Twilight's Last Gleaming

by John Michael Greer

  His staff gave him worried looks as he made a beeline for his office, closed the door behind him, poured himself a double shot of bourbon and went to his desk. As he settled in the chair, the intercom beeped. “Boss?”

  That would be the phone call from the White House, he guessed, and stabbed at the button with a finger. “What is it?”

  “General Wittkower on the phone.”

  The Pentagon, then. “Can he—”

  “It's about Mel.”

  After a frozen moment: “Thanks, Anne. Put him through.”

  He closed the intercom circuit, picked up the phone. “Ralph? What's up?”

  “We just got the POW lists from the International Red Cross,” Wittkower said. “I had one of my people go through it, and—Pete, Melanie's okay.”

  Bridgeport opened his mouth and tried to say something, could not.

  “She's in a POW camp in a place called Shinyanga in Tanzania. The IRC's got people there right now—I'll have somebody keep you posted once we hear anything else.”

  “Thank you,” Bridgeport managed to say. “Thank you, Ralph.”

  “Sure thing. I figured, might as well tell you myself. Hey, let me know when you've got an evening free for dinner with Holly and me.”

  Bridgeport promised he would, fumbled his way through the courtesies, hung up, and sat there staring at nothing for what seemed like a long time, trying to make himself believe that the news was true.

  25 September 2029: The White House, Washington DC

  “It's shaping up into a major war,” said Barbara Bateson, the acting Secretary of Defense.

  Weed stared up at the map on the Situation Room screen, barely aware of the other members of the National Security Council around him. Yellow against blue sea, the angular shape of the Arabian peninsula hovered there, marked with the green and red symbols of contending armies. Half a world away, Turkish and Iranian forces were locked in combat on the outskirts of Riyadh.

  “Who's winning?” Weed asked.

  “It's impossible to call at this point,” Bateson said. “The Iranian force is larger, the Turkish and what's left of the Saudi forces are better armed. It could go either way, or settle down into a stalemate—a lot depends on whether anybody else gets involved.”

  “So far,” Greg Barnett said, “that's an open question. The Turks have cut some kind of deal with Egypt—they're overflying Egypt's airspace without anybody objecting, and we think there's more involved than that. There are rumors that Egypt's planning to send ground forces and aircraft shortly. We're also pretty sure the Turks are getting technology covertly from the Israelis. Iran's being supplied with all kinds of stuff by China—there's got to have been some kind of payoff for the use of Iran's airspace, and this is probably it.”

  “Do we know whether the payoff includes Chinese cruise missiles?” Weed asked.

  “Not for sure, no. They've had older generation cruise missiles along the Gulf coast since the 1990s, and those have certainly been upgraded—we've had unconfirmed reports that Tehran got a shipment of Russian supersonic cruise missiles as part of the deal they cut with Moscow after the Syrian war.”

  “Which means that our people in Bahrain are sitting ducks,” said Weed.

  “With all due respect, that's overstating the case,” Bateson insisted. “We've got plenty of firepower in Bahrain—enough that the Iranians would face crippling losses if it came to live fire. They can't afford that now, not with the Turks pounding on them.”

  “Tell me this,” Weed said. “Do we have the option of intervening to help the Saudis?”

  An uncomfortable silence settled over the room. “We could,” Bateson said after a moment. “And it might well turn the tide against Tehran. The problem is that our losses would probably be very high. We could hit hard, but we'd take a lot of damage.”

  “If we don't,” Barnett warned, “the Saudis aren't going to forgive us, ever—and whoever ends up in control of the situation is going to be in a position to treat everybody we've got in Bahrain as de facto hostages.”

  “I've been thinking about that,” said Weed.

  He frowned, considering the map on the screen. “Do you think there's any way we can get our people out?”

  Barnett gave him a measured look. “We could, provided that Tehran was willing—and I think they'll be happy to see us go, since that's one more threat they don't have to contend with. But if that's the way we go, any hope of a US presence in the Gulf once this blows over can kiss its ass goodbye—and you know as well as I do how that's going to play in the media.”

  “I know,” said Weed. “Will the other options play any better?”

  No one answered.

  “Draw up plans to get everyone out of Bahrain,” Weed snapped. “Get them on my desk as soon as possible.”

  26 September 2029: Shinyanga District, Tanzania

  McGaffney got out of the car, crossed the dusty parking lot to the front gate of the camp. The guards gave him bored looks, glanced over his papers, found somebody to escort him and waved him in. The war wasn't officially over, but with the ceasefire almost a week old and the global media chattering about the negotiations in Geneva, nobody seemed too concerned about the risk of renewed hostilities.

  Protocol required a visit to the camp commandant, who shook his hand and welcomed him to the camp with an expansive gesture. McGaffney asked a few pro forma questions, noted down the man's answers, and then got permission for the interviews with American prisoners of war his editors had begged him to get.

  Outside, it could have been any other POW camp from any of two dozen recent wars: dust and barbed wire, tents in rows, guards lounging about with guns slung casually from their shoulders, a clutch of Red Cross personnel scurrying about on some errand of their own, and prisoners, thousands of them, looking tired, dusty and sullen. McGaffney let his guide lead him down among the tents, then stopped in front of one at random. “How about this one?”

