Without Warning Part 3

Yost fixed him with a killing stare and waited a full three seconds before answering.

"As. Soon. As. Possible."

A further glare delivered as a broadside to most of the room cut off any more interruptions.

"As you know, communications links to North America have been severed, not just from CENTCOM, but more generally, across both the civilian and military spectrums," said Yost. "Answering speculation as to why, how, and by whom is not my responsibility today. It may be yours, but you won't get your answers here. CENTCOM is endeavoring to reestablish contact as quickly as possible. We have already confirmed links with the Pacific, European, and, I emphasize, some elements of the Northern Command. For those of you who do not know, NORTHCOM is the unified military command responsible for operations in the U.S., Mexico, Canada, and the northern Caribbean."

Melton didn't bother to jot down the explanation. He was familiar with all of the U.S. commands, having worked in each of them at some time, but he did note that Yost didn't claim to be in contact with NORTHCOM proper, just "elements" of it. That could mean a big a.s.s-kicking setup like Fort Lewis, outside of Seattle, or it might mean he'd phoned a guard post somewhere on the outskirts of Juneau or Guantanamo.

"Have you seen the photos, Colonel? The French satellite photos? Of your cities. Can you tell us what has happened to them?"

Melton recognized the voice of Sayad al-Mirsaad, the al-Jazeera correspondent who was forever in danger of being thrown off the base. Yost leveled the same robotic stare at him that he'd used to silence the Italian provocateur, but Melton knew his Jordanian colleague wouldn't be so easily cowed. Al-Mirsaad remained on his feet, hands on hips, almost inviting him to reach over and take a swing.

"They are gone, Colonel. They are all gone. An act of G.o.d, no less. How could it be otherwise?"

Yost jumped in before a flood tide of voices could drown him out.

"It could very easily be anything but, Mr. al-Mirsaad. You are not there. You haven't seen anything for yourself. All you know is that you can't get a phone call through, and somebody is selling very expensive pictures of what looks to me like computer-generated video game imagery. If I were you I'd go read your H. G. Wells before I pushed the panic b.u.t.ton, sir."

Melton smirked quietly as he filled his notepad with shorthand. He had to score that one to Yost, although the cla.s.sical sci-fi reference seemed lost on the Jordanian as well as most of the other foreign journalists in the room. For himself, he didn't mind a bit of trashy reading when he was stretched out in business cla.s.s, thirty thousand feet up. But he lived and worked in the real world, just like the men and women he wrote about, and while the Army Times correspondent couldn't possibly imagine what sort of technical cl.u.s.ter-f.u.c.k or psy-war hoax they were dealing with, he had no doubt the explanation was more prosaic than alien s.p.a.ce bats or the hand of G.o.d.

He hadn't had time to view the still shots on BBC World. He'd been too busy trying and failing to get through to the head office back in Virginia. If he had to make a bet, however, he'd lay his money on some kind of killer software virus, probably written up by guerrilla hackers in Russia or Malaysia as a protest against the imminent war, not to mention as a personal shot at glory in the bizarro underground. A hit like this, just days before the start of the war, would instantly transform some zitty college dropout into a hyper-celebrity superhacker. A pity for them they'd never be able to cash in with Nike endors.e.m.e.nts or a c.o.ke ad. Best they could hope for was a virtual hand job on some malware chat site. f.u.c.kwits. Just a few months ago he'd freelanced a three-thousand-word feature on digital security for Stratfor.com that the Times didn't want. He'd come away with mixed feelings: utter contempt for the social misfits and losers who were the creators of so many of the most destructive programs, and an unshakable certainty that one day one of them was going to pull some stunt that did real-world damage to real-world lives. Perhaps this was it.

Somebody from Agence France-Presse jumped to his feet demanding to know-the French reporters always sounded like they were demanding this or that-how the Coalition expected to maintain the integrity of its communications in any conflict with Iraq, given the "total collapse" of its network this morning. It was a good question, one Melton had wondered about, and he was surprised to see that Yost looked almost relieved to get it.

"Our theater-level networks remain fully functional, intact, and secure," he said. "General Franks is in complete control of all Coalition forces in situ. That is simply not an issue. The U.S. and its allies are ready and willing to carry out any order from their national command authorities. Whatever the mission, we will accomplish it. Thank you. This briefing is at an end. You will be kept informed of any developments via the media center."

