Dragon Strike -- A Novel of the Coming War with China (Future History Book 1)

by Humphrey Hawksley

  `They won't do it with you here, Reece.'

  `Like hell they won't, Jamie. And there are a lot of people in the Pentagon who think we should have done it a damn sight earlier.'

  Briefing

  The effect of a nuclear explosion on a Japanese city

  Japanese houses and low-rise apartment buildings were made to fall over. A history of constant earthquakes conditioned the Japanese people to view their housing as essentially temporary structures. It was a mindset reinforced by Imperial ritual. To the south of Tokyo, on the Ise Peninsula, were the Great Shrines at Ise. These commemorated the founding of the Imperial line in the mists of time, and were maintained by Shinto priests. Since ad 478 they had torn down and rebuilt the shrines every twenty years. Sometimes a massive earthquake destroyed everything as in 1923, or the Kobe earthquake of 1995 which devastated that port city, but most of the time people's houses and apartments were buffeted and jolted by an almost continuous series of small and large tremors. Their buildings were therefore lightweight wooden frames and a ferro-concrete surround – and made to flex with the movement of the earth. If the earthquake was strong and they fell over they were comparatively cheap to replace. Light, flexible structures were well suited to surviving low-level earthquakes but were about the worst shelters to use in the aftermath of a nuclear attack. This was not so much because they collapsed in the face of the huge pressures and winds generated by a nuclear explosion: those near the epicentre and for many kilometres beyond were flattened. The lightweight construction of Tokyo's houses and apartments meant that the ones which survived a nuclear attack -- the ones at the periphery of the explosion -- provided so little protection from the effects of radioactive fallout as to be virtually useless. Gamma radiation passed unimpeded through the roofs and walls of the houses.

  The best piece of advice the authorities had given the people was to own a fire extinguisher. Given the materials used in the construction of the Tokyo housing stock, fires were likely in the event of an attack. For survivors of an attack the first two or three days after are a critical time. During this period it is best to stay indoors, because radioactive fallout is at its most lethal immediately after a nuclear explosion. Food, water, and bedding supplies were centralized. A ward could feed up to 300,000 for a day or two; it had 51,000 blankets, 51,000 straw mats, 2,300 portable toilets, and, in underground emergency reservoirs, it had 52,700 metric tons of fresh water. But the surviving population was meant to make its way to designated safety areas where the local government would distribute food and medical aid.

  Monzennaka-cho, Koto Ward, Tokyo

  Local time: 1500 Thursday 22 February 2001

  GMT: 0600 Thursday 22 February 2001

  The street that ran past the entrance to Monzennaka-cho on the Tozai line of the Tokyo underground was like any in Tokyo. Next door to Chozushi sushi shop, just four doors from the entrance to the station, is a Japanese sweetshop; next to it a cheap coffee shop, and then Mr Donuts, a popular chain outlet catering to commuters, schoolgirls, and local mums and their children. With a dozen tables and a counter that seats a dozen, Mr Donuts is crowded with as many as a hundred patrons at a time. In the front, two girls bag takeout doughnuts for customers as fast as they can. The store is a virtual madhouse at most hours of the day. The west entrance-exit to the subway is just outside Mr Donuts' door, bounded on the far side by an eat-as-you-stand soba and tempura shop. A woman sits in a tiny news-stand located between the two doors at each end of the soba-tempura shop. Around the corner is the local police koban, sandwiched next to a shoe shop. Then comes Kentucky Fried Chicken, another soba shop, a barber's, a pub, and McDonald's.

  It was cold and grey but the teikiya, or outdoor market, was in full swing. Twice a month, the street vendors converge on Mon-naka, setting up their booths on the broad footpath that stretches from the Mitsubishi Bank east for several blocks past the Tomioka Hachiman shrine. The first booth usually sells Brother sewing machines, with a hawker proclaiming the wonders of home sewing. Down the line there are booths selling hard rock sweets, dumplings with octopus in them (takoyaki), round monaka full of sweet bean paste, fried noodles, underwear apparently targeted at women over sixty, plastic toys and masks, wind chimes, barbecued chicken (yakitori), pottery, pirated tapes and CDs, potted plants, and cut flowers. These vendors turn up on the 22nd of each month, and when they do, the elderly residents come out to browse. Bent backs and canes are the mode of the day, and it can be a nerve-racking task to walk that side of the street. The confusion and congestion is compounded by store owners putting their own pavement booths out, competing with the teikiya.

