Without Warning Part 12

He'd done his best to explain what he knew, but really, what did he know? As Melton had laid it out for them, bellowing over the thump of the rotor blades, the looks on their faces had made him feel like a mental case. They gaped in horror and disbelief as he described what he'd seen and heard-and how could he blame them? He couldn't really believe it himself. He sounded authentically mad. After twenty minutes they'd all lapsed into silence, and the rest of the flight pa.s.sed in a sort of stunned, half-catatonic state. Melton knew that by the time these guys relayed the news to their friends it'd be totally bent out of shape, but he didn't see much point to holding anything back. Everything they were defending was gone. Their homes and loved ones. Everything. They had a right to know. In fact, that was the only reason he was still here. He had open tickets back to Paris and could check out any time he wanted, but he could no more fly out to Paris than he could to New York now. Ever since he'd left the army, after Somalia, he'd had one faith, one love from which he could not be diverted: the telling of soldiers' stories.

The pilot's voice came through, a clipped monotone announcing that they were five minutes out. Melton craned around on his perch and briefly popped his head out into the slipstream. The First Brigade Combat Team's desert base wasn't totally blacked out, but it was much darker than the last time he'd come in, three days ago. Even so, under the moon it still glowed as a bed of pearls in the wide vessel of shadows that was the desert at night. On a satellite image the tent city and ma.s.ses of equipment would show up as a vast glowing metropolis of blood and iron, but what the h.e.l.l. There was no sense in making it easy for Saddam.

They flew in low, flaring and pivoting for the touchdown on a steel mesh landing pad. A storm of gritty, stinging sand blasted into the cabin, scouring any exposed skin and working its way in through the layers of clothing Melton had drawn tightly around himself. One of the soldiers slapped him on the shoulder and grimly mouthed, "Thanks anyway, buddy," before leaping out and hurrying off, bent double. The Army Times correspondent-or was he a former correspondent now?-followed the others out into the chill darkness, intending to head for the tent where some of the journalists maintained a rudimentary press club with a small stash of carefully h.o.a.rded bourbon and beer.

"Mr. Melton? Sir?"

"Lieutenant Euler?"

Melton recognized him immediately. The platoon commander, who at six and a half feet was forced into a very exaggerated stoop by the Blackhawk's spinning rotors, hurried forward and took Melton by the elbow, steering him away from his intended heading.

"Captain wants to see you, sir. We're getting set to roll on fifteen minutes' notice."

"Roll where?"

"Don't know, sir. But Captain Lohberger needs you over at headquarters. The squadron commander will want to hear what you have to say as well."

"About what's happened back home?"

"Yes, sir."

Both men carefully stood up as they cleared the track of the rotor blades. Melton hoisted his backpack into a slightly more comfortable position and tried to take in as much as he could of his surroundings. Something was going to happen soon and it left a weird coppery taste in the back of his mouth. They hurried down from the rise of the makeshift helipad, diving into a small tent city that was laid out on a strict grid pattern, much of it obscured by the tan camouflage nets. Away from the overwhelming din of the chopper he began to hear shouts and curses as non coms wrangled their squads toward a.s.sembly points while junior officers like Euler gathered up platoons and began clicking them into larger units for deployment into the field. He could hear the whine of Abrams gas turbines and the snarl of Bradley fighting vehicles somewhere nearby, and overlaying it all was the ceaseless thumping of rotor blades as dozens of helicopters pirouetted through the inky black sky above them. The metallic, oily taste of diesel mixed with the grit and dust kicked up by the Blackhawk and filled his sinuses. He pulled out a rag and blew his nose, knowing full well that the snot would be blood-flecked from the dirt.

"Do you mind if I ask you a question, sir?" said Euler, as they double-timed past a tent where a group of men in uniforms and berets he recognized as British SAS was hunkered around a table. One of the commandos leveled a hard stare at him and flicked the tent flap closed.

"Is it true, sir? What we've been hearing?"

Melton squinted against the sand, which was already coating the inside of his mouth and nostrils.

