It surprised her still, even after twenty-four years, the way from horizon to horizon the vast expanse of ocean could in an instant turn completely calm, taut as a linen pulled across a table. She imagined that if a single needle were dropped from a height, it would slip through all the fathoms of water to the seabed, where, undisturbed by any current, it would rest on its point. How many times over her career had she stood as she did now, on the bridge of a ship, observing this miracle of stillness? A thousand times? Two thousand? On a recent sleepless night, she had studied her logbooks and totaled up all the days she had spent traversing the deep ocean, out of sight of land. It added up to nearly nine years. Her memory darted back and forth across those long years, to her watch-standing days as an ensign on the wood-slatted decks of a minesweeper with its bronchial diesel engines, to her mid-career hiatus in special warfare spent in the brown waters of the world, to this day, with these three sleek Arleigh Burke-class destroyers under her command cutting a south-by-southwest wake at eighteen knots under a relentless and uncaring sun.
Her small flotilla was twelve nautical miles off Mischief Reef in the long-disputed Spratly Islands on a euphemistically titled freedom-of-navigation patrol. She hated that term. Like so much in military life it was designed to belie the truth of their mission, which was a provocation, plain and simple. These were indisputably international waters, at least according to established conventions of maritime law, but the People's Republic of China claimed them as territorial seas. Passing through the much-disputed Spratlys with her flotilla was the legal equivalent of driving doughnuts into your neighbor's prized front lawn after he moves his fence a little too far onto your property. And the Chinese had been doing that for decades now, moving the fence a little further, a little further, and a little further still, until they would claim the entire South Pacific.
So … time to doughnut-drive their yard.
Maybe we should simply call it that, she thought, the hint of a smirk falling across her carefully curated demeanor. Let's call it a doughnut drive instead of a freedom-of-navigation patrol. At least then my sailors would understand what the hell we're doing out here.
She glanced behind her, toward the fantail of her flagship, the John Paul Jones. Extending in its wake, arrayed in a line of battle over the flat horizon, were her other two destroyers, the Carl Levin and Chung-Hoon. She was the commodore, in charge of these three warships, as well as another four still back in their home port of San Diego. She stood at the pinnacle of her career, and when she stared off in the direction of her other ships, searching for them in the wake of her flagship, she couldn't help but see herself out there, as clearly as if she were standing on that tabletop of perfectly calm ocean, appearing and disappearing into the shimmer. Herself as she once was: the youthful Ensign Sarah Hunt. And then herself as she was now: the older, wiser Captain Sarah Hunt, commodore of Destroyer Squadron 21—Solomons Onward, their motto since the Second World War; “Rampant Lions,” the name they gave themselves. On the deck plates of her seven ships she was affectionately known as the “Lion Queen.”
She stood for a while, staring pensively into the ship's wake, finding and losing an image of herself in the water. She'd been given the news from the medical board yesterday, right before she'd pulled in all lines and sailed out of Yokosuka Naval Station. The envelope was tucked in her pocket. The thought of the paper made her left leg ache, right where the bone had set poorly, the ache followed by a predictable lightning bolt of pins and needles that began at the base of her spine. The old injury had finally caught up with her. The medical board had had its say. This would be the Lion Queen's last voyage. Hunt couldn't quite believe it.
The light changed suddenly, almost imperceptibly. Hunt observed an oblong shadow passing across the smooth mantle of the sea, whose surface was now interrupted by a flicker of wind, forming into a ripple. She glanced above her, to where a thin cloud, the only one in the sky, made its transit. Then the cloud vanished, dissolving into mist, as it failed to make passage beyond the relentless late-winter sun. The water grew perfectly still once again.
Her thoughts were interrupted by the hollow clatter of steps quickly and lightly making their way up the ladder behind her. Hunt checked her watch. The ship's captain, Commander Jane Morris, was, as usual, running behind schedule.
Major Chris “Wedge” Mitchell hardly ever felt it. …
His father had felt it a bit more than him, like that one time the FLIR on his F/A-18 Hornet had failed and he'd pickle-barreled two GBU-38s “danger close” for a platoon of grunts in Ramadi, using nothing but a handheld GPS and a map. …
“Pop,” his grandfather, had felt it more than them both when, for five exhausting days, he'd dropped snake and nape with nothing more than an optical sight on treetop passes during Tet, where he dusted in so low the flames had blistered the fuselage of his A-4 Skyhawk. …
“Pop-Pop,” his great-grandfather, had felt it most of all, patrolling the South Pacific for Japanese Zeros with VMF-214, the famed Black Sheep squadron led by the hard-drinking, harder-fighting five-time Marine Corps ace Major Gregory “Pappy” Boyington. …
This elusive it, which had held four generations of Mitchells in its thrall, was the sensation of flying by the seat of your pants, on pure instinct alone. (Back when I flew with Pappy, and we'd be on patrol, it wasn't all whizbang like you have it now. No targeting computers. No autopilot. It was just your skill, your controls, and your luck. We'd mark our gunsights on the canopy with a grease pencil and off we'd fly. And when you flew with Pappy you learned pretty quick to watch your horizon. You'd watch it close, but you'd also watch Pappy. When he'd toss his cigarette out of the cockpit and slam his canopy shut, you knew he meant business and you were about to tangle with a flight of Zeros.)
The last time Wedge had heard that little speech from his great-grandfather, he'd been 6 years old. The sharp-eyed pilot had only the slightest tremor in his voice despite his 90-plus years. And now, as the clear sun caught light on his canopy, Wedge could hear the words as distinctly as if his great-grandfather were riding along as his back-seater. Except the F-35E Lightning he flew had only a single seat.
This was but one of the many gripes Wedge had with the fighter he was piloting so close to Iranian airspace that he was literally dancing his starboard wing along the border. Not that the maneuver was hard. In fact, flying with such precision took no skill at all. The flight plan had been inputted into the F-35's onboard navigation computer. Wedge didn't have to do a thing. The plane flew itself. He merely watched the controls, admired the view out his canopy, and listened to the ghost of his great-grandfather taunting him from a nonexistent back seat.
Jammed behind his headrest was an auxiliary battery unit whose hum seemed impossibly loud, even over the F-35's turbofan engine. This battery, about the size of a shoebox, powered the latest upgrade to the fighter's suite of stealth technologies. Wedge hadn't been told much about the addition, only that it was some kind of an electromagnetic disrupter. Before he'd been briefed on his mission, he'd caught two civilian Lockheed contractors tampering with his plane belowdecks and had alerted the sergeant at arms, who himself had no record of any civilians on the manifest of the George H. W. Bush. This had resulted in a call to the ship's captain, who eventually resolved the confusion. Due to the sensitivity of the technology being installed, the presence of these contractors was itself highly classified. Ultimately, it proved a messy way for Wedge to learn about his mission, but aside from that initial hiccup every other part of the flight plan had proceeded smoothly.
