The night-time desert was a crumpled drift of blue-white silk below the chopper, which was all hot metal and grease and the suffocating body odour of soldiers. In the gloom it enfolded him like an unpleasant memory. Bret Melton had jumped out of helicopters and into another war not far from here, not long ago, and at times while riding out towards the line he had wondered if he’d be doing the same thing in another ten years. And ten more after that, forever and ever, amen. Now he knew that he wouldn’t.
The thundering engine and rotors made normal conversation impossible but the four troopers in the cabin with him all needed to talk, to know what was happening back in the real world. In the faint glow leaking through from the cockpit, their faces were hollowed out and haunted. They all knew him, or knew of him. As a former Ranger, Melton was a popular embed. His shit was stowed according to regs and he could be trusted. He was as close to a believer as an outsider could be. Hitching the flight back to 3rd Infantry Division, the questions started as soon as they recognised him.
‘What the fuck’s happening, man?’
‘What about our families?’
‘Is it a fucking attack or what, dude?’
He’d done his best to explain what he knew, but really, what did he know? As Melton had laid it out for them, bellowing over the thump of the rotor blades, the looks on their faces had made him feel like a mental case. They gaped in horror and disbelief as he described what he’d seen and heard – and how could he blame them? He couldn’t really believe it himself. He sounded authentically mad. After twenty minutes they’d all lapsed into silence and the rest of the flight passed in a sort of stunned, half-catatonic state. Melton knew that by the time these guys relayed the news to their friends, it’d be totally bent out of shape, but he didn’t see much point in holding anything back. Everything they were defending was gone. Their homes and loved ones – everything. They had a right to know. In fact, that was the only reason he was still here. He had open tickets back to Paris and could check out any time he wanted, but he could no more fly out to Paris than he could to New York now. He had no immediate family. No steady girlfriend. His relationships had always been short term and contingent. One woman he’d been closer to than most called him ‘commitment phobic’, but she was wrong. Melton wasn’t scared of commitment; he just wasn’t committed to her. Ever since he’d left the army after Somalia he’d had one faith, one love from which he could not be diverted: the telling of soldiers’ stories.
The pilot’s voice came through, a clipped monotone announcing they were five minutes out. Melton craned around on his perch and briefly popped his head out into the slipstream. The 1st Brigade Combat Team’s desert base wasn’t totally blacked out, but it was much darker than the last time he’d come in, three days ago. Even so, under the moon it still glowed as a bed of pearls in the wide vessel of shadows that was the desert at night. On a satellite image, the tent city and masses of equipment would show up as a vast glowing metropolis of blood and iron, but what the hell. There was no sense in making it easy for Saddam, hence the blackout.
They flew in low, flaring and pivoting for the touchdown on a steel-mesh landing pad. A storm of gritty, stinging sand blasted into the cabin, scouring any exposed skin and working its way in through the layers of clothing Melton had drawn tightly around himself. One of the soldiers slapped him on the shoulder and grimly mouthed, ‘Thanks anyway, buddy’, before leaping out and hurrying off, bent double. The Army Times correspondent – or was he a former correspondent now? – followed the others out into the chill darkness, intending to head for the tent where some of the journalists maintained a rudimentary press club with a small stash of carefully hoarded bourbon and beer.
‘Mr Melton? Sir?’
‘Lieutenant Euler?’
Melton recognised him immediately. The platoon commander, who, at six-and-a-half foot, was forced into a very exaggerated stoop by the Blackhawk’s spinning rotors, hurried forward and took Melton by the elbow, steering him away from his intended heading.
‘Captain wants to see you, sir. We’re getting set to roll on fifteen minutes’ notice.’
‘Roll where?’
‘Don’t know, sir. But Captain Lohberger needs you over at headquarters. The squadron commander will want to hear what you have to say as well.’
‘About what’s happened back home?’
‘Yes, sir.’
Both men carefully stood up as they cleared the track of the rotor blades. Melton hoisted his backpack into a slightly more comfortable position and tried to take in as much as he could of his surroundings. Something was going to happen soon and the knowledge of it left a weird coppery taste in the back of his mouth. They hurried down from the rise of the makeshift helipad, diving into a small tent city laid out in a strict grid pattern, much of it obscured by the tan camouflage nets. Away from the overwhelming din of the chopper, he began to hear shouts and curses as non-coms wrangled their squads towards assembly points while junior officers like Euler gathered up platoons and began clicking them into larger units for deployment in the field. He could hear the whine of Abrams gas turbines and the snarl of Bradley fighting vehicles somewhere nearby, and overlaying it all was the ceaseless thumping of rotor blades as dozens of helicopters pirouetted through the inky black sky above them. The metallic, oily taste of diesel mixed with the grit and dust kicked up by the Blackhawk filled his sinuses. He pulled out a rag and blew his nose, knowing that the snot would be blood-flecked from the dirt.
