2034

by Elliot Ackerman

  At the mention of the sanctions, Farshad clenched his hands into fists. His face reddened. No doubt Farshad’s career, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Palestine and Syria, and wherever else he’d fought over the past thirty years, had been inextricably linked to the West’s punitive measures against his country, making Chowdhury’s evocation of sanctions far more personal than a policy disagreement between two nations. And knowing how Farshad had lost control of himself during his interrogation of Major Mitchell, Chowdhury now wondered if he might be the victim of a similar episode. Might he find himself battered to unconsciousness in his uncle’s den by this Iranian?

  However, Farshad took a breath. His body language began to change. His shoulders relaxed. His fists opened. His complexion unreddened. Then, in his calmest voice, Farshad said, “I wouldn’t be here if my nation didn’t believe a solution existed to our current problem.”

  Chowdhury, seizing upon this, nodded agreement. “We feel the same way. Neither of our countries wish to see a further spread of hostilities. I believe I also speak for our Indian allies when I say that they don’t wish to be brought into this conflict either. They’ve stayed out of our dispute with Beijing, as have our other allies like the Japanese, and it would be foolish for this conflict to take on an even broader dimension due to a”—Chowdhury paused a beat, searching for the correct word—“miscalculation.”

  The miscalculation, however, seemed to be in Chowdhury’s choice to speak for Indian interests and in so doing to speak for his uncle, who glowered at him from his place in the wing chair and then silenced him with a dismissive wave. “The fact of the matter is,” Patel began, “that neither of your nations has behaved in its best interest. America’s hubris has finally gotten the better of its greatness. You’ve squandered your blood and treasure to what end?” He looked directly at his nephew but did not wait for an answer. “For freedom of navigation in the South China Sea? For the sovereignty of Taiwan? Isn’t the world large enough for your government and Beijing’s? Perhaps you’ll win this war. But for what? To be like the British after the Second World War, your empire dismantled, your society in retreat? And millions of dead on both sides?” Then Patel turned his attention to Farshad. “Tell me, Lieutenant Commander, how does it serve your nation to provoke us, a neutral power with a population fifteen times the size of your own? We’re more than capable of taking back our ship, if need be. And we’re capable of far more, if further provoked.” Then the retired vice admiral sat a little straighter in his chair, his shoulders rounded backward, his chest filling with air, addressing both Farshad and Chowdhury as though he were again in command on one of his ships and they were subordinates to whom he was issuing a course correction. “You both represent countries that began this war. I represent a country that is capable of finishing it.”

  Sufficiently chastised, Chowdhury and Farshad sat silently next to one another in the den. The only movement was from the television in the corner, where their eyes instinctively wandered. Patel turned up the volume. On the screen, the troupe of dancers had yielded to a single woman, hardly more than a teen, who wore a sari of green silk, with golden bangles on her wrists and henna on her hands, palms, and the bottoms of her bare feet, which she kicked in the air as she pirouetted in time with a quick drumming. Patel said, “This is the Tandava,” as if Farshad, or at least Chowdhury, would be familiar with the dance. Their blank expressions made it clear that neither were. “Performed in a cycle, it channels the cosmic evolution of life.”

  “How so?” asked Farshad, his eyes fixed on the screen.

  “The Tandava was first danced by Lord Shiva,” answered Patel.

  “Shiva?” said Chowdhury, as he reached back in his memory for the identity of that particular deity.

  His uncle filled in the gap. “Yes, Lord Shiva. He is both the Creator and Destroyer.”

  A phone rang in the back of the house. Patel excused himself, leaving Chowdhury and Farshad alone in the den. Neither of them had an inclination to speak without Patel in the room, so they sat wordlessly while the tempo of the drum, flutes, and accompanying sitars continued to accelerate the dance that played out on the television.

