Page 100 of Nobody's Hero
‘That’s like saying theChallengerlaunch didn’t go as planned,’ Carlyle said. ‘It was an unmitigated disaster. I can’t even say it was an unmitigated disaster from start to finish, as the consequences are still being felt today.’
‘This is important?’
Naval Base San Diego was sealed tighter than a frog’s ass. SEALs in the water, eyes in the sky. A dozen other security measures, some so secret they wouldn’t even be written down. It was secure. Koenig knew that. He also didn’t care. Naval Base San Diego wasn’t the target. It was chicanery. Smoke and mirrors. Tas had his eyes on a much bigger prize. He’d also pulled the time-to-murder-your-team-and-go-it-alone trigger. That meant they didn’t have long. Maybe not even long enough for a history lesson. Carlyle knew this. Yet she still thought he’d benefit from the context.
So instead of insisting she get to the point, he said, ‘Tell me what I need to know.’
Carlyle nodded. Like she understood the mental gymnastics he’d gone through. An unspoken acknowledgement that she thought the same.
‘A little history,’ she said. ‘The East India Company gained a foothold in India in the early seventeenth century. They took effective control in 1757 following the Battle of Plassey in Bengal. The company’s principal aim was plunder through taxation and one-sided trade treaties. They acted on behalf of the British government until the Indian Uprising of 1857. That’s when the British Crown stepped in and instituted direct imperial rule. This period, lasting until Indian independence in 1947, is known as the Raj.’
‘I worked with a guy whose grandfather was a colonel out there,’ Koenig said. ‘He showed me photographs. The Brits lived like kings. Massive houses, servants, cooks, gardeners, chauffeurs, the lot.’
‘They did,’ Carlyle agreed. ‘And it’s why it ultimately failed. The powerlessness of Indians to decide their own future led to an increasingly inflexible independence movement. The British had always managed rebellions with brutal suppression, but after the Second World War their economy couldn’t cope with an overextended empire. It was agreed that they would exit India and split the country into two independent nation states: the Hindu-majority India and the Muslim-majority Pakistan. But instead of managing Partition carefully, the British rushed it. A civil servant called Cyril Radcliffe, a man who hated India from the moment he disembarked to the moment he set sail back to Britain, headed up the boundary committee. The process should have taken three years. Radcliffe did it in five weeks. He used out-of-date maps and census reports, and then drew an arbitrary demarcation line. TheRadcliffeLine. It came into effect in August 1947. The British then left and washed their hands of the whole thing.’
‘Five weeks to decide the fate of a continent?’ Koenig said. ‘No wonder they screwed it up.’
‘What followed was one of the greatest human tragedies of the twentieth century,’ Carlyle agreed. ‘All along the Radcliffe Line, communities that had coexisted for a millennium turned on each other overnight. There were mass killings and mass abductions. There were forced conversions. Villages were set ablaze. Men, women and children were hacked to death. Rape was commonplace. British soldiers who’d seen Nazi death camps said Partition was worse.’
Koenig didn’t respond. Anything he said would have seemed pedestrian. Too small.
‘But the think tank didn’t study the Partition of India because of the sectarian violence,’ Carlyle continued. ‘Despite what you might read, the United States takes the First Amendment seriously. The freedom to practise your religion is constitutionally guaranteed. Our country will never tear itself apart on religious grounds.’
‘Whatdidyou study it for, Bess?’ Koenig said gently.
‘Mass migration,’ she replied. ‘The Acacia Avenue think tank studied the Partition of India because it led to the greatest mass migration in human history.’
Chapter 106
‘Partition led to twelve million people being displaced in the Punjab alone,’ Carlyle said. ‘Overnight, Muslims found themselves in India, Sikhs and Hindus found themselves in Pakistan. People whose identities had been rooted in geography, not religion, found themselves mixed up in the biggest population exchange in history. An unprecedented number of refugees poured across the Radcliffe Line to regions completely foreign to them.’
‘And I guess these new countries weren’t expecting it?’ Koenig said.
‘Weren’t expecting it, weren’t ready for it,’ Carlyle confirmed. ‘How could they be? They’d had five weeks’ warning. The Brits drew a line on an out-of-date map, then left the subcontinent so quickly they only lost seven soldiers. But in the short period that followed their withdrawal, two million people died. There was an incredible amount of bloodshed at the border. Hundreds of thousands never even made it across. And those who did found themselves in a country that simply didn’t have the resources to feed or house them. This caused conflict with the people who already lived there, which led to evenmoremigration.’
‘You looked at how a mass migration event would impact the US?’ Koenig said.
‘We already study mass migration. We have to. It’s rarely contained to one country. An event in Bangladesh will spill over to India, which leads to tension at the Chinese border, and so on. And although it wasn’t technically a future threat – there have been two mass migration events in recent US history, the California Gold Rush and the Great Migration – it’s what the Acacia Avenue think tank landed on. We thought about what might cause millions of Americans to flee one part of the country and seek refuge in another part.’
‘War is the obvious one,’ Koenig said.
‘But war doesn’t happen overnight. There’s a buildup. Attempts at diplomacy. There are skirmishes and a whole bunch of other things that happen before we declare war. Ultimately, war is predictable unpredictability. We ignored climate change for the same reason. Whether it’s drought in the south-west, tropical storms in the south-east or flooding in Louisiana, it doesn’t happen overnight. We’d have time to adapt. To find room for the displaced and make them our neighbours.’
‘A Chernobyl-type event?’
‘Certainly. Whether it’s a catastrophic system failure or a terrorist attack, a nuclear incident would be sudden, devastating and long-lasting. But it’s not afuturethreat. We know our nuclear plants are high-value targets. Measures are in place to protect them, and drills are well practised should a plant go into meltdown. It would be serious. It might even trigger mass migration, but it wouldn’t be a surprise. We were looking for that one thing we hadn’t thought of. The thing wedidn’thave contingencies for.’
Koenig considered it from the think tank’s point of view. He reckoned they’d have focused on the basics. What did humans need? Not want,need. They probably used Maslow’s hierarchy of needs as a starting point. It was something her academics would have been familiar with. Maslow’s five-tier model was often depicted as a pyramid. The bottom tier were physiological needs. Food and water. Clean air. Clothing and shelter. The next tiers were psychological needs like friendship, employment and intimacy. Important, but nothing that would cause a stampede.
‘The food chain can be vulnerable,’ he said. ‘If a well-resourced group managed to simultaneously introduce mad cow disease, foot-and-mouth, swine fever and avian flu into our farms, most food animals would have to be culled.’ He stopped to think through what he’d said. ‘But although that would cause untold economic and logistical problems, it wouldn’t cause a mass migration event.’
‘No, it wouldn’t,’ Carlyle said. ‘Food can be imported. For the eighty per cent of Americans who live in urban areas, itisimported. There would be no reason for anyone to move. Certainly not in the numbers we were looking for. But youareon the right lines.’
‘Air, then,’ he said. ‘If something happened to the air. Say it went bad. That would cause a migration event.’
Carlyle nodded. ‘Bad airwouldcause a mass migration event. What else?’
‘Water,’ Koenig said. ‘Water’s not like food. Sure, we provide water trucks and bottles in severe droughts, but they’re temporary measures. If the water dries up, or if something leaches into it, the population has to move. Look at what happened in Flint. The population is less than half what it used to be, and a large part of that is due to water crisis.’