Without Warning (68 page)

He was getting ready to make a clean getaway when a Mack truck in an expensive-looking three-piece suit suddenly blocked his way.

“Mr. Kipper, the city engineer?”

Kip kept his face neutral, wondering if he was going to get into trouble for stealing the chocolate bar. As one of the city’s senior administrators he had unrestricted access to the conference floor—in case he had to speak urgently to any of the now-released city councillors—but he probably shouldn’t have been grazing at the buffet. It had been laid out for the delegates. He palmed the chocolate bar, or attempted to anyway.

“Oh, don’t sweat it, son. I have a sweet tooth myself.” The suit grinned. “Culver is the name. Jed Culver, with the Hawaiian delegation. And you’re James Kipper, aren’t you?”

“City engineer, yeah,” said Kipper, who felt the need to explain himself. “This, uh, this is for my daughter. She’s six and …”

Culver held up his hand and shook his head.

“Say no more. I have two of my own. Although they’ve moved on a bit in years now. Terrible teens, back in Honolulu, thank God. Listen, Mr. Kipper, I wonder if I might bother you for a few moments of your time.”

Feeling as guilty as hell over the chocolate ration bar, Kip didn’t feel that he could say no.

“Is there something I can help you with, Mr. Culver? I’m not a delegate. Not elected. I’m just the city engineer. I’m trying to keep things running.”

Culver nodded. “I know. That’s why I wanted to talk, briefly. But not here. Do you have an office? Or, even better, somewhere we could talk that isn’t likely to be bugged.”

Culver spoke in such a matter-of-fact way that the real meaning of his question took a second to register with Kip. He blinked and shook his head in surprise.

“I uh … well.”

“I have good reason for caution, sir. Doesn’t need to be anywhere special. Indeed, the less special the better. Somewhere you wouldn’t normally transact business. Somewhere your elected officials would be unlikely to frequent.”

“Somewhere not worth bugging?” said Kip.

“Yes,” nodded Culver.

Kipper shrugged. “Okay, I suppose so, if you want to follow me.”

“Tell you what. I understand that it may be an inconvenience for a busy man, but could you meet me in half an hour? Wherever you think best.”

Kipper wasn’t sure whether to be pissed off, intrigued, or worried. A little of each, perhaps. He gave Culver directions to an empty office on the twenty-ninth floor. An auditor had been working in there all last year, causing untold angst for all of the department heads. But he was gone now, and the office had not been reallocated. It was a bare space full of paper files awaiting the shredder.

Kipper had enough time to squeeze in a quick meeting with his own section heads, detailing their priorities for the day—sanitation and sewage were the new headaches—before excusing himself for ten minutes. To his surprise, he found Culver waiting for him in the empty office. He wasn’t entirely happy with that.

“Do you mind if I ask how you made it up here, Mr. Culver? I mean, you’re not really supposed to be on this floor.”

“Nope. But in my experience just looking like you should be somewhere is ninety percent of the battle won. And you don’t have any armed soldiers up on these floors, do you?”

Kipper released a deep breath from his nostrils.

“No. Not since they released the councillors. Military’s handling security downstairs, but the city looks after its own up here now.”

Culver seemed to chew this over.

“I hear tell you were the one who dragged this town through the worst of the aftermath. Heard you were the de facto mayor and governor.”

Kipper shrugged it off.

“City employs a lot of people, Mr. Culver. They all worked long days after the Disappearance. I wasn’t unique. There’s thousands of city and state government workers, thousands more in private firms, tens of thousands of individual citizens who all pitched in to help. Most of my people haven’t seen their families awake in a month.”

“And the military,” said Culver. “Do you mind if I ask how they … fitted in?”

Kipper snorted.

“Fitted in? More like stormed in. Was a time there I was seriously thinking about following one of my guys out the door. He quit after Blackstone arrested the councillors. Said it was fascism, no less. But his family came from Europe. I guess they had some history.”

“But you didn’t quit.”