Yost nodded curtly, gathered up his papers, and walked away from the rostrum as hundreds of seated reporters suddenly leapt to their feet to hurl questions at him. Melton stood with them. In the sudden outburst all he'd heard was a single question shouted by Sayad al-Mirsaad before anyone else.

"What national command authority? They're gone ..."

It's an intensely frustrating experience for a newsman to find himself cut off from the biggest story of the day, and Bret Melton felt as though he was cut off from the biggest story of all time. That's not to say that there was nothing to report from Qatar. The press conference had broken up in chaos, and the headquarters of the Coalition forces was seething with all of the mad energy of a giant ants' nest that had been rudely kicked open. But in spite of all the activity as the military spooled up its response to whatever had happened on the other side of the globe, Melton knew that a more immediate story was available a short plane ride away: the inevitable eruption of the Arab world when it realized that America was gone.

It was unbelievable, insane, and completely f.u.c.king outrageous.

It was gone.

He'd eaten nearly half a roll of antacid pills in the last hour as he tried to accept the situation. Sitting by himself in a crowded canteen roaring with the voices of dozens of reporters who'd crowded in for the free Wi-Fi and chilled air, Melton had surfed the web frantically looking for something, anything that might expose the morning's news as a gigantic fraud. All he managed to do was convince himself that n.o.body, no state or group and certainly no individual , could pull off such an enormous scam. The disappearance was real.

He thumbed another couple of Rolaids into his mouth, sucking at them despondently as he clicked through a series of windows. News reports. Canadian TV shots. Webcam feeds. He'd searched dozens of chat sites, which had "lost" most of their partic.i.p.ants hours ago, their last messages often ending in midsentence. It was a visit to an online gaming site that convinced him, however. He had a little-used subscription to Blizzard.net that he'd set up when researching a piece about the possibility of using multi-player combat sims as a recruiting tool. Everywhere he went in the virtual worlds, he found CGI avatars standing mutely, awaiting instructions from their creators. Beneath them, in the small windows given over to character dialogue, there were reams of increasingly bemused, uneasy, and then fearful comments from players who'd logged on from areas outside North America. Most tellingly, almost n.o.body was now online, the survivors having abandoned the game servers for news sites or perhaps even the real world.

"A dark day, my friend. A very dark day."

Melton looked up from the eerie stillness of a window running a multi-player version of Diablo. Sayad al-Mirsaad, the al-Jazeera correspondent, stood over him.

"Do you mind?" he asked, indicating the seat in front of Melton.

"Of course not," he said distractedly. "Sit down, Sadie."

His Jordanian colleague had given up protesting the American's use of the slightly offensive nickname, finally accepting some time ago that it was meant affectionately. He was regularly called much worse by some of Melton's countrymen.

"I can see from your face you are a believer now, yes?" said al-Mirsaad without a hint of irony. He and Melton were both educated men, both men of strong faith, and they had pa.s.sed many late hours in Qatar discussing theology and politics.

The former ranger shrugged and let his hand fly up in a gesture that was part resignation, part expression of utter futility. He didn't reply. Around him the reporters roared on, all holding forth on their own ideas and bulls.h.i.+t conspiracy theories. An unpleasant energy pervaded the room, setting his teeth on edge. In contrast, al-Mirsaad appeared to be almost as depressed as he was.

"Not everyone will think it's a bad day, Sadie," Melton said at last. "Some a.s.shole's gonna be sending a lot of extra prayers upstairs tonight, thanking their G.o.d for getting rid of the great Satan."

He watched al-Mirsaad closely, but he seemed almost as upset as any American.

"Then they would be fools," replied the Jordanian. "Ultimately everything is G.o.d's will, but this is not His work. In the affairs of men, the will of Allah is known through the actions of men. This ... this is something else."

"I think so, too." Melton nodded. "But it doesn't mean ..."

"Hey, shut the f.u.c.k up!" somebody yelled from across the room. "It's Saddam."

The name acted like a spell, laying a hush over the room as Melton twisted around in his plastic chair to get a view of a television screen high on the wall behind him. The Iraqi leader appeared there, beaming like a pirate king who'd fallen a.s.s-backward into a huge pile of both kinds of booty. The electronic watermark in the top right-hand corner of the screen belonged to the al-Jazeera network, and the report was in Arabic.

"What's it saying?" somebody asked. Melton glanced back at al-Mirsaad for a translation, but before he could answer, an educated English voice rang out over the heads of the crowd. A handsome, well-groomed young man with South Asian features and an impeccable Etonian accent stood on a chair to get a clear view of the TV. Melton thought he recognized him. A BBC producer.

