2034: A Novel of the Next World War

6 The Tandava

Lin Bao was alone when the first images came in. He’d arrived at the Defense Ministry three hours before the strike, sequestering himself in the conference room, and he waited. The Zheng He had dispatched long-dwell drones, whose radar and infrared profiles were the size of gnats, over San Diego and Galveston. The static-filled live feed projected ghostly gray onto a screen at the far end of the room. While Lin Bao sat in his armchair at the head of the table, he listened to the drone operator’s disembodied voice as it described what it saw: the blast circumference of the crater; the black rain of several pyrocumulus clouds; the otherworldly annihilation of two cities, which appeared as though a wrathful deity had inhaled them up from the earth. The voice was giving words to this single greatest act of human destruction. The more it spoke, the more it took on larger proportions, so that to Lin Bao it soon sounded less and less like the voice of a man and more as though it were the voice of God Himself.

If Lin Bao possessed any reservations about his decision to leave the Navy and government service, watching the fallout over San Diego and Galveston gave him complete conviction that his time as a military officer was through. The only question was how to extract himself safely — not a small task, he realized. After their meeting at Mission Hills, Zhao Leji had, by default, made himself Lin Bao’s direct superior. Even though no table of organization existed that showed Lin Bao and Zhao Leji in the same chain of command, no official would accept Lin Bao’s resignation without Zhao Leji’s explicit approval.

And so Lin Bao could submit his resignation to one person alone: Zhao Leji.

However, since leaving Mission Hills, he and Lin Bao had had no direct communication. Not a telephone call. Not a meeting. Not an email. Zhao Leji had become a ghost, as distant and disembodied as the drones circling the destroyed American cities.

Although Lin Bao had heard nothing from Zhao Leji, he did nothing without the old man’s tacit approval. That formal approval would, of course, never arrive with Zhao Leji’s name on it, or anyone else’s name on it for that matter. The Politburo Standing Committee expressed itself in the language of bureaucratic obfuscation. Direct intent from an individual (or a collection of individuals) was laundered through existing offices, and not infrequently through nonexistent ones. The routing on any memo — the “FROM:”—often took up the entire first page. Names hardly ever appeared, only those obscure office titles. If a decision from the Politburo Standing Committee went awry, one of these intermediary offices could take any or all of the blame.

As Lin Bao watched the live feed from the Zheng He, one of these bureaucratic messages sat on the desk in front of him. Like the strike’s launch order, it had arrived in a sealed envelope. It, too, had an extensive administrative routing directive on its first page. Lin Bao wondered what would happen if he composed his letter of resignation with a reverse of this routing? Like a trail of bread crumbs, would it lead back to Zhao Leji and the Politburo Standing Committee? He doubted it. He knew, instinctually, that a matter as sensitive as the resignation of a senior admiral couldn’t be handled through such channels. If only his departure was as simple as properly formatting a memo.

His thoughts inexplicably turned to the one-way radios on the Soviet tanks during the Second World War, that cautionary case study at the US Naval War College about overly centralized command structures. His wife and daughter had loved Newport, the winter snowstorms spent huddled by the fireplace and that single glorious summer when on weekends they would rent a dinghy from Goat Island and then let out full-sail, passing beneath the Claiborne Pell suspension bridge as they headed toward the hulking gray facade of the historic Naval War College, where they’d beach their dinghy and spread a picnic on a blanket in the sand. With his shoes off, reclining alongside his family, Lin Bao had talked about his retirement back then too. His idea: to teach at the war college.

He smiled self-consciously even thinking of it. How preposterous it seemed now.

The disembodied voice interrupted: “Twenty-two minutes on-station time remaining. Standing by for additional taskings….” The combat information center on the Zheng He responded, sending the unmanned flight out into the spectral blast-scape to further confirm what was obvious at a glance: the destruction of everything.

I would have taught history, thought Lin Bao, his mind wandering as he considered the live feed. His dream to teach was one that he didn’t speak of to anyone, not even his wife. Had he acted on it those years ago he never would have made admiral. He would have retired from the Navy as a commander, a respectable rank. His dual US citizenship and his doctorate would have been enough to land him a job. As a former Chinese naval officer, he would have brought a unique perspective to the faculty. He had never quite relinquished the dream. Over the years, he had composed a curriculum for a few classes in his mind. He never dared write them down; that would have made the dream too real, and deferring it too painful.

He imagined himself at the lectern discussing the ancient Greeks to his American students: “The First Persian War, in which Miltiades defeats Darius at Marathon in 490 BC, leads to the Second Persian War, in which the Athenian navy commanded by Themistocles destroys the Persian navy under Xerxes at Salamis in 480 BC. Ten years of war gives the Greeks fifty years of peace, a golden age. The Athenians secure peace on the Hellespont through the Delian League, a mutual-security pact in which the other Greek city-states pay Athens a tribute to protect them against future Persian aggression. Sound familiar?” Lin Bao would then imagine himself looking out at his class, at their blank expressions, in which the past held no relevance, in which there was only the future and that future would always be American.

Then, in his imagined class, Lin Bao would tell his students of their past but also of their future. He would explain how America’s golden age was born out of the First and Second World Wars, just as Greece had found its greatest era of prosperity in the aftermath of the two Persian Wars. Like the Athenians with the Delian League, Lin Bao would explain how the Americans consolidated power with mutual-security pacts such as NATO, in which they would make the largest contributions in exchange for military primacy over the western world — much as the Athenians had gained military primacy of the then-known world through the Delian League.

Lin Bao would always wait for the question he knew was coming, in which one of his students would ask why it all ended. What external threat overwhelmed the Delian League? What invader accomplished what the Persian fleet could not at Salamis? And Lin Bao would tell his students that no invader had come, no foreign horde had sabotaged the golden age forged by Miltiades, Themistocles, and Greece’s other forefathers.

“Then how?” they would ask. “If the Persians couldn’t do it, who did?”

And so, he would say, “The end came — as it always does — from within.”

He would explain this patiently, like a father telling a beloved child that the Easter Bunny or another cherished fairy tale didn’t exist, and while his students’ puzzled expressions fixed on him, he would tell them about the jealousy of the Spartans, the fear they felt for the broadening powers of the Delian League. He would also tell them about Athens, drunk on its own greatness, blinded by narcissism and decadence. “Look over the ages,” he would assert, “from Britain, to Rome, to Greece: the empire always rots from within.” Most of his students, he knew, would underwhelm him. They would stare back in disbelief, or even hostility. Their assumption would always be that the time in which they lived could never be usurped; it was singular, as they believed themselves to be singular. Endemic dysfunction in America’s political life hardly mattered because America’s position in the world was inviolate. But a few of his students, their faces clear in his imagination, would return his stare as if his understanding had become their own.

What Lin Bao wondered now, as he watched the last of the live feed, the skeletal remains of buildings, the rush-hour commute left incinerated on the highway, was what rank those few American students would hold today. Some would likely be admirals, like himself.

What if he had retired early? What if he had taught and reached a few of them?

Would there have been a Zhanjiang? A San Diego? A Galveston?

Probably so, but he allowed himself to conjure an alternative history, one in which the miscalculations of the past four months had not occurred, one in which incidents like the Wén Rui and battles like Mischief Reef and Taiwan had never happened. Perhaps a single dissenting voice, properly applied, had prevented this collective madness. The historian in him couldn’t resist placing these events into a causative order, in which each became a link in an otherwise interruptible chain, one that had bound them to this moment, where Lin Bao — seated at the conference table, staring at the live feed — was witnessing the single greatest act of destruction in the history of mankind.

But there was nothing he could do about any of this.

The task before him was simple: to observe the last of the live feed and to pass along to the Zheng He the order that sat in front of him on the table. It tasked the carrier and its escorts to return from the Pacific to the South China Sea at best speed to “defend against the American threat in our waters.”

Another fifteen minutes had passed.

The drone operator continued to survey the blast-scape. Then, with fuel running low, he announced that he’d be checking off-station in seven minutes. With his hollow, disembodied voice, the drone operator radioed to the Zheng He, asking whether they had any further taskings.

The Zheng He had none.

Next, the drone operator called to the Defense Ministry and asked if they had any further taskings. Lin Bao picked up the handset on the satellite uplink, connecting him directly to the drone operator. He said the Defense Ministry had no further taskings.

There was a moment of silence.

The drone operator again asked if the Defense Ministry had any further taskings. Lin Bao repeated himself into the handset.

Nothing.

There’d been some breakdown in communications. A member of Lin Bao’s support staff rushed into the conference room, untangling wires beneath the table, toggling switches on and off at the back of the satellite uplink, while Lin Bao repeated over and over again that he’d seen enough, that he had no further taskings, that he didn’t need to see any more.

There was no response.

Lin Bao kept repeating himself. He was frantic to deliver his message, frantic to hear a response on the other end of the line from that hollow, disembodied voice.

Vice Admiral Patel immediately ordered two taxicabs, one for Farshad and the other for his nephew. The three of them hardly spoke as they waited. Farshad never considered himself a prejudiced man — in his mind bigotry was a safe harbor for weaklings. However, all through his life, he’d noticed how on the few occasions he’d met an American he’d immediately recoiled at their presence (he had a similar reaction to Israelis, though had an easier time self-rationalizing this response as something other than bigotry). But when Farshad witnessed Chowdhury’s palpable grief as the first reports came in from San Diego and Galveston, he couldn’t help but feel something akin to pity. What he did next not only surprised his American friend but also surprised himself. As the two sat next to each other on the love seat in the admiral’s den, Farshad reached over and placed his right hand consolingly on the American’s left arm.

The first taxicab arrived. There was no question that Chowdhury would be taking it instead of Farshad. The American’s need was more urgent. As his uncle shuttled him to the door, he turned to Farshad and said, “Thank you.” Farshad said nothing in return. He suspected that the American was thanking him for the gesture from before, but he couldn’t be certain. He reminded himself never to trust an American.

Farshad asked Patel when the second taxicab would arrive. Instead of answering, Patel invited Farshad to sit with him a little longer in the den. Farshad made a slight protest — he, too, had to check in with the officials at his embassy — but Patel ignored him. “How about a cup of tea?” he said.

Farshad’s patience was running low, but he gathered up enough composure to accept the invitation. Somehow, despite himself, he trusted this old admiral. Patel disappeared into his kitchen and returned with the pot of tea. He sat next to Farshad on the love seat, their knees almost touching as Patel prepared Farshad’s cup and then his own. Patel exhaled heavily. “A tragedy, this.”

Farshad frowned. “Inevitable,” he replied, and then blew curlicues of steam from the surface of his cup.

“Inevitable?” asked Patel. “Really? You don’t think this could’ve been avoided?”

As he thought of the annihilation of two American cities, Farshad considered the ancient antipathies that existed toward the United States, deep antipathies, not merely those of his own nation but those of all the world. It was America’s perpetual overreach that had led to today’s events. How long could one country continue stoking up resentment before someone eventually struck a mortal blow? His word choice had been correct: inevitable.

