John Birmingham: Without warning

Musso nodded slowly. He was a huge man, with what looked like a solid block of white granite for a head, resting atop a tree trunk of a neck. Even that one simple gesture spoke of enormous reserves of power. He shifted his gaze from the antique, analogue reality of the map table with its little wooden and plastic markers, across to the banks of flat screens, which even now were refusing to tell him anything about what was going on a short distance to the north. The faces of the men and women around him were a study in barely constrained anxiety. They were a mixed service group about two dozen strong, representing all the arms of the US military that had a stake in Guantanamo, mostly Navy and Marines, but with a few Army and Air Force types thrown in. There was even one lone Coast Guard rep, mournfully staring at the map table, wondering where his little boat could possibly have gone. The cutter had dropped out of contact. It was easily found on radar, but would not respond to hail.

Musso had no permanent connection to Guantanamo. He’d been sent down to review operations at X-ray, the first task of a new job, a desk job back in DC he really hadn’t wanted. A genuine shooting war was about to begin, and here he was, on a fucking day trip to Gitmo, making sure a bunch of jihadi whackjobs were getting their asses wiped for them with silken handkerchiefs, not copies of the Koran. It was almost enough to test a man’s faith, and more than enough to make this one regret the international law degree he’d taken as a younger marine. It had seemed like a good idea at the time. A fall back, his old man had called it, in case he didn’t take to the Corps with any enthusiasm. Musso stood erect, folded his arms as though examining a really shitty used-car deal, and grunted.

‘Okay. Let’s take an inventory. What do we know for certain?’ he asked, and began ticking the answers off on his fingers. ‘Thirty-three minutes ago, we lost contact with CONUS for two minutes. We had nothing but static on the phones, sat links, the net, broadcast TV, radio – everything. Then, all of our comm links started functioning again, but we get no response to anything we send home. All our other links are fine – Pearl, NATO, ANZUS, CENTCOM in Qatar – but not Tampa. All responding and wanting to know what the hell is going on. But we have no fucking idea. I mean, look at that… What the hell is that about?’

The Marine Corps lawyer was waving his hand at a bank of TV monitors. They were all tuned in to US news networks, which should have been pumping out their inane babble twenty-four,’ seven. With the war in Iraq only days away, the global audience for reports out of America and the Middle East was huge and nigh on insatiable. But there was the Atlanta studio of CNN, back after a few minutes of static, devoid of life. The anchor desk sat in centre frame, and dozens of TV and computer screens flickered away in the background, but nobody from CNN was anywhere to be seen. The same over at Fox. Bill O’Reilly’s chair was empty. Bloomberg still filled most of one monitor with garishly bright cascades of financial data, but the little picture window in one corner where you’d normally find a couple of dark-suited bizoids droning on about acquisitions and mergers was occupied by two chairs, what looked like some smouldering rags, and nothing else. Meanwhile another bank of screens, running satellite feeds from Europe and Asia, showed the studios there to be fully operational, and peopled by increasingly worried talking heads, none of whom could explain what was happening in North America.

‘Anybody?’ asked Musso, not really expecting an answer.

The silence might have become unbearable had it not been broken by a young ensign, who coughed nervously at the edge of the huddle. ‘Excuse me, General,’ she said.

Musso bit down on an irrational urge to snap at her, instead keeping his voice as level and non-threatening as he could. ‘Yes, Ms…?’

‘Oschin, sir. I thought you might need to look at these. I’ve streamed vision from eighteen webcams onto a couple of monitors at my workstation. These cams are all in high-volume public areas, General. Grand Central in New York, Daley Plaza in Chicago, that sort of thing…’

Ensign Oschin, who was obviously uncomfortable addressing such a high-powered group, seemed to run down like a wind-up toy at that point. Musso noticed a couple of army officers glaring at her for having interrupted the big kids at play.

‘Go on, Ensign,’ he reassured her, giving the army jerk-offs a cold, hard glare. ‘What’s your point?’

Oschin stood a full inch taller. ‘They’re live feeds, sir, from all over the country. And there’s nobody in them. Anywhere.’

That information fell like a lead weight into a dark, bottomless well, tumbling down out of sight. No one spoke as Musso held Oschin’s gaze, seeing the fear gnawing away at her carefully arranged professional mask. He could taste a trace of bile at the back of his throat and he was unable to stop his thoughts straying to his family back home in Galveston. The boys would both be in school, and Marlene would be up to her elbows in blue rinse at the salon. He allowed himself the indulgence of a quick, wordless prayer on their behalf.

‘Can you patch it through onto the main displays?’ he asked.

‘Aye sir.’

‘Then do so, please, as quickly as you can.’

Oschin, a small bird-like woman, spun around and retreated to the safety of her workstation, whipping her fingers across the keyboard in a blur. Other sysops, who’d been less successful in their own endeavours to raise anyone Stateside, snuck peeks over their shoulders at the results of her work as two large Sony flat panels hanging from the ceiling suddenly filled with multiple windows displaying scenes from across the US. Oschin appeared at the map table again with a laser pointer. She laid the red dot on the first window in the upper left-hand quadrant of the nearest screen.

‘With your permission, General?’

‘Of course.’

‘That’s the Mall of America, in Bloomington, Minnesota. Local time 1320 hours. You’re looking at the main food court.’

It was empty. A small fire burned in one concession stand and it looked as though sprinklers may have tripped, but the image quality wasn’t clear enough to be certain. It reminded Musso of an old zombie flick he’d watched as a kid. Dawn of the Dead or something. For some reason, his flesh crawled at the memory, even though he’d thought the movie was a dumbass piece of crap the first time he’d seen it. Oschin flicked the laser pointer over the next three windows as a group.

‘Disneyland, California. Local time 1120 hours. You’re looking at the concourse just inside the main entrance. Then you have Space Mountain in Tomorrowland. And finally Mickey’s Toontown.’

Again, the pictures were poor in quality, but no less disturbing because of it. Not a soul moved anywhere in them. A breeze pushed litter around the main concourse, where some sort of golf buggy had run up on a gutter and tipped over. The young officer, her voice wavering, laid the red dot on a couple of piles of smoking rags. ‘I think they may have been clothes, sir.’

Nobody replied, possibly because they all felt as sick in the gut as Musso. Oschin waited a second, then made her way through the rest of the image windows. Crown Center in Kansas City. Half-a-dozen cams from UCLA’s Berkeley campus. A mortgage brokers’ convention in Toledo. The main strip in Vegas – which looked like Satan’s wrecker’s yard, with cars all piled into each other and burning fiercely. Venice Beach. JFK Airport. The Strand in Galveston…

Musso arranged his features into a blank facade for that one. He’d already recognised the scene before Oschin had explained what they were looking at. Down in his meat, right down in the oldest animal parts of his being, he knew his family were gone.