The Edge of Madness

  When Harry and Nipper returned to the castle they found D’Arby sitting in the sunshine by the causeway. He was perched atop a weather-beaten stone block that might once have been used by guests to mount their horses.

  ‘Ah, the travellers return!’ he greeted as they approached. ‘I’ve been waiting for you, Harry. A word?’

  Taking his cue, Nipper held out a hand and solemnly shook Harry’s, thanking him for his company. Then the boy scampered back inside, his arms out wide, pretending to be an airplane. D’Arby, too, extended an arm, placing it round Harry’s shoulders and leading him away from the castle until they were entirely on their own. They sat themselves on a rock close by the shore.

  ‘We’ve come to that time, Harry. The next couple of hours will decide all, and I need your help.’

  ‘In what way, Mark? I feel I’ve done nothing since I’ve been here.’

  ‘You have been waiting for the moment. Now it’s here.’ D’Arby bent to scoop up a handful of pebbles and began casting the stones, one by one, into the waters of the blue firth. For a while he seemed to have lost his train of thought. ‘It’s moving much as I’d expected,’ he said eventually. ‘Shunin’s up for it. Stands to reason. Whatever else he may be he’s a patriot, a devoted Russian, and no fool. He knows how fragile his country is. He was part of the nineties when old women stood in the streets of Moscow, begging in the snow for a stranger to buy their only coat because they hadn’t eaten in three days. Once the Chinese start playing their games, he’d be only a snowstorm away from disaster. All the Muslim areas, the Tatars, the Ingush, the Humpty Dumpties, they’ll go, but Chechnya will be first, and at that point the Russian dream is over. Our Mr Shunin knows very clearly what’s at stake.’

  ‘You think you can trust him?’

  ‘Trust him? Trust that bastard? Good God, no! But I think I know him, Harry, I think I’ve known how he’ll react.’

  ‘It seems Shunin hasn’t been the only one playing chess.’

  ‘The man’s an animal, Harry. Put him in a tight corner and the only thing he knows is to fight. And Washington is a notorious hawk. Wind him up and watch him go. Totally reliable. But Blythe…’ He sighed and threw the rest of the pebbles into the water, grown tired of his game. ‘Frankly, she’s been a disappointment. So slow to see the point, to make up her mind.’

  ‘She’s had distractions. Personal problems.’

  ‘Ah, I see.’ He squinted into the sun. ‘I knew you’d understand her better than any of us, Harry. I’ve seen the two of you together here. I knew I’d made the right choice in bringing you.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘She trusts you–as do I. Help me to bring her back into play.’

  ‘What do you expect me to do?’

  The Prime Minister took Harry’s arm and squeezed it. ‘Whatever it takes,’ he said, slowly repeating the words he had used earlier.

  ‘Give her a little time, Mark—’

  ‘But we have no time! We’re about to get hung out to dry! Brought to our knees! Made to beg!’ His shoe kicked out in frustration at the pebbles that lay at his feet, sending them scattering. ‘Blythe is our only chance.’ he cried, raising his arms to the gods, imploring their intervention, but then his shoulders sagged and his hands fell to his side. ‘Without her, Shunin won’t come with us, not on his own. He’ll be on the first plane to Beijing hoping he can scratch out some sort of deal, while we shall be left entirely alone. Everything–everything–depends on us staying together, and right now that’s down to Blythe. We have to persuade her–you have to persuade her!’

  ‘And how do you suggest I do that?’

  The arms were waving once more, this time in frustration. Harry was supposed to know, not be asking damn fool questions. ‘Reason with her. Plead with her. Tell her she owes it to you for saving her son–and she does, Harry, you pulled her fingers out of the wringer on that. And if guilt doesn’t work, appeal to her sense of history. Tell her she’ll be right up there with George Washington. Flatter her. Promise her anything. Whatever it takes…’

  Now, with a clarity so sharp it was painful, Harry knew why he had been brought along. Being the keeper of D’Arby’s conscience had nothing to do with it; in fact, the man appeared to have no conscience at all. Harry was a donkey, a beast of a burden intended to carry Blythe along the chosen path, whether she wanted the ride or not. He sat looking out towards the islands, his loyalties in turmoil. He felt used by D’Arby. He let forth a long sigh.

