Without Warning (4 page)

Musso had no permanent connection to Guantánamo. He’d been sent down to review operations at Delta, the first task of a new job, a
desk
job back in D.C. that he really hadn’t wanted. A genuine shooting war was about to begin in the Middle East, and here he was, on a fucking day trip to Gitmo, making sure a bunch of jihadi wack jobs 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 him regret the international law degree he’d taken as a younger marine. It had seemed like a good idea at the time. A fallback, 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 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 are functioning again, but we get no response to anything we send home. All our other links are fine. Pearl. NATO. ANZUS. CENT-COM 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 waved his hand at a bank of TV monitors. They were all tuned into U.S. news networks, which should have been pumping out their inane babble 24/7. 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 center frame, and dozens of TV and computer screens flickered away in the background, but nobody from CNN was 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 a couple of chairs, what looked like some smoldering rags, and nothing else. Meanwhile another bank of screens running satellite feeds from Europe and Asia was 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 nonthreatening 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 windup 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 jerkoffs 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 nervous 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 endeavors 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 U.S. 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. 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 might 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 To-morrowland. 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 onto a gutter and tipped over. The young officer, her voice quavering, 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 wrecking 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 façade for that one. He’d already recognized the scene before Oschin had explained to the others what they were looking at. Down in his meat, right down in the oldest animal parts of his being, he knew his family was gone.

Oblivious of the personal import of what she’d just shown him, Ensign Oschin carried on, cycling through a list of public gathering places that should have been teeming with people. All of them abandoned, or empty, or … what?

“It’s the Rapture,” whispered an army major standing directly across the table from Musso. One of the two who’d unsettled Oschin a few minutes ago. “The end of days.”

Musso spoke up loudly and aggressively, smacking down on the first sign of anyone in this command unraveling.

“Major, if it was the Rapture don’t you think
you’d
be gone by now? And where are the sinners? Don’t they get to stay and party? And last time I heard, this thing has a defined horizon, not too far north of here.”

Chastened and not a little put out, the major, whose name tag read
CLARENCE,
clamped his mouth shut again.

Musso wished, for once in his life, that someone were giving him orders as opposed to the other way around. This was one football he didn’t want to run with. He didn’t know what to make of the video streaming out of his homeland. After 9/11 he hadn’t thought anything could surprise him again. He’d been ready for the day he flicked on the television and saw mushroom clouds blooming over an American city. But this … this was bullshit.

“Allahu akbar. Allahu akbar.”

The distinct popping sound of gunfire in the middle distance crackled out of a speaker set. Then came the screams.

“George,” growled Musso.

“I’m on it, sir.”

His aide hurried out of the room to track down the source of this new disturbance. Musso waited for more shots, but none came.

“Okay,” he said. “I’m not sending any more assets into this thing, whatever it is. I think we’ve established that it’s a no-go zone.”

Both of the helicopters he’d ordered to fly north over international waters had apparently crashed soon after crossing the line that now defined the edge of the phenomenon.

“Okay. Let’s call up PACOM …” he started to say.

“General, pardon me, sir? Permission to report?”

A fresh-faced marine butterbar in full battle rattle appeared in the doorway, his dark features unaffected by the recent turn of events.

“Go ahead,” said Musso.

“It’s the Cubans, sir. They’ve sent a delegation in through the minefield. They want to talk. Matter of fact, they’re dying to. One of their vehicles hit a mine coming in and the others just kept on rolling.”

Musso stretched and rolled his neck, which had begun to ache with a deep muscle cramp. He was probably hunching his shoulders again. Marlene said she could tell a mile off when he was really pissed, because he seized up like the hunchback of Notre Dame.

(Marlene… Ohmigod…)

“Okay,” he said. “Disarm them and bring them in. They’re a few miles closer to it, whatever it is. They might have seen something we haven’t.”

The lieutenant acknowledged the order and hurried away, weaving around Stavros, who returned at the same moment.

“I’m afraid a bunch of our guests decided to charge a guard detail,” he said, explaining the gunshots of just a few minutes ago. Things were moving so quickly that Musso had stopped caring about the incident as soon as it didn’t escalate. “Two dead, five wounded. They’ve heard that something is up. They think Osama’s set off a nuke or something. The camps are locked down now.”

Musso took in the report and decided it didn’t need any more of his attention.

“Folks, right now, I gotta say this. I don’t think bin Laden or any of those raghead motherfuckers had anything to do with this. I think it’s much bigger, but what the hell it is, I have no idea.”

The live feed from Oschin’s webcam trawl stuttered along above his head. Mocking them all.

wish it was just a nuke,
thought Musso, but he kept it to himself.

The old sailboat was a twin-masted forty-footer carved out of thousand-year-old Huon pine from the Tasmanian highlands, a beautifully preserved museum piece. She’d placed third on corrected time in a Sydney-Hobart race way back in 1953, and in the decades since had logged enough miles to make it to the moon and back. In that time she’d been the plaything of a builder, a manufacturing tycoon, two dot-com millionaires, and Pete Holder.

Pete knew he was never going to be anywhere near as wealthy as any of the
Diamantina
‘s former skippers—although the dot-com guys had tanked badly a couple of years ago and were probably down to their last two or three million now, hence the bargain-basement price he’d paid for the old girl. Not that he gave a shit. The Australian government issued his passport, but he considered himself a citizen of the waves, and for the past eight years, after taking a redundancy payment from his old job as a rig boss for Shell, he’d been devoted entirely to the pursuit of the world’s most fantastic lifestyle. Mostly that involved meandering from one secret surf break to the next, putting in a few weeks at the Maldives, cutting down the Indonesian archipelago to Nias, booming across the Pacific to chase triple-overhead sets off northern California. And sometimes, of course, to pay for this life of pure indulgence,
it meant loading the boat up with half a ton of compressed ganja and running the gauntlet of international supernarcs like the DEA and AFP.

Even worse were the state-sponsored but highly autonomous shakedown artists, like the crooked Indonesian navy commodore he’d tangled with in Bali last year, or the
Peruvian federales
he thought he’d paid off in Callao only to have them come back a day later saying they’d “lost” their very generous bribe and would be in need of another of the same value within twenty-four hours—unless Señor Pedro felt like seeing out his days as a slave in a manganese mine deep in the jungles of
la Montaña.
Pete had transferred the money within two hours and never sailed into the territorial waters of Peru again.

As he watched Fifi and Jules, moving around to clear away the remains of lunch, the veteran smuggler catalogued all of the near misses he’d survived over the years. It was a sobering exercise, one he forced himself to endure before every new payday. Bad luck he couldn’t control, but with good planning and preparation he could at least minimize opportunities for the ever-fickle finger of fate to insert itself firmly into his anus. Hubris and stupidity, on the other hand, were completely avoidable. They were the principal mechanisms by which natural selection thinned out his competitors, and he’d be dammed if he was going to fall victim to them. Pete Holder was a survivor.