Maybe too smoothly. Which was the problem. Wedge was hopelessly bored. He glanced below, to the Strait of Hormuz, that militarized sliver of turquoise that separated the Arabian Peninsula from Persia. He checked his watch, a Breitling chronometer with built-in compass and altimeter his father had worn during strafing runs over Marjah twenty-five years before. He trusted the watch more than his onboard computer. Both said that he was forty-three seconds out from a six-degree eastward course adjustment that would take him into Iranian airspace. At which point—so long as the little humming box behind his head did its job—he would vanish completely.
It would be a neat trick.
It almost seemed like a prank that he'd been entrusted with such a high-tech mission. His buddies in the squadron had always joked that he should've been born in an earlier time. That's how he'd gotten his call sign, “Wedge”: the world's first and simplest tool.
Time for his six-degree turn.
He switched off the autopilot. He knew there'd be hell to pay for flying throttle and stick, but he'd deal with that when he got back to the Bush.
He wanted to feel it.
If only for a second. And if only for once in his life.
It would be worth the ass-chewing. And so, with a bunch of noise behind his head, he banked into Iranian airspace.
“You wanted to see me, Commodore?”
Commander Jane Morris, captain of the John Paul Jones, seemed tired, too tired to apologize for being almost fifteen minutes late to her meeting with Hunt, who understood the strain Morris was under. Hunt understood that strain because she herself had felt it on occasions too countless to number. It was the strain of getting a ship underway. The absolute accountability for nearly four hundred sailors. And the lack of sleep as the captain was summoned again and again to the bridge as the ship maneuvered through the seemingly endless fishing fleets in the South China Sea. The argument could be made that Hunt was under that strain three times over, based on the scope of her command, but both Hunt and Morris knew that the command of a flotilla was command by delegation while the command of a ship was pure command. In the end, you and you alone are responsible for everything your ship does or fails to do. A simple lesson they'd both been taught as midshipmen at Annapolis.
Hunt fished out two cigars from her cargo pocket.
“And what're those?” asked Morris.
“An apology,” said Hunt. “They're Cubans. My dad used to buy them from the Marines at Gitmo. It's not as much fun now that they're legal, but still … they're pretty good.” Morris was a devout Christian, quietly evangelical, and Hunt hadn't been sure whether or not she'd partake, so she was pleased when Morris took the cigar and came up alongside her on the bridge wing for a light.
“An apology?” asked Morris. “What for?” She dipped the tip of the cigar into the flame made by Hunt's Zippo, which was engraved with one of those cigar-chomping, submachine-gun-toting bullfrogs commonly tattooed onto the chests and shoulders of Navy SEALs or, in the case of Hunt's father, etched onto the lighter he'd passed down to his only child.
“I imagine you weren't thrilled to learn that I'd picked the John Paul Jones for my flagship.” Hunt had lit her cigar as well, and as their ship held its course the smoke was carried off behind them. “I wouldn't want you to think this choice was a rebuke,” she continued, “particularly as the only other female in command. I wouldn't want you to think that I was trying to babysit you by situating my flag here.” Hunt instinctively glanced up at the mast, at her commodore's command pennant.
“Permission to speak freely?”
“C'mon, Jane. Cut the shit. You're not a plebe. This isn't Bancroft Hall.”
“Okay, ma'am,” began Morris, “I never thought any of that. Wouldn't have even occurred to me. You've got three good ships with three good crews. You need to put yourself somewhere. Actually, my crew was pretty jazzed to hear that we'd have the Lion Queen herself on board.”
“Could be worse,” said Hunt. “If I were a man you'd be stuck with the Lion King.”
Morris laughed.
“And if I were the Lion King,” deadpanned Hunt, “that'd make you Zazu.” Then Hunt smiled, that wide-open smile that had always endeared her to her subordinates.
Which led Morris to say a little more, maybe more than she would've in the normal course: “If we were two men, and the Levin and Hoon were skippered by two women, do you think we'd be having this conversation?” Morris allowed the beat of silence between them to serve as the answer.
“You're right,” said Hunt, taking another pull on her Cuban as she leaned on the deck railing and stared out toward the horizon, across the still impossibly calm ocean.
“How's your leg holding up?” asked Morris.
Hunt reached down to her thigh. “It's as good as it'll ever be,” she said. She didn't touch the break in her femur, the one she'd suffered a decade before during a training jump gone bad. A faulty parachute had ended her tenure as one of the first women in the SEALs and nearly ended her life. Instead, she fingered the letter from the medical board resting in her pocket.
They'd smoked their short cigars nearly down to the nubs when Morris spotted something on the starboard horizon. “You see that smoke?” she said. The two naval officers pitched their cigars over the side for a clearer view. It was a small ship, steaming slowly or perhaps even drifting. Morris ducked into the bridge and returned to the observation deck with two pairs of binoculars, one for each of them.
They could see it clearly now, a trawler about seventy feet long, built low amidships to recover its fishing nets, with a high-built prow designed to crest storm surge. Smoke billowed from the aft part of the ship, where the navigation bridge was set behind the nets and cranes—great dense, dark clouds of it, interspersed with orange flames. There was a commotion on deck as the crew of maybe a dozen struggled to contain the blaze.
The flotilla had rehearsed what to do in the event they came across a ship in duress. First, they would check to see if other vessels were coming to render assistance. If not, they would amplify any distress signals and facilitate finding help. What they wouldn't do—or would do only as an absolute last resort—was divert from their own freedom-of-navigation patrol to provide that assistance themselves.
“Did you catch the ship's nationality?” asked Hunt. Inwardly, she began running through a decision tree of her options.
Morris said no, there wasn't a flag flying either fore or aft. Then she stepped back into the bridge and asked the officer of the deck, a beef-fed lieutenant junior grade with a sweep of sandy blond hair, whether or not a distress signal had come in over the last hour.
The officer of the deck reviewed the bridge log, checked with the combat information center—the central nervous system of the ship's sensors and communications complex a couple of decks below—and concluded that no distress signal had been issued. Before Morris could dispatch such a signal on the trawler's behalf, Hunt stepped onto the bridge and stopped her.
“We're diverting to render assistance,” ordered Hunt.
“Diverting?” Morris' question escaped her reflexively, almost accidentally, as every head on the bridge swiveled toward the commodore, who knew as well as the crew that lingering in these waters dramatically increased the odds of a confrontation with a naval vessel from the People's Liberation Army. The crew was already at a modified general quarters, well trained and ready, the atmosphere one of grim anticipation.
“We've got a ship in duress that's sailing without a flag and that hasn't sent out a distress signal,” said Hunt. “Let's take a closer look, Jane. And let's go to full general quarters. Something doesn't add up.”
Crisply, Morris issued those orders to the crew, as if they were the chorus to a song she'd rehearsed to herself for years but up to this moment had never had the opportunity to perform. Sailors sprang into motion on every deck of the vessel, quickly donning flash gear, strapping on gas masks and inflatable life jackets, locking down the warship's many hatches, spinning up the full combat suite, to include energizing the stealth apparatus that would cloak the ship's radar and infrared signatures. While the John Paul Jones changed course and closed in on the incapacitated trawler, its sister ships, the Levin and Hoon, remained on course and speed for the freedom-of-navigation mission. The distance between them and the flagship began to open. Hunt then disappeared back to her stateroom, to where she would send out the encrypted dispatch to Seventh Fleet Headquarters in Yokosuka. Their plans had changed.
