“We’re diverting to render assistance,” ordered Hunt.
“Diverting?” Morris’s question escaped her reflexively, almost accidentally, as every head on the bridge swiveled toward the commodore, who knew as well as the crew that lingering in these waters dramatically increased the odds of a confrontation with a naval vessel from the People’s Liberation Army. The crew was already at a modified general quarters, well trained and ready, the atmosphere one of grim anticipation.
“We’ve got a ship in duress that’s sailing without a flag and that hasn’t sent out a distress signal,” said Hunt. “Let’s take a closer look, Jane. And let’s go to full general quarters. Something doesn’t add up.”
Crisply, Morris issued those orders to the crew, as if they were the chorus to a song she’d rehearsed to herself for years but up to this moment had never had the opportunity to perform. Sailors sprang into motion on every deck of the vessel, quickly donning flash gear, strapping on gas masks and inflatable life jackets, locking down the warship’s many hatches, spinning up the full combat suite, to include energizing the stealth apparatus that would cloak the ship’s radar and infrared signatures. While the John Paul Jones changed course and closed in on the incapacitated trawler, its sister ships, the Levin and Hoon, remained on course and speed for the freedom of navigation mission. The distance between them and the flagship began to open. Hunt then disappeared back to her stateroom, to where she would send out the encrypted dispatch to Seventh Fleet Headquarters in Yokosuka. Their plans had changed.
* * *
04:47 March 12, 2034 (GMT-4)
Washington, D.C.
Dr. Sandeep “Sandy” Chowdhury, the deputy national security advisor, hated the second and fourth Mondays of every month. These were the days, according to his custody agreement, that his six-year-old daughter, Ashni, returned to her mother. What often complicated matters was that the handoff didn’t technically occur until the end of school. Which left him responsible for any unforeseen childcare issues that might arise, such as a snow day. And on this particular Monday morning, a snow day in which he was scheduled to be in the White House Situation Room monitoring progress on a particularly sensitive test flight over the Strait of Hormuz, he had resorted to calling his own mother, the formidable Lakshmi Chowdhury, to come to his Logan Circle apartment. She had arrived before the sun had even risen in order to watch Ashni.
“Don’t forget my one condition,” she’d reminded her son as he tightened his tie around the collar that was too loose for his thin neck. Heading out into the slushy predawn, he paused at the door. “I won’t forget,” he told her. “And I’ll be back by the time Ashni’s picked up.” He had to be: his mother’s one condition was that she not be inflicted with the sight of Sandy’s ex-wife, Samantha, a transplant from Texas’s Gulf Coast whom Lakshmi haughtily called “provincial.” She’d disliked her the moment she had set eyes on her skinny frame and pageboy blonde haircut. A poor man’s Ellen DeGeneres, Lakshmi had once said in a pique, having to remind her son about the old-time television show host whose appeal she’d never understood.
If being single and reliant upon his mother at forty-four was somewhat humiliating, the ego blow was diminished when he removed his White House all-access badge from his briefcase. He flashed it to the uniformed Secret Service agent at the northwest gate while a couple of early morning joggers on Pennsylvania Avenue glanced in his direction, wondering if they should know who he was. It was only in the last eighteen months, since he’d taken up his posting in the West Wing, that his mother had finally begun to correct people when they assumed that her son, Dr. Chowdhury, was a medical doctor.
His mother had asked to visit his office several times, but he’d kept her at bay. The idea of an office in the West Wing was far more glamorous than the reality, a desk and a chair jammed against a basement wall in a general crush of staff.
He sat at his desk, enjoying the rare quiet of the empty room. No one else had made it through the two inches of snow that had paralyzed the capital city. Chowdhury rooted around one of his drawers, scrounged up a badly crushed but still edible energy bar, and took it, a cup of coffee, and a briefing binder through the heavy soundproof doors into the Situation Room.
