The Third World War: A Terrifying Novel of Global Conflict

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The passengers from the Singapore Airlines flight clustered at the end of the escalator and shuffled slowly towards the immigration desk. A faded sign, high up and hanging crookedly on the dirty cream wall, welcomed them to India. The hall smelt faintly of spices and carried something of the night about it. Indian international air travel revolved around the hours when the human body was at its weakest.

The man whose British passport described him as Jonathan Desai said nothing as the officer, his fingers yellow with tobacco smoke, flicked through the pages, looking for the visa. When the officer looked up to check the passport photograph, Desai tilted his slightly tinted spectacles downwards to show his eyes, but not enough to reveal a cut under his right eye which was still bruised. With the thud of the stamp, Desai took his passport back and moved through.

He carried only hand luggage, a worn, black canvas briefcase and a laptop in a black case, both slung over his left shoulder, leaving his right hand free. He eased his way through the melee in the baggage hall, nodded at the customs officer who waved him on, and raised his hand to the moustachioed attendant from the Imperial Hotel holding up a sign with his name on it.

Outside he was engulfed by the chill of winter, the cold air, acrid with the smells of cheap burning coal and wood smoke. The attendant made small talk, and Desai obliged. It was a long time since he had been to India, he said. He ran a business from London. Was business good? No, said the concierge, it had never recovered to the glory days of the 1980s. The War on Terror and the conflict in Kashmir had made life difficult. Desai slipped him a 1,000 rupee note, just as the jeep pulled round and the driver opened the door, offering a hot face towel.

In his first-floor hotel room, he pushed open the windows, which looked out over the kidney-shaped swimming pool and a row of palm trees in the garden. From somewhere beyond came the sounds of holy men, beggars and those who slept on the streets. But the driveway beneath was empty apart from the beam of a night-watchman's flashlight.

Desai kept the main light of the room off, and used the fluorescent lamp over the bathroom mirror. He undressed, hanging his beige cotton trousers and light checked shirt in the wardrobe. He showered, shaved, put on the white towelling hotel robe and fixed himself some coffee.

The hotel safe in the wardrobe was closed with a code, known only to Desai and the hotel room boy, who had punched it into the safe's memory. Desai opened the safe. Inside was an Australian passport in the name of Ben Dutta, a driving licence and two valid credit cards, MasterCard and American Express. His date of birth was given as 22 April 1977. Place of birth was Manly, New South Wales, Australia. A box of business cards described him as Managing Director of Maximol Computing, with an address in north Sydney. He felt towards the back of the safe where he found a black box the size of a cigarette packet with the battery unattached and the aerial wrapped in polythene beside it. He felt around for the weapon he had asked for, but it wasn't there. A message to tell him the location and the identification features of the vehicle being used was also missing. The back-up for it was to have been sent by email. For under no circumstances should the telephone, mobile or landline be used.

Working on the lowered lid of the toilet seat, he opened the laptop case and removed the computer. He unfurled a telephone cable and ran it to the socket under the desk. While it was booting up, he drew the curtains across the window and wedged a hardback chair against the handle of the door. Before boarding the plane in Singapore, he had reformatted the computer's hard disk and reinstalled the factory software, together with the latest AOL programme, to which he had signed up using the name and credit-card number of Ben Dutta.

When he logged on, one message was waiting. It told him the operational names of the men with whom he would work, and the schedule of the Indian Prime Minister.

Desai, Dutta, or in fact the man who thought of himself as Hassan Muda, put on a beige loose-fitting top and pants, a common dress for all classes and castes in India. He slipped his identity documents into an inside pocket, took the reformatted computer hard disk, left it in the safe and closed it using the same code. He pulled off the bed covers, crumpled them and dropped them back to give the bed the look of having been slept in.

He unfolded a detailed street map of Delhi. He preferred to walk, rather than leave a witness by taking a taxi ride. Security around the parliament compound was still tight. But it also attracted the curious, as had Ground Zero in New York. If he was stopped, he had his reasons, his passport and his hotel key. His only risk was to be his exit from the hotel. Muda drew back the curtains. The driveway was still empty. He waited five minutes and saw no sign of the nightwatchman.

With his bag slung over his back, Muda eased himself out and jumped one floor down on to the grass. This was the back of the hotel, with kitchen flues and rubbish carts. He walked quickly past them. The gate at the end was ajar. Once through it, he was on the streets. It was peppered with sleeping bodies and the odd car, shrouded in a mix of early-morning mist and pollution.

