2034

by Elliot Ackerman

  Flickering in the distance, Lin Bao made out a dim oscillating light.

  Minister Chiang’s plane.

  Pitching and yawing, it catapulted out of a rent in the clouds. Seconds later it was reeling on the deck, the pilots having perfectly caught the three-wire, much to Lin Bao’s satisfaction. The engines whined in reverse, decelerating. After a few moments, the back ramp dropped and Minister Chiang emerged, his round face laughing and smiling at the exhilaration of a carrier landing. One of the pilots helped the minister remove his cranial helmet, which caught on his large ears. The minister’s visit hadn’t been announced, but like a politician he began distributing handshakes to the ground crew, who eventually surmised who he was. Before any fuss could be made on account of his arrival Lin Bao escorted him off the flight deck.

  Inside Lin Bao’s stateroom, the two sat at a small banquette scattered with nautical charts. A holographic map of Taiwan was projected over the table, rotating on its axis. An orderly poured them cups of tea and then stood at attention with his back to the bulkhead, his chest arching upward. Minister Chiang gave the orderly a long, interrogatory look. Lin Bao dismissed him with a slight backhanded wave.

  Now it was only the two of them.

  Minister Chiang slouched a bit deeper into his seat. “We find ourselves at an impasse with our adversaries . . .” he began.

  Lin Bao nodded.

  “I had hoped the Legislative Yuan would vote to dissolve, so we might avoid an opposed invasion. That seems increasingly unlikely.” Minister Chiang took a sip from his tea, and then asked, “Why do you think the Americans threatened us with a nuclear strike?”

  Lin Bao didn’t quite understand the question; its answer seemed too obvious. “To intimidate us, Comrade Minister.”

  “Hmm,” said Minister Chiang. “Tell me, does it intimidate you?”

  Lin Bao didn’t answer, which seemed to disappoint Minister Chiang.

  “Well, it shouldn’t,” he told his subordinate. According to the minister, the American threat of a nuclear strike didn’t show their strength. Quite the opposite. It revealed how vulnerable they were. If the Americans had really wanted to threaten the Chinese, they would’ve launched a massive cyberattack. The only problem was they couldn’t—they lacked the capability to hack into China’s online infrastructure. The deregulation that had resulted in so much American innovation and economic strength was now an American weakness. Its disaggregated online infrastructure was vulnerable in a way that the Chinese infrastructure was not. “The Americans have proven incapable of organizing a centralized cyber defense,” said Minister Chiang. “Whereas we can shut down much of their country’s electric grid with a single keystroke. Their threat of nuclear retaliation is outdated and absurd, like slapping someone across the face with your glove before challenging them to a duel. It’s time we show them what we think of their threat.”

  “How do we do that?” asked Lin Bao, as he clicked a remote that turned off the rotating hologram. He cleared away their cups of tea so as to reveal the nautical charts that covered the banquette table, as if the two might discuss a naval maneuver.

  “It’s nothing we do here,” answered Minister Chiang, disregarding the charts. “We’ll handle it up north, in the Barents Sea. The American Third and Sixth Fleets have left those waters to transit south. With the American fleets gone, our Russian allies have unfettered access to the subsurface 10G internet cables that service the United States. Our allies will help us to, gently, remind the Americans that their power is outdated, that bombs aren’t the only way to cripple a nation—not even the best way. What I need you to do is simple: be ready. This will be a cyber show of force. It will be limited; we’ll only cut a cable or two. We’ll dip the Americans into darkness, allow them to stare into that void. Afterward, either the Legislative Yuan will invite us into Taipei, or we will go of our own accord. Either way, your command must be ready.”

  “Is that what you came all this way to tell me?”

  “I didn’t come to tell you anything,” said Minister Chiang. “I came because I wanted to stand on this ship and see if you are, in fact, ready.”

  Lin Bao could feel the minister’s gaze boring into him. In the days ahead he understood how much would depend on his command’s ability to act quickly, whether through an unopposed landing in Taipei, or alternatively a ship-to-shore assault. Before Minister Chiang could deliver his verdict as to the perceived readiness of Lin Bao and his command, there was a knock at the door, a dispatch from the combat information center.

