John Birmingham - Without warning

Melton was lying in a child’s bed, his head pillowed by a mildew-riddled stuffed elephant. The room was dark and the multi-level house empty, abandoned. Or at least it had been.

As he came awake, he heard voices on the lower floors. Men talking in a ghetto mixture of Arabic and French. He was jolted awake as all of his body’s remaining adrenalin reserves sluiced into his nervous system. A cool ball of ice seemed to form in his stomach, making his balls contract and loosening his bowels.

He wondered if some friends of the man he’d killed earlier had come looking for him, but the few snatches of conversation he heard clearly seemed to be all about the civil war.

A quick scan of the room where he’d hidden out, far above the street, told him there were no obvious hiding places. He slowly, carefully, eased himself up, fearful of a creaking bed spring that might give his presence away. For the same reason, he dared not put his feet on the floor as the boards would surely creak. Instead, he lay in darkness, straining to hear whatever he could pick up. He stroked his pistol for reassurance and checked that he still had the spare mags in his vest pocket. Not that a dinky little handgun would be much help if he’d woken up in a houseful of jihadi street fighters. And really, who the hell else was left in this part of Paris?

As the minutes ticked by with infuriating slowness, his heart rate began to calm a little and he even managed to relax. Nobody had come up to check on this room. He hadn’t been discovered. Indeed, there didn’t appear to be anybody on this attic level of the house. But he found that hard to accept. It commanded a good view of the street below and some of the approaching roads. If this were his show, he would have put a lookout up here, even if he was just running a small gang of looters. Then again, his instructors at Ranger school had probably drilled the basics into him with more alacrity than the towel-headed loser who’d trained these guys downstairs. If trained they had ever been. Judo rolls and paintball in the forest didn’t really count.

Slowly, and as quietly as he possibly could, Melton eased himself off the bed and slid across to the door. He placed his ear against the cool wood for two minutes, straining to hear anything that might indicate he wasn’t alone up here. After that, he gripped the old-fashioned brass knob and turned it gently but firmly until the door clunked open. It sounded as loud as a grenade to him, but there was no discernible change in the flow of conversation from downstairs. He was able to make out a lot more of what was being said, however – not that it did him much good. The men’s French was heavily accented and their Arabic so guttural and fast spoken that his very basic understanding of the language was all but useless.

Then someone spoke whom he could understand. A Frenchman, with a polished, well-educated voice. Again, Melton’s French wasn’t great, but he was certain this guy was giving them a pep talk. Something about how well the fight had gone in the suburbs and how they had to delay the fascist Sarkozy forces long enough to get their leaders out of this area. Or at least, that was what Melton thought he said. He simply couldn’t be sure, and it made no sense. He had no context in which to frame the conversation.

It was infuriating, but there was nothing he could do about it.

‘They will be here in fifteen minutes,’ said Captain Rolland, referring to the back-up he’d called in. ‘They are coming through the storm water drains. There is a… how do you call it… a man’s hole in the rear courtyard of the building two doors down.’

Caitlin snickered despite the seriousness of the situation. ‘Okay. You got any floor plans?’

Rolland removed a set of drawings from a plastic tube. ‘There has been some remodelling of the property in the last five years,’ he explained. ‘These were lodged with the city archives. I had a devil’s job getting them.’

‘Yeah, but God bless continental bureaucracy,’ said Caitlin. ‘Now, what’ve we got here?’

They scoped out the plans of the house across the street by torchlight on a foldout card table, in a windowless room on the second floor of their own building. It looked like it may have been used as a storeroom until recently. A few cardboard packing boxes, folded flat, remained.

The target property was not so different from the one in which they stood. Same number of floors, and a similar layout of rooms, save for the ground floor, which had been opened up into one vast living space. It was not bomb-damaged either, as far as they could tell.

‘This will be very hard,’ said Rolland, ‘getting them alive.’

Caitlin nodded. ‘Like a hostage situation, where the hostage doesn’t want to come with. And he’s armed.’

‘We would normally train in a mock-up facility first. But there is no time.’

‘You could let me go in on my own,’ she offered. ‘I’m renowned as a sneaky bitch, you know.’

‘You are renowned as an assassin, Caitlin. I have no doubt you could make it inside. But perhaps only you would come out, non?

‘Perhaps,’ she conceded. ‘But I could make it easier for you.’

‘How so?’

Caitlin explained what she would need, and although the plan was crazy, to his credit, Rolland heard her out.

When she was finished she folded her arms and shrugged. ‘Captain, it is the only way I can think of to kick down the doors, kill everyone who needs killing, and maybe, just maybe, keep Baumer and Lacan in one piece.’

Rolland pinched his lip between thumb and forefinger, a gesture she had already recognised as his giveaway. He was thinking of betting the pot.

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake…’

‘I am sorry, Captain, but the storm, it put much stress on the engines, yes, much stress on everything, and this can be repaired but it will take time.’

Julianne examined the length of black steel-mesh tubing that was going to kill them all. It was less than an inch thick and just a foot long and it carried coolant to one of the Aussie Rules’s twin 1492-horsepower Caterpillar engines. Or rather, it would have were it not disconnected and dangling uselessly, having blown as a result of running at maximum pressure for way too long. Her Sri Lankan chief engineer shook his head sadly, as though betrayed by his wife.

‘How much time do you need to fix this, Pankesh?’ asked Jules. ‘The truth. Don’t underestimate the difficulty’

‘It is a very specialised fitting, ma’am,’ he said as his two Dutch offsiders crowded in behind him, both of them looking equally despondent. ‘Three hours, minimum. Possibly up to five. You can run the other engine at half power, but that is all.’

She closed her eyes and breathed deeply. Her temples were throbbing. They had a break of twenty nautical miles on the Viarsa 1, but their pursuers would eat that distance up in two hours. They were going to have to fight.

‘Okay,’ she said, standing up and turning away from the mess of spilled coolant. The engine room gleamed as white as ever, but it was eerily still with the power plant shut down. ‘All three of you will work on this as fast as you have ever worked on anything in your fucking lives. Got me? Maybe you’ll perform miracles. First, though, each of you get to the armoury and draw yourself a weapon. If they board us, we’ll need every hand we have – except for you, Pankesh. You keep working here. You don’t stop until one of them comes through that door, understood?’

The Sri Lankan’s frightened eyes were comically wide as he bobbed his head up and down.