Without Warning Part 15

"Fedayeenl"

The warning cry came from the man at point, a fraction of a second before the hammering of automatic-weapon fire started up. The Cav troopers, veterans now of urban warfare as meat grinder, moved for cover as though every man had been jabbed with a stun gun. The dismounted cavalry scouts were fast and flowed like quicksilver, pouring themselves into doorways, around stone walls, and down behind piles of rubble that made vehicle movement all but impossible through the narrow streets of An Nasiriyah. The M3A2 Bradley cavalry fighting vehicles followed them when and where they could. A couple of squads of infantry, with their M2A2 Bradley infantry fighting vehicles, joined them when they moved into the town.

Melton moved with them, the instincts and experience of his own time in the rangers, and a decade of combat reportage since, rubbing up hard against fatigue and aging muscles. He landed next to Specialist Alcibiades, burrowing in under the protection of a ma.s.sive, broken beam of concrete and rebar as small-arms fire chewed up the mud-brick walls of the street, zipping less than a foot overhead.

Melton had picked up an M4 for his own protection moments before they entered Iraq. n.o.body said word one to him. After the carbine, he picked up some MOLLE web gear and some ammo pouches. He already had a matching dark blue set of Level III body armor and a Kevlar helmet. The army issued him a protective mask and MOPP gear in case someone dropped some germs or chemicals on them, but he had always been one of the skeptics on the WMD front.

In any case, the fighting was simply too chaotic and disordered for him to rely on anyone else to look after him. In the labyrinthine warren of souks, alleys, cut-throughs, and ragged streets of the towns and villages in which they'd been fighting, you never knew when you were going to have some a.s.shole suddenly appear right in front of you with murder in his eyes. He hadn't needed the carbine yet, for which he was grateful. Still, he flicked the selector from safe to semi and waited. Alcibiades let rip with two short bursts, holding his own M4 up over the cover and firing blind. The Bradleys added the hum and mechanical metal-punching beat to the chaotic audio mix, sending twenty-five mike-mike into buildings without a care for possible civilian casualties.

When the specialist came back down, he spit a green stream in the sand, his cheeks bulging from a wad of chew. "f.u.c.kin' ragheads."

The volume of fire going downrange was impressive and deafening, nearly drowning out the shouts of Lieutenant Euler and his noncoms as they organized the counterambush with the infantry troops who had linked up with them.

Melton did his best to collect himself and commit to memory as many details as possible. He would write notes out later, when the immediate danger had pa.s.sed, and his hands, hopefully, weren't shaking too much. As always the head rush of contact was giddy and horrifying, a gla.s.sy funnel of light and color down which you fell as soon as you realized somebody was trying to take your life. Melton found it harder to deal with as a reporter than he had as a soldier, perhaps because he was older and wiser, perhaps because now he had nothing to distract him from the experience. Indeed, having the experience and recording it for others were his sole reasons for being there. He couldn't shut down and get on with whatever task the sergeant or corporals a.s.signed him. He played his part by opening his senses to the madness of battle, letting it burn its terrors directly onto his cortex.

He savored the taste of the dust in his mouth, the gritty, choking, dog-s.h.i.+t-and-tangy-metallic-diesel flavor of it. He noted the struggle of a green, be-jeweled bug caught in a wad of gum stuck to the side of Alcibiades's boot. Tried to freeze in his memory the smell of the man next to him, a cloying miasma of body odor, stale farts, and wintergreen Skoal brand chewing tobacco. He studied the contours of the street, the way the ancient biscuit-colored buildings snaked away, slightly uphill. The yellow-green, foul-smelling stream of raw sewage and trash that flowed downslope toward him. The soldiers themselves, some cool and frosty, others sweating but focused, most of them scared out of their minds.

