He could see their markings, a green, white, and orange roundel.
Not Chinese—Indian.
Wedge didn’t quite understand. Since when were the Indians allied with the Chinese? Then two more flashes, one off his left wing and another off his right. An alliance between the Indians and Chinese didn’t make any sense to Wedge, but he didn’t have time to consider it. The shock wave from the two explosions came from separate directions, jarring his aircraft. His radio remained silent. He didn’t know who he’d lost or understand who he’d lost them to. He still had a target to reach, and his only chance to reach it was to use these seconds of confusion to slip away, hug the contours of the earth, and head north. His radio was surely being jammed, but he nevertheless called out to whatever remained of the Death Rattlers, ordering all ships to proceed to their targets. And as if in rebuttal to his words, he tracked another explosion high above him as a fifth Hornet was destroyed.
Nose down, afterburners screaming, Wedge descended to below one hundred feet, pulling up so low that his engines blew ripples across the ocean’s surface. Above him, three of the Hornets remained tangled with a gathering number of Indian fighters—perhaps a dozen—which Wedge tracked as the superior Su-35. His Hornets didn’t stand a chance; his pilots’ skill would count for very little, maybe nothing. He knew that they understood this. Even though he couldn’t communicate, he hoped they appreciated that the seconds they remained fighting in the air would be put to good use by him. With the Indians occupied, he’d make his escape, heading north toward Shanghai.
Another explosion behind him.
Then a second.
And eventually a third.
Wedge had the head start he needed. If he stayed below one hundred feet, with luck he’d slip the coastal defenses. Flight time was another twenty-two minutes. He checked his watch. It’d been forty-three minutes since their mission had launched. Even if his radio had worked, his communications window with the Enterprise had closed.
* * *
07:14 July 30, 2034 (GMT-4)
Washington, D.C.
No one could get in touch with Major Mitchell. Admiral Hunt’s decision to strip the Hornets of any overridable communications system had left the aircraft without any functioning communications at all. Without too much trouble, the Indians had jammed the low-tech UHF/VHF/HF receivers the aircraft relied on. From the White House Situation Room to the combat information center on the Enterprise, the only sound was Quint as he continued to call out to the flight of nine aircraft, his voice echoing across the video teleconference. In the Oval Office, a separate conversation was in process: the president requesting that her counterpart, the Indian prime minister, recall his fleet.
The prime minister obfuscated. Was Madam President certain the aircraft that engaged her were Indian? The prime minister would, of course, need to confirm this with his defense minister and his armed forces chief of staff before recalling any of his assets. And what was the mission of these aircraft that had allegedly come under fire from the Indian fleet? Could Madam President kindly pass along the exact location of this flight of nine planes? Nearly a dozen staffers—from CIA, NSA, the State Department, and Pentagon—listened on the line, furiously jotting down their notes on the prime minister’s obvious stonewalling.
That was also the word Wisecarver used when he stepped back into the Situation Room from the Oval Office. On hearing this, Chowdhury exited into the hallway and pulled out his phone. There was only one other thing he could think to do.
Patel answered on the first ring. “Quite a corner we’ve painted ourselves into,” he said, without waiting for his nephew to speak.
“You need to call off your aircraft,” answered Chowdhury. He had cupped his hand over the receiver, concerned that he might be overheard. “Switch off your jammers so we can talk to our pilots.”
“Pilot,” corrected his uncle. “Our interceptors report that only one of them escaped. Two of our aircraft are giving chase.”
“Recall your interceptors,” pleaded Chowdhury. “Let us get in touch with our pilot to abort his mission.” Even as he said this, Chowdhury wasn’t certain it was possible. Would they be able to contact the pilot? Was he even listening?
The line went silent. Chowdhury glanced up and noticed Wisecarver standing in the doorway of the Situation Room, watching him.
“Too risky,” answered Patel. “If we call off our interceptors, how can we be certain that the pilot won’t strike Shanghai?”