"It's saying Hussein appeared briefly before a crowd at one of his palaces about forty minutes ago," the man called out.

The footage showed a beaming dictator. Melton thought he was smiling so much that if he'd been a cartoon character the top of his head would have fallen off. Dressed in army greens and sporting a black beret, he fired six rounds from a pistol into the air as a small coterie of unctuously smiling generals watched and a no-doubt-handpicked crowd exploded into spasms of joy and tyrannophilia. Hussein began talking and an Arab voice-over cut in, after a few seconds, paraphrasing him. The English producer translated as the room full of journalists remained unnaturally still and quiet.

"He's saying that Allah the merciful, the Almighty, has swept the crusaders from the very heart of their castle ... from the very face of the earth which they defiled with their presence. He's calling on General Franks to come out of his spider hole, to fight right now. He's demanding that all of the Arab world rise up and throw out the invaders ... and their dogs and puppets in Riyadh and Kuwait and Qatar ... and he's promising to lead a coalition of the fedayeen, the honorable, to drive the infidel and the apostate out of the holy lands."

The Iraqi leader punched out a few more gunshots before spreading his arms wide and retreating inside the palace. Probably to haul a.s.s to an underground bunker before a Tomahawk caught him out in the open, thought Melton. He raised an eye at al-Mirsaad, and the Jordanian nodded, confirming the accuracy of the BBC man's translation. Within a second the room was in an uproar again, even louder and somehow denser this time. Melton s.h.i.+fted in his seat and rolled his shoulders in a vain attempt to shrug off a growing sense of frustration.

He had no family back in the States. He was an only child, and his parents, who'd had him late in life, were both dead. For the first time in what felt a long and lonesome existence, he was glad to be on his own in the world. His work didn't lend itself to stable relations.h.i.+ps, and although he'd never had trouble finding women to date, none had ever lasted beyond a few weeks. Now, perversely, he was thankful for that. What must it be like for those poor f.u.c.kers around him who had family back home? A cursory glance around the canteen told him they were the ones whose voices were loudest, and whose faces were the most strained.

"What will you do, Bret?" asked al-Mirsaad.

He was about to throw out the standard reply of "my job" when it occurred to him what a ridiculous answer that would be. Did he even have a job anymore? His month's salary and travel allowance were due to be automatically deposited overnight. Would they go through? He had no idea.

"I don't know," he answered honestly, raising his voice to be heard over the tumult. "What about you?"

Al-Mirsaad seemed almost ashamed.

"I have an a.s.signment in Palestine," he said. "They are celebrating there. Dancing in the streets. A big party. But soon I think there will be fighting, no?"

"Fighting?" muttered Bret Melton, as he contemplated the loss of his whole world, and the prospect of what remained falling to pieces beneath his feet. "I reckon so."

Pitie-Salpetriere Hospital, Paris.

A harried-looking man wearing a white coat over a dark suit appeared at the door and pushed past Maggie. Poleaxed by the TV news, she barely noticed him. The physician seemed to do his level best to ignore all of them, including Caitlin, even as he questioned her. A name tag on his white jacket read COLBERT.

"Any pain? Discomfort? Anything?" he asked in French, addressing the query to his watch, which he was examining as though it was the most fascinating trinket in the world.

"Yes, Doctor," she replied, in the same language. "When I tried to turn my head. My neck is very sore and I feel ..."

She stopped short. To judge by the wide-eyed surprise on Monique's face, the young woman had not known she could speak French.

s.h.i.+t.

"Yes?" he asked, still in French. "You feel what?"

"My neck ... is very stiff and sore," she said, slowly, in English. "It hurts so much to turn it, I get sick. And I have a terrible ache in my head all the time."

Monique's hand fell away from hers. The young woman stared at her as if she had grown a new limb. The others were still fixated on the BBC. More commercial satellite imagery, from all over the North American continent, was becoming available every minute. Forty-five minutes after the short burst of white noise that shut down all communication with the richest, most powerful nation in the world-and big chunks of the countries bordering her to the north and south-the truth was unavoidable. They were gone.

Caitlin had woken into some sort of Kafkaesque nightmare, and for a moment she clutched at the hope that it might just be an actual nightmare, or even a psychotic break, perhaps the result of an acquired brain injury.

"But you told us you could not speak French," Monique said.

"f.o.o.kin' 'ell, lookit that."

