Without Warning (63 page)

“I don’t know what to do, George,” he admitted. “Pearl wants this expedited. And that’s the extent of their instructions. Except for Susan Pileggi’s Uplift requirements we really don’t rate as a priority anymore, and the refugee flow has slowed up anyway. God knows some of these losers really don’t need to be here.” He waved a dismissive hand back toward the detainees. “But, on the other hand, nobody’s going to thank me for releasing a couple of hundred more lunatics onto the job market. So what do we do?”

“Don’t know, General. That’s why you make the
big
bucks.”

That really was a joke. Neither of them had been paid in three weeks. Even if they had been, what use would they have for a dead, worthless currency?

“Okay, decision time. Let’s set up a small review team. We’ll do a quick and dirty study of each case. The really bad motherfuckers, like Khalid, we’re going to try according to the laws of war. If convicted, they can be dealt with summarily.”

Lieutenant Colonel Stavros looked wary.

“But, General, most of the personnel involved in the commission process were back home. Prosecutors. Defense. Most of their files. They’re gone. What do we charge them with? How can we …”

Musso cut him off with a chopping hand gesture.

“I didn’t say it’d be pretty, George. Just fast. Some of these guys need their necks stretched. Some of them don’t belong here. Let’s shake the box and see who falls out of which hole. I want it sorted in a month.”

“A month … but, General, we’ve got hundreds of cases … And where are we going to send them?”

“A lot of them can be repatriated to their homelands, assuming the Israelis didn’t turn them into a slag heap. We got a lot of Pakistanis here. Let Musharraf have them. We might even get lucky. India might nuke him as soon as they touch down. Most of the rest are Saudis, Jordanians, Afghanis. Let’s send ‘em home. What happens then is up to their governments. Frankly I don’t think many of them will survive but that’s not my problem. A month, Colonel. This is one issue I don’t need to think about anymore. There’s plenty that I do. Including this waste of space.”

Stavros turned to look over his shoulder where Musso had glowered at two approaching civilians: Dr. Griffiths and his assistant, Tibor, universally known as Igor. They were stomping up the road in front of Camp 4, sweating profusely.

Griffiths began carping as soon as he was in pistol-shot range.

“Found you at last,
General.
I must protest again about the lack of cooperation from your staff with my research. Do I have to remind you that I was sent here by your superiors? I am supposed to be studying the phenomenon. Instead I spend most of my time getting jerked around by you or your minions.”

“Good afternoon, Doctor. Always lovely to see you. And no, you don’t have to remind me,” said Musso. “I’ve heard that particular song so many times now that it has its own neural pathway that lights up every time I see you. If this is about your field trip, my staff aren’t thwarting you, Doctor. They’re simply following orders. They cannot go into the exclusion zone along the line of the Wave because they have been ordered not to. The Wave is dangerous, Doctor. It eats people. It ate one of yours the first week you were here. Left a little pile of goo in a white coat as I recall. It’s not getting any more of mine.”

Musso’s voice was rising, and he could feel his anger slipping the leash. He pushed past the civilians and stomped over to where his driver and Humvee stood waiting on the small loop road in front of the camp. Brown, dried-out grass grew to knee height on the waste ground there, and Musso made a note to himself to have that seen to. It was getting to be a fire hazard. He was aware of Stavros crunching up behind him, but his thoughts were elsewhere, sailing out across the blue waters he could just glimpse between the prison camp buildings as he attempted to calm down. Increasingly he found that the fuse on his incendiary temper was burning way too quickly. He had once fancied himself the world’s most patient man. Really. He was known for it. That’s what made him a good lawyer. But he did have a temper, a foul one, and it had been running wild for weeks. Ever since the first shock had ebbed and he’d had time to really take in the enormity of the loss. Of his loss, personally.

He lay awake in his cot most nights, unable to sleep properly, tortured by the loss of his family. It was wrong, he knew, to feel their deaths so much more keenly than the hundreds of millions of lives snuffed out on that day and since. But that was just how people were. As each day went past, he found it more difficult to deal with their absence, not less. He often caught himself thinking irrationally of calling one of his boys, or his wife. And then he’d remember … and his mood would implode.