Lieutenant Euler took shelter behind a pockmarked stone pillar that might well have stood on the same spot since the time of Muhammad. He was on the radio with a map in his hand, looking at something Melton couldn't see. The radio operator kept security, his carbine traversing along the rooftops, looking for snipers, RPG gunners, or any other Iraqi in desperate need of a new weeping a.s.shole in the middle of their forehead.

Top Jaanson was doing the standard shoot, move, and communicate drill, moving the soldiers, infantry and cavalry both, around the restricted battle s.p.a.ce of the narrow street like a brutal chess master. Some soldiers would balk while others would execute on command. With some, Jaanson calmed them with a pat on the shoulder and a few fatherly words the way one would handle a terrified horse. With others, it was a boot imprint on the a.s.s.

Melton couldn't help but smile, having been there himself.

He saw a bird, swooping up and away to escape the sudden eruption of slaughter, suddenly fly apart in a spray of feather and blood as some stray round punched right through its frail body. The remains dropped into the dust, raising a small puff of dirt, and the body twitched for a few seconds as dumb electrical storms raged through its shattered nervous system.

Alcibiades saw it, too. "f.u.c.k me, man. Not safe for man or beast in this motherf.u.c.ker. I say call in Air and let them f.u.c.king hammer this place back to the Stone Age."

"Hooah," Melton said before he could stop himself. He tapped Al on the shoulder. "Got any dip, Specialist?"

Specialist Alcibiades pulled a can from his hip pocket. "Got a whole log before we left. I'm about half through it so you'd better make me look good. Hooah?"

Melton took the can of Skoal and nodded. "Hooah, Specialist. f.u.c.king hooah."

The dip in his mouth and the can returned to Alcibiades, he tried to lock himself down on reality. But no matter how hard he tried to anchor himself in the real world, time always seemed to warp and stretch, before snapping back on these moments, almost as though it, too, had become an actor in the conflict, constantly turning and folding in on itself to better examine the deeds of the frail, ridiculous little creatures who raged through its currents. It might have been four minutes or many hours before the Apaches arrived overhead and announced themselves with a whoosh of rockets and the industrial thumpety-thump-thump-thump of their thirty-mike-mike chain guns. Half the street ahead of them disintegrated, quite literally, flying apart under the kinetic hammer of high-velocity explosive ordnance. Blocks of sandstone and dried mud shattered and crumbled, releasing their ma.s.s in the form of thick powdery clouds to drift away on the warm sirocco pa.s.sing over the village.

"Apaches will do," croaked Alcibiades. "I feel like dancing every time they play my tune. Sing it, f.u.c.kers!"

Melton stayed down, rub-f.u.c.king the ground, as the fire from the soldiers of the Rock of the Marne tapered off. For a brief interlude, silence as heavy as an old coat lay over them. He heard the crunch of boots moving across broken masonry through the ringing in his ears. The rattle of equipment as men darted forward. The metallic click and slide of a mag being swapped out. Slowly, carefully, he raised his head over the cover. Their concrete beam had been badly chewed over by gunfire. Pockmarks and dark scores pitted and scarred the surface. One rusted spike of rebar glistened in the sun, a silver fang sliced out of its dull, reddish length by the impact of a single bullet. Melton let his peripheral vision take over for a second, scanning for any movement that would indicate the presence of a lingering threat. A window pushed open to accommodate the barrel of a sniper's rifle. A door creaking backward into a darkened hut, from whence some maniac in a dynamite vest might emerge shouting "Saddam is great!" before detonating himself. But there was nothing. The Apaches had cleaned up the ambush, and probably a fair number of unlucky innocents as well.

Alcibiades arose beside him like an apparition, the muzzle of his rifle sweeping through a narrow arc in front of them, covering the men who were scoping out the rubble under which their attackers had died. Melton waited for the call of "Medic!"

