For the third night in a row, Farshad struggled to sleep. His cabin was right above the waterline, and he could hear the ice floes glancing off the bow, hitting like the tolling of a bell—dong, dong, dong. All through the night, the noise was relentless. When he had arrived in Tartus weeks before, a set of orders had awaited him. He wouldn't be assigned to liaison duties there, with the Russian Federation's short-sleeved, sun-bronzed Mediterranean Fleet, but far to the north with its Baltic Fleet. When he had stepped off the plane at naval headquarters in Kaliningrad, he didn't even have a winter coat. He assumed headquarters would assign him to one of the larger command ships, the Kuznetsov, or perhaps the battle cruiser Pyotr Velikiy. Instead, he found himself aboard the corvette Rezkiy, which rolled incessantly. Farshad found himself mildly seasick aboard this fast little tin can of a ship with its thin sides.
Dong, dong, dong—
He gave up and switched on the light.
His bed was cantilevered to the bulkhead of his cabin, which was so small that he couldn't open his door until he stowed the bed, and he couldn't stow the bed until he stripped it of its wool blanket, sheets, and pillow. This multistep process of putting away his bed, to open his door, to leave his cabin, was one of the myriad humbling routines that composed his life as a relatively junior liaison officer. Another was taking his meals in the cramped wardroom among his fellow officers, few of whom spoke anything but Russian and all of whom were at least a decade younger. This had caused Farshad to eat mostly between meals, or to eat midrats, which were the day's leftovers placed out at around midnight by the messmen.
Over his pajamas he shrugged on his peacoat, a gift from a kindly supply orderly in Kaliningrad. The incessant noise of the ice floes banging off the hull kept him company as he padded down the red-lit passageway, staggering between the ship's steel bulkheads, toward the wardroom where he hoped to scrounge a bite to eat.
Like Farshad's room, the wardroom was an exercise in spacial economy. It was no more than a two-table banquette with a small galley attached. Sitting at the banquette was Lieutenant Commander Vasily Kolchak, the Rezkiy's executive officer. He was nursing a cup of tea tapped from the wardroom's samovar. A cigarette receded toward his knuckles as he read from a laptop. Behind him was the room's only adornment, an aquarium populated by yellow-orange fish who poked their eyes from a novelty shipwreck at its bottom. The messmen had already laid out the midrats in two stainless-steel vats, one filled with a dark-colored meat in a brown sauce and the other filled with a light-colored meat in a white sauce. A placard sat next to each dish, but Farshad couldn't read Russian.
“The white one is fish, some type of herring, I think,” said Kolchak in English, glancing up from his laptop. “The dark one is pork.”
Farshad paused for a moment, hovering over the two options. Then he sat across from Kolchak with an empty plate.
“Good choice,” said Kolchak. The only other sound was the aquarium filter running in the corner. He wore a gold signet ring on his right pinkie. With his left hand he played nervously with the blond, almost snow-white hair that brushed the tops of his ears. His small, shrewd eyes were cold and blue, their color slightly faded like two precious stones that had been cut generations ago. His nose was long, sharply pointed, and red on its tip; it seemed as though Kolchak was battling a cold. “I don't imagine you've seen the news,” he said to Farshad. Kolchak's English accent sounded faintly British and old-worldly, as if Farshad were eavesdropping on the conversational mores of a previous century.
Kolchak clicked on a video from his laptop. The two of them listened to an address made a couple of hours before by the American president. When the video cut out, neither of them spoke. Finally Kolchak asked Farshad about his missing fingers.
“Fighting the Americans,” he explained. Farshad then pointed to Kolchak's signet ring, which at a closer inspection he could see was adorned with a two-headed eagle. “And your ring?”
“It was my great-great-grandfather's. He was also a naval officer, the Imperial Navy.” Kolchak took a long drag on his cigarette. “He fought in our war with Japan. Then the Bolsheviks killed him when he was an old man. This ring remained hidden in my family for many years. I'm the first to wear it openly since him. Time changes everything.”
“What do you think the Americans will do?” asked Farshad.
“I should ask you,” answered Kolchak. “You've fought against them before.”
This slight gesture of deference caught Farshad off guard. How long had it been since someone had sought out his opinion? Farshad couldn't help it; he felt a certain measure of affection for Kolchak, who, like him, was the loyal son of a nation that had not always treated him or his family fairly. Farshad answered Kolchak by saying that American presidents had a mixed history when it came to the enforcement of self-imposed “red lines.” He wondered if the United States would be willing to resort to nuclear weapons—even tactical nuclear weapons, as the president had suggested in her remarks—to prevent the Chinese from annexing Taiwan. “The United States was once predictable; not so much anymore,” concluded Farshad. “Their unpredictability makes them very dangerous. What will Russia do if the United States acts? Your leaders have a great deal to lose. Everywhere I look I see wealthy Russians.”
“Wealthy Russians?” Kolchak laughed. “There is no such thing.”
Farshad didn't understand. He mentioned their ubiquitous mega yachts in the Mediterranean and Black Seas, their ostentatious villas on the Amalfi and Dalmatian coasts. Whenever Farshad traveled abroad and he saw some resplendent thing—a villa, a boat, a private jet idling on the tarmac, or a woman bejeweled beyond measure—and he asked to whom it all belonged, the inevitable response was always some Russian.
Kolchak was shaking his head. “No, no, no,” he said. “There are no wealthy Russians.” He stubbed his cigarette out in the ashtray. “There are only poor Russians with money.”
While lighting another cigarette, Kolchak began to pontificate about the Rodina, his “Mother Russia,” how in its many iterations, whether they be tsarist, imperialist, or communist, it had never enjoyed the legitimacy of other world powers. “During the empire our tsars spoke French at court,” said Kolchak. “During communism our economy was a hollow shell. Today, under the federation, our leaders are viewed as criminals by the rest of the world. In New York City, or in London, they don't respect any of us, not even President Putin. To them, President Putin isn't the grandfather of our federation; no, to them he is simply another poor Russian, a gangster at best, even though he has retaken our ancestral territories in Crimea, Georgia, and Greater Ukraine; even though he has crippled America's political system, so that now their president doesn't even have a party but has to run as one of these enfeebled ‘independents.’ We are a cunning people. Our leader is one of us and is equally cunning. You asked what Russia will do if the United States acts? Isn't it obvious? What does the fox do in the henhouse?” Kolchak's lips peeled back from his teeth in a smile.
