2034

by Elliot Ackerman

  “America is my home,” answered Chowdhury. “Nowhere else on earth could I, the son of an immigrant, rise up to work in the White House. America is special. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”

  Patel sat, respectfully listening to his nephew. “Do you know what I most enjoy about belonging to this club?” he asked.

  Chowdhury returned a vacant gaze.

  “Come,” said Patel, pushing back his chair, its legs stuttering across the tiled floor of the veranda. They stepped into a room immediately inside, which appeared to be a trophy room, the walls lined with glass-fronted cabinets that contained resplendent two-handled cups engraved with years that reached back into other centuries. Patel took Chowdhury to a framed photograph in the far corner. Three ranks of British army officers stood flanked by their turbaned sepoys. The date was nearly one hundred years ago, a decade before Indian independence. Patel explained that the photograph was of the Rajputana Rifles, whose British officers were members of this club, and that it was taken on the eve of the Second World War, before the regiment shipped out for the Pacific theatre.

  “Most of the officers were killed in either Burma or Malaya,” said Patel. Their sepia-toned expressions stared hauntingly back at Chowdhury. Then his uncle took a silver pen from his pocket, which he indexed on one face, that of a mustachioed orderly with a squat build and single chevron, who scowled at the camera. “Him, right there. You see the name?” Patel tapped his pen on the bottom of the photograph, where there was a roster. “Lance Naik Imran Sandeep Patel . . . your great-great-grandfather.”

  Chowdhury stood silently in front of the photograph.

  “It isn’t only in America where people can change their fortunes,” his uncle said. “America is not so special.”

  Chowdhury removed his phone from his pocket and snapped a photograph of his ancestor’s face. “How do you think your government will respond?” he asked, gesturing toward the television and the breaking news about what seemed to be the certainty of an impending war.

  “It’s difficult to say,” his uncle told him. “But I believe we’ll make out very well.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because we have learned the lessons that you have forgotten.”

  * * *

  11:42 May 13, 2034 (GMT+9)

  Yokosuka Naval Base

  First it was her flight home that was canceled.

  Then her orders.

  A medical evaluation was scheduled for her at the naval hospital.

  This time she passed it.

  A below-the-zone promotion came next, to rear admiral (lower half)—a one-star. A new set of orders followed. The assignment shocked her. The Navy was giving her command of the Enterprise Strike Group, which included the carrier itself as well as nearly twenty other ships. This all took a week. In another week she’d meet the flotilla at Yokosuka. The night before the Enterprise arrived, Hunt had the first of the nightmares that would come to plague her.

  In them, she is watching what is left of the Ford and Miller carrier strike groups limp into port, just three ships. She stands on the dock, where one of the ships, a destroyer, drops its gangplank. But the destroyer isn’t part of the group that went out with the Ford and Miller; no, it’s her old flagship, the John Paul Jones. Her crew files down the gangplank. She recognizes many of the young sailors. Among them is Commander Jane Morris. She is smoking a cigar, the same cigar they shared on the bridge of the John Paul Jones those weeks before. Which feel like a lifetime before. When Hunt approaches Morris, her former subordinate walks right past her, as if she doesn’t exist. There’s no malice in Morris’s reaction; rather it is as though Hunt is the ghost and these ghosts are the living. Then, while Hunt is trying to gain Morris’s attention, she glimpses a young petty officer coming down the gangplank and onto the dock. Hunt is drawn to him because unlike the other sailors he is wearing his dress whites, the wide bell-bottoms flaring out over his mirror-shined leather shoes. Two chevrons are sewn to his sleeve. His Dixie cup hat balances on his head at a jaunty angle. He can’t be more than twenty-five years old. And although he’s a young petty officer, he wears a dizzying array of medals and ribbons, such as the Navy Cross, lesser awards for valor, and several Purple Hearts, to include the one that got him killed. He’s a SEAL. He crosses the dock, comes right up to Hunt, and takes her by the hand. He squeezes it three times— I / LOVE / YOU—just as her father used to do. He looks at her, still holding her hand, still waiting. He is clean-shaven, strong; his torso angles toward his waist in a V. And his palm is soft. She can hardly recognize him. In her memory he is always older, worn down; she never remembered her father’s medals and ribbons as shining. But they shine now, spectacularly so. His blue eyes are fixed on hers. She squeezes his hand four times—I / LOVE / YOU / TOO.

