2034

by Elliot Ackerman

  The next night he arrived for dinner at precisely seven o’clock. Samantha sat discreetly in the back, though the establishment was empty. The hostess led Chowdhury to a corner booth and pulled out the table, as if he might sit next to Samantha. Samantha didn’t stand to greet him, and Chowdhury didn’t sit in the booth; he pulled out the chair across from his ex-wife. The hostess handed Chowdhury his menu and left them alone. Chowdhury already knew what he wanted. He and Samantha used to come to City Lights weekly when they were first married and lived only a few blocks away near Dupont Circle, in a condo she had kept in the divorce settlement.

  The decor hadn’t changed in the intervening years, the plump goldfish in the gurgling aquarium, the reproductions of dynastic woodblock prints on the walls. “Nice choice, Sammy,” Chowdhury said flatly.

  “You used to like this place,” she replied, and then added, “Please don’t call me that.”

  When they’d been at graduate school together, her friends had called her Sammy and her professors had called her Samantha, but the further those years receded, the more she insisted on the formal name.

  Chowdhury apologized—“Samantha”—and explained that given the current geopolitical crisis and his role in it, her choice of a Chinese restaurant seemed to be, “How shall I put this,” he said, “a passive-aggressive move.”

  “You’re the one who asked me to meet you, Sandeep,” she replied, nearly spitting out his name. “Now more than ever, supporting businesses like this one is the right thing.” God, she was insufferable, thought Chowdhury, always so quick to tell you what was or was not the right thing. “Ten million people are dead in Zhanjiang. Why don’t you order the Peking duck, asshole. It’s the least you could do.”

  She flagged down their waiter.

  Chowdhury cupped his hand over his mouth to conceal a smile. Samantha’s attitude and her sense of humor—the two were often one and the same. What he appreciated in her and what repelled him about her had always coexisted, so perhaps their relationship had been doomed from the start. However, this didn’t prevent him from admiring Samantha for the seconds it took her to gain their waiter’s attention and order an entire Peking duck. “What do you want?” she asked him.

  “Just a wonton soup,” Chowdhury answered as he handed the waiter his menu.

  The waiter receded toward the kitchen.

  “Are you kidding me?” said Samantha. “That’s all you’re going to—”

  Chowdhury cut her off, “Just stop.” He could feel his blood rising. “What organization have you got paying you minimum wage while I subsidize your do-gooding with alimony payments? What’s it today? Human Rights Watch? Amnesty International? PETA?” She pushed away the table so she could climb from the booth and leave. It stuttered across the floor and jammed Chowdhury in the ribs, which was enough to bring him back to his senses. “Wait,” he said sharply between his teeth. “Please,” and he made a motion with his hands. “Sit down.”

  She glanced once at him.

  “Please,” he repeated, knowing that what he was about to tell her would likely cause her to get up all over again. She sat down, took a breath, and crossed her arms over her chest. “Thank you,” he said.

  “Why did you need to see me?” she asked. For the first time, Chowdhury wondered about the reasons she had imagined for their meeting: that he’d lost his job; that his mother was sick; that he was sick. Whatever it was, she was carrying the expectation in her rigid posture and the slight frown she wore.

  He blurted out what he’d done with their daughter in a single long sentence: “I won’t be dropping off Ashni to you on Thursday because she’s with my mother in New Delhi staying with my uncle the vice admiral since it isn’t safe here after what we did at Zhanjiang and if you or anybody else believes Beijing won’t retaliate then you’re wrong but we don’t know where that retaliation will come but since we struck their homeland it only makes sense that they’ll strike our homeland and I’m not going to play Russian roulette with what city Beijing decides to target you can judge me all you want and I don’t care because even though I’m an American and even though I work in this administration I am a father first and I have to do what’s best for my—sorry—for our daughter.”

  Chowdhury was breathing heavily by the time he finished. He sat very still. Samantha was equally still as she sat across from him. He watched her intently, searching for her reaction, hoping that she wouldn’t again push back the table and bolt for the door, rushing home to call a lawyer and drag him in front of a judge as she’d taken every opportunity to do over the course of their bitter divorce.

