The Third World War: A Terrifying Novel of Global Conflict

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Thousands of miles away, a few minutes earlier, massive engines had blasted into the reinforced-concrete base hewn into a mountain side. A North Korean medium-range, three-stage, solid-fuel Taepodong-2 missile had roared into the morning sky. While West and Brock had been discussing the turbulence in South-East Asia, every satellite camera and listening post in the region had picked up the launch and traced it to Manchon County, North Korea, 500 miles from the western Japanese coastline and 700 miles from Tokyo.

Just outside Tokyo, in an aircraft hangar at the US Yokata airbase, maintenance engineers and their families were having morning coffee together to bid some colleagues goodbye. Friends were reading out goodwill emails from those who could not be at the party. There was cheering, laughter and not a lot of concentration on what was going on around them. It was a tight cluster of people, a cross-section of American family life and ethnicity, including children who had been given a special late start to school for the event.

The Yokata US military airbase had a responsibility for forward projection and crisis response. It would be the primary supply base for troops fighting a war on the Korean peninsula. As many as 14,000 people lived there at any one time, and, most symbolically, it was less than thirty miles from downtown Tokyo — the military installation closest to the metropolitan area.

The missile flew over the glittering Tokyo skyline and across the northern Kanto Plain at the foothills of the Okutama Mountains before smashing through the roof of the aircraft hangar.

The roof split in two and the head of the missile crashed into the fuselage of a transport C-130 Hercules plane undergoing routine maintenance. The fin snapped on impact and flipped over on to the wing of a C-21 Learjet with such force that the wing broke off, letting vapourous aviation fuel into the atmosphere.

They were gathered at one end of the hangar near a stack of oxyacetylene welding tanks when the missile struck.

The electrical systems on the two aircraft shorted, throwing out sparks which ignited the aviation fuel, blasting a hole in the wall between the hangars and sending a fireball towards the welding tanks. The youngest child to die was eleven-year-old Carrie Berlin. Both her parents and older brother, Richard, died, too. Her younger twin brother and sister, Paul and Rebecca, were orphaned.

By dawn the fires were out, the body bags organized, the missile identified and the grieving had begun. Fifty-eight Americans were dead.