When he was ten years old, he’d put his cardboard box cockpit on the top of the stairs. Wearing his prized helmet, he sat inside. He wanted to feel what it was like to fly. His mother told him it wasn’t a good idea, and though she wouldn’t stop him from trying, she refused to be the one to give him the push. So he balanced his box on the lip of the stairs and then he leaned himself forward. The box tipped over the edge. And he flew . . .
For about five stairs.
Then the front of the box caught the sixth stair. It pitched over, violently. Wedge went face-first into the floor. The crash landing split his lip open. He still had the scar, ever so slight, on the inside of his mouth. He ran the tip of his tongue over it now.
“Can I help you, Major?”
Wedge glanced over the side of the cockpit, to find a senior chief with an unlit cigarette dangling from his mouth. He introduced himself to the senior chief and explained who he was. As he was the new commanding officer of the Death Rattlers, these were, in fact, his planes, so there was nothing to worry about; he could sit where he wanted.
“Your planes, Major?” said the senior chief, gazing out at the Hornets. The ten aircraft were gathered nearest the elevator that led to the flight deck, in the ready position, and crowding out the dozens of F-35s that had proven useless. The senior chief laughed to himself incredulously as he pulled a ladder up to the side of the cockpit. “Your predecessor thought these were his planes too. Admiral Hunt didn’t much appreciate that.”
Wedge had an in-brief with the admiral scheduled sometime in the next week. At the evocation of her name, he chose to listen a bit more closely to the senior chief, who introduced himself only as “Quint” and who Wedge suspected might possess some shred of wisdom to keep him in the good graces of his boss, or at least from meeting the ignominious fate of his predecessor. Quint then powered on the avionics in the cockpit. Any interface with a computer, a GPS, or that could conceivably be accessed online, Quint had disabled. Munitions would be deployed via manual weapons sights and manual releases. Navigation would be performed off charts, with flight times calculated using a wristwatch, pencil, and calculator. Communications would be handled via a custom-installed suite of VHF, UHF, and HF radios. For Wedge, who already knew that his Hornets had undergone some modifications, the tour Quint gave of their streamlined cockpits both under- and overwhelmed him.
It underwhelmed him because—even though he should’ve known better—he couldn’t believe the bare-bones nature of the onboard systems. It overwhelmed him because he couldn’t believe that he would have the chance to fly how they used to fly, before pilots became technicians, which was to say on instinct.
Inadvertently, Wedge succumbed to a heedless smile.
“You all right there, Major?” Quint asked.
Wedge turned toward him, the expression still stamped to his face. “Fine, senior chief. Just fine.” He ran the tip of his tongue on the inside of his lip, tracing the outline of his boyhood scar.
* * *
10:37 July 03, 2034 (GMT+2)
Gdańsk Bay
The destruction of the undersea cables was accepted with equanimity, if not a measure of outright enthusiasm, by Farshad’s old colleagues in the Revolutionary Guard Corps. Major General Mohammad Bagheri, chief of staff of the armed forces, was somewhat more taciturn. A dispatch directly from the general arrived on Farshad’s encrypted laptop within hours. It gave a single instruction: Continue to keep us apprised of all developments. Farshad couldn’t help but wonder what the Russians would come up with next.
The following week, the Rezkiy, Pyotr Velikiy, and Kuznetsov altered their course southward, toward Kaliningrad. Farshad didn’t believe this merited notification of Bagheri’s staff in Tehran. They would, he assumed, be returning to their home port. But when the Kuznetsov held fifteen miles short of Kaliningrad and began preparing for flight operations in Gdańsk Bay, Farshad knew they weren’t returning to port, at least not yet. When the first sorties of Su-34 Sukhoi attack aircraft catapulted off the deck of the Kuznetsov, their wings drooping with munitions, Farshad disappeared into his cramped quarters and quickly fired off another dispatch to his superiors, notifying them of developments but providing no analysis of his own. Farshad knew enough to know that an incorrect analysis of the situation could only be used against him later and that a correct analysis would gain him little. Before he could shut down his laptop, a cursory reply arrived from the General Staff: Acknowledged. Continue to monitor.
