Without Warning (3 page)

“Ah shit.”

Kipper shook his head, and took a few steps toward the small, roiling ball of fire before he stopped himself. He would never make it, and anyway he had to stay here and wait for the chopper. He apparently had his own disaster to deal with.

Still, he had to do something.

He keyed 911 into his sat phone, glancing down momentarily to check that he’d gotten the numbers right. He could at least call this in. Maybe someone had survived. A ridiculous thought, which he recognized as such as soon as he’d had it. But he couldn’t just stand by with his thumb in his ass, taking in the view, could he?

“Nine-one-one, which service do you require?”

The dispatcher sounded harried, and just as freaked out as Barney had been. But then, Kipper thought, that was probably her normal state of being.

“This is James Kipper, chief engineer, Seattle City Council. I’ve just seen a passenger plane crash. A big jet.”

The dispatcher’s voice seemed nearly mechanical, washed free of human affect by the multiple layers of impossibly complicated technology required to allow Kipper to speak to her from the side of this mountain in the middle of nowhere.

“Sir, what is your location and the location of the incident?”

As Kipper told her that he was in the lower reaches of the Cascades, and read his location off the GPS beacon, the soft rumble of the titanic explosion finally reached him.

“Sir, please repeat. Are you outside the metro area?”

“Yes, damn it. I just watched this plane go down in the mountains. It was flying out of the east and it got too low and …”

“Are you outside the Seattle metro area, sir?”

“Yes, I …”

“Your call has been logged sir, but we cannot dispatch anyone right now. Please hang up and leave the line free for genuine emergency calls.”

And with that he was cut off.

“What the fuck?” he said, loud enough to startle a flight of birds from a nearby tree. A mass of snow, disturbed by their takeoff, fell to the ground with a soft, wet crunch. Twenty miles to the north a pillar of dark smoke climbed away into the hard blue sky. A secondary explosion bloomed silently in the heart of the maelstrom on the face of the granite peak. Kipper was still staring at the phone in disbelief when the sound reached him.

The parking lot of the supermarket on Broadway East could be a challenge at the best of times. Barbara’s little Honda had picked up three mystery scratches and dents there over the past six months. But today it felt like genuine hell. With one hand she was trying to steer a heavily laden cart sporting at least two malfunctioning wheels, while carrying a sobbing child on her other arm and attempting to redial Kipper’s number on her cell phone. The Safeway parking lot was full of hysterics and loons, some of them normal people who’d gone over the edge, but also some full-time nutbars who’d turned up with sandwich boards urging everyone to “REPENT” as the “HOUR OF DOOM” was
“AT HAND!!!!”
The signs looked quite professional, as though they’d been prepared much earlier for just this occasion. Barb had taken a small measure of childish joy from clipping one of the Jesus
freaks with the corner of her fast-moving, barely controlled metal shopping cart.

She was less pleased with the long scrape she gouged out of the paintwork as she stumbled and lost her grip on the cart just as they made it to the car.

“Shit!”

Suzie, who at six years old was way too big to be carried, one-armed or otherwise, for more than a few steps, struggled to clamber deeper into Barbara Kipper’s embrace. “I’m scared, Mommy,” she cried.

Struggling with her daughter, Barbara lost her grip on the cell phone, a cheap flip-top model, which fell to the asphalt and broke into two.

“Oh shit! Oh … I’m sorry, sweetheart. Mommy’s sorry. Just hop down, okay, and …”

Suzie, who had buried her face in Barbara’s neck, shook her head and wailed,
“Noooo.”

“Suffer the little children unto him, good lady …”

Barb spun around to find that one of the nuts had followed her through the heaving crush of the parking lot and was holding aloft a small branch of some sort, waving it as if to bless her.

“Suffer the little …”

“I’ll fucking suffer you to get the hell away from me, you goddamned freak. You’re scaring the bejesus out of my daughter.”

