Without warning

by John Birmingham

  Caroline Wyatt rolled her eyes up to the peeling paint of the high ceiling. ‘His minders promised me I’d see him yesterday and I spent the whole bloody day in this wretched armoured car, roaring around from one bunker to the next, without ever actually managing to get anywhere near the little bugger. I’ll stay on it, Monty, if you really wish, but I don’t think Sarkozy’s going to roll over for us until he has some genuinely good news to crow about.’

  ‘Well, his armoured boys entered the old city last night. I’d have thought that was good enough.’

  ‘Yes, it is a feel-good story, isn’t it? Dozens of Leclerc main battle tanks crushing Arab street fighters under their treads in the Bois de Boulogne… I can’t imagine why he wouldn’t want to sit down and chat about that over a Pernod or two.’

  ‘Well, keep at it, sweetheart. I have faith in your charms,’ the chief of staff told her. ‘Bret, are you all squared away with the Marines? London is super-keen to see you embed with them after they cleaned out Lyons.’

  Melton tapped the point of his ballpoint pen on a Spirax writing pad. ‘Soon as we’re finished up here, I’m heading west to Suresnes,’ he replied. ‘The Marines – although, you know, they’re really more like Army Rangers – they laid up last night at Mont-Valerien, the old fortress right next door. Parachuted in there when it was still full of jihadis. Pretty fucking hard-core. They’ll have some good stories.’

  Normally, in a room full of BBC reporters, he’d have kept his mouth shut and just grunted, ‘Yeah, good to go.’ But these guys weren’t normal. Even Caroline Wyatt, who still spent an hour in make-up every day, nodded appreciatively. He didn’t need to sex it up for them. They all knew what a godless blood-swarm the drop into Mont-Valerien would have been, and what the push eastwards into the city was going to be like from there. The clashes between rival elements of the French military were destructive in the extreme. Whole swathes of the suburbs had been gutted by collisions between main-force units siding with either Minister Sarkozy or the so-called Loyalist Committee. The blocks bordering the Bois de Boulogne parklands now looked like Stalingrad at the end of 1944. Those buildings still standing were mostly gutted and blackened, often with the upper floors sheared off by high explosives. The line of the ruined streetscape looked like broken teeth.

  ‘It’s bloody confusing, isn’t it,’ grumbled Monty. ‘Rebels, renegades, mutineers, Loyalists – hard to keep them all straight some days. And if someone could do me a favour and explain why we’re still calling them fucking “Loyalists” when it seems pretty obvious they’ve cut some sort of deal with the intifada crew, I’d be very grateful.’

  Melton, who was idly sketching a rough map of the city centre, with various lines of advance and defence marked out, just as he’d been taught so long ago, looked up and shrugged. ‘They self-identify as Loyalists, Monty, so it’s only good manners. After all, Sarkozy did anoint himself boss hog when Chirac got whacked. Smart move or not, it was illegal. Shades of Napoleon grabbing the crown. Gotta figure most of the guys fighting for the Loyalist Committee think they’re the ones protecting the Republic. The soldiers, at least. Sarko calling them all traitors and sell-outs to the intifada wouldn’t have helped calm the matter down either. The jihadi, they’re allies of convenience. It’s all fucked up. Civil wars always are.’

  ‘Do you believe him, though?’ asked Caroline.

  ‘Sarko? Who knows?’

  ‘It seems a little incredible, don’t you think, him accusing the Loyalists of treason? They seem rather less discriminating than that. Anyone in their way gets killed, no matter what their allegiance. Street gangs, neo-fascists, jihadis. They’ve cut them all down at one time or another.’

  ‘Like I said, Caroline, it’s confused. It’s a mistake to think of this thing in terms of massed armies manoeuvring against each other. Alliances and loyalties are contingent. They can shift in minutes. An agreement negotiated at one level might have no effect at others, or further down a city block. I think this is going to be one of those times when the winners definitely write the history.’

