Never, p.68
Never, page 68
Jianjun would not meet Kai’s eye. He said: “I have no son.”
“Ah, but I have a father,” said Kai.
Chapter 42
Pauline had killed hundreds of people, perhaps thousands, by bombing North Korean military bases, and more would have been maimed by the blast and ravaged by the radiation. In her head she knew she had done the right thing: General Pak’s murderous regime had to be closed down. But no amount of reasoning could make her feel all right about it in her heart. Every time she washed her hands she thought of Lady Macbeth trying to get the blood off.
She had spoken to the nation on television at eight o’clock this morning. She had announced that the nuclear threat from North Korea was now over. The Chinese and others should understand that this was the fate that awaited any group that used nuclear weapons against the US or its allies. She had received messages of support from more than half the world’s leaders, she reported: a rogue nuclear regime was a threat to everyone. She urged calm but did not assure the audience that everything was going to be all right.
She feared the Chinese would retaliate, though she did not tell them that. The thought filled her with dread.
Telling people not to panic was never effective, and the flight out of American cities grew. Every major town center was gridlocked. Hundreds of cars formed lines at border crossings into Canada and Mexico. Gun stores sold out of ammunition. At a Costco in Miami a man was shot dead in a quarrel over the last box of twelve cans of tuna.
Immediately after the broadcast, Pauline and Pippa got into Marine One to fly to Munchkin Country. Having been up all night, Pauline catnapped on the way. When the helicopter landed she did not want to open her eyes. She would grab an hour or two of sleep later, if she could.
As the elevator took them down, Pauline was grateful to be deep underground, then she felt cowardly for thinking of her own safety, then she looked at Pippa and was glad again.
The first time she came to Munchkin Country she had been a visiting celebrity inspecting a showpiece. Everything had been pristine, the atmosphere calm. It was different today. Now the place was functioning and the corridors were bustling, mostly with people in uniform. Pauline’s cabinet and senior Pentagon officers were moving in. Store cupboards were being resupplied, and half-empty cardboard boxes were everywhere. Engineers accessed environmental control machinery, checking and oiling and double-checking. Orderlies were putting towels in the bathrooms and setting tables in the officers’ mess. The air of brisk efficiency did not quite mask the undertone of suppressed fear.
Round-faced General Whitfield welcomed her, looking strained. Last time, he had been the amiable curator of a never-used facility; today he bore the crushing weight of managing what might be the last holdout of American civilization.
Pauline’s accommodation was modest, for a presidential suite: one bedroom, a sitting room that doubled as an office, a kitchen nook, and a compact bathroom with a combined shower and bathtub. It was appropriately basic, like a midrange hotel, with cheap framed prints and a green carpet. There was a constant background sound of blowers and the unnatural smell of purified air. Wondering how long she would have to live here, she suffered a pang of regret for leaving the opulent palace that was the White House Residence. But this was about survival, not comfort.
Pippa had a single room nearby. She was excited by the move and eager to explore the bunker. “It’s like that moment in an old western movie when they circle the wagons,” she said.
She assumed that her father would be joining them later, and Pauline did not disabuse her. One shock at a time.
She offered Pippa a soda from the refrigerator. “You have a minibar!” Pippa said. “All I have is bottled water. I should have brought candy.”
“There’s a store here. You can buy some.”
“And I can go shopping without the Secret Service. What a treat!”
“Yes, you can. This is the safest place in the world.” Which was ironic, she thought.
Pippa saw the irony too. Her elation evaporated. She sat down, looking pensive. “Mom, what really happens in a nuclear war?
Pauline recalled asking Gus, less than a month ago, to remind her of the bare facts, and she felt again her own dread as he reprised the litany of agony and destruction. Now she gazed lovingly at her daughter, who was wearing an old pauline for president T-shirt. Pippa’s expression showed curiosity and concern rather than fear. She had never known violence or heartbreak. She deserves the truth, Pauline thought, even though it will upset her.
All the same she softened the details. In the first one millionth of a second, a fireball is formed two hundred yards wide. Everyone within it dies instantly. She changed that to: “First of all, many people are killed instantly by the heat. They would know nothing about it.”
“Lucky them.”
“Maybe.” The blast flattens buildings for a mile around. Almost everyone in that area dies. “Then the blast destroys property and brings down debris.”
Pippa said: “So what would the, like, authorities be doing?”
“No country in the world has enough doctors and nurses to cope with the casualties from nuclear war. Our hospitals would be overwhelmed and many people would die for lack of medical attention.”
“But how many?”
“It depends how many bombs. In a war between the US and Russia, both of which have huge stockpiles of nuclear weapons, probably about a hundred and sixty million Americans would die.”
Pippa was bemused. “But that’s, like, half the country.”
“Yes. The danger right now is a war with China, which has a smaller stockpile, but we still think something like twenty-five million Americans would be killed.”
Pippa was good at arithmetic. “One person in thirteen.”
“Yes.”
She was trying to imagine it. “That’s thirty of the kids in my school.”
“Yes.”