Farshad had always understood, or at least understood intellectually, that his country and Russia had many shared interests. But with Kolchak, he began to understand the depth of their kinship, the degree by which their two nations had developed in tandem, sharing a trajectory. Both had imperial and ancient pasts: the Russian tsars, the Persian shahs. Both had endured revolutions: the Bolsheviks, the Islamists. And both had suffered the antipathies of the West: economic sanctions, international censure. Farshad also understood, or at least intuited, the opportunity now presenting itself to his Russian allies.
They had left their home port of Kaliningrad three weeks before. On the first week of their journey, the Rezkiy had tracked numerous ships from the US Third and Sixth Fleets, which aggressively patrolled the western Atlantic and these northern Baltic waters. And then, quite suddenly, their American antagonists had vanished. After the dual catastrophes in the South China Sea, the destination of the American fleet became obvious. Equally obvious was the opportunity presented by its absence. No fewer than five hundred fiber-optic cables, which accounted for 90 percent of North America's 10G internet access, crisscrossed these icy depths.
“If the Americans detonate a nuclear weapon,” said Kolchak, “I don't think the world will much care if we tamper with a few undersea cables.” He held Farshad in his gaze. “I also don't think the world would say much if our troops seized a sliver of Poland, to unite Kaliningrad to the Russian mainland.” Kolchak pointed to a map on the wall. He traced out a corridor with his finger, which would give Russia direct overland access to its one Baltic port. Putin himself had often spoken about reclaiming this strip of land. “If the Americans detonate a nuclear weapon, they will become the pariah state they have always claimed we are.”
“Do you think they'd ever go through with it?” Farshad asked Kolchak.
“Ten or even fifteen years ago, I would have said no. Today, I am not so sure. The America they believe themselves to be is no longer the America that they are. Time changes everything, doesn't it. And now, it is changing the world's balance in our favor.” Kolchak checked his watch. He shut his laptop and glanced up at Farshad. “But it is late. You must get some rest.”
“I can't sleep,” said Farshad.
“How come?”
Farshad allowed the quiet to settle between them, so that Kolchak could perceive the faint dong, dong, dong of the ice floes glancing against the hull of the ship. “I find that sound unnerving,” Farshad admitted. “And the ship constantly rolls.”
Kolchak reached across the table and grasped Farshad affectionately by the arm. “You mustn't let either bother you. Go back to your room, lie down. The rolling you will get used to. And the noise? It has always helped me to imagine that the noise is something else.”
“Like what?” Farshad asked skeptically.
Dong, dong, a couple more ice floes glanced against the hull.
“Like a bell, tolling out a change in the time.”
A knock on his door.
Middle of the night.
Lin Bao groaned as he sat up. What can it be now? he wondered. Such interruptions to his sleep had become routine. Last night, the commanders of two destroyers in his battle group had a dispute as to their order in formation, which Lin Bao had to resolve; the night before that there had been an unexpected weather advisory, a typhoon that thankfully never materialized; then a missed communications window with one of his submarines; before that an excess of hard-water moisture in one of his ship's reactors. The list blurred in his sleep-deprived mind. If Lin Bao stood on the cusp of a great moment in his nation's history, it didn't feel that way. Lin Bao felt consumed by the minutiae of his command, and convinced that he might never again enjoy a full night's rest.
He did, however, feel a small surge of satisfaction that the complex mix of cyber cloaking, stealth materials, and satellite spoofing had kept his fleet well hidden. While the Americans surely suspected them of heading for the vicinity of Chinese Taipei, their old adversary had been unable to develop the precise targeting data required for a countermaneuver. Eventually, the Americans would find them. But by then it would be too late.
“Comrade Admiral, your presence is requested in the combat information center.”
Lin Bao awoke to another knock. “Comrade Admiral—”
Lin Bao flung open his door. “I heard you the first time,” he snapped at the young sailor, who couldn't have been more than 19 and who looked as sleep-deprived as the admiral. “Tell them”—he coughed—“tell them I'm coming.” The sailor nodded once and hurried down the corridor. As he dressed, Lin Bao regretted his outburst. It was a manifestation of the strain he was under. To exhibit that strain to his crew was to exhibit his weakness to them, and they were under a similar strain. For the past three weeks, ever since they had gone dark, the Zheng He Carrier Battle Group—along with the Navy's three other strike groups, elements of special forces from the People's Army, strategic land-based bombers, and hypersonic missiles from the air force—had all converged in a noose around Chinese Taipei, or Taiwan, as the West insisted on calling it. Although Lin Bao's command remained cloaked, he could almost feel the massive American global surveillance network groping for his precise location.
The operation, as designed by Minister Chiang and approved by the Politburo Standing Committee, was playing out in two phases, each of which adhered to one of Sun Tzu's famous axioms, the first being, Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt. As dramatically as the Chinese fleet had vanished, it would soon reappear around Taiwan, moving like that proverbial thunderbolt. Never before had a nation concentrated its military strength with such stealth. It would take weeks, or even as much as a month, for the Americans or any other power to position combat assets to counter it. The second phase of Minister Chiang's plan was likewise based on Sun Tzu: The supreme art of war is to subdue your enemy without fighting. Minister Chiang believed that the sudden revelation of his forces off the coast would present the Legislative Yuan, the governing body of so-called Taiwan, with only one choice: a vote of dissolution followed by annexation into the People's Republic. Not a single shot would need to be fired. When Minister Chiang had proposed his plan to the Politburo Standing Committee, he had argued that surrounding Taiwan so suddenly would result in a bloodless checkmate. Although skepticism existed among certain committee members, including Zhao Leji, the much-feared octogenarian secretary of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, ultimately the majority placed its confidence in Minister Chiang.
Lin Bao entered the combat information center and found Minister Chiang waiting for him via secure video teleconference. “Comrade Minister,” Lin Bao began, “it is good to see you.” When the Zheng He had gone dark, the two had continued to email, but because of security concerns they hadn't spoken. Upon seeing each other again there was an embarrassed silence, as if each were taking a measure of the other's strain.