“Well, let the Cubans escort me, General,” continued Griffiths, who was entirely oblivious of the needs of anyone but himself. “They don’t have to follow your orders, do they? I’m sure some of them would love a chance to travel back into their own country.”

Musso spun on him.

“Go ask them yourself, Doctor, but first, tell me what the fuck you have actually learned while you’ve been here. Tell me what anyone has learned, here or anywhere else, about that thing.”

Griffiths staggered back one step and opened his mouth, but no words came out, because there was nothing to say. The Wave did not exist, at least not according to any instruments or sensor arrays currently available. The only evidence that it still sat squatting over the North American continent was available by looking north. There it soared, miles into the sky. Mute, terrible, and utterly impenetrable.

“Nobody is stopping you, Doctor. Off you go, if you wish. But do not bother my people about it. I have lost half a dozen of them to that thing. Not to mention the Cubans it’s grabbed up. It’s random. There is no safe distance within two thousand meters from it. People have been snatched from twenty feet away, and two klicks. You were told all of this, on arrival. Nothing has changed.”

Griffiths, a small man afflicted with receding red hair, appeared likely to blow a gasket. But unlike Musso, he still had control of his temper.

“I am sorry for the loss of your men, General …”

“And women. Two of my marines were women, Corporal Crist and Lieutenant Kwan.”

“Okay. I am sorry. But those casualties all predated my arrival. I do not need anyone to follow me into the exclusion zone. Entering is a risk I am willing to take. But I cannot get out there without an escort. There are simply too many bandits now. It is too dangerous.”

Musso made a conscious effort not to explode. He tried to climb down from the heights of his rage. Perhaps Griffiths was right. Nobody had ever been taken beyond two thousand meters. The survey stations in the Pacific Northwest and Canada confirmed that, too. If the scientist had the nuts to take himself inside that safe, established perimeter, on his own, who was he to argue? After all, if the Wave gobbled him up it’d be one less headache for Musso to deal with.

“Okay. You can have an escort to within three thousand meters. After that you’re on your own. Even if you get nailed by bandits within clear sight of my people, if you’re in the zone, you’re on your own. See if you can remember that little rhyme. It’ll help with your confusion when we don’t come running to drag your ass out of trouble.”

“General, your meeting with the French consul, sir, you’re going to be late.”

“Thanks, George,” he grunted. It wasn’t even a setup. He really did have
a meeting, for which he was truly grateful. “Dr. Griffiths, if you don’t mind, I have to sign off the last of the refugee convoys today. Perhaps when they are gone, there will be time for dealing with your issues.”

That seemed to surprise and even mollify Griffiths somewhat, and Musso climbed into the Humvee without delay. He didn’t offer the civilians a ride anywhere.

“These won’t be the last refugees we get, you know, General.”

“I know, but it will be the last big convoy the navy escorts anywhere. The word from Pearl
is finito.
It’s been a month. From now on people will have to make their own arrangements. We’re losing more of our power-projection capability with each passing day.”

The midnight hour had long since passed, and Musso was back in his office, enjoying the chill of the air-conditioning and the absence of pests. He nursed a precious cup of coffee. At least in this part of the world it was still plentiful, if expensive. Colonel Pileggi sat across from him, just outside the cone of light thrown down by his desk lamp, half hidden in the gloom, an old-fashioned clipboard on her knee as she ticked off her checklist. Behind her the waters of the bay twinkled under a bright moon, and dozens of civilian craft of all sizes lay quietly at anchor, awaiting the departure of the next convoy for the Pacific. A few small light craft still plied a path between them, distributing stores, collecting passenger lists, and handing out information on convoy protocols. In contrast with the first few crazed days of his time at Gitmo, a skeleton crew was on deck at the headquarters building. The base slumbered out in the darkness.

“So we can expect the escorts here tomorrow?” she asked doubtfully. There had been problems recently transiting the Canal. With the Panama nian government’s collapse, Pearl had finally put in a brigade combat team to control the locks, but they were being pressed by an unknown number of criminal syndicates. Not a day went by without one or two casualties among the Americans. On the upside, though, the rules of engagement for the Canal zone were robust. Anybody approaching the American-controlled locks was immediately engaged and destroyed without warning.

Musso nodded.