He checked his watch and again asked about the cab. Patel ignored the request. “I can’t say that I agree with you,” he began. “This conflict hasn’t felt like a war — at least not in the traditional sense — but rather a series of escalations, each one greater than the last. But a single break in this chain of escalation could defuse the entire conflict and halt this cycle of violence. That’s why my word is tragic, not inevitable. A tragedy is a disaster that could otherwise have been avoided.” Patel took another sip from his tea, and Farshad could feel the old admiral’s gaze from over the rim of his cup. If Patel was searching for agreement, he would have none. Farshad sat rigid in his seat, his shoulders swept back, his hands in his lap. His face expressed nothing. Patel continued, “You above all others should know that today could have been avoided. You were on the bridge of the Rezkiy when the Russians sabotaged the undersea cables. The Americans never would have launched at Zhanjiang had that accident not occurred. That’s another word for you: accident.” Instead of three syllables Patel spoke it in one, spitting it out, its falseness in his mouth like a bite into spoiled fruit.

Farshad became defensive. He offered other words, like miscalculation and unintentional, to describe what the Russians had done in the Barents Sea. But he knew they were lies and soon retired them, drawing silent and resigning himself only to, “How did you figure out that I was on the Rezkiy?”

“You just told me,” Patel replied.

Farshad smiled. He couldn’t help it; he liked this wily old man.

Placing Farshad on the Rezkiy was a simple act of deduction on Patel’s part — Farshad had flown through Moscow, and how many Iranian liaison officers did Tehran have assigned to the Russian fleet? Not many. Patel now asked his Iranian counterpart to engage with him in a similar deductive exercise. The Indian government, Patel explained, wanted its ship back from the Revolutionary Guards. Patel understood that unlike the Russians in the Barents Sea, the seizure of the privately owned tanker was an actual miscalculation that had led to an impasse between their two governments. After laying out the facts as he saw them, Patel expounded on “the unique position of our two countries.”

According to Patel, arbitration of the Sino-American War now fell to India. Among the nations of the world, events had conspired to make New Delhi the best interlocutor between Washington and Beijing, and it would take Iranian cooperation as well. Only their countries had a chance of ending the hostilities. He alluded to “sweeping actions” his government might be called upon to take in the coming days. “Without our intervention,” Patel explained, “the Americans will counterstrike, and the Chinese will counterstrike the counterstrike. Tactical nuclear weapons will turn into strategic ones. And that will lead to the end. For all of us…. But our intervention can work and will only work if it’s allowed to unfold freely, if no other nation interferes.” Patel turned to Farshad. Like a spouse begging their partner to give up a lover, he said simply, “When I say interference, I’m talking about the Russians.”

Farshad understood. He knew that Patel saw the Russians clearly, just as he and his government saw them clearly. Farshad found himself thinking of Kolchak, who could trace his lineage to the Imperial Navy, his ancestors having served on both the tsars’ dreadnoughts and on the Soviets’ guided missile cruisers. Within four generations Kolchak’s family had veered from imperialist to communist to capitalist — at least the current Russian version of capitalist. Did this mean that Kolchak’s character, and that of his ancestors, was unprincipled and opportunistic? Or did it simply mean that he came from a people who had always done what they must to survive?

“The world is in disarray,” said Patel, who took another sip of his tea, placing the cup delicately on its saucer. “Do you think the Russians won’t continue to take advantage of that? Do you think they’ll stop with a ribbon of land in Poland?” Patel didn’t wait for an answer; instead, he began to shake his head at Farshad. “You’re next. The Strait of Hormuz is next.” Patel then explained, in great detail, a Russian plan to seize Larak and Hormuz Islands, two rocky, treeless outcroppings strategically positioned in the center of the strait. “From those islands, their fleet could close down all maritime traffic. They could choke off the export of oil from the Gulf, skyrocketing the price of Russia’s own oil. A nice little piece of extortion, don’t you think?”

Farshad had drawn silent. Eventually, he asked, “Why are you telling me this?”

“I thought you’d be grateful,” scoffed Patel. “You should be.”

Farshad allowed the silence to return between them, and in that silence was an affirmation that he, like Patel, understood that nothing was granted for free. If this information was true, there would be a price associated with it. If it were a lie, Patel wouldn’t ask him for a thing. Farshad sat on the love seat and allowed the old admiral to make his request. “We need your help,” Patel eventually said. “First, we need our tanker released. Its seizure has caused quite a stir here, and that has been, well… embarrassing for us. However, and more importantly, when our government takes decisive action, it’s very probable that the Pakistanis might use that as an opportunity to stir up trouble, perhaps an attack on Kashmir, or some domestic terrorism sponsored by one of their ISI surrogates. When it comes to the Pakistanis, emotions run very high in our country. Perhaps you can understand how this would prove a — how shall I put this? — a distraction.”

Farshad understood. Certain national identities were defined by certain national antipathies. What was more Persian than hating an Israeli? More American than hating a Russian? Even if Patel wouldn’t divulge what “decisive action” his country was planning to take, Farshad understood that like a pack of distracted children swarming a soccer ball, a crisis with the Pakistanis might prevent the politicians in New Delhi from acting strategically. What Farshad didn’t understand was how he and his country were in a position to forestall Pakistani aggression.

“The Pakistanis won’t move without Beijing’s approval,” Patel stated flatly. “You’ve got the ear of the Chinese. Convince them to keep their Pakistani allies on a leash. That shouldn’t be too difficult, should it?”

“And the Russians?” asked Farshad.

Patel gathered their two empty cups of tea and disappeared into the kitchen. When he returned, he was carrying a thick manila folder. “Our intelligence services have intercepted their plans,” he said. “It’s all here.” Patel handed over the folder, which detailed how a Russian Spetsnaz division, supported by a carrier battle group, would seize the two lightly defended Iranian islands in the strait. The entire operation would take a single day. Farshad skimmed the documents with a growing sense of alarm. There wasn’t much time to avert this disaster, a week at best.

The doorbell rang. It was the taxicab.

“The driver will take you to the airport,” said Patel.

“The airport?”

“I imagine you want to get back to Tehran, to speak with General Bagheri. We’ve booked a flight for you. Pass along my regards. Tell him that we’re happily anticipating news that our freighter has been released and that we’re very much looking forward to our partnership.”

Outside the window, the driver stood by his taxi.

“What is this ‘decisive action’ you keep referring to?” Farshad asked. “General Bagheri is going to want to know.” Farshad remained on the sofa, cemented in place as if his returning to Tehran might be contingent on this last piece of information.

Patel gave Farshad a long, appraising look. “What we’re going to do next will be dramatic,” he answered. “But it will end this war. Will you trust me?” Patel placed his hand on Farshad’s arm.

Over and over again, Chowdhury kept calling her. Sitting in the back of the taxicab on the way to the embassy, he was in a panic. Samantha wouldn’t answer her phone. He kept dialing and dialing.

Nothing.

His former mother-in-law, that Texan WASP Chowdhury had never felt any affinity for, lived in Galveston, her health failing, her only enjoyment the ocean air and those periodic visits from her daughter.

As he crossed from the east to the west bank of the Yamuna River, Chowdhury tapped out an email to Samantha: Have tried you many times. Please call — Sandy

A new email popped into Chowdhury’s in-box, an out-of-office reply from Samantha. I will be away from my desk and in Galveston on a family matter until Monday, July 24th. If the issue is urgent, please try my cell phone.

Like that, she was gone.

The grief Chowdhury felt wasn’t for the loss of her; the two hardly had a relationship. It was for his daughter—their daughter. How many times over the years had he secretly hoped that Samantha, his stalwart antagonist, might vanish in such a way? Lost in a plane crash. Incinerated in a fire. Killed in a car wreck. He had, guiltily, harbored such fantasies. However, had any of these fantasies proven true, it would’ve left Ashni motherless. And now that Samantha was gone, his guilt was as acute as if he’d killed her himself. In fact, he couldn’t quite convince himself that he hadn’t.

When he arrived at the embassy, it was eerily quiet. He had expected to find a hive of activity as the ambassador responded to this crisis. Instead, the halls were mostly empty. Here and there, clusters of staff gathered around one cubicle or another. From the hushed tones of conversations, Chowdhury assumed the cubicles’ occupants had lost a loved one in the attack. Otherwise, the mood was stunned silence.

Chowdhury shut the door to the temporary office he’d been assigned. Though he didn’t wish to admit it, he, too, was stunned. As he logged into his email, he hoped to find something that might recall him to his senses. At the top of his in-box there was a message from Hendrickson. The subject line was empty, and even though they were communicating on a classified system, the text was cryptic: Our orders arrived. What do you hear? — Bunt

Chowdhury knew those orders were for a counterstrike led by the Enterprise. It would be against the Chinese mainland. The days of indirect strikes — at power grids, or disputed territories like Taiwan — were over. The counterstrike would follow this pattern of escalation. Zhanjiang had led to San Diego and Galveston, so the next logical step after the destruction of two American cities would be the destruction of three Chinese ones. The only question was which cities, a detail that Hendrickson had no doubt received in the recently arrived “orders.”

While Chowdhury sat in front of his screen struggling to compose a response, his cell phone rang.

It was his uncle. “Our Iranian friend just left.”

“To where?”

“Home,” said Patel. “Are you at the embassy?”

Chowdhury told him that he was.

“Nothing’s going to get accomplished there,” said his uncle. “I’m on my way to the Defense Ministry. Come meet me.”

Chowdhury made a half-hearted protest; he wasn’t in New Delhi on an official diplomatic mission and a meeting at the Defense Ministry broke any number of protocols; he would first need to secure the appropriate authorizations. His uncle listened, or at least the other end of the line fell silent, before he said, “Sandeep, we know the Enterprise has its launch orders… and I know about Ashni’s mother. For that, I am sorry; we can tell her together if you like. But first, we need you to come to the Defense Ministry.”

Chowdhury glanced out his window, to the vacant corridors of the embassy. He knew his uncle was right. Nothing was going to happen here, or at least nothing that might avert a counterstrike by the Enterprise. We’ll take out three of their cities for our two. Then what? They’ll take out four of ours. Then we take out five more. Then come the doomsday weapons…. He could feel his loyalties shifting, not from one nation to another, but between those who wanted to avert an escalation and those who believed that victory, whatever that meant, could exist along this spectrum of destruction. Receiving the appropriate authorizations to visit the Defense Ministry suddenly seemed like an irrelevance. He increasingly felt as though his allegiance didn’t reside with any government but with whoever could reverse this cycle of annihilation.

“All right,” said Chowdhury, returning to his desk. “I’ll be there in thirty minutes.”

His uncle hung up.

Chowdhury couldn’t help but wonder how the Indians knew that the Enterprise had received their launch orders. It could have been a myriad of intercepts made by their intelligence services, but Chowdhury suspected they’d intercepted his correspondence with Hendrickson. If they had, their ability to hack into his classified email demonstrated a level of cyber sophistication beyond what he and his country had previously thought them capable. When Chowdhury crafted his reply to Hendrickson, he now did so with the knowledge that others might be reading it. In response to the question What do you hear? he wrote: The Indians might do something.

