The Third World War: A Terrifying Novel of Global Conflict

47

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.

But the 20-kiloton warhead, which had exploded 1,600 feet above Chelmsford Road, midway between Connaught Place and New Delhi railway station, had demolished everything. Temperatures at the blast areas would have reached 3,000 degrees Celsius. The heat had no discrimination. Nothing appeared to have survived. Campbell was looking down on the instant ruination of a city. Everything, as far as his eye could see, was a wilderness.

He had been sent in because there had been no contact from the embassy bunker. The Indian embassy in Washington, out of touch with its government, had given permission for the Osprey to go in. The readings of radiation, atmosphere particles, biological agents and much more were being computer-analysed on board and read simultaneously by scientists in the United States and India. A real-time satellite link had been set up between the Osprey and the Indian Bhabha Atomic Research Centre just outside Mumbai.

Since flying in, contact had been made with Vasant Mehta, just a few hundred feet from Campbell, but in a sealed bunker underneath Raisana Hill. The video camera on the Osprey's wings was relaying images directly to the Indian command and control centre there.

To the east, Campbell spotted movement through a clear patch of sky. He got the pilot to change course. It took some seconds to realize what he was seeing, and identify the path of the Yamuna River which ran north-south on the eastern edge of the centre of Delhi.

The smoke was thicker there, caused by a line of funeral pyres, the cremation of the dead by those who had survived. Here, Campbell had reached the half-world, where some had lived through the first blast but in such a state that he had to turn his eyes away. He coughed through his breathing apparatus. The air he breathed was clear, but his senses were with the stench outside.

Those on the ground did not react to the Osprey. They were not seeking help. Things had gone too far, and they knew that by the end of the day they would most likely be dead, too. Campbell got the pilot to descend to just fifty feet, where he saw that the river was not covered in debris as he had thought. It was filled with blackened corpses bumping each other like logs. Hundreds of thousands must have fled to the water to escape the fire and then drowned. More corpses lay strewn on the river banks, most of them with no faces. Their eyes and mouths had been burned, their ears melted and their hair singed to the skull.

On the other side of the river, further from the centre of the blast, a man and a child were propped up on a bicycle, leaning against a railing. Both were dead, with no sign, though, of how their bodies had survived as they did. The trees all around had been burnt by fireballs leaping across the water.

A line of people crouched at the river's edge, drinking the fetid, blood-stained water, and from the tattered remnant of a blouse, Campbell saw that they were high-school girls. Their skin was cracked, their heads bald and their faces were barely recognizable as human. On the other side, a figure, its skin blackened and hanging off like a rag, started to cross by crawling over the bodies like a bridge. Halfway, it sank, and did not come up again.

It was then that someone pointed, and the eyes of the living became distinguishable from those of the dead. They looked up at the Osprey at the figure of Campbell half out of the aircraft, their eyes now looking for someone to come and help. As they pointed, blackened skin hung from their fingertips and elbows. Dark liquid ran down their arms, and he saw how shrivelled or how swollen their bodies were. A woman turned and he saw the imprint of a child on her breast, where the two must have been scorched together, but left to live a few hours more. She opened her mouth to plead with him, and froth oozed from her lips. Then she fell backwards, but she remained conscious, and even as she was falling, she managed to hold Campbell's eyes in a stare that made his blood run cold.

'Take her up,' he ordered the pilot, and as they went higher the scene became worse because there was more of it. But at least Campbell could no longer see the eyes of the dying individuals.

'Back to Chanakyapuri,' he instructed. 'We'll take a last look round the embassy.'

After the scenes at the river, the ashen desolation of Delhi's diplomatic area came as a relief. There was no life at all. Campbell ordered the aircraft down to fifty feet again, just high enough to escape the debris flung up by the rotor blades, asking the pilot to criss-cross the area so that NIMA could map at least this part of post-nuclear Delhi.

Through the intercom, the co-pilot was calling the embassy on the high-frequency radio. If anyone was alive down there, they were locked in concrete with no contact at all.

'We'll map Raisana Hill and Rajpath as well,' said Campbell. The Osprey turned north-east and just as the pilot was about to take it up again Campbell spotted movement way in the distance.

'Stop,' he said. 'Hold your altitude. Do you see anything due east?'

'Heading over there,' said the pilot. He edged the aircraft towards the area. Campbell took a GPS reading. Down below, two figures were on their feet and walking. They heard the aircraft, turned towards it and waved. Then he saw a third figure, a child, being held by one of them.'

'Lower the winch rope,' said Campbell.

With the Osprey hovering, Campbell clipped himself on and slid down through clouds of dust thrown up by the rotor blades. He lowered himself into a haze, stumbling forward, getting his balance on the soft, crumbling moon-like surface. He drew his pistol.

'US government,' he shouted. His voice was relayed from a speaker on his helmet. 'Please identify yourself.' Then he remembered that even if they heard him, they might not be able to reply.

Inch by inch he trod forward, groping in the dust cloud, which was beginning to settle. He turned on the flashlight on his helmet, and through the particles of thick dust swirling in front of him a figure stood with its hands up straight ahead of him.

He wiped the glass of his helmet, peered forward, saw the face of Meenakshi and only then registered that her survival suit had an emblem of the Stars and Stripes sewn on to the sleeve.

Behind her, carrying a child, was a man he recognized as Vasant Mehta's private secretary. But as for the child he was carrying, they must have put the suit on it as a desperate act of madness and compassion. It was dead, its face a crumpled burnt shape, like those by the river: no eyes, no nose, no mouth, no human features, only an imprint of the holocaust.

Meenakshi lowered her arms, began a step forward, but her bad leg couldn't take it and Campbell caught her as she fell.