Without warning

‘Daddy is fine,’ she repeated calmly, even as her head reeled with the insanity of it all. ‘And nobody was eaten, Suzie. I don’t know what’s happened, but nobody was eaten. That’s just silly talk. Now strap yourself in, sweetie. This is going to be very dangerous.’

The young girl snapped her seatbelt to show that she’d already done so, and Barb apologised for not noticing. She keyed the ignition (which worked perfectly, like those of all the other cars in the parking lot) and slowly but resolutely backed out of her parking space, pushing the trolley aside with the rear bumper. A few more scrapes and scratches, then.

The view out of the back window was bedlam, with people swarming and vehicles everywhere. Barb gritted her teeth and kept moving, even as she butted up against shoppers who didn’t move out of her way. Some hammered on the window – one guy punching it so hard it cracked, causing Suzie to squeal in fear. But Barbara Kipper refused to stop, believing that to do so would see them trapped. She was only making a walking pace, but kept going. Not for the first time was she grateful to be driving a small car in this parking lot. Whereas SUVs and sedans soon got themselves jammed together, almost like broken teeth on a zipper, she was able to thread, very slowly and determinedly, through the crowd, until she made it to a small hedge line at the edge of the lot and gunned the little Honda right on through it. The car didn’t like it much, and the scratching of branches on the paintwork was hideous. She almost certainly knocked the wheels out of alignment while mounting the kerb, but she was suddenly able to press the accelerator and break free onto Harvard Avenue. They bounced and hit the road with a terrible, metallic crunch. But at least they were out.

As they drove away in the heavy traffic, Barb was certain she heard the pop of gunfire. She couldn’t help but keep looking at the phone, wondering if Barney had got through to Kip.

* * * *

3 GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, CUBA

Somebody must have tipped off the ragheads, because they were wailing up a storm. Long ululating cries of ‘Allahu Akbar’ rolled around the dusty confines of Camp X-ray, drifting over the razor wire. General Musso heard them as tinny voices emanating from the speakers of a nearby computer in the situation room of the Naval Op Centre, at the southern end of the base. ‘Operation centre’ was a grand title for such a modest facility, a demountable hut with heavy grey air-con units rumbling away at the windows. It was a relatively mild Caribbean day outside. Late winter in Cuba was almost but not quite balmy. The brigadier general knew he could probably run up and down the nearest of the scrubby, low-rise hills that surrounded this part of the base without raising much of a sweat. But the room was stuffy. Dozens of laptops had been plugged into the existing cluster of workstations and they were all running hard, dumping waste heat into a space that was already overcrowded, with at least three times as many occupants as normal.

Having given up on the computers in frustration, Tusk Musso leaned over the old map table, gripping the back of a swivel chair, biting down hard on the urge to pick it up and throw it through the window. He was so angry – and, just quietly, so weirded out-that there was a fair chance he could have heaved that sucker all the way down to the water’s edge. The bay was deep cerulean blue, almost perfectly still, and the chair would have made a satisfying splash. Unfortunately, Musso was the ranking officer on the base today and everybody was looking to him for answers. Guantanamo’s naval commandant, Captain Cimines, was missing, apparently along with about three hundred million of his countrymen, and a whole heap of Mexicans and Canucks into the bargain. And Cubans too, Musso reminded himself. Let’s not forget our old buds just over the wire.

‘What are the locals up to, Georgie?’ he rumbled.

His aide, Lieutenant Colonel George Stavros, delivered one brief shake of the head. ‘Still hopping around, sir. Looks like someone really kicked over their anthill. Our guys have counted at least two hundred of them bugging out.’

‘But nothing coming our way yet?’

‘No sir. Santiago and Baracoa are still quiet. A few crowds building, but nothing too big.’

Musso nodded slowly. He was a huge man, with what looked like a solid block of white granite for a head, resting atop a tree trunk of a neck. Even that one simple gesture spoke of enormous reserves of power. He shifted his gaze from the antique, analogue reality of the map table with its little wooden and plastic markers, across to the banks of flat screens, which even now were refusing to tell him anything about what was going on a short distance to the north. The faces of the men and women around him were a study in barely constrained anxiety. They were a mixed service group about two dozen strong, representing all the arms of the US military that had a stake in Guantanamo, mostly Navy and Marines, but with a few Army and Air Force types thrown in. There was even one lone Coast Guard rep, mournfully staring at the map table, wondering where his little boat could possibly have gone. The cutter had dropped out of contact. It was easily found on radar, but would not respond to hail.

Musso had no permanent connection to Guantanamo. He’d been sent down to review operations at X-ray, the first task of a new job, a desk job back in DC he really hadn’t wanted. A genuine shooting war was about to begin, and here he was, on a fucking day trip to Gitmo, making sure a bunch of jihadi whackjobs 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 this one regret the international law degree he’d taken as a younger marine. It had seemed like a good idea at the time. A fall back, 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 an 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 started functioning again, but we get no response to anything we send home. All our other links are fine – Pearl, NATO, ANZUS, CENTCOM 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 was waving his hand at a bank of TV monitors. They were all tuned in to US news networks, which should have been pumping out their inane babble twenty-four,’ seven. 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 centre frame, and dozens of TV and computer screens flickered away in the background, but nobody from CNN was anywhere 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 two chairs, what looked like some smouldering rags, and nothing else. Meanwhile another bank of screens, running satellite feeds from Europe and Asia, showed the studios there to be fully operational, and peopled by increasingly worried talking heads, none of whom could explain what was happening in North America.