“It is good to see you too,” began Minister Chiang, who then proceeded to laud Lin Bao and his crew on their exceptional conduct, not only in maneuvering the Zheng He Carrier Battle Group into position—a complex task to be sure—but also for repairing their ship while underway, so that it stood poised to achieve a great victory. On and on the minister went. The more congratulations he heaped on the crew of the Zheng He, the more it unsettled Lin Bao.
Something was wrong.
“Late last night, the Legislative Yuan scheduled an emergency session,” said Minister Chiang. “I expect a vote for dissolution in the coming days … ” His voice began to peter out, to choke even. “Our plan seems to be coming together … ” He pinched the bridge of his nose and squeezed his eyes shut. He took a long, heavy breath, and then, in a more defeated tone, he added, “However, there is a concern. The Americans have threatened a nuclear strike—no doubt you've heard.”
Lin Bao hadn't heard. He shot a glance at one of his intelligence analysts, who sat an arm's length away. For the last twelve hours they'd been in a communications blackout. The young sailor immediately pulled up the New York Times home page on an unclassified laptop. The headline was in the largest, boldest font: “WITH RED LINE DRAWN, NUCLEAR WEAPONS AN OPTION, SAYS PRESIDENT.” The story had been filed several hours earlier.
Lin Bao wasn't certain how to respond to Minister Chiang. All he could think to do was provide the latest disposition of the Zheng He Carrier Battle Group, so he began talking mechanically. He reviewed the readiness of his flight crews, the placement of his surface escorts, the arrangements of his assigned submarines. On and on he went. But as he covered these technical details, Minister Chiang began to nervously bite his fingernails. He stared at his hands. He hardly seemed to listen.
Then Lin Bao blurted out, “Our plan remains a good one, Comrade Minister.”
Minister Chiang glanced up at him and said nothing.
Lin Bao continued, “If the Legislative Yuan votes to dissolve, the Americans can't launch a strike against us. They aren't brazen enough to attack us for a vote taken by someone else.”
Minister Chiang stroked his round chin. “Perhaps,” he said.
“And if they did strike, they can't attack our fleet. They don't have precise positional data, even for a tactical nuclear strike. Also, we're only a few miles off the coast of Taipei—the collateral damage to the ports would prove catastrophic. That is the genius of your plan, Comrade Minister. We subdue the enemy without ever fighting. As Sun Tzu said, it's ‘the supreme art of war.’”
Minister Chiang nodded and repeated, “Perhaps.” His voice was thin, as if he needed a drink of water. Then their video teleconference was over. The Legislative Yuan had a vote to take. The Americans had drawn a red line, one that they might or might not enforce. There was little for Lin Bao and his crew to do, except to wait. It was now early morning. On his way back to his cabin, Lin Bao checked the bridge watch. His crew, despite their youth and inexperience, executed their duties vigilantly. Each understood the enterprise they were embarked upon. In the near distance was the Taiwanese coast, shrouded in a predawn fog. Their fleet was also concealed in this fog. The sun would soon rise, and that fog would burn away. The island would reveal itself and so, too, would they. But Lin Bao was tired. He needed to get some rest.
He returned to his quarters and attempted but failed to sleep. Eventually, he tried reading. He scanned his bookshelf and saw his copy of The Art of War, which, ironically, he'd first read at the US Naval War College in Newport. As he browsed the well-annotated pages, he thought of the fog in Newport, the way it clung to the coast, its consistency, how a ship sliced through it, and how it reminded him of the fog here. He then came to a passage, one he'd read many times before but seemed to have forgotten in the intervening years: If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.
Lin Bao shut his eyes.
Did he know his enemy? He tried to remember everything he could of America. He thought of his years studying there, living there, and of his mother, that other half of him who was born there. When he shut his eyes, he could hear her voice, how she used to sing to him as a child. Her songs … American songs. He hummed one unevenly to himself, “The Dock of the Bay”; its rhythm, he knew it so well. At last he fell into a deep and peaceful sleep.
The morning before it was delivered, a copy of the president's Oval Office address had been circulated widely and thoroughly staffed. It had traveled through the interagency coordination process—State, Defense, Homeland Security, even Treasury had all weighed in with their comments. The press secretary, senior political advisors, and select members of the national security staff, including Chowdhury, had been privy to the rehearsals, which had taken place with the president sitting behind the Resolute Desk. Chowdhury thought she looked good, very composed, steady.
That evening, when it came time for her to deliver her remarks, Chowdhury was sitting at his desk while his colleagues gathered around one or another of the ubiquitous televisions that littered the cramped West Wing. Chowdhury wasn't watching; after the many rehearsals he hadn't felt the need to. It was only when he heard a collective murmur that he glanced up. Neither he nor any of his colleagues had known that the president planned to announce the authorization of a potential nuclear strike. Before they had a chance to do anything except to stare dumbfounded at the television, the door to the Oval Office swung open. A handful of cabinet officials strode past. Based on their demeanor—the blank looks, the tight whispers—they were caught off guard too. The only two who appeared unfazed were Hendrickson and Wisecarver. Wisecarver beckoned Chowdhury into his office, which in the previous week had been moved kitty-corner to the president's own.
“C'mon in,” said Wisecarver, as he waved Chowdhury through the door. “We can get this done with a five-minute stand-up.” Wisecarver's office was a chaos of neglect. A framed grade-school portrait of the son he'd lost sat next to his keyboard, but this was the only personal object amid the binders and folders that piled his desk and every shelf, one open on top of another. Each cover sheet contained an alphabet soup of classification codes. He began to stack documents one by one in either Chowdhury's or Hendrickson's outstretched hands, depending on whether the action needed to originate from the executive branch or Department of Defense. Wisecarver, a master in the language of bureaucracy, talked his subordinates through their paper chase with a practiced enthusiasm. Each minor task Wisecarver assigned to Hendrickson and Chowdhury took the country one step closer to a nuclear war.
Before Chowdhury could ask a question of his boss, the five minutes were up.
The door shut. Both he and Hendrickson stood out front of Wisecarver's office with a stack of binders in their hands. “Did you know ahead of time about the speech?” Chowdhury asked.
“Does it matter?”
Chowdhury wasn't certain that it did matter. He also thought this was Hendrickson's way of telling him that, yes, in fact he had known about the changes. He'd been the senior official from Defense in the room, so it made sense that he would have known. It also made sense that this knowledge would've stayed within a tight circle, one that excluded much of the cabinet and nearly all of the White House staff. Nevertheless, it felt like a deception to Chowdhury. Which is to say, it didn't feel right. But then again, he thought, how else should a decision authorizing such a use of force feel?
