2034: A Novel of the Next World War

2 Blackout

Anyone who lived through the war could tell you where they were the moment the power went out. Captain Sarah Hunt had been on the bridge of the John Paul Jones, fighting to keep her flagship afloat while trying to ignore the panicked cries coming from belowdecks. Wedge had his wrists flex-cuffed in the small of his back as he was driven blindfolded under armed escort across the tarmac of Bandar Abbas airfield. Lin Bao had recently departed Dulles International Airport on a Gulfstream 900, one of a suite of private jets made available to members of the Central Military Commission.

Lin Bao had, over the course of his thirty-year career, flown on these jets from time to time, either as part of a delegation to an international conference or when escorting a minister or other senior-level official. However, he’d never before had one of these jets sent for him alone, a fact that signified the importance of the mission he’d now completed. Lin Bao had placed his call to Chowdhury right after takeoff, while the flight attendants were still belted into their jump seats. The Gulfstream had been ascending, cresting one thousand feet, when he hung up with Chowdhury and sent an encrypted message to the Central Military Commission, confirming that this final call had been placed. When he pressed send on that message the response was immediate, as though he had thrown a switch. Below him, the scattered lights of Washington went dark and then came right back on. Like a blink.

Lin Bao was thinking of that blink while he watched the eastern seaboard slip beneath the Gulfstream, as they struck out into international airspace and across the dark expanse of the Atlantic. He thought about time and how in English they say, it passes in the blink of an eye. While he sat alone on the plane, in this liminal space between nations, he felt as though his entire career had built to this one moment. Everything before this day — from his time at the academy, to his years shuffling from assignment to assignment in the fleet, to his study and later grooming in diplomatic postings — had been one stage after another in a larger plan, like a mountain’s ascent. And here he stood at the summit.

He glanced once more out of his window, as if expecting to find a view that he might admire from such a height. There was only the darkness. The night sky without stars. The ocean below him. Onto that void, his imagination projected events he knew to be in progress half a world away. He could see the bridge of the carrier Zheng He, and Rear Admiral Ma Qiang, who commanded that battle group. The trajectory of Lin Bao’s life, which had made him the American defense attaché at this moment, had been set by his government years ago, and it was every bit as deliberate as the trajectory set for Ma Qiang, whose carrier battle group was the perfect instrument to assert their nation’s sovereignty over its territorial waters. If their parallel trajectories weren’t known to them in the earliest days of their careers, when they’d been contemporaries as naval cadets, they could have been intuited. Ma Qiang had been an upperclassman, heir to an illustrious military family, his father and grandfather both admirals, part of the naval aristocracy. Ma Qiang had a reputation for cold competence and cruelty, particularly when it came to hazing underclassmen, one of whom was Lin Bao. In those days Lin Bao, an academic prodigy, had proven an easy target. Despite eventually graduating first in his class, with the highest scholastic record the faculty could remember, he’d arrived as a sniveling, homesick boy of half-American, half-Chinese descent. This split heritage made him particularly vulnerable, not only to derision but also to the suspicions of his classmates — particularly Ma Qiang.

But that was all a long time ago. Ultimately, it was Lin Bao’s mixed heritage from which his government derived his value, eventually leading him to his current position, and it was Ma Qiang’s competence and cruelty that made him the optimal commander of a fleet that at this moment was striking a long-anticipated blow against the Americans. Everyone played their role. Everyone did their part.

Part of Lin Bao wished he were the one standing on the bridge of the Zheng He, with the power of an entire carrier battle group arrayed in attack formation behind him. After all, he was a naval officer who had also held command at sea. But what offset this desire, or any jealousy he felt about his old classmate Ma Qiang’s posting, was a specific knowledge he possessed. He was one of only a half dozen people who understood the scope of current events.

Ma Qiang and the thousands of sailors under his command had no idea that on the other side of the globe an American F-35 stealth fighter had been grounded by a previously unknown cyber capability their government had deployed on behalf of the Iranians, nor how this action was related to his own mission. Those qualities Lin Bao had always admired in the Americans — their moral certitude, their single-minded determination, their blithe optimism — undermined them at this moment as they struggled to find a solution to a problem they didn’t understand.

Our strengths become our weaknesses, thought Lin Bao. Always.

The American narrative was that they had captured the Wén Rui, a ship laden with sensitive technologies that Lin Bao’s government would do anything to retrieve. For the Wén Rui’s capture to precipitate the desired crisis, Lin Bao’s government would need a bargaining chip to force the Americans’ hand; that’s where the grounded F-35 came in. Lin Bao knew that the Americans would then follow a familiar series of moves and countermoves, a choreography the two nations had stepped through many times before: a crisis would lead to posturing, then to a bit of brinksmanship, and eventually to de-escalation and a trade. In this case, the F-35 would be traded for the Wén Rui. Lin Bao knew, and his superiors knew, that it would never occur to the Americans that pilfering the sensitive technology on the F-35 was a secondary objective for their adversary and that whatever was on the Wén Rui was of little value. The Americans wouldn’t understand, or at least not until it was too late, that what Lin Bao’s government wanted was simply the crisis itself, one that would allow them to strike in the South China Sea. What the Americans lacked — or lost somewhere along the way — was imagination. As it was said of the 9/11 attacks, it would also be said of the Wén Rui incident: it was not a failure of American intelligence, but rather a failure of American imagination. And the more the Americans struggled, the more trapped they would become.