“Fifty thousand inhabitants of DC.”
“And that’s only the beginning, I’m afraid,” said Pauline. I might as well give her the whole horror, she thought. “The radiation causes cancers and other illnesses for years to come. We know this from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where the first nuclear bombs exploded.” She hesitated, then added: “And what happened in Korea today is like thirty Hiroshimas.”
Pippa was close to tears. “Why did you do it?”
“To prevent something worse.”
“What could be worse?”
“General Pak nuked two cities. The third might have been in the US.”
Pippa looked troubled. “American lives aren’t worth more than Korean lives.”
“All human life is precious. But the American people chose me to be their leader, and I promised to protect them. I’m doing my damnedest. And I can’t think of anything, in the last two months, that I could have done that would have prevented what’s happening now. I averted a war on the Chad-Sudan border. I tried to stop countries from selling guns to terrorists. I let the Chinese get away with sinking a Vietnamese ship. I wiped out ISGS camps in the Sahara Desert. I held back from invading North Korea. I can’t see one of those as the wrong decision.”
“What about the nuclear winter?”
Pippa was relentless, but she was entitled to answers. “The heat from nuclear explosions starts thousands of fires, and the smoke and soot rise high into the atmosphere and block the sunlight. If hundreds of bombs go off, even thousands, the darkening of the sun will cool the Earth and reduce rainfall. Some of our biggest farming regions may become too cold or dry to grow crops. Therefore, many of the people who survived the blast and the heat and the radiation will end up starving to death.”
“So it’s the end of the human race?”
“Probably not, if Russia stays out of the war. Even in the worst case, a few people will probably live on in places where there is sunshine and rain. But in any scenario it’s the end of the civilization that we know.”
“I wonder what life will be like then.”
“There are a thousand novels about that, and each one tells a different story. The truth is that no one knows.”
“It would be better if nobody had nuclear weapons.”
“Which isn’t going to happen. It’s like asking Texans to give up their guns.”
“Maybe we could all just have not so many.”
“That’s called arms control.” Pauline kissed Pippa. “And that, my clever daughter, is the beginning of wisdom.” She had spent a long time explaining life to Pippa, but she had to take care of all the other Americans too. She picked up the remote for the TV. “Let’s watch the news.”
An anchor said: “Millions of American homes and workplaces are without electricity this morning after faults developed in the computers of several different power providers. Some commentators suspect that the faults have all been caused by the release of a single software virus.”
Pauline said: “It’s the Chinese.”
“Can they do that?”
“Yes. And we’re probably doing similar things to them. It’s called cyber warfare.”
“Lucky we’re okay here.”
“This place has an independent power supply.”
“I wonder why they decided to attack the power to ordinary homes.”
“It’s one of a dozen different things they will have tried. Ideally they want to sabotage military communications, so that we can’t launch missiles and scramble planes. But our military software is heavily defended. Civilian security systems aren’t as good.”
Pippa looked hard at Pauline and said perceptively: “Your words are reassuring but your face is worried.”
“You’re right, honey. I think we can survive the cyberattack. But something else is worrying me. In Chinese military philosophy the cyberattack is a prelude. What follows is real war.”
* * *
Abdul drove out of Nice heading west along the coast, with Kiah beside him and Naji strapped into a child seat in the back. He had bought a small two-door family car, three years old. The driving position was a bit cramped for his tall frame but it was all right for short distances.
The road ran beside deserted Mediterranean beaches and restaurants shuttered for winter. There were traffic jams in Paris and other big cities as frightened people headed for the countryside, but the Côte d’Azur was an unlikely nuclear target, and although people here were scared, they could not think of anywhere safer to go.
Kiah had little knowledge of global politics and was only vaguely aware of nuclear weapons, so she did not appreciate the awfulness of what might happen, and Abdul did not enlighten her.
He stopped the car at a large marina in a small town. He checked a device in his pocket and was reassured by a signal the same as the one he had picked up on his first visit here, two days earlier.
He parked the little car and he and Kiah got out and inhaled the bracing sea air. They put on the new winter coats they had bought in Galeries Lafayette. The sun was warm, but there was a breeze, and for people used to the Sahara Desert this was cold weather. Kiah had picked a tailored black cloth coat with a fur collar that made her look like a princess. Abdul had a blue reefer jacket that gave him a nautical air.
Kiah got Naji into his new down coat and knitted hat. Abdul unfolded the stroller and they made Naji comfortable in it. “I’ll push him,” Kiah said.
“I’ll do it, I don’t mind.”
“It’s demeaning for a man. I don’t want people to think you’re henpecked.”
Abdul smiled. “French people don’t think like that.”
“Have you looked around? There are thousands of Arabs in this part of the world.”
It was true. The area of Nice in which they were living had a high percentage of ethnic North Africans.
Abdul shrugged. It really did not matter who pushed the stroller, and in time Kiah would probably change her ideas. There was no need to hurry her.