It was perhaps the loneliest moment of her life. Hunt stood on the bridge overseeing flight operations, but what she was really there to observe was Hendrickson departing to Yokosuka, then on to Honolulu, and finally back to Washington, where he’d been recalled via an immediate action request, originating from the White House. When Hendrickson received the message, he’d crumpled the sheet of paper, tossed it in a burn bag, and muttered, “Fucking Wisecarver.”

Hendrickson had come to believe that he hadn’t actually been sent to the Enterprise to check up on Hunt; he had been sent to the Enterprise so he would be out of the way when Wisecarver crafted the orders for the nuclear counterstrike. Now that the White House had dispatched those orders, he wanted Hendrickson back in Washington to keep an eye on him. He explained his theory to Hunt.

“But I thought I was the one they didn’t trust?” she asked.

Hendrickson replied, “They don’t trust you. It’s just that they might not trust me either.” In this way, by both being untrustworthy to the same authority, they were once again confederates in the hours that remained before Hendrickson’s departure.

This may have been why, watching his plane dwindle into a speck on the horizon, Hunt felt so spectacularly alone. She returned to her flag cabin. The orders for the counterstrike were locked in her safe, whose combination she struggled with, preoccupied as her mind was. She couldn’t quite bring herself to focus on the detailed planning that would be required of her. Before he’d left, Hendrickson mentioned that he had it “on good authority that the Indians might intervene.”

“Cut the shit. On whose authority?” she’d asked.

Hendrickson would only answer, “A contact of mine from Washington.”

The fantasy of the Indians — or of anyone — intervening proved such an escapist distraction that it took her four attempts to unlock the safe. Then at her desk she unfolded the orders, which totaled three pages, one for each of the targets, coastal cities that read from south to north: Xiamen (population: 7.1 million), Fuzhou (population: 7.8 million), and, lastly, Shanghai (population: 33.24 million).

To both Hunt and Hendrickson, the inclusion of Shanghai seemed chillingly disproportionate. It was China’s most populous city. A strike on Shanghai would assure a counterstrike on New York, Los Angeles, or even Washington. Which wasn’t to say that the staggering number of lives lost in a place like Xiamen or Fuzhou wasn’t grim enough, but it would be difficult to imagine a scenario in which a strike on Shanghai wouldn’t result in an escalation from tactical to strategic nuclear weapons. It was, Hunt thought, a suicide mission. Not that the pilot wouldn’t make it back, though that was unlikely enough. No, it was a suicide mission in the broadest sense. Its accomplishment assured the suicide of much, if not all, of mankind.

As that thought lingered, there was a knock at the door. “Come in,” she said. Wedge stepped across the threshold, wiping some grease from his hands with a filthy rag. He then tucked the rag into the pocket of his flight suit and presented himself to Hunt, snapping to attention. “Christ, at ease,” she said. “I’ve told you that you don’t have to do that.”

Wedge again took the rag from his pocket, working the grease from his palms and beneath his fingernails. “Customs and courtesies, ma’am. A simple sign of respect.”

Hunt held the three pages of the order in front of her. “I appreciate that, but I don’t need the extra deference.”

“It’s not specific to you, ma’am. It’s respect for your rank.” He tucked the rag back into his flight suit. Hunt couldn’t help it; she had come to like Wedge. He was insubordinate. But his insubordination didn’t manifest itself in a refusal to follow orders, or disrespect for his superiors. He was, instead, insubordinate in the broadest sense. He was insubordinate to the time in which he lived. He refused to give up the old ways. Or, put differently, he refused to stop believing in them. Where did Wedge think all this would lead? wondered Hunt. Did he imagine that a bygone order would one day reassert itself? That he could somehow fly through the fabric of time to arrive in a different, better, and older world? Perhaps his insubordination was a form of denial, a rejection not only of the present but of all that was to come.

No matter, she thought cruelly, as she handed him the order for the counterstrike.

“What’s this?” he asked, thumbing through the pages. Hunt didn’t need to tell him; he could read it for himself: Xiamen, Fuzhou,… Shanghai. His left eyebrow ticked upward when he read the last one. Aside from that he sat across from her stone-faced.

“When can you be ready?” she asked.

“Day after tomorrow,” said Wedge. That would give his pilots a full night’s rest. The Hornets, antiquated as they were, could also benefit from the attention of a twenty-four-hour maintenance stand-down. Each crew chief could then conduct a full inspection of the avionics, airframes, and weapons systems, all of which had proven temperamental during their training runs.

“That’s fine,” said Hunt. “We don’t need to launch any earlier than that.”

“Three flights of three,” answered Wedge. “That sound about right to you?”

Hunt glanced down at her desk and nodded. “Which flight will you take?”

“I figured I’d take Shanghai.”

When he said the name, all Hunt could think was 33.24 million people. The same with the other cities turned targets. Fuzhou wasn’t Fuzhou anymore; it was 7.8 million people. The same for Xiamen: 7.1 million. “Wedge—” she said, his name catching for a moment in her throat. “A lot of folks are calling this a suicide mission.”

Wedge folded up the three sheets of paper Hunt had given him and stuffed them in the same pocket as his dirty rag. “Ma’am, I don’t do suicide missions. We’ll get her done and make it back here.” For a moment, Hunt thought to tell him that wasn’t what she meant by suicide mission. But she thought better of it.

Wedge snapped to attention and was dismissed.

It took four days before Lin Bao realized that his wife and daughter had fled the city. He’d last seen them when he left for work on a Tuesday. He had stayed that night at the ministry as well as the night that followed. He’d come home the following morning, a Thursday, and had slept from nine o’clock until three o’clock in the afternoon before returning to the ministry. He’d worked all the next day and through that night into Saturday. When he came home around lunch the house was empty. He began to wonder where his family was. When he phoned his wife, she answered on the third try. She and her daughter were staying in her mother’s village in the countryside, hundreds of miles inland—“until this is over,” she had said. Lin Bao asked to speak with his daughter, but she was out taking a walk with her grandmother. “I’ll have her call you back.”

“When?” Lin Bao had asked.

“Soon,” answered his wife.

Lin Bao didn’t protest. What right did he have to? If anything, he was jealous of his wife and daughter. Jealous of the time they had together; jealous of their safety, of their distance from the capital, and of their decision to leave it. He’d been indulging in escapist fantasies of his own, imagining what his life might be like when he left the Navy. He was indulging in one of these fantasies as he settled down in his empty house, rooting around the mostly bare fridge for some dinner. Early the next morning he would need to return to the ministry to monitor the reentrance of the Zheng He into territorial waters. He heated up a microwave meal, a burger and fries, his favorite indulgence, although it never cooked quite right in a microwave. The burger always wound up bland, the fries soggy. Not like it tasted in the States.

He watched the timer. He wondered again if perhaps he’d teach when this war was over. The idea of returning to the academy, or to any of his country’s war colleges, was unappealing. Their curricula were merely programs of regurgitation. The professors had no input in their development. To teach the way he wanted to, he’d need to settle in the West. However, with each passing day of the current conflict that seemed more and more like an impossibility. And if he couldn’t teach, he would at least use his retirement to refocus on his family, to reestablish his relationship with his daughter, which had lost the warmth it had known during their days in Newport almost a decade before. No one could take his family from him, he thought, as the timer on the microwave went off.

Lin Bao took his meal in its plastic container and settled down on the sofa in the living room. He uncapped a bottle of Tsingtao and took a long pull. With one hand he grasped his beer by the neck and with the other he held his remote as he scrolled through a series of unfamiliar television shows. How long had it been since he’d had a night alone like this? Feeling overwhelmed by his program choices and disoriented by being on his own, he struggled to relax. He couldn’t quite bring himself to take advantage of his time off. Eventually, he rerouted his internet through an illicit VPN he’d downloaded, allowing him to watch an uncensored broadcast of BBC News from London.

The pasty-faced anchor led with a story, “… coming from the open waters south of Japan in the Philippine Sea…” According to reports, freighters transiting into and out of the Pacific had observed a massive fire. Ceaseless clouds of smoke billowed miles into the air. Early speculation leaned toward this being the result of an undersea drilling disaster; however, the BBC and other networks soon dispelled this theory. No energy companies had wells in that remote portion of the Philippine Sea. An intrepid private pilot had, with that afternoon’s sun descending off her left tail wing, managed to fly the approximately two hundred miles southeast from the Japanese archipelago of Naha. The BBC was livestreaming video recorded by the pilot, while the anchor, mumbling away, attempted to make sense of the images.

Lin Bao set his beer on the floor and put his meal on a side table. He craned his neck forward, his face pressing closer to the television.

It couldn’t be.

He would’ve heard.

There would have been a cry for help.

But then Lin Bao thought of them heading west, their stealth technology fully engaged while maintaining the discipline of a communications blackout. A student of history, he recalled the USS Indianapolis, which had gone down in the Philippine Sea almost a hundred years before, sunk by a torpedo fired from a Japanese submarine; it’d taken four days for the Americans to realize what had happened.

Lin Bao continued to watch closely, his eyes unblinking.

The pilot, who was narrating parts of the livestream, explained that she had to keep her distance. Secondary explosions made it difficult for her to approach any closer. Her plane rattled in the turbulent air. Then, through a break in the smoke, Lin Bao saw it. The familiar slope of its prow, the gentle arch where its anchor lay: his old ship, the Zheng He.

She was ablaze, listing hard to starboard.

The news anchor still didn’t understand what he was looking at. He fumbled along through his broadcast, hypothesizing along with his coanchor as to what all this smoke and fire at sea could possibly mean. Lin Bao, however, was already up from his seat, out the door, and on his way back into the ministry. He forgot to switch off the television.

An hour later, when his daughter returned his call, he wasn’t available to take it.

This was Chowdhury’s second trip to the Defense Ministry in as many weeks. His first trip had proven eventful by way of introductions. Over lunch, Chowdhury had met the defense minister himself, the chief of staff of the armed forces, and an extensive retinue of staff officers. Sitting around an oval table in the minister’s personal dining room, each of them had offered their condolences for “the atrocities at Galveston and San Diego.” None of them knew about Chowdhury’s ex-wife, or his recently motherless daughter, so these condolences felt impersonal, like one nation’s theoretical expression of sympathy for another. No one had said anything of substance in that first meeting; it had served to open a dialogue.

Now Patel had recalled his nephew to the ministry for a second time. They met down by security. Despite Patel’s retired status he had a badge that listed him as permanent staff, allowing him to come and go as he pleased. When Patel arrived, he cut to the front of the security line and was promptly handed a visitor’s badge for his nephew. The two were waved through a turnstile by an alert, white-gloved soldier in his service dress.

Patel walked briskly, with Chowdhury trailing a half step behind. Unlike the day before, when they’d followed the long corridor toward the upper-floor offices of the senior ministry officials, Patel led Chowdhury down to the basement. With its low ceilings and flickering halogen bulbs, this was the domain of minor officialdom. Eventually, they found themselves at a small canteen. “Let me buy you a cup of tea,” said his uncle.