‘Do you mind if I ask you a question, sir?’ said Euler, as they double-timed past a tent where a group of men in uniforms and berets he recognised as British SAS were hunkered around a table. One of the commandos levelled a hard stare at him and flicked the tent flap closed. ‘Is it true, sir, what we’ve been hearing?’
Melton squinted against the sand, which was already coating the inside of his mouth and nostrils. ‘I don’t know what you’ve heard, exactly, Lieutenant. But it’s gone. Home. Everyone there has gone.’
Euler’s face twisted into a mask of despair. ‘I’d heard it was a jihad attack. Bio weapons or nukes, or something. Took out a bunch of cities.’
They turned a corner, nearly running into a couple of MPs.
‘Watch where you’re going, asshole,’ one of them barked, surprising Melton with a female voice. She was built thicker and closer to the ground than him. He muttered a hasty apology and moved on.
‘No, this is nothing to do with the jihadis. Unless it was merciful fucking Allah, of course, like Saddam is telling everyone. But nobody knows. Some kinda weird energy bubble or something. Seems to have zapped away all the primates inside its boundary.’
Euler looked aghast. ‘Primates?’
‘Just before I took off, that was the latest on CNN. Some Japanese blogger checking webcams of the San Diego Zoo noticed all the monkeys were gone. Didn’t take long to work it out from there.’
‘Holy shit,’ said the lieutenant in a small, choked voice that was completely at odds with his towering frame.
The reporter knew exactly what was going through his mind. He’d seen that same reaction many times today. Lieutenant Euler was counting his losses. Children and partner, if he had them. Mom and dad, ditto. Brothers. Sisters. Old friends and new. Neighbours. Faces on the streets where he once lived, even if he didn’t know their names. Ex-girlfriends. Classmates from school. A widening gyre of personal history, all of it sucked away in some freakish moment when the laws of physics got turned inside out. Any moment now he’d look around, like a child who’d woken up in a strange room, trying to figure out where he was and how to put everything back in its place. There.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Melton, but Euler just shook his head.
‘This sucks,’ he breathed. ‘Everyone?’
‘Most everyone,’ he confirmed. ‘Seattle’s still there. Alaska. Hawaii. Coupla places in Canada. That’s it, though.’
‘Man… Oh shit, here we are.’
They stepped into a large frame tent, one of the newer types that came with power outlets and lighting. It was nicer than the Korean War-era GP Mediums he used to spend time in. Melton recognised the tense, guarded body language of men who were used to facing the worst possible situations, but had never really expected anything this bad. He was almost rocked back on his heels by the concentrated force of their attention when they recognised him.
‘Come in, gentlemen,’ a voice called out. ‘We’re pressed for time here, Bret.’
Melton nodded a quick greeting at Captain Christian Lohberger, Bravo Troop CO, 5-7th Cav, and the only man in the tent who routinely used Melton’s first name. Everyone else referred to him as ‘sir’, or ‘Mr Melton’. Being called ‘sir’ beat ‘hooah’ or ‘Rangers lead the way’., the last of which Melton found increasingly annoying over the years, especially hearing the Ranger war cry from pukes who most definitely were not Rangers and were never going to be Rangers. And as a former grunt, the ‘sir’ thing had greatly amused him at first. Nothing much amused him at the moment, however.
‘I’m guessing Iraq’s not why you wanted to see me,’ he said.
Lohberger shook his head and cut straight to the bone. ‘No. We’re getting nothing but smoke blown up our asses from Division on down. What the hell is going on?’
Melton dropped his bag by the trestle table, on which a map of the Kuwait-Iraq borderlands rested. It was a covered in a swirl of red and blue lines and unit markings. The faces around the tent were grim and focused entirely on him.
‘Well,’ he began, ‘what I knew when I caught the chopper back this afternoon…’
By the time Bret finished, Lohberger’s first sergeant had fetched the squadron’s commander and command sergeant major.