Chowdhury glanced once more at Wisecarver, who’d taken a menacing step in his direction. “We’ll abort the strike; you have my word. The president will—”
Wisecarver slapped the phone from his grip. In the time it had taken Chowdhury to utter his first sentence and then half of his second, Wisecarver had covered the distance between them. “You don’t speak for the president,” Wisecarver snapped, planting the heel of his shoe on the phone, so that when Chowdhury reached after it, he appeared as though he were groveling at Wisecarver’s feet, which in a way he was.
“Please,” said Chowdhury. “You’ve got to give us a chance to call it off.”
“Not after Galveston,” he answered, shaking his head. “Not after San Diego. Do you think this administration or this country will tolerate”—for a moment he struggled for the appropriate word, and then found it, plucking it like fruit from a branch—“appeasement.”
Chowdhury remained on his knees, his hands still reaching pathetically for his phone as he glanced up at Wisecarver, who, with a halogen bulb from the ceiling framing his head, seemed to glow strangely, like a vengeful saint. “There’s only one pilot left,” Chowdhury said weakly. “What are the chances he’ll even make it to his target? If we call the Indians off, we could save him . . . we could stop all of this.”
Wisecarver reached down toward his foot. He picked up Chowdhury’s phone and tucked it into his own coat pocket. Then he offered Chowdhury a hand, hoisting him up from the floor. “C’mon,” said Wisecarver. “On your feet. No need to stay down there.” The two stood next to one another in the empty corridor, sharing a quiet second as if to diffuse the tension between them. Then Wisecarver glanced up toward the lights that had framed his head a moment before. “There’s a quote from the Bible,” he began, “or maybe it’s the Talmud or Qur’an? I can never remember which. But it’s one I’ve always appreciated. It goes, Whosoever destroys one life has destroyed the world entire, and whosoever saves a single life is considered to have saved the whole world. . . . Or at least I think that’s how it goes. Tell me, Sandy, are you a religious man?”
Sandeep shook his head, no.
“Me neither,” said Wisecarver. He walked off with Chowdhury’s phone.
* * *
19:19 July 30, 2034 (GMT+8)
Shanghai
At first the shore was just a smudge on the horizon. Then the contours of the skyline formed. At one mile out, Wedge would begin his ascent, climbing to his attack altitude. Everything would depend on altitude and time. He needed to take on at least ten thousand feet so that when he activated and then dropped his payload it would have sufficient time to arm. He needed to do this quickly so that the antiaircraft systems that lurked below couldn’t find their mark. As he approached the city, his thought pattern was simple, almost primordial: Here it comes, here it comes, here it comes, each breath seemed to say.
At five miles out he could see traffic on the roads.
At three miles he could see the waves breaking on the beach.
At two miles the individual windows in the skyscrapers winked at him as they caught the sun—
Then he rocketed his stick, hard back.
The Gs pressed on his chest like an enormous hand. Pinpricks of light did their familiar Tinker Bell dance in his vision. Had anyone been listening, they would’ve heard his grunts, which were like a tennis player hitting from the baseline. A long stream of tracer fire arched toward him from the shore as he careened above Shanghai. Wedge rolled his plane belly skyward. With
his cockpit hung toward the ground, he glimpsed two wispy missile launches, whirling upward toward his head. He deployed the last of his chaff and flares, dumping the white-hot magnesium beneath him and hoping it would be enough to confuse the missiles.
His altimeter orbited past three thousand feet.
Behind him, the pair of Indian Sukhois now appeared. He’d flown low enough and fast enough that they couldn’t have tracked him. They must’ve figured he was heading here.
His altimeter passed four thousand feet.
The Chinese systems didn’t distinguish between him and the Indian pilots. All three of them corkscrewed and juked through the antiaircraft fire that chewed up the sky while their engines, with a dismal rumble, forced them ever higher. Wedge struggled to reach his drop altitude of ten thousand feet while the Sukhois kept up the pressure, slotting into position on his tail. Any second they’d take their shot. Wedge knew he needed to deal with the Sukhois if he was ever going to get up to altitude.
He barreled right.
