We stayed in Bodrum for that week, keeping as low a profile as possible, packed into a hotel near the airport while they worked out what to do with us. It was one of the bonuses of not working for the army in a traditional sense: you got to stay in hotels, because there was actually a budget assigned to your excursion. When word came through that they wanted us to move, we were on the road within half an hour, because that’s the way we did it; we got bonuses for being prompt, for getting to destinations on time, for other aspects, mostly casualty- or control-related. We were accompanying some of the regular army boys, and it was sad to see their APCs, which weren’t much more than vans with benches in the back. We were in fully reinforced hummers for this part; we had air conditioning. It bred resentment between them and us, but we couldn’t help that; if they were in our position, they’d have done the same. We headed to Yüksekova, tiny place, where we made camp just on the outskirts (on land covered in so much dry bloody brush that it would have gone up in seconds if you so much as broke a glass there), and the whole time the villagers stood watching us. One of them offered to bring us food, so we said alright, and we got these awful dog-on-a-stick type things, gave us all the shits. Last thing you want when there’s not even any bloody bushes around the place; squatting over sand’s one of the most ignominious things you can suffer. We got a field kitchen set up, put some tents up for the sleepers, spoke to some of the locals – we were always nice, always friendly, because that didn’t cost anything – and we waited. The army boys had already moved on, headed right into Iran on whatever their mission was, but we were held back. That was another perk of being with a private military contractor: you got to bide your time, because you weren’t as expendable. Sad fact, but a true one. If you died, somebody somewhere lost money. If an army boy dies, it’s a casualty of war, a name on a plaque near a statue; PMC lads were a far more costly expense.
Turkey was a trick, of course, because the Muslim thing ran through there as well. You could see it in their Prime Minister’s face on the telly when he pledged his allegiance to the rest of Europe, asking himself what mattered more: a possibility of religious sanity, or the delicate fragility of the European Alliance? So he gave us permission to use the country as we pleased, and the British government got their boys here, another five or six of us PMCs, all in case this situation exploded in the West’s face. They were worried about Iran – or Iraq, or even Pakistan, at a push – reacting badly to The Broadcast, so we waited to see what would happen. Don’t think they counted on the Yanks throwing their weight around the way they did, and that made our orders shift slightly: if Iran looked like it was going to launch something, we were to step in. If the Americans looked like they were going to launch something? We ran like fuck. We had to sit and wait until something happened, so we did. We played cricket on the dusty fields – dust so bad you couldn’t see the ball coming towards you if the ball was too fast, so we had to do it underarm, slowly – and we played football with the kids from the village, but they were vicious little fuckers, slicing your feet out from under you at a moment’s notice. One of them, Urkhan, was a shover, and he didn’t care if he went down with you, as long as you didn’t score. The ground was so rocky it’d tear chunks out of your knees, but they all escaped unscathed, because the skin on their knees was so scarred and hard already, from years of playing there. We spent post-match sitting on the side pouring iodine over ours. Urkhan wanted to be a waiter, to move to Istanbul, so he was learning English, one of the few that could understand us. When we got our orders to move out, to head into Iran, we told him, told him to thank the rest of the village for their hospitality. Don’t die, he said, and he grinned like the scar-riddled little shit that he was.
We managed to intercept a bomb in the Rockefeller Center, and that was really the last one we were willing to let through the cracks. POTUS wanted to know how it was happening, how we hadn’t stopped the terrorists making it into the country. The best we had was that they had been there all along, sitting, waiting. They might even have been born here, I said, and that terrified him. The acceptable face of terrorism was the stereotype. They flew over on a plane, C4 packed into their turbans; the thought that they could be here already was far worse. Why are they doing this? he asked, and again, I didn’t know. If I knew we’d have been able to end it all much sooner, but I didn’t, so we couldn’t.
I’ve never had issues with decision-making. It’s easy: you make a decision, you stand by it, and you refuse to let that decision define you. That was Obama’s mistake, W’s mistake, Clinton’s mistake. They let their indecision define them, define their presidency, and that was something that we wanted to avoid. So I could feel as guilty as I wanted about what we did, what we ordered, but we had to live with it and work from that point forward rather than worrying if it was the right choice in the first place. The UN was stepping in, asking us to wait it out, saying that we were stepping over our jurisdiction, but there’s a point comes where decorum and diplomacy become moot. We had terrorist threats against our people, and there was only one language that those people understood.
