Without warning

by John Birmingham

  ‘Man, this is totally fucked,’ said Bakic. ‘What the fuck are we even doing here? It sure as shit ain’t paying the rent anymore.’

  ‘What we’re doing here, bitch,’ growled Shetty, ‘is trying to get the fuck outta the ‘hood without losing too many worthless motherfuckers like you along the way. That good enough reason for you? Or would you like to just lay down your fucking arms and walk out there and tell the towel heads, “Yo, dogs, it’s my bad. I’m gonna ease on up outta here and head back to my new crib up in Alaska, yo”? Is that what you want to do, Private?’

  The chastened soldier mumbled something like ‘Sorry Corporal, no Corporal’ and devoted himself to the intense study of the dirt at his feet. Up and down the line, similar scenes played themselves out as the men dealt with the shock of losing their air cover and gaining a new enemy.

  Melton checked his watch. It was late afternoon, shading towards sunset in maybe an hour or so. He wondered if 3rd ID would wait until dark, when the Americans’ night-vision equipment would return to them a significant advantage. On the other hand, the power of a unit like 5-7 Cav lay in its mobility. It was a ‘terrible swift sword’ in movement, cutting through anything that got in its way. Sitting here like this merely invited the Iraqis to gather their forces around them, especially when they couldn’t be targeted for destruction from the air.

  Euler was back on the radio within a few minutes, his head bent and shoulders hunched tightly forward as though he was attempting to contain some new piece of shit news from getting free. Figuring on being stationary for a while, Melton opened a chilli mac MRE and stuck the shit-brown spoon down into its contents. He chewed on the meaty mac combo joylessly and washed it down with a drink of warm water. The other men all used the break as best suited them. Some ate, some dozed, one pissed his name up against an ancient wall. Everyone sipped some water or mixed some flavoured drink from their MREs in a water bottle. Most of their store-bought pougie bait had run out days ago.

  At least the shade of the alleyway was a blessed relief from the oppressive heat of day. Even with the sun dropping towards the edge of the world, fighting in this temperature was a crippling business. Keeping the troops’ fluids up was proving as difficult as clearing a block of Fedayeen. Melton craned back his neck, stretching it far enough to work out a few kinks with a distinct cracking sound. The sky was lightly clouded and the glare had faded somewhat from its painful intensity in the middle of the day. He searched in vain for any sign of the so-called Disappearance Effect, the nuclear winter that had fallen on Western Europe with the arrival of billions of tons of particulate matter, released into the atmosphere by the burning cities of North America. Maybe it was all bullshit. He couldn’t tell. He was as cut off from the wider world as everyone else in the unit.

  It was in that position, leaning back against the wall of the gutted building, squinting slightly into the hot grey sky, that he saw the dark blur of the mortar round as it dropped towards them. The cry of ‘Incoming!’ arose in his head but never reached his mouth, as another round smacked into the rooftop corner at the far end of the alleyway, detonating with a bone-cracking roar and a deadly spray of shrapnel. Men screamed out warnings and dived for what little cover existed in the narrow passageway. A few made it through a single door halfway down. A couple of others scrambled through a hole in the wall blown out by a grenade some hours earlier.

  Oh fuck, Melton thought. He got down and tried to become one with the ground while he looked for a better patch of cover than nothing at all. An open shopfront across the street looked promising.

  He was on his feet then, unaware of how he’d made it up off his ass so quickly. More rounds were dropping on their position with enough accuracy to suggest they’d been pre-sighted by the Iraqis, who had been waiting for just such an opportunity. Many of the rounds impacted the roofline but one speared right down into the constricted space, exploding with a terrible force that lifted Melton off the ground, turning him over and over.

  He twisted slowly, impossibly, through the air. His mind, detached from the dead, stringless puppet of his body, pulled free with a discernible tug. He watched himself falling back to earth with bricks and clods of dirt, with the disembodied arms and legs of his friends, with clattering pieces of steel and burning splinters of wood.