"I don't know what you've heard, exactly, Lieutenant. But it's gone. Home. Everyone there has gone."

Euler's face twisted in a mask of despair.

"I'd heard it was a jihad attack. Bioweapons or nukes or something. Took out a bunch of cities."

They turned a corner, nearly running into a couple of MPs.

"Watch where you're going, a.s.shole," one of them barked, surprising Melton with a female voice. She was built thicker and closer to the ground than he. He muttered a hasty apology and drove on.

"No. This is nothing to do with them. Unless it was merciful f.u.c.king Allah, of course, like Saddam is telling everyone. But n.o.body knows. Some kinda weird energy bubble or something. Seems to have zapped all the primates inside its boundary. Some of them gone. Some of them just sort of turned into mush."

"Primates?" Euler looked aghast. "And mush?"

"Just before I took off, that was the latest on CNN. Some j.a.panese blog-ger checking webcams of the San Diego Zoo noticed that all the monkeys were gone. Didn't take long to work out from there."

"Holy s.h.i.t," said the lieutenant in a small, choked voice that was completely at odds with his towering frame and full battle rattle. The reporter knew exactly what was going through his mind. He'd seen that same reaction many times today. Lieutenant Euler was counting his losses. Children and partner if he had them. Mom and dad, ditto. Brothers. Sisters. Old friends and new. Neighbors. Faces on the streets where he once lived, even if he didn't know their names. Ex-girlfriends. Cla.s.smates from school. A widening circle of personal history, all of it sucked away in some freakish moment when the laws of physics got turned inside out. Any moment now he'd look around, like a child who'd woken up in a strange room, trying to figure out where he was and how to put everything back in its place.

There.

"I'm sorry," said Melton, but Euler just shook his head.

"This sucks," he breathed. "Everyone?"

"Most everyone," he confirmed. "Seattle's still there. Alaska. Coupla places in Canada. That's it, though."

"Man ... oh, s.h.i.t, here we are."

They stepped into a large frame tent, one of the newer types, which came with power outlets and lighting. It was nicer than the Korean Warera GP Mediums he used to spend time in. Melton recognized the tense, guarded body language of men who were used to facing the worst possible situations, but had never really expected anything this bad. He was almost rocked back on his heels by the concentrated force of their attention when they recognized him.

"Come in, gentlemen. We're pressed for time here, Bret."

Melton nodded a quick greeting at Captain Christian Lohberger, Bravo Troop CO, 5/7 Cav, and the only man in the tent who routinely used Melton's first name. Everyone else referred to him as sir, or Mr. Melton. Being called "sir" beat "hooah" or "rangers lead the way," which Melton had found increasingly annoying over the years, especially hearing the ranger war cry from pukes who most definitely were not rangers and were never going to be rangers. And as a former grunt, the "sir" thing had greatly amused him at first. Nothing much amused him at the moment, however.

"I'm guessing that's not why you wanted to see me," he said.

Lohberger shook his head and cut straight to the bone. "No. We're getting nothing but smoke blown up our a.s.ses from Division on down. What the h.e.l.l is going on?"

Melton dropped his bag by the trestle table, on which a map of the Kuwaiti-Iraqi borderlands rested. It was covered in a swirl of red and blue lines and unit markings. The faces around the tent were grim and focused entirely on him.

"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 G.o.d," grunted Sergeant Major Bo Jaanson, a gnarled stump of old wood who looked like he might well have seen the n.a.z.is off at the Singfried line. Melton had given them the superconcentrated version of the hours he'd spent plugged into the European and Asian news feeds, finishing up with the news of the "monkey" 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 was 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 a bug sitting on a mound kicked over by laughing, moronic G.o.ds.

"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 web. I wouldn't call it gospel, but... you know ..."

The men were all younger than he, 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 p.o.r.n stash in his daughter's bedroom.

"Okay. There's nothing we can do about it from here, not right now anyway," he 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 of a Cold Warera Forward Defense at Fulda Gap write-up. He started to feel ill. Katie bar the door indeed, Melton thought, not seeing the humor in the battle plan's name.