  Chowdhury believed that the situation would soon resolve itself. The Iranian position was untenable. They couldn’t shut down the Strait of Hormuz for much longer. The risk of a broader Indian intervention was too great, not only for Tehran but also for Tehran’s ally Beijing. Such an intervention would be enough to tip the scales decidedly in favor of the United States. However, as Chowdhury reached this conclusion, a certain melancholy came over him. His country was the one that intervened—whether in the First World War, or the Second, in Korea or Vietnam, in the Balkans and later in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria. American intervention, if only occasionally successful, was always decisive among nations. But no longer.

  His uncle, having finished his call, appeared in the doorway. His mouth opened slightly as if to speak, but then he sealed it. He sat back in his chair with whatever he had to say trapped inside of him. Before he could deliver his message, a ticker unspooled itself across the bottom of the television’s screen. It was a news update in both Hindi and English. Before Chowdhury or Farshad could read further, Patel exhaled once, as if in anguish, only to say in a voice like doom, “San Diego and Galveston.”

  They sat, the three of them. In the room the only sound was the music. Not a word was spoken. The sole movement came from the television. The ticker continued to run, articulating the news, while above it was the girl, joyously articulating the movements of the Tandava. On and on she seemed to dance.

  6

  The Tandava

  21:47 July 20, 2034 (GMT+8)

  Beijing

  Lin Bao was alone when the first images came in. He’d arrived at the Defense Ministry three hours before the strike, sequestering himself in the conference room, and he waited. The Zheng He had dispatched long-dwell drones, whose radar and infrared profiles were the size of gnats, over San Diego and Galveston. The static-filled live feed projected ghostly gray onto a screen at the far end of the room. While Lin Bao sat in his armchair at the head of the table, he listened to the drone operator’s disembodied voice as it described what it saw: the blast circumference of the crater; the black rain of several pyrocumulus clouds; the otherworldly annihilation of two cities, which appeared as though a wrathful deity had inhaled them up from the earth. The voice was giving words to this single greatest act of human destruction. The more it spoke, the more it took on larger proportions, so that to Lin Bao it soon sounded less and less like the voice of a man and more as though it were the voice of God Himself.

  If Lin Bao possessed any reservations about his decision to leave the Navy and government service, watching the fallout over San Diego and Galveston gave him complete conviction that his time as a military officer was through. The only question was how to extract himself safely—not a small task, he realized. After their meeting at Mission Hills, Zhao Leji had, by default, made himself Lin Bao’s direct superior. Even though no table of organization existed that showed Lin Bao and Zhao Leji in the same chain of command, no official would accept Lin Bao’s resignation without Zhao Leji’s explicit approval.

  And so Lin Bao could submit his resignation to one person alone: Zhao Leji.

  However, since leaving Mission Hills, he and Lin Bao had had no direct communication. Not a telephone call. Not a meeting. Not an email. Zhao Leji had become a ghost, as distant and disembodied as the drones circling the destroyed American cities.

  Although Lin Bao had heard nothing from Zhao Leji, he did nothing without the old man’s tacit approval. That formal approval would, of course, never arrive with Zhao Leji’s name on it, or anyone else’s name on it for that matter. The Politburo Standing Committee expressed itself in the language of bureaucratic obfuscation. Direct intent from an individual (or a collection of individuals) was laundered through existing offices, and not infrequently through nonexistent ones. The routing on any memo—the “FROM:”—often
took up the entire first page. Names hardly ever appeared, only those obscure office titles. If a decision from the Politburo Standing Committee went awry, one of these intermediary offices could take any or all of the blame.

  As Lin Bao watched the live feed from the Zheng He, one of these bureaucratic messages sat on the desk in front of him. Like the strike’s launch order, it had arrived in a sealed envelope. It, too, had an extensive administrative routing directive on its first page. Lin Bao wondered what would happen if he composed his letter of resignation with a reverse of this routing? Like a trail of bread crumbs, would it lead back to Zhao Leji and the Politburo Standing Committee? He doubted it. He knew, instinctually, that a matter as sensitive as the resignation of a senior admiral couldn’t be handled through such channels. If only his departure was as simple as properly formatting a memo.