She fixed him with such a baleful stare that he actually seemed to recoil, but Barbara, who was normally so conscious of others’ feelings, felt not the least bit contrite. This place was a madhouse. It was as though people had gone berserk or something when the first news came through, and these holy fucking lunatics were only making it worse. She managed somehow to lower a clinging Suzie to the ground while digging her keys out and thumbing the car’s electronic lock. It opened with a reassuring
bleep-bloop,
lessening her fears that whatever had happened, it might have put the zap on all the electrics. Some bearded panic merchant had jumped up onto a checkout in the store to announce that an electromagnetic “event” had taken out all the circuits, everywhere. Unfortunately for him the automatic conveyor belt on which he was standing was entirely functional and jerked forward, pulling his feet out from under him. The last Barb had seen of him he was lying on the floor of Safeway with a badly broken ankle.

His theatrics, the almost instant viral panic that had seemed to flash through everyone, a couple of fender benders in the parking lot, followed by the inevitable blare of horns, the trilling of alarms, and the increasingly ugly screams of abuse … it had all been enough to upset Suzie so badly she was shivering, begging to know where Daddy was, and whether it was “mine
eleven” happening again. Barbara Kipper soothed her as best she could while pushing the child into the backseat, where her stuffed panda, Poofy Bear, might at least provide some comfort.

She popped the hatch and transferred the shopping bags as quickly as possible, with no idea how she was going to get them away from here. The lot was a gridlocked nightmare, with people increasingly desperate to get away, backing and crunching into each other, while more turned up every minute, presumably to panic-buy a year’s worth of discount Pop-Tarts and boxed mac-‘n’-cheese, the specials of the day.

A short distance away two men were squaring up for a fight. An actual fight. One was huge, enormously obese, while the other looked tall and fit. God only knew what they were pissed at each other about. Maybe the big guy got the last of the Pop-Tarts. They circled each other, feinting and throwing out air punches, and then, much to her surprise, the thinner of the two bent over and charged the other guy like a rhino, head-butting him in the gut. They went down in a tangle as police or maybe ambulance sirens seemed to be closing in from somewhere nearby.

Barbara shook her head in disgust and threw the last of her groceries into the hatch.

Having unloaded the cart, she didn’t dare push it back to the collection bay for fear of leaving Suzie alone for even a moment. She could have killed Kipper at that point. He would choose this of all weeks to disappear into the mountains.

As soon as she voiced the thought in her mind, her heart lurched forward.

Disappeared.

No, he wasn’t gone too. He was fine. He’d left a hiking plan with her and the park rangers, and as soon as she’d called them they said there was no way he would have been anywhere near the edge of this … effect… event… whatever it was. It was on the far side of the mountains. They said he’d be cool. Barney said the same thing.

She began shaking anyway, an uncontrolled shudder that seized her whole body as dizziness threatened to steal her legs from under her. Biting down on a knuckle until she drew blood helped focus her mind away from the terror that wanted to swamp her. The pain was something sharp and real, something on which to focus. And as soon as she did, Barb was embarrassed that she’d let herself get so frantic. She gathered up the broken pieces of her cell phone and tossed them into the front passenger seat before moving around to the driver’s door. She was going to hit the shopping cart if she backed out, but she really didn’t care. Getting Suzie away from here was more important.

“Is Daddy all right, Mommy? Is he okay?” her daughter asked as soon as Barb had the door closed. It shut out some of the chaos and madness but meant that Suzie could see without any distractions just how disturbed her mother was.

“He’s fine, sweetheart,” she said as calmly as she could manage. “His friends from work are phoning him and sending a helicopter just for him. To bring him home. He’ll be back later, don’t worry.”

“But what if he got
eaten,
Mommy? I heard a man in the store say everyone was
eaten.
Everyone.”

“Daddy is fine,” she repeated as calmly as possible, even as her head reeled with the insanity of it all. “And nobody was eaten, Suzie. I don’t know what’s happened, but nobody was eaten. That’s just silly talk. Now strap yourself in, sweetie. This is going to be very dangerous.”

