Twilight's Last Gleaming

by John Michael Greer

  Most of America's allies had already wiggled out of buying the thing by then, and after the media and a Congressional subcommittee got through with the program, production of new F-35s had been stopped at a fraction of what was originally planned. Now all the scuttlebutt out of the Pentagon was about the F-43, which might be ready for service by 2038 if everything went well—but in the meantime Mahoney was stuck with the F-35, and so were his pilots. The plane's official name was the Lightning II, but everybody at Eglin called it the Lardbucket.

  “We use the tools we've got,” he reminded Watanabe. “It's not as though the other side has anything like a modern air force.”

  FIVE

  2 June 2029: The White House, Washington DC

  “Operation Blazing Torch,” Jameson Weed said aloud. “Nice.”

  Ellen Harbin smiled her tight little smile. “Thank you. One of my staffers suggested it.”

  Weed nodded, picked up a pen, signed the final orders for the Tanzanian operation. Outside the Oval Office, roses glowed in the bright June sun.

  Stedman looked on from the other side of the room with a silent frown. He'd tried several times over the past month to bring up the small but real chance that the Chinese might decide to intervene, and had his advice dismissed by Weed and mocked to his face by Harbin and Gurney. The minute this thing was over, he told himself for the fifteenth time, he would hand in his resignation.

  “Anything else?” Weed asked. “Okay, keep me posted on the preparations.” He tapped the comm button on the desk. “Margie? Tell the Brazilian ambassador I'll be with him in ten minutes. No, make that twenty. Thanks.” Another tap of the button silenced the comm, and he turned to the national security adviser. “Ellen, I'll want an update on the situation in Spain first thing tomorrow. Can you do that?”

  “Of course.” She waited for a moment longer, then turned and left the room with the others. Stedman moved to join them, but Weed said, “Bill.”

  Stedman stopped, let the others go. When the door clicked shut behind them, Weed went on. “I know you still don't support this thing.”

  “I don't see any point in discussing that further,” Stedman said.

  Weed got up from his chair. “Bill, we don't have a choice. Take a look at this.” He pulled a report in a red binder out from a drawer of the desk, waved it. After a moment, Stedman crossed the room, took it and opened it.

  “I asked Lloyd for a confidential review of our energy situation back in February,” Weed said. “Not just the usual how do we get through until the next election sort of thing—a review in depth, going ten, twenty years out. The short version is that we're screwed.”

  Stedman looked up from the report. “That's been in the classified part of the Pentagon's annual threat assessment paper now for years.”

  “I don't mean screwed someday.” Weed turned abruptly away, went to the window, faced out into the rose garden. “Everybody who's sat in this office since Nixon has been told that, and spent his time here kicking the can four or eight years down the road while the scientists tried to come up with something to keep us afloat once the shale fields run out. You know the score: ethanol, wind, solar, fusion, hydrates—one goddamn subsidy dumpster after another. None of it's lived up to the hype—for God's sake, none of it's even paid for itself, and we can't kick the can much farther because we're running out of road.”

  “I know,” said Stedman.

  “We're down to the dregs,” Weed went on, as though Stedman hadn't spoken. “Mexico's down to the dregs. The North Sea's down to the dregs. Canada's got tar, Venezuela's got tar, but who can spare the natural gas to process it into oil any more?” He turned around, faced Stedman. “Oil hit $200 a barrel again this morning. That's bleeding our economy dry.”

  “Jim,” said Stedman, “I know.”

  “Then why can't you see that we've got to go ahead with Blazing Torch?”

  Stedman considered him. “Tell me this,” he said. “Eleven billion barrels sounds like a lot, but that's not going to last forever. What happens when it's gone?”

  “That's why I've asked Congress to triple the Department of Energy's research budget for next year.”

  “Jim,” Stedman said then, “that's not an answer.”

  Weed said nothing for a time, and his face tautened. “It's not going to happen on my watch,” he said finally. “Not if I can help it. Not if all it takes is knocking over a goddamn Third World country that doesn't have enough brains to sell their oil to us instead of the Chinese. Once that's done, we'll have a little more breathing room to figure out our next step.”

  Stedman didn't answer. After a moment, Weed turned away.

  “You think I'm just kicking the can again,” he said. With a bleak little laugh: “You're probably right. After the shit I had to eat and the deals I had to make to get into this goddamn office, though, I'm not going to be the one who's holding the bag when the bottom falls out.” He walked over to the window again, and stared out at the roses. Stedman waited for a while, then turned and left the Oval Office.

  6 June 2029: The Presidential Palace, Dar es Salaam

  “This is…” President Mkembe tried to find an adequate word, failed. “Ambitious.”

  “But well within your military capacities, I believe,” said the Chinese officer. He had arrived that morning from Beijing, in civilian clothes, under an assumed name, and with a cover story as a cultural-exchange official. “If there is anything that seems unreasonable…”

  “Not at all.” Mkembe considered the plan outlined in the papers before him. “I notice, though, that nothing is said here about the American navy and air force.”

  “That is quite correct, your excellency. You need not concern yourselves with those.”