  His thoughts inexplicably turned to the one-way radios on the Soviet tanks during the Second World War, that cautionary case study at the US Naval War College about overly centralized command structures. His wife and daughter had loved Newport, the winter snowstorms spent huddled by the fireplace and that single glorious summer when on weekends they would rent a dinghy from Goat Island and then let out full-sail, passing beneath the Claiborne Pell suspension bridge as they headed toward the hulking gray facade of the historic Naval War College, where they’d beach their dinghy and spread a picnic on a blanket in the sand. With his shoes off, reclining alongside his family, Lin Bao had talked about his retirement back then too. His idea: to teach at the war college.

  He smiled self-consciously even thinking of it. How preposterous it seemed now.

  The disembodied voice interrupted: “Twenty-two minutes on-station time remaining. Standing by for additional taskings. . . .” The combat information center on the Zheng He responded, sending the unmanned flight out into the spectral blast-scape to further confirm what was obvious at a glance: the destruction of everything.

  I would have taught history, thought Lin Bao, his mind wandering as he considered the live feed. His dream to teach was one that he didn’t speak of to anyone, not even his wife. Had he acted on it those years ago he never would have made admiral. He would have retired from the Navy as a commander, a respectable rank. His dual US citizenship and his doctorate would have been enough to land him a job. As a former Chinese naval officer, he would have brought a unique perspective to the faculty. He had never quite relinquished the dream. Over the years, he had composed a curriculum for a few classes in his mind. He never dared write them down; that would have made the dream too real, and deferring it too painful.

  He imagined himself at the lectern discussing the ancient Greeks to his American students: “The First Persian War, in which Miltiades defeats Darius at Marathon in 490 BC, leads to the Second Persian War, in which the Athenian navy commanded by Themistocles destroys the Persian navy under Xerxes at Salamis in 480 BC. Ten years of war gives the Greeks fifty years of peace, a golden age. The Athenians secure peace on the Hellespont through the Delian League, a mutual-security pact in which the other Greek city-states pay Athens a tribute to protect them against future Persian aggression. Sound familiar?” Lin Bao would then imagine himself looking out at his class, at their blank expressions, in which the past held no relevance, in which there was only the future and that future would always be American.

  Then, in his imagined class, Lin Bao would tell his students of their past but also of their future. He would explain how America’s golden age was born out of the First and Second World Wars, just as Greece had found its greatest era of prosperity in the aftermath of the two Persian Wars. Like the Athenians with the Delian League, Lin Bao would explain how the Americans consolidated power with mutual-security pacts such as NATO, in which they would make the largest contributions in exchange for military primacy over the western world—much as the Athenians had gained military primacy of the then-known world through the Delian League.

  Lin Bao would always wait for the question he knew was coming, in which one of his students would ask why it all ended. What external threat overwhelmed the Delian League? What invader accomplished what the Persian fleet could not at Salamis? And Lin Bao would tell his students that no invader had come, no foreign horde had sabotaged the golden age forged by Miltiades, Themistocles, and Greece’s other forefathers.

  “Then how?” they would ask. “If the Persians couldn’t do it, who did?”

  And so, he would say, “The end came—as it always does—from within.”

  He would explain this patiently, like a father telling a beloved child that the Easter Bunny or another cherished fairy tale didn’t exist, and while his students’ puzzled expressions fixed on him, he would tell them about the jealousy of the Spartans, the fear they felt for the broadening powers of the Delian League. He would also tell them about Athens, drunk on its own greatness, blinded by narcissism and decadence. “Look over the ages,” he would assert, “from Britain, to Rome, to Greece: the empire always rots from within.” Most of his students, he knew, would underwhelm him. They would stare back in disbelief, or even hostility. Their assumption would always be that the time in which they lived could never be usurped; it was singular, as they believed themselves to be singular. Endemic dysfunction in America’s political life hardly mattered because America’s position in the world was inviolate. But a few of his students, their faces clear in his imagination, would return his stare as if his understanding had become their own.

