Without warning

by John Birmingham

  The American regarded his friend warily. ‘Sadie,’ he said in a gentle tone, ‘Washington’s gone. Bush, Cheney, all of them. All the petrol-company head offices, motor manufacturers, arms companies, all gone. If there was a conspiracy, it was a one-way street. Everything I’ve seen tells me the Israelis completely suckered Jim Ritchie. Iranian military doctrine is to throw everything at a threat. No reserves. They got an hour or so warning and put everything up. They tried to warn their own people, with the end result that the entire country lit up in panic. Computers, phones, radio, TV, every goddamn piece of electronic equipment in the place, and none of it hardened against a pulse.’

  ‘So what you are really saying, Bret, is that they didn’t need to bomb the cities. They had already destroyed their enemies as functioning modern societies.’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t call them functioning or modern, but yes, I see your point,’ Melton replied. ‘Look, I don’t condone it – who would? By the time the final butcher’s bill is toted, they’ve probably killed, what, a hundred and fifty, two hundred million people. Christ only knows how many more if anybody else follows their lead. Possibly everyone, in the end. You know what that makes us – I mean, the US and the Disappearance? Old news.’

  ‘You are right,’ Mirsaad conceded. ‘I apologise. I sound like some ill-bred street Arab falling on conspiracy talk like a scabrous dog on a bone. Tell me truthfully, Bret, what do you think your military will do?’

  He shook his head. ‘I have no idea, Sadie. Leave you all to it, I expect. We’re out of the superpower business as of last week. Go ask the Chinese, or whoever’s running India. If Pakistan hasn’t nuked them yet.’

  They fell into an uncomfortable silence as the PA called flights out to Paris, Rotterdam and Bangkok. Melton attempted to find a position in which he could recline without putting pressure on his injured butt cheek or shoulder. It was difficult. But at least for the first time in weeks he was clean, and dressed in luxuriously soft and well-fitting civilian clothes. The BBC had sent him payment in euros for the copy he’d filed before he was wounded, and had advanced him another, larger sum, on the basis of the interviews he had taken at the transit facility out in the desert. As he’d expected, they were most interested in any European angle.

  Their money was still worth something in Kuwait, at least in the hermetically sealed environment of the international airport. He was able to buy clothes and replace some lost and damaged equipment. Even better than that, he’d managed to fill a few prescriptions at a pharmacy on the main concourse and, now that he had escaped the Kafkaesque frustrations of the military transport system, he could eat when he felt like it.

  ‘What will you do when you get to London?’ asked Mirsaad.

  ‘I got a bunch of studio interviews to do,’ he said. ‘You know, glamorously wounded foreign correspondent stuff. I’ve promised to write up a couple of thousand words for their website, and I really want to push ahead with this book I’ve been thinking about. I wouldn’t be surprised if they asked me to turn around and come right back, though. They lost a lot of people yesterday. Reporters in bureaux throughout the region. They’re gonna be hiring, but it’ll mean heading back here.’

  ‘Do you want to?’

  ‘Nope. Well… I don’t know what I want. Something normal would be nice – do you miss normal, Sadie? I do. I can’t go home, so all the conventional nostalgia bullshit is out. Truthfully? I’d just like to sit on my busted ass somewhere, write my book and, I dunno, look around and not see guys armed to the fucking teeth. How about you?’

  ‘I am an Arab,’ Mirsaad answered glumly. ‘I grew up surrounded by men who were armed to the teeth.’

  ‘Hey, I grew up in Kentucky. Me too.’

  The PA system announced that his flight to London was boarding and Melton suddenly felt a soft pressure in his chest and throat. ‘Well, Sadie, I gotta be going, bud. I might be back, but you know… I just want to say thanks for finding me. I think I might still be doing the zombie shuffle through TRANSCOM’s twilight zone if you hadn’t grabbed me up.’

  Mirsaad stuck out his hand and they shook, awkwardly because of Bret’s wounds.

  ‘It was nothing, a trifling favour for a friend at the Beeb, and one I was happy to do as it helped another friend… I hope we still stay friends, Bret. If we live.’

  ‘Yup. A big if, Sadie,’ Melton agreed. ‘Take care. I’ll contact you though the network when I get settled.’

  The Jordanian patted him gently on the arm and picked up his bags for the short walk to the departure gate. Most of the passengers lining up there were civilians, their numbers split evenly between Arabs and Europeans, although, Melton reminded himself, they might well all be British citizens. Nobody looked happy to be travelling. Either because of what they were heading towards – parts of England were under martial law, and it was being strictly and harshly enforced – or perhaps because of a well-founded fear they might never get there. Thousands of people had died when their aircraft were knocked out of the sky by the same electromagnetic pulses the Israelis had set off to cripple their enemies.

  Neither reporter spoke again until Melton had swiped his boarding pass. The BA hostess was as smooth and pleasant as ever, which only served to heighten the sense of brittle weirdness and impending doom.

  ‘Good luck. And thanks again,’ said Melton.

  ‘A safe journey to you, my friend, God willing,’ replied Mirsaad.

