Without warning

by John Birmingham

  ‘Home, yes. We hope.’ He waved his hands in the air, a concession of helplessness. ‘If we have not been forgotten. Or abandoned. Or lost… But we may not see our families even if we do get home. There will be much work to be done. Our sort of work.’

  ‘Fighting.’

  ‘Of course. You have seen what happens when things go bad, Melton. In Polish history, there is much fighting – Russians, Germans. Who knows who will come now? Maybe Tartars and Ottomans again. Once, even the Swedes invaded. I doubt they would again. They are a soft people now. But not everyone is soft, no? The jihadi pigs I am fighting in Afghanistan, they are crazy men, but hard. The Iraqis – not so hard, but bad, and led badly. Weak men are often the cruellest. And Russia, a sick place, but still peopled with ruthless commissars and tyrants. This Putin, watch him. He is an iron fist hanging over all of us.

  ‘So yes, Melton, fighting. Always fighting. Fighting big, between states, and small, between people for little things. Food, water – basic things. My brother, I spoke to him for three minutes on American phone yesterday. Nothing he has to eat for two days. Just some dried crackers and a little tinned food for his children. Nothing in market. It is like communism again. And now, with the poison clouds, no harvests, I think.’

  His men were nodding, and Melton wondered about their grasp of English. If he recalled correctly, GROM operators had to have a working knowledge of at least two languages other than Polish. He supposed there was a fair chance all of these men did speak English with some fluency, given the anglophone nature of the Coalition. And doubtless this was a topic that had been chewed down to the gristle among them. He wished he had taken notes, or recorded the sergeant’s lament. He was sure he could sell a story based solely on snatches of interviews taken with the men in this hangar, or with those men and women with whom he’d travelled to get here. An old, nearly burnt-out spark flickered somewhere inside him and he reached inside his jacket pocket, searching for the Sony digital recorder he kept there. It was gone, but he had a pen and a notebook that he had lifted off someone’s desk over the course of his journey from Kuwait. His writing hand was uninjured, but holding the pad in his heavily bandaged left hand was awkward.

  He looked at the lance corporal by the Arabic Coke machine. Don’t end up like her, he swore to himself.

  Melton raised an eyebrow at Milosz and asked, ‘Would you mind? I don’t have any of my gear. My newspaper is gone, but I’m still a reporter. I shouldn’t be sitting here on my ass feeling sorry for myself – I should be telling stories. Your stories. Would you mind?’

  ‘Of course not!’ the sergeant cried out, holding his arms wide. ‘I am always interesting in hearing myself talk. And these, my poor little bastards, they have no choice – they have to listen. Why should they suffer alone? Yes, Melton, of course you can tell my stories. Where should I start? With our attack on the Mukarayin Dam? Yes, that was us. We flooded Baghdad. Everyone thinks it was Green Berets, pah, Hollywood pussies! It was GROM.’

  Melton couldn’t help glancing around to see if any Army Special Forces were around to hear that remark. If they were and heard, they didn’t make themselves known.

  Still struggling with his pen and paper, Melton came up short. The Polish special forces were not an old and venerable outfit. They had only been established in 1991. But they already had a rep as a very closed-up shop. You rarely heard about them, and they never did press. Yet here was one of the senior enlisted men, suddenly happy to give up details of a mission that he would have denied even happened a week or so back.

