Without warning

‘It’s bloody confusing, isn’t it,’ grumbled Monty. ‘Rebels, renegades, mutineers, Loyalists – hard to keep them all straight some days. And if someone could do me a favour and explain why we’re still calling them fucking “Loyalists” when it seems pretty obvious they’ve cut some sort of deal with the intifada crew, I’d be very grateful.’

Melton, who was idly sketching a rough map of the city centre, with various lines of advance and defence marked out, just as he’d been taught so long ago, looked up and shrugged. ‘They self-identify as Loyalists, Monty, so it’s only good manners. After all, Sarkozy did anoint himself boss hog when Chirac got whacked. Smart move or not, it was illegal. Shades of Napoleon grabbing the crown. Gotta figure most of the guys fighting for the Loyalist Committee think they’re the ones protecting the Republic. The soldiers, at least. Sarko calling them all traitors and sell-outs to the intifada wouldn’t have helped calm the matter down either. The jihadi, they’re allies of convenience. It’s all fucked up. Civil wars always are.’

‘Do you believe him, though?’ asked Caroline.

‘Sarko? Who knows?’

‘It seems a little incredible, don’t you think, him accusing the Loyalists of treason? They seem rather less discriminating than that. Anyone in their way gets killed, no matter what their allegiance. Street gangs, neo-fascists, jihadis. They’ve cut them all down at one time or another.’

‘Like I said, Caroline, it’s confused. It’s a mistake to think of this thing in terms of massed armies manoeuvring against each other. Alliances and loyalties are contingent. They can shift in minutes. An agreement negotiated at one level might have no effect at others, or further down a city block. I think this is going to be one of those times when the winners definitely write the history.’

‘Well,’ Monty interrupted the discussion, ‘as another of your countrymen once pointed out, journalism is the first draft of history, and ours will be due in a few hours. So let’s crack on, shall we?’

* * * *

Leaving the office was no longer a matter of grabbing his equipment and stepping out to hail a cab. Melton didn’t expect to see the compound again for a couple of days and he packed accordingly. At the bottom of a small black rucksack he stuffed a layer of spare socks and underwear, on top of which he placed some emergency rations, even though he’d be eating with his embedded unit, he hoped. On top of them went his equipment: a small handy cam and twenty-four hours’ worth of videotape, three notebooks and a couple of pens. He topped it off with two handfuls of carefully hoarded chocolate bars and cigarettes, which he planned to share with ‘his’ troops. He understood just how welcome an outsider with a small stash of luxuries could be.

It was raining outside again, quite heavily, enough to dull the sounds of close-quarter fighting. The steel plating that covered all the windows only served to magnify the sound of the downpour as the torrents hit the metal. He carefully pulled on his rain slicker over a BBC-issue ballistic vest and snagged a pair of goggles to protect his eyes. His injuries still troubled him. These days the toxic rain wasn’t nearly as bad as it had been a few weeks back, but letting the water run into your eyes felt like swimming in a hideously over-chlorinated pool.

The last item, he took his time with. It was a controversial choice – a personal weapon. Some of the reporters, like Caroline and Adam Mynott, who’d arrived from Afghanistan with the last of NATO’s returning contingent, refused to carry anything and tried very hard to talk Melton out of doing so. They argued that a journalist’s best protection was their non-combatant status. In turn Melton insisted that nobody was playing by the Geneva Convention and cited at least three occasions in Iraq and two in Paris where he’d been forced to defend himself. It was an unresolved dispute, with some of the older hands writing him off as a fossil from the Cowboy Age, while a few of the younger ones quietly sought him out to ask his advice about how they might discreetly pack their own protection. It was telling, he thought, that Barry had scrounged him two spare magazines for the Fabrique Nationale 57 pistol.

He stripped, cleaned and rebuilt the handgun before slotting home a full mag. Safety on, it went into the holster on his right hip and disappeared under the slicker. Melton finished his packing with a fully charged cell phone, plugged into British Telecom’s network and set to roam, but he noted that – as usual – there was no signal available. Service was spotty, at best. After a quick visit to Monty’s cubicle for all the goodbyes and good-luck wishes, he signed out at the security desk, lodging a run-down of his expected movements over the next forty-eight hours, the name of the French unit he would be with, and the number of the all-but-useless cell phone in his breast pocket.