‘Sweet mother of God,’ grunted Sergeant Major Bo Jaanson, a gnarled stump of old wood who looked like he might well have seen off the Nazis at Bastogne. Melton had given them the super-concentrated version of the hours he’d spent plugged into the European and Asian news feeds, finishing up with the news of the primate discovery – fresh when he’d stepped off the tarmac in Qatar, but probably superseded by some new madness in the hours since.
The leadership cadre were otherwise speechless. Outside the slowly billowing walls of the tent in which they stood, the squadron continued to gather its strength. Yesterday it had seemed utterly formidable. Now, Melton felt like an ant sitting on a mound kicked over by laughing, moronic gods.
‘Thanks anyway,’ said Lohberger at last. ‘It’s been hard not knowing anything.’
Bret shrugged helplessly. ‘I’m only telling you what I got off the satellite feed and the web. I wouldn’t call it gospel, but… you know…’
The men were all younger than him, the platoon commanders by a considerable margin. Some of them would have young families of their own. Lohberger, at thirty, was something of a grand old man. He sucked in a deep breath and looked at the map as though he’d found some kind of nasty porn stash in his daughter’s bedroom.
‘Okay. There’s nothing we can do about it from here, not right now anyway,’ the captain declared. ‘We know a lot more than we did ten minutes ago, but nothing that changes what we have to do in the next couple of hours.’
His voice and manner were hard. Melton observed a stiffening of postures and facial expressions among the other men in the room, a turning away from anxiety and doubts, as men jammed them down somewhere deep, at least for the next little while.
‘Do you mind if I ask what’s gonna go down here?’ said Melton.
‘Nope,’ Lohberger replied. ‘You’re gonna be in on it soon enough.’
He jabbed a finger at the map table. Melton read the map plan, named Oplan Katie. It looked like someone’s joke, a Cold War-era forward defence at Fulda Gap write-up. He started to feel ill.
‘Saddam’s moving towards us. He’s pulled a lot of his guys out of those useless fucking trenches they dug, and put them on the road heading this way.’
‘Holy shit.’
‘Yeah. Like we don’t have enough to think about.’
Melton leaned forward to examine Oplan Katie on the transparent acetate. The basic plan had all Coalition forces moving forward out of Kuwait as originally planned. On the map was one phase line, a graphic control measure called Phase Line Katie, that ran through the Sulaybat Depression. All of the units in the Coalition were to hold that phase line and attrit any Iraqi force approaching it. The Brits with the 1st UK Division were still assigned the chore of dealing with Basra. Melton choked back any criticism of the plan. Getting into an urban fire fight, especially now, didn’t seem to make any sense at all. It negated almost all of the Coalition forces’ technological and military advantages. The 5-7 Cav’s objective was Jalibah Airfield, marked as Objective Marne three hundred and seventy klicks south of Baghdad. The Mog all over again, he thought. It explained why everyone in the tent looked pale and sweaty
What idiot came up with this plan? But he kept that question to himself and asked a different one. ‘Any idea which units?’
Command Sergeant Major Jaanson volunteered the answer. ‘The crap ones – militia, Fedayeen, reserve forces. A couple of Republican Guard units as well, but from the way they’re moving, they look like their job is to keep a gun at the back of those other guys heading into the meat grinder.’
The Army Times reporter glanced at Lohberger for confirmation and received a brusque nod. ‘We’ve seen a couple of fire fights break out within the Iraqi ranks. Guard units chewing over militia who tried to break off the advance.’
Melton couldn’t help it. He pointed at Phase Line Katie. ‘Surely you’re not going to attack them, are you?’
Captain Lohberger shrugged as his squadron commander, a lieutenant colonel, left the tent for a meeting with the brigade commander. ‘Well, the Kuwaitis don’t want us fighting on their soil,’ he explained. ‘So that is why we’re moving forward. They are taking positions on the Coalition’s western flank, inside Iraqi territory, just on the other side of Wadi al Batin. These base camps are not the best defensive positions anyway, so we may as well follow the first tenet of warfare.’
‘Engage the enemy as far forward as possible,’ Melton said, nodding.
‘Hooah, Rangers lead the way.’
Lohberger had a Ranger tab on his uniform and thus, in Melton’s mind, the right to talk like one. Still, Bret winced anyway while Lohberger continued.
‘The plan is that Coalition air power will conduct the air war as before, going for command and control. They’ll take out the bridges as well, which should make our life a bit easier. Close air will stomp anyone who gets over those obstacles, then our arty engages them. Whatever is left is our meat, Bret.’
Melton didn’t ask the obvious question – why?
