KUWAIT INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT, KUWAIT CITY
The sutures in his butt made it all but impossible to run, and for a ‘running high’ junkie like Bret Melton, that was becoming every bit as uncomfortable as his assorted injuries. ‘You’ll have to excuse my irritability, Sadie. I’ve been folded, spindled and mutilated. Puts a man in a poor frame of mind.’
The Al Jazeera correspondent clicked his coffee cup against Melton’s and smiled. The Army Times reporter was pathetically grateful to him for getting him out of that hangar in the boonies. ‘It is nothing, really,’ Mirsaad replied. ‘Look at what is happening to the world. And you are worried about your manners.’
‘Well, perhaps if people were possessed of a few more manners, they wouldn’t go around killing each other with such abandon.’
Sayad al Mirsaad’s eyes flickered nervously around the departure lounge. Kuwait International Airport was swarming with armed personnel from a dozen different countries, mostly American, however, and the atmosphere was twitchy and dangerous. Dense knots of travellers, civilian and military, crowded around every available television screen to follow the war news. There had already been one unpleasant incident where Mirsaad had been recognised from a report he’d just filed on the sinking of the USS Hopper. A couple of Marines didn’t think he was suitably respectful in tone and Melton had been forced to intervene before the little Jordanian got stomped. It had put the American in a bad mood, arguing with his own people, even if they were a couple of Podunk assholes who would have left the world a better place had they stayed home and been zapped by the Wave. He’d been snappy and irritable ever since, and his inability to break out of the blue funk simply made it all the worse.
He needed to piss, his wounded hand throbbed like a bastard, and he’d had no sleep since the first Israeli warhead had gone off. He was grateful to Sayad for hauling his ass out of TRANSCOM limbo, especially so given the business-class ticket, paid for by BBC World, that his colleague had handed him.
‘You’re off to London, you lucky devil,’ Mirsaad had said as he handed over the precious travel wallet. ‘You don’t deserve it, of course, what with your whoring and drinking and your disgraceful attitude to the Prophet and his faithful. I should really be going in your place. After all, I am much more virtuous.’
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, safer. For now, Kuwait and Qatar are my beats, as you say. I shall fly out to Coalition headquarters when you have gone for a briefing on the ceasefire.’
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? Old news.’
‘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.
Neither reporter spoke again until Melton had swiped his boarding pass. The BA hostess was as smooth and pleasant as ever, which only served to heighten the sense of brittle weirdness and impending doom.
‘Good luck. And thanks again,’ said Melton.
‘A safe journey to you, my friend, God willing,’ replied Mirsaad.
He was pathetically grateful for a business-class seat. It was like settling into an overstuffed hotel bed compared to the steel benches, hard plastic seats and stinking kitbags on which he’d mostly fetched up while in transit. It was possible, while sipping at the complimentary orange juice, as they waited to taxi, to imagine that things were entirely normal. The business-class section was full, but remained decadently spacious and agreeable. His fellow bizoids, with one exception, were all male. The one woman looked like a banker or lawyer and had no sooner strapped in than she began opening files to work on. She plugged herself into an iPod and radiated a fierce repeller field, lest anyone should attempt to approach or interrupt her. An old hand, then.
The man sitting next to him, in the window seat, nodded brusquely before returning to his BlackBerry. He kept stabbing at the keyboard without any observable result. ‘It was working this morning,’ he kept muttering to himself. Melton ignored him all too easily.
A hostess, noticing his injuries as he’d levered himself into his seat, offered extra pillows and a blanket to lie on. A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, he’d have derided such indulgences as ‘snivel gear’; it took him a long time, after getting out, to throw off some of the dumber attitudes of his time in service. He took the pillows and thanked her, settling into them after washing down a couple of painkillers with the last of the orange juice. As the engines spooled up, the captain came on to announce that they would be taking a very circuitous route to avoid any hazards from hostilities to the north. Melton didn’t bother to pay attention to the announcements. He didn’t care how they got out of this mess, only that they did so.
He was going to miss Sayad, and felt yet again that he was simply allowing events to sweep him along and away from another friend, one whose own future looked very bleak. Melton didn’t see anything good happening in this part of the world any time soon. There was no way the US could sustain a presence here, but it remained an area of vital importance to the surviving great powers. How long could it be before Chinese, Indian and Russian warships replaced the US Navy on permanent station in the Gulf? As his eyelids drooped and he tried to suppress the snoring he knew was going to piss off his fellow passengers, he sought to get his head around the strategic and economic wreckage of the Israeli strike, but he was too tired and the seat too comfortable, and before long he was asleep.
He woke briefly, thousands of miles later in Gibraltar, but popped another couple of pills, drank some water and went back to sleep. After that he didn’t stir again until the plane began to descend. A flight attendant appeared at his elbow to gently rouse him and the BlackBerry addict, and to ask that they put their seats into the upright position for landing.
‘We’re in London?’ he croaked.
The young woman, a rare beauty of Caribbean heritage by the look of her, seemed distracted and anxious. ‘No,’ she replied with a shake of her head. ‘No. We’re stopping in Paris. It’s… unscheduled… but nothing to worry about. We’ll refuel and be on our way.’
That brought him awake.
‘We won’t be going to London,’ said his travelling companion, whom he’d avoided talking to so far.
‘I’ve been out of it, sorry,’ said Melton, still feeling groggy. ‘I snore. Has something happened?’
The man, a young, nondescript-looking character with one of those weird Amish-style beards, shrugged and held up a pair of earphones. ‘Sennheiser sound-cancelling technology,’ he explained. ‘Blocks out jet engines and loud snoring. Not a problem.’
Okay, so he wasn’t Amish then.
‘Britain’s closed its borders,’ he went on. ‘They haven’t told us yet.’ He waved a hand towards the front of the plane to indicate he meant the flight crew. ‘But I snuck a look at a news feed in the toilet. Everything’s locked down. Air and sea ports, ferries, the Chunnel – all of it.’
Melton’s head was clearing slowly because of the painkillers in his bloodstream. ‘Why?’ he asked.
BlackBerry guy folded his arms in obvious disgust. ‘Blair’s saying something about unrest spilling over the Channel. It’s rubbish. I need to get home. Do you see any jihadi whackjobs on this plane? We’re business people. This is just bullshit.’
‘What unrest?’ asked Bret. ‘I didn’t think those riots in Paris were so bad, considering.’
The man looked at him like he was dealing with a retarded child. ‘You’re kidding me, right? You’ve been out in the boonies, have you? Paris is on fire, man. All of France is. It’s a civil war. And they’re sending us into the middle of it.’