by Unknown
'I haven't finished,' said Mehta. 'What I outlined just now is what you owe this country after supporting those bastards for forty years. We warned you. We kept warning you, and you kept playing with fire. What I just listed, I want you to begin implementing now, as soon as this phone call is finished.'
'Go on, then,' said Song disbelievingly.
'If we find a direct link between the attack here and any element of the Pakistani military or intelligence services, you will give unequivocal support for us to go to war and destroy the institutions of that nation.'
Mehta paused to let his words sink in so there could be no misunderstanding. He had delivered his ultimatum. He had probably been too harsh, too much drawn back to the battlefield, addressing a corporal rather than the president of the most populous country on earth. He would allow Jamie Song a reply, even a defence if he wanted it. But, as he had spoken unprepared, unbriefed by his advisers, Mehta knew he could not negotiate on his conditions. Either China joined the world of civilized nations or he would expose it as a pariah.
'You are a brave man, Vasant Mehta,' said Song after a decent interval. 'The world has seen your courage. I have the picture on my desk, you with your daughter. It will be with me for ever as the image of how a man should lead and defend a nation.'
Mehta listened, glancing down at the newspapers as Song knew he would. Song was speaking in short, staccato phrases. Mehta could almost feel his brain working on how to find a diplomatic sidestep to the directness of Mehta's demands.
'You and I,' Song continued, drawing in common ground, 'we have come to office with the baggage of history. What has happened in Delhi is a tragedy. But it is one your nation is strong enough to bear. Pakistan is a pack of cards, Vasant, and you know it. It has no strength, only poison. Would I like China to cut its links with Pakistan? Yes, of course I would. But it is not something I can do overnight--'
'Stop,' Mehta broke in. 'I didn't call you for platitudes. If you want to break with Pakistan, do it now. There is no better time.'
'It cannot be done that quickly,' responded Song, his voice more firm. 'You must have talked to Khan about this.'
'Khan was not responsible. That is why he is dead.' Mehta slammed his hand down on the desk, loud enough for Song to hear. 'You know that as well as I do. Because he did not control the military. The men who have the supremacy of violence in Pakistan are given that power by your government. So, as I said, I want your technicians and scientists on a plane out of there within a week.'
'Prime Minister, I understand your anger. I sympathize with your grief. But I cannot allow you to threaten China.'
'Jamie,' said Mehta tersely. 'It is not a threat. It is a demand on your moral duty.' He dropped the receiver into its cradle. Had he gone too far? Vasant Mehta, India's accidental prime minister, didn't care. He picked up the phone again. 'Ashish,' he said unenthusiastically. 'I need to speak to Andrei Kozlov.'*
*****
He heard the flare of Kozlov's lighter as the Russian president took up the telephone, and his drawing on the tobacco. 'How's the warrior?' Kozlov asked sympathetically.
'Just one question,' said Mehta, dismissing the attempt at small talk. 'If it comes to war with Pakistan, Andrei, will you be with us?'
'We do not want war, Vasant, as you know,' said Kozlov. 'But if you have the evidence, you will have our political support. Our arms contracts remain regardless. They are indestructible.'
'Even if Jim West wants you to stop them?'
'Particularly if Jim West wants me to stop them,' answered Kozlov, his voice hardening. 'This is not the era of Vladimir Putin.'
'What about China?'
It must have been thirty seconds before Kozlov spoke again. 'China is complicated,' he said. 'We have a new alliance with China, Vasant. If you need muscle with China, I will try. But don't pick a fight with Jamie Song. Not now.'
****
14*
****
Pyongyang, North Korea*
'You have lost Brunei,' said Park Ho. He had walked, uninvited, into Ahmed Memed's suite at the government guest-house in the northern suburbs of Pyonyang. The Muslim cleric and his bodyguard, Hassan Muda, were at prayers, facing west towards Mecca using mats they had brought with them on the plane.
On Qureshi's insistence before he left, Memed had been given better quarters. But still they were far from luxurious. The room was large and narrow with high ceilings and a glass chandelier in the middle. The armchairs were covered in faded pink cloth and the other furniture was of heavy, dark wood: a low coffee table, three upright chairs, a writing desk and two cupboards, one with a stuffed pheasant decorating a shelf, with books by Kim Il-sung and his son Kim Jong-il lining the shelf underneath. The walls were a dirty white, the paint grubby and faded, and on them were photographs of Kim Il-sung, some from when he was a young man just after the Korean War.
Memed looked up patiently, and shifted his position while studying the impatience on Park Ho's face. 'Please, a few minutes,' he said gently.
'You have lost Brunei,' Park repeated. He walked to the window, impatiently tapping his fingers on the glass. 'You told me you had fighters with courage. You lied to me.'
Memed did not respond. Park lit a cigarette and opened the window. 'Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria - nothing. You told me there would be rebellion throughout the Islamic world. You lied to me.'
Memed ignored him. Park stepped over to Hassan Muda and kicked him in the face as he was kneeling.