  ‘Why so glum, Harry?’

  ‘It’s just that I’d been planning to spend the weekend with a ridiculously entertaining woman from Manhattan named Gabbi. So far, your alternative isn’t coming up to scratch.’

  D’Arby gave a dry chuckle. ‘Come on, old friend,’ he encouraged, placing his arm round Harry’s shoulder. ‘Your country needs you. And we don’t have much time,’ he said glancing at his watch as he led the way back inside.

  Saturday, 2.17 p.m. British Summer Time; 5.17 p.m. Persian Gulf.

  A barge, ugly, smeared with grime and rust, nudged up against the USS Reuben James as it unloaded the fuel and water, anything to lighten the load. While they waited, the warship’s crew offered up their own private prayers that the high tide would re-float them and send them far away from this bug-infested place. They knew they might be attacked at any moment, stuck out there in the open, but they scarcely needed the Iranians to finish them off; the humiliation alone was going to be enough to kill them.

  They had gathered a mighty audience. Patrol boats of the Islamic Republic of Iran were swarming in the sea around the Reuben James, while along the smudge of coastline on the horizon, military units massed in their support. Above the scene, helicopters of the US 5th Fleet hovered in close attendance, and many thousands of feet higher their warplanes kept a vigilant eye on everything that moved. Almost lost amongst the crowd was a commercial tug, sent from Kuwait, just in case the high tide didn’t do its job. It was turning into quite a party. And as they rubbed shoulders, the Persian Gulf teetered on the brink.

  The day seemed endless beneath the withering sun. Nerves were frayed. When, many hours earlier, the commander of the frigate had first reported his difficulties, a rescue plan had been put into immediate effect. At first light the commander of the US 5th Fleet, from his flagship in Bahrain, had sent a senior officer to the stricken frigate in order to take over its command–the ship’s own senior officer could no longer be trusted, not after parking on a sandbank. The nuclear-powered USS Ronald Reagan, one of the US Navy’s newest aircraft carriers, had also been ordered to the area. It was as long as the Empire State Building was high and carried an awesome inventory of armaments, and although it hadn’t yet reached the scene its mere suggestion cast a long shadow.

  The Iranian patrol boats had arrived shortly after dawn. They were small and not heavily armed but they posed a direct threat to the safety of the Reuben James, and in any other circumstances the Americans would simply have blown them from the water. Yet there was one glaring problem with such a response. The patrol boats were on home territory. Instinct suggested the Iranians should be swatted like flies, but caution dictated that instead the Americans wait and see. So the Reuben James’ new captain gave orders that the patrol boats should not be attacked unless they showed hostile intent or came within four hundred yards of his ship. This was radioed to the boats but the Reuben James had no way of knowing whether it was using the right frequency or whether the Iranians even understood English, so to back up this message three helicopters were sent to mark the perimeter, squatting menacingly above waters that began to boil in the downdraughts. For the moment both sides waited, pistols at the ready, with no one entirely sure who was the sheriff and who the bad guy.

  There was more immediate justice to be dispensed. The new captain of the Reuben James was on the point of having his predecessor relieved of all duties and flown from the ship–the standard consequence for such a god-awful screw-up–when strange faults in the navigation systems were discovere
d. At first the mess seemed like a straightforward case of catastrophic incompetence, but when the computer history of the navigation system was examined, it suggested something more sinister had taken place. Four thousand tons of warship can’t jump more than two miles in a nanosecond, but that’s what the computer logs showed. They had to be wrong, so…Sabotage. And that meant the Iranians–didn’t it?

  These were dangerous seas, no stranger to confrontation. A few years earlier a large detachment of British Royal Marines in pursuit of smugglers had been arrested by the Iranians and held captive. It hadn’t been the first such incident. Tehran had crowed, the British had been humiliated, yet in the end the Britons had all been safely released. Twenty years earlier it had been a different story. The US had shot down Iran Air Flight 655 after mistaking the civilian Airbus for an attacking warplane. All two hundred and ninety passengers on board had died, including sixty-six children. No apology had ever been forthcoming from the Americans.

