The BBC offices in Paris were an armed compound, with every window covered in steel plating. It did nothing to dull the arrhythmic tom-tom beat of heavy machine-gun fire or the dense, percussive thud of high-explosive ordnance pounding the rubble in the 16th Arrondissement just a few minutes’ drive away. A sandbagged gunpit and razor wire guarded the main entrance, secured by a rotating team of gunned-up heavies from Sandline, a British-based ‘private military company’. Dave, one of the operators, was American, and Melton had initially attempted to forge some kind of relationship with him, but entirely without luck. All he ever received in return for his stream of ‘howdy’s, ‘hi there’s and ‘how ya doin’?’s were grunts and the blank, dead stare of deep disinterest.
‘He’s not really a people person, is he?’ said Monty Pearson, the chief of staff. ‘Still, better than having every man and his mad dog wandering in, eh?’
Monty was a thirty-year veteran of war reporting, having cut his teeth on the Golan Heights all the way back in 1973, during the Yom Kippur War. Like most of the bureau staff, he was a new arrival, a volunteer, in his case from Kabul. Paris was considered a war posting, which was how Melton had moved from freelancer to staffer almost as soon as he’d put his foot in the door with his collection of Iraq War interviews. Very few people had the desire, experience and unique mix of skills that he brought to the table.
Even among the grizzled veterans of the Beeb’s first-rank war correspondents, he stood out because of his own combat experience.
‘Tea?’ asked Monty, as they gathered in the second-floor conference room, a windowless box in the centre of the building. Along with the production studios down in the basement, it was one of the most secure areas in the building, but even so, every now and then a larger explosion nearby would shake flakes of plaster from the ceilings. Melton could feel the detonation through the soles of his shoes.
There was no coffee to be had, unfortunately, and Bret had noticed that the Brits really did seem to function a lot more effectively with just a cup or two of their weak, milky brew inside them. He had no idea where Barry, the office manager, sourced their supplies, but in a starving city riven by ethnic and civil warfare, he somehow kept the larder stocked and the teapots full. When Melton had complimented him on his scrounging chops, Barry had grinned back and said, ‘If I can keep Jim Muir’s fuckin’ beer fridge full of fuckin’ Boddingtons in Beirut, a cup of fuckin’ char in Paris in’t going to bovver me, is it, guvnor!’
‘But a decent cup of Java’s impossible?’ Melton asked.
‘All but,’ said Barry, in an apologetic tone. ‘Frogs is killing each other over mouldy croissants and fuckin’ Nescafe. So no, Mr Melton, no fuckin’ coffee. Learn to drink somefin civilised, why doncha?’
The small team of correspondents and editors took their places around the conference table, most of them juggling papers and folders in one hand, and bone-china cups and saucers in the other. A packet of ‘biscuits’, as they insisted on calling all forms of cookie life, sat in the centre of the table, and Monty doled out one to each tea drinker, before carefully twisting the packet closed again and clamping it with a wooden clothes peg. The provenance of the peg was never explained. It was a peculiar ritual, one that Melton had rather come to look forward to each day. He was offered one of the McVitie’s wholemeal ‘bickies’ to have with his glass of water, but again he turned it down.
‘Couldn’t get any Oreos, Barry?’ he teased, only half in jest.
‘Oh, I know where there’s a whole warehouse of ‘em, Mr Melton. Just couldn’t be fucked dickerin’ for ‘em. Why, do you want some?’
‘Oh no, don’t put yourself out on my behalf,’ Bret replied, smiling.
‘Wasn’t planning to, sir.’
Other exchanges rolled back and forth across and around the table as everyone settled in. The morning news conference was about something more than simply assigning new stories and monitoring those already in progress. It was the only time each day when the entire team was in one place, and it served as an opportunity for everyone to touch base, for the tribe to hunker down and count its blessings that once again their numbers had not been thinned out. The BBC had lost seventeen journalists killed or simply disappeared in the last month, not counting those who’d been vaporised in the Middle East. The Paris bureau, however, was charmed, having lost nobody since Jon Sopel was killed in the first week of fighting. The bureau had grown like topsy since then, and had taken the buildings on either side as they’d become abandoned, but only seasoned warcos and freelancers like Melton worked here now. He’d been hired on a twelve-month contract. It paid a fraction of his Army Times job, which hadn’t been a great earner anyway, but because of the hazardous posting status, the former Ranger was guaranteed ‘room and board’ at the Paris compound. It seemed perverse, but he ate better and slept more securely than many people in England.
‘Right then,’ Monty called out in his down-to-business voice. ‘What enchanting fripperies and puff pieces will we be filing from the City of Light today, then? Caroline, darlin’, any chance of that interview with the blessed Sarko yet?’