  Mkembe gave the man a long, steady look. “Very well,” he said finally. “We will leave those matters in your hands.”

  “Excellent. I have one more favor to ask, if I may. I will be presenting similar plans to several of our other African allies. If someone from your government could accompany me and assure them that Tanzania is already preparing to follow these plans, that would be very helpful indeed.”

  “I trust that our deputy minister of defense will be adequate,” said Mkembe. “As you know, we are facing a crisis here.”

  “Of course,” said the officer. “If it will be possible for me to brief him this evening, we will proceed to Lusaka tomorrow.”

  “Certainly,” said Mkembe. He picked up his phone, asked the secretary to get a message to the deputy minister, exchanged a few more pleasantries with the Chinese officer, and wished him a safe trip as he left the office. Once he was alone in the room, he read through the papers again and shook his head. Then, on an inspiration, he pulled open his desk drawer, took out a well-thumbed Bible, and with eyes closed and a brief muttered prayer, opened it at random and put down a finger.

  7 Lo, this is the man that made not God his strength: but trusted in the abundance of his riches, and strengthened himself in his wickedness.

  8 But I am like a green olive tree in the house of God; I trust in the mercy of God forever and ever.

  Mkembe drew in a deep breath, let it out. There was no question in his mind which of the players in this game was trusting in the abundance of its riches, and if invading another country to steal its oil wasn't strengthening itself in its wickedness, he couldn't imagine anything that would qualify. Very well, then: he would trust in the mercy of God.

  Which, at the moment, seemed to be taking the form of the Chinese.

  19 June 2029: South of Narok, Kenya

  Melanie Bridgeport shouldered her duffel and went to the door of the C-130 transport. Outside was darkness, with the lights of the new base scattered here and there like stars; the air smelled of fresh damp dirt.

  When she got down to the tarmac, an Air Force staff sergeant came up to her. “Colonel Bridgeport? Welcome to Camp Pumbaa.”

  She grinned, catching the reference to the old Disney film. “Thank you.”

  “Ge
neral Mahoney wants you at HQ at seven, so—” He glanced at his watch. “You've got two hours. I can drive you to your quarters, get you anyplace else you need.”

  “That'll be fine.” She followed him to a Humvee, threw her duffel in the back and climbed in as the engine roared to life.

  Her quarters amounted to a trailer most of two miles from the airfield, lined up with others in long monotonous rows across the flat and mostly treeless ground. She got her gear stowed, took the time to wash and change clothes, and had the driver take her to the mess hall for coffee and a couple of doughnuts before getting to HQ with a few minutes to spare. By then the sun was up and she could see Camp Pumbaa in all its rawness—she remembered from briefings that there had been nothing but empty savannah there, and the Red Horse air base construction battalion and their opposite numbers in the Army had to start from bare ground.

  The HQ building was one more big blocky prefab structure. She thanked the sergeant, got out of the Humvee, went inside.

  “Mel!” General Mahoney's face lit up when he saw her. “Good to have you here. I hope the flight down from Bahrain wasn't too bad.”

  “Slept through most of it,” she told him, “so I guess so.”

  “Good,” he said, abruptly serious. “You're going to have to hit the ground running. It's—” He shrugged. “The usual. Tight schedule, plenty of fubars, and just try getting enough air transport.”

  “I'll see what I can do. Martell's still scrounging trucks stateside; I'll tell him he needs to steal us some C-130s while he's at it.”

  That got a grin from the general; Major Jack Martell was in charge of the 33rd Transportation Squadron, and his talent for getting access to trucks and planes technically assigned to other units was legendary. “Anything he can get, we can use,” Mahoney said. “You gotta wonder sometimes what planet the Pentagon thinks it's on.”

  24 June 2029: Dar es Salaam

  Engines roared and voices shouted as the first of the shipping containers came down onto the dock. The CSC Hainan, the ship offloading them, was just one of half a dozen huge container ships moored at the Dar es Salaam docks, packed with Chinese consumer goods for the booming Tanzanian economy. There was no record of the fact that twenty-eight of the containers originally loaded on board in Guangzhou harbor had been replaced at night, under cloud cover, during a stop at Sittwe, Myanmar's main port and the location of a big Chinese naval base.

  Like the thousands of other containers aboard the CSC Hainan, those twenty-eight were hauled to the storage yards and signed over to the trucking firms contracted to take them to their destinations. The riots in Dar es Salaam stayed well away from the port facilities, which would be needed later by the Americans and the new government they expected to impose; the security guards around the storage yards carried automatic weapons, but that was to prevent ordinary theft. The only signs of trouble that reached the containers were the smell of smoke and the drumbeat sounds of government helicopters circling the center of town.

  One by one, as trucks could be found, the containers found their way to commercial districts in a dozen ports along the northern Tanzanian coast, and went into warehouses rented by an assortment of little import-export firms. No one had any reason to notice that the employees at these particular warehouses were all young Chinese men who had recently arrived from overseas, or that whatever arrived in the containers stayed out of sight inside the warehouses as the last of the rainy season ended and the cool dry weather of July began.

