2034

by Elliot Ackerman

  No matter, she thought cruelly, as she handed him the order for the counterstrike.

  “What’s this?” he asked, thumbing through the pages. Hunt didn’t need to tell him; he could read it for himself: Xiamen, Fuzhou, . . . Shanghai. His left eyebrow ticked upward when he read the last one. Aside from that he sat across from her stone-faced.

  “When can you be ready?” she asked.

  “Day after tomorrow,” said Wedge. That would give his pilots a full night’s rest. The Hornets, antiquated as they were, could also benefit from the attention of a twenty-four-hour maintenance stand-down. Each crew chief could then conduct a full inspection of the avionics, airframes, and weapons systems, all of which had proven temperamental during their training runs.

  “That’s fine,” said Hunt. “We don’t need to launch any earlier than that.”

  “Three flights of three,” answered Wedge. “That sound about right to you?”

  Hunt glanced down at her desk and nodded. “Which flight will you take?”

  “I figured I’d take Shanghai.”

  When he said the name, all Hunt could think was 33.24 million people. The same with the other cities turned targets. Fuzhou wasn’t Fuzhou anymore; it was 7.8 million people. The same for Xiamen: 7.1 million. “Wedge—” she said, his name catching for a moment in her throat. “A lot of folks are calling this a suicide mission.”

  Wedge folded up the three sheets of paper Hunt had given him and stuffed them in the same pocket as his dirty rag. “Ma’am, I don’t do suicide missions. We’ll get her done and make it back here.” For a moment, Hunt thought to tell him that wasn’t what she meant by suicide mission. But she thought better of it.

  Wedge snapped to attention and was dismissed.

  * * *

  19:25 July 29, 2034 (GMT+8)

  Beijing

  It took four days before Lin Bao realized that his wife and daughter had fled the city. He’d last seen them when he left for work on a Tuesday. He had stayed that night at the ministry as well as the night that followed. He’d come home the following morning, a Thursday, and had slept from nine o’clock until three o’clock in the afternoon before returning to the ministry. He’d worked all the next day and through that night into Saturday. When he came home around lunch the house was empty. He began to wonder where his family was. When he phoned his wife, she answered on the third try. She and her daughter were staying in her mother’s village in the countryside, hundreds of miles inland—“until this is over,” she had said. Lin Bao asked to speak with his daughter, but she was out taking a walk with her grandmother. “I’ll have her call you back.”

  “When?” Lin Bao had asked.

  “Soon,” answered his wife.

  Lin Bao didn’t protest. What right did he have to? If anything, he was jealous of his wife and daughter. Jealous of the time they had together; jealous of their safety, of their distance from the capital, and of their decision to leave it. He’d been indulging in escapist fantasies of his own, imagining what his life might be like when he left the Navy. He was indulging in one of these fantasies as he settled down in his empty house, rooting around the mostly bare fridge for some dinner. Early the next morning he would need to return to the ministry to monitor the reentrance of the Zheng He into territorial waters. He heated up a microwave meal, a burger and fries, his favorite indulgence, although it never cooked quite right in a microwave. The burger always wound up bland, the fries soggy. Not like it tasted in the States.

  He watched the timer. He wondered again if perhaps he’d teach when this war was over. The idea of returning to the academy, or to any of his country’s war colleges, was unappealing. Their curricula were merely programs of regurgitation. The professors had no input in their development. To teach the way he wanted to, he’d need to settle in the West. However, with each passing day of the current conflict that seemed more and more like an impossibility. And if he couldn’t teach, he would at least use his retirement to refocus on his family, to reestablish his relationship with his daughter, which had lost the warmth it had known during their days in Newport almost a decade before. No one could take his family from him, he thought, as the timer on the microwave went off.

  Lin Bao took his meal in its plastic container and settled down on the sofa in the living room. He uncapped a bottle of Tsingtao and took a long pull. With one hand he grasped his beer by the neck and with the other he held his remote as he scrolled through a series of unfamiliar television shows. How long had it been since he’d had a night alone like this? Feeling overwhelmed by his program choices and disoriented by being on his own, he struggled to relax. He couldn’t quite bring himself to take advantage of his time off. Eventually, he rerouted his internet through an illicit VPN he’d downloaded, allowing him to watch an uncensored broadcast of BBC News from London.

