Without warning

by John Birmingham

  ‘Yes, sir, we are indeed in the shit,’ Price replied. ‘I’ll get on that anti-tank team.’

  ‘Okay. I’ll keep someone on this line,’ Musso promised. He turned to the navy lieutenant by the door. ‘Lieutenant McCurry, man this phone.’

  ‘Aye, sir,’ barked McCurry, taking the handset from him.

  Tusk watched as Pileggi continued to yell into her phone. ‘No, hold those fuckers off the airfield, Sergeant!’ she insisted. ‘And if you’ve got civilians volunteering to fight, then let them. I don’t have time for any bullshit about whether or not it’s kosher – just do it!’

  ‘Can you hold it?’ Musso asked her as she slammed the receiver down.

  ‘I have no idea, sir. I’m not over there, I’m here,’ Pileggi said.

  ‘Grab a couple of Marines as close protection, and a personal weapon, and go, Susie. You’re my man out there.’

  She stood to attention and ripped out a salute. Then she was gone, barking out orders at men in the hallway he couldn’t see.

  Turning back to the shattered window on the second floor of his headquarters building, Musso watched tracer fire flickering across the airfield, some of it going astray into the bay, skipping across the water. A C-5 Galaxy was trying to climb off the runway and claw its way into the air. Ice water flooded Musso’s veins as tracer reached out from the perimeter of the airfield to pepper the fuselage of the massive cargo transport.

  Climb, Musso prayed silently. Climb.

  ‘Sir!’ McCurry shouted over the chaos. ‘I’m getting reports of two additional columns outside the base perimeter. Estimated time to contact is five minutes.’

  The tracer fire lost interest in the Galaxy and focused again on earthbound targets. Musso allowed himself a sigh of relief.

  Just then a missile zipped into the flank of the cargo plane at the wing root and exploded. The lost wing folded up and back over the top of the C-5, shearing off the tail section as the fuel ignited, engulfing the dying aircraft.

  ‘Mother. Fucker…’ said Musso.

  He watched the wreckage plummet towards a Carnival cruise ship, which was already burning from a number of bomb strikes. Musso knew he would never be free of the image of children falling out of the belly of that burning Galaxy as it careened towards the ship.

  ‘No,’ Musso whispered. ‘No, God…’

  The plane hit the bow of the Carnival vessel, shearing it off completely. Burning fuel and white-hot shrapnel shredded the upper decks. Adding to the carnage, another aircraft, a Venezuelan jet, swooped in low, and began strafing the growing funeral pyre in the bay, catching some burning passengers in midair as they flung themselves from the cruise ship and tried to find safety in the waters of Guantanamo Bay. A second container ship pushed past the wreckage for the beach, only to be met by a couple of Navy Shore Patrol boats, gnats buzzing around a behemoth. Small-arms fire passed back and forth between the mayfly’s quick adversaries and their lumbering prey, chopping up the water around the smaller boats where civilians were mixed in the fray.

  ‘Got a fire fight between base police and some infiltrators at the McDonald’s, sir,’ McCurry reported. ‘Another engagement is taking place up at base housing. Gunny Price says he’s only got a third of his force under arms and maybe two-dozen civilians. That’s it.’

  ‘Where’s that army commo puke?’ Musso asked, as he stalked over to the doorway. ‘Captain Birch!’ he roared.

  A scuffle of boots through the smoke-filled corridors produced a large, somewhat overweight man in army BDUs. ‘Sir?’

  ‘Do we still have comms with Pearl or the brigade in Panama?’

  Birch seemed pale, a bit stunned.

  ‘Comms with Pearl, Birch. Or the Canal. Get with the fucking program,’ Musso said, resisting the urge to slap the man silly. ‘I need air cover over our AO.’

  ‘I’ll check, sir… right away.’ The captain turned to leave. ‘Specialist Gibbs!’ he called down the hallway. ‘See if Pearl is -’

  Birch’s head exploded.

  ‘Sniper!’

