Without Warning (27 page)

Remember your military bearing, soldier.

“Okay, if the ALO can’t get me air, then what about… ?” Euler pulled off his K-pot and threw it at the wall across from him.

“You gotta be fucking kidding me …” Euler continued, obviously not impressed
by the previous admonishment about military bearing. “How about some goddamned fucking fire support then?”

The handset shouted back, leaving Euler to shake his head some more. He signed off and threw the handset back at his radio operator. His noncoms pulled in closer, concern acid-etched into all of their faces. A few shook their heads as he relayed to them the details of whatever shit sandwich they’d just been handed.

“Goddamn,” muttered one of the sergeants, loud enough for Melton to hear. The enlisted men around him strained to pick up a few clues without being too obvious about it. They were spread out along a side street running between two shops, both of which had been cleared not fifteen minutes earlier. Euler had men inside both, and crawling around on the rooftops, denying the high ground to any hostiles. Anxiety crept stealthily down the line of soldiers, as men who’d been sitting in the dirt, catching a few minutes’ respite, picked up on the changed atmospherics in the leadership group and slowly began to attend to them. Eyes that had been closed cracked open, heads turned almost imperceptibly, bodies shifted just a little bit, leaning in toward the lieutenant, hoping to catch some scrap of information that might provide a clue as to what mess they’d stepped in now.

At last the NCOs dispersed down the line, carrying the news with them. Corporal Shetty, a short, dense African-American version of the Thing from
The Fantastic Four,
rumbled over, his face a study in disgust.

“Choppers had to bug out,” he informed them, and suddenly Melton realized for the first time that the constant droning thud of the Apaches and Blackhawks that had shepherded them through the dusty maze of An Nasiriyah was missing. He saw men craning their heads upward all along the shadowed alleyway as they heard the news.

Alcibiades asked the obvious question. “Why?”

Shetty glared at him, as if the absence were his fault.

“Fucking Iranians,” he said, as if those two words were enough. When they were found to be patently not enough, however, he continued.

“Iran declared war on America an hour ago. Their air force is up and trying to punch through, to get to us. It is a full-on furball out in the Gulf. Hundreds of speedboats and Jet Skis. All of ‘em suicide runners. They been swarmin’ the navy. Air force and some British units are mixing it up with the Iranian planes right now, trying to keep ‘em off us, here.”

“Holy shit,” said Alcibiades, his swarthy features paling noticeably.

“Yeah, anyway. Choppers are outta here for the moment. If we want air cover, we gotta call in A10s, and they’re only coming when they can get their own cover. It’s fucked up.”

“Shit, what about arty then?” Some private; he was a replacement pulled out of the division’s 123rd Signal Battalion and it showed every time he nearly shot himself in the foot with his M16. Melton stayed far away from him, because it was going to end in tears for that commo puke. He knew it in his bones.

“They’re busy hammering a column of Republican Guard who are trying to get to us here,” Shetty said. “So no artillery, no air, nothing but buffalo soldiers and the grunts.”

Melton yawned so hard he nearly swallowed his stale wad of chew. He was exhausted but it was a nervous gesture, too, one of his personal “tells” that he was under pressure. He fingered the crap out of his mouth, took a sip from his CamelBak, and tapped Corporal Shetty on the shoulder.

“Corporal, is it just Iran? Do we know if anyone else is moving? Syria? Israel maybe?”

The noncom’s head swiveled like a gun turret. Back and forth, once.

“Dunno, Mr. Melton. You’d be better placed to find out than any of us, if your satellite phone is working.”

“Battery’s dead. Went down yesterday and I haven’t been able to recharge,” Melton said. “Sat coverage has gotten awfully spotty of late anyway.”

Shetty took that piece of news like a dustbowl farmer absorbing yet another month without rain. Such was life.

“Lieutenant’s talking with Lohberger, getting instructions,” he said. “If we can’t hammer down the bad guys with air support, it makes this whole deal a lot fucking harder.”