  The pasty-faced anchor led with a story, “. . . coming from the open waters south of Japan in the Philippine Sea . . .” According to reports, freighters transiting into and out of the Pacific had observed a massive fire. Ceaseless clouds of smoke billowed miles into the air. Early speculation leaned toward this being the result of an undersea drilling disaster; however, the BBC and other networks soon dispelled this theory. No energy companies had wells in that remote portion of the Philippine Sea. An intrepid private pilot had, with that afternoon’s sun descending off her left tail wing, managed to fly the approximately two hundred miles southeast from the Japanese archipelago of Naha. The BBC was livestreaming video recorded by the pilot, while the anchor, mumbling away, attempted to make sense of the images.

  Lin Bao set his beer on the floor and put his meal on a side table. He craned his neck forward, his face pressing closer to the television.

  It couldn’t be.

  He would’ve heard.

  There would have been a cry for help.

  But then Lin Bao thought of them heading west, their stealth technology fully engaged while maintaining the discipline of a communications blackout. A student of history, he recalled the USS Indianapolis, which had gone down in the Philippine Sea almost a hundred years before, sunk by a torpedo fired from a Japanese submarine; it’d taken four days for the Americans to realize what had happened.

  Lin Bao continued to watch closely, his eyes unblinking.

  The pilot, who was narrating parts of the livestream, explained that she had to keep her distance. Secondary explosions made it difficult for her to approach any closer. Her plane rattled in the turbulent air. Then, through a break in the smoke, Lin Bao saw it. The familiar slope of its prow, the gentle arch where its anchor lay: his old ship, the Zheng He.

  She was ablaze, listing hard to starboard.

  The news anchor still didn’t understand what he was looking at. He fumbled along through his broadcast, hypothesizing along with his coanchor as to what all this smoke and fire at sea could possibly mean. Lin Bao, however, was already up from his seat, out the door, and on his way back into the ministry. He forgot to switch off the television.

  An hour later, when his daughter returned his call, he wasn’t available to take it.

  * * *

  12:25 July 29, 2034 (GMT+5:30)

  New Delhi

  This was Chowdhury’s second trip to the Defense Ministry in as many weeks. His first trip had proven eventful by way of introductions. Over lunch, Chowdhury had met the defense minister himself, the chief of staff of the armed forces, and an extensive retinue of staff officers. Sitting around an oval table in the minister’s personal dining room, each of them had offered their condolences for “the atrocities at Galveston and San Diego.” None of them knew about Chowdhury’s ex-wife, or his recently motherless daughter, so these condolences felt impersonal, like one nation’s theoretical expression of sympathy for another. No one had said anything of substance in that first meeting; it had served to open a dialogue.

  Now Patel had recalled his nephew to the ministry for a second time. They met down by security. Despite Patel’s retired status he had a badge that
listed him as permanent staff, allowing him to come and go as he pleased. When Patel arrived, he cut to the front of the security line and was promptly handed a visitor’s badge for his nephew. The two were waved through a turnstile by an alert, white-gloved soldier in his service dress.

  Patel walked briskly, with Chowdhury trailing a half step behind. Unlike the day before, when they’d followed the long corridor toward the upper-floor offices of the senior ministry officials, Patel led Chowdhury down to the basement. With its low ceilings and flickering halogen bulbs, this was the domain of minor officialdom. Eventually, they found themselves at a small canteen. “Let me buy you a cup of tea,” said his uncle.

  Chowdhury followed him inside. There were only three tables, each empty. Patel explained that the woman at the cash register was the pensioned widow of a long-since-martyred soldier. Patel paid, dropped a few extra coins in her tip jar, and offered the elderly widow his most convivial smile.

  “I was hoping we could talk unofficially,” Patel began as they sat. “When I brought you here last week to meet the defense minister and chief of staff, it was to convey to you that I speak for the senior-most levels of our government. Understood?”

