Without Warning (9 page)

Musso cleared his throat.

“Major, my own observers reported some of your men … heading north …”

“Yes,” he said bitterly. “They abandoned their posts.”

“And they ran into the haze?”

Núñez nodded, almost looking satisfied.

“Yes. There was no need to shoot them. They have gone, too.”

“I see,” said Musso. “And what would you like us to do?”

Núñez shifted uncomfortably in his seat, looking around, surprised at last to find himself in the devil’s lair. He sighed.

“We would like help. We are not a tin pot dictator’s ship,” he said, forcing Musso to suppress a grin for the first time that morning. “We have been intercepting your satellite news services. We know this is beyond the normal. Something terrible and large is happening. We need to know what. To prepare.”

Musso folded his arms and let his chin rest on his chest.

“This ‘curtain’ of air,” he said after a brief moment of quiet. “Is it stable? Is it moving, expanding at all?”

Núñez appeared deeply troubled by the question. “Like I said. It is a giant curtain and like a curtain, it moves as if blown by the wind, sweeping over the countryside like a curtain blows in a window.”

Musso had to suppress a shiver that started at the base of his spine and ran up into his shoulders. The idea of this thing moving an inch was disturbing at a cellular level.

“Major, how much is it moving? Have you been able to determine any limits?”

Núñez bobbed his head up and down.

“It seems to … billow … is that your word? It seems to billow like a sail, up to fifteen or twenty meters. It seems random. Just like a curtain or the branches of a tree moving in the breeze. But if it sweeps over you … poof! You are gone.”

“Well, we need to know more about it, about the parameters under which it operates. But neither of us can send any more of our people in,” said Musso.

“I know,” Núñez agreed. “We have watched your planes and ships, no? The pilots and sailors, they have been taken, too.”

“What about a Predator?” suggested Stavros. “I understand there’s a unit on base. The effect doesn’t seem to interfere with electronics. Perhaps we could send one up and into the affected area.”

Musso gave Núñez an inquiring look.

“How d’you feel about that, Major? We could send an unmanned drone up, but we’d be violating your airspace. I would need a written authorization from your senior officer.”

Part of him marveled at how deeply ingrained the ass-covering reflex was, but what the hell was he supposed to do?

“I am the senior officer, now,” said Núñez as he began patting his pockets.
“My colonel was in Havana, and Lieutenant Colonel Lorenz drove into the haze before we realized what it was. His car went off the road and burned.”

Stavros handed him a pen and notepad. The Cuban began scribbling immediately. Nobody spoke while he wrote. Musso walked over to the window. It was coming on for midday and the sun beat down fiercely on the base. A flagpole across the compound outside cast only a short dagger of shadow, the Stars and Stripes hanging limp in the humidity. Guantánamo was not a major fleet base. It had been established as a coaling station, not the most glamorous of postings, long before it became a famous prison camp. Down in the bay, a couple of tugs and a single minesweeper lay at anchor close to shore. It was a scene entirely normal, even banal.

“Here,” said Núñez, handing the slip of paper to Stavros. “You may countersign as a witness. I have authorized Brigadier General Musso to deploy surveillance assets into Cuban territory on a temporary basis, with myself to administratively supervise such deployments in each and every instance.”

“Fine,” said Musso.

In fact there were any number of red flags sticking out of such an arrangement, and under normal circumstances Núñez would have guaranteed himself a trip to prison, or even a blindfold and last cigarette, by writing out such an order. If he was willing to put his nuts in the grinder, Musso could hardly quibble.

“Goddamn.”

Lieutenant Colonel Stavros was the first to speak, and he said it all.

“Goddamn is right,” agreed Musso.

“Madre de Dios,
“ muttered Núñez.

His very presence in the situation room would have been unthinkable only hours earlier, and two heavily built MPs were shadowing his every move, but Musso wasn’t expecting any trouble. Nor was he expecting any repercussions from having allowed an enemy officer into one of the nerve centers of the U.S. military to watch some of its newest technology in action. There had been some quiet and very forceful dissent from the army’s senior representatives on base, a military police colonel and a signal corps major, no less. But they had been overruled with extreme prejudice.