Lin Bao remembered a puzzle he’d seen in a novelty shop in Cambridge, when he’d been studying at Harvard’s Kennedy School. It was a tube made of a woven mesh material. The man behind the counter of the store had seen him looking at the puzzle, trying to figure out what it was. “You stick your fingers in either end,” he had said in one of those thick Boston accents Lin Bao always struggled to understand. Lin Bao did as he was told. When he went to remove his fingers, the woven mesh cinched down. The more he tugged, the more tightly his fingers became stuck. The man behind the counter laughed and laughed. “You’ve never seen that before?” Lin Bao shook his head, no. The man laughed even harder, and then said, “It’s called a Chinese finger trap.”

Brigadier General Qassem Farshad sat on a plastic foldout chair in an empty office next to one of the holding cells. It was early in the morning and he was in a sour mood. But no one seemed to notice because his appearance was always fearsome. His reputation equally so. This made it difficult to gauge his moods, as his expression at rest seemed to convey mild annoyance or even low-level rage, depending on who was looking at him. Farshad had scars, plenty of them. Most prominent was his right hand, where he’d lost his pinky and ring finger when assembling an IED in Sadr City on his first assignment as a young lieutenant. This misstep had almost cost him his job within the elite Quds Force. But Farshad’s namesake, Major General Qassem Soleimani, the commander of the Quds Force, had intervened, blaming the incident on the incompetence of the Jaish al-Mahdi militiamen whom Farshad was advising.

This was the only time in his more than thirty years working within the Quds Force that Farshad had ever used his special connection with Soleimani to his advantage. His father, who had achieved the rank of lieutenant colonel, had died subverting an assassination attempt on Soleimani’s life weeks before Farshad was born. The particulars of that incident had always remained shrouded in mystery, but the idea that Soleimani — one of the great protectors of the Islamic Republic — owed a debt to the elder Farshad lent the younger’s career an aura of mystique as he ascended the ranks of the Revolutionary Guards. This mystique endured even after Soleimani’s death, magnified by Farshad’s inherent competence and daring.

The history of his exploits was etched across his body in scar tissue. When advising Syrian government forces in the Battle of Aleppo, a piece of shrapnel from a mortar had sliced a tidy diagonal gash from above his eyebrow to below his cheek. When advancing on Herat after the 2026 collapse of Afghanistan’s last Kabul-based national government, a sniper’s bullet had passed through his neck, missing his jugular and arteries, leaving a coin-sized entrance hole at one side of his neck and the same-sized exit wound at the other. That scar made his neck appear like Frankenstein’s with the bolts removed, which inevitably led to a nickname among the younger troopers. And lastly, in the battle that was the pinnacle of his career, he’d led a regiment of Revolutionary Guards in the final assault to retake the Golan Heights in 2030. In this, his crowning achievement, the one that would earn him his nation’s highest award for valor, the Order of the Fath, the retreating Israelis had fired a cowardly but lucky rocket that had struck beside him, killing his radio operator and severing his right leg below the knee. He still limped slightly from this wound, although Farshad hiked three miles each morning on a well-fitted prosthetic.

The missing fingers. The scar on his face. The leg lost below the knee. All those wounds were on his right side. His left side — apart from the scar on his neck — had never been touched. If his troopers called him “Padishah Frankenstein” (which translated to English as “Great King Frankenstein”), the intelligence analysts at Langley had given him a different nickname, one that corresponded with his psychological profile. That name was “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” Farshad was a man with two sides, the one with the scars and the one without. He was capable of great kindness but also great rage. And that rageful side, the one that easily moved him into his reckless tempers, was very much present now as he waited in the empty office next to the holding cell at Bandar Abbas.

Five weeks before, the General Staff of the Armed Forces had issued Farshad his orders directly. His government planned to down an American F-35 and Farshad was to interrogate the pilot. He would have two days to extract a confession. The plan was to create one of those videos his government could use to shame the Americans. After that, the pilot would be released, and the aircraft’s technology exploited and then destroyed. When Farshad protested that this was the work of an interrogator far junior to him in rank, he was told that he was the most junior person who could be entrusted with so sensitive a task. This could, the General Staff had explained, bring their two nations to the brink of war. The incident his government would precipitate was delicate. And so Farshad had been ordered to remain at this remote airfield for more than a month, waiting for the Americans to fly their plane overhead.

I’ve been reduced to this, Farshad thought bitterly. The most junior man who can be trusted.

Gone were his days of active service. Farshad had accumulated all of the scars he ever would. He remembered General Soleimani’s end. When the Americans killed him, cancer had already developed in his throat and was slowly eating the great commander alive. Several times over those months, the disease had confined his father’s old friend to his bed. During a particularly dire episode, he had summoned Farshad to his modest country house in Qanat-e Malek, a hamlet three hours’ drive outside of Tehran where Soleimani had been born. The audience hadn’t lasted long. Farshad was brought to the general’s bedside, and he could see slow death in the smile that greeted him, the way Soleimani’s gums had receded, the purple-white shade of his chapped lips. He told Farshad in a raspy voice that his father had been the lucky one, to be martyred, to never grow old, this was what all soldiers secretly desired, and he wished a warrior’s death for the son of his old friend. Before Farshad could answer, Soleimani abruptly dismissed him. As he traveled out of the house, he could hear the old man retching pathetically from behind his closed door. Two months later, Soleimani’s great adversary, the Americans, would grant him the most generous of gifts: a warrior’s death.

