Interrupting Farshad’s thoughts, a stranger asked if he could sit in the empty seat at his table. Farshad gestured with his hand and the stranger, a man who was perhaps a decade older, joined him. Farshad continued to consider the crowd.
The stranger asked if he was waiting for someone. Farshad said that he was.
“Who?” asked the stranger.
Farshad considered him for a moment. “A friend, I guess.”
The man extended his hand, introducing himself. “I am Vice Admiral Anand Patel, a friend.”
* * *
22:46 July 19, 2034 (GMT+5:30)
New Delhi
Chowdhury was returning late to the US embassy. Diplomatic tensions being what they were, he was obliged to sleep there. His mother, however, had determined that it would be best if she and his daughter stayed with Chowdhury’s uncle. Though his days had been busy, Chowdhury committed himself to having dinner every night with Ashni. He had been in New Delhi for almost a week and the routine of early mornings, full days, and late-night returns to the embassy from his uncle’s house east of the Yamuna River was quickly wearing him out. He dozed in the back of the cab, remembering the last week as though it were a dream while he skirted Nehru Park. Within hours of the Iranians’ claiming autonomous control of the Strait of Hormuz and seizing the tanker owned by TATA NYK, Trent Wisecarver had called Chowdhury into his office and told him he would be “heading back to New Delhi.”
The way Wisecarver had said “back” hadn’t sat well with Chowdhury. Amid this conflict, a resurgent nativism was beginning to possess the American psyche, as it had in other conflicts, a phenomenon Chowdhury had witnessed that night with Samantha at the empty City Lights restaurant. Perhaps Wisecarver hadn’t meant anything by it; perhaps when he said “back” he was referring to his prior mission to New Delhi to retrieve the downed Marine pilot. But Chowdhury couldn’t shake his suspicions.
After the strike on Zhanjiang, Wisecarver had cleaned house within the national security staff. The country, unlike in generations past, had failed to come together when confronted by the specter of a world war, even a nuclear one. A strike against the American homeland seemed inevitable, though no one could know where or in what shape it would manifest—a dirty bomb planted by a sleeper cell, a warhead on the tip of a ballistic missile, or perhaps both? Decades of partisan division had taken their toll, and the administration was under fire from all sides, from the hawks who believed the tactical nuclear strike hadn’t gone far enough to the doves who believed America had abdicated its moral authority by employing such weapons. To respond to whatever came next, Wisecarver needed true loyalists. Which was to say he needed people who owed their positions in the administration not to their competencies, but to him alone. And so Chowdhury had been quietly sent “back” to New Delhi to deal with the new crisis in the Strait of Hormuz.
When Chowdhury arrived at the embassy, he checked his email a last time before heading to bed and saw that he had a message from another colleague who had been banished in Wisecarver’s putsch, Rear Admiral John Hendrickson: Bunt.
The two had left Washington at about the same time, though Hendrickson’s journey had been longer and more treacherous, and his mission equally complex. It was, in its way, also a diplomatic mission. Sarah Hunt, his “old friend and colleague” (this was how Hendrickson always referred to her), had at Zhanjiang launched the first nuclear strike in almost a century. On her orders millions had been killed. The strain must’ve been enormous. With the leadership in the White House bracing for the Chinese response to Zhanjiang, every commander in the field needed to be ready to deliver a swift counterpunch. Hesitation could be disastrous. Which was why Hendrickson was being sent to check on Hunt, to assess her state of mind. The fuzzy language Wisecarver had given him was “augment her command.”
The message Chowdhury had in his in-box from Hendrickson read simply, Arrived on Enterprise. Hope you’re well. More soon.—Bunt. Chowdhury and Hendrickson had made an arrangement when they’d both left Washington at the behest of Wisecarver, to help each other navigate the increasingly internecine politics of the administration they served. Chowdhury doubted their alliance would amount to much. But he needed all the friends he could muster. Hendrickson did too.
