2034

by Elliot Ackerman

  By the time Lin Bao had walked to the far end of the corridor on the fifth floor, these ideas had calmed him, so that when the security man swiped the key card and gestured with a low wave of his hand for Lin Bao to step inside, he did so without any trace of fear.

  He took a half dozen steps into the empty room. It wasn’t a suite. It was a single. There was a queen-size bed.

  A console.

  A dresser.

  Everything, including the carpeted floor, was covered with plastic tarps, as though the room were undergoing a renovation.

  Lin Bao stepped toward the bed.

  Resting on its edge was a golf club, a 2-iron. He lifted it up. The familiar weight was pleasant in his hands. A note was attached to the shaft with a piece of string. He took a deep breath, filling his lungs, knowing it was likely the last such breath he might take. The writing on the card was blocky, the symbols formed by an untutored hand, the hand of a peasant. It read, This time you picked wrong. I am sorry.

  It was unsigned. That’s how they survive, he thought. They never sign their names to anything.

  From behind Lin Bao, a series of steps squished over the plastic. He could feel the presence of the large security man at his back, plus the three others who no doubt stood by the door, waiting to help clean up the mess. Lin Bao had an instinct to shut his eyes, but he fought it off. He’d watch, until the very end, in this grim room where there was little worth seeing. He peered out the solitary window, to the equally grim Beijing skyline. The idea that this—not his daughter’s face, nor the open ocean he loved—would be the last thing he ever saw filled him with self-pity and regret. He felt his throat constrict with those emotions in the same moment he felt the cold press of metal against the soft hairs at the base of his neck.

  Keep your eyes open, he demanded of himself.

  He continued to stare out the window, which faced to the southeast, generally in the direction of sunrise and the Pacific. Though it was late, a brilliant light like twenty sunrises all at once kept expanding unrestrained from that direction, as though the light itself had the potential to consume everything. This was coupled by an incredible noise that shook the windows and assured that no one heard the single gunshot.

  What is that on the horizon? Lin Bao wondered. It was his last thought as he toppled forward onto the bed.

  CODA

  The Horizon

  10:18 September 12, 2035 (GMT+4:30)

  Isfahan

  Finally, he was home. The trip to Bandar Abbas had been the first of any kind Major General Qassem Farshad had made in the past year since his promotion and subsequent retirement. He dropped his bags by the front door, went straight to the bedroom, and stripped out of his uniform. He’d forgotten how much he hated wearing it. Or, put another way, he had forgotten how much he’d come to enjoy not wearing it. He thought over the difference between the two as he showered and changed into the polyester tracksuit that had become his new uniform around the house. While he tied on his sneakers, he reminded himself that he didn’t harbor any real grudges against Bagheri and the others in the high command. He simply wanted to embrace this new life.

  On the return flight from Bandar Abbas, he had worked on his memoir, as he did most every morning, and now he was looking forward to his customary walk around his property and to settling back into the comfort of his routine. When the invitation to Bandar Abbas had arrived some weeks before, Farshad had initially refused it. Ever since the Victory of the Strait, as the high command had anointed his last battle, his country had heaped honor after honor on his shoulders, from his second awarding of the Order of the Fath to a mention by the Supreme Leader in a nationally televised address to the Parliament. Had such recognition arisen from another battle, one where the difference between victory and defeat hadn’t come down to which direction the wind was blowing, perhaps Farshad would have felt otherwise about accepting the invitation.

  Now, finally home, he first thought to unpack but then decided he would do it that night. He would instead have a long walk, to stretch his legs. He went to the kitchen and prepared himself his usual simple lunch: a boiled egg, a piece of bread, some olives. He placed the meal in a paper sack and set out across his property. Trees canopied his route. The first autumn colors already touched the rims of their leaves, and in the early afternoon the cool air hinted at the passing of the seasons. Late-blooming wildflowers lined his path as he headed along dirt-packed trails toward the ribbon of stream bisecting his property.

  Farshad could hardly believe it had been more than a year since those Russian paratroopers had been blown out to sea. He couldn’t quite decide whether a great deal of time had passed or not very much at all. When he thought of the specifics of the battle in the strait, it felt like not very much. When he thought of how much the world had changed since then, it seemed as though far more than a year had passed. Farshad now understood himself as a small actor in a far broader war, one that had resulted in a profound global realignment.

  When Farshad was bracing for a Russian attack against his island fortifications, he had no inkling that the Indians had intervened on the side of peace by sinking a Chinese carrier and destroying an American fighter squadron. Tragically, a single pilot from that squadron managed to slip both the Indian interceptors and Chinese air defenses, dropping his payload on Shanghai. These many months later the city remained a charred, radioactive wasteland. The death toll had exceeded thirty million. After each of the nuclear attacks international markets plummeted. Crops failed. Infectious diseases spread. Radiation poisoning promised to contaminate generations. The devastation exceeded Farshad’s capacity for comprehension. Though he’d spent his entire adult life at war, not even he could grasp such losses.