Vasant Mehta looked across the table with incredulity at what he was hearing. He brushed his hand over the linen tablecloth, then glanced out of the window where groundsmen were lighting a fire of dead, dried leaves at the bottom of the garden.

'No brown faces at all?' he said, repeating it in order to clarify it.

'That's right,' said Lazaro Campbell. 'All volunteers. All Caucasian. No documents. No traceability.' Campbell buttered a piece of toast. He had flown to Delhi from Australia and had been holed up in the US embassy for the past two days, discussing the plan with Brock and finally confirming how to handle it on a conference call with Jim West and Chris Pierce. Campbell's idea had just been to go in. But Brock, judging that his protege was still fired up with the success of Brunei, argued that Pakistan would be a much more difficult target. And Jim West insisted that Mehta be brought on board. He would not do it without Mehta's agreement.

'No accountability. But the job will be done,' assured Campbell.

'Deepak,' said Mehta. 'You are very quiet.' His face carried a barely detectable expression of understanding, that here in front of them, there might be a way out, if only it could be made politically acceptable. Mehta had invited his Chief of Defence Staff to the breakfast precisely because he expected Suri to disagree with him.

'I am quiet because it is for you to determine the political fallout from such an action,' said Suri slowly, nursing a cup of tea in both hands. 'And by fallout I mean the reaction to allowing another nation to fight a war that should be fought by India. The all-white-skin scenario may leave a bitter taste.'

'With all due respect, Mr Campbell, you don't look that white-skinned yourself.'

All three men turned to see Meenakshi walking quickly into the room, carrying a heavy cardboard box in both arms. A corner of the box had become caught on her blue sari, and it was skewing across her shoulders. Campbell stood up, freed it and helped her lower it on to the table.

'Thank you,' she said, smiling.

'A pleasure, ma'am.' Campbell had seen Meenakshi briefly earlier that morning. While he was walking round the garden with Mehta, she had appeared on the back verandah, sleepy-eyed in a nightdress, her hand on her forehead, shielding her eyes from the sun.

She had filled a bird tray with water and sprinkled food grain on it, before examining the unexpected guest from a distance and stepping barefoot on to the lawn to introduce herself.

'I've never seen anyone out here with father so early in the morning before,' she had said, shaking Campbell's hand. 'You must be a very special visitor indeed, Mr Campbell.'

With that she had vanished back into the house, and, thought Campbell, off the agenda. Except, now, she must have been listening to some, if not all, of his highly classified conversation with the Indian Prime Minister and his Chief of Defence Staff. Campbell, younger than his hosts by a generation, glanced at Suri for guidance, his eyes reflecting the uncertainty he felt at Meenakshi's presence.

But it was Mehta who spoke. 'She's fine, Campbell. She might even knock some sense into your damn head.'

Meenakshi picked up a breakfast knife and sliced open the box. 'You're from Washington, I understand,' she said, carefully unpeeling the lid. 'Do you know Lizzie?'

'Lizzie?' asked Campbell, hiding his irritation that the meeting was so abruptly being disturbed. In ten minutes, Mehta was due to leave. Once gone, the momentum would be lost.

'Lizzie West. Jim West's daughter,' smiled Meenaksi. 'She thinks the Pakistanis are going to gas us, so she borrowed these from the White House secret store and FedExed them over. Apparently, they're better than ours, Deepak,' she finished, looking reprovingly at the Chief of Defence Staff.

Her hands plunged inside pulling out air-bubble padding. On the top were three masks. Below that four pairs of rubber boots and at the bottom was a pile of vacuum-packed nuclear, biological and chemical warfare suits.

'Good God,' she exclaimed, reading from a note. 'Lizzie says they're the best around. We can keep them in a cupboard and they'll last for years.' She recited the label on the olive-green suit. 'See here. This suit is computer-designed and impregnated with charcoal to withstand the most toxic threats in an NBC environment. Two-piece suit with pants, top and attached suit, cuff closures and pull-string adjustments.' She dropped the packet on to the table. 'Is that what does it, Mr Campbell? Charcoal?'

'It helps,' smiled Campbell. 'But best not to be there anyway.'

