Third World War (45 page)

But the 20-kiloton warhead, which had exploded 1,600 feet above Chelmsford Road, midway between Connaught Place and New Delhi railway station, had demolished everything. Temperatures at the blast areas would have reached 3,000 degrees Celsius. The heat had no discrimination. Nothing appeared to have survived. Campbell was looking down on the instant ruination of a city. Everything, as far as his eye could see, was a wilderness.

He had been sent in because there had been no contact from the embassy bunker. The Indian embassy in Washington, out of touch with its government, had given permission for the Osprey to go in. The readings of radiation, atmosphere particles, biological agents and much more were being computer-analysed on board and read simultaneously by scientists in the United States and India. A real-time satellite link had been set up between the Osprey and the Indian Bhabha Atomic Research Centre just outside Mumbai.

Since flying in, contact had been made with Vasant Mehta, just a few hundred feet from Campbell, but in a sealed bunker underneath Raisana Hill. The video camera on the Osprey's wings was relaying images directly to the Indian command and control centre there.

To the east, Campbell spotted movement through a clear patch of sky. He got the pilot to change course. It took some seconds to realize what he was seeing, and identify the path of the Yamuna River which ran north-south on the eastern edge of the centre of Delhi.

The smoke was thicker there, caused by a line of funeral pyres, the cremation of the dead by those who had survived. Here, Campbell had reached the half-world, where some had lived through the first blast but in such a state that he had to turn his eyes away. He coughed through his breathing apparatus. The air he breathed was clear, but his senses were with the stench outside.

Those on the ground did not react to the Osprey. They were not seeking help. Things had gone too far, and they knew that by the end of the day they would most likely be dead, too. Campbell got the pilot to descend to just fifty feet, where he saw that the river was not covered in debris as he had thought. It was filled with blackened corpses bumping each other like logs. Hundreds of thousands must have fled to the water to escape the fire and then drowned. More corpses lay strewn on the river banks, most of them with no faces. Their eyes and mouths had been burned, their ears melted and their hair singed to the skull.

On the other side of the river, further from the centre of the blast, a man and a child were propped up on a bicycle, leaning against a railing. Both were dead, with no sign, though, of how their bodies had survived as they did. The trees all around had been burnt by fireballs leaping across the water.

A line of people crouched at the river's edge, drinking the fetid, blood-stained water, and from the tattered remnant of a blouse, Campbell saw that they were high-school girls. Their skin was cracked, their heads bald and their faces were barely recognizable as human. On the other side, a figure, its skin blackened and hanging off like a rag, started to cross by crawling over the bodies like a bridge. Halfway, it sank, and did not come up again.

It was then that someone pointed, and the eyes of the living became distinguishable from those of the dead. They looked up at the Osprey at the figure of Campbell half out of the aircraft, their eyes now looking for someone to come and help. As they pointed, blackened skin hung from their fingertips and elbows. Dark liquid ran down their arms, and he saw how shrivelled or how swollen their bodies were. A woman turned and he saw the imprint of a child on her breast, where the two must have been scorched together, but left to live a few hours more. She opened her mouth to plead with him, and froth oozed from her lips. Then she fell backwards, but she remained conscious, and even as she was falling, she managed to hold Campbell's eyes in a stare that made his blood run cold.

'Take her up,' he ordered the pilot, and as they went higher the scene became worse because there was more of it. But at least Campbell could no longer see the eyes of the dying individuals.

'Back to Chanakyapuri,' he instructed. 'We'll take a last look round the embassy.'

After the scenes at the river, the ashen desolation of Delhi's diplomatic area came as a relief. There was no life at all. Campbell ordered the aircraft down to fifty feet again, just high enough to escape the debris flung up by the rotor blades, asking the pilot to criss-cross the area so that NIMA could map at least this part of post-nuclear Delhi.

Through the intercom, the co-pilot was calling the embassy on the high-frequency radio. If anyone was alive down there, they were locked in concrete with no contact at all.

'We'll map Raisana Hill and Rajpath as well,' said Campbell. The Osprey turned north-east and just as the pilot was about to take it up again Campbell spotted movement way in the distance.

'Stop,' he said. 'Hold your altitude. Do you see anything due east?'

'Heading over there,' said the pilot. He edged the aircraft towards the area. Campbell took a GPS reading. Down below, two figures were on their feet and walking. They heard the aircraft, turned towards it and waved. Then he saw a third figure, a child, being held by one of them.'

'Lower the winch rope,' said Campbell.

With the Osprey hovering, Campbell clipped himself on and slid down through clouds of dust thrown up by the rotor blades. He lowered himself into a haze, stumbling forward, getting his balance on the soft, crumbling moon-like surface. He drew his pistol.

'US government,' he shouted. His voice was relayed from a speaker on his helmet. 'Please identify yourself.' Then he remembered that even if they heard him, they might not be able to reply.

Inch by inch he trod forward, groping in the dust cloud, which was beginning to settle. He turned on the flashlight on his helmet, and through the particles of thick dust swirling in front of him a figure stood with its hands up straight ahead of him.

He wiped the glass of his helmet, peered forward, saw the face of Meenakshi and only then registered that her survival suit had an emblem of the Stars and Stripes sewn on to the sleeve.

Behind her, carrying a child, was a man he recognized as Vasant Mehta's private secretary. But as for the child he was carrying, they must have put the suit on it as a desperate act of madness and compassion. It was dead, its face a crumpled burnt shape, like those by the river: no eyes, no nose, no mouth, no human features, only an imprint of the holocaust.

Meenakshi lowered her arms, began a step forward, but her bad leg couldn't take it and Campbell caught her as she fell.

****

48*

****

Washington, DC, USA*

'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.