Dragon Fire

State Department, Washington, DC

The land line was open to the Embassy in Delhi. A satellite link had been set up with Pakistan and the secure encrypted connection was being used with Beijing. The State Department’s Management Crisis Center was manned round the clock by three staff, specializing in foreign policy, security and the military. They liaised constantly with counterparts in the White House situation room and in the Pentagon.

Ten minutes earlier, the Crisis Center had been elevated to Task Force level. Across the corridor, two rooms were being opened up. One was for consular staff to field calls about Americans living in Pakistan and China. It was linked by a sparsely furnished reception room with a few chairs and a photocopier to the small Task Force room with an oval desk in the middle and ten work stations, four on each side and one at each end. The single television on one wall was on split screens, taking in the rolling global channels together with Indian and Pakistani television.

Just down the corridor outside the Crisis Center area, Joan Holden put down the telephone from Jamie Song in Beijing. The conversation was cordial, wary and noncommittal on both sides. She had also spoken to Christopher Baker in London, and the foreign ministers of Germany, France and Russia. Records of her conversations were being printed out, together with the latest reports from the embassies.

With her informal manner, she had insisted the State Department meeting took place in the Crisis Center, so officers could keep an eye on their work. So far staff from the South Asia and East Asia Pacific Affairs Bureaux had arrived together with officers from the Department of Defense, Consular Affairs, USAID, the PolMil (political/ military) Division, and Medical and someone from Public Affairs to handle the press. Experts on nuclear, biological and chemical warfare were expected within minutes.

After the Pakistan coup, the attack on Dharamsala and the SFF operation in Lhasa, the Crisis Center did not stand up as a task force, because no American lives were at risk. Pakistan’s nuclear strike and China’s incursion into India did not involve the American military and, at this stage, the State Department remained the lead Federal agency to handle the crisis.

A message from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Geneva, which monitors all nuclear risk, came through reporting on the prevailing wind, the blast-danger area and the concentration of population. Joan Holden saw that thinly populated civilian areas were affected, and the blast and wind direction was such that the threat would have diminished by the time the dust cloud reached any significant town. Consular officials reported that no American citizens were known to be in the area.

Holden’s executive secretary had already mobilized two thirty-seat aircraft to fly to Islamabad and Delhi in what was known as a non-combative environment operation. Each was medically equipped to evacuate seriously ill or injured American citizens, be they Embassy staff or civilians. There was strict procedure, known as the ‘no double standard rule’, which meant that all Americans would be treated equally.

Plans were put in place for an ‘authorized departure’ from both embassies which would allow dependants and non-essential staff to leave. If the crisis escalated, an ‘ordered departure’ would take place and finally a special aircraft would be on stand-by to evacuate a core of staff who had to stay behind until the last minutes before closing the Embassy.

Given that neither India nor Pakistan were considered hostile governments, Holden hoped she could keep events on track so that didn’t happen.

She picked up the phone and talked directly to Tom Bloodworth at the National Security Council in the White House. ‘The IAEA say the fallout of the strike can be confined,’ she said, hoping he would take her lead to play it softly. Bloodworth’s job was to devise a plan according to presidential policy. Bloodworth could hand out hard truths. Holden had to be more measured.

She walked into the Crisis Management Center. ‘I’ve got five minutes for a brief from each of you, then I’m off to the White House,’ she said.