Without Warning (42 page)

“So, Melton by-the-way. You have a theory, yes?”

It was such a weird, unexpected question that Melton shook his head as though a bug had crawled into his ear.

“Sorry. What do you mean?”

“A theory, about the Disappearance, no? I am interested in theories. Real theories with science and learning, not bugaboo magic for explanation. Like these Muslim pigs and their stupidity about Allah’s will. So, your theory. Tell me.”

Melton opened his mouth to say something but simply shut it again, shaking his head. Fact was, he’d heard any number of bullshit explanations and crazy-talk gibberish about what might have been behind the catastrophe. He’d heard as many backwoods Christians lay it all at the foot of God as there were bug-eyed imams rejoicing in Allah’s vengeance on the infidel. He’d heard whispers of secret government experiments gone wrong, black-hole laboratories, portals to hell dimensions, and alien space-bat biology missions that had scooped up hundreds of millions of lives with something akin to a giant butterfly net. He hadn’t given any of them a second thought.

“I don’t know, Sergeant. I don’t even begin to know what happened, or why, or whether it can ever be reversed. I figure best analogy is we’re like ants whose nest got hit by a lightning strike, or a kid with a magnifying glass on a sunny day. We’re ants. What would we know about anything? Either of those things, they’d be the end of the world to us, but you stand outside the situation, you get the context in a way that we don’t have, and it’s probably
something really simple … that we’re a thousand years from understanding. Possibly we’ll never understand it. My bet is, a thousand years from now we’ll be back living in caves banging rocks together for a living.”

The Polish noncom narrowed his eyes and dipped his head in acknowledgment.

“This
is a wise man,” he said to his troops. “You see. He knows what he cannot know and does not pretend otherwise. This is wisdom, Jerzy.”

Milosz pointed to a younger, black-haired youth and spoke in a rapid garble of Polish. Melton had the impression that he was repeating what he’d just said. The young commando shrugged, conceding a point.

“So what about you, Sergeant. No theories for you?”

Milosz smiled sadly.

“It is like you say. People groping through the dark, grasping at this and that, trying to explain what cannot be understood. My question, I ask it of people because it tells me how they are now. Whether they will get through or not.”

“You think people will ‘get through’ based on whether they believe in conspiracy theories, or magic, or the will of God?”

“No. People will survive this; some because of luck. If you have no food to eat, no warmth in the deep of winter, it doesn’t matter whether you think little green men or Muhammad broke your world. You will still die frozen and hungry. But if you have enough to eat, just enough, and if you have some shelter and safety, again just enough, then maybe your living or dying might have something to do with whether you fall to madness and superstition, or whether you hold on to your rationality.”

A small, indulgent grin sketched itself onto Melton’s weathered features.

“You’re a materialist then? Of the dialectic school? I thought Poland was done with all that.”

“Yes, I am a material thinker, like my father, a mathematician, and you are no boxhead, Melton.”

“It’s foolish to assume that just because somebody puts on a uniform and takes orders they turn off their brains. You didn’t.”

“Excellent,” beamed Milosz. “It is good to talk like this, Melton. So much of soldiering is crudity and ugliness, yes. But there is more to the profession of arms, and to life itself. We soldier so our children won’t. For us, guns. For them, books and easier lives.”

Melton gestured helplessly. “I never had any kids. Gotta say I’m real happy about that now.” He didn’t look back over at the marine lance corporal. She was still talking about her girl in North Dakota. Someone came over, checked the man on the cot, took his pulse. The orderly pulled a blanket over
the man’s head and made a note on the clipboard, but the lance corporal didn’t notice. “But if I had,” he continued, “and they hadn’t disappeared, I don’t know that they’d be looking at an easier life than I had.”

“Not now, no,” conceded the Pole.

Three trucks pulled up at the vast hangar doors and able-bodied troopers began unloading more litters from their rear cabins. Corpsmen and a few nurses appeared and hurried over to help them, but otherwise there was no appreciable reaction to their arrival. Men still sat and talked in low voices in their own small, closed groups. Country-and-western crooners still clashed with speed-metal shrieks and hardcore rap from dozens of portable stereos. Listless card games of hearts and spades continued without pause. The
bleep-blee-bloop
of Game Boy systems never faltered.

