could ride out with the Cav and dutifully file his copy. For now the net was still working and his emails would zip through the myriad channels of fibre and copper wire all the way back to the Army Times server. But there they would sit, unread, forever. He had no idea whether his pay had gone into his account as scheduled. Possibly it had, if the process was automated. But how long would that last? And how long would anyone go on accepting US dollars anyway? For that matter, could the world economy even expect to survive the sudden disappearance of its beating heart? He didn’t think so. Not when he gave it any real thought.

  Sayad al Mirsaad had been right. This was the end of things.

  * * * *

  15

  13TH ARRONDISSEMENT, PARIS

  Monique screamed as the windscreen crashed and bulged inwards, threatening to shatter. Rather than hitting the brakes, Caitlin sped up, awkwardly pawing inside her stolen leather jacket for one of the pistols she’d taken back at the hospital. The wheel jerked in her free hand and a dramatic shudder ran through the body of the Volvo as they struck something with a loud thud. She heard a cry and sensed, rather than saw, a dark shape fly through the air. The dense spider’s web of cracks in the windshield made it impossible to know exactly what was going on outside. Caitlin hammered at the safety glass with the butt of the gun, using her peripheral vision and one-handed driving to keep to the road.

  ‘Would you shut the fuck up and help me out here!’ she yelled at the screaming Monique, eliciting a couple of ineffectual taps at the glass from the girl in the passenger seat.

  The windscreen popped out just as they struck the tail end of a Mercedes with a massive metallic crash and a sudden jerk back into the middle of the road. Both women could now see dozens of people scattering from the roadway in front of their moving vehicle. They seemed to be fighting amongst each other, although a healthy number were focused solely on their car. Monique huddled down as more rocks came flying at them, one bouncing off the bonnet to slam into her shoulder. She cried out in pain and Caitlin reached across, grabbed a handful of her jacket and violently jerked the girl right down so that she was no longer exposed to the improvised missiles flying directly at them. The American enjoyed no such luxury and had to drive while dodging and weaving.

  They had come around a sharp bend into a street fight, or riot. A normal person would have slowed down, fearful of injuring or perhaps killing a pedestrian, even as they were targeted with a fusillade of torn-up cobblestones, bottles and broken bricks. Caitlin set her mouth in a grim line and, hunching behind the wheel for the minimal protection it offered, she deliberately pointed the Volvo into the centre of a mass of youths blocking the road ahead of them. She didn’t sound the horn or wave them away. She simply drove at them, implacably increasing her speed as they drew closer. A few of the braver (or dumber) among them hurled a couple more rocks, but they were poorly directed and none managed to hit the body of the car. The group lost its coherence rapidly as the men – they were all young, dark-skinned men – dived for the relative safety of the footpath. One, his head swathed in a black and white keffiyeh, was a fraction too late and the car’s headlight caught his foot in midair, spinning him off the arc of his dive and into the side of a grocery van. His scream was snatched away by the speed of their passage.

  ‘What is happening? Who are they?’ cried Monique in distress.

  ‘Arabs,’ shouted Caitlin, over the roar of the wind pouring into the car. Youths from the city’s outer suburbs, who were normally never found in the old quarters in such numbers.

  In a few mad moments the car was through the confrontation and back into clear space, as Caitlin swung through a roundabout and took the exit furthest from the direction in which they’d just come. She tried to organise her impressions in a coherent fashion, arranging a random series of images into something she could understand and maybe even use. It wasn’t just a riot, it was a brawl. The crowd, which she would have put at somewhere between seventy and a hundred strong, seemed almost evenly split between young white men and women, and perhaps a slightly larger number of African- and Arabic-looking youths. All of the latter had been males, as far as she could tell. The clash appeared undirected, and was probably a fight between the sort of moronic drunks she and Monique had encountered a little earlier, and a pack of Muslim yahoos, stoned on kif or possibly drunk as well. In her experience, for all of their sanctimonious posturing, many of the thugs from Paris’s Muslim districts liked a drink as much as the next hoodie. Still, it didn’t explain what they were doing all the way in here, she realised.

  A brief check of the GPS navigator placed them within a few blocks of the Parc de Choisy, a locale Caitlin knew well from a previous mission. A much quicker, cleaner job to shut down an official from the French Trade Ministry who had been selling perfectly mocked-up end-user certificates to a Lashkar-e-Toiba cell. Jeez, those were the days.

  She swerved onto Avenue Edison and almost immediately threw the car into a hairpin turn around a small, arrow-shaped traffic island to run south-east alongside the park down Rue Charles Moureu. She was going to have to ditch the Volvo very soon. It had taken a horrible beating in the short time she’d been driving it and was certain to attract the attention of the gendarmes before long. In the seat next to her, covered in small diamonds of shattered windshield glass, Monique had curled up into a tight little ball and was shaking violently. The yellow wash of sodium lamps gave her features a gaunt, malarial cast. Caitlin dropped down through the gears and pulled over under the budding canopy of an ancient oak tree.

  ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘We’re ditching the ride.’

  ‘Non,’ replied the French girl in a flat, affectless voice.

  ‘Fine. Die here then. Or in a cell at Noisy-le-Sec’

  Monique turned an empty, uncomprehending face on her.

  ‘There’s an old fort there, run by the Action Division of your DGSE,’ Caitlin explained. ‘Spent some time there a few years ago. It sucked. Believe me, you don’t want to find out first-hand. So sit there if you want, but I’m outta here.’

  She grabbed the phone and GPS unit before heading off towards the park. She smiled at finding an unused McDonald’s towelette in one of the pockets of the bag – You should be ashamed of yourself, mademoiselle - and ripped it open, cleaning the worst of the blood from her face and hands.

  The park was beautiful at night, just as Caitlin remembered it. Soft white s
potlights under-lit trees budding with the first intimation of the coming spring. She briefly consulted the GPS again and took her bearings. The screen seemed overly bright and she dimmed it a fraction, so as not to degrade her night vision too badly. With time to think, she could finally place herself within a mental map of the city as she understood it: a matrix of boltholes, safe houses, escape routes, dead drops, rat-runs, friendly and hostile camps and, naturally, a matrix of history – a personal and professional history of assignments, targets, milk runs, black bag jobs, and wetwork. An ocean of wetwork these past few years.

  There was an apartment she could access on the Rue de la Sabliere, over in the next arrondissement, but it was a good hour’s walk away, possibly more, and Caitlin did not fancy being exposed on foot for so long, especially not given her condition. She had already taken to thinking of the tumour as ‘my condition’. They would have to steal another vehicle, if possible. A car door slammed behind her and she heard boot heels hammering on the road surface as Monique chased after her.