"Ms. Mercure, I'm afraid I have some bad news for you ..."

Dr. Colbert was still mechanically checking his watch.

No s.h.i.+t, Sherlock, thought Caitlin.

Monique, like the doctor, was also phase-locked in her own little world.

"But you told us. You told us you could not speak French."

Caitlin stared at her, as the world broke up into jagged mirror shards of meaning and insanity. She improvised as best she could.

"I don't speak it very well. It's embarra.s.sing to even try. You guys are like so hard-core about it, with all the eye rolling and the shrugging. I mean, you know, lighten up."

The doctor saved her by cutting her off at that point, speaking in English.

"Excuse me. But my patient is very ill. Now is not twenty-questions time. Now is..."

"f.o.o.k me!"

Auntie Celia's extra-loud cry finally brought everyone's attention back to the TV, where a top-down image of Manhattan was displayed. Caitlin momentarily thought it might have been archival footage of the 9/11 attacks. Great plumes of black smoke curled away from collapsed high-rise buildings that burned at their cores like active volcanoes. But she quickly saw that there were too many of them, too widely spread over the island, at least eight or nine that she could count immediately.

"... if repeated across the country, the death toll might run into the millions," read the anchorwoman.

"Everyone's gone," said Maggie in a flat voice. "This is f.u.c.ked. Where have they gone?"

"... At any one time many thousands of aircraft are aloft over the U.S., many of them above densely populated cities."

The coverage switched to grainy video taken from a weathercam, somewhere high above Manhattan. As Caitlin watched, numb and disbelieving, a Singapore Airlines jumbo jet plowed into the side of the Chrysler Building, one wing spinning offscreen.

Something snagged in Caitlin's conscious mind. Something that she had almost missed.

"I'm ill?" she asked, suddenly picking up on the qualification the doctor had made. "I'm sick? Not just injured?"

Irrationally, she reached for the thought, hoping it might explain the psychotic bulls.h.i.+t on the television.

Dr. Colbert nodded distractedly. Now that he was watching the TV he seemed unable to wrench his attention away from it. The screen switched to a series of shots detailing the moments just before and after a giant tanker slammed into a wharf in a city she didn't recognize. Two frames showed it heading straight in to the dockside. The next two captured the impact, with the front quarter of the supertanker crumpling back in on itself while the water around the vessel churned white and dockside cranes began to topple. A single frame caught the moment of detonation amids.h.i.+ps, a blossom of white light spilling from the ruptured hull. And then the entire length of the supertanker was consumed by the birth of a dwarf star.

Maggie started swearing at the TV again, a stream of disconnected curses. Auntie Celia softly repeated the same thing over and over again.

"f.o.o.kin' 'ell... f.o.o.kin' 'ell..."

Every time she said it, she unfolded and refolded her arms, like a malfunctioning animatronic figure. Monique, however, was refusing to even look at the screen anymore.

"You said you could not speak French at all," she said.

Dr. Colbert shook his head like a dog emerging from water and waved her away with his clipboard, addressing himself only half to Caitlin. His eyes remained fixed on the catastrophe as it unfolded a few feet above the end of the bed.

"We have done scans while you were unconscious. You have a lesion on your hippocampus, a part of the brain intimately involved in the organization of memory. It may be a tumor," he said in English. "But we need to take a biopsy to ascertain its nature. It may be serious. Much more serious than the injuries that brought you here. They are uncomfortable, but they can be dealt with."

Caitlin Monroe had been an Echelon field agent for nearly five years. She had been intensively trained for three years before that. Her entire adult life she had lived in a crazy maze where every step she took, every corner she turned, she faced the possibility of betrayal and death. She had adapted to a contingent existence where nothing was taken for granted. She had faced her own potential annihilation so many times that a doctor telling her she might be dying was completely pa.s.se. At least on a normal day.

But this was a thousand miles from being a normal day, and for once Caitlin found the idea of her life ending a completely novel and unsettling concept. It stuck in her mind, a barbed, immovable object that tugged painfully whenever she tried to pull at it.

"I'm dying?"

"No," said Colbert. "But..."

The television went blank, the screen a dead black void.

"What the ..."

Two words of plain white type appeared.

TRANSMISSION INTERRUPTED.

"Holy s.h.i.+t, it's happing here now!" said Maggie.

"No!" said Caitlin, cutting off an outbreak of panic. They could all hear cries of alarm and distress from other rooms on the hospital floor. "Just wait."