I did an interview with the Harvard News that morning, because it had been on the books for months, and because we wanted to present the White House as being completely together, completely in charge. We brought the girl into the Oval Office, sat her down, let her marvel at the seal, the chairs, they all did, and then she had five minutes with me. We had POTUS stick his head around the door at the end of the interview, call me away – they loved that, like pulling a rabbit from a hat – and that was meant to be the end, leave them on a high note. When he had disappeared, she didn’t seem impressed, so I called her on it. I voted for the other guy, she said. We all pick a side, I told her, and sometimes we pick what’s best, even though we might not like it, right? She wrote that down in her book, and I let her. Seemed like that would be the least of my worries over the next few days. Weeks. Hopefully not longer.
POTUS and I were running through his speech – more televised speeches in this week than he had given in the rest of his first year in office, somebody joked, but that wasn’t actually a joke – when we had word that there had been another bomb, in Boston, and that only served to reinforce that what we were doing was right. When we were done I called the staffers into the press office, closed the doors to everybody else, told them what was happening. Some of them cried, because they felt complicit, I suppose. Take the next hour off, I said, have a coffee, a donut, and try to relax, because it’s going to be crazy around here for the foreseeable. And don’t leak this, I said, knowing that somebody would, and that we actually wanted them to. That’s the point: you tell the kids not to do something, they push their luck. We needed it leaked, because then we got to come in and tell the world that it wasn’t as bad as it first sounded.
When the press room was cleared I sat there by myself for a few minutes. I don’t remember what I was thinking about.
Our interim boss – dragged over from HR, only because she knew everybody’s names – shouted at us to be quiet, that the US President was on the TV making a statement. We watched it, then Marcus from sales said, Well, we’re all fucked.
I called Lev back, and he answered and started screaming at me, saying that he was alone, and that I was ignoring him. Lev, I don’t have time, I said. I don’t have time for this. He said, I’m coming down there, and I told him not to, but he came anyway. I watched him pull up, and I telephoned him, told him that I didn’t want to see him. You will see me, he said, or we are over. This is my job, I told him, and he said, Sure, like the last time you had a job. Fuck you, I told him. I never swore at him. Fuck you. Don’t you dare, he said, you come and see me. I hung up the telephone, took the battery out, threw it out of the window at him, and then I told security that he was a threat, that he was making threats to me. I’m in the office with her, I told the security officer, and I watched from the window as they dragged him down the street, hands behind his back. Straight after that, my work phone rang.
We’re going to the television studios to make a statement, the Prime Minister said, I need you to come with me, write it for me in the car. When I got back upstairs to fetch my things, the televisions were showing the American President’s statement again, and I didn’t have time to watch the whole thing, but they were looping the content underneath the screen so quickly that I could barely keep up.
I thought that Leonard was going to keel over, and that would be the end of him. The President – Leonard spat when I said his name for the rest of the day, comically, almost – announced that we were going to take Iran away from the hands of the terrorists in charge, because they were a threat to our liberty. Our liberty! Leonard shouted, over and over, Oh, because our liberty matters, but theirs doesn’t?
It wasn’t like with Saddam all those years ago. Our problems with Iran came from the threat, that vaguest of notions; they had weapons, we were sure, but they maintained that they didn’t. Way back when, they signed the treaties along with everybody else, but we were sure that they were – at the very least – doing research. Every time we had another threat, another bomb, another suggestion that they – as a power – were getting stronger, we worried more. But, on this occasion, we were doing something baseless. The government of Iran weren’t despots, they weren’t ordering attacks, there wasn’t a problem with them, that we could see, apart from their lack of cooperation (we were told) with handing over terrorist cells to our government. They were a proper government, and we were going to throw the full might of our military forces at them to get them to roll over and concede. It’s unjust, Leonard said, and if they weren’t attacking us before, they damn well better had now. That’s more than this damned government deserves.
