2034

by Elliot Ackerman

  Lin Bao wasn’t certain how to respond to Minister Chiang. All he could think to do was provide the latest disposition of the Zheng He Carrier Battle Group, so he began talking mechanically. He reviewed the readiness of his flight crews, the placement of his surface escorts, the arrangements of his assigned submarines. On and on he went. But as he covered these technical details, Minister Chiang began to nervously bite his fingernails. He stared at his hands. He hardly seemed to listen.

  Then Lin Bao blurted out, “Our plan remains a good one, Comrade Minister.”

  Minister Chiang glanced up at him and said nothing.

  Lin Bao continued, “If the Legislative Yuan votes to dissolve, the Americans can’t launch a strike against us. They aren’t brazen enough to attack us for a vote taken by someone else.”

  Minister Chiang stroked his round chin. “Perhaps,” he said.

  “And if they did strike, they can’t attack our fleet. They don’t have precise positional data, even for a tactical nuclear strike. Also, we’re only a few miles off the coast of Taipei—the collateral damage to the ports would prove catastrophic. That is the genius of your plan, Comrade Minister. We subdue the enemy without ever fighting. As Sun Tzu said, it’s ‘the supreme art of war.’”

  Minister Chiang nodded and repeated, “Perhaps.” His voice was thin, as if he needed a drink of water. Then their video teleconference was over. The Legislative Yuan had a vote to take. The Americans had drawn a red line, one that they might or might not enforce. There was little for Lin Bao and his crew to do, except to wait. It was now early morning. On his way back to his cabin, Lin Bao checked the bridge watch. His crew, despite their youth and inexperience, executed their duties vigilantly. Each understood the enterprise they were embarked upon. In the near distance was the Taiwanese coast, shrouded in a predawn fog. Their fleet was also concealed in this fog. The sun would soon rise and that fog would burn away. The island would reveal itself and so, too, would they. But Lin Bao was tired. He needed to get some rest.

  He returned to his quarters and attempted but failed to sleep. Eventually, he tried reading. He scanned his bookshelf and saw his copy of The Art of War, which, ironically, he’d first read at the US Naval War College in Newport. As he browsed the well-annotated pages, he thought of the fog in Newport, the way it clung to the coast, its consistency, how a ship sliced through it, and how it reminded him of the fog here. He then came to a passage, one he’d read many times before but seemed to have forgotten in the intervening years: If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.

  Lin Bao shut his eyes.

  Did he know his enemy? He tried to remember everything he could of America. He thought of his years studying there, living there, and of his mother, that other half of him who was born there. When he shut his eyes, he could hear her voice, how she used to sing to him as a child. Her songs . . . American songs. He hummed one unevenly to himself, “The Dock of the Bay”; its rhythm, he knew it so well. At last he fell into a deep and peaceful sleep.

  * * *

  21:37 May 21, 2034 (GMT-4)

  Washington, D.C.

  The morning before it was delivered, a copy of the president’s Oval Office address had been circulated widely and thoroughly staffed. It had traveled through the interagency coordination process—State, Defense, Homeland Security, even Treasury had all weighed in with their comments. The press secretary, senior political advisors, and select members of the national security staff, including Chowdhury, had been privy to the rehearsals, which had taken place with the president sitting behind the Resolute Desk. Chowdhury thought she looked good, very composed, steady.

  That evening, when it came time for her to deliver her remarks, Chowdhury was sitting at his desk while his colleagues gathered around one or another of the ubiquitous televisions that littered the cramped West Wing. Chowdhury wasn’t watching; after the many rehearsals he hadn’t felt the need to. It was only when he heard a collective murmur that he glanced up. Neither he nor any of his colleagues had known that the president planned to announce the authorization of a potential nuclear strike. Before they had a chance to do anything except to stare dumbfounded at the television, the door to the Oval Office swung open. A handful of cabinet officials strode past. Based on their demeanor—the blank looks, the tight whispers—they were caught off guard too. The only two who appeared unfazed were Hendrickson and Wisecarver. Wisecarver beckoned Chowdhury into his office, which in the previous week had been moved kitty-corner to the president’s own.

