Kai’s phone rang and he answered without taking his eyes off the screen.
It was Defence Minister Kong Zhao, who said: ‘Are you fucking seeing this?’
‘They’ve deployed chemical weapons,’ Kai said. ‘And maybe biological too – those act more slowly, we can’t tell yet.’
‘What the fuck are we going to do?’
‘It hardly matters,’ said Kai. ‘The only thing that counts now is what the Americans will do.’
DEFCON 2
ONE STEP FROM NUCLEAR WAR. ARMED FORCES READY TO ENGAGE IN LESS THAN SIX HOURS.
（THE ONLY TIME THE ALERT LEVEL HAS EVER BEEN THIS HIGH WAS IN THE CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS of 1962.）
CHAPTER 37
For a few moments, Pauline was paralysed by horror.
She had turned on the TV while she got dressed, but now she stood in front of the screen in her underwear, unable to look away. CNN was showing non-stop pictures from South Korea, mostly footage taken on phones and posted on social media, also Korean TV coverage, all of it showing a monstrous nightmare beyond anything conceived by the medieval painters of the Day of Judgement.
It was torture at long range. The poison sprays and gases attacked indiscriminately: men and women and children, Koreans and Americans and others. Those out of doors had been most vulnerable, but shops and offices had ventilation systems that sucked in some of the chemicals; and the deadly air could creep into houses and apartments, slipping silently around the edges of doors and windows. It had even drifted down ramps into the underground car parks where some people had taken shelter, causing horrific scenes of panic and hysteria. Gas masks did not offer complete protection for – as the more educated news reports pointed out – some of the lethal substances could slowly enter the bloodstream through the skin.
It was the babies and children that got to her: the screams, the desperate gasping for air, the burned faces, the uncontrollable twitching. It would have been hard to watch adults suffering so badly; to see children in such agony was unbearable, and she kept closing her eyes, then forcing herself to look.
The phone rang. It was Gus. She said: ‘How widespread is this?’
‘The three major cities of South Korea are affected – Seoul, Busan and Incheon – plus most US and Korean military bases.’
‘Hell.’
‘Hell is what it is.’
‘How many Americans killed?’
‘There’s no count yet, but it’s going to be in the hundreds, including some of our troops’ family members.’
‘Is it ongoing?’
‘The missile attack is over, but the poisons continue to claim new victims.’
There was a bubble of rage in Pauline’s throat, and she wanted to scream. She forced herself to be unemotional. She thought for a minute, then said: ‘Gus, this obviously requires a major response by the United States, but I’m not going to rush that decision. This is the biggest crisis since 9/11.’
‘It’s dark now in the Far East and there may be no further action overnight. Which gives us a day to plan.’
‘But we’ll start early. Get everyone into the Situation Room, at, say, eight thirty.’
‘You got it.’
They hung up, and she sat on the bed, thinking. Chemical and biological weapons were inhuman and against international law. They were unspeakably cruel. And they had been used to kill Americans. The war in Korea was no longer a local squabble. The world would be waiting for the American response to the outrage. Which meant her response.
She dressed carefully in a sombre dark-grey skirted suit and an off-white blouse, reflecting her solemn mood.
By the time she got to the Oval Office, the breakfast news shows were gathering reactions. People did not need a rabble-rousing politician to get them worked up about this. Pauline’s fury was shared all over the US. Commuters interviewed at metro stations were enraged. Any attack on Americans angered them; this one made them incandescent.
North Korea did not have an embassy in the US, but it had a Permanent Mission at the United Nations, with a one-room office at the Diplomat Center on 2nd Avenue in New York City; and an angry crowd gathered on the street outside the building, shouting up at the windows on the thirteenth floor.
In Columbus, Georgia, a Korean-American couple were shot and killed in their convenience store by a young white man. No money was stolen, though he took a carton of Marlboro Light cigarettes.
Pauline read her overnight briefings and phoned half a dozen key people, including Secretary of State Chester Jackson, just arrived back from his wasted trip to Sri Lanka and the peace conference that never happened.