Without warning Read online

  Without warning

  John Birmingham

  John Birmingham

  Without warning

  CHARACTER LIST

  PARIS

  Caitlin Monroe (aka Cathy Mercure): Echelon senior field agent posing as

  international eco warrior and London-based political activist

  ‘Aunty’ Celia Wickstead: English member of The Sorry Committee

  Maggie Leigh: American member of The Sorry Committee

  Monique Duroc: French political activist, member of The Sorry Committee

  Dr Stйphane Colbert: Groupe Hospitalier de la Pitiй-Salpкtriиre

  Bilal Baumer (aka al Banna): Cell Master, al-Qaeda in Europe

  Nicolas Sarkozy: French Minister of the Interior

  Captain Marcel Rolland: 1er Rйgiment d’Infanterie

  Bernard Lacan: Director, Action Division, DGSE

  Wales Larrison: Echelon’s Paris controller

  Monty Pearson: chief of staff, BBC Paris bureau

  Noordim ul Haq: Indonesian-born Jemaah Islamiyah commander

  SEATTLE, WASHINGTON

  James Kipper: chief engineer with Seattle City Council

  Barney Tench: deputy chief engineer with Seattle City Council

  Barbara Kipper: James’s wife, and mother of six-year-old Suzie

  Heather Cosgrove: engineering intern at Seattle City Council

  Marv Basco: sanitation engineer at Seattle City Council

  Dave Chugg: water engineer at Seattle City Council

  Rhonda Thiess: secretary to the chief engineer, Seattle City Council

  Aaron Metz: Microsoft executive

  Malcolm Vusevic: Constitutional Convention delegate from Spokane, WA

  NORTHCOM, GUANTANAMO BAY

  Brigadier General Tusk Musso: US Marine Corps lawyer, acting commander of

  Guantanamo Bay Naval Base

  Lieutenant Colonel George Stavros: aide to Musso, acting 2IC of Guantanamo Bay

  Naval Base

  Ensign April Oschin: USN sysop, Guantanamo Bay Naval Base

  Major Eladio Nuсez: Cuban Army officer

  Lieutenant Jenny Kwan: US Marine Corps, Incident Response Unit

  Sergeant Guilio Gutteres: US Marine Corps, Incident Response Unit

  Captain Vincente Бlvarez: Cuban Army officer

  Professor Norman Griffiths: US National Laboratory

  Lieutenant Dan McCurry: US Navy

  Chief Petty Officer Strom Lundquist: US Coast Guard

  Sergeant Les Carlyon: US Marine Corps

  General Alano Salas: Venezuelan Marine Infantry commander

  PACIFIC OCEAN/ACAPULCO

  Pete Holder: Australian-born skipper of the Diamantina

  Mr Lee: first mate on the Diamantina

  Julianne Balwyn: daughter of English nobility, Diamantina crew member

  Fifi Lamont: ship’s cook on the Diamantina

  Sergeant Narayan Shah: formerly of Her Majesty’s Royal Gurkha Regiment

  Corporal Birendra: formerly of Her Majesty’s Royal Gurkha Regiment

  Private Thapa: formerly of Her Majesty’s Royal Gurkha Regiment

  Private Subba: formerly of Her Majesty’s Royal Gurkha Regiment

  Private Sharma: formerly of Her Majesty’s Royal Gurkha Regiment

  Miguel Pieraro: contracted beef hauler for McDonald’s

  Rhino Ross: former CPO, United States Coast Guard

  Dietmar Dietz: navigator

  Henry Cesky: Brooklyn-based construction magnate

  Larry Zood: internet pornographer

  Phoebe St John: survivor, heiress, from Boston

  Jason St John: survivor, heir, from Boston

  Denby Moorhouse: Basel-based merchant banker

  Marc Unwin: oil broker

  Lars Havel: Norwegian ship’s mate

  Mariela Pieraro: Miguel’s wife

  Pankesh Daxa: Sri Lankan chief engineer, Aussie Rules

  Rohan van der Meuwe: Dutch ship’s engineer, Aussie Rules

  Urvan Plost: Dutch ship’s engineer, Aussie Rules

  QATAR/KUWAIT

  Bret Melton: former US Ranger, veteran Army Times foreign correspondent

  Sayad al Mirsaad: Jordanian journalist with Al Jazeera news agency

  Captain Christian Lohberger: US 7th Cavalry

  Lieutenant Leo Euler: US 7th Cavalry

  Sergeant-Major Bo Jaanson: US 7th Cavalry

  Specialist Vincent Alcibiades: US 7th Cavalry

  Corporal Tucson Shetty: US 7th Cavalry

  Sergeant Fryderyk Milosz: Polish GROM squad leader

  Colonel Rudi Molenz: Israeli Air Force pilot

  PACOM, PEARL HARBOR, HAWAII

  Admiral James Ritchie: US Navy

  Captain Andrew McKinney: PA to Admiral Ritchie

  Colonel Brian Maccomb: US Army’s 500th Military Intelligence Brigade

  Jed Culver: Louisianan attorney

  Commander Damon Oakshott: US Navy aide to Admiral Ritchie

  Asher Warat: Israel’s envoy to the United States

  Governor Linda Lingle: Republican senator, Governor of Hawaii

  Lieutenant General Stephen Francis Murphy: Commander, US Army, 25th Infantry

  Division

  CENTCOM,DOHA

  General Tommy Franks: Commander of the United States Central Command

  BRUSSELS

  General JL Jones: Commander of the United States European Command

  SOUTHCOM, COMAYAGUA, HONDURAS

  Lieutenant Colonel Susan Pileggi: Acting Commander, SOUTHCOM

  FORT LEWIS, WASHINGTON

