‘Too damn true. I’ll talk to you soon.’
They hung up.
Kai sat back and reflected. The campaign against him was building. Now it wasn’t just gossip about Ting. Someone was trying to paint him as some kind of traitor. What he needed to do was drop everything and go head-to-head with his enemies. He should raise questions about the loyalty of Vice-Minister Li, spread rumours that General Huang had a serious gambling problem, and circulate an order that no one was to talk about Fu Chuyu’s mental health issues. But that was all bullshit and he did not have time.
Suddenly the radar came alive. The top-left corner of the screen seemed to fill with arrows. Kai found it difficult to estimate how many.
Jin Chin-hwa phoned him and said: ‘Missile attack.’
‘Yes. How many?’
‘A lot. Twenty-five, thirty.’
‘I didn’t think North Korea had that many missiles left.’
‘It might be just about their entire stockpile.’
‘The Supreme Leader’s last gasp.’
‘Watch the lower part of the screen for the South Korean response.’
But something else happened first. Another cluster of arrows appeared, also on the North Korean side but nearer to the border. Kai said: ‘What the hell . . .’
‘They could be drones,’ said Jin. ‘It might be my imagination but I think they’re moving more slowly.’
Missiles and drones, thought Kai; bombers are next.
He switched to South Korean TV. It was broadcasting an air-raid warning alternating with news footage of people running for shelter in underground parking garages and the more than seven hundred stations of the Seoul Metropolitan Subway. The high-pitched whine of the siren sounded over the traffic noise. Kai knew that air-raid drills were held once a year, but always at 3 p.m., and as it was now late in the afternoon, the South Koreans knew this was the real thing.
North Korean TV was not broadcasting yet, but he found a radio station. It was playing music.
Back on the radar screen, the incoming ordnance was beginning to encounter anti-missile defences. The sight was oddly undramatic: two moving arrows, one attacking and one defending, met and touched, then both quietly disappeared, with no sound and no indication that millions of dollars of military equipment had just been smashed to pieces.
But it was clear to Kai that, as with every other missile assault, the defences were not impenetrable. It seemed to him that at least half the North Korean missiles and drones were getting through. Soon they would hit crowded cities. He switched back to South Korean television.
In between the air-raid warnings, the shots of city streets now showed something of a ghost town. There was almost no traffic. Cars, buses, trucks and cycles were parked where they had been abandoned by panicking drivers. Traffic lights at deserted crossroads changed from green to amber to red unwatched. A few people could be seen running, none walking. A red fire engine came slowly along a street, waiting for the fires to start, and a yellow-and-white ambulance followed. Brave people inside, Kai thought. He wondered who was shooting these pictures, and decided the cameras might be remotely operated.
Then the bombs began to fall, and Kai suffered another shock.
The bombs did little damage. They seemed to be loaded with very small amounts of explosive. Some burst in the air, fifty or a hundred feet up. No buildings collapsed, no cars blew up. Paramedics leaped from their ambulances and firefighters deployed their hoses, then they stood staring in bewilderment at the gently fizzing projectiles.
Finally, the emergency workers began to cough and sneeze, and Kai said aloud: ‘Oh, no, no!’
Quickly the people began to gasp for breath. Some fell to the ground. Those who could still move hurried to their vehicles to break out gas masks.
Kai said: ‘The motherfuckers are using chemical weapons.’ He was speaking to an empty office.
Another camera showed the scene in a Korean army camp. Here the poison seemed different: the soldiers were rushing to put on hazmat gear, but already their faces were turning red, some were throwing up, others were too confused to know what to do, and the worst-affected were on the ground, jerking in seizure. Kai said: ‘Hydrogen cyanide.’
In a supermarket car park, shoppers were jumping out of their gridlocked cars and trying to make it to the store, some with babies and children. Most were too late to reach the doors and they fell to the tarmac, mouths open in screams that Kai could not hear, as mustard gas blistered their skin, blinded their eyes, and destroyed their lungs.
The worst scene was at a US army base. There a nerve agent had landed. Many of the soldiers seemed to have been wearing protective gear already, a far-sighted precaution. They were desperately trying to help others who had not yet got around to it, including a lot of civilians. The stricken men and women were half blind, streaming with sweat, vomiting and twitching uncontrollably. Kai thought they must be exposed to VX, an English invention favoured by North Koreans as a murder weapon. It quickly led from agony to paralysis and death by suffocation.