A seat with a built-in work terminal had been left for him at the head of the conference table. He logged in. At the far end of the room was an LED screen with a map displaying the disposition of US military forces abroad, to include an encrypted video-teleconference link with each of the major combatant commands, Southern, Central, Northern, and the rest. He focused on the Indo-Pacific Command—the largest and most important, responsible for nearly 40 percent of the earth’s surface, though much of it was ocean.
The briefer was Rear Admiral John T. Hendrickson, a nuclear submariner with whom Chowdhury had a passing familiarity, though they’d yet to work together directly. The admiral was flanked by two junior officers, a man and a woman, each significantly taller than him. The admiral and Chowdhury had been contemporaries in the doctoral program at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy fifteen years before. That didn’t mean they’d been friends; in fact, they’d only overlapped by a single year, but Chowdhury knew Hendrickson by reputation. At a hair over five feet, five inches tall, Hendrickson was conspicuous in his shortness. His compact size made it seem as though he were born to fit into submarines, and his quirky, deeply analytic mind seemed equally customized for that strange brand of naval service. Hendrickson had finished his doctorate in a record-breaking three years (as opposed to Chowdhury’s seven), and during that time he’d led the Fletcher softball team to a hat trick of intramural championships in the Boston area, earning the nickname “Bunt.”
Chowdhury nearly called Hendrickson by that old nickname, but he thought better of it. It was a moment for deference to official roles. The screen in front of them was littered with forward-deployed military units—an amphibious ready group in the Aegean, a carrier battle group in the Western Pacific, two nuclear submarines under what remained of the Arctic ice, the concentric rings of armored formations fanned out from west to east in Central Europe, as they had been for nearly a hundred years to ward off Russian aggression. Hendrickson quickly homed in on two critical events underway, one long planned; the other “developing,” as Hendrickson put it.
The planned event was the testing of a new electromagnetic disrupter within the F-35’s suite of stealth technology. This test was now in progress and would play out over the next several hours. The fighter had been launched from a Marine squadron off the George H. W. Bush in the Arabian Gulf. Hendrickson glanced down at his watch. “The pilot’s been dark in Iranian airspace for the last four minutes.” He went into a long, top secret, and dizzyingly expository paragraph on the nature of the electromagnetic disruption, which was occurring at that very moment, soothing the Iranian air defenses to sleep.
Within the first few sentences, Chowdhury was lost. He had never been detail oriented, particularly when those details were technical in nature. This was why he’d found his way into politics after graduate school. This was also why Hendrickson—brilliant though he was—did, technically, work for Chowdhury. As a political appointee on the National Security Council staff Chowdhury outranked him, though this was a point few military officers in the White House would publicly concede to their civilian masters. Chowdhury’s genius, while not technical, was an intuitive understanding of how to make the best out of any bad situation. He’d gotten his political start working in the one-term Pence presidency. Who could say he wasn’t a survivor?
“The second situation is developing,” continued Hendrickson. “The John Paul Jones command group—a three-ship surface action group—has diverted the flagship from its freedom of navigation patrol nearby the Spratly Islands to investigate a vessel in duress.”
“What kind of vessel?” asked Chowdhury. He was leaning back in the leather executive chair at the head of the conference table, the same chair that the president sat in when she used the room. Chowdhury was mu
nching the end of his energy bar in a particularly non-presidential fashion.
“We don’t know,” answered Hendrickson. “We’re waiting on an update from Seventh Fleet.”
Even though Chowdhury couldn’t follow the particulars of the F-35’s stealth disruption, he did know that having a two-billion-dollar Arleigh Burke guided missile destroyer playing rescue tugboat to a mystery ship in waters claimed by the Chinese had the potential to undermine his morning. And splitting up the surface action group didn’t seem like the best idea. “This doesn’t sound good, Bunt. Who is the on-scene commander?”
Hendrickson shot a glance back at Chowdhury, who recognized the slight provocation he was making by using the old nickname. The two junior staffers exchanged an apprehensive look. Hendrickson chose to ignore it. “I know the commodore,” he said. “Captain Sarah Hunt. She is extremely capable. Top of her class at everything.”
