Without Warning (69 page)

Chief Lundquist, who had the wheel, swerved a few times to avoid burned-out vehicles and hastily erected firing positions before slamming on the brakes next to a long concrete pipe behind which a small group of marines seemed to be directing the defense of the airfield. Pileggi, still dressed in her office uniform, scrambled out and hurried over with her bodyguard right behind her. She was protected from the worst of the enemy’s ground fire by the giant pipe, which stood at least six feet high, but she crouched almost double anyway, running to avoid getting picked off from above. A few of the Venezuelans were shooting from small handheld weapons as they came down. The fire was inaccurate, but getting heavier.

“You Sergeant Carlyon?” she asked the senior noncom, throwing herself up against the pipe.

“Yes, ma’am,” he answered, reading her name tag and adding, “We spoke before, Colonel.”

“Okay, what’s your situation, Sergeant? I’m not going to run your fight for you. I’ll just see what I can do to help.”

Carlyon looked relieved.

“I have eight marines with me, Colonel. Only six have any ammo left. Around the base, I have less than fifty men. Some of them sailors. Some airmen. They’re not trained for this. Some MPs, who are.”

As he spoke, two of his men depleted their stocks even further by sniping at the Venezuelans dropping to earth beneath dozens of chutes.

“There’s at least a platoon of hostiles on the ground already,” explained the sergeant, raising his voice over the steady gunfire and more distant roar of the battle in the bay. “But they haven’t consolidated. I think they came ashore in a couple of inflatable hulls, probably got split up, and haven’t regrouped yet. We’ve got ‘em pinned down behind a couple of shipping containers on the far side of the strip. But tactical’s changing, ma’am.”

He looked upward, stepped away from the cover of the pipe, calmly raised his rifle, and put two shots into a paratrooper a hundred yards up and slightly north of them.

“Well, you got my guys, here,” said Pileggi. “Here, take my rifle, give it to one of your men. I’ll make do.”

She unholstered her pistol as Carlyon passed her M1 across to a grateful-looking marine.

“Thank you, Colonel. Much obliged.”

Just behind her, Lundquist raised a Remington shotgun and fired twice. She turned briefly to see a human leg falling from beneath a writhing, screaming paratrooper, not fifty yards away.

“You’re gonna need more men and guns,” she said. “You got a radio?”

Carlyon shook his head and handed her a cell phone.

“It’s still working. On and off.”

“Okay. I’ll see if I can round up some warm bodies. What happened to those civilians you had before?”

“They’re dead.”

Admiral Ritchie watched the four fifty-two-inch HDTV screens of the ad hoc war room of the re-formed Joint Chiefs of Staff at Fort Shafter. Center left displayed a real-time Keyhole satellite feed of the running battle at Guan-tánamo Bay. Center right displayed a live feed from some reporter on the scene, an embed from the government-run TVes network. He was covering Venezuelan marines as they tried to fight their way toward base headquarters and at that moment was speaking to camera, framed by the burning light of an amtrac. The satellite feed was choppy and slow, breaking into bursts of static, but Ritchie could see that he looked terrified. He was also providing a constant stream of very useful information that a small team of marines were feeding right back to their colleagues at Gitmo.

On the last screen, on the far left screen, President Hugo Chávez pumped his fist in the air as he shouted cadenced beats of Spanish at the microphone. A running subtitle of translation tried to keep up, but Ritchie had long since given up on reading it. Most of his attention was focused on a real-time videoconference with the surviving senior officer of the Nimitz Battle Group, Captain Don Taylor. Lights flickered behind the master and commander of the wounded USS
Nimitz
as he gave his report to General Tommy Franks.

“I’ve got two cats up, and two-thirds of my air wing operational. However, we’re still at half power and running on one screw. Additionally, the USS
Princeton
is trailing behind. We may have to scuttle her if we can’t get flooding stabilized,” Captain Taylor said.

“Captain”—Admiral Ritchie leaned forward—”you’ll transition into the Atlantic later this afternoon your time, correct?”