  He looks at her and says, “You don’t have to do this.”

  Then he drops her hand and walks away.

  She calls after him, “Do what?” but he doesn’t turn around.

  This is where the dream always ends. Hunt had just woken from it on the morning the Enterprise pulled into port. She was still shaken by the question in the dream as she met her crew on the docks of Yokosuka. She caught herself looking around, as if she might see him, or even Morris, wandering among the other sailors as they descended the gangplank. Her crew was young. Most of the officers and enlisted filled positions that were one or two grades senior to their rank, a result of the Navy struggling to account for its most recent losses at sea as well as what in recent years had become perennial manpower shortages. Hunt consoled herself with the idea that if the crew was young, then it was also hungry, and she would take enthusiasm over experience.

  The Enterprise was scheduled for a week in port after an arduous transit from Fifth Fleet and the Arabian Gulf. Its sister carrier, the Bush, had recently suffered the ignominy of losing a pilot over Iranian airspace, and the crew of the Enterprise seemed determined to avoid a similar humiliation in the performance of their mission. As to the specifics of that mission, they remained unclear. They knew the Chinese navy possessed an offensive cyber capability that they’d yet to effectively counter, and that this capability reduced their high-tech platforms—whether it be navigation, communications, or weapons guidance systems—to little more than a suite of glitching computers. Nevertheless, they understood that whatever their specific mission was, it would certainly include the more general objective of destroying, or at least neutralizing, the flotilla of Chinese vessels that threatened to destabilize the balance of power in the region.

  First, however, they would need to find the Chinese fleet, specifically the Zheng He Carrier Battle Group. If the Wén Rui incident and the sinking of the Ford and Miller demonstrated anything, it was that China’s cyber capability could effectively black out a vast swath of ocean. While Hunt was having her retirement canceled by Seventh Fleet Headquarters, that same headquarters had scrambled reconnaissance drones across the South China Sea and even the far reaches of the Pacific in an effort to map the disposition of Chinese naval forces and infer their next move. A variety of drones were tasked, from the latest stealth variants of MQ-4C Tritons, to RQ-4 Global Hawks, to even the CIA’s RQ-170 Sentinels, each fully integrated into America’s network of satellites. However, as was the case with the F-35 at Bandar Abbas, the Chinese were able to take control of these drones once they came into a certain range, disabling their sensors and controls. The result was that all Hunt had from Seventh Fleet was a circular black hole with a radius of nearly eight hundred nautical miles. This included the waters around Japan, Vietnam, Taiwan, and the Philippines. Somewhere in that black hole was the Zheng He and the rest of the Chinese fleet. And she would be expected to find and destroy it.

  She made a request to disable all of the avionics in one of her fighter squadrons, VMFA-323, the Death Rattlers, the only Marine squadron aboard the Enterprise and the only one that still used the antiquated F/A-18 Hornet airframe. She would be given two days to modify the aircraft i
n port, and then whatever extra time she could steal once she got underway. She would, in effect, be refashioning one of her squadrons as a “dumb squadron.”

  The squadron’s commanding officer had stridently objected. He had told Hunt that he wasn’t sure all of his pilots were up for this type of flying—without instruments, by the seat of their pants alone. She had dismissed his concerns, not because she didn’t think they had merit but because she had little alternative. She knew that when they next fought, they would fight blind.

  That was, of course, if she could find the Zheng He.

