Without Warning Part 25

Milosz flashed him a blindingly white grin and raised his eyebrows with such comic elan that Melton couldn't help but laugh out loud. It hurt his shoulder dreadfully but he gave in to it anyway. It had been a long time since he'd enjoyed the abandon of real laughter. It seemed to loosen up Milosz's men as well, with some of them smiling and nodding, as their own tension and stresses eased off a little.

"We are going home soon," said Milosz. "But you, my friend, where do you go now?"

The man's eyes were dark pools of sympathy.

"London, I think," said Melton. "That's what my travel chit says anyway. After that, well, I don't know that there is an after that."

"No," agreed Milosz, nodding as though Melton had revealed some deeper truth. "Maybe nothing after that, no."

Melton waved his hands as if to say, What the h.e.l.l?

Leaning back and taking in his surroundings, he couldn't help but dwell on how things were unraveling. There had to be nearly a thousand guys crammed into the baking heat of this hangar at the edge of a temporary base in the middle of nowhere. A lot of desert MARPAT, which meant marines. Mixed in with the MARPAT were some army and air force in the three-pattern desert BDUs like the fresh set Melton wore.

Marine, army, the few navy and air force he saw, all had the same look. The long stare, the slumped shoulders, postures crumpled in upon themselves. A few were crying openly, quietly, regardless of the severity of their wounds. Here and there Melton would spot a soldier looking at a snapshot or a Marine watching a saved video file on his laptop. Some were by the door, chain smoking for lack of anything better to do.

One soldier, from the 101st Airborne, had a collection of dog tags in his fist. He rocked himself back and forth until someone pa.s.sed him. Melton watched the soldier ask a number of times, "Who should I give these to? Do you know?"

Even when he got an answer, he didn't seem to hear it. He'd go back to rocking, back and forth, until someone else walked past.

A female marine over by a c.o.ke machine covered in Arabic script was smiling, flirting with a half-comatose man on a cot. "When I get home to see my baby girl, it'll be all right. She lives in North Dakota with my grandma. I heard they made it."

Oh boy, Melton thought, taking in the glazed green eyes of the marine, a lance corporal. She looked right past him, not seeing anything but her dead girl smiling back from the past.

To Melton they looked beaten. Like men and women with nothing to live for. Milosz and his small band of brothers, however, they were still tight and looking forward to something. Home, family, a simple f.u.c.king ride out of the furnace. It was enough to keep their spirits up. Melton shook his head. Any place where soldiers gathered in great numbers always ended up reeking of sweat and stale breath, cigarettes, ration farts, and something more elemental , an animal smell of violence waiting to turn loose upon the world. But that musky scent had turned rancid and cloying in here. Even Somalia wasn't this bad, Melton thought. The rangers on the whole weren't beaten, nor were those pogues from Tenth Mountain, who'd done better than anyone thought they would.

Desertions, Melton thought. These folks will desert or simply collapse if someone doesn't give them their spines back real soon.

The giant metal fans droning away at the edge of the hangar merely pushed the vile atmosphere around, a gaseous slough of ill feeling and desolation. He was familiar with this. It was what happened when men faced the hopelessness of their circ.u.mstances and shrugged away any chance of redemption. It was what happened when men who were used to fighting for their lives gave up and said, "What's the point?"

Milosz let him alone for a few moments, but perhaps uncomfortable with the brooding presence that had just insinuated itself into his little group, he toed Melton's boot to regain his attention.

"So, Melton by-the-way. You have a theory, yes?"

It was such a weird, unexpected question that Melton shook his head as though a bug had crawled into his ear.

"Sorry. What do you mean?"

"A theory, about the Disappearance, no? I am interested in theories. Real theories with science and learning, not bugaboo magic for explanation. Like these Muslim pigs and their stupidity about Allah's will. So, your theory. Tell me."

