Without Warning (41 page)

The door slammed shut quickly. A child screamed endlessly somewhere in the building.

Cautiously approaching the downed man, she kept her eyes on his hands and feet, aware that even now he might lash out at her. In his position, if at all possible, she would have. But a thick, glutinous, gargling sound told her he was on the way out. She shouldered the Benelli again, where it clanked against the barrel of the Heckler & Koch. Her pistol replaced the long guns, and she dropped a knee right into the small of the man’s back, jamming the Glock up against the base of his ear. A pellet had torn off a bite-sized chunk, and she ground the iron gun sight into the bleeding wound for emphasis. He groaned pitiably, but there was very little fight left in him.

“You don’t have long, Pepé Le Pew. We both know that,” she snarled in French. “But I could make the last few minutes of your miserable fucking life feel like an eternity.”

To drive the point home she shifted her balance to focus her weight onto a rib that was protruding from an ugly chest wound. A weak, liquid groan escaped from the man beneath her as she felt a nub of bone dig into her knee.

“Okay. Two questions. First one. Did you shoot my friend downstairs?”

“I don’t…”

The Glock gouged out a chunk of meat from his ruined ear, and he found the strength for a full-bodied scream.

“Yes. Yes. I did,” he babbled. In heavily accented English.

“Question two. Who sent you?”

Lighter pressure was all she required this time.

The answer told her half of what she needed to know.

“Noisy-le-Sec.”

An iceberg in her stomach.

Just as she’d thought. They were from the action division of the DGSE.

She didn’t bother asking why.

This loser wouldn’t have a clue, only a target. Her and Monique.

“Okay I lied. More questions. How many in your team? How many shooters? How many on overwatch?”

“Fuck you,” he groaned.

Caitlin drove a short, sharp punch into his injured rib cage and he screamed.

“How many?”

But his howling did not abate. If anything it grew worse.

Her skin crawled, and every nerve ending under it seemed to tingle.

Time to go.

She stood up carefully, making sure to give him no chance of entangling her legs or feet, and then she fired once into the back of his head, silencing the caterwauling cries, before turning and hurrying back downstairs to Monique.

Not that she needed to hurry.

She already knew that her friend—and yes, “friend”
was
appropriate— was dead.

The body lay still and heavy in that telltale way, as though slowly melting into the floor under the pressure of its own dead weight. Black petals of light bloomed in her vision, and her head began to spin again, this time around the axis of a bright, sharp pain. Caitlin staggered against the wall, which seemed to fall away from her. She had to get out. She had to abandon her friend. More killers would be on their way. As the floor rushed up to slam into her face she thought she heard the dull metallic thudding of a helicopter. But it could have been her own heartbeat.

He was getting used to the chaotic, tumbling, white-water rush of events, to waking up in different cots, or beds, or a plastic picnic chair at some random transit point. Of course, Melton had experienced plenty of hurry-up-and-wait during his time as a ranger, and although he enjoyed a much greater degree of autonomy in his later career as a civilian correspondent, he was, in the end, still hanging around the army, which had raised “hanging around” to an Olympic standard event, interspersed with short bouts of furious ass haulage and seemingly pointless tail chasing. The thirty-six hours after he awoke in the field hospital featured plenty of each.

He’d been upset on returning from the mess tent to discover that Corporal Shetty was gone, evacuated on a medical flight to Ramstein. He was alone again, without friends or colleagues or even a passing acquaintance, before Corpsman Deftereos returned, this time with a set of three-pattern desert BDUs and a standard-issue brown undershirt and underwear. He was accompanied by an exhausted-looking female doctor, who gave the reporter a perfunctory once-over, checked his stitches, wrote him a prescription for some antibiotics, and signed off a travel order, ripped from a clipboard, and pushed into Melton’s pocket.

“Congratulations,” she said in a voice devoid of any spark. “You win a no-expenses-paid trip out of my ward and on into the next exciting phase of your own personal mystery tour.”

