Without warning

Nobody replied, possibly because they all felt as sick in the gut as Musso. Oschin waited a second, then made her way through the rest of the image windows. Crown Center in Kansas City. Half-a-dozen cams from UCLA’s Berkeley campus. A mortgage brokers’ convention in Toledo. The main strip in Vegas – which looked like Satan’s wrecker’s yard, with cars all piled into each other and burning fiercely. Venice Beach. JFK Airport. The Strand in Galveston…

Musso arranged his features into a blank facade for that one. He’d already recognised the scene before Oschin had explained what they were looking at. Down in his meat, right down in the oldest animal parts of his being, he knew his family were gone.

Oblivious to the personal import of what she’d just shown them, Ensign Oschin carried on, cycling through a list of public gathering places that should have been teeming with people. All of them abandoned or empty, or… what?

‘It’s the Rapture,’ whispered an army major standing directly across the table from Musso. He was one of the two who’d unsettled Oschin a few minutes ago. ‘The end of days.’

Musso spoke up loudly and aggressively, smacking down on the first sign of anyone in this command unravelling. ‘Major, if it was the Rapture, don’t you think you’d be gone by now? And where are the sinners? Don’t they get to stay and party? And last time I heard, this thing has a defined horizon, not too far north of here.’

Chastened and not a little put out, the major, whose name-tag read Clarence, clamped his mouth shut again.

Musso wished, for once in his life, that someone was giving him orders as opposed to the other way around. This was one football he didn’t want to run with. He didn’t know what to make of the video streaming out of his homeland. After 9/11 he didn’t think anything could surprise him again. He’d been ready for the day he flicked on the television and saw mushroom clouds blooming over an American city. But this… this was bullshit.

‘Allahu Akbar. Allahu Akbar…’

The distinct popping sound of gunfire in the middle distance crackled out of a set of speakers. Then came the screams.

‘George,’ growled Musso.

‘I’m on it, sir.’

His second-in-command hurried out of the room to track down the source of this new disturbance. Musso waited for more shots, but none came.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I’m not sending any more assets into this thing, whatever it is. I think we’ve established that it’s a no-go zone.’

Both of the helicopters he’d ordered to fly north over international waters had apparently crashed soon after crossing the line that now defined the edge of the phenomenon.

‘Okay. Let’s call up Pacom…’ he started to say.

‘General, pardon me, sir. Permission to report?’

A fresh-faced Marine butterbar in full battle rattle appeared in the doorway, his dark features unaffected by the recent turn of events.

‘Go ahead,’ said Musso.

‘It’s the Cubans, sir. They’ve sent a delegation in through the minefield. They want to talk. Matter of fact, they’re dying to. One of their vehicles hit a mine coming in and the others just kept on rolling.’

Musso stretched and rolled his neck, which had begun to ache with a deep muscle cramp. He was probably hunching his shoulders again. Marlene said she could tell a mile off when he was really pissed, because he seized up like the Hunchback of Notre Dame. Marlene… Oh my god…

‘Okay,’ he said quickly. ‘Disarm them and bring them in. They’re a few miles closer to it, whatever it is. They might have seen something we haven’t.’

The lieutenant acknowledged the order and hurried away, weaving around Stavros, who returned at the same moment.

‘I’m afraid a bunch of our guests decided to charge a guard detail,’ he said, explaining the gunshots of just a few minutes ago. Things were moving so quickly that Musso had stopped caring about the incident as soon as it had failed to escalate. ‘Two dead, five wounded. They’ve heard something is up. They think Osama’s let off a nuke or something. The camps are locked down now.’

Musso took in the report and decided it didn’t need any more of his attention. ‘Folks, right now, I gotta say this. I don’t think bin Laden or any of those raghead motherfuckers had anything to do with this. I think it’s much bigger. But what the hell it is, I have no idea.’

The live feed from Oschin’s webcam trawl stuttered along above his head. Mocking them all.

I wish it was just a nuke, thought Musso, but he kept it to himself.

* * * *

4 MV DIAMANTINA, PACIFIC OCEAN

The old sailboat was a twin-masted forty-footer carved out of thousand-year-old Huon pine from the Tasmanian highlands, a beautifully preserved museum piece. She’d placed third on corrected time in a Sydney-Hobart race way back in 1953, and in the decades since had logged enough miles to make it to the moon and back. In that time she’d been the plaything of a builder, a manufacturing tycoon, two dot-com millionaires, and Pete Holder.