We’ll decide it here, he thought, at five thousand feet.
Beneath the three aircraft, the city was lit up, spitting tracers in every direction. When Wedge had barreled right, the Sukhois had barreled left. The two sets of aircraft traveled in opposite directions along the circumference of a shared circle whose miles-long diameter was nearly the size of Shanghai itself. Wedge couldn’t help but admire the Indian pilots, who had made an astute tactical move. By giving up their position on his tail they’d each be able to make a head-on pass, leveraging their two-to-one advantage.
Wedge made his orbit around the city and prepared to meet the pilots somewhere along that path. They would come at each other like jousting horsemen of another era—lances down, forward in their saddles, the issue decided in a blink. Events were playing out in seconds and in fractions of seconds. This is it, Wedge thought—the it he’d been chasing for the entirety of his life. He was ready. His thoughts returned to his family, to that lineage of pilots from whom he’d descended. He could feel his father, his grandfather, and his great-grandfather, their presence so close it was as if they were flying off his wing. A certainty possessed him: the advantage in numbers wasn’t with the two assholes in the Sukhois but with him, Wedge.
Odds are four to two, motherfuckers, he thought—and almost said it aloud.
He locked onto the first Sukhoi, releasing a sidewinder from his wingtip, while simultaneously firing an exhalation’s worth of rounds from his cannon. The Sukhoi did the exact same to him, so that their air-to-air missiles passed one another in mid-flight. However, the first Sukhoi had made a mistake. When Wedge diverted toward the second aircraft, so, too, had the sidewinder fired by the first. Wedge was out of chaff and flares to confuse the sidewinder, but if he could bring it in close enough to the second Sukhoi, that might disorient it.
The second Sukhoi observed the threat of the incoming sidewinder.
From its fuselage, it deployed chaff and flare.
Wedge could see the sidewinder spiraling toward him as he rushed closer to the second Sukhoi, like a three-way game of chicken. Then the sidewinder dipped on its axis, following a burning piece of chaff. Simultaneously, both Wedge and the second Sukhoi released bursts from their cannon. When the two passed one another, there was a sound like a limb snapping off a tree. . . .
. . . Blue sky everywhere, it turns to black, then rushes back to blue.
The wind on Wedge’s face.
When he bolted awake, the stick had flopped out of his right hand. Wedge grabbed it, snatching back control of his Hornet. Checking his instruments, he hadn’t lost much altitude. He couldn’t have been unconscious for long, maybe a second, like an extended blink. A puddle was growing beneath his legs. He touched his right thigh and could feel a protrusion. A piece of steel—likely from the fuselage—had embedded below his hip. Two thumb-sized holes—around thirty millimeters, a little larger than his own cannon—had pierced the front-left and back-right of his cockpit, hence the wind on his face.
He glanced behind him, to where the second Sukhoi would’ve passed. He found it easily, a brackish trail of smoke heaving from one of its engines. In the same direction, a little farther on, an oil-black smoke cloud lingered in the otherwise perfectly clear sky. This could only be one thing—the other Sukhoi. His sidewinder must have found its mark. He’d tallied his first-ever air-to-air victory. He felt dizzy, which might have been loss of blood and might have been his body’s response to the thrill of this achievement.
Wedge now needed to climb to ten thousand feet. He still had his payload to deliver. Then he would figure out how to get home, or at least how to get far enough out to sea to bail out. Slowly, he climbed. His left rudder was shot out, making the plane skittish in its ascent and hard to control. Neither of his engines were at thrust capacity; the pair of them were bleeding fuel. Whatever damage he’d done to the second Sukhoi, it had done about the same to him. And as he climbed, that stubborn second pilot slotted in behind him, giving a limp chase.
Won’t matter, concluded Wedge. He was already past eight thousand feet.