  Compared to the trilateral conflict between the Americans, Chinese, and Indians, his country’s contest with the Russians felt in retrospect like little more than an intramural squabble. In Parliament and among the high command, there had been some question as to whether the captured Russian prisoners qualified as “prisoners of war,” seeing as the two nations were not in a state of formal hostilities. In Tehran, zealots within the government had threatened to classify the Russians as “bandits” and execute them accordingly. However, when as part of the New Delhi Peace Accords negotiated by the Indians, the United Nations announced its reorganization, the Supreme Leader astutely leveraged clemency for the imprisoned Russians as a way to secure a permanent Iranian seat on the Security Council, which the Indians had already insisted on relocating from New York City to Mumbai as a precondition of delivering a direly needed multiyear aid package to the United States.

  Out on his walk, Farshad arrived at the stream on his property. He stepped onto the footbridge, leaned against its balustrade, and gazed into the clear glacial melt that passed below. His thoughts turned from the last year to the last few days, to his trip to Bandar Abbas and the final, albeit somewhat absurd, honor that the Navy had bestowed on him: the dedication of a vessel in his name.

  Admittedly, Farshad had been quite flattered at first. Although he was technically retired as an officer in the Revolutionary Guards, the Navy had taken him in when his career was in tatters, and now, bedecked with his newfound glory, they proved keen to claim Farshad as their own. He pictured the sleek prow of a frigate or cruiser with his name emblazoned on its side. He could envision the teeth of its magnificent anchor, and its decks bristling with rockets, missiles, guns, and a crew that kept the ship, and thus his name, gleaming as it crossed horizon after horizon.

  Several weeks passed while arrangements were made for Farshad’s travel to Bandar Abbas. Then the Navy forwarded along the specifications of the vessel that would bear his name.

  Not a frigate.

  Not a cruiser.

  Not even a puny yet swift corvette.

  A photograph of the undedicated vessel accompanied the announcement; the shape of its hull was like a wooden shoe, wide in the front, narrow in the back, functional but not something anyone would wish to be see
n in. The decision had been made to dedicate a newly laid Delvar-class logistics ship in his honor.

  Standing on the footbridge over the stream, Farshad leaned forward and considered his reflection as he thought of the many photographs that had been taken of him over these past few days. When he’d arrived in Bandar Abbas, the Navy had scheduled an ambitious itinerary. After dedicating the ship, he accompanied it out to sea for its maiden voyage, which took them to the now heavily garrisoned islands in the Strait of Hormuz where he’d fought his famous battle. As a surprise—and a signal that Iran would lead the nations of the world in the process of reconciliation—there was a guest visitor aboard: Commander Vasily Kolchak. Kolchak, it turned out, had been part of the Russian invasion fleet a year before.

  The two were scheduled to sail through the Strait of Hormuz together—allies turned adversaries, then allies again. He was pleased to see Kolchak, who had also been promoted since their last encounter. The dedication ceremony was on the whole a pleasant affair, except when the seas rose late that afternoon. The pitch and roll of the little, flat-hulled logistics ship that bore Farshad’s name soon proved too much for him. He spent the final hours of the maiden voyage locked in the latrine, retching, while his old friend Kolchak stood vigil outside the door, doing Farshad one last favor. He made certain nobody witnessed the greatest naval hero in a generation bent over on all fours debilitated by seasickness.

  As Farshad rested on the footbridge, recalling these past few days, he felt reassured to know that in all likelihood he would never again see a body of water larger than the little stream that babbled pleasantly below his feet. He continued on his walk. The leaf-filtered sun fell along the path and on Farshad’s upturned and smiling face. It felt good to have the steady earth beneath him. He breathed deeply and quickened his pace. Soon he was at the far end of his property, near the elm where he was in the habit of taking his lunch.

  He sat with his back against the trunk. On his lap, he spread out his meal: the egg, the bread, the olives. Since his bout of seasickness, his appetite hadn’t quite returned. He only nibbled at his food. He thought of Kolchak. When the two had a quiet moment on the ship that bore Farshad’s name, the Russian had asked him what he would do now that he was retired. Farshad didn’t mention his memoirs—that would’ve been too presumptuous. Instead, he talked about this land, his walks, a quiet life in the countryside. Kolchak had laughed uproariously. When Farshad asked what was so funny, Kolchak said that he never took Farshad as one for the quiet life. He had expected Farshad to try his hand at politics, or business; to use his notoriety to vault toward the topmost rungs of power.

  Farshad finished his lunch. He wondered what his old mentor Soleimani would think of his decision to strive for a quieter life. It was, after all, Soleimani who had wished a soldier’s death for his young protégé, as opposed to the withering away he himself had feared and so narrowly avoided. How many times and on how many battlefields had Farshad cheated death? Too many to count. But as he thought of this, he began to wonder whether he’d cheated death or if it was death who had cheated him, never granting the end that Soleimani had wished for Farshad. Still, sitting beneath the elm at the edge of his property, Farshad couldn’t quite bring himself to wish that he’d died on a battlefield. Didn’t a soldier deserve the fruits of his labor? It seemed fitting that at the end of his days a soldier would become an intimate with peace. One might argue that the highest achievement for a soldier wasn’t to die on the battlefield, but rather to pass away quietly in a peace of his own creation.