Farshad returned to the bridge to find Kolchak in command of the Rezkiy as they circled the Kuznetsov, screening for threats to the much larger carrier, close as they were to the coastline. Farshad could see the shore through his binoculars, a ribbon of dark rocks in the hazy distance. He estimated it was perhaps a dozen miles off. Not even an hour had passed since the first launch of Sukhois and already they’d returned across the coast and were “feet wet,” safely over the water. Farshad observed them through his binoculars: their wings were empty. The Sukhois had dropped their munitions. When the aircraft came a little closer and entered the flight pattern to land on the Kuznetsov, he could make out soot-darkened smudges on the gun ports at either side of the cockpit. The cannons within those gun ports had been firing.
Kolchak saw it too. With his binoculars raised he watched the Sukhois as they landed. “Looks like they got in pretty close,” he said, and then called out a new heading and speed to the helmsman before smiling triumphantly at Farshad, who struggled to know how he should react to his ally’s apparent victory, given that his Russian counterparts had not as of yet taken him into their confidence as to their mission.
As the first sorties landed, refueled, and rearmed, all within sight of the Rezkiy, Kolchak explained to Farshad that aircraft from the Kuznetsov were flying close air support for an invasion force that, at this very moment, was “reclaiming ancestral territories that connect the Rodina to its northern ports on the Baltic Sea.” That these ancestral territories were part of present-day Poland mattered little. Weeks before in the wardroom, Kolchak had foreshadowed Russia’s interests in seizing a ribbon of land that would connect its mainland to its Baltic port at Kaliningrad. While the world’s attention was diverted to the Far East, they would use that crisis to their benefit. “Who will object?” Kolchak now asked Farshad rhetorically. “Not the Americans. They’re hardly in a position to lecture us on ‘sovereignty’ and ‘human rights,’ particularly not after Zhanjiang. As for the Chinese, they understand our actions intuitively. In their language the word for crisis and opportunity are one and the same. Look at the map.” Kolchak fingered it while his cigarette smoldered between his knuckles. “We carve this slice from Poland and connect it to us through Belorussia. The Poles will complain, but they won’t really miss it. And it sews up a tidy ribbon around Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia. They, too, will soon return home to the Rodina.”
Farshad opened his mouth to speak, but his words were drowned out by another section of Sukhois catapulting off the deck of the Kuznetsov. Ribbons of dark smoke began to tower upward on the horizon as the fighters struck their targets and advancing Russian ground forces seized their objectives. Farshad thought to disappear to his quarters belowdecks, to check if he had received another message from the General Staff in Tehran. His Russian counterparts would have thought little of it. They wanted him reporting back their every move, particularly on a day like this, in which each move brought them greater success.
Farshad thought the operation was reckless, even by Russian standards. Poland was a NATO member nation. Perhaps President Putin, now an octogenarian, had made a disastrous miscalculation in his old age. He looked up at the jets and wondered when NATO would respond. American disinterest over the previous decades had crippled the alliance. It felt antiquated, irrelevant, a shadow of its Cold War self. This year it had celebrated its eighty-fifth birthday. But it still had teeth, surely? Maybe not. Maybe of the two octogenarians locked in this conflict, it was Putin who’d kept his teeth over the years.
Before Farshad could send a further report from his quarters there was a commotion on the bridge. A single fighter had threaded its way between the Kuznetsov and the Rezkiy. It had come in low and fast, at less than one hundred feet, so that its twin engines blew ripples across the water’s surface. With the continuous comings and goings of the Russian Sukhois, it must’ve gotten confused in the mix. The aircraft was a MiG-29, its wings clearly marked with the red-and-white checkerboard pattern of the Polish Air Force. Everyone seemed to see it at once: Farshad, Kolchak, the entire crew of the Rezkiy. The collective shock of finding an enemy aircraft at so close a range caused them all to freeze, and in that moment a great silence enveloped them.
