John Birmingham - Without warning

‘I don’t…’

The Glock gouged out a chunk of meat from his ruined ear and he found the strength for a full-bodied scream.

‘Yes. Yes. I did,’ he babbled in heavily accented English.

‘Question two: who sent you?’

Lighter pressure was all that was required this time. The answer told her half of what she needed to know. ‘Noisy-le-Sec’

An iceberg in her stomach. Just as she’d thought – they were from the Action Division of the DGSE.

She didn’t bother with her last unanswered question: why? This loser wouldn’t have a clue, only a target. Her and Monique. But she had a new enquiry.

‘Last question: how many in your team altogether? How many shooters? How many on overwatch?’

‘Fuck you,’ he groaned.

Caitlin drove a short, sharp punch into his injured rib cage and he screamed.

‘How many?’

But his howling did not abate. If anything it grew worse.

Her skin crawled and every nerve ending under it seemed to tingle. Time to go.

She stood up carefully, making sure to give him no chance of entangling her legs or feet, and then she fired once into the back of his head, silencing the caterwauling cries, before turning and hurrying back downstairs to Monique.

Not that she needed to hurry. She already knew her friend -and yes, ‘friend’ was appropriate – she already knew that her friend was dead.

The body lay still and heavy in that telltale way, as though slowly melting into the floor under the pressure of its own dead weight. Black petals of light bloomed in Caitlin’s vision and her head began to spin again, this time around the axis of a bright, sharp pain. She staggered against the wall, which seemed to fall away from her. She had to get out; she had to abandon her friend. More killers would be on their way.

As the floor rushed up to slam into her face, she thought she heard the dull metallic thudding of a helicopter. But it could have been her own heartbeat.

US ARMY COMBAT SUPPORT HOSPITAL, KUWAIT

He was getting used to the chaotic, tumbling, whitewater rush of events, to waking up in different cots or beds, or a plastic picnic chair at some random transit point. Of course, Melton had experienced plenty of hurry up and wait during his time as a Ranger, and although he enjoyed a much greater degree of autonomy in his later career as a civilian correspondent, he was, in the end, still hanging around the army, which had raised ‘hanging around’ to an Olympic-standard event, interspersed with short bouts of furious ass haulage and seemingly pointless tail chasing. The thirty-six hours after he awoke in the field hospital featured plenty of each.

He’d been upset on returning from the mess tent to discover Corporal Shetty was gone, evacuated on a medical flight to Ramstein. He was alone again, without friends or colleagues or even a passing acquaintance, until Corpsman Deftereos returned, this time bringing with him a set of three-pattern desert BDUs and a standard-issue brown undershirt and underwear. The young orderly was accompanied by an exhausted-looking female doctor, who gave the reporter a perfunctory once-over, checked his stitches, wrote him a prescription for some antibiotics and signed off a travel order, ripped from a clipboard and pushed into Melton’s pocket.

‘Congratulations,’ she said in a voice devoid of any spark. ‘You win a no-expenses-paid trip out of my ward and on into the next exciting phase of your own personal mystery tour.’

He hadn’t even drawn breath to ask what the fuck she was talking about before the doc was gone, administering more scripts and travels documents like some sort of malfunctioning vending machine. Deftereos at least had been a little more helpful, gesturing for him to stay exactly where he was for the next couple of minutes. Melton felt abandoned and more alone than he had in a long time as the two of them swept out of the ward, and he was on the verge of simply climbing back into his cot when the corpsman rushed back in, grabbing him by the arm and pulling him upright.

‘No, really, you gotta get the hell outta here, right now, sir.’

‘Why? What’s up, Tony?’

‘What, you think they tell me anything? I don’t fucking know – excuse my language, sir.’

Deftereos was babbling, and noticeably distracted. ‘Look, we just got word through that we’re shifting at least a third of our cot cases,’ he said. ‘Corporal Shetty scored a golden ticket with the 86th Airlift while you were out. And you just lucked in with a civilian charter, to London. If I was you, I wouldn’t even be here anymore. I’d be a dust ball, on my way to the fucking helipad. Now go!’

He pushed a small bottle of pills into Melton’s hand. Vicodin. ‘It’ll help, with the shoulder and your finger,’ he added. ‘Don’t worry about your kit. All your stuff has gone ahead. Now you gotta get going too.’

And with that Melton had changed out of his scrubs and been given the bum’s rush out of the tent and into the dust and harsh sunlight, to join a small throng of the walking wounded, all recently displaced and as thoroughly nonplussed as himself. They had just enough time to work up some really wild theories about battles gone wrong, bio-weapon exchanges, hundreds of thousands of American dead and wounded, when a white bus with dark blue Hilton Hotel insignias pulled around the corner formed by a pod of air-conditioned shipping containers a hundred yards away, and a navy chief stuck his head out of the rear door, roaring at them to get their worthless carcasses into the vehicle or they’d get left behind for good.

Bret remembered a short ride out to a vast helipad where civilian choppers of all manner and description vied with US military helicopters for landing and take-off slots. He remembered shuffling onto a Vietnam-era Chinook with Australian aircrew, but missed a lot of that flight after downing two of the Vicodin with a swig of warm, bottled water. He vaguely recalled half an hour spent in some lavish civilian airport where he was at least able to fill the prescription for his antibiotics, at a mark-up of about a thousand per cent.

Melton slept through a C-130 flight to Qatar, and fetched up for a long spell in a giant hangar where hundreds of wounded Marines and soldiers were laid out on stretchers if they were lucky, or if they weren’t, on a makeshift line of bright orange moulded plastic chairs. Groggy from the Vicodin and creeping exhaustion, Melton made his way towards a small mound of duffel bags that had been colonised by half-a-dozen Polish commandos. They all seemed in fine fettle, with their equipment stowed neatly in a pile to one side, guarded by one of their own – a huge blond stone monolith of a man.

‘Witam!’ Melton smiled in greeting, before holding up his hands to forestall a Polish-language landslide. ‘Sorry, that’s all the Polish I know. Besides piwo and piekna dzie … dzi…’

‘Dziewczyna?’ The small, wiry, heavily moustachioed man grinned back at him. The men’s sergeant, judging by his chevrons. ‘Not much beer or beautiful ladies around here, my friend. Just stinky American boxheads, yes? Apologies if you are boxhead too. I say it with love in my heart. And sorrow too, great sorrow. Please sit, you are wounded, yes?’

Two of the Poles crabbed around and Melton eased himself down on a couple of kitbags. They seemed wonderfully soft.

‘Boxhead? No,’ he grunted with relief at getting off his feet. ‘Not for a long time, anyway. Wounded, yes. Not too bad, though, just missing a few bits and pieces.’

‘Nothing to stop you enjoying piwo or dziewczyna then?’

‘No, nothing that bad. My name is Melton, by the way. Bret Melton. I’m a reporter, or was…’ He shrugged awkwardly and trailed off. It was simply too much effort to go into his CV, to explain his shift from Army Times staffer to itinerant freelancer for a slew of British media outlets. ‘You guys been waiting long for transport?’ he asked instead.