Waiting in the empty office in Bandar Abbas, Farshad thought again of that last meeting with Soleimani. He felt certain his fate wouldn’t be like his father’s. His fate would be to die in his bed, like the old general nearly had. And if he was in a sour mood that day at Bandar Abbas, it was because of this. Another war was brewing — he could feel it — and it would be the first war in his life from which he wouldn’t walk away with a scar.

A young trooper with a freshly washed and perfectly creased uniform stood at the door. “Brigadier Farshad, sir…”

He looked up, his gaze eager to the point of cruelty. “What is it?”

“The prisoner is ready for you now.”

Farshad stood slowly. He pushed his way past the young trooper, toward the cell with the American. Whether he liked it or not, Farshad still had a job to do.

Sandy Chowdhury knew the situation was bad. Their government email accounts, their government cell phones, even the vending machine that took credit cards and operated off a government IP address — all of it was down. No one could log in. Not a single password worked. They’d been locked out of everything. This is bad, this is bad, this is bad; it was all Chowdhury could think.

He couldn’t contact Central Command or the Indo-Pacific Command, and his imagination raced as he projected a host of possible outcomes for the F-35 they’d lost, as well as the fate of the John Paul Jones and its sister ships in the South China Sea. In this gathering panic, Chowdhury’s thoughts wandered unexpectedly.

A memory kept reoccurring.

When he was in high school in Northern Virginia, he’d run hurdles. He was quite good too, until an accident curtailed his track career. He’d broken an ankle on the anchor leg of the 4x400-meter relay. It was junior year, at the regional championships. When he fell on the track, he could feel his skinned knee and palms, the burn of sweat in those cuts, but he couldn’t feel his badly broken ankle. He simply sat there in the middle of the race, his competitors passing him by, staring dumbfounded at his foot as it dangled numbly from the bottom of the joint. He knew how much it would soon hurt, but it hadn’t started hurting yet.

That was what this moment was like; he knew something had broken, but he felt nothing.

Chowdhury, Hendrickson, and their modest staff scrambled about, tapping at keyboards, unplugging and re-plugging phones that refused to give a dial tone, troubleshooting systems that refused to be troubleshot. Air Force One had been scheduled to land at Andrews more than an hour ago, but there was still no word as to its status. There was no way to get a call into Andrews. Their personal cell phones worked, but no one wanted to dial through an unsecure line, particularly after Lin Bao had proven to Chowdhury that his own phone had been compromised.

Time passed strangely in the hours after the blackout. Everyone knew the minutes were critical, everyone could intuit that events of the type that shape history were unfolding at this very moment. But no one understood their form; no one understood what those events were or what that history would be. So much was happening — the Wén Rui, the F-35, Air Force One, which had seemed to vanish — and yet they had no news. Frantic as they were to understand the scope of this attack, they couldn’t even make a secure phone call. Everything had been compromised.

They carried on in a general, ineffectual frenzy, with Chowdhury and Hendrickson bunkered up in the Situation Room, leaning over its conference table, scribbling on legal pads, hatching plans and then discarding them. Until after a few hours Chowdhury’s boss, Trent Wisecarver, the national security advisor, stood in the open doorway.

At first they didn’t notice him.

“Sandy,” he said.

Chowdhury glanced up, stupefied. “Sir?”

Decades before, Wisecarver had played tailback at West Point, and he still looked the part. His shirtsleeves were rolled up over his thick forearms, his tie was loosened around his trunk of a neck, and his flop of salt-and-pepper hair was uncombed. He wore a pair of frameless eyeglasses (he was severely myopic) and looked as though he’d slept in his rumpled Brooks Brothers suit. “How much cash do you have?”

“Sir?”

“Cash. I need eighty bucks. My government credit card isn’t working.”

Chowdhury fished through his pockets, as did Hendrickson. Between them they came up with seventy-six dollars, three of which were in quarters. Chowdhury was passing the handful of coins and the crumple of bills to Wisecarver as they marched from the West Wing out toward the White House vestibule and North Lawn, where, pulled up on the curved driveway by the fountain, there was a metro taxi. A uniformed Secret Service guard handed Chowdhury the taxi driver’s license and registration and then returned to his post. Chowdhury’s boss curtly explained that his plane had been forced to divert to Dulles and land under the guise of a civilian aircraft. That meant no escort to meet them, no Secret Service motorcade, no elaborate security detail. POTUS herself was due back at Andrews within the hour. From Air Force One her communications proved limited, she could reach the four-star commanding general at Strategic Command and had spoken to the VP, but these carve-outs in their communications hierarchy were clearly designed by whoever instigated the attack as a way to avoid an inadvertent nuclear escalation. Beijing (or whoever did this) surely knew that if she had no communications with her nuclear capability, protocols were in place for an automatic preemptive strike. She did, however, have no direct communications with the secretary of defense, or any of her combatant commanders in the field other than Strategic Command. Establishing contact with them was Wisecarver’s job. Refusing to wait for official travel arrangements when his plane landed, he had rushed into the main terminal at Dulles and gotten in a cab so he’d have communications working at the White House by the time POTUS arrived. And here Wisecarver was, without a dime to pay the fare.