Chowdhury followed him inside. There were only three tables, each empty. Patel explained that the woman at the cash register was the pensioned widow of a long-since-martyred soldier. Patel paid, dropped a few extra coins in her tip jar, and offered the elderly widow his most convivial smile.

“I was hoping we could talk unofficially,” Patel began as they sat. “When I brought you here last week to meet the defense minister and chief of staff, it was to convey to you that I speak for the senior-most levels of our government. Understood?”

Chowdhury nodded. He didn’t quite understand why he’d been chosen as the receptacle for whatever message his uncle seemed poised to deliver. Why wasn’t this proceeding through official channels, through the ambassador, or even some lesser embassy official? As if in anticipation of these concerns, his uncle explained, “Within your government, certain parties have a strong interest toward escalation. They will knowingly misinterpret our actions. Because of this, it is important for you to convey clearly both what we have done but also what we are willing to do.”

Chowdhury studied his uncle. “By ‘certain parties,’ who do you mean?”

“I believe you know who I mean,” answered Patel.

“Wisecarver?” asked Chowdhury quietly.

Patel neither affirmed nor refuted Chowdhury’s guess. He took another sip of his tea before explaining, “Our government, specifically the leadership in this building, is not choosing a side. We are not supporting Beijing. And we are not supporting Washington. We are allied with no one. Our support is for de-escalation. Do you understand?”

Chowdhury nodded.

“Good,” added Patel. “Because what I’m about to show you might be confusing to your national security staff.” From his pocket, Patel removed his government-issued cell phone. He began to scroll through a series of photographs taken along the surface of the ocean, with waves cresting in the bottom of the frame. Superimposed over each image was a reticle, as if from a gunsight, with crosshatched X and Y axes bisecting its width and length. As Patel scrolled through each picture the ship on the horizon drew closer, until Chowdhury could clearly observe an aircraft carrier. Patel paused for a moment, glanced once more at his nephew, and then cycled to the next photo….

An inferno of smoke and flames obscured and consumed the carrier.

Patel paged quickly through the pictures that followed as if each were an image in a flip-book, animating the burning carrier as it slipped beneath the waves. When his uncle came to the last photograph, which was of the calm and consuming sea again at rest, he put words to what Chowdhury had witnessed. “These are periscope photographs from one of our upgraded Kalvari-class diesel-electric submarines. Their modified propulsion system affords them an essentially unlimited range, equal to any of your nuclear submarines. We’ve used one to sink the Zheng He.”

As his uncle had promised, Chowdhury was perplexed. “You sunk the Zheng He… but you are not allying yourself with the United States?”

“Correct,” said Patel. “Our interests are to de-escalate this conflict. If your government takes any retaliatory action for Galveston or San Diego, it won’t be a Chinese ship that we sink next but an American one.” Patel presented his nephew with another image, a map that showed the approximate disposition of Indian naval forces in and around the South China Sea. “And as you’ll see, this isn’t a hollow threat.”

Patel’s map seemed an impossibility to Chowdhury. If accurate, it meant that dozens of Indian warships had infiltrated into the South China Sea undetected, representing a gross underestimation of India’s stealth-cloaking and cyber capability by his own country. Chowdhury’s thoughts shifted to a couple of days before, how his uncle had learned of the Enterprise’s receipt of launch orders against the Chinese mainland. He was increasingly certain that Patel knew this through Chowdhury’s email exchange with Hendrickson. If the Indians possessed enough sophistication to hack into a state-of-the-art encrypted email system, was it not also likely that they possessed the sophistication to position their fleet clandestinely between the Enterprise and the Chinese mainland?

“Our defense attaché visited the White House and showed these pictures to your national security advisor….”

“And?” Chowdhury asked his uncle.

“He was thanked and escorted out of the building.”

Chowdhury nodded.

“It is my belief that your Mr. Wisecarver never passed along these materials or news of our attaché’s visit to anyone else in the administration. It is also my belief that your Mr. Wisecarver has no intention of expressing the nuance of our government’s position to your president.”

“Your beliefs are likely correct,” answered Chowdhury. “So why are you telling me this?”

They’d finished their tea. Patel gave his nephew a glance, then went back to the register where the cashier sat. She poured him another two cups, but this time Patel neglected to drop a coin in her jar. Patel returned to his seat, picking up their conversation. “I am telling you all of this because perhaps there is another way to convey our message.” He handed Chowdhury his tea and fixed him in his stare, as if he were waiting for his nephew to speak. However, Chowdhury wouldn’t say anything. By conspiring with his uncle in this way, he felt as though he were skirting a treasonous line. And so, Patel finished the thought for him: “Your friend Hendrickson might be able to communicate our message directly.”

“Going around Wisecarver to the president would likely end his career.”

“If the Enterprise launches a counterstrike,” Patel answered gravely, “much more will end than the career of one man.”

The two of them sat quietly. “Why are we meeting here, in this canteen?” asked Chowdhury. “Why not in a secure conference room?” He glanced at the cashier, who was nominally paging through a gossip magazine but who he suspected had been listening to them this entire time.

“Because we haven’t had a meeting,” answered Patel. “None of this is official. My government hasn’t sanctioned my talking to you. As far as they’re concerned, we’re discussing my sister’s health.” For the first time, Chowdhury felt uncertain who exactly his uncle spoke for. As if he could sense his nephew’s unease, Patel added, “To break certain impasses, sometimes we have to rely on a bond stronger than nationality. Sometimes the only bond that is strong enough is family.” Patel clasped his nephew by the shoulder. “You will talk to your friend Hendrickson?”

Chowdhury nodded.

“Good,” he said. “I’m late to a meeting. Can you find your way out?”

He nodded. “Yes.”

“And don’t worry about her,” Patel added as he got up. “She’s near deaf… a tragic story.” On his way out, he glanced once more at the cashier. With that, his uncle was gone.

Chowdhury sipped slowly from his half-finished cup of tea, puzzling over how to outmaneuver Wisecarver. He likely had only hours until the Enterprise launched its counterstrike against the Chinese mainland. He had no idea what the Indian response might be. Or how his government might react. The task his uncle had placed before him seemed an impossible one. He must’ve appeared in pretty bad shape as he stood from his seat. He could feel the old widow at the cash register staring at him piteously. As Chowdhury passed by her, he reached into his pocket and took out some change, dropping it into her jar.

She took his hand by the wrist, startling him. Her eyes were wide and watery with what seemed like nostalgia. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you.”

Chowdhury glanced down at her grip. “Think nothing of it.”

For another long moment, she wouldn’t let him go.

He had been walking in circles. At least that’s what it felt like to Farshad. Day and night. Ever since he’d arrived on Hormuz Island. Going in one big circle. He would check a fighting position — say, an antiaircraft gun — then proceed to the next — say, a machine gun oriented on the beaches — then one of the new directed-energy cannons, which never seemed to work. On and on he’d go, viciously kicking stones out of his path as he followed the few miles of perimeter, his only break being the brief boat ride between this island and its twin, Larak Island, where he walked a nearly identical circle.

The defenses on the islands were paltry at best: a handful of antiaircraft guns, a few hundred poorly trained conscripts, some barbed-wire obstacles. That was about it. Did General Bagheri really expect him to defend these strategically critical islands with this? He couldn’t be serious. And in fact, General Bagheri wasn’t serious — or at least he didn’t take the threat of a Russian invasion seriously. When Farshad had presented this prospect on his return from New Delhi, General Bagheri had sat behind his desk, plucking pistachios from a dish, knuckling open their shells while he listened patiently. Then with indifference he’d asked, “Is that all?”

What had followed was the greatest dressing-down Farshad had received in at least a decade. According to General Bagheri, the idea of a Russian invasion of the Hormuz Strait Islands was preposterous. Tehran and Moscow had been allied for decades. Furthermore, the information had come from the Indians, who were no great friends of either nation. Then, turning personal, Bagheri had said, “Lieutenant Commander Farshad” (annunciating his full rank as if to remind him how far he had fallen), “I placed you in the Navy so that you wouldn’t cause more problems. But now, the Supreme Leader has himself read your warning of a Russian strike. Against my advice, he’s chosen to release the Indian tanker and he has also ordered me to reinforce our islands in the strait. It seems I’ve been unsuccessful in keeping you out of trouble.”

General Bagheri informed Farshad that he had no choice but to follow orders. He was compelled to reinforce the islands. But his reinforcement would be a single person: Farshad. When he departed General Bagheri’s office, it was to a small dhow that was waiting to take him to his new, desolate posting. Since arriving on the islands, Farshad hadn’t allowed himself to wonder how much longer he would remain there. If the Russian invasion — those Spetsnaz parachutists supported by their navy — never arrived, how long would Bagheri keep him postured to repel an assault? A week? A month? A year? The rest of his pitiful life? Farshad had come to realize that by delivering his message directly to the high command he had become the architect of his own exile.

The few hundred conscripts who manned these defenses had been enduring a similar exile, some of them for years. As Farshad mingled among them, he learned that most had a history of disciplinary infractions. These islands had become a dumping ground for hard cases. The supply depots sent them no fresh food, only packaged rations. They showered once a week. The tents they slept in were often blown away by the unpredictable winds that thrashed through the strait.

Unlike General Bagheri, the men on the island had accepted the idea of a Russian invasion, even if such an occurrence seemed like an improbability. What were the odds, one in ten? Even less? But what else did they have to do but prepare, and how long would the odds have to be on their lives for them to take no precautions whatsoever? And so they filled sandbags, they calibrated the ranges on their antiaircraft guns in precise intervals of one hundred feet, and they endured incessant inspections by Farshad while they waited for the invasion.

At night under his tent, with no special accommodations afforded him, Farshad began to think of home. He wanted to return. The desire entered his dreams. It wasn’t the comfort of his bed that he envisioned, or the warmth of his house, or a good meal. It was his family’s land, specifically his garden. With the fierce winds whipping against his tent, surrounded by the sleeping heaps of rejected soldiers, he concluded that he’d seen enough. If he ever got off this rocky island, he swore to himself that he would finally go home. And he wouldn’t again make the mistake of leaving.

These dreams recurred fitfully each night, all except for this one. It was the only night that he slept the whole way through. It was also the only night that the wind shifted its course, dying down to a gentle breeze. This night he dreamed most intensely of all.

He is back in his garden, performing the routine he’d fallen into after his expulsion from the Revolutionary Guards. He writes his memoirs in the morning. He takes his walk at around noon, lunching beneath the elm tree on the far end of his property. When he finishes his meal, he leaves the scraps out for the pair of squirrels to eat. And he waits. He is conscious that he is dreaming, and he hopes that both squirrels might again appear. He thinks that this time he might restrain himself and not kill the squirrel if it bit him. Farshad waits a long while in this dream. The longer he waits, the more the landscape changes. The trees dry up, their brittle leaves falling around him. The thirsty grass turns to stubble and then to bleached rock. The rock is the same as the island’s.

The next morning, right at dawn, the wind returned. He woke up to its howl. It stretched the fabric of his tent before yanking up the stakes and sending that same tent tumbling toward the sea. Farshad lay in the dawn with nothing between him and the sky except for the wind.