Dr. Sandeep “Sandy” Chowdhury, the deputy national security advisor, hated the second and fourth Mondays of every month. These were the days, according to his custody agreement, that his 6-year-old daughter, Ashni, returned to her mother. What often complicated matters was that the handoff didn't technically occur until the end of school. Which left him responsible for any unforeseen childcare issues that might arise, such as a snow day. And on this particular Monday morning, a snow day in which he was scheduled to be in the White House Situation Room monitoring progress on a particularly sensitive test flight over the Strait of Hormuz, he had resorted to calling his own mother, the formidable Lakshmi Chowdhury, to come to his Logan Circle apartment. She had arrived before the sun had even risen in order to watch Ashni.
“Don't forget my one condition,” she'd reminded her son as he tightened his tie around the collar that was too loose for his thin neck. Heading out into the slushy predawn, he paused at the door. “I won't forget,” he told her. “And I'll be back by the time Ashni's picked up.” He had to be: His mother's one condition was that she not be inflicted with the sight of Sandy's ex-wife, Samantha, a transplant from Texas' Gulf Coast whom Lakshmi haughtily called “provincial.” She'd disliked her the moment she had set eyes on her skinny frame and blonde, pageboy haircut. A poor man's Ellen DeGeneres, Lakshmi had once said in a pique, having to remind her son about the old-time television show host whose appeal she'd never understood.
If being single and reliant upon his mother at 44 was somewhat humiliating, the ego blow was diminished when he removed his White House all-access badge from his briefcase. He flashed it to the uniformed Secret Service agent at the northwest gate while a couple of early-morning joggers on Pennsylvania Avenue glanced in his direction, wondering if they should know who he was. It was only in the last eighteen months, since he'd taken up his posting in the West Wing, that his mother had finally begun to correct people when they assumed that her son, Dr. Chowdhury, was a medical doctor.
His mother had asked to visit his office several times, but he'd kept her at bay. The idea of an office in the West Wing was far more glamorous than the reality, a desk and a chair jammed against a basement wall in a general crush of staff.
He sat at his desk, enjoying the rare quiet of the empty room. No one else had made it through the two inches of snow that had paralyzed the capital city. Chowdhury rooted around one of his drawers, scrounged up a badly crushed but still edible energy bar, and took it, a cup of coffee, and a briefing binder through the heavy, soundproof doors into the Situation Room.
A seat with a built-in work terminal had been left for him at the head of the conference table. He logged in. At the far end of the room was an LED screen with a map displaying the disposition of US military forces abroad, to include an encrypted video-teleconference link with each of the major combatant commands, Southern, Central, Northern, and the rest. He focused on the Indo-Pacific Command—the largest and most important, responsible for nearly 40 percent of the earth's surface, though much of it was ocean.
The briefer was Rear Admiral John T. Hendrickson, a nuclear submariner with whom Chowdhury had a passing familiarity, though they'd yet to work together directly. The admiral was flanked by two junior officers, a man and a woman, each significantly taller than him. The admiral and Chowdhury had been contemporaries in the doctoral program at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy fifteen years before. That didn't mean they'd been friends; in fact, they'd overlapped by only a single year, but Chowdhury knew Hendrickson by reputation. At a hair over five feet, five inches tall, Hendrickson was conspicuous in his shortness. His compact size made it seem as though he were born to fit into submarines, and his quirky, deeply analytic mind seemed equally customized for that strange brand of naval service. Hendrickson had finished his doctorate in a record-breaking three years (as opposed to Chowdhury's seven), and during that time he'd led the Fletcher softball team to a hat trick of intramural championships in the Boston area, earning the nickname “Bunt.”
Chowdhury nearly called Hendrickson by that old nickname, but he thought better of it. It was a moment for deference to official roles. The screen in front of them was littered with forward-deployed military units—an amphibious ready group in the Aegean, a carrier battle group in the Western Pacific, two nuclear submarines under what remained of the Arctic ice, the concentric rings of armored formations fanned out from west to east in Central Europe, as they had been for nearly a hundred years to ward off Russian aggression. Hendrickson quickly homed in on two critical events underway, one long planned, the other “developing,” as Hendrickson put it.
The planned event was the testing of a new electromagnetic disrupter within the F-35's suite of stealth technology. This test was now in progress and would play out over the next several hours. The fighter had been launched from a Marine squadron off the George H. W. Bush in the Arabian Gulf. Hendrickson glanced down at his watch. “The pilot's been dark in Iranian airspace for the last four minutes.” He went into a long, top secret, and dizzyingly expository paragraph on the nature of the electromagnetic disruption, which was occurring at that very moment, soothing the Iranian air defenses to sleep.
Within the first few sentences, Chowdhury was lost. He had never been detail oriented, particularly when those details were technical in nature. This was why he'd found his way into politics after graduate school. This was also why Hendrickson—brilliant though he was—did, technically, work for Chowdhury. As a political appointee on the National Security Council staff, Chowdhury outranked him, though this was a point few military officers in the White House would publicly concede to their civilian masters. Chowdhury's genius, while not technical, was an intuitive understanding of how to make the best out of any bad situation. He'd gotten his political start working in the one-term Pence presidency. Who could say he wasn't a survivor?
“The second situation is developing,” continued Hendrickson. “The John Paul Jones command group—a three-ship surface action group—has diverted the flagship from its freedom-of-navigation patrol nearby the Spratly Islands to investigate a vessel in duress.”
“What kind of vessel?” asked Chowdhury. He was leaning back in the leather executive chair at the head of the conference table, the same chair that the president sat in when she used the room. Chowdhury was munching the end of his energy bar in a particularly non-presidential fashion.
“We don't know,” answered Hendrickson. “We're waiting on an update from Seventh Fleet.”
Even though Chowdhury couldn't follow the particulars of the F-35's stealth disruption, he did know that having a $2 billion Arleigh Burke guided missile destroyer playing rescue tugboat to a mystery ship in waters claimed by the Chinese had the potential to undermine his morning. And splitting up the surface action group didn't seem like the best idea. “This doesn't sound good, Bunt. Who is the on-scene commander?”
Hendrickson shot a glance back at Chowdhury, who recognized the slight provocation he was making by using the old nickname. The two junior staffers exchanged an apprehensive look. Hendrickson chose to ignore it. “I know the commodore,” he said. “Captain Sarah Hunt. She is extremely capable. Top of her class at everything.”
“So?” asked Chowdhury.
“So, we'd be prudent to cut her a little slack.”
Once the order to render aid was given, the crew of the John Paul Jones worked quickly. Two RHIBs launched off the fantail and pulled alongside the burning trawler. The stocky, blond lieutenant junior grade had been placed in charge of this tiny flotilla of inflatable boats, while Hunt and Morris observed from the bridge, listening to the updates he sent over his handheld radio with all the baritone hysteria of plays being called at the line of scrimmage. Both senior officers forgave his novice lack of calm. He was putting out a fire with two pumps and two hoses in hostile waters.