  * * * *

  He was pathetically grateful for a business-class seat. It was like settling into an overstuffed hotel bed compared to the steel benches, hard plastic seats and stinking kitbags on which he’d mostly fetched up while in transit. It was possible, while sipping at the complimentary orange juice, as they waited to taxi, to imagine that things were entirely normal. The business-class section was full, but remained decadently spacious and agreeable. His fellow bizoids, with one exception, were all male. The one woman looked like a banker or lawyer and had no sooner strapped in than she began opening files to work on. She plugged herself into an iPod and radiated a fierce repeller field, lest anyone should attempt to approach or interrupt her. An old hand, then.

  The man sitting next to him, in the window seat, nodded brusquely before returning to his BlackBerry. He kept stabbing at the keyboard without any observable result. ‘It was working this morning,’ he kept muttering to himself. Melton ignored him all too easily.

  A hostess, noticing his injuries as he’d levered himself into his seat, offered extra pillows and a blanket to lie on. A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, he’d have derided such indulgences as ‘snivel gear’; it took him a long time, after getting out, to throw off some of the dumber attitudes of his time in service. He took the pillows and thanked her, settling into them after washing down a couple of painkillers with the last of the orange juice. As the engines spooled up, the captain came on to announce that they would be taking a very circuitous route to avoid any hazards from hostilities to the north. Melton didn’t bother to pay attention to the announcements. He didn’t care how they got out of this mess, only that they did so.

  He was going to miss Sayad, and felt yet again that he was simply allowing events to sweep him along and away from another friend, one whose own future looked very bleak. Melton didn’t see anything good happening in this part of the world any time soon. There was no way the US could sustain a presence here, but it remained an area of vital importance to the surviving great powers. How long could it be before Chinese, Indian and Russian warships replaced the US Navy on permanent station in the Gulf? As his eyelids drooped and he tried to suppress the snoring he knew was going to piss off his fellow passengers, he sought to get his head around the strategic and economic wreckage of the Israeli strike, but he was too tired and the seat too comfortable, and before long he was asleep.

  He woke briefly, thousands of miles later in Gibraltar, but popped another couple of pills, drank some water and went back to sleep. After that he didn’t stir again until the plane began
to descend. A flight attendant appeared at his elbow to gently rouse him and the BlackBerry addict, and to ask that they put their seats into the upright position for landing.

  ‘We’re in London?’ he croaked.

  The young woman, a rare beauty of Caribbean heritage by the look of her, seemed distracted and anxious. ‘No,’ she replied with a shake of her head. ‘No. We’re stopping in Paris. It’s… unscheduled… but nothing to worry about. We’ll refuel and be on our way.’

  That brought him awake.

  ‘We won’t be going to London,’ said his travelling companion, whom he’d avoided talking to so far.

  ‘I’ve been out of it, sorry,’ said Melton, still feeling groggy. ‘I snore. Has something happened?’

  The man, a young, nondescript-looking character with one of those weird Amish-style beards, shrugged and held up a pair of earphones. ‘Sennheiser sound-cancelling technology,’ he explained. ‘Blocks out jet engines and loud snoring. Not a problem.’

  Okay, so he wasn’t Amish then.

  ‘Britain’s closed its borders,’ he went on. ‘They haven’t told us yet.’ He waved a hand towards the front of the plane to indicate he meant the flight crew. ‘But I snuck a look at a news feed in the toilet. Everything’s locked down. Air and sea ports, ferries, the Chunnel – all of it.’

  Melton’s head was clearing slowly because of the painkillers in his bloodstream. ‘Why?’ he asked.

  BlackBerry guy folded his arms in obvious disgust. ‘Blair’s saying something about unrest spilling over the Channel. It’s rubbish. I need to get home. Do you see any jihadi whackjobs on this plane? We’re business people. This is just bullshit.’

  ‘What unrest?’ asked Bret. ‘I didn’t think those riots in Paris were so bad, considering.’

  The man looked at him like he was dealing with a retarded child. ‘You’re kidding me, right? You’ve been out in the boonies, have you? Paris is on fire, man. All of France is. It’s a civil war. And they’re sending us into the middle of it.’

  * * * *

  ONE MONTH

  14 APRIL, 2003

  * * * *

  35

  NOISY-LE-SEC, PARIS

  ‘So, you missing Uncle Sugar yet? Nostalgia sucks the big one, don’t it?’

  Caitlin’s voiced cracked and she smiled through split, swollen lips, with teeth stained cherry red by her own blood. But the look on Reynard’s face was totally worth it.

  The Frenchman did his best to hold his feelings in check, but she’d struck a nerve point and his anguish spilled out in a slight downturn at the corners of his mouth, the merest pout of his lips and a hollowing of the cheeks, as he tilted his head back in an effort to disengage emotionally from his prisoner. He would not beat Caitlin for her insolence. The Algerian would be back later on to do that. Reynard – not his name, but to Caitlin he looked like a Reynard, like a hungry fox licking shit from a wire brush, as her old man would have said – he was too important to get her blood on his hands.

