Without Warning (66 page)

“But a decent cup of java’s impossible?” Melton asked.

“All but,” said Barry, in an apologetic tone. “Frogs is killing each other over moldy croissants and fucking Nescafé. So no, Mr. Melton. No fucking coffee. Learn to drink somefin’ civilized, why don’tcha?”

The small team of correspondents and editors took their places around the table, most of them juggling papers and folders in one hand, and bone-china cups and saucers in the other. A packet of “biscuits,” as they insisted on calling all forms of cookie life, sat in the center of the table, and Monty doled out one each to every tea drinker before carefully twisting the packet closed again and clamping it off with a wooden clothespin. The provenance of the clothespin was never explained. It was a peculiar ritual, which Melton had rather come to look forward to each day. He was offered one of the McVitie’s wholemeal “bickies” to have with his glass of water, but again he turned it down.

“Couldn’t get any Oreos, Barry?” he teased, only half in jest.

“Oh, I know where there’s a whole warehouse of them, Mr. Melton. Just couldn’t be fucked dickering for ‘em. Why, do you want some?”

“Oh, no, don’t put yourself out on my behalf.” He smiled.

“Wasn’t planning to, sir.”

Other exchanges rolled back and forth across and around the table as everyone settled in. The morning news conference was about something more than simply assigning new stories and monitoring those already in
progress. It was the only time each day when the entire team was in one place, and it served as an opportunity for everyone to touch base, for the tribe to hunker down and count its blessings that their numbers had not been thinned out once again. The Beeb had had seventeen journalists killed or simply disappeared in the last month, not counting those who’d been vaporized in the Middle East or the United States. The Paris bureau, however, was charmed, having lost nobody since Jon Sopel was killed in the first week of fighting. The bureau had grown like Topsy since then, and had taken the buildings on either side as they were abandoned, but only seasoned warcos and freelancers like Melton worked there now. He’d been hired on a twelvemonth contract. It paid a fraction of
his Army Times
job, which hadn’t been a great payer in the first place, but because of the hazardous posting status, he was guaranteed “room and board” at the Paris compound.

It seemed perverse, but he ate better and slept more securely than many people in England.

“Right then,” Monty called out in his down-to-business voice. “What enchanting fripperies and puff pieces will we be filing from the city of light today then? Caroline, darlin’, any chance of that interview with the blessed Sarko yet?”

Caroline Wyatt rolled her eyes up to the peeling paint of the high ceiling.

“His minders promised me I’d see him yesterday and I spent the whole bloody day in this wretched armored car roaring around from one bunker to the next, without ever actually managing to get anywhere near the little bugger. I’ll stay on it, Monty, if you really wish, but I don’t think he’s going to roll over for us until he has some genuinely good news to crow about.”

“Well, his armored boyos entered the old city last night. I’d have thought that was good enough.”

“Yes, it is a feel-good story, isn’t it, dozens of Leclerc main battle tanks crushing Arab street fighters under their treads in the Bois de Boulogne? I can’t imagine why he wouldn’t want to sit down and chat about that over a Pernod or two.”

“Well, keep at it, sweetheart. I have faith in your charms. Bret, are you all squared away with the marines? London is super keen to see you embed with them after they cleaned out Lyons.”

Melton tapped the point of his ballpoint on a Spirax writing pad.

“Soon as we’re finished up here, I’m off to Suresnes. The marines— although you know, they’re really more like army rangers—they laid up last night at Mont Valérien. It’s an old fortress right next door. Parachuted in there when it was still full of jihadi. Pretty fucking hard-core. They’ll have some good stories.”