Hostile but completely calm, rigid as a pane of glass as the drama of the fire and the trawler played out a couple of hundred yards off the bridge. Hunt found herself staring wistfully at the water, wondering again if perhaps this might be her last time seeing such a sea, or at least seeing it from the command of a naval vessel. After a moment's thought, she told the officer of the deck to send a signal to her other two destroyers to break off the freedom-of-navigation patrol and divert on-scene. Better to have a bit more firepower in close.
The Levin and Hoon reversed course and increased speed, and in a few minutes they had taken up positions around the John Paul Jones, sailing in a protective orbit as the flagship continued a dead slow approach toward the trawler. Soon, the last of the flames had been extinguished and the young lieutenant junior grade gave a triumphant announcement over the radio, to which both Hunt and Morris volunteered some quick congratulations followed by instructions for him to board and assess the extent of the damages. An order that he followed. Or at least tried to follow.
The crew of the trawler met the first boarding party at the gunnels with angry, desperate shouts. One went so far as to swing a grapple at a boatswain's head. Watching this struggle from the bridge of the John Paul Jones, Hunt wondered why the crew of a burning ship would so stridently resist help. Between radio transmissions, in which she encouraged a general de-escalation, she could overhear the trawler's crew, who spoke in what sounded like Mandarin.
“Ma'am, I suggest we cut them loose,” Morris eventually offered. “They don't seem to want any more help.”
“I can see that, Jane,” responded Hunt. “But the question is, why not?”
She could observe the boarding party and the crew of the trawler gesticulating wildly at one another. Why this resistance? Hunt saw Morris' point—with each passing minute her command became increasingly vulnerable to intercept by a People's Liberation Army naval patrol, which would undermine their mission. But wasn't this their mission as well? To keep these waters safe and navigable? Ten, maybe even five years before, the threat level had been lower. Back then, most of the Cold War treaties had remained intact. Those old systems had eroded, however. And Sarah Hunt, gazing out at this trawler with its defiant crew, had an instinct that this small fishing vessel represented a threat.
“Commander Morris,” said Hunt gravely, “pull your ship alongside that trawler. If we can't board her from the RHIBs, we'll board her from here.”
Morris immediately objected to the order, offering a predictable list of concerns: first, the time it would take would further expose them to a potential confrontation with a hostile naval patrol; second, placing the John Paul Jones alongside the trawler would put their own ship at undue risk. “We don't know what's on board,” cautioned Morris.
Hunt listened patiently. She could feel Morris' crew going about their tasks on the bridge, trying to ignore these two senior-most officers as they had their disagreement. Then Hunt repeated the order. Morris complied.
As the John Paul Jones came astride the trawler, Hunt could now see its name, Wén Rui, and its home port, Quanzhou, a provincial-level anchorage astride the Taiwan Strait. Her crew shot grapples over the trawler's gunnels, which allowed them to affix steel tow cables to its side. Lashed together, the two ships cut through the water in tandem like a motorcycle with an unruly sidecar. The danger of this maneuver was obvious to everyone on the bridge. They went about their tasks with a glum air of silent-sailor disapproval, all thinking their commodore was risking the ship unnecessarily for a bunch of agitated Chinese fishermen. No one voiced their collective wish that their commodore let her hunch go by the boards and return them to safer waters.
Sensing the discontent, Hunt announced that she was heading belowdecks.
Heads snapped around.
“Where to, ma'am?” Morris said by way of protest, seemingly indignant that her commander would abandon her in such a precarious position.
“To the Wén Rui,” answered Hunt. “I want to see her for myself.”
And this is what she did, surprising the master-at-arms, who handed her a holstered pistol, which she strapped on as she clamored over the side, ignoring the throbbing in her bad leg. When Hunt dropped onto the deck of the trawler, she found that the boarding party had already placed under arrest the half dozen crew members of the Wén Rui. They sat cross-legged amidships with an armed guard hovering behind them, their wrists bound at their backs in plastic flex-cuffs, their peaked fishing caps pulled low, and their clothes oily and stained. When Hunt stepped on deck, one of the arrested men, who was oddly clean-shaven and whose cap wasn't pulled low but was worn proudly back on his head, stood. The gesture wasn't defiant, actually quite the opposite; he was clear-eyed. Hunt immediately took him for the captain of the Wén Rui.
The chief petty officer who was leading the party explained that they'd searched most of the trawler but that a steel, watertight hatch secured one of the stern compartments and the crew had refused to unlock it. The chief had ordered a welding torch brought from the ship's locker. In about fifteen minutes they'd have everything opened up.
The clean-shaven man, the trawler's captain, began to speak in uncertain and heavily accented English: “Are you command here?”
“You speak English?” Hunt replied.
“Are you command here?” he repeated to her, as if perhaps he weren't certain what these words meant and had simply memorized them long ago as a contingency.
“I am Captain Sarah Hunt, United States Navy,” she answered, placing her palm on her chest. “Yes, this is my command.”
He nodded, and as he did his shoulders collapsed, as if shrugging off a heavy pack. “I surrender my command to you.” Then he turned his back to Hunt, a gesture that, at first, seemed to be a sign of disrespect, but that she soon recognized as being something altogether different. In his open palm, which was cuffed behind him at the wrist, was a key. He'd been holding it all this time and was now, with whatever ceremony he could muster, surrendering it to Hunt.
Hunt plucked the key from his palm, which was noticeably soft, not the calloused palm of a fisherman. She approached the compartment at the stern on the Wén Rui, popped off the lock, and opened the hatch.
“What we got, ma'am?” asked the master-at-arms, who stood close behind her.
“Christ,” said Hunt, staring at racks of blinking miniature hard drives and plasma screens. “I have no idea.”
When Wedge switched to manual control, the Lockheed contractors on the George H. W. Bush immediately began to radio, wanting to know if everything was okay. He hadn't answered, at least not at first. They could still track him and see that he was adhering to their flight plan, which at this moment placed him approximately fifty nautical miles west of Bandar Abbas, the main regional Iranian naval base. The accuracy of his flight proved—at least to him—that his navigation was as precise as any computer.
Then his F-35 hit a pocket of atmospheric turbulence—a bad one. Wedge could feel it shudder up the controls, through his feet, which were planted on the rudder pedals, into the stick, and across his shoulders. The turbulence threatened to throw him off course, which could have diverted him into the more technologically advanced layers of Iranian air defenses, the ones that expanded outward from Tehran, in which the F-35's stealth countermeasures might prove inadequate.
This is it, he thought.
Or at least as close to it as he had ever come. His manipulation of throttle, stick, and rudder was fast, instinctual, the result of his entire career in the cockpit, and of four generations' worth of Mitchell family breeding.
He skittered his aircraft on the edge of the turbulence, flying for a total of 3.6 nautical miles at a speed of 736 knots with his aircraft oriented with 28 degrees of yaw respective to its direction of flight. The entire episode lasted under four seconds, but it was a moment of hidden grace, one that only he and perhaps his great-grandfather watching from the afterlife appreciated in the instant of its occurrence.