“Empty,” said Núñez. “Completely empty.”

“Goddamn,” whispered Stavros again. A single bead of sweat trickled down his temple even though the blue-lit room, buried thirty meters below ground, was nearly as cold as a beer fridge. Fear sweat, sour and musky, filled
the space. Holguín, a city of more than three hundred souls, scrolled down the plasma screen in front of them. It lay nearly a hundred klicks away to the north, well within the Predator’s range. But Musso intended to push the aircraft on, deeper into Cuban airspace. It was going to go down in hostile territory. Or what had been hostile territory this morning. Musso was already thinking of it as no-man’s-land now. Quite literally.

The sysop controlling the surveillance bird had dropped its altitude to three hundred meters, a height at which the Predator’s cameras could easily pick out very fine detail on the streets below. In fact, so low was she flying and so close had the operator pulled in the view that the real-time feed was a blur, and Musso, like the other observers, was instead examining slo-mo replays on the other monitors. In one, the Calixto García Park, right in the middle of the city’s downtown area, rolled into view. Another showed the giant Cervecería Bucanero brewery—a joint venture with the Canadian brewer Labatt. It was aflame, but nobody was fighting the blaze. On some monitors beautifully decaying Spanish colonial architecture sat cheek by jowl with aesthetically worthless cement office blocks and warehouses. Winding streets gave onto cobblestone plazas and the town’s surprisingly rich cultural district, wherein half a dozen museums, galleries, and libraries all stood.

Not a solitary human figure moved anywhere.

“You know what else I don’t see,” said Musso. “Dogs. Or birds. Or animals of any kind.”

“Damn,” said Stavros. “You’re right.”

Unlike the satellite images they’d been watching on the European and Asian news services, the Predator fed live video, and although the streets of Holquín were not nearly as crowded with vehicular traffic as an American city of comparable size, they were still choked with the wreckage of hundreds of cars, many of them burning, which had apparently all lost their drivers at the same time. A thickening layer of smoke hung over the city, stirred only slightly by a gathering breeze.

“General Musso, sir?”

“Yes, son,” Musso answered without looking away from the eerie scenes.

“I have PACOM on line for you, sir.”

Musso accepted a pair of headphones with a mike attached, fitting them on and walking over to a far corner.

“This is Musso,” he said, quietly.

“General,” came a brusque reply in a rather refined New England accent. “Admiral James Ritchie here. Glad to hear you’re still with us. You seem to be on the front line of this … phenomenon.”

“Close enough, sir. It’s touched down about seventy klicks north of here. Admiral, if you don’t mind me asking, do you have information about the situation in CONUS? All we’re getting is the news feeds out of Europe and Asia.”

“No,” complained Ritchie. “We’re not doing much better. Some of my people have managed to take control of the Keyhole over Havana. That’s what I’m pushing through to you now, but we’ve got nothing from home yet. I take it there’s no chance we’ll get a real pair of eyeballs on this today?”

Musso shook his head, holding the earphones in place as he did so. The set was way too small for him and kept slipping off.

“No, sir. Whatever this thing is, it’s specifically targeted for an antipersonnel effect. We lost a few people to it before we realized. The Cubans lost a lot more, for what it’s worth. But there seems to be no interference with electronic signals or equipment. I guess it’s something akin to a neutron bomb. Takes out the people and leaves the infrastructure in place.”

Even as he said it, the rational part of his mind rebelled. He was talking about his wife and children. They were part of the “antipersonnel effect.” They had to have “shimmered away,” just like all of Núñez’s men. Just like everyone north of here.

They’ll be fine,
he repeated over and over.
They’ll be fiine and they’ll be home soon.

Ritchie’s voice crackled in the headset, and Musso wondered if he’d spoken too soon about signal interference, but the audio came good again.

“Okay, well, have a look at the video my people are sending you. There’s about twelve minutes’ worth. Then we’ll talk again. I’m going to call a video-conference of the … the available theater commands in twenty minutes.”

The admiral sounded like an old man.

He’d have family at home, too. But this was worse than losing a family. Much, much worse.

