Third World War (55 page)

Park Ho struck Li hard against his mask and tore out the air tube. Li flailed, trying to seal the suit again. Park drew a knife and slashed the sleeve, drawing blood from Li's arm. Li staggered, choking. Park Ho caught him, slipped the knife into his neck and dropped him on the floor. He quickly left the biocontainment area. Stripping off the suit and not bothering to shower, he put on his military uniform and walked into the underground atrium. Much of it had survived the first wave of bombing. A guard saluted him.

'Have you made an exit yet?' demanded Park Ho.

'We are still digging, comrade.'

A line of soldiers, in green hard hats, carrying pickaxes, drills, even a chainsaw, appeared at the end of the corridor. They were covered in dust from the chipped and broken concrete. Their heads hung low and they carried their tools listlessly. There was a staleness in the air, a pungent smell of burning that caught the back of the throat. Park Ho felt a tightness in his lungs. The guard dropped the salute, and he didn't care. He was ashamed that he had given in to his anger and killed Li Pak. The urge to kill was a strange instinct, and with humans it might have nothing to do with simply staying safe or eating. Often, it ended up being a necessary thing to get through the day.

'You,' he shouted to a soldier at the head of the work gang. The man looked up but did not even salute. He stayed where he was, not bothering to move towards Park. Then his gaze fell on the epaulettes and medals on the uniform, and he realized who was addressing him.

The soldier shook his head. 'Every exit is sealed,' he said. 'They have used a hardened chemical formula. It is like a foam. By the time we get to it it is setting. Very quickly. Then it is tougher than concrete.' He turned and pointed at the soldier behind him, whose drill shaft had snapped in two.

'When can you get us out?' said Park, his voice less harsh. He had built loyalty by being one of the men. If he was to die with them, that was how it would be.

The soldier pointed ahead. 'We will try up here. But I think it will be impossible. Unless there are tunnels we don't know about.'

A line of dust fell from the roof above, then a chunk of plaster.

'There are not,' said Park Ho.

The soldier coughed and spat out black phlegm mixed with blood. 'The whole structure has been weakened,' he whispered, his throat still clogged with phlegm. He spat again. 'We are trying to prop up the roof before it collapses. Then we will find a place where the foam has not reached and try and drill through to find air.'

Park Ho went into the office. The room had once had a lift up into the hotel foyer. The computer screens were frozen, but the three soldiers there were watching a television on whose screen the picture was faded but still discernible. They turned. Two had handkerchiefs over their mouths. They saw Park, but their attention remained on the screen, where Vasant Mehta was speaking against a backdrop of still pictures of the nuclear aftermath in Islamabad, Delhi and Tokyo.

'Where is this from?' demanded Park impatiently.

'The fibre-optic line from Shenyang,' said one of his men, concentrating on the pictures and showing Park Ho no respect. Never before would they have seen uncensored television, and they looked as if a secret mould had been broken. A simultaneous translation in Chinese was being run over Mehta's voice, and the soldiers, who had worked up on the Chinese border, understood the gist of what the Indian Prime Minister was saying.

'. . . must stop,' said Mehta. 'India has lost millions and millions of its citizens. Over the next years many millions more will die. We can no longer function as a nation. We have no hospitals, no emergency services. Nothing. Pakistan is the same. For what? A piece of disputed land? A different God? Why? Why? Why?' Mehta swallowed hard, looked behind him, pointed, smiled and rubbed his right eye. 'I challenge you to tell me which city is Delhi, which is Islamabad and which is Tokyo. Because I don't know. What is the point of trying to preserve something if it ends up being like this, being exactly like your enemy's city?'

Mehta fell silent and buried his face in his hands. When he looked up again, his eyes were full of tears. He was unshaven. He noticed his shirt collar was skewed and brought it back into place. 'I am sorry,' he said. 'I cannot leave this place without a nuclear warfare suit on. I can no longer smell the smells of India. That has gone. I am told that the nuclear dust clouds from India and Pakistan have combined as one and it is drifting east. I hear that the winds from Tokyo are blowing west, so those two big clouds will join together as well. Where? Maybe over Thailand or Vietnam, where they'll poison people who have nothing to do with our squabbles at all, people who have just tried to live.'

The room shook, catching Park Ho off balance. He steadied himself with a hand on the wall. Another raid. But somewhere else. It was like a distant earth tremor. The screen flickered and then settled.

'. . . President West. Jim West is a friend of mine. My daughters Meenakshi and Romila are under his care now. He is not an evil man, just as the United States is not an evil nation. Any more than India is, or Pakistan is, or Japan is. He asked me to make this address because he sees a holocaust coming, something unstoppable and totally destructive. There is smallpox in America. To us, in India, that might now seem nothing. But when the virus reaches us - and it will reach us - it will kill all those of us who are not already being killed by radiation. In America, there is vaccine. In India, we have nothing left to give.'

A crack appeared in the floor and more dust fell from the ceiling. But Park Ho ignored it. His mind was completely on what Mehta was saying. He had talked about a vaccine and made no mention of IL-4. He was lying. Or he hadn't been told. Jim West had set up the whole broadcast to lie to the world.

'. . . be peace, to stop the spread of this terrible disease--'

'Put me through to Shenyang,' snapped Park Ho. One of the soldiers looked round curiously, because to do that they would have to cut the broadcast. But his questioning lasted only a moment. Even now Park's presence brooked no dispute. The soldier diverted the link and pointed to a telephone.

'Can you put this line through to Washington? . . . No? . . . Why not? . . . I don't accept . . . then get this message to the Americans. I have the vaccine for the IL-4 strain of variola major with me here. If they destroy this place, they destroy the cure. These are our coordinates . . .'