  If Samantha had wanted to get up and leave she was at least momentarily stymied by the arrival of the food. Several long moments passed.

  Finally she said, “Eat your soup; it’s getting cold.” She tucked into her duck, tearing off a leg, peeling back the skin. “I suppose you thought I’d be angry at you about this?”

  Chowdhury made a slight, deferential nod.

  Samantha began to shake her head; she almost seemed amused. “I’m not angry at you, Sandy. I’m grateful that our daughter has someplace to go. Someplace that’s safe. She only has that because of your family, not mine. If anything, I should be thanking you.”

  Chowdhury wanted to say, But this means you might not see her for a long time, and thought better of it. He knew Samantha understood this and was mustering her strength to accept the pain of that conclusion. Chowdhury couldn’t help but admire her. And in this admiration, he couldn’t help but reflect on one of life’s great ironies: namely, how many divorced couples understood each other more completely than many married couples. They had seen each other at their best, when falling in love and constructing a life together; and at their worst, when falling out of love and dismantling that life. Which was particularly excruciating when children were involved.

  “You aren’t going to do anything?” Chowdhury asked her.

  “Like what?”

  Chowdhury knew there was nothing that could be done, for either of them. In Europe, in Asia, here, a crisis was playing out, a global realignment, or you might just call it a war. Events had been set in motion and they would need to resolve before he or Samantha could determine what to do next. But he felt relieved that the two of them, who hadn’t agreed on anything for as long as Chowdhury could remember, had found it within themselves to agree on this one measure to protect their daughter.

  Changing the subject, Chowdhury asked Samantha about her mother, who he knew was sick, or at least increasingly frail. Samantha was traveling one week a month to care for her. Then Samantha began to ask him about work, nothing sensitive, but more of a genteel checking in, the type of non-substantive professional chitchat that comprised most dinner conversations, at least in quieter times. She asked about “the Navy officer who was at school with us, what’s-his-name, do you see him much?”

  Chowdhury spoke with some pride about the work he’d done alongside Hendrickson, who had been a far superior student—as if the fact that the two were now colleagues was proof that he had not been the academic basket case his ex-wife discounted him for. “We’ve all been under a lot of strain,” Chowdhury said between slurps of wonton soup. “Hendrickson is pretty close with the one-star admiral who launched the strike on Zhanjiang, Sarah Hunt.” Chowdhury glanced over his bowl, to see if Samantha recognized the name, as here and there the papers had reported it. Her expression didn’t register anything, so Chowdhury added, “She was one of his students when he taught at the academy. He’s worried about her. It’s a lot to ask of someone.”

  “What’s a lot to ask?” replied Samantha.

  “To have that on your conscience—all those deaths.”

  Samantha paused from pulling a strip of meat off a thigh bone to point a greasy finger at Chowdhury. “Aren’t they on your conscience?”

  Chowdhury flinched, almost as if the light of a projector had been turned on his face. “Stop it,” he said.

  “Stop what? It’s a fair question,
Sandy.” And then Chowdhury’s ex-wife began to hold forth on his moral complicity not only with respect to Zhanjiang, but also with respect to the entirety of American foreign policy, stretching back to the decades before his birth and before his parents’ migration to this country. Chowdhury could easily have formulated counterarguments to the case Samantha laid against him. He could have pointed out that her family, a brood of purebred Texan WASPs, had settled this country centuries before his own, making her the inheritor of every crime from slavery to Manifest Destiny to fracking; but he’d made those arguments before, even though he didn’t believe them himself and fundamentally disagreed with her worldview, in which history held the future hostage.

  Instead he sat and said nothing, allowing her to say whatever the hell she wanted to say. He had gotten what he’d come for. Their daughter was safe. Samantha wouldn’t fight him. This was the only thing that mattered.

