Cut To The Oriental Chase

The politics between the nuclear powers is so far entirely credible, but Hawksley introduces two interesting subplots. One is the underlying terror network that is about to grasp power in Southeast Asia. Modelled on Abubakr, the head of the real-life Jemmah Islamiah (JI), Memed is the chief of the eastern half of the world’s terror network which has actually proclaimed the goal of establishing one Islamic state through Malaysia, Brunei, Sarawak, Indonesia, Sulawesi and South Philippines. The signal to begin the Islamic revolution is the assassination of the Pakistani president, an affable and cultivated ex-general, sympathetic to American regional geopolitics. Sounds familiar? The assassination uncovers Hawksley’s crafty second subplot which links the terror network of South and Southeast Asia to the Pakistani and North Korean states through rebel groups in Beijing and Islamabad.

The Pakistan president, who is on a first name basis with the Indian PM, is replaced by a flamboyant, barely religious Air Marshal who flits between Pyongyang and Beijing before being humiliated and replaced by the real Pakistani kingpin, a brigadier in cahoots with Memed. The suave Harvard-educated Chinese premier is only nominally in power, while the party chief Yan plays realpolitik in the old Chinese way. Hawksley has done his homework on East and Central Asian politics, when he gets Yan to argue for accepting Pakistan and North Korea "as is where is". Pakistan, according to Yan, may be the source of all violent terrorist leaders but has so far kept them out of Xingkiang and without North Korea as a buffer state, South Korean (and hence American) industry, prosperity and way of life would be at China’s doorstep.

There are some neat diversions. The first is the JI’s attempt to capture Brunei and its oil as the source of the new Islamic state’s wealth. A smart riposte by British sas and Gurkha troops recaptures Brunei, making it the only victory for the good guys. Another closed-door session in Islamabad turns out to be really closed door, when Memed’s bodyguard shoots the Pakistani naval chief for being normal and disagreeing with the mad mullahs. The bodyguard earlier drives into the Delhi Gymkhana Club and fires three special terminally homing mortar rounds into 7, Race Course Road, wounding the PM and his attractive daughter. Large parts of the book were apparently written in Delhi, although the acknowledgements don’t quite show that, but the Indian PM’s portrayed sympathetically, with the humaneness and discipline to understand a nuclear holocaust and not press red buttons randomly.

The end is depressing with the Yamuna and Potomac choked with burnt-out corpses. It’s easy to see that Hawksley knows where his market is—in the US, UK and India, so it is surprising that some fundamentalist has not protested about the Indian PM’s unstable wife and her succession of lovers. A strategic aside is the entry of Japan into a direct combat mode against North Korea. Tokyo jettisons its constitutional shackles against deploying its forces overseas unilaterally, and decouples itself from the US. It then acts in its own interest against North Korea, which again is a scenario that receives heavy nods and winks in any Tokyo discussion.

There is also good news—that while each of Hawksley’s scenarios is credible in itself, the coincidences involved in stringing them together to achieve armageddon are so mathematically remote that a reader can enjoy the book without taking too many moral lessons from it.