“Look!” one of the conscripts cried out.

He pointed to the east, in the direction of the rising sun. Farshad squinted, making a visor of his hand.

Dozens and dozens of them.

More than he could have imagined.

Arranged like a vast migration of birds.

“They are here!” he shouted to his garrison, but the wind drowned out his voice.

Weather had been erratic, thunderstorms appearing violently and then vanishing. Wild fluctuations in temperature. Golf ball — sized hailstones fell on the deck of the Enterprise one morning. That same evening, the temperature peaked at ninety-two degrees. The onboard meteorologist surmised that this erratic weather was the result of the atmospheric fallout from Galveston and San Diego. They had struggled to find a launch window for Wedge and the nine Death Rattlers. Each time they’d be given the all-clear and migrate to their ready room for a final mission brief, a fresh weather system would appear. Complicating matters further was the fact that they didn’t need passable weather but perfect weather. The Hornets that Wedge and his crews would be flying didn’t have GPS-guided bombs. Without that technology they’d have to drop their ordnance in the old way, which meant they needed clear skies over the three target cities.

After the fourth or fifth aborted launch attempt (Wedge had lost count), he found himself alone in his stateroom, sitting at his desk, trying to pass the time. Two levels above him, he could hear the ground crews working. Each iteration of stand-up-then-stand-down cost them several hours. They couldn’t allow nine fully armed Hornets (particularly given the nature of their armament) to idle on a flight deck that was pitching through rough weather. Wedge took out his flight plan, reviewing it yet again:

He knew that last bullet point — despite being the shortest — was the one with the least probability of success. He could feel it in his gut. But Wedge didn’t do suicide missions; that’s what he’d told Admiral Hunt and he’d meant it. Instead of fixating on the slim probabilities of his return, he diverted his attention elsewhere….

He began a letter.

It wasn’t an if-you-are-reading-this-then-I-am-gone death letter. He’d always held those in low esteem, thinking of them as little better than suicide notes. Instead, he thought of it as a historical document. He wanted to capture his thoughts on the eve of victory. He addressed the letter to his father.

Wedge found himself writing in a sort of stream of consciousness, freed from the way he normally wrote, which was the composition of lists like the flight plan he’d just reviewed. It felt good to write in this way, a release. Although it was only him, alone in his stateroom, he wanted to bring all the world into this moment. The more he wrote, the more aware he became of his place in the universe. It was as though he could see his words being read by future generations of American schoolchildren before he’d even composed them. He could envision a child standing in front of the class, reciting portions of this note from memory in much the same way Wedge himself had recited the Gettysburg Address. This wasn’t his ego at work; he knew that he possessed no remarkable gifts of expression — a C-minus in freshman English could attest to that. Rather, Wedge knew it was the moment itself that was remarkable, a moment in which everything was on the line. Then he thought, Christ, Wedge, get a grip.

Except for a single page, he crumpled up the many sheets of paper and pitched them in his trash can. The remaining page sat on the desk in front of him. He didn’t read it over.

He didn’t want to.

What remained were his thoughts, as pure as he could harness them, to be handed to his father.

Wedge found himself unexpectedly exhausted from the writing. He was soon asleep in his chair, his head on the desk.

Time passed, perhaps an hour or more. There was a knock on his door. Wedge felt disoriented, as if maybe it had all been a dream. Perhaps he was back in his stateroom on the Bush. Before Bandar Abbas. Before his stint in captivity. Back to when he was still trying to get close to it.

There was another knock.

“What?” he growled.

“Sir, it’s time.”

“Tell them that I’m coming.”

He could hear the sound of departing steps as he sat up. Wedge gathered his things on the way to the ready room. His notebook. His sunglasses. A pack of Marlboro Reds. He planned to smoke one on his triumphant return. He also thought to bring the letter. After all, it wasn’t a death letter. There was no reason to leave it on his desk, was there?

He glanced at it skeptically.

Wedge eventually chose to leave the letter where it was. What did it matter? Whether for bad weather, or a maintenance issue, he’d likely be back in his stateroom in a few hours after yet another aborted launch. He could mail it then. Walking toward his briefing in the ready room, he took his time down the ship’s passageways, even as every other member of the crew rushed past as though in possession of some urgent piece of news. When Wedge came to an exterior hatch, he thought to take a minute to grab a breath of fresh air. What he saw caused him to hurry back inside the ship.

The day was sunny, clear, and crisp. The most beautiful flying weather he could remember.

Hendrickson insisted Chowdhury catch the night flight. “Don’t wait until morning,” he said. “Get back here now.” On the phone Hendrickson confirmed everything Patel had said in the canteen. Wisecarver had rebuffed the Indian defense attaché when he’d come to the White House. The defense attaché had met with Hendrickson unofficially (at a Starbucks) to reiterate India’s intention to take military action against either party — Chinese or American — who further escalated the crisis. Hendrickson and Chowdhury had this conversation over an unsecured landline between Washington and New Delhi. What did it matter if the Indians intercepted their call? They’d already intercepted their emails. Perhaps it would assuage them if they knew two national security staffers were taking matters into their own hands.

Chowdhury’s flight had been bumpy, with heavy turbulence over the Atlantic. When he landed at Dulles, Hendrickson was there to meet him. On the drive in from Northern Virginia, Hendrickson told Chowdhury the one thing he hadn’t been able to mention over the phone. “All that’s stopping the launch at this point is the weather.”

“The weather?”

“The Enterprise is ready,” Hendrickson said gravely. “The planes are fueled and armed. The pilots are briefed. After Galveston and San Diego, the weather’s been erratic.”

“So how much time do we have?” asked Chowdhury.

“Like I said, we’ve got until the weather gets better. After that, they launch.”

Chowdhury’s flight had been virtually empty, which got him an upgrade to first class. Despite the upgrade, he hadn’t slept a wink. Exhausted, he now leaned his head against the car window. His eyes grew heavy, and as they began to close, he noticed the traffic. It was early morning, D.C. rush hour. Except no one was on the road. He wondered when, if ever, they would return.

The drive in was quick, maybe thirty minutes, but Chowdhury felt he’d been asleep for much longer. They had no trouble finding a spot for the car across from Lafayette Park. In front of the office buildings, trash was piled up. Traffic lights flashed on mostly deserted streets. When they crossed the park, they walked past the Peace Vigil. The tent was empty, though at a glance Chowdhury couldn’t tell whether or not it’d been abandoned. The White House was, of course, in perfect order. The uniformed Secret Service agents stood at their posts. The morning’s newspapers sat in reception, along with coffee and pastries. Chowdhury’s surroundings began to reassume their familiar proportions.

To his surprise, Chowdhury’s badge still worked. A part of him had assumed that when Wisecarver dispatched him to New Delhi it was with the expectation that he would never return. Soon both Hendrickson and Chowdhury sat outside Wisecarver’s office door. On the other side they could hear the murmurs of a meeting in progress.

Chowdhury and Hendrickson had no plan beyond confrontation. They would explain to Wisecarver that they knew about the defense attaché’s visit. They would demand that he disclose this information to the president. The pilots on the Enterprise needed to know about the Indian threat. They had no idea that it wasn’t the Chinese defenses alone that they’d have to contend with. If Wisecarver still refused to divulge this threat, Chowdhury and Hendrickson would go to the press, which, admittedly, wouldn’t do much.

The door to Wisecarver’s office swung open.

One by one a group of staffers Chowdhury didn’t recognize stepped into the corridor. They spoke in low tones, sharing sidebar conversations, even laughing here and there. In a word, these staffers — all hand-selected by Wisecarver — projected confidence. Last out of the room was Wisecarver himself.

He stepped across the hall, his hand on the doorknob to the Oval Office.

“Sir, do you have a minute?” asked Hendrickson.

Wisecarver froze, his hand still on the knob. At the sound of Hendrickson’s voice, he slowly turned over his shoulder. “No, Bunt, I don’t have a minute.” If there was any doubt in Chowdhury’s mind as to how much of a nuisance Hendrickson had made of himself over the preceding weeks, it was now obvious.

“Millions of lives are at stake,” interjected Chowdhury, “to say nothing of an international radiation-induced pandemic and the collapse of the global economy, and you don’t have a minute?” He was shaking, but managed to add, “You have an obligation to pass on what you know.”

Wisecarver released the doorknob. “Do I have an obligation to pass along misinformation?” He took a step closer to Chowdhury, invading his personal space. “Also,” said Wisecarver, as he ran his eyes intrusively over Chowdhury, “aren’t you supposed to be back in New Delhi?”

That word again, back.

Chowdhury didn’t hesitate this time. He knew exactly what it meant. Had he come this far, had his family endured so much, only to turn back? And back to what exactly? He was here; only a shut door separated him from the most powerful office on earth. He was in possession of knowledge that could save this country—his country — if only he could convince Wisecarver to step away and let him pass to the other side.

But there would be no convincing him.

Of this, Chowdhury felt certain.

That word, back—he conjured it into a necessary rage. If Wisecarver wouldn’t step aside, Chowdhury would move through him. He reached for the doorknob. “Where do you think you’re going?” snapped Wisecarver. Chowdhury shouldered into him. The two struggled, their arms hooking, their chests pushing against one another. Neither was a fighter, so the scene quickly turned sloppy, with both Wisecarver and Chowdhury losing their balance and taking an amateurish tumble to the floor.

Hendrickson tried to separate them.

Chowdhury lunged upward for the doorknob, as though it were the rung of a ladder placed just out of reach.

Wisecarver swatted his arm down.

The commotion didn’t last long. Three Secret Service agents charged toward them, pulling both Chowdhury and Wisecarver to their feet. Wisecarver was left by the door. Chowdhury was escorted to the other side of the corridor.

“Get him out of here!” shouted Wisecarver.

Before the Secret Service agents could lead anyone away, the door opened.

Chowdhury couldn’t see inside, but he could hear her voice. That persistent and restrained voice of speeches. The voice that had, a long time ago, convinced him that staying in government was a good idea.

It asked, “What the hell is going on out there?”

The seconds passed with strange imprecision. Farshad stood steadily among his men, a panicked swarm of conscripts scrambling to their dugouts with boots untied and slung rifles jangling over bare shoulders. Farshad watched the incoming formations of planes, calculating their altitude and distance and factoring for wind. He would pass this along to the antiaircraft gunners who were already cranking at the elevation wheels that raised their barrels skyward, swiveling and locking themselves into position. Farshad then ran to his command post, nothing more than a hole with a radio dug into the rocky sand.

As he crossed the beach, a half dozen impacts struck behind him, blasting up fountains of earth. Then the shock wave. It brought him to his knees. Up again, he continued to run, calculating his steps. Twenty… fifteen… he was almost there. Another group of impacts, this time closer — close enough that the shock wave blew the shirt up his back. Then he toppled over the lip of his command post, landing on his radio operator, who was gathered in a knees-to-chest bundle in the corner of the hole. “Get up,” he growled. The young conscript slowly stood, a pleasing confirmation to Farshad that among his men he remained more frightening than death.