“How could I? The army is good at some things. Not others. You want
something destroyed, they’re your guys. You want something saved, preserved, built, whatever, not so much. Believe me, Mr. Culver, I had my doubts. But this place would have fallen apart if enough of us just threw up our hands on a point of politics. And it did get sorted out in the end.”

Culver waited to see if Kipper claimed any credit for that. His sources told him the engineer was responsible for sorting out the “misunderstanding” between the city and Fort Lewis, and for ensuring that everybody moved on from it as quickly as possible. A remarkable piece of hog trading, in Jed’s considered opinion.

But the engineer said nothing. He didn’t even raise it.

Culver decided to nudge him.

“I have to say, Mr. Kipper, I am surprised it got sorted, as you put it. People must have been a tad upset with General Blackstone? I would have thought a lot of folks would have wanted him arrested and court-martialed. Or at least relieved of duty, or whatever they call it.”

Kipper shrugged.

“Look, it’s a tough call. Blackstone is an asshole. He shouldn’t have done what he did. But he gets as much credit for pulling this place through the last month as anyone. More than most, really. I guess unusual times call for unusual methods.”

Kipper checked his watch.

“Look, I don’t want to be rude, Mr. Culver, but is there some reason we had to arrange such a cloak-and-dagger meeting for a conversation you could have a hundred times over down on the conference floor?”

Jed smiled.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Kipper, I know you’re very busy. There was one thing. Have you ever dealt with a Major Ty McCutcheon?”

The screaming howl of turbines prompted Tusk Musso to dive for the floor, badly jarring his elbow and bruising a few ribs. Thunder struck the headquarters building. Windows shattered, and the floor seemed to jump beneath him as a computer screen crashed down off the desk. Smoke poured into the office from down the hallway, and dozens of phones rang as the base alert siren trumpeted the end of the world. The shouts of marines, sailors, and soldiers in and out of the building reached Musso dully through the ringing in his ears.

“Corpsman! Man down.”

“What the fuck what the
fuck
what the…”

“The armory now, Gutteres…”

Colonel Pileggi picked herself up, checked for injuries while dusting off, and reached for one of the two ringing phones. Musso grabbed the other one as Pileggi shouted into her handset.

“Commanding officer,” Musso yelled, finger to his ears. He heard an unfamiliar voice, gruff and powerful, as someone attempted to make himself heard over the crash of rockets and gunfire.

“Gunnery Sergeant Miles Price, base security, sir. Orders?”

“What’s our status, Gunny?” coughed Musso as he caught a lungful of dust and smoke.

The room glowed bright orange from the flames in the bay, bright enough to blot out the stars and illuminate the panic of the civilians on the vessels crammed together down there. Their cries and screams registered faintly in the small spaces between the crash and roar of battle.

“Got a battalion-size landing force in the bay, sir. They’ve split into two groups. One headed for the airfield, the other for your position. My marines are scattered all over the base. It’ll take at least fifteen minutes to get everyone up,” the gunny shouted.

Musso carried the phone with him over to the window, taking care not to present an easy target. He could see a column of six-wheeled armored vehicles and amtracs rolling out of the bow of the beached container ship. Muzzle flashes twinkled from their gun mounts as long ropy arcs of tracer fire reached out for targets unseen in the night.

“Try to set up an antitank team and hit that column headed for headquarters. Colonel Pileggi’s organizing a security force to handle the airfield. Get every swinging dick a weapon, I don’t care what branch they are or what their MOS is, I want everyone armed. Grab any willing civilians, too. Anyone who can and will pull a trigger. We’re in the shit deep, Gunny. You read me?” Musso asked.

“Yes, sir, we are indeed in the shit,” the gunny replied. “I’ll get on that antitank team.”

“I’ll keep someone on this line,” Musso promised. He turned to the navy lieutenant by the door. “Lieutenant McCurry, man this phone.”

“Aye, sir,” barked McCurry, taking the handset from him.