  ‘Well,’ Monty interrupted the discussion, ‘as another of your countrymen once pointed out, journalism is the first draft of history, and ours will be due in a few hours. So let’s crack on, shall we?’

  * * * *

  Leaving the office was no longer a matter of grabbing his equipment and stepping out to hail a cab. Melton didn’t expect to see the compound again for a couple of days and he packed accordingly. At the bottom of a small black rucksack he stuffed a layer of spare socks and underwear, on top of which he placed some emergency rations, even though he’d be eating with his embedded unit, he hoped. On top of them went his equipment: a small handy cam and twenty-four hours’ worth of videotape, three notebooks and a couple of pens. He topped it off with two handfuls of carefully hoarded chocolate bars and cigarettes, which he planned to share with ‘his’ troops. He understood just how welcome an outsider with a small stash of luxuries could be.

  It was raining outside again, quite heavily, enough to dull the sounds of close-quarter fighting. The steel plating that covered all the windows only served to magnify the sound of the downpour as the torrents hit the metal. He carefully pulled on his rain slicker over a BBC-issue ballistic vest and snagged a pair of goggles to protect his eyes. His injuries still troubled him. These days the toxic rain wasn’t nearly as bad as it had been a few weeks back, but letting the water run into your eyes felt like swimming in a hideously over-chlorinated pool.

  The last item, he took his time with. It was a controversial choice – a personal weapon. Some of the reporters, like Caroline and Adam Mynott, who’d arrived from Afghanistan with the last of NATO’s returning contingent, refused to carry anything and tried very hard to talk Melton out of doing so. They argued that a journalist’s best protection was their non-combatant status. In turn Melton insisted that nobody was playing by the Geneva Convention and cited at least three occasions in Iraq and two in Paris where he’d been forced to defend himself. It was an unresolved dispute, with some of the older hands writing him off as a fossil from the Cowboy Age, while a few of the younger ones quietly sought him out to ask his advice about how they might discreetly pack their own protection. It was telling, he thought, that Barry had scrounged him two spare magazines for the Fabrique Nationale 57 pistol.

  He stripped, cleaned and rebuilt the handgun before slotting home a full mag. Safety on, it went into the holster on his right hip and disappeared under the slicker. Melton finished his packing with a fully charged cell phone, plugged into British Telecom’s network and set to roam, but he noted that – as usual – there was no signal available. Service was spotty, at best. After a quick visit to Monty’s cubicle for all the goodbyes and good-luck wishes, he signed out at the security desk, lodging a run-down of his expected movements over the next forty-eight hours, the name of the French unit he would be with, and the number of the all-but-useless cell phone in his breast pocket.

  From there he hurried out to the internal courtyard where his ride was waiting, a custom-built six-wheeled Land Rover, with two armed guards and his driver, American Dave.

  ‘Fantastic,’ Bret muttered to himself. More loudly, on approaching the vehicle, he called out, ‘Morning! You guys got my route map this morning? We’re gonna be skirting around some contested ground.’

  Dave, a chunky, dark-haired man with a short-cropped beard, continued chewing his gum and nodded. ‘Yup.’

  ‘Okay then. Drive on.’

  Melton had mapped out a long, looping circuitous path through the district’s quieter streets to avoid the fighting just north-east of the Bois de Boulogne, between Avenue Foch and the huge traffic roundabout at Place de la Porte Maillot. Within that area, fourteen irregularly shaped city blocks had been reduced to a wasteland of shattered buildings, burning ruins, and rubble through which no armour could pass and over which thousands of men and women now fought. The rain had dampened hostilities somewhat, but the rolling thunder of combat never com
pletely abated. Soon after they set off, two jets screamed low overhead to unload their bombs on somebody. The air force was almost entirely behind Sarkozy, but even so, Melton flinched a little. Technically, they were still in Loyalist territory, and an armoured Land Rover would make an excellent target of opportunity.

  It took them all of four minutes to deviate from the route and hit trouble. And the reason he didn’t notice them veering off course was because American Dave surprised him by initiating a conversation as he popped a CD into the stereo. Melton checked out the cover. Don Dudley’s Truckin’ Hits.