  * * * *

  Pileggi, shepherded by two Marines and a stray Coast Guard chief, made the airstrip on the bay’s western headland by virtue of a white-knuckle high-speed run in a little Trabant. The Cuban vehicle had been parked outside the headquarters block, and one of the Marines, Sergeant Gutteres, had hotwired it with practised ease. At times, tracer fire zipped and crackled all around them, while at others, on short stretches of road, everything seemed eerily still.

  As they screeched around the last curve before the hangar buildings at the edge of the field, Gutteres pointed skywards and Pileggi’s heart sank as she saw dozens of parachute canopies popped open, high in the air. A few lines of orange and green fire flicked up to cross-hatch the descending paratroopers, but not enough. It was a feeble, poorly guided effort compared to the volume of fire on the ground.

  Chief Lundquist, who had the wheel, swerved a few times to avoid burnt-out vehicles and hastily erected firing positions, before slamming on the brakes next to a long concrete pipe behind which a small group of Marines seemed to be directing the defence of the airfield. Colonel Pileggi, still dressed in her office uniform, scrambled out and hurried over with her bodyguards right behind her. She was protected from the worst of the enemy’s ground fire by the giant pipe, which stood at least six feet high, but she crouched almost double anyway, running to avoid getting picked off from above. A few of the Venezuelans were shooting from small handheld weapons as they came down. The fire was inaccurate, but getting heavier.

  ‘You Sergeant Carlyon?’ she asked the senior non-com, throwing herself up against the pipe.

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ he answered, reading her name-tag and adding, ‘We spoke before, Colonel.’

  ‘Okay, what’s your situation, Sergeant? I’m not going to run your fight for you. I’ll just see what I can do to help.’

  Carlyon looked relieved. ‘I have eight Marines with me, Colonel,’ he replied. ‘Only six have any ammo left. Around the base, I have less than fifty men. Some of them sailors, some airmen. They’re not trained for this. Some MPs, who are.’

  As he spoke, two of his men depleted their stocks even further by sniping at the Venezuelans dropping to earth beneath the billowing chutes.

  ‘There’s at least a platoon of hostiles on the ground already,’ the sergeant continued, raising his voice over the steady gunfire and the more distant roar of the battle out in the bay. ‘But they haven’t consolidated. I think they came ashore in a couple of inflatable hulls, probably got split up, and haven’t regrouped yet. We’ve got ‘em pinned down behind two shipping containers on the far side of the strip. But tactical’s changing, ma’am.’ Carlyon looked upwards. Stepping away from the cover of the pipe and calmly raising his rifle, he put two shots into a paratrooper a hundred yards up and slightly north of them.

  ‘Well, you got my guys here,’ said Pileggi. ‘Here, take my rifle – give it to one of your men. I’ll make do.’ She unholstered her pistol, as Carlyon passed her M-1 across to a grateful-looking Marine.

  ‘Thank you, Colonel. Much obliged.’

  Just behind her, Lundquist raised a Remington shotgun and fired twice. She turned briefly to see a human leg falling from beneath a writhing, screaming paratrooper, not fifty yards away.

  ‘You’re going to need more men and guns,’ she said. ‘You got a radio?’

  Carlyon shook his head and handed her a cell phone. ‘It’s still working, ma’am. On and off.’

  ‘Okay. I’ll see if I can round up some warm bodies. What happened to those civilians you had before?’

  ‘They’re dead.’

  * * * *

  PACOM HQ, HAWAII

  Admiral Ritchie watched the four 52-inch HDTV screens in the ad-hoc war room of the re-formed Joint Chiefs of Staff at Fort Shafter. Centre left displayed a real-time Keyhole satellite feed of the running battle at Guantanamo Bay; centre right, a live feed from some Venezuelan reporter on the scene, an embed from the governm
ent-run TVes network. The reporter was covering his country’s Marines as they tried to fight their way towards base headquarters, and at that moment was speaking to camera, framed by the burning light of an amtrac. The satellite feed was choppy and slow, breaking into bursts of static, but Ritchie could see that the man looked terrified. He was also providing a constant stream of very useful information, which a small team of Marines here in Pearl were feeding right back to their colleagues at Gitmo.