  “C’mon in,” said Wisecarver, as he waved Chowdhury through the door. “We can get this done with a five-minute stand-up.” Wisecarver’s office was a chaos of neglect. A framed gradeschool portrait of the son he’d lost sat next to his keyboard, but this was the only personal object amid the binders and folders that piled his desk and every shelf, one open on top of another. Each cover sheet contained an alphabet soup of classification codes. He began to stack documents one by one in either Chowdhury’s or Hendrickson’s outstretched hands, depending on whether the action needed to originate from the executive branch or Department of Defense. Wisecarver, a master in the language of bureaucracy, talked his subordinates through their paper chase with a practiced enthusiasm. Each minor task Wisecarver assigned to Hendrickson and Chowdhury took the country one step closer to a nuclear war.

  Before Chowdhury could ask a question of his boss, the five minutes were up.

  The door shut. Both he and Hendrickson stood out front of Wisecarver’s office with a stack of binders in their hands. “Did you know ahead of time about the speech?” Chowdhury asked.

  “Does it matter?”

  Chowdhury wasn’t certain that it did matter. He also thought this was Hendrickson’s way of telling him that, yes, in fact he had known about the changes. He’d been the senior official from Defense in the room, so it made sense that he would have known. It also made sense that this knowledge would’ve stayed within a tight circle, one that excluded much of the cabinet and nearly all of the White House staff. Nevertheless, it felt like a deception to Chowdhury. Which is to say, it didn’t feel right. But then again, he thought, how else should a decision authorizing such a use of force feel?

  “There’s no way we’ll follow through with it,” said Chowdhury. But as he said this, he wasn’t certain whether he was asking a question or making a statement. Although Chowdhury had been kept in the dark about the president’s plan to draw a nuclear red line, he’d been kept in the dark about little else. For instance, he knew the latest disposition of Chinese forces near Taiwan; the noose they had drawn around the island was a combination of their navy, their land- and air-based missiles, along with a contingent of their special forces that could conduct a limited invasion. To stealthily execute this high-speed encirclement, they had used an impressive and still-mysterious combination of technologies. China’s naval forces now hugged the Taiwanese coast, and given the danger of collateral damage, what, if anything, could an American tactical nuclear strike target?

  “They’ve just got to believe we’ll do it,” said Hendrickson. “Right now, three of our carrier strike groups have orders in hand to transit the South China Sea. We need time. If we can get those ships on station, we can threaten the Chinese mainland. Then they’ll have to pull resources away from Taiwan. A credible nuclear threat buys us time.”

  “It’s also risky as hell.”

  Hendrickson shrugged; he didn’t disagree. He began to gather his things, locking the binders and folders in a classified courier bag. He needed to return to the Pentagon. Chowdhury offered to walk out with him. He’d likely spend all night at the office and so wanted to get some fresh air. “I saw your friend Hunt got command of the Enterprise Strike Group,” mentioned Chowdhury in an effort at small talk. The two stood outside the West Wing, a few st
eps from the last Secret Service checkpoint. Above them the sky was clear and thick with stars.

  “Yeah,” said Hendrickson, who was looking away from Chowdhury, across the street toward Lafayette Park. “I saw that too.”

  “Well,” said Chowdhury, “good for her.” He was smiling.

  “Is it good for her?” asked Hendrickson. He didn’t return Chowdhury’s smile. He only stood there, alternating his gaze between the park and the clear night sky. It was as if he couldn’t quite bring himself to take either a step forward or one backward. “If we do launch—because the Taiwanese cave, or because the Chinese misstep, or because Wisecarver gets his way—it’s most likely Sarah who will have to pull the trigger.”

  This hadn’t occurred to Chowdhury.