That silence was broken when the MiG-29 engaged its afterburners, arching upward, gathering altitude as it bled off speed. One thousand, two thousand, three thousand feet, it hung suspended above the flight deck of the Kuznetsov. Beneath the single Polish MiG, dozens of heavily armed Sukhois and their ground crews were, suddenly, exposed.
The MiG barreled over, nosing downward into its angle of attack.
Farshad glimpsed the MiG’s belly as it pirouetted. It wasn’t even outfitted with a full complement of munitions. Two bombs hung from a single rack; that was it. But that would be enough.
A flash and then a trail of smoke on the deck of the Rezkiy as it fired on the MiG.
The smoke coiled upward.
On the belly of the MiG, Farshad could see the bombs leave their rack, where they hung for a moment, suspended in air. Farshad could also see the profile of the pilot, a determined speck in the canopy. The last thing Farshad saw before the rocket fired from the Rezkiy destroyed the MiG and the twin bombs it attempted to drop, as well as the pilot who never had a chance to eject, was the gun ports on the aircraft.
They were clean, not soot-darkened like the returning Sukhois. Because in the end, after all of the commotion, the pilot of the MiG never got off a shot.
Farshad went belowdecks to send his report to Tehran.
* * *
07:55 July 06, 2034 (GMT+8)
Shenzhen
Lin Bao’s summons from the Politburo Standing Committee had come in the middle of the night. The unmarked transport that flew him off the deck of the Zheng He an hour later wasn’t one of his; it was sourced from another command. There were only two additional passengers aboard, both large, dark-suited men, clearly from one of the internal security branches. Lin Bao thought he recognized them from his last meeting with Minister Chiang in the British Airways lounge, though he couldn’t be sure. Thugs like these usually defied differentiation.
By first light, Lin Bao was sandwiched between those two security men in the back of a black sedan as it wound up a long, twisting ribbon of driveway to its improbable location, the front entrance of the Mission Hills Golf Club and Resort in Shenzhen. To his surprise, when he stepped from the sedan, Lin Bao was met by a lithe twentysomething woman. She had an orchid pinned in her long black hair, wore a name tag that announced her title: hospitality associate. She handed Lin Bao a glass of cucumber-infused water. He sipped it, cautiously.
She escorted Lin Bao along the labyrinthine route to his junior suite, while the two security men disappeared amid the bland furniture of the echoing reception hall. When they arrived in his suite, the hospitality associate gave Lin Bao a quick tour, pointing out the mini-fridge and the sofa that pulled out into a second bed, then drawing back the curtains so he could appreciate the expansive green-lawned view overlooking the more than two hundred holes of golf at Mission Hills. Everything would be provided for Lin Bao, she explained, pulling out a drawer that contained a change of civilian clothes and gesturing to his fully stocked bathroom. She knew he had traveled a great distance, so it was now time to relax. If Lin Bao was hungry, he could order some lunch from room service. She would also send up the valet to clean and press his uniform, which wasn’t appropriate attire at a resort. The hospitality associate was polite and methodical in her speech, missing no detail, her chin raised slightly, the tense line of her throat expressing her words with a practiced efficiency that by the end of their exchange had Lin Bao wondering whether she was employed by the resort or by the same branch of internal security as the darkly suited men who’d brought him this far.
It hardly mattered, Lin Bao concluded as she left him alone.
But not really alone. Lin Bao sat on the edge of the bed, his left hand on his left knee, his right hand on his right knee, his back rigidly straight. He searched the room with his eyes. The air-conditioning vent most likely contained a listening device and pinhole-sized camera. The mirror that hung above the bed most likely contained the same. The hotel phone was certainly monitored. He walked to his window, which overlooked the golf course. He tried to open it—the window was sealed.