As he finished scrolling through his work emails, Chowdhury’s cell phone pinged with a fresh text message. It was from his uncle:
Come tomorrow 08:00 for breakfast. Have a new friend you should meet.
* * *
20:03 July 19, 2034 (GMT+8)
South China Sea
Hunt couldn’t believe it until she held the flight manifest in her hand. How had life conspired to deliver him here, now? His name on the manifest: Hendrickson, J. T. It appeared in the same order as when it had headed their softball team roster decades before at Annapolis. She checked her watch. From her stateroom she could hear flight deck operations underway. The Death Rattlers had been constantly in the air. Hunt had given Major Mitchell top priority to qualify his pilots on their low-tech avionics. At all hours, she could hear the fiery rumble and metallic screech of their Hornets launching and recovering. Now came an interruption, the hollow, raspy vibrations of a turboprop engine, a V-22 Osprey—the resupply flight with Hendrickson aboard.
Ten minutes or so passed and then with a knock at Hunt’s door a junior sailor announced, “Admiral Hendrickson to see you, ma’am.” When Hendrickson came in, he glumly stood there, his khaki uniform carrying the creases of the many layovers he’d had to endure as he leapfrogged from one base to another on his way out to sea. Dispensing with the naval courtesies, Hendrickson slumped into the chair opposite her desk, cradled his chin in his palm, and said only, “I want you to know that coming out here wasn’t my idea.”
“Why are you out here, then?” she asked.
The office rattled slightly as another Hornet catapulted off the flight deck.
Hendrickson, ever the company man, regurgitated the language Wisecarver had offered him.
“Augmenting my command?” Hunt replied, throwing back his words. “What the hell does that mean? Have you cleared this with INDOPACOM? Though, I guess respecting protocol has never been your thing.” She was angry, and she felt she had every right to be angry. No one had listened to her, not from the start. Hendrickson and his cronies on the national security staff had been so certain of their superiority, of their ability to take on any threat, and that overconfidence had backed them into this corner, cutting squares in the South China Sea, waiting for the imminent strike against their homeland.
“Admiral Johnstone at INDOPACOM is well aware of my visit,” answered Hendrickson. “You can call him on the redline if you want. I stopped in Honolulu and briefed him on my way out here—”
Another Hornet roared as it was catapulted off the flight deck.
“People are worried about you, Sarah.” Hendrickson softened his tone. He couldn’t manage to look at her as he said this, so he stared at his hands, fingering the obnoxiously large Annapolis class ring he still insisted on wearing. “You’ve been through a lot . . . been asked to take on a lot . . . emotionally.” Emotionally? Fuck him. Was he referring to events since her command of the John Paul Jones and her central role in the strike against Zhanjiang? Or was he going beyond that, to her days at Annapolis? To what she’d given up—namely, a family, a life, him—so that they could sit here together these many years later, two admirals on the bridge of a US warship. She’d never know. And he’d never say. But she listened to him regardless. “We all realize what’s coming. And it seems the Enterprise will be in the middle of our response. You shouldn’t have to go through it alone. I am here . . .” And she hoped for a moment he’d leave it at that, a personal statement that affirmed the history between them, except he couldn’t and so added, “. . . to augment your command.”
Their conversation shifted to the overall readiness of the Enterprise and its ability to inflict a counterstrike. So long as the Chinese didn’t engage with strategic nuclear weapons, the
appropriate response would be a multipronged attack on their mainland with tactical nukes. Hunt had concluded that her one squadron of Hornets, the Death Rattlers, would be the most effective. She explained to Hendrickson the reworked avionics system, and her belief that a strike package should consist of the squadron’s nine planes distributed over three target sets: three flights composed of three aircraft each. The squadron’s new commanding officer, Major Chris “Wedge” Mitchell, had been tirelessly preparing his pilots for such a mission.
Hendrickson said, “I thought it was ten aircraft to a Marine Hornet squadron?”