Then, as quickly as the turbulence sprung up, it dissipated, and Wedge was flying steadily. Once again, the Lockheed contractors on the George H. W. Bush radioed, asking why he'd disabled his navigation computer. They insisted that he turn it back on. “Roger,” said Wedge, as he finally came up over the encrypted communications link, “activating navigation override.” He leaned forward, pressed a single innocuous button, and felt a slight lurch, like a train being switched back onto a set of tracks, as his F-35 returned to autopilot.
Wedge was overcome by an urge to smoke a cigarette in the cockpit, just as Pappy Boyington used to do, but he'd pushed his luck far enough for today. Returning to the Bush in a cockpit that reeked of a celebratory Marlboro would likely be more than the Lockheed contractors, or his superiors, could countenance. The pack was in the left breast pocket of his flight suit, but he'd wait and have one on the fantail after his debrief. Checking his watch, he calculated that he'd be back in time for dinner in the pilots' dirty-shirt wardroom in the forward part of the carrier. He hoped they'd have the “heart attack” sliders he loved—triple cheeseburger patties with a fried egg on top.
It was while he was thinking of that dinner—and the cigarette—that his F-35 diverted off course, heading north, inland toward Iran. This shift in direction was so smooth that Wedge didn't even notice it until another series of calls came from the Bush, all of them alarmed as to this change in heading.
“Turn on your navigation computer.”
Wedge tapped at its screen. “My navigation computer is on … Wait, I'm going to reboot.” Before Wedge could begin the long reboot sequence, he realized that his computer was nonresponsive. “Avionics are out. I'm switching to manual override.”
He pulled at his stick.
He stamped on his rudder pedals.
The throttle no longer controlled the engine.
His F-35 was beginning to lose altitude, descending gradually. In sheer frustration, a frustration that bordered on rage, he tugged at the controls, strangling them, as if he were trying to murder the plane in which he flew. He could hear the chatter in his helmet, the impotent commands from the George H. W. Bush, which weren't even really commands but rather pleadings, desperate requests for Wedge to figure out this problem.
But he couldn't.
Wedge didn't know who or what was flying his plane.
Sandy Chowdhury had finished his energy bar, was well into his second cup of coffee, and the updates would not stop coming. The first was this news that the John Paul Jones had found some type of advanced technological suite on the fishing trawler they'd boarded and lashed to their side. The commodore, this Sarah Hunt, whose judgment Hendrickson so trusted, was insistent that within an hour she could offload the computers onto one of the three ships in her flotilla for further forensic exploitation. While Chowdhury was weighing that option with Hendrickson, the second update came in, from Seventh Fleet Headquarters, “INFO” Indo-Pacific Command. A contingent of People's Liberation Army warships, at least six, to include the nuclear-powered carrier Zheng He, had altered course and was heading directly toward the John Paul Jones.
The third update was most puzzling of all. The controls of the F-35, the one whose flight had brought Chowdhury into the Situation Room early that snowy Monday morning, had locked up. The pilot was working through every contingency, but at this moment, he was no longer in control of his aircraft.
“If the pilot isn't flying it, and we're not doing it remotely from the carrier, then who the hell is?” Chowdhury snapped at Hendrickson.
A junior White House staffer interrupted them. “Dr. Chowdhury,” she said, “the Chinese defense attaché would like to speak with you.”
Chowdhury shot Hendrickson an incredulous glance, as if he were willing the one-star admiral to explain that this entire situation was part of a single, elaborate, and twisted practical joke. But no such assurance came. “All right, transfer him through,” said Chowdhury as he reached for the phone.
“No, Dr. Chowdhury,” said the young staffer. “He's here. Admiral Lin Bao is here.”
“Here?” said Hendrickson. “At the White House? You're kidding.”
The staffer shook her head. “I'm not, sir. He's at the northwest gate.” Chowdhury and Hendrickson pushed open the Situation Room door, hurried down the corridor to the nearest window, and peered through the blinds. There was Admiral Lin Bao, resplendent in his blue service uniform with gold epaulets, standing patiently with three Chinese military escorts and one civilian at the northwest gate among the growing crowd of tourists. It was a mini-delegation. Chowdhury couldn't fathom what they were doing. The Chinese are never impulsive like this, he thought.
“Jesus,” he muttered.
“We can't just let him in,” said Hendrickson. A gaggle of Secret Service supervisors gathered around them to explain that the proper vetting for a Chinese official to enter the White House couldn't possibly be accomplished in anything less than four hours; that is, unless they had POTUS, chief of staff, or national security advisor-level approval. But all three were overseas. The television was tuned to the latest updates on the G7 summit in Munich, which had left the White House without a president and much of its national security team. Chowdhury was the senior NSC staffer in the White House at that moment.
“Shit,” said Chowdhury. “I'm going out there.”
“You can't go out there,” said Hendrickson.
“He can't come in here.”
Hendrickson couldn't argue the logic. Chowdhury headed for the door. He didn't grab his coat, though it was below freezing. He hoped that whatever message the defense attaché had to deliver wouldn't take long. Now that he was outside, his personal phone caught signal and vibrated with a half dozen text messages, all from his mother. Whenever she watched his daughter she would pepper him with mundane domestic questions as a reminder of the favor she was performing. Christ, he thought, I bet she can't find the baby wipes again. But Chowdhury didn't have time to check the particulars of those texts as he walked along the South Lawn.
Cold as it was, Lin Bao wasn't wearing a coat either, only his uniform, with its wall of medals, furiously embroidered epaulets in gold, and peaked naval officer's cap tucked snugly under his arm. Lin Bao was casually eating from a packet of M&M's, picking the candies out one at a time with pinched fingers. Chowdhury passed through the black steel gate to where Lin Bao stood. “I have a weakness for your M&M's,” said the admiral absently. “They were a military invention. Did you know that? It's true—the candies were first mass-produced for American GIs in World War II, specifically in the South Pacific, where they required chocolate that wouldn't melt. That's your saying, right? Melts in your mouth, not in your hand.” Lin Bao licked the tips of his fingers, where the candy coloring had bled, staining his skin a mottled pastel.
“To what do we owe the pleasure, Admiral?” Chowdhury asked.
Lin Bao peered into his bag of M&M's, as if he had a specific idea of which color he'd like to sample next but couldn't quite find it. Speaking into the bag, he said, “You have something of ours, a small ship, very small—the Wén Rui. We'd like it back.” Then he picked out a blue M&M, made a face, as if this wasn't the color he'd been searching for, and somewhat disappointedly placed it into his mouth.
“We shouldn't be talking about that out here,” said Chowdhury.
“Would you care to invite me inside?” asked the admiral, nodding toward the West Wing, knowing the impossibility of that request. He then added, “Otherwise, I think out in the open is the only way we can talk.”
Chowdhury was freezing. He tucked his hands underneath his arms.
“Believe me,” added Lin Bao, “it is in your best interest to give us back the Wén Rui.”
Although Chowdhury worked for the first American president in modern history who was unaffiliated with a political party, the administration's position with regards to freedom of navigation and the South China Sea had remained consistent with the several Republican and Democratic administrations that had preceded it. Chowdhury repeated those well-established policy positions to an increasingly impatient Lin Bao.
