Operation Megiddo: a novel that never was

As if the letter weren't enough, Palmer had to address the senate that afternoon on the delicate matter of the chancellor of the exchequer's disappearance and he could not think of what he was going to say. Scotland Yard had drawn a blank. Forsyth's car, crammed with muscle-bound minders and navigational electronics, had simply disappeared from the screens. One moment it had been driving up Whitehall on its way from parliament to 11 Downing Street, and the next moment there was nothing but a cloud of dense smoke which had left passers-by gasping for breath.

The telephone rang and the prime minister's computer-screen told him that the call was from the president of the European commission. In his anxiety about the letter, Palmer had forgotten to set his phone to exclude all incoming call traffic and it therefore connected him after the second ring. The president's rubicund face appeared on the screen and the desktop loudspeakers began to throb with the background-rumble of the Berlin traffic.

"Mike," said the president in his twanging middle-American English. "Where are you? Your ambassador nearly froze to death at Tempelhof this morning and all he got was Kevin and a few civil servants. Aren't you coming too?" Palmer was still looking at the letter in front of him and only replied after a couple of seconds' pause. "We're rather busy over here, Manfred. You'll have heard about Jim's disappearance."

"Might it have been aliens?" the president asked in a way which could have been either jocular or serious. "We've not ruled that out," the prime minister replied, still not looking at the screen, "but there was no aerial traffic that our radar could detect. Of course, it could have been the Irish again."

President Stolz shrugged and seemed not to care. The fact that England's chancellor was chairman of the union's economic committee that year did not concern him. Indeed, Stolz preferred Cyril Towner, Forsyth's deputy and heir-apparent, who belonged to the same political party as he did.

"We shall have to start without you, you know," Stolz warned with a reproachful frown. "Of course you must," Palmer replied, now with his head raised and attempting a carefree smile. "I can always eavesdrop by conference-phone, though I hope that this time I don't get simultaneous translation in Turkish!" The president chuckled indulgently while recalling that it was he who had authorised the ploy to keep the English out of the previous week's defence-debate. The screen went blank and the rumbling of traffic ceased.

Palmer then remembered that he had kept the new Scottish foreign minister waiting for nearly half an hour so, with a click of his computer-mouse, he told his secretary to have him shown in. Their meeting was a formality, not least because the minister was Palmer's elder son and leader of his own Liberal party north of the border. During their conversation, the prime minister could think of nothing but the letter from Mitchell and his abstracted tone and tendency to ramble even more than usual reflected this.

"What's the matter, Dad?", Francis Palmer asked as he turned to leave, but he received no reply other than a grim smile from his father as he swivelled his office-chair away from him and lifted the receiver on his private telephone. When he heard the door close behind him, Michael Palmer keyed in the code to connect him, at priority-level 1, to the secretary general of the United Nations. Safe in the knowledge that the conversation would be scrambled and that the secretary general was the soul of discretion, the prime minister proceeded to unburden himself of his appalling secret. What he did not know was that, when he had heard the door close, his son had not been on the other side of it.

Mark was, to his complete surprise, now the allied military governor of Guangdong province. Though his official headquarters were in Canton, he could not resist the urge to spend most of his time in Hong Kong, unlawfully but brazenly flying the Union Flag from Government House once more. His entry into the city had been particularly gratifying. The crowds were made up of the only group of Chinese who were actually sincere in the welcome they gave to their conquerors. English was being used in the schools again and American TV and radio was being beamed from an aircraft-carrier in the South China Sea.

Mark, single, good-looking, heterosexual, brave (except for his fear of darkness and heights) had risen to the challenge despite his battle-fatigue and natural shyness. Allied command had written all his speeches and the Mandarin he had learned at college had come in handy when laying down the law to Peking appointees whose short-lived rule he had come to supplant. He knew no Cantonese, though, and had to be content with reading advertisements on the sides of buses and listening to AFN's inappropriately-targetted short wave broadcasts.

On the day in question - the same day as the English chancellor's disappearance - Mark was preparing for an inspection of the international forces at an occupied airbase near Canton. He was concerned that the deafness he had acquired during the short war had still not totally left him. Although all battle had been initiated from underground bunkers (many of them not even in Asia), Mark's otherwise soundproofed land-ship had been caught with a single hatch slightly ajar when operation Megiddo had been launched. Though he and his command-staff had been in eastern Kazakhstan, some 100 kilometres from where the first aerial detonation took place, and while they had known the precise time of that attack, they were so excited by what they were being shown on All-Forces Television that they had failed to make everything shipshape.

Servicemen throughout Eurasia, as well as viewers of CNN's domestic service, had watched wide-screen, three-dimensional pictures of the preparation, launch and deployment of the fiercest nuclear attack ever yet made. Each bomb had its on-board camera which was released a minute before detonation. This meant that each explosion was covered in full. Ground-cameras, deployed the previous day by parachute, showed the effects on plants, animals, people and buildings, while the space-shuttle Adventurer relayed pictures of the flashes from above and the Heimat moonbase televised the atmospheric tongues of fire which looked from space like solar flares. It had been a wonderful day to be alive and deafness was a price worth paying, particularly if it could be made to go away some day.

Mark stood to attention on the saluting-base as the first of the South African land-ships trundled past.