  Chowdhury nodded. He didn’t quite understand why he’d been chosen as the receptacle for whatever message his uncle seemed poised to deliver. Why wasn’t this proceeding through official channels, through the ambassador, or even some lesser embassy official? As if in anticipation of these concerns, his uncle explained, “Within your government, certain parties have a strong interest toward escalation. They will knowingly misinterpret our actions. Because of this, it is important for you to convey clearly both what we have done but also what we are willing to do.”

  Chowdhury studied his uncle. “By ‘certain parties,’ who do you mean?”

  “I believe you know who I mean,” answered Patel.

  “Wisecarver?” asked Chowdhury quietly.

  Patel neither affirmed nor refuted Chowdhury’s guess. He took another sip of his tea before explaining, “Our government, specifically the leadership in this building, is not choosing a side. We are not supporting Beijing. And we are not supporting Washington. We are allied with no one. Our support is for de-escalation. Do you understand?”

  Chowdhury nodded.

  “Good,” added Patel. “Because what I’m about to show you might be confusing to your national security staff.” From his pocket, Patel removed his government-issued cell phone. He began to scroll through a series of photographs taken along the surface of the ocean, with waves cresting in the bottom of the frame. Superimposed over each image was a reticle, as if from a gunsight, with crosshatched X and Y axes bisecting its width and length. As Patel scrolled through each picture the ship on the horizon drew closer, until Chowdhury could clearly observe an aircraft carrier. Patel paused for a moment, glanced once more at his nephew, and then cycled to the next photo. . . .

  An inferno of smoke and flames obscured and consumed the carrier.

  Patel paged quickly through the pictures that followed as if each were an image in a flip-book, animating the burning carrier as it slipped beneath the waves. When his uncle came to the last photograph, which was of the calm and consuming sea again at rest, he put words to what Chowdhury had witnessed. “These are periscope photographs from one of our upgraded Kalvari-class diesel-electric submarines. Their modified propulsion system affords them an essentially unlimited range, equal to any of your nuclear submarines. We’ve used one to sink the Zheng He.”

  As his uncle had promised, Chowdhury was perplexed. “You sunk the Zheng He . . . but you are not allying yourself with the United States?”

  “Correct,” said Patel. “Our interests are to de-escalate this conflict. If your government takes any retaliatory action for Galveston or San Diego, it won’t be a Chinese ship that we sink next but an American one.” Patel presented his nephew with another image, a map that showed the approximate disposition of Indian naval forces in and around the South China Sea. “And as you’ll see, this isn’t a hollow threat.”

  Patel’s map seemed an impossibility to Chowdhury. If accurate, it meant that dozens of Indian warships had infiltrated into the South China Sea undetected, representing a gross underestimation of India’s stealth-cloaking and cyber capability by his own country. Chowdhury’s thoughts shifted to a couple of days before, how his uncle had learned of the Enterprise’s receipt of launch orders against the Chinese mainland. He was increasingly certain that Patel knew this through Chowdhury’s email exchange with Hendrickson. If the Indians possessed enough sophistication to hack into a state-of-the-art encrypted email system, was it not also likely that they possessed the sophistication to position their fleet clandestinely between the Enterprise and the Chinese mainland?

  “Our defense attaché visited the White House and showed these pictures to your national security advisor. . . .”

  “And?” Chowdhury asked his uncle.

  “He was thanked and escorted out of the building.”

  Chowdhury nodded.

  “It is my belief that your Mr. Wisecarver never passed along these materials or news of our attaché’s visit to anyone else in the administration. It is also my belief that your Mr. Wisecarver has no intention of expressing the nuance of our government’s position to your president.”

  “Your beliefs are likely correct,” answered Chowdhury. “So why are you telling me this?”

  They’d finished their tea. Patel gave his nephew a glance, then went back to the register where the cashier sat. She poured him another two cups, but this time Patel neglected to drop a coin in her jar. Patel returned to his seat, picking up their conversation. “I am telling you all of this because perhaps there is another way to convey our message.” He handed Chowdhury his tea and fixed him in his stare, as if he were waiting for his nephew to speak. However, Chowdhury wouldn’t say anything. By conspiring with his uncle in this way, he felt as though he were skirting a treasonous line. And so, Patel finished the thought for him: “Your friend Hendrickson might be able to communicate our message directly.”

