The Third World War: A Terrifying Novel of Global Conflict

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'The only disaster we are equipped to deal with is an earthquake,' said Kiyoko, as Prime Minister Sato's disguised limousine edged through the Tokyo traffic. Sato rested his hand on her elbow but looked away, out of the tinted glass on to the teeming streets. After the tests, he had felt not exhilarated as he had expected but exceedingly tired, and he wanted to sleep for a very long time.

The later explosions over India and Pakistan had been picked up by satellites, even by passengers with video cameras on airliners not yet rerouted. Flaming red, encircled by grey and black and enveloped in the deep blue, stretched above the curve of the earth like a farewell banner.

'Start the broadcasts,' he said. He felt the shift of Kiyoko's arm as she concentrated on her telephone. He slid his window down a little. Bland music played from speakers in the streets. Then it stopped and a calm voice said: 'This is an emergency. Please go home. Close your businesses, go home and await further instructions.'

The pace on the street slowed. Heads tilted up to hear the message again. Confirmation was sought. The young found refuge in their mobile phones. The middle-aged, with families to protect, walked purposefully towards the nearest subway station. The elderly were reflective. A woman cried. A man dropped his walking stick and squatted on the cold pavement, his eyes looking far away. An old couple stopped, their faces worked over by the years, but their eyes as expressive as children's, while they heard the message for the third time. They embraced, clasped like statues, their age bringing a stillness to the street.

This was the generation that would have remembered Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They had lived through the firebombing of Tokyo. They were not the ones who had set Sato on the path to free Japan from its ties with America. Sato saw now, so clearly, that anyone who had lived through a nuclear attack would not care who ran their lives as long as they were safe. But they were not his constituents.

Kiyoko passed him the telephone. 'It is the White House,' she said gently.

Sato shook his head. 'Park Ho will launch on us,' he said. 'Jim West will tell me to do nothing. But I cannot do nothing, so we have nothing to discuss.'

They rode in silence. He looked up and saw they were at the corner of Hakumi-dori and Hibaya-dori, a junction dominated by the building from where General Douglas MacArthur ruled Japan after the Second World War. The driver turned north along Hibiya-dori into the Marunouchi district, the home turf of corporate Japan. What had happened to the glory days of the 1980s, when the names of Mitsui, Mitsubishi and Sony were the national flags of Japan's success? Since the seventeenth century Tokyo's commercial capital had been in the east of the city, but after the firebombing it had been rebuilt in Marunouchi, with wide streets and square, squat buildings.

Where would they rebuild it after this, wondered Sato. Kiyoko touched him on the elbow. He turned to her. He loved her, yet she was a stranger to him. He had asked if she wanted to go to safety. She had refused, and although the mantle was with Yamada, she had chosen to be with him, and he was grateful. The telephone call was from Yamada, but Sato did not need to take it. Yamada had his orders: he was to see the war through until a Japanese victory — whatever the cost.

Sato took in the sharp smells from outside, tobacco smoke and petrol fumes, then slid the window up. If he was doubtful, Kiyoko's eyes were cool and directly on him. There was an unmovable calmness in them.

He touched her hand, and Kiyoko relayed the message back to Japan's Defence Minister.

By trying to play God and change the shape of Japan, had Sato brought about its destruction? But if it had remained as it was now, entrapped by America, it would have become a slowly dying nation, bereft of ideas and a future.

Kiyoko closed the telephone. She took his hand. 'Don't try to judge,' she said softly. 'It has happened.'

Across the road, Sato saw the line of cypress trees and the wall that marked the boundary of the Imperial Palace. The moat was serene and flat, and he watched in it the orange reflection of the sky lighting up with a flash and the ripples gently spreading out.

He had seen Delhi. He knew what would happen. Sato tasted something bitter in the back of his throat.