Chowdhury examined the taxi’s registration. The driver was an immigrant, South Asian, with a last name from the same part of India as Chowdhury’s own family. When Chowdhury stepped to the taxi’s window to hand back the documents, he thought to mention something about it but decided not to. This wasn’t the time or the place. Wisecarver then paid the driver, meticulously counting out the fare from the wad of cash and coins, while the twitchy Secret Service agent he’d traveled with scanned in every direction for threats, whether real or imagined.

Lin Bao hadn’t slept much on the flight. When the Gulfstream touched down, he was shepherded by a heavily armed official escort — dark suits, dark sunglasses, concealed weapons — to the Ministry of National Defense headquarters, an ominous building in the heart of the smog-choked capital. Lin Bao guessed his escorts were officers of the Ministry of State Security but couldn’t be sure. Without a hello or goodbye or any pleasantry whatsoever, they brought him up to a windowless conference room on the building’s sixth floor and shut the door behind them.

Lin Bao waited. The conference table in the room’s center was massive, designed to receive international delegations and to host negotiations of the highest sensitivity. In a vase at the center of the table were some flowers, peace lilies, one of the few species that required no sunlight to grow. Lin Bao ran his fingers beneath their white, silky petals and couldn’t help but appreciate the irony of the choice in this place.

Also on the table were two silver platters, piled with packets of M&M’s. He noticed the writing on the packets: it was in English.

Two double doors at the opposite end of the conference room swung open. Startled, Lin Bao sat up straight.

Mid-level military officers flowed into the room, dropping down a projection screen, establishing a secure video-teleconference connection, and arraying fresh pitchers of water on the table. Then, like a tidal surge, they moved back through the door as quickly as they had appeared. In their wake a diminutive man entered the room, his chest glinting with a field of medals. He wore a tobacco-colored dress uniform made of fine but poorly cut fabric, the sleeves extending almost to his knuckles. His demeanor was gregarious and his earlobes pendulous, framing his very round face whose full cheeks creased in a fixed smile. His arm was extended in a handshake like an electric plug in search of a socket. “Admiral Lin Bao, Admiral Lin Bao,” he repeated, turning the name into a song, a triumphal anthem. “Congratulations. You have done very well.”

Lin Bao had never met the Defense Minister General Chiang, but that face was as familiar as his own. How often had he seen it hung in one of those hierarchical portrait collages that adorned the anodyne military buildings in which he’d spent his career? It was the minister’s smile that set him apart from the rest of the party officials who so assiduously cultivated their dour expressions for the photographer. His habitual courtesy, which could have been interpreted as weakness, was the smooth sheath that contained the force of his office. Minister Chiang gestured toward the silver platters spread across the conference table. “You haven’t touched your M&M’s,” he said, barely suppressing a laugh.

Lin Bao felt a sense of foreboding. If he assumed that Minister Chiang and the Central Military Commission had recalled him for a debriefing, he was quickly disabused of this belief. They knew everything already, including the smallest of details. Every exchange. Every gesture. Every word. Down to a single comment made about M&M’s. This was the point of the platters: to let Lin Bao know that nothing escaped their attention, lest he come to believe that any individual might assume an outsize role in this enterprise, lest he ever think that any one person could become greater than a single cog in the vast machinery of the People’s Republic — their republic.

Minister Chiang reclined in his plush office chair at the head of the conference table. He gestured for Lin Bao to sit beside him. Although Lin Bao had served nearly thirty years in his country’s navy, this was the first time he’d ever met directly with a member of the Central Military Commission. When he’d studied at Harvard’s Kennedy School as a junior officer and later at the US Naval War College in Newport as a mid-level officer, and when he’d attended exercises with his Western counterparts, he was always fascinated by the familiarity so common among senior- and junior-level officers in their militaries. The admirals often knew the first names of the lieutenants. And used them. The deputy assistant secretaries and secretaries of defense had once been Annapolis or officer candidate school classmates with the commanders and captains. The egalitarian undercurrents ran much deeper in Western militaries than in his own, despite his country’s ideological foundation in socialist and communist thought. He was anything but a “comrade” to senior officers or officials, and he knew it well. While at the war college in Newport, Lin Bao had studied the Battle of Kursk, the largest tank engagement of the Second World War, in which one of the great flaws of the Soviet army was that only command-variant tanks possessed two-way radios. The Soviets couldn’t see any reason for subordinates to speak up to their commanders. The subordinate’s job was solely to follow orders, to remain a cog in the machine. How little had changed in the intervening years.

The screen at the far end of the conference table flickered to life. “We’ve won a great battle,” explained Minister Chiang. “You deserve to see this.” The secure connection was perfect, its sound clear, and the image as unfiltered as if they were staring through a window into another room. That room was the bridge wing of the carrier Zheng He. Standing center frame was Ma Qiang.

“Congratulations, Admiral,” said Minister Chiang, showing his small, carnivorous teeth. “I have an old friend of yours here with me.” He gestured to Lin Bao, who awkwardly leaned into the frame so that he might nod once respectfully.

