Philip Kerr - Esau

‘China and India have always been rivals,’ said Boyd. ‘India only went for the bomb after China exploded its first device in 1964, two years after they’d fought a border war, which the Chinese won. Meanwhile the odd Soviet Union was arming the Indians because they were just happy to have an ally against the Chinese. The Russians had their own little border war going with the Chinese, in Manchuria. Pakistan is an Islamic country that has helped many of the former Soviet Union’s own Islamic republics to try and break away from Russian control. It’s natural that the Russians should be opposed to Pakistan. And so it goes.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Swift said quietly. ‘This is all my fault. I should never have brought any of you up here. If I hadn’t been so—’

‘Cut it out,’ said Cody, interrupting her. ‘We all knew the risks we were taking when we signed on for this expedition.’ He looked pointedly at Lincoln Warner, as if daring the other man to contradict him. ‘Besides, we found what we were looking for.’

‘Maybe so,’ said Warner. ‘But shouldn’t we now be thinking about getting out of here? I mean, what are we doing just sitting around, waiting for something to happen?’

‘Where do you suggest we go?’ said Boyd. ‘You said yourself, we’re right in the middle of things. Up here may actually be safer than any of the places we could go to. Delhi, Calcutta, Dacca, maybe even Hong Kong. Temporarily at least, this could be as safe as anywhere else.’

‘Boyd’s right,’ croaked Jack. ‘We should stay put and hope it blows over.’

‘Isn’t that just the problem?’ said Warner. ‘The fallout. It might very well blow over us. It might have happened already and we just don’t know about it.’

‘Again,’ said Cody, ‘selfish but accurate. Link? Have you ever thought of working for the U.S. State Department?’

‘At this kind of height, we’d probably be okay,’ said Boyd. ‘Anyway, we’d know if there had been.’

‘How’s that?’ said Warner.

‘We’d know if there had been any kind of nuclear exchange in this region,’ explained Boyd, ‘because an electromagnetic pulse would have been generated by the blasts, affecting all semiconductor devices. Radios, computers, telecommunications, you name it. Kind of like a lightning strike, except much more rapid. The radio may be a little temperamental right now. Probably some bad weather on the way. But we’re still getting e-mail. I just got a letter from my girlfriend. There’s still a world outside, folks.’ He chuckled unpleasantly. ‘At least for the time being.’

The standard perspective on the nuclear security of the Indian subcontinent was that a failure of deterrence would be the most likely cause of any nuclear conflict between India and Pakistan. Consequently, this received far more attention as a possible path to war than what the strategic analysts termed — with typical massive understatement — inadvertence . But even then, ran the conventional wisdom, inadvertence could in itself prevent a crisis from escalating. Command and control dysfunctions and other non-rational factors that might cause two countries to blunder into war would, it was argued, actually motivate rational statesmen and — women to step back from the abyss of full-fledged nuclear war.

Such thinking was fine during the Cold War, when the two principal antagonists, the United States and the Soviet Union, had been enemies for only a few decades. It counted for nothing when applied to an essentially religious conflict that was at least twelve centuries old. Moreover, religious faith was, by its very definition, irrational. When presidents and prime ministers took advice from their joint chiefs of staff, things promised to turn out better than when they accepted the recommendation of their respective gods.

Even before the cooling-off period brokered by the U.S. secretary of state, both the Indian and Pakistani governments had brought all their strategic and tactical forces to a state of maximum readiness: Unlock codes had been distributed, targets assigned, contingent times of future launches designated — so that if the enemy did attack, one code word would be all that was required to order a retaliatory strike. To further safeguard against the threat of state decapitation, given the vulnerability of centralized command and control systems, each side had disseminated its code word to the two commanders in the field so that they might employ nuclear missiles at their discretion, provided they were needed to repulse an attack and provided the commander was unable to receive direct orders from his head of state. It was this essentially irresolvable dilemma of control, added to the intervention of the Russians and the Chinese on opposite sides of the Indian subcontinent conflict that now brought the world to the edge of the nuclear abyss.

The new crisis began simply enough, with a common event in the Pakistani capital city of Islamabad — a power cut caused by a gang of negligent workmen. In itself this would not have done very much to affect the city’s communications; however, the sudden return of the electricity supply caused a massive power surge in the computers controlling the Islamabad telephone exchange, and this resulted in the loss of all outgoing and incoming calls for several hours.

During this same period, potential safeguards reached a critical point and broke down when the Indian Navy fired an unarmed practice missile, an SS-N-8 with a range of nine thousand kilometres, from one of its Charlie 1-class nuclear-powered submarines that, despite the cooling-off period, was continuing to blockade the city of Karachi from the Bay of Bengal. The missile had been aimed at the regular practice target site in the Great Indian Desert. But soon after launch, the missile veered sharply to the north and could not be destroyed by the submarine’s safety officer. It eventually hit an empty factory building on the outskirts of Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city, several hundred kilometres off course, killing two men. Immediately the Khairpur regional governor put out a statement to the effect that a missile had hit Karachi but had failed to go off. Unable to find further clarification from Islamabad because of the problems in the local telephone exchange, the commander in the field. General Mohammed Ali Ishaq Khan, assumed that a nuclear missile had also been launched against the capital city and had annihilated it. After a short hesitation he ordered Pakistan’s own M9 surface-to-surface ballistic missiles prepared for immediate launch. Twelve missiles using a combination of fixed site and mobile launchers, each carrying a crude twenty-kiloton uranium device twice as powerful as the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, were armed and readied for use. With an effective range of just six hundred kilometres, they were targeted at the Indian cities of Ludhiana, Jodhpur, Ajmer, Jaipur, Agra, Amritsar, Ahmadabad, Delhi, New Delhi, Faridabad, Ghaziabad, and Moradabad.

But before ordering the launch of Pakistan’s missiles. General Khan prayed. And while he waited for an answer, the world covered its eyes.

Hundreds of kilometres away in the Himalayas, no one said very much. There was little that could be said. Everyone was worried.

Swift’s first feelings on the renewed crisis were those of guilt that she had exposed her colleagues to such a risk, but these quickly yielded to a sense and outrage that, in the age of knot theory, laser fusion, space time, gender therapy, and chaos, there were still people who could do such things in the name of the stupid and tyrannical fables of religion.

Some members of the team, however, did hoist a few prayers to the blue sky above the Sanctuary. Others drank a lot and tiled to put the events out of their minds. Mostly they tried to forget what was happening by immersing themselves in the scientific work they had come to do. Boyd sectioned his samples. Jutta nursed Jack. Cody, Swift, and Jameson studied the yetis, and Mac took their photographs. None of them worked harder than Lincoln Warner. But his dedication to the task before him was only partly explained by his desire to forget about being at the centre of a potential nuclear war. He was, quite simply, now the one who had the most with which to occupy himself.