  ‘The doctors tell me you are a very sick little girl,’ he said, speaking to her in English as usual. ‘We could help you. Your illness progresses, but it is not too late. Help us, so we can help you.’

  She laughed, a wet, rattling sound that ended in a string of explosive, searingly painful coughs. They felt like phosphorous burns in her chest. Small gobbets of blood flew out and spotted his shirt and tie. ‘Sorry… Red just isn’t your colour, is it, Reynard?’ she said, before hawking up a mouthful of phlegm and blood to spit at him.

  Caitlin had given him the name as soon as she realised he was not going to identify himself, not even with a false name. It was a cheap trick by the Frenchman to increase her feelings of powerlessness, and one easily countered by her simply calling him something and sticking to it. Hawking up blood clots to spit at him helped a little, too.

  He held up a clipboard to protect himself, but she let fly anyway, hitting his fingers with a satisfyingly lurid chunk. He cursed her in French and stormed out of the cell, dragging the door closed behind him. A heavy iron cage, it slammed shut with a deafening clang.

  Caitlin closed her eyes and smiled. A small victory. Not so long ago, Reynard would simply have absorbed the abuse and bored in on her, attempting to undermine her defences, all the time reminding her of how utterly alone she was in the world. Enraging him was a small victory. Possibly pyrrhic, but a victory nonetheless. She breathed in slowly. The air was stale and dank. She remembered her last stay in the cells beneath Noisy-le-Sec as being uncomfortable because of the cold. Her interrogators had maintained the temperature just above freezing, but on this occasion there had been no attempts to manipulate her environment. She put that down to power shortages. The lights flickered off and on irregularly, often going out for minutes at a time. The fort would have had its own generator but even so, the directorate would need to ration supply if the wider grid had gone offline.

  Really though, she had no idea. She had been held incommunicado for three weeks now, and her captors told her nothing of the outside world save for those details that suited their ends, and of course, she could not necessarily believe them anyway. She could only trust what few miniscule scraps of reality came filtering through their control.

  Time. They had tried to disconnect her from the flow of time. To impress upon her that she was adrift on the seas of eternity, and completely within their control. They were good, too. She had been trained to listen for any clues in their conversation, to try to catch a glimpse of any timepieces or watches that might stray into her field of view. But Reynard and his men were good. On their wrists she found only a tan line, and for a long time, lost in the haze of beatings and interrogation, she did lose track of the days and weeks. But of course there was one thing they could not take or hide from her: she was a woman and two weeks into her capture, her period arrived, weak but unmistakable.

  It had since passed, marking three weeks since Monique had been killed and she had collapsed in the hallway of the apartment block back on the Route d’Asnieres, betrayed by her own failing body. She kept the small morsel of knowledge, that she knew how long she’d been held, to herself. It was a small prize to covet in her ongoing battle with Reynard. And not the only one either. She knew things about him that he would not want her to know.

  The Frenchman, for instance, was losing weight. She had taken note of where he notched his belt the first time he had interrogated her. It was two notches in from there now. At first, too, he had always been clean shaven, and his suits freshly dry-cleaned and pressed. Recently, however, he had once or twice sported a five o’clock shadow and she noted that his collars and cuffs were growing dark with grime. He, like her, was suffering. Dark bags had appeared under his eyes and he had chewed the skin around his left thumbnail quite ragged.

  She could not know what was happening in the city outside the fortress walls, she didn’t even know what was happening in the cells near her own, but Caitlin was willing to bet on a systemic collapse. And so she taunted him along those lines, finally eliciting the angered reaction of a few moments past. She would wait now for her punishment. She composed herself, a task made somewhat easier because today she was able to lie flat on the cold slab that served as her bed. She was naked, but she had long since grown used to that. Most importantly, they did not have her trussed into a stress position, sitting cross-legged, with her knees pulled right up and bound, and her hands cuffed behind her back. It had been excruciating after a while, and they’d forced her to maintain the posture by having two men stand over her with lengths of heavy rubber tubing, to hand out a beating whenever she attempted to alter position.

  After a few days, however, pressure sores covered her buttocks and had become infected. That bought her respite for a day or two while a medic treated her. They then relented, in a fashion – resorting to a mix of stress positioning, water-boarding and sensory bombardment, rotated in such a way as to maintain her torment without the inconvenience of needing to halt for medical treatment. The combination
had almost broken her, but they had stopped it after she sank her teeth into the wrist of a man who’d been attempting to place a hood over her head in preparation for another water-boarding session. Caitlin had bitten down as hard as she could, feeling the skin break and hot, salty blood start to flow, a split second before feeling the satisfying crack of a shattered bone. The asshole had screamed a lot louder than she ever did – something she’d been quick to point out to Reynard. Following that incident, they reverted to beatings for a couple of days.

  Beatings she could handle, and she had even begun to goad her captors, holding on to the hope that somebody might lose control and kill her with an uncontrolled blow. Because Reynard was right about one thing: she was doomed. There was no point in hanging on for the sake of the mission. There was no mission, and there would be no deliverance.