Without Warning Part 42

"Say no more. I have two of my own. Although they've moved on a bit in years now. Terrible teens, back in Honolulu, thank G.o.d. Listen, Mr. Kipper, I wonder if I might bother you for a few moments of your time."

Feeling as guilty as h.e.l.l over the chocolate ration bar, Kip didn't feel that he could say no.

"Is there something I can help you with, Mr. Culver? I'm not a delegate. Not elected. I'm just the city engineer. I'm trying to keep things running."

Culver nodded. "I know. That's why I wanted to talk, briefly. But not here. Do you have an office? Or, even better, somewhere we could talk that isn't likely to be bugged."

Culver spoke in such a matter-of-fact way that the real meaning of his question took a second to register with Kip. He blinked and shook his head in surprise.

"I uh ... well."

"I have good reason for caution, sir. Doesn't need to be anywhere special. Indeed, the less special the better. Somewhere you wouldn't normally transact business. Somewhere your elected officials would be unlikely to frequent."

"Somewhere not worth bugging?" said Kip.

"Yes," nodded Culver.

Kipper shrugged. "Okay, I suppose so, if you want to follow me."

"Tell you what. I understand that it may be an inconvenience for a busy man, but could you meet me in half an hour? Wherever you think best."

Kipper wasn't sure whether to be p.i.s.sed off, intrigued, or worried. A little of each, perhaps. He gave Culver directions to an empty office on the twenty-ninth floor. An auditor had been working in there all last year, causing untold angst for all of the department heads. But he was gone now, and the office had not been reallocated. It was a bare s.p.a.ce full of paper files awaiting the shredder.

Kipper had enough time to squeeze in a quick meeting with his own section heads, detailing their priorities for the day-sanitation and sewage were the new headaches-before excusing himself for ten minutes. To his surprise, he found Culver waiting for him in the empty office. He wasn't entirely happy with that.

"Do you mind if I ask how you made it up here, Mr. Culver? I mean, you're not really supposed to be on this floor."

"Nope. But in my experience just looking like you should be somewhere is ninety percent of the battle won. And you don't have any armed soldiers up on these floors, do you?"

Kipper released a deep breath from his nostrils.

"No. Not since they released the councillors. Military's handling security downstairs, but the city looks after its own up here now."

Culver seemed to chew this over.

"I hear tell you were the one who dragged this town through the worst of the aftermath. Heard you were the de facto mayor and governor."

Kipper shrugged it off.

"City employs a lot of people, Mr. Culver. They all worked long days after the Disappearance. I wasn't unique. There's thousands of city and state government workers, thousands more in private firms, tens of thousands of individual citizens who all pitched in to help. Most of my people haven't seen their families awake in a month."

"And the military," said Culver. "Do you mind if I ask how they ... fitted in?"

Kipper snorted.

"Fitted in? More like stormed in. Was a time there I was seriously thinking about following one of my guys out the door. He quit after Blackstone arrested the councillors. Said it was fascism, no less. But his family came from Europe. I guess they had some history."

"But you didn't quit."

"How could I? The army is good at some things. Not others. You want something destroyed, they're your guys. You want something saved, preserved, built, whatever, not so much. Believe me, Mr. Culver, I had my doubts. But this place would have fallen apart if enough of us just threw up our hands on a point of politics. And it did get sorted out in the end."

Culver waited to see if Kipper claimed any credit for that. His sources told him the engineer was responsible for sorting out the "misunderstanding" between the city and Fort Lewis, and for ensuring that everybody moved on from it as quickly as possible. A remarkable piece of hog trading, in Jed's considered opinion.

But the engineer said nothing. He didn't even raise it.

Culver decided to nudge him.

"I have to say, Mr. Kipper, I am surprised it got sorted, as you put it. People must have been a tad upset with General Blackstone? I would have thought a lot of folks would have wanted him arrested and court-martialed. Or at least relieved of duty, or whatever they call it."

Kipper shrugged.

"Look, it's a tough call. Blackstone is an a.s.shole. He shouldn't have done what he did. But he gets as much credit for pulling this place through the last month as anyone. More than most, really. I guess unusual times call for unusual methods."

Kipper checked his watch.

"Look, I don't want to be rude, Mr. Culver, but is there some reason we had to arrange such a cloak-and-dagger meeting for a conversation you could have a hundred times over down on the conference floor?"

Jed smiled.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Kipper, I know you're very busy. There was one thing. Have you ever dealt with a Major Ty McCutcheon?"