A swift crosswind cleared the smoke from the last barrage. Farshad snatched the radio’s handset. He called out range, altitude, and windage to his gun crews, his ability to triangulate the three being one of those refined soldier skills that proved useless elsewhere in life. All at once, his several antiaircraft batteries began to chug out their fat, egg-shaped explosive rounds. The sky peppered with little detonations. Immediately, Farshad could tell they were off target. He had one battery of directed-energy cannons, but when he looked at them, he could tell their generators weren’t engaged. Another cyberattack? Or shitty maintenance? It didn’t matter.

Another missile barrage fell, this time directly onto his position.

Farshad crumpled forward, hands on his head, eyes shut. He opened his mouth so his eardrums wouldn’t rupture with the overpressure. And he waited, rolling the dice as he’d done so many times before. He could feel the alternating blasts, like a violent wind juking between two opposing directions. The back of his neck was covered in dirt. Then stillness. He lifted his head.

Range… altitude… windage…. Those were his first thoughts. He made his estimations and then gave another order to fire, noticing a slight tinge of desperation in his voice, which he swallowed away. This would be their last chance. The landing paratroopers would overwhelm the garrison if Farshad didn’t take out at least a portion of their transport planes.

Out chugged the egg-shaped explosive rounds.

Again, the sky peppered with little detonations.

Off target — all of them.

Then Farshad realized what he’d done — the fatal mistake he’d made. He’d calculated for wind, but not for wind at altitude. The erratic weather had caused wild atmospheric fluctuations. The crosswind he was experiencing at sea level must not be blowing at several hundred feet — or it was at least blowing differently. Even though he now noticed the inconsistency, it was too late. Standing in his command post, Farshad could do nothing but look above as in quick succession thousands of parachutes blossomed open into tidy skyborne rows.

The antiaircraft guns continued to fire, though they proved ineffective against the dispersed paratroopers. Farshad placed his rifle on the lip of his trench. He glanced from position to position, to the upturned faces of his men. A few took potshots at the descending paratroopers, but most didn’t, perhaps for fear of retribution. The seconds passed, as they had all morning, with strange imprecision.

Time bent.

A life’s worth of consequences existed in the moments it took for a plane to pass overhead. Or for a gust of wind to blow over a dusty fighting hole. Or for a parachute to descend to earth, coming down at… six hundred feet… Farshad watched… five hundred feet… he fingered his trigger… four hundred feet… the radio clutched in his hand… three hundred feet… the crosswind on his face.

The swift crosswind.

Farshad couldn’t believe it at first. Wouldn’t allow himself to believe it.

The crosswind he’d felt all morning caught the first stick of paratroopers as they descended below two hundred feet. Their parachutes, snatched by this slipstream, now raced dramatically across the frontage of the island, yanked out to sea as if by invisible tethers.

They splashed into the water.

Within minutes, thousands of others fell on top of them, all into the water. Although a few paratroopers touched down on the beach, or near enough to swim in, Farshad’s conscripts quickly rounded them up. Soon Farshad was out of his hole, standing on its lip, observing the miraculous expanse of parachutes dispersed across the open water like so many lily pads coating a pond.

Well into that afternoon survivors crawled onto the beach, many retching seawater. The garrison rounded them up one at a time, trotting them off at rifle point with a jaunty confidence that Farshad’s conscripts had hardly earned. Although this battle had cost the Russians an entire Spetsnaz division, Farshad didn’t feel he could count the victory as his own. He and his opposing commander had, after all, made an identical mistake, albeit with different consequences: both of them had incorrectly calculated the wind.

There was an unfairness to it, thought Farshad. But also, an irony. A miscalculation in one circumstance could win a battle, and in another lose it.

By the time the last of the paratroopers splashed into the water, the Russian missiles had stopped falling. Reports from Iranian reconnaissance aircraft scrambled from Bandar Abbas were that the Russian fleet, which was moving from the northern Indian Ocean to reinforce the islands after the paratroopers seized them, had retreated north, back toward the Red Sea and the Syrian port of Tartus.

The Russian prisoners mixed calmly among their Iranian captors, the two sides swapping cigarettes, speaking each other’s languages in broken phrases. Because neither nation existed in a formal state of war with the other, it allowed each side to assume a posture of mea culpa: the Russian paratroopers for their misbegotten and opportunistic invasion, and the Iranian conscripts for inflicting on them the inconvenience of captivity.

Farshad’s state of mind was neither apologetic nor hostile — he was numb. A bone-deep exhaustion had set in. After a battle — particularly a battle won — he had usually felt elation, a nearly uncontainable exuberance as he passed among his men, readying them for a counterattack and radioing his situation report to a congratulatory high command. Not this time. Farshad didn’t have the energy to prepare his men for an unlikely counterattack. As for the high command, when General Bagheri’s helicopter arrived from Bandar Abbas right after nightfall, Farshad could barely muster the effort to receive it.

When Bagheri stepped off the ramp, he walked with his arm extended, as if the congratulatory handshake he offered to Farshad had lured his entire body from Tehran. “Fine work,” Bagheri muttered. The radius of his congratulations spread wider as he trooped the line, clasping the shoulder of every soldier who came within reach. Only when a member of Bagheri’s staff handed out challenge coins did the befuddled conscripts realize they’d met the chief of staff of the armed forces.

General Bagheri and Farshad retired to the “command post.” They sat on the lip of Farshad’s hole, staring out into the spongy darkness. “Did they land over there?” asked General Bagheri, pointing in a vague direction, to where the night hid the thousands of parachutes littered over the surface of the water.

Farshad nodded.

General Bagheri gave a belly laugh. “You are the embodiment of Napoléon’s most famous maxim. Do you recall it?” Farshad shook his head. Not because he didn’t know the maxim (which he did), but because he didn’t care. He could feel himself struggling to stay awake. General Bagheri prattled on, “When it comes to a general, Napoléon said, ‘I would rather have one who is lucky than good.’”

Farshad leaned his head all the way back, his face flush with the stars. He felt a slight spasm through his body, as one feels when dozing off in a dull movie. General Bagheri continued to speak. His voice — and its message — only partly registered to Farshad as he listed further and further toward sleep. Bagheri was stumbling through a half-hearted apology, in which he conceded that he hadn’t believed Farshad’s report about the threat to these islands but in which he also congratulated himself for possessing the intuition to send Farshad to command the garrison. Farshad propped his elbows on his knees and cradled his head in his palms. General Bagheri didn’t seem to notice, continuing to heap praise not on Farshad himself but on his remarkable luck. The importance of this victory over the Russians couldn’t be overstated, explained General Bagheri. It would unite the nation and the nation would, of course, again recognize Farshad with the Order of the Fath. Schoolchildren would learn his name, which shouldn’t be that of a lowly naval officer. No, this wouldn’t do. General Bagheri then confided to Farshad that his staff had already begun to process the required paperwork to have Farshad reinstated to the Revolutionary Guards and, perhaps, even promoted.

This woke Farshad up. “You’ll do no such thing.”

“And why not?” asked General Bagheri, whose tone wasn’t anger but bewilderment. “Your country needs to honor you. You must let it. Is there some other distinction you would prefer? Say the word and, believe me, it will be yours.”

Farshad could see that General Bagheri was telling the truth. This was Farshad’s moment to ask for what he truly wanted. And why shouldn’t he? He’d given his country so much, everything in fact. From his father’s assassination, to his mother’s grief and death thereafter, to his own adult life spread across so many wars, everything he’d ever had or could have hoped to have had been laid on the same altar.

“What is it?” General Bagheri repeated. “What is it that you want?”

“I think,” said Farshad sleepily, “that I just want to go home.”

“Home?… You can’t go home. There’s work to be done. Your reinstatement must be accepted… then there’s a new command to discuss… I have certain ideas…” As General Bagheri spoke, the sound of his words receded, as if he were speaking at the distant end of a tunnel down which Farshad had begun to travel. Farshad had stopped trying to remain awake. He leaned onto his side in the dirt, tucked his knees to his chest, and with a rock for a pillow drifted into the sweetest sleep he had ever known.

“Blue Leader, this is Red Leader; acknowledge arrival at release point.”

“Roger, Red Leader. This is Blue Leader. We’ve arrived.”

“Good copy, Blue Leader…. Gold Leader, this is Red Leader; acknowledge arrival at release point.”

“Roger, Red Leader. This is Gold Leader. Arrival acknowledged.”

“Good copy, Gold Leader…. Red Leader confirms all flights in orbit at release point.” Wedge checked his watch. They were right on time. According to plan, they’d hold at the release point for five additional minutes. This would be his last communications window with the Enterprise. After that they’d go dark.

Wedge then glanced below, to the vast expanse of ocean beneath his wing.

The day was bright and clear, with perfect visibility.

The conditions were ideal for him to see the column of smoke corkscrewing toward him from the water’s surface.

“God help you if you’re wrong.”

That’s all Wisecarver could say as Hendrickson was joined by Chowdhury in the Situation Room. The three of them sat at one end of the table while a single staffer dialed INDOPACOM and the Enterprise for an emergency video teleconference. The president waited in the Oval Office, while the White House operator scoured the switchboard for a direct line to the Indian prime minister.

When Lin Bao arrived at the ministry, the lights in the conference room were out. Surprised, he switched them on one at a time and began to poke his head into the adjacent offices, trying to find his support staff, that platoon of junior officers who set up his video teleconferences, his live drone feeds, his numerous secure calls.

They were nowhere to be found.

Stillness pervaded the large, empty rooms. Not sure what to do, Lin Bao installed himself at the head of the table. With perfect timing, the phone next to him rang. He startled. He would have been embarrassed if someone had been there to see him. Then the thought occurred that perhaps he was being watched. Putting this thought from his mind, he picked up the phone.

It was Zhao Leji: “No doubt you’ve heard the news.”

The attack on the Zheng He was part of the American response to Galveston and San Diego, replied Lin Bao. Sinking the Zheng He demanded a reprisal. However, Lin Bao cautioned, it should be proportional. Perhaps they could use their surface-based missiles to strike at American interests in Japan or the Philippines. Such a response would be immediate. Also, there was always the opportunity to launch another cyberattack, perhaps this time against more critical US infrastructure, like their electrical grid, or water system. “There are many options,” Lin Bao explained. “The key is that our response to the Americans be carefully considered.”

The line went silent.

“Hello?” said Lin Bao.

A sigh. Then, “The Americans didn’t do this.”

Now it was Lin Bao’s end of the line that went silent.

Zhao Leji added, “It was the Indians who sunk the Zheng He.”

“The Indians?” Lin Bao’s mind went blank. “But… why would the Indians…” He struggled to find the right words. “They’ve allied themselves with the Americans?” Lin Bao had already begun placing one alliance against another as though canceling out the numerators and denominators in a complex equation whose solution would solve for how the American-Indian alliance might shift the global balance of power. “This doesn’t change anything with the Russians… nor the Iranians…. With the Indians in play we will, of course, need to keep the Pakistanis in check….”

