Without warning

And behind his friend’s twinkling eyes and ready smile, Melton had seen real fear at being left behind to burn in a nuclear furnace. It made it all the more affecting that he had agreed to track Melton down for the British broadcaster, which had lost contact with him when he was injured. Bret wondered whether he would have done the same thing in Mirsaad’s place. The small coterie of full-time war correspondents tended to be close and unusually supportive of each other, but Mirsaad had spent days hunting him through the vast labyrinth of the US Transport Command and, having found him in that transit hangar out in the desert, had insisted on personally driving the injured reporter three hundred miles to Kuwait City.

‘Don’t you have a job?’ asked Melton as they waited in the lounge for his BA flight to England.

‘I am a roving reporter,’ Mirsaad replied with a grin. ‘I rove, therefore I am. And I will file many stories on the reaction to the Israeli bombs and to the American pull-out. Frankly, if it keeps me away from the bombsites themselves, I am grateful. I have heard from colleagues sent into Egypt and Syria about the conditions there. Many of them are now very sick. The network has suspended operations in the irradiated areas until they are safe. Well, safer. For now, Kuwait and Qatar are my beats, as you say. I shall fly out to Coalition headquarters when you have gone for a briefing on the ceasefire.’

Melton snorted. ‘Not much of a ceasefire, Sadie. The Israelis wiped the field clean with a couple of airburst nukes. EMPs fried everything the Iranians had.’

Mirsaad’s fragile smile fell away. ‘You know, a lot of people are saying that if your government had not warned Tehran and the others, they would not have deployed all of their defences to be wiped out. Many people think it was a conspiracy, a plot between Washington and Tel Aviv to steal all of the oil, not just Saddam’s.’

The American regarded his friend warily. ‘Sadie,’ he said in a gentle tone, ‘Washington’s gone. Bush, Cheney, all of them. All the petrol-company head offices, motor manufacturers, arms companies, all gone. If there was a conspiracy, it was a one-way street. Everything I’ve seen tells me the Israelis completely suckered Jim Ritchie. Iranian military doctrine is to throw everything at a threat. No reserves. They got an hour or so warning and put everything up. They tried to warn their own people, with the end result that the entire country lit up in panic. Computers, phones, radio, TV, every goddamn piece of electronic equipment in the place, and none of it hardened against a pulse.’

‘So what you are really saying, Bret, is that they didn’t need to bomb the cities. They had already destroyed their enemies as functioning modern societies.’

‘Well, I wouldn’t call them functioning or modern, but yes, I see your point,’ Melton replied. ‘Look, I don’t condone it – who would? By the time the final butcher’s bill is toted, they’ve probably killed, what, a hundred and fifty, two hundred million people. Christ only knows how many more if anybody else follows their lead. Possibly everyone, in the end. You know what that makes us – I mean, the US and the Disappearance? Old news.’

‘You are right,’ Mirsaad conceded. ‘I apologise. I sound like some ill-bred street Arab falling on conspiracy talk like a scabrous dog on a bone. Tell me truthfully, Bret, what do you think your military will do?’

He shook his head. ‘I have no idea, Sadie. Leave you all to it, I expect. We’re out of the superpower business as of last week. Go ask the Chinese, or whoever’s running India. If Pakistan hasn’t nuked them yet.’

They fell into an uncomfortable silence as the PA called flights out to Paris, Rotterdam and Bangkok. Melton attempted to find a position in which he could recline without putting pressure on his injured butt cheek or shoulder. It was difficult. But at least for the first time in weeks he was clean, and dressed in luxuriously soft and well-fitting civilian clothes. The BBC had sent him payment in euros for the copy he’d filed before he was wounded, and had advanced him another, larger sum, on the basis of the interviews he had taken at the transit facility out in the desert. As he’d expected, they were most interested in any European angle.

Their money was still worth something in Kuwait, at least in the hermetically sealed environment of the international airport. He was able to buy clothes and replace some lost and damaged equipment. Even better than that, he’d managed to fill a few prescriptions at a pharmacy on the main concourse and, now that he had escaped the Kafkaesque frustrations of the military transport system, he could eat when he felt like it.

‘What will you do when you get to London?’ asked Mirsaad.