Guantanamo Bay naval base, Cuba

The screaming howl of turbines prompted Tusk Musso to dive for the floor, badly jarring his elbow and bruising a few ribs. Thunder struck the headquarters building. Windows shattered, and the floor seemed to jump beneath him as a computer screen crashed down off the desk. Smoke poured into the office from down the hallway, and dozens of phones rang as the base alert siren trumpeted the end of the world. The shouts of marines, sailors, and soldiers in and out of the building reached Musso dully through the ringing in his ears.

"Corpsman! Man down."

"What the f.u.c.k what the f.u.c.k what the..."

"The armory now, Gutteres..."

Colonel Pileggi picked herself up, checked for injuries while dusting off, and reached for one of the two ringing phones. Musso grabbed the other one as Pileggi shouted into her handset.

"Commanding officer," Musso yelled, finger to his ears. He heard an unfamiliar voice, gruff and powerful, as someone attempted to make himself heard over the crash of rockets and gunfire.

"Gunnery Sergeant Miles Price, base security, sir. Orders?"

"What's our status, Gunny?" coughed Musso as he caught a lungful of dust and smoke.

The room glowed bright orange from the flames in the bay, bright enough to blot out the stars and illuminate the panic of the civilians on the vessels crammed together down there. Their cries and screams registered faintly in the small s.p.a.ces between the crash and roar of battle.

"Got a battalion-size landing force in the bay, sir. They've split into two groups. One headed for the airfield, the other for your position. My marines are scattered all over the base. It'll take at least fifteen minutes to get everyone up," the gunny shouted.

Musso carried the phone with him over to the window, taking care not to present an easy target. He could see a column of six-wheeled armored vehicles and amtracs rolling out of the bow of the beached container s.h.i.+p. Muzzle flashes twinkled from their gun mounts as long ropy arcs of tracer fire reached out for targets unseen in the night.

"Try to set up an ant.i.tank team and hit that column headed for headquarters. Colonel Pileggi's organizing a security force to handle the airfield. Get every swinging d.i.c.k a weapon, I don't care what branch they are or what their MOS is, I want everyone armed. Grab any willing civilians, too. Anyone who can and will pull a trigger. We're in the s.h.i.+t deep, Gunny. You read me?" Musso asked.

"Yes, sir, we are indeed in the s.h.i.+t," the gunny replied. "I'll get on that ant.i.tank team."

"I'll keep someone on this line," Musso promised. He turned to the navy lieutenant by the door. "Lieutenant McCurry, man this phone."

"Aye, sir," barked McCurry, taking the handset from him.

Tusk watched as Pileggi yelled into her phone. "No, hold those f.u.c.kers off the airfield, Sergeant. And if you've got civilians volunteering to fight, then let them. I don't have time for any bulls.h.i.+t about whether or not it's kosher, just do it!"

"Can you hold it?" Musso asked her as she slammed the receiver down.

"I have no idea, sir. I'm not over there, I'm here," Pileggi said.

"Grab a couple of marines as close protection, a personal weapon, and go, Susan. You're my man out there."

She stood to attention and ripped out a salute. Then she was gone, barking out orders at men in the hallway he couldn't see.

Turning back to the shattered window on the second floor of his headquarters building, Musso watched tracer fire flickering across the airfield, some of it going astray into the bay, skipping across the water. A C-5 Galaxy was trying to climb off the runway and claw her way into the air. Ice water flooded Musso's veins as tracer fire reached out from the perimeter of the airfield to pepper the fuselage of the ma.s.sive cargo transport plane.

Climb, Musso prayed to himself. Climb.

"Sir," McCurry shouted over the chaos. "I'm getting reports of two additional columns outside the base perimeter. Estimated time to contact is five minutes."

The tracer fire lost interest in the Galaxy and refocused on earthbound targets. Musso allowed himself a sigh of relief.

A missile zipped into the flank of the cargo plane at the wing root and exploded. The lost wing folded up and back over the top of the C-5, shearing off the tail section as the fuel exploded, engulfing the dying aircraft.

"Mother. f.u.c.ker," said Musso.

He watched the wreckage plummet toward a Carnival cruise s.h.i.+p, which was burning from a number of bomb strikes. Years later, when his body was stooped and his eyes dimmed by glaucoma, Musso would still wake at night and see children falling out of the belly of that burning Galaxy as it careened toward the s.h.i.+p.

"No," Musso whispered. "No, G.o.d."