  A few morsels of his meal remained. Farshad flattened the paper sack in front of him on the grass, placing a piece of egg, a crust of bread, and two olives in a neat arrangement.

  He waited. Waiting as he’d done nearly every day since his return home the year before. He dozed off. When he awoke, the afternoon sun held just above the treetops. The shadows had lengthened. Now he saw what he’d been watching for. Standing in the open grass was the single squirrel, the white-tailed one whose partner had bit Farshad long ago.

  He placed the crust in his hand, offering it to her.

  She wouldn’t come. Yet she wouldn’t run away either.

  On many an afternoon, the two of them had sat fixed in a similar impasse. It always ended when Farshad walked off and the squirrel safely ate what he left behind on the paper sack. But Farshad wouldn’t quit. Eventually, he would convince her to trust him enough to eat again from his open palm. What would Kolchak, Bagheri, Soleimani, or even his father think if they could see him now, reduced to this, an old man coaxing this helpless creature toward him.

  But Farshad no longer cared.

  “I’m not giving up,” he whispered to the squirrel. “Come closer, my friend. Don’t you believe even an old man can change?”

  * * *

  07:25 October 03, 2036 (GMT-4)

  Newport

  New home. New city. The loss of her father. The overworked guidance counselor at their local middle school had told the girl’s mother that the first year would be the hardest. Yet the second year was proving harder still. When they’d left their home in Beijing for the countryside, her mother had said it would only be for a few days. The girl had repeatedly asked to speak to her father on the phone, and her mother had tried to call but couldn’t reach him. According to her mother, he had been doing important work for their government. She was old enough to understand that there had been a war on, that this was the reason they’d had to leave the capital. However, she wasn’t quite old enough to understand her father’s role. That understanding would come later, after Shanghai, when she and her mother were recalled to Beijing.

  She remembered the old man who’d come to their apartment. Several of his large attendants in dark suits had waited outside the door. The old man carried himself like a well-dressed peasant. When her mother told her to go to her room so they could speak, the old man insisted that the girl stay. He cupped her cheek in his hand and said, “You look very much like your father. I see his intelligence in your eyes.” The old man went on to tell them that their home wasn’t their home anymore. That her father—intelligent as he was—had had bad luck, he’d made some mistakes, and he wouldn’t be returning. Her mother would cry later, at night, when she thought her daughter couldn’t hear her. But she didn’t betray a single emotion in front of the old man, who suggested they go live in the United States. “This will help things,” he said. And then he asked if there was anywhere in particular that they would like to go.

  “Newport,” her mother answered. That’s where they’d been happiest.

  And so they went. Her mother explained to her that they were lucky. Her father had gotten himself into trouble and they might have found themselves in prison, or worse. Except the government needed someone to blame for what had happened in Shanghai. They would blame her father. They would tout his disloyalty. They would accuse him of having conspired with the Americans. The proof of this would be his family’s abrupt departure to the United States. Her mother told her these things so that she would know that they weren’t true. “This new life,” her mother had said, “is what your father left us. We have become his second chance.”

  Her mother, the wife of an admiral and a diplomat, now worked fourteen-hour days cleaning rooms at two separate chain hotels. The girl had offered to help, to also get a job, but her mother placed limits on her own humiliation, and seeing her daughter’s education sacrificed to menial labor would have breached those limits. Instead, the girl attended school full-time. In solidarity with her mother, she helped keep the studio apartment they shared impeccably clean.

  Her mother never settled for menial labor. When she wasn’t working, she was searching for a better job. On several occasions, she reached out to the local Chinese community, those immigrants who’d arrived on American shores within the last one or two generations, her presumed allies who now owned small businesses: restaurants, dry cleaners, even car dealerships sprouting up around Route 138. Although America was a place
where people came to make a new life, for both mother and daughter their old lives followed them. The Chinese community had to contend with the suspicions of other Americans, many of whom assumed their complicity in the recent devastation. Unfair as that assumption was, such assumptions in times of war were an American tradition—from Germans, to Japanese, to Muslims, and now Chinese. Helping the wife and daughter of a deceased Chinese admiral would only heighten suspicions against anyone foolish enough to assume the undertaking. The community of Chinese immigrants rejected the girl and her mother.

  So her mother continued with her menial labor. One day a week she had off from work, but it didn’t always fall on a weekend, so it was the rare occasion when mother and daughter could spend a free day together. When they had their day, they always chose to do the same thing. They would take the bus to Goat Island, rent a dinghy from the marina, let out full sail, and head north, tucking beneath the Claiborne Pell suspension bridge up toward the Naval War College, the same route they’d taken years before, with Lin Bao.

  They never spoke his name around the house, fearful of who might still be listening. Out here, however, on the open water, who could hear them? They were beyond reach and free to say what they pleased. Which was why it was on the water, shortly after they passed beneath the bridge and two years after they’d first arrived, that her mother admitted she’d finally stopped looking for a different job. “Nothing better is coming,” she conceded to her daughter. “We must accept this. . . . Your father would expect us to be strong enough to accept it.”