Ma Qiang returned the gesture, but otherwise ignored Lin Bao. He launched into a situation update: his carrier battle group had sunk two American destroyers, which they’d identified as the Carl Levin and the Chung-Hoon. The former had suffered a massive explosion in its magazine, leaving few survivors among the crew of nearly three hundred, while the latter had taken all night to sink. In these first hours of the morning, Ma Qiang’s ships had picked up a few American survivors. The final ship in the flotilla, the crippled John Paul Jones, was taking on water. Ma Qiang had already called for the captain to surrender, but she had flatly refused, replying with an expletive-laced transmission that, at first, Ma Qiang’s translator hesitated to put into Mandarin. The Zheng He Carrier Battle Group had been on station for the last thirty-six hours and Ma Qiang was growing increasingly concerned that the Americans, having heard nothing from their flotilla, might send a contingent of ships to investigate. He sought permission to strike the fatal blow against the John Paul Jones. “Comrade Minister,” Ma Qiang said, “I have no doubt as to our success against any American naval reinforcements, but their arrival would lead to the escalation I’ve been instructed to avoid. I have a flight of J-31 interceptors ready for launch against the John Paul Jones. Total mission time with recovery is fifty-two minutes. We’re awaiting your order.”

Minister Chiang rubbed his round and very smooth chin. Lin Bao watched the screen. In the background, beyond the hurried comings and goings of the sailors on the bridge, he could see the horizon. A haze hung about the ocean. It took Lin Bao a moment to understand what had caused it — this haze was all that was left of the Carl Levin and Chung-Hoon. And it would, he suspected, soon be all that was left of the John Paul Jones. Ma Qiang’s concern was merited, Lin Bao thought. This operation from its inception had always been limited in scope. Its objective — the final, uncontested control of the South China Sea — could only be undermined in one of two ways: first, if their forces failed to destroy this US flotilla; and second, if through a miscalculation this crisis escalated beyond a single, violent demonstration.

“Admiral,” Minister Chiang began, addressing Ma Qiang, “is it your belief that the John Paul Jones can be saved?”

Ma Qiang paused for a moment, spoke to someone off screen in a hushed voice, and then returned his attention to the teleconference. “Comrade Minister, our best estimates are that the John Paul Jones will sink within three hours if unaided.” Lin Bao could see that the Zheng He was turning into the wind to be in the most advantageous position to launch its aircraft. Suddenly on the distant horizon a stitch of dark smoke appeared. At first it was so faint that Lin Bao mistook it for an imperfection in the teleconference’s connection. Then he understood: it was the John Paul Jones burning a dozen miles off.

Minister Chiang began stroking his chin as he weighed whether to order this final blow. A decisive engagement was essential, but he needed to proceed with caution lest a miscalculation cause the incident to spiral into a broader conflict, one that could threaten his nation’s interests further afield than the South China Sea. He leaned forward in his seat. “Admiral, you are cleared for launch. But listen closely; there is a specific message we must deliver.”

“This fucking place stinks.”

The dank air. The putrid scent. If Wedge hadn’t known any better, he would’ve thought he’d been detained in the public restroom of a Greyhound bus terminal. Blindfolded, he sat cuffed to a steel chair bolted to the floor. He couldn’t see anything except for the irregular permutations of shadow and ashy light that played around the room from what he suspected was a window near the ceiling.

A door creaked open, heavy on its hinges. From the sound, Wedge could tell it was metal. A set of uneven steps approached, like someone with a slight limp. Then a scrape on the floor as a chair was dragged over. Whoever sat across from him sat clumsily, as if the movement were awkward for them. Wedge waited for the person to say something, but there was only the smell of their cigarette. Wedge wouldn’t be the one to speak first. He knew the Code of Conduct for POWs, an exclusive club into which he’d been inducted only hours before.

“Major Chris ‘Wedge’ Mitchell…” came the voice across from him.

Then his blindfold was yanked off. Overwhelmed by the light, even though the room was poorly lit, Wedge struggled to see. He couldn’t quite focus on the dark figure across from him, who continued, “Why are you here, Major Wedge?”

Slowly, his eyes adjusted. The man asking questions was dressed in a green uniform with gold embroidered epaulettes of some significance. He had an athletic build like a runner and a hostile face with a long, hook-shaped scar that traced from above his eyebrow to below his cheek. His nose was compressed into a triangle, as if it had been broken and reset many times. In his hands he held the name patch that had been Velcroed onto Wedge’s flight suit.

“It’s not Major Wedge. It’s just Wedge. And only my friends call me that.”

The man in the green uniform frowned slightly, as if this hurt his feelings. “When we finish here, you will be wanting me as a friend.” He offered Wedge a cigarette, which he refused with a wave. The man in the uniform repeated his question. “Why are you here?”

Wedge blinked his eyes. He inventoried the bare room. A single window with bars in one corner, which cast a square of light on the damp concrete floor. His chair. A metal table. And another chair where this man now sat. Based on his epaulettes, Wedge guessed he was a brigadier. In the far corner of the room was a pail, which Wedge assumed was his toilet. In the near corner was a mat, which he assumed was his bed. Above the mat a shackle with a chain was bolted into the wall. He realized they planned to restrain him while he slept — if they let him sleep. The room was medieval, except for a single camera. It was hung high in the center of the ceiling, a red light blinking at its base. It was recording everything.

Wedge felt a sinking sensation in the pit of his stomach. He found himself thinking of his great-grandfather, the stories of gunsights marked in grease pencil on his canopy, and Pappy Boyington, the greatest of Marine aces. Pappy had wound up as a prisoner too, finishing the war in a Japanese POW camp. He also thought of his grandfather slinging snake and nape up north in I Corps while kids back home smoked dope and burned their draft cards. Lastly, and in some ways most bitterly, he thought of his own dad. Wedge feared the old man might hold himself responsible if his son wound up rotting in this prison. Wedge had always wanted to be like his dad, even if it killed him. For the first time he entertained the idea that it might.

