John Birmingham - Without warning

The Venezuelan’s neck flushed noticeably, but his face froze in a cold fury. He sat himself very carefully down behind the damaged desk again.

‘Have you spoken to Caracas?’ asked Musso, all but ignoring the gross umbrage taken by Salas at his remark.

‘Si,’ the General said, deciding in the end not to respond to the insult. ‘I am authorised to offer safe passage to all Americans in Cuba. We, in turn, will accept custodianship of the unaffected region of Cuba until the Cuban Government reasserts itself.’

Musso snorted. ‘We want more than just safe passage out of Cuban waters. It wouldn’t do to have one of your submarines taking pot shots at us as we try to sail out of the neighbourhood. We want a guarantee of safe passage out of the Caribbean and Atlantic as well.’

Salas narrowed his eyes. His lips turned white and his nostrils flared again. ‘You are pushing your luck, General Musso,’ he said with a tightly clenched jaw.

‘No,’ Musso corrected him. ‘You are pushing yours.’

‘Tell the President that it is not a bluff, Mr Shapiro,’ said Franks. ‘Tell him we are deadly serious. The rules have changed. Hell, there are no rules anymore – not when he feels free to fire on our civilians whenever it suits him… I don’t give a damn that they deny it. That’s one of the things that’s changed: I don’t have to give a damn anymore. Just tell him.’

Ritchie stood quietly in the underground command centre, listening to Franks as he talked on the phone to the American Ambassador in Venezuela. Now, there’s a job I’m glad I didn’t get stuck with, he thought.

Many of the screens in the room were blank, the workstations unmanned. Just behind Franks, a navy commander silently updated the positions of three Ohio-class ballistic-missile submarines in the south Atlantic, moving their pins on an old-fashioned paper map. All three were well within striking distance of Caracas. One of them, the Tennessee, had only just responded to flash traffic, having been silent since 14 March. There were two other boomers lurking somewhere in the Atlantic right then as well, but they had flatly refused Franks’s request to put some bite into Musso’s bluff, citing the launch protocol, line and verse. Only the President of the United States, using the correct and verified launch codes…

It didn’t matter. They really only needed the ordnance of one Ohio-class submarine.

Franks appeared to be listening to some long and winding passage of dialogue from Ambassador Shapiro but then cut him off. ‘Look. I can see this is getting us nowhere, Mr Ambassador. Can I suggest you take cover, sir? Franks out.’ He hung up and turned to Ritchie. ‘Do it.’

The admiral picked up a phone. He had expected his voice to sound shaky but it was remarkably steady. ‘This is Ritchie,’ he said. ‘Patch me through to the Tennessee.’

General Alano Salas nodded and hung up his phone. ‘It is not acceptable,’ he told Musso. ‘You impugn our honour with the very suggestion. To promise that we will not attack you as you flee, to imply that we would even consider such a thing, is to traduce our national reputation. Our very manhood.’

Musso would have snorted in derision but he was haunted by the awful sight of that C-5 spilling its precious human cargo into the night. So many children, hundreds of them. Their deaths had been confirmed by the light of dawn. It was a sight so gruesome he would never be free of it. What terror must have attended their last moments on earth? If he had been wearing a side-arm, the general’s brains would probably be dripping down the wall behind him right now.

‘Do not talk to me of your honour,’ he said, slowly and carefully enunciating each word. ‘I have seen your honour and it is a poor ragged fucking thing, which barely hides the crude ugliness of your intentions and deeds. The lowest of my Marines could not wipe his ass clean with your honour, General Salas. It would not be worth the effort of the rubbing. Now, I suggest you stop fucking everyone around and agree to what is a very reasonable request.’ Musso looked at his watch. ‘Time is running out.’

Salas regarded him with lidded eyes, a snake sizing up a scorpion for its dinner, weighing up the risks. ‘And how long do you imagine that the civilians we are holding, some four thousand of them, I believe, how long do you think they will survive in any… cross-fire?’

Musso sneered openly. ‘Those people are in your care, General,’ he replied, ‘and I would warn you to have a care for their safety. You, and every man under your command, will be held personally responsible for their fate. You keep telling me that things have changed, and you are right. There will be no diplomatic solution to this question, no Security Council meetings, no backroom deals – if you hurt them you will be hunted down. Your men will be hunted down. And your country will be laid to waste.’

‘I think you overestimate yourself, General Musso. You are not the power you once were.’

‘No. We’re not,’ said Musso. ‘We’re something infinitely worse now.’

‘Active track, package inbound,’ a staff officer announced. ‘One minute to impact.’

Ritchie watched the centre-left screen, which showed a view of Caracas from the roof of the American Embassy. The Venezuelan capital sat high up in a valley of the Cordillera de la Costa Central, separated from the shores of the Caribbean by a ten- to twelve-mile stretch of national park. On a linked display, the ocean could be seen in a wide-angle shot sourced from the international airport, which lay on the water’s edge in the smaller city of Maiquetia, a short distance away. The image looked benign, a pleasant scene of blue water and a few plodding boats. Ritchie wondered if there were people down by the water, taking in the fresh air. He didn’t recall Caracas being famous for any beaches. The embassy had reported that the streets of the capital were not overly crowded, although there was a heavy and obvious military presence. But there was none of the violence and chaos that was rampant throughout so much of South America, or Europe for that matter.

Nobody in the command centre spoke. Ritchie could hear the blood rushing through his own head. It seemed perverse that he had just unleashed a nuclear warhead. It could not be real.

At 0706 hours a second sunrise blossomed over Maiquetia. On the satellite feed, three bright flashes, one at a time, flared up, twenty miles offshore.

‘All weapons delivered, Admiral.’

The Venezuelan general looked ill as he put down the phone.

‘S-s-afe passage out of the region is… assured, General Musso,’ he said. ‘But this isn’t over. My government assures me that this isn’t over.’

‘It’d better be over,’ Musso replied, rising from his seat. ‘The next time it won’t be warning shots. Good day.’

Caitlin wormed her way through the crawl-space, feeling nauseous and claustrophobic. The attic was a constricted geometric tangle of wooden beams, hundreds of years old, rendered into opalescent green by her borrowed night-vision goggles. She’d had three days to recover since her liberation from the cell, but at least two of those days she had spent on the move with Rolland and his small team, creeping through hostile territory, backtracking through a year’s worth of surveillance of Bilal Baumer. Tight spaces had never bothered her before, but her heart felt as though it was being squeezed by a giant rubber band. Yet another symptom of her physical decay.