It never came. Whatever injuries the troopers had taken did not require immediate intervention. He kept his personal weapon to hand but consciously dialed back on the tension compressing his whole body into an impacted ma.s.s of nerve endings. They'd survived another one. The brigade and most of the Third Infantry Division had been remarkably lucky so far. Less than twenty KIA after days of fighting, and all of them lost in close-quarters battles like this one. Out on the desert plains, where they'd first engaged the Iraqis, it had been a pure slaughter. n.o.body had any idea of the enemy's casualties, but in this sector alone it ran into the thousands. Perhaps more than ten thousand by now.

Lieutenant Euler appeared beside him, handing back a receiver to his radio operator.

"D'you get all that, sir?" he asked. "Gotta keep the folks at home informed."

It was an attempt at light banter, but the young officer's eyes were too tired and far away to carry it off. Sleep when you are dead became the unofficial motto of the soldiers. Bret Melton nodded absently and spit into the ground, the nicotine slowly infiltrating his wired nervous system.

"Any casualties, Lieutenant?" he asked.

Euler shook his head.

"Nothing serious. No sucking chest wounds or lost limbs so I'll count myself a happy man. Worthless fedayeen f.u.c.ktards. Sometimes I think they shoot high and wide, praying to get f.u.c.king captured."

Saddam's volunteer militia had borne the brunt of the fighting in the crossroads towns, and although they'd handed out some grief here and there, as a fighting force they seemed to be tasked with holding up the coalition and making them "waste" ammunition and lives. The coalition didn't have the troops to provide EPW facilities, so without an order per se, the higher-ups let it be known that there would be no quarter. Some units in Third ID had taken up the old practice of flying a black flag from an antenna. It didn't take long for the Iraqis to figure out what that meant.

As a tactic, Melton had to admit that sending your worthless troops forward as bullet catchers made some sense. Everyone knew they weren't pus.h.i.+ng on to Baghdad now, that'd be insane. The British and U.S. forces executing Operation Katie in southern Iraq were planning to leave the whole leprous mess to fester on its own when they were gone. That was a.s.suming they could kick the Kuwaitis and the Saudis off so they could actually get the h.e.l.l out of Dodge. The tiny Polish and Australian special-forces contingents were already gone, what missions they'd originally been a.s.signed now irrelevant. And Saddam was openly mocking them from Baghdad, whipping up a perfect storm of pan-Arab hysteria at his "defeat" of the infidel crusaders.

Well, not openly. Not since we dropped that JDAM on Uday.

Saddam still made appearances in the open, but they were never televised live, and they never lasted very long. They did hit the mark, though. The allied air campaign went forward pretty much as originally planned, from what Melton heard the air force liaison say, attempting to decapitate his command-and-control systems. The only difference was that coalition air power destroyed bridges they originally needed. But as long as the fat little f.u.c.ker survived to taunt them, his stature only grew. He was openly comparing himself to Saladin now, declaring himself the reborn leader of the faithful.

The crackle of gunfire drifted in over the rooftops of the surviving buildings from somewhere to the west, another element of Third ID conducting sweep-and-clear ops to make sure that everyone, ladie dadie everyone, could withdraw through this s.h.i.+thole without getting nickel-and-dimed to death by snipers and suicide bombers and the half-a.s.sed incompetents tricked out like Arab ninjas who called themselves the Fedayeen Saddam.

Euler's men were moving toward one of the remaining intact bridges, in tandem with another platoon taking a parallel route two streets over. Apaches from the squadron's air cav component buzzed about high overhead, waiting to pounce on any resistance. When Operation Katie went into effect, the rule book was thrown out along with it. Melton remembered Captain Lohberger saying, f.u.c.k the rules of engagement, before he b.u.t.toned up his Bradley so many days ago. Somebody seemed to have handed Third ID's commander, Major General Blount, an open checkbook.

No one took any chances. If a building needed to be swept, soldiers tossed frags through the door, then the M249 SAW gunner sprayed the room before they went in. If the Iraqis decided a mosque prayer tower made a pretty good forward observation post, an MPAT round from one of 5/7's M1 Abrams tanks chopped it down. If they used a school or a hospital for a fort, the division's artillery hammered it with one-five-five or MLRS rounds.