  The guard shrugged. The tent flaps were open; McGaffney walked up to it, stooped, and said, “G'day. I'm Tommy McGaffney from All Aussie News. If I can bother you for an interview or two?”

  The soldiers gave him wary looks, but made room for him, and once he made it clear that he wasn't going to ask anything they weren't supposed to answer, they loosened up. Yes, they were getting enough to eat and drink; they'd gotten the chance the day before to send notes home to their families and friends via the Red Cross; he got their names and some good printable anecdotes from them, and then thanked them and went on. Down the line of tents and over to the next row, he repeated the same performance, got more story fodder.

  “What's down there?” McGaffney pointed across the way, to a section of the camp closed off behind its own fence.

  “Women's part of camp,” the guard told him.

  “Any reason I can't go there?”

  The guard shrugged, followed him to the nearest gate in the fence.

  He did the same thing there, chatting with a tentful of women; one of them was an Air Force colonel, no less, and she was a looker, too. He noted down her name with the others—Melanie Bridgeport—and wondered briefly where he'd heard the last name before. Half an hour later, after another brief visit to the commandant, he was back in his car, pulling out of the parking lot to head back to Dar es Salaam.

  27 September 2029: Newport News, Virginia

  “In tonight's lead story,” said the anchorman, “another of the Weed administration's claims about the East African war has come under fire. The issue this time? The fate of the US naval task force. Here's Bryan Tuckerman in Newport News with the details.”

  Rumors about the Battle of Kilindini had begun to circulate in the United States within days of the assault on the carrier group, spreading through the internet and the alternative media. The mainstream news programs and websites stayed strictly away from the story—among the rules of the game that old hands in the media taught newcomers to the business were that you didn't contradict the Pentagon when there was a war o
n, and you didn't contradict the president unless the other party had your back. Now that the war was over and Weed couldn't even be sure of his own party's support, though, all bets were off.

  “Here's the official story,” said Tuckerman, standing in front of a gray Navy ship. A clip from one of Weed's public appearances followed; “The task force came under attack from Tanzanian missiles,” Weed said, “and I'm sorry to say that there were casualties on our side. Of course our naval forces responded and destroyed the missile bases.” The clip ended, and Tuckerman went on: “That's true as far as it goes, but reports we've gathered from sailors who were there on the scene make it clear that what actually happened was much worse than the administration is letting on.”

  More than 1,000 crew members from Joint Expeditionary Task Force Three had been evacuated to US bases in the Gulf just before the Battle of Mombasa, and close to half of them were already back in the United States when the nuclear crisis began. It took a chance conversation in a Boston bar to get word to a reporter for one of the television networks, and launch an investigation. That the network in question had close ties to one of Weed's most likely rivals in the 2032 election was simply one more incentive.

  “We had maybe thirty minutes’ warning,” said a chief petty officer from the USS Gridley on screen. “Cruise missiles—a lot of them, a couple of hundred—coming off the Tanzanian coast at Mach 2 or thereabouts. We had all our antimissile defenses going, and my best guess is that we took out two-thirds of the incoming missiles, maybe even three-quarters, but that wasn't enough.”

  “There were fifteen surface ships in the task force,” Tuckerman went on. “According to eyewitness accounts like the one you just heard, four of them were sunk during the battle, three more sank the next day, and another five took enough damage to put them effectively out of action.” Carrier on sandbar, the most famous image of the war came onscreen. “One volley of cruise missiles sank or crippled twelve of those fifteen ships, including the Ronald Reagan, the carrier at the heart of the task force.”

  “None of this should have been any kind of surprise,” said a new face, a professor of military history from Princeton. “For years now, every time the Navy's done an exercise involving swarming attacks, they had to give the carrier group completely unrealistic advantages or this is what they got. The Navy and the nation had so much invested in aircraft carriers, emotionally as well as financially, that nobody wanted to think about what was going to happen if we kept on trying to fight twenty-first-century wars with twentieth-century thinking. Well, now we have to think about it.”

  “In just a moment,” said the anchorman, “the latest news from Hollywood.” The news program gave way to a snack-food advertisement, leaving millions of Americans staring at their televisions with shocked looks, trying to come to terms with the unthinkable.

  Over the days that followed, the other television networks and the big news websites joined the feeding frenzy, finding eyewitnesses and experts of their own. Long before the story had become old news, though, the nation had something else to worry about.

  30 September 2029: Wall Street, New York City

  The market had been losing ground since summer, jolting down hard whenever bad news came from East Africa and never quite recovering on the up days in between. Shuttered during the nuclear crisis—not even the most diehard traders wanted to be sitting in Manhattan when a Russian or Chinese warhead came calling—it opened again on the 22nd, dropped steeply for a few days, then managed to stabilize on light trading. The same evening news program that broke the story of the Battle of Kilindini reported a 12 point gain in the Dow Jones average the previous day.

