2034

by Elliot Ackerman

  But that was all a long time ago. Ultimately, it was Lin Bao’s mixed heritage from which his government derived his value, eventually leading him to his current position, and it was Ma Qiang’s competence and cruelty that made him the optimal commander of a fleet that at this moment was striking a long-anticipated blow against the Americans. Everyone played their role. Everyone did their part.

  Part of Lin Bao wished he were the one standing on the bridge of the Zheng He, with the power of an entire carrier battle group arrayed in attack formation behind him. After all, he was a naval officer who had also held command at sea. But what offset this desire, or any jealousy he felt about his old classmate Ma Qiang’s posting, was a specific knowledge he possessed. He was one of only a half dozen people who understood the scope of current events.

  Ma Qiang and the thousands of sailors under his command had no idea that on the other side of the globe an American F-35 stealth fighter had been grounded by a previously unknown cyber capability their government had deployed on behalf of the Iranians, nor how this action was related to his own mission. Those qualities Lin Bao had always admired in the Americans—their moral certitude, their single-minded determination, their blithe optimism—undermined them at this moment as they struggled to find a solution to a problem they didn’t understand.

  Our strengths become our weaknesses, thought Lin Bao. Always.

  The American narrative was that they had captured the Wén Rui, a ship laden with sensitive technologies that Lin Bao’s government would do anything to retrieve. For the Wén Rui’s capture to precipitate the desired crisis, Lin Bao’s government would need a bargaining chip to force the Americans’ hand; that’s where the grounded F-35 came in. Lin Bao knew that the Americans would then follow a familiar series of moves and countermoves, a choreography the two nations had stepped through many times before: a crisis would lead to posturing, then to a bit of brinksmanship, and eventually to de-escalation and a trade. In this case, the F-35 would be traded for the Wén Rui. Lin Bao knew, and his superiors knew, that it would never occur to the Americans that pilfering the sensitive technology on the F-35 was a secondary objective for their adversary and that whatever was on the Wén Rui was of little value. The Americans wouldn’t understand, or at least not until it was too late, that what Lin Bao’s government wanted was simply the crisis itself, one that would allow them to strike in the South China Sea. What the Americans lacked—or lost somewhere along the way—was imagination. As it was said of the 9/11 attacks, it would also be said of the Wén Rui incident: it was not a failure of American intelligence, but rather a failure of American imagination. And the more the Americans struggled, the more trapped they would become.

  Lin Bao remembered a puzzle he’d seen in a novelty shop in Cambridge, when he’d been studying at Harvard’s Kennedy School. It was a tube made of a woven mesh material. The man behind the counter of the store had seen him looking at the puzzle, trying to figure out what it was. “You stick your fingers in either end,” he had said in one of those thick Boston accents Lin Bao always struggled to understand. Lin Bao did as he was told. When he went to remove his fingers, the woven mesh cinched down. The more he tugged, the more tightly his fingers became stuck. The man behind the counter laughed and laughed. “You’ve never seen that before?” Lin Bao shook his head, no. The man laughed even harder, and then said, “It’s called a Chinese finger trap.”

  * * *

  05:17 March 13, 2034 (GMT+4:30)

  Bandar Abbas

  Brigadier General Qassem Farshad sat on a plastic foldout chair in an empty office next to one of the holding cells. It was early in the morning and he was in a sour mood. But no one seemed to notice because his appearance was always fearsome. His reputation equally so. This made it difficult to gauge his moods, as his expression at rest seemed to convey mild annoyance or even low-level rage, depending on who was looking at him. Farshad had scars, plenty of them. Most prominent was his right hand, where he’d lost his pinky and ring finger when assembling an IED in Sadr City on his first assignment as a young lieutenant. This misstep had almost cost him his job within the elite Quds Force. But Farshad’s namesake, Major General Qassem Soleimani, the commander of the Quds Force, had intervened, blaming the incident on the incompetence of the Jaish al-Mahdi militiamen whom Farshad was advising.