  Those containers were only the first of just over two hundred that would find their way to Tanzania in the month before the fighting began, all in small batches mixed into the cargoes of ordinary container ships. Each of them arrived and found its way to a warehouse or a storage compound somewhere in the country. Another two hundred containers found their way to South Sudan during that same month, offloaded at a dozen East African ports and hauled to the Nile valley like any other freight. The CIA agents in Dar es Salaam, watching for signs of a conventional military response, missed them completely.

  11 July 2015: Academy of Military Science, Beijing

  “They can't possibly be that foolish,” Liu said.

  Fang smiled. “Quite the contrary. They are Americans; they have no other choice.”

  They were in Fang's office in the Academy of Military Science complex, a spare little room with bookshelves lining the walls on three sides. The final preparations for Plan Qilin were well under way.

  Liu gave him a baffled look. “Perhaps you can explain.”

  “Of course.” Fang waved the general to a chair, and perched on the corner of his desk. “Do you know what makes America different from any other country in the world?” When Liu motioned for him to continue: “They have never lost a war.”

  “Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Venezuela,” Liu countered, but Fang shook his head at once. “There's a difference between losing a war and being unable to win one,” he said. “In each of those, they decided when to withdraw, and under what terms. They have never been beaten, never been forced to accept whatever terms the other side chose to offer.”

  Liu nodded, granting the point. “Go on.”

  “They literally can't imagine losing a war, and that affects their thinking in ways that are hard for us to imagine. You know that they fought a civil war at the same time as the Taiping Rebellion? Very similar, really; a region tried to break away from their national government. Your family's from Nanjing—do you happen to know if any of your ancestors fought for the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, or against it?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Exactly. But in the southeastern states of America, where their rebellion happened, most people not only can tell you the side for which their great-great-grandfathers fought, but in which units and which battles. Many of those whose ancestors fought for the rebellion still feel the most intense bitterness toward the victors. Why? Because they were defeated, and Americans simply have no idea how to deal with that.

  “That's a tremendous disadvantage, in two ways—no, three. The first is that their political leaders, when they decide to use military force, never think of asking themselves what the consequences of defeat might be. It quite literally never occurs to them that they might be defeated. At worst, they think, they might not get the kind of victory they desire. It is unimaginable to them that their actions might risk America's global position, or even its survival.

  “The second is that, once they've begun a military venture, the political leaders don't have the option of backing out if they fail to achieve their goals. To do that, even to advocate that, is enough to end a career or worse, because a nation that has only known victory can't tolerate even the semblance of defeat. So, once committed, they keep on trying to achieve victory even when the only rational decision is to withdraw. Escalation has always worked for them in the past; more precisely, escalation has never caused them to lose, and so it's the only thing they know how to do.

  “The third is that since American military officers are taught to expect victory, they have no idea how to direct a losing situation to their own benefit. The kind of generalship that plays for time, frustrates the opposing forces, draws out an inevitable defeat until the enemy is ready to grant generous terms in order to limit his ongoing losses—they know nothing of this; all their training blinds them to it.”

  “Thus what happened in Korea.” Liu was nodding again, slowly.

  “Or the first year of the Pacific war. If the American commanders in the eastern Pacific had known how to lose skillfully, they could have pinned down any number of Japanese naval and ground units, dangling the bait of decisive victory before the Japanese and then snatching it away again, while the American fleet recovered from the Pearl Harbor attack and prepared an overwhelming offensive. Instead, they collapsed completely, and made their nation's victory much harder than it should have been.

  “Consider what happened afterwards, though. The Japanese really couldn't have done a worse job of planning the war
. They started with an attack on American territory, thus uniting a nation that had been deeply divided about the potential conflict. Next, they overextended themselves tremendously, and then surrendered the power of maneuver by refusing to withdraw forces from untenable positions. Thus they allowed the Americans to win by doing the only thing Americans know how to do: keep on hitting with more force, and still more force, until the other side collapsed. They didn't need to do any of those things.”

  “If you were the Japanese high command,” said Liu, “what would you have done?”

  “Exactly what we're doing in East Africa,” Fang replied at once. “Force the Americans to play the aggressor; their national ideology doesn't allow them to be comfortable in that role. Act through allies and proxies, and maintain the good opinion of neutral countries. Let the Americans think the initiative is theirs, until it's taken from them. Anticipate each escalation they will make, have assets in place to counter each escalation, and then wait for the next one. They will throw one asset after another into the conflict, until everything they have is at risk, and then—you know the rest.”

  Liu sat back in the chair, considering. “And if they escalate even then?”

  “We'll be prepared for that as well. And when that doesn't give them the victory they expect—why, then they'll be left with nothing at all.”

  SIX

  14 July 2029: Russell Senate Office Building, Washington DC

  Senator Bridgeport closed the door to his office, went to the bar and poured himself his habitual bourbon. Four ice cubes, this time: even with the building's air conditioning running full tilt, the air was warm and stuffy. The “new normal”—that was what the media called the brutally hot weather, when they couldn't get away from saying something about the shifting climate. Everyone else had less printable terms for it.