  “Going around Wisecarver to the president would likely end his career.”

  “If the Enterprise launches a counterstrike,” Patel answered gravely, “much more will end than the career of one man.”

  The two of them sat quietly. “Why are we meeting here, in this canteen?” asked Chowdhury. “Why not in a secure conference room?” He glanced at the cashier, who was nominally paging through a gossip magazine but who he suspected had been listening to them this entire time.

  “Because we haven’t had a meeting,” answered Patel. “None of this is official. My government hasn’t sanctioned my talking to you. As far as they’re concerned, we’re discussing my sister’s health.” For the first time, Chowdhury felt uncertain who exactly his uncle spoke for. As if he could sense his nephew’s unease, Patel added, “To break certain impasses, sometimes we have to rely on a bond stronger than nationality. Sometimes the only bond that is strong enough is family.” Patel clasped his nephew by the shoulder. “You will talk to your friend Hendrickson?”

  Chowdhury nodded.

  “Good,” he said. “I’m late to a meeting. Can you find your way out?”

  He nodded. “Yes.”

  “And don’t worry about her,” Patel added as he got up. “She’s near deaf . . . a tragic story.” On his way out, he glanced once more at the cashier. With that, his uncle was gone.

  Chowdhury sipped slowly from his half-finished cup of tea, puzzling over how to outmaneuver Wisecarver. He likely had only hours until the Enterprise launched its counterstrike against the Chinese mainland. He had no idea what the Indian response might be. Or how his government might react. The task his uncle had placed before him seemed an impossible one. He must’ve appeared in pretty bad shape as he stood from his seat. He could feel the old widow at the cash register staring at him piteously. As Chowdhury passed by her, he reached into his pocket and took out some change, dropping it into her ja
r.

  She took his hand by the wrist, startling him. Her eyes were wide and watery with what seemed like nostalgia. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you.”

  Chowdhury glanced down at her grip. “Think nothing of it.”

  For another long moment, she wouldn’t let him go.

  * * *

  17:49 July 29, 2034 (GMT+4:30)

  Strait of Hormuz

  He had been walking in circles. At least that’s what it felt like to Farshad. Day and night. Ever since he’d arrived on Hormuz Island. Going in one big circle. He would check a fighting position—say, an antiaircraft gun—then proceed to the next—say, a machine gun oriented on the beaches—then one of the new directed-energy cannons, which never seemed to work. On and on he’d go, viciously kicking stones out of his path as he followed the few miles of perimeter, his only break being the brief boat ride between this island and its twin, Larak Island, where he walked a nearly identical circle.

  The defenses on the islands were paltry at best: a handful of antiaircraft guns, a few hundred poorly trained conscripts, some barbed-wire obstacles. That was about it. Did General Bagheri really expect him to defend these strategically critical islands with this? He couldn’t be serious. And in fact, General Bagheri wasn’t serious—or at least he didn’t take the threat of a Russian invasion seriously. When Farshad had presented this prospect on his return from New Delhi, General Bagheri had sat behind his desk, plucking pistachios from a dish, knuckling open their shells while he listened patiently. Then with indifference he’d asked, “Is that all?”

  What had followed was the greatest dressing-down Farshad had received in at least a decade. According to General Bagheri, the idea of a Russian invasion of the Hormuz Strait Islands was preposterous. Tehran and Moscow had been allied for decades. Furthermore, the information had come from the Indians, who were no great friends of either nation. Then, turning personal, Bagheri had said, “Lieutenant Commander Farshad” (annunciating his full rank as if to remind him how far he had fallen), “I placed you in the Navy so that you wouldn’t cause more problems. But now, the Supreme Leader has himself read your warning of a Russian strike. Against my advice, he’s chosen to release the Indian tanker and he has also ordered me to reinforce our islands in the strait. It seems I’ve been unsuccessful in keeping you out of trouble.”