  Bret Melton, formerly of the US Army Rangers, twirled oh so slowly through clear air. Up so high he imagined he could see the entire town of An Nasiriyah below him. The savage close-quarter battles that still raged around choke points and contested streets. The ruined block where they had been ambushed in another life. Hundreds of Iraqi soldiers and militia fighters running towards his position. And beyond that. He could see the deserts stretching away towards the mountains in the far north. He could see the ships of the US fleet as they raked at skies full of Iranian fighters. And perhaps, at the dimmest edge of vision and consciousness, he could see an empty realm, the burning land that he had once known as home. The lost continent of North America.

  Bret saw all of these things. Or thought he did, before he fell back to earth and into darkness.

  * * * *

  18

  17TH ARRONDISSEMENT, PARIS

  She was sick. Increasingly nauseous, and occasionally close to vomiting. Caitlin had no idea whether it was a side effect of the headache, which had been constant for three days now, or an entirely new symptom of whatever was eating her brain from the inside out. Of course, it could also be a result of breathing in the soupy miasma of toxins and burnt chemicals that had rolled over the city on Tuesday and stayed for the last three days. The charred, atomised memory of America. Some Guardian writer with a very dark sense of humour and a taste for DeLillo had named it ‘the airborne toxic event’, and the tag had stuck.

  French government warnings played on a loop across every radio station, advising listeners to stay indoors whenever possible. Caitlin couldn’t believe anyone would need telling twice. Millions of dead seabirds had washed up on the coast of western France just before the tsunami of pollutants arrived, and thousands of pigeons – flying rats, as she thought of them – had been dropping from the sick, leaden skies over Paris ever since. She could see dozens of little grey carcasses from the apartment window. City council workers had already cleaned the streets below of twitching, broken birds, but that was on Wednesday, and they hadn’t been back.

  The few times Caitlin had ventured outside to stock up on fresh food, she’d returned with her eyes stinging and her airways burnt. It reminded her of the time she’d done a job in Linfen, a city in China’s Shanxi Province, where you could feel the acids and poisons leaching through your skin every extra minute you were exposed.

  She splashed a handful of cold water on her waxy face. She looked bad. Bruised, puffy eyes; hollow cheeked. All the lines on her face etched too long and deep. Then again, almost everyone in Paris looked like that now. There weren’t too many parties celebrating the new world order these days. People were either keeping to themselves, holed up with their families, or they were out in mobs, heedless of the poisoned atmosphere. The ring of fire that surrounded the old core of the city was down to them. What had begun as small-scale opportunistic looting had escalated into a rolling series of street battles between the police and ever-greater numbers of rioters from the banlieue. In the last twenty-four hours, the radio had carried reports of wider clashes, between ‘migrant gangs’ and ‘white youths’.

  Between Muslim zohackjobs and fascist skinheads, Caitlin thought to herself. The first sparks.

  She scrubbed her face with a damp cloth before towelling off.

  The old bathroom at the rear of the apartment, a dark, depressing closet tiled in deep green and featuring a small faded yellow tub, wasn’t the most flattering place in which to examine herself in a mirror. But there was nowhere else in the tiny flat. The fit-out was very basic, funded entirely from a black, discretionary account that she’d kept off the books at Echelon. One bed; a couch and a table; a bar fridge in the kitchenette, a tw
o-ring gas burner, a microwave oven. And a small armoury under the floorboards in the bathroom where she had also stashed some money – increasingly useless – and three passports – ditto. Nobody knew about this place, not even Wales.

  And for now at least, it remained off the grid, undiscovered by her hunters and relatively safe, unlike the first sanctum near the cemetery. It made sense, she supposed. If they’d known to try grabbing her up at the hospital, they had probably taken down her control cell, and possibly even the whole Echelon network.

  Normally, she’d be gone by now. Disappeared off the map. But her illness seemed to grow worse by the day, and she had realised with horror some time ago that she actually needed Monique’s help just to get through the day. A lone run through hostile territory was out of the question.

