Chapter 91

War

Gabrielle

2041

Like most men—even bisexual men—Ghazi wasn't someone who'd willingly display his true emotions, especially not those such as sorrow, misery and distress. This time, however, Gabrielle was in a position she'd never been in before and one for which she was not remotely suited and that was to provide comfort to a man who'd lost his emotional self-control.

"Amritsar. Jalandhar. Jaipur," Ghazi moaned. "These are places I've known and visited. My sister lives—or rather lived—in Amritsar. And now they've gone. Incinerated. Annihilated. Nothing left but radioactive waste."

And then he released yet more tears on a pillow already damp with proof od his grief and despair.

Gabrielle placed a comforting hand on his bare back, but recognised the need for restraint. Ghazi was no longer in the mood for sex that was his original excuse for seeking her company. What he wanted from her was nothing more than sympathetic companionship which somehow meant more to him when it came from a woman who wasn't Indian or Pakistani, who wasn't Muslim or Hindu, but who understood at least something about what such differences in culture and religion might mean.

It wouldn't do for Gabrielle to remind Ghazi that Ajit, her senior farm manager, was also in a state of abject despair although his concerns were more for the people of Rawalpindi, Gujranwala and Lahore. It wouldn't do to bring up the subject that her long-term policy of recruiting from the dispossessed of the Indian subcontinent had now left her business functioning at rather less than half its normal capacity at a time of the year when harvests needed to be collected and mid-year tax accounts collated.

Gabrielle was as distressed as anyone by the news film that showed only too vividly what happened when nuclear warheads were used in anger rather than for show. Although she was awed by the magnificent beauty of the unfolding mushroom clouds as they rose above the cities of the Punjab, the Rajasthan and Kashmir, she was uncomfortably aware that the same awe-inspiring splendour consisted in part of the incinerated ruins of human lives, centuries of history and the hopes and dreams of the abruptly deceased.

Gabrielle had been so sure over the last few weeks that this was a catastrophe that would never happen. Surely, the very purpose of nuclear weapons was to make the prospect of all-out war inconceivable. Only the very stupid or the psychotically insane would contemplate actually unleashing such formidable weapons. The news pundits had been vying with one another to predict the moment of climb-down, capitulation and compromise. In the meantime, people who were unsure where Pakistan was in relation to India had now become familiar with the names of places and politicians they couldn't hope to spell correctly. Nobody had expected the nations of the relatively prosperous Indian subcontinent to wreck everything that had been achieved in nearly a century of independence.

One consequence of India's growing self-confidence was that the European, American or Oriental powers no longer had the influence to restrain the sparring nations. After all, India was a member of the Group of Five leading Economic Powers including China, America, Japan and the European Union. No one, including the Permanent Members of the United Nations, had the means to persuade India to take a more temperate stance with regards to its equally obdurate neighbour.

As the crescendo of retaliation and counter-retaliation became inexorably more serious over the passing week, Gabrielle had already forgotten what it was that either India or Pakistan had originally been demanding of the other. The conflict had taken on its own remorseless logic and any kind of compromise had become ever more unlikely. The mood progressed from sound and fury that would eventually extinguish itself to alarm and resignation about the near-certainty of a suicidal exchange of nuclear warheads. The predictions became less about which nation would stand back first as to which one would be so foolish as to be first to press the red button.

There was an uneasy stand-off as each day went by and yet another prediction of imminent disaster was confounded by an absence of nuclear conflagration, while at the same time the bombardment by more conventional but still highly destructive weapons continued to rain on the cities of Delhi, Mumbai, Srinagar and Islamabad. Armies were gathered at the borders. Aircraft carriers were floating on the seas around Karachi and Ahmedabad. Armed drones were flying over the mountains, plains and forests. The rhetoric became ever more uncompromising.

And then—when Gabrielle got so used to the unfolding crisis that she'd forgotten what it was like to live in a time when imminent nuclear war was nothing more than a theoretical scenario—there came the first explosion of a nuclear device by one lethally armed nation on another in all human history. Those punters who'd taken the grim bet at the bookmakers that it would be India who'd be the more lunatic of the two belligerent nations were well-rewarded. The response as the city of Rawalpindi dissolved into nuclear heat and radioactive dust was predictable. Pakistan's reply was cautious in terms of the republic's military capability but it was devastating to the citizens of Jaipur who might have assumed that their city's survival was guaranteed by its sublime beauty and historical significance. But all such considerations and many others became meaningless as the day went on and more and more of the subcontinent's magnificence was reduced to nuclear waste whose legacy was likely to last longer in terms of lethal half-lives than the histories of either Islam or Hinduism.

Normal life in Britain or, indeed, in every country in the world was suspended while every few minutes came rumours and later confirmation of another nuclear explosion and then yet another and not long after, still another. If the Second World War had been covered in such blow-by-blow detail, then it could scarcely have been more compelling television news. Gabrielle was unable to concentrate on any one thing for more than a moment until her attention was drawn towards the mobile feed on her phone or the high-definition images on the television. Although the news presentation, even on Fox News UK, was coherent and informative, Gabrielle couldn't retain more than a staccato pattern in her head as atrocity followed by catastrophe followed by humanitarian crisis. There was too much to assimilate. It was far too apocalyptic in its scale and implications for her to put it into any kind of context.