Lin Bao returned to the edge of the bed. He took off his boots and his fatigues and wrapped a towel around his waist. He crossed the suite and turned on the shower. A fresh tube of toothpaste was balanced on its cap by the sink. He touched the bristles of the hotel toothbrush; they were damp. Lin Bao brushed with his finger. Before he could step into the shower, a valet knocked on his door.
Did he have any dry cleaning?
Lin Bao gathered his uniform and handed it to the valet, who told him that his colleagues would be ready for him that afternoon. Who those colleagues were, Lin Bao didn’t know, and likely neither did the valet, who left with the bundle of clothes tucked beneath his arm. Lin Bao showered, ordered a light lunch for which he had little appetite, and dressed in the khakis and golf shirt that had been left for him. He sat in a chair by the window and looked out at the nearly vacant course, its acres and acres of grass rolling outward like an ocean.
For the first time, he allowed himself to wonder if he would ever gaze at the ocean again. Since being summoned here from the Zheng He, he’d disciplined himself against such thoughts, but his anxiety got the better of him as he waited in his room. He had heard of such “summonses” before. A national disaster had occurred in Zhanjiang, with millions killed, incinerated, while many others slowly perished in hospital beds around the country—in hospital beds not far from here. Someone would be held accountable. The Politburo Standing Committee would purge what it identified as the single point of failure. Which would always be a person.
Lin Bao suspected that he was perfectly positioned to be that person.
He continued staring at the golf course. What an improbable venue for it all to end.
Hours passed until there was a gentle knock on his door. It was the same pleasant young woman, the hospitality associate. “Were you able to get some rest, Admiral Lin Bao?” Before he could answer, she added, “Do the clothes fit all right?” Lin Bao glanced down at his khakis and shirt. He nodded, allowing himself to smile at the woman and restraining himself from thinking of his own wife and daughter, neither of whom he expected to see after today. Then the young woman said, “Your colleagues are ready for you now.”
* * *
15:25 July 06, 2034 (GMT-4)
Washington, D.C.
Home felt lonely and Chowdhury was trying to spend as little time there as possible. His mother and daughter had left Dulles International two days before, bound for New Delhi. Young as she was, Ashni would’ve asked few questions, but Chowdhury felt compelled to give the little girl an explanation as to where she was going and why—an explanation that approximated the truth. “You’re taking a trip to see where our family is from,” was what Chowdhury had settled on, even though his mother still struggled with the idea that her own brother could be considered family, let alone trusted.
The idea of trust was very much on Chowdhury’s mind as he considered what he had to do next, which was to inform his ex-wife, Samantha, that without her permission or foreknowledge he had flown their daughter across the world, to New Delhi, with an indefinite date of return. As he calculated what lay ahead, Chowdhury thought there existed a two-in-three chance of a strategic nuclear exchange with China. The idea th
at tactical nuclear exchanges wouldn’t escalate to strategic ones seemed wishful thinking at best. And so, he needed to get his daughter a long way from Washington. What Chowdhury understood—or had at least resigned himself to—was that no matter what his ex-wife said, no matter what custody court she dragged him into, no matter what international convention she evoked to have their daughter returned, he would fight and stall and writhe and obfuscate until he felt certain that it was safe for Ashni to come home. And if that day never arrived, then she would never return; he would simply alter his life accordingly.
But he didn’t need to deal with the rest of his life now; he only needed to inform Samantha of what he’d done and brace himself for her reaction. He sent her a text message, asking if they could meet for dinner. It was an odd request, to be sure; the two of them could hardly get on the phone without one hanging up on the other. However, Samantha replied immediately to the invitation—that is, Chowdhury could see the floating ellipses on the message thread, which meant that Samantha was typing, or typing and then deleting, which was likely the case because her reply after nearly a minute read only: Ok.
To which he replied: Name a place.
More ellipses before she answered: City Lights.
He nearly threw his phone across his empty apartment. The choice was so typical of her. Typical of her passive aggression. Typical of her moralizing. Typical of her need—since his one, fleeting infidelity, which led to their divorce—to belittle him whenever the opportunity presented itself. City Lights was a Chinese restaurant.
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