  And anyway, where could she go? Wales was uncontactable, probably because they’d grabbed him. The cell structure of Echelon’s wetwork sections meant she was floating, alone. There were no convenient fronts or trapdoors through which she could slip. Beyond a few dead drops and compromised lay-up points, the network had no permanent presence on the continent. No outposts or operational centres. Just a transient pool of operators like her, who came and went with each mission. And she was being hunted.

  But why now? What was the fucking point?

  A small tic tugged at her cheek in the fly-spotted bathroom mirror. ‘Relatively safe’ didn’t really mean much in Paris at the moment. Caitlin pulled down on a string, killing the power to the bare bulb that hung from the ceiling. She couldn’t be sure it would come back on when next she needed it. The city’s electricity supply was getting patchy. They’d been blacked out for three hours yesterday, and this morning the water had run brown and cold from all of the taps.

  She padded down the short hallway so as not to disturb Monique, who was sleeping in the single bedroom. It was well after midnight and the only light in the apartment spilled in through the large windows overlooking an intersection. She moved up to the nearest one, careful not to silhouette herself. Dead birds still littered the cobblestones. She watched as a thin, scabrous dog carried off one of the bodies. The lights of the old city centre provided a pale illumination under the thick blanket of smog, while the fires burning out in the otherwise darkened suburbs threw a harder, eldritch glare over the world below.

  Caitlin had never had to use the hide-out before. She only ever leased these places as a fail safe, a fall-back position, taking them for a maximum of six months before switching to a new address. After setting one up she would almost never return, unless her cover was blown, and that had happened only once, three years earlier in Berlin. That episode had convinced her of the need for a bolthole, no matter how much expense and hassle were involved in maintaining one without the direct logistical support of Echelon.

  After staring out the window for a few minutes she realised that her nausea had eased, replaced by a hollow feeling in her stomach. Hunger. With one last glance at the deserted streets outside, Caitlin padded through to the kitchen to prepare a meal. It was late, but if she didn’t feed herself now, she may not have the chance for another day. She’d been eating when she could, to fuel up for the long periods when her body simply rejected anything but water and breath mints. For some reason the mints seemed to help with the queasiness. She suppressed a sigh as she entered the tiny kitchen, not bothering with the light, which had blown earlier.

  Besides the small box of prohibitively expensive fruit and vegetables Monique had bought on her last expedition, two weeks’ worth of dried and tinned food remained – although, given Caitlin’s reduced appetite, it would probably last longer, maybe even a month. She ran the tap for a minute, which helped to thin out the brown tea-stained tint of the water. Satisfied the quality wouldn’t improve any more, she filled a pot and added a pinch of salt, setting it down on a gas burner. The pretty blue flame that flared up at the touch of a match was a pleasant surprise. The building’s gas supply had been interrupted the previous day. As she worked, her hunger came roaring back and she decided to chance a slightly heavier meal.

  She diced a brown onion and set it aside before opening a can of Italian tuna and breaking the chunks into a bowl. Another tin gave up four deep-red Roma tomatoes swimming in their own thick sauce. Saliva began to squirt into her mouth and she felt almost dizzy with new hunger and the prospect of a decent meal. She had no idea why her nausea had cleared, but she wasn’t going to waste the opportunity. There was a hunk of nearly dried-out bacon in the small fridge and Caitlin diced that up, frying it with the onion in the oil from the tuna. One last shrivelled mushroom went into the pan, which was spitting and popping as the meat cooked.

  Once the water had boiled, Caitlin added a thick sheaf of dried spaghetti, pushing the long yellow stalks under as they softened. The tuna went into the frying pan, followed by the tomatoes and their sauce. She turned the heat right down to a simmer while the pasta cooked. It was an old and much-loved dish, one of only three meals her dad had been able to cook. One-eyed Egyptians. Shit on a shingle. And this bad boy right here. She knew nowadays that the recipe was a variation on an old Italian standard, usually made with porcini mushrooms and their soak, but for Caitlin it had always been ‘Dad’s big pasta sauce’. As a teenager, she’d begged him to cook up buckets of the stuff to freeze and take away with her on surfing holidays. After seven or eight hours of carving up the big sets off northern California, she could inhale three big bowls’ worth.

