Without Warning (32 page)

An aide was waiting for him at the door and ushered Ritchie down the hallway to a temporary communications room he’d ordered set up a few days earlier. Running hither and yon across the scattered PACOM campus was a frustrating time sink, and he had moved quickly to consolidate his most important functions right here in the old white stone colonial building where he’d been quartered before the Disappearance.

“Generals Musso and Franks are online, Admiral. But I’m afraid the secure link to Brussels is out, so we can’t get General Jones in conference,” explained his aide, a navy commander named Oakshott. “Also, I’m still having trouble getting Fort Lewis online.”

“Well, keep on it,” grumbled Ritchie. “I know we’ve got links dropping out everywhere but this system was supposed to survive a first strike so I don’t see why it should be so goddamn flaky now.”

“No, sir. We’re on it, but it’s not just the links, Admiral.”

Oakshott handed him a sealed envelope with a red stamp.
TOP SECRET—
ECHELON. YOUR EYES ONLY.

“What the hell now?” grumbled Ritchie as they turned into the comms facility, which had quickly been christened “the Radio Shack” by the lower ranks. “Just excuse me, for one moment, Commander. If you’ll apologize to the generals for the delay.”

“Yes, sir.”

Ritchie took himself off into a small alcove attached to the main communications office, shutting a soundproof door behind him. The space was cramped, not much bigger than a closet, which indeed it had once been. He tore open the brown envelope and read the few lines of text, cursing under his breath as the import of the message became clear.

“That’s all we fucking need.”

He crumpled the communiqué before regaining control of his temper, smoothing it out, and replacing it in the envelope as he hurried over to the bank of monitors where he could see video images of Musso and Franks.

“Commander, safe-hand this back to my office, would you, and wait for me there. I’ll reply when I’m done with the conference.”

“Aye, sir.”

Ritchie settled himself into a chair in front of the big flat screen, nodding at Musso and Franks. There were only four sysops in the small room, all of
them cleared to the level of Top Secret Absolute. One of them handed him a headset, which he fitted on himself before speaking.

“Please excuse the delay, gentlemen. Unavoidable, I’m afraid.”

On-screen, both men nodded. They were all dealing with the unavoidable on a daily basis.

Ritchie continued.

“First point. This secure channel may not be secure. I’ll explain by encrypted path later, but assume it’s been compromised for now.”

He noted the immediate reaction of the two officers. They didn’t go into a flap, but there was a noticeable stiffening of the sinews.

“Okay. We still have business to do. I’ve just come from a meeting with some of our regional allies and partners, and we now have firmed up commitments from them to absorb any refugee flows. Some firmer than others, of course, but we can proceed with Operation Uplift.”

Musso’s relief was palpable. He appeared to exhale a long, pent-up breath.

“General Musso, I’ll send you a schedule of receiving ports in an hour. If you could get back to me soonest with a concept for getting any U.S. nationals who want to get out of the SOUTHCOM area I’ll start organizing transport assets for you.”

Musso thanked him and appeared to scratch out a note to himself.

“General Franks, Uplift doesn’t concern you as much in the immediate future, but it will when you’ve disengaged from the current operation. With a mind to my precaution about communications security, you want to update me with your latest?”

The commander of the coalition forces in the Gulf looked as though he was chewing on nettleweed. He took a moment to gather his thoughts, obviously choosing what he could say over a possibly compromised channel.

“I have multiple situations evolving and deteriorating, sir. OPLAN Katie is reaching the limits of its effectiveness. I have the Kuwaiti government screaming at my liaison not to pull out of the theater and citing line and verse of our treaty obligations; the Saudis and our other allies are doing the same,” Franks said.

Marvelous,
Ritchie thought.
Just marvelous.

“The Kuwaiti armed forces are presently engaged along their front in the Wadi al-Batin region to the west of our lines. The British and the marines are heavily engaged against an Iranian armored sweep through al-Basra toward their lines.” Frank ticked those items off of a sheaf of paper. “We are heavily attritting any force sent against us regardless of their origin or nationality.”

Franks hadn’t said anything that wasn’t being reported by various surviving
news networks. He was sticking to the public and the knowable. Ritchie wasn’t surprised.

General Franks continued. “The Iranians have contested our air supremacy over the theater. At present, I’ve limited myself to asset defense.”

Ritchie pursed his lips and grunted an acknowledgment of Franks’s vague allusions to the fact that the Iranian air force and navy were probably doing their best to try and sink every coalition ship in the Persian Gulf.

Those Kilo subs of theirs will be a nightmare to find in the Gulf, Ritchie thought. He had half a mind to hammer their so-called regional allies into sending their air and naval assets out to help hunt the Iranians down, citing the same treaties they were currently being hammered with.

“General, execute OPLAN Damocles,” Ritchie said. No one listening should know what that was. If they watched their news feeds, they’d know soon enough.
But did I step over the line? Hell, where is the line?

Frank paused for a mere second before saying, “Copy that, Admiral.”

See how the Iranians like that,
Ritchie thought before he continued.

“We’re in dangerous, uncharted waters here, gentlemen, if you’ll forgive me the maritime analogy. This isn’t just a military problem. It’s political, but we have no political authority to lead us, and frankly I don’t see that changing any time soon. The civilian leadership here is barely coping with local responsibilities. Just feeding the islands and maintaining order is keeping Governor Lingle busy twenty-five hours a day. She makes the point, quite reasonably, that she can do infinitely more in her current office. After all, her state government instrumentalities remain completely intact and functional, whereas nearly everything at the federal level has disappeared. I get the same line from Alaska and Washington State. They might be bucketing out a sinking boat, but we’re asking them to give up the bucket and the boat just to help us out. I don’t think we should plan for a new executive to emerge any time soon. Certainly not soon enough to deal with your immediate concerns, General Franks.”

