Page 2 of Never

As if reading her mind, Whitfield said: ‘Our air supply comes in from outside through a set of blast filters that, as well as resisting explosion damage, will capture airborne contaminants, whether chemical, biological or radioactive.’

Fine, Pauline thought, but what about the millions of people on the surface who would have no protection?

At the end of the tour Whitfield said: ‘Madam President, your office indicated that you would not wish to have lunch before leaving, but we have prepared something in case you should change your mind.’

This always happened. Everyone liked the idea of an hour or so of informal conversation with the president. She felt a pang of sympathy for Whitfield, stuck underground in this important but unseen post, but she had to repress this urge as always and stick to her timetable.

Pauline rarely wasted time eating with people other than her family. She held meetings at which information was exchanged and decisions were made, then she moved on to the next meeting. She had slashed the number of formal banquets the president attended. ‘I’m the leader of the free world,’ she had said. ‘Why would I spend three hours talking to the King of Belgium?’

Now she said: ‘That’s very kind of you, general, but I have to get back to the White House.’

Back in the helicopter she fastened her seat belt then took from her pocket a plastic container the size of a small wallet or billfold. This was known as the Biscuit. It could be opened only by breaking the plastic. Inside was a card with a series of letters and numbers: the codes for authorizing a nuclear attack. The president had to carry the Biscuit all day and keep it beside the bed all night.

Gus saw what she was doing and said: ‘Thank heaven the Cold War is over.’

She said: ‘That ghastly place has reminded me that we still live on the edge.’

‘We just have to make sure it’s never used.’

And Pauline, more than anyone else in the world, had that responsibility. Some days she felt the weight on her shoulders. Today it was heavy.

She said: ‘If I ever come back to Munchkin Country, it will be because I have failed.’

DEFCON 5

LOWEST STATE OF READINESS.

CHAPTER 1

Seen from a plane, the car would have looked like a slow beetle creeping across an endless beach, the sun glinting off its polished black armour. In fact, it was doing thirty miles per hour, the maximum safe speed on a road that had unexpected potholes and cracks. No one wanted to get a flat tyre in the Sahara Desert.

The road led north from N’Djamena, capital city of Chad, through the desert towards Lake Chad, the biggest oasis in the Sahara. The landscape was a long, flat vista of sand and rock with a few pale-yellow dried-up bushes and a random scatter of large and small stones, everything the same shade of mid-tan, as bleak as a moonscape.

The desert was unnervingly like outer space, Tamara Levit thought, with the car as a rocket ship. If anything went wrong with her space suit she could die. The comparison was fanciful, and made her smile. All the same, she glanced into the back of the car, where there were two reassuringly large plastic demijohns of water, enough to keep them all alive in an emergency, until help arrived, probably.

The car was American. It was designed for difficult terrain, with high clearance and low gearing. It had tinted windows, and Tamara was wearing sunglasses, but even so the light glared off the concrete road and hurt her eyes.

All four people in the car wore shades. The driver, Ali, was a local man, born and raised here in Chad. In the city he wore blue jeans and a T-shirt, but today he had on a floor-length robe called a jalabiya, with a loose cotton scarf wound around his head, traditional clothing for protection from the merciless sun.

Next to Ali in the front was an American soldier, Corporal Peter Ackerman. The rifle held loosely across his knees was a US army standard-issue short-barrelled lightweight carbine. He was about twenty years old, one of those young men who seemed to overflow with chirpy friendliness. To Tamara, who was almost thirty, he seemed ridiculously young to be carrying a lethal weapon. But he had no lack of confidence – one time he had even had the cheek to ask her for a date. ‘I like you, Pete, but you’re much too young for me,’ she had said.

Beside Tamara in the rear seat was Tabdar ‘Tab’ Sadoul, an attaché at the European Union Mission in N’Djamena. Tab’s glossy mid-brown hair was fashionably long, but otherwise he looked like an off-duty business executive, in khakis and a sky-blue button-down shirt, the sleeves rolled to show brown wrists.

She was attached to the American embassy in N’Djamena, and she wore her regular working clothes, a long-sleeved dress over trousers, with her dark hair tucked into a headscarf. It was a practical outfit that complied with tradition, and with her brown eyes and olive skin she did not even look like a foreigner. In a high-crime country such as Chad it was safer not to stand out, especially for a woman.

She was keeping an eye on the milometer. They had been on the road a couple of hours but now they were close to their destination. Tamara was tense about the meeting ahead. A lot hung on it, including her own career.

‘Our cover story is a fact-finding mission,’ she said. ‘Do you know much about the lake?’

‘Enough, I think,’ Tab said. ‘The Chari River rises in central Africa, runs eight hundred and seventy miles, and stops here. Lake Chad sustains several million people in four countries: Niger, Nigeria, Cameroon and Chad. They’re small farmers, graziers and fishermen. Their favourite fish is the Nile perch, which can grow to six feet long and four hundred pounds.’

Frenchmen speaking English always sounded as if they were trying to get you into bed, Tamara thought. Perhaps they always were. She said: ‘I guess they don’t catch many Nile perch now that the water is so shallow.’

‘You’re right. And the lake used to cover ten thousand square miles, but now it’s only about five hundred. A lot of these people are on the edge of starvation.’

‘What do you think of the Chinese plan?’

‘A canal one thousand five hundred miles long, bringing water from the River Congo? Chad’s president is keen on it, not surprisingly. It might even happen – the Chinese do amazing things – but it won’t be cheap, and it won’t be soon.’