John Birmingham - Without warning

Chief Lundquist, who had the wheel, swerved a few times to avoid burnt-out vehicles and hastily erected firing positions, before slamming on the brakes next to a long concrete pipe behind which a small group of Marines seemed to be directing the defence of the airfield. Colonel Pileggi, still dressed in her office uniform, scrambled out and hurried over with her bodyguards right behind her. She was protected from the worst of the enemy’s ground fire by the giant pipe, which stood at least six feet high, but she crouched almost double anyway, running to avoid getting picked off from above. A few of the Venezuelans were shooting from small handheld weapons as they came down. The fire was inaccurate, but getting heavier.

‘You Sergeant Carlyon?’ she asked the senior non-com, throwing herself up against the pipe.

‘Yes, ma’am,’ he answered, reading her name-tag and adding, ‘We spoke before, Colonel.’

‘Okay, what’s your situation, Sergeant? I’m not going to run your fight for you. I’ll just see what I can do to help.’

Carlyon looked relieved. ‘I have eight Marines with me, Colonel,’ he replied. ‘Only six have any ammo left. Around the base, I have less than fifty men. Some of them sailors, some airmen. They’re not trained for this. Some MPs, who are.’

As he spoke, two of his men depleted their stocks even further by sniping at the Venezuelans dropping to earth beneath the billowing chutes.

‘There’s at least a platoon of hostiles on the ground already,’ the sergeant continued, raising his voice over the steady gunfire and the more distant roar of the battle out in the bay. ‘But they haven’t consolidated. I think they came ashore in a couple of inflatable hulls, probably got split up, and haven’t regrouped yet. We’ve got ‘em pinned down behind two shipping containers on the far side of the strip. But tactical’s changing, ma’am.’ Carlyon looked upwards. Stepping away from the cover of the pipe and calmly raising his rifle, he put two shots into a paratrooper a hundred yards up and slightly north of them.

‘Well, you got my guys here,’ said Pileggi. ‘Here, take my rifle – give it to one of your men. I’ll make do.’ She unholstered her pistol, as Carlyon passed her M-1 across to a grateful-looking Marine.

‘Thank you, Colonel. Much obliged.’

Just behind her, Lundquist raised a Remington shotgun and fired twice. She turned briefly to see a human leg falling from beneath a writhing, screaming paratrooper, not fifty yards away.

‘You’re going to need more men and guns,’ she said. ‘You got a radio?’

Carlyon shook his head and handed her a cell phone. ‘It’s still working, ma’am. On and off.’

‘Okay. I’ll see if I can round up some warm bodies. What happened to those civilians you had before?’

‘They’re dead.’

Admiral Ritchie watched the four 52-inch HDTV screens in the ad-hoc war room of the re-formed Joint Chiefs of Staff at Fort Shafter. Centre left displayed a real-time Keyhole satellite feed of the running battle at Guantanamo Bay; centre right, a live feed from some Venezuelan reporter on the scene, an embed from the government-run TVes network. The reporter was covering his country’s Marines as they tried to fight their way towards base headquarters, and at that moment was speaking to camera, framed by the burning light of an amtrac. The satellite feed was choppy and slow, breaking into bursts of static, but Ritchie could see that the man looked terrified. He was also providing a constant stream of very useful information, which a small team of Marines here in Pearl were feeding right back to their colleagues at Gitmo.

On the screen to the far left, President Hugo Chavez pumped his fist in the air as he shouted cadenced beats of Spanish at the microphone. A running subtitle of translation tried to keep up, but Ritchie had long since given up reading it. Most of his attention was focused on the fourth screen, the videoconference taking place with the surviving senior officer of the Nimitz battle group, Captain Ted Branch. Lights flickered behind the master and commander of the wounded USS Nimitz as he gave his report to General Tommy Franks.

‘I’ve got two cats up, and two-thirds of my air wing operational. However, we’re still at half power and running on one screw. Additionally, the USS Princeton is trailing behind. We may have to scuttle her if we can’t get flooding stabilised,’ Captain Branch said.

Admiral Ritchie leaned forward. ‘Captain, you’ll transition into the Atlantic later this afternoon your time, correct?’

‘Yes, sir. Barring any trouble at Gibraltar,’ Branch replied. ‘The Royal Navy tell me they still have things under control, but Morocco is a little too close for comfort. I estimate we can be in Cuban waters, earliest, in ten days.’

General Franks shook his head. ‘This will be over long before then, Ted.’

Captain Branch nodded. The thin man didn’t appear to have an ounce of body fat on him. Ritchie always thought the carrier commander looked more like an Army Ranger than a naval officer. Most in the navy were, well, a little heavier than they ought to be. Himself included.

‘Ted, do you think you can spare any elements of your battle group?’ Ritchie asked. ‘Who can sprint away and arrive sooner?’

Branch rubbed the bridge of his nose, probably trying to clear his head or suppress a burning migraine, perhaps both. ‘Sir, if you think it will do some good, I’m sure the battle group is willing to make the sacrifice. However, I do not think we can suffer the loss of our remaining combat power without endangering either the Nimitz or the Princeton. Furthermore, I do have a convoy of my own refugee vessels trailing my battle group. Some of them have been vetted by our Marine and navy boarding teams, some have not. There’s no way of knowing whether or not one of them is a jack-in-the-box waiting to pop on us.’

Franks glanced over at Ritchie. ‘Do you think it’s worth it, Jim?’

Ritchie looked up at the paper map of the Atlantic area of operations. Here in the war room, they were already falling back to paper, acetate and coloured markers to indicate their force dispositions. It wasn’t for a lack of computing power. It was the lack of secure communications and data sources that forced the fallback to more primitive methods.

‘No, sir,’ Ritchie concluded. ‘Nimitz should continue as planned. We’ll have to try something else.’

Franks turned to the commander of the 25th Infantry Division, who had remained silent during the exchange. ‘Francis, what’s your take on Guantanamo?’

General Murphy snorted. ‘They’re well and truly fucked, sir. Civilians mixed into it, and us with our cocks in our hands… Musso is a smart man. He’ll see it pretty clear as well.’

‘You mean surrender,’ Franks said. ‘Right?’

Murphy couldn’t bring himself to say it. He folded his arms and nodded.

‘Sir?’ An army specialist approached the officers. ‘Gitmo on the line.’

Susan Pileggi exhaled, and with the hot, stale breath went some of the tension cramping her arms and shoulders. Not that she relaxed – that would have been impossible. But as she saw the end coming, with no chance of escape or redemption, she accepted it for the first time, and part of the fear and the strain of the last few weeks ebbed away.

She waited in the gun pit. The muzzle of her M-1, retrieved from the body of the Marine she’d lent it to a few hours ago, tracked the small group of Venezuelan paratroopers as they cautiously rounded the huge mound of burning rubble a hundred yards away. It had been a chemical storehouse; for what, she had no idea. But the stench was vile enough to blot out the smells of the base as it died around her. Burnt meat, corpses crawling with carpets of black flies, the unwashed bodies of the men around her, napalm smoke and festering wounds – the evil stink of the warehouse blotted them all out.