The Edge of Madness (15 page)

Washington was gasping, bent double, sucking in deep lungfuls of air. ‘You must have hit a rabbit hole,’ he exclaimed.

‘You’re probably right,’ Harry replied. ‘I’ll remember to avoid it on the second lap.’

Slowly Washington raised himself from his crouch, his eyes wide with confusion. ‘What?’

‘That could only have been around four miles. I normally do eight. You up for it?’

‘You’re…’ Washington was about to suggest that the other man was indulging in a joke, but as he straightened himself, still panting, he noticed that Harry’s breathing was alarmingly regular.

‘Come on,’ Harry urged, ‘it’ll make room for breakfast.’

‘I’m afraid I have work to do. Otherwise…’

‘Sure. I’ll see you later, then.’ And Harry took to his heels once more. Sometimes, men like Washington just had to be put in their place.

Early Saturday morning. Sizewell, on the Suffolk coast.

The golf-ball dome of Sizewell’s second reactor could be seen for many miles along the long stretch of
Suffolk’s heritage coast, near the small fishing village that bore the same name. It was Britain’s newest nuclear power station, facing out across the North Sea, with its riches of fishing grounds and oilrigs and its control of the navigation routes that gave access to London and many of the other major ports of northern Europe. As was appropriate with a nuclear reactor in such an extraordinarily sensitive area, Sizewell B was fitted with the latest security systems. Safety, as the power company proclaimed, not afraid to grasp the cliché, was their number-one priority.

So when the reactor desk engineer, sitting before his array of screens, keyboards and buttons in the control room, noticed that the pressure inside the reactor core was slowly creeping up, he decided to investigate. Nothing would be left to chance. Irrespective of the corporate clichés, he took pride in his work, and his family lived only a bicycle ride from the plant. He wanted to know what was going on.

But the engineer could find nothing wrong, apart from the gentle tickle of pressure. None of the other safety systems was registering any fault or problem, it was a bit of a mystery. So he picked up his blue phone and instructed other engineers to take a look around the plant itself, checking the hardware, the nuts, bolts, rivets and turbines from which Sizewell was constructed, to make sure everything was operating as it should be. He wasn’t going to accept the word of the instruments in the control room, it was
always better to find out what was going down on the other side of the door. But it seemed everything was in order.

Except, that is, for the slow drift upwards of the pressure in the reactor core.

Perplexed, but conscientious, he discussed it with his colleagues in the control room. No one had an explanation, so they decided to call in the duty physicist. He’d be able to figure out what was going on. He lived, as regulations required, no more than an hour away, but there was a problem. On a hot August holiday weekend near the coast, with tourists hauling their trailers and caravans and clogging every approach road, that hour was going to stretch well beyond its sixty minutes.

Sizewell B didn’t have sixty minutes. Its core was already melting, because five thousand miles away, in Shanjing, the morning shift had assembled and that final button had been pushed.

Saturday morning. Castle Lorne.

Breakfast. Even condemned men are allowed it. The meal was served next to the kitchen in an informal room that the family used for recreation. When Harry arrived, D’Arby had already set anchor to a wicker chair drawn up in front of the television in a far corner. A single slice of toast was on a plate beside him, but he had done no more than nibble, his attentions fixed to the screen. It was tuned to the news. Shunin sat apart, at a low table by the windows with a view over the rocks. He was playing chess, by himself, clearly not wishing to be disturbed. And at a sideboard laden with everything required for a self-service breakfast, Blythe Edwards was hovering over a selection of cereal, porridge, grilled bacon and kippers.

‘Sleep well?’ Harry enquired.

‘A little.’ She stretched out to squeeze his hand.

‘What’s that for?’

‘Nothing. Nothing in particular. Just for caring.’ She
couldn’t manage a smile, but there was steel behind her eyes. ‘We’ve got a busy day, I guess, deciding what to do with the world. So why do I find it so difficult to make up my mind what to eat for breakfast?’

‘Take the kippers. They’ll be from Loch Fyne, not far from here. The best in the world.’

‘And there’s another man telling me what to do.’ Ouch, she was on edge, and rushed to apologize. ‘I’m sorry, Harry, I didn’t mean it like that.’

‘I still suggest the kippers.’ He smiled.

Almost without their noticing, Shunin had joined them at the sideboard. He picked up a fork and began prodding the contents of each dish in turn, a Cossack picking over the battlefield. Harry looked closely at him. The eyes were rimmed with a reddish crust of sleeplessness, and there were midge bites, angry, incriminating, on his cheek and the back of his hand.

‘Did you enjoy your game of chess, Mr President?’ Harry asked.

‘Yes. I won. I always win, Mr Jones,’ he replied, before wandering off with a laden plate.

‘That man plays with himself too much,’ Harry muttered.

Then, as if on cue, Marcus Washington walked in. He offered a brief greeting to Blythe but seemed reluctant to accept Harry’s persistent suggestion that he join them; instead he wandered off, muttering something about macrobiotic yogurt.

