On other screens, smaller, more intimate and, in a way, more dreadful images played out. In Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Iran, thousands of burnt and wounded victims of the atomic strikes had swarmed out of the charred husks of their cities and fallen upon the rural hinterlands. With no reliable supplies of fuel, power, or water in many areas, and with practically no functioning transport system to speak of, the farming lands of those countries, already poisoned by fallout, had since suffered an almost total collapse in their productivity. Whatever little edible stores the smaller settlements had, they now needed to be defended against the hordes falling upon them.

Ritchie had ordered that the worst of the footage not be allowed to run as a live feed. There was no tactical reason for having such grotesquery on display. But as the senior officer, he still had to view the edited intelligence take, which more often than not featured surveillance cover of village-level fratricide. It was heinous and terrible, disturbing at a cellular level, and it was repeated over and over again until he no longer possessed any moral capacity to react to the horror. It was all just pixels.

‘Okay, I’ve seen enough,’ General Franks told him.

The two men turned away as half of the video wall blinked out and switched over to standby feeds.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Ritchie as they left the room, dragging a short tail of aides behind them. ‘Short of nuking the Israelis themselves, I didn’t see what I could -’

‘Forget about it,’ growled Franks. ‘They blindsided you. Me too. The warning I passed on to Tehran just made it worse for them, meant they lost everything to the EMP. I guess we can count ourselves lucky they didn’t fry us as collateral damage.’

‘There would have been consequences for that, Tommy.’

‘Yeah,’ Franks agreed. ‘Wouldn’t have made any difference to my guys, though, would it? And that bullshit target list – brilliant really. But now the Israelis have to live with what they’ve done, and they know they can’t do it again. The Russians will nuke ‘em, and we won’t lift a finger in their defence.’

Ritchie said nothing to that. Three days after Armageddon, as the one-sided atomic war of March had been christened by the Western press, an emergency session of the reconstituted UN Security Council in Geneva had passed a unanimous resolution authorising member states to use ‘all necessary means’ to respond to any further nuclear strikes. In contrast to the usual ambiguity surrounding such things, the Russian and Chinese ambassadors had made it clear that this meant a massive nuclear attack on Israel. No other states had demurred.

‘We still don’t know where those other subs of theirs are hiding,’ said Ritchie.

‘Not our problem,’ replied Franks. ‘Not anymore. We’re out of the world-policing business. Let the fucking French or the Brits find them. They have more to lose.’

The small pod of military brass turned into a large briefing room that had been prepared for their arrival. General Franks, the new Acting Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, waved everyone back to their seats as the assembled officers came to attention. He and Ritchie took their places at the head of the large conference table. There was no ceremony. Franks ordered the first briefer to the podium with another wave of his hand.

Colonel Maccomb nodded and smiled thinly at Ritchie as he moved around the table. The two men had seen a lot more of each other than their families in the last month. Ritchie had come to trust the intelligence man’s judgement implicitly. He seemed able to read Jed Culver like an open book, for instance, and he’d warned of a possible Israeli strike days before it happened – which admittedly wasn’t all that impressive, because the same predictions had been made many times in the press. But Maccomb had worked up a scenario that predicted the attack almost exactly as it transpired. Unfortunately, the report had not made it to Ritchie’s desk before Asher Warat arrived in his office. The admiral made certain that the much-chastened commander of the 500th Military Intelligence Brigade understood he was never again to sit on any of Maccomb’s reports if the colonel thought they should go up the line.

‘Good morning, ladies and gentlemen,’ Maccomb began. ‘I have a number of points from each of the theatre commands to cover quickly before we discuss any particular issue in depth. Firstly, CENTCOM. Our latest best estimate puts half the population of the area dead, and it is likely that seventy-five per cent of the remainder are going to die within six months to a year.’

There was no evident reaction to the statement. Everyone had become inured to the horror story of the Middle East what felt like a long time ago.

‘Major combat operations have ceased entirely, both between our forces, which have now left the region, and our former combatants, and between Israel and her former combatants. Israel remains under martial law, but we expect the state of emergency to be lifted within the next forty-eight hours as decontamination procedures are progressed far enough to allow some of the population to return to work.’

Maccomb thumbed a control stick and powered up a large flat-panel display on the wall behind him. A very familiar map of the Middle East appeared, with each of the atomic strikes clearly marked. Shaded areas of fallout stretched around the sites.

‘A combined British, French, Russian and Chinese task force has arrived in Saudi Arabia to replace our own withdrawn forces,’ the intelligence man continued. ‘Smaller deployments have been made to various Gulf states to secure the surviving oil infrastructure. The Russian Federation’s missile forces targeting Israel remain on the highest state of alert. British and French submarines also remain on station in the eastern Mediterranean, as a continued deterrent against further strikes by Tel Aviv. The future status of the French nuclear submarine Le Triomphant remains uncertain, however, dependent of the outcome of the struggle within France.’

Ritchie had some trouble containing a snort of surprise at Colonel Maccomb’s talent for understatement. The ‘struggle’ he referred to had degenerated from incipient anarchy into civil war and from there into a confused and savage blood-swarm. Tracking the movements of the country’s nuclear submarines was consuming almost as much attention from the surviving great powers as speculating on the disposition of those assets should the French Government finally succumb to the intifada.

‘The situation within EUCOM is fluid,’ said Maccomb, continuing with his penchant for understatement. ‘The British Government is still enforcing its maritime exclusion zone and has secretly begun work to seal its end of the Channel Tunnel.’

That was a surprise to Ritchie. Since Franks had returned from Qatar and replaced him as Acting Chairman, he was no longer fully briefed on developments in Europe. Last he’d seen, Tony Blair was still denying that the Brits intended to do any such thing.

‘The state of emergency remains in place throughout Britain, but we are informed that it will be lifted in Northern Ireland as of 0600 hours tomorrow. Our best information to hand is that the Blair Government will ignore the ultimatum from the European Union to release all of the so-called emergency detainees and is in fact planning to deport significant numbers of them.’