Third World War (44 page)

'Exactly, Mr President,' confirmed Newman. 'Park Ho might not attack across the border. And if our troops were withdrawn, I'm pretty certain he wouldn't.'

'Where the hell you get that from, Mary?' said West. Newman's deep intake of breath was audible over the line. West remembered the meeting, not that long ago, when he had snubbed her in favour of Pierce. If they had hit Park Ho then, perhaps he would be neutralized by now. Jamie Song would have taken it on the chin. Toru Sato would be satisfied for the time being, kicking his heels until another opportunity arose for him to fight the 'good war' he was seeking. Cuba would have been sorted out as a single issue, unconnected to wider events. Song, Kozlov and he could have found a way through with India and Pakistan, and most important of all, Peter Brock would still have been alive. The past was a slippery thing, and difficult to balance. What Mary had suggested then had been too dangerous. Just as right now what she was saying seemed to be completely off the wall. 'Go ahead, Mary,' said West gently. 'We're listening.'

'Cho's view is this,' she said. 'Park Ho wants to kick American butts. He wants to be hailed as the man who threw the US out of Asia and brought Japan to book. If he ends up fighting fellow Koreans in the south, he will have failed. If we launch air strikes on North Korea, he will retaliate against our bases in Japan, and he probably has a handful of missiles with a range to hit our western seaboard. But we have the defences to handle that. The only motive for him to attack the South is to defeat the US troops holding the front line. If they are removed, his motivation is removed as well.'

'Do you believe him?' said West, pensively, 'when he said he had developed a nuclear capability?'

'I do, Mr President,' said Newman. 'There is no point in declaring a nuclear weapon to an ally unless you propose to use it to help them. Cho's reading of Park's mind is better than any of us can have.'

'If we let Cho do that,' said Pierce, 'then Japan is bound to follow.'

'OK, thanks, Mary,' said West, in a manner that indicated the conversation was closing. 'I'll think about the balance between 37,000 dead Americans and two new nuclear states. Mary, if we go ahead with the strikes, I want you in Beijing, preferably standing right next to Jamie Song. Chris, see you here shortly. And I need to talk to you both again when you're not in airplanes. So Mary, get yourself to the embassy as soon as you arrive.'

West closed the call and spoke to Rinaldi. 'Jenny, get me Jamie Song, right away.'

Kozerski caught West's attention. 'Caroline Brock is on her way up.'

'Four hundred million doses are fine,' said Patton bluntly into one of his mobile phones. 'But we need them disseminated . . . No . . . get them to distribution areas which are within two hours of any hospital in the US . . . Yes, now, but no vaccinations without my . . . OK, service personnel, I'm not talking about . . . No, firemen, doctors, nurses . . . OK, take your point, draw up a list of who has and who has not been vaccinated.'

As soon as he flipped shut the phone, Rinaldi's voice came through on the intercom. 'Secretary Patton, the US Coastguard needs to talk to you.'

Patton dropped his head, drew a breath, and Kozerski pointed to a red light flashing on a phone on the coffee table. Patton picked it up, while filling a glass with mineral water. 'He's ditched . . . OK, fish him out, and get him to Guantanamo . . . I want a bioreading from the area of splashdown.' He looked up, catching the eye of Kozerski and West and saying to neither in particular. 'Does anyone know if this virus survives in sea water?'

West and Kozerski looked at each other and shook their heads. 'We know damn all,' muttered West.

When the call was finished, Rinaldi came across the line. 'Jenny,' said Patton, 'can you get me General Bill Dayan, the commander at Guantanamo?'

'Sure,' said Rinaldi. 'And please tell the President that President Song of China is on the line. He wishes to speak in English.'

West put up a finger and switched the line to the speaker phone. 'Jamie, Jim West here,' he began. 'Thanks for coming on so swiftly. I assume you're aware of the North Korean launch.'

'We are,' said Song cautiously.

'Are you also aware that the missile was carrying the smallpox virus?'

'No,' said Song. 'I am not.'

'I've asked Mary to divert from Tokyo and come to you early.'

'I'm not sure if we're--'

'Jamie, she's touching down in a couple of hours. She's my personal envoy. I need her to tell me what the hell role China is playing in all this mess. And if you don't want her, I'll send her to take a couple of days off in Taiwan.'

'Point taken,' said Song smoothly.

As soon as the call was over, Jenny Rinaldi said: 'I've asked Mrs Brock to come through.'

Caroline Brock's appearance at the door of the Oval Office had an immediate calming effect. Her face was shadowed and disturbed, her eyes still tired and dried out of tears. She clasped her hands nervously in front of her and stepped in. She was fighting grief with concentration, and in the mixture of expressions that flitted across her face in those seconds was one of gratitude that Jim West had called her out of her loneliness to help avenge her husband's death.

West walked straight up to her, put his hand on her shoulder, guided her inside, bent over, touched the pot of tepid coffee on the table, poured some into a cup and handed it to her. 'Thanks for coming,' he said softly. 'We badly need you here, Caro. The North Koreans have--'

He was interrupted by Kozerski. 'The Wake Island tests are through. Variola major is confirmed. They need the equipment from Hawaii before they can make a final identification.'

'Smallpox?' whispered Caroline.

'Park Ho launched a warhead carrying it into the Pacific,' explained West.

Caroline sat down, sipped the lukewarm coffee and put the cup heavily back on the table. 'Do they know what strain?' she asked Kozerski.

'Do you have the strain?' repeated Kozerski into the phone. He looked at Caroline and shook his head. They need more tests.

