2034

by Elliot Ackerman

  Minister Chiang insisted that Lin Bao sit beside him while all through that day a procession of subordinates entered and exited the conference room, receiving orders, issuing updates. The morning extended into the afternoon. The plan took shape. The Zheng He maneuvered into a blocking position south of the Spratly Island Chain, deploying in attack formation toward the last recorded position of the Ford and Miller. The American carrier battle groups would in all likelihood be able to get off a single salvo of weaponry before the Zheng He could disable their guidance systems. After that, the proverbial elephant would be blind. The American smart weapons would no longer be smart, not even dumb; they’d be brain-dead. Then the Zheng He, along with three surface action groups, would strike the Ford and Miller.

  That had been the plan.

  But by late afternoon, there was still no sign of the Americans.

  Ma Qiang was on the video teleconference again, updating Minister Chiang as to the disposition of his forces, which at that moment were deployed in a racetrack formation extending over dozens of nautical miles. As Ma Qiang spoke of current conditions at sea, Lin Bao glanced surreptitiously at his watch.

  “Why are you looking at your watch?” snapped Minster Chiang, interrupting the briefing.

  Lin Bao felt his face turn red.

  “Do you have somewhere else to be?”

  “No, Comrade Minister. Nowhere else to be.”

  Minister Chiang nodded back toward Ma Qiang, who continued on with his briefing, while Lin Bao settled exhaustedly into his chair. His carpool had left fifteen minutes before. He had no idea how he would get home.

  * * *

  04:27 April 26, 2034 (GMT+5:30)

  New Delhi

  The phone rang. “Are you up?”

  “I’m up now.”

  “It’s bad, Sandy.”

  “What’s bad?” he asked Hendrickson, swallowing the dryness from his throat as he rubbed his eyes, his vision slowly coming into focus so he could read the digital display of his alarm clock.

  “The Ford and the Miller, they’re gone.”

  “What do you mean gone?”

  “They got the drop on us, or shut us down, or I don’t even know how to describe it. Reports are nothing worked. We were blind. When we launched our planes, their avionics froze, their navigation systems glitched out and were then overridden. Pilots couldn’t eject. Missiles wouldn’t fire. Dozens of our aircraft plunged into the water. Then they came at us with everything. A carrier, frigates and destroyers, diesel and nuclear submarines, swarms of unmanned torpedo boats, hypersonic cruise missiles with total stealth, offensive cyber. We’re still piecing it all together. The whole thing happened middle of last night. . . . Christ, Sandy, she was right.”

  “Who was right?”

  “Sarah—Sarah Hunt. I saw her weeks ago when I was in Yokosuka.”

  Chowdhury knew that the board of inquiry had cleared Hunt of all culpability in the Battle of Mischief Reef and the loss of her flotilla, but he also knew the Navy had wanted to consign her defeat to a fluke. That would be far easier than taking a hard look at the circumstances that led to it. It would now be impossible for the Navy—or the nation—to ignore a disaster on this scale. Thirty-seven warships destroyed. Thousands of sailors perished.

  “How did we do?” Chowdhury asked tentatively. “Did our long-range air score any hits? How many of theirs did we sink?”

  “None,” said Hendrickson.

  “None?”

  The line went silent for a moment. “I’ve heard that we might have scored a hit on their carrier, the Zheng He, but we didn’t sink any of their ships.”

  “My God,” said Chowdhury. “How’s Wisecarver reacting?”

  He was up now, his bedside lamp on, stepping into each leg of his trousers, which he’d draped over the back of a chair. He’d arrived at these bland quarters in the embassy’s visitors’ annex two days before. While Chowdhury dressed, Hendrickson explained that the news hadn’t yet leaked to the public: one of the benefits of the blackout the Chinese had employed was that it allowed the administration to control the news, or at least to control it until the Chinese used that information against them. Which they had, strangely, not yet done.