“Yes, sir. Barring any trouble at Gibraltar. The Royal Navy tell me they still have things under control, but Morocco is a little too close for comfort. I estimate that we can be in Cuban waters, earliest, ten days,” Taylor said.

General Franks shook his head. “This will be over long before then, Don.”

Captain Taylor nodded. The thin man didn’t appear to have an ounce of body fat on him. Most in the navy were, well, a little heavier than they ought to be, himself included.

“Don, do you think you can spare any elements of your battle group?” Ritchie asked. “Who can sprint away and arrive sooner?”

Captain Taylor rubbed the bridge of his nose, probably trying to clear his head or suppress a burning migraine, perhaps both. “Sir, if you think it will do some good, I’m sure the battle group is willing to make the sacrifice. However, I do not think we can suffer the loss of our remaining combat power without endangering either the
Nimitz
or the
Princeton.
Furthermore, I do have a convoy of my own refugee vessels trailing my battle group. Some of them have been vetted by our marine and navy boarding teams, some have not. There is no way to know whether or not one of them is a jack-in-the-box waiting to pop on us.”

Franks looked at Ritchie. “Do you think it’s worth it?”

Ritchie looked up at the paper map of the Atlantic area of operations. They were already falling back to paper, acetate, and colored markers to indicate their force dispositions. It wasn’t for lack of computing power. It was lack of secure communications and data sources that forced the fallback to more primitive methods.

“No, sir,” Ritchie concluded.
“Nimitz
should continue as planned. We’ll have to try something else.”

Franks turned to the commander of the U.S. Army in the Pacific, who had sat silently during the exchange. “Francis, what is your take on Guantánamo?”

General Murphy snorted. “They’re well and truly fucked, sir. Civilians mixed into it and us with our cocks in our hands … Musso is a smart man. He’ll see it pretty clear as well.”

“You mean surrender,” Franks said. “Right?”

Murphy couldn’t bring himself to say it. He folded his arms and nodded.

“Sir.” An army specialist approached the officers. “Gitmo on the line.”

Susan Pileggi exhaled, and with the hot, stale breath went some of the tension cramping her arms and shoulders. Not that she
relaxed.
That would have been impossible. But as she saw the end coming, with no chance of escape or redemption, she accepted it for the first time, and some of the fear and the strain of the last few weeks ebbed away.

She waited in the gun pit. The muzzle of her M1, retrieved from the body of the marine she’d lent it to a few hours ago, tracked the small group of Venezuelan paratroopers as they cautiously rounded the huge mound of burning rubble a hundred yards away. It had been a chemical storehouse; for what she had no idea. But the stench was vile enough to blot out the smells of the base as it died around her. Burned meat, corpses crawling with carpets of black flies, the unwashed bodies of the men around her, napalm smoke and festering wounds—the evil stink of the warehouse blotted them all out.

“Sergeant Carlyon. A head count.”

“Twenty-three friendly, ma’am. As of five minutes ago.”

Pileggi nodded. They were spread out over a hundred-yard front, some fucking the earth in a drainage ditch, others taking cover behind broken machinery or piles of concrete barriers. They held on.

The enemy numbered in the hundreds now, but they still hadn’t forced the issue, and in this failure had probably died in greater numbers than was necessary.
They could have plowed us under an hour back,
she thought. Carlyon popped up and squeezed off a three-round burst, and the reassuring boom of Lundquist’s shotgun followed almost immediately. The volume of return fire was heavy, but poorly directed.

She followed the advance of the small party attempting to flank them to the north. Carlyon was aware of them, too.

Gitmo was dying. The little base had done so well to hold off against the
sneak attack, but the colonel knew it would be overrun, probably in the next few hours, and her small band of brothers was sure to die with her. She was aware, without turning to look at them, of the men in the firing pit next to her. Lundquist was hunkered down reloading his shotgun next to Jimbo Jamieson, a civilian who’d joined them in the middle of some of the worst fighting, pulling up in a Humvee full of sailors, carrying two boxes of ammo and, most precious of all, spare barrels for a squad automatic weapon. Jamieson was watching the enemy creeping through the dark, too, never taking his eyes off them as they crept closer.