Caroline Wyatt rolled her eyes up to the peeling paint of the high ceiling. ‘His minders promised me I’d see him yesterday and I spent the whole bloody day in this wretched armoured car, roaring around from one bunker to the next, without ever actually managing to get anywhere near the little bugger. I’ll stay on it, Monty, if you really wish, but I don’t think Sarkozy’s going to roll over for us until he has some genuinely good news to crow about.’
‘Well, his armoured boys entered the old city last night. I’d have thought that was good enough.’
‘Yes, it is a feel-good story, isn’t it? Dozens of Leclerc main battle tanks crushing Arab street fighters under their treads in the Bois de Boulogne… I can’t imagine why he wouldn’t want to sit down and chat about that over a Pernod or two.’
‘Well, keep at it, sweetheart. I have faith in your charms,’ the chief of staff told her. ‘Bret, are you all squared away with the Marines? London is super-keen to see you embed with them after they cleaned out Lyons.’
Melton tapped the point of his ballpoint pen on a Spirax writing pad. ‘Soon as we’re finished up here, I’m heading west to Suresnes,’ he replied. ‘The Marines – although, you know, they’re really more like Army Rangers – they laid up last night at Mont-Valerien, the old fortress right next door. Parachuted in there when it was still full of jihadis. Pretty fucking hard-core. They’ll have some good stories.’
Normally, in a room full of BBC reporters, he’d have kept his mouth shut and just grunted, ‘Yeah, good to go.’ But these guys weren’t normal. Even Caroline Wyatt, who still spent an hour in make-up every day, nodded appreciatively. He didn’t need to sex it up for them. They all knew what a godless blood-swarm the drop into Mont-Valerien would have been, and what the push eastwards into the city was going to be like from there. The clashes between rival elements of the French military were destructive in the extreme. Whole swathes of the suburbs had been gutted by collisions between main-force units siding with either Minister Sarkozy or the so-called Loyalist Committee. The blocks bordering the Bois de Boulogne parklands now looked like Stalingrad at the end of 1944. Those buildings still standing were mostly gutted and blackened, often with the upper floors sheared off by high explosives. The line of the ruined streetscape looked like broken teeth.
‘It’s bloody confusing, isn’t it,’ grumbled Monty. ‘Rebels, renegades, mutineers, Loyalists – hard to keep them all straight some days. And if someone could do me a favour and explain why we’re still calling them fucking “Loyalists” when it seems pretty obvious they’ve cut some sort of deal with the intifada crew, I’d be very grateful.’
Melton, who was idly sketching a rough map of the city centre, with various lines of advance and defence marked out, just as he’d been taught so long ago, looked up and shrugged. ‘They self-identify as Loyalists, Monty, so it’s only good manners. After all, Sarkozy did anoint himself boss hog when Chirac got whacked. Smart move or not, it was illegal. Shades of Napoleon grabbing the crown. Gotta figure most of the guys fighting for the Loyalist Committee think they’re the ones protecting the Republic. The soldiers, at least. Sarko calling them all traitors and sell-outs to the intifada wouldn’t have helped calm the matter down either. The jihadi, they’re allies of convenience. It’s all fucked up. Civil wars always are.’
‘Do you believe him, though?’ asked Caroline.
‘Sarko? Who knows?’
‘It seems a little incredible, don’t you think, him accusing the Loyalists of treason? They seem rather less discriminating than that. Anyone in their way gets killed, no matter what their allegiance. Street gangs, neo-fascists, jihadis. They’ve cut them all down at one time or another.’
‘Like I said, Caroline, it’s confused. It’s a mistake to think of this thing in terms of massed armies manoeuvring against each other. Alliances and loyalties are contingent. They can shift in minutes. An agreement negotiated at one level might have no effect at others, or further down a city block. I think this is going to be one of those times when the winners definitely write the history.’
‘Well,’ Monty interrupted the discussion, ‘as another of your countrymen once pointed out, journalism is the first draft of history, and ours will be due in a few hours. So let’s crack on, shall we?’
Leaving the office was no longer a matter of grabbing his equipment and stepping out to hail a cab. Melton didn’t expect to see the compound again for a couple of days and he packed accordingly. At the bottom of a small black rucksack he stuffed a layer of spare socks and underwear, on top of which he placed some emergency rations, even though he’d be eating with his embedded unit, he hoped. On top of them went his equipment: a small handy cam and twenty-four hours’ worth of videotape, three notebooks and a couple of pens. He topped it off with two handfuls of carefully hoarded chocolate bars and cigarettes, which he planned to share with ‘his’ troops. He understood just how welcome an outsider with a small stash of luxuries could be.
It was raining outside again, quite heavily, enough to dull the sounds of close-quarter fighting. The steel plating that covered all the windows only served to magnify the sound of the downpour as the torrents hit the metal. He carefully pulled on his rain slicker over a BBC-issue ballistic vest and snagged a pair of goggles to protect his eyes. His injuries still troubled him. These days the toxic rain wasn’t nearly as bad as it had been a few weeks back, but letting the water run into your eyes felt like swimming in a hideously over-chlorinated pool.