Tusk watched as Pileggi yelled into her phone. “No, hold those fuckers off the airfield, Sergeant. And if you’ve got civilians volunteering to fight, then let them. I don’t have time for any bullshit about whether or not it’s kosher, just do it!”

“Can you hold it?” Musso asked her as she slammed the receiver down.

“I have no idea, sir. I’m not over there, I’m here,” Pileggi said.

“Grab a couple of marines as close protection, a personal weapon, and go, Susan. You’re my man out there.”

She stood to attention and ripped out a salute. Then she was gone, barking out orders at men in the hallway he couldn’t see.

Turning back to the shattered window on the second floor of his headquarters building, Musso watched tracer fire flickering across the airfield, some of it going astray into the bay, skipping across the water. A C-5 Galaxy
was trying to climb off the runway and claw her way into the air. Ice water flooded Musso’s veins as tracer fire reached out from the perimeter of the airfield to pepper the fuselage of the massive cargo transport plane.

Climb,
Musso prayed to himself.
Climb.

“Sir,” McCurry shouted over the chaos. “I’m getting reports of two additional columns outside the base perimeter. Estimated time to contact is five minutes.”

The tracer fire lost interest in the Galaxy and refocused on earthbound targets. Musso allowed himself a sigh of relief.

A missile zipped into the flank of the cargo plane at the wing root and exploded. The lost wing folded up and back over the top of the C-5, shearing off the tail section as the fuel exploded, engulfing the dying aircraft.

“Mother. Fucker,” said Musso.

He watched the wreckage plummet toward a Carnival cruise ship, which was burning from a number of bomb strikes. Years later, when his body was stooped and his eyes dimmed by glaucoma, Musso would still wake at night and see children falling out of the belly of that burning Galaxy as it careened toward the ship.

“No,” Musso whispered. “No, God.”

The plane hit the bow of the cruise ship, shearing it off completely. Burning fuel and white-hot shrapnel shredded the upper decks. Adding to the carnage, an aircraft, a jet, swooped in low, strafing the growing funeral pyre in the bay, catching some burning passengers in midair as they flung themselves from the cruise ship and tried to find safety in the waters of Guantánamo Bay. Another container ship pushed past the wreckage for the beach only to be met by a couple of navy shore-patrol boats, gnats buzzing around a behemoth. Small-arms fire passed back and forth between the mayfly-quick adversaries and their lumbering prey, chopping up the water around the smaller boats where civilians were mixed in the fray.

“Got a firefight between base police and some infiltrators at the McDonald’s, sir,” McCurry said. “Another engagement is taking place up at base housing. Gunny Price says he’s only got a third of his force under arms and maybe two dozen civilians. That’s it.”

“Where’s that army commo puke?” Musso asked, as he stalked over the doorway. “Captain Birch!” he roared.

A scuffle of boots through the smoke-filled corridors produced a large, somewhat overweight man in army BDUs. “Sir.”

“We still have comms with Pearl, or the brigade in Panama?”

Birch seemed pale, a bit stunned.

“Comms with Pearl, Birch. Or the Canal. Get with the fucking program,”
Musso said, resisting the urge to slap the man silly. “I need air cover over our AO.”

“I’ll check.” Birch turned to leave. “Specialist Gibbs,” he called out, “see if Pearl is …”

Birch’s head exploded.

“Sniper!”

Pileggi, shepherded by two marines and a stray coast guard chief, made the airstrip on the bay’s western headland by virtue of a white-knuckle highspeed run in a little Trabant, a Cuban vehicle parked outside the headquarters block that one of the marines, a Sergeant Gutteres, hot-wired with practiced ease. At times tracer fire zipped and crackled all around them, while at others, on short stretches of road, everything seemed eerily still. As they screeched around the last curve before the hangar buildings at the edge of the field, Gutteres pointed skyward and her heart sank as she saw dozens of parachute canopies popped open high in the air. A few lines of orange and green fire flicked up to crosshatch the descending paratroopers, but not enough. It was a feeble, poorly guided effort compared with the volume of fire on the ground.