Twilight's Last Gleaming

by John Michael Greer

  A soft tapping on the hatch awakened him from a nap he hadn't intended to take. In the hall outside was an ensign, who saluted and let him know that the Zheng He would be crossing into international waters in a few minutes, and would he do Captain Kuo the favor of meeting with him in his quarters?

  Chung let the ensign lead him to the captain's stateroom. It was as neat and spare as the rest of the sub, just larger enough than Chung's quarters to provide room for a table and some chairs. Kuo and his executive officer were waiting. The captain was career Navy, Chung guessed from his look, the kind who'd worked his way up from mopping decks on a coastal patrol boat. He got up to greet Chung, exchanged pleasantries, waved him to a seat.

  “So,” the captain said when everyone was seated and the hatch was closed and locked. “I am at least as eager as you are to find out where we are going, and—” He glanced at a clock over on one wall. “We are just now in international waters. Perhaps we can consult your orders.”

  “Of course,” said Chung. He pulled the envelope out of the inside pocket of his coat. Red security stamps showed on both sides. “If you would prefer?”

  The captain waved the offer away. “By all means open it.”

  The envelope, tamperproof plastic, zipped open, and Chung took out the folded papers inside. The uppermost was a folded nautical chart; he set the others down, unfolded it. It showed a section of the central Indian Ocean and an atoll with an unmistakable shape.

  Chung considered it, then glanced at the others. “Of course,” he said. “Diego Garcia.”

  FOURTEEN

  15 September 2029, Endebess, Kenya

  When the message came by radio, Seversky didn't need to guess what it meant. Still, he nodded, told the communications tech to go on.

  “It's Hayakawa, sir. They've got a party with a white flag coming up the road from Kitale. He's asking for orders.”

  “Tell him to get a technical and send ’em in.” Seversky returned the man's salute, walked to the front of the primary school he'd taken over as HQ after the retreat from Eldoret. Back behind the school rose the slopes of soaring Mount Elgon; beyond that was Uganda, where the last satellite photos he'd been able to download from SPACECOM showed a second Coalition force assembling, cutting off the last thin possibility of retreat.

  “General?” One of his aides crossed the room. “What's up?”

  Seversky didn't turn. “We're about to be offered surrender terms. Get the brigade commanders over here.”

  It was maybe fifteen minutes before a technical skidded to a stop in front of the school. Seversky was waiting out front. There were a couple of American soldiers in back, and another man, an officer in Tanzanian uniform.

  The officer climbed down out of the truck, waited for his American guards to follow, and then walked up to Seversky. With a crisp British salute: “You are Lieutenant General Seversky, I believe? Colonel Mohammed Ilumubeke, of the Coalition general staff. I think you know why I am here, General.”

  “Pretty much,” Seversky allowed.

  “You and your men have fought very well, but—” The colonel shrugged. “There is only so much that men can do. The Coalition command has ordered a final assault on your positions. I will not say when, but soon. Maybe you will survive that. Maybe you will survive the next one, too. But—” Another shrug. “The matter is settled; now it is merely a question of how many more of your soldiers must die before this ends.”

  Seversky nodded, once. “I assume you've got terms to suggest.”

  “Of course.” The colonel pulled an envelope from inside his jacket and handed it to him. Seversky opened it, glanced over the sheet of paper, and nodded again. “I'll need time to consult with my staff.”

  “Of course,” the colonel said again. “Twenty-four hours? I think we can allow that much.”

  When the colonel was on his way back to Kitale, Seversky took the sheet of paper back inside. The brigade commanders were waiting, along with what was left of his staff. He handed the paper to the nearest, waited until it had circled the group.

  “Anything from Washington?” This from Isherwood.

  Seversky snorted. “They're, quote, evaluating options for a relief force. Unquote.”

  “Meaning we're on our own,” Isherwood said. Nobody argued with him.