He hadn’t even drawn breath to ask what the fuck she was talking about before she was gone, administering more scrips and travel documents like some sort of malfunctioning vending machine. Deftereos, at least, had been a little more helpful, gesturing for him to stay exactly where he was for the next couple of minutes at least. Melton felt abandoned and more alone than he had in a long time as the two of them swept out of the ward, and he was on the verge of simply climbing back into his cot when the corpsman rushed back in, grabbing him by the arm and pulling him upright.

“No, really, you gotta get the hell outta here right now, sir,” said Deftereos.

“Why? What’s up?”

“What? You think they tell me anything? I don’t fucking know, excuse my language, sir.”

Deftereos was babbling, and noticeably distracted.

“Look, we just got word that we’re shifting at least a third of our cases. Corporal Shetty scored a golden ticket with the Eighty-sixth Airlift while you were out. And you just lucked out with a civilian charter, to London. If I was you, I wouldn’t even be here anymore. I’d be a dust ball, on my way to the fucking helipad. Now go!”

He pushed a small bottle of pills into Melton’s hand. Vicodin.

“It’ll help. With the shoulder and your finger,” he said. “Don’t worry about your kit. All your stuff has gone ahead. Now you gotta get going, too.”

And with that he’d changed out of his scrubs and been given the bum’s rush out of the tent and into the dust and harsh sunlight, to join a small throng of the walking wounded, all recently displaced and as thoroughly nonplussed as himself. They had just enough time to work up some really wild theories about battles gone wrong, bioweapon exchanges, hundreds of thousands of American dead and wounded, when a white bus with dark blue Hilton Hotel livery pulled around the corner formed by a pod of air-conditioned shipping containers a hundred yards away, and a navy chief stuck his head out of the rear door, roaring at them to get their worthless carcasses into the vehicle or they’d get left behind for good.

Melton remembered a short ride out to a vast helipad where civilian choppers of all manner and description vied with U.S. military helicopters for landing and takeoff slots. He remembered shuffling onto a Vietnam-era Chinook with an Australian aircrew, but missed a lot of that flight, after downing two of the Vicodin with a swig of warm bottled water. He vaguely recalled half an hour spent in some lavish civilian airport where he was at last
able to fill the prescription for his antibiotics, at a markup of about a thousand percent.

Melton slept through a C-130 flight to Qatar, and ended up for a long spell in a giant hangar where hundreds of wounded marines and soldiers were laid out on stretchers if they were lucky, or if they weren’t, on a makeshift line of bright orange molded plastic chairs. Groggy from the Vicodin and creeping exhaustion, he made his way toward a small mound of duffel bags that had been colonized by half a dozen Polish commandos. They all seemed in fine fettle, with their equipment stowed neatly in a pile to one side, guarded by one of their own, a huge blond stone monolith of a man.

“Witatn!”
He smiled in greeting, before holding up his hands to forestall a Polish-language landslide. “Sorry. That’s all the Polish I know. Besides
piwo
and
piekna dzie…dzi…
“

“Dziewczyna?”
grinned a small, wiry, heavily mustachioed man, the men’s sergeant to judge by his chevrons. “Not much beer or beautiful ladies around here, my friend. Just stinky American boxheads, yes. Apologies if you are boxhead, too. I say it with love in my heart. And sorrow, too, great sorrow. Please sit, you are wounded, yes?”

Two of the Poles crabbed around and Melton eased himself down onto a couple of kit bags. They seemed wonderfully soft.

“Boxhead? No,” he grunted with relief at getting off his feet. “Not for a long time, anyway. Wounded, yes. Not too bad though. Just missing a few bits and pieces.”

“Nothing to stop you
enjoying piwo
or
dziewczyna
though?”