  What Lin Bao wondered now, as he watched the last of the live feed, the skeletal remains of buildings, the rush-hour commute left incinerated on the highway, was what rank those few American students would hold today. Some would likely be admirals, like himself.

  What if he had retired early? What if he had taught and reached a few of them?

  Would there have been a Zhanjiang? A San Diego? A Galveston?

  Probably so, but he allowed himself to conjure an alternative history, one in which the miscalculations of the past four months had not occurred, one in which incidents like the Wén Rui and battles like Mischief Reef and Taiwan had never happened. Perhaps a single dissenting voice, properly applied, had prevented this collective madness. The historian in him couldn’t resist placing these events into a causative order, in which each became a link in an otherwise interruptible chain, one that had bound them to this moment, where Lin Bao—seated at the conference table, staring at the live feed—was witnessing the single greatest act of destruction in the history of mankind.

  But there was nothing he could do about any of this.

  The task before him was simple: to observe the last of the live feed and to pass along to the Zheng He the order that sat in front of him on the table. It tasked the carrier and its escorts to return from the Pacific to the South China Sea at best speed to “defend against the American threat in our waters.”

  Another fifteen minutes had passed.

  The drone operator continued to survey the blast-scape. Then, with fuel running low, he announced that he’d be checking off-station in seven minutes. With his hollow, disembodied voice, the drone operator radioed to the Zheng He, asking whether they had any further taskings.

  The Zheng He had none.

  Next, the drone operator called to the Defense Ministry and asked if they had any further taskings. Lin Bao picked up the handset on the satellite uplink, connecting him directly to the drone operator. He said the Defense Ministry had no further taskings.

  There was a moment of silence.

  The drone operator again asked if the Defense Ministry had any further taskings. Lin Bao repeated himself into the handset.

  Nothing.

  There’d been some breakdown in communications. A member of Lin Bao’s support staff rushed into the conference room, untangling wires beneath the table, toggling switches on and off at the back of the satellite uplink, while Lin Bao repeated over and over again that he’d seen enough, that he had no further taskings, that he didn’t need to see any more.

  Ther
e was no response.

  Lin Bao kept repeating himself. He was frantic to deliver his message, frantic to hear a response on the other end of the line from that hollow, disembodied voice.

  * * *

  11:49 July 20, 2034 (GMT+5:30)

  New Delhi

  Vice Admiral Patel immediately ordered two taxicabs, one for Farshad and the other for his nephew. The three of them hardly spoke as they waited. Farshad never considered himself a prejudiced man—in his mind bigotry was a safe harbor for weaklings. However, all through his life, he’d noticed how on the few occasions he’d met an American he’d immediately recoiled at their presence (he had a similar reaction to Israelis, though had an easier time self-rationalizing this response as something other than bigotry). But when Farshad witnessed Chowdhury’s palpable grief as the first reports came in from San Diego and Galveston, he couldn’t help but feel something akin to pity. What he did next not only surprised his American friend but also surprised himself. As the two sat next to each other on the love seat in the admiral’s den, Farshad reached over and placed his right hand consolingly on the American’s left arm.

  The first taxicab arrived. There was no question that Chowdhury would be taking it instead of Farshad. The American’s need was more urgent. As his uncle shuttled him to the door, he turned to Farshad and said, “Thank you.” Farshad said nothing in return. He suspected that the American was thanking him for the gesture from before, but he couldn’t be certain. He reminded himself never to trust an American.

  Farshad asked Patel when the second taxicab would arrive. Instead of answering, Patel invited Farshad to sit with him a little longer in the den. Farshad made a slight protest—he, too, had to check in with the officials at his embassy—but Patel ignored him. “How about a cup of tea?” he said.