  General Jackson Blackstone: US Army, Commander, Fort Lewis

  Major Ty McCutcheon: US Air Force, aide to General Blackstone

  ONE DAY

  14 MARCH, 2003

  1

  HOSPITAL, PARIS

  The killer awoke, surrounded by strangers. An IV line dripped clear fluid through a long, thick needle punched into the back of her right hand. Surgical tape held the silver spike in place and tugged at the fine blonde hairs growing there. The strangers – all women, she thought dully – leaned in, their faces knotted with anxiety, apparently for her. But she stared instead at her hands as they lay in her lap on a thin brown blanket. They looked strong, even masculine. She turned them over, examining them. The nails were cut short. Calluses disfigured her knuckles, the heels of both palms, and the sides of her hands, from the base of both little fingers down to her wrists. The more she stared, the more unsettled she became. Like the women gathered around her bed, those hands were completely alien to her. She had no idea who she was.

  ‘Cathy? Are you all right?’

  ‘Nurse!’ somebody called out.

  The strangers, three of them, seemed to launch themselves at her bed. She felt herself tense up, but they simply wanted to comfort her.

  ‘Docteur! Elle s’est rйveillйe…’

  She felt soft hands patting her down, stroking her like one might comfort a child who’s suffered a bad fright. Cathy – that wasn’t her name, was it? – Cathy tried not to panic or to show how much she didn’t want any of these women touching her. They looked weird, not the sort of people she’d want as friends. And then, she remembered. They weren’t her friends. They were her mission. And her name wasn’t Cathy. It was Caitlin.

  The women were dressed in cheap clothing, layered for warmth. Falling back into the pillows, recovering from an uncontrolled moment of vertigo into which she had fallen, Caitlin Monroe composed herself. She was in a hospital bed, in a private room, and in spite of the apparent poverty of her ‘friends’, the room was expensively fitted out. The youngest of the women wore a brown suede jacket, frayed at the cuffs and elbows and festooned with colourful protest buttons. A stylised white bird. A rainbow. A col
lection of slogans: Halliburton Watch, Who would Jesus bomb? and Resistance is fertile.

  Caitlin took a sip of water from a squeeze bottle by the bed.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she croaked. ‘What happened to me?’

  She received a pat on the leg from an older, red-haired woman wearing a white tee-shirt over some sort of lumpy handmade jumper. Celia. ‘Aunty’ Celia, although she wasn’t related to anyone in the room. Aunty Celia had very obviously chosen this strange ensemble to show off the writing on her shirt, which read: If you are not outraged you are not paying attention.

  ‘Doctor!’ cried the woman in the doorway.

  Maggie. An American, like Caitlin. And there the similarity ended. Maggie the American was short and barrel-chested and pushing fifty, where Caitlin was tall, athletic and young.

  She felt around under her blanket and came up with a plastic control stick for the bed. Try this,’ she offered, passing the control to the young girl she knew as Monique. A pretty, raven-haired Frenchwoman. ‘See, the red call button. That’ll bring ‘em.’ Then, gently touching the bandages that swaddled her head, she asked, ‘Where am I?’

  ‘You’re in a private room, at the Pitiй-Salpкtriиre Hospital in Paris,’ explained Monique. ‘Paris, France,’ she added self-consciously.

  Caitlin smiled weakly. ‘S’okay. I remember Paris is in France.’ She paused. ‘And now I am too, I guess. How did I get here? I don’t remember much after coming out of the Chunnel on the bus.’

  The large American woman standing over by the door to her room (Maggie - try to remember her fucking name!) turned away from her post. ‘Fascist asswipes, that’s how. Attacked us outside of Calais.’

  ‘Skinheads,’ explained Monique. ‘And you were magnifique!’

  ‘I was?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ the French girl enthused, as the others chorused their agreement. Monique looked no more than seventeen years old, but Caitlin knew her to be twenty-two. She knew a lot about Monique Duroc. ‘These National Front fascists, Le Pen’s bully boys, they stopped the bus and began pulling us out, hitting and kicking us. You stood up to them, Cathy. You fought with them. Slowed them down long enough for the union men to reach us and drive them away.’

  ‘Union men?’

  ‘Workers,’ Maggie informed her. ‘Comrades from the docks at Calais. We’ll meet up with them and the others in Berlin, for the next rally, if you’re up for it. We really gotta keep Bush on the back foot. Mobilise the fucking streets against him.’