“And what now for you, Sergeant? Home to your families?”

Milosz nodded, but there was a grimness to his expression that belied any sense of release or deliverance. A couple of the other Poles appeared just as somber.

“Home yes. We hope.”

He waved his hands in the air, a concession to helplessness.

“If we have not been forgotten. Or abandoned. Or lost.”

He shrugged.

“But we may not see our families even if we do get home. There will be much work to be done. Our sort of work.”

“Fighting.”

“Of course. You have seen what happens when things go bad, Melton. In Polish history, there is much fighting. Russians. Germans. Who knows who will come now? Maybe Tartars and Ottomans again. Once even the Swedes invaded. I doubt they would again. They are a soft people now. But not everyone is soft, no? The jihadi pigs I am fighting in Afghanistan. They are crazy men, but hard. The Iraqis, not so hard, but bad, and led badly. Weak men are often the cruelest. And Russia, a sick place, but still peopled with ruthless boyars and commissars and would-be tyrants. This Putin, watch him. He is an iron fist hanging over all of us. So yes, Melton, fighting. Always fighting. Fighting big, between states. And small, between people for little things. Food, water. Basic things. My brother, I spoke to him for three minutes on American phone yesterday. Nothing he has to eat for two days. Just some dried crackers and little tinned foods for his children. Nothing in market. It is like communism again. And now, with the poison clouds, no harvests I will wager.”

His men were nodding, and Melton wondered about their grasp of English. If he recalled correctly, GROM operators needed a working knowledge
of at least two languages other than Polish. He supposed there was a fair chance that all of these men did speak English with some fluency, given the Anglophone nature of the coalition. And doubtless this was a topic that had been chewed down to the gristle among them. He wished he had taken notes, or recorded the sergeant’s lament. He was sure he could sell a story based solely on snatches of interviews taken with the men in this hangar, or with those men and women with whom he’d traveled to get here. An old, nearly burned-out spark flickered somewhere inside him, and he reached inside his jacket pocket, searching for the digital recorder he kept there. It was gone, but he had a pen and a notebook that he had lifted off someone’s desk over the course of his journey from Kuwait to this hangar. His writing hand was uninjured, but holding the pad in his heavily bandaged left hand was awkward.

He looked at the lance corporal by the Arabic Coke machine one last time.

Don’t end up like her,
he swore to himself.

Melton raised an eyebrow at Milosz and asked, “Would you mind? I don’t have any of my gear. My newspaper is gone. But I’m still a reporter. I shouldn’t be sitting here on my ass feeling sorry for myself. I should be telling stories. Your stories. Would you mind?”

“Of course not,” the sergeant said, holding his arms wide. “I am always interested in hearing myself talk. And these, my poor little bastards, they have no choice. They have to listen. Why should they suffer alone? Yes, Melton, of course you can tell my stories. Where should I start? With our attack on the Mukarayin Dam? Yes, that was us. We flooded Baghdad. Everyone thinks it was Green Berets. Pah. Hollywood pussies! It was GROM.”

Melton couldn’t help but take a quick glance around to see if any Army Special Forces were around to hear that remark. If they were and they heard, they didn’t make themselves known.

Still struggling with his pen and paper, Melton came up short. The Polish special forces were not an old and venerable outfit. They had only been established in 1991. But they already had a rep as a very closed-up shop. You rarely heard of them, and they never did press. Yet here was one of the senior non-coms suddenly happy to give up details of a mission that he would have denied even happened just last week.

Milosz had no trouble translating the American’s puzzled look.

“Do not be surprised, Melton. Everything has changed now. I will tell you about Mukarayin because it suits our purposes.”

“How so?” he asked.

“It is like I said, there will be much more evil in the world soon. There is already, yes? My country, she has suffered more than most through her history. But not this time. Or not without making others suffer for what they
might do to us. I will tell you about Mukarayin because you will tell the world, and then she will know, we Poles will not be plowed under again. You know what most people see when they imagine Polish army? They see horsemen galloping off to charge Hitler’s tanks. Brave but stupid. And doomed. But now, if you tell them about Mukarayin, in future when people think about Polish fighting man, they maybe think about that dam blowing high into sky and that mountain of water flooding out and drowning city of Baghdad. They will think twice about wishing evil upon us, yes?”