Melton opened his mouth to say something but simply shut it again, shaking his head. Fact was, he'd heard any number of bulls.h.i.+t explanations and crazy-talk gibberish about what might have been behind the catastrophe. He'd heard as many backwoods Christians lay it all at the foot of G.o.d as there were bug-eyed imams rejoicing in Allah's vengeance on the infidel. He'd heard whispers of secret government experiments gone wrong, black-hole laboratories, portals to h.e.l.l dimensions, and alien s.p.a.ce-bat biology missions that had scooped up hundreds of millions of lives with something akin to a giant b.u.t.terfly net. He hadn't given any of them a second thought.

"I don't know, Sergeant. I don't even begin to know what happened, or why, or whether it can ever be reversed. I figure best a.n.a.logy is we're like ants whose nest got hit by a lightning strike, or a kid with a magnifying gla.s.s on a sunny day. We're ants. What would we know about anything? Either of those things, they'd be the end of the world to us, but you stand outside the situation, you get the context in a way that we don't have, and it's probably something really simple ... that we're a thousand years from understanding. Possibly we'll never understand it. My bet is, a thousand years from now we'll be back living in caves banging rocks together for a living."

The Polish noncom narrowed his eyes and dipped his head in acknowledgment.

"This is a wise man," he said to his troops. "You see. He knows what he cannot know and does not pretend otherwise. This is wisdom, Jerzy."

Milosz pointed to a younger, black-haired youth and spoke in a rapid garble of Polish. Melton had the impression that he was repeating what he'd just said. The young commando shrugged, conceding a point.

"So what about you, Sergeant. No theories for you?"

Milosz smiled sadly.

"It is like you say. People groping through the dark, grasping at this and that, trying to explain what cannot be understood. My question, I ask it of people because it tells me how they are now. Whether they will get through or not."

"You think people will 'get through' based on whether they believe in conspiracy theories, or magic, or the will of G.o.d?"

"No. People will survive this; some because of luck. If you have no food to eat, no warmth in the deep of winter, it doesn't matter whether you think little green men or Muhammad broke your world. You will still die frozen and hungry. But if you have enough to eat, just enough, and if you have some shelter and safety, again just enough, then maybe your living or dying might have something to do with whether you fall to madness and superst.i.tion, or whether you hold on to your rationality."

A small, indulgent grin sketched itself onto Melton's weathered features.

"You're a materialist then? Of the dialectic school? I thought Poland was done with all that."

"Yes, I am a material thinker, like my father, a mathematician, and you are no boxhead, Melton."

"It's foolish to a.s.sume that just because somebody puts on a uniform and takes orders they turn off their brains. You didn't."

"Excellent," beamed Milosz. "It is good to talk like this, Melton. So much of soldiering is crudity and ugliness, yes. But there is more to the profession of arms, and to life itself. We soldier so our children won't. For us, guns. For them, books and easier lives."

Melton gestured helplessly. "I never had any kids. Gotta say I'm real happy about that now." He didn't look back over at the marine lance corporal. She was still talking about her girl in North Dakota. Someone came over, checked the man on the cot, took his pulse. The orderly pulled a blanket over the man's head and made a note on the clipboard, but the lance corporal didn't notice. "But if I had," he continued, "and they hadn't disappeared, I don't know that they'd be looking at an easier life than I had."

"Not now, no," conceded the Pole.

Three trucks pulled up at the vast hangar doors and able-bodied troopers began unloading more litters from their rear cabins. Corpsmen and a few nurses appeared and hurried over to help them, but otherwise there was no appreciable reaction to their arrival. Men still sat and talked in low voices in their own small, closed groups. Country-and-western crooners still clashed with speed-metal shrieks and hardcore rap from dozens of portable stereos. Listless card games of hearts and spades continued without pause. The bleep-blee-bloop of Game Boy systems never faltered.

"And what now for you, Sergeant? Home to your families?"

Milosz nodded, but there was a grimness to his expression that belied any sense of release or deliverance. A couple of the other Poles appeared just as somber.

"Home yes. We hope."