  This was the only time in his more than thirty years working within the Quds Force that Farshad had ever used his special connection with Soleimani to his advantage. His father, who had achieved the rank of lieutenant colonel, had died subverting an assassination attempt on Soleimani’s life weeks before Farshad was born. The particulars of that incident had always remained shrouded in mystery, but the idea that Soleimani—one of the great protectors of the Islamic Republic—owed a debt to the elder Farshad lent the younger’s career an aura of mystique as he ascended the ranks of the Revolutionary Guards. This mystique endured even after Soleimani’s death, magnified by Farshad’s inherent competence and daring.

  The history of his exploits was etched across his body in scar tissue. When advising Syrian government forces in the Battle of Aleppo, a piece of shrapnel from a mortar had sliced a tidy diagonal gash from above his eyebrow to below his cheek. When advancing on Herat after the 2026 collapse of Afghanistan’s last Kabul-based national government, a sniper’s bullet had passed through his neck, missing his jugular and arteries, leaving a coin-sized entrance hole at one side of his neck and the same-sized exit wound at the other. That scar made his neck appear like Frankenstein’s with the bolts removed, which inevitably led to a nickname among the younger troopers. And lastly, in the battle that was the pinnacle of his career, he’d led a regiment of Revolutionary Guards in the final assault to retake the Golan Heights in 2030. In this, his crowning achievement, the one that would earn him his nation’s highest award for valor, the Order of the Fath, the retreating Israelis had fired a cowardly but lucky rocket that had struck beside him, killing his radio operator and severing his right leg below the knee. He still limped slightly from this wound, although Farshad hiked three miles each morning on a well-fitted prosthetic.

  The missing fingers. The scar on his face. The leg lost below the knee. All those wounds were on his right side. His left side—apart from the scar on his neck—had never been touched. If his troopers called him “Padishah Frankenstein” (which translated to English as “Great King Frankenstein”), the intelligence analysts at Langley had given him a different nickname, one that corresponded with his psychological profile. That name was “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” Farshad was a man with two sides, the one with the scars and the one without. He was capable of great kindness but also great rage. And that rageful side, the one that easily moved him into his reckless tempers, was very much present now as he waited in the empty office next to the holding cell at Bandar Abbas.

  Five weeks before, the General Staff of the Armed Forces had issued Farshad his orders directly. His government planned to down an American F-35 and Farshad was to interrogate the pilot. He would have two days to extract a confession. The plan was to create one of those videos his government could use to shame the Americans. After that, the pilot would be released, and the aircraft’s technology exploited and then destroyed. When Farshad protested that this was the work of an interrogator far junior to him in rank, he was told that he was the most junior person who could be entrusted with so sensitive a task. This could, the General Staff had explained, bring their two nations to the brink of war. The incident his government would precipitate was delicate. And so Farshad had been ordered to remain at this remote airfield for more than a month, waiting for the Americans to fly their plane overhead.

  I’ve been reduced to this, Farshad thought bitterly. The most junior man who can be trusted.

  Gone were his days of active service. Farshad had accumulated all of the scars he ever would. He remembered General Soleimani’s end. When the Americans killed him, cancer had already developed in his throat and was slowly eating the great commander
alive. Several times over those months, the disease had confined his father’s old friend to his bed. During a particularly dire episode, he had summoned Farshad to his modest country house in Qanat-e Malek, a hamlet three hours’ drive outside of Tehran where Soleimani had been born. The audience hadn’t lasted long. Farshad was brought to the general’s bedside, and he could see slow death in the smile that greeted him, the way Soleimani’s gums had receded, the purple-white shade of his chapped lips. He told Farshad in a raspy voice that his father had been the lucky one, to be martyred, to never grow old, this was what all soldiers secretly desired, and he wished a warrior’s death for the son of his old friend. Before Farshad could answer, Soleimani abruptly dismissed him. As he traveled out of the house, he could hear the old man retching pathetically from behind his closed door. Two months later, Soleimani’s great adversary, the Americans, would grant him the most generous of gifts: a warrior’s death.