“But the brass still wants this bridge,” Melton said without any real enthusiasm.

“Yup,” said Shetty. “They still want it. Why they want it, I’ve no fucking clue but they still want it.”

“Man, this is totally fucked,” said Bakic. “What the fuck are we even doing here? It sure as shit ain’t paying the rent anymore.”

“What we’re doing here, bitch,” growled Shetty, “is trying to get the fuck outta the Hood without losing too many worthless motherfuckers like you along the way. That good enough reason for you? Or would you like to just lay down your fucking arms and walk out there and tell the towelheads, Yo, dogs. My bad. I’m gonna ease on up outta here and head back to my new crib up in Alaska, yo.’ Is that what you want to do, Private?”

The chastened soldier mumbled something like “Sorry Corporal, no Corporal,” and devoted himself to the intense study of the dirt at his feet. Up and down the line, similar scenes played themselves out as the men dealt with the
shock of losing their air cover and gaining a new enemy. Melton checked his watch. It was late afternoon, shading toward sunset in maybe an hour or so. He wondered if Third ID would wait until dark, when the Americans’ night-vision equipment would return to them a significant advantage. On the other hand, the power of a unit like 5/7 Cav lay in its mobility. It was a “terrible swift sword” in movement, cutting through anything that got in its way. Sitting here like this merely invited the Iraqis to gather their forces around them, especially when they couldn’t be targeted for destruction from the air.

Euler was back on the radio within a few minutes, his head bent and shoulders hunched tightly forward as though he was attempting to contain some new piece of shit news from getting free. Figuring on being stationary for a while, Melton opened a chili mac MRE and stuck the shit-brown spoon down into the contents. He chewed on the meaty mac combo joylessly and washed it down with a drink of warm water. The other men all used the break as best suited them. Some ate, some dozed, one pissed his name up against an ancient wall. Everyone sipped some water or mixed some flavored drink mix from their MREs in a water bottle. Most of their PX-bought pougie bait had run out days ago, along with most of Alcibiades’s chew.

At least the shade of the alleyway was a blessed relief from the oppressive heat of day. Even with the sun dropping toward the edge of the world, fighting in this temperature was a crippling business. Keeping the troops’ fluids up was proving as difficult as clearing a block of fedayeen. Melton craned his neck back, stretching it far enough to work out a few kinks with a distinct, cracking sound. The sky was lightly clouded, and the glare had faded somewhat from its painful intensity in the middle of the day. He searched in vain for any sign of the so-called Disappearance Effect, the “nuclear winter” that had fallen on western Europe with the arrival of billions of tons of particulate matter, released into the atmosphere by the burning cities of North America. There was nothing to see. Maybe it was all bullshit. He couldn’t tell. He was as cut off from the wider world as everyone else in the unit.

It was in that position, leaned back against the wall of the gutted building, squinting slightly into the hot gray sky, that he saw the dark blur of the mortar round as it dropped toward them. The cry of
“Incoming!”
arose in his head but never reached his mouth as another round smacked into the rooftop corner at the far end of the alleyway, detonating with a bone-cracking roar and a deadly spray of shrapnel. Men screamed out warnings and dived for what little cover existed in the narrow passageway. A few made it through a single door halfway down. A couple of others scrambled through a hole in the wall blown out by a grenade hours earlier.

Oh, fuck,
Melton thought. He got down and tried to fuck the ground, to become one with it while he looked for a better patch of cover than nothing at all. An open shop front across the street looked promising.

He was on his feet, then, unaware of how he’d made it up off his ass so quickly. More rounds were dropping on their position with enough accuracy to suggest that they’d been presighted by the Iraqis, who were waiting for just such an opportunity. Many of them impacted the roofline but one speared right down into the constricted space, exploding with a terrible force that lifted Melton off the ground, turning him over and over.