“You don't have time for this,” he said to Chowdhury, still picking through his diminishing bag of M&M's.
“Is that a threat?”
“Not at all,” said Lin Bao, shaking his head sadly, feigning disappointment that Chowdhury would make such a suggestion. “I meant that your mother has been texting you, hasn't she? Don't you need to reply? Check your phone. You'll see she wants to take your daughter Ashni outside to enjoy the snow but can't find the girl's coat.”
Chowdhury removed his phone from his pants pocket.
He glanced at the text messages.
They were as Lin Bao had represented them.
“We have ships of our own coming to intercept the John Paul Jones, the Carl Levin, and the Chung-Hoon,” continued Lin Bao, speaking the name of each destroyer to prove that he knew it, just as he knew the details of every text message that was sent to Chowdhury's phone. “Escalation on your part would be a mistake.”
“What will you give us for the Wén Rui?”
“We'll return your F-35.”
“F-35?” said Chowdhury. “You don't have an F-35.”
“Maybe you should go back to your Situation Room and check,” said Lin Bao mildly. He poured the last M&M from his packet into his palm. It was yellow. “We have M&M's in China too. But they taste better here. It's something about the candy shell. In China, we just can't get the formula quite right.” Then he put the chocolate in his mouth, briefly shutting his eyes to savor it. When he opened them, he was again staring at Chowdhury. “You need to give us back the Wén Rui.”
“I don't need to do anything,” said Chowdhury.
Lin Bao nodded disappointedly. “Very well,” he said. “I understand.” He crumpled up the candy wrapper and then pitched it on the sidewalk.
“Pick that up, please, Admiral,” said Chowdhury.
Lin Bao glanced down at the piece of litter. “Or else what?”
As Chowdhury struggled to formulate a response, the admiral turned on his heels and stepped across the street, weaving his way through the late-morning traffic.
The pair of high-speed fighter-interceptors came out of nowhere, their sonic booms rattling the deck of the John Paul Jones, taking the crew completely unawares. Commodore Hunt ducked instinctively at the sound. She was still aboard the Wén Rui, picking over the technical suite they'd uncovered the hour before. The trawler's captain returned a toothy grin, as if he'd been expecting the low-flying jets all along. “Let's get the crew of the Wén Rui secured down in the brig,” Hunt told the master-at-arms supervising the search. She ran up to the bridge and found Morris struggling to manage the situation.
“What've you got?” asked Hunt.
Morris, who was peering into an Aegis terminal, now tracked not only the two interceptors but also the signatures of at least six separate ships of unknown origin that had appeared at the exact same moment as the interceptors. It was as if an entire fleet, in a single coordinated maneuver, had chosen to unmask itself. The nearest of these vessels, which moved nimbly in the Aegis display, suggested the profile of a frigate or destroyer. They were eight nautical miles distant, right at the edge of visible range. Hunt raised a set of binoculars, searching the horizon. Then the first frigate's gray hull ominously appeared.
“There,” she said, pointing off their bow.
Calls soon came in from the Levin and the Hoon confirming visuals on two, then three, and finally a fourth and fifth ship. All People's Liberation Army naval vessels, and they ranged in size from a frigate up to a carrier, the hulking Zheng He, which was as formidable as anything in the US Navy's Seventh Fleet. The Chinese ships formed in a circle around Hunt's command, which itself had encircled the Wén Rui, so that the two flotillas were arrayed in two concentric rings, rotating in opposite directions.
A radioman positioned in a corner of the bridge wearing a headset began to emphatically gesture for Hunt. “What is it?” she asked the sailor, who handed her the headset. Over the analog hum of static, she could hear a faint voice: “US Naval Commander, this is Rear Admiral Ma Qiang, commander of the Zheng He Carrier Battle Group. We demand you release the civilian vessel you have captured. Depart our territorial waters immediately.” There was a pause, then the message repeated. Hunt wondered how many times this request had been spoken into the ether, and how many times it would be allowed to go unanswered before the attendant battle group—which seemed to be drawing ever closer—took action.
“Can you get a secure VoIP connection with Seventh Fleet Headquarters?” Hunt asked the radioman, who nodded and then began reconfiguring red and blue wires into the back of an old-fashioned laptop normally used on the quiet midwatches for video games; it was primitive and so perhaps a more secure way to connect.
“What do they want?” asked Morris, who was staring vacantly at the ring of six ships that surrounded them.
“They want that fishing trawler back,” said Hunt. “Or, rather, whatever technology is on it, and they want us out of these waters.”
“What's our move?”
“I don't know yet,” answered Hunt, who glanced over at the radioman, who was toggling the VoIP switch, checking it for a dial tone. While she waited, her leg began to ache from the activity of climbing around the ship. She reached in her pocket, rubbed the ache, and felt the letter from the medical board. “You got me Seventh Fleet yet?” she asked.
“Not yet, ma'am.”
Hunt glanced impatiently at her watch. “Christ, then call the Levin or the Hoon. See if they can raise them.”
The radioman glanced back at her, wide-eyed, as if searching within himself for the courage to say something he couldn't quite bear to say.
“What is it?” asked Hunt.
“I've got nothing.”
“What do you mean, you've got nothing?” Hunt glanced at Morris, who appeared equally unnerved.
“All of our communications are down,” said the radioman. “I can't raise the Levin or the Hoon. I've got nobody.”
Hunt unclipped the handheld radio she had fastened to her belt, the one she'd been using to communicate with the bridge when she'd been belowdecks on the Wén Rui. She keyed and unkeyed the handset. “Can you get up on any channel?” Hunt asked, betraying for the first time the slightest tinge of desperation in her voice.
“Only this one,” said the radioman, who raised the earphones he'd been listening to, which relayed a message on a loop:
“US Naval Commander, this is Rear Admiral Ma Qiang, commander of the Zheng He Carrier Battle Group. We demand you release the civilian vessel you have captured. Depart our territorial waters immediately …”
All the screens in the cockpit were out. The avionics. The weapons. The navigation. All of it—dark. Wedge's communications had gone silent a few minutes before, which left him feeling a remarkable sense of calm. No one from the Bush was calling. It was just him, up here, with an impossible problem. The plane was still flying itself. Or, rather, it was being flown by unseen forces who were smoothly and carefully maneuvering the jet. His descent had stalled. By his estimation, he was cruising at around five thousand feet. His speed was steady, five hundred, maybe five hundred and fifty knots. And he was circling.
He pulled from his flight bag the tablet on which he'd downloaded all the regional charts. He also checked the compass on his watch, the Breitling chronometer that had belonged to his father. Referencing the compass and the tablet together, it didn't take him long to calculate exactly where he was, which was directly above Bandar Abbas, the site of the massive Iranian military installation that guarded the entrance to the Arabian Gulf. Or the Persian Gulf, as they call it, thought Wedge. He watched the parched land below slowly rotate as he flew racetracks in the airspace.
There was, of course, the off chance that this override of his aircraft was due to some freak malfunction in the F-35. But those odds were long and running longer with each minute that passed. What was far more probable, as Wedge saw it, was that his mission had been compromised, the controls of his plane hacked, and he himself turned into a passenger on this flight that he increasingly believed would end with him on the ground in Iranian territory.