No one took any chances anymore.

"Who you writin' for now, anyway, Bret?" Alcibiades was beside him, his eyes hidden behind the silver of a pair of Ray-Bans. They gave him an insec-tile appearance as he scanned the blasted remains of the thoroughfare ahead, the muzzle of his rifle tracking the movements of his head with mechanical precision. "Army Times is gone, right? Like everything else."

Unlike the officers, most of the grunts just called him by his first name. He didn't have to work hard to fit in with them.

"Headquarters is, but we've got field offices in Europe and Korea," said Melton, not that he had had any luck getting in touch with any of them. "And worse comes to worst, there is always Stars and Stripes, I suppose. I had some contacts from my freelance days, foreign websites and magazines, you know, British mostly. I'm filing for them now. The war's not nearly as big a story as it would have been. But it's up there."

They formed up again with Alcibiades's scout team, picking their way through the rubble, stepping over tumbledown walls and mounds of pulverized mud brick. Melton stood on something soft and yielding, and before he could stop himself he glanced down and saw the tiny arm beneath his soiled boots. It ended in ragged flesh and a stump of white bone, just after the elbow joint.

He spit on the ground next to the remains and whispered, "Yeah. f.u.c.k the rules of engagement. Hooah."

Lieutenant Euler's Bradley, Fiddler's Green, was burning a few hundred yards short of the bridge over the Euphrates. One of the crew had made it out, only to be shot down from a window in one of the low-rise, ferroconcrete bunkers that pa.s.sed for apartments in this part of Nasiriyah. His crewmates had not escaped.

"They've got a f.u.c.king howitzer in one of those buildings with the muzzle aimed into the street. Or maybe a T72. I can't tell, d.a.m.n it," said Euler, who was blessed not to be in the Bradley at the time. The binoculars came down from his eyes as he turned away from the corner to address his squad leaders.

"f.u.c.k me runnin'. Either it is Republican Guard or someone who has got their s.h.i.+t wired tight," Euler said.

Melton chanced a quick peek around the corner, darting his head out and back like a nervous chipmunk. He took a sight picture of the disabled Brad. The rear troop hatch was gone and the turret was missing. Rounds cooked off in the main body, one at a time, with the sound of an M80 firecracker under a steel bucket. It made a hollow thump with each cook-off. Thick, oily smoke poured from the commander's hatch, and flames burned at the rear of the cha.s.sis.

Euler spoke quickly and privately with his platoon sergeant, while Melton fell back to give the two some s.p.a.ce. After a few words, Euler held his hand out to his radio operator for the handset of their SINCGARS radio.

"Airstrike," said Alcibiades as he spat into the ground. "Betcha this week's pay the LT will call in some A10s. Probably gonna flatten a coupla blocks."

"We ain't getting paid this month," said Bakic, one of his buddies.

"Still gonna be an ..."

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

Euler hadn't shouted, but the force of his exclamation had drawn all the attention back on him. He was talking on the radio, and everyone listened to his side of the exchange, which didn't tell them much.

"What d'you f.u.c.king mean ..." Euler paused while the voice on the other end shouted loud enough for Melton to hear a time-honored army phrase.

Remember your military bearing, soldier.

"Okay, if the ALO can't get me air, then what about... ?" Euler pulled off his K-pot and threw it at the wall across from him.

"You gotta be f.u.c.king kidding me ..." Euler continued, obviously not impressed by the previous admonishment about military bearing. "How about some G.o.dd.a.m.ned f.u.c.king fire support then?"

The handset shouted back, leaving Euler to shake his head some more. He signed off and threw the handset back at his radio operator. His noncoms pulled in closer, concern acid-etched into all of their faces. A few shook their heads as he relayed to them the details of whatever s.h.i.+t sandwich they'd just been handed.

