John Birmingham - Without warning

Normally, in a room full of BBC reporters, he’d have kept his mouth shut and just grunted, ‘Yeah, good to go.’ But these guys weren’t normal. Even Caroline Wyatt, who still spent an hour in make-up every day, nodded appreciatively. He didn’t need to sex it up for them. They all knew what a godless blood-swarm the drop into Mont-Valerien would have been, and what the push eastwards into the city was going to be like from there. The clashes between rival elements of the French military were destructive in the extreme. Whole swathes of the suburbs had been gutted by collisions between main-force units siding with either Minister Sarkozy or the so-called Loyalist Committee. The blocks bordering the Bois de Boulogne parklands now looked like Stalingrad at the end of 1944. Those buildings still standing were mostly gutted and blackened, often with the upper floors sheared off by high explosives. The line of the ruined streetscape looked like broken teeth.

‘It’s bloody confusing, isn’t it,’ grumbled Monty. ‘Rebels, renegades, mutineers, Loyalists – hard to keep them all straight some days. And if someone could do me a favour and explain why we’re still calling them fucking “Loyalists” when it seems pretty obvious they’ve cut some sort of deal with the intifada crew, I’d be very grateful.’

Melton, who was idly sketching a rough map of the city centre, with various lines of advance and defence marked out, just as he’d been taught so long ago, looked up and shrugged. ‘They self-identify as Loyalists, Monty, so it’s only good manners. After all, Sarkozy did anoint himself boss hog when Chirac got whacked. Smart move or not, it was illegal. Shades of Napoleon grabbing the crown. Gotta figure most of the guys fighting for the Loyalist Committee think they’re the ones protecting the Republic. The soldiers, at least. Sarko calling them all traitors and sell-outs to the intifada wouldn’t have helped calm the matter down either. The jihadi, they’re allies of convenience. It’s all fucked up. Civil wars always are.’

‘Do you believe him, though?’ asked Caroline.

‘Sarko? Who knows?’

‘It seems a little incredible, don’t you think, him accusing the Loyalists of treason? They seem rather less discriminating than that. Anyone in their way gets killed, no matter what their allegiance. Street gangs, neo-fascists, jihadis. They’ve cut them all down at one time or another.’

‘Like I said, Caroline, it’s confused. It’s a mistake to think of this thing in terms of massed armies manoeuvring against each other. Alliances and loyalties are contingent. They can shift in minutes. An agreement negotiated at one level might have no effect at others, or further down a city block. I think this is going to be one of those times when the winners definitely write the history.’

‘Well,’ Monty interrupted the discussion, ‘as another of your countrymen once pointed out, journalism is the first draft of history, and ours will be due in a few hours. So let’s crack on, shall we?’

Leaving the office was no longer a matter of grabbing his equipment and stepping out to hail a cab. Melton didn’t expect to see the compound again for a couple of days and he packed accordingly. At the bottom of a small black rucksack he stuffed a layer of spare socks and underwear, on top of which he placed some emergency rations, even though he’d be eating with his embedded unit, he hoped. On top of them went his equipment: a small handy cam and twenty-four hours’ worth of videotape, three notebooks and a couple of pens. He topped it off with two handfuls of carefully hoarded chocolate bars and cigarettes, which he planned to share with ‘his’ troops. He understood just how welcome an outsider with a small stash of luxuries could be.

It was raining outside again, quite heavily, enough to dull the sounds of close-quarter fighting. The steel plating that covered all the windows only served to magnify the sound of the downpour as the torrents hit the metal. He carefully pulled on his rain slicker over a BBC-issue ballistic vest and snagged a pair of goggles to protect his eyes. His injuries still troubled him. These days the toxic rain wasn’t nearly as bad as it had been a few weeks back, but letting the water run into your eyes felt like swimming in a hideously over-chlorinated pool.

The last item, he took his time with. It was a controversial choice – a personal weapon. Some of the reporters, like Caroline and Adam Mynott, who’d arrived from Afghanistan with the last of NATO’s returning contingent, refused to carry anything and tried very hard to talk Melton out of doing so. They argued that a journalist’s best protection was their non-combatant status. In turn Melton insisted that nobody was playing by the Geneva Convention and cited at least three occasions in Iraq and two in Paris where he’d been forced to defend himself. It was an unresolved dispute, with some of the older hands writing him off as a fossil from the Cowboy Age, while a few of the younger ones quietly sought him out to ask his advice about how they might discreetly pack their own protection. It was telling, he thought, that Barry had scrounged him two spare magazines for the Fabrique Nationale 57 pistol.

He stripped, cleaned and rebuilt the handgun before slotting home a full mag. Safety on, it went into the holster on his right hip and disappeared under the slicker. Melton finished his packing with a fully charged cell phone, plugged into British Telecom’s network and set to roam, but he noted that – as usual – there was no signal available. Service was spotty, at best. After a quick visit to Monty’s cubicle for all the goodbyes and good-luck wishes, he signed out at the security desk, lodging a run-down of his expected movements over the next forty-eight hours, the name of the French unit he would be with, and the number of the all-but-useless cell phone in his breast pocket.

From there he hurried out to the internal courtyard where his ride was waiting, a custom-built six-wheeled Land Rover, with two armed guards and his driver, American Dave.

‘Fantastic,’ Bret muttered to himself. More loudly, on approaching the vehicle, he called out, ‘Morning! You guys got my route map this morning? We’re gonna be skirting around some contested ground.’

Dave, a chunky, dark-haired man with a short-cropped beard, continued chewing his gum and nodded. ‘Yup.’

‘Okay then. Drive on.’

Melton had mapped out a long, looping circuitous path through the district’s quieter streets to avoid the fighting just north-east of the Bois de Boulogne, between Avenue Foch and the huge traffic roundabout at Place de la Porte Maillot. Within that area, fourteen irregularly shaped city blocks had been reduced to a wasteland of shattered buildings, burning ruins, and rubble through which no armour could pass and over which thousands of men and women now fought. The rain had dampened hostilities somewhat, but the rolling thunder of combat never completely abated. Soon after they set off, two jets screamed low overhead to unload their bombs on somebody. The air force was almost entirely behind Sarkozy, but even so, Melton flinched a little. Technically, they were still in Loyalist territory, and an armoured Land Rover would make an excellent target of opportunity.

It took them all of four minutes to deviate from the route and hit trouble. And the reason he didn’t notice them veering off course was because American Dave surprised him by initiating a conversation as he popped a CD into the stereo. Melton checked out the cover. Don Dudley’s Truckin’ Hits.

‘Gonna git bloody soon,’ said Dave.

Okay, it wasn’t much of a conversation, but it was a start.

‘Yeah,’ agreed Bret. ‘Always gets kinda biblical whenever you get a lot of irregulars tangling with main force. These guys’ll be desperate too. You got the Marines and tanks coming in from the park, and those two grunt divisions hit Romaine and Noisy-le-Sec yesterday. Loyalists are trapped.’