  The small domestic scene in front of her blurred and disappeared behind diamonds and blue sapphires of light as tears filled her eyes. She rubbed away the moisture with the back of her hand. Her parents, of course, hadn’t known the exact nature of her work, but her dad, an old air force man, had filled in some of the blanks for himself. He never asked Caitlin why a bureaucrat from the US Information Service had to travel so frequently or spend so much time out of contact. He never asked how a junior civil servant came to acquire such an impressive array of scars, broken bones and deep-tissue injuries over the years, and when other family members did, she explained them away as surf injuries. But he had taken her aside at a family wedding a while ago, just after she’d returned from four months ‘out of contact’ in the aftermath of 9/11, and he’d told her that he knew his little girl was doing ‘good work’, and that she needed to know her family loved her and were very, very proud of her. Dave Monroe, a veteran of Tricky Dick Nixon’s undeclared war in Cambodia, had held his daughter’s gaze for what felt like an eternity, and while no more words had passed between them, understanding did. He knew his daughter was a soldier.

  ‘Caitlin?’

  She had heard Monique shuffling up the hallway and rubbed the last of her tears away before the French girl caught her in a moment of weakness. Still, her eyes were red-rimmed and glassy as she turned around, holding the onion skin, by way of explanation. Monique seemed to think nothing of it. She herself was very sensitive to the smell. It had probably woken her.

  ‘You are hungry then?’ she asked. ‘You don’t feel sick anymore?’

  There was a keen edge of hope to Monique’s questions. For a muddle-headed idealist, she had proven herself to be a lot tougher and more reliable than the American had thought possible. Long accustomed to isolation and loneliness, Caitlin had allowed herself to relax just a little around her companion.

  She drained the pasta and poured it into a large serving bowl, tipping the rich, steaming sauce over it straight away. ‘Right now I’m fine,’ she replied. ‘So I’m going to eat, if you want to join me. A bit late for dinner, I know, but I have to take what I can get at the moment.’

  ‘I’m hungry too,’ Monique conceded. ‘I have not eaten since this morning. It is so difficult to get good food, non?’

  Caitlin ladled two large serves of the meal into a couple of old china bowls that had seen better days. ‘It doesn’t help that we can’t move about freely because of me,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry about that, Monique. I’m sorry you got caught up in all this.’


  ‘All this?’ The French girl gestured expansively, taking in the disintegrating city, and a whole world of hurt beyond it. ‘This is not your doing. This would have happened whether we had ever met or not. Look out there. It is so sad. People behaving so badly towards each other. That is not your doing.’

  She was gesturing towards the window where Caitlin had been standing earlier. With the apartment in darkness, the fires burning through the outer ‘burbs stood out prominently against large swathes of blacked-out city. Here and there, blue and red strobes marked the passage of emergency vehicles, but they looked… inadequate. Paris was heading towards a tipping point. Caitlin doubted most of the city’s residents realised that yet. Not down in their marrow, anyway. As soon as they truly understood what was coming, the unrest of the present moment would probably give way to savage anarchy. It would be a little while yet, however. The civilised mind was slow and deeply reluctant to throw off the habits of a lifetime, which meant that Caitlin and Monique still had a chance to escape.

  They moved through to stand by the window as they forked up the pasta. It had become something of ritual between them, a way to push back the walls. It wasn’t so much a problem for Caitlin, but Monique felt very much the press of claustrophobia as their time in the hide-out dragged on, and the city itself seemed to contract around them, the sky lowering, the streets becoming mean and pinched and increasingly filthy. And of course, there were hunters, somewhere out there, still looking for them. The lack of a police response to the events at the Pitiй-Salpкtriиre, the appearance of more anonymous gunned-up suits and the vans outside Caitlin’s other ‘official’ safe house did more to convince Monique that she’d been caught up in something weird and dangerous than anything Caitlin had said. She was not a believer. She hadn’t gone across to the dark side, as the American wryly put it. But she was more trusting of Caitlin than she had been, more willing to go along with her call.