  They finished their food and the waiter cleared their plates. Chowdhury caught Samantha glancing at her watch. “If you’ve got somewhere else to be that’s fine.”

  “You don’t mind?” she asked.

  Chowdhury shook his head. When Samantha reached into her purse, he told her to put her wallet away. “I’ve got this.” She protested, and he added, “Please, I’d like to take you out.” She nodded once, thanked him, and also elaborately thanked the staff of the empty restaurant. Then she was gone.

  Their waiter presented Chowdhury with a little dish that contained his bill with a pair of fortune cookies on it. Chowdhury stared vacantly at the cookies and thought about what Samantha had said, about his complicity, about how each of us was bound together, from his ex-wife, to his mother, to his daughter, to Hendrickson and Sarah Hunt, and even to this waiter, who would likely only have one table to serve for the entire night.

  “Is there anything else I can get you?” the waiter asked.

  “Yes, actually,” said Chowdhury. “I’d like to place an order to go.”

  He was returning to an empty apartment and ordered enough food to last him several days—another Peking duck, General Tso’s chicken, mixed fried rice, the works. And as he added to his heaping order, the waiter’s subdued expression raised itself into a smile. While the kitchen got to work, Chowdhury sat there waiting, either end of his fortune cookie pinched between his fingers. He then broke the cookie apart and ate it piece by piece, avoiding the fortune inside, which he didn’t read but instead tore compulsively into little pieces.

  His food was soon ready. The waiter brought out four bags, saying, “Thank you very much,” as he bowed slightly and set them on the table.

  Chowdhury nodded. He looked once more around the empty restaurant before replying, “It’s the very least I could do.” He lifted the bags and headed for the door. On the table all that remained was the little pile of shredded paper for the waiter to brush away.

  * * *

  10:32 July 06, 2034 (GMT+8)

  South China Sea

  The dream changed a little each time. Hunt would be back in Yokosuka, standing on the dock, all of her ships pulling in at once—the John Paul Jones, the Chung-Hoon, the Carl Levin. What altered was how many more ships kept showing up. Now the scuttled Ford and Miller arrived each night. So, too, did the ships from the South Sea Fleet sunk at anchor in Zhanjiang, the carrier Liaoning, the destroyers Hefei, Lanzhou, Wuhan, Haikou, as well as a blur of smaller ships—frigates and corvettes too numerous to count. Their dozens of gangplanks would fall, the boatswains would pipe their calls, and the crews—American and Chinese alike—would spill onto the dock.

  Hunt would be there to meet them. In her dream she is always searching for familiar faces, people like Morris, and like her father. But ever since she gave the order for Zhanjiang, she hasn’t been able to find him on the dock. There are too many ships pulling in at once. She asks for help, but the disembarking crews ignore her or can’t see her—Hunt can’t say which. Are they ghosts? Or is she?

  She remembers what her father told her, the first time she had the dream. She remembers how young he appeared, and the way he took her by the arm and said, “You don’t have to do this.”

  But it had been done.

  The stream of ships, disembarking their thousands—they were the evidence.

  Her father had once said to her that if you could snap your fingers and bring all of the dead sailors in the Mediterranean Sea to the surface, you’d be able to walk from the Strait of Gibraltar to the Port of Haifa stepping on the backs of sailors—Greeks, Romans, Carthaginians, Britons, Germans, French, Arabs, and on and on. War at sea began in the Mediterranean, but it might end here, in the South China Sea. Already, in one strike, Sarah Hunt had killed more people than had died across the millennia in the distant Mediterranean.

  Among the thickening mass of ghosts, she can’t find her father. She’s calling out for him. But her voice doesn’t carry far enough. And even if it did, what could he tell her?

  Nothing—there is nothing he can say to make this crowd disappear so that it could be only the two of them standing on the dock. But she wants to find him, nevertheless. She remembers how he used to take her by the hand and squeeze three times and then she would squeeze four times back. And if she could just feel his hand in hers that might be enough . . . enough to bring back the dead? To forget what she’d done? To be forgiven? Enough for what?