Why the hell did any of them have to be here now? Saddam was no longer a threat to America, was he? And if the wing-nuts were right, and it was all just about the oil and fattening up Halliburton’s balance sheet so that Dick Cheney could retire in comfort… well, again, so what? Cheney was gone. And Bush. And the hundreds of millions of Americans they said they were defending. Melton had to shake his head to clear the buzz of conflicting thoughts crowding each other out. Why the hell didn’t they just pack up and leave the whole sorry mess behind?
Of course, that begged the question of where they might go. Hawaii? Alaska? The Pacific Northwest? Frankly, he couldn’t see anyone staying there if they could find a way out. Not with that hungry fucking bubble buzzing away just down the road.
Lohberger finished and let the air force liaison start his portion of the briefing. Bret found his thoughts drifting once the ALO, a major who liked to dip Oreos in his scotch, had taken over. His private thoughts, a tangle of confused memories and fresh trauma, were interrupted by Jaanson and Euler.
‘You all right, sir?’ Sergeant Major Jaanson asked.
The briefing was over. Melton blushed at having been caught out so badly. He’d seen plenty of others zoning out through the day. Men and women just standing, staring into the middle distance, eyes unfocused and faces slack. The worst ones looked like they’d come out of a session of electroconvulsive therapy. It was a mild form of shock, he supposed, as the rational mind shut down its higher functions to let the hindbrain deal with the violation it had experienced. In millions of years of evolution, humans had never been confronted by a threat like the energy wave. It was going to take some adapting, some getting used to – assuming the goddamn thing didn’t end up swallowing the whole world, of course.
‘Sorry,’ he replied. ‘It’s been a helluva day. I’m a bit out of it.’
‘That’s fine,’ said Lieutenant Euler, who looked to have recovered a good deal of his composure since their conversation on the way to the tent. ‘You’ll have time to shower, change and get some food into you, sir. Then you’ll need to get your gear together and find my Bradley. We’re on thirty minutes’ readiness, but I want my guys ready to rock in ten.’
‘Outstanding.’ Melton’s voice was flat with weariness and just a touch of sarcasm. The meeting was breaking up around them as Lohberger’s men set to their duties with almost discernible relief that they had something to keep them busy.
‘I’ll send someone to get you from the reporters’ billet, Mr Melton,’ said Jaanson. ‘Don’t stray from there, okay?’
‘Okay. I won’t take long. I was already packed to move anyway.’
As they left the tent he could see that a change had come over the camp. The activity he’d noted on arriving had greatly intensified. Hundreds of men, all of them in full combat harness, hurried about in regimented groups, raising thick clouds of dust. The rattle of their equipment and the dull thudding of boots was loud enough to nearly drown out the shouts and curses of their NCOs. Nearly, but not quite. Humvees snarled and rumbled and a flight of jet fighters turned long, lazy circles high overhead.
Melton hurried back to his tent. He’d spent more than enough time in camp to move with confidence through the organised bedlam and located the six-man canvas shelter without trouble. Inside he found that his colleagues had already departed. There was a note from Patricia Mescalon on his cot, but otherwise nothing to show for the small civilian community they’d built up over the weeks. He slumped down on the bed and allowed himself a few moments of rest. He would need to eat, and a quick shower wouldn’t be a bad idea. It might be weeks before he could wash again. Instead of moving, however, Melton found himself immobilised by a bone-deep lassitude.
What the fuck is the point of any of it now?
His throat tightened up and he felt tears beginning to well. Sitting up quickly, he rubbed the moisture from his eyes and sucked in a deep breath. Now was not the time to be falling to pieces. Chances were, things were gonna get a shitload worse in the next few weeks. Even if that bubble didn’t move an inch, you couldn’t punch a hole in the world like that and expect life to continue as normal. How long could the military hold together, for instance? They couldn’t be resupplied for very long. And who was going to pay for them? Who was going to pay for him?
His paper was gone. He could ride out with the Cav and dutifully file his copy. For now the net was still working and his emails would zip through the myriad channels of fibre and copper wire all the way back to the Army Times server. But there they would sit, unread, forever. He had no idea whether his pay had gone into his account as scheduled. Possibly it had, if the process was automated. But how long would that last? And how long would anyone go on accepting US dollars anyway? For that matter, could the world economy even expect to survive the sudden disappearance of its beating heart? He didn’t think so. Not when he gave it any real thought.
Sayad al Mirsaad had been right. This was the end of things.