  Waiting in the empty office in Bandar Abbas, Farshad thought again of that last meeting with Soleimani. He felt certain his fate wouldn’t be like his father’s. His fate would be to die in his bed, like the old general nearly had. And if he was in a sour mood that day at Bandar Abbas, it was because of this. Another war was brewing—he could feel it—and it would be the first war in his life from which he wouldn’t walk away with a scar.

  A young trooper with a freshly washed and perfectly creased uniform stood at the door. “Brigadier Farshad, sir . . .”

  He looked up, his gaze eager to the point of cruelty. “What is it?”

  “The prisoner is ready for you now.”

  Farshad stood slowly. He pushed his way past the young trooper, toward the cell with the American. Whether he liked it or not, Farshad still had a job to do.

  * * *

  21:02 March 12, 2034 (GMT-4)

  Washington, D.C.

  Sandy Chowdhury knew the situation was bad. Their government email accounts, their government cell phones, even the vending machine that took credit cards and operated off a government IP address—all of it was down. No one could log in. Not a single password worked. They’d been locked out of everything. This is bad, this is bad, this is bad; it was all Chowdhury could think.

  He couldn’t contact Central Command or the Indo-Pacific Command, and his imagination raced as he projected a host of possible outcomes for the F-35 they’d lost, as well as the fate of the John Paul Jones and its sister ships in the South China Sea. In this gathering panic, Chowdhury’s thoughts wandered unexpectedly.

  A memory kept reoccurring.

  When he was in high school in Northern Virginia, he’d run hurdles. He was quite good too, until an accident curtailed his track career. He’d broken an ankle on the anchor leg of the 4x400-meter relay. It was junior year, at the regional championships. When he fell on the track, he could feel his skinned knee and palms, the burn of sweat in those cuts, but he couldn’t feel his badly broken ankle. He simply sat there in the middle of the race, his competitors passing him by, staring dumbfounded at his foot as it dangled numbly from the bottom of the joint. He knew how much it would soon hurt, but it hadn’t started hurting yet.

  That was what this moment was like; he knew something had broken, but he felt nothing.

  Chowdhury, Hendrickson, and their modest staff scrambled about, tapping at keyboards, unplugging and re-plugging phones that refused to give a dial tone, troubleshooting systems that refused to be troubleshot. Air Force One had been scheduled to land at Andrews more than an hour ago, but there was still no word as to its status. There was no way to get a call into Andrews. Their personal cell phones worked, but no one wanted to dial through an unsecure line, particularly after Lin Bao had proven to Chowdhury that his own phone had been compromised.

  Time passed strangely in the hours after the blackout. Everyone knew the minutes were critical, everyone could intuit that events of the type that shape history were unfolding at this very moment. But no one understood their form; no one understood what those events were or what that history would be. So much was happening—the Wén Rui, the F-35, Air Force One, which had seemed to vanish—and yet they had no news. Frantic as they were to understand the scope of this attack, they couldn’t even make a secure phone call. Everything had been compromised.

  They carried on in a general, ineffectual frenzy, with Chowdhury and Hendrickson bunkered up in the Situation Room, leaning over its conference table, scribbling on legal pads, hatching plans and then discarding them. Until after a few hours Chowdhury’s boss, Trent Wisecarver, the national security advisor, stood in the open doorway.

  At first they didn’t notice him.

  “Sandy,” he said.

  Chowdhury glanced up, stupefied. “Sir?”

  Decades before, Wisecarver had played tailback at West Point, and he still looked the part. His shirtsleeves were rolled up over his thick forearms, his tie was loosened around his trunk of a neck, and his flop of salt-and-pepper hair was uncombed. He wore a pair of frameless eyeglasses (he was severely myopic) and looked as though he’d slept in his rumpled Brooks Brothers suit. “How much cash do you have?”