“There's no way we'll follow through with it,” said Chowdhury. But as he said this, he wasn't certain whether he was asking a question or making a statement. Although Chowdhury had been kept in the dark about the president's plan to draw a nuclear red line, he'd been kept in the dark about little else. For instance, he knew the latest disposition of Chinese forces near Taiwan; the noose they had drawn around the island was a combination of their navy, their land- and air-based missiles, along with a contingent of their special forces that could conduct a limited invasion. To stealthily execute this high-speed encirclement, they had used an impressive and still-mysterious combination of technologies. China's naval forces now hugged the Taiwanese coast, and given the danger of collateral damage, what, if anything, could an American tactical nuclear strike target?
“They've just got to believe we'll do it,” said Hendrickson. “Right now, three of our carrier strike groups have orders in hand to transit the South China Sea. We need time. If we can get those ships on station, we can threaten the Chinese mainland. Then they'll have to pull resources away from Taiwan. A credible nuclear threat buys us time.”
“It's also risky as hell.”
Hendrickson shrugged; he didn't disagree. He began to gather his things, locking the binders and folders in a classified courier bag. He needed to return to the Pentagon. Chowdhury offered to walk out with him. He'd likely spend all night at the office and so wanted to get some fresh air. “I saw your friend Hunt got command of the Enterprise Strike Group,” mentioned Chowdhury in an effort at small talk. The two stood outside the West Wing, a few steps from the last Secret Service checkpoint. Above them the sky was clear and thick with stars.
“Yeah,” said Hendrickson, who was looking away from Chowdhury, across the street toward Lafayette Park. “I saw that too.”
“Well,” said Chowdhury, “good for her.” He was smiling.
“Is it good for her?” asked Hendrickson. He didn't return Chowdhury's smile. He only stood there, alternating his gaze between the park and the clear night sky. It was as if he couldn't quite bring himself to take either a step forward or one backward. “If we do launch—because the Taiwanese cave, or because the Chinese misstep, or because Wisecarver gets his way—it's most likely Sarah who will have to pull the trigger.”
This hadn't occurred to Chowdhury.
When Hendrickson tried to step out onto Pennsylvania Avenue, the Secret Service held him back a moment. The Metro Police were responding to an incident inside Lafayette Park, where an old man with a tattered beard was screaming frantically about the “End of Days.” He had emerged only a few minutes before from a small, dirty plastic tent. With a smartphone clutched in his hand, he was listening to a streaming news channel, the volume turned all the way up. Chowdhury recognized the man as he scrambled past. He was part of the so-called White House Peace Vigil, which had protested continually against all war, but particularly nuclear war, since 1981. As the police descended upon the man, he grew more frenzied, tearing at his clothes and hurling himself at the gates of the White House. While Chowdhury waited for the Metro Police to make their arrest, he heard one of the Secret Service agents on the other side of the gates mutter, “Old loon …”
The next morning, when Chowdhury opened the news on his tablet's browser, he clicked on a brief story in the metro section dedicated to the incident. The old man had been released without bail but charged, nevertheless, with a single count of disturbing the peace.
Chowdhury closed the browser; he placed his tablet on the table.
To read another word felt futile.
Water sluiced through the creases of Lin Bao's raincoat as he stood on the flight deck. On a clear day he would've been able to see the gleaming skyline in the distance. Now all he could see were the storm clouds that shrouded the city. Minister Chiang was scheduled to land any minute. The purpose of his visit wasn't entirely clear; however, Lin Bao felt certain that the time had come to resolve their current stalemate with the Americans and the Taiwanese. The resolution to that stalemate was the news Lin Bao believed the minister would bring.
Flickering in the distance, Lin Bao made out a dim oscillating light.
Minister Chiang's plane.
Pitching and yawing, it catapulted out of a rent in the clouds. Seconds later it was reeling on the deck, the pilots having perfectly caught the three-wire, much to Lin Bao's satisfaction. The engines whined in reverse, decelerating. After a few moments, the back ramp dropped and Minister Chiang emerged, his round face laughing and smiling at the exhilaration of a carrier landing. One of the pilots helped the minister remove his cranial helmet, which caught on his large ears. The minister's visit hadn't been announced, but like a politician he began distributing handshakes to the ground crew, who eventually surmised who he was. Before any fuss could be made on account of his arrival Lin Bao escorted him off the flight deck.
Inside Lin Bao's stateroom, the two sat at a small banquette scattered with nautical charts. A holographic map of Taiwan was projected over the table, rotating on its axis. An orderly poured them cups of tea and then stood at attention with his back to the bulkhead, his chest arching upward. Minister Chiang gave the orderly a long, interrogatory look. Lin Bao dismissed him with a slight backhanded wave.
Now it was only the two of them.
Minister Chiang slouched a bit deeper into his seat. “We find ourselves at an impasse with our adversaries …” he began.
Lin Bao nodded.
“I had hoped the Legislative Yuan would vote to dissolve, so we might avoid an opposed invasion. That seems increasingly unlikely.” Minister Chiang took a sip from his tea, and then asked, “Why do you think the Americans threatened us with a nuclear strike?”
Lin Bao didn't quite understand the question; its answer seemed too obvious. “To intimidate us, Comrade Minister.”
“Hmm,” said Minister Chiang. “Tell me, does it intimidate you?”
Lin Bao didn't answer, which seemed to disappoint Minister Chiang.
“Well, it shouldn't,” he told his subordinate. According to the minister, the American threat of a nuclear strike didn't show their strength. Quite the opposite. It revealed how vulnerable they were. If the Americans had really wanted to threaten the Chinese, they would've launched a massive cyberattack. The only problem was they couldn't—they lacked the capability to hack into China's online infrastructure. The deregulation that had resulted in so much American innovation and economic strength was now an American weakness. Its disaggregated online infrastructure was vulnerable in a way that the Chinese infrastructure was not. “The Americans have proven incapable of organizing a centralized cyber defense,” said Minister Chiang. “Whereas we can shut down much of their country's electric grid with a single keystroke. Their threat of nuclear retaliation is outdated and absurd, like slapping someone across the face with your glove before challenging them to a duel. It's time we show them what we think of their threat.”
