2034

by Elliot Ackerman

  Chowdhury remembered a classmate of his from graduate school, a Navy lieutenant commander, a prior enlisted sailor who’d gotten his start as a hospital corpsman with the Marines in Iraq. Walking past his cubicle in the study carrels one day, Chowdhury had noticed a vintage postcard of the USS Maine tacked to the partition. When Chowdhury joked that he ought to have a ship that didn’t blow up and sink pinned to his cubicle, the officer replied, “I keep it there for two reasons, Sandy. One is as a reminder that complacency kills—a ship loaded out with fuel and munitions can explode at any time. But, more importantly, I keep it there to remind me that when the Maine blew up in 1898—before social media, before twenty-four-hour news—we had no problem engaging in national hysteria, blaming it on ‘Spanish terrorists,’ which of course led to the Spanish-American War. Fifty years later, after World War Two, when we finally performed a full investigation, you know what they found? The Maine blew up because of an internal explosion—a ruptured boiler or a compromised ammunition storage compartment. The lesson of the Maine—or even Iraq, where I fought—is that you better be goddamn sure you know what’s going on before you start a war.”

  Chowdhury closed his newsfeed. It was nearly lunch time. He walked home lost in thought. His desire for de-escalation didn’t stem from any pacifistic tendencies on his part. He believed in the use of force—after all, he worked on the National Security Council staff. His fear of escalation was more instinctual. Inherent in all wars, he knew, was a miscalculation; by their nature it had to exist. That’s because when a war starts both sides believe that they will win.

  As he walked, he struggled to put words around his reservations as if he were writing a white paper to himself. His opening sentence came to him. It would be, The America that we believe ourselves to be is no longer the America that we are. . . .

  He thought this was a true statement. He pondered just how fraught a statement it was, how an overestimation of American strength could be disastrous. But it was lunch time, and there was nothing he could do about such existential questions, at least at this moment. This crisis, like every other, would likely pass. Cooler heads would prevail because it seemed that they always did.

  He rooted around in the fridge. Not much there.

  In the background CNN was playing. The anchor announced some breaking news. “We have obtained exclusive video of downed Marine pilot Major Chris Mitchell. . . .”

  Chowdhury banged the back of his head as he startled up from the fridge. Before he could get to the television, he heard the warning that the video was graphic, that it might prove disturbing to some audiences. Chowdhury didn’t wait around to see it. He already knew how bad it was. He climbed in his car and rushed to the office, forgetting to turn off the television.

  He texted his mother to see if she could pick up Ashni from school, lest he appear negligent to his ex-wife. His mother wrote back immediately and, uncharacteristically, didn’t complain about yet another change in plan. She must have already seen the video, thought Chowdhury. He was listening to the radio on his fifteen-minute drive into work; MSNBC, Fox, NPR, WAMU, even the local hip-hop station WPGC—everyone was talking about what they’d just seen. The image quality was grainy, pixilated, but what they all fixated on was how Wedge—lying on his side, with that brute of an Iranian officer standing over him, kicking him in the ribs and head—kept repeating only his name, rank, and service number.

  The divergence of views Chowdhury had read in the paper that morning was quickly yielding to a consensus. Every voice he heard on the drive into work agreed: the defiance displayed by this downed flyer was an example to us all. We wouldn’t be pushed around, not by anyone. Had we forgotten who we were? Had we forgotten the spirit which made us that single, indispensable nation? Chowdhury thought of yesterday’s debate in the Situation Room and the president’s policy of de-escalation. With the release of this video, such a policy would become untenable.

  When he barged into his office, the first person he saw was Hendrickson, whom he hadn’t seen since the crisis began. The offices of the national security staff were packed with Pentagon augments who were helping with—or at times getting in the way of—the administration’s response to the Iranians. “When did the video come in?” Chowdhury asked Hendrickson.

  He pulled Chowdhury into the corridor. “It came in last night,” he said in a conspiratorial whisper, glancing side to side as though he were about to cross the road. “A signals intercept from Cyber Command—weird that it didn’t come from NSA. It seems this Iranian brigadier in the video lost his cool. He’s well connected and his superiors didn’t quite believe what he’d done until a video circulated internally of the interrogation. We picked it up in their email traffic. Cyber defense has never been a strong suit for the Iranians. They have a tendency to focus on offensive cyber, but kind of forget to guard the barn door.”

  “How did it get to the press?” asked Chowdhury.

  Hendrickson gave him a look, one Chowdhury had seen many times before when they’d attended the Fletcher School and either Chowdhury or one of his classmates had asked a question with an answer so obvious that its very asking annoyed Hendrickson. Nevertheless, Hendrickson obliged with an answer. “How do you think? A leak.”

  Before Chowdhury could ask Hendrickson who he thought had leaked the video, Trent Wisecarver stepped out from the office and into the corridor where the two stood. His frameless glasses were balanced on the tip of his nose, as if he’d been reading. Under his arm were several binders marked TOP SECRET//NOFORN. Based on their thickness and on the fact that they were paper, not electronic, Chowdhury assumed them to be military operational plans of the highest sensitivity. When he saw Chowdhury, Wisecarver made a face. “Didn’t I tell you to take the day off?”