Trembling with anger, Memed pushed himself to his feet. 'What are you trying to achieve, General?' He brushed down his gown and walked as calmly as he could manage to a window, across the room from Park. 'If you do that again, you will have lost everything, because you will have lost my cooperation.'
Park drew on his cigarette. In the silence that followed Memed's threat, Park silently studied the portraits of his predecessors.
'General,' said Memed gently. 'You will gain nothing by using sadism against Hassan Muda. You have seized upon him in a fit of anger. You do not respect me because you do not understand me, and you are a man who is afraid of what he does not have the courage to discover.'
'Don't preach to me,' said Park, walking to another corner of the room, his eyes concentrating on the cold and grimy view through the window.
'We are following our religion,' continued Memed, patiently, softly, trying to bring Park round. 'You do not have a religion. You have no god. You do not understand. Wherever people feel suppressed, they will turn to us. We have a vision that uplifts the hearts of men. It will spread, because Islam is a truth. You do not win or lose truths. They simply exist.'
'Brunei is lost,' said Park, turning back inside the room. 'That is a truth.'
'You cannot expect to gain such a large territory as Daulah Islamiah Nusantara without losing and regaining territory. We have not won Singapore. Penang, we never expected to win. But we have Kuching, Kota Kinabalu, Zamboanga, Jolu, Sulu. When we win, it is because the people believe us. It will not be through the barrel of a gun.' Memed finished the sentence with his eyes on Park. Then he knelt down and dipped a clean cloth in a bowl of fresh water that he kept underneath the radiator.
'Here,' he whispered to Muda. 'Take this. It will stop the bleeding.' Memed opened out the cloth and let Muda tilt his head back into his hand, while he lay the cloth over his face. His nose was bleeding and the kick had cut him under the right eye.
He got up and walked up to Park. There was a shiftiness across the general's face, an uneasiness about being looked straight in the eye. The two men were close and hostile, one in a laundered, khaki uniform, the other in a white, floor-length robe.
Park flinched as Memed put his hand on his shoulder. 'You follow the juche philosophy of your nation's founder Kim Il-sung,' Memed said slowly. 'Juche is based on the principle that man is the master of everything and man decides everything. I follow the religion of Islam, which believes that God is the master of everything and God decides everything.
'I see in your face a force more immediate, more human. Perhaps you follow your path because of an experience in your early life. That is what most godless people do.'
'Enough,' said Park, dropping his cigarette on the floor. He trod on the butt inches away from Memed's sandals and stepped back. 'With Qureshi, we talked of the need for another catalyst. With Brunei gone, do you still believe it will work?'
'The British newspapers are criticizing Stuart Nolan's action. International opinion is against him. They have published photographs of British special forces men attacking Muslim Bruneian soldiers. They ask why Western thugs are let loose in the developing world. Nolan will now try to take back Sabah and Sarawak. But each day, public opposition will grow. This is not just a battle for territory, but for the will of the new world we are trying to create. The West believes that if it can regain South-East Asia, the danger of unrest in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt will subside. I believe that the longer we fight, the wider the revolution will spread.'
Memed looked Park straight in the eye. His expression was soft, but determined. 'So yes, General, it will work. We will continue, and Muda will leave tonight, if you permit him.'
****
15*
****
Washington, DC, USA*
'I would have expected you to be visiting Pakistan now,' said the Defense Secretary, speaking on the phone while being driven across the Potomac River from the Pentagon. 'Pakistan is after all a friendly Islamic nation and needs all the support it can get at this difficult time.'
Mary Newman drew a deep breath. She was in the back of her car on the shorter journey from the drab 'M' Street office, which housed the American Secretary of State. 'No more than our service personnel would expect their Defense Secretary to be with them at Yokata,' she countered.
'Juvenile,' Pierce muttered. 'I told Jim you were too young for the job. I can only think it's your close friendship which makes him stick by you.'
Utter bastard, thought Newman, yet so typical that a man so intellectually challenged as Chris Pierce would have to use sexual innuendo. If he was jealous of her access to the President, so be it. ''I back the British Prime Minister,' she said, ignoring the slight. 'And that's what I will be telling the President. In Park Ho, we're dealing with a very dangerous man indeed. I believe we should go in now and stop him, while we can. In fact, I believe North Korea may be turning itself into the world's first suicide state.'
'A little colourful, Mary,' interjected the Defense Secretary dryly. 'The Taliban in 2001. Iraq in 2003. They knew full well they were signing their own death warrants. But, of course, you were still getting your feet wet in international affairs then.'
'The Taliban was an imported regime set up by Pakistan and Saudi Arabia,' said Newman. 'Saddam Hussein was a hollow shell. But North Korea is different. However crazy its leaders might seem to us, what they have been trying to achieve does make a kind of perverse sense to them.'
'If you had ever been anywhere close to a war, Mary,' said Pierce, 'you wouldn't even begin to be saying the things you are.'
'We're both needed in Washington and you know it,' said Newman, delivering her parting shot. 'You and I represent the defining and opposing views within the administration. That is what debate and democracy are about, and our President deserves to hear our views before he makes his decision.'*
*****
Newman eyed Pierce with caution across the room as he finished his analysis of North Korea. He returned her look with a confident smile.