  Lin Bao read the note.

  “What does it say?” asked Minister Chiang.

  “The Enterprise is on the move.”

  “Coming here?”

  “No,” answered Lin Bao. “It doesn’t make sense. They’re sailing away.”

  * * *

  11:19 June 18, 2034 (GMT+8)

  220 nautical miles off the coast of Zhanjiang

  These waters were a graveyard. As the Enterprise set its course, Sarah Hunt knew the countless wrecks she sailed over. The Philippines were to her east. To her west was the Gulf of Tonkin. She considered the names of the ships—the USS Princeton, Yorktown, the Hoel, and the Gambier Bay—whose blasted hulls rested on the seabed beneath her. And Japanese ships as well, battleships and carriers. Hunt and her crew passed silently above them, taking up a position—for what?

  Hunt didn’t know.

  Her orders had come in quick succession. Every couple of hours she was summoned to the radio room, an antiquated closet in the bowels of the ship that a senior chief, who everyone called Quint, treated as his own personal fiefdom. The nickname Quint came from his uncanny resemblance to the captain of the ill-fated Orca played by Robert Shaw in the film Jaws. Working alongside Quint was his assistant, a young petty officer third class who the crew of the Enterprise called Hooper, not because he looked like Richard Dreyfuss’s character, Matt Hooper—the intrepid, bespectacled, Great White–hunting marine biologist—but simply because he spent every waking hour with Quint.

  Hunt, who had spent a career receiving her orders over lengthy briefings via secure video teleconference, accompanied by kaleidoscopic displays of PowerPoint, was slowly getting used to this fragmented manner of communications. With their Chinese adversaries having the upper hand in cyber, the Enterprise had gone into an internet blackout. Indo-Pacific Command, which was in direct contact with the White House, kept tapping out these minimalist communications to Hunt in high-frequency radio bursts, the same long-range bandwidth employed by the US Navy in the Second World War.

  Another of these messages had arrived, so Hunt traveled four levels down from her stateroom to the radio room, where she found Quint and Hooper surrounded by a tangle of electronics, the former with a pair of spectacles perched on the tip of his nose as he unsnarled some wires and the latter holding a smoking soldering iron.

  “Gentlemen,” said Hunt, announcing herself.

  Hooper startled at her voice while Quint sat frozen with his chin tucked down as though calculating his share of the bill at a restaurant. Undisturbed, he continued to focus through his spectacles as his hands worked swiftly at the tangle of wires leading into the radio. “Mornin’, ma’am,” said Quint. An unlit cigarette dangled from his mouth.

  “It’s evening, Senior Chief.”

  Quint raised an eyebrow but didn’t take his concentration away from the wires. “Then evenin’, ma’am.” He nodded for Hooper to pass him the soldering iron, which he quickly applied to a connection he was grafting onto a circuit board. For the past two weeks, ever since they got underway, Quint and Hooper had been retrofitting a suite of antiquated VHF, UHF, and HF radios into the avionics of the single F/A-18 Hornet squadron aboard the Enterprise. This made the Death Rattlers the only squadron that would be entirely immune to cyber interference. At least that was the plan.

  “How many of those have you got left to install?” she asked.

  “None,” said Quint. “We finished the last Hornet this morning. This
is an upgrade to our ship’s HF receiver.” Quint drew silent for a moment, mustering his concentration. “There,” he said, a ribbon of smoke unspooling from the soldering iron as he handed it back to Hooper. Quint then screwed on the front panel of the radio they’d been tampering with. They powered it on. Its receiver was hooked to a speaker, which emitted a warbling sound.

  “Can you turn that down?” asked Hunt.

  Hooper glanced at Quint, who nodded, but kept his head canted slightly to the side, his one ear raised, like a maestro fine-tuning his instrument. While Hooper manipulated the dial, Quint gestured alternately with his left hand or his right as they cycled up or down the frequency ladder, searching for . . . what? Hunt couldn’t say. Then, as if perceiving her curiosity, Quint began to explain himself.