  When Hendrickson tried to step out onto Pennsylvania Avenue, the Secret Service held him back a moment. The Metro Police were responding to an incident inside Lafayette Park, where an old man with a tattered beard was screaming frantically about the “End of Days.” He had emerged only a few minutes before from a small, dirty plastic tent. With a smart phone clutched in his hand, he was listening to a streaming news channel, the volume turned all the way up. Chowdhury recognized the man as he scrambled past. He was part of the so-called “White House Peace Vigil,” which had protested continually against all war, but particularly nuclear war, since 1981. As the police descended upon the man, he grew more frenzied, tearing at his clothes and hurling himself at the gates of the White House. While Chowdhury waited for the Metro Police to make their arrest, he heard one of the Secret Service agents on the other side of the gates mutter, “Old loon . . .”

  The next morning, when Chowdhury opened the news on his tablet’s browser, he clicked on a brief story in the metro section dedicated to the incident. The old man had been released without bail but charged, nevertheless, with a single count of disturbing the peace.

  Chowdhury closed the browser; he placed his tablet on the table.

  To read another word felt futile.

  * * *

  12:38 June 11, 2034 (GMT-7)

  Marine Corps Air Station Miramar

  They hadn’t quite figured out what to do with Wedge. His orders from Quantico read only ASSIGNED, THIRD MARINE AIRWING with no specific squadron mentioned. What was worse was that when he checked into Wing Headquarters and they pulled up his ratings log, the file had been corrupted. They had no record of him being qualified on the F-35, the latest entry being three years old, before he’d transitioned out of the F/A-18 Hornet. It made little difference to the Marine Corps’ bureaucracy that this discrepancy in Wedge’s record was likely the result of yet another Chinese cyber hack. The Marine Corps couldn’t put a pilot into the cockpit of a hundred-million-dollar aircraft if that pilot had no record of ever having flown it. That Wedge had been taken down in Iranian airspace piloting an F-35 and that the details of that incident had been widely publicized didn’t matter. If it wasn’t in his flight log, it hadn’t happened.

  This was why, in the weeks after the president’s address, with the specter of a nuclear exchange on the near horizon, Major Chris “Wedge” Mitchell, a fourth-generation fighter pilot, found himself spending most of each day in the deserted officers’ club trying to beat the high score on Galaga, the vintage arcade game. The console sat in the back, leaning against the wall between a chewed-out dartboard and the bullet-riddled tail section of a Japanese Zero, a trophy from another war. Wedge loved the game’s controls. They were so simple. A stick. A button. That was it. The idea behind the game was equally simple: a lone starship holds off a swarm of invaders. The weapons held by the invader and defender are an equal match. The only advantage the starship had was the skill of its human pilot. The game had been in the Miramar officers’ club for decades—since the early 1980s, Wedge guessed. How many hundreds of pilots had played? Guys who’d come home from Vietnam, who had flown in the Gulf War, in Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria, even in the liberation of Venezuela—they had all touched these controls, striving for that high score. This little red joystick, it was like a holy relic, like the Sword in the Stone. Or at least this was how Wedge allowed himself to think over the quiet mornings and restless afternoons spent in the empty officers’ club.

  Every pilot was deployed or getting ready to deploy. Every staffer was working long hours. Which was why Wedge was surprised when a lieutenant colonel wandered into the club one afternoon. Wedge didn’t notice him at first. His concentration was fixed on Galaga. That morning he’d come within a few hundred points of the impossibly high score before his concentration had lapsed. He’d broken for lunch and one fruitless meeting at Wing Headquarters about fixing his orders. He then returned to Galaga, from which he would take only the occasional break to pour over the newspapers for the latest developments in what was beginning to appear like a stalemate around Taiwan.

  The lieutenant colonel was sipping a pale beer poured into a frosted glass, his massive shoulders hunched over the bar. His chest was littered with ribbons and badges, to include gold flight wings, and he wore his service alpha uniform, so he was either headed to or coming from a meeting with a more senior officer—probably the commanding general, Wedge guessed. And from the colonel’s loosened tie and hangdog expression, Wedge intuited that the meeting had not gone well. The colonel lifted a newspaper that Wedge had left at the bar. “You mind?” he asked.

  “All yours, sir,” said Wedge, who took a break from Galaga to perch himself on a nearby barstool.

