Without Warning (15 page)

Three minutes later they were cutting back across town in a gray Volvo
station wagon, a late model V40. A suction cup held a black plastic cradle to the windshield just below the rearview mirror. Caitlin leaned across Monique as they came to a red light, popping the glove compartment open.

“Sweet,” she said as she pulled out a small Magellan Meridian GPS receiver. “Is there a power cord in there? Look for a sort of flexi cord and an adapter to plug into the cigarette lighter.”

Monique couldn’t find one, but the little yellow and black unit had three-quarters of a charge anyway. Caitlin powered it up as the light changed and waited for the chime that would tell them it had linked to enough satellites to fix their position. A frustrating few minutes passed during which time she had to force herself to concentrate on the road. As full darkness covered the city, she could see the telltale glow of fires burning on the outskirts of the old center, explaining the large number of emergency vehicles. Apparently not everyone was content to celebrate with a smirk and a snifter of Courvoisier.

The Magellan chimed once, eliciting a small “Oh!” from Monique.

“Is this us? Here, near the rue Ricaut?”

“Yeah. That’s us. Does it have a route function? Can you work out how to get us to …”

The windshield suddenly cracked and starred with a huge, hollow boom.

As a boy, Tusk Musso had loved visiting the city with his grandfather. For the Musso clan, that meant New York, the greatest city in the world. In the whole goddamned history of the world, except maybe for Rome, according to his grandpa Vinnie Musso. There was a game they played, which Grandpa insisted little Tusk never tell his mother about, where they lay on the sidewalk at the base of the highest building they could find, and then just stared up at this monster looming over them, looking like it went all the way to heaven. They had to be quick before the cops or security guards chased them off. The very first time they’d done it, when Tusk was only six, it had been a cool, overcast day, with a slight breeze dragging clouds across a lowering sky, and it looked for all the world like the Chrysler Building was gonna fall right down on top of them. Tusk had squealed with laughter, and not a little fear. He wasn’t allowed to say anything to Momma about it, of course, because she would’ve had a blue fit if she’d known that Grandpa Vinnie, whom she considered a
very
poor influence at best, had been letting her precious bundle roll around on the filthy pavement with the dog turds and cigarette butts.

Thank God they’re long gone,
he thought, as he stood about two hundred yards back from the base of the event horizon and craned his head back to watch it climb away to heaven, feeling as small and insignificant as he had all those years ago at the feet of the tallest buildings in the world. Clouds drifted overhead, and Musso narrowed his eyes against the still-intense glare of the day and watched as a patch of white that reminded him of a Spanish galleon floated serenely into the silvery haze at the edge of the affected area. At that distance it created an effect similar to a stationary waterfall, all glistening silver hanging down like a curtain.

And like a curtain, it moved. Not much, just a lazy drift back and forth, across the ground, no more than a couple of yards in either direction—just enough to wake up the primitive creature dwelling in the darkest parts of Musso’s mind, to fill him with an atavistic fear of whatever danger lay in the darkness just outside the mouth of the cave.

Musso the modern, rational man, dressed in a short-sleeved khaki shirt and olive-drab pants, ground down on that ancient terror and watched, fascinated, as the cloud drifted into the energy wave. It seemed completely unaffected as it passed through. Its form became less distinct on the far side, but it was discernibly the same shape and size.

“Seen any birds fly into it, or out of it?” he asked, still peering upward.

Major Núñez shook his head. “None. Some of my men say they saw large flights of birds moving away from here earlier today, but I do not know where they came from. And there are none here now. Not one.”

Musso dropped his gaze. They stood by the crumbling edge of a two-lane road, the asphalt surface shimmering in the heat a few hundred yards behind them, a natural phenomenon. The much more powerful haze directly in front was decidedly unnatural. The small convoy of Hummers and Cuban vehicles had pulled up ten minutes ago, and his heart was still beating hard from the sight. Any last, lingering doubts placed in the way of belief by his rational mind had been banished as soon as he’d seen the haze. Visible from well over the horizon, it not only reached up to the stratosphere, it curved away toward the horizon in both directions like a giant standing wave, raised by an unknowable deity.

It was alien.

It sat there, in front of him, utterly removed from any human context to give it meaning. He had no idea what it was, and having seen it for himself he doubted that anybody ever would.

“You still got nothing, Lieutenant Kwan?” he said.

Lieutenant Jenny Kwan shook her head. She seemed too young to Musso,
almost baby-faced, but she was one of the smartest, scariest individuals he’d ever met. An MIT grad, Kwan was a marine first lieutenant, the boss of an incident response unit, a bland name for a bunch of very smart people trained to look for and respond to some of the worst things in the world—chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. Her crew and equipment took up three of the seven Humvees that had driven deep into Cuban territory, escorted by Major Núñez and a platoon of his men in a couple of old Soviet-era BMP-2s. Musso had to hand it to the Cubans. This monstrosity wasn’t an abstract proposition for them, something to be intuited from indirect evidence provided by web links or satellite data. It was sitting literally a stone’s throw away, bisecting their country. Given all that, he was impressed by their professionalism and no-bullshit attitude, although Núñez had probably picked his Praetorian guard for this gig.

They helped Lieutenant Kwan whenever she asked for it, and kept to themselves when she didn’t. Not that Kwan was having any luck with her equipment. No matter what sensors or sniffers or magic wands she waved at the haze, it made not a damn bit of difference.

“According to my readings, General, that thing isn’t even there,” she said.

“Uh-huh,” he muttered. They’d had the same result plugging into FAA and weather satellites back at Gitmo. As far as their technology was concerned, the haze didn’t exist.

He could feel the warmth leaking out of the late afternoon as the sun dropped toward a line of low, scrubby hills in the west. There was a faint but noticeable dry heat radiating from the haze, but that was all.

