Page 207 of Never

Gus’s phone rang and he took it out of his pocket. ‘Coming in now, I hope,’ he said. He looked at the screen. ‘This is the CIA. Shall I answer?’

‘Please.’

He spoke into the phone. ‘Gus Blake.’ Then he listened.

Pauline watched him. A woman’s heart can be an unexploded bomb, she thought. Handle me delicately, Gus, so that I don’t detonate. If you just bring together the wrong pair of wires I could blow up, destroying my family and my re-election hopes and your own career too.

Such inappropriate thoughts were coming to her more often.

He hung up and said: ‘The CIA talked to the National Intelligence Service in South Korea.’

Pauline grimaced. The NIS was something of a rogue agency, with a long history of corruption, interference in elections and other illegal activities.

‘I know,’ said Gus, reading her mind. ‘Not our favourite people. But here goes. They say an underwater vessel was detected in South Korean waters and identified as a Romeo-class submarine, almost certainly Chinese-built and part of the North Korean navy. Such vessels are thought to be armed with three ballistic missiles, although we don’t know for sure. When it began to approach the base at Jeju, the navy sent out a frigate.’

‘Did the frigate try to warn the submarine?’

‘There’s no normal radio transmission underwater, so the frigate dropped a depth charge at a safe distance from the sub, which is pretty much the only way of communicating in those circumstances. But the sub continued to approach the base, and was therefore judged to be on some kind of attacking mission. The ship was ordered to fire one of its Red Shark anti-submarine missiles. It scored a direct hit and destroyed the sub with no survivors.’

‘It’s not much of an explanation.’

‘I don’t necessarily believe the story. More likely the sub strayed into South Korean waters by accident and they decided to prove they could be just as tough as the north.’

Pauline sighed. ‘The north attacks a fishing trawler. The south destroys a northern submarine. Tit for tat. We need to knock it on the head before it gets out of control. Every catastrophe begins with a little problem that doesn’t get fixed.’ This kind of thing scared her. ‘Tell Chess to call Wu Bai and suggest that the Chinese restrain the North Koreans.’

‘They may not be able to.’

‘They can try. But you’re right: the Supreme Leader probably won’t listen. The trouble with being a tyrant is that your position is so insecure. You can’t relax your grip for an instant. As soon as you show weakness, the smell of blood is in the air and the jackals gather. Machiavelli said it’s better to be feared than loved, but he was wrong. A popular leader can make mistakes and survive, up to a point. A tyrant can’t.’

‘Maybe we can get South Korea calmed down.’

‘Chess can talk to them too. They might be persuaded to make some kind of peace offering to the Supreme Leader.’

‘President No is a hard case.’

‘Yeah.’ No Do-hui was a proud woman who believed in her own brilliance and felt she could overcome all obstacles. A populist politician, she had won election by vowing that North and South Korea would be reunited; asked when that would happen, she had replied: ‘Before I die.’ Cool South Korean kids had taken to wearing T-shirts that said: ‘Before I die’, and it became her defining slogan.

Pauline knew that reunification would never be so simple: the cost would be huge in dollars and immeasurable in social disruption, as twenty-five million half-starved North Koreans realized that everything they had believed in was a lie. Presumably No understood that. She probably calculated that the Americans would pay the financial bill, and the momentum of her triumph would overcome all other problems.

Chief of Staff Jacqueline Brody came in and said: ‘The Secretary of Defense wants a word.’

Pauline said: ‘Was he calling from the Pentagon?’

‘No, ma’am, he’s right here, on his way to the Situation Room.’

‘Send him in.’

Luis Rivera had been the youngest admiral in the US navy. Although he was wearing a standard Washington dark-blue suit, he managed to look as if he was still in the military: his black hair was buzz cut, his tie was tightly knotted, and his shoes gleamed. He greeted Pauline and Gus with brisk courtesy and said: ‘The Eighth US Army in South Korea has suffered a major cyberattack.’

The Eighth Army was the biggest component of the US military in South Korea.

Pauline said: ‘What kind of attack?’

‘DDoS.’

This was a test, Pauline knew. He used jargon to see whether she would understand. But she knew this acronym. ‘Distributed Denial of Service,’ she said, making it a statement rather than a question.

Rivera gave her a nod of acknowledgement: she had passed the test. ‘Yes, ma’am. Starting early this morning, our firewalls were breached and our servers were flooded with millions of artificial requests from multiple sources. Workstations slowed down and our intranet was disabled. All electronic communication ceased.’