“So?” asked Chowdhury.
“So, we’d be prudent to cut her a little slack.”
* * *
15:28 March 12, 2034 (GMT+8)
South China Sea
Once the order to render aid was given, the crew of the John Paul Jones worked quickly. Two RHIBs launched off the fantail and pulled alongside the burning trawler. The stocky blond lieutenant junior grade had been placed in charge of this tiny flotilla of inflatable boats, while Hunt and Morris observed from the bridge, listening to the updates he sent over his handheld radio with all the baritone hysteria of plays being called at the line of scrimmage. Both senior officers forgave his novice lack of calm. He was putting out a fire with two pumps and two hoses in hostile waters.
Hostile but completely calm, rigid as a pane of glass as the drama of the fire and the trawler played out a couple of hundred yards off the bridge. Hunt found herself staring wistfully at the water, wondering again if perhaps this might be her last time seeing such a sea, or at least seeing it from the command of a naval vessel. After a moment’s thought, she told the officer of the deck to send a signal to her other two destroyers to break off the freedom of navigation patrol and divert on-scene. Better to have a bit more firepower in close.
The Levin and Hoon reversed course and increased speed, and in a few minutes they had taken up positions around the John Paul Jones, sailing in a protective orbit as the flagship continued a dead slow approach toward the trawler. Soon, the last of the flames had been extinguished and the young lieutenant junior grade gave a triumphant announcement over the radio, to which both Hunt and Morris volunteered some quick congratulations followed by instructions for him to board and assess the extent of the damages. An order that he followed. Or at least tried to follow.
The crew of the trawler met the first boarding party at the gunnels with angry, desperate shouts. One went so far as to swing a grapple at a boatswain’s head. Watching this struggle from the bridge of the John Paul Jones, Hunt wondered why the crew of a burning ship would so stridently resist help. Between radio transmissions, in which she encouraged a general de-escalation, she could overhear the trawler’s crew, who spoke in what sounded like Mandarin.
“Ma’am, I suggest we cut them loose,” Morris eventually offered. “They don’t seem to want any more help.”
“I can see that, Jane,” responded Hunt. “But the question is, why not?”
She could observe the boarding party and the crew of the trawler gesticulating wildly at one another. Why this resistance? Hunt saw Morris’s point—with each passing minute her command became increasingly vulnerable to intercept by a People’s Liberation Army naval patrol, which would undermine their mission. But wasn’t this their mission as well? To keep these waters safe and navigable? Ten, maybe even five years before, the threat level had been lower. Back then, most of the Cold War treaties had remained intact. Those old systems had eroded, however. And Sarah Hunt, gazing out at this trawler with its defiant crew, had an instinct that this small fishing vessel represented a threat.
“Commander Morris,” said Hunt gravely, “pull your ship alongside that trawler. If we can’t board her from the RHIBs we’ll board her from here.”
Morris immediately objected to the order, offering a predictable list of concerns: first, the time it would take would further expose them to a potential confrontation with a hostile naval patrol; second, placing the John Paul Jones alongside the trawler would put their own ship at undue risk. “We don’t know what’s on board,” cautioned Morris.
Hunt listened patiently. She could feel Morris’s crew going about their tasks on the bridge, trying to ignore these two senior-most officers as they had their disagreement. Then Hunt repeated the order. Morris complied.
As the John Paul Jones came astride the trawler, Hunt could now see its name, Wén Rui, and its home port, Quanzhou, a provincial-level anchorage astride the Taiwan Strait. Her crew shot grapples over the trawler’s gunnels, which allowed them to affix steel tow cables to its side. Lashed together, the two ships cut through the water in tandem like a motorcycle with an unruly sidecar. The danger of this maneuver was obvious to everyone on the bridge. They went about their tasks with a glum air of silent-sailor-disapproval, all thinking their commodore was risking the ship unnecessarily for a bunch of agitated Chinese fishermen. No one voiced their collective wish that their commodore let her hunch go by the boards and return them to safer waters.
