John Birmingham - Without warning

Ritchie knew it was coming, but most people in the room did not. And, as much as a tightly controlled group of professional officers could descend instantly into uproar, they did – which is to say, an air force general swore under his breath and a Marine Corps colonel banged his water down a little too loudly.

‘Get over it, people,’ barked Franks. ‘If they don’t want us, we can’t stay. They’re already picking up our drinks tab and they can’t afford it – their economy has imploded. Vote or no vote, we’d be leaving. Go on, Colonel. Give us some bad news for a change.’

Maccomb essayed a slight twitch of the mouth that may have been the ghost of a grin. ‘India and Pakistan,’ he said. ‘The probability that one or the other will attempt a pre-emptive strike is approaching certainty. Their conventional forces have already clashed seriously on three occasions in the last month, and all cooperation with Islamabad over the Afghan situation has effectively ceased. Both sides have carried out proxy terror attacks approaching mass-casualty levels, and satellite cover indicates that each country has stepped up the readiness of its nuclear forces.’

‘Jesus wept, did they learn nothing?’ exclaimed the same Marine Corps officer.

‘You can skip the details of any likely exchange, Colonel,’ said Franks. ‘We know what one of these wars looks like now, and how it affects the rest of the globe. Admiral Ritchie, what’s our Uplift status for the subcontinental region?’

Ritchie didn’t need to consult his notes or an aide. He’d been living Operation Uplift for nearly three weeks. ‘Ninety per cent complete, General,’ he answered. ‘TRANSCOM has moved eighty-three thousand US citizens from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh to reception facilities in Australia and New Zealand. We’re still shifting up to a thousand a week, but the flow has really tapered off.’

‘Anybody who’s not out soon is going to get turned into an x-ray,’ said Franks. ‘We’ve done what we can. I don’t want our people there in large numbers when one of those fools presses the button. I think we might put a deadline of this Friday local time for Uplift. After that, anyone dumb enough to hang around will be on their own. That timing sound right to you, Maccomb?’

‘It’s tight,’ replied the briefer. ‘The Indians have begun to prepare their launch sites. A lot of embassies are already shutting up and getting out. The Brits and Aussies have upgraded their travel advisories to the highest level, warning of immediate interstate conflict.’

‘Okay. Wednesday – midnight. That’s the end of it for us. Go on.’

‘China.’ Maccomb paused briefly as if that was all that was needed on the subject. ‘While the People’s Republic does not suffer from some of the ethnic division present in France, on our reading of the current situation its future is just as bleak. The economy hasn’t imploded, it just ceased to be. There were already imbalances and rigidities building up before 14 March. Thousands of state-run enterprises were being propped up just to keep the rural poor fed and housed. Now, hundreds of millions of people have no income, and in the cities, no means of supporting even a subsistence level of existence. China was a net food importer when the Disappearance hit. It cannot feed itself. The PLA, which had begun to deploy some force projection assets around the Taiwan Strait, is now fully engaged within the country’s borders. The government has imposed a media blackout and expelled all but a handful of foreign journalists, and their movements are tightly controlled. Most of our in-country assets were managed from CONUS and are of little use now. But we do have some access to British and Russian intel, and they are convinced that a schism has opened both between the army and the Communist Party, as well as within those institutions. At 0230 hours this morning, the FSB’s Beijing station was reporting that major combat had broken out within the city between elements of the People’s Armed Police and at least two divisions of Army Group 6, including armoured and artillery units. Admiral Ritchie will have more on this, in a few minutes.’

Ritchie felt the weight of everyone’s attention fall on him.

Franks met the admiral’s gaze. ‘Very quickly, Jim. You think they’re going to turn this inwards, or out, on the rest of us?’

‘Inwards,’ he replied without hesitation. ‘At least in the short term. Command and control of the Chinese state is failing – has failed. This is about re-establishing that control, but it won’t be simple or easy, or something that happens very quickly. Like the colonel said, they have hundreds of millions of people who might well starve to death in the next few weeks. Jumping across the Taiwan Strait will not change that. It’ll simply make dealing with it all the more difficult, and at any rate, the chain of command is broken. They can only fight among themselves, for now.’

‘Okay,’ said Franks. ‘That’ll do for the wrap-up. Let’s start grinding our way through the to-do list, shall we?’

They met privately during a break in the all-day conference, Franks joining Ritchie in his office to share a cup of powdered coffee. There wasn’t a drop of the real stuff to be had on the islands.

‘This French business, we’re gonna have to do something about it,’ Franks told him. ‘I wouldn’t have believed it when you first told me, but this latest intelligence from the Brits nails it. We have to get that girl out, Jim.’

Ritchie drained the last of his lukewarm Java and pondered the view out of his window. Another beautiful Hawaiian day. It seemed perverse, given the state of the world, but he knew that even out there, things were going badly. Most of the islands’ nonresidential population had already been moved on to resettlement facilities elsewhere in the Pacific. Almost none had volunteered to return to the mainland.

‘Well, it explains a lot,’ said Ritchie. ‘Especially about what Blair has done, I suppose. How are we going to get her? She’s dropped off the grid.’

Franks shook his head. ‘We’ve found her again. Sarkozy’s people grabbed her an hour ago.’

Jed Culver had scored himself three adjoining rooms at the Hotel Monaco, and standing in the centre suite, straining to listen to a CNN report on the nearby Constitutional Convention, he wondered if he should’ve grabbed a couple of spares. For the overflow. There had to be more than a hundred people in here. The roar of such a large crowd in so closely confined an area was loud enough to bury the sound of the television unless you knelt down in front of the set and jacked up the volume. He’d done that a couple of times, but within a few minutes the background noise had simply grown in response.

Dozens of people pressed in close around him, also trying to listen to the report, but their own cries of outrage drowned out the TV just as effectively as the background roar. On the screen, a doughy-faced man with an unfortunate comb-over banged his fist on a podium, shouting out his words. ‘It would only be temporary… a three-year sunset clause, with… extension only if the emergency requires it. But we need… measures now. We face annihilation without…’

A small band of type flashed up, identifying him as Reggie Guertson, whom Jed now knew of as a GOP mayor from some pissant burg out east that for the last month had been holding its breath right up against the edge of the Wave.

‘The military got us through the worst of this,’ yelled an increasingly red-faced Guertson, ‘and they’ll get us through the worst that is to come. But only if we give them what they need to get the job done.’