We cut to the conference as it was on, then spent the next hour dissecting it, then every part of the cycle for the rest of the day, almost, was repeats of it. We’ve given the Supreme Leader one more chance to hand over the murderers to our government, and then we’re going to be forced to take action, the President had said. And it was hard, because of the bombs – especially the one at the school, that was brutal – so it was hard to disagree with what he was saying, with going to war, essentially, even though there was something about it that just seemed … hasty.
We had another conversation about it, but the Cabinet was in agreement: we were not touching that with the world’s biggest ruddy barge-pole. We agreed that we should try to reason with the Americans, call them off, as it were, maybe even stick our noses into negotiations between Iran and the US, if we could get them talking, but in terms of the army? We weren’t touching it. We would offer no support, no help. We had troops on the ground in Iran, we were told, a few hundred of Her Majesty’s and a few PMCs, and we would be using them to help evacuate areas in danger, hospitals, schools, anywhere we could, but they weren’t going to engage. They were overseers, there with the Iranian government’s permission; but they weren’t going to be our soldiers. This conflict? It wasn’t our battle.
We swapped the Hummers for vans, unmarked beige troop-carriers, because we were told to keep as low a profile as possible. The trip from Turkey to Tabriz was a hundred miles, maybe a bit more, but it wasn’t all main roads, so we knew it’d take a while. It’s less sandy than you’d think, even though the stuff gets everywhere, parts of your body that never even see water in a shower. It never swirls in the wind; it just sits there, like dust in sunlight. Our orders were to get to Tabriz, which was one of the sites most likely to be attacked, we were told. It was a hotbed of political activity, camps all around the local towns surrounding, and we were Tabriz’s cover. We didn’t know what the Americans’ first move would be, so we just did as we were told: get there, wait, if something happens, help the people where they needed it.
There was really only one road, can you believe that? One road at least that wasn’t just tread-laden sand and dirt. The van drive ended up taking even longer than we expected, nearly a full cycle of the light, and we didn’t stop. We’re under instructions, the driver said when I asked him to, so the men ended up pissing out of the back flap, their piss dribbling along the road behind us as we went. It looked like we were leaking fuel. When we arrived we were shown to the camp. It was night, and we were running totally dark. We heard that there were American troops a hundred miles to the south, out of any potential blast zones, and we knew that we were safe from them – although with the rumours flying around the men at the time, they weren’t nearly as assured of that – but the Iranians … We didn’t know. We worked out that we weren’t officially there, anyway – we weren’t allowed calls home, we weren’t allowed to visit the towns. Halfway through the night we got woken by this scream right above us, then bangs in the distance, and then the sky lit up.
We had word that we shouldn’t cut to our stocks and trading segment like usual, that we should keep running the news, and then, five after eight, word trickled in that something was going on in Iran. We tried to get hold of our correspondents, the guys we used to usually go to, but there wasn’t anything; and then it came like a flood, all the information in one go. There had been an attack on Tehran; it came from US carriers off the Persian Gulf, but we didn’t know the size of the attack, the payload et cetera. We couldn’t get a line into the country for what felt like hours, and when we finally did – somebody in the south, so far away from Tehran and actual civilization that they knew even less than us – we already knew that we were in the shit.
We watched the bomb in the distance. It started with a flash, and then there was a bang, like a lightning storm down the road, the sky bursting, and it did it again and again; tiny explosions. The sky kept flicking on and off, like a dark room with a flashing un-set clock in it, and then we saw smoke billowing upwards, and then another explosion. This one started small and grew, and the smoke that was already up there – and I hadn’t thought about this, but we were a hundred miles away, so how high must that smoke have been? – that smoke flew away, dispersed, as if somebody had just blown it away, and a tower of greyness rocketed upwards in its place. This was like all those videos you see, films, TV shows when you know that something nuclear has just happened: a mushroom cloud, and they call it that because that’s what it looks like. Somebody better with words than me might have a different way of selling it to you. It was nearly beautiful; the sky bright behind it, like some weird version of daylight that came from the ground rather than the sun. It wasn’t for a minute or two that I realized that the light must have been the city burning.