A brusque nod from Franks signaled his agreement.

“So, what do I do, Jim?”

The words seemed to come from outside Ritchie.

“If there is no political solution, we will have to find a military one. And fast.”

Sleep finally claimed her, but only after hours of pain, dulled in the end by a dangerously large dose of Advil. The argument with Monique had been titanic and galvanizing and she feared that it had cost her more than a few hours’ rest. Caitlin felt as though something vital had torn inside her head. She had lost her temper, and lashed out physically at one point, pushing Monique away from her, which only served to reinforce the French girl’s certainty that she held the moral high ground. After the initial shock of being pushed into the wall, Caitlin was sure she’d seen a smile and a small measure of triumph on Monique’s face.

“So, in the end it is always the same, Caitlin, yes? If you cannot win by reason you will do so with violence.”

Caitlin had been unable to reply. She’d staggered backward, suddenly losing her balance to a strong surge of nausea and a blinding stab of pain behind one eye. She’d collapsed and vomited up all of her dinner.

Monique was beside her immediately.

She had to hand it to the chick, she didn’t hold grudges. From a crazed harpy, screeching at Caitlin that she knew
nothing
about her boyfriend, she had switched without hesitation, propping her up, wiping the sick from
Caitlin’s face with the sleeve of her shirt, helping her over to the tatty, uncomfortable couch, where she lay shivering for the next hour, sipping a glass of cloudy, brackish tap water. She had even apologized repeatedly for upsetting Caitlin when she was so ill.

She was genuinely remorseful. Caitlin didn’t know whether to be aggravated or touched, and in the end it hadn’t mattered. She was too sick to care. Sleep had been possible only after taking the painkillers, and she’d managed that only after three attempts. Her stomach was rebellious and disinclined to keep anything down. Eventually, however, she had drifted into a feverish, unsatisfying, and fitful doze, waking frequently, or thinking she had, but never gaining full consciousness. The couch was just a few inches too short for her to stretch out comfortably, and the cushions were old and hard. She was so tired and drained, however, that it didn’t matter. Her body needed to rest.

She found some peace by emptying her mind of all the troubles piling up around them, and imagining herself young again. Really young. Perhaps fifteen or sixteen, a family beach holiday in Baja. Her dad was newly retired. Her older brother Dom was just about to leave home to take up a basketball scholarship all the way over in Vermont. Mom was still healthy. She lay shivering in the darkness of the small, unheated apartment in a city tearing itself apart, and recalled an endless couple of weeks surfing, swimming, and hiking with her family. She managed a sad, lonesome smile at the memory of the surfing lessons she’d tried to give her parents. Her mother had wisely begged off after ten minutes, but Dad, he’d always been up for anything, and without the air force telling him what he could do with his life 24/7, Dave Monroe vowed that he would spend whatever was left of it living as a surf bum. He was
probably
joking. He already had a civilian job lined up with an air freight company run by a couple of buds who’d handed in their uniforms a few years before he did. But it was nice, Caitlin thought, to have him there to herself, with no prospect that he would ever again be called away to some Third World suckhole to get shot at by wack jobs and savages. It was nice to think of him living a life of ease if only for a little while. And it was a pure delight when she finally taught him to stand up and dial into a little baby wave that carried him all of ten or twelve feet, whooping and hollering before he went A-over-T into the drink. She fell asleep with that happy memory as her last thought.

It didn’t last. Nightmares tormented her, some vivid, some half remembered. Her family was gone, and she was left to wander a world denuded of love and kindness. She dreamed herself in a city she did not quite recognize, where decomposing bodies hung from lampposts. Swinging on rotted ropes,
they twisted in the breeze and revealed themselves as her family. Wales. Even Monique. She ran and ran through the dream, deeper into a city where children labored under the whip and scourge to build pyramids of severed heads, where monsters capered and ghouls in human form held dominion over all. Every barbarous malignancy of human nature was free to bloom and run free. She passed through this landscape of horrors as a shade, unable to act, invisible to victim and tormentor alike. Every now and then she would come awake with her heart hammering and her mouth dry and she would attempt to find the happy place where she swam and played with her father in the surf off Baja, but to close her eyes meant falling back into dreams where the whole world had become a charnel house.

In the early hours of morning, sometime before the inky blackness of night gave way to the slightest hint of gray dawn, she dreamed herself imprisoned in a cell, somewhere in the old fortress of Noisy-le-Sec. Her captors had beaten her, told her that as a “floater,” a deniable asset, she was already dead. She lay on an old cobblestone floor, in a pool of her own vomit and blood, her eyes closed almost shut by swelling. Two teeth were loose, probably knocked free of their roots. The pain from them alone was a hard, white supernova burning one side of her face. She could hear voices discussing her. Guttural French, a smattering of German, and a few snatches of Arabic.

“She is already a ghost. Let us be finished with it now.”

“But the Americans, they know …”

“But they can do nothing! She is Echelon. She does not exist.”

“They dare to send her against us. They should learn that such impudence is always punished.”

“There will be reprisals.”

“But of course!”

“Oh, it is fine for you, al-Banna, you are not…”

She tried to wrench herself back toward consciousness.

Al-Banna. Her target. Monique’s “boyfriend.”

“It is all right for you. You are safe.”

“Nobody is safe.”

“She is not just a spy. She is a killer of the most dangerous kind.”

“Then ensure that she does not kill again.”