Sensing the discontent, Hunt announced that she was heading belowdecks.
Heads snapped around.
“Where to, ma’am?” Morris said by way of protest, seemingly indignant that her commander would abandon her in such a precarious position.
“To the Wén Rui,” answered Hunt. “I want to see her for myself.”
And this is what she did, surprising the master-at-arms, who handed her a holstered pistol, which she strapped on as she clamored over the side, ignoring the throbbing in her bad leg. When Hunt dropped onto the deck of the trawler, she found that the boarding party had already placed under arrest the half dozen crew members of the Wén Rui. They sat cross-legged amidships with an armed guard hovering behind them, their wrists bound at their backs in plastic flex-cuffs, their peaked fishing caps pulled low, and their clothes oily and stained. When Hunt stepped on deck, one of the arrested men, who was oddly clean-shaven and whose cap wasn’t pulled low but was worn proudly back on his head, stood. The gesture wasn’t defiant, actually quite the opposite; he was clear-eyed. Hunt immediately took him for the captain of the Wén Rui.
The chief petty officer who was leading the party explained that they’d searched most of the trawler but that a steel, watertight hatch secured one of the stern compartments and the crew had refused to unlock it. The chief had ordered a welding torch brought from the ship’s locker. In about fifteen minutes they’d have everything opened up.
The clean-shaven man, the trawler’s captain, began to speak in uncertain and heavily accented English: “Are you command here?”
“You speak English?” Hunt replied.
“Are you command here?” he repeated to her, as if perhaps he weren’t certain what these words meant and had simply memorized them long ago as a contingency.
“I am Captain Sarah Hunt, United States Navy,” she answered, placing her palm on her chest. “Yes, this is my command.”
He nodded, and as he did his shoulders collapsed, as if shrugging off a heavy pack. “I surrender my command to you.” Then he turned his back to Hunt, a gesture that, at first, seemed to be a sign of disrespect, but that she soon recognized as being something altogether different. In his open palm, which was cuffed behind him at the wrist, was a key. He’d been holding it all this time and was now, with whatever ceremony he could muster, surrendering it to Hunt.
Hunt plucked the key from his palm, which was noticeably soft, not the calloused palm of a fisherman. She approached the compartment at the stern on the Wén Rui, popped off the lock, and opened the hatch.
“What we got, ma’am?” asked the master-at-arms, who stood close behind her.
“Chr
ist,” said Hunt, staring at racks of blinking miniature hard drives and plasma screens. “I have no idea.”
* * *
13:47 March 12, 2034 (GMT+4:30)
Strait of Hormuz
When Wedge switched to manual control, the Lockheed contractors on the George H. W. Bush immediately began to radio, wanting to know if everything was okay. He hadn’t answered, at least not at first. They could still track him and see that he was adhering to their flight plan, which at this moment placed him approximately fifty nautical miles west of Bandar Abbas, the main regional Iranian naval base. The accuracy of his flight proved—at least to him—that his navigation was as precise as any computer.
Then his F-35 hit a pocket of atmospheric turbulence—a bad one. Wedge could feel it shudder up the controls, through his feet, which were planted on the rudder pedals, into the stick, and across his shoulders. The turbulence threatened to throw him off course, which could have diverted him into the more technologically advanced layers of Iranian air defenses, the ones that expanded outward from Tehran, in which the F-35’s stealth countermeasures might prove inadequate.
This is it, he thought.
Or at least as close to it as he had ever come. His manipulation of throttle, stick, and rudder was fast, instinctual, the result of his entire career in the cockpit, and of four generations’ worth of Mitchell family breeding.
He skittered his aircraft on the edge of the turbulence, flying for a total of 3.6 nautical miles at a speed of 736 knots with his aircraft oriented with 28 degrees of yaw respective to its direction of flight. The entire episode lasted under four seconds, but it was a moment of hidden grace, one that only he and perhaps his great-grandfather watching from the afterlife appreciated in the instant of its occurrence.
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