  Night after night she lay in her bed, not quite asleep but not quite awake, asking herself that question.

  It was after one such night that Hunt had an in-brief scheduled with a new pilot who’d arrived on the Enterprise. When she saw who he was, she’d requested this in-briefing. She knew his history, how the Iranians had taken him down over Bandar Abbas in an F-35; knew that he’d spent some weeks in captivity, and that he’d pulled strings—a whole bunch of strings—to receive orders to the Enterprise, specifically to the one Hornet squadron that she had so controversially modified. She also knew, as she sat at her desk studying his personnel file, that Major Chris “Wedge” Mitchell, by either luck or his own design, would be the senior-most pilot in that squadron, making him the de facto commanding officer.

  He stood in front of her desk, throwing out his chest in salute, his body magnificently still and his thumbs pinned to the seam of his flight suit, as he held the position of attention. Hunt let him stand there for a moment while she paged through not only his file but also a few media clippings her chief of staff had included, ones that spoke to his family history, those generations of Mitchells who’d flown fighters for the Marines. When she glanced up, she couldn’t help but notice that his attention was fixed on the photograph hanging on the wall behind her; it was of the John Paul Jones, the Chung-Hoon, and the Carl Levin, sailing in a column. It had been taken less than six months ago, a fact she struggled to comprehend. She wondered if, perhaps, Wedge was struggling to comprehend the same.

  “At ease, Major Mitchell,” she said, shutting his file and welcoming him aboard the Enterprise. She dispensed some pleasantries, asking how his flight out had been and whether he was comfortable in his assigned quarters, to which he replied that everything was fine. Hunt then got to the point. “No doubt you’re aware that I fired your predecessor.”

  Wedge was aware.

  “He didn’t agree with certain of my directives,” she added. “I assume we’re not going to have the same problem.” Before Wedge could answer, Hunt explained how every vulnerable system had been stripped from the cockpits of his Hornets. “Even after your downing at Bandar Abbas and our defeat at Mischief Reef, there’s still a whole swath of officers in our military who cling to a cult of technology. They cannot bring themselves to acknowledge that an overreliance on these systems has crippled us. They cannot imagine how this might ultimately be the source of our recent defeats.” Hunt then described the situation as she saw it, a dire picture in which America’s strike on Zhanjiang made a counterstrike on the continental United States inevitable. “An old friend of mine from the academy is on the White House staff. He insis
ts that Beijing will back down, that we’ve made our point and enforced our red line. He’s as smart as they come . . . and he’s been wrong about most things lately, to include this.” And then she looked at Wedge hard and grim, as if she could see every step that was to come, one following another, events progressing like a dark figure stalking a narrow corridor toward an inevitable door. “They’re going to strike at least two US cities. That’ll be their escalation. We hit one. They’ll hit two. Then we’ll have to choose whether or not to de-escalate. We won’t, of course. We’ll strike back, at least three cities. We won’t use strategic nukes; that’s doomsday stuff, not practical. We’ll keep the nukes tactical. Which means they’ll have to come off a carrier. That means you.”

  A silence followed as she allowed this vision of hers to coalesce between them. Hunt was watching Wedge, closely observing his reaction to the events she’d described.

  Slowly, his smile revealed itself.

  “Does some part of this amuse you?”

  The smile vanished. “No, ma’am.”

  “Then what’s with the smile?”

  “Nothing.” He appeared to be talking to the corners of the room. “Just tension, I guess.”

  But she didn’t believe him. For a certain type of pilot, flying by the seat of your pants on a raid deep into enemy territory held an allure. Romance always attended a particularly daring mission. It also attended a suicide mission. And Hunt needed someone who would regard it as the former instead of the latter. Hunt also needed someone who thought they could make it back—even if they never did. Because a pilot determined to survive would stand a better chance of success.

  Hunt began to review with Wedge some of the modifications made to the avionics in his Hornets, but she didn’t get far before he interrupted her, explaining that he’d already made an inspection of the aircraft.