Without warning

by John Birmingham

  ‘Where are we?’ asked Melton. His voice was cracked and he reached for a squeeze bottle of water on the small stand next to his bed. It was warm and tasted slightly metallic, but still felt like sweet dew in his parched mouth.

  ‘We scored an evac slot,’ Shetty told him. ‘Don’t know where from exactly, they’re not saying. But I’d bet Kuwait or Qatar if I had to… if I had any money. Germany is our next stop.’

  Now fully awake, if still groggy at the edges, Melton found himself unpleasantly aware of just how much he hurt. His entire body seemed to ache, but here and there, more intense pain warned him of some very special hurts he’d picked up. Shetty seemed to read his mind.

  ‘You’re not doing too badly, Mr Melton,’ he explained. ‘Doc told me you lost a finger off your right hand. A big chunk of shoulder meat. You lost about half of your Ranger tattoo. And you got peppered with shrapnel and one big hunk of wooden window casement. Had a splinter as big as Florida stuck in your ass, apparently. Doc said that hunk of wood coulda been a thousand years old. Said they shoulda had an archeologist dig it outta your butt.’

  Melton forced a weak smile, more in recognition of Shetty’s attempt to cheer him up than from any genuine amusement. He carefully levered himself up on his elbows to have a look around. The tent was about as big as a tennis court and housed something like sixty or seventy cots. All of them were occupied. He was surrounded by a forest of IV lines and blood bags, but very little specialised equipment.

  Shetty was on the other side of his cot, propped up on a couple of dirty-looking pillows, one stump of an arm heavily bandaged. He was smoking Kools with his free, intact hand.

  ‘Glad to have you back, Mr Melton. You’re the only familiar face in here. They got guys from all over, but nobody from my platoon.’

  ‘How bad?’ asked Melton.

  Shetty’s eyes clouded over slightly. ‘They fucked us up three ways from Sunday, sir. The lieutenant’s dead, Sarn’t Jaanson, everyone in my squad. About fifteen guys all up, most of ‘em in that alley. There just weren’t nowhere to go. You and me, we got blown clear into a little shop. That’s what saved us.’

  ‘Holy shit,’ he muttered. ‘I’m sorry, Corporal. I really am.’

  ‘I know, sir. You’re a good guy. The boys, they liked having you along with them.’

  A jet flew low overhead, the screaming whine cycling up quickly and shaking Melton’s rib cage from the inside out. The dull thud of chopper blades emerged from the tail end of the cacophony. He tried to move around to face Shetty but only succeeded in hurting his left shoulder. Waves of grey washed out his vision and a thin layer of sweat broke out all over his body. He started shaking.

  ‘Take it easy, sir,’ said the wounded non-com. ‘You’re going to be a while getting better.’

  Somewhere down the row of cots to his left a man began screaming. There was no warning, no cycling up. His shrieks suddenly filled the entire tent and brought two orderlies running. Melton turned his head as far as he dared but could only see what was happening in the very limit of his peripheral vision. The medics appeared to inject the soldier, and a few seconds later he slipped back into unconsciousness. The reporter gave up and eased himself onto his pillows.

  ‘So, you know what’s been happening here, Corporal? Or back home? Anywhere?’

  Shetty drew on his cigarette and shrugged. Melton wondered idly how he’d managed to get one in and light up. There were no oxygen tents nearby or flammable chemicals that he could see, but he was sure there had to be a rule against smoking in a hospital tent. Yeah, there would definitely be A Rule.

  ‘You were out of it a coupla days, sir. You missed a lot of stuff. We’re fighting Iran and Iraq now. Expecting to have to fight pretty much everyone between here and wherever we’re bugging out to-probably Europe, maybe the Pacific somewhere. But the Kuwaitis and the Saudis aren’t too happy about that, so it’s all up in the air. And it ain’t just us. Israel has called up all of its reserves. Everything they got is ready to go, on a fucking hair trigger, is what I heard. Had my first walk outta here just this morning. Over to the mess tent. Guy there, a reporter like you, he told me the only reason the Arabs ain’t invaded Israel so far, or tried to, is the bomb. That Ariel Sharon, he went on Al Jazeera and just straight up said, “Yep, we got it, in fact we got over two hundred of ‘em”, and then he read out a list of cities they’d nuke if anyone so much as looked at ‘em wrong.’