“Yes,” agreed Melton. “I think they will.”

It was more than he had imagined writing about. He’d been more interested in Milosz’s story of calling home and talking to his brother, of being trapped in the broken machinery of a vast war machine, suddenly cut off and alone in a hostile world. And he did take that interview, but he also filled half of his notebook with stories from every man in Milosz’s extended squad—GROM usually operated in teams of four—about blowing the dam that flooded Baghdad.

As he did so, the strangest thing happened. A small audience began to gather around them, just two passing Cav troopers at first, but increasingly building up into a circle of attentive listeners that drew in even more men and women by virtue of its novelty. After ten minutes Melton was sure that more than two hundred people surrounded them, perhaps the majority of the walking wounded in the hangar space. The Polish operators spoke into a rapt silence, but occasionally someone would call out, confirming a detail of their story, or some would clap or cheer like believers at a revival meeting.

The specialist from the 101st Airborne stood over him, with a fistful of the dog tags, his eyes clear now. “Sir?”

“Yes, Specialist?”

“Can I … would it be okay if I told you …” The specialist held up the dog tags.

There must have been twenty or more of the tags, some of them with blood and skin on them.

“Sure, Specialist,” Melton said. “Tell me what happened.”

“Hey.” A marine stepped forward. “Need a recorder, Mr. Melton?”

Melton took it and smiled. “Just call me Bret.”

When the dog tags had been reattached to formerly breathing, living, loving people, the army specialist moved away. The batteries were low, but a Brit
stepped forward with a set of AAA batteries. Melton talked to the marine who loaned him the tape recorder until the tape ran out. He took the tape out and offered the recorder to the marine, who had a boy, a girl, and a horse named Eagle back home, but the man shook his head.

“No, Bret. You keep it. You need it more than I do.” He fished around in his pocket and pulled out some fresh tapes. “I don’t have anyone to record messages for anymore.”

The marine stood up, squared his shoulders, and moved out of the hangar. At the door he collected a rifle and a helmet from another marine and they walked out into the searing Qatar daylight.

Melton had no idea where he would place the interviews, or what form they might take. But he kept scribbling and taping, encouraging people to talk about… well, whatever they wanted.

“So the bastard was up in the ceiling,” Private Adrian Bennet said. “He popped four in my squad before we finally figured out where he was hiding.”

“Our convoy got cut off.” A Native American army private, Piewesta, shook her head. “We took a hell of a lot of fire and my friend Jessie, she was in the back of the Hummer when we got hit. She didn’t make it.”

“That was a hell of a mess,” someone added. “Five-oh-seventh Support Battalion, right?”

Piewesta nodded.

“The bullets came flying from everywhere,” said an Apache pilot, half of his left foot missing. “Hell of a thing, Bret. I thought I was home safe after knocking down those three Iranian helicopters, but then all of this ground fire comes up. Like being trapped in a Mason jar full of lightning bugs. Just wasn’t my day to be flying.”

Bret noticed that the pilot didn’t mention his gunner. Probably didn’t make it, he decided.

“She just wouldn’t sink,” a sailor from the USS
Belleau Wood
said. “That Iranian sub put three torpedoes into her but she wouldn’t go down. We were trying to get the fires under control when we got word to abandon ship. We could have saved her but they said resources were tight. Better to scuttle her.”

A Tarawa-class LHA lost, Melton thought. Scuttled. The navy hadn’t lost a ship that large in combat since World War II.

The sailor smiled. “We got that fucking Kilo sub, though. ASW guys from the
Nimitz
got us some payback on that bitch.”

“Hell, yeah,” someone else said. Others took up the chorus. “Hell, yeah. Payback.”

He heard a seemingly unending stream of combat horror stories. Units cut off or abandoned. Enemies suddenly materializing out of nowhere. Supplies running out. Air cover disappearing. Waves of Iraqi troops flowing toward them, suddenly disappearing inside great roiling walls of flame, or enormous volcanic eruptions of high explosive dropped from miles overhead. He heard small, intimate stories about men killing each other with whatever weapon came to hand. About a female truck driver, trapped in a hostile village, crawling out via the two-thousand-year-old sewage system, and souveniring a couple of old Roman coins she discovered on the way.