The Third World War: A Terrifying Novel of Global Conflict

48

'We need Lazaro's pictures on the net right now, and out to every television station in the world,' said West. 'I have never seen anything so dreadful.' His expression was one of horror and anger. He stared at Kozerski. 'And uncensored. Let the kids see it, so that when they grow up they will despise this monster our ancestors created.'

Kozerski repeated the instructions down a telephone line. Chris Pierce sat with his feet up on the coffee table and a laptop balanced between his knees. The map was skewed and half on the floor. The cartons of takeaway Chinese and pizza were piled on a trolley with bottles of water and a coffee urn. In the corner of the Oval Office, Tom Patton was working at one end of a desk which Kozerski had procured and Caroline Brock was at the other. A permanent line on speaker phone was open to Fort Detrick, and both had their own laptop links.

The door to the office was kept open so that Jenny Rinaldi could be seen and could shout through instead of relying on the clogged-up intercom line. 'The Secretary of State is on the line from Beijing, sir,' she said.

'Mary, have you seen Jamie yet?'

'No, sir. I'm not pushing it, and he's promised me a meeting within three hours. The embassy report a heap of telephone traffic between Beijing and Moscow. Chris might be aware of that—'

'Chris,' shouted West across the room. 'Has the NSA got any increased traffic between Beijing and Moscow?'

'Not that's come to me. But I'll check.'

'Which indicates that Song and Kozlov have been talking, sorting things before Song wants to talk to us—'

'Jenny,' said West. 'Get me Kozlov in Moscow. Urgent.'

'Mr President,' said Kozerski. 'The first polls are saying that any strike against North Korea after what happened in Delhi would be deeply unpopular.'

'Yeah, well, we're not striking North Korea — at least not for an hour or so,' retorted West. He walked to the window and spotted for the first time daffodils in the garden outside, getting beaten down by the rain which hadn't let up for the past two days. His voice softened. 'Mary, what I want you to do more than anything is rest up and think. Stay fresh. I'm going to need a good brain in the next few hours.'

'Mr President,' said Patton, turning in his chair, his finger jabbing at the laptop screen. 'We picked up four suspects from Korean associations which we tracked back to Mason's original calls from Canberra. They were given blood tests. Two of the four showed antibodies to the smallpox vaccine. They were civilians. Not from the US or South Korean military.'

'So the only reason they would have been vaccinated is—' began West before trailing off.

'Because they were going to handle it,' finished Patton.

'Christ,' muttered West.

'We need to conduct further tests to see if there is an IL-4 component involved,' said Caroline Brock. 'If there isn't, find out from the suspects if they knew for sure that they'd be handling the IL-4 component of the variola major virus and that the standard vaccine would work.'

'They're not talking,' said Patton.

'Make them talk,' snapped West, slamming his hand down on the desk, then bringing it up to his forehead. He sat down and leant back in his chair.

'President Kozlov is not available, sir,' said Rinaldi.

'Good,' said West, getting sharply to his feet. 'I'm going for a jog. And every six hours, I want every one of you out of the office, for half an hour, to clear your heads. Do whatever exercise you have to, but do it.'

West stepped outside and two secret service officers fell in with him. Rain, caught in a gust of wind, hit him in the face. He wiped it away with the back of his hand. 'Stay well away,' he told the officers. 'I don't want to hear you. I don't want to see you.'

Water drained across the surface of the jogging track. The weather had been so hard that puddles were scattered across the manicured lawns, throwing them into a late winter disrepair.

West began jogging, but then stopped, because his mind was wandering. Valerie was the one who had kept telling him there was nothing like a brisk walk in cold weather for sharp, deep thinking. So he slowed to walking pace, not caring where he went or how he got there. He walked off the path, across the South Lawn, through the Children's Garden, avoiding the Rose Garden, where the press were huddled in a corner, working on shifts.

And it took him a full fifteen minutes, soaked through and with water dripping down his face, his hair matted on his forehead, before he had convinced himself that the destruction of Delhi was not just a nightmare; that the smallpox release over the Pacific had actually happened; and that if he was a general wishing to bring down an empire, he could not have planned it better.

West punched his fist through the air, anger welling up inside him, forcing it out of him, before he could settle down to think more clearly. He licked rainwater off his lips, spotted a bench at one end of the east side of the garden and sat on it, barely feeling the dampness seep through his tracksuit.

Could they have factored it in all those years ago when the Soviets went into Afghanistan, and the US bankrolled Islamic forces to throw them out? If Jimmy Carter had just handed Afghanistan to Moscow, what difference would that have made now? The Soviet Union would have collapsed anyway. It was economically unsustainable and Afghanistan would never have spawned Bin Laden and his clones. Should they have spotted it in the winter of 2002 when Islamic parties had done so well in the elections in Pakistan? And then what should they have done? Rigged the elections? What about when North Korea had fired its first long-range missile over Japan in 1998? Why didn't Clinton strike then? What about when it declared its nuclear weapons in 2002, threw out inspectors and reactivated its nuclear reactor? Why didn't Bush go in then? Because he was fighting another war in another arena; and had President James H. West been in the White House in 2002, he would have done exactly the same.

And where does the hatred come from? Under the American umbrella, Japan and the whole of the western Pacific Rim had been able to pull themselves from poverty to prosperity. Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore were all shining examples of how to transfer from third world to first world society. Even Vietnam, which had given America a bloody nose, was now an ally. China, the long-term strategic rival, sent tens of thousands of students to American universities every year.

And did the Islamic world have any legitimate grievances? In the last half-century, had the US ever taken offensive action against a Muslim community? West stopped, letting this thought seep through. He pulled up the sodden sleeve of his tracksuit top and began counting on his fingers: 1956, the US went against Britain, France and Israel in the Suez War, and kept Gamal Abdel Nasser in power — even though he was becoming an ally of Moscow; 1971, the USS Enterprise was in the Bay of Bengal supporting Muslim Pakistan against India; 1973, the US forced a ceasefire on Israel and rescued Egypt from humiliation and defeat; 1979, Jimmy Carter persuaded the Shah of Iran to go into exile, rather than face down Tehran's demonstrators with tanks and bullets; 1980, Washington poured millions into Afghanistan to undermine the Soviet invasion; 1982, it arranged safe passage for the Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, from Beirut to Tunisia. US troops protected Bosnian Muslims against Christian Serbia; they died in Muslim Somalia trying to defend ordinary people against bloodthirsty warlords; they acted as an honest broker between Muslim Turkey and Christian Greece.

'What a load of bullshit,' muttered West to himself, getting up from the bench with more certainty in his step. Pakistan and North Korea were both failed states, run by failed and embittered leaders. America was an enemy of convenience, because both countries had been unable to provide for their people. And he was damned if he was going to compromise. He walked back towards the White House, a solitary but determined figure. He saw Kozerski by the window in the Oval Office and waved, because he knew what he would get his Chief of Staff to do next. He crouched down and picked a dozen daffodils from a bed, and held them up to Kozerski, who waved back, a mobile phone in his hand. Valerie had always said the daffodil was her favourite flower, because it showed that the darkness of winter was about to end.