The first missile that we sent – an AGM 175, codenamed Fester – was a success. We had expected that, but there was always a danger that it would be shot down before it hit. It wasn’t. The damage was catastrophic, we were told. That was a poor choice of words. It wasn’t a catastrophe; that suggested that it was an accident. The second series of strikes – smaller payloads, codenamed Gomez, Morticia, Pugsley – hit their targets then, the major army bases, the nuclear plant at Bushehr, and within half an hour we had the Supreme Leader begging for a phone call. We officially accepted their surrender at a quarter to midnight, only four hours after we started the assault, and that would go down in history as the second shortest war of all time. That night, I didn’t sleep yet again, even though I tried to.
We were told to get out of the area as fast we could, that there was actually nothing we could do. Nobody had a clue what the size of the payload was, so we didn’t know the blast radius, or how far the fallout would hit. We crammed into the trucks and drove back towards Turkey. We left the town to fend for itself, because we didn’t know what was coming, and we were on the clock. The British government had thought that we’d be playing with a land invasion, maybe; they evidently weren’t expecting the fireworks. We went back the way we came in, only this time the locals were all outside, just watching the sky. You couldn’t see the blast from there, but the sky was clear enough that the storm effect, of something going on, you could see that. And the air felt warmer, anyway. I know that it wasn’t, but it felt it. One of them asked the translator why their television wasn’t working, and he told them that Tehran had exploded, and the chap just nodded. As if, that’s expected. As if, Oh, yes, we were waiting for that to happen.
We were on our way to the studio in Jerusalem when the rumours about the missile went out, when we all knew that something was going to be hit, and then we saw that Tehran had been attacked, and that changed what the message had to be. It suddenly became about, How do we get across a reassurance to our people when this is happening? The Prime Minister spoke to the Palestinian Prime Minster about it when I was writing the script, as the cameramen did light tests, and the Palestinians agreed to support us in their speech as we would support them in ours. When she had hung up, the Prime Minister joined me at the table. They don’t know anything about the PLO threats, she said. They say that, but they’ve said that ever since we divided the West Bank up, and they’ve had countless opportunities to stop the antagonism, so … She dismissed it, waved her hand. What have we got?
I was talking her through my first draft when we heard that the missiles had struck, and that changed everything. As I say, it put a hold on what we were doing, where we were with the statement; we had to rewrite everything. By the time the Palestinian leaders arrived they had their own ideas, their own communications people, and we spoke about it, what it meant to have somewhere so close – geographically, of course – being so damaged, and we knew that we would have to reassure the people of Israel and Palestine that not only would our countries be fine in the wake of The Broadcast – which was still an unanswered question, still such a worry, the meaning of it – but fine in the face of impending war in the region also. Because that threat was always present, always hanging over our heads. The sword of Damocles, the press said when we announced the divide. It’s a temporary solution, when there are still so many displaced citizens, and now they’re displaced on both sides of the conflict. We waited to see how Iran reacted, because we knew – the Prime Minister said as much – that we had to play this one carefully. I know, I said, I’ll write something precise, perfect.
The British Deputy PM was so angry he looked like he was going to cry. That was the worst I’ve ever seen a head of state, acting or not. We had him on a video call in The Danger Room. POTUS dealt with him perfectly: wait until they’re threatening you in that way, he said, wait until you have thousands of dead bodies on your nation’s soil, then tell me that you wouldn’t have done the same. They fought it out, but what was he going to do? We couldn’t take the strike back, and the Iranian government had already stepped down. It was the trigger; suddenly everybody else was scared of us, it seemed. Overnight, we became the foremost power in the world again, and the British Deputy PM, for all his shouting, was still the false ruler of a tiny island in the sea. He asked POTUS what he thought God would make of it all – everything went back to God, same as it always did – and POTUS said that if He was real, and if He’d had any issue with it, He would have stopped it happening. I remember, he said something like, God said that we shouldn’t be afraid, but how can we not be when you’re pushing the button?
When the call ended, POTUS was upset. I didn’t want to be a wartime president, he said. I’ve got a degree in socio-economics. I know, I told him, but you play the hand you’re dealt. After that, every country who even vaguely considered us a threat – or themselves a threat – called us up to pay their respects, or try to find out if they were next.