“Wedge lost one aircraft four days ago. We’ve had to modify their targeting computers so that the bomb release is now done manually. We were testing them at sea with live ordnance. One of the pilots had a bomb get stuck, so it was dangling from his wing off its ejector rack. He couldn’t land like that, so he bailed out and put his plane into the drink. These pilots are young; they’re not used to navigating with nothing but a compass and flight chart. He had called in his position and we diverted there. We circled for an entire day, never found him. Maybe someone else picked him up—we were close to the mainland. . . . You can always hope.”
After a long silence, Hendrickson cocked his head skeptically. “‘Wedge?’ What the hell kind of a call sign is that, anyway?”
* * *
09:37 July 20, 2034 (GMT+8)
Beijing
His wife and daughter were happy to see him, but home felt unreal to Lin Bao. He was living in the shadow of what was to come.
The Zheng He had already gone dark when Lin Bao returned to Beijing. He monitored it daily from the Defense Ministry as it made creeping progress toward the West Coast of the United States, its complement of stealth technology fully employed, its communications under a blackout. Lin Bao, better than anyone, understood the capabilities of that battle group. All they needed was a target set, which the ministry would transmit to Lin Bao’s replacement, a younger admiral of high competence, once the Zheng He was in position. Although Minister Chiang hadn’t lived to see his plan’s implementation, Lin Bao recognized the plan when it came across his desk. It arrived preapproved by the Politburo Standing Committee in a single manila folder. Lin Bao took it into the secure conference room in the bowels of the ministry, the same conference room where Minister Chiang had once triumphantly received him with heaping bowls of M&M’s. Lin Bao missed the doughy old bureaucrat; he missed his exuberant scheming and his odd sense of humor. Perhaps what Lin Bao missed most of all, as he tucked into Minister Chiang’s old armchair at the head of the conference table, was his boss’s company, the assurance that he wasn’t engaged in this madness alone.
But he was, at this moment, very much alone, by design.
Although the Politburo Standing Committee had approved the plan Lin Bao was about to put into action, he would be the senior-most officer tasked with its execution—the only person in the room. All responsibility fell on him.
Tensely, he collected himself and opened the folder.
It contained two envelopes. The two target sets.
One or another of the junior staffers had left a letter opener on the table for him. He slid the dull blade into the first and then the second envelope. Inside each were four paper-clipped pages, exhaustively stamped, certified, and serialized. On the top was a signature line, confirming receipt. He wrote his name, the only actual name that would appear on any of these documents. Then he skimmed over the authorizations, a labyrinth of anodyne operational language with whole passages that he himself had drafted on behalf of Minister Chiang.
Every detail was accounted for.
Which was to say with Lin Bao’s signature alone on the document, he was accountable for every detail: from the selection of the launch platform (whether it be surface-based, submarine-based, or aircraft-based), to the loading of the fissile material, to the readiness of the crews, to the accurate delivery onto the targets—
The targets . . .
For Lin Bao, this was the single unknown aspect of the plan. He imagined that Zhao Leji had chosen them himself. After their exchange on the golf course, Lin Bao half expected the old man to consult him as to their selection, to allow him again to assume the role of caddy. If given that chance, Lin Bao would’ve advised him not to overplay. A strike against the largest US cities—such as Los Angeles, or New York—would be too ambitious, the equivalent of choosing the 3-wood that day on the course. It should be two US cities for Zhanjiang, so an escalation. A parity should exist in the choice. Their South Sea Fleet had been based at Zhanjiang, so a similar military target would be appropriate, at least for one of the cities. The other target should be more industrial. Lin Bao thought of the advice he would have given had he been asked. However, Zhao Leji hadn’t needed another advisor. What he’d really needed was a receptacle for blame if his plans unwound.
A fall guy.
A patsy.
Which is what Lin Bao had been reduced to. In that moment, he made himself a promise: This would be the last order he ever followed. He would retire from the Navy.