  ‘Gonna git bloody soon,’ said Dave.

  Okay, it wasn’t much of a conversation, but it was a start.

  ‘Yeah,’ agreed Bret. ‘Always gets kinda biblical whenever you get a lot of irregulars tangling with main force. These guys’ll be desperate too. You got the Marines and tanks coming in from the park, and those two grunt divisions hit Romaine and Noisy-le-Sec yesterday. Loyalists are trapped.’

  Dave snorted in disgust. ‘Fucking Loyalists. Bullshit. Nobody loyal to nothing but Allah ever partnered up with those raghead motherfuckers.’

  Melton let that one slide past. He had no idea what game plan the Loyalist Committee were running and wouldn’t have been surprised to see them turn on the Arab street fighters and massacre them wholesale if the need arose.

  The Land Rover rumbled down a deserted street in which all of the trees had died. The rain was still heavy, reducing visibility to about thirty yards, and he could tell from the neglected appearance of the buildings, with gaping broken windows and doors left ajar, that most of them were empty. Every now and then a figure would dart furtively from cover, but only for a few seconds at most. In the back, Dave’s companions kept their weapons at the ready.

  ‘You don’t think?’ said Dave.

  ‘Sorry. I don’t think what?’

  ‘You don’t think the ragheads and Loyalists are teamed up?’

  Melton shrugged. ‘They have a common enemy, but that doesn’t make them friends or even allies. Loyalists are fighting Sarkozy because they think he’s a dictator. A fascist. The street Arabs from the banlieue are fighting him because he sent his troops into their neighbourhoods and served up a big bowl of smack-down. As for the skinheads, they’re fighting the Arabs because they’re skinheads. The other white gangs are fighting the Arabs because fighting’s all there is now. You fight, you eat. You eat, you live. Don’t know that there’s much more to it.’

  Dave grunted and lapsed back into silence as Don Dudley started singing that he was king of the road.

  And just out of the corner of his eye, Bret Melton saw the telltale, snaking smoke trail of an RPG round. A warning cry was in his throat but never got out.

  Then the world turned upside down with a head-cracking roar and a geyser of hot fire.

  * * * *

  42

  SEATTLE, WASHINGTON

  It was raining, of course. Jed pulled his overcoat a little more tightly around his stout frame as he left the foyer of the Hotel Monaco. The caucus was still running in his three suites. It ran twenty-four/seven all week, forcing him to retain another private room on a different floor. He scowled at the weather and tugged his hat down a little more tightly, feeling like an extra from a B-grade film noir movie.

  There was no avoiding it, though. The temperature had dropped away dramatically as spring succumbed to a ‘Disappearance Fall’ and a wide-brimmed hat was the only way to keep the acidic rain off one’s face. For good measure, he popped open a large black umbrella as he stepped out onto the street. He had a four-block walk in front of him. Only the military and emergency services were getting any gas in Seattle, and they didn’t rate Jed Culver’s needs high enough to afford him a car and driver. He rather missed Hawaii.

  The Monaco might have been one of the hippest little boutique joints in the world a month ago, but now it was full of rowdy conventioneers and tobacco-chewing soldiers who clomped so much mud through the place that the management had given up attempting to keep the public areas clean. Instead the hotel staff had laid down massive canvas tarpaulins everywhere. As Culver was leaving the establishment just now, he’d found a quartet of soldiers standing around one of the carpet-shampoo machines, trying to figure out how it worked. He overheard someone, probably a sergeant, saying he wanted to leave the place in a better condition than they’d found it. If they left, Culver thought, as he trudged through the quiet streets.

  Huddled deep inside his coat, he shuffled quickly past an abandoned building site where oily water gathered in pools and dripped from torn plastic sheeting. Some locals had told him it would have been their new public library, but nobody expected it to be finished now. Jed walked on down 4th Avenue, with his free hand jammed into a coat pocket. He pressed a leather document wallet up against his body with that arm. Despite the thin leather gloves he wore to protect his hands from the burning rain, he preferred to keep them tucked away anyway.