'Quite right,' she said firmly, becoming distracted by the packet at the bottom. Her face broke into a huge grin. 'Lizzie!' she exclaimed to nobody in particular. 'My dear Lizzie, you are so mischievous.' With packet in hand, she walked over to her father, leaned on the table and read him the description. 'Listen to this, Father. Designed for infants up to three years of age. The finest infant protective suits on the market today, blah, blah, blah. Reduces stress by providing a constant airflow to the infant.'

Mehta patted his daughter on her leg, chuckled and made a show of inspecting her waistline. 'So the President's daughter doesn't think there'll be a war for at least nine months,' he said.

'Wishful thinking, if you reckon on nine months,' quipped Meenakshi. 'And if you get us into a war, I will personally kill you. That goes for the two of you as well.'

'Exactly what we're discussing,' said Mehta, handing his daughter back the infant's NBC suit.

'So I heard. Well, a bit anyway.' Meenakshi pushed her hair off her face, looking straight at her father, but pointing to Campbell. 'If what he's suggesting is going to work, Father, do it. Don't for God's sake stand on any high-minded philosophy. It's not who fights wars that is important. It's who is clever enough to stop them happening in the first place.'

'You should be knocking sense into his head, not mine,' said Mehta. He still wore a smile, but his tone indicated that the cheerfulness that Meenakshi had brought to the room was fading.

'Why don't you meet halfway? In my job, it usually works,' replied Meenakshi brightly. 'I'll leave this stuff here for now,' she added in a tone that dismissed herself from the meeting. 'Mr Campbell, if you're going back to Washington, could you take Lizzie a thank-you note? If you're important enough to have breakfast with my father, I expect you could drop by the White House.'

'It'd be my pleasure, ma'am,' said Campbell, knowing that he would deliver it straight to the embassy and it would be couriered over for him.

Meenakshi left a lingering silence behind her as the mood shifted back. The box of NBC equipment remained as if symbolic on the table. Its smells of polythene and rubber mixed with the fresh flowers on the table and faint fire smoke from the garden.

'No dog tags,' resumed Campbell. 'No documentation. The men are trained to withstand torture. They've all been through the polygraph detector. They've been tested with sodium pentothal.'

'Foolproof?' asked Suri.

'Nothing's foolproof, sir,' said Campbell. 'But we think it will work.'

Mehta stood up, walked to the door and stood right in the entrance, leaning on the frame looking into the garden. 'Deepak, give me your thoughts again.'

'I'm pretty certain we can shoot down nuclear-armed aircraft before they launch. But against missiles we have no real defence. I understand that Qureshi will soon announce himself both as president and commander-in-chief. Hussain is chairman of the National Command Authority, which means he directly controls the ten corps commanders, and it is they who would have the autonomy to launch in a time of war.'

'Without the authority of the NCA?' said Campbell.

'Correct. The thinking behind that is that if India captures Rawalpindi and Islamabad, the commander in, say, Karachi can order nuclear retaliation without authority from the centre.'

Mehta turned back into the room. 'The criterion for a launch, Mr Campbell is — or was, because the coup might have changed things — that the NCA no longer existed. In other words it was wiped out.'

'It could equally mean that if the commander disagreed with his orders from the NCA he could do what the hell he liked,' said Suri, shooting a hostile look in the direction of Campbell. 'If we went along with you, you would have to take out each military commander in each district. Then you would have to get access to the missile areas and neutralize them. That's not to mention whatever short-range missiles they might have on rail tracks or on trucks.' He shook his head. 'It can't be done. If it was that simple, don't you think we would have done it by now?'

'Tell me, the Taepodong-2 missile from North Korea — what difference does it make?' Mehta asked Deepak directly.

'They can strike anywhere in India.'

'Correct. But with a smaller warhead they can reach Europe and South-East Asia. Which means that the threat is not just to India.'

'That's why the President has sent me, sir,' said Campbell.

Mehta lifted his jacket off the back of the dining chair, slipped it on and addressed Campbell. 'I want you to come to our Cabinet Committee on Security meeting. Travel with Deepak, and meet me there. I believe your special forces concept would fail. But you could succeed with your white-only faces in assassinating Qureshi, Hussain and probably a handful of others. If we eradicate that level of the new Pakistani leadership, then we might find someone underneath who talks some sense.' He glanced out of the window which had just become spotted with raindrops, and waved at Meenakshi who was in the garden, gathering her sari around herself, and walking briskly towards the house so as not to get caught in a downpour.