“No.” He smiled. “Nothing that bad. My name is Melton, by the way. Bret Melton. I’m a reporter, or was …”

He shrugged awkwardly and trailed off. It was simply too much effort to go into his CV, to explain his shift from
Army Times
staffer to itinerant freelancer for a slew of British arms trade mags.

“You guys been waiting for transport long?”

“Eight hours. Not long. Some here have been waiting many days. Some have died here. Not joking now. I am Sergeant Fryderyk Milosz. I do not joke. Pleased to meet you, Melton by-the-way. Okay. That was joke. Polish joke, yes? The best kind. By Pole.”

Milosz flashed him a blindingly white grin and raised his eyebrows with such comic élan that Melton couldn’t help but laugh out loud. It hurt his shoulder dreadfully but he gave in to it anyway. It had been a long time since he’d enjoyed the abandon of real laughter. It seemed to loosen up Milosz’s men as well, with some of them smiling and nodding, as their own tension and stresses eased off a little.

“We are going home soon,” said Milosz. “But you, my friend, where do you go now?”

The man’s eyes were dark pools of sympathy.

“London, I think,” said Melton. “That’s what my travel chit says anyway. After that, well, I don’t know that there is an after that.”

“No,” agreed Milosz, nodding as though Melton had revealed some deeper truth. “Maybe nothing after that, no.”

Melton waved his hands as if to say,
What the hell?

Leaning back and taking in his surroundings, he couldn’t help but dwell on how things were unraveling. There had to be nearly a thousand guys crammed into the baking heat of this hangar at the edge of a temporary base in the middle of nowhere. A lot of desert MARPAT, which meant marines. Mixed in with the MARPAT were some army and air force in the three-pattern desert BDUs like the fresh set Melton wore.

Marine, army, the few navy and air force he saw, all had the same look. The long stare, the slumped shoulders, postures crumpled in upon themselves. A few were crying openly, quietly, regardless of the severity of their wounds. Here and there Melton would spot a soldier looking at a snapshot or a Marine watching a saved video file on his laptop. Some were by the door, chain smoking for lack of anything better to do.

One soldier, from the 101st Airborne, had a collection of dog tags in his fist. He rocked himself back and forth until someone passed him. Melton watched the soldier ask a number of times, “Who should I give these to? Do you know?”

Even when he got an answer, he didn’t seem to hear it. He’d go back to rocking, back and forth, until someone else walked past.

A female marine over by a Coke machine covered in Arabic script was smiling, flirting with a half-comatose man on a cot. “When I get home to see my baby girl, it’ll be all right. She lives in North Dakota with my grandma. I heard they made it.”

Oh boy,
Melton thought, taking in the glazed green eyes of the marine, a lance corporal. She looked right past him, not seeing anything but her dead girl smiling back from the past.

To Melton they looked beaten. Like men and women with nothing to live for. Milosz and his small band of brothers, however, they were still tight and looking forward to something. Home, family, a simple fucking ride out of the furnace. It was enough to keep their spirits up. Melton shook his head. Any place where soldiers gathered in great numbers always ended up reeking of sweat and stale breath, cigarettes, ration farts, and something more elemental
, an animal smell of violence waiting to turn loose upon the world. But that musky scent had turned rancid and cloying in here. Even Somalia wasn’t this bad, Melton thought. The rangers on the whole weren’t beaten, nor were those pogues from Tenth Mountain, who’d done better than anyone thought they would.

Desertions,
Melton thought.
These folks will desert or simply collapse if someone doesn’t give them their spines back real soon.

The giant metal fans droning away at the edge of the hangar merely pushed the vile atmosphere around, a gaseous slough of ill feeling and desolation. He was familiar with this. It was what happened when men faced the hopelessness of their circumstances and shrugged away any chance of redemption. It was what happened when men who were used to fighting for their lives gave up and said, “What’s the point?”

Milosz let him alone for a few moments, but perhaps uncomfortable with the brooding presence that had just insinuated itself into his little group, he toed Melton’s boot to regain his attention.