  The streets were quiet; save for a few council workers who all wore bright yellow ID laminates around their necks, and small groups of soldiers who tried to stay under cover at every street corner. Some managed a little respite under an awning or a bus shelter. Those who didn’t looked as miserable as Jed Culver had ever seen grown men and women look. His own laminate, which guaranteed his passage through the downtown area, was an embarrassing hibiscus pink, identifying him as one of Governor Lingle’s representatives to the convention.

  A gust of wind, whipping through the canyons of the city, threw a spray of toxic water into his face, forcing Culver to stop and wipe it down with a handkerchief, one of a collection he carried for just that purpose. He had stopped outside Simon’s Espresso Cafe, where he’d managed to score a quite decent prime-beef sandwich on his first day in Seattle, two weeks back. But between grousing about the ‘fascist-pig-dog-maggots’ who’d ‘taken over’ the city, and muttering darkly about the secret military experiment that had caused the Wave in the first place, his waiter – a life-support system for three hundred and ninety-two stainless steel ringlets, studs and spears – had advised him to enjoy the dead flesh. It was one of the last sandwiches Simon’s would serve. And sure enough, the cafe was soon closed and dark, like most of the retail outlets in the city. As he wiped the stinging water from his face, Jed wondered idly what had happened to the freak with all the piercings. Probably joined ‘the Resistance’.

  He had to laugh at the studied pretension of those losers styling themselves on the French Underground. As bad as things were in Seattle, it wasn’t Paris under the Nazis. And when you got down to it, these Resistance idiots were simply making things worse. Every time they hacked a server at Fort Lewis, every time they broke into a food bank to ‘liberate’ the supplies for ‘the common people’, every fucking time they chopped down a tree or spread small iron spikes on a road to ‘deny’ it to military traffic, they aggravated the situation. They weren’t achieving anything – a major sin in Jed Culver’s book – and they were handing Blackstone one rolled-gold opportunity after another to maintain martial law. What was worse, of course, was that they played right into the hands of the pinhead lobby who wanted to hijack the convention as the first step in reframing the Constitution, adapting it into something that Ferdinand Marcos or some Argentine general might have approved of in the 1970s.

  Still, thought Jed, as he shuffled down the road, dabbing away the stinging water on his face, these Resistance characters were an element of the game, another piece on the board, and they could be played, too. That’s why he had contact numbers and encrypted net addresses for some of the larger cells in his smart phone.

  ‘Hey, buddy. Got a mouthful, did you?’

  The lawyer looked up with a start. He had no idea where the man standing beside him had come from. Correction: the soldier standing beside him.

  ‘Sorry, hope I didn’t scare you. Ty McCutcheon’s the name. Major Ty McCutcheon. But you can call me Mac, if that suits.’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ replied Culver,
warily. He felt he’d been put off balance on purpose, but for what reason he wasn’t sure.

  ‘I’ve seen you at the convention,’ said McCutcheon. ‘I’m heading up there myself now if you’d like the company. It is kinda lonesome round here at the moment. I feel like the Omega Man some days.’

  ‘The what?’ asked Culver in a flat voice.

  ‘You know, Charlton Heston? End of the world, last man alive – a great, great flick. Even with those dumbass hippie vampires. I’m telling you, Jed. They won’t ever make ‘em like that again.’

  ‘No,’ said Culver, who was about to point out that he had not introduced himself. He decided not to, though, wondering what game this character was into, and what role that little gambit with his name was supposed to play.

  He scrunched up the damp handkerchief and jammed it deep into a pocket. He could feel the smart phone in there. Loaded with dozens of names and numbers, any one of which could see him hauled in by the military police for extended questioning. That’s how things ran in this city.

  ‘Well, I am headed that way, Captain… uh…’ Culver knew what the gold oak leaf on the stranger’s Gore-tex jacket represented.