By the best of Muda's estimates, the Indian Prime Minister would be in the dining room between 08.00 and 08.30. He usually attended breakfast dressed and ready to go to work. He would either breakfast alone, with his daughters Meenakshi or Romila, if they were staying with him, or very occasionally with senior advisers. Today, Meenakshi was to chair a workshop in Old Delhi on the communal integration of the urban poor. The Prime Minister was due at his office in South Block at 09.15. Mehta had a reputation for promptness, meaning that his motorcade from Race Course Road would leave by 08.45. Ashish Uddin, his private secretary, would brief Mehta and any other aides in a small office off the entrance to the residence for ten to fifteen minutes before the convoy left.

Muda took a three-wheeler to India Gate and was dropped off just past the National Stadium on the corner of Pandara Road. He paid the fare, tipped moderately and idled until the driver disappeared from sight. Rajpath, the stately boulevard which ran between India Gate and the government buildings, was shrouded in winter fog. Since the attack on the Parliament, no one had been allowed there except the police. Onlookers still gathered against the cordon ropes. India was a place where too many had too little to do, and disaster was always an attraction. The traffic was thin, with the city slowly waking to a misty, chilly morning, and the cordons up to Raisana Hill and around the parliament building were heavily fortified but lazily manned.

He quickened his pace, turning left in Akbar Road, where four schoolchildren with their maids waited on the corner for a bus. Up ahead a sweeper, caped in blue chiffon, threw dust into the air, and Muda stepped into the empty road to avoid it. As soon as the morning got under way, there would be a roar of white Ambassador cars, some with the flashing lights of dignitaries and ministers. But at this time, a quietness hung over the big houses set back behind gates. It was a neighbourhood of wealth and high office.

He passed the Congress Party headquarters on his right, with a poster of Indira Gandhi, grey hair swept back, her confident eyes showing none of the failure of her rule. To his left, set back from the road, was the house of the Air Chief Marshal.

At the second roundabout, he lingered just for a second by the memorial to Mahatma Gandhi. Two cars appeared through the mist, the grubbiness of their windows shown up by the sun, which was breaking through in slatted rays. At the next junction he passed the sign for the Indira Gandhi Memorial Trust and, suddenly, he felt surrounded by the history of what he was about to do.

India's leaders often met violent deaths. His action seemed natural, given the character of the nation. As he walked on, stepping on to the road to avoid a leaking water pipe, a mask of relaxation drew across his face.

By the time he reached the next roundabout, the traffic had become busier and fine needles of rain were falling on the dry road, creating a small rainbow over the cordon set up across Race Course Road. A four-wheel-drive police jeep was parked at one end of the cordon, with two men, leaning on the metal barriers, smoking. At the other end, the door of their small hut was open, their tunics hanging in the window, with their weapons carelessly left in their holsters.

Muda walked purposefully into the junction, crossed Safdarjung Road, turned left and then right into the entrance of the Gymkhana Club, nodding at the guard with an expression that allowed no room for a response. Muda kept going past the main buildings with the clubhouse on his right, and on his left at first the library and then the expanse of playing fields and open space which stretched to the gardens of the Prime Minister's house and offices along Race Course Road. He estimated the distance to be just over five hundred metres.

At the tennis courts, he turned left, keeping up his brisk pace, until he spotted the vehicle, a grubby delivery truck, its logo covered in grime and a rattling freezer unit belching cold air on the roof. It was backed up against a trade delivery entrance of the clubhouse.

An email to the club, one week earlier, had booked the Kashmir Room for a private party, citing membership of one of the Gymkhana's reciprocal clubs in London, the Royal Over-Seas League. The reservation had been followed up by a faxed menu request, specifying a special delivery of frozen Irish wild salmon would be flown in that morning. The number plate of the van was on the fax, a copy of which the driver produced when he had arrived at the entrance. He had been early, and told to wait until the staff arrived for the morning shift.

Once inside the gates, the van was free of random police checks. The hallowed grounds of the club itself were beyond suspicion. From far away in the Philippines, Memed had drawn up the plan, and Muda refined it.

Inside the cab, two men were smoking cigarettes. The driver's window was down, his elbow resting on the door. A third man was at the open back door of the refrigerated unit, sorting through frozen luxury food.

Once past the tennis courts, Muda stopped to flick a stone out of his sandal. The truck driver brought his elbow in and started the engine. The doors at the back were closed and the van set off, driving the short way to a spot in a large car park, and pulling up as far away as possible from the target, adding another two hundred metres to the range. Muda felt the inside pocket of his loose-fitting shirt. With one hand he eased up the aerial, making enough space for it to be extended inside his clothing. He brushed his fingers over the control panel, pressing the single button on the right, which let out a complex series of directional radio beams.

