Dragonfire (21 page)

‘We’re not sympathizing with anybody, Ennio,’ Hastings replied impatiently. ‘Frankly, I don’t think we should say a damn thing. We’ve got two border
skirmishes in faraway places. Most people know Tibet through the movies and Nepal because of Mount Everest. By the time I get round to explaining what Bhutan is, the whole thing might be
fixed.’

The President’s Private Secretary rang through on the intercom. ‘The National Security Advisor asks if he could have a quick word. He knows you’re in a meeting and wants to
join it.’

Bloodworth came in a sports shirt and shorts and looked as if he had been trying to get an early night. He pulled out a batch of photographs. ‘These are our own images and show the
build-up of Indian armour and artillery along the border with Pakistan. I’ve just spoken to Chandra Reddy, their Foreign Intelligence chief. He warns us to back off any condemnation of
India’s military actions. He is convinced that China has flown into Pakistan either a proven tactical nuclear warhead or their version of the neutron bomb, and possibly the DF-21 missile. If
that’s true, Pakistan now has a credible strategy to deter an Indian armoured advance into its territory.’

‘How quickly could he use them?’ said Hastings.

‘If China has handed them over ready-to-use, as it were, they would be ready now. These pictures are about twenty-four hours old.’

‘I don’t buy it,’ said Holden. ‘Why would they break every rule in the book? Peddling nuclear technology. How far does the DF-21 go?’

‘Twelve hundred miles,’ said Bloodworth.

‘Then they’re breaking the Missile Technology Control Regime as well. I can’t see why they would do it.’

‘Why do you say that, Joan?’ said Hastings.

‘China craves stability. She has enormous internal problems of modernization and unemployment. She needs our technology and trade to develop. Why should she risk all that to support a
basket-case like Pakistan?’

‘Alvin. What’s your view?’ said Hastings.

‘The Chinese leadership enjoys believing that it could soon be a world power and it expects to play a leading role in Asia much sooner than that. For us in the West, there is nothing so
destabilizing as the arrival of a new economic and military power on the international scene. China is in a state of transition, switching suddenly between confidence and insecurity. It is an
adolescent, and adolescents are dangerous. It is suspicious of India and distrusts Russia and Japan.’

‘What does it think of us?’ said Barber, his eyes down studying the map.

‘Like many of our friends, allies and enemies in Asia, it sees America as a power in decline, drifting towards an obsession with domestic issues, no longer interested in being the
world’s policeman. Your policies since coming to office, Mr President, have underlined that view. Your predecessors were thought to be overly strong on human rights and democracy, but short
on vision and realpolitik. At least with you, they think they know where they stand.’

‘But I’m with Joan,’ said Hastings. ‘Why now? Why take the risk?’

‘Unelected national leaders rarely act rationally,’ said Bloodworth. ‘Tao sees a window. As Alvin said, he could be taking advantage of our more inward-looking policies. You
might not be here three years from now, and a new President could be much tougher and more involved with the China issue. Nor is Hari Dixit a warrior Prime Minister. Hamid Khan is, despite his
vision for development. He needs China to balance the power of the Islamic fundamentalists. The United States has proved to be an unreliable ally, so he is willing to ditch us completely and use
China to win Kashmir and prove his Islamic and national credentials.’

‘In order to control the fundamentalists?’

‘Correct.’

‘And China?’ said Hastings.

‘China realizes that India’s democratic status is beginning to attract American interest as a counterbalance to its own relationship with us,’ said Jebb. ‘It is also
worried that in the long term India’s economic reforms promise a much more successful economy because they are based on an established and impartial judicial and financial system.’

‘So India’s threat to China is not so much military as economic and diplomatic?’

‘Correct,’ said Jebb. ‘It is very difficult to see India and China confront each other seriously through conventional means. India is, and will remain for some time, the much
weaker power. But it could become the moral political beacon for Asia, in a similar role to that played by Japan – a functioning democracy and the rule of law underwritten by the United
States and the European Union.’

‘For the US, though, China has the far larger interest?’ said Holden.

‘That’s right, at the moment. But China believes that the world needs it as a global player. It studies incremental shifts in the balance of power and is gradually becoming more
assertive.’

