Third World War (60 page)

'Jamie?' he said again, louder.

'The line's gone.' It was Kozerski's voice coming across.

West did not return the receiver to its cradle. Outside, he watched the greyness of the lingering winter. It seemed so long since the missile had hit Yokata, yet not long enough for the seasons to change and the colours to sharpen. He saw his own reflection in the glass looking back at him like a stone-faced stranger.

****

Epilogue*

My name is Lazaro Campbell. I am writing from a secure location where we have been for several months. I am not permitted to say where it is, exactly how we live, or who is with me. However, for the purpose of this report, some exceptions have been made, and I am permitted to give an outline of what happened after the war with China and Russia began.

Shortly before the President made his address to the nation, we launched against Cuba. We tried to talk to China again, but failed. In response, China launched against Taiwan and our military bases in Japan.

We targeted the key Chinese long-range missile facilities of the Second Artillery Regiment. For the record, they were: 80301 Unit in Shenyang, Liaoning province; 80302 Unit in Huangshan, Jiangxi province; 80303 Unit in Kunming, Yunnan province; 80304 Unit in Luoyang, Henan province; 80305 Unit in Huaihua, Hunan province; 80306 Unit in Xining, Qinghai province; and the Second Artillery headquarters at Qinghe in northern Beijing. These were air and missile strikes with conventional warheads.

After that, events moved with horrifying speed. Even now we are still piecing together the exact sequence.

Russia entered the war by striking the missile interceptor bases at Fylingdales in England, Thule in Greenland and Fort Greely in Alaska. Andrei Kozlov telephoned Jim West offering a ceasefire. His attack, he said, had been to take away our missile defence capability and level the odds with China.

But while those negotiations were going on, China struck Kobe and Kyoto with nuclear-armed missiles and invaded Taiwan.

The President ordered a second-wave assault against China, using nuclear weapons against their hardened and isolated command and control bunkers. We tried to reach Kozlov again, but failed. We took pre-emptive action against Russia's missile sites. We hit twenty-six of them including the Moscow Institute of Heat Engineering, which makes their Topol-M long-range missile and the test site at Plesetsk, just north of Moscow. Again, these were conventional strikes - which is why some of them did not work.

'Should we have done that?' Jim West keeps asking. 'Should we have done a pre-emptive on Russia?'

But Mary tells him to keep his thoughts on the future. 'You might as well ask why you didn't go nuclear earlier,' she scolds.

There was no single turning point. It was an inevitable slide that had no beginning. You could begin with the inadequate Treaty of Versailles that ended the First World War, or with the failure to stop Hitler, or our inability to grasp the new centres of power after the Cold War, or our failure to go into Baghdad after the first Gulf War. The origins of the Third World War go much further back than the beginning of my account.

I can only understand those initial strikes by examining the minute-by-minute chronology we are compiling. Each was a logical response. Never could I have imagined that man could act so brutally and so swiftly, all the time knowing the consequences.

Yet I was part of it, and I never thought of walking away.

Nuclear explosions destroy electronic communications, so all but the military facilities broke down. Some satellites continued to work for a while, as did our own command centres, but essentially we watched the world collapse city by city.

London, Paris, Berlin and Brussels were all destroyed on the same day, and about that time both Europe and the United States stopped functioning.

The strike on Manhattan added a new layer of realism. That was the moment that we shed our remaining optimism and accepted that the world as we knew it no longer existed.

We watched the attack from satellite imagery. There must have been sixteen separate warheads ranging from 20 to 100 kilotons. For the first few seconds, with the clouds of dust and rubble, I was reminded of Nine Eleven. But, of course, this was much more thorough. As they disintegrated, the buildings became hidden in smoke. The stems of clouds from different explosions seemed to drift together to create one vast mushroom that hung over the whole of Manhattan. It wasn't about the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, the already trashed Times Square. It became an image of a cloud framed by the Hudson and East rivers that slowly spilled out and engulfed them all.

I got NIMA to bring the picture close to Kenmore and Mott streets, where my parents lived on the eighth floor of their apartment block. They would have been there for sure, but by the time the cloud had cleared my neighbourhood looked no different from the diplomatic quarter of Delhi after the strike on that city.

After getting back from Delhi, I had called my mother. My father had been out getting supplies, gas masks, NBC suits and things. My mother told me they had been watching the news. She told me to look after myself and come and see them when it was over. The conversation lasted perhaps a minute. She was more upset about what would happen to Cuba than anything else.

When the cloud cleared, we saw bodies in the East River, just like those in the Yamuna in Delhi - rows of smouldering, blackened balls that had once been human beings. When I realized that any of those could have been the bodies of my mother and father, I stopped looking. I refused to watch the destruction of any more cities. My inbuilt safety valve for human survival kicked in. I slept for twenty hours straight.

The nuclear war gave way to the smallpox epidemic. The health system collapsed and the virus spread unchecked. People headed south into Mexico and north into Canada to escape the war, but they took the virus with them. Boats and private aircraft left Britain for the neutral countries of Europe. Soon the epidemic was everywhere.

In Colombia, villages were firebombed to try and contain it. In Turkey, cities were cordoned off and the inhabitants shot by troops in NBC suits. There was no vaccine and no wherewithal to create one. Eventually the disease took over the world.