Muda strolled, watchful and undisturbed.

He never needed to be closer than fifty metres to the van. The windows were up. They were so filthy it was impossible to see through. Muda knew the other men would have a false partition in the cab to hide the mortars in the back of the van.

He had designed the mortars at just over 120mm and ordered them to be set for a range of seven hundred metres, with enough altitude to connect with the radio signals. He had instructed that heavy steel plates should be welded into the base of the van and for each mortar stand to be wedged in with sandbags. The three firings had to be carried out in quick succession, before the heat caught the fuel tank of the van and blew it up.

The mortar had been Muda's weapon of choice because it need not be in the line of sight of the target. Nor did anyone have to infiltrate the target area to plant a bomb or carry out an assassination. The aeronautics had been the main challenge. It had taken months to get right, but with Muda's remarkably simple electronic guidance system, pinpoint accuracy on trajectory was no longer essential.

As long as the mortar was fired in roughly the right direction, it would find its target. Until now this type had never been used by any guerrilla organization anywhere in the world.

Instead of being a free-flying bomb, Muda had experimented with aluminium fins, a tiny motorized propeller, a radio-signal receiver and technology from the hand-held Stinger surface-to-air-missile which locked on to heat given off by aircraft.

After dozens of practice sessions in the Philippines he had created a mortar that could be coaxed down in the right direction. On the mortars themselves, he installed a Global Positioning System tracker. To make it work, he only needed it to fix on a target which was linked to a satellite. He did not expect there to be a GPS on the Prime Minister's house itself. But there would certainly be one attached to his car and the chase cars of the convoy. If he tilted the trajectory slightly beyond the vehicles, he should be able to guide the mortars through the roof of the house.

He had chosen one to be airburst, one to detonate on impact and a burrowing one to explode several seconds after impact and filled with phosphorus which would act as a firebomb sending out toxic smoke.

What Muda did not know was the sophistication of the anti-mortar defences around the Prime Minister's residence. But he doubted they had the ability to create the defensive shield needed to withstand a three-mortar attack.

Inside his clothes, his finger slipped to the second button. The small vibration of the box confirmed that the radio signals were running at full strength. The top of the van slid open like a sun roof. For a second, the sharp crack went unnoticed. Muda pressed the button and the vibration stopped, indicating that the signals had locked on. The mortar was travelling too fast for him to check. Another crack. Then another. A cry from the tennis courts. A guard running forward. Muda broke his stroll into a half-run, looking towards the confusion among the handful of people in the car park, his eyes following everyone else's, quickening his pace with their mood. Then the withering explosion of the first mortar round finding its mark, and almost simultaneously a ball of fire rising out of the van which had launched them, killing the three men inside.

Muda let the crowd gather around him, and he stayed with it, until the first police car arrived, when he walked out of the gates, exchanging expressions of shock with the guard. Once clear, he hailed a taxi to take him south, away from the government houses, India Gate, North Block, South Block, the parliament building and the Imperial Hotel. He got the taxi to drop him off at the neighbourhood known as Defence Colony, and an hour later took another taxi to the domestic airport.

His hotel room would have been cleaned out and wiped clear of fingerprints. The phone record of the call to AOL would have been destroyed. The bill would have been paid by the imprint of the credit card of Jonathan Desai. Memed's orders had been for Muda to be on an afternoon flight to Mumbai and to lie up there for a week. Then he would receive his next instructions.

'Mortar,' yelled Mehta, throwing himself at Suri and pulling them both to the ground. Flame shot down from the roof. A searing explosion tore the ceiling, hurling down chunks of plaster like missiles. The blast threw Campbell against the wall. As he crashed to the ground, he saw an unexploded mortar embedded in the lawn outside. Behind him, there was a second explosion. The door to the hallway was flung open amid a mass of smoke and fire.

Meenakshi, in the garden, was running away from the burning house towards the unexploded bomb. 'No,' screamed Campbell, scrambling up, toxic fumes choking his throat. He threw himself through the door frame, slashing his face on jagged glass, running, arms waving, blood on his face, tripping over himself, his voice screaming out. 'No, no, get back, get back—' as the mortar exploded, smashing him down against the ground.