John Birmingham - Without warning

Monique’s eyes had filled with tears and she was shaking her head in jerky little spasms. ‘No.’

‘So you wore all his bullshit excuses about work and his mother and needing to stay in contact with his community. You were pathetically grateful when he travelled to see you, but you covered most of the miles in that relationship, didn’t you, honey? And you had to wonder sometimes, when he was away with a client, or travelling for work, whether there might be some other girl he was stringing along – because he was a catch and a half, wasn’t he?’

A nod this time, just the smallest movement, but a crucial acknowledgement that Caitlin wasn’t entirely wrong. She could have said something about how Monique was also drawn to Bilal because he was simultaneously dangerous and safe. A young man from a Muslim background, politically aware if not active, but fiercely secular in his outlook. Not at all like the bearded wingnuts whose medieval views on women would’ve made it impossible for an enlightened feminist like Monique Duroc to have had anything to do with them. But of course, to lay it out as brutally as that would break the tenuous connection she had established.

‘Monique, you were right,’ the American continued. ‘You were not his only one.’

A small groan escaped the throat of the distressed young woman.

Judging the time to be right, Caitlin reached into her jacket and produced the envelope she’d removed from the folder hidden under the floorboards back at the apartment. She shook out a handful of surveillance shots, good-quality hi-def colour photos of Baumer entwined with two separate women. The date stamps marked them as having been taken in the last six months.

‘He also successfully targeted a Belgian student,’ said Caitlin as Monique took the photographs with a shaking hand. ‘Anya Delvaux, a part-time canvasser for Greenpeace in Brussels, and Sofia Calderon, an activist documentary-maker from Barcelona.’

Monique had started to sway on her feet and her face grew blotchy, with irregular patches of high colour fading quickly into bloodlessness. ‘An auteur?’ she asked.

‘Well, a would-be auteur. Sofia’s posted a few vids on the net, entered a competition or two, but she stills pays the bills as a waitress.’

The first photograph showed Baumer and the Spaniard, a tall, rather extravagant beauty, dry-humping each other in a park. Monique’s tears were flowing freely now, but silently, as she attempted to control her free-falling emotions. ‘You… you seem to know them well, these women.’ She leafed through the other photographs with an unsteady hand, blinking large tears onto them and gasping at some of the more intimate encounters.

‘Oh my god,’ she said in a tiny voice. ‘You must have similar photographs of…’

‘Of you,’ Caitlin finished for her. ‘I’m sorry, but yes, I do. Or I did. When I selected you as my objective, my target, I filed them.’

The effort to dam up her feelings failed at last, and with a series of hitching sobs, Monique came apart, wailing and crying like a child who suddenly realises she is lost and alone. Caitlin placed a hand on her elbow and steered her through the carpet of twitching birds towards a side street, which was still deserted. The avenue on which they stood was beginning to come to life. It was nowhere near as busy as it would have been on a normal day, but here and there individuals were venturing out.

The photos spilled from Monique’s fingers, falling into the contaminated mud and refuse of the street. Caitlin was forced to bend over and pick them up. It saved her life.

US ARMY COMBAT SUPPORT HOSPITAL, KUWAIT

Everything came back slowly, from a great distance. Awareness, senses, memory – and pain. Oh yeah, there was plenty of that. Everything was so dim and far away that the actual transition to consciousness was not immediately real and for an age he hovered on the far side of a morphine dream unable and unwilling to pull himself back to reality. In the end, the pain made it impossible to hide. Whatever drugs he’d been given were beginning to wear off and Bret Melton had a dizzying, sick-making instant of realisation that he was in pain. Real pain, seated in more places throughout his broken body than he cared to catalogue.

‘Goddamn,’ he muttered.

‘Hurts like a bitch, don’t it, sir?’

The voice was loud and obnoxiously cheerful. Familiar too, in its smooth rap cadences. But he felt as though everything in his head, every thought and memory, had been violently jostled out of place by the explosion that must have put him here.

Where?

His eyelids were gummy and difficult to force open, but force them he did, blinking and raising a hand to rub away the crust that had formed while he slept. Or at least he tried to. His shoulder throbbed abysmally, as though he’d reinjured the old wound picked up so many moons ago at Ranger parachute school. ‘Damn!’

‘Yeah. You’ll want to lie still, until the nurse comes to get you. Don’t go getting no ideas, though – it’s a male nurse. Skinny, ugly little fucker too. He’ll jam a bedpan sideways up your ass if you give him any stick.’

‘Corporal Shetty?’

‘Uh-uh. What’s left of me.’

Their surroundings slowly came into focus. Melton was lying on a cot in a tent. On either side of him lay more men in uniform, some heavily bandaged, some apparently undamaged, at least on the outside. A fine layer of sand covered the plywood floors, and through a flap a short distance away he could see the fierce white light of the desert. He noticed the thrum of a heavy-duty air-con unit, keeping them cool. It looked as hot as a furnace outside. He slowly turned his head towards Shetty’s voice, noticing immediately that the corporal was short one limb. His left arm had disappeared just above the elbow.

‘Yeah, gonna have to work extra hard scratching my ass now,’ he said. ‘And that was my natural ass-scratching hand, too. Least I still got an ass, though. And my nuts.’ He gave his groin a reassuring squeeze with his remaining hand.

‘Where are we?’ asked Melton. His voice was cracked and he reached for a squeeze bottle of water on the small stand next to his bed. It was warm and tasted slightly metallic, but still felt like sweet dew in his parched mouth.

‘We scored an evac slot,’ Shetty told him. ‘Don’t know where from exactly, they’re not saying. But I’d bet Kuwait or Qatar if I had to… if I had any money. Germany is our next stop.’

Now fully awake, if still groggy at the edges, Melton found himself unpleasantly aware of just how much he hurt. His entire body seemed to ache, but here and there, more intense pain warned him of some very special hurts he’d picked up. Shetty seemed to read his mind.

‘You’re not doing too badly, Mr Melton,’ he explained. ‘Doc told me you lost a finger off your right hand. A big chunk of shoulder meat. You lost about half of your Ranger tattoo. And you got peppered with shrapnel and one big hunk of wooden window casement. Had a splinter as big as Florida stuck in your ass, apparently. Doc said that hunk of wood coulda been a thousand years old. Said they shoulda had an archeologist dig it outta your butt.’

Melton forced a weak smile, more in recognition of Shetty’s attempt to cheer him up than from any genuine amusement. He carefully levered himself up on his elbows to have a look around. The tent was about as big as a tennis court and housed something like sixty or seventy cots. All of them were occupied. He was surrounded by a forest of IV lines and blood bags, but very little specialised equipment.

Shetty was on the other side of his cot, propped up on a couple of dirty-looking pillows, one stump of an arm heavily bandaged. He was smoking Kools with his free, intact hand.