by Unknown
'It takes a couple of minutes,' said Colchester, as ever fascinated by the technical. 'We'll be getting an integrated picture - that's a composite of images from satellites, unmanned vehicles and the fighters which have just been scrambled.'
'Park would be in Pyongyang, wouldn't he?' muttered Nolan to himself. 'That's where I'd be.'
'The Americans have launched on Kanggye now,' said Colchester. 'Thermobaric carpet-bombing. Twenty thousand work underground there. If they penetrate the mountain, they will have crippled his war machine.'
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Pyongyang, North Korea*
After the heated airlessness of underground bunkers the cold night air smelt good. Light snow fell and brought with it a silence. So different from rain. The night was frozen and black. He had wanted to see the stars, so he had ordered the street lights to be turned off.
Park Ho walked alone through a Pyongyang that would soon be engulfed in war. He headed for the river and pulled his collar up against the wind. The water was cold and black but flowed serenely, rippling with gusts of wind and reflecting the torch from the top of the Tower of Juche. It created a play of light and flame which captivated Park Ho, despite the chill of the night.
He was an intelligent man, but his life had always been at odds with his nation's place in the world. Koreans in the north starved. In the south, they were wealthy. But did that mean he should surrender his nation to the more successful system - the one that had killed his mother? When he had watched the pictures from Delhi, Park Ho accepted that Ahmed Memed had more courage than him. Memed had given him his resolve. His empathy for Delhi was blunted because his own country was under threat. Purposefully, as he walked around the monuments of Pyongyang that night, Park Ho reinforced himself with uncomplicated motives - a hunger for his own success and revenge for his mother's death.
A corner of the night sky changed colour, and soon dawn would come. Park Ho came to the monument of the Great Leader, where wreaths of flowers dampened by the night lay beneath bronze arms stretched out to protect all the people around him.
His expression was serene, showing no remorse, no expectation, nor was there any sign of moral purpose. By the time he opened the door at the foot of the statue, Park Ho had rid himself of all those issues.
He stepped inside and took the lift down three levels. They were expecting him, of course. For however alone he was, he was always watched.
'Get me President Song of China,' he commanded.
When Jamie Song came on the line, Park Ho recognized the voice of a defeated man.
In the morning, Park drove to the airport. It was a clear day, the clouds blown away by wind from the south, meaning that America's spy cameras would be watching from the sky. He stood by the aircraft as Ahmed Memed walked out of the terminal building. They embraced, Park in his uniform, Memed in his white robe. The cleric climbed the steps, looked back and waved. Park Ho stayed on the runway until the aircraft had taken off and set its course for China.
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55*
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Kabul, Afghanistan*
A white United Nations Russian-made helicopter landed at Bagram airbase near Kabul in Afghanistan, staying on the ground just long enough for a single passenger to climb out and get into a waiting UN Land Cruiser. Dressed in a light-green down jacket, the hood up, denim jeans and leather walking boots, the passenger checked his British passport that identified him as Robert Vines. His accompanying papers were copies of his contract with the United Nations Development Programme and a letter stating that he was taking home leave.
The Land Cruiser dropped Vines at Kabul's international terminal, where he was given a boarding pass in the premier economy class cabin of a British Airways flight to London, ensuring that air miles were credited to his account.
At Heathrow, he checked into the Hilton Hotel near Terminal 4, under the name of Michel Juliet, travelling on a French passport that had been issued in Lyon. He stayed in the room for five hours, meeting the same man twice. That afternoon, using Michel Juliet's passport with a matching green card, he travelled economy class on Virgin Atlantic to New York and took a cab to the Paramount Hotel near Times Square where a suite was booked for him under the name of William Thomas, an American from Los Angeles.
At each stage of the journey Hassan Muda destroyed the documents of his previous identity.
Of all the hotels around Times Square, the Paramount would be the most difficult in which to identify a face. He had chosen it because the lobby was dark, lit only by dim wall lights and candles. His suite was small and run down, but it did have two rooms in which he could work.
On the upper shelf of the wardrobe, underneath a spare blanket, Muda found a suitcase. Hanging the 'Do Not Disturb' sign on the handle, he double locked the door, closed the bedroom door, double locked that, lifted down the suitcase and opened it.
The contents were packed exactly as he had instructed.
He took out the NBC suit but put it to one side unopened, together with the respirator. He tested the bed, happy that it was firm enough, and laid the specially tailored Gore-tex waistcoat on it, opening up both sides. He took a strip of Semtex-H plastic explosive and slipped it into a polythene bag. Then he pressed a tiny electric detonator into the explosive, ran a wire outside the bag and attached it to a nine-volt battery which he slipped into a left inside pocket of the waistcoat. He cut open the lining of his own jacket and took out a wafer-thin plastic phial which he taped into a lower inside pocket of the waistcoat.
