room, buried thirty metres below ground, was nearly as cold as a beer fridge. Fear and sweat, sour and musky, filled the space.
Holguin, a city of more than three hundred thousand souls, scrolled down the plasma screen in front of them. It lay nearly a hundred klicks away to the north, well within the Predator’s range. But Musso intended to push the aircraft on, deeper into Cuban airspace. It was going to go down in hostile territory. Or what had been hostile territory this morning. Musso was already thinking of it as no-man’s-land now. Quite literally.
The sysop controlling the surveillance bird had dropped its altitude to three hundred metres, a height at which the Predator’s cameras could easily pick out very fine detail on the streets below. In fact, so low was it flying and so close had the operator pulled in the view that the real-time feed was a blur, and Musso, like the other observers, was instead examining slo-mo replays on the other monitors. In one the Calixto Garcia Park, right in the middle of the city’s downtown area, rolled into view. Another showed the giant Ceverercia Bucanero brewery, a joint venture with the Canadian brewer Labatt. It was aflame, but nobody was fighting the blaze. On other monitors, beautifully decaying Spanish colonial architecture sat cheek by jowl with aesthetically worthless cement office blocks and warehouses. Winding streets gave onto cobblestone plazas and the town’s surprisingly rich cultural district, wherein half-a-dozen museums, galleries and libraries all stood. Not a solitary human figure moved anywhere.
Unlike the satellite images they’d been watching on the European and Asian news services, the Predator fed live video, and although the streets of Holguin were not nearly as crowded with vehicular traffic as an American city of comparable size, they were still choked with the wreckage of hundreds of cars, many of them burning, all apparently having lost their drivers at the same time. A thickening layer of smoke hung over the city, stirred only slightly by a gathering breeze.
‘General Musso, sir?’
‘Yes, son,’ Musso answered without looking away from the eerie scenes.
‘I have PACOM on line for you, sir.’
Musso accepted a pair of headphones with a mike attached, fitting them on and walking over to a far corner. ‘This is Musso,’ he said quietly.
‘General,’ came a brusque reply in a rather refined New England accent, ‘Admiral James Ritchie here. Glad to hear you’re still with us. You seem to be on the front line of this… phenomenon.’
‘Close enough, sir. It’s touched down about seventy klicks north of here. Looks like a weird storm front. Admiral, if you don’t mind me asking, do you have information about the situation in CONUS? All we’re getting is the news feeds out of Europe and Asia.’
‘No,’ complained Ritchie. ‘We’re not doing much better. Some of my people have managed to take control of the Keyhole over Havana – that’s what I’m pushing through to you now-but we’ve got nothing from home yet. I take it there’s no chance we’ll get a real pair of eyeballs on this today?’
Musso shook his head, holding the earphones in place as he did so. The set was way too small for him and kept slipping off. ‘No, sir. Whatever this thing is, it’s specifically targeted for an anti-personnel effect. We lost a few people to it before we realised. The Cubans lost a lot more, for what it’s worth. But there seems to be no interference with electronic signals or equipment. I guess it’s something akin to a neutron bomb – takes out the people and leaves the infrastructure in place.’
Even as he said it, the rational part of his mind rebelled. He was talking about his wife and children. They were part of the ‘anti-personnel effect’. They had to have ‘shimmered away’, just like all of Nuсez’s men. Just like everyone north of here.
Ritchie’s voice crackled in the headset and Musso wondered if he’d spoken too soon about signals interference, but the audio came good again.
‘Okay, well, have a look at the video my people are sending you. There’s about twelve minutes’ worth. Then we’ll talk again. I’m going to call a videoconference of the… the available theatre commands in twenty minutes.’
The admiral sounded like an old man. He’d have family at home, too. But this was even worse than losing a family. Much, much worse.
The videoconference, hosted out of Pearl Harbor, drew in high-level participants from all the theatre commands, including himself as the senior officer ‘available’ from NORTHCOM. That’s how they were putting it: not ‘surviving’, just ‘available’. For Musso, the fact that he was sitting in was a bad, bad sign.
He was enthroned behind the desk of the ‘unavailable’ commander of Guantanamo Naval Base, in a small, bare office just off from the base war room. Beads of moisture sweated from grey concrete walls and no personal touches softened the utilitarian space. Even the Sony plasma screens on the desk had been set up by a couple of Navy techs ten minutes earlier, to give him some privacy during the link-up. One panel was layered with multiple windows running civilian news feeds and restricted military data channels. In one of these windows he saw live top-down footage of Washington, with English-language subtitles laid in over the original Cyrillic script. There was no explanation for the Russian source material. It may have been hacked, purchased or simply offered for free. Another small riddle to add to the all-enveloping mystery of why the city in the satellite footage was entirely devoid of human life. At least half of Washington was visible in the pop-up window. Musso could see dozens of fires burning out of control, unattended by a single soul. It was amazing how the human mind could adapt to the most irrational, outrageous insults. He’d already accepted, down in his bones, that what had happened was real, and there would be no reversing it. But his balls still tried to crawl up into his belly as he considered the vision of a depopulated American capital. Perhaps it was the Russian captioning.
‘Links secure.’ The disembodied female voice could have originated anywhere, but Musso supposed it belonged to a comms specialist somewhere in Pearl.
The screen devoted to the conference divided in two, with the face of Admiral James Ritchie taking up half the real estate, while four smaller windows carried the heads or acting heads of the unified theatre commands. Apart from General Jones, the Marine Corps officer in charge of US forces in Europe, Musso didn’t know any of them personally. But of course he knew
By way of contrast, a fresh-faced woman, Lieutenant Colonel Susan Pileggi, occupied the frame set aside for the senior ‘available’ officer of the Southern Command. With SOUTHCOM’s main HQ in Miami lying well behind the event horizon, seniority fell to her as acting commander of Joint Task Force Bravo in Honduras. She was based at