Suddenly their breakfast plans were interrupted by a
low moan from the far end of the room. D’Arby was scrabbling for the remote control, switching up the volume, waving for their attention. It was the latest CNN report from Beijing. More troops on the streets. A clampdown on the Internet. Many foreign websites blocked. An eerie silence from the government quarter in Zhongnanhai.

It was as though China was drawing itself in, like a tiger waiting to pounce. Blythe pushed her plate away, her food untouched. D’Arby sat silently shaking his head. From his seat by the window, Shunin knocked over his white king and stomped out of the room.

They had agreed to resume their business at ten, but Shunin thrashed the gong some minutes early, loud enough to shake even the ancient mortar. As they began to assemble around the dining table once more, Lavrenti stumbled down to join them, bleary eyed.

‘Sorry. Overslept,’ he muttered, his eyes dancing in apology around the room.

‘Shut up and sit down,’ Shunin snapped, in a humourless manner that seemed to have the same affect on Lavrenti as a cold shower. As he was bidden, he found his place and sat silently.

‘Mr Washington, I believe you had the floor,’ Shunin observed, laying claim to command of the bridge.

‘My point is this,’ Washington began, ‘the Chinese threat is like a weed. Hack off its head and it just sprouts up again all over the place, ever stronger. So
there’s no point in taking out Mao without taking out their cyber-war facilities, too. We have to disarm them, otherwise we may as well be pulling the tail of a hungry bear.’ He sat back and began a distracted examination of the pictures hanging on the wall.

‘And that’s it?’ D’Arby muttered.

‘What more do you need, Prime Minister?’ Washington replied, his voice buttered in condescension.

D’Arby spread his hands, clutching for something that was clearly eluding him. ‘A little elaboration, perhaps. Some deeper justification for what it is I think you’re proposing.’

‘What part of it don’t you understand? If you could explain that to me, I’ll be happy to
elaborate
. Draw a few diagrams. Beginning with the bear’s backside.’

Blythe interrupted the spat. ‘Marcus, let’s take the animosity out of this, shall we?’

‘Forgive me, Madam President, but I don’t see how we can. Animosity is the name of the game we’re playing right now, in its most extreme and absolute form.’

He glared defiantly at D’Arby, who pushed his chair back from the table and rose to pour himself a cup of coffee, anything to put distance between himself and the obnoxious academic. It was Harry who picked up the gauntlet.

‘You said we should be “taking out” their facilities. Can you be more specific?’

‘Taking out,’ Washington repeated. ‘As in obliterat
ing. Destroying. Blitzing the barnacles off them. Most of these cyber-warfare ops are soft targets, in university campuses, civilian research complexes, that sort of thing. We’re not talking hardened nuclear-missile sites here, this isn’t Strangelove territory. And of course we have to use our own cyber resources to attack them, cyber on cyber, but frankly that’s entirely unknown territory. So we have to add a little muscle to the mix.’

Blythe interjected, her voice as full of soft uncertainties as her adviser’s was of confidence. She turned to Shunin. ‘And what about you, Mr President? What are your thoughts?’

The Russian rested his forehead on the tips of his fingers, as though trying to complete some electrical circuit to stimulate his troubled mind. He thought of Chernobyl, and of Sosnovy Bor that had come within moments, within a few blobs of misplaced molten metal, of total destruction. Had that happened, it would have destroyed St Petersburg, his birthplace, the most magnificent city in all the Russias. And it would have destroyed him. That’s why they’d chosen Sosnovy Bor, because of him, of that he was sure. For Shunin, this had become very personal.

His head came up. ‘A question first. For Mr D’Arby. Your little Oriental tart has put you at an advantage. Tell me, in your view, in
her
view, was Chernobyl down to them?’

Chernobyl. The bringer of death. It had promised
eternal light yet it had cast his world into darkness. Of all the psychological burdens born by the leaders of Russia, that was perhaps the greatest.

D’Arby knew he had his moment. He was standing beside the great fireplace, cup in hand, and while they waited he put it slowly to one side. Then, as they all stared, he shook his head. ‘No, Mr President. It was too early for that. I believe that Chernobyl was nothing more than an accident–a Russian accident. But it gave the Chinese a template. Chernobyl was their inspiration.’

‘In what way?’

‘What Chernobyl did wasn’t simply to inflict colossal physical damage, like a missile strike. It went much further. It inflicted dread. It’s a name known throughout the world, and although not one per cent actually understands what went on there, everyone fears it. It’s the perfect psyops–scaring your enemy into submission. It’s the very uncertainty of something like Chernobyl that rips at the entrails, and that’s what the Chinese are so very good at, sticking pins in the right points. It’s psychological acupuncture. In the days of the early Han dynasties they’d set off rockets and beat drums to frighten the wits out of the barbarians without a sword being raised in anger. Now, a thousand years later, they want to do the same. Quite simply, they want to drown us in despair.’

Yet, even as they listened to his analysis, the Chinese were making a few other plans, too.

Saturday mid-morning. The Sizewell B reactor, Suffolk.

Ninety minutes after he had been summoned the duty physicist still hadn’t made it to the nuclear plant. Police were trying to clear an accident on the road up ahead, he couldn’t turn round, and no amount of increasingly animated mobile-phone discussions with the control room got him any nearer to the answer of what was going on within the reactor.