He waved his hands in the air, a concession to helplessness.

"If we have not been forgotten. Or abandoned. Or lost."

He shrugged.

"But we may not see our families even if we do get home. There will be much work to be done. Our sort of work."

"Fighting."

"Of course. You have seen what happens when things go bad, Melton. In Polish history, there is much fighting. Russians. Germans. Who knows who will come now? Maybe Tartars and Ottomans again. Once even the Swedes invaded. I doubt they would again. They are a soft people now. But not everyone is soft, no? The jihadi pigs I am fighting in Afghanistan. They are crazy men, but hard. The Iraqis, not so hard, but bad, and led badly. Weak men are often the cruelest. And Russia, a sick place, but still peopled with ruthless boyars and commissars and would-be tyrants. This Putin, watch him. He is an iron fist hanging over all of us. So yes, Melton, fighting. Always fighting. Fighting big, between states. And small, between people for little things. Food, water. Basic things. My brother, I spoke to him for three minutes on American phone yesterday. Nothing he has to eat for two days. Just some dried crackers and little tinned foods for his children. Nothing in market. It is like communism again. And now, with the poison clouds, no harvests I will wager."

His men were nodding, and Melton wondered about their grasp of English. If he recalled correctly, GROM operators needed a working knowledge of at least two languages other than Polish. He supposed there was a fair chance that all of these men did speak English with some fluency, given the Anglophone nature of the coalition. And doubtless this was a topic that had been chewed down to the gristle among them. He wished he had taken notes, or recorded the sergeant's lament. He was sure he could sell a story based solely on s.n.a.t.c.hes of interviews taken with the men in this hangar, or with those men and women with whom he'd traveled to get here. An old, nearly burned-out spark flickered somewhere inside him, and he reached inside his jacket pocket, searching for the digital recorder he kept there. It was gone, but he had a pen and a notebook that he had lifted off someone's desk over the course of his journey from Kuwait to this hangar. His writing hand was uninjured, but holding the pad in his heavily bandaged left hand was awkward.

He looked at the lance corporal by the Arabic c.o.ke machine one last time.

Don't end up like her, he swore to himself.

Melton raised an eyebrow at Milosz and asked, "Would you mind? I don't have any of my gear. My newspaper is gone. But I'm still a reporter. I shouldn't be sitting here on my a.s.s feeling sorry for myself. I should be telling stories. Your stories. Would you mind?"

"Of course not," the sergeant said, holding his arms wide. "I am always interested in hearing myself talk. And these, my poor little b.a.s.t.a.r.ds, they have no choice. They have to listen. Why should they suffer alone? Yes, Melton, of course you can tell my stories. Where should I start? With our attack on the Mukarayin Dam? Yes, that was us. We flooded Baghdad. Everyone thinks it was Green Berets. Pah. Hollywood p.u.s.s.ies! It was GROM."

Melton couldn't help but take a quick glance around to see if any Army Special Forces were around to hear that remark. If they were and they heard, they didn't make themselves known.

Still struggling with his pen and paper, Melton came up short. The Polish special forces were not an old and venerable outfit. They had only been established in 1991. But they already had a rep as a very closed-up shop. You rarely heard of them, and they never did press. Yet here was one of the senior non-coms suddenly happy to give up details of a mission that he would have denied even happened just last week.

Milosz had no trouble translating the American's puzzled look.

"Do not be surprised, Melton. Everything has changed now. I will tell you about Mukarayin because it suits our purposes."

"How so?" he asked.

"It is like I said, there will be much more evil in the world soon. There is already, yes? My country, she has suffered more than most through her history. But not this time. Or not without making others suffer for what they might do to us. I will tell you about Mukarayin because you will tell the world, and then she will know, we Poles will not be plowed under again. You know what most people see when they imagine Polish army? They see hors.e.m.e.n galloping off to charge Hitler's tanks. Brave but stupid. And doomed. But now, if you tell them about Mukarayin, in future when people think about Polish fighting man, they maybe think about that dam blowing high into sky and that mountain of water flooding out and drowning city of Baghdad. They will think twice about wis.h.i.+ng evil upon us, yes?"