“Lin Bao—” Zhao Leji cut him off. “India’s involvement in the conflict is because of a strategic miscalculation. The sinking of the Zheng He is a disastrous consequence of that miscalculation. The Politburo Standing Committee is meeting later today in a secure location. There’s a man outside who will take you to us. We need you to help with our response. Do you understand?”

Lin Bao said that he did.

Zhao Leji hung up.

Silence returned to the room. Then a knock. A man opened the door; he wore a dark suit, and had a powerful build and a blank, anonymous affect. Lin Bao thought he recognized him from Mission Hills.

Thirty-seven minutes since launch. Sarah Hunt hadn’t moved in that time. Fixed in the middle of the combat information center, she stood with her arms folded across her chest, staring at a digital display that plotted an approximation of Wedge’s progress from the Enterprise toward his mission’s three targets. Behind her sat Quint, along with Hooper, the pair of them tuning their radios through a desert of static, searching for a return signal.

“Are you sure you’ve got the right frequency?” Hunt asked Quint, trying to restrain her growing impatience.

Quint, lost in his task, didn’t reply.

Beside the digital map was a video teleconference split between two screens. The first screen was INDOPACOM, a conclave of admirals with furrowed brows calling in from Hawaii, none of whom had much to say. The second screen was the White House Situation Room, a smaller group that comprised Hendrickson, another staffer who Hunt didn’t know but who introduced himself as Chowdhury, and in the background Trent Wisecarver, who she recognized from television and who kept getting up to refill his cup of coffee. “Are you sure he’s arrived at the release point?” Hendrickson asked gently.

“Am I sure?” Hunt countered. “No, I’m not sure. That’s only where he’s supposed to be.” Wedge was also supposed to have come up for a last comm check with the Enterprise, but they couldn’t raise him. They were thirty-seven minutes into the mission. At the twenty-eight-minute mark Hunt had received the call from Hendrickson in which he had, with little explanation, ordered her to abort the strike. When Hunt had asked on whose authority, as she was obliged to do, Trent Wisecarver entered the video teleconference’s frame and answered flatly, “On the president’s authority.”

For the past nine minutes they had been trying to contact Wedge.

They’d been met by nothing but static.

“Quint,” snapped Hunt, “are you sure you’re on the right frequency?”

Quint glanced up at her very slowly, his unlit cigarette calmly dangling from his lip. “Yes, ma’am,” he said in a whisper, as if he were consoling her. “I’m sure. He ain’t there.”

“He wouldn’t miss a comm window. It makes no sense,” she said.

Quint replied, “What if it’s exactly what it seems. Maybe he just ain’t there. Maybe those Chinese or those Indians, or whoever, maybe they took him and the whole mission out before they ever got to the release point. Ma’am, it might be they’re all gone.”

On the video teleconference, there was a sharp exhalation, almost like a laugh. It was Wisecarver. He was reclined in a chair, so only half of his body appeared on the screen. He leaned forward. “Well,” he said, “since we’re trying to call off their mission that would simplify things, wouldn’t it?”

The only sound in response was radio static.

Wedge broke hard right, taking on altitude. The corkscrew of smoke climbed from the surface, chasing him skyward. “This is Red Leader, missile launch, my two o’clock!” He was banking hard — as hard as he could — five G, six G, then seven…. He flexed his legs and abdomen, making little grunts as the G-forces sucked the blood downward in his body…. He held there; any more G and he’d black out. Little pinpricks of light burst in his vision like paparazzi cameras as his aircraft pirouetted almost as violently as the missile that he’d lost sight of. He popped chaff and flare from ports on his fuselage, the shards of burning magnesium tumbling in a celebratory arc to confuse the missile’s sensors.

Then a flash behind him, in the direction where the three Hornets that comprised Gold Flight had been assembled. He called out over the radio, trying to confirm what he already knew, which was that he’d lost one aircraft. There was no response. “Gold Leader, this is Red Leader,” he repeated… and then he tried, “Any station, any station, this is Red Leader, over.” For a handful of seconds he spoke into this emptiness until one of the other Hornets formed on his wing. The two held even like a pair of drivers idling at a traffic light. At a glance, Wedge couldn’t tell which of his pilots this was. All he could see was the silhouette gesturing toward its ear, making the universal sign for I can’t hear you.

And another flash.

Smoke enveloped his cockpit. Debris collided with glass. As quickly as the smoke engulfed him, it released him. His aircraft was fine, again flying straight and level. Off his wing, the other Hornet had vanished — incinerated in that flash. He craned his neck forward and could see little flaming pieces of its fuselage drizzling over the ocean, on whose surface Wedge now observed a half dozen other smoking corkscrews, their white tails ribboning skyward. Then behind him in his mirror, Wedge glimpsed a section of four aircraft forming near his six o’clock.

He could see their markings, a green, white, and orange roundel.

Not Chinese — Indian.

Wedge didn’t quite understand. Since when were the Indians allied with the Chinese? Then two more flashes, one off his left wing and another off his right. An alliance between the Indians and Chinese didn’t make any sense to Wedge, but he didn’t have time to consider it. The shock wave from the two explosions came from separate directions, jarring his aircraft. His radio remained silent. He didn’t know who he’d lost or understand who he’d lost them to. He still had a target to reach, and his only chance to reach it was to use these seconds of confusion to slip away, hug the contours of the earth, and head north. His radio was surely being jammed, but he nevertheless called out to whatever remained of the Death Rattlers, ordering all ships to proceed to their targets. And as if in rebuttal to his words, he tracked another explosion high above him as a fifth Hornet was destroyed.

Nose down, afterburners screaming, Wedge descended to below one hundred feet, pulling up so low that his engines blew ripples across the ocean’s surface. Above him, three of the Hornets remained tangled with a gathering number of Indian fighters — perhaps a dozen — which Wedge tracked as the superior Su-35. His Hornets didn’t stand a chance; his pilots’ skill would count for very little, maybe nothing. He knew that they understood this. Even though he couldn’t communicate, he hoped they appreciated that the seconds they remained fighting in the air would be put to good use by him. With the Indians occupied, he’d make his escape, heading north toward Shanghai.

Another explosion behind him.

Then a second.

And eventually a third.

Wedge had the head start he needed. If he stayed below one hundred feet, with luck he’d slip the coastal defenses. Flight time was another twenty-two minutes. He checked his watch. It’d been forty-three minutes since their mission had launched. Even if his radio had worked, his communications window with the Enterprise had closed.

No one could get in touch with Major Mitchell. Admiral Hunt’s decision to strip the Hornets of any overridable communications system had left the aircraft without any functioning communications at all. Without too much trouble, the Indians had jammed the low-tech UHF/VHF/HF receivers the aircraft relied on. From the White House Situation Room to the combat information center on the Enterprise, the only sound was Quint as he continued to call out to the flight of nine aircraft, his voice echoing across the video teleconference. In the Oval Office, a separate conversation was in process: the president requesting that her counterpart, the Indian prime minister, recall his fleet.

The prime minister obfuscated. Was Madam President certain the aircraft that engaged her were Indian? The prime minister would, of course, need to confirm this with his defense minister and his armed forces chief of staff before recalling any of his assets. And what was the mission of these aircraft that had allegedly come under fire from the Indian fleet? Could Madam President kindly pass along the exact location of this flight of nine planes? Nearly a dozen staffers — from CIA, NSA, the State Department, and Pentagon — listened on the line, furiously jotting down their notes on the prime minister’s obvious stonewalling.

That was also the word Wisecarver used when he stepped back into the Situation Room from the Oval Office. On hearing this, Chowdhury exited into the hallway and pulled out his phone. There was only one other thing he could think to do.

Patel answered on the first ring. “Quite a corner we’ve painted ourselves into,” he said, without waiting for his nephew to speak.

“You need to call off your aircraft,” answered Chowdhury. He had cupped his hand over the receiver, concerned that he might be overheard. “Switch off your jammers so we can talk to our pilots.”

“Pilot,” corrected his uncle. “Our interceptors report that only one of them escaped. Two of our aircraft are giving chase.”

“Recall your interceptors,” pleaded Chowdhury. “Let us get in touch with our pilot to abort his mission.” Even as he said this, Chowdhury wasn’t certain it was possible. Would they be able to contact the pilot? Was he even listening?

The line went silent. Chowdhury glanced up and noticed Wisecarver standing in the doorway of the Situation Room, watching him.

“Too risky,” answered Patel. “If we call off our interceptors, how can we be certain that the pilot won’t strike Shanghai?”

Chowdhury glanced once more at Wisecarver, who’d taken a menacing step in his direction. “We’ll abort the strike; you have my word. The president will—”

Wisecarver slapped the phone from his grip. In the time it had taken Chowdhury to utter his first sentence and then half of his second, Wisecarver had covered the distance between them. “You don’t speak for the president,” Wisecarver snapped, planting the heel of his shoe on the phone, so that when Chowdhury reached after it, he appeared as though he were groveling at Wisecarver’s feet, which in a way he was.

“Please,” said Chowdhury. “You’ve got to give us a chance to call it off.”

“Not after Galveston,” he answered, shaking his head. “Not after San Diego. Do you think this administration or this country will tolerate”—for a moment he struggled for the appropriate word, and then found it, plucking it like fruit from a branch—“appeasement.”

Chowdhury remained on his knees, his hands still reaching pathetically for his phone as he glanced up at Wisecarver, who, with a halogen bulb from the ceiling framing his head, seemed to glow strangely, like a vengeful saint. “There’s only one pilot left,” Chowdhury said weakly. “What are the chances he’ll even make it to his target? If we call the Indians off, we could save him… we could stop all of this.”

Wisecarver reached down toward his foot. He picked up Chowdhury’s phone and tucked it into his own coat pocket. Then he offered Chowdhury a hand, hoisting him up from the floor. “C’mon,” said Wisecarver. “On your feet. No need to stay down there.” The two stood next to one another in the empty corridor, sharing a quiet second as if to diffuse the tension between them. Then Wisecarver glanced up toward the lights that had framed his head a moment before. “There’s a quote from the Bible,” he began, “or maybe it’s the Talmud or Qur’an? I can never remember which. But it’s one I’ve always appreciated. It goes, Whosoever destroys one life has destroyed the world entire, and whosoever saves a single life is considered to have saved the whole world…. Or at least I think that’s how it goes. Tell me, Sandy, are you a religious man?”

Sandeep shook his head, no.

“Me neither,” said Wisecarver. He walked off with Chowdhury’s phone.

At first the shore was just a smudge on the horizon. Then the contours of the skyline formed. At one mile out, Wedge would begin his ascent, climbing to his attack altitude. Everything would depend on altitude and time. He needed to take on at least ten thousand feet so that when he activated and then dropped his payload it would have sufficient time to arm. He needed to do this quickly so that the antiaircraft systems that lurked below couldn’t find their mark. As he approached the city, his thought pattern was simple, almost primordial: Here it comes, here it comes, here it comes, each breath seemed to say.

At five miles out he could see traffic on the roads.

At three miles he could see the waves breaking on the beach.