  ‘Holy shit,’ muttered Melton.

  ‘Yeah. Rules are changing. Even so, the Israeli army is fighting right now. They’ve gone into those Palestinian areas – what is it again? – that Left Bank Gaza joint, I can never keep that shit straight. Anyway, Israelis have put a world of hurt on ‘em. They’re fighting Hamas, the PLO, a whole bunch of fruit-and-nut-bar Islamic whackjobs. They pretty much hammered Arafat’s guys flat. But Hamas is shooting loadsa rockets at ‘em from Lebanon or something. Everyone thinks they’re gonna get nuked.’

  Melton felt dizzy and had to sip at his water bottle and lie back with his eyes closed. ‘What about Iraq?’ he asked. ‘What’s happening with them? You said we’re fighting Iran too now. I sort of remember something about that before getting clobbered, but it’s all hazy. My head feels like mush, you know.’

  ‘Well, they ain’t allies or anything. It’s more like a street fight where everyone’s piling in. Do you remember the Iranians had sent all them little speedboats into the Gulf waters, half of them suicide bombers? They got some good fucking licks in early, too, before we started sinking anything that didn’t belong to the Coalition. They got a coupla our cruisers, sank a British destroyer, tagged some Australian boat full of clearance divers. It was fucking chaos for an hour or so, and then the skies were full of fucking MiGs: Iranian, Iraqi. Our guys were raking ‘em out of the air, but these things are unloading hundreds of bombs and missiles, and some of ‘em got through. Fucking scuds start landing on us – well, not us here, but right on some port where the Brits were fighting a bunch of Republican Guards and those Fedayeen motherfuckers. Those fucking scuds, man, they don’t discriminate – they’re dropping like rain, killing everybody. Iraqis, Brits, a buncha Marines who happened to be in the wrong place. It’s fucking madness. A brawl, not a war.’

  Melton was about to say, ‘What about Washington?’ when he remembered that Washington was gone, or empty at least. Instead he asked: ‘So, what happened? Is it sorted now?’

  Shetty smiled without humour. ‘You know how I said the rules have changed? Well, of course, there ain’t nobody in Washington to prod us in the ass with no 12,000-mile-long screwdriver. General Franks, he just gets on the blower to some admiral back in Pearl – he’s like the new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs or something – and Franks says, “I’m gonna kill these motherfuckers if it’s cool with you”. And the admiral didn’t have to run it past no senate committee or congressional circle jerk. He just goes, “Yeah, sure, kill ‘em all.”‘

  Shetty drew in the last of his smoke, and with one quick little move, almost like a magic trick, he twisted and squeezed out the butt between his fingers, before pocketing the remains to throw away later.

  ‘So?’ asked Melton. ‘What happened?’

  ‘It’s happening right now,’ said the nuggety corporal. ‘Navy and air force turned around, dismantled the Iranians’ air defence net. Then they demolished their fields. Last I heard, Baghdad and Tehran were getting taken apart by cruise missiles, and…’ – he leaned over as if to impart some grave national secret – ‘I heard there’s a hundred or more B-52s flying in from the Pacific right now and they’re gonna carpet-bomb what’s left of both cities. None of this pinprick surgical-strike bullshit. We’re just gonna smash ‘em flat. Give those raghead motherfuckers something to think about next time they feel like pissing us off. Lets the Chinese know the big dog’s still in the yard, too. I heard they tossed a coupla missiles over Taiwan’s way this morning.’

  Melton tried to take it all in. He doubted there were a hundred B-52s available no
w, but he suspected that Shetty probably had the broad outlines of what was happening more or less right. Everything was beginning to unravel. The politics of it were pretty much irrelevant. All that mattered now was getting the hell out and hunkering down somewhere safe. But where?