  * * *

  16:23 April 09, 2034 (GMT+9)

  Yokosuka Naval Base

  Captain Sarah Hunt ventured out to the commissary on foot. For three weeks she’d been trapped on base without a car, living in a room at the bachelor officers’ quarters, its only amenities a television that played the antiseptically boring American Forces Network and a kitchenette with a mini-fridge that didn’t make ice. Why the Navy chose to perform her board of inquiry here, at Yokosuka, instead of her home port of San Diego, was a mystery to her. Her best guess was that they wanted to avoid any undue attention paid to the proceedings, but she couldn’t be certain. The Navy wasn’t in the business of explaining its decisions, not to anyone, and most certainly not to itself, at least at her level of command. And so she’d spent the intervening weeks since the Battle of Mischief Reef stowed away in this crappy room, reporting to a nondescript office building once or twice a day to give tape-recorded answers to questions and hoping that the deliberations in progress might clear her name so that the administrative hold she’d been placed under would soon lift, allowing her to retire in peace.

  She’d begun to think that the board of inquiry might never reach its conclusion when an optimistic note arrived in the form of a voicemail left by her old friend Rear Admiral John Hendrickson, in which he announced that he “happened to be on base” and asked if he could stop by for a drink. When he was a lieutenant on faculty at Annapolis, Hendrickson had volunteered as one of the softball coaches. As a midshipman, Hunt had been one of his star players. She’d been the catcher. And Hendrickson and the other players had affectionately nicknamed her “Stonewall” for the way she guarded home plate. On occasions too numerous to count, a runner rounding third would find herself flat on her back along the baseline, staring up at an expanse of sky, while Midshipman Sarah “Stonewall” Hunt stood triumphantly over her, ball in hand, with the umpire bellowing, “Ouutt!”

  Sarah Hunt now stood in the checkout line of the commissary. She’d bought two six-packs of IPA, a jar of Planters mixed nuts, some crackers, some cheese. While she waited in line, she couldn’t help but feel as though the other sailors were eyeing her. They knew who she was, stealing glances while trying to pretend that they didn’t notice her. S
he couldn’t decide whether this reaction was awe or contempt. She had fought in her country’s largest naval battle since the Second World War. She was, at this moment, the only officer who had ever held command at sea during a peer-level naval engagement, her three subordinate commanders having gone down with their ships. As she worked her way through the checkout line, she wondered how the sailors at Pearl Harbor felt in the days after that iconic defeat. Although eventually they had been celebrated, were the veterans of that battle first vilified? Did they have to suffer through boards of inquiry?

  The cashier handed Hunt her receipt.

  Back in her room, she put the nuts into a plastic bowl. She laid the crackers and cheese on a plate. She popped open a beer. And then she waited.

  It didn’t take long.

  Knock, knock, knock . . . knock . . . knock . . . knock . . . knock, knock, knock . . .

  Unreal, thought Hunt.

  She called out for him to come in. Hendrickson opened the unlocked door, crossed the room, and sat across from Hunt at the small table in the kitchenette. He exhaled heavily, as though he were tired; then he took one of the beers that sat sweating condensation on the table, as well as a fistful of the salty nuts. They knew each other so well that neither had to speak.

  “Cute with the knocks,” Hunt eventually said.

  “SOS, remember?”

  She nodded, and then added, “But this isn’t Bancroft Hall. I’m not a twenty-one-year-old midshipman and you aren’t a twenty-seven-year-old lieutenant sneaking into my room.”

  He nodded sadly.

  “How’s Suze?”

  “Fine,” he answered.

  “The kids?”

  “Also fine . . . grandkid soon,” he added, allowing his voice to perk up. “Kristine’s pregnant. The timing’s good. She just finished a flight tour. She’s slated for shore duty.”

  “She still with that guy, the artist?”

  “Graphic designer,” Hendrickson corrected.

  “Smart girl,” said Hunt, giving a defeated smile. If Hunt had ever married, she knew it would’ve needed to be an artist, a poet, someone whose ambition—or lack thereof—didn’t conflict with her own. She had always known this. That was why, decades before, she’d broken off her affair with Hendrickson. Neither of them was married at the time, so what made it an affair—because affairs are illicit—was their discrepancy in rank. Hendrickson thought after Hunt’s graduation from Annapolis they could be out in the open. Despite Hunt’s feelings for Hendrickson, which were real, she knew she could never be with him, or at least never be with him and have the career she wanted. When she explained this logic weeks before her graduation, he had told her that she was the love of his life, a claim that in the intervening thirty years he’d never disavowed. She had offered him only the same stony silence they now shared, which in that moment again reminded him of her namesake from those years ago—Stonewall.

  “How you holding up?” Hendrickson eventually asked her.

  “Fine,” she said, taking a long pull off her beer.

  “The board of inquiry’s almost finished with its report,” he offered.