  Milosz had no trouble translating the American’s puzzled look. ‘Do not be surprised, Melton,’ he said. ‘Everything has changed now. I will tell you about Mukarayin because it suits our purposes.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘It is like I said – there will be much more evil in the world soon. There is already, yes? My country, she has suffered more than most through her history. But not this time. Or not without making others suffer for what they might do to us. I will tell you about Mukarayin because you will tell the world, and then she will know that we Poles, we will not be ploughed under again. You know what most people see when they imagine Polish Army? They see horsemen galloping off to charge Hitler’s tanks. Brave, but stupid, and doomed. But now, if you tell them about Mukarayin, in future when people think about Polish fighting man, they maybe think about that dam blowing high into sky and that mountain of water flooding out and drowning city of Baghdad. They will think twice about wishing evil upon us, yes?’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Melton. ‘I think they will’

  * * * *

  It was more than he had imagined writing about. He’d been more interested in Milosz’s story of calling home and talking to his brother, of being trapped in the broken machinery of a vast war machine, suddenly cut off and alone in a hostile world. And he did do that interview, but he also filled half of his notebook with stories from every man in the sergeant’s extended squad – GROM usually operated in teams of four – about blowing the dam that flooded Baghdad.

  As he did so, the strangest thing happened. A small audience began to gather around them – just two passing Cav troopers at first, but increasingly building up into a circle of attentive listeners that drew in even more men and women by virtue of its novelty. After ten minutes Melton was sure that over two hundred people surrounded them, perhaps the majority of the walking wounded in the hangar space. The Polish operators spoke into a rapt silence, but occasionally someone would call out, confirming a detail of their story, or others would clap and cheer like believers at a revival meeting.

  The specialist from the 101st Airborne stood over him, his fist full of dog tags, his eyes clear now. ‘Sir?’

  ‘Yes, Specialist?’

  ‘Can I… Would it be okay if I told you…?’ The soldier held up the identity discs. There must have been twenty or more of the tags, some with blood and skin on them.

  ‘Sure, Specialist,’ Melton replied. ‘Tell me what happened.’

  A Marine stepped forward. ‘Hey, need a recorder, Mr Melton?’ he asked.

  The reporter took it and smiled. ‘Just call me Bret.’

  * * * *

  When the dog tags were connected to formerly breathing, living, loving people, the army specialist moved away. The batteries were low, but an Australian commando contributed a set of triple AAA batteries. Bret then talked to the Marine who’d loaned him the tape recorder, until the tape ran out. He ejected the mini-cassette and passed the recorder back to its owner, who had a boy, a girl and a horse called Eagle back home, but the man shook his head.

  ‘No, Bret, you keep it,’ the Marine said. ‘You need it more than I do.’ He fished around in his pocket and pulled out some fresh tapes. ‘I don’t have anyone to record messages for anymore.’ He then stood up, squared his shoulders, and moved out of the hangar. At the bay doors he collected a rifle and a helmet from another Marine, and they walked out into the searing Qatar daylight.

  Melton had no idea where he would place the interviews, or what form they might take. But he kept scribbling and taping, encouraging people to talk about… well, about whatever they wanted. And they did.

  * * * *

  ‘So the bastard was up in the ceiling,’ one Private Adrian Bennet said. ‘He popped four in my squad before we finally figured out where he was hiding…’

  * * * *

  ‘Our convoy got cut off,’ a Native American army private by the name of Piewesta told him, shaking her head. ‘We took a hell of a lot of fire and my friend Jessie, she was in the back of the Hummer when we got hit. She didn’t make it.’

  ‘That was a helluva mess,’ someone added. ‘You with 507th Support Battalion, right?’

  Piewesta nodded.

  * * * *

  ‘The bullets came flying from everywhere,’ an Apache pilot, half of his left foot missing, recalled. ‘Hell of a thing, Bret. I thought I was home safe after knocking down those three Iranian helicopters, but then all of this ground fire
comes up. Like being trapped in a mason jar full of lighting bugs. Just wasn’t my day to be flying.’

  Melton noticed that the pilot didn’t mention his gunner. Probably didn’t make it, he decided.

  * * * *

  ‘She just wouldn’t sink,’ a sailor from the USS Belleau Wood said. ‘That Iranian sub put three torpedoes into her, but she wouldn’t go down. We were trying to get the fires under control when we got word to abandon ship. We could’ve saved her but they said resources were tight. Better to scuttle her.’