  Seversky glanced around the circle of tense and worried faces. “A month ago,” he said, “if somebody had said I'd be looking at a piece of paper like this one, I'd have said he was nuts. If somebody had said I'd be considering it—” For a moment, the words failed him. “You all know what we're facing. Can we beat the next assault?”

  For a long moment nobody said anything. Martinez, the colonel who led Second Brigade, finally broke the silence. “Probably not. We're down to less than ten rounds per man and dead out of almost everything else. The men'll still fight, but they don't have much left to fight with.”

  That was true in more than a logistical sense, Seversky knew. “Does anyone disagree?”

  Martinez shook his head. Nobody else responded at all, and after a moment Bridgeport realized why. They were in charge of what was left of the 101st, the Screaming Eagles, and one of the proudest records in the US Army stood between them and the choice they had to make.

  “I know,” Seversky said at last. “If I thought we could accomplish anything by it, I'd send back a message saying ‘nuts’ and we'd fight to the last man. But—” His gaze fell. “This isn't Bastogne and Patton's not on the way. We're going to have to face the fact that the US of A has just had its clock cleaned.”

  16 September 2029: Diego Garcia Island

  The last of the boats bobbed to the surface. Chung Ehrwan, who had just hauled himself out of the sea onto another boat, wigwagged a flashlight signal to the rest of the men in the water. A few minutes later, in total darkness, Unit 6628 was on its way in.

  The boats were inflatables with steeply angled radar-deflecting shields, their motors quiet as whispers. The men on board, gleaming in their wetsuits, got their gear stowed and crouched low, so that radars on shore would miss them. All the skills they'd learned in endlessly repeated drills, and tested in clashes with the Vietnamese and Filipinos on the barren, oil-rich little islets of the South China Sea, were about to face a much harsher test. Chung had reminded his men of that in the last briefing aboard the submarine, reminded them also of the Hainan bombing they were about to avenge.

  There were six of the inflatables, and six strike teams, each with its own mission. Invisible in the night, Diego Garcia lay due north.

  An hour later, one at a time, the men slipped off the boats and plunged into the sea to make the final approach. When it was his turn, Chung slid off the stern, hung there in the water for a moment, and then hit the button that let the air out of the boat and filled it with sea water instead. As it sank, he pushed his rebreather mouthpiece into place and pulled down his goggles, then followed the boat down, hauling out the anchor as it went. A few minutes later, with the anchor neatly wedged into the coral and the boat safe from tides and currents, Chung pushed off from the bottom and swam into shore.

  The beach was narrow and steep, with plenty of cover. Chung crossed it with his bag of gear, got into the tangled tropical brush just behind. The soft click-click of a signal led him to his strike team's meeting point. As he made sure every member of the team had his silenced weapons and explosive charges, and the two men with the mortar were ready to do their part, he had to fight off the conviction that this was just another exercise.

  At zero two thirty local time, they left the meeting point and headed for the nearest service road. A quarter mile up they passed a dark shape sprawled awkwardly in the ditch alongside the road: the Humvee that had been patrolling the road, with both soldiers inside neatly headshot. Chung nodded; so far, the plan was going as it should.

  He passed more corpses as his team closed in on its first set of targets, one of the guarded island's main radar installations. The corpses were the work of the first two strike teams, whose
job was to eliminate sentries and maintain mission security; the other four were there to destroy a set of targets and then secure the airfield. The orders did not specify what would happen after that, but Chung thought he could guess.

  Zero three hundred. Chung signaled, and four of the team members headed in toward the radar installation in pairs. The two with the mortar found a good location, and Chung stayed with them. His team would regroup there, move on to the next target, keep going until the mission was completed or every member of the team was dead. He stared into the night, waiting for the flash of the first explosive charges against the radome supports.

  All at once, further up the island, an explosion flared: one of the other teams had gotten to its target first. Chung signaled, and the mortar went flash-whump, sending the first shell on its way.

