John Birmingham - Without warning

‘What?’

‘He’s a whackjob – what do I know what he means?’

Pileggi’s eyes suddenly flew wide open, just as Musso’s had done a few seconds earlier. ‘Those container ships,’ she said. ‘We haven’t been able to inspect them yet, but one of them’s a conro vessel.’

Musso shook his head, trying to clear the mud out and not having a lot of luck.

‘A container ship with a roll-on/roll-off facility,’ she explained quickly. ‘Just like an LHD. You could use it for putting troops ashore.’

‘Shit!’

Another officer appeared at the door. A Signals Corps captain. ‘Excuse me, General, you need to see this, sir. It’s a distress call from the French ship, the Montcalm. She says she’s been torpedoed. Three hits and she’s going down, requesting immediate SAR to this location.’ The captain handed over another piece of paper containing the grid coordinates.

Musso turned to the first messenger. ‘Venezuelan navy, Lieutenant – do they even have submarines?’ he asked the wide-eyed naval officer.

She seemed to stumble over the answer before composing herself. ‘Two that I recall, General. A couple of Type 209 diesel-electric attack boats. German design. Not a bad ship killer if you can’t afford a top-shelf product.’

Tusk Musso squeezed out a silent curse as the sound of gunfire escalated behind him. He hurried back to the window for a quick look-see. The previously calm moonlit setting had changed into a maelstrom of moving craft, all illuminated by the guttering of the burning freighter. By pressing his face against the glass, he could see right up the main branch of the bay.

A big cargo vessel appeared to have beached itself. An armoured vehicle rolled down off the ramp, spewing tracer fire into the camp.

The soup was a simple broth, a thin brown liquid in which floated a few chunks of carrot, some onion and a little shredded meat, possibly beef, but to Caitlin it was heaven in a bowl. She sipped at the rim. Her hands shook too much to use the spoon they had given her, and she had already finished the small piece of bread that came with the meal.

‘Thank you,’ she said again. ‘I’m afraid this place doesn’t really deserve its Michelin star.’

Captain Rolland smiled kindly and effected a very Gallic lift of the shoulders. ‘Standards are slipping everywhere, mademoiselle.’

Caitlin returned the smile. ‘I dunno. My last stay here wasn’t much better.’

She finished the bowl and placed it on the table in front of the old leather couch on which she sat, wrapped in a clean blanket and dressed for the first time in weeks. Rolland snapped his fingers and a young soldier appeared from outside the office to clear away the dish and plate. They did not speak while he was in the room.

Caitlin stood up and peered out of the window, over a rain-slicked parking lot below. A bus burned in one corner, and a couple of bodies lay nearby in pools of blood, which became lighter and pinker as the rain diluted them. She appeared to be about three storeys up, high enough to see over the red tiled roofs of the surrounding buildings to the eastern suburbs of Paris. A few fires burned in a desultory fashion here and there, dwarfed by a huge tower of smoke about five miles away. She couldn’t see any movement in the streets, but she could hear gunfire. A lot of it.

‘Sounds like Beirut. Or maybe the Mog,’ she said.

Rolland, a handsome thirty-something man with a full head of black hair that was swept back and oiled in a very old-fashioned style, lit a cigarette and then stopped himself. ‘Excuse me, do you mind?’

The pain in her head was wretched, but it was no worse than any of her other manifold agonies. ‘Knock yourself out, mon Capitaine,’ Caitlin replied as she returned to the couch, ‘I doubt those things will kill me. They’re at the back of a very long line.’

The Frenchman sat down across the coffee table from her and drew deeply on the unfiltered cigarette with evident pleasure. His army uniform was filthy and his boots caked with mud. He hadn’t shaven in a few days.

‘This is my first one all week,’ he said, waving the cigarette around. ‘And I had to take it from one of the jihadi pigs. It’s Turkish. Not my blend. But what can one do?’

‘Yeah, those jihadi pigs – you want to tell me what my target was doing in your dungeons? You know, besides raping me.’

Rolland shifted uncomfortably in his chair. ‘I am sorry,’ he said. ‘It was a disgraceful thing. But, I am afraid, all too common these days. Monsieur Baumer, your target – and mine, as it transpires – he unfortunately escaped our net. We were hoping you might be able to help us find him. After all, you are the expert on “al Banna”?’

She laughed, a short, joyless sound. ‘I’m the world expert on getting my ass kicked by him,’ she replied. ‘And I have to tell you, Rolland, the shape I’m in, I’d get it kicked all over again if we met. But you’re not answering my question – what was he doing here? What were any of them doing here? And what the hell’s been going on out there? Reynard told me you guys had things under control.’ She nodded towards the city centre. ‘But that’s not under control. This place is dying.’

Momentary confusion passed over the soldier’s face as he shook his head. ‘Reynard?… Oh, you mean Lacan. No, it is not under control, mademoiselle. It has not been for weeks. Half of the city’s population have fled into the countryside, but things are worse out there. All the cities have emptied out. You can imagine what that means. Some of them took tents and provisions for a few days’ camping. Most just fled when the intifada and the Resistance began in earnest. Farms and villages have barricaded themselves off from the world, fought off everyone who seeks shelter or aid. It is a Dark Age again. There are bodies piling up in fields – possibly a million of them by now. With thousands more dying every day. Many, many are dead.’

Caitlin was already dizzy with exhaustion and moral collapse, but Rolland was making her head spin. She imagined a host of totally unprepared urbanites swarming over the French countryside expecting to live off stolen eggs and wild berries. They’d have stripped the fields bare in days. She began shaking again, the same deep body tremors that had seized her after being raped by al Banna. ‘S-sorry,’ she stuttered.

Rolland reached into his blood-smeared tunic and removed a silver flask. ‘Here, drink some,’ he said. ‘It is brandy. Good brandy, not like the hospital disinfectant you are familiar with. And my battalion surgeon, he said these may help too.’

A small blister pack of tablets dropped onto the tabletop. Half of them had already been popped.

‘They will calm your nerves,’ he explained. ‘But should not dull your senses.’

Caitlin briefly wondered whether she might react to them, given her medical condition. Then she thought, What the hell, and downed two with a swig from Rolland’s flask. The liquor burned softly and warmed her upper body. As she handed back the brandy, a jet suddenly screamed through the air nearby, the noise arcing up from a distant whine to a deafening shriek in mere seconds. A very short time later she heard the unmistakable crump of air-dropped munitions detonating within a few miles.

‘So, things haven’t gone as well as I was led to believe?’

The captain took a long draw on the harsh-smelling cigarette. ‘I am afraid not,’ he admitted. ‘The situation remains… confused.’

‘Not as confused as me. Why don’t you try explaining – you could start with Baumer. He was one of yours, right, so is that why I was targeted?’