Normally, in a room full of BBC reporters, he’d have kept his mouth shut and just grunted, “Yeah, good to go.” But these guys weren’t normal. Even Caroline Wyatt, who still spent an hour in makeup every day, nodded appreciatively. He didn’t need to sex it up for them. They all knew what a godless bloodswarm the drop into Mont Valérien would have been, and what the push into the city was going to be like. The clashes between rival elements of the French military were destructive in the extreme. Whole swaths of the suburbs had been gutted by collisions between main force units siding with either Sarkozy or the so-called Loyalist Committee. The blocks bordering the Bois de Boulogne parklands now looked like Stalingrad at the end of 1944. Those buildings still standing were mostly gutted and blackened, often with the upper floors sheared off by high explosives. They stuck up out of the ruined streetscape like broken teeth.

“It’s bloody confusing, isn’t it?” grumbled Monty. “Rebels, renegades, mutineers, loyalists. Hard to keep them all straight some days. And if someone could do me a favor and explain why we’re still calling them fucking loyalists when it seems pretty obvious they’ve cut some sort of deal with the Intifada crew, I’d be very grateful.”

Melton, who was idly sketching a rough map of the city center, with various lines of advance and defense marked out, just as he’d been taught so long ago, shrugged. “They self-identify as loyalists, Monty. It’s only good manners. After all, Sarkozy did anoint himself boss hog when Chirac got whacked. Smart move or not, it was illegal. Shades of Napoleon grabbing the crown. Gotta figure most of the guys fighting for the committee think
they’re
the ones protecting the Republic. The soldiers, at least. Sarko calling them all traitors and sellouts to the Intifada wouldn’t have helped calm the matter down either. The jihadi, they’re allies of convenience. It’s all fucked up. Civil wars always are.”

“Do you believe him, though?” asked Caroline.

“Sarko? Who knows?”

“It seems a little incredible, don’t you think, accusing the Loyalists of treason? They seem rather less discriminating than that. Anyone in their way gets killed, no matter what their allegiance. Street gangs, neofascists, jihadis. They’ve cut them all down at one time or another.”

“Like I said, Caroline, it’s confused. It’s a mistake to think of this thing in terms of massed armies maneuvering against each other. Alliances and loyalties are contingent. They can shift in minutes. An agreement negotiated at one level might have no effect at others, or farther down a city block. I think this is going to be one of those times where the winners definitely write the history.”

“Well,” Monty interrupted, “as another of your countrymen once pointed out, journalism is the first draft of history, and ours will be due in a few hours. So let’s crack on, shall we?”

Leaving the office was no longer a matter of grabbing his equipment and stepping out to hail a cab. Melton didn’t expect to see the compound again for a couple of days, and he packed accordingly. On the bottom of a small black rucksack he stuffed a layer of spare socks and underwear. On top of them some emergency rations, though he hoped he’d be eating with his embedded unit. On top of them went his equipment, a small digital camera and twenty-four hours’ worth of videotape, three notebooks, and a couple of pens. He topped off with two handfuls of carefully hoarded chocolate bars and cigarettes, which he planned to share with “his” troops. He understood just how welcome an outsider with a small stash of luxuries could be.

It was raining again, quite heavily, enough to dull the sounds of close-quarters fighting. He couldn’t see outside, but the steel plating that covered all the windows only served to magnify the sound of the downpour as the torrents hit the metal. He pulled on his rain slicker over a BBC-issue ballistic vest and snagged a pair of goggles to protect his eyes. The toxic rain wasn’t nearly as bad as it had been a few weeks back, but letting the water run into your eyes still felt like swimming in a hideously overchlorinated pool. The last item, he took his time with. It was a controversial choice, a personal weapon. Some of the reporters, like Caroline and Adam Mynott, who’d arrived from Afghanistan with the last of NATO’s returning contingent, refused to carry anything, and tried very hard to talk Melton out of doing so. They argued that their best protection was their noncombatant status.

In turn he insisted that nobody was playing by the Geneva conventions and cited at least three occasions in Paris where he’d been forced to defend himself. It was an unresolved dispute, with some of the older hands writing him off as a fossil from the Cowboy Age, while some of the younger ones quietly sought him out to ask his advice about how they might discreetly pack their own protection. It was telling, he thought, that Barry had scrounged him two spare magazines for the Fabrique Nationale Five-seveN pistol.