"Saddam's moving toward us. He's pulled a lot of his guys out of those useless f.u.c.king trenches they dug and put them on the road heading this way."

"Holy s.h.i.t."

"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 First UK Division were still a.s.signed the ch.o.r.e of dealing with Basra. Melton choked back any criticism of the plan. Getting into an urban firefight, especially now, didn't seem to make any sense at all. It negated almost all of the coalition forces' technological and military advantages.

5/7 Cav's objective was Jalibah Airfield, marked as Objective Marne.

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? He kept that question to himself and asked a different one. "Any idea which units?"

Command Sergeant Major Jaanson volunteered the answer. "The c.r.a.p ones. Militia. Fedayeen. Reserve forces. A couple of Republican Guard units, 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 firefights 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 are 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. So that is why we are 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," Lohberger said.

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

"Hooah, rangers lead the way," said Lohberger, who did have 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 h.e.l.l 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 d.i.c.k 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 h.e.l.l 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 in Seattle if they could find a way out. Not with that hungry f.u.c.king bubble buzzing away just down the road.

Lohberger finished and let the air force liaison, also known as the ALO, 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 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 felt. 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, getting used to. a.s.suming the G.o.dd.a.m.ned thing didn't end up swallowing the whole world, of course.

"Sorry," he said. "It's been a h.e.l.luva 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. "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," said Melton, his voice 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 organized 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 Escalon 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 immobilized by a bone-deep la.s.situde.

What the f.u.c.k is the point of any of it now?

His throat tightened 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 s.h.i.tload worse in the next few weeks. Even if the bubble didn't move an inch ever again, 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 e-mails would zip through the myriad channels of fiber 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 would go into his account as scheduled. Possibly it might, if the process was automated. But how long would that last? And how long would anyone go on accepting U.S. 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.

Thirteenth arrondiss.e.m.e.nt, Paris

Monique screamed as the windshield crashed and bulged inward, 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 spiderweb of cracks in the windshield made it impossible to know exactly what was going on outside. Caitlin hammered at the safety gla.s.s with the b.u.t.t of the gun, using her peripheral vision and one-handed driving to keep to the road.

"Would you shut the f.u.c.k up and help me out here?" she yelled at the screaming Monique, eliciting a couple of ineffectual taps at the gla.s.s from the girl in the pa.s.senger seat. It popped out just as they struck the tail end of a Mercedes with a ma.s.sive 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 among themselves, although several were focused solely on their car. Monique hunched down as more rocks came flying at them, one bouncing off the hood to slam into her shoulder. She cried out in pain and Caitlin reached across, grabbed a handful of her jacket, and violently jerked her 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 even 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, deliberately pointed the Volvo into the center of a ma.s.s 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 sidewalk. One, his head swathed in a black and white kaffiyeh, was a fraction too late, and one of the car's headlights caught his foot in midair, spinning him off the arc of his dive and into the side of a grocery van. His scream was s.n.a.t.c.hed away by the speed of their pa.s.sage.

"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 s.p.a.ce, as Caitlin swung through a roundabout and took the exit farthest from the direction in which they'd just come. She tried to organize her impressions in a coherent fashion, organizing 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 one hundred strong, seemed almost evenly split between young white men and women, and perhaps a slightly larger number of African-and Arabian-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 kef 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 doesn't explain what they're doing all the way in here, though.

A quick 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-Taiba cell.

"Jeez, those were the days," she sighed to herself.

She swerved onto the avenue Edison and almost immediately threw the car into a hairpin turn around a small, arrow-shaped traffic island to run southeast alongside the park down the rue Charles Moreau. 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 gla.s.s, Monique had curled up in a tight little ball and was shaking violently. The yellow wash of sodium lamps gave her features a gaunt, malarial cast. Caitlin dropped 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 flat, affectless voice.

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

Monique turned an empty, uncomprehending face to her.