  A Tarawa class LHA lost – scuttled. The US Navy hadn’t lost a ship that large in combat since World War II.

  The sailor smiled. ‘We got that fucking Kilo sub, though. ASW guys from the Nimitz got us some payback on that bitch.’

  ‘Hell, yeah,’ someone else said. Others took up the chorus: ‘Hell, yeah! Payback!’

  * * * *

  He heard a seemingly endless stream of combat horror stories. Units cut off or abandoned. Enemies materialising out of nowhere. Supplies running out. Air cover disappearing. Waves of Iraqi troops flowing towards them, then suddenly disappearing inside great roiling walls of flame, or enormous volcanic eruptions of high-explosive dropped from miles overhead. He heard small, intimate stories about men killing each other with whatever weapon came to hand. About a female truck driver, trapped in a hostile village, crawling out via the thousand-year-old sewage system, and souveniring a couple of old Roman coins she discovered on the way.

  Night had fallen, and half of the hangar’s floating population had been spirited away before he finally stopped. Both hands ached, but his missing finger tormented him with a particular ferocity and the wounded shoulder throbbed with a deep, agonising bass line from his having sat hunched over the notepad for so long. But Melton thought he had enough material for a whole book, including a wrenching series of personal stories about what people had already lost. Families, home, friends, everything.

  He made an effort to gather testimonials from the handful of Europeans present, such as Milosz and his men, and some British tankers whose Challenger had been crippled by a buried mine. Fact was, their stories would sell the piece in whatever form it took, the domestic market for American stories having literally disappeared. When the Poles finally got their ride out, he was reading back over the tale of a Scottish infantryman who’d been separated from his platoon in al Basra for two days, but whose main concern remained the fate of his family’s trout farm after a week of acid rain had killed off the entire stock. They all shook hands and wished each other well.

  ‘Make them understand that there is a new Poland,’ said Milosz as they parted.

  Melton looked around at those who remained. Not quite so many tears now. A few of them were snoring, sound asleep, jerking in the fit of a nightmare somewhere in their past. He heard a couple of guys laughing about a canoe trip they had been on – how drunk they’d been, and the silly idiot with the yellow swimming trunks who wouldn’t fall into the raft full of college co-eds.

  It was mid evening; a cool, almost chilly night, alive with the rumble of distant air operations. He was tired and very hungry, and getting shack-whacky, having been trapped inside for so long, even in such a large building. The last thing he’d eaten had been a protein bar, four hours earlier, and he just knew the table service in this place was going to suck big-time. Until his transport batch number was called, there was nothing for it but to wait. Having lost the pile of Polish duffel bags on which he’d been resting contentedly, he’d since moved to one of the uncomfortable plastic chairs dotted about the facility. He remembered the poncho liner, which he still had, gifted by the specialist on KP back in Kuwait.

  Melton wrapped himself in the woodland-green camo snivel gear as the earlier desert heat turned to night-time frigid. It was there, half asleep, haunted by visions of the mortar attack that had put him in hospital, that Sayad al Mirsaad found him.

  * * * *

  27

  SEATTLE, WASHINGTON

  ‘You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me!’ Kipper was incredulous, outraged even. In fact, half-a-dozen emotions blasted through him like a hot desert zephyr on finding out that the military had arrested the elected city councillors, but mostly his feelings arranged themselves around ‘incredulous’ and ‘outraged’. ‘You can’t do that. It’s… it’s…’

  ‘Wrong?’ offered General Blackstone.

  ‘Yeah, that’s right. It’s wrong. It’s fucking wrong in so many ways I can’t even begin to count them. What, you guys couldn’t get your own way so you just threw the switch on a military coup? For Christ’s sake, you’re dealing with a bunch of frightened, fucked-up nimrods who take three hours to decide which sort of cookies they’re gonna serve up at council meetings.’