Park Ho ended the call and did up the top button of his tunic. The tremors were getting more powerful. They were carpet bombing, using thermobaric explosive again, trying to seal off his ventilation, suck out the air and suffocate him. The lights flickered, then went out, and emergency lamps working off batteries came on. They had only been designed for evacuation. They would not last long.

'Put me through to Toksong-gun,' he said. 'Quickly, before the lines go.'

A huge shudder ran through the whole complex, breaking the glass wall in the office and throwing open the door. The structure had buckled, crushing the two sealed doors leading to the biocontainment area. There was no vaccine and the virus was out, circulating in the stale air that the trapped survivors were breathing.

'Have they struck you yet?' asked Park Ho when he got through.

'We're clear. Nothing,' said the missile engineer, Kee Tae Shin.

'Then you have your orders,' said Park. 'The juche ideal is now in your hands.'

****

68*

****

Beijing, China*

When the car stopped, Song recognized a mix of uncertainty and arrogance in the driver's eyes, watching him in the windscreen mirror. They showed the expression of a man not sure who was in power, and uncertain about whom to avoid and whom to respect.

A gush of cold air came into the car, bringing with it the acrid smoke from the fires burning around Tiananmen Square.

When he had called the meeting with his political opponents, Jamie Song had made three conditions. He could see his wife, Xiaomei, on to a plane for Hong Kong that would connect directly with a flight to Vancouver, Canada. The meeting would take place at a venue of his choice. And he could visit, alone and unimpeded, the place where he was now. Apart from that, the agenda would be open. Any topic could be discussed.

Jamie Song stepped out of the car, his feet crunching on ash and broken glass. Wooden placards lay strewn along the pavement. Banners had been blown against buildings, stark red Chinese characters against the now dirty white of the cotton. Firemen played a hose on a cafe across the road. Next door a supermarket window had been broken. A television set lay smashed in the gutter.

The soldiers had been told he was coming, and kept their distance, not even acknowledging who he was. Yan stayed in the car, but with the engine running and the back door open. He lit a cigarette.

Up ahead, wisps of smoke drifted up from a ruined building, floodlit from a crane which swung round to move away burnt-out cars blocking the road. The flickering beams from soldiers' torches played over the rubble, damp and glistening from rain that had been falling in a fine drizzle.

Jamie Song walked on to see what he had come for. As soon as Yan had told him, Song had asked that everything be left untouched.

Throughout his political life, Jamie Song had known that the ghost of the Chinese Communist Party would always cast a shadow over him. Every two steps he moved forward, the party had hauled him back one. They wanted him, but not enough to give up their privileges. He could have made his future in America, as an exile, as a millionaire, as part of the Chinese diaspora. He had always known that when the time was right he would be spat out towards a foreign land, his usefulness over. After all, he was only the president, and the party was the party.

Another crane, at work somewhere else, swivelled. The glaring yellow beam of its searchlight sparkled on the glass of a damaged window. As it moved, it lit up a hanging shape, for less than a second, as if what it revealed wasn't meant to be. Song quickened his pace, tripping on a coffee table that had found its way on to the street and catching his balance against a wall, grimy from a leaking water pipe above. Smells intensified. He had never before thought of the number of different odours burnt material gives off.

Silence. It was some time before Song realized that the cranes had stopped working. There was no noise from the soldiers in the rubble. The quiet enveloped him. They were paying their respects. Perhaps. Or simply waiting to see what he did.

He trod on a piece of wood, torn away from somewhere, and half blackened by fire. He picked it up, felt a nail at the top and dropped it. He felt an urgent impatience to move forward. But he was wrapped in fear about his reaction, about how he could stop himself screaming out and crying, in front of men whose respect he needed.

Song moved ahead slowly, trying to imagine what it would have been like to be here during those moments of madness.

'He was in a cafe with friends,' Yan had told him. 'It was very sudden. They recognized him. I am very sorry.'

The shape lit up by the crane's searchlight had been a reflection in glass. Song turned the corner, and looking down the street he saw the chaos left by the riot. Beyond that was a stillness. Nothing there had been touched, as if a line of demarcation had been drawn, or they had been stopped in time. Street lamps showed up steady drops of rain so light that he could barely feel them.

Between the stillness and the mess was the lamp post, still working and illuminating the corpse of his son as if the body were a marionette. Yun had been hung by the neck, his head wrenched horribly back and his arms hanging limply by his sides. His feet were bare. Someone had torn his shoes off. Scorch marks showed on the left side of his body, reaching his waist. Then they must have stopped it. But by then Yun would have been dead.

There were other lamp posts, with empty cords hanging where Yun's friends must have been murdered, then cut down. A stepladder was by the lamp post, just as Song had asked, with a knife resting on its top rung. As he approached, two soldiers noiselessly stepped out from somewhere. Song climbed the ladder. His face was now next to Yun's face, which smelt of ash. He touched the face. It didn't move, of course. But what was wrong with hoping that your son had just overslept at the end of a hangman's rope, and that his eyes might open and he might speak? But the dry and protruding tongue was wedged between the teeth, and he knew it was true.

The death had been simple and brutal in line with Chinese culture. After you have done it once, it is not difficult to get used to killing.

Song cut the rope and the soldiers took the weight. They carried Yun back on a stretcher, and Song walked beside him. Tomorrow would be his wedding anniversary, and Xiaomei would be safe in Vancouver, albeit dying from grief. Perhaps he would tell her that Yun was still alive and recovering. Perhaps that would save her.