John Birmingham - Without warning

Even as he said it, the rational part of his mind rebelled. He was talking about his wife and children. They were part of the ‘anti-personnel effect’. They had to have ‘shimmered away’, just like all of Nuсez’s men. Just like everyone north of here. They’ll be fine, he repeated over and over. They’ll be fine and they’ll be home soon.

Ritchie’s voice crackled in the headset and Musso wondered if he’d spoken too soon about signals interference, but the audio came good again.

‘Okay, well, have a look at the video my people are sending you. There’s about twelve minutes’ worth. Then we’ll talk again. I’m going to call a videoconference of the… the available theatre commands in twenty minutes.’

The admiral sounded like an old man. He’d have family at home, too. But this was even worse than losing a family. Much, much worse.

The videoconference, hosted out of Pearl Harbor, drew in high-level participants from all the theatre commands, including himself as the senior officer ‘available’ from NORTHCOM. That’s how they were putting it: not ‘surviving’, just ‘available’. For Musso, the fact that he was sitting in was a bad, bad sign.

He was enthroned behind the desk of the ‘unavailable’ commander of Guantanamo Naval Base, in a small, bare office just off from the base war room. Beads of moisture sweated from grey concrete walls and no personal touches softened the utilitarian space. Even the Sony plasma screens on the desk had been set up by a couple of Navy techs ten minutes earlier, to give him some privacy during the link-up. One panel was layered with multiple windows running civilian news feeds and restricted military data channels. In one of these windows he saw live top-down footage of Washington, with English-language subtitles laid in over the original Cyrillic script. There was no explanation for the Russian source material. It may have been hacked, purchased or simply offered for free. Another small riddle to add to the all-enveloping mystery of why the city in the satellite footage was entirely devoid of human life. At least half of Washington was visible in the pop-up window. Musso could see dozens of fires burning out of control, unattended by a single soul. It was amazing how the human mind could adapt to the most irrational, outrageous insults. He’d already accepted, down in his bones, that what had happened was real, and there would be no reversing it. But his balls still tried to crawl up into his belly as he considered the vision of a depopulated American capital. Perhaps it was the Russian captioning.

‘Links secure.’ The disembodied female voice could have originated anywhere, but Musso supposed it belonged to a comms specialist somewhere in Pearl.

The screen devoted to the conference divided in two, with the face of Admiral James Ritchie taking up half the real estate, while four smaller windows carried the heads or acting heads of the unified theatre commands. Apart from General Jones, the Marine Corps officer in charge of US forces in Europe, Musso didn’t know any of them personally. But of course he knew of Tommy Franks, the CENTCOM boss. The long, weathered face was famous the world over as commander of the Coalition arrayed against Saddam Hussein. Musso could only imagine what sort of pressure he must have been under right now. Franks had a naturally melancholy appearance to begin with, and Musso thought it even more deeply lined and puffy-eyed than usual.

By way of contrast, a fresh-faced woman, Lieutenant Colonel Susan Pileggi, occupied the frame set aside for the senior ‘available’ officer of the Southern Command. With SOUTHCOM’s main HQ in Miami lying well behind the event horizon, seniority fell to her as acting commander of Joint Task Force Bravo in Honduras. She was based at Soto Cano Air Base, about ten miles south of Comayagua. Like Musso himself, and Admiral Ritchie, whose superior, Admiral Fargo, had been in Washington this morning, Pileggi had found herself thrust into the rumble seat by the absence of her own boss back in the US. It reminded him of war games in which he’d had a very minor part back at the start of his career, role-playing a massive Soviet nuclear strike that all but destroyed the United States and her government.

Franks was the ranking officer among them, but he deferred to Ritchie, who wasn’t burdened with managing a looming war in the Middle East, and who had the full resources of PACOM at his disposal. The admiral, like all of them, appeared tense and when he spoke it was with a clipped tone that Musso recognised. He heard the same serrated edge on his own words whenever he opened his mouth at the moment.

‘I’ll recap what we do know,’ said Ritchie, ‘before moving on to the much greater issue of what we don’t.’

Musso watched four heads, including his own, nod in a acknowledgement.

‘As of three hours, fourteen minutes ago, an event of unknown origin appears to have wiped human habitation from an area estimated at just over four million square miles…’

Tusk Musso found his throat closing involuntarily. His wife and children were deep inside that four million square miles. His whole country was, close enough. His life.

‘We have not yet mapped the exact perimeter of the effect,’ Ritchie continued. ‘But we have good estimates that it lies in a very rough ovoid shape that covers ninety per cent of the contiguous US mainland states, half of Canada, and all of Mexico above a line extending from a point a few miles south of Chilpancingo on the west coast to Chetumal on the east, and extending through the Gulf to transect Cuba seventy thousand metres north of Guantanamo. Of the larger cities on the contiguous mainland US, only Seattle appears to lie outside the area. We’re still checking on Olympia, a bit further south. Things are confused there. The Governor’s office has declared a state of emergency, imposed a curfew and called out the National Guard.’

Musso couldn’t keep the surprise off his face. Nor could Susan Pileggi, he noted. He hadn’t seen any mention of Seattle in the news bulletins. As if reading his thoughts, Ritchie explained.

‘General Blackstone at Fort Lewis sent troops into the local media outlets to forestall a panic. The… uh… Governor and deputy are… unaccounted for. So too are some of the city council people for Seattle. Apparently they were at some conference in Spokane, behind the event horizon. An estimated three hundred and fifty million people were caught within the affected zone,’ Ritchie continued. ‘At this stage we have no information or even speculation about what may have happened to them, whether the effect is permanent, or stable, a natural phenomenon, or technologically based. We’ve been monitoring the reaction from any potentially hostile governments and none are behaving in any way that would give rise to a suspicion that they played any role in this.’

‘What’s happening in Beijing?’ asked General Franks.

Ritchie appeared to direct his answer to a spot just over Musso’s shoulder as he addressed the image of Franks on a screen thousands of miles away. ‘The army is pouring onto the streets in every major provincial capital, General. Martial law has been declared but none of the PLA’s force-projection assets have been mobilised. Nonetheless, our own counter-strike forces are at Def-con 2, just in case.’

Ice water pooled in Musso’s guts. Ritchie had ordered his nuclear submarines to stand ready should the need arise to reduce the communist giant to a vast crematorium. It raised an immediate question: who would authorise any such strike? Again, Ritchie seemed to be one step ahead of him.

‘I’m afraid, before we proceed any further,’ he said, ‘we need to discuss where the executive authority now lies.’