  When the market opened again on Monday morning, trading on the New York Stock Exchange had opened heavy, with defense industry stocks down hard on a flurry of sell orders from institutional investors. Toward noon, a story about the upcoming Senate hearings appeared on the Wall Street Journal website, naming half a dozen big firms whose executives had already been served subpoenas; there had been dozens of stories like it over the previous week, but that one hit the market at a vulnerable moment, and sparked a wave of selling that spread beyond the original defense firms to include most industrial stocks. When the closing bell sounded, the Dow was down 881 points.

  The next morning, 30 September, was one of the handful of days that would earn a permanent place in Wall Street's history. Traders reading the financial news on commuter trains into New York City got the first glimpse of what was about to happen, as reports from the European markets warned of panic selling in dollar-denominated commercial paper. By the time the opening bell sounded on Wall Street, the panic had spread to US treasury bills, and the dollar was down hard against most other currencies. Stock prices on the US markets opened down sharply from their lows the day before, struggled through the first half of the morning, and then plunged as traders struggled to meet a flood of sell orders at any price.

  By noon it was clear that the market was in serious trouble. In Washington, Treasury Secretary Beryl Mickelson met with President Weed and the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. “Under any other circumstances,” Mickelson said, “I'd advise you to flood the market with cheap credit, but with the dollar on the ropes—”

  “We can't just let the market tank,” Weed protested.

  “The alternative is to risk a run on Treasury paper that would send interest rates out of control, and possibly force a default on the federal debt.”

  Weed stared at her. “What you're saying is we're screwed.”

  “The stock market's expendable,” Mickelson said. “The government's ability to borrow isn't. It's not going to be pretty, but a stock market crash isn't the end of the world.”

  Glumly, Weed nodded. Maybe it's not the end of the world, he thought, but one more blow like this and it's going to be the end of me.

  Word reached the big Wall Street brokerages a half hour later that the federal government was in no condition to bail the market out. Top executives huddled with trading-floor experts, and made the only decision they could: unwind everything. As brokerages began liquidating their own stock positions, what had been a bad day turned into the worst day in Wall Street's history. By the time the closing bell sounded, the Dow Jones average had plunged 2606 points.

  3 October 2029: Beijing

  The little nameless restaurant just outside the Party enclave of Zhongnanhai was more crowded than usual, but Liu had had no trouble getting a quiet table out of earshot of anyone else for his lunch with Fang. When he'd been promoted to the Central Military Commission five years before, and become one of the half dozen or so most powerful men in China, he'd assumed that there was no higher he could climb. Since the war, though, it had become impossible not to notice the difference between being one of the half dozen or so most powerful men in China, and being the hero of the country and almost certainly its next president. He could sense gaps opening around him where once there had been human contact; it was by no means an agreeable feeling.

  Even Fang seemed a little distant, a little preoccupied. Still, they chatted about small things, Fang's promotion to director of the Academy of Military Science among them, while the waiters brought one delectable course after another. Finally, when the meal had reached that pleasant moment when two cups of green tea made everything perfect, Fang cupped his chin pensively in his hand. “There is one other matter,” he said.

  “Ah,” said Liu. “I wondered how soon you would move your chariot.”

  Fang smiled; clearly he had not forgotten the earlier conversation. Then, somber again: “Less an opening move than an inquiry about whether a game might or might not be appropriate. I have been considering the situation in the United States just now, and it occurs to me that there are opportunities that the Motherland might wish to exploit.” He sipped tea. “Or might not.”

  Liu gestured: go on.

  “I certainly don't mean to inquire about state secrets, but it is clear to me that some other country has been funding antigo
vernment propaganda in the United States for years now.”

  “Good,” said Liu. “Four countries, that I know of. You might be surprised if you knew which ones.” In response to Fang's raised eyebrow: “I'll just say that at least one of America's putative allies has recognized that under some circumstances, it might be necessary to turn Washington's favorite game of regime change back onto its originators.”

  “That does surprise me,” Fang admitted. “But the Americans have been preparing to deal with something of that kind for many years now—by my estimate, half their annual Homeland Security budget goes to such preparations. I don't think the same sort of process they tried to use in Tanzania could be used against them with any chance of success—but there are other possibilities, using means that wouldn't draw so much attention. Between the widespread public acceptance of antigovernment propaganda and the shock of this recent defeat, the United States is in an extremely delicate state. The right moves, or the wrong ones, could bring about a crisis of legitimacy that would destabilize it completely.”

  “And result in regime change?”

  “Not at all.” He sipped more of his tea. “In regime collapse. Perhaps partition, perhaps civil war—in any event, the end of the United States as a nation.”

  Liu considered that for a moment. “How would you set out to do that?”

  It took Fang less than five minutes to explain the strategy. By the time he was finished, Liu was staring at him. “That is—brilliant,” he said.

  “Thank you,” said Fang. “But I am far from certain that crushing America completely would be to the benefit of the Motherland. That is yours to judge, General—yours with the other members of the Central Military Commission. I consider it my duty to bring the possibility to your attention.”

  “And for that you have my thanks,” Liu said. His mind was racing, considering the possibilities. “I'll ask you not to mention this to anyone else. If we decide to proceed with this, it must be done in even greater secrecy than Plan Qilin—and if we decide otherwise, nobody must know about it, now or later.”