  “We’re searching for long-delayed echoes, ma’am. LDEs. When you transmit an HF frequency, it loops around the earth until it finds a receiver. On rare occasions, that can take a while and you wind up with an echo.”

  “How long of an echo?” asked Hunt.

  “Usually, only a few seconds,” said Quint.

  “We picked up some yesterday,” added Hooper.

  Hunt smiled at him. “What’s the longest echo you ever heard of?”

  While Hooper manipulated the dial, Quint made a gesture with his right hand, as though encouraging a piece of music. He was both speaking to Hunt and listening to the oscillations in frequency. “Old salts I served with said that in these waters they’d picked up conversations from fifty or even seventy-five years ago,” explained Quint. With a wide grin that revealed decades of the Navy’s shoddy dental work, he added, “There’s lots of ghosts out here, ma’am. You just got to listen for ’em.”

  Hunt didn’t return Quint’s smile; still, she couldn’t help but imagine the possibility of ages-old conversations lingering in the surrounding atmosphere—the lost pilots searching the darkness for their carriers off the coast of North Vietnam, the frantic gun crews calling out flights of incoming Zeros in the Philippine Sea. However, she needed to turn to the task at hand.

  Quint reached across his desk to a piece of paper with the message he’d recently decoded from Indo-Pacific Command. “They aren’t giving you much to go off of, huh?” he said.

  The message was hardly a message, simply four latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates, so a box. There was no mission statement, no situation update; Hunt would place the Enterprise and its escorts within this box and then await further instructions. She tucked the scrap of paper in the pocket of her coveralls. As she went to leave, Quint stopped her. “Ma’am,” he said, reaching onto a back shelf. “We fixed this up; thought you might be able to use it.” In his large grip was an old travel radio. “If you tune it just right, you can get the BBC World Service, even a bit of music, depending on where we’re at. The dial is a bit tricky. It takes some finesse. But it should do all right for you.”

  Quint and Hooper were still playing around with the HF receiver as she left, Quint making motions with his hands, Hooper manipulating the dial. With the decoded message in her pocket, Hunt bounded up the four levels to her stateroom. She set the slip of paper with the coordinates on her desk, already layered with an assortment of nautical charts. With a set of parallel rulers, a divider, a compass, and a sharp pencil, she sketched out the corners of the box. It was tight, but large enough to fit her carrier strike group. It was to the south of their current position, another eighty nautical miles further off the coast, a three-hundred-mile straight line overwater to Zhanjiang, the headquarters of China’s South Sea Fleet. With the crisis around Taiwan, she wondered how many of the South Sea Fleet’s ships were currently in port.

  It wouldn’t be many.

  But it would be enough.

  Hunt set her pencil down on the chart. She turned on the radio and managed to find the BBC World Service. With her arms crossed and her legs stretched out in front of her, she closed her eyes and relaxed. She tried to imagine the news reports—USS Enterprise strikes Chinese naval facility with tactical nuclear weapons—but she couldn’t; it seemed too improbable. Although few Cold War precepts had aged well in the twenty-first century, the logic of mutually assured destruction was one of them. Even so, thought Hunt, her country had little to gain by wiping out the port at Zhanjiang. As she prepared to alter the course of the Enterprise, she couldn’t help but recognize this maneuver for the theater it was—for the theater such maneuvers always had been—ever since man split the atom, unleashed its power, and nations coerced one another with the threat of that power. The current crisis would de-escalate, as crises always did. She felt certain of this.

  That certainty gave her some peace of mind, enough so she dozed off in her chair. She slept dreamlessly, waking an hour later. Her radio was no longer playing the BBC World Service. It had lost the signal. All it emitted was static. Hunt fiddled with the dial, trying to retune into the news.

  Then she heard something.

  A weak, indistinct voice.

  As quickly as she heard it, it disappeared.

  She left her radio tuned to the static, set on the same frequency, wondering if she might hear the strange transmission again. She knew what it was; Quint had told her.

  It was ghosts.

