Without Warning (6 page)

Pete chewed his lower lip, sucking the salt from it as he pondered the unfolding disaster. A window displaying the Google news page refreshed, informing him that nearly three thousand stories had already been filed on the phenomenon; none of them from North America. The bright blue hyperlinks all led to European and Asian sites. One, from Agence France-Presse, reported that trading had been suspended on the London, Tokyo, and Sydney stock exchanges. Just beneath it, a Novosti report out of Moscow claimed that the Russian armed forces had all been called into barracks and placed on high alert. Pete adjusted his balance as the
Diamantina
slipped sideways down the face of another large wave.

“You’re right,” he concluded. “We’ve got to get in somewhere fast. This feels like a big bucket of shit about to tip over and bury the whole world. Let’s head for Acapulco.”

“You sure?” said Fifi, her usually sunny features darkened by real fear. “That’s close to the … thing.”

“I know,” said Pete. “But I got friends there. Well, contacts anyway. And the effect’s not moving.”

For now,
he thought.

The shock and awe was not long in coming. Coalition headquarters in Qatar was a focal point of communications links, neutron-star-dense, not all of them controlled by the military. Hundreds of journalists had gathered there to report on the invasion of Iraq, and many if not all of them enjoyed direct voice and data access to their own headquarters and, of course, to the wider global media. The “incident,” as it was now being referred to, occurred shortly before a scheduled press briefing in the main media room, giving the assembled journalists just long enough to work up a fine head of blind panic and to warn their colleagues who might have been disinclined to attend the tightly scripted and mostly useless briefing that for once “the follies” might be worth a look. Bret Melton couldn’t believe the turnout. Normally this room was only half full, but today every seat was taken, and in the back half even the aisles were full. He doubted it had anything to do with the scheduled appearance of the British and Australian task force commanders to do their first joint conference with General Franks.

Indeed, neither Franks nor the junior Coalition partners were anywhere to be seen as a USAF colonel took the podium. Melton, a former ranger, was a nine-year veteran of the
Army Times
foreign desk and knew most of the
U.S. military’s Qatar-based flack handlers by first names. He had never seen the air force bird before. He keyed on his Dictaphone as soon as the officer appeared, ensuring that the first twenty seconds of his recording was taken up with the jabbering crescendo of two hundred plus colleagues all shouting individual questions at the front of the room. He had no trouble resisting the urge to join in the raucous assault on the dignity of the briefer. What would be the point? Melton waited for the chaos to die down. The colonel did nothing to calm the room. He merely placed a sheaf of papers on the podium and stood at ease examining the unruly mob with cool aloofness. Nearly a minute and half after he had first entered the room, the reporters slowly, gradually quieted down and resumed their seats like shamefaced schoolchildren. As if to make the point about who precisely was in charge, the colonel’s eyes traversed his audience with a cold, mechanical detachment.

Melton readied his pen to take notes. His Sony recorder was working perfectly, but that was exactly when you couldn’t trust the damn things.

“Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Colonel Yost, and I will be taking your briefing tonight in place of Generals Franks and Wall and Brigadier McNairn. They have been indisposed by developments but will make themselves available for questioning as soon as possible.”

An Italian TV producer sitting directly in front of Melton leapt to his feet and called out, “When?”

Yost fixed him with a killing stare and waited a full three seconds before answering.

“As. Soon. As. Possible.”

A further glare delivered as a broadside to most of the room cut off any more interruptions.

“As you know, communications links to North America have been severed, not just from CENTCOM, but more generally, across both the civilian and military spectrums,” said Yost. “Answering speculation as to why, how, and by whom is not my responsibility today. It may be yours, but you won’t get your answers here. CENTCOM is endeavoring to reestablish contact as quickly as possible. We have already confirmed links with the Pacific, European, and,
I emphasize, some
elements of the Northern Command. For those of you who do not know, NORTHCOM is the unified military command responsible for operations in the U.S., Mexico, Canada, and the northern Caribbean.”

Melton didn’t bother to jot down the explanation. He was familiar with all of the U.S. commands, having worked in each of them at some time, but he did note that Yost didn’t claim to be in contact with NORTHCOM proper, just “elements” of it. That could mean a big ass-kicking setup like Fort
Lewis, outside of Seattle, or it might mean he’d phoned a guard post somewhere on the outskirts of Juneau or Guantánamo.

“Have you seen the photos, Colonel? The French satellite photos? Of your cities. Can you tell us what has happened to them?”

Melton recognized the voice of Sayad al-Mirsaad, the al-Jazeera correspondent who was forever in danger of being thrown off the base. Yost leveled the same robotic stare at him that he’d used to silence the Italian provocateur, but Melton knew his Jordanian colleague wouldn’t be so easily cowed. Al-Mirsaad remained on his feet, hands on hips, almost inviting him to reach over and take a swing.

“They are gone, Colonel. They are all gone. An act of God, no less. How could it be otherwise?”

Yost jumped in before a flood tide of voices could drown him out.

“It could very easily be anything but,
Mr.
al-Mirsaad. You are not there. You haven’t seen anything for yourself. All you know is that you can’t get a phone call through, and somebody is selling very expensive pictures of what looks to me like computer-generated video game imagery. If I were you I’d go read your H. G. Wells before I pushed the panic button, sir.”

Melton smirked quietly as he filled his notepad with shorthand. He had to score that one to Yost, although the classical sci-fi reference seemed lost on the Jordanian as well as most of the other foreign journalists in the room. For himself, he didn’t mind a bit of trashy reading when he was stretched out in business class, thirty thousand feet up. But he lived and worked in the real world, just like the men and women he wrote about, and while the
Army Times
correspondent couldn’t possibly imagine what sort of technical cluster-fuck or psy-war hoax they were dealing with, he had no doubt the explanation was more prosaic than alien space bats or the hand of God.

