John Birmingham - Without warning

Euler looked aghast. ‘Primates?’

‘Just before I took off, that was the latest on CNN. Some Japanese blogger checking webcams of the San Diego Zoo noticed all the monkeys were gone. Didn’t take long to work it out from there.’

‘Holy shit,’ said the lieutenant in a small, choked voice that was completely at odds with his towering frame.

The reporter knew exactly what was going through his mind. He’d seen that same reaction many times today. Lieutenant Euler was counting his losses. Children and partner, if he had them. Mom and dad, ditto. Brothers. Sisters. Old friends and new. Neighbours. Faces on the streets where he once lived, even if he didn’t know their names. Ex-girlfriends. Classmates from school. A widening gyre of personal history, all of it sucked away in some freakish moment when the laws of physics got turned inside out. Any moment now he’d look around, like a child who’d woken up in a strange room, trying to figure out where he was and how to put everything back in its place. There.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Melton, but Euler just shook his head.

‘This sucks,’ he breathed. ‘Everyone?’

‘Most everyone,’ he confirmed. ‘Seattle’s still there. Alaska. Hawaii. Coupla places in Canada. That’s it, though.’

‘Man… Oh shit, here we are.’

They stepped into a large frame tent, one of the newer types that came with power outlets and lighting. It was nicer than the Korean War-era GP Mediums he used to spend time in. Melton recognised the tense, guarded body language of men who were used to facing the worst possible situations, but had never really expected anything this bad. He was almost rocked back on his heels by the concentrated force of their attention when they recognised him.

‘Come in, gentlemen,’ a voice called out. ‘We’re pressed for time here, Bret.’

Melton nodded a quick greeting at Captain Christian Lohberger, Bravo Troop CO, 5-7th Cav, and the only man in the tent who routinely used Melton’s first name. Everyone else referred to him as ‘sir’, or ‘Mr Melton’. Being called ‘sir’ beat ‘hooah’ or ‘Rangers lead the way’., the last of which Melton found increasingly annoying over the years, especially hearing the Ranger war cry from pukes who most definitely were not Rangers and were never going to be Rangers. And as a former grunt, the ‘sir’ thing had greatly amused him at first. Nothing much amused him at the moment, however.

‘I’m guessing Iraq’s not why you wanted to see me,’ he said.

Lohberger shook his head and cut straight to the bone. ‘No. We’re getting nothing but smoke blown up our asses from Division on down. What the hell is going on?’

Melton dropped his bag by the trestle table, on which a map of the Kuwait-Iraq borderlands rested. It was a covered in a swirl of red and blue lines and unit markings. The faces around the tent were grim and focused entirely on him.

‘Well,’ he began, ‘what I knew when I caught the chopper back this afternoon…’

By the time Bret finished, Lohberger’s first sergeant had fetched the squadron’s commander and command sergeant major.

‘Sweet mother of God,’ grunted Sergeant Major Bo Jaanson, a gnarled stump of old wood who looked like he might well have seen off the Nazis at Bastogne. Melton had given them the super-concentrated version of the hours he’d spent plugged into the European and Asian news feeds, finishing up with the news of the primate discovery – fresh when he’d stepped off the tarmac in Qatar, but probably superseded by some new madness in the hours since.

The leadership cadre were otherwise speechless. Outside the slowly billowing walls of the tent in which they stood, the squadron continued to gather its strength. Yesterday it had seemed utterly formidable. Now, Melton felt like an ant sitting on a mound kicked over by laughing, moronic gods.

‘Thanks anyway,’ said Lohberger at last. ‘It’s been hard not knowing anything.’

Bret shrugged helplessly. ‘I’m only telling you what I got off the satellite feed and the web. I wouldn’t call it gospel, but… you know…’

The men were all younger than him, the platoon commanders by a considerable margin. Some of them would have young families of their own. Lohberger, at thirty, was something of a grand old man. He sucked in a deep breath and looked at the map as though he’d found some kind of nasty porn stash in his daughter’s bedroom.

‘Okay. There’s nothing we can do about it from here, not right now anyway,’ the captain declared. ‘We know a lot more than we did ten minutes ago, but nothing that changes what we have to do in the next couple of hours.’

His voice and manner were hard. Melton observed a stiffening of postures and facial expressions among the other men in the room, a turning away from anxiety and doubts, as men jammed them down somewhere deep, at least for the next little while.

‘Do you mind if I ask what’s gonna go down here?’ said Melton.

‘Nope,’ Lohberger replied. ‘You’re gonna be in on it soon enough.’

He jabbed a finger at the map table. Melton read the map plan, named Oplan Katie. It looked like someone’s joke, a Cold War-era forward defence at Fulda Gap write-up. He started to feel ill.

‘Saddam’s moving towards us. He’s pulled a lot of his guys out of those useless fucking trenches they dug, and put them on the road heading this way.’

‘Holy shit.’

‘Yeah. Like we don’t have enough to think about.’

Melton leaned forward to examine Oplan Katie on the transparent acetate. The basic plan had all Coalition forces moving forward out of Kuwait as originally planned. On the map was one phase line, a graphic control measure called Phase Line Katie, that ran through the Sulaybat Depression. All of the units in the Coalition were to hold that phase line and attrit any Iraqi force approaching it. The Brits with the 1st UK Division were still assigned the chore of dealing with Basra. Melton choked back any criticism of the plan. Getting into an urban fire fight, especially now, didn’t seem to make any sense at all. It negated almost all of the Coalition forces’ technological and military advantages. The 5-7 Cav’s objective was Jalibah Airfield, marked as Objective Marne three hundred and seventy klicks south of Baghdad. The Mog all over again, he thought. It explained why everyone in the tent looked pale and sweaty

What idiot came up with this plan? But he kept that question to himself and asked a different one. ‘Any idea which units?’

Command Sergeant Major Jaanson volunteered the answer. ‘The crap ones – militia, Fedayeen, reserve forces. A couple of Republican Guard units as well, but from the way they’re moving, they look like their job is to keep a gun at the back of those other guys heading into the meat grinder.’

The Army Times reporter glanced at Lohberger for confirmation and received a brusque nod. ‘We’ve seen a couple of fire fights break out within the Iraqi ranks. Guard units chewing over militia who tried to break off the advance.’

Melton couldn’t help it. He pointed at Phase Line Katie. ‘Surely you’re not going to attack them, are you?’

Captain Lohberger shrugged as his squadron commander, a lieutenant colonel, left the tent for a meeting with the brigade commander. ‘Well, the Kuwaitis don’t want us fighting on their soil,’ he explained. ‘So that is why we’re moving forward. They are taking positions on the Coalition’s western flank, inside Iraqi territory, just on the other side of Wadi al Batin. These base camps are not the best defensive positions anyway, so we may as well follow the first tenet of warfare.’

‘Engage the enemy as far forward as possible,’ Melton said, nodding.