'You're making sense, Chris,' said Jim West, shaking his head. 'I don't see why he should do anything rash. He has half a country, a starving population, no grass-roots support anywhere else in the world.' He slapped his hand hard on the table. 'Even if he did order the Yokata launch, even if he is psychotic, even if he is trying to develop a new strain of smallpox, he has no power in the real sense of the word. We'll have no problem getting an international coalition to destroy him.'
'Does that mean that right now we do nothing?' said Mary Newman, knowing immediately that she had injected a fraction too much of an edge. The President looked sharply at her. She did not enjoy taking on Jim West, particularly in front of an audience.
She understood that West was elected and had a constituency whose cries for retribution might not be in the national interest. She understood, too, that she was appointed and had risen to her position without having to give a damn about public opinion. To complicate things, she was fond of Jim West. The way he conducted himself in office, the way he had borne the sudden death of his wife, all told her the measure of the man.
But she was also convinced that Chris Pierce was wrong.
'You got something to say, Mary, say it,' said West brusquely. 'But never accuse me of doing nothing.'
There were six of them in the White House basement, sitting at a table that could seat thirty. West was at the top with a laptop computer into which he typed notes as he talked and listened. 'I hope to hell you're wrong, Mary,' he said. 'I wasn't elected to get us into a war, particularly one with missiles and 37,000 American troops right on the front line.'
He turned to his Secretary for Homeland Security. 'Tom, what's the current threat assessment here?'
'Here on US soil, we still have no evidence of hostile Korean activity,' said Tom Patton, pulling two separate sheets of paper out of his file. 'No upsurge of Islamic activity, either. Just the usual string of tip-offs and unsubstantiated threats.'
'Thank you.' West appreciated Patton's forthright answers. In the United States he had a single and linear picture. In the jungle of foreign affairs, however, the world was foggy and confused.
West changed programs on the laptop and brought up a map stretching from Hawaii to the Middle East which was displayed on a screen at the end of the room.
'Let's get this straight, then,' he said, pointing his finger so that it threw an unintended shadow across the image. Brock slid a laser pointer across the table towards him. West turned it on, found Pyongyang and moved the narrow red beam between North Korea and Japan. 'Worst-case scenario one. North Korea deliberately struck Japan. Here.' He moved the laser to Pakistan. 'Worst case scenario two: the assassination of President Khan of Pakistan was the call sign for Islamic uprisings in South-East Asia.' He tapped the keyboard. 'Now let's ring-fence these two areas.'
Almost immediately, South-East Asia and North Korea became outlined in red. West expanded the screen into a map of the whole world, making the red appear much smaller.
'Is there any other area,' he asked, addressing the room, but looking at Pierce, 'in which we have detected activity that could be hostile to the United States, either shortly before or coinciding with the North Korean attack or the assassination?'
Pierce shook his head. 'Activities in Iran, Mr President. Uncertainty in Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Conflict in Israel. These are all ongoing.'
'OK, now I'm going to highlight every Islamic area in the world.'
The map flickered again then re-formed itself with swathes of green stretching from right across northern Africa, up into the Middle East to Pakistan. The President picked up the laser and pointed to South-East Asia. 'Is there any link that we know of between what is happening here and these other areas?'
It was Peter Brock who replied this time. 'Nothing unusual, Mr President. Our SIGINT and IMINT intelligence hasn't found anything either. The only uncertainty is the power vacuum in Pakistan.'
'All right,' said West slowly. 'Let's treat it as a neutral power vacuum for the moment.'
'Mr President,' interjected Newman. 'Can we not factor in that the power vacuum was created by a political killing which was followed by well-organized, anti-US regional riots and a coup in Brunei?'
'Which has been successfully put down by the British,' said Pierce.
'As far as our public policy goes, Mary, we will treat it as a coincidence. There is no point in inflaming public fear.' He shot a look at Newman, but she couldn't read whether the glint in his eyes w
as one of fun or of irritation. He pointed back at the map. 'There's one more thing I want to do to put our situation in perspective,' he said, using the mouse arrow to reconfigure.
A pattern of black spread across the screen from Japan through to India, then through Europe from Scandinavia to southern France and on into northern Africa. Against the wave of black, the red appeared as mere specks.
West linked his fingers at the back of his head and laughed. 'Son of a bitch,' he said softly. 'The black shows the territory controlled by hostile forces when we joined the Second World War in 1941. The red shows the territory hostile to us now. Don't you all agree it's minuscule?' He leant across and touched Newman on the arm. 'What's your take, Mary? Have we got a Hitler on our hands? Or just a handful of terror runts?'
The President was being mischievous and impossible. Newman swallowed hard. 'We believe Park Ho is now in control of North Korea, Mr President,' she said firmly. 'We know he's working on a missile that can reach US territory. We believe he is close to getting a strain of smallpox for which we have no vaccination. Whether or not a Hitler is created depends on how we handle him.'