  Hendrickson explained that the White House had succumbed to panic. “Jesus, what will the country say?” had been the president’s response on hearing the news. Trent Wisecarver had contacted NORAD and elevated the threat level to DEFCON 2, with a request to the president to elevate it to DEFCON 1. In an emergency meeting of the National Security Council he had also requested preemptive authorization for a tactical nuclear launch against the Zheng He Carrier Battle Group, provided it could be found and targeted. Remarkably, his request had not been rejected outright. The president, who only days before had wanted to de-escalate tensions, was now entertaining such a strike.

  De-escalation had been the entire reason the administration dispatched Chowdhury to New Delhi. Negotiations surrounding the release of Major Chris “Wedge” Mitchell had progressed to the point where the Iranians agreed to transport him to their embassy in India, and a prisoner swap seemed imminent. Chowdhury believed—and the analysts at CIA backed him up—that the sole reason the Iranians were dragging their feet on the major’s release was because they wanted his wounds to heal a bit more, particularly his face. The last contact Chowdhury had with the Iranians—a contact brokered through officials at India’s Foreign Ministry—they’d assured him that Major Mitchell would be released within a week, as he now explained to Hendrickson.

  “A week’s too long,” Hendrickson replied. “Once the Iranians learn what’s happened—if they don’t know already—they’ll take Major Mitchell back to Tehran. You’ve got to get him out now, or at least try. That’s why I’m calling—” There was a pause on the line as Chowdhury wondered how Hendrickson could possibly expect him to accomplish such a task. Then Hendrickson added, “Sandy, we’re at war.” The words might once have sounded melodramatic, but now they didn’t; they had become a statement of fact.

  * * *

  04:53 April 26, 2034 (GMT+9)

  Yokosuka Naval Base

  Dawn vanished the fog as the day broke bright and pure. Three ships on the horizon. A destroyer. A frigate. A cruiser.

  They were sailing slowly, barely moving in fact. The frigate and cruiser were very close together, the destroyer a little further off. This view from Sarah Hunt’s window early that morning was a curious sight. Her flight to San Diego was scheduled for later that day. As she watched the three ships limping closer, she wondered if they would pull into port by the time she left. What she saw didn’t make much sense to her. Where were the Ford and Miller?

  A red flare went up, followed by one and then two more. On the deck of the destroyer was a signal lamp; it began to flash.

  Flash, flash, flash . . . flash . . . flash . . . flash . . . flash, flash, flash . . .

  Three short . . . three long . . . three short . . .

  Hunt recognized the message immediately. She ran out of her barracks room toward Seventh Fleet Headquarters.

  * * *

  05:23 April 26, 2034 (GMT+8)

  Beijing

  Victory had been total. Beyond what they could have hoped for.

  It almost unsettled them.

  It had been past midnight when Ma Qiang reported contact with the vanguard of destroyers from the Ford Battle Group. He was able to neutralize their weapons systems and communications with the same offensive cyber capability his fleet had employed weeks before to great effect near Mischief Reef. This allowed a dozen of his stealthy unmanned torpedo boats to close within a kilometer of the vanguard and launch their ordnance. Which they did, to devastating effect. Three direct hits on three American destroyers. They sunk in under ten minutes, vanished. That had been the opening blow, delivered in darkness. When the news was reported in the Defense Ministry, the cheers were raucous.

  After that, all through the night their blows fell in quick succession.

  A single f
light of four Shenyang J-15s launched from the Zheng He scored a total of fifteen direct hits divided between three destroyers, two cruisers, and a frigate, sinking all six. A half dozen torpedo-armed Kamov helicopters launched from three separate Jiangkai II–class frigates scored four out of six hits, one of which struck the Ford itself, disabling its rudder. This would be the first of many strikes against both American carriers. Those carriers responded by launching their aircraft while the surface ships responded by launching their ordnance, but they all fired blindly, into not only the darkness of that night but the more profound darkness of what they could no longer see, reliant as they had become on technologies that failed to serve them. Chinese cyber dominance of the American forces was complete. A highly sophisticated artificial intelligence capability allowed the Zheng He to employ its cyber tools at precisely the right moment to infiltrate US systems by use of a high-frequency delivery mechanism. Stealth was a secondary tool, though not unimportant. In the end, it was the massive discrepancy in offensive cyber capabilities—an invisible advantage—that allowed the Zheng He to consign a far larger force to the depths of the South China Sea.