He hadn’t had time to view the still shots on BBC World. He’d been too busy trying and failing to get through to the head office back in Virginia. If he had to make a bet, however, he’d lay his money on some kind of killer software virus, probably written up by guerrilla hackers in Russia or Malaysia as a protest against the imminent war, not to mention as a personal shot at glory in the bizarro underground. A hit like this, just days before the start of the war, would instantly transform some zitty college dropout into a hyper-celebrity superhacker. A pity for them they’d never be able to cash in with Nike endorsements or a Coke ad. Best they could hope for was a virtual hand job on some malware chat site. Fuckwits. Just a few months ago he’d freelanced a three-thousand-word feature on digital security for Stratfor.com that the
Times
didn’t want. He’d come away with mixed feelings: utter contempt for the social misfits and losers who were the creators of so many of the
most destructive programs, and an unshakable certainty that one day one of them was going to pull some stunt that did real-world damage to real-world lives. Perhaps this was it.

Somebody from Agence France-Presse jumped to his feet demanding to know—the French reporters always sounded like they were
demanding
this or that—how the Coalition expected to maintain the integrity of its communications in any conflict with Iraq, given the “total collapse” of its network this morning. It was a good question, one Melton had wondered about, and he was surprised to see that Yost looked almost relieved to get it.

“Our theater-level networks remain fully functional, intact, and secure,” he said. “General Franks is in complete control of all Coalition forces in situ. That is simply not an issue. The U.S. and its allies are ready and willing to carry out any order from their national command authorities. Whatever the mission, we will accomplish it. Thank you. This briefing is at an end. You will be kept informed of any developments via the media center.”

Yost nodded curtly, gathered up his papers, and walked away from the rostrum as hundreds of seated reporters suddenly leapt to their feet to hurl questions at him. Melton stood with them. In the sudden outburst all he’d heard was a single question shouted by Sayad al-Mirsaad before anyone else.

“What national command authority? They’re gone …”

It’s an intensely frustrating experience for a newsman to find himself cut off from the biggest story of the day, and Bret Melton felt as though he was cut off from the biggest story of all time. That’s not to say that there was nothing to report from Qatar. The press conference had broken up in chaos, and the headquarters of the Coalition forces was seething with all of the mad energy of a giant ants’ nest that had been rudely kicked open. But in spite of all the activity as the military spooled up its response to whatever had happened on the other side of the globe, Melton knew that a more immediate story was available a short plane ride away: the inevitable eruption of the Arab world when it realized that America was gone.

It was unbelievable, insane, and completely fucking outrageous.

It was gone.

He’d eaten nearly half a roll of antacid pills in the last hour as he tried to accept the situation. Sitting by himself in a crowded canteen roaring with the voices of dozens of reporters who’d crowded in for the free Wi-Fi and chilled air, Melton had surfed the web frantically looking for something, anything that might expose the morning’s news as a gigantic fraud. All he managed to do was convince himself that nobody, no state or group and certainly no individual
, could pull off such an enormous scam. The disappearance was real.

He thumbed another couple of Rolaids into his mouth, sucking at them despondently as he clicked through a series of windows. News reports. Canadian TV shots. Webcam feeds. He’d searched dozens of chat sites, which had “lost” most of their participants hours ago, their last messages often ending in midsentence. It was a visit to an online gaming site that convinced him, however. He had a little-used subscription to Blizzard.net that he’d set up when researching a piece about the possibility of using multi-player combat sims as a recruiting tool. Everywhere he went in the virtual worlds, he found CGI avatars standing mutely, awaiting instructions from their creators. Beneath them, in the small windows given over to character dialogue, there were reams of increasingly bemused, uneasy, and then fearful comments from players who’d logged on from areas outside North America. Most tellingly, almost nobody was now online, the survivors having abandoned the game servers for news sites or perhaps even the real world.

“A dark day, my friend. A very dark day.”

Melton looked up from the eerie stillness of a window running a multi-player version of Diablo. Sayad al-Mirsaad, the al-Jazeera correspondent, stood over him.

“Do you mind?” he asked, indicating the seat in front of Melton.

“Of course not,” he said distractedly. “Sit down, Sadie.”

His Jordanian colleague had given up protesting the American’s use of the slightly offensive nickname, finally accepting some time ago that it was meant affectionately. He was regularly called much worse by some of Melton’s countrymen.

“I can see from your face you are a believer now, yes?” said al-Mirsaad without a hint of irony. He and Melton were both educated men, both men of strong faith, and they had passed many late hours in Qatar discussing theology and politics.

The former ranger shrugged and let his hand fly up in a gesture that was part resignation, part expression of utter futility. He didn’t reply. Around him the reporters roared on, all holding forth on their own ideas and bullshit conspiracy theories. An unpleasant energy pervaded the room, setting his teeth on edge. In contrast, al-Mirsaad appeared to be almost as depressed as he was.

“Not everyone will think it’s a bad day, Sadie,” Melton said at last. “Some asshole’s gonna be sending a lot of extra prayers upstairs tonight, thanking their God for getting rid of the great Satan.”

He watched al-Mirsaad closely, but he seemed almost as upset as any American.

“Then they would be fools,” replied the Jordanian. “Ultimately everything is God’s will, but this is not His work. In the affairs of men, the will of Allah is known through the actions of men. This … this is something else.”