Without Warning (56 page)

And behind his friend’s twinkling eyes and ready smile Melton had seen real fear at being left behind to burn in a nuclear furnace. It made it all the more affecting that he had agreed to track Melton down for the British broadcasting company, which had lost contact with him when he was injured. Melton wondered whether he would have done the same thing in al-Mirsaad’s place. The small coterie of full-time war correspondents tended to be close and unusually supportive of each other, but al-Mirsaad had spent days hunting him through the vast labyrinth of the U.S. Transport Command and, having found him in that transit hangar out in the desert, had insisted on personally driving the injured reporter three hundred miles to Kuwait City.

“Don’t you have a job?” asked Melton as they waited in the lounge for his BA flight to England.

“I am a roving reporter.” Al-Mirsaad grinned. “I rove, therefore I am. And I will file many stories on the reaction to the Israeli bombs and to the American pull out. Frankly, if it keeps me away from the bomb sites themselves, I am grateful. I have heard from colleagues sent into Egypt and Syria about the conditions there. Many of them are now very sick. The network has suspended operations in the irradiated areas until they are safe. Well, safer. For now, Kuwait and Qatar are my beats, as you say. I shall fly out to coalition headquarters when you have gone, for a briefing on the cease-fire.”

Melton snorted.

“Not much of a cease-fire, Sadie. The Israelis wiped the field clean with a couple of airburst nukes. EMPs fried everything the Iranians had.”

Al-Mirsaad’s fragile smile fell away.

“You know, a lot of people are saying that if your government had not warned Tehran and the others, they would not have deployed all of their defenses to be wiped out. Many people think it was a conspiracy, a plot between Washington and Tel Aviv to steal all of the oil, not just Saddam’s.”

Melton regarded his friend warily.

“Sadie,” he said in a gentle tone. “Washington’s gone. Bush, Cheney, all of them. Gone. All of the oil company head offices. Gone. Car manufacturers. Gone. Arms companies. Gone. If there was a conspiracy it was a one-way street. Everything I’ve seen tells me the Israelis completely suckered Jim Ritchie. Iranian military doctrine is to throw everything at a threat. No reserves. They got an hour or so warning and put everything up. They tried to warn their own people with the end result that the entire country lit up in panic. Computers, phones, radio, TV, every goddamned piece of electronic equipment in the place, and none of it hardened against a pulse.”

“So what you are really saying is that they didn’t need to bomb the cities. They had already destroyed their enemies as functioning modern societies.”

“Well, I wouldn’t call them functioning or modern, but I see your point. Look, I don’t condone it. Who would? By the time the final butcher’s bill is totted they’ve probably killed, what, a hundred and fifty, two hundred million people. Christ only knows how many more if anybody else follows their lead. Possibly everyone, in the end. You know what that makes us? I mean the U.S. and the Disappearance? Old news.”

“You are right,” al-Mirsaad conceded. “I apologize. I sound like some ill-bred street Arab falling on conspiracy talk like a scabrous dog on a bone. Tell me truthfully, Bret, what do you think your military will do?”

He shook his head.

“I have no idea. Leave you all to it, I expect. We’re out of the superpower business as of last week. Go ask the Chinese. Or whoever’s running India. If Pakistan hasn’t nuked them yet.”

They fell into an uncomfortable silence as the PA called flights out to Paris, Rotterdam, and Bangkok. Melton attempted to find a position in which he could recline without putting pressure on his injured butt cheek or shoulder. It was difficult. At least for the first time in weeks he was clean, and dressed in luxuriously soft and well-fitting civilian clothes. The BBC had sent him payment in euros for the copy he’d filed before he was wounded, and had advanced him another, larger sum, on the basis of the interviews he
had done at the transit facility out in the desert. As he’d expected they were most interested in any European angle.

For a wonder, their money was still worth something in Kuwait, at least in the hermetically sealed environment of the international airport. He was able to buy clothes. and replace some of his lost and damaged equipment. Even better than that, he managed to fill a few prescriptions at a pharmacy on the main concourse and, now that he had escaped the Kafkaesque frustrations of the military transport system, he could eat when he felt like it.

“What will you do when you get to London?” asked al-Mirsaad.

“I got a bunch of studio interviews to do,” he said. “You know, glam-orously wounded foreign correspondent stuff. I’ve promised to write up a couple of thousand words for their website, and I really want to push ahead with this book I’ve been thinking about. I wouldn’t be surprised, though, if they asked me to turn around and come right back. They lost a lot of people yesterday. Reporters in bureaus throughout the region. They’re gonna be hiring, but it’ll mean heading back here.”

“Do you want to?”

“I don’t know what I want. Something normal would be nice. Do you miss normal, Sadie? I do. I can’t go home, so all of the conventional nostalgia bullshit is out. Truthfully? I’d just like to sit on my busted ass somewhere, write my book, and, I dunno, look around and not see guys armed to the fucking teeth. How about you?”

“I am an Arab,” al-Mirsaad answered glumly. “I grew up surrounded by men who were armed to the teeth.”

“Hey, I grew up in Kentucky. Me too.”

The PA system announced that his flight to London was boarding, and Melton suddenly felt a soft pressure in his chest and throat.

“Well, Sadie. I gotta be going, bud. I might be back, but you know … I just want to say thanks for finding me. I think I might still be doing the zombie shuffle through TRANSCOM’s twilight zone if you hadn’t grabbed me up.”