  Memories die slowly in the desert, and the Iranians had not forgotten. So was the Reuben James to be the means of their revenge? As the day drew on and temperatures rose, fingers grew tighter on every trigger. And in the Persian Gulf, there were so many triggers.

  Saturday, 2.22 p.m. Castle Lorne.

  Harry headed up the stairs to his room, taking them two at a time, so swiftly that the old oak boards didn’t even have time to squeak. He was hurrying not simply to change his shoes–the gong had already been sounded to summon them all–but also to leave behind what the Prime Minister had said. He was seeing Mark D’Arby in a new and far less attractive light.

  He had just reached the neck of the stairs when he came to an abrupt halt. Ahead of him, in the hallway, he saw Shunin. The Russian was coming out of Harry’s room, quietly closing the door behind him.

  The Russian hadn’t seen him and Harry was about to retreat, not wanting to let the other man know he’d been spotted, when Shunin set off in the opposite direction towards the back staircase. As he passed his son-in-law’s room he paused. For a moment he seemed to be debating whether to go in. Then he stiffened and hurried on, disappearing from sight.

  You get around, don’t you? Harry whispered to himself. What was the bastard up to? Harry scurried to his room, seeking answers, and his first impression was that nothing had changed–perhaps the Russian had simply lost his way, grown confused in a strange house, wandered in innocently? But even as he offered up the excuse, he knew it was bollocks. Innocence and Sergei Illich Shunin were such improbable bedfellows. He scanned the room, everything seemed as he’d left it, except…Weren’t the pillows disturbed? Hadn’t the contents of his drawer been lifted and left rumpled, and those clothes hanging in the cupboard pushed just a little further along the rail? Harry was an orderly man, not anal but simply disciplined from the days when you either assembled the components of your assault rifle in the dark in precisely the right order or ran the risk of a bullet from the bad guys. And, damn it, his things had been moved, he was sure of it. Then in the bathroom he discovered his wash bag sitting on the wrong side of the sink–OK, so maybe he was a little anal, he admitted, but there were worse things. Worse things, too, than finding your wash bag had been tampered with, but what the hell was the Russian President up to? Nothing good, that was for sure.

  Saturday, 2.30 p.m. Castle Lorne.

  Someone had decided they should pick up their business in the library–perhaps it was Flora, to enable her to make preparations for the evening meal in the dining hall. As Harry walked in, it was as though he had been presented with a picture that would tell the whole story of what was to come. Washington was huddled with Shunin, seated in two of the deep armchairs. The American was animated, clutching the cracked leather arms and levering himself forward in his eagerness to draw closer to the Russian. Shunin sat back, listening with intent. They didn’t appear to notice Harry as he came in, or perhaps they simply didn’t bother. Meanwhile, D’Arby was checking the news channel once more, leaving Blythe to gaze out of the window, a little apart from the rest. She was fiddling with her wedding ring, twisting it, pulling it over the knuckle. When Harry crossed to join her, she shot him a look that might have cut a lesser man in two.

  ‘Sorry,’ she muttered in immediate apology. She took a deep restorative breath. ‘I spent lunchtime with a coat hanger pretending the pillow was Arnie. I beat the crap out of him. Feathers everywhere.’ She jammed the wedding ring back tight on her finger. ‘Mrs MacDougall will be as mad as hell.’

  ‘She’s a woman. And she’s a Scot. Her only complaint will be that you let him off lightly.’

  She managed a guilty smile.

  ‘When Mel and I split, I almost ran out of coat hangers.’

  ‘Is that why you started leaving your coat slung across the backs of chairs all over town? Because you’d run out of coat hangers?’

  Ouch. She was blazing away in all directions. It seemed she wasn’t in the mood to be friends with anyone at the moment–at least, not with anyone in trousers. ‘No,’ Harry responded, determined not to rise to the bait, ‘I simply went out and bought more coat hangers. They’re the easy things to replace.’