"G.o.dd.a.m.n," muttered one of the sergeants, loud enough for Melton to hear. The enlisted men around him strained to pick up a few clues without being too obvious about it. They were spread out along a side street running between two shops, both of which had been cleared not fifteen minutes earlier. Euler had men inside both, and crawling around on the rooftops, denying the high ground to any hostiles. Anxiety crept stealthily down the line of soldiers, as men who'd been sitting in the dirt, catching a few minutes' respite, picked up on the changed atmospherics in the leaders.h.i.+p group and slowly began to attend to them. Eyes that had been closed cracked open, heads turned almost imperceptibly, bodies s.h.i.+fted just a little bit, leaning in toward the lieutenant, hoping to catch some sc.r.a.p of information that might provide a clue as to what mess they'd stepped in now.

At last the NCOs dispersed down the line, carrying the news with them. Corporal Shetty, a short, dense African-American version of the Thing from The Fantastic Four, rumbled over, his face a study in disgust.

"Choppers had to bug out," he informed them, and suddenly Melton realized for the first time that the constant droning thud of the Apaches and Blackhawks that had shepherded them through the dusty maze of An Nasiriyah was missing. He saw men craning their heads upward all along the shadowed alleyway as they heard the news.

Alcibiades asked the obvious question. "Why?"

Shetty glared at him, as if the absence were his fault.

"f.u.c.king Iranians," he said, as if those two words were enough. When they were found to be patently not enough, however, he continued.

"Iran declared war on America an hour ago. Their air force is up and trying to punch through, to get to us. It is a full-on furball out in the Gulf. Hundreds of speedboats and Jet Skis. All of 'em suicide runners. They been swarmin' the navy. Air force and some British units are mixing it up with the Iranian planes right now, trying to keep 'em off us, here."

"Holy s.h.i.+t," said Alcibiades, his swarthy features paling noticeably.

"Yeah, anyway. Choppers are outta here for the moment. If we want air cover, we gotta call in A10s, and they're only coming when they can get their own cover. It's f.u.c.ked up."

"s.h.i.+t, what about arty then?" Some private; he was a replacement pulled out of the division's 123rd Signal Battalion and it showed every time he nearly shot himself in the foot with his M16. Melton stayed far away from him, because it was going to end in tears for that commo puke. He knew it in his bones.

"They're busy hammering a column of Republican Guard who are trying to get to us here," Shetty said. "So no artillery, no air, nothing but buffalo soldiers and the grunts."

Melton yawned so hard he nearly swallowed his stale wad of chew. He was exhausted but it was a nervous gesture, too, one of his personal "tells" that he was under pressure. He fingered the c.r.a.p out of his mouth, took a sip from his CamelBak, and tapped Corporal Shetty on the shoulder.

"Corporal, is it just Iran? Do we know if anyone else is moving? Syria? Israel maybe?"

The noncom's head swiveled like a gun turret. Back and forth, once.

"Dunno, Mr. Melton. You'd be better placed to find out than any of us, if your satellite phone is working."

"Battery's dead. Went down yesterday and I haven't been able to recharge," Melton said. "Sat coverage has gotten awfully spotty of late anyway."

Shetty took that piece of news like a dustbowl farmer absorbing yet another month without rain. Such was life.

"Lieutenant's talking with Lohberger, getting instructions," he said. "If we can't hammer down the bad guys with air support, it makes this whole deal a lot f.u.c.king harder."

"But the bra.s.s still wants this bridge," Melton said without any real enthusiasm.

"Yup," said Shetty. "They still want it. Why they want it, I've no f.u.c.king clue but they still want it."

"Man, this is totally f.u.c.ked," said Bakic. "What the f.u.c.k are we even doing here? It sure as s.h.i.+t ain't paying the rent anymore."