“How do we do that?” asked Lin Bao, as he clicked a remote that turned off the rotating hologram. He cleared away their cups of tea so as to reveal the nautical charts that covered the banquette table, as if the two might discuss a naval maneuver.
“It's nothing we do here,” answered Minister Chiang, disregarding the charts. “We'll handle it up north, in the Barents Sea. The American Third and Sixth Fleets have left those waters to transit south. With the American fleets gone, our Russian allies have unfettered access to the subsurface 10G internet cables that service the United States. Our allies will help us to, gently, remind the Americans that their power is outdated, that bombs aren't the only way to cripple a nation—not even the best way. What I need you to do is simple: Be ready. This will be a cyber show of force. It will be limited; we'll only cut a cable or two. We'll dip the Americans into darkness, allow them to stare into that void. Afterward, either the Legislative Yuan will invite us into Taipei, or we will go of our own accord. Either way, your command must be ready.”
“Is that what you came all this way to tell me?”
“I didn't come to tell you anything,” said Minister Chiang. “I came because I wanted to stand on this ship and see if you are, in fact, ready.”
Lin Bao could feel the minister's gaze boring into him. In the days ahead he understood how much would depend on his command's ability to act quickly, whether through an unopposed landing in Taipei, or alternatively a ship-to-shore assault. Before Minister Chiang could deliver his verdict as to the perceived readiness of Lin Bao and his command, there was a knock at the door, a dispatch from the combat information center.
Lin Bao read the note.
“What does it say?” asked Minister Chiang.
“The Enterprise is on the move.”
“Coming here?”
“No,” answered Lin Bao. “It doesn't make sense. They're sailing away.”
These waters were a graveyard. As the Enterprise set its course, Sarah Hunt knew the countless wrecks she sailed over. The Philippines were to her east. To her west was the Gulf of Tonkin. She considered the names of the ships—the USS Princeton, Yorktown, the Hoel, and the Gambier Bay—whose blasted hulls rested on the seabed beneath her. And Japanese ships as well, battleships and carriers. Hunt and her crew passed silently above them, taking up a position—for what?
Hunt didn't know.
Her orders had come in quick succession. Every couple of hours she was summoned to the radio room, an antiquated closet in the bowels of the ship that a senior chief, who everyone called Quint, treated as his own personal fiefdom. The nickname Quint came from his uncanny resemblance to the captain of the ill-fated Orca played by Robert Shaw in the film Jaws. Working alongside Quint was his assistant, a young petty officer third class who the crew of the Enterprise called Hooper, not because he looked like Richard Dreyfuss' character, Matt Hooper—the intrepid, bespectacled, Great White-hunting marine biologist—but simply because he spent every waking hour with Quint.
Hunt, who had spent a career receiving her orders over lengthy briefings via secure video teleconference, accompanied by kaleidoscopic displays of PowerPoint, was slowly getting used to this fragmented manner of communications. With their Chinese adversaries having the upper hand in cyber, the Enterprise had gone into an internet blackout. Indo-Pacific Command, which was in direct contact with the White House, kept tapping out these minimalist communications to Hunt in high-frequency radio bursts, the same long-range bandwidth employed by the US Navy in the Second World War.
Another of these messages had arrived, so Hunt traveled four levels down from her stateroom to the radio room, where she found Quint and Hooper surrounded by a tangle of electronics, the former with a pair of spectacles perched on the tip of his nose as he unsnarled some wires and the latter holding a smoking soldering iron.
“Gentlemen,” said Hunt, announcing herself.
Hooper startled at her voice while Quint sat frozen with his chin tucked down as though calculating his share of the bill at a restaurant. Undisturbed, he continued to focus through his spectacles as his hands worked swiftly at the tangle of wires leading into the radio. “Mornin', ma'am,” said Quint. An unlit cigarette dangled from his mouth.
“It's evening, Senior Chief.”
Quint raised an eyebrow but didn't take his concentration away from the wires. “Then evenin', ma'am.” He nodded for Hooper to pass him the soldering iron, which he quickly applied to a connection he was grafting onto a circuit board. For the past two weeks, ever since they got underway, Quint and Hooper had been retrofitting a suite of antiquated VHF, UHF, and HF radios into the avionics of the single F/A-18 Hornet squadron aboard the Enterprise. This made the Death Rattlers the only squadron that would be entirely immune to cyber interference. At least that was the plan.
“How many of those have you got left to install?” she asked.
“None,” said Quint. “We finished the last Hornet this morning. This is an upgrade to our ship's HF receiver.” Quint drew silent for a moment, mustering his concentration. “There,” he said, a ribbon of smoke unspooling from the soldering iron as he handed it back to Hooper. Quint then screwed on the front panel of the radio they'd been tampering with. They powered it on. Its receiver was hooked to a speaker, which emitted a warbling sound.
“Can you turn that down?” asked Hunt.
Hooper glanced at Quint, who nodded, but kept his head canted slightly to the side, his one ear raised, like a maestro fine-tuning his instrument. While Hooper manipulated the dial, Quint gestured alternately with his left hand or his right as they cycled up or down the frequency ladder, searching for … what? Hunt couldn't say. Then, as if perceiving her curiosity, Quint began to explain himself.
“We're searching for long-delayed echoes, ma'am. LDEs. When you transmit an HF frequency, it loops around the earth until it finds a receiver. On rare occasions, that can take a while and you wind up with an echo.”
“How long of an echo?” asked Hunt.
“Usually, only a few seconds,” said Quint.
“We picked up some yesterday,” added Hooper.
Hunt smiled at him. “What's the longest echo you ever heard of?”
While Hooper manipulated the dial, Quint made a gesture with his right hand, as though encouraging a piece of music. He was both speaking to Hunt and listening to the oscillations in frequency. “Old salts I served with said that in these waters they'd picked up conversations from fifty or even seventy-five years ago,” explained Quint. With a wide grin that revealed decades of the Navy's shoddy dental work, he added, “There's lots of ghosts out here, ma'am. You just got to listen for 'em.”