  For four hours, a steady stream of reports filtered in from the bridge of the Zheng He back to the Defense Ministry. The blows struck by Ma Qiang’s command fell with remarkable rapidity. Equally remarkable was that they fell at such little cost. Two hours into the battle, they hadn’t lost a single ship or aircraft. Then, the unimaginable happened, an event Lin Bao never thought he would see in his lifetime. At 04:37 a single Yuan-class diesel-electric submarine slipped toward the hull of the Miller, flooded its torpedo tubes, and fired a spread at point-blank range.

  After impact, it took only eleven minutes for the carrier to sink.

  When this news arrived, there wasn’t any cheering in the Defense Ministry as there’d been before. Only silence. Minister Chiang, who had sat diligently at the head of the conference table all through the night, stood and headed for the door. Lin Bao, as the second most senior officer in the room, felt obliged to ask him where he was going and when he might return—the battle wasn’t over yet, he reminded the minister. The Ford was out there, injured but still a threat. Minister Chiang turned back toward Lin Bao, and his expression, which was usually so exuberant, appeared tired, contorted by the fatigue he’d hidden these many weeks.

  “I’m only stepping out for some fresh air,” he said, glancing at his watch. “The sun will be up soon. It’s a whole new day and I’d like to watch the dawn.”

  * * *

  05:46 April 26, 2034 (GMT+5:30)

  New Delhi

  After Hendrickson hung up with him, Chowdhury knew who he needed to call, though it was a call he didn’t wish to place. He quickly calculated the time difference. Though it was late, his mother would still be up.

  “Sandeep, I thought I wasn’t going to hear from you for a few days?” she began, sounding slightly annoyed.

  “I know,” he said exhaustedly. And his exhaustion wasn’t as much from his lack of sleep, or even his gathering realization of how dire circumstances had become for the Seventh Fleet, as it was from having to apologize to his mother. He’d said he wasn’t going to phone on this trip. Yet when he needed her, as he did now, she had always been there. “There’s been a problem at work,” said Chowdhury, pausing dramatically, as if to give his mother’s imagination sufficient time to conjure what a “problem at work” currently meant for her son, given the circumstances. “Can you put me in touch with your brother?”

  The line went silent, as he knew it would.

  There was a reason Chowdhury hadn’t referred to retired Vice Admiral Anand Patel as “my uncle,” but instead as “your brother.” Because Anand Patel had never been an uncle to Chowdhury, and he hadn’t been much of a brother to his sister Lakshmi. The cause of their estrangement was an arranged marriage between a teenage Lakshmi and a young naval officer—a friend of her older brother’s—that ended in an affair, a marriage-for-love to Chowdhury’s father, who had been a medical student with plans to study at Columbia University, which led to Lakshmi’s departure for the United States while the family honor—at least according to her elder brother—was left in tatters. But that was all a long time ago. Long enough that it’d been twenty years since the young naval officer who was meant to be Lakshmi’s husband died in a helicopter crash, and ten years since Sandy’s father, the oncologist, had died of his own cancer. In the meantime, Lakshmi’s brother, Sandy’s uncle, had climbed the ranks of India’s naval service, ascending to the admiralty, a distinction that was never spoken of in the Chowdhury household but that now might prove useful as Sandy scrambled to play the inside hand that would assure Major Mitchell’s release. That is, if his mother would oblige.

  “I don’t understand, Sandeep,” she said. “Doesn’t our government have contacts in the Indian government? Isn’t this the sort of thing that gets worked out in official channels?”

  Chowdhury explained to his mother that, yes, this was the sort of thing that was usually worked out in official channels, and that, yes, their government did have any number of contacts inside the Indian government and military—to include certain intelligence assets that Chowdhury didn’t mention. However, despite these formidable resources, oftentimes the key to severing the Gordian knot of diplomacy was a personal connection, a familial connection.