Time was short; he would be out of fuel within the hour. He had one choice.
It likely meant he wouldn't be smoking a celebratory Marlboro on the fantail of the Bush anytime soon. So he reached between his legs, to the black-and-yellow striped handle, which was primed to the rocket in his ejection seat. This is it, he nearly said aloud, as he thought of his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, all in the single instant it took him to pull the handle.
But nothing happened.
His ejector seat had been disabled too.
The engine on the F-35 let out a slight, decelerating groan. His plane began to cast off altitude, corkscrewing its descent into Bandar Abbas. One last time, Wedge stamped on the rudder pedals, pushed and then pulled the throttle, and tugged on the stick. He then reached under his flight vest, to where he carried his pistol. He grabbed it by its barrel, so that in his grip he wielded it like a hammer. And as his aircraft entered its glide path toward the runway, Wedge began to tear apart the inside of his cockpit, doing his best to destroy the sensitive items it contained, beginning with the small black box situated behind his head. This entire time, it hadn't stopped its humming.
Air Force One, with the president on board, was slicing across the Atlantic on its way back from the G7 summit, its last round of meetings having been curtailed due to the burgeoning crisis. Touchdown at Andrews was scheduled for 16:37 local time, more than an hour after Chowdhury had sworn to his mother that he'd be home to facilitate his daughter's pickup with his ex-wife. Taking a reprieve from one crisis, he stepped outside the Situation Room and turned on his cell phone to deal with another.
“Sandeep, I refuse to stand in the same room as that woman,” answered his mother as soon as Chowdhury had explained. He pleaded for her help. When she asked for the details of what was holding him up he couldn't say, recalling Lin Bao's familiarity with his texts. His mother continued to protest. In the end, however, Chowdhury insisted on remaining at work, adding, lamely, that it was “a matter of national security.”
He hung up the phone and returned to the Situation Room. Hendrickson and his two aides sat on one side of the conference table, staring blankly at the opposite wall. Lin Bao had called, delivering news that had yet to filter from the George H. W. Bush, through Fifth Fleet Headquarters in Bahrain, up to Central Command, and then to the White House: The Iranian Revolutionary Guards had taken control of an F-35 transiting their airspace, hacking into its onboard computer to bring it down.
“Where's the plane now?” Chowdhury barked at Hendrickson.
“In Bandar Abbas,” he said vacantly.
“And the pilot?”
“Sitting on the tarmac brandishing a pistol.”
“Is he safe?”
“He's brandishing a pistol,” said Hendrickson. But then he gave Chowdhury's question greater thought. The pilot was safe, insomuch as to kill him would be a further and significant provocation, one it seemed the Iranians and their Chinese collaborators weren't ready to make, at least not yet. What Lin Bao wanted was simple: a swap. The John Paul Jones had stumbled upon something of value to the Chinese—the Wén Rui, or more specifically the technology installed on it—and they wanted that technology back. They would be willing to arrange a swap through their Iranian allies, the F-35 for the Wén Rui.
Before Chowdhury could reach any conclusions, Lin Bao was again on the line. “Have you considered our offer?” Chowdhury thought of his own larger questions. Ever since the mid-2020s, when Iran had signed on to the Chinese “Belt and Road” global development initiative to prevent financial collapse after the coronavirus pandemic, they had helped project Chinese economic and military interests; but what was the scope of this seemingly new Sino-Iranian alliance? And who else was a party to it? Chowdhury didn't have the authority to trade an F-35 for what would seem to be a Chinese spy ship. The president herself would decide whether such a swap was in the offing. Chowdhury explained the limitations of his own authority to Lin Bao and added that his superiors would soon return. Lin Bao seemed unimpressed.
“While you're holding the Wén Rui we are forced to interpret any stalling as an act of aggression, for we can only assume you are stalling so as to exploit the technology you've seized illegally. If the Wén Rui isn't turned over to us within the hour, we and our allies will have no other choice but to take action.”
Then the line went silent.
What that action was, and who those allies were, Lin Bao didn't say. Nothing could be done within an hour. The president had already indicated that she wouldn't be moved by ultimatums. She had summoned the Chinese ambassador to meet that evening and not before, which according to Lin Bao would be too late. While they assessed their options, Hendrickson explained gravely to Chowdhury that the only naval force they had within an hour's range of any other Chinese ships was the Michelle Obama, an attack submarine that had been trailing a Chinese merchant marine convoy up and around the Arctic deltas that had once been the polar ice caps. The Obama was tracking two Russian submarines, which had closed to within ten miles off the stern of the merchant convoy. While Chowdhury considered this development, puzzling over the appearance of the Russians, he was reminded of a story about Lincoln.
“It was during the darkest days of the Civil War,” Chowdhury began, ostensibly speaking to Hendrickson, but really speaking to himself. “The Union had sustained a series of defeats against the Confederates. A visitor from Kentucky was leaving the White House and asked Lincoln what cheering news he could take home. By way of reply, Lincoln told him a story about a chess expert who had never met his match until he tried his luck against a machine called the ‘automaton chess player’ and was beaten three times running. Astonished, the defeated expert stood from his chair and walked slowly around and around this amazing new piece of technology, examining it minutely as he went, trying to understand how it worked. At last he stopped and leveled an accusing finger in its direction. ‘There's a man in there!’ he cried. Then Lincoln told his visitor to take heart. No matter how bad things looked, there was always a man in the machine.”
The phone rang again. It was Lin Bao.
Wedge was furious. He couldn't help but feel betrayed as he sat on the taxiway at Bandar Abbas. Of course, he hadn't chosen this taxiway, or where to land, or even to open his canopy and shut off his engine. His plane had betrayed him so completely that the overriding emotion he felt was shame. On his descent he had managed to destroy the black box behind his head by using his pistol as a hammer. He had also destroyed the encrypted communications on board, as well as the most sensitive avionics, which controlled his suite of weapons. Like a crazed, captive animal, he'd been banging away at the inside of his cockpit ever since losing control.
He continued his work once he landed.
As soon as his cockpit was open, he'd stood up in it and fired his pistol into the controls. The gesture filled him with a surprising upsurge of emotion, as though he were a cavalryman putting a bullet through the brain of a once-faithful mount. The few dozen Revolutionary Guards dispersed around the airfield struggled to understand the commotion. For the first several minutes, they chose to keep their distance, not out of fear of him, but out of fear that he might force a misstep into what, up to this point, had been their well-orchestrated plan. However, the more Wedge destroyed—tearing at loose wiring, stamping with the heel of his boot, and brandishing his pistol in the direction of the guardsmen when he felt them approaching too closely—the more he forced their hand. If he completely destroyed the sensitive items in his F-35, the aircraft would be of no use as a bargaining chip.
The on-scene commander, a brigadier general, understood what Wedge was doing, having spent his entire adult life facing off, either directly or indirectly, with the Americans. The brigadier slowly tightened the cordon around Wedge's aircraft. Wedge, who could feel the Iranians closing in, continued to flash his pistol at them. But he could tell that each time he pulled it out, the guardsmen on the cordon became increasingly unconvinced that he'd actually use it. And he wouldn't have used it, even if it'd had any ammunition left, which it didn't. Wedge had already plugged the last round into the avionics.