The instruments were indicating that the pressure in the core was still gently, tantalizingly, rising, but the rest of the system seemed in good order. Temperatures were stable, the cooling system was functioning as it should. The system was designed to adjust the flow of coolant to the core so that the reactor remained at the right temperature, hot enough to create the steam required to drive the turbines, yet cool enough to keep the process under control.

What no one could know was that the instrumentation had been, to use a basic engineering term, stuffed. It had been persuaded that it was delivering too much coolant to the core, so it had begun to cut back. That was causing the temperature inside the reactor to rise but this instrumentation, too, had been compromised.

It wasn’t like Chernobyl, where the water had been turned to steam in such quantities that it created pressure so huge that it had blown the top off the reactor. What
was happening at Sizewell B was more like the nightmare that had struck Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania a few years before Chernobyl. Not enough water was getting to the fuel rods to cool them. The rods themselves were beginning to melt. As they turned to liquid, they began to form a puddle at the bottom of the reactor vessel. It was double-skinned, made of steel, but even hardened steel was no match for temperatures that were beginning to resemble those found a stone’s throw from the sun.

Saturday mid-morning. Castle Lorne.

D’Arby was still holding forth, pacing up and down in front of the fireplace, a teacher before his class.

‘You see, the People’s Liberation Army are still light-years behind us. They could never beat us in a straight fight. Our bombs and missiles are so good they can reach their targets with pinpoint accuracy–we see it all, even the horror on the face of the truck driver in that fraction of a moment before he gets it right between the eyes. The Chinese are trying to do the job more subtly–and more cheaply. Instead of blowing that truck driver to bits, they want to scare the crap out of him, cutting off his fuel supplies, sending his truck on the wrong road, loading it with the wrong cargo…He ends up not knowing what the hell he’s doing or where he’s going. And for that single truck driver you can read an entire Western country–you, me, any of us. It’s all about psychological rather than physical
advantage, ying instead of yang or whatever the correct terminology is. Everything straight from Sun Tzu.’

‘Hacker wars,’ Washington declared. ‘Their recent literature is full of it.’

‘Winning without fighting,’ Shunin muttered.

‘So, what conclusion do you draw from this, Mr President?’ Blythe repeated, pushing him once more.

‘I conclude,’ the Russian responded, ‘that Mr Washington’s point has significant merit. If you’re going tiger-hunting, you’d better carry a damned big stick. Or perhaps you would prefer to wait until the tiger has you in its jaws and your country is little more than breakfast, Madam President?’

She returned his cold stare. ‘Mr Shunin, I live in a democracy. It means I have to tread carefully.’

‘I understand democracy. I have millions of democrats in Russia.’

‘Not all of them in gulags, I trust.’

He lunged forward in his chair, filled with passion. ‘If we don’t show them we mean business straight from the start, get it over and done with, then we lose control. We’ll be playing into the hands of every Islamist, terrorist and rebel, all the stinking parasites that have wormed their way into our systems. Show any hesitation, any doubt, the slightest sign of weakness, and they’ll crawl out of their sewers and get on with the job of ripping our countries apart!’ His hands were clenched, his fists like clubs. ‘But open your minds. By God, this isn’t just a crisis, it’s also an opportunity. To
get rid of those soul-sucking bastards once and for all. While we’re cleaning out the Chinese stables, we can clean out our own, too. You get re-elected, I get on with sorting out Russia. Why, in five years’ time we could be looking back and wondering why we ever hesitated.’

They all understood what he was suggesting. His price for getting involved with the Chinese was a free hand to deal with those little local difficulties that had proved such a distraction. China, Chechnya–it was all much the same to him. They were threats that required squashing, and he wanted no chorus of complaint from squeamish Western souls.

His performance was interrupted by the arrival of Nipper to check the supply of tea and coffee, but Lavrenti had other ideas. As D’Arby helped himself to more coffee and offered some to Blythe, Lavrenti Konev wandered over to the sideboard and poured a large whisky. Harry glanced at his watch. It was a little early, even for a Russian.

When they were all resettled, it was D’Arby who spoke first. He grew reflective, his voice softer, and all the more penetrating for it. ‘Let me say a few words, if you’ll allow me, about how I see our position. We have come here as leaders from our different backgrounds, bringing with us our often rival loyalties and competing ambitions. And leadership can be a harsh calling, it rarely leaves us easy options. We seek not crowns or personal enrichment, we do what we do for one reason above all else. That reason is the love of our homeland.
And in her service we are little more than slaves. Our first duty is not to ourselves nor to those things we wish to be remembered by, but to our country. Sometimes that means we are required to do things we find distasteful, painful–yes, even occasionally unprincipled, because we all know that this imperfect world of ours is built of confusing colours. Those who seek a straight path to the gates of glory are either saints or more often sad failures. None of us sought this challenge which now faces us but we cannot shrink from it, no matter how much we would wish it otherwise. For my part, I can only say that I will do what I believe is right, not for my own peace of mind but for my people, whatever that takes.’ He picked out the words one by one. ‘
Whatever
that takes.’