  “Sir?”

  “Cash. I need eighty bucks. My government credit card isn’t working.”

  Chowdhury fished through his pockets, as did Hendrickson. Between them they came up with seventy-six dollars, three of which were in quarters. Chowdhury was passing the handful of coins and the crumple of bills to Wisecarver as they marched from the West Wing out toward the White House vestibule and North Lawn, where, pulled up on the curved driveway by the fountain, there was a metro taxi. A uniformed Secret Service guard handed Chowdhury the taxi driver’s license and registration and then returned to his post. Chowdhury’s boss curtly explained that his plane had been forced to divert to Dulles and land under the guise of a civilian aircraft. That meant no escort to meet them, no Secret Service motorcade, no elaborate security detail. POTUS herself was due back at Andrews within the hour. From Air Force One her communications proved limited, she could reach the four-star commanding general at Strategic Command and had spoken to the VP, but these carve-outs in their communications hierarchy were clearly designed by whoever instigated the attack as a way to avoid an inadvertent nuclear escalation. Beijing (or whoever did this) surely knew that if she had no communications with her nuclear capability, protocols were in place for an automatic preemptive strike. She did, however, have no direct communications with the secretary of defense, or any of her combatant commanders in the field other than Strategic Command. Establishing contact with them was Wisecarver’s job. Refusing to wait for official travel arrangements when his plane landed, he had rushed into the main terminal at Dulles and gotten in a cab so he’d have communications working at the White House by the time POTUS arrived. And here Wisecarver was, without a dime to pay the fare.

  Chowdhury examined the taxi’s registration. The driver was an immigrant, South Asian, with a last name from the same part of India as Chowdhury’s own family. When Chowdhury stepped to the taxi’s window to hand back the documents, he thought to mention something about it but decided not to. This wasn’t the time or the place. Wisecarver then paid the driver, meticulously counting out the fare from the wad of cash and coins, while the twitchy Secret Service agent he’d traveled with scanned in every direction for threats, whether real or imagined.

  * * *

  10:22 March 13, 2034 (GMT+8)

  Beijing

  Lin Bao hadn’t slept much on the flight. When the Gulfstream touched down, he was shepherded by a heavily armed official escort—dark suits, dark sunglasses, concealed weapons—to the Ministry of National Defense headquarters, an ominous building in the heart of the smog-choked capital. Lin Bao guessed his escorts were officers of the Ministry of State Security but couldn’t be sure. Without a hello or goodbye or any pleasantry whatsoever, they brought him up to a windowless conference room on the building’s sixth floor and shut the door behind them.

  Lin Bao waited. The conference table in the room’s cente
r was massive, designed to receive international delegations and to host negotiations of the highest sensitivity. In a vase at the center of the table were some flowers, peace lilies, one of the few species that required no sunlight to grow. Lin Bao ran his fingers beneath their white, silky petals and couldn’t help but appreciate the irony of the choice in this place.

  Also on the table were two silver platters, piled with packets of M&M’s. He noticed the writing on the packets: it was in English.

  Two double doors at the opposite end of the conference room swung open. Startled, Lin Bao sat up straight.

  Mid-level military officers flowed into the room, dropping down a projection screen, establishing a secure video-teleconference connection, and arraying fresh pitchers of water on the table. Then, like a tidal surge, they moved back through the door as quickly as they had appeared. In their wake a diminutive man entered the room, his chest glinting with a field of medals. He wore a tobacco-colored dress uniform made of fine but poorly cut fabric, the sleeves extending almost to his knuckles. His demeanor was gregarious and his earlobes pendulous, framing his very round face whose full cheeks creased in a fixed smile. His arm was extended in a handshake like an electric plug in search of a socket. “Admiral Lin Bao, Admiral Lin Bao,” he repeated, turning the name into a song, a triumphal anthem. “Congratulations. You have done very well.”