  The broadcasts started soon after 3 p.m. There were 111 public address loudspeakers in Koto ward, and three of them ran the length of the teikiya. Simultaneously the loudspeakers switched from the somewhat irritating low-level muzak that they usually emitted to the calm voice of a woman telling everyone to go home. That was all. Over and over again in a very calm voice she said everyone must go home and all businesses should close: there was an emergency. People stopped and just looked at each other. An old woman began to weep. In the sushi-ya the owner switched the television channel to NHK, the national broadcaster. A grave young woman said that China was threatening Japan with a nuclear strike. People should listen to their local officials and do what they were told.

  Just before the public broadcasts began, the chief of Koto's Ward Disaster Preparation Committee had sent a message to local volunteers via the ward's additional network of 533 PA speakers situated in the homes of volunteers. He called them up to take the initiative in helping their neighbours. `If they ask why, tell them that China has threatened to bomb us.' The emergency always talked about and prepared for was an earthquake. 1 September, the day of the Great Kanto earthquake of 1923 that devastated Tokyo, was set aside for the good citizens of Koto, indeed Japan, to practise what to do after a big earthquake. On 6 August 1945 the Americans dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima; three days later it was Nagasaki's turn. But there was not a 6 August day set aside to practise what to do in the event of a nuclear attack. The Japanese government did not have a plan as such for dealing with the bomb. The only disaster Koto was even partially equipped to deal with was an earthquake: local officials had to harness earthquake emergency procedures using the ward-wide PA system.

  Koto had a problem with the emergency that gripped it that Thursday afternoon and it did not know quite what to do.

  Briefing

  Planning for a nuclear attack on Kent

  The County Emergency Centre for Kent (pop. 1,500,000) is located in the basement under the canteen for the county offices on Sandling Road in central Maidstone. It is an unprepossessing accumulation of rooms that was adapted during the Cold War. But given the crisis that was to unfold many had cause to give thanks for that. The centre was designed primarily to protect its inhabitants from the worst effects of radioactive fallout from a nuclear explosion. Only 1 per cent of the radiation at street level could penetrate the bunker, or so its designers hoped. Structurally, however, the facility itself could only withstand the excessive atmospheric pressures created by a nuclear explosion of 1 lb per square inch (p.s.i.). A 1 megaton Chinese bomb would create an overpressure of 126 p.s.i. 0.5 nautical miles from the point of detonation. Implicitly, the designers of the bunker had therefore assumed that if Maidstone itself were a target then to preserve a local government presence was pointless when all the population was destroyed. Indeed, at just over a mile from point of detonation, a 1 megaton bomb produces an overpressure of 10 p.s.i. overpressure powerful enough to uproot all trees, destroy all houses, and shred most high-rise buildings. It was just such a bomb that a Xinhua report had said would be launched at the south-east of England.

  The emergency centre had been designed to support forty-eight people for a month. It had an oil-fired generator to provide electricity, a tank of fresh water, food stores, accommodation for sixteen to sleep at any one time, and a warren of rooms crammed full of telephones — t
heir cords hanging from points in the ceiling — arranged on long tables. The telephone was part of a network maintained by the government and was quite separate from the civilian telephone network owned and operated by British Telecom. In one room of the bunker was a green box, about the size of a refrigerator. Manufactured by Rainford Secure Systems of St Helens, near Liverpool, this was the telephone switching gear and it was meant to be impervious to the electromagnetic pulse, or EMP. The equipment would have to be sturdy because a 1 megaton nuclear weapon exploding at ground level generated 100,000,000,000 joules of energy. A fraction of a joule was enough to damage most modern electronic equipment; 1 joule was enough to render a telephone, or hospital life-support system, useless. Such widespread and indiscriminate damage to all electrical and electronic equipment could be expected within a radius of 10 to 20 kilometres from the point of impact of the Chinese bomb. The Kent local government's ability to communicate with the Cabinet Office Emergency Committee in London would depend crucially on just how good Rainford Secure Systems' shielding of the telephone switch gear really was.