“It should be cool. Principal escort’s French, coming up from Guiana. An F-70-class ship on the way now, a frigate, although it’s big enough that we’d call it a destroyer. I spoke with their guy out of Cayenne when he flew in late afternoon. It won’t have to transit the Canal until the convoy gets there, and it has enough firepower to muscle through any parts where we can’t provide
cover. And a solid detachment of marine infantry for good measure. Our guys will pick them up on the other side. Then the French will split off with the smaller group for New Caledonia.”

Pileggi raised one eyebrow but remained silent.

Musso shrugged. “I know. I know. Surprised me, too. I thought the French were too busy tearing each other apart to bother with helping anyone else, but Sarkozy’s faction has been looking real hard at their Pacific territories. You want my opinion, there’s going to be a lot of Frenchies opting out of food riots and ethnic cleansing for grass skirts and Gilligan’s Island any day now.”

“Damn,” muttered Pileggi. “Is that the good dope you’re smoking? Straight from Pearl?”

“Yeah,” said Musso. “There have been talks, apparently. Very quiet talks. This consular guy confirmed as much. We may be in business as a transit point in the future. Assuming Sarkozy wins, of course.”

“That’s quite an assumption from what I’ve read,” said Pileggi, as a new worry etched itself into the deep lines of her face, and shadows pooled under her eyes. “I’ve got a lot of my refugees bunking down in the French colonies. What’s going to happen to them?”

“No idea. I guess there’ll be more talks. Things are already pretty crowded in French Polynesia. For now, our problems are all here. We’ve got nigh on a hundred vessels to get out of the harbor and through the Canal. Are they going to be finished provisioning? You were having some trouble with supplies as I recall.”

Pileggi tapped the clipboard with her pen.

“Those two big container ships that came in early this morning from Port-au-Spain declared a lot of stuff we could use. So I requisitioned their cargo. My guys are going to check them out in the morning and begin redistribution.”

“Uh-huh. How were the captains about that?”

She waved the question off with a hand gesture.

“Relaxed. They even sent over a complete cargo manifest to help out. They’re Panamanian-flagged with mostly Russian and Indian crews. The shipping line’s gone out of business. They say they’ll need some fuel and an escort to Australia. I’d guess they’re going to sell what they can in Sydney. The Indians will want to go home from there, the Russians will probably jump ship and try to disappear into the crowd.”

“Well, the crowds would be big enough, I imagine. Must be nearly two million displaced down there now.”

Pileggi shook her head.

“Passed that last week. They’re up to two point two, as of close of business yesterday. Two and a half if you count New Zealand. Mostly ours, but a fair number of Europeans, too. Clean-shaven and fair-skinned, of course,” she added drily. “Don’t bother knocking if your name is Mohammad.”

Musso felt instinctive disapproval stirring in his gut, just as he disapproved of the British government’s mass internment and deportation policies. It was ethnic cleansing by another name, or ethnic filtering, perhaps, Down Under. Racism cloaked as necessity when you got right down to it. But it was hardly the worst thing happening in the world today. And the Aussies had taken anyone with an American passport, regardless of background. While their motives were almost entirely selfish—just look at how much remnant U.S. military power had been redeployed down there to protect America’s most precious asset, its remaining people—you couldn’t argue with the result. Refugee allocations to Southern Hemisphere locations were among the most precious things in the world at the moment. The ecological catastrophe of the Disappearance was mostly confined to the northern latitudes. Nobody in their right mind wanted to go into the tribal slaughterhouse that was Africa. And with so many South American countries succumbing to the contagion of anarchy or military takeover, slots in the Australia and New Zealand programs were the most avidly sought. Fortunes in trade goods were being made smuggling people in there.

Musso was about to ask Pileggi for a rundown on the civilian flights out of Soto Cano, in Honduras, the other leg of her role in Operation Uplift, when he suddenly blinked in shock.

A freighter moored near the old fueling station down in the bay exploded. There was no warning. It simply lifted a few feet out of the water, a small dense blossom of white light cracking it amidships before flowering into a dark, oily orange ball of flame that lit up the entire harbor. The sundered bow and stern thumped back down, throwing up huge fantails of water before the vessel keeled over and started to sink.