Without warning

‘Here, Colonel,’ said Nuсez, handing the slip of paper to Stavros. ‘You may countersign as a witness. I have authorised Brigadier General Musso to deploy surveillance assets into Cuban territory on a temporary basis, with myself to administratively supervise such deployments in each and every instance.’

‘Fine,’ agreed Musso.

In fact there were any number of red flags sticking out of such an arrangement, but under normal circumstances Nuсez would have guaranteed himself a trip to prison, or even a blindfold and a last cigarette, by writing out such an order. If he was willing to put his nuts in the grinder, Musso could hardly quibble.

* * * *

‘Goddamn.’ Lieutenant Colonel Stavros was the first to speak, and he said it all.

‘Goddamn is right,’ agreed Musso.

‘Madre de Dios,’ muttered Nuсez.

His very presence in the situation room would have been unthinkable only hours earlier, and two heavily built MPs did shadow his every move, but Musso wasn’t expecting any trouble. Nor was he expecting any repercussions from having allowed an enemy officer into one of the nerve centres of the US military to watch some of its newest technology in action. There had been some quiet and very forceful dissent from the army’s senior representatives on base – a Military Police colonel and a Signal Corps major, no less. But they had been overruled with extreme prejudice.

‘Empty,’ said Nuсez. ‘Completely empty.’

‘Goddamn,’ whispered Stavros again. A single bead of sweat trickled down his temple even though the blue-lit room, buried thirty metres below ground, was nearly as cold as a beer fridge. Fear and sweat, sour and musky, filled the space.

Holguin, a city of more than three hundred thousand souls, scrolled down the plasma screen in front of them. It lay nearly a hundred klicks away to the north, well within the Predator’s range. But Musso intended to push the aircraft on, deeper into Cuban airspace. It was going to go down in hostile territory. Or what had been hostile territory this morning. Musso was already thinking of it as no-man’s-land now. Quite literally.

The sysop controlling the surveillance bird had dropped its altitude to three hundred metres, a height at which the Predator’s cameras could easily pick out very fine detail on the streets below. In fact, so low was it flying and so close had the operator pulled in the view that the real-time feed was a blur, and Musso, like the other observers, was instead examining slo-mo replays on the other monitors. In one the Calixto Garcia Park, right in the middle of the city’s downtown area, rolled into view. Another showed the giant Ceverercia Bucanero brewery, a joint venture with the Canadian brewer Labatt. It was aflame, but nobody was fighting the blaze. On other monitors, beautifully decaying Spanish colonial architecture sat cheek by jowl with aesthetically worthless cement office blocks and warehouses. Winding streets gave onto cobblestone plazas and the town’s surprisingly rich cultural district, wherein half-a-dozen museums, galleries and libraries all stood. Not a solitary human figure moved anywhere.

Unlike the satellite images they’d been watching on the European and Asian news services, the Predator fed live video, and although the streets of Holguin were not nearly as crowded with vehicular traffic as an American city of comparable size, they were still choked with the wreckage of hundreds of cars, many of them burning, all apparently having lost their drivers at the same time. A thickening layer of smoke hung over the city, stirred only slightly by a gathering breeze.

‘General Musso, sir?’

‘Yes, son,’ Musso answered without looking away from the eerie scenes.

‘I have PACOM on line for you, sir.’

Musso accepted a pair of headphones with a mike attached, fitting them on and walking over to a far corner. ‘This is Musso,’ he said quietly.

‘General,’ came a brusque reply in a rather refined New England accent, ‘Admiral James Ritchie here. Glad to hear you’re still with us. You seem to be on the front line of this… phenomenon.’

‘Close enough, sir. It’s touched down about seventy klicks north of here. Looks like a weird storm front. Admiral, if you don’t mind me asking, do you have information about the situation in CONUS? All we’re getting is the news feeds out of Europe and Asia.’

‘No,’ complained Ritchie. ‘We’re not doing much better. Some of my people have managed to take control of the Keyhole over Havana – that’s what I’m pushing through to you now-but we’ve got nothing from home yet. I take it there’s no chance we’ll get a real pair of eyeballs on this today?’