“Care to take a closer look, Major?” he said.

Núñez shook his head. “No. But what else is to be done?”

The Cuban officer took the first steps away from the convoy, toward the new edge of the known world. Musso fell in beside him as they cautiously approached the barrier. The country hereabouts was little different from the area around Guantánamo. Both were nestled at the edge of the Sierra Maestra range, the remnants of huge fractured slabs of continental plate raised from the ocean floor over millions of years by tectonic impact, volcanic eruptions, and the hundred-thousand-gigaton blast of the Chicxulub comet punching into the surface of the planet just a short distance away some sixty-five million years ago. The Maestra was a perfect guerrilla territory, a vast contrary maze of steep valleys, volcanic dikes, abrupt fault lines, and nearly impenetrable karst areas, all riven with limestone caves and covered in dense forest. The ranges gave out on the far side of the haze, smoothing out into the low, rolling plains that made up nearly two-thirds of Cuba’s land surface. For
all of the earth-shattering violence that had gone into creating this environment over the aeons, it was nothing compared with the immediate spectacle of the static energy wave.

Musso was able to make out the lowland steppes on the far side without much trouble. Nothing moved there. Núñez had compared it to looking through a waterfall, but to his mind it was more like a few layers of plastic wrap. He stooped down to pick up a rock as they walked, wondering what would happen if he threw it in. Núñez slowed as they approached the face. It appeared to billow, like a sail. They stopped about fifty yards away.

“I would not think it safe to get much closer,” Núñez said.

“I wouldn’t argue with that, Major,” agreed Musso. “Let’s just accept that we’re both possessed of stainless-steel
cojones
and take it nice and careful from here.”

He could see a burned-out car wreck on the far side, near a bend in the road, and wondered if that’s where Núñez’s superior officer had disappeared. This close to it, he avoided looking up. The scale of the thing was enough to give him a teetering sense of vertigo without making it any worse by craning his head back. He turned around to check on his people. They were all watching anxiously, their bodies rigid with anticipation. Suddenly there was a whooshing noise and he saw them all jump, like an audience in a horror movie frightened by a cheap stunt.

“What the fuck?” he said, turning to Núñez.

But the Cuban was gone.

The cries of his comrades and of Núñez’s men reached him a moment later.

“Run, General! Get the hell outta there!”

Admiral Ritchie found his eyes straying from the television news broadcast to the silver-framed picture of his daughter on the desk in front of him. The photograph was old. Nancy was nineteen now, but on his desk she remained forever three, holding a small bear, sucking her thumb, and staring off a thousand miles into the distance.

He had to tear his eyes away. It was almost too painful to bear. She should be all right. She was supposed to fly out for Europe this morning. But they had heard nothing from her.

Had she made the flight? Had it escaped the Wave? He didn’t know. His wife was frantically trying to find out, but without much luck.

With a grinding effort of will, Ritchie turned his attention back to work.

Thank God for cable news, at least, he thought. He had wondered if he might have to press the governor’s office for a declaration of martial law, fearing that panic and violence would be inevitable as the population of the islands digested what was happening. But far from sending mobs onto the street, the wall-to-wall media coverage, all of its sourced from Asia and Europe, seemed to be keeping Hawaii’s civilian population glued to their TV and computer screens. Every available police officer had been called in, and a battalion apiece of marines and soldiers were hurriedly tooling up with crowd-control gear, just in case, although all of the reports he’d received so far had the streets half deserted. Hopefully they wouldn’t be needed. The surf breaks off the north shore were a little less crowded than usual, but not much. Apparently even the end of the world wasn’t going to interfere with some people’s search for the perfect wave.

“Governor’s office called, sir.”

Ritchie looked up from the drifts of paperwork that covered every square inch of his desk. A couple of pages had even dropped to the floor. His PA, Captain McKinney, bent forward and retrieved them.

“Yes, Andrew? Good news, I hope?”

“Mixed, Admiral. Curfew starts at 1800 sharp tonight. They couldn’t agree on the rationing, though. But they have organized emergency flights from Tokyo and Sydney for any perishables or medical supplies that run low. The national security committees of both the Japanese and Australian cabinets are still meeting, but their local liaison staff has passed on messages from both prime ministers that they’ll give us whatever help we need.”

They’re the ones who’ll be needing help soon enough,
thought Ritchie. But aloud he only said, “Well, that’s something at least. For now.”

The armed forces had considerable stockpiles of rations and medical supplies on the islands, but they didn’t store items like insulin for diabetics, or drugs for treating cancer or a dozen other common maladies. Ritchie couldn’t help wondering just how much of a supply of antidepressants there was in Hawaii, and how many people were likely to kill themselves or suffer heart attacks or stress-related strokes in the next few days. Given the number of tourists from the mainland here, probably lots.

Nearly two and a half decades earlier he’d written his master’s dissertation at Annapolis on the navy’s crisis management at Pearl Harbor. He’d been scathingly critical of their efforts on December 7, 1941. Now, faced with his very own calamity, he had to wonder if he would have done any better. There was just so much to do and so little to do it with. Events had accelerated to a point where he would possibly never catch up.

“Thank you, Captain,” he grunted, dismissing young McKinney, just as an officer in army greens appeared at his door.

“Colonel Maccomb, Admiral. I have your updates if you have a moment.”

Ritchie didn’t, but waved the man in anyway. Maccomb looked like he had run all the way over from the 500th Military Intelligence Brigade, a decent hike in the midday heat of the equatorial sun. PACOM was just months away from taking possession of a new headquarters, the Nimitz-MacArthur Pacific Command Center, which would have centralized everybody in one modern facility. It looked like they’d be sticking with the old campus now, however, necessitating a lot of time wasting as his subordinates ran all over the island.