Hunt didn't return Quint's smile; still, she couldn't help but imagine the possibility of ages-old conversations lingering in the surrounding atmosphere—the lost pilots searching the darkness for their carriers off the coast of North Vietnam, the frantic gun crews calling out flights of incoming Zeros in the Philippine Sea. However, she needed to turn to the task at hand.
Quint reached across his desk to a piece of paper with the message he'd recently decoded from Indo-Pacific Command. “They aren't giving you much to go off of, huh?” he said.
The message was hardly a message, simply four latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates, so a box. There was no mission statement, no situation update; Hunt would place the Enterprise and its escorts within this box and then await further instructions. She tucked the scrap of paper in the pocket of her coveralls. As she went to leave, Quint stopped her. “Ma'am,” he said, reaching onto a back shelf. “We fixed this up; thought you might be able to use it.” In his large grip was an old travel radio. “If you tune it just right, you can get the BBC World Service, even a bit of music, depending on where we're at. The dial is a bit tricky. It takes some finesse. But it should do all right for you.”
Quint and Hooper were still playing around with the HF receiver as she left, Quint making motions with his hands, Hooper manipulating the dial. With the decoded message in her pocket, Hunt bounded up the four levels to her stateroom. She set the slip of paper with the coordinates on her desk, already layered with an assortment of nautical charts. With a set of parallel rulers, a divider, a compass, and a sharp pencil, she sketched out the corners of the box. It was tight, but large enough to fit her carrier strike group. It was to the south of their current position, another eighty nautical miles further off the coast, a three-hundred-mile straight line overwater to Zhanjiang, the headquarters of China's South Sea Fleet. With the crisis around Taiwan, she wondered how many of the South Sea Fleet's ships were currently in port.
It wouldn't be many.
But it would be enough.
Hunt set her pencil down on the chart. She turned on the radio and managed to find the BBC World Service. With her arms crossed and her legs stretched out in front of her, she closed her eyes and relaxed. She tried to imagine the news reports—USS Enterprise strikes Chinese naval facility with tactical nuclear weapons—but she couldn't; it seemed too improbable. Although few Cold War precepts had aged well in the twenty-first century, the logic of mutually assured destruction was one of them. Even so, thought Hunt, her country had little to gain by wiping out the port at Zhanjiang. As she prepared to alter the course of the Enterprise, she couldn't help but recognize this maneuver for the theater it was—for the theater such maneuvers always had been—ever since man split the atom, unleashed its power, and nations coerced one another with the threat of that power. The current crisis would de-escalate, as crises always did. She felt certain of this.
That certainty gave her some peace of mind, enough so she dozed off in her chair. She slept dreamlessly, waking an hour later. Her radio was no longer playing the BBC World Service. It had lost the signal. All it emitted was static. Hunt fiddled with the dial, trying to retune into the news.
Then she heard something.
A weak, indistinct voice.
As quickly as she heard it, it disappeared.
She left her radio tuned to the static, set on the same frequency, wondering if she might hear the strange transmission again. She knew what it was; Quint had told her.
It was ghosts.
This far north the sun held above them nearly twenty-four hours a day. The sky was clear, the weather unseasonably warm. The American fleet was nowhere to be found; it had sailed away. The Russian Federation owned these waters, and they knew it. Unencumbered by the looming threat of the US Navy, the crew of the Rezkiy and other ships of the flotilla indulged in bouts of recreation. On the battle cruiser Pyotr Velikiy, the crew descended its side boats to take plunges into the icy seawater. On the carrier Kuznetsov, the captain authorized sunbathing on the flight deck despite the cold. On the smaller Rezkiy, Kolchak allowed pop songs to play over the ship's intercom during the daily cleanup; most popular were classics like Elvis, the Jonas Brothers, and anything by Shakira. “Hips Don't Lie” was a favorite.
These little breaks with discipline, plus the general eccentricity of naval life, confounded Lieutenant Commander Farshad. His liaison duties consisted of little more than being a presence that evidenced two nations' faithfulness to one another, even though neither of those nations had ever been renowned for faithfulness to anything but themselves. Farshad had once said as much in the wardroom to Kolchak, who had asked in reply, “Has a nation ever been faithful to anything but itself?” Farshad had conceded the point.
Not long after this exchange, Farshad had been standing on the bridge of the Rezkiy when the watch spotted a school of sharks off the ship's port side. Kolchak had been manning that watch, and he took an uncanny interest in the sharks, even adjusting their ship's course to follow them for several minutes. “Perfect,” said Kolchak as he stared at their thrashing dorsal fins. As if sensing Farshad's confusion, he explained himself. “Those sharks are heading in the direction of the 10G undersea cables. They're attracted to the electromagnetic energy. Those cables connect to the United States, and sharks have been known to chew through them. Their presence will give us deniability.”
Destroying a few of the undersea cables would send a powerful message to the Americans, slowing internet across the country by as much as 60 percent, or so Farshad had been told by Kolchak. This might be enough to de-escalate the crisis, to bring everyone to their senses. When it came to acting pragmatically, which was to say acting in their national interests, it seemed to Farshad that only his country—and perhaps the Russians—were capable of clear thinking. The Russians, like them, knew that any scenario that weakened the Americans was advantageous. In fact, a de-escalation of the current crisis wasn't really in the Iranian or Russian interest.
Disruption was in their interest.
Chaos.
A change in the world order.
The sharks disappeared beneath the waves, and for the remaining hours of the day the Rezkiy and its sister ships idled over the 10G cables. The mood on the ship turned businesslike. Farshad lingered on the bridge, where Kolchak and the captain kept a vigil, the two speaking exclusively in Russian, while Kolchak took the occasional break to explain the situation to Farshad.
“We'll circle around this area here,” Kolchak said, pushing a yellowing fingernail at their navigation computer's interface. “The Pyotr Velikiy has a tethered submersible aboard that is going to place an explosive cutting charge on the cables.”
“How large is the charge?” asked Farshad.
The captain brought his eyes out of his binoculars. From over his shoulder, he glanced at them warily.
“Just enough to do the job,” said Kolchak.
The captain made a face, and then a transmission came over the radio in Russian. Kolchak snatched the receiver and promptly replied while the captain dipped his eyes back into his binoculars and continued to scan the open sea. The Pyotr Velikiy was recovering its submersible, the charge having been set. Planted on the horizon was the Kuznetsov, its decks crowded with aircraft. Kolchak continued to check his watch, the second hand making its steady orbit around the dial as they waited.
