Without Warning (58 page)

He reached out and brushed away a few matted strands of filthy hair that had fallen over her eyes. “I understand that you were a warrior, Caitlin Monroe. And you remain one. It is an honorable calling. But there is a time for war, and a time to put aside our swords and shields. The world has been wounded and it suffers gravely, Caitlin. We are all God’s subjects, and we must bind up those wounds together. But we cannot do so without trust. That is why I am here, why ‘Reynard’ has invited me here, to make peace with my old enemies.”

Her feet and hands were still bound, but if she could lock her arms around his head, she might still have a chance, with one wrenching pull, of separating his head from his spinal column.

“I can trust you, Caitlin, because I know you. Just like you know me. I know you must be calculating the odds of lashing out at me now. You must be measuring your strength against the damage and pain you have endured in here the last few weeks, perhaps weighing what residual skills you retain from all of your years of training, what strength of will you possess, even after Reynard has tried to break that will.”

He grinned and flicked one eyebrow up in a gesture of camaraderie.

Then his hand shot out in a blur and he gripped one of hers, turning it back on her cuffed, bleeding wrists so quickly that a spike of pure white fire ran up her arms and she almost screamed, biting deeply into the inside of her cheek in a desperate attempt to draw her mind off the agony of the wrist lock.

The holy warrior known as al-Banna let her go.

“So, shall we stop fucking around?”

He drove a fist squarely into her face, a blow that detonated inside her head like shellfire. As the back of her skull hit the hard concrete slab, she felt his iron grip on her arms, wrenching her bodily over onto her stomach.

“Or shall we begin?” he snarled.

She tried to lash out with a feeble kick but only scraped more skin off her legs.

Another punch on the back of her neck stunned her, and she came to understand just how weakened she was by weeks of torture and illness. His hands clawed at her hips, dragging her toward him, confirming the worst.

The rape lasted only a few minutes, but she was still shaking hours later.

When Caitlin was a girl, maybe nine or ten years old, her family had traveled to California for a holiday, driving all the way from Charleston AFB, in South Carolina, where her daddy had been stationed with an airlift squadron. They had done all of the family things you do in California, visiting Disneyland, Hollywood, the beaches. But for her the standout memory had been climbing the bell tower on the Berkeley campus, just before the clock struck ten in the morning. The pealing of the bells was frighteningly loud, much louder than she had imagined it would be. She not only heard the thunderous clanging, she felt it, inside her chest and stomach, reverberating right down through her feet. The sensation, which was entirely unpleasant, remained with her ever after.

Lying on her slab, under a harsh flat white light in her cell at Noisy-le-Sec, she felt a powerful psychic echo of that same deep-body shock.

Her limbs quivered and shook, sometimes so violently that she resembled a victim of late-stage Parkinson’s disease, but it was inside that she felt herself being torn apart by a quaking, shuddering violence that was entirely psychological.

Nobody had entered the room since her violation. In her rational, calculating mind, the cold, mechanical killer’s mind that had been honed to such a dangerous edge, she knew that that was just part of the “tactical questioning phase.” But she could not rid herself of the burning shame and humiliation she felt. As hard as she tried to control herself, the awful, nauseating tremors reminded her of that day in the bell tower, which naturally led to thoughts of her family, especially her father, and with them came more unutterable shame.

She tried to focus on something simple, some goal she might start working toward, like driving a stiffened sword hand strike into Baumer’s throat at the first opportunity, but that only reminded her how weak and unable to resist
him she had been in the first place. She was curled into a tight, shivering fetal ball when the lights went out.

It was so unexpected, so out of the ordinary that Caitlin suffered a moment of total disorientation. She had been kept for so long in a cell flooded with bright artificial light that the sudden fall of darkness was terrifying, as though her eyes had been put out by sorcery. And then she heard something so familiar, but, like the sudden inky darkness, so unexpected, that her mind seized up for an instant.

Gunfire.

It was muted at first, far off in the distance somewhere in the underground maze of Noisy-le-Sec’s interrogation cells. But it soon grew louder, and with it came more familiar sounds. Boots running. Men cursing. More gunfire, the ripping snarl of automatic weapons and the crash of large-bore single-shot rifles and pistols. A grenade exploded with a deafening roar in the enclosed tunnels outside her cell. She could see the flashes in the dark now and pick out individual voices, none of them familiar, all of them French.

Men ran past the heavy iron cage door locking her in. One stopped, briefly, and fired in through the bars, a short wild burst that largely missed her, although a ricochet did rake a painful burning graze along one hip. She groaned and rolled off the slab, letting herself fall as a deadweight to the floor. In the pitch darkness of the cell nobody could see her, and whoever had stopped to finish her off rushed on. Muzzle flashes soon accompanied the crash and zip of bullets, which reached a crescendo as more men rushed past her cell carrying their fight deeper into the complex.

In the blackness, Caitlin crawled into a blind corner, where she might just avoid getting shot, if she was lucky. She huddled there, naked, bleeding, and all alone, for what felt a long time.

“My God, it looks like the seventh level of hell down there.”

“Down there” meant the Valley of the Nile, for thousands of years a seat of human civilization, and now an eerie wasteland of oozing, radioactive mud dotted with the stubs of a few scattered ruins, both modern and ancient. To Ritchie it looked like nothing so much as an endless sea of black garden mulch littered with tens of millions of corpses being picked over by every vulture in northeast Africa. The few American recon teams that had ventured in described the buzzing of flies as being unbearably loud, something akin to a band saw. There were a handful of crazed survivors, one-in-ten-million lottery winners, of a sort. They were all, without exception, insane. The population of Egypt had been reduced to a few oasis dwellers deep in the Western Desert, and some wandering Bedouin, all moving south.