  The lieutenant colonel began to read, his forehead drawn into horizontal wrinkles. He pointed to an editorial’s headline: THE US MILITARY’S IRRELEVANT TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANTAGE. “You see this shit,” he said, flicking the page. Wedge noticed the walnut-sized Annapolis class ring he wore. “They’re calling us irrelevant.”

  Wedge leaned a little closer, scanning the editorial, which advocated for a reduced reliance on high-tech platforms as a centerpiece of America’s defense strategy, particularly in light of recent “Sino aggression,” as the article euphemistically referred to the destruction of more than a quarter of the ships in the US Navy and what appeared like the inevitable loss of Taiwan. “Their argument isn’t that we are irrelevant,” said Wedge. “The argument is that our technology is getting in the way.”

  The lieutenant colonel placed both of his hands, palms down, on the bar. His bushy Cro-Magnon eyebrows knitted together, as if he were having a hard time understanding how someone could be critical of his aircraft without being critical of him. “What are you doing at the o-club in the middle of the day, Major?”

  Wedge nodded toward the Galaga machine. “Trying to beat the high score.”

  The colonel laughed deeply from his stomach.

  “How about you, sir?” asked Wedge. “What are you doing here?”

  He stopped laughing. His eyebrows came together in the same prehistoric way as before. “Until a few days ago, I was the CO of VMFA-323.”

  “The Death Rattlers,” said Wedge.

  The colonel shrugged.

  “I thought you guys were deployed on the Enterprise,” added Wedge. He glanced down at the paper, to the bottom of page A3, where there was a photo of the Enterprise accompanying a lengthy reported piece on recent events in the South China Sea, which concluded that the US was, at this moment, outmatched. “What happened?”

  “A real bitch of an admiral runs the carrier strike group, that’s what happened.” The colonel took a long pull on his beer, emptying the glass. He ordered up another and began to talk. “Hunt’s her name. She’s the one that got all those sailors from the John Paul Jones, Levin, and Chung-Hoon killed. I guess losing three ships is what qualifies as combat experience in the Navy these days. One morning, she shows up in our ready room and says I’ve got to rip all the avionics out of my Hornets, that it’s the only platform she’s got that can operate offline. According to her, when the time comes my guys and I are supposed to ‘fly by the seat of our pants’ against the Chinese fleet with dumb bombs and our sights gr
ease-penciled onto the canopies of our cockpits. No fucking way.”

  Wedge’s mouth turned dry. “What’d you tell her?”

  “Just that. I said, ‘Ma’am, with all due respect, no fucking way.’ So here I am.”

  “And who’s running the squadron?”

  The lieutenant colonel rubbed his chin, as though the question hadn’t occurred to him. “Beats the shit out of me. No one, I guess. When I left, the Enterprise was cutting squares and the ground crews were ripping out the insides of our cockpits. No one was doing any flying.”

  “They don’t have a CO?”

  The colonel shook his head.

  Wedge’s eyes opened very wide. He reached in his pocket and pulled out a crumple of bills and a fistful of the quarters he’d been pumping into the Galaga machine. He picked through it to settle his tab.

  “Where you headed?” asked the colonel.

  “I got to make a phone call.”

  The colonel seemed disappointed.

  “You want these quarters?” asked Wedge.

  “What the fuck for?”

  Wedge glanced over at the Galaga machine. “If you’re killing time here, I thought you might like to try for the high score.”

  The colonel took a long pull on his second beer. He planted his near-empty glass on the bar. “Gimme that.” He snatched up the quarters and stormed over to the Galaga console. As Wedge left the officers’ club, he could hear the colonel cursing. The game seemed to be getting the better of him.

  * * *

  10:27 June 18, 2034 (GMT+8)

  20 nautical miles off the coast of Taipei

  Water sluiced through the creases of Lin Bao’s raincoat as he stood on the flight deck. On a clear day he would’ve been able to see the gleaming skyline in the distance. Now all he could see were the storm clouds that shrouded the city. Minister Chiang was scheduled to land any minute. The purpose of his visit wasn’t entirely clear; however, Lin Bao felt certain that the time had come to resolve their current stalemate with the Americans and the Taiwanese. The resolution to that stalemate was the news Lin Bao believed the minister would bring.