He stripped, cleaned, and rebuilt the handgun before slotting home a full mag. Safety on, it went into the holster on his right hip and disappeared under the slicker. He finished his packing with a fully charged cell phone, plugged into British Telecom’s network and set to roam, but noted that—as usual—there was no signal available. Service was spotty at best. After a quick visit to Monty’s cubicle for all the good-byes and good-luck wishes, he signed
out at the security desk, lodging a rundown of his expected movements over the next forty-eight hours, the name of the French unit he would be with, and the number of the all-but-useless cell phone in his breast pocket.

From there he hurried out to the internal courtyard where his ride was waiting, a custom-built six-wheeled Land Rover with two armed guards and his driver, American Dave.

“Fantastic,” Bret muttered to himself. More loudly, on approaching the vehicle he called out, “Morning! You guys got my route map this morning. We’re gonna be skirting around some contested ground.”

Dave, a chunky, dark-haired man with a short-cropped beard, continued chewing his gum and nodded. “Yup.”

“Okay then. Drive on.”

It took them all of four minutes to deviate from the route. Bret had mapped out a long, looping, circuitous path through the district’s quieter streets to avoid the fighting between Avenue Foch and the huge traffic roundabout at the Place de la Porte Maillot. Within that area fourteen irregularly shaped city blocks had been reduced to a wasteland of shattered buildings, burning ruins, and rubble through which no armor could pass and over which thousands of men and women now fought. The rain had dampened hostilities somewhat, but the rolling thunder of combat never completely abated. At one point two jets screamed low overhead to unload their bombs on somebody. The air force was almost entirely behind Sarkozy, but even so, Melton flinched a little. Technically, they were still in Loyalist territory, and an armored Land Rover would make an excellent target of opportunity.

He didn’t notice them veering off course because American Dave surprised him by initiating a conversation as he popped a CD into the stereo. Bret checked out the cover.
Dave Dudley’s Truckin’ Hits.

“Gonna git bloody, soon,” said American Dave.

Okay, it wasn’t much of a conversation, but it was a start.

“Yeah,” agreed Bret. “Always gets kinda biblical whenever you get a lot of irregulars tangling with main force. These guys’ll be desperate, too. You got the marines and tankers coming in from the park, and those two grunt divisions hit Romaine and Noisy-le-Sec yesterday. The Loyalists are trapped.”

Dave snorted in disgust.

“Fucking Loyalists. Bullshit. Nobody loyal to nothing but Allah ever partnered up with those raghead motherfuckers.”

Melton let that one slide past. He had no idea what game plan the Loyalists were running and wouldn’t be surprised to seem them turn on the Arab street fighters and massacre them wholesale if the need arose.

The Land Rover rumbled down a deserted street in which all of the trees
had died. The rain was still heavy, reducing visibility to about thirty yards, and he could tell from the neglected appearance of the buildings, with gaping broken windows and doors left ajar, that most of them were empty. Every now and then a figure would dart furtively from cover, but only for a few seconds at most. In the back, Dave’s companions kept their weapons at the ready.

“You don’t think?” said Dave.

“Sorry. I don’t think what?”

“You don’t think the ragheads and Loyalists are teamed up?”

Melton shrugged.

“They have a common enemy, but that doesn’t make them friends or even allies. The Loyalists are fighting Sarkozy because they think he’s a dictator. A fascist. The street Arabs from the outer suburbs are fighting him because he sent his troops into their neighborhoods and served ‘em up a big bowl of smackdown. The skinheads are fighting them because they’re skinheads. The other white gangs are fighting the Arabs because fighting’s all there is now. You fight, you eat. You fight, you live. Maybe. Don’t know that’s there’s much more to it.”

Dave grunted and lapsed back into silence.

Mr. Dudley started singing that he was the king of the road.

And just out of the corner of his eye, Bret Melton saw the telltale, snaking smoke trail of an RPG round.

A warning cry was in his throat but never got out.

The world turned upside down with a head-cracking roar and a geyser of hot fire.