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,
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?
‘You are right,’ Mirsaad conceded. ‘I apologise. I sound like some ill-bred street Arab falling on conspiracy talk like a scabrous dog on a bone. Tell me truthfully, Bret, what do you think your military will do?’
He shook his head. ‘I have no idea, Sadie. Leave you all to it, I expect. We’re out of the superpower business as of last week. Go ask the Chinese, or whoever’s running India. If Pakistan hasn’t nuked them yet.’
They fell into an uncomfortable silence as the PA called flights out to Paris, Rotterdam and Bangkok. Melton attempted to find a position in which he could recline without putting pressure on his injured butt cheek or shoulder. It was difficult. But at least for the first time in weeks he was clean, and dressed in luxuriously soft and well-fitting civilian clothes. The BBC had sent him payment in euros for the copy he’d filed before he was wounded, and had advanced him another, larger sum, on the basis of the interviews he had taken at the transit facility out in the desert. As he’d expected, they were most interested in any European angle.
Their money was still worth something in Kuwait, at least in the hermetically sealed environment of the international airport. He was able to buy clothes and replace some lost and damaged equipment. Even better than that, he’d managed to fill a few prescriptions at a pharmacy on the main concourse and, now that he had escaped the Kafkaesque frustrations of the military transport system, he could eat when he felt like it.
‘What will you do when you get to London?’ asked Mirsaad.
‘I got a bunch of studio interviews to do,’ he said. ‘You know, glamorously wounded foreign correspondent stuff. I’ve promised to write up a couple of thousand words for their website, and I really want to push ahead with this book I’ve been thinking about. I wouldn’t be surprised if they asked me to turn around and come right back, though. They lost a lot of people yesterday. Reporters in bureaux throughout the region. They’re gonna be hiring, but it’ll mean heading back here.’
‘Do you want to?’
‘Nope. Well… I don’t know what I want. Something normal would be nice – do you miss normal, Sadie? I do. I can’t go home, so all the conventional nostalgia bullshit is out. Truthfully? I’d just like to sit on my busted ass somewhere, write my book and, I dunno, look around and not see guys armed to the fucking teeth. How about you?’
‘I am an Arab,’ Mirsaad answered glumly. ‘I grew up surrounded by men who were armed to the teeth.’
‘Hey, I grew up in Kentucky. Me too.’
The PA system announced that his flight to London was boarding and Melton suddenly felt a soft pressure in his chest and throat. ‘Well, Sadie, I gotta be going, bud. I might be back, but you know… I just want to say thanks for finding me. I think I might still be doing the zombie shuffle through TRANSCOM’s twilight zone if you hadn’t grabbed me up.’
Mirsaad stuck out his hand and they shook, awkwardly because of Bret’s wounds.
‘It was nothing, a trifling favour for a friend at the Beeb, and one I was happy to do as it helped another friend… I hope we still stay friends, Bret. If we live.’
‘Yup. A big if, Sadie,’ Melton agreed. ‘Take care. I’ll contact you though the network when I get settled.’
The Jordanian patted him gently on the arm and picked up his bags for the short walk to the departure gate. Most of the passengers lining up there were civilians, their numbers split evenly between Arabs and Europeans, although, Melton reminded himself, they might well all be British citizens. Nobody looked happy to be travelling. Either because of what they were heading towards – parts of England were under martial law, and it was being strictly and harshly enforced – or perhaps because of a well-founded fear they might never get there. Thousands of people had died when their aircraft were knocked out of the sky by the same electromagnetic pulses the Israelis had set off to cripple their enemies.