  By the time senior officials from the county council and the emergency services had been summoned to the emergency centre -- just after 9 a.m. -- they all knew why they were there. Since 7 a.m. the BBC and its commercial competitors had been broadcasting news of the Chinese threat. Although it would not be until 10 a.m. that the BBC began broadcasting its `What to do in the event of a nuclear attack' television and radio programmes, many Kent citizens had decided the threat was all too real and had begun to flee the south-east. The roads had become congested, especially main motorways -- the M20 to Folkestone and Dover, and the M2 to Ramsgate and Dover -- and the faster A roads leading north to the M25 orbital motorway that circled London and provided access to Gatwick and Heathrow airports. Chokepoints, such as the entrance to the Channel Tunnel at Folkestone, and the entrances to cross-Channel ferries at Ramsgate, Dover, and Folkestone were also very crowded with people fleeing. One of the first decisions the Emergency Committee had to take was whether to permit large-scale self-evacuation (and the attendant chaos on the roads that might bring) or attempt to keep the civilian population in their homes. One of the advantages of the timing of the warning was that most bread winners had not gone to work, so families were not dispersed. But to an extent the actions of people had pre-empted the discussion: self-evacuation was already taking place, and there was a spirited discussion between the police and the county council. The representative of the Chief Constable for Kent said he was sure his officers could control the situation and keep the roads clear for emergency use. The County Emergency Planning Officer disagreed. As the county was unable to guarantee personal safety the police should not hinder anyone's attempt to leave, rather they should ensure the roads were kept open. In addition, in the absence of emergency powers being enacted, while the police might close roads and maintain public order the legality of their restricting movement was judged extremely dubious. The county should, however, use local radio to send the message that people were likely to be safer in a properly constructed shelter in their houses than in a car if a bomb was detonated. The County Chief Executive came down on the side of his County Emergency Planning Officer and it was decided that the Chief Executive and the County Emergency Planning Officer would make themselves available for radio interviews after the meeting to explain the benefits of staying put.

  Although many thousands had taken to their cars and were driving north to the M25 motorway or to the coast in the hope of getting to France, many more people had either made the decision to stay or did not possess the means to leave. In the latter category were the homeless and elderly. Here it was decided that social services should immediately set out to determine who were at risk; to identify their whereabouts; and, in the case of the homeless, remove them to an appropriate residential establishment.

  The subject no one really wanted to discuss but every one knew had to be discussed came towards the end of the meeting: health. Governments did not plan expenditure on the basis of the sort of medical facilities a country of sixty million people would need to survive a nuclear attack. Kent would have to make do with what it had. One of the consequences of civilian nuclear disasters is a rise in thyroid cancer. This occurs because radioactive iodine produced by a nuclear accident lodges in the thyroid glands of affected workers. One way of preventing thyroid cancer is to administer potassium iodate. This lodges in the thyroid and crowds out the radioactive isotopes which then pass through the body. Stocks of potassium iodate were at the Dungeness nuclear power plant on Kent's south coast, beyond the Romney Marshes, but they were hardly adequate for a county-wide emergency. Hospitals had been alerted and were instituting their own emergency procedures. But only one, the Royal Marsden Hospital at Sutton in Surrey, was geared up for nuclear accidents. It offered a procedure known as `pulmonary lavage', whereby a patient who had breathed in radioactive particles was put on an alternative oxygenated blood supply while he had his lungs irrigated. Pulmonary lavage was, however, a complicated and time-consuming process, and Royal Marsden could accommodate only a fraction of the expected casualties from the Chinese bomb.