The plane hit the bow of the cruise s.h.i.+p, shearing it off completely. Burning fuel and white-hot shrapnel shredded the upper decks. Adding to the carnage, an aircraft, a jet, swooped in low, strafing the growing funeral pyre in the bay, catching some burning pa.s.sengers in midair as they flung themselves from the cruise s.h.i.+p and tried to find safety in the waters of Guantanamo Bay. Another container s.h.i.+p pushed past the wreckage for the beach only to be met by a couple of navy sh.o.r.e-patrol boats, gnats buzzing around a behemoth. Small-arms fire pa.s.sed back and forth between the mayfly-quick adversaries and their lumbering prey, chopping up the water around the smaller boats where civilians were mixed in the fray.

"Got a firefight between base police and some infiltrators at the McDonald's, sir," McCurry said. "Another engagement is taking place up at base housing. Gunny Price says he's only got a third of his force under arms and maybe two dozen civilians. That's it."

"Where's that army commo puke?" Musso asked, as he stalked over the doorway. "Captain Birch!" he roared.

A scuffle of boots through the smoke-filled corridors produced a large, somewhat overweight man in army BDUs. "Sir."

"We still have comms with Pearl, or the brigade in Panama?"

Birch seemed pale, a bit stunned.

"Comms with Pearl, Birch. Or the Ca.n.a.l. Get with the f.u.c.king program," Musso said, resisting the urge to slap the man silly. "I need air cover over our AO."

"I'll check." Birch turned to leave. "Specialist Gibbs," he called out, "see if Pearl is ..."

Birch's head exploded.

"Sniper!"

Pileggi, shepherded by two marines and a stray coast guard chief, made the airstrip on the bay's western headland by virtue of a white-knuckle highspeed run in a little Trabant, a Cuban vehicle parked outside the headquarters block that one of the marines, a Sergeant Gutteres, hot-wired with practiced ease. At times tracer fire zipped and crackled all around them, while at others, on short stretches of road, everything seemed eerily still. As they screeched around the last curve before the hangar buildings at the edge of the field, Gutteres pointed skyward and her heart sank as she saw dozens of parachute canopies popped open high in the air. A few lines of orange and green fire flicked up to crosshatch the descending paratroopers, but not enough. It was a feeble, poorly guided effort compared with the volume of fire on the ground.

Chief Lundquist, who had the wheel, swerved a few times to avoid burned-out vehicles and hastily erected firing positions before slamming on the brakes next to a long concrete pipe behind which a small group of marines seemed to be directing the defense of the airfield. Pileggi, still dressed in her office uniform, scrambled out and hurried over with her bodyguard right behind her. She was protected from the worst of the enemy's ground fire by the giant pipe, which stood at least six feet high, but she crouched almost double anyway, running to avoid getting picked off from above. A few of the Venezuelans were shooting from small handheld weapons as they came down. The fire was inaccurate, but getting heavier.

"You Sergeant Carlyon?" she asked the senior noncom, throwing herself up against the pipe.

"Yes, ma'am," he answered, reading her name tag and adding, "We spoke before, Colonel."

"Okay, what's your situation, Sergeant? I'm not going to run your fight for you. I'll just see what I can do to help."

Carlyon looked relieved.

"I have eight marines with me, Colonel. Only six have any ammo left. Around the base, I have less than fifty men. Some of them sailors. Some airmen. They're not trained for this. Some MPs, who are."

As he spoke, two of his men depleted their stocks even further by sniping at the Venezuelans dropping to earth beneath dozens of chutes.

"There's at least a platoon of hostiles on the ground already," explained the sergeant, raising his voice over the steady gunfire and more distant roar of the battle in the bay. "But they haven't consolidated. I think they came ash.o.r.e in a couple of inflatable hulls, probably got split up, and haven't regrouped yet. We've got 'em pinned down behind a couple of s.h.i.+pping containers on the far side of the strip. But tactical's changing, ma'am."

He looked upward, stepped away from the cover of the pipe, calmly raised his rifle, and put two shots into a paratrooper a hundred yards up and slightly north of them.

"Well, you got my guys, here," said Pileggi. "Here, take my rifle, give it to one of your men. I'll make do."

She unholstered her pistol as Carlyon pa.s.sed her M1 across to a grateful-looking marine.

"Thank you, Colonel. Much obliged."

Just behind her, Lundquist raised a Remington shotgun and fired twice. She turned briefly to see a human leg falling from beneath a writhing, screaming paratrooper, not fifty yards away.

"You're gonna need more men and guns," she said. "You got a radio?"

Carlyon shook his head and handed her a cell phone.

"It's still working. On and off."

"Okay. I'll see if I can round up some warm bodies. What happened to those civilians you had before?"

"They're dead."