The brigadier asked him once again why he was there.

Wedge did what he’d been trained to do, what the Code of Conduct demanded: he answered the brigadier’s question by giving only his name, rank, and service number.

“That’s not what I asked you,” said the brigadier. “I asked why you are here.”

Wedge repeated himself.

The brigadier nodded, as if he understood. He circled the room until he stood behind Wedge. The brigadier rested both his hands on Wedge’s shoulders, allowing the three fingers of his mangled right hand to crawl crab-like toward the base of Wedge’s neck. “The only way we can resolve this situation is to work together, Major Mitchell. Whether you like it or not, you’ve trespassed. We have the right to know why you are here so we can resolve this. Nobody wants things to escalate further.”

Wedge glanced toward the camera in the center of the ceiling. He repeated himself for a third time.

“Would it help if I turned that off?” the brigadier asked, looking up at the camera. “You could tell just me. Everything doesn’t have to be recorded.”

Wedge knew from his survival training that the brigadier was trying to ingratiate himself and build trust, and then through that trust to elicit a confession. The goal of an interrogation wasn’t information but rather control — emotional control. Once that control was taken — preferably by building rapport, but just as often through intimidation, or even violence — the information would flow. But something didn’t add up with this brigadier: his rank (he was too senior to be a first-line interrogator), his scars (he had too many of them to have spent a career in intelligence), and his uniform (Wedge knew enough to recognize that he wasn’t standard Iranian military). What Wedge felt was nothing more than his intuition, but he was a pilot, reared from a long line of pilots, all of whom had been taught to trust their well-cultivated intuition, both in and out of the cockpit. And it was his trust in this intuition that led him to go on the offense, to make a desperate attempt to gain control of the situation.

The brigadier asked Wedge one more time why he’d come.

This time Wedge didn’t answer with his name, rank, and service number. Instead, he said, “I’ll tell you, if you tell me.”

The brigadier appeared surprised, as if his reason for being there was obvious. “I’m not sure that I understand.”

“Why are you here?” asked Wedge. “If you tell me, then I’ll tell you.”

The brigadier was no longer standing behind Wedge but had returned to his seat across from him. He leaned curiously toward his prisoner. “I’m here to question you,” the brigadier said tentatively, as if this fact embarrassed him in some way he didn’t recognize until the very words had escaped his mouth.

“Bullshit,” said Wedge.

The brigadier came out of his seat.

“You’re no interrogator,” continued Wedge. “With a face like that you want me to believe you’re some intel weenie?”

And that entire face, aside from the scar tissue, began to turn shamefully red.

“You should be out in the field, with your troops,” said Wedge, and he was smiling now, with a reckless grin. He’d taken a gamble and from the brigadier’s reaction he knew he’d been right. He knew he had control. “So why are you in here? Who’d you piss off to get stuck with this shit duty?”

The brigadier was towering over him. He swung back and struck Wedge so hard that he knocked his chair out of the floor where it had been bolted. Wedge toppled over. He hit the ground lifeless as a mannequin. As he lay on his side with his wrists still bound to the chair, the blows fell on him in quick succession. The video camera with its solid red light, high up in the center of the ceiling, was the last thing Wedge saw before he blacked out.

They charged out of the east, two silvery flashes on the horizon, and made an orbit around the badly wounded John Paul Jones. Nearly half the crew, more than one hundred sailors, had perished since that morning, either incinerated in the blast from the pair of successive torpedo impacts or entombed in the flooded compartments belowdecks that their shipmates had been forced to secure with them still trapped inside. There were very few wounded, mostly dead, as was usually the case in naval engagements, where there was no battlefield for the injured to rest upon, only the consuming sea.

When the two planes didn’t come in straight for the attack, a collective silence fell over the crew, like a breath sucked in. Within that breath was a fleeting hope that these planes had been sent from Yokosuka, or perhaps launched from a friendly carrier dispatched to their aid. But as soon as the crew of the John Paul Jones glimpsed their wings, which were laden with munitions, and observed that the two aircraft kept a cautious distance, they knew they weren’t friendly.

But why didn’t they strike? Why didn’t they drop their ordnance and finish the job?

Captain Sarah Hunt couldn’t waste her time on speculation. Her full attention remained where it had since the first torpedo hit the day before. She needed to keep her flagship afloat. And it was, sadly, her ship now. Commander Morris hadn’t been seen since the second impact. Hunt hadn’t heard from the Levin or Chung-Hoon either. She’d only watched, helplessly, as each was crippled and then sunk. This was the fate that would soon befall her and the surviving members of her crew. Although they’d contained most of the fires on the John Paul Jones, they were taking on more water than they could pump out. As the weight of the water contorted the steel hull, it creaked mournfully, like a wounded beast, as minute by minute it came closer to buckling.

Hunt stood on the bridge. She tried to occupy herself — checking and rechecking their inoperable radios, dispatching runners for updates from damage control, replotting their position on an analog chart since anything that required a GPS had failed. She did this so her crew wouldn’t despair at their captain’s inactivity, and so that she herself wouldn’t have to imagine the water slipping over the mast. She glanced up, at the twin attack planes from the Zheng He. How she wished they would stop taunting her, that they would stop their impudent circling, drop their ordnance, and allow her to go down with her ship.

“Ma’am…” interjected one of the radiomen standing beside her, as he pointed toward the horizon.

She glanced up.

