Without warning

Musso nodded. Nuсez was deeply agitated but Musso was not so stupid as to make any judgments about the man’s character on that basis. The major had been chosen by the Cuban military to face off a mortal enemy, squatting on the very soil of his motherland. He would be neither a fool nor a coward.

‘Have you sent anybody in?’ he asked. ‘To investigate.’

The captain standing by the door moved fractionally. A tic flickered under one eye.

Nuсez nodded. ‘Yes. I send in some scouts. They appear to, uh, to disappear in the heat haze. It was very thick, very powerful, no, near the effect? It seemed much hotter. And so my men they walk in, slowly. They…’ He groped for the right word. ‘They shimmer, yes? In the haze. And they are gone.’

‘Just gone?’ asked Stavros.

Nuсez nodded vigorously. ‘Yes. Sometimes the haze seems to shift, like a curtain, just for a second, and we can see further down the road, say two hundred metres. It is like looking into a fish tank, yes, in a restaurant? It is a very strange sight. Like a curtain of air? I do not see how that can be but it… ah…’ He rolled his hands in a helpless gesture, again seeking the right words. ‘You can see this curtain. But the scouts, they never emerge on the far side. Their uniforms, they fall in a heap. Charred and smoking.’

Musso frowned. He thought he understood what Nuсez was describing. The heat wall sounded a little like a blast wave – the front of super-compressed air that moves outwards from the point of an explosion. But in this case it wasn’t moving, or compressed. It merely hung in the air like a ‘curtain’, as Nuсez had called it.

Musso cleared his throat. ‘Major, my own observers reported some of your men heading north…’

‘Si,’ he said bitterly. ‘They abandoned their posts.’

‘And they ran into the haze?’

Nuсez nodded, looking almost satisfied. ‘Yes. There was no need to shoot them. They have gone too.’

‘I see,’ replied Musso. ‘And so what would you like us to do?’

The Cuban shifted uncomfortably in his seat, looking around, surprised at last to find himself in the devil’s lair. He sighed. ‘We would like help. We are not a tin-pot dictator’s ship,’ he said, forcing Musso to suppress a grin for the first time that morning. ‘We nave been intercepting your satellite news services. We know this is beyond the normal. Something terrible and large is happening. We need to know what. To prepare.’

Musso folded his arms and let his chin rest on his chest.

‘This “curtain” of air,’ he said after a brief moment of quiet, ‘is it stable? Is it moving, expanding, at all?’

Nuсez appeared deeply troubled by the question. ‘Like I said. It is a giant curtain, and like a curtain, it moves as if blown by the wind, sweeping over the countryside like a curtain blows in a window.’

Musso felt a shiver that started at the base of his spine and ran up into his shoulders. The idea of this thing moving an inch was disturbing at a cellular level. ‘Major, how much is it moving?’ he asked. ‘Have you been able to determine any limits?’

Nuсez bobbed his head up and down. ’It seems to… billow … is that your word? It seems to billow like a sail, up to fifteen or twenty metres. It seems random. Just like a curtain or the branches of a tree moving in the breeze. But if it sweeps over you – poof! You are gone.’

‘Well, we need to know more about it, about the parameters under which it operates. But neither of us can send any more of our people in.’

‘I know,’ Nuсez agreed. ‘We have watched your planes and ships, no? The pilots and sailors, they have been taken too.’

‘What about a Predator?’ suggested Stavros. ‘I understand there’s a unit on base. The effect doesn’t seem to interfere with electronics. Perhaps we could send one up and into the affected area.’

Musso gave Nuсez an enquiring look. ‘How’d you feel about that, Major? We could send an unmanned drone up, but we’d be violating your airspace. I would need written authorisation from your senior officer.’ Part of him marvelled at how deeply ingrained was the ass-covering reflex, but what the hell was he supposed to do?

‘I am the senior officer now, General,’ said Nuсez as he began patting his pockets. ‘My colonel was in Havana, and Lieutenant Colonel Lorenz drove into the haze before we realised what it was. His car went off the road and burned.’

Stavros handed him a pen and a notepad, and the Cuban began scribbling immediately. Nobody spoke while he wrote.

Musso walked over to the window. It was coming on for midday and the sun beat down fiercely on the base. A flagpole across the compound cast only a short dagger of shadow, the Stars and Stripes hanging limp in the humidity. Guantanamo was not a major fleet base. It had been established as a coaling station – not the most glamorous of postings, even before it became famous as a prison camp. Down in the bay, a couple of tugs and a single minesweeper lay at anchor close to shore. It was a scene entirely normal, even banal.