But for now, he had a job to do.
He flipped to the final page of each document, where he found the coordinates that would serve as ground zero:
32.7157° N, 117.1611° W
29.3013° N, 94.7977° W
He plotted the first on a chart: San Diego. Then the second: Galveston.
* * *
08:17 July 20, 2034 (GMT+5:30)
New Delhi
Traffic in the city didn’t follow any logical pattern, or at least none that Chowdhury could decipher. During rush hour he’d find the roads empty and during the laziest parts of the day he’d find the roads congested to a standstill. He struggled to arrive at appointments on time. He would either show up awkwardly early, or woefully late. As was the case now, at nearly twenty past eight in the morning, as he struggled to navigate his way to his uncle’s house for a breakfast appointment that the vice admiral, using his military vernacular, had set for 08:00.
Business with his uncle needed to remain “unofficial”: retired Vice Admiral Patel didn’t technically represent his government in any formal capacity, which was why Chowdhury found himself crossing to the east bank of the Yamuna in the back of a taxi as opposed to an embassy car. Chowdhury couldn’t deny that his mother and daughter were safer now, staying with his uncle. But this placed him in an increasingly conflicted position, with the interests of his country not necessarily aligning with the interests of his family. So he reflected as he approached his uncle’s home for the 08:00 breakfast that was now closer to 09:00. And if Chowdhury was tardy to this meeting, he was equally tardy when it came to figuring a solution to his conflicted interests. However, he accepted that certain things, like the traffic, moved with a logic all their own.
When his uncle greeted him at the door, he didn’t mention the delay, and even explained that “his guest” had also arrived late, though not quite as late as his nephew. The house was empty aside from the three of them. At his uncle’s behest Ashni had enrolled in the local primary school, a decision Chowdhury hadn’t felt certain of but that his mother supported, leading to perhaps the first time in decades the two long-estranged siblings had agreed on anything. Chowdhury was glad that at this moment he wouldn’t need to face his mother or daughter as his uncle escorted him into the den.
The room was furnished with a love seat, a wing chair, a bookshelf, and a television in the corner on whose screen a troupe of colorfully attired dancers gesticulated about a stage in what looked like the climactic third act of some Bollywood production. A man stood waiting in the center of the room. Before Chowdhury could catch his name, he noticed that he had only three fingers on his right hand. They shook. Chowdhury was introduced as “my nephew, Sandeep, who works for the American government,” while his uncle introduced his guest as “Qassem, a Persian friend.”
A slight duplicity existed in Patel’s introduction, one which Chowdhury didn’t mind but of which he was cer
tainly aware. His uncle evidently assumed that Chowdhury knew nothing of this Iranian officer. Chowdhury knew a great deal. He had read Major Mitchell’s debriefing from his captivity in Bandar Abbas, which included—among other details—a lengthy description of the three-fingered Iranian brigadier who’d beaten him senseless. What Chowdhury didn’t understand was how Farshad, a former senior-level officer in the Revolutionary Guards Quds Force, had wound up here, on a somewhat quixotic diplomatic mission to negotiate the release of an Indian tanker.
The three of them sat in the den, with Patel strategically placed in the wing chair while Farshad and Chowdhury were forced to share the love seat, a seating arrangement that reminded Chowdhury of the interminable sessions he’d spent in marriage counseling years before. Farshad and Chowdhury had begun to speak of their nations’ current dispute with the same low-level acrimony of one of those matrimonial sessions.
It was, said Chowdhury, unacceptable for the Iranians to claim control over the Strait of Hormuz. The consequences to the global economy, which had already suffered enormously due to the current Sino-American War and now teetered on the edge of a depression, would be devastating, to say nothing of the effects on Iran, which would surely suffer further censure and perhaps renewed sanctions, similar to what they’d endured two decades before during their failed nuclear bid.
2034 Page 20