He repeated the whole process exactly for the right side of the waistcoat and finally cross-duplicated the detonators on to the batteries in case one failed. He folded the waistcoat, put it back into the suitcase and locked it. He checked the aerosol canisters at the bottom of the suitcase and left them sealed by his bedside.
Hassan Muda prayed.
Before going to sleep, he brought out another phial, opened a sealed packet containing a hypodermic needle and syringe, filled it and injected himself with the virus variola major.
When he woke in the morning, he had a slight fever, but not bad enough to stop him catching the train to Philadelphia, then Washington. By the time he was flying back to New York and going through at La Guardia, he had discarded his aerosol canisters.
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Beijing, China*
For Jamie Song, this was nothing less than a struggle for China's life. It was fierce and silent, being played out through satellite images, secure phone calls and in those shadows that had always lured his country towards its own destruction.
'Why?' he had asked Park Ho, when the unexpected call came through.
'Why not?' Park had responded. Historians would draw their own conclusions, but for the moment Song could think of no two words to describe more accurately what Park Ho was doing. He could, so he would.
'Because you will destroy us,' Song had said lamely.
'Only if you surrender.'
Park had ended the call. Now Song looked across the room to Yan, whose hand was on a telephone, about to pick it up. Two of Yan's guards stood at the entrance. Outside, the ice on the lake was gone, but the water was still thick with melting snow. The waiting cars were unfamiliar, the drivers and number plates from another military unit.
Yet there was tranquillity in the room. The murky shifts of allegiance among China's ruling elite were being played out somewhere on the end of Yan's telephone line.
'They won't accept it,' said Yan. 'I cannot persuade them otherwise. Neither can you.'
Song had no secrets. They knew what he stood for; had always stood for. The confusion lay with them. 'Why then did they give me the presidency?' he asked. 'They knew about Park Ho. They knew about Pakistan. What has changed?'
Yan did not answer. He was the conduit whom Song had hired, the loyal protector, fulfilling his role to the last before receiving accolades from the other side for a job well done.
'You will retain all your posts,' said Yan. 'Once these events have settled, your power will be restored.'
'To do what?'
'You are a peacetime leader,' said Yan. Without stating it, Yan was offering his sympathies.
'Do they want war?' Some did. But did they all? Surely not Yan? Surely not those who knew the missiles were not perfected; that the navy could not deploy and extend; that the pilots did not have enough training hours? So who wanted a war that would stall trade and growth?
'Give me one last shot,' said Song.
'To achieve what?' asked Yan, the negotiator.
'No territory has been seized. If anything, we have gained Pakistan.'
'You'll speak to West?'
'I'll speak to Newman. She is here. If it stops here, we will accept it. We stabilized Pakistan. They sought retribution in North Korea.'
'Above the fortieth parallel - against your express wishes.'
'We'll take it on the chin,' said Song. 'We're big enough.'
Yan began shaking his head, his brow furrowed in confusion. 'I will tell them,' he said. But as he picked up the receiver to make the call, another telephone rang, not from an office within Zhongnanhai but from China's central command and control centre in the Western Hills just outside Beijing.
Yan listened briefly. 'We may be too late,' he said, handing the receiver to Jamie Song.
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Delhi, India*
Air conditioning hummed through the control room, bringing with it the stench of drainage. The space was smaller than anyone would have imagined, circular rooms with corridors appearing to lead nowhere, with ceilings impossibly low, the temperature, lights and ventilation as erratic as the generators which powered them. The food was becoming inedible and Vasant Mehta, a soldier trained in the Himalayas and the Rajasthan desert, was feeling helpless and depressed.
Since the Chinese-Russian attacks on Pakistan, then the American thermobaric bombing, he had been in limbo.
The commander-in-chief in him demanded that he be patient and stay in the bunker. The politician in him needed to be above ground amid the debris of his capital city. And should he be lynched by survivors, so be it. For he deserved it.
The father in him wanted to be in Washington, with his daughter Meenakshi, her life saved not by him but by the Americans. He couldn't even hope to speak to her in private, for every line in and out of the bunker was monitored. Military psychologists would have been having a field day analysing the mood swings of the first head of government since 1945 to have his nation struck by a nuclear weapon.
Meenakshi was in Washington, staying in the White House residence with Lizzie West, delivered safely there by Lazaro Campbell. Yet when Mehta asked to speak to him to thank him, Campbell was out of touch and somewhere else altogether. Romila had flown up from Argentina, and even Geeta had made an appearance, snatching the phone from Meenakshi, so that she could talk to her estranged husband. How proud she was of him; how she had always believed in him; how the three of them missed him so much. He let her talk, without responding or committing.
Mehta had even taken a conference call with Meenakshi, Lizzie, and West to find a line to destroy Jamie Song's argument which had so powerfully blamed democracy for causing poverty.