‘What we should bear in mind is that Tao is doing nothing new in sending Pakistan a weapons package,’ said Bloodworth. ‘China is the main supplier to the military. It designed
Pakistan’s nuclear-weapons programme. It broke the MTCR in 1988 with a three-billion-dollar sale to Saudi Arabia. It has gunned its citizens down in Beijing’s main city square,
continued to ban political dissent and carries out ethnic repression in Tibet, Xinjiang and numerous other places. And Joan tells us our largest interest is with China and not India.’

‘Let me get this right,’ said Barber, folding up his map. ‘It seems that for years India has been kept preoccupied with Pakistan. If India was rid of this problem and sorted
out its economy it would move from having a local-power role to a much bigger regional role and China doesn’t want this. So China fuels the Pakistan conflict and keeps India weak.’

‘That’s about it,’ said Jebb.

‘I still don’t buy it,’ said Holden.

‘All right. Let’s move on,’ said Hastings, ‘because I assume Tom wouldn’t be in this room with twenty-four-hour-old imagery unless he thought there was a
problem.’

‘If India invades Pakistan, I don’t believe Pakistan’s first use of tactical nuclear weapons can be confined to the battlefield,’ said Bloodworth. ‘There are no
safeguards to stop it escalating into a full-scale nuclear exchange.’

‘Then it’s up to China to stop them, isn’t it?’ said Hastings.

China World Hotel, Beijing, China

Local time: 1400 Saturday 5 May 2007
GMT: 0600 Saturday 5 May 2007

Reece Overhalt, the
American Ambassador to Beijing and multibillionaire businessman, flicked through the television channels in the suite he had personally booked and
paid for in the China World Hotel. Jamie Song had called him two hours earlier, suggesting a quick and private drink. But he couldn’t come to the Embassy. Nor could the Ambassador be seen at
the Foreign Ministry. Since then Overhalt had talked to Hastings and was told to do everything within his power to bring China into line. He had also spent a difficult thirty minutes with the
Pakistani Ambassador, Javed Jabbar.

‘I honestly don’t know what you are talking about,’ Jabbar had said urbanely as Overhalt accused Pakistan of getting missiles and neutron bombs from China.

‘Would you necessarily know?’ pressed Overhalt. ‘There is a military government in charge now.’

‘Pakistan’s institutions are intact, Ambassador Overhalt. Personally, I’m surprised your government isn’t giving more support to General Khan. Is it that you find it
easier to deal with those singing to the tune of the Taleban or the Iranian mullahs, or are you more at home with buying your foreign leaders so that they are more answerable to America’s
beck and call?’

‘Let’s not go down an anti-America road, Javed,’ replied Overhalt. ‘The MV
Baldwin
—’

‘The
Baldwin
is bringing artillery shells from Korea to us. They have supplied us with these shells for years. Journalists who go up to the front have reported it. The fighting in
Kashmir ebbs and flows and right now there is an upsurge.’

‘Our information is that you are being given the DF-21 intermediate-range missile, which would break international regulations.’

‘Your regulations. Not ours,’ said Jabbar sharply. ‘If what you say is correct, it would be diplomatic madness for both us and China. We have just had a military takeover.
There is an Indian offensive going on in Kashmir. We are being accused of terrorism in India. At this very time, to import the weapons you suggest would brand us as a pariah state.’

‘Precisely,’ said Overhalt.

‘Then think again, Ambassador. For God’s sake think again. If you don’t it will be the end of a modern Pakistan.’

Doubt flitted back and forth as Overhalt ran through his conversation with Jabbar. Doubt about whether Tom Bloodworth had called it right. Doubt about whether Jabbar had been
sending Overhalt a message of admission by listing the steps Pakistan had taken towards isolating itself from the international community.

In the middle of his analysis, and more than two hours late, Jamie Song arrived, looking unusually confused and harassed. Overhalt took him out onto the balcony, just in case one of the many
Chinese intelligence agencies had bugged the room.

‘Sorry, I got delayed. Just as we were about to summon the Indian Ambassador for a third time, a bloody air war broke out over Bhutan.’

‘Togden’s dead, I gather,’ said Overhalt gently.