He glanced down at the city spread before him. Little pits of light appeared in his vision. He tried to blink them away. Then a vertiginous darkness crept inward from his periphery as though he might black out again. The puddle he sat in kept deepening. When he looked at his altimeter, it was blurry too, but it soon read ten thousand feet. Wedge went through the arming sequence. His hands felt as though he wore several sets of gloves as he clumsily toggled through the switches and buttons and lined up his aircraft into its angle of attack. The Sukhoi was behind him, but he had thirty seconds, maybe more, until he’d need to deal with that.
A lot was going to happen in those seconds.
Everything was set. Wedge’s finger hovered over the button. Whatever wooziness or confusion he’d felt moments before had yielded to a perfect clarity.
He hit the release.
Nothing.
He hit it again.
And again.
Still, nothing. And now the Sukhoi was coming up to altitude, notching in behind him. Wedge struck the controls in his cockpit in frustration. He recalled the tenth Hornet in their squadron, the one that’d gone down in training days before. He thought they’d fixed this problem with the release mechanism. Apparently not.
Didn’t matter. He had a job to do.
Wedge pushed the stick forward, angling into a dive. The payload was going through its arming sequence, and if it was stuck on his wing he’d take it in himself. The Sukhoi didn’t follow but instead broke away, understanding the maneuver and evidently wanting no part of it. Not that it would’ve made a difference. The Sukhoi wouldn’t be able to put enough distance between itself and what was to come.
A sensation of weightlessness overtook Wedge as he dove.
The details below—buildings, cars, individual trees, and even individuals—were filling in fast. This business, war, the business of his family and of his country—he’d always accepted that it was a dirty business. He thought of his father and his grandfather—the only family he had—hearing the news of what he’d done. He thought of his great-grandfather, who’d flown with Pappy Boyington. And, strangely, he thought of Pappy and the old stories of him staring out through his canopy, scanning the horizon for Japanese fighters, a cigarette dangling from his lip before he’d toss it into the vastness of the Pacific.
The city was rushing up toward Wedge.
He’d told Admiral Hunt that he didn’t do suicide missions. Yet this didn’t feel like a suicide. It felt necessary. Like an act of creative destruction. He felt like he was the end of something and in being the end he would achieve a beginning.
Wind from the broken canopy was on his face.
At five hundred feet, he remembered the pack of celebratory Marlboros he’d tucked into his flight suit, in the left chest pocket. Though it was futile, he reached for them. This was his last gesture. His hand placed over his heart.
* * *
Beijing
Three more men from internal security waited in the lobby of the Four Seasons Hotel. They stepped onto the elevator with Lin Bao. Not a single introduction, no one speaking. His escort, the dark-suited man who’d taken him from the ministry, had the number of the suite where Zhao Leji and other key members of the Politburo were clandestinely meeting to discuss the appropriate strategic response to the sinking of the Zheng He.
Lin Bao had ideas as to what that response could be. He chose to focus on those ideas as opposed to why they were meeting at the Four Seasons and not some more secure location, or why they’d stepped out of the elevator on only the fifth floor and were now walking down a corridor with closely spaced rooms as opposed to suites. India’s involvement might prove a positive development, if leveraged correctly. An Indian intervention would make it so that the strikes against Galveston and San Diego would be the last of the war. If his country struck the final blow, they could make the argument—at least to their own people—that they had been the victors. And they could avoid what at this moment seemed like an inevitable counterstrike against another of their major cities—Tianjin, Beijing, or even Shanghai.
He would explain this to Zhao Leji, and to whoever else from the Politburo attended this meeting. Lin Bao imagined that Zhao Leji would place some of the blame for the Zheng He on his shoulders. After all, it had been his name on the deployment orders, not Zhao Leji’s, or that of any other member of the Politburo. They would likely accuse him of having exceeded his authority in a time of war, but nothing more than that. They would want to be rid of him. After peace was negotiated with the Americans, it would be easy for Lin Bao to convince Zhao Leji to turn the other way while he defected. If anything, a defection would help prove the substance behind the accusations Zhao Leji would surely level, which was that Lin Bao was untrustworthy, a secret ally of the Americans. Good riddance, they’d say. And he would return to the country of his mother’s birth. Maybe even to Newport, with his family. To teach.
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