He twisted slowly, impossibly through the air. His mind, detached from the dead, stringless puppet of his body, pulled free with a discernible tug. He watched himself falling back to earth with bricks and clods of dirt, with the disembodied arms and legs of his friends, with clattering pieces of steel and burning splinters of wood. Bret Melton, formerly of the U.S. Army Rangers, twirled oh so slowly through clear air, up so high he imagined he could see the entire town of An Nasiriyah below him. The savage close-quarters battles that still raged around choke points and contested streets. The ruined block where they had been ambushed in another life. Hundreds of Iraqi soldiers and militia fighters running toward his position. And beyond that. He could see the deserts stretching away toward the mountains in the far north. He could see the ships of the U.S. fleet as they raked at skies full of Iranian fighters. And perhaps, at the dimmest edge of vision and consciousness, he could see an empty realm, the burning land that he had once known as home. The lost continent of America.

Melton saw all of these things. Or thought he did, before he fell back to earth and into darkness.

She was sick. Increasingly nauseated, and occasionally close to vomiting. Caitlin had no idea whether it was a side effect of the headache, which had been constant for three days now, or an entirely new symptom of whatever was eating her brain from the inside out. Of course, it could also be a result of breathing in the soupy miasma of toxins and burned chemicals that had rolled over the city three days ago and stayed. The charred, atomized memory of America. Some
Guardian
writer with a very dark sense of humor and a taste for Delillo had named it the “airborne toxic event,” and the name had stuck.

French government warnings played on a loop across every radio station, advising listeners to stay indoors whenever possible. Caitlin couldn’t believe anyone would need telling twice. Millions of dead seabirds had washed up on the coast of western France just before the tsunami of pollutants had arrived, and thousands of pigeons—flying rats, as she thought of them—had been dropping from the sick, leaden skies over Paris ever since. She could see dozens of little gray carcasses from the apartment window. City council workers had already cleaned the streets below of twitching, broken birds, but that was on Tuesday, and they hadn’t been back.

The few times Caitlin had ventured outside to stock up on fresh food she’d returned with her eyes stinging and her airways burned. It reminded her of the time she’d done a job in Lin-fen, a city in China’s Shanxi Province where you could feel the acids and poisons leaching through your skin every minute you were exposed.

She splashed a handful of cold water on her waxy face. She looked bad. Bruised, puffy eyes. Hollow cheeks. All the lines on her face etched too long and deep. Then again, almost everyone in Paris looked like that now. There weren’t too many parties celebrating the new world order these days. People were either keeping to themselves, holed up with their families, or they were out in mobs, heedless of the poisoned atmosphere. The ring of fire surrounding the old core of the city was due to them. What had begun as small-scale opportunistic looting had escalated into a rolling series of street battles between the police and ever-greater numbers of rioters from the outer suburbs. In the last twenty-four hours the radio had carried reports of wider clashes, between “migrant gangs” and “white youths.”

Between Muslim wack jobs and fascist skinheads,
Caitlin thought to herself. The first sparks.

She scrubbed her face with a damp cloth before toweling off.

The old bathroom at the rear of the apartment, a dark, depressing closet tiled in deep green and featuring a small faded yellow tub, wasn’t the most flattering place in which to examine herself in a mirror. But there was nowhere else in the tiny apartment. The setup was very basic, funded entirely from a black discretionary account that she’d kept off the books at Echelon. One bed. A couch and a table. A bar fridge in the kitchenette, a two-ring gas burner, a microwave oven. And a small armory under the floorboards in the bathroom where she had also stashed some money—increasingly useless—and three passports, ditto. Nobody knew about this place. Not even Wales.

And for now, at least, it remained off the grid, undiscovered by her hunters, and relatively safe, unlike the first sanctum near the cemetery. It made sense, she supposed. If they’d known to try grabbing her up at the hospital, they had probably taken down her control cell, and possibly even the whole Echelon network.