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 mid-range 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 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 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.’