Song shrugged and leant on the balcony rails looking over the lights of Beijing. ‘Reece, I don’t know. And, frankly, I would like to say I don’t care. But I’m a wiser man
than that. Let me give you good advice. Your President’s instinct on this is right. Let us sort Tibet and Bhutan with the Indians and it will settle down. If you guys get involved, Europe
will get involved, and your politicians will be like lapdogs reacting to the democratic mob.’

‘That’s how things work nowadays, Jamie. Humanitarian foreign policy.’

‘Bullshit, Reece, and you know it. Let me tell you this. You succeeded in Kosovo, Timor and Iraq because these were dying regimes of a bygone age. Milosevic was no new Hitler. Saddam
Hussein was no new Ayatollah Khomeini. But India and China are new powers, Reece. In a hundred, a thousand years, when the American empire has collapsed, we will be ruling the world. Let us fight
our wars. Let the tectonic plates of history shift naturally.’

‘I’m more concerned about the next hundred days,’ said Overhalt.

‘Then accept what I am saying. If you had ever attended a meeting inside Zhongnanhai, you would understand that the longer we can keep things balanced, the better it is for everyone. It
could see us both to retirement. Tibet is one issue about which you don’t mess with us. Even a cosmopolitan man-of-the-world like me becomes a crazy nationalist when it comes to
Tibet.’

‘Those pictures were not very pleasant, Jamie.’

Song glanced sideways towards his friend: ‘Nor was My Lai or Kent State, Reece. Nor are the pictures of prison chain gangs in Alabama. One image does not represent a whole
nation.’

‘Point taken. But I’m not sure how the President would have to react if more of this got out.’

‘You lost the Vietnam War because the American public did not like the images of violence coming out of it. That was your choice. But the American people will not decide whether or not we
win our war in Tibet. If it helps the President, I’ll go on CNN and say precisely this. Lhasa was suffering riots. Just like America suffers riots. We have put them down and arrested the
ringleaders. Just like America does. It all started because Indian troops—’

‘Renegades, Jamie.’

‘You’re too big a man to quibble, Reece. Let me finish. We pursued some of those troops into Bhutan, just as you pursued the Vietnamese into Cambodia and Laos; just as you pursue
drug traffickers into Latin America. We have achieved our objectives and have now withdrawn.’

‘What about Pakistan, then?’

‘What about Pakistan?’

‘We have information that you’re shipping them missiles and nuclear technology.’

Jamie Song was silent for a moment: ‘You have this on authority?’

Overhalt nodded.

‘They’ve asked. They’ve been asking for years. If it’s happening, Reece, I don’t know. And that’s the truth.’

India–Pakistan border, Rajasthan, India

Local time: 1200 Saturday 5 May 2007
GMT: 0630 Saturday 5 May 2007

Lieutenant General Gurjit
Singh, commander of the Indian XXI Strike Armoured Corps, closed his eyes to acclimatize quickly to the bright desert sunlight, opened the tank
turret and lifted himself out of the cramped and dingy interior. If they were sent in, he anticipated at least seventy-two hours of continual combat before the Pakistani surrender. His ears were
already ringing with the constant radio traffic through his headphones. He took them off and jumped down onto the crusty surface of the Thar Desert to allow himself five minutes of clear
thinking.

His armoured deployment was as good as he could make it. But even for the new and most tested tanks the Rajasthan sector was one of the most difficult for armoured warfare. The desert was not
like in North Africa, where the sand was relatively hard. The surface of the Thar desert was loose and shifting. No wheeled vehicle could handle it, and even tracked vehicles could suddenly get
bogged down. There were very few paved roads, and once across the border all Pakistani territory was assumed mined.

Under his command were a thousand main battlefield tanks, an assortment of tracked armoured vehicles and a hundred thousand men. The advance armour would be led by the three-man T-72M1 Ajay main
battlefield tank (MBT), whose resistance to nuclear, biological and chemical attack had been proven in exercises. Its sensors could detect chemicals, viruses, bacteria and gamma rays released into
the air by an explosion. The filters ensured that contaminated air didn’t enter the crew chamber and there would be enough oxygen to continue advancing in hostile conditions for several
hours.