They ambled around the marina. Abdul had thought that maybe Naji would like to see the boats, but it was Kiah who reacted. She was amazed. She had been a boat owner, but she had never seen vessels like this. The smallest cabin cruiser seemed astonishingly luxurious to her. On some of them the owners were cleaning or painting or just sitting having drinks. There was a handful of large oceangoing yachts. Abdul stopped to look at one called Mi Amore. Crew in white uniforms were washing the windows. “It’s bigger than the house I used to live in!” Kiah said. “What is it for?”
“It’s for him.” Abdul pointed to a man in a big chunky sweater sitting on the sun deck with two young women who were underdressed for the weather and looked cold. They were drinking champagne. “Just for his pleasure.”
“I wonder where he got all that money.”
Abdul knew where the man had gotten the money.
They walked around the marina for an hour. There were four cafés, three closed and one open though not busy. Inside it was clean and warm, with gleaming silver coffee machines and a briskly efficient proprietor who smiled at Naji and told them to sit anywhere they liked. They chose a table by the window with a good view of the boats, including Mi Amore. They took off their coats and ordered hot chocolate and pastries.
Abdul cooled some of the drink on a spoon and fed it to Naji. He loved it and asked for more.
If this afternoon went according to plan, Abdul’s mission would be over by nightfall.
After that he could no longer pretend, to his employers or to himself. He would have to face the fact that he did not want to go home. But he had enough money for several months of idleness, and he was not sure the human race had that much time left.
When he looked at Kiah and Naji, he felt sure of one thing: he was not going to leave them. He had found a quiet contentment in his life with them, and he would never give it up. He knew what was happening in Korea, and however much time he had left—sixty years or sixty hours or sixty seconds—all he cared about was spending it with them.
He saw two small vessels enter the marina, a speedboat and a fast dinghy, both white with red and blue stripes and the word police in large letters. They belonged to the Police Judiciaire, which was the national serious crime force, a bit like the FBI.
A moment later he heard sirens, and several police cars entered the marina from the road. Ignoring the no entry signs, they drove along the quay dangerously fast. Kiah said: “I’m glad we’re not in their way!”
Both cars and boats approached Mi Amore.
The police jumped out of the cars. They were heavily armed. They all had pistols in holsters at their belts, and some of them were carrying rifles. They moved rapidly. Some spread out along the quayside while others crossed the gangway quickly and boarded the yacht. This had been planned and rehearsed, Abdul was glad to see.
Kiah said: “I don’t like those guns. They might go off by accident.”
“Let’s stay here in the café. It’s probably the safest place.”
The white-uniformed crew of the Mi Amore all raised their hands in the air.
Several of the cops went belowdecks.
One with a rifle went up to the sun deck. The big man spoke to him, waving his arms angrily. The cop seemed unconcerned, holding his rifle and shaking his head.
Then a big muscular cop came up on deck hefting a large sack made of heavy-duty polythene imprinted with the words caution—dangerous chemicals in several languages.
Abdul recalled a nighttime scene on a dockside in Guinea-Bissau, and men unloading sacks like that by lamplight while a limousine waited, its engine turning over. “Bingo,” he said softly to himself.
Kiah heard and looked at him with curiosity, but she did not ask for an explanation.
The crew were handcuffed, led off the yacht, and pushed into the back of a van. The big man and his girls got similar treatment, despite the man’s outrage. A few more people emerged from belowdecks and they too were handcuffed and put into vehicles.
The last person to be brought up from below looked familiar.
He was a pudgy young North African man wearing a green sweatshirt and grubby white shorts. Around his neck was a string of beads and stones that Abdul had seen before.
Kiah said: “It can’t be Hakim, can it?”
“Looks like him,” said Abdul. In fact he knew. The men running the enterprise had decided, for some reason, that Hakim should accompany the consignment all the way to France, and here he was.
Abdul got up and stepped outside to see better. Kiah stayed inside with Naji.
A cop took hold of Hakim’s grigri necklace and yanked it hard. The chain broke and the stones fell to the quay. Hakim let out a cry of grief: his magical protection was gone.
The cops laughed as the ornaments bounced on the concrete.
While they were distracted, Hakim dived off the quay into the water and began swimming strongly.
Abdul was surprised that Hakim could swim so well. Not many desert folk could swim at all. Hakim might have learned in Lake Chad.
All the same his escape bid was hopeless. Where could he go? If he came out of the water onto the quay or the beach he would just be seized again. If he swam out of the harbor he would probably drown in the open sea.
In any case he was not going to get that far. The two cops in the dinghy went after him. One steered the inflatable boat while the other took out a telescopic steel baton and extended it to its full length. They caught up with Hakim easily, and the cop with the baton lifted it high, then hit Hakim’s head with full force.
Hakim’s head went underwater and he changed direction, still swimming fast, but the dinghy followed and the cop hit him again, missing his head but striking his elbow. Blood appeared in the seawater.
Hakim kept struggling, swimming with one arm and trying to keep his head under the surface, but the cop held the baton ready, and as soon as Hakim came up for air the cop hit him again. The officers on the quay cheered and clapped.