The young girl snapped her seat belt to show that she’d already done so, and Barb apologized for not noticing. She keyed the ignition, which worked perfectly, and slowly but resolutely backed out of her parking space, pushing the cart aside with the rear bumper. A few more scrapes and scratches then. The view out of the back window was bedlam, with people swarming and vehicles everywhere. Barb gritted her teeth and kept moving, even as she butted up against other shoppers who didn’t move out of her way. Some hammered on the window, one guy punching it so hard it cracked, causing Suzie to squeal in fear. But Barbara Kipper refused to stop, believing that to do so would see them trapped. She was only making a walking pace, but kept going. Not for the first time was she grateful for driving a small car in this parking lot. While SUVs and sedans soon got themselves jammed together, almost like broken teeth on a zipper, she was able to thread, very slowly and determinedly, through the crowd, until she made it to a small hedge line at the edge of the lot and gunned the little Honda right on through it. The car didn’t like it much, and the scratching of branches on the paintwork was hideous. She almost certainly knocked the wheels out of alignment mounting the curb, but she was suddenly able to press the accelerator and break free onto Harvard Avenue. They bounced and hit the road with a terrible, metallic crunch. But at least they were out.

As they drove away in heavy traffic, Barb was certain she heard the pop of gunfire.

She couldn’t help but keep looking at the phone, wondering if Barney had got through to Kip.

Somebody must have tipped off the ragheads, because they were wailing up a storm. Long ululating cries of
“Allahu akbar”
rolled around the dusty confines of Camp Delta, drifting over the razor wire. General Musso heard them as tinny voices emanating from the speakers of a nearby computer in the situation room of the naval op center—a grand title for such a modest facility, a demountable hut with heavy gray air-conditioning units rumbling away at the windows. It was a relatively mild Caribbean day outside; almost but not quite balmy. The brigadier general knew he could probably run up and down the nearest of the scrubby low-rise hills that surrounded this part of the base without raising much of a sweat. But the room was stuffy. Dozens of laptops had been plugged into the existing cluster of workstations, and they were all running hard, dumping waste heat into a space that was already overcrowded with at least three times as many occupants as normal.

Having given up on the computers in frustration, however, Tusk Musso leaned over the old map table, gripping the back of a swivel chair, biting down hard on the urge to pick it up and throw it through the window. He was so angry, and—just quietly—so weirded out, that there was a fair chance
he could have heaved that sucker all the way down to the water’s edge. The bay was deep cerulean blue, almost perfectly still, and the chair would have made a satisfying splash. Unfortunately, Musso was the ranking officer on the base that day and everybody was looking to him for answers. Guantánamo’s naval commander, Captain Cimines, was missing, apparently along with about three hundred million of his countrymen, and a whole heap of Mexicans and Canucks into the bargain.
And Cubans, too,
Musso reminded himself.
Let’s not forget our old buds just over the wire.

“What are the locals up to, Georgie?” he rumbled. His aide, Lieutenant Colonel George Stavros, delivered one brief shake of the head.

“Still hopping around, sir. Looks like someone really kicked over their anthill. Our guys have counted at least two hundred of them bugging out.”

“But nothing coming our way, yet?”

“No, sir. Santiago and Baracoa are still quiet. A few crowds building. But nothing too big.”

Musso nodded slowly. He was a huge man, with a head resembling a solid block of white granite resting atop a tree trunk of a neck. Even that simple gesture spoke of enormous reserves of power. He shifted his gaze from the antique, analog reality of the map table with its little wooden and plastic markers across to the banks of flat screens that even now were refusing to tell him anything about what was going on such a short distance to the north. The faces of the men and women around him were a study in barely constrained anxiety. They were a mixed service group about two dozen strong, representing all the arms of the U.S. military which had a stake in Guantánamo, mostly navy and marines, but with a few army and air force types thrown in. There was even one lone coast guard rep, mournfully staring at the map table, wondering what could possibly have happened to his little boat. The cutter had dropped out of contact. It was easily found on radar, but would not respond to his hail.