"Yes," agreed Melton. "I think they will."

It was more than he had imagined writing about. He'd been more interested in Milosz's story of calling home and talking to his brother, of being trapped in the broken machinery of a vast war machine, suddenly cut off and alone in a hostile world. And he did take that interview, but he also filled half of his notebook with stories from every man in Milosz's extended squad-GROM usually operated in teams of four-about blowing the dam that flooded Baghdad.

As he did so, the strangest thing happened. A small audience began to gather around them, just two pa.s.sing Cav troopers at first, but increasingly building up into a circle of attentive listeners that drew in even more men and women by virtue of its novelty. After ten minutes Melton was sure that more than two hundred people surrounded them, perhaps the majority of the walking wounded in the hangar s.p.a.ce. The Polish operators spoke into a rapt silence, but occasionally someone would call out, confirming a detail of their story, or some would clap or cheer like believers at a revival meeting.

The specialist from the 101st Airborne stood over him, with a fistful of the dog tags, his eyes clear now. "Sir?"

"Yes, Specialist?"

"Can I ... would it be okay if I told you ..." The specialist held up the dog tags.

There must have been twenty or more of the tags, some of them with blood and skin on them.

"Sure, Specialist," Melton said. "Tell me what happened."

"Hey." A marine stepped forward. "Need a recorder, Mr. Melton?"

Melton took it and smiled. "Just call me Bret."

When the dog tags had been reattached to formerly breathing, living, loving people, the army specialist moved away. The batteries were low, but a Brit stepped forward with a set of AAA batteries. Melton talked to the marine who loaned him the tape recorder until the tape ran out. He took the tape out and offered the recorder to the marine, who had a boy, a girl, and a horse named Eagle back home, but the man shook his head.

"No, Bret. You keep it. You need it more than I do." He fished around in his pocket and pulled out some fresh tapes. "I don't have anyone to record messages for anymore."

The marine stood up, squared his shoulders, and moved out of the hangar. At the door he collected a rifle and a helmet from another marine and they walked out into the searing Qatar daylight.

Melton had no idea where he would place the interviews, or what form they might take. But he kept scribbling and taping, encouraging people to talk about... well, whatever they wanted.

"So the b.a.s.t.a.r.d was up in the ceiling," Private Adrian Bennet said. "He popped four in my squad before we finally figured out where he was hiding."

"Our convoy got cut off." A Native American army private, Piewesta, shook her head. "We took a h.e.l.l of a lot of fire and my friend Jessie, she was in the back of the Hummer when we got hit. She didn't make it."

"That was a h.e.l.l of a mess," someone added. "Five-oh-seventh Support Battalion, right?"

Piewesta nodded.

"The bullets came flying from everywhere," said an Apache pilot, half of his left foot missing. "h.e.l.l of a thing, Bret. I thought I was home safe after knocking down those three Iranian helicopters, but then all of this ground fire comes up. Like being trapped in a Mason jar full of lightning bugs. Just wasn't my day to be flying."

Bret noticed that the pilot didn't mention his gunner. Probably didn't make it, he decided.

"She just wouldn't sink," a sailor from the USS Belleau Wood said. "That Iranian sub put three torpedoes into her but she wouldn't go down. We were trying to get the fires under control when we got word to abandon s.h.i.+p. We could have saved her but they said resources were tight. Better to scuttle her."

A Tarawa-cla.s.s LHA lost, Melton thought. Scuttled. The navy hadn't lost a s.h.i.+p that large in combat since World War II.

The sailor smiled. "We got that f.u.c.king Kilo sub, though. ASW guys from the Nimitz got us some payback on that b.i.t.c.h."

"h.e.l.l, yeah," someone else said. Others took up the chorus. "h.e.l.l, yeah. Payback."