One by one, the networks went off the air, and eventually we lost contact with other centres. Chris Pierce and Tom Patton at the Pentagon went quiet after the strike on Washington. Stuart Nolan had managed to get to a bunker in Britain's west country. But we heard nothing from him after London was hit. John Kozerski had refused to come with us. He brought his family to the White House bunker, and we presume they died there. Yamada went silent after China's nuclear blitz. We thought we had raised Cho in South Korea, but it turned out to be a prankster from the Cook Islands in the Pacific, so far unaffected by either smallpox or the nuclear cloud.

I should mention how Jim West, myself and others came to be where we are now. Jim refused to leave, but Tom Patton instructed me to get him to a safe place. I used a tranquillizing gun while he was on the telephone in his private office. It turned out that he had been talking to his son, Chuck, who was just outside the radiation belt around Oakland. Jim was never able to raise him again. The drug lasted until we were on board Air Force One. I can't say where we headed.

We made sure that Jim kept his word to Vasant Mehta, and Meenakshi is with us. We were unable to locate Romila or Geeta. Lizzie is here, working on a fairer economic plan for whatever world survives. Some members of Congress and other allocated officials came. But the numbers are far less than the allocations and, even allowing for the confined space in which we live, there is plenty of room.

The place has been built with flair. We have ultraviolet for the plants that provide natural oxygenation, electric cars, a swimming pool, gym, running track, restaurants and self-catering apartments with views outside our windows created by video montages. Cooks, cleaners, technicians and staff had been kept here on rotation, so it was like checking into a massive out-of-this-world resort.

The aim is to create as much space between us and the catastrophe above ground. In that way we would be able to begin leading as normal a life as possible and plan for the future. In a strange way, it's working.

After weeks of silence, our first contact was with Vasant Mehta in Delhi. It was also our first experience of genuine shared joy since the war began - when Vasant learnt that Meenakshi was alive.

After absorbing the multiple strikes from Pakistan, India was not attacked again. In nuclear terms, it had suffered just a scratch, compared to the Mutually Assured Destruction taking place in the US, Europe, Russia and China.

Mehta explained how India was already rebuilding communities. Some areas had escaped both radiation and smallpox. Scientists had been taken in NBC-secured aircraft and vehicles to set up laboratories there. Mehta wanted them to exchange research data with the virologists at Fort Detrick who had been working on a new smallpox vaccine. But we had lost contact with Fort Detrick.

Indian meteorologists were also tracking the radiation cloud, which had gathered and joined with the clouds over China and eastern Russia. A huge mass of radiation had drifted across South-East Asia and was over the Pacific, moving towards Hawaii and the western coast of the United States. Similar clusters of lethal clouds had formed over Europe.

Kozlov and Song have also been in contact, but even encased in our bunkers none of us is giving ground. The war has not ended. It is in a lull. Every so often, either we, Russia or China launch a small warhead as a reminder that hostilities have not ended.

We are getting used to our new lives. For a while Mary and Jim were open about their relationship, even sleeping together in one apartment. Now, possibly because of the personal intensity - and the war - they have drifted apart again. In their work, however, they seem unchanged.

Meenakshi is pregnant. When Vasant heard, he joked that he thought any child with Cuban, Scottish and Indian blood would run a far better world than they had.

I often think back on the events and wonder if there could have been another way. The truth is that the attack on the Indian Parliament, the assassination of the Pakistani President, even the missile strike on Yokata, would never have been sufficient reason to set us at each other's throats.

The zealots who led the war, Park Ho and Ahmed Memed, were unknowns to us. I doubt even they had planned to fight. They simply wanted to enjoy the spoils of victory.

I remember one evening, in Washington, just after getting back from confronting Qureshi, and news had leaked out about the Camp David summit. I wandered into a bar and noticed renewed laughter and chatter. The waiters were whistling. My cab driver talked about Jim West: 'man clever enough to take them to the brink,' he said proudly, 'get what he needs, then pull back.'

Everyone was happy because we thought there would be no war.

How stupid we were. It had always been only a matter of time before the nuclear weapon stopped being a deterrent and became simply another weapon of war.

All most of us want to do is live our lives in peace, have our children, buy our houses, pay off our loans, play our sports, go on holiday. Few of us seek conflict. Who wants to see their cities bombed, their countries ravaged and their families killed? Surely it's a matter of common sense.

So why did we do it?

****

Author's note*

My thanks to those who helped me with The Third World War, either in conversations, briefings and on-the-record interviews, or through their writings in books and journals. Among those are Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (Simon & Schuster, 1986); Jonathan B. Tucker, Scourge, The Once and Future Threat of Smallpox (Grove Press, 2001); Andrew J. Nathan and Bruce Gilley, 'China's New Rulers: What They Want' (New York Review, 2002), as well as dozens of others including Jon Cohen's brilliant account in Atlantic Monthly (July/August 2002) on mousepox and interleukin-4.

The concept for this novel - the third in the series of books which have become known as 'future histories' - straddled the attacks of September 11th 2001 and the Iraq War. As I wrote The Third World War, the simultaneous threats of Iraq and North Korea became more and more embedded in the public consciousness.

Weapons of mass destruction, biological and chemical warfare, pre-emptive strike are now part of our everyday language. This is the sharp end of a debate as to which political system delivers the most to its people. And it may be settled with bombs. It is as if the Cold War aftermath has finally shaken itself through and this is what is left - a sense that our communities are under threat, that our values are being questioned, and that our lives are no longer as safe as they were a few years ago.

My great thanks, however, to the many colleagues in the BBC who have sent me to far-flung places and allowed me to observe.