'I need the DNA sequences from our library of smallpox strains,' said Caroline. 'Most specifically, Bangladesh-1975 and India-1967. If this does come from the Pokrov theft, it will be the India-1967 strain, which the Soviets preferred for weapons development. Even without IL-4, more than 30 per cent of infections were fatal, it retained stability during traumatic delivery and kept its virulence for long periods.' She paused and Patton repeated the question he had earlier asked West and Kozerski. 'Yes, Tom, it might well survive in sea water. Do we know exactly how it came down from the missile?'

Kozerski relayed the question. 'They're still studying the imagery,' he said. 'But right now, they believe a capsule broke off from the warhead, and then opened up like cluster bombs.'

Caroline nodded. 'A Soviet design,' she said. 'It was meant for the SS-18 long-range ballistic missile. They made it interchangeable between nuclear and biological warheads. If Park Ho was using a full payload, the infected area could be more than a 100 square kilometres. I doubt, though, that he would do that. This is his way of declaring his potential, telling us he has the virus and can use it.'

'General Dayan,' said Patton, back on a mobile again. 'Tom Patton, Homeland Security, here . . . Yes . . . you have the Cuban pilot coming your way. I need you to do two things. I'm flying some specialists down for the interrogation. They should be with you in a couple of hours. If he starts talking before that, let him talk. If he gets beyond shitbagging the regime and on to substance, I want to know - particularly anything about China, Chinese weapons, anything like that. Secondly, I want every pore on his body checked for smallpox - or any other bioterror disease . . . Vaccinating? . . . Yes, of course . . . I thought, they had been since 2001 . . . Then if you have the doses, vaccinate them for Christ's sake--'

'Tom,' interrupted Caroline, shaking her head. 'No, don't do it.'

'General, hold back on that last instruction. I'll get back to you.' He cut the call, keeping his large hand wrapped around the tiny telephone.

'What do you mean?' said West.

'Mr President, if this is India-1967 and IL-4 or a sister agent--'

'Mr President,' said Rinaldi over the intercom. 'An urgent call from--'

'Jenny, give me a couple of minutes.'

'--IL-4 or a sister agent,' resumed Caroline. 'Then we do not have a vaccine against it. And we have no idea how IL-4 will react with the vaccine stocks we have.'

'You mean--' West let his question hang.

'I mean it could make it worse, much, much worse, if we use the vaccine.' She dropped her head. 'I told you at Camp David that you probably had six months before you needed to worry. I was wrong, Jim. I'm so, so sorry. It seems he had it up and running even as we discussed it.'

'What are you saying, Caro?' said Patton, flipping open his mobile and punching in the autodial number for Fort Detrick.

'I'm saying that if Park Ho has, say, 10 tons of this and can deliver it, he could infect maybe 4,000, maybe 10,000 square kilometres of territory. With the unknown factor of the IL-4, we just don't know. But he could destroy the United States as a functioning society.'

A silence enveloped the room. A telephone rang unanswered. West sat down heavily behind his desk. Kozerski remained absolutely stationary, still on the line, but not speaking, not relaying anything in. Patton stood, a telephone in each hand, one vibrating with a call, gazing through the window at the drizzle floating around a lamp outside. Caroline put her chin in her hands and said softly: 'There's a manual that was compiled by the Centre of Virology in Zagorsk. It has the recipes for culture conditions, nutrients and formulae for chemical additives to extend the life of the virus. There's an off chance the Soviets might have experimented with an agent like IL-4. We should check.'

But she knew it was a long shot, and no one answered, each wrapped in his own thoughts and responsibilities.

West only looked up when the door opened without a knock and Jenny Rinaldi stepped in. 'I didn't mean to barge in, Mr President, but something terrible has just happened.'

Jenny Rinaldi leant against the door frame and burst into tears.

****

47*

****

Delhi, India*

Lazaro Campbell felt the oxygen tank heavy on his back, and the bioterror suit was even more cumbersome because of the Kevlar flak jacket strapped around his chest. The cabin and cockpit of the Osprey V-22 were protected from nuclear radiation with a positive pressured filter system, but Campbell was kitted out because he intended to order the aircraft down and get out to see what was going on outside.

Although, seeing the wasteland, flash fires and smoky emptiness below, he wondered how anything or any living creature could have survived.

The Osprey approached central Delhi at a speed of 200 knots. No structures were left standing and Campbell was using GPS readings to get his position. Once he was above what had once been Connaught Circus, he asked the pilot to slow and switch the Osprey from being a twin-engine turboprop fixed-wing aircraft to a helicopter. While slowing, the two 400 turboshaft engines slid upwards to be at right angles to the wing and turn the long propellers into helicopter blades. The Osprey juddered briefly until settling into its new, more versatile role.

The pilot brought the aircraft down to 300 feet. Campbell closed off the cabin, turned on his breathing apparatus and gave himself a few seconds to acclimatize before checking his GPS again.

'Head south towards the US embassy in Chanakyapuri,' he ordered the pilot, relaying the coordinates. Campbell's orders had been simply to get into what was left of Delhi and identify any Americans who were still alive.

As the Osprey turned, he absorbed for the first time the scene below him, realizing that the black seared bundles, smoking in little balls, were human corpses which had vapourized within seconds, their internal organs boiled into nothing by the heat.

Some were in lines glued to the smoking ground. Some were clustered, flung together, then meshing. Some were individual and totally alone. The landscape around them bore the stark colours of grey and black, and of orange and yellow from burning fires.

The smoke hung in clusters, too. One moment the Osprey was flying through cloud whose debris clung to the windscreen so thickly that the pilot had to wiper it off with a high-pressure spray. Next, the air was so clear that Campbell could see a brilliant blue sky, wisped with clouds.

The same grey sea of debris covered the area that had once been the US embassy compound. He looked for remnants of something recognizable: the stubs of the arches of India Gate; the foundations of the government buildings of North Block and South Block; a statue toppled but intact; the contours of a road; the circular shape of Connaught Place.