  * * *

  14:22 June 24, 2034 (GMT+2)

  Barents Sea

  This far north the sun held above them nearly twenty-four hours a day. The sky was clear, the weather unseasonably warm. The American fleet was nowhere to be found; it had sailed away. The Russian Federation owned these waters, and they knew it. Unencumbered by the looming threat of the US Navy, the crew of the Rezkiy and other ships of the flotilla indulged in bouts of recreation. On the battle cruiser Pyotr Velikiy, the crew descended its side boats to take plunges into the icy seawater. On the carrier Kuznetsov, the captain authorized sunbathing on the flight deck despite the cold. On the smaller Rezkiy, Kolchak allowed pop songs to play over the ship’s intercom during the daily cleanup; most popular were classics like Elvis, the Jonas Brothers, and anything by Shakira. “Hips Don’t Lie” was a favorite.

  These little breaks with discipline, plus the general eccentricity of naval life, confounded Lieutenant Commander Farshad. His liaison duties consisted of little more than being a presence that evidenced two nations’ faithfulness to one another, even though neither of those nations had ever been renowned for faithfulness to anything but themselves. Farshad had once said as much in the wardroom to Kolchak, who had asked in reply, “Has a nation ever been faithful to anything but itself?” Farshad had conceded the point.

  Not long after this exchange, Farshad had been standing on the bridge of the Rezkiy when the watch spotted a school of sharks off the ship’s port side. Kolchak had been manning that watch and he took an uncanny interest in the sharks, even adjusting their ship’s course to follow them for several minutes. “Perfect,” said Kolchak as he stared at their thrashing dorsal fins. As if sensing Farshad’s confusion, he explained himself. “Those sharks are heading in the direction of the 10G undersea cables. They’re attracted to the electromagnetic energy. Those cables connect to the United States, and sharks have been known to chew through them. Their presence will give us deniability.”

  Destroying a few of the undersea cables would send a powerful message to the Americans, slowing internet across the country by as much as 60 percent, or so Farshad had been told by Kolchak. This might be enough to de-escalate the crisis, to bring everyone to their senses. When it came to acting pragmatically, which was to say acting in their national interests, it seemed to Farshad that only his country—and perhaps the Russians—were capable of clear thinking. The Russians, like them, knew that any scenario that weakened the Americans was advantageous. In fact, a de-escalation of the current crisis wasn’t really in the Iranian or Russian interest.

  Disruption was in their interest.

  Chaos.

  A change in the world order.

  The sharks disappeared beneath the waves, and for the remaining hours
of the day the Rezkiy and its sister ships idled over the 10G cables. The mood on the ship turned businesslike. Farshad lingered on the bridge, where Kolchak and the captain kept a vigil, the two speaking exclusively in Russian, while Kolchak took the occasional break to explain the situation to Farshad.

  “We’ll circle around this area here,” Kolchak said, pushing a yellowing fingernail at their navigation computer’s interface. “The Pyotr Velikiy has a tethered submersible aboard that is going to place an explosive cutting charge on the cables.”

  “How large is the charge?” asked Farshad.

  The captain brought his eyes out of his binoculars. From over his shoulder, he glanced at them warily.

  “Just enough to do the job,” said Kolchak.

  The captain made a face, and then a transmission came over the radio in Russian. Kolchak snatched the receiver and promptly replied while the captain dipped his eyes back into his binoculars and continued to scan the open sea. The Pyotr Velikiy was recovering its submersible, the charge having been set. Planted on the horizon was the Kuznetsov, its decks crowded with aircraft. Kolchak continued to check his watch, the second hand making its steady orbit around the dial as they waited.

  More minutes passed in silence.

  Then an explosion, a geyser fountaining upward from the seabed. Followed by a shock. And a sound, like a clap. The entire ship rattled. The water splashed back onto the surface of the ocean. Another radio transmission came into the bridge. The voice was excited, congratulatory. The captain answered the call in the same congratulatory manner. The only person on the bridge who didn’t seem pleased by the result was Farshad, who was confused. Grasping Kolchak by the elbow, he said, “That must’ve destroyed more than one or two cables.”