  They began to settle themselves in an informal group, sitting by the library’s vast window, as outside the gulls plunged and soared in the air currents rushing past the face of the castle. As Harry crossed the room to join the group, he began to realise what a bizarre bunch they made. He wondered whether any of them were fit for the decisions they were about to take. Not that summits had ever been the orderly occasions people might expect. In Harry’s experience such gatherings were often carried out in varying states of exhaustion or inebriation, or both. George Bush Sr. had been plain unlucky when he’d thrown up in the lap of the Japanese Prime Minister, that had been a genuine case of food poisoning, but Brezhnev had been drugged up to the eyeballs while Yeltsin had been so drunk in Ireland he couldn’t even get off his plane. At least, fast asleep, he couldn’t do too much harm.

  ‘No Lavrenti?’ Harry asked.

  ‘He is not well,’ Shunin replied gruffly. ‘He had an accident. Slipped in the bathroom. He–’ Shunin waved his hand across his face–‘has a headache.’

  ‘I bet he has,’ Harry whispered, to no one but himself.

  They were interrupted by Mrs MacDougall, who had come to ensure that all their needs were satisfied. Her face was still clouded by the damage that had been done to her carefully planned lunch. ‘Are there any requirements?’ she asked in the manner of a seaside landlady kept up by rowdy guests.

  ‘I wouldn’t mind a vodka, if you have one,’ the Russian replied.

  ‘This is a family home, not a distillery, Mr Shunin,’ she replied tartly. ‘Now, if there’s nothing else you require…’ She glared at them. They lowered their eyes, like guilty schoolchildren, even Shunin. ‘Then dinner will be served at seven o’clock–sharp!’ And with that, she bustled away.

  ‘She reminds me of my mother,’ Shunin said in quiet appreciation as the door closed on them.

  ‘Now you understand why Hadrian built his wall,’ D’Arby added.

  They enjoyed their joke, even Shunin. It was a small but welcome distraction from what lay ahead, a way to relieve the tension as they settled back and began to prepare for war.

  But war had already overtaken them.

  Saturday, 2.37 p.m. The Sizewell B reactor, Suffolk.

  The duty physicist was still several minutes away, clinging to the back of a commandeered police motorcycle, already too late to prevent catastrophe. The pressure in the reactor core was continuing to rise, and now the instruments that recorded the rate of flow of the coolant were beginning to act up. The engineers still couldn’t work it out, but at the heart of the reactor core, beyond the limits of their understanding, the melting fuel rods were beginning to create blockages inside the cooling system. The reactor was out of control. The slow, localized, almost imperceptible meander towards disaster was about to turn into a sprint.

  Yet the instrumentation in the cont
rol room still suggested that everything was in order, almost. The engineers were puzzled more than panicked, right up to the point when monitors positioned near the pipes that carried the coolant began to go haywire, blasting out a warning. Radiation was finding its way outside the reactor core, and the levels were rising. It was a sign that the fuel was failing–melting. And as it did so it threatened to spew radiation over the surrounding countryside, not by blowing its lid as Chernobyl had done but through a creeping, invisible tide of nuclear pollution on a scale Britain had never known.

  The desk engineer gasped, his thoughts overwhelmed by the sudden outpouring of alarms. He cast a bewildered look at his screens, then turned to his supervisor. As their eyes met, the moment seemed endless as their unspoken fears tripped over each other, although the report of the Royal Commission of Enquiry later revealed that they had hesitated for no longer than a couple of seconds.

  The minds of the men in the control room were racing. They knew the potential consequences. Sizewell stood on the coast. Any leak of radiation would find its way straight to the sea. Millions of residents along the east coast of England would have to be evacuated. The swirling currents and tides would disperse the radioactivity over a huge area, throughout the fishing grounds of the North Sea, right up to the oil and gas fields that kept the British economy afloat. The tides would even push this atomic storm into the Thames Estuary until it had reached the heart of London itself.

  Catastrophe.

  Then they began to think about the consequences for themselves, and for their families, of standing in the middle of the greatest radioactive puddle in history. It was at that point that the supervisor screamed, and the desk engineer thumped the large red button in front of him. It tripped the reactor, which immediately began to shut itself down. It flooded the core with coolant, yet the neat geometry that should have allowed the coolant to pour freely between the fuel rods had long since disappeared. A large number of rods were no longer in place but slopping around in a radioactive sludge at the bottom of the reactor. That sludge was still heating up and eating its way through the steel casing, towards the world outside.