  He drifted off into a long fitful doze and when he awoke, Shetty was sleeping, the ward seemed quieter and the bright, hard edge had come off the day outside. Melton felt a little better, a little less muddle-headed and fragile. He still hurt all over, but being able to identify the injuries behind his pain allowed him to put each of his many hurts into a box and file it away. It didn’t decrease the pain, but it sure helped dealing with it. Pain could be endured a lot more easily when you knew where it came from and when it was likely to recede.

  ‘Mr Melton, you’re awake. That’s good.’

  Bret turned his head carefully towards the male voice. A thin, exhausted-looking corpsman, with deep purple smudges under his eyes, appeared to have just noticed him and was advancing with a clipboard. He looked to be of Italian or maybe Greek extraction, and was obviously running too close to the ragged edge of a complete physical breakdown. It was a look you got used to around soldiers. When you saw it on rear-echelon personnel, however, it was never a good sign.

  ‘What’s your name, son?’ Melton asked him. He had about fifteen years on the kid, and probably had more time in service than him too, so he felt comfortable taking the liberty.

  ‘Deftereos, sir. Tony Deftereos.’ Then he seemed to remember himself. ‘Hospital corpsman, 15th MEU, sir… I’ve been told to watch out for you.’

  ‘You’re navy? What are you doing here?’

  ‘Oh, you know. Chaos. Madness. The usual. My ship got hit by a jet ski.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A fucking jet ski, sir – pardon my language. Full of explosives. So here I am, looking after you, as per my orders.’

  ‘From who?’ asked Melton, somewhat nonplussed.

  ‘Corporal Shetty, sir. He said he’d stomp me if he woke up and found out anything had happened to you.’

  Melton looked across at the maimed black soldier lying in the bed next to his, and realised that Shetty was the closest thing he had to family or friend. At least in this part of the world. Possibly anywhere. He felt that familiar, irrational swelling of affection for someone he didn’t really know, beyond having faced mortal danger with them.

  ‘I’m sure he didn’t mean it, Corpsman,’ Melton said with a smile. ‘Corporal Shetty is a gentle soul, a friend of lost animals and small children. He wouldn’t hurt anyone.’

  Deftereos looked most uncertain. ‘Well, I promised him I’d keep an eye on you, sir. If you feel up to it, the doc would like you to answer some questions for him.’

  ‘I’d shrug, but I’ve got a big hole in my shoulder and it really hurts. What d’you need to know?’

  Deftereos took him through a standard post-trauma questionnaire, which wasn’t all that different from the experience a civilian might have answering an ER survey at hospital, except for the questions about exposure to chemical or biological weapons and so on. By the time they were done, Melton felt a little hungry and asked if he might have something to eat.

  The corpsman checked a note at the end of his bed and nodded. ‘Nothing heavy, sir. A cup of soup maybe, to begin with.’

  ‘Thanks. Listen… Tony, wasn’t it? You hear anything from back home about what happened? Have there been any developments in the last few days while I’ve been out of it?’

  A sad shake of the head was the initial reaction to that. ‘No, sir,’ Deftereos replied. ‘Nobody’s had any word out of home. And the news coverage we were getting – you know, satellite photos, webcams and stuff – it’s drying up, because of the firestorms over there. Some whole cities have gone up. Not just a couple of blocks here and there – the whole thing, sir. They reckon the clouds are like a nuclear winter or something over Europe. Like when Saddam torched those oil wells in the last war, only much worse.’

  Melton remembered that from before he checked out. He recalled resting in the alleyway, looking straight up at a hard blue sky and wishing some of those clouds would drift south and cool things down a bit. He tried to recall some more details but it was like pushing those same dirty, polluted clouds around the inside of his head. Nothing really cleared up.

  ‘I’m not feeling too bad,’ he told the corpsman. ‘D’you think I could get up and walk over to the mess tent for my soup?’