Al-Mirsaad stuck out his hand and they shook, awkwardly because of Melton’s wounds.

“It was nothing, a trifling favor for a friend at the Beeb, and one I was happy to do, as it helped another friend … I hope we will stay friends, Bret. If we live.”

“Yup. A big if, Sadie. Take care. I’ll contact you through the network when I get settled.”

The Jordanian patted him gently on the arm and picked up his bags for the short walk to the air bridge. Most of the passengers lining up there were
civilians, their numbers split evenly between Arabs and Europeans, although, Melton reminded himself, they might well all be British citizens. Nobody looked happy to be traveling, either because of what they were heading toward—parts of England were under martial law and it was being strictly and harshly enforced—or perhaps because of a well-founded fear that they might never get there.

Thousands of people had died when their aircraft were knocked out of the sky by the same electromagnetic pulses the Israelis had set off to cripple their enemies.

Neither reporter spoke again until Melton had swiped his boarding pass. The BA hostess was as smooth and pleasant as ever, which only served to heighten the sense of brittle weirdness and impending doom.

“Good luck. And thanks again,” said Melton.

“A safe journey to you, my friend, God willing,” replied al-Mirsaad.

He was pathetically grateful for the business-class seat. It was like settling into an overstuffed hotel bed compared with the steel benches, hard plastic seats, and stinking kit bags on which he’d mostly sat while in transit. It was possible, while sipping at the complimentary orange juice and waiting to taxi, to imagine that things
were
entirely normal. The business-class section was full, but remained decadently spacious and agreeable. His fellow bizoids, with one exception, were all male. The one woman looked like a banker or lawyer, and had no sooner strapped in than she began opening files to work on. She plugged herself into an iPod and radiated a fierce repeller field lest anyone should attempt to approach or interrupt her. An old hand, then.

The man sitting next to him, in the window seat, nodded brusquely before returning to his BlackBerry. He kept stabbing at the keyboard without any observable result. “It was working this morning,” he kept muttering to himself. Melton ignored him all too easily. A hostess, noticing his injuries as he levered himself into place, offered extra pillows and a blanket to lie on. A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away he’d have derided such indulgences as snivel gear. It took him a long time, after getting out, to throw off some of the dumber attitudes of his time in service. He took the pillows and thanked her, settling into them after washing down a couple of painkillers with the last of the orange juice. As the engines spooled up, the captain came on to announce that they would be taking a very circuitous route to avoid any hazards from hostilities to the north. Melton didn’t bother to pay attention to the announcements. He didn’t care how they got out of this mess, only that they did so.

He was going to miss Sayad, and felt yet again that he was simply allowing events to sweep him along and away from another friend, one whose own future looked very bleak. Melton didn’t see anything good happening in this part of the world any time soon. There was no way the U.S. could sustain a presence here, but it remained an area of vital importance to the surviving great powers. How long could it be before Chinese and Indian and Russian warships replaced the U.S. Navy on permanent station in the Gulf? As his eyelids drooped and he tried to suppress the snoring he knew was going to piss off his fellow passengers, he tried to get his head around the strategic and economic wreckage of the Israeli strike, but he was too tired and the seat was too comfortable and before long he was asleep.

He woke briefly, thousands of miles later in Gibraltar, but popped another couple of pills, drank some water, and went back to sleep. After that he didn’t stir again until the plane began to descend. A stewardess appeared at his elbow to gently rouse him and the BlackBerry addict, and to ask that they put their seats into the upright position for landing.

“We’re in London?” he croaked.

The young woman, a rare beauty of Caribbean heritage by the look of her, seemed distracted and anxious.

“No.” She shook her head. “No. We’re stopping in Paris. It’s … unscheduled … but nothing to worry about. We’ll refuel and be on our way.”

That brought him awake.

“We won’t be going to London,” said his traveling companion, whom he’d avoided talking to so far.

“I’ve been out of it, sorry,” said Melton. “I snore. Has something happened?”

The man, a young, nondescript-looking character with one of those weird Amish-style beards, shrugged and held up a pair of earphones.

“Sennheiser sound-canceling technology,” he said. “Blocks out jet engines and loud snoring. Not a problem.”

Okay, so he wasn’t Amish, then.

“Britain’s closed its borders,” he explained. “They haven’t told us yet.” He waved a hand toward the front of the plane to indicate that he meant the flight crew. “But I snuck a look at a news feed in the toilet. Everything’s locked down. Air and sea ports, ferries, the Chunnel. All of it.”

Melton’s head was clearing slowly because of the painkillers in his bloodstream.

“Why?” he asked.

BlackBerry guy folded his arms in obvious disgust.

“Blair’s saying something about unrest spilling over the Channel. It’s rubbish
. I need to get home. Do you see any jihadi wack jobs on this plane? We’re businesspeople. This is just bullshit.”

“What unrest?” asked Melton. “I didn’t think those riots in Paris were so bad, considering.”

The man looked at him as if he were dealing with a retarded child. “You’re kidding me, right? You’ve been out in the boonies, have you? Out of contact? Paris is on fire, man. All of France is. It’s a civil war. And they’re sending us into the middle of it.”

April 14, 2003

“So, you missing Uncle Sugar yet? Nostalgia sucks the big one, don’t it?”

Caitlin’s voice cracked, and she smiled through split, swollen lips, with teeth stained cherry red by her own blood.