The last item, he took his time with. It was a controversial choice – a personal weapon. Some of the reporters, like Caroline and Adam Mynott, who’d arrived from Afghanistan with the last of NATO’s returning contingent, refused to carry anything and tried very hard to talk Melton out of doing so. They argued that a journalist’s best protection was their non-combatant status. In turn Melton insisted that nobody was playing by the Geneva Convention and cited at least three occasions in Iraq and two in Paris where he’d been forced to defend himself. It was an unresolved dispute, with some of the older hands writing him off as a fossil from the Cowboy Age, while a few of the younger ones quietly sought him out to ask his advice about how they might discreetly pack their own protection. It was telling, he thought, that Barry had scrounged him two spare magazines for the Fabrique Nationale 57 pistol.
He stripped, cleaned and rebuilt the handgun before slotting home a full mag. Safety on, it went into the holster on his right hip and disappeared under the slicker. Melton finished his packing with a fully charged cell phone, plugged into British Telecom’s network and set to roam, but he noted that – as usual – there was no signal available. Service was spotty, at best. After a quick visit to Monty’s cubicle for all the goodbyes and good-luck wishes, he signed out at the security desk, lodging a run-down of his expected movements over the next forty-eight hours, the name of the French unit he would be with, and the number of the all-but-useless cell phone in his breast pocket.
From there he hurried out to the internal courtyard where his ride was waiting, a custom-built six-wheeled Land Rover, with two armed guards and his driver, American Dave.
‘Fantastic,’ Bret muttered to himself. More loudly, on approaching the vehicle, he called out, ‘Morning! You guys got my route map this morning? We’re gonna be skirting around some contested ground.’
Dave, a chunky, dark-haired man with a short-cropped beard, continued chewing his gum and nodded. ‘Yup.’
‘Okay then. Drive on.’
Melton had mapped out a long, looping circuitous path through the district’s quieter streets to avoid the fighting just north-east of the Bois de Boulogne, between Avenue Foch and the huge traffic roundabout at Place de la Porte Maillot. Within that area, fourteen irregularly shaped city blocks had been reduced to a wasteland of shattered buildings, burning ruins, and rubble through which no armour could pass and over which thousands of men and women now fought. The rain had dampened hostilities somewhat, but the rolling thunder of combat never completely abated. Soon after they set off, two jets screamed low overhead to unload their bombs on somebody. The air force was almost entirely behind Sarkozy, but even so, Melton flinched a little. Technically, they were still in Loyalist territory, and an armoured Land Rover would make an excellent target of opportunity.
It took them all of four minutes to deviate from the route and hit trouble. And the reason he didn’t notice them veering off course was because American Dave surprised him by initiating a conversation as he popped a CD into the stereo. Melton checked out the cover. Don Dudley’s Truckin’ Hits.
‘Gonna git bloody soon,’ said Dave.
Okay, it wasn’t much of a conversation, but it was a start.
‘Yeah,’ agreed Bret. ‘Always gets kinda biblical whenever you get a lot of irregulars tangling with main force. These guys’ll be desperate too. You got the Marines and tanks coming in from the park, and those two grunt divisions hit Romaine and Noisy-le-Sec yesterday. Loyalists are trapped.’
Dave snorted in disgust. ‘Fucking Loyalists. Bullshit. Nobody loyal to nothing but Allah ever partnered up with those raghead motherfuckers.’
Melton let that one slide past. He had no idea what game plan the Loyalist Committee were running and wouldn’t have been surprised to see them turn on the Arab street fighters and massacre them wholesale if the need arose.
The Land Rover rumbled down a deserted street in which all of the trees had died. The rain was still heavy, reducing visibility to about thirty yards, and he could tell from the neglected appearance of the buildings, with gaping broken windows and doors left ajar, that most of them were empty. Every now and then a figure would dart furtively from cover, but only for a few seconds at most. In the back, Dave’s companions kept their weapons at the ready.
‘You don’t think?’ said Dave.
‘Sorry. I don’t think what?’
‘You don’t think the ragheads and Loyalists are teamed up?’
Melton shrugged. ‘They have a common enemy, but that doesn’t make them friends or even allies. Loyalists are fighting Sarkozy because they think he’s a dictator. A fascist. The street Arabs from the banlieue are fighting him because he sent his troops into their neighbourhoods and served up a big bowl of smack-down. As for the skinheads, they’re fighting the Arabs because they’re skinheads. The other white gangs are fighting the Arabs because fighting’s all there is now. You fight, you eat. You eat, you live. Don’t know that there’s much more to it.’
Dave grunted and lapsed back into silence as Don Dudley started singing that he was king of the road.
And just out of the corner of his eye, Bret Melton saw the telltale, snaking smoke trail of an RPG round. A warning cry was in his throat but never got out.
Then the world turned upside down with a head-cracking roar and a geyser of hot fire.