'Dad, if you're going to win this, you have to concede something,' Lizzie West had argued. 'Not on democracy, but on the international banking system and on commodity trading.'
'If I concede a damn thing - whether rightly or wrongly - I'm defeated,' said West. 'What I need is proof that he is full of bullshit.'
'Then talk about the human spirit, Mr President,' said Meenakshi.
'What about it?'
'Well,' and she drew a deep breath, 'I have worked both in Bihar in India and in Gansu in western China. Both are poverty-stricken. But in Gansu the government controls everything, even how many children are born. In Bihar, in the most appalling conditions, they still feel they have the right to speak out and make decisions.' Meenakshi's voice had become emotional. 'The thing is, Mr President, if you take away people's minds, they do lose everything. There is no happiness. You tell Jamie Song that we, in India, tried their methods in the 1970s and they failed. And if China ever becomes a shining beacon of the arts, of science, literature and music, with world-class highways, hospitals, schools and skyscrapers, then he can boast. But it is not now, and I believe it never will be, because at some stage the human spirit comes into conflict with the power that wants to control it. Our system - and your system, Mr President - allows for the growth of the human spirit. In China, it does not, and when there is conflict it will break the country in two.'
'You got that, Dad?' asked Lizzie bluntly. 'And if you need it, I'll get you the statistics to prove it.'
'Thanks, Meenakshi,' agreed West. 'Vasant, we'll hold on to your daughter for a while, if you don't mind. I think I've just appointed her presidential adviser.'
Mehta had found himself choking with pride, but laughing at the same time. The strangest thing was that no one mentioned Delhi. The conversation could have taken place before the nuclear strike had happened. Nor had they talked about the American bombing of Pakistan's missile sites in the Chagai Hills. Their own human spirit prevented them from lingering over even the recent past and propelled them forward towards a solution - until Deepak Suri cut harshly into the conversation.
Mehta turned. His Chief of Defence Staff, unshaven, his uniform stained and unwashed, stood up, signalled to his aide-de-camp at a computer terminal and raised a forefinger towards Mehta. 'They've launched,' he said. Mehta heard him both from his earpiece and from across the room.
'Vasant?' queries West.
'One second,' said Mehta abruptly.
'Eleven minutes to impact,' said Suri, his tone composed. 'Four, sorry, six missiles--'
'Warheads?'
'Don't know.'
The nod which Mehta gave to Suri was barely perceptible, and he gave it instead of a verbal command so that West would not hear. Suri turned fractionally and with the same forefinger gesture passed the command on to his aide-de-camp, who spoke into his mouthpiece, while repeating the instruction into the computer.
'Vasant? Vasant?' pressed West, the tension showing in his voice.
'Mumbai, Trombay, Pune, Bangalore, Chennai, Goa - first estimates,' said Suri.
But did it matter? Mehta asked himself. As a functioning society, India was finished. It would recreate itself, but for the immediate future it would be engulfed in tragedy.
'Vasant?'
'Yes, Jim,' said Mehta softly. 'Your intervention did not work. They launched and we have responded.'
'No.' It was almost a cry of anguish from the American President. 'No. Wait.'
'We did wait, Jim,' said Mehta. 'We waited after our Parliament was attacked, my house destroyed, my capital city destroyed. I think we waited too long.' His voice was distant as if he was talking to an unknown power somewhere far away, and that Jim West just happened to be the person closest.
'Karachi and Hyderabad are targeted by missile and submarine launches,' said Suri. 'Multan, Islamabad, Rawalpindi, Sarghoda and Peshawar. Islamabad and Rawalpindi will be the first hit. ETA eight minutes thirty.'
'Meenakshi, are you there?' said Mehta.
'Yes, Father.'
'We will not see each other again,' he said. 'You are now under the protection of Jim West. I love you more than anything, and on this terrible, terrible day, I can only see one ray of hope - that you are in America and not here.'
'I'm coming out. I'll be needed--'
'You are not,' said Mehta. 'It will not finish here.' No one, including him, could even imagine what would be left of India in half an hour's time. 'Jim, are you hearing this?'
'I'm here, Vasant.'
'My daughters are under your protection. Ensure they receive protection as if they were your own family.'
'ETA Mumbai four minutes twenty,' said Suri.
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Moscow, Russia*
'President Song is unavailable,' said Alexander Yushchuk, frowning when Kozlov simply tilted his head in response. The Russian President watched his daughter, whom he could see through the door, and whose cello music filled the small study. Satellite images of nuclear clouds over India and Pakistan were being relayed on a screen that Yushchuk had rigged up above his desk. Yushchuk was about to say something else, when BBC and CNN, showing on two separate sets, almost simultaneously, broke into their programmes and switched to the same pictures.