  On the screen to the far left, President Hugo Chavez pumped his fist in the air as he shouted cadenced beats of Spanish at the microphone. A running subtitle of translation tried to keep up, but Ritchie had long since given up reading it. Most of his attention was focused on the fourth screen, the videoconference taking place with the surviving senior officer of the Nimitz battle group, Captain Ted Branch. Lights flickered behind the master and commander of the wounded USS Nimitz as he gave his report to General Tommy Franks.

  ‘I’ve got two cats up, and two-thirds of my air wing operational. However, we’re still at half power and running on one screw. Additionally, the USS Princeton is trailing behind. We may have to scuttle her if we can’t get flooding stabilised,’ Captain Branch said.

  Admiral Ritchie leaned forward. ‘Captain, you’ll transition into the Atlantic later this afternoon your time, correct?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Barring any trouble at Gibraltar,’ Branch replied. ‘The Royal Navy tell me they still have things under control, but Morocco is a little too close for comfort. I estimate we can be in Cuban waters, earliest, in ten days.’

  General Franks shook his head. ‘This will be over long before then, Ted.’

  Captain Branch nodded. The thin man didn’t appear to have an ounce of body fat on him. Ritchie always thought the carrier commander looked more like an Army Ranger than a naval officer. Most in the navy were, well, a little heavier than they ought to be. Himself included.

  ‘Ted, do you think you can spare any elements of your battle group?’ Ritchie asked. ‘Who can sprint away and arrive sooner?’

  Branch rubbed the bridge of his nose, probably trying to clear his head or suppress a burning migraine, perhaps both. ‘Sir, if you think it will do some good, I’m sure the battle group is willing to make the sacrifice. However, I do not think we can suffer the loss of our remaining combat power without endangering either the Nimitz or the Princeton. Furthermore, I do have a convoy of my own refugee vessels trailing my battle group. Some of them have been vetted by our Marine and navy boarding teams, some have not. There’s no way of knowing whether or not one of them is a jack-in-the-box waiting to pop on us.’

  Franks glanced over at Ritchie. ‘Do you think it’s worth it, Jim?’

  Ritchie looked up at the paper map of the Atlantic area of operations. Here in the war room, they were already falling back to paper, acetate and coloured markers to indicate their force dispositions. It wasn’t for a lack of computing power. It was the lack of secure communications and data sources that forced the fallback to more primitive methods.

  ‘No, sir,’ Ritchie concluded. ‘Nimitz should continue as planned. We’ll have to try something else.’

  Franks turned to the commander of the 25th Infantry Division, who had remained silent during the exchange. ‘Francis, what’s your take on Guantanamo?’

  General Murphy snorted. ‘They’re well and truly fucked, sir. Civilians mixed into it, and us with our cocks in our hands… Musso is a smart man. He’ll see it pretty clear as well.’

  ‘You mean surrender,’ Franks said. ‘Right?’

  Murphy couldn’t bring himself to say it. He folded his arms and nodded.

  ‘Sir?’ An army specialist approached the officers. ‘Gitmo on the line.’

  * * * *

  Susan Pileggi exhaled, and with the hot, stale breath went some of the tension cramping her arms and shoulders. Not that she relaxed – that would have been impossible. But as she saw the end coming, with no chance of escape or redemption, she accepted it for the first time, and part of the fear and the strain of the last few weeks ebbed away.

  She waited in the gun pit. The muzzle of her M-1, retrieved from the body of the Marine she’d lent it to a few hours ago, tracked the small group of Venezuelan paratroopers as they cautiously rounded the huge mound of burning rubble a hundred yards away. It had been a chemical storehouse; for what, she had no idea. But the stench was vile enough to blot out the smells of the base as it died around her. Burnt meat, corpses crawling with carpets of black flies, the unwashed bodies of the men around her, napalm smoke and festering wounds – the evil stink of the warehouse blotted them all out.