  16 September 2029: Above the Indian Ocean

  The flight plan they'd been given in Kunming was simple enough—southwest over Burma and the Bay of Bengal to just south of the equator, then west-southwest to Tanzania, refueling air-to-air from tankers out of the PLAAF base at Trincomalee in Sri Lanka. What bothered Captain Kwan Wenshang was the packet of sealed orders he'd been handed at the last minute, and by no less than a PLA general. He was to open them, the general told him, at a certain point along the way, and take action accordingly.

  There were eight Y-8 transports in the flight, with a dozen J-20s for fighter cover—their flight path took them far too close to the American base at Diego Garcia for comfort. Each of the Y-8s contained close to a hundred PLA infantrymen and all their gear, part of an elite airborne brigade, headed for the fighting in East Africa and a potential landing under fire on a Kenyan airfield. That was the official plan, at least. Exactly what would happen after he opened the orders was much on Kwan's mind.

  “Sir?” The navigator turned. “You wished to be notified—”

  Kwan nodded his thanks, pulled out his sealed orders and opened them. He read through the packet once in disbelief, then a second time, carefully. Then he turned to the communications officer, and handed him a card.

  “You will search for radar transmissions of these types,” he said. “Let me know at once what you find.”

  The Y-8 had the latest radar-detection gear, and it took the communications officer only a few moments to find the broadcast. “Sir,” he said, “we're receiving two of the signals, but not the others.” A moment later: “That's odd. One of the two has just stopped.”

  “If the other stops,” Kwan said, “inform me at once.”

  The transport flew on. Outside, the night rushed past. After a few more minutes: “Sir, all the radar signals are gone.”

  “We are under new orders,” Kwan said then, pitching his voice so that everyone in the cabin could hear him. “We will be landing under fire at Diego Garcia.” He handed a chart and a new flight order to the navigator, a set of instructions to the communications officer. “Let the others know.” Then, rising, he turned and left the cockpit.

  The soldiers looked up as he appeared in the door to the main cabin and brought his hand up in a crisp salute. Their commander, obviously surprised, stood and returned the salute. “Your mission has just been changed,” Kwan told him. “Here are the new orders.”

  The officer glanced at the papers, at him, then read the papers and drew in a sudden sharp breath. He looked up at Kwan, then. “How long until we land?”

  “Maybe forty-five minutes.”

  “We will be ready.”

  “Excellent.” He saluted again, went forward into the cockpit.

  Over the minutes that followed, the communications officer finished passing on the new orders to the other transports and the J-20s. Kwan, leaning forward in his seat, stared through the windscreen at the night ahead. The orders said very little about what would be waiting for them on the ground. If the airfield was held by the enemy, or their antiaircraft missiles were still in working order—

  He dismissed the thought, reviewed the orders one more time.

  Finally, off in the distance, dim points of light became visible. The J-20s hurtled ahead; ground attack wasn't normally a mission assigned to the long-range fighters, but Kwan had no doubt they could do plenty of damage to targets on the island, and draw out any antiaircraft missiles before the more vulnerable transports came into range. As the points of light came closer, Kwan's Y-8 sank down to within a dozen meters of the sea, and the others followed, flying low and fast toward the guarded island.

  15 September 2029: The White House, Washington DC

  Jameson Weed stared out the windows of the Oval Office, wishing he could take that fishing trip he'd planned months ago. The first hint of fall was in the air; it was a perfect afternoon, bright and clear, the kind of day when sitting by a trout stream and casting a fly onto the water was the best possible answer to the pressures of the world's toughest job.

  No chance of that, though, not now.

  The National Security Council and the Joint Chiefs would be arriving in minutes. He paced back over to the desk, read the message on the computer screen, tried to think of some way to spin it that would add up to something short of political disaster. Nothing came to mind. How do you tell a nation that's never lost a war that it's about to lose one?