He heard a seemingly unending stream of combat horror stories. Units cut off or abandoned. Enemies suddenly materializing out of nowhere. Supplies running out. Air cover disappearing. Waves of Iraqi troops flowing toward them, suddenly disappearing inside great roiling walls of flame, or enormous volcanic eruptions of high explosive dropped from miles overhead. He heard small, intimate stories about men killing each other with whatever weapon came to hand. About a female truck driver, trapped in a hostile village, crawling out via the two-thousand-year-old sewage system, and souveniring a couple of old Roman coins she discovered on the way.

Night had fallen, and half of the hangar's floating population had been spirited away before he finally stopped. Both hands ached, but his missing finger tormented him with a particular ferocity, and his wounded shoulder throbbed with a deep, agonizing ba.s.s line from having sat hunched over his notes for so long. But Melton thought he had enough material for a whole book, including a wrenching series of personal stories about what people had already lost. Families, home, friends, everything.

He made an effort to gather testimonials from the handful of Europeans present, such as Milosz and his men, and some British tankers whose Challenger had been crippled by a buried mine. Fact was, they would sell the piece in whatever form it took. The hometown market for American stories had literally disappeared. When the Poles finally got their ride out, he was reading over the tale of a Scottish infantryman who'd been separated from his platoon in al-Basra for two days, but whose main concern remained the fate of his family's trout farm after a week of acid rain had killed all the stock. They all shook hands and wished each other well.

"Make them understand that there is a new Poland," said Milosz, taking his hand gently as they parted.

Melton looked around at those who remained. Not quite so many tears now. A few of them were snoring, sound asleep, jerking in the fit of a nightmare somewhere in their past. He heard a couple of guys laughing about a canoe trip they had been on, how drunk they'd been and the silly idiot with the yellow swimming trunks who wouldn't fall into the raft full of college coeds.

It was mid-evening, a cool, almost chilly night, alive with the rumble of distant air operations. He was tired and very hungry, and growing almost claustrophobic having been trapped inside for so long, even in such a large building. The last thing he'd eaten had been a protein bar, four hours earlier, and he just knew the table service in this place was going to suck. Until his transport batch number was called there was nothing for it but to wait. Having lost the pile of Polish duffel bags on which he'd been resting contentedly, he'd moved to one of the uncomfortable plastic chairs dotted about the facility. He remembered the poncho liner, which he still had from the specialist on KP back in Kuwait. Melton wrapped himself in the woodland-green camo snivel gear as the desert daylight heat turned to nighttime frigid. It was there, half asleep, haunted by visions of the mortar attack that had put him in the hospital, that Sayad al-Mirsaad found him.

Seattle, Was.h.i.+ngton

"You've gotta be f.u.c.king kidding me!"

Kipper was incredulous, outraged even. In fact, half a dozen emotions blasted through him like a hot desert zephyr on finding out that the military had arrested the elected city councillors, but mostly his feelings arranged themselves around incredulous and outraged.

"You can't do that. It's ... it's ..."

"Wrong?" offered General Blackstone.

"Yeah. That's right. It's wrong. It's f.u.c.king wrong in so many ways I can't even begin to count them. What? You guys couldn't get your own way so you just threw the switch on a military coup? For Christ's sake, you're dealing with a bunch of frightened, f.u.c.ked-up nimrods who take three hours to decide which sorta cookies they're gonna serve up at council meetings."

"We knew you'd understand," said McCutcheon without a hint of irony. "That's exactly why we put 'em in the bag. They really do argue about the cookies, don't they? It's a big deal. I watched them do it last week. Amazing, man. Truly f.u.c.king amazing. Anyway, while they're banging heads over the catering arrangements PEOPLE ARE DYING."

The last part of his routine he delivered in a parade-ground roar emphasized by pounding a fist on a stack of folders, which burst out from under the blow in an explosion of paper. Kipper jumped and looked over to Blackstone, but the general remained impa.s.sive. It was a bad-cop bad-cop routine.