At two miles the individual windows in the skyscrapers winked at him as they caught the sun—

Then he rocketed his stick, hard back.

The Gs pressed on his chest like an enormous hand. Pinpricks of light did their familiar Tinker Bell dance in his vision. Had anyone been listening, they would’ve heard his grunts, which were like a tennis player hitting from the baseline. A long stream of tracer fire arched toward him from the shore as he careened above Shanghai. Wedge rolled his plane belly skyward. With his cockpit hung toward the ground, he glimpsed two wispy missile launches, whirling upward toward his head. He deployed the last of his chaff and flares, dumping the white-hot magnesium beneath him and hoping it would be enough to confuse the missiles.

His altimeter orbited past three thousand feet.

Behind him, the pair of Indian Sukhois now appeared. He’d flown low enough and fast enough that they couldn’t have tracked him. They must’ve figured he was heading here.

His altimeter passed four thousand feet.

The Chinese systems didn’t distinguish between him and the Indian pilots. All three of them corkscrewed and juked through the antiaircraft fire that chewed up the sky while their engines, with a dismal rumble, forced them ever higher. Wedge struggled to reach his drop altitude of ten thousand feet while the Sukhois kept up the pressure, slotting into position on his tail. Any second they’d take their shot. Wedge knew he needed to deal with the Sukhois if he was ever going to get up to altitude.

He barreled right.

We’ll decide it here, he thought, at five thousand feet.

Beneath the three aircraft, the city was lit up, spitting tracers in every direction. When Wedge had barreled right, the Sukhois had barreled left. The two sets of aircraft traveled in opposite directions along the circumference of a shared circle whose miles-long diameter was nearly the size of Shanghai itself. Wedge couldn’t help but admire the Indian pilots, who had made an astute tactical move. By giving up their position on his tail they’d each be able to make a head-on pass, leveraging their two-to-one advantage.

Wedge made his orbit around the city and prepared to meet the pilots somewhere along that path. They would come at each other like jousting horsemen of another era — lances down, forward in their saddles, the issue decided in a blink. Events were playing out in seconds and in fractions of seconds. This is it, Wedge thought — the it he’d been chasing for the entirety of his life. He was ready. His thoughts returned to his family, to that lineage of pilots from whom he’d descended. He could feel his father, his grandfather, and his great-grandfather, their presence so close it was as if they were flying off his wing. A certainty possessed him: the advantage in numbers wasn’t with the two assholes in the Sukhois but with him, Wedge.

Odds are four to two, motherfuckers, he thought — and almost said it aloud.

He locked onto the first Sukhoi, releasing a sidewinder from his wingtip, while simultaneously firing an exhalation’s worth of rounds from his cannon. The Sukhoi did the exact same to him, so that their air-to-air missiles passed one another in mid-flight. However, the first Sukhoi had made a mistake. When Wedge diverted toward the second aircraft, so, too, had the sidewinder fired by the first. Wedge was out of chaff and flares to confuse the sidewinder, but if he could bring it in close enough to the second Sukhoi, that might disorient it.

The second Sukhoi observed the threat of the incoming sidewinder.

From its fuselage, it deployed chaff and flare.

Wedge could see the sidewinder spiraling toward him as he rushed closer to the second Sukhoi, like a three-way game of chicken. Then the sidewinder dipped on its axis, following a burning piece of chaff. Simultaneously, both Wedge and the second Sukhoi released bursts from their cannon. When the two passed one another, there was a sound like a limb snapping off a tree….

… Blue sky everywhere, it turns to black, then rushes back to blue.

The wind on Wedge’s face.

When he bolted awake, the stick had flopped out of his right hand. Wedge grabbed it, snatching back control of his Hornet. Checking his instruments, he hadn’t lost much altitude. He couldn’t have been unconscious for long, maybe a second, like an extended blink. A puddle was growing beneath his legs. He touched his right thigh and could feel a protrusion. A piece of steel — likely from the fuselage — had embedded below his hip. Two thumb-sized holes — around thirty millimeters, a little larger than his own cannon — had pierced the front-left and back-right of his cockpit, hence the wind on his face.

He glanced behind him, to where the second Sukhoi would’ve passed. He found it easily, a brackish trail of smoke heaving from one of its engines. In the same direction, a little farther on, an oil-black smoke cloud lingered in the otherwise perfectly clear sky. This could only be one thing — the other Sukhoi. His sidewinder must have found its mark. He’d tallied his first-ever air-to-air victory. He felt dizzy, which might have been loss of blood and might have been his body’s response to the thrill of this achievement.

Wedge now needed to climb to ten thousand feet. He still had his payload to deliver. Then he would figure out how to get home, or at least how to get far enough out to sea to bail out. Slowly, he climbed. His left rudder was shot out, making the plane skittish in its ascent and hard to control. Neither of his engines were at thrust capacity; the pair of them were bleeding fuel. Whatever damage he’d done to the second Sukhoi, it had done about the same to him. And as he climbed, that stubborn second pilot slotted in behind him, giving a limp chase.

Won’t matter, concluded Wedge. He was already past eight thousand feet.

He glanced down at the city spread before him. Little pits of light appeared in his vision. He tried to blink them away. Then a vertiginous darkness crept inward from his periphery as though he might black out again. The puddle he sat in kept deepening. When he looked at his altimeter, it was blurry too, but it soon read ten thousand feet. Wedge went through the arming sequence. His hands felt as though he wore several sets of gloves as he clumsily toggled through the switches and buttons and lined up his aircraft into its angle of attack. The Sukhoi was behind him, but he had thirty seconds, maybe more, until he’d need to deal with that.

A lot was going to happen in those seconds.

Everything was set. Wedge’s finger hovered over the button. Whatever wooziness or confusion he’d felt moments before had yielded to a perfect clarity.

He hit the release.

Nothing.

He hit it again.

And again.

Still, nothing. And now the Sukhoi was coming up to altitude, notching in behind him. Wedge struck the controls in his cockpit in frustration. He recalled the tenth Hornet in their squadron, the one that’d gone down in training days before. He thought they’d fixed this problem with the release mechanism. Apparently not.

Didn’t matter. He had a job to do.

Wedge pushed the stick forward, angling into a dive. The payload was going through its arming sequence, and if it was stuck on his wing he’d take it in himself. The Sukhoi didn’t follow but instead broke away, understanding the maneuver and evidently wanting no part of it. Not that it would’ve made a difference. The Sukhoi wouldn’t be able to put enough distance between itself and what was to come.

A sensation of weightlessness overtook Wedge as he dove.

The details below — buildings, cars, individual trees, and even individuals — were filling in fast. This business, war, the business of his family and of his country — he’d always accepted that it was a dirty business. He thought of his father and his grandfather — the only family he had — hearing the news of what he’d done. He thought of his great-grandfather, who’d flown with Pappy Boyington. And, strangely, he thought of Pappy and the old stories of him staring out through his canopy, scanning the horizon for Japanese fighters, a cigarette dangling from his lip before he’d toss it into the vastness of the Pacific.

The city was rushing up toward Wedge.

He’d told Admiral Hunt that he didn’t do suicide missions. Yet this didn’t feel like a suicide. It felt necessary. Like an act of creative destruction. He felt like he was the end of something and in being the end he would achieve a beginning.

Wind from the broken canopy was on his face.

At five hundred feet, he remembered the pack of celebratory Marlboros he’d tucked into his flight suit, in the left chest pocket. Though it was futile, he reached for them. This was his last gesture. His hand placed over his heart.

Three more men from internal security waited in the lobby of the Four Seasons Hotel. They stepped onto the elevator with Lin Bao. Not a single introduction, no one speaking. His escort, the dark-suited man who’d taken him from the ministry, had the number of the suite where Zhao Leji and other key members of the Politburo were clandestinely meeting to discuss the appropriate strategic response to the sinking of the Zheng He.

Lin Bao had ideas as to what that response could be. He chose to focus on those ideas as opposed to why they were meeting at the Four Seasons and not some more secure location, or why they’d stepped out of the elevator on only the fifth floor and were now walking down a corridor with closely spaced rooms as opposed to suites. India’s involvement might prove a positive development, if leveraged correctly. An Indian intervention would make it so that the strikes against Galveston and San Diego would be the last of the war. If his country struck the final blow, they could make the argument — at least to their own people — that they had been the victors. And they could avoid what at this moment seemed like an inevitable counterstrike against another of their major cities — Tianjin, Beijing, or even Shanghai.

He would explain this to Zhao Leji, and to whoever else from the Politburo attended this meeting. Lin Bao imagined that Zhao Leji would place some of the blame for the Zheng He on his shoulders. After all, it had been his name on the deployment orders, not Zhao Leji’s, or that of any other member of the Politburo. They would likely accuse him of having exceeded his authority in a time of war, but nothing more than that. They would want to be rid of him. After peace was negotiated with the Americans, it would be easy for Lin Bao to convince Zhao Leji to turn the other way while he defected. If anything, a defection would help prove the substance behind the accusations Zhao Leji would surely level, which was that Lin Bao was untrustworthy, a secret ally of the Americans. Good riddance, they’d say. And he would return to the country of his mother’s birth. Maybe even to Newport, with his family. To teach.

By the time Lin Bao had walked to the far end of the corridor on the fifth floor, these ideas had calmed him, so that when the security man swiped the key card and gestured with a low wave of his hand for Lin Bao to step inside, he did so without any trace of fear.

He took a half dozen steps into the empty room. It wasn’t a suite. It was a single. There was a queen-size bed.

A console.

A dresser.

Everything, including the carpeted floor, was covered with plastic tarps, as though the room were undergoing a renovation.

Lin Bao stepped toward the bed.

Resting on its edge was a golf club, a 2-iron. He lifted it up. The familiar weight was pleasant in his hands. A note was attached to the shaft with a piece of string. He took a deep breath, filling his lungs, knowing it was likely the last such breath he might take. The writing on the card was blocky, the symbols formed by an untutored hand, the hand of a peasant. It read, This time you picked wrong. I am sorry.

It was unsigned. That’s how they survive, he thought. They never sign their names to anything.

From behind Lin Bao, a series of steps squished over the plastic. He could feel the presence of the large security man at his back, plus the three others who no doubt stood by the door, waiting to help clean up the mess. Lin Bao had an instinct to shut his eyes, but he fought it off. He’d watch, until the very end, in this grim room where there was little worth seeing. He peered out the solitary window, to the equally grim Beijing skyline. The idea that this — not his daughter’s face, nor the open ocean he loved — would be the last thing he ever saw filled him with self-pity and regret. He felt his throat constrict with those emotions in the same moment he felt the cold press of metal against the soft hairs at the base of his neck.

Keep your eyes open, he demanded of himself.

He continued to stare out the window, which faced to the southeast, generally in the direction of sunrise and the Pacific. Though it was late, a brilliant light like twenty sunrises all at once kept expanding unrestrained from that direction, as though the light itself had the potential to consume everything. This was coupled by an incredible noise that shook the windows and assured that no one heard the single gunshot.

What is that on the horizon? Lin Bao wondered. It was his last thought as he toppled forward onto the bed.