  Royal Tunbridge Wells, Kent

  Local time: 1000 Thursday 22 February 2001

  Eric Wallace, father of two, looked out of his sitting room window on to St John's Road. It was usually a busy road to the north it offered access to Tonbridge and Sevenoaks, to the south Lewes and East Grinstead but on that Thursday morning it was bumper-to-bumper both ways. Wallace had talked things over with his wife, Cathy, and they had decided to stay put. `If it's going to hit us direct then it doesn't matter where we are,' he said. He also thought that of all the places in the south-east Tunbridge Wells was about as unlikely a target as you could get . . . and London by far the more likely. In any event he was taking no chances.

  The television had been turned on and tuned to BBC 1 since Wallace heard on his clock radio that south-east England might be the target for a Chinese nuclear attack. The calm voice of the announcer explained that the greatest threat to life was from gamma radiation. Some houses impede the progress of gamma radiation better than others. Caravans are next to useless as they stop virtually no radiation at all. A lot of modern houses are not much better. The best dwelling to be holed up in during a nuclear attack is in the basement of a three-storey block of flats. The announcer said that a Home Office study pointed out that the occupants of such a cellar or basement would receive one three-hundredth of the external gamma radiation. In general, cellars or basements are the best place to hide because they are furthest away from the roof, which lets in a lot of radiation, and because the ground is a good shield against radiation. Eric Wallace and his family, however, lived in a two storey mock-Tudor house without a cellar. On the ground, with only the windows blocked, more than 80 per cent of gamma radiation would pass through the house, without some protection.

  Soon after he and his wife had decided to remain in their house Cathy set out for the shops in Tunbridge Wells. She was in charge of getting the family's survival kit together. She set off down St John's Road towards the town centre. The roads were packed with cars. The cars were packed with people and possessions. She passed car after car. None overtook her. She got to Grosvenor Road but Tesco's was closed. A crowd milled around its entrance. She continued on. She always shopped at Tesco's; it was the closest and they knew her.

  Grosvenor Road became Mount Pleasant Road just at the point where Calverley Road met both. Calverley Road was a pedestrian mall and a short way down was Marks & Spencer. It was open, but an angry crowd was milling around the entrance like a swarm of agitated bees. Five policemen were attempting to restrain one group of people who had claimed that another had jumped the queue. Cathy spoke to one of the policemen who told her that Safeway's, down by the mainline railway station, was open, so she made for that. As she passed the Town Hall, a thirties structure of studied ugliness that dominated Mount Pleasant Road, she saw a Transit van full of vagrants being un
loaded and taken into the town hall. Safeway's was as crowded and rowdy as the other supermarkets. Cathy queued and said little. All she knew was that she had a list to get, and then get back home although the prospect of a twenty-minute walk carrying what she had to carry scared the living daylights out of her. Eric had told her that they needed enough food for four for fourteen days. Since 10 a.m. the BBC had been broadcasting advice about what to buy. The government's advice was to stock up on sugar, jams, and other sweet foods, cereals, biscuits, meats, vegetables, fruit, and fruit juices. She also had to get batteries for the portable radio, pain killers, adhesive dressings, bandages, disinfectant, three buckets (with lids), and bin liners.

  When she got home it looked as though a bomb had hit. Eric had removed doors and filled rubbish-bin liners with soil from the garden. He'd also painted the glass in the windows white and moved pieces of furniture in front of them.

  The main ground floor room in the Wallaces' house ran the full depth of the house. The room was divided in two by sliding doors and they used the front half as their sitting room and the back half for dining. Behind the dining area was a kitchen and behind that a garden. Mr Wallace made his family's internal shelter in the dining room. Along the wall the room shared with the kitchen he propped four doors which he had removed from rooms upstairs. These were arranged in a `lean-to' and secured on the floor by a batten running its length. According to the film which had been running continuously on the BBC since 10 a.m., the next thing to do was insulate the lean-to. This was most effectively done by filling rubbish sacks full of earth and placing them over it. He also stacked sacks of earth on the kitchen side of the wall the lean-to was using. In all, he managed to fill and stack more than fifty sacks of earth by lunchtime. The entrance to the lean-to posed a problem until he uncovered two old tea chests. He filled each with earth. He put planks of wood over the top of the chests and on the planks stacked more bags of earth. There wasn't much left of the garden after he finished.