Even while concentrating so fiercely on the flankers, Pileggi remained unnaturally aware of other details.

A patch of red hair peeking out beneath the curve of a helmet. The straight line of a bayonet. A muted cough in the next foxhole, barely audible under the freight-train scream of battle all around.

Their lives had only one meaning now: to delay a catastrophe that was otherwise inevitable. Attackers were pouring onto the headland from three sides, and they were going to take the strip. When they did, more would doubtless fly in, falling upon Guantánamo’s defenders and the unarmed refugees with equal ferocity.

God only knew what sort of a bloodswarm that’d unleash, and Pileggi wasn’t sorry to miss it. She’d already seen civilian boats targeted out on the bay, for no apparent reason other than that they made easier, more pleasing prey than armed marines and soldiers.

The atrocities, witnessed by everyone she’d managed to gather for the airfield defense, had doubtlessly hardened their resolve. Dozens of dead paratroopers lay on the tarmac as testimony to that.

She laid the cold iron sight of her weapon on the center of the group of men, who were now coming at them with much greater confidence and speed. They hadn’t seen Carlyon’s ambush yet. Good. Half a second telescoped out toward infinity. Susan Pileggi had plenty of time to examine the poor standard of their uniforms and the torn rubber shoes of the man in the lead. It spoke of a badly planned, hastily thrown-together attack. A three-legged dog suddenly bounded in front of the advancing Venezuelans, spinning in circles, howling as though possessed by a demon. It was probably mad.

“Fire.”

The dog exploded into a ball of hair and gore as the SAW opened up a short distance away. She heard cursing and saw Lundquist adjust his aim up a little. The attackers dispersed like startled rabbits, those who could anyway. An invisible wave swept over at least half of them, cutting some down, throwing others into the air, completely disassembling one from the groin up.

“Pour it on, boys!” Carlyon yelled over the uproar.

The dense crump of exploding hand grenades momentarily smothered the rattle and snarl of gunfire. The battle for Gitmo, a vast conflagration, fell away from the minds of the men around her. The whole world was now contained on the small stage of this burning, rubble-strewn airstrip. They started to take return fire from the enemy dug in all around them, and someone screamed as a round took him in the face. Pileggi squeezed off discrete shots from the rifle, picking her targets, waiting until she had a clear line, and sending two or three rounds downrange. The bullets hit hard, punching out chunks of meat and bone when they struck. Pileggi dropped three men in just a few seconds before having to duck behind the shattered masonry she’d built up in front of her firing position.

Lundquist cried out and flew backward. Gouts of dark red blood looped gracefully into the sky. The ground shook and heaved violently as mortar bombs began dropping on their position. None of them had any overhead protection.

“They’re coming!” screamed Carlyon. “Get ready!” He emptied a whole magazine to give himself and his men some cover. The Venezuelans had gathered themselves at last and were charging at them en masse, running into their own mortar barrage with bayonets drawn. She was almost certain she heard a bugle faintly beneath the din of battle.

Pileggi changed magazines, rapidly, mechanically, firing again as quickly as possible. Four of the attackers fell in front of their pit. Two more leaped, sailed over the edge, and threw themselves onto Jimbo Jamieson, who swung wildly at the closest with a lump of wood. It connected with a hollow thunk that Pileggi heard quite clearly despite all the noise. She swung her own gun like a club, too, driving the heavy stock into the face of the other attacker. The man’s nose collapsed with sickening ease as blood erupted from torn flesh.

Carlyon fell on her, driving her down.

She felt his dead weight, the terrible slackness of his limbs, and knew he was gone.

She tried to lift him clear so she could get back to her firing position, but he was too heavy. It was worse, much worse than having a drunken lover fall asleep on top of you. It was crushing, painful.

And then he was gone, the weight suddenly flying away, and she was looking up into the muzzle of a gun, wondering what it was, and realizing just before it flashed white.