Without warning

The small team of correspondents and editors took their places around the conference table, most of them juggling papers and folders in one hand, and bone-china cups and saucers in the other. A packet of ‘biscuits’, as they insisted on calling all forms of cookie life, sat in the centre of the table, and Monty doled out one to each tea drinker, before carefully twisting the packet closed again and clamping it with a wooden clothes peg. The provenance of the peg was never explained. It was a peculiar ritual, one that Melton had rather come to look forward to each day. He was offered one of the McVitie’s wholemeal ‘bickies’ to have with his glass of water, but again he turned it down.

‘Couldn’t get any Oreos, Barry?’ he teased, only half in jest.

‘Oh, I know where there’s a whole warehouse of ‘em, Mr Melton. Just couldn’t be fucked dickerin’ for ‘em. Why, do you want some?’

‘Oh no, don’t put yourself out on my behalf,’ Bret replied, smiling.

‘Wasn’t planning to, sir.’

Other exchanges rolled back and forth across and around the table as everyone settled in. The morning news conference was about something more than simply assigning new stories and monitoring those already in progress. It was the only time each day when the entire team was in one place, and it served as an opportunity for everyone to touch base, for the tribe to hunker down and count its blessings that once again their numbers had not been thinned out. The BBC had lost seventeen journalists killed or simply disappeared in the last month, not counting those who’d been vaporised in the Middle East. The Paris bureau, however, was charmed, having lost nobody since Jon Sopel was killed in the first week of fighting. The bureau had grown like topsy since then, and had taken the buildings on either side as they’d become abandoned, but only seasoned warcos and freelancers like Melton worked here now. He’d been hired on a twelve-month contract. It paid a fraction of his Army Times job, which hadn’t been a great earner anyway, but because of the hazardous posting status, the former Ranger was guaranteed ‘room and board’ at the Paris compound. It seemed perverse, but he ate better and slept more securely than many people in England.

‘Right then,’ Monty called out in his down-to-business voice. ‘What enchanting fripperies and puff pieces will we be filing from the City of Light today, then? Caroline, darlin’, any chance of that interview with the blessed Sarko yet?’

Caroline Wyatt rolled her eyes up to the peeling paint of the high ceiling. ‘His minders promised me I’d see him yesterday and I spent the whole bloody day in this wretched armoured car, roaring around from one bunker to the next, without ever actually managing to get anywhere near the little bugger. I’ll stay on it, Monty, if you really wish, but I don’t think Sarkozy’s going to roll over for us until he has some genuinely good news to crow about.’

‘Well, his armoured boys entered the old city last night. I’d have thought that was good enough.’

‘Yes, it is a feel-good story, isn’t it? Dozens of Leclerc main battle tanks crushing Arab street fighters under their treads in the Bois de Boulogne… I can’t imagine why he wouldn’t want to sit down and chat about that over a Pernod or two.’

‘Well, keep at it, sweetheart. I have faith in your charms,’ the chief of staff told her. ‘Bret, are you all squared away with the Marines? London is super-keen to see you embed with them after they cleaned out Lyons.’

Melton tapped the point of his ballpoint pen on a Spirax writing pad. ‘Soon as we’re finished up here, I’m heading west to Suresnes,’ he replied. ‘The Marines – although, you know, they’re really more like Army Rangers – they laid up last night at Mont-Valerien, the old fortress right next door. Parachuted in there when it was still full of jihadis. Pretty fucking hard-core. They’ll have some good stories.’

Normally, in a room full of BBC reporters, he’d have kept his mouth shut and just grunted, ‘Yeah, good to go.’ But these guys weren’t normal. Even Caroline Wyatt, who still spent an hour in make-up every day, nodded appreciatively. He didn’t need to sex it up for them. They all knew what a godless blood-swarm the drop into Mont-Valerien would have been, and what the push eastwards into the city was going to be like from there. The clashes between rival elements of the French military were destructive in the extreme. Whole swathes of the suburbs had been gutted by collisions between main-force units siding with either Minister Sarkozy or the so-called Loyalist Committee. The blocks bordering the Bois de Boulogne parklands now looked like Stalingrad at the end of 1944. Those buildings still standing were mostly gutted and blackened, often with the upper floors sheared off by high explosives. The line of the ruined streetscape looked like broken teeth.