More minutes passed in silence.
Then an explosion, a geyser fountaining upward from the seabed. Followed by a shock. And a sound, like a clap. The entire ship rattled. The water splashed back onto the surface of the ocean. Another radio transmission came into the bridge. The voice was excited, congratulatory. The captain answered the call in the same congratulatory manner. The only person on the bridge who didn't seem pleased by the result was Farshad, who was confused. Grasping Kolchak by the elbow, he said, “That must've destroyed more than one or two cables.”
The smile vanished from Kolchak's face. “Perhaps.”
“Perhaps?” answered Farshad. He could feel the old familiar rage brimming up from the center of his chest, into his limbs. He felt duped. “That explosion must have destroyed every cable.”
“And so what if it did?” answered Kolchak. “A de-escalation between Beijing and Washington hardly benefits us. It doesn't benefit your nation either. Let's see what happens now. The result of this disruption will be advantageous, for both of our countries. Who knows, then we might—” Before Kolchak could finish the thought, the ship's collision alarm sounded.
Orders were rapidly shouted across the bridge—a new heading, a new speed (“Reverse right rudder, full ahead left!”), a reflexive set of impact-avoidance measures—while both Kolchak and Farshad scanned off the bow. At first, Farshad couldn't see the obstacle that threatened collision. There was no ship. No iceberg. No large object that assured catastrophe. There was only clear sky. And a mist of seawater that still lingered in the air after the explosion.
It was the mist that concealed the obstacle.
Sharks, dozens of them, an entire school, bobbing upward like so many apples in a barrel, their white bellies presented to the sun. The evasive maneuvers continued. Farshad could do nothing; a sailor in name only, he couldn't help the crew avoid the collision. The Rezkiy plowed through the field of dead fish, their bodies hitting the thin hull, reminding Farshad of the ice floes that had so often kept him awake at night—dong, dong, dong. Then a far sharper noise combined with this hollow thudding, a noise like a fistful of metal spoons tossed down a garbage disposal; the shark carcasses were passing through the twin propellers of the Rezkiy.
Farshad followed Kolchak out to the bridge wing. They turned to the stern of the ship to assess the damage. The seawater mist still lingered in the air. The sunlight passed through it, casting off brilliant rainbows—blues, yellows, oranges, reds.
So much red.
Farshad realized the red wasn't only in the air; it was also in the water. The slightly damaged Rezkiy set a new course, leaving a wide swath of blood in its wake.
The internet was out across the entire eastern seaboard. Eighty percent of the connectivity in the Midwest was gone. Connectivity on the West Coast had been reduced by 50 percent.
A nationwide power outage.
The airports closed.
The markets panicked.
Hunt listened to the updates arriving via the BBC World Service on the handheld radio Quint had given her. She immediately understood the implications. She scrambled down four levels to the radio room, where Quint was also listening to the news and awaiting her.
“Anything yet?” she asked.
“Nothing,” he said.
Hooper wasn't there, he was asleep in the berthing, and Hunt was glad it was only her and the old chief. She knew the message she was waiting for, and she felt as though she wanted the fewest people possible around when it arrived. The idea of receiving her task in front of someone from a younger generation, like Hooper, felt particularly difficult. Perhaps this was because he would have to live with the consequences longer than any of them. This was Hunt's train of thought as she sat in the cramped radio room with Quint, the two of them listening to static on the HF radio set, waiting.
And then the message arrived.
Chowdhury wasn't in the room when they made the decision. To assuage his guilt about what followed, he would always cling to that fact. In the years to come he would have ample opportunity to imagine the discussion around the Situation Room conference table beneath the dim generator-powered lights. He would imagine the positions taken by Trent Wisecarver, by the various service chiefs and cabinet secretaries, the tabulations of arguments for or against what they were about to do—what they had all committed themselves to do when the president had put down her “red line” and dared her counterparts in Beijing to cross it.
Which was what it seemed Beijing had now done, though not in the way anyone had anticipated. The cutting of the undersea cables and the resulting plunge into darkness was the demonstrable fact that, when discussed around the conference table, proved Beijing had crossed the red line. The question was the response. And even that was settled in remarkably short order. Chowdhury envisioned the scene—a disquisition of US interests by Wisecarver, followed by a range of options (or lack thereof) presented by the Joint Chiefs, and then formal nuclear authorizations being granted by the president herself. Chowdhury didn't need to imagine any more than that, because he had seen the principals as they exited into the West Wing, their dour expressions failing to contain the knowledge of the decision they had settled upon, even though they themselves didn't yet understand past intellectualization the destruction they would unleash. How could they?
With the orders dispatched, Wisecarver set up a duty rotation among the national security staff and Chowdhury was sent home, to return the following morning. He expected the strike to occur sometime in the night. There would, of course, be a response from Beijing. And the national security staff needed to be ready for it. On Chowdhury's drive home, entire blocks were still without power. Only about half the traffic lights in the city worked; the other half were blacked out or shuffling their colors nonsensically onto empty streets. In only a few more days, the trash would begin to pile up. When he tuned in to his favorite radio station he was met with static.
So he drove in silence.
And he thought.
He thought the same thought all through that night—as he ate dinner with his mother and Ashni, as he carried the girl up to bed with her arms looped heavily around his neck like two ropes, and as he wished his mother good night in the guest room and she kissed him, uncharacteristically, on the forehead and then touched his cheek with her cupped palm as she hadn't done in years, not since his divorce. The thought was this: I have to get my family somewhere safe.
Chowdhury knew where that place was. It wasn't a bomb shelter (if those even existed anymore) or outside of the city (although that wouldn't be a bad start). No, he concluded; none of that would be enough.
He knew what he needed to do.
Who he needed to call.
In the quiet of his home, with his mother and daughter sleeping so near he would need to speak in a whisper, he picked up his phone and dialed. The answer came after the first ring.
“Admiral Anand Patel speaking. ”
Chowdhury froze. A beat of silence followed.
“Hello? Hello?”
“Hello, Uncle. It's me, Sandeep.”
White light on the horizon.
That's how Sarah Hunt would always remember it.
Lin Bao believed he had known them, but he hadn't.
