John Birmingham - Without warning

Both Jules and Shah answered at once: ‘No.’

‘They’re not American citizens,’ the Englishwoman continued. ‘They’re peasants. Nobody is going to take them in as genuine refugees. Even if we can get all the way across the Pacific with the rations we have on board – and, look, I suppose we can – Hawaii will not take them. They’re shedding people at the moment. New Zealand might. Australia won’t. And everybody else is just as likely to open fire on us as soon as we sail into view.’

Shah held both hands up as if to show her he had nothing left. ‘I do not presume to tell you what you should do. But you have hired me to provide security, and I advise you now that heading back towards the coastline will be a very dangerous business.’

‘Fifi, you’ve been out on the Rules with Lee a lot more than me. How’s our provisioning?’

She drained half of the beer and burped. ‘’Scuse me. It’s not bad, Julesy,’ she replied. That golfer had some good shit in the fridge, and plenty of it. And we topped up the larder nicely. There’s like two frozen pigs and couple of steer down there now. Plus, them Mexicans did bring plenty of food – not like those other fucking snobs. All they brought was expensive luggage and heaps of attitude. I don’t see a problem. Really. Come on, it’ll be fun. Be like Carnivale every night.’

Jules looked to Shah for support but he remained entirely impassive. ‘I just… it’s just that…’ she faltered. ‘Oh, I don’t know… my father taught me that helping people was wrong. It never ends well. We’re not philanthropists here, we’re smugglers – at best.’

‘Foxy fucking smugglers.’ Fifi saluted Julianne with her bottle. ‘And anyway, your old man ate his pistol one night just before the cops grabbed him. Should you really be looking to him for advice?’

Jules looked completely lost. ‘That was my mother’s fault,’ she said bitterly. ‘If she hadn’t tipped off Scotland Yard about Daddy diddling the tax man…’

Shah regarded her with some confusion. ‘Your mother informed on your father?’ he asked.

‘After a less than satisfying divorce settlement failed to provide for her in the style to which she’d so been looking forward,’ Jules explained. She was surprised to find it hard to speak, with her throat suddenly locking. ‘I was his favourite,’ she said quietly.

KUWAIT INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT, KUWAIT CITY

The sutures in his butt made it all but impossible to run, and for a ‘running high’ junkie like Bret Melton, that was becoming every bit as uncomfortable as his assorted injuries. ‘You’ll have to excuse my irritability, Sadie. I’ve been folded, spindled and mutilated. Puts a man in a poor frame of mind.’

The Al Jazeera correspondent clicked his coffee cup against Melton’s and smiled. The Army Times reporter was pathetically grateful to him for getting him out of that hangar in the boonies. ‘It is nothing, really,’ Mirsaad replied. ‘Look at what is happening to the world. And you are worried about your manners.’

‘Well, perhaps if people were possessed of a few more manners, they wouldn’t go around killing each other with such abandon.’

Sayad al Mirsaad’s eyes flickered nervously around the departure lounge. Kuwait International Airport was swarming with armed personnel from a dozen different countries, mostly American, however, and the atmosphere was twitchy and dangerous. Dense knots of travellers, civilian and military, crowded around every available television screen to follow the war news. There had already been one unpleasant incident where Mirsaad had been recognised from a report he’d just filed on the sinking of the USS Hopper. A couple of Marines didn’t think he was suitably respectful in tone and Melton had been forced to intervene before the little Jordanian got stomped. It had put the American in a bad mood, arguing with his own people, even if they were a couple of Podunk assholes who would have left the world a better place had they stayed home and been zapped by the Wave. He’d been snappy and irritable ever since, and his inability to break out of the blue funk simply made it all the worse.

He needed to piss, his wounded hand throbbed like a bastard, and he’d had no sleep since the first Israeli warhead had gone off. He was grateful to Sayad for hauling his ass out of TRANSCOM limbo, especially so given the business-class ticket, paid for by BBC World, that his colleague had handed him.

‘You’re off to London, you lucky devil,’ Mirsaad had said as he handed over the precious travel wallet. ‘You don’t deserve it, of course, what with your whoring and drinking and your disgraceful attitude to the Prophet and his faithful. I should really be going in your place. After all, I am much more virtuous.’

And behind his friend’s twinkling eyes and ready smile, Melton had seen real fear at being left behind to burn in a nuclear furnace. It made it all the more affecting that he had agreed to track Melton down for the British broadcaster, which had lost contact with him when he was injured. Bret wondered whether he would have done the same thing in Mirsaad’s place. The small coterie of full-time war correspondents tended to be close and unusually supportive of each other, but Mirsaad had spent days hunting him through the vast labyrinth of the US Transport Command and, having found him in that transit hangar out in the desert, had insisted on personally driving the injured reporter three hundred miles to Kuwait City.

‘Don’t you have a job?’ asked Melton as they waited in the lounge for his BA flight to England.

‘I am a roving reporter,’ Mirsaad replied with a grin. ‘I rove, therefore I am. And I will file many stories on the reaction to the Israeli bombs and to the American pull-out. Frankly, if it keeps me away from the bombsites themselves, I am grateful. I have heard from colleagues sent into Egypt and Syria about the conditions there. Many of them are now very sick. The network has suspended operations in the irradiated areas until they are safe. Well, safer. For now, Kuwait and Qatar are my beats, as you say. I shall fly out to Coalition headquarters when you have gone for a briefing on the ceasefire.’

Melton snorted. ‘Not much of a ceasefire, Sadie. The Israelis wiped the field clean with a couple of airburst nukes. EMPs fried everything the Iranians had.’

Mirsaad’s fragile smile fell away. ‘You know, a lot of people are saying that if your government had not warned Tehran and the others, they would not have deployed all of their defences to be wiped out. Many people think it was a conspiracy, a plot between Washington and Tel Aviv to steal all of the oil, not just Saddam’s.’

The American regarded his friend warily. ‘Sadie,’ he said in a gentle tone, ‘Washington’s gone. Bush, Cheney, all of them. All the petrol-company head offices, motor manufacturers, arms companies, all gone. If there was a conspiracy, it was a one-way street. Everything I’ve seen tells me the Israelis completely suckered Jim Ritchie. Iranian military doctrine is to throw everything at a threat. No reserves. They got an hour or so warning and put everything up. They tried to warn their own people, with the end result that the entire country lit up in panic. Computers, phones, radio, TV, every goddamn piece of electronic equipment in the place, and none of it hardened against a pulse.’

‘So what you are really saying, Bret, is that they didn’t need to bomb the cities. They had already destroyed their enemies as functioning modern societies.’

‘Well, I wouldn’t call them functioning or modern, but yes, I see your point,’ Melton replied. ‘Look, I don’t condone it – who would? By the time the final butcher’s bill is toted, they’ve probably killed, what, a hundred and fifty, two hundred million people. Christ only knows how many more if anybody else follows their lead. Possibly everyone, in the end. You know what that makes us – I mean, the US and the Disappearance? Old news.’