Without warning

He had eaten almost half a roll of antacid pills in the last hour as he’d tried to accept the situation. Sitting by himself in a crowded canteen roaring with the voices of dozens of reporters who’d crowded in for the free Wi-Fi and chilled air, Melton had surfed the web frantically looking for something – anything – that might expose this morning’s news as a gigantic fraud. All he’d managed to do was convince himself that nobody, no state or group, and certainly no individual, could pull off such an enormous scam. The disappearance was real.

He thumbed another couple of Rolaids into his mouth, sucking at them despondently as he clicked through a series of windows. News reports. Canadian TV shots. Webcam feeds. He’d searched dozens of chat sites, which had ‘lost’ most of their participants hours ago, their last messages often ending mid-sentence. It was a visit to an online gaming site that convinced him, however. He had a little-used subscription to Blizzard.net that he’d set up when researching a piece about the possibility of using multi-player combat sims as a recruiting tool. Everywhere he went in the virtual world he found CGI avatars standing mutely, awaiting instructions from their creators. Beneath them, in the small windows given over to character dialogue, there were reams of increasingly bemused, uneasy, and then fearful comments from players who’d logged in from areas outside North America. Most tellingly, almost nobody was now online, the survivors having abandoned the game servers for news sites or perhaps even the real world.

‘A dark day, my friend. A very dark day.’

Melton looked up from the eerie stillness of a window running a multiplayer version of Diablo. Sayad al Mirsaad, the Al Jazeera correspondent, stood over him.

‘Do you mind?’ he asked, indicating the seat in front of Melton.

‘Of course not,’ Bret said distractedly. ‘Sit down, Sadie.’

His Jordanian colleague had given up protesting the American’s use of the slightly offensive nickname, finally accepting some time ago that it was meant affectionately. He was regularly called much worse by some of Melton’s countrymen.

‘I can see from your face, you are a believer now, yes?’ said Mirsaad, without a hint of irony. He and Melton were both educated men, both men of strong faith, and they had passed many late hours in Qatar discussing theology and politics.

The former Ranger shrugged and let his hand fly up in a gesture that was part resignation, part expression of utter futility. He didn’t reply. Around him, the reporters all roared on, each holding forth on their own ideas and bullshit conspiracy theories. An unpleasant energy pervaded the room, setting Melton’s teeth on edge. In contrast with the others, Mirsaad appeared to be as depressed as he was.

‘Not everyone will think it’s a bad day, Sadie,’ Melton said at last. ‘Some assholes are gonna be sending a lot of extra prayers upstairs tonight, thanking their God for getting rid of the great Satan.’ He watched Mirsaad closely, but he seemed almost as upset as any American was.

‘Then they would be fools,’ replied the Jordanian. ‘Ultimately everything is God’s will, but this is not His work. In the affairs of men, the will of Allah is known through the actions of men. This… this is something else.’

Melton nodded. ‘I think so too. But it doesn’t mean -’

‘Hey, shut the fuck up!’ somebody yelled from across the room. ‘It’s Saddam.’

The name acted like a spell, laying a hush over the room as Melton twisted around in his plastic chair to get a view of a television screen high on the wall behind him. The Iraqi leader appeared there, beaming like a pirate king who’d fallen ass-backwards into a huge pile of both kinds of booty. The electronic watermark in the top right-hand corner of the screen belonged to the Al Jazeera network and the report was in Arabic.

‘What’s it saying?’ somebody asked.

Melton glanced back at Mirsaad for a translation, but before he could answer, an educated English voice rang out over the heads of the crowd. A handsome, well-groomed young man with South Asian features and an impeccable Etonian accent stood on a chair to get a clear view of the TV. Melton thought he recognised him. A BBC producer.

‘It’s saying that Saddam appeared briefly before a crowd at one of his palaces about forty minutes ago,’ the man called out.

The footage showed a beaming dictator. Melton thought he was smiling so much that if he’d been a cartoon character, the top of his head might well have fallen off. Dressed in army greens and sporting a black beret, he fired six rounds from a pistol into the air as a small coterie of unctuously smiling generals watched on and the hand-picked crowd exploded into spasms of joy and tyrannophilia. Saddam began talking and an Arab voice-over cut in, after a few seconds, paraphrasing him. The English producer translated as the roomful of journalists remained unnaturally still and quiet.