  Deftereos grimaced slightly. ‘In fact, I was gonna ask if you could, sir. We’re real shorthanded here. Doc’s written that you should be mobile by now. You got no leg or spinal injuries, nothing internal. Just have to watch your sutures on the shoulder and some stitching on your rear end, where they took out some real big splinter. You’ll have to move slowly, is all. I’m sorry, sir…’

  ‘That’s fine,’ grunted Melton as he pulled himself up. ‘If you could just give me a hand up, that’d be great.’

  He bit down hard on the pain that welled up as he rose from the bed. No stranger to injuries and discomfort, he knew he’d have to get used to moving around with both. He was very much a non-essential part of this operation and considered himself lucky to have made it this far. It seemed a lot of the boys he’d been covering hadn’t. A mild headspin unbalanced him and he leaned against Deftereos, but it passed with a few deep breaths.

  ‘You gonna be okay, sir?’ asked the corpsman.

  Melton nodded. ‘I’ll be fine, Tony. You get back to looking after your patients. Just give me some directions.’

  Deftereos pointed at the main tent flap as a puff of wind caught it. Melton could see a throng of uniformed personnel hurrying in both directions outside. ‘You head out, turn left, and move through three intersections, then it’s on your left again. About a hundred and fifty yards. You won’t miss it.’

  Melton thanked him and began the slow shuffle out of the tent. It remained quiet in there, with most of the wounded men sleeping in their cots. A few orderlies and corpsmen moved about checking on them. Some were in scrubs, others in their desert fatigues, a mix of various services, something that wouldn’t normally happen in an army combat support hospital. But regardless of their branch, not one spared him as much as a glance. He was walking and mostly in one piece. He just wasn’t a priority.

  He felt adrift, disconnected from the world. He understood Shetty’s feelings about not wanting to let go of the familiar. Melton had never been part of a unit that’d been shattered before, but it sounded like that’s what had happened to Euler’s platoon. He’d embedded with them, nearly died with them, been right there in amongst them as they fought their way through southern Iraq. It had been such a bullshit mission in one way, rushing forward to engage the Iraqis who’d attacked them, just to give themselves enough elbow room to get the hell out of Iraq when the war was all but called off by events – or just the event - back home.

  The hospital tent opened up onto a thoroughfare, a wide street of sand in yet another huge military camp, laid out as always in a grid pattern. Soldiers and Marines moved about in groups of two or more, all in full battle rattle, many with a bad case of the thousand-yard stare. Melton blinked at the raw power of the sun after the relative gloom of the tent’s interior. The field hospital enjoyed the benefit of a slight rise in an otherwise flat landscape, affording a view of the frame tents, generators and vehicles. The combat support hospital was attached to a number of other units in the area, near as he could tell. A five-ton truck rolled past him, filled with body bags, the bumper number clearly defined. HHC 703rd MSB.

  ‘Jesus,’ he muttered, watching the REMF vehicle roll down towards a container. ‘I’ve died and gone to the rear.’

  The truck stopped in front of the container, where a detail of soldiers waited. With great care, two soldiers at a time would remove a single body bag from the truck and carry it into the container. Melton could see a refrigeration unit attached to the side. A couple of soldiers from 3rd ID glanced at the body, the
n looked away. Melton overheard them talking as they passed.

  ‘Those poor dumb bastards really got zapped,’ one specialist said.

  ‘Glad I wasn’t there,’ the other, a private first class, replied. ‘Stupid fucking mission anyway.’

  ‘Amen to that,’ Melton said under his breath.

  He gazed over a vista of thousands of tents and makeshift arrangements of prefab huts, motorised trailers, converted shipping containers, vehicle parks, supply depots and chopper pads. A cluster of antennas sprouted next to a tight knot of command vehicles and shelters. The camp had to cover a couple of klicks of real estate, thought Melton. He cautiously craned his head skywards, and was able to pick out the twinkling points and occasional contrails of at least a dozen jets flying Combat Air Patrol.

  ‘Division main will want that on the double,’ someone said to an underling. The underling nodded to the soldier, who was standing in the back of a communications shelter. Melton read the bumper number without thinking: 223 Sig BN.