"What we're doing here, b.i.t.c.h," growled Shetty, "is trying to get the f.u.c.k outta the Hood without losing too many worthless motherf.u.c.kers like you along the way. That good enough reason for you? Or would you like to just lay down your f.u.c.king arms and walk out there and tell the towelheads, Yo, dogs. My bad. I'm gonna ease on up outta here and head back to my new crib up in Alaska, yo.' Is that what you want to do, Private?"

The chastened soldier mumbled something like "Sorry Corporal, no Corporal," and devoted himself to the intense study of the dirt at his feet. Up and down the line, similar scenes played themselves out as the men dealt with the shock of losing their air cover and gaining a new enemy. Melton checked his watch. It was late afternoon, shading toward sunset in maybe an hour or so. He wondered if Third ID would wait until dark, when the Americans' night-vision equipment would return to them a significant advantage. On the other hand, the power of a unit like 5/7 Cav lay in its mobility. It was a "terrible swift sword" in movement, cutting through anything that got in its way. Sitting here like this merely invited the Iraqis to gather their forces around them, especially when they couldn't be targeted for destruction from the air.

Euler was back on the radio within a few minutes, his head bent and shoulders hunched tightly forward as though he was attempting to contain some new piece of s.h.i.+t news from getting free. Figuring on being stationary for a while, Melton opened a chili mac MRE and stuck the s.h.i.+t-brown spoon down into the contents. He chewed on the meaty mac combo joylessly and washed it down with a drink of warm water. The other men all used the break as best suited them. Some ate, some dozed, one p.i.s.sed his name up against an ancient wall. Everyone sipped some water or mixed some flavored drink mix from their MREs in a water bottle. Most of their PX-bought pougie bait had run out days ago, along with most of Alcibiades's chew.

At least the shade of the alleyway was a blessed relief from the oppressive heat of day. Even with the sun dropping toward the edge of the world, fighting in this temperature was a crippling business. Keeping the troops' fluids up was proving as difficult as clearing a block of fedayeen. Melton craned his neck back, stretching it far enough to work out a few kinks with a distinct, cracking sound. The sky was lightly clouded, and the glare had faded somewhat from its painful intensity in the middle of the day. He searched in vain for any sign of the so-called Disappearance Effect, the "nuclear winter" that had fallen on western Europe with the arrival of billions of tons of particulate matter, released into the atmosphere by the burning cities of North America. There was nothing to see. Maybe it was all bulls.h.i.+t. He couldn't tell. He was as cut off from the wider world as everyone else in the unit.

It was in that position, leaned back against the wall of the gutted building, squinting slightly into the hot gray sky, that he saw the dark blur of the mortar round as it dropped toward them. The cry of "Incoming!" arose in his head but never reached his mouth as another round smacked into the rooftop corner at the far end of the alleyway, detonating with a bone-cracking roar and a deadly spray of shrapnel. Men screamed out warnings and dived for what little cover existed in the narrow pa.s.sageway. A few made it through a single door halfway down. A couple of others scrambled through a hole in the wall blown out by a grenade hours earlier.

Oh, f.u.c.k, Melton thought. He got down and tried to f.u.c.k the ground, to become one with it while he looked for a better patch of cover than nothing at all. An open shop front across the street looked promising.

He was on his feet, then, unaware of how he'd made it up off his a.s.s so quickly. More rounds were dropping on their position with enough accuracy to suggest that they'd been presighted by the Iraqis, who were waiting for just such an opportunity. Many of them impacted the roofline but one speared right down into the constricted s.p.a.ce, exploding with a terrible force that lifted Melton off the ground, turning him over and over.