We discovered that Iran had surrendered by watching the news. The Prime Minister said that she wanted to talk to the American President, so some of her people went about setting up the telephone call, and I wrote the speech as I listened to her go through security protocols, jumping through hoops. I was at a table a few feet away when the call connected, and she said something that I didn’t hear to her security guards, and I was asked to leave the room. I sat outside, finished the draft, and waited for her to need me back in the room. I didn’t even think about Lev: all I could think about was when I could get into the room.
The joint chiefs told POTUS to stay quiet, to not give anything away. He reassured each person that he spoke to that there was no need for concern, that our actions are only ever based on evidence and concern for the well-being of our nation and its citizens. That seemed to subdue most of them.
The Prime Minister came out to speak to me after she got off the telephone. She smiled, asked if I had written the speech yet, which I had. It just needs your approval. She read it in front of me and smiled. This seems fine, she said. I’ll make some changes myself. You’ve done excellent work. I stood up, and she said, Oh, I think it’s better that you don’t come into the room with us. You should go home, see your husband, relax. It’s been a long day. My husband is gone, I said, and I didn’t explain what that meant, and she didn’t ask. I can stay here in case you need me. She smiled, like she expected me to say more. I would love the job full-time, I said, after this. It’s what I’ve always wanted. You’ve been an inspiration. I’ll stay with you, and I’ll write if you need it, or whatever else.
After this, she said, I am going home. I’m making my statement and handing in my resignation, and I am going home to see my husband and my children. You have children? No, I said. You ever want them? No, I said. She shook my hand, such a firm handshake, like my father’s. They’re a blessing. Thank you for your good work.
I went to a restaurant that had a television, showing the speech she made. She didn’t use many of my words. One of the men in the restaurant said she was a bitch, blamed her for the trouble. Bitch, he said, she got us into this. And listen to what she says, how she talks, like some aggressive man. She should be softer. You sound like my husband, I told him. He laughed, looked at me up and down. Lucky man, he said. I called him a pig and left the bar.
The internet is like a microcosm, and online games aren’t any different. We all spoke about the US announcement, some of us in character, some breaking totally, but we all had opinions. Some of the people were getting aggressive – racist, even – in their agreement with the retaliatory attacks, so the mods bumped them from the server, gave them a time out. But most of us were civil, trying to work out what it all meant. An orc I didn’t recognize ran into the dungeon and said, That’s World War 3, then, but then I pointed out the countries involved had technically been at war for as long as any of us could remember, so this was, really, just a continuation of that.
All we could do was watch the footage of Iran, of what the US was doing to them. Audrey and I watched it at my place, first, and then went into work. David was already there, working already, writing something down, and I said, Good morning, but he didn’t really bat an eyelid. Yo, David! I shouted, and then he looked at me, his eyes all red and teary. What’s wrong? I asked, and he said, You people, you’re just taking this as fine? I asked him what he meant, and he said, This, speaking to God, bombs, missiles, wars … You’re not running around like fucking headless chickens? Nobody thinks that this is the end of days?
Some people think that, I said, some of the newspapers are joking, calling it Revelation, like the book. This is nothing like the book, David said; that was more like second comings and dragons. This is … He didn’t finish the sentence, so I told him that I thought it was showing off. Showing off? he replied, Who is He showing off to? We’re fucking tiny compared to Him, we’re nothing! Why the fuck would He think that He needed to show off? We’re all going to die, he said, all of us, and there’s nothing that we can do.
I took Audrey out for coffee that day. She spent the morning looking at her notes, not really working. We had pretty much given up. I’m thinking about emailing those people who didn’t hear Him, you know, she said. Maybe that’s a clue. She was clutching at straws. When we got back to my apartment there was a message to call the university admin staff, so I did, and they told me that David had died, killed himself, in the lab. David, in the lab, with the hunting rifle (that we got from the crazy man back at the start of this, that I brought back here for no reason at all other than because). I told Audrey what happened, that we needed to get dressed and go to work. Jesus, she said, as she cried, that’s two of them dead, now, both because of this fucking miracle. I know, I said, and I ran my tongue into the hole in my smile and tasted that thick bitterness that you only get when it’s your own blood.