The flight of two had changed their angle of attack. They were darting toward the John Paul Jones, flying low and fast, staggered in echelon. When the sun glinted off their wings, Hunt imagined it was their cannons firing. She grimaced but no impacts came. The flight of two was closing the distance between them. The weapon systems on the John Paul Jones had been taken out of action. On the bridge there was silence. Her command — the hierarchy that was her ship and its crew — it all melted away in these, their final moments. The radioman, who couldn’t have been more than nineteen, glanced up at her, and she, surprising herself, placed her arm around him. The flight of two was so close now, so low, that she could observe the slight undulation of their wings as they passed through the uneven air. In a blink their ordnance would drop.

Hunt shut her eyes.

A noise like thunder — a boom.

But nothing happened.

Hunt glanced upward. The two planes turned aerobatic corkscrews around each other, climbing higher and higher still, losing and finding themselves in striations of cloud. Then they descended again, passing a hundred feet or less above the surface of the ocean, flying slowly, right above stall speed. As they passed in front of the bridge, the lead plane was so close that Hunt could see the silhouette of the pilot. Then he dipped his wing — a salute, which Hunt believed was the message he’d been sent there to deliver.

The planes ascended and flew back the way they came.

The ship’s bridge remained silent.

Then there was a crackle of static. For the first time in more than a day, one of their radios turned on.

The video teleconference shut off. The screen withdrew into the ceiling. Lin Bao and Minister Chiang sat alone at the vast conference table.

“Do you think your friend Admiral Ma Qiang is upset with me?”

The question took Lin Bao off guard. He never imagined that someone in Minister Chiang’s position would concern himself with the emotional state of a subordinate. Not knowing how to answer, Lin Bao pretended that he hadn’t heard, which caused Minister Chiang to ruminate a bit about why he’d asked.

“Ma Qiang is an excellent commander, decisive, efficient, even cruel. But his effectiveness can also be his weakness. He is an attack dog only. Like so many military officers, he doesn’t understand nuance. By sparing the John Paul Jones, he believes that I’ve denied him a prize. However, he doesn’t understand the true purpose of his mission.” Minister Chiang arched an eyebrow. What the true purpose of that mission was hung in the air as an unanswered question, one that Lin Bao wouldn’t dare ask aloud but instead asked through his silence, so that Minister Chiang continued, “Tell me, Lin Bao, you studied in the West. You must’ve learned the story of Aristodemus.”

Lin Bao nodded. He knew the story of Aristodemus, that famous Spartan who was the sole survivor of the Battle of Thermopylae. He’d learned it at the Kennedy School, in a seminar pompously titled “The History of War” taught by a Hellenophile professor. The story went that in the days before the final stand of the famous Three Hundred, Aristodemus was stricken with an eye infection. The Spartan king, Leonidas, having no use for a blind soldier, sent Aristodemus home before the Persians slaughtered what was left of his army.

“Aristodemus,” said Lin Bao, “was the only Spartan who survived to tell the story.”

Minister Chiang leaned back in his armchair. “This is what Ma Qiang doesn’t understand,” he said, showing his teeth in an amused half smile. “He wasn’t sent to sink three American warships; that was not his mission. His mission was to send a message. If the entire flotilla was destroyed, if it disappeared, the message would be lost. Who would deliver it? Who would tell the story of what happened? But by sparing a few survivors, by showing some restraint, we will be able to send our message more clearly. The point here is not to start a needless war but to get the Americans to finally listen to us, to respect the sovereignty of our waters.”

Minister Chiang then complimented Lin Bao on his effectiveness as the American attaché, noting how well he’d managed the baiting of the John Paul Jones with the Wén Rui, and how American culpability in the seizure of that intelligence vessel disguised as a fishing trawler would undermine the international outcry that was certain to begin at the United Nations and then trickle from that ineffectual international organization to others that were equally ineffectual. Then, being in a pensive mood, Minister Chiang held forth on his vision of events as they might unfold in the coming days. He imagined the surviving crew members of the John Paul Jones recounting how they had been spared by the Zheng He. He imagined the Politburo Standing Committee brokering a deal with their Iranian allies to release the downed F-35 and its pilot as a means of placating the Americans. And lastly, he imagined their own country and its navy possessing unfettered control of the South China Sea, a goal generations in the making.

By the time he’d finished his explication, Minister Chiang seemed in an expansive mood. He placed his hand on Lin Bao’s wrist. “As for you,” he began, “our nation owes you a great debt. I imagine you’d like to spend some time with your family, but we also need to see to your next posting. Where would you like to be assigned?”

Lin Bao sat up in his chair. He looked the minister in the eye, knowing that such an opportunity might never again present itself. “Command at sea, Comrade Minister. That’s my request.”

“Very well,” answered Minister Chiang. He gave a slight backhanded wave as he stood, as if with this gesture alone he had already granted such a wish.

Then as Minister Chiang headed for the door, Lin Bao plucked up his courage and added one caveat, “Specifically, Comrade Minister, I request command of the Zheng He Carrier Battle Group.”

Minister Chiang stopped. He turned over his shoulder. “You would take Ma Qiang’s command from him?” Then he began to laugh. “Maybe I was wrong about you. Perhaps you are the cruel one…. We’ll see what can be arranged. And please, take those damn M&M’s with you.”