  * * *

  09:00 May 21, 2034 (GMT-4)

  Quantico

  Wedge just wanted to go home. Back to San Diego. Back to the beach. Back to 06:00 at the gym, to a 08:00 preflight, to a 09:00 first hop, then lunch, then a second hop at 13:30, then postflight and debrief, followed by drinks at the officers’ club and a night spent in a bed that wasn’t his own. He wanted to wear his Ray-Bans. He wanted to surf the point at Punta Miramar. He wanted to talk shit to his buddies in the squadron, and then back that shit up when they did dogfight maneuvers at Fallon Naval Air Station.

  What he didn’t want?

  He didn’t want to be in Quantico. He didn’t want the master sergeant who Headquarters Marine Corps had assigned as his “escort while in the WDCMA” to keep following him around. “What the fuck is the WDCMA?” Wedge had asked the humorless master sergeant, who had shit for ribbons except a bunch of drill field commendations and about a dozen Good Conduct Medals. “Washington, D.C., Metro Area, sir,” the master sergeant had said.

  “Are you shitting me?”

  “Negative, sir.”

  In the weeks since Wedge had arrived back in the States, or CONUS as the master sergeant insistently referred to it, the two had had this exchange numerous times. About Wedge’s denied request to have dinner with an old college buddy who lived near Dupont Circle (“Are you shitting me?” “Negative, sir.”), or the master sergeant insisting on coming with him to the base theater when he wanted to see a movie (“Are you shitting me?” “Negative, sir.”), and, lastly—and perhaps most bitterly—each time his enforced stay in Quantico was extended by at first a day, then two, then a week, and then another (“Are you motherfucking shitting me?” “Negative, sir.”).

  The reason, nominally, for Wedge’s lengthening stay was a series of debriefings. Within the first week of coming home, he had breezed through meetings with officers from CIA, DIA, NSA, State, and even the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. He had explained to them in detail the malfunctions he’d had with the F-35, the series of troubleshooting procedures he’d employed (to include putting a bullet into the avionics—“When all systems became unresponsive, I disabled them manually”—which was met with skeptical looks by the career bureaucrats and defense contractors), and he had gone on to explain his captivity. Or at least what he could remember of it.

  “Tell us a bit more about this Iranian officer.”

  “Guy had three fingers on his right hand, a short temper, and kicked the shit out of me. What more do you want to know?”

  The bureaucrats scribbled studiously in their notepads.

  Wedge was bored. That was the real problem. He spent most of his day sitting around, watching the news. “Thirty-seven ships,” he’d often say aloud, as if from nowhere. Each time he said it he hoped that someone—maybe the buttoned-down master sergeant—would refute him and tell him that none of it had happened; that the Ford and Miller with all their escorts were still afloat; that the whole thing was a dream, an illusion; that the only reality was American greatness. Wedge knew a number of the now-dead pilots from flight school in Pensacola a decade before. “We got our teeth kicked in,” Wedge would say of the battle, running his tongue over his own missing teeth. On his second week in Quantico, he had a four-hour dental appointment, and it was the dentist who revealed the real reason he was being held on base. After finishing her handiwork, a total of five replaced teeth, she held up the mirror so Wedge could take a look. “What do you think?” she asked. “You’ll be in good shape for when they take you over to the White House.”

  Another week passed.

  So that’s what he’d been waiting for, a debriefing at the White House.

  The master sergeant explained to Wedge his brush with celebrity while behind bars, even showing him the #FreeWedge threads on social media. The president was, after all, a politician, so it seemed little wonder she wanted to have a photo op with Wedge. It was a box she needed to check. But their meeting kept getting delayed. All Wedge had to do was turn on the news to see why. The Chinese fleet had disappeared. Vanished. Vamoose. The SECDEF, the chairman of the joint chiefs, even the national security advisor—that chicken hawk Trent Wisecarver—all of them held press conferences in which they made thinly veiled threats in response to “Sino aggression.”

  The Chinese were watching.

  They didn’t respond.

  After weeks of saber rattling, the administration seemed as if it had tired itself out. The first day without a press conference was when Wedge finally received his summons to the White House. On the car ride north from Quantico, he kept checking and rechecking his service alpha uniform the Marine Shop had rush-tailored for him. The president, he was told, was going to present him with the Prisoner of War Medal. She would ask him a few questions, they’d have their picture taken, and he’d be done. As Wedge fiddled with the ribbons on his chest, he kept running his tongue over his new teeth.