The brigadier, who was missing the pinkie and ring finger of his right hand, was now waving at Wedge, standing in the seat of his jeep, as the other jeeps and armored vehicles on the cordon grew closer. The brigadier's English was as mangled as his three-fingered hand, but Wedge could make out what he was saying, which was something to the effect of, “Surrender and no harm will come to you.”
Wedge didn't plan on surrendering, not without a fight. Though he couldn't say what that fight would be. All Wedge had was the empty pistol.
The brigadier was now close enough to issue his demands for surrender without needing to shout them at Wedge, who replied by standing in the cockpit and chucking his pistol at the brigadier.
It was an admirable toss, the pistol tumbling end-over-end like a hatchet.
The brigadier, who to his credit didn't flinch when the pistol sailed right above his head, gave the order. His men stormed the F-35, dismounting their vehicles in a swarm to clamber up its wings, and then over its fuselage, where they found Wedge, crammed in his cockpit, his feet on the rudder pedals, one hand on the throttle, the other on the stick. Absently, he was scanning the far horizon, as if for enemy fighters. A Marlboro dangled from his lips. When the half dozen members of the Revolutionary Guard leveled the muzzles of their rifles around his head, he pitched his cigarette out of the cockpit.
The flotilla's communications had been down for the past twenty minutes, an eternity.
Between the John Paul Jones, the Carl Levin, and the Chung-Hoon, Hunt had been able to communicate only through signal flags, her sailors flapping away in the upper reaches of the ship as frantically as if they were trying to take flight for land. Surprisingly, this primitive means of signaling proved effective, allowing the three ships to coordinate their movements in plain sight of the Zheng He Carrier Battle Group that encircled them. The only message that came over any of the ship's radios was the demand to surrender the Wén Rui. It continued to play on a maddening loop while Hunt and one of her chief petty officers troubleshot the communications suite on the John Paul Jones, hoping to receive any sliver of a message from Seventh Fleet, something that might bring clarity to their situation, which had so quickly deteriorated.
That message wouldn't come, and Hunt knew it.
What she also knew was that whatever was happening to her was happening within a broader context, a context that she didn't understand. She'd been placed into a game in which her opponent could see the entire board and she could see but a fraction of it. The crew on all three of her ships were at general quarters. The master-at-arms had yet to offload the suite of computers from the Wén Rui, though that task would be completed within the hour. Hunt had to assume that her opponent, who was watching her, understood that, and so whatever was going to happen would happen before that hour was up.
Another twenty minutes passed.
Morris, who had been belowdecks checking on the Wén Rui, scrambled back to the bridge. “They're almost done with the transfer,” she told Hunt, catching her breath. “Maybe five more minutes,” she announced optimistically. “Then we can cut the Wén Rui loose and maneuver out of here.”
Hunt nodded, but she felt certain that events would take a different course.
She didn't know what would happen, but whatever it was, she had only her eyes to rely on in order to see the move that would be played against her. The ocean remained calm, flat as a plane of glass, just as it had been all that morning. Hunt and Morris stood alongside one another on the bridge, scanning the horizon.
Because of the stillness of the water, they saw their adversary's next move when it came only seconds later. A single darting wake below the surface, jetting up a froth as it made its steady approach, closing the distance in seconds: a torpedo.
Six hundred yards.
Five hundred.
Three hundred and fifty.
It sliced through the torpid water.
Morris shouted the instinctual commands across the bridge, sounding the alarm for impact, the sirens echoing throughout the ship. Hunt, on the other hand, stood very still in these ultimate seconds. She felt strangely relieved. Her adversary had made his move. Her move would come next. But was the torpedo aimed at the Wén Rui, or at her ship? Who was the aggressor? No one would ever be able to agree. Wars were justified over such disagreements. And although few could predict what this first shot would bring, Hunt could. She could see the years ahead as clearly as the torpedo, which was now less than one hundred yards from the starboard side of the John Paul Jones.
Who was to blame for what had transpired on this day wouldn't be decided anytime soon. The war needed to come first. Then the victor would apportion the blame. This is how it was and would always be. This is what she was thinking when the torpedo hit.
Chowdhury leaned forward out of his seat, his elbows planted on the conference table, his neck angled toward the speakerphone in its center. Hendrickson sat opposite him at a computer, his hands hovering over the keyboard, ready to transcribe notes. The two had received orders from the National Command Authority, which was now handling the situation from Air Force One. Before the Chinese ambassador's visit to the White House that evening, the national security advisor had laid out an aggressive negotiating framework for Chowdhury to telegraph to Lin Bao, which he now did.
“Before we agree to transfer the Wén Rui to your naval forces,” Chowdhury began, glancing up at Hendrickson, “our F-35 at Bandar Abbas must be returned. Because we are not the ones who instigated this crisis, it is imperative that you act first. Immediately after we receive our F-35, you will have the Wén Rui. There is no reason for further escalation.”
The line remained silent.
Chowdhury shot Hendrickson another glance.
Hendrickson reached over, muted the speaker, and whispered to Chowdhury, “Do you think he knows?” Chowdhury shook his head with a less-than-confident no. What Hendrickson was referring to was the call they'd received moments ago. For the past forty minutes, Seventh Fleet Headquarters in Yokosuka had lost all communications with the John Paul Jones and its sister ships.
“Hello?” said Chowdhury into the speaker.
“Yes, I am here,” came the otherworldly echo of Lin Bao's voice on the line. He sounded impatient, as though he were being forced to continue a conversation he'd tired of long ago. “Let me repeat your position, to assure that I understand it: For decades, your navy has sailed through our territorial waters, it has flown through our allies' airspace, and today it has seized one of our vessels; but you maintain that you are the aggrieved party, and we are the ones who must appease you?”
The room became so quiet that for the first time Chowdhury noticed the slight buzzing of the halogen light bulbs overhead. Hendrickson had finished transcribing Lin Bao's comments. His fingers hovered above the keyboard, ready to strike the next letter.
“That is the position of this administration,” answered Chowdhury, needing to swallow once to get the words out. “However, if you have a counterproposal, we would, of course, take it into consideration.”
More silence.
Then Lin Bao's exasperated voice: “We do have a counterproposal.”
“Good,” interjected Chowdhury, but Lin Bao ignored him, continuing on.
“If you check, you'll see that it's been sent to your computer—”
Then the power went out.
It was only a moment, a flash of darkness. The lights immediately came back on. And when they did, Lin Bao wasn't on the line anymore. There was only an empty dial tone. Chowdhury began messing with the phone, struggling to get the White House operator on the line, while Hendrickson attempted to log back on to his computer. “What's the matter?” asked Chowdhury.
“My login and password don't work.”
Chowdhury pushed Hendrickson aside. His didn't work either.
Adapted from 2034: A Novel of the Next World War by Elliot Ackerman and Admiral James Stavridis to be published March 09, 2021, by Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2021 by Elliot Ackerman and James Stavridis.
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