The videoconference, hosted out of Pearl, drew in high-level participants from all the theater commands, including himself as the senior officer “available” from NORTHCOM. That’s how they were putting it. Not “surviving,” just “available.” For Musso, the fact that he was sitting in was a bad, bad sign.

He was enthroned behind the desk of the “unavailable” commander of Guantánamo Naval Station, in a small, bare office just off the base war room. Beads of moisture sweated from gray concrete walls, and no personal touches softened the utilitarian space. Even the Sony plasma screens on the desk had
been set up by a couple of navy techs ten minutes earlier, to give him some privacy during the linkup. One panel was layered with multiple windows running civilian news feeds and restricted military data channels. In one of them he saw live top-down footage of Washington, with English-language subtitles laid in over the original Cyrillic script. There was no explanation for the Russian source material. It might have been hacked, or purchased, or simply offered for free. Another small riddle to add to the all-enveloping mystery of why the city in the satellite footage was entirely devoid of human life. At least half of Washington was visible in the pop-up window. Musso could see dozens of fires burning out of control, unattended by a single soul. It was amazing how the human mind could adapt to the most irrational, outrageous insults. He’d already accepted, down in his bones, that what had happened was real, and that there would be no reversing it. But his balls still tried to crawl up into his belly as he considered the vision of a depopulated American capital. Perhaps it was the Russian captioning.

“Links secure.”

The disembodied female voice could have originated anywhere, but Musso supposed it belonged to a comms specialist somewhere in Pearl. The screen devoted to the conference divided in two, with the face of Admiral James Ritchie taking up half the real estate, while four smaller windows carried the heads or acting heads of the other unified theater commands. Apart from General Jones, the Marine Corps officer in charge of U.S. forces in Europe, Musso didn’t know any of them personally. But of course he knew
of
Tommy Franks, the CENTCOM boss. The long, weathered face was famous the world over as commander of the Coalition arrayed against Saddam Hussein. Musso could only imagine what sort of pressure he must be under right now. Franks had a naturally melancholy appearance to begin with, and Musso thought it even more deeply lined and puffy-eyed than normal. By way of contrast, a fresh-faced woman, Lieutenant Colonel Susie Pileggi, occupied the frame set aside for the senior “available” officer of the Southern Command. With SOUTHCOM’s main HQ in Miami lying well behind the event horizon, seniority fell to her as acting commander of Joint Task Force Bravo in Honduras. She was based at Soto Cano Air Base, about ten miles south of Comayagua. Like Musso himself, and Admiral Ritchie, whose superior, Admiral Fargo, had been in Washington this morning, Pileggi had found herself thrust into the rumble seat by the absence of her own boss back in the U.S. It reminded him of war games in which he’d played a very minor role back at the start of his career, role-playing a massive Soviet nuclear strike that all but destroyed the United States and her government.

Franks was the ranking officer among them, but he deferred to Ritchie, who wasn’t burdened with managing a looming war in the Middle East, and who had the full resources of PACOM at his disposal. The admiral, like all of them, appeared tense, and when he spoke it was with a clipped tone that Musso recognized. He’d heard the same serrated edge on his own words whenever he’d opened his mouth today.

“I’ll recap what
we do
know,” said Ritchie, “before moving on to the much greater issue of what we don’t.”

Musso watched four heads, including his own, nod in acknowledgment.

“As of three hours, fourteen minutes ago, an event of unknown origin appears to have wiped human habitation from an area estimated at just over four million square miles …”

Musso found his throat closing involuntarily. His wife and children were deep inside that four million square miles. His whole country was, close enough. His life.

“We have not yet mapped the exact perimeter of the effect,” Ritchie continued. “But we have good estimates that it lies in a
very
rough ovoid shape that covers ninety percent of the contiguous U.S. mainland states, half of Canada, and all of Mexico above a line extending from a point a few miles north of Chilpancingo on the west coast to Chetumal on the east and extending through the Gulf to transect Cuba seventy klicks north of Guantánamo. Of the big mainland U.S. cities, only Seattle appears to lie outside the area. The governor’s office in Olympia has declared a state of emergency, imposed a curfew, and called out the guard.”