  No point in delaying the inevitable, though. He picked up the phone, dialed his press secretary. “Susan? I want a press conference at seven this evening.” He paused, listening. “No, it's bad news—really bad. No questions afterward; there'll be a full briefing later on, time and place TBA.” Another pause. “That'll be fine. Thanks.”

  He put the phone down. As he turned away, it rang. He picked it up, snapped, “Yes?”

  Greg Barnett's voice answered, tense with worry. “Jim, we've got another problem.”

  Oh fuck, Weed thought. Just what I need. “What's up?”

  “We've lost contact with Diego Garcia. Everything went down right after 3 am local time—four in the afternoon here.”

  The words landed like a physical blow. Weed guessed what that meant, flailed for an alternative. “Something technical?”

  “I wish. No, NRO just got satellite images, and there are planes on the runways that aren't ours.” Weed could hear the man draw in a breath. “You wanted to know when we'd get a response from the Chinese. This is probably it.”

  16 September 2029: Diego Garcia Island

  The Marine units on Diego Garcia were as tough as any in the US military, and given any kind of warning, they might have had a chance. The problem they faced was that each blow came with no warning at all. The explosions that took out the island's radar, antiaircraft defenses, and communications links were the first sign anyone had that anything was wrong. By the time the Marines had established a defensive perimeter and started closing with the first wave of raiders, air-to-ground rockets started slamming into buildings around the airfield, vaporizing the island's fighter planes and forcing the Marines to take cover. Then the J-20s shot past at treetop level, banked and turned, fired more rockets into the American positions. As they came back around for a third pass, the first of the transports came down onto the airfield's main runway, swerved to the side as soon as it slowed to taxiing speed, and began to spill soldiers onto the airfield. Behind it came another, and another, and another, until all eight transports were on the ground and more than 700 of the PLA's best combat troops were spreading out around the airfield.

  “Another force is on its way, sir,” Kwan explained to Major Chung. They were standing in an undamaged maintenance building just off the main runway, the temporary headquarters of the Chinese forces on Diego Garcia. Gunfire could still be heard in the middle distance. “My orders give no details, but I was instructed to send a message via satellite as soon as I was certain the airfield could be secured.”

  “When did you send the message?”

  “The moment we landed.”

  Chung grinned. “Excellent. If they're coming from Trincomalee they should be here in a matter of hours.”

  Voices
sounded outside the building, in Chinese and American English. Chung and Kwan both turned. Three PLA infantrymen came in, escorting an American wearing a bathrobe and pajamas. “Sir,” said one of the infantrymen, saluting. “Rear Admiral Wanford, the American commander.”

  The American looked at once dazed and outraged. He looked from Kwan to Chung and back again, apparently decided that the man in the uniform outranked the one in the wetsuit, and addressed Kwan in English. “What the hell is this supposed to be about?”

  “Admiral,” said Chung in the same language, “your nation launched an air attack on mine a few days ago. You may consider this a repayment.”

  The American's mouth opened and closed several times, but no sound came out. “I regret,” Chung told him then, “that our facilities for prisoners of war are fairly primitive at the moment. We will change that as soon as more of our soldiers land and finish securing the island. Did you have anything else to say? No?” He turned to the infantrymen, and in Chinese: “Keep him apart from the others. See that he stays safe and under guard.”

  The soldiers saluted and led the American away.

  16 September 2029: The Kremlin, Moscow

  “You are absolutely certain of this?” Kuznetsov said. The president was dressed in pajamas, slippers and a bathrobe. Any other time, someone might have joked about that, but the faces that turned toward him at that moment were tense with worry.

  “Yes, sir,” said the duty officer at the intelligence desk, and tapped keys on the keyboard in front of him. “Here are the latest intercepts from Krasnodar.”

  Kuznetsov leaned over the man's shoulder, read the text on the screen, and nodded. Straightening up: “Get me Bunin.” An orderly saluted and hurried away, and Kuznetsov turned to face the others. “All our conventional and strategic resources are to be put on alert at once. The Americans are not going to take this calmly.”