Ritchie stood grimfaced in front of the multipanel displays, many of them recently arrived from Qatar and the former headquarters of the coalition. The Pacific Command’s war room was fully engaged monitoring the dozen or more chaotic conflicts now scattered across Ritchie’s theater. This temporary facility had been constructed to maintain an overwatch of the former CENTCOM area, the nuclear wastelands of the Middle East. And as bad as
the apocalyptic desolation of Egypt might have looked through the cameras of the two Global Hawks slowly circling above the Nile Valley and Delta, it was by no means the most horrifying vista arrayed in front of him.

On other screens smaller, more intimate, and, in a way, more dreadful images played out. In Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Iran the survivors were eating each other, literally. Thousands of burned and wounded but still living victims of the atomic strikes had swarmed out of the charred husks of their cities and fallen upon the rural hinterlands. With no reliable supplies of fuel, power, or even water in many areas, with almost no functioning transport system, the farming lands of those countries, already poisoned by fallout, had suffered an almost total collapse in their productivity. What little edible stores the smaller settlements had now needed to be defended against the hordes that fell upon them.

Ritchie had ordered that the worst of it not be allowed to run as a live feed. There was no tactical reason for having such grotesquerie on display. But as the senior officer he still had to view the unedited intelligence tape, which more often than not featured surveillance cover of village-level fratricide and cannibalism. It was heinous and terrible, disturbing at a cellular level, and it was repeated over and over again until he no longer possessed any moral capacity to react to the horror. It was all just pixels.

“Okay, I’ve seen enough,” said General Franks.

The two men turned away as half of the video wall blinked out and switched over to standby feeds.

“I’m sorry,” said Ritchie, as they left the room, dragging a tail of aides behind them. “Short of nuking the Israelis themselves I didn’t see what I could …”

“Forget about it,” growled Franks. “They blindsided you. Me too. The warning I passed on to Tehran just made it worse for them, meant they lost everything to the EMP. I guess we can count ourselves lucky they didn’t fry us as collateral damage.”

“There would have been consequences for that,” said Ritchie.

“Yeah,” Franks agreed. “Wouldn’t have made any difference to me and my guys, though, would it? And that bullshit target list. Brilliant really. But now they have to live with what they’ve done. And the Israelis know they can’t do it again. The Russians will nuke them, and we won’t lift a finger in their defense.”

Ritchie said nothing to that. Three days after Armageddon, as the onesided atomic war had been christened by the Western press, an emergency session of the reconstituted UN Security Council in Geneva had passed a unanimous resolution authorizing member states to use “all necessary means”
to respond to any further nuclear strikes. In contrast to the usual ambiguity surrounding such things, the Russian and Chinese ambassadors had made it clear that that meant a massive nuclear attack on Israel.

No other states had demurred.

“We still don’t know where those other subs of theirs are hiding,” said Ritchie.

“Not our problem,” said Franks. “Not anymore. We’re out of the world-policing business. Let the fucking French or the Brits find them. They have more to lose.”

The small pod of military officers turned into a large briefing room that had been prepared for their arrival. Franks, the new acting chairman of the Joint Chiefs, waved everyone back to their seats as the assembled officers came to attention. He and Ritchie took their places at the head of the large conference table. There was no ceremony. Franks ordered the first briefer to the podium with a wave of his hand.

Colonel Maccomb nodded and smiled thinly at Ritchie as he moved around the table. The two men had seen a lot more of each other than their families in the last month. Ritchie had come to trust the intelligence man’s judgment implicitly. He seemed able to read Jed Culver like an open book, for instance, and he’d warned of the possible Israeli strike days before it happened, which admittedly wasn’t all that impressive, because the same predictions had been made many times in the press. But Maccomb had worked up a scenario predicting the attack almost exactly as it transpired. Unfortunately, the report had not made it to Ritchie’s desk before Asher Warat arrived in his office. The admiral made certain that the much-chastened commander of the 500th Intelligence Brigade understood that he was never again to sit on any of Maccomb’s reports if the colonel thought they should go up the line.

“Good morning, ladies and gentlemen,” Maccomb began. “I have a number of points from each of the theater commands to cover quickly before we discuss any particular issue in depth. Firstly, CENTCOM. Our latest best estimate puts half the population of the area dead, and it is likely that seventy-five percent of the remainder are going to die within six months to a year.”

There was no evident reaction to the statement. Everyone had become inured to the horror story of the Middle East what felt like a long time ago.

“Major combat operations have ceased entirely, both between our forces, which have now left the region, and our former combatants, and between Israel and her former combatants. Israel remains under martial law but we expect the state of emergency to be lifted within the next forty-eight hours, as decontamination procedures progress far enough to allow some of the population to return to work.”

Maccomb thumbed a control stick and powered up a large flat-panel display on the wall behind him. A very familiar map of the Middle East appeared, with each of the atomic strikes clearly marked. Shaded areas of fallout stretched behind them.

“A combined British, French, Russian, and Chinese task force has arrived in Saudi Arabia to replace our own withdrawn forces. Smaller deployments have been made to various Gulf states to secure the surviving oil infrastructure. The Russian federation’s missile forces targeting Israel remain on the highest state of alert. British and French submarines also remain on station in the eastern Mediterranean as a continued deterrent against further strikes by Tel Aviv. The future status of the French nuclear submarine
Le Triomphant
remains uncertain, however, dependent on the outcome of the struggle within France.”