  She looked away from him, out the window, toward the port where she’d noticed over the past week an unusually heavy concentration of ships.

  “Sarah, I’ve read over what happened. . . . The Navy should’ve given you a medal, not an investigation.” He reached out and put his hand on her arm.

  Her gaze remained fixed on the acres of anchored gray steel. What she wouldn’t give to be on the deck of any of those ships instead of here, trapped in this room, at the end of a career cut short. “They don’t give medals,” she said, “to commodores who lose all their ships.”

  “I know.”

  She glared at him. He was an inadequate receptacle for her grievances: from the destruction of her flotilla; to her medical retirement; all the way back to her decision never to have a family, to make the Navy her family. Hendrickson had gone on to have a career gilded with command at every level, prestigious fellowships, impressive graduate degrees, and even a White House posting, while also having a wife, children, and now a grandchild. Hunt had never had any of this, or at least not in the proportions that she had once hoped. “Is that why you came here?” she asked bitterly. “To tell me that I should’ve gotten a medal?”

  “No,” he said, taking his hand off her arm and coming up in his seat. He leaned toward her as if for a moment he might go so far as to remind her of their difference in rank, that even she could push him too far. “I came here to tell you that the board of inquiry is going to find that you did everything possible given the circumstances.”

  “What circumstances are those?”

  Hendrickson grabbed a fistful of the nuts, dropping them one at a time in his mouth. “That’s what I was hoping you might tell me.”

  The board of inquiry wasn’t the only reason Hendrickson had flown from Washington to Yokosuka. This should’ve been obvious to Hunt, but it hadn’t. She was so ensconced in her own grief, in her own frustration, that she hadn’t given much thought to broader events. “You’re here to coordinate our response?” she asked.

  He nodded.

  “What’s our response going to be?”

  “I’m not at liberty to say, Sarah. But you can imagine.”

  She glanced back out to the port filled with ships, to the twin carriers at anchor studded with parked fighters on their decks, to the low-set submarines brooding on the surface, and then to the new semisubmersible frigates and the more traditional destroyers with their bladelike hulls facing out to sea.

  This was the response.

  “Where are you and your bosses going to send these ships?”

  He didn’t answer, but instead held forth on a range of technical issues. “You told the board of inquiry that your communications shut down. We haven’t figured out how they did this, but we have some theories. . . .” He asked her about the frequency of the static she heard from her failing radios, about whether the Aegis terminal turned off or simply froze. He asked a series of more runic questions above the classification level of the board of inquiry. She answered—at least as best she could—until she couldn’t stand it anymore, until Hendrickson’s questions began to prove that whatever response he and his masters at the White House had planned against their adversaries in Beijing was fated to be a disaster.

  “Don’t you see?” she finally said, exasperated. “The technical details of what they did hardly matter. The way to defeat technology isn’t with more technology. It is with no technology. They’ll blind the elephant and then overwhelm us.”

  He gave her a confused, sidelong glance. “What elephant?”

  “Us,” she added. “We’re the elephant.”

  Hendrickson finished off the last of his beer. It’d been a long day and a tough few weeks, he told her. He’d return in the morning to check on her and then he had a flight out the following afternoon. He understood what she was saying, or at least wanted to understand. But the administration, he explained, was under enormous pressure to do something, to somehow demonstrate that they wouldn’t be cowed. It wasn’t only what had happened here but also this pilot, he said, this Marine who’d been brought down. Then he ruminated on the curse of domestic politics driving international policy as he stood from his seat and made for the door. “So, we’ll pick up again tomorrow?” he asked.

  She didn’t answer.

  “Okay?” he added.

  She nodded. “Okay.” She shut the door behind him as he left.

  That night her sleep was thin and empty, except for one dream. He was in it. And the Navy wasn’t. It was the two of them in an alternative life, where their choices had been different. She woke from that dream and didn’t sleep well the rest of the night because she kept trying to return to it. The following morning, she woke to a knock at her door. But it wasn’t him; it wasn’t his familiar SOS knock, just a plain knocking.

  When she opened her door, a pimply faced sailor handed over a message.
She was to report to the board of inquiry that afternoon for a final interview. She thanked the sailor and returned to her dim room, where the darkness congealed in the empty corners. She threw open the drapes to let in the light. It blinded her for a moment.

  She rubbed at her eyes and looked down onto the port.

  It was empty.

  3

  Blinding the Elephant

  12:13 April 23, 2034 (GMT+4:30)

  Isfahan

  Qassem Farshad had taken the deal he was offered. Discipline against him had been decisive and swift. In less than a month he was delivered a letter of reprimand for his excesses during the interrogation of the American pilot, followed by an early retirement. When he had asked if there was anyone else he might appeal his case to, the administrative officer who’d been sent to deliver the news showed him the bottom of the page, which held the signature of the old man himself, Major General Mohammad Bagheri, chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces. When Farshad received the letter, he’d been on suspension at home, at his family’s country residence an hour outside of Isfahan. It reminded him of Soleimani’s home in Qanat-e Malek. It was peaceful there, quiet.