He twisted slowly, impossibly through the air. His mind, detached from the dead, stringless puppet of his body, pulled free with a discernible tug. He watched himself falling back to earth with bricks and clods of dirt, with the disembodied arms and legs of his friends, with clattering pieces of steel and burning splinters of wood. Bret Melton, formerly of the U.S. Army Rangers, twirled oh so slowly through clear air, up so high he imagined he could see the entire town of An Nasiriyah below him. The savage close-quarters battles that still raged around choke points and contested streets. The ruined block where they had been ambushed in another life. Hundreds of Iraqi soldiers and militia fighters running toward his position. And beyond that. He could see the deserts stretching away toward the mountains in the far north. He could see the s.h.i.+ps of the U.S. fleet as they raked at skies full of Iranian fighters. And perhaps, at the dimmest edge of vision and consciousness, he could see an empty realm, the burning land that he had once known as home. The lost continent of America.

Melton saw all of these things. Or thought he did, before he fell back to earth and into darkness.

Safe house, seventeenth arrondiss.e.m.e.nt, Paris

She was sick. Increasingly nauseated, and occasionally close to vomiting. Caitlin had no idea whether it was a side effect of the headache, which had been constant for three days now, or an entirely new symptom of whatever was eating her brain from the inside out. Of course, it could also be a result of breathing in the soupy miasma of toxins and burned chemicals that had rolled over the city three days ago and stayed. The charred, atomized memory of America. Some Guardian writer with a very dark sense of humor and a taste for Delillo had named it the "airborne toxic event," and the name had stuck.

French government warnings played on a loop across every radio station, advising listeners to stay indoors whenever possible. Caitlin couldn't believe anyone would need telling twice. Millions of dead seabirds had washed up on the coast of western France just before the tsunami of pollutants had arrived, and thousands of pigeons-flying rats, as she thought of them-had been dropping from the sick, leaden skies over Paris ever since. She could see dozens of little gray carca.s.ses from the apartment window. City council workers had already cleaned the streets below of twitching, broken birds, but that was on Tuesday, and they hadn't been back.

The few times Caitlin had ventured outside to stock up on fresh food she'd returned with her eyes stinging and her airways burned. It reminded her of the time she'd done a job in Lin-fen, a city in China's Shanxi Province where you could feel the acids and poisons leaching through your skin every minute you were exposed.

She splashed a handful of cold water on her waxy face. She looked bad. Bruised, puffy eyes. Hollow cheeks. All the lines on her face etched too long and deep. Then again, almost everyone in Paris looked like that now. There weren't too many parties celebrating the new world order these days. People were either keeping to themselves, holed up with their families, or they were out in mobs, heedless of the poisoned atmosphere. The ring of fire surrounding the old core of the city was due to them. What had begun as small-scale opportunistic looting had escalated into a rolling series of street battles between the police and ever-greater numbers of rioters from the outer suburbs. In the last twenty-four hours the radio had carried reports of wider clashes, between "migrant gangs" and "white youths."

Between Muslim wack jobs and fascist skinheads, Caitlin thought to herself. The first sparks.

She scrubbed her face with a damp cloth before toweling off.

The old bathroom at the rear of the apartment, a dark, depressing closet tiled in deep green and featuring a small faded yellow tub, wasn't the most flattering place in which to examine herself in a mirror. But there was nowhere else in the tiny apartment. The setup was very basic, funded entirely from a black discretionary account that she'd kept off the books at Echelon. One bed. A couch and a table. A bar fridge in the kitchenette, a two-ring gas burner, a microwave oven. And a small armory under the floorboards in the bathroom where she had also stashed some money-increasingly useless-and three pa.s.sports, ditto. n.o.body knew about this place. Not even Wales.

And for now, at least, it remained off the grid, undiscovered by her hunters, and relatively safe, unlike the first sanctum near the cemetery. It made sense, she supposed. If they'd known to try grabbing her up at the hospital, they had probably taken down her control cell, and possibly even the whole Echelon network.

Normally, she'd be gone by now. Disappeared from the map. But her illness seemed to grow worse by the day, and she had realized with horror some time ago that she actually needed Monique's help just to get through the day. A lone run through hostile territory was out of the question.