Without warning

may be unquantifiable effects, further afield. Millions of bodies and radioactive debris have been flushed out of the Nile Delta and into the Mediterranean, for instance, where they will contaminate the environment and enter the marine food chain.’

A woman sitting by Governor Lingle covered her mouth and ran from the room.

Jed Culver, who had been standing near the door, waiting to speak, yanked it open to let her through. He was sweating profusely and appeared blotchy and unwell.

‘General Franks reports that coordinated attacks on US forces in the area have ceased,’ said Ritchie. ‘Iraqi forces are requesting ceasefires or surrendering en masse. Iranian forces are withdrawing. Further, there seems to be no evidence of any national command authority in either country having survived the Israeli strike. In the areas of Iraq still under our nominal control as part of Operation Katie, local Iraqi government leaders have requested humanitarian aid. We have had similar requests from the surviving civilian leadership in both Syria and Egypt. Iran has also requested our assistance.’

He paused as a Republican state senator from Alaska swore loudly and colourfully.

‘Uncoordinated attacks by non state actors continue off the coast of Lebanon and in Afghanistan. General Musharraf survived yet another assassination attempt this morning in the aftermath of the attacks. He informed me personally that Pakistan has now gone to full readiness to retaliate against anyone – Israel, India, anyone – who even remotely threatens his country,’ he went on.

Ritchie let his hand drop and looked around the room, taking in the cameras beaming his image across the Pacific to Olympia and Anchorage as well.

‘I have no national command authority to whom I can turn for orders,’ he said. ‘Our own nuclear deterrent is effectively useless without said authority. I can give orders to fire all day and night long, but the commanders of our ballistic-missile subs will not follow them without Presidential authority. That is why we originally scheduled this meeting. I believe that if we had such an authority, if we had a President and even the semblance of an emergency government, that this… holocaust could have been avoided.’

He had spoken the word without forethought, but having done so, did not regret it.

‘This is not your fault,’ he added, with a mounting and voluble anger that seemed to imply just the opposite. ‘You have all had a hell of a time dealing with the impossible demands of our own emergency. But I promise you, if you cannot come to some sort of working arrangement, if you do not leave this room tonight with a plan to immediately rebuild some basic form of national government, then what happened today will happen again and again and again until the only evidence that civilisation ever arose on this planet will be its radioactive ruins.’

And with that, he turned and stormed out of the room.

* * * *

31 SEATTLE, WASHINGTON

Suzie was in the lounge room, watching Toy Story with her friend Emma, when Kip heard the news. Emma’s mom had a transit pass and a voucher for the food bank in Bellevue and the chief engineer had spent the morning on the phone to Fort Lewis – another ‘privilege’ of his newly elevated status – making sure that this time all of the security that should have been in place was in place. He was just running through a checklist of the local aid centres with a Lieutenant Somebody-or-other when he heard Barbara cry out from across the kitchen.

‘Just hang on… I’ll call you back,’ he said.

She had the radio on, listening to a news bulletin – which Kipper never put much stock in because of the army’s control of the airwaves. Yesterday’s shootings at Costco, for instance, had been reported as a ‘serious disturbance’, possibly ‘Resistance related’, that had halted food distribution for the day. Nothing more.

Whatever Barb had just heard, though, had to be something more than the anodyne pap and propaganda that Blackstone’s people let out. She was pale-skinned by nature, but at that very moment she looked almost translucent, as though every drop of blood had rushed away from her face. Her hands shook visibly as she raised them to her mouth.

‘What is it, Mommy?’

Suzie and Emma had appeared at the door, drawn by the cry of an adult. Both of them wore very grown-up frowns. Kip hustled them back into the lounge room with a promise of ‘emergency chocolate’ from the camping rations, before hurrying back to his wife.

‘What’s up?’ he asked. Her eyes were wide with fear.

‘A war,’ she said. ‘A nuclear war has started.’

Kipper’s stomach flipped over. ‘What d’you mean?’

‘It’s on the radio,’ she said in a quavering voice.

He cast a quick look over his shoulder but the kids were back watching the movie. He stood next to Barb, who grabbed on and held him tightly. She seemed even more scared than she’d been after the Disappearance.

‘… of sixty million dead in the Nile Delta. Israel remains on the highest state of alert, and the Israeli Cabinet is meeting in secret. Full-scale fighting continues in the Gaza Strip, on the West Bank and in southern Lebanon, but hostilities elsewhere in the region have ceased…’

The report was short, sourced from somewhere in England, to judge by the accent; and frustrating in the brief details it gave of American forces, which were reported to be unaffected, for the moment.

‘What if they bomb here, Kip? What will happen?’

‘Shh. That’s not gonna happen. This is a local thing, over there. It’s been coming for over a week now. It won’t affect us.’

‘But the Chinese or the Russians…’