  “That man is no longer family of mine,” she snapped back at him.

  “Mom, why do you think they picked me, Sandeep Chowdhury, to come here? Plenty of others could have been given this assignment. They gave it to me because our family is from here.”

  “What would your father say to that? You’re American. They should send you because you’re the best man for the job, not because of who your parents—”

  “Mom,” he said, cutting her off. He allowed the line to go silent for a beat. “I need your help.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Do you have a pen?”

  He did.

  She recited her brother’s phone number by heart.

  * * *

  09:13 April 26, 2034 (GMT+5:30)

  New Delhi

  The swelling on his face had gone down considerably. His ribs were doing much better. When Wedge took a deep breath it no longer hurt. There were some scars, sure, but nothing too bad, nothing that would turn off the girls he imagined hanging on his every word in the bars around Miramar Air Station when he made it home with his stories. A few days before, they’d given him a clean change of clothes, added some sort of stringy meat to his diet, and placed him on a government airplane with stewardesses, fruit juice, and bagged peanuts—all he could eat. He hadn’t been alone, of course. A plainclothes entourage of guards with pistols brandished in their waistbands and mirrored sunglasses masking their eyes kept a watch over him. When Wedge clownishly tossed a few of the peanuts into the air and caught them with his mouth, the guards even laughed, though Wedge couldn’t be certain whether they were laughing at or with him.

  The plane had landed in darkness, a choice he assumed was intentional. Then he was whisked from the airport in a panel van with blacked-out windows. No one told him anything until late that night, when he was getting ready for bed in the carpeted room where they’d placed him, more like a drab hotel room than a cell, and nicer than anything Wedge had seen for weeks. Still, no one told him where he’d been flown to. All they told him was that tomorrow a representative from the Red Cross would pay a visit. That night, excited by the prospect, he hardly slept. The image of an attractive nurse, of the type that entertained GIs at USO tours in another era, relentlessly came to mind. He could see her generically beautiful face, her white uniform, her stockings, the cap with the little red cross. He knew that wasn’t how Red Cross women looked these days, but he couldn’t help it. His room was empty, though he assumed a guard was posted outside his door, and in the emptiness of that room his imagination became ever more expansive as he fantasized about this meeting, his first contact with the outside world in nearly two months. H
e could see her lipsticked mouth forming the reassuring words: I’ll get you home.

  When his door opened the next morning and a slight Indian man appeared, his disappointment was acute.

  * * *

  09:02 April 27, 2034 (GMT+4:30)

  Isfahan

  At the Second Army’s administrative center nobody knew for certain what had happened in the South China Sea. The General Staff of the Armed Forces had issued a nationwide mobilization order; the country was going to war, or was at least on the brink of war, yet no one could say exactly why. When leaving his family’s home, Farshad thought of wearing his uniform but decided against it. He was no longer a brigadier in the Revolutionary Guards, let alone a brigadier in the elite Quds Force. He was a civilian now, and even though it had only been a few weeks the break felt permanent—less a break, more an amputation. Whether this amputation was reversible Farshad would soon discover. He was waiting in a line that extended down a corridor on the third floor of this vast administrative annex. He was, he guessed, the oldest person in the line by several decades. He could feel the others stealing glances at this man with all the scars and three fingers on his right hand.

  After less than an hour, he was escorted out of the line and up a set of stairs to an office on the fourth floor. “Now wait here,” said a corporal, who spoke to Farshad as though he outranked him. The corporal stepped into the office only to emerge moments later and wave Farshad in.

  It was a spacious corner office. Behind the large oak desk were a pair of crossed flags; the first was the flag of the Islamic Republic and the second that of the army. A uniformed man, a colonel in the administrative service, approached Farshad with his hand outstretched. His palm was smooth and his uniform had been starched and ironed so many times that it shined with a metallic patina. The colonel asked for the old brigadier, the hero of the Golan Heights, the recipient of the Order of the Fath, to sit and join him for tea. The corporal set the glasses out, first in front of Farshad and then in front of the colonel.