  Caitlin tried to reach for any memories of the incident but it was like grabbing at blocks of smoke. She must have taken a real pounding in the fight.

  ‘I see,’ she said, but really she didn’t. ‘So I beat on these losers?’

  Monique smiled brightly for the first time. ‘You are one of our tough guys, no? It was your surfing. You told us you always had to fight for your place on the waves. Really fight. You once punched a man off his board for… what was it… dropping in?’

  Caitlin felt as though a great iron flywheel in her mind had suddenly clunked into place. Her cover story. To these women she was Cathy Mercure. Semi-pro wave rider. Ranked forty-sixth in the world. Part-time organiser for the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, a deep green militant environmental group famous for direct and occasionally violent confrontation with any number of easily demonised eco-villains. Ocean dumpers, long-line tuna boats, Japanese whale killers – they were all good for a TV-friendly touch-up by the Sea Shepherds. But that was her cover. Her jacket.

  She took another sip of cool water and closed her eyes for a moment.

  Her real name was Caitlin Monroe. She was a senior field agent with Echelon, a magic box hidden within the budgets of a dozen or more intelligence agencies, only half of them American. She was a killer, and these women were… for a half second, she had no idea. And then the memory came back, clear and hard: these women were not her targets, but they would lead her to the target.

  Al Banna.

  Caitlin cursed softly under her breath. She had no idea what day it was. No idea how long she’d been out, or what had transpired in that time.

  ‘Are you all right?’ It was the French girl, Monique. The reason she was here, with these flakes.

  ‘I’m cool,’ said Caitlin. ‘Do you mind?’ she asked, pointing at the television that hung from the ceiling. ‘I feel like I’m lost or something. How’d the peace march go?’

  ‘Brilliant!’ said the red-headed woman. Aunty Celia. She was a Liverpudlian with a whining accent like an ice pick in the eardrums. ‘There was ‘undreds of thousands of people. Chirac sent a message and all. Berlin’s gonna be huge.’

  ‘Really?’ said Caitlin, feigning enthusiasm. ‘That’s great. Was there anything on the news about it? Or about the war?’ she continued, pointedly looking at the television.

  ‘Oh sorry,’ muttered Monique as she dug another remote control out of the blankets on Caitlin’s bed. Or Cathy’s bed, as she would have thought of it.

  A flick of the remote and the screen lit up.

  ‘CNN?’ asked Caitlin.

  Monique flicked through the channels, but couldn’t find the news network. White noise and static hissed out of the television from channel 13, where it should have been. She shrugged. There was nothing on MSNBC either, just an empty studio, but all of the French-language channels were available, as was BBC World.

  ‘Can we watch the Beeb then?’ asked Celia. ‘Me French, you know, it’s not the best.’

  Caitlin really just wanted to carve out a couple of minutes to herself, so she could get her head back in the game. Her injuries must be serious, having put her under for three days, and although her cover was still intact, she didn’t want to take any chances. She needed to re-establish contact with Echelon. They’d have maintained overwatch while she was out. They could bring her back up to-

  ‘Eh up? What’s this then?’ blurted Celia.

  Everyone’s eyes fixed on the screen, where an impeccably groomed Eurasian woman with a perfectly modulated BBC voice was struggling to maintain her composure.’… vanished. Communications links are apparently intact and fully functional, but remain unresponsive. Inbound commercial flights are either returning to their points of origin or being diverted to Halifax and Edmonton in Canada, or to airports throughout the West Indies, all of which remain unaffected so far.’

  The women all began to chatter at once, much to Caitlin’s annoyance. On screen the BBC’s flustered anchorwoman explained that the ‘event horizon’ seemed to extend down past Mexico City, out into the Gulf, swallowing most of Cuba, encompassing all of the continental US and a big chunk of south-eastern Canada, including Montreal. Caitlin had no idea yet what she meant by the term ‘event horizon’, but it didn’t sound friendly. A hammer started pounding on the inside of her head as she watched the reporter stumble through the rest of her read.

  ‘… from a Canadian air base have not returned. US Naval flights out of Guantanamo Bay, at the southern tip of Cuba, have likewise dropped out of contact at the same point, seventy kilometres north of the base. Reuters is reporting that attempts by US military commanders at Guantanamo to contact the Castro government in Havana have also failed.’

  Caitlin realised that the background buzz of the hospital had died away in the last few minutes. She heard a metallic clatter as a tray fell to the floor somewhere nearby. Caitlin had a passing acquaintance with the Pitiй-Salpкtriиre. There had to be nearly three thousand people in this hospital and at that moment they were all silent, the only human sounds coming from the television sets that hung in every room and ward, a discordant clashing of French and English voices, all of them speaking in the same clipped, urgent tone.

  ‘The Prime Minister, Mr Blair, has released a statement calling for calm and promising to devote the full resources of the British Government to resolving the crisis. A Ministry of Defence spokesman confirmed that British forces have gone onto full alert, but that NATO headquarters in Brussels has not yet issued any such orders. The
Prime Minister rejected calls by the Social Democrats to immediately recall British forces deployed in the Middle East for expected operations against the regime of Saddam Hussein.’