  ‘Sergeant Carlyon. A head count, please.’

  ‘Twenty-three friendly, ma’am. As of five minutes ago.’

  Pileggi nodded. They were spread out over a hundred-yard front, some fucking the earth in a drainage ditch, others taking cover behind broken machinery or piles of concrete barriers. They held on. The enemy numbered in the hundreds now, but they still hadn’t forced the issue, and in this failure had probably died in greater numbers than was necessary. They could’ve ploughed us under an hour back, she thought.

  Carlyon popped up and squeezed off a three-round burst, and the reassuring boom of Lundquist’s shotgun followed almost immediately. The volume of return fire was heavy, but poorly directed.

  She followed the advance of the small party attempting to flank them to the north. Carlyon was aware of them too.

  Gitmo was dying. The base had done so well to hold off against the sneak attack, but Lieutenant Colonel Pileggi knew it would be overrun, probably in the next few hours, and her small band of brothers were sure to die with her. She was aware, without turning to look at them, of the men in the firing pit next to her. Chief Lundquist was hunkered down, reloading his shotgun next to Jimbo Jamieson, a civilian who had joined them in the middle of some of the worst fighting; he’d pulled up in a Humvee full of sailors, carrying two boxes of ammo and, most precious of all, spare barrels for an M249 squad automatic weapon. Jamieson was watching the enemy creeping through the dark too. Never taking his eyes off them as they crept closer.

  Even while concentrating so fiercely on the flankers, Pileggi remained unnaturally aware of other details. A patch of red hair peeking out beneath the curve of a helmet… The unnaturally straight line of a bayonet… A muted cough in the next foxhole, barely audible under the freight-train scream of battle all around.

  Their lives had only one meaning now: to delay a catastrophe that was otherwise inevitable. Attackers were pouring onto the headland from three sides and they were going to take the strip. When they did, more would doubtless fly in, falling upon Guantanamo’s remaining defenders and the unarmed refugees with equal ferocity.

  God only knew what sort of shit rain and hellfire that would unleash, and Pileggi wasn’t sorry she’d be missing it. She had already seen civilian boats targeted out on the bay, for no apparent reason other than that they made easier, more pleasing prey than armed Marines and soldiers. The atrocities, witnessed by everyone she’d managed to gather for the airfield defence, had doubtless hardened the Americans’ resolve. Dozens of dead paratroopers lay on the tarmac as testimony to that.

  She laid the cold iron sight of her weapon on the centre of the group of men, who were now coming at her with much greater confidence and speed. They hadn’t seen Carlyon’s ambush yet. Good. Half a second telescoped out towards infinity. Susie Pileggi had plenty of time to examine the poor standard of their uniforms and the torn rubber shoes of the man in the lead. It spoke of a badly planned, hastily thrown-together plan of attack. A three-legged dog suddenly bounded in front of the advancing Venezuelans, spinning in circles, howling as though possessed by a demon. It was probably mad.

  ‘Fire,’ yelled Carlyon.

  The dog exploded into a ball of hair and gore as the SAW opened up a short distance away. She heard cursing and saw Lundquist adjust his aim up a little. The attackers dispersed like startled rabbits, those who could anyway. An in
visible wave swept over at least half them, cutting some down, throwing others into the air, completely disassembling one from the groin up.

  ‘Pour it on, boys!’ Carlyon yelled over the uproar.

  The dense crump of exploding hand grenades momentarily smothered the rattle and snarl of gunfire. The battle for Gitmo, a vast conflagration, fell away from the minds of the men around her; the whole world was now contained on the small stage of this burning, rubble-strewn airstrip. They started to take return fire from the enemy, dug in all around them, and someone screamed as a round took him in the face.

  Pileggi squeezed off discrete bursts from the rifle – picking her targets, waiting until she had a clear line, and sending two or three rounds down-range. The bullets hit hard, punching out chunks of meat and bone when they struck. Pileggi dropped three men in just a few seconds before having to duck behind the shattered masonry she’d built up in front of her firing position.