  ‘We knew you’d understand,’ McCutcheon replied, without a hint of irony. ‘That’s exactly why we put ‘em in the bag. They really do argue about the cookies, don’t they? I watched them do it last week. Amazing, man. Truly fucking amazing. Anyway, while they’re banging heads over the catering arrangements, PEOPLE ARE DYING.’

  The last part of his routine he delivered in a parade-ground roar, emphasised by pounding a fist down on a stack of folders that burst out from under the blow in an explosion of paper. Kipper jumped and looked over to Blackstone, but the general remained impassive. It was a bad-cop bad-cop routine.

  ‘Look,’ the major said, instantly switching back to his usual calm and spookily cheery self. ‘They haven’t been arrested as such, just detained preventively.’

  ‘What the hell do you mean, “preventively”?’

  Blackstone answered for him. ‘To prevent them being arrested when they fuck up so badly they really do get a lot of people killed.’

  ‘Like this morning?’

  ‘Oh grow up, Kipper,’ snarled Blackstone. ‘This is serious. We don’t want to take over here. We don’t want to take over anywhere. Hell, we’re desperate for someone to tell us what to do, but nobody’s putting a hand up. Everyone’s arguing about fucking cookies.’

  ‘Bullshit, General, that’s an exaggeration.’

  ‘No,’ said McCutcheon, tag-teaming again. ‘It’s a metaphor. For “pointless, infuriating contention about complete fucking inanities”. Like cookies – which I can assure you they did argue about. Somebody said they needed to start conserving food, so they spent three-quarters of an hour debating whether they were entitled to a packet of fucking Oreos at their meetings. This was just last Thursday, by phone hook-up, during the worst of the pollutant storm. By phone hook-up, Kipper – they were all at home. They could have eaten their own fucking cookies.’

  Kipper rubbed his tired, burning eyes, but it only made them sting all the worse. ‘So what are you gonna do, Major,’ he asked, ‘keep arresting people until you get someone you can work with? You gonna go all the way down to the dogcatcher?’

  ‘If we have to. But really, I’ve met that guy. He’s a freak – got that gimpy eye, and half of one ear chewed off. Wouldn’t be a good look for the next President.’

  ‘President?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s what I’m talking about. We need a President, and pronto. If we don’t get a handle on this situation, we’re all going to hell in a hand-basket.’

  Kipper bumped up against a filing cabinet, jarring his elbow on the corner. ‘Shit! Who the fuck talks like that? “Hell in a handbasket”!’

  The air force man’s eyes twinkled. ‘Granny Mae McCutcheon. Eighty-six this year and still skinning her own beaver… Oh man, that didn’t come out right. She’s a trapper’s wife – or she was. Granddaddy McCutcheon passed away back in ‘92. It was Clinton that killed him. Seeing that gladhanding cocksucker take the oath, it was too much…’

  ‘Back on message, Major,’ said Blackstone. ‘Mr Kipper, we have some command and control issues here, and elsewhere. Here it’s bad enough, elsewhere it gets worse by an order of magnitude. That mess at your food bank this morning was a C-3 issue. That’s what happens when command, control and communicat
ion break down. Blood. Gets. Spilled.’

  Kipper’s head was reeling. He wondered if the heating had been turned up too high or if any contamination had made it into the building through the filters.

  ‘Do you know anything about the line of succession, Kipper?’ asked Blackstone.

  ‘The line of what?’

  ‘Succession,’ echoed McCutcheon. ‘You know, the President gets whacked in a motorcade, the Veep steps up to the plate and bam! - any hopes the enemies of freedom had of exploiting our temporary constitutional befuddlement are right down the crapper.’

  ‘Are you sure you’re an air force guy?’

  ‘Sure, born and bred. Anyway, the line of succession – focus, dude. Right? You with me? It’s toast. We got nada. Nobody. Everyone we could’ve tapped for the top job is gone. Everyone we’ve approached since is like: “Oh no, don’t ask me, I’m too fucking busy. I got this fucking cookie crisis exploding in my face here.”‘