  “You look good, sir,” the master sergeant said.

  Wedge said thanks, and then stared out the window.

  When they arrived at the West Wing visitor entrance, it seemed as though no one was expecting them. The Secret Service didn’t have Wedge in the system for a visit that day. Wedge suggested to the master sergeant that maybe they should get a bite nearby; they could grab sliders and a couple of beers at the Old Ebbitt Grill or the Hay-Adams bar and then come back later. The master sergeant wasn’t having it. He kept arguing with the Secret Service uniform division officer, who eventually called his supervisor. This went on for half an hour as phone calls were placed to the Pentagon and Headquarters Marine Corps.

  Then Chowdhury walked past. He knew about Wedge’s visit and volunteered to escort him inside. The master sergeant would have to wait, as Chowdhury was only authorized to escort one person at a time. While he and Wedge navigated through the cramped West Wing offices, Chowdhury apologetically explained, “Since the blackout none of our systems have come back online properly.” He then found Wedge a seat where he could wait. “I know you’re on the schedule for today, but things are pretty fluid at the moment. Let me find out when we’re going to get you in.” And then Chowdhury disappeared into a hive of activity.

  Wedge knew a crisis when he saw one. Staffers hurrying in one direction down the corridor, only to turn around suddenly and head in the opposite direction. Heated conversations taking place in whispers. Phones urgently answered. The men hadn’t shaved. The women hadn’t brushed their hair. People ate at their desks.

  “So you’re him?” said a man who had crept up next to Wedge, a red binder tucked beneath his arm, his frameless glasses balanced on the tip of his nose, evaluating Wedge as though he were a painting of dubious provenance.

  Instinctively, Wedge stood, making a sir sandwich of this introduction. “Yes, sir, Major Chris Mitchell, sir,” he said, as though he was once again an officer candidate on the parade field in Quantico. Trent Wisecarver introduced himself not by name, but by his position, as in “I’m the president’s national security advisor,” and then he weakly shook Wedge’s hand as though he couldn’t muster enough regard for a heartier grip. “Major Mitchell,” he continued, referring to the binder tucked beneath his arm, “you are on the schedule; however, this evening the president has an address to the nation that she’s preparing for. So today has gotten a little busy. I must apologize, but I’ve been instructed to present you with your award instead.” Wisecarver then unc
eremoniously handed over the red binder, as well as a blue box that contained the medal itself. He paused for a moment, searching, it seemed, for the appropriate words, and mustered a paltry “Congratulations” before excusing himself as he rushed off to his next briefing.

  Wedge wandered out of the West Wing to the visitor area, where the master sergeant dutifully waited for him. Neither spoke as they stepped out onto Pennsylvania Avenue and into the public garage where they’d left their government car. The master sergeant didn’t ask for the details of Wedge’s presidential visit. He seemed to intuit the unceremonious nature with which Wedge had been handled, and as if trying to cheer up the major, he reminded him that the next day they could cut his orders. He was now free to rejoin a squadron. Wedge smiled at this, and as they drove down to Quantico the two of them filled the silence with music from an oldies station. Until that station and every other was interrupted by a public service announcement followed by the president’s remarks.

  The master sergeant turned up the radio.

  Wedge stared out the window, into the night.

  “My fellow Americans, hours ago our navy and intelligence services reported the appearance of a large Chinese fleet off the coast of Taiwan, an ally of the United States. In the context of recent hostilities with Beijing, this represents a clear and present danger not only to the independence of that island nation but also to our own. Recent military setbacks have limited our options for dealing with this threat. But, rest assured, those options remain ample. To quote the words of our thirty-fifth president, John F. Kennedy, ‘Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.’ This statement proved true during the darkest hours of President Kennedy’s administration, to include the Cuban Missile Crisis. And it proves true today.