If he had once considered himself half American, he no longer thought so. Not after what they'd done at Zhanjiang three days ago. Every member of his crew knew someone who'd perished there, and almost all had family within the blast zone. Countless friends of his—from his academy days, to postings on other ships, to three cousins who had nothing to do with the Navy but who lived in that port city by the turquoise sea—each gone in an instant, in a flash. Others had not been so lucky. Lin Bao couldn't bear to linger on the details; they were too gruesome. But he knew the hospitals in Beihai, Maoming, Yangjiang, and even as far away as Shenzhen had already filled to capacity.
If the American strike on Zhanjiang had been swift and decisive, the invasion of Taiwan by the People's Army had proven its equal—though it wasn't Beijing's response to the 150-kiloton blast; that was yet to come. A discussion of that response was the reason Lin Bao was summoned away from his ship to a conference, so that he was now awaiting the arrival of Minister Chiang in the airport's international terminal, in what had once been the British Airways first-class lounge. Floor-to-ceiling windows allowed Lin Bao to marvel at his country's occupation of the island. Though the invasion had shut down the airport to civilian traffic, it was busy—if not busier—with military traffic, commuter jets having been replaced with fighters and transports, and vacationers and business travelers having been replaced with soldiers. When Minister Chiang at last arrived in the lounge, he was followed by a vast retinue of security, which, as he explained apologetically, was the reason for his delay. “They've become very protective of me,” he said, and laughed nervously, offering one of his characteristically expansive smiles to his security detail, none of whom returned it.
Minister Chiang escorted Lin Bao into a conference room, a clean glassed-in cube designed for executives to use between flights. The two sat next to each other at one end of a long table. Lin Bao couldn't help but notice Minister Chiang's uniform, which wasn't his usual service dress but rather a set of poorly fitting camouflage utilities that still held the creases from where they'd been folded in plastic packaging. Like Lin Bao, the minister couldn't help but steal the occasional admiring glance at his troops as they moved efficiently through the airport, dispersing throughout Taipei and then beyond for the seizure and annexation of this stubborn republic, finally brought to heel.
However, when Minister Chiang's attention returned to the conference room, his expression turned severe, and he began to knead his chin, as if the action were a way to coax his jaw into motion. Eventually, he spoke, “Our position is becoming increasingly precarious. We have a week, maybe two, until the Americans will have massed their fleets so close to our mainland that we'll no longer possess free access to the sea. Which is unacceptable. If we allow that to happen, the Americans will strangle us as we have done here, to this island. With our access to the sea blocked, our entire mainland will be under threat of invasion, to say nothing of the nuclear threat. The Americans have crossed that threshold. Once a nation has dropped one nuclear weapon the stigma of a second or a third is less. The moment has come for us to settle on a course of action.”
Minister Chiang was speaking imperiously, which caused Lin Bao to hesitate before replying, “Is that the reason for this”—and Lin Bao struggled for a word to describe the nature of their meeting, which was ostensibly why Minister Chiang had summoned him here, away from his ship, to the British Airways lounge, which increasingly felt like a strange, even illicit location—“I mean, the reason for this conference?”
Minister Chiang leaned forward in his chair, placing his hand affectionately on Lin Bao's forearm. Then he glanced out the window, to his security detail, as if making sure his dark-suited entourage observed the gesture. And Lin Bao saw that they did. Gradually, he began to intuit the subtext for their meeting as Minister Chiang confessed that their “conference” was a “conference of two.” Yes, he could have invited the commander of the special forces task force, an unimaginative major general whose troops had already fanned out across Taipei, seizing strategic targets such as radio, television, and power stations, as well as gathering up probable agitators; and he could have also invited the commander of their air forces, a technocrat who was coordinating a vast logistical web of resupply while keeping his fighter and attack aircraft poised for any counterstrike; but to invite either of them would have disrupted their efforts. Also, Minister Chiang explained that he wasn't certain they possessed “the required competencies for what would come next.”
Which begged the question of what that next would be.
When Lin Bao asked, Minister Chiang grew uncharacteristically reticent. He crossed his arms over his chest, turned his chin slightly to the side, so that he was observing Lin Bao from the corners of his eyes as if to confirm that he had appraised him correctly from the start.
“It seems I've been recalled to Beijing,” said Minister Chiang. He once again glanced outside the glass conference room, to where his security detail lingered. Lin Bao now understood; those men were to ensure the minister returned—whether he wanted to or not. “After what happened three days ago in Zhanjiang,” the minister continued, “certain voices are saying that our planning miscalculated the American response.” He fixed his stare on Lin Bao, examining him for the slightest reaction to such charges of miscalculation. “Those same voices, both inside and outside the Politburo Standing Committee, are blaming me. Intrigue like this is nothing surprising. My enemies see a vulnerability and they strike after it. They claim I'm to blame for the actions of our unreliable allies in the Barents Sea, or for an American president whose greatest weakness is her fear of being perceived as weak. I haven't come as far as I have without possessing certain instincts that allow me to navigate such intrigues. And it is those instincts that drew me to you, Admiral Lin Bao. It is why I made you Ma Qiang's replacement, and it is why I am asking for your support now, against not only our enemies on the outside but also our enemies within.”
“My support?” asked Lin Bao.
“Yes, for what comes next.”
But Lin Bao still didn't know what came next. Perhaps they could hold their gains around Taipei and negotiate with the Americans. The devastation of Zhanjiang would be the price they'd pay to annex Taiwan. He said as much to Minister Chiang, reminding him that their original plan was based on a strategy of de-escalation, as well as Sun Tzu's wisdom about subduing one's enemy without fighting.
One of the dark-suited security men knocked on the glass with the knuckle of his middle finger. He pointed to his watch. It was time.
Minister Chiang stood, tugging down on his uniform, which had ridden up his soft belly. With all the dignity he could muster, he raised a finger to the impatient member of his security detail, insisting that he wait another moment. Then he turned to Lin Bao and rested his hand on his shoulder. “Yes, we all know that old bit of Sun Tzu. He was a master of asymmetric warfare, of defeating an enemy without giving battle. But he also tells us, On difficult ground, press on; on encircled ground, devise stratagems—”
The security man swung open the door, interrupting them.
Minister Chiang's eyes flashed in that direction, but then he fixed them determinedly on Lin Bao. “And on death ground, fight.”
As improbably as he had arrived, Minister Chiang was gone.
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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