For ten days Sandeep Chowdhury had slept on the floor of his office. His mother watched his daughter. His ex-wife didn’t harass him with a single email or text message even after internet and cellular service resumed. His personal life remained mercifully quiet. He could attribute this détente to the crisis consuming the country’s attention and his family’s knowledge that he was playing a central part in its management. On the political left and political right, old adversaries seemed willing to dispense with decades of antipathy in the face of this new aggression. It had taken the television networks and newspapers about a day, maybe two, to understand the magnitude of what had occurred in the South China Sea and over the skies of Iran:

A flotilla wiped out.

A downed pilot.

The result was public unity. But also, a public outcry.

This outcry had grown louder and louder, to the point where it had become deafening. On the morning talk shows, on the evening news, the message was clear: We have to do something. Inside the administration a vociferous group of officials led by National Security Advisor Trent Wisecarver subscribed to the wisdom of the masses, believing that the US military must demonstrate to the world its unquestioned supremacy. “When tested, we must act” was the refrain echoed by this camp in various corners of the White House, except for one specific corner, the most important one, which was the Oval Office. The president had her doubts. Her camp, of which Chowdhury counted himself a member, had no refrain that they articulated within the administration, or on television, or in print. Their doubts manifested in a general reluctance to escalate a situation that seemed to have already spun out of control. The president and her allies were, put simply, dragging their feet.

Ten days into this crisis, the strategy of de-escalation seemed to be failing. Like the sinking of the Lusitania in the First World War, or the cries of “Remember the Maine!” at the outbreak of the Spanish-American War, a new set of names had replaced these historical ones. Within days, every American knew about the sinking of the Carl Levin and the Chung-Hoon, as well as the survival of the John Paul Jones, which hadn’t really survived but had been scuttled by the submarine that had rescued its few dozen remaining crew members, to include the commodore of the flotilla, whom the Navy had kept out of the limelight as she faced a board of inquiry.

If Sarah Hunt had, at least up to this point, managed to remain relatively anonymous, the opposite held true for Marine Major Chris “Wedge” Mitchell. After the Battle of Mischief Reef, as the media dubbed the one-sided engagement, senior Chinese officials reached out to the administration. Minister of Defense Chiang was particularly engaged, insisting that this crisis was one large misunderstanding. As a gesture of goodwill, he offered himself to the Americans as an intermediary between them and the Iranians. He would personally negotiate the return of the F-35 and the release of its pilot. When a delegation of Chinese emissaries arrived with this message at the US embassy in New Delhi — their own embassy in Washington having been shut down in the wake of the crisis — the administration replied that it was the height of dishonesty to pretend that the F-35 would be turned over before the pilfering of its many sensitive technological secrets by the Chinese and Iranians. As for the pilot, the administration was under an intense amount of pressure to recover him.

Three days after Major Mitchell went missing, his name was leaked by someone in the administration to a cable news network. An anchor at that network then paid a visit to the Mitchell family home outside of Kansas City, Missouri, where she found quite a story: four generations of Marine fighter pilots. The anchor conducted her interview in a living room with nearly one hundred years of memorabilia hanging on the walls, from captured Japanese battle flags to a blood-splattered flight suit. On camera, Major Mitchell’s father described his son, while from time to time staring vacantly into the backyard, out toward a tree with the two rusted steel anchor points of a swing set drilled into its thickest branch. The elder Mitchell spoke about the family, the decades of tradition, all the way back to his own grandfather, who had flown with the vaunted Black Sheep squadron in the Second World War. The segment integrated photos of the young, handsome Major Chris “Wedge” Mitchell alongside photos of his father, and of his “Pop,” and of his “Pop-Pop,” the passage of generations linking the America of this time to the America of another time, when the country had been at the height of its greatness.

The video went up online, and within hours, it had been watched millions of times.

At a National Security Council meeting in the Situation Room on the fifth day of the crisis, the president asked if everyone had seen the segment. They all had. Already, #FreeWedge had begun to trend heavily on social media. One only had to look out of any West Wing window to see the proliferation of black POW/MIA flags that overnight picketed the Washington skyline. The president wondered aloud why the plight of this one pilot seemed to resonate more profoundly than the deaths of hundreds of sailors in the South China Sea. The room grew very quiet. Every staffer knew that on her desk for signature were the letters of condolence to the families of the Levin, Chung-Hoon, and John Paul Jones. Why, she asked rhetorically, does he matter more than them?

“He’s a throwback, ma’am,” Chowdhury blurted out.

He didn’t even have a seat but was standing against the wall among the other backbench staffers. Half the cabinet turned to face him. He immediately regretted that he’d opened his mouth. He glanced down at his hands, as if by looking away he might convince the room that someone else had spoken, that his comment had been some strange act of ventriloquism.

In a firm but measured tone the president asked him to explain.

“Wedge is a link in a chain,” Chowdhury began hesitantly, gaining confidence as he went. “His family ties us back to the last time we defeated a peer-level military. The country can intuit what might be coming. Seeing him reminds people of what we as a nation are capable of accomplishing. That’s why they’re so invested in him.”

No one either agreed or disagreed with Chowdhury.

After a few beats of silence, the president told the room that she had one goal, and one goal alone, which was to avoid an escalation that would lead to the type of peer-to-peer conflict Chowdhury had mentioned. “Is that clear?” she said, leveling her gaze at those around the conference table.

Everyone nodded, but a lingering tension made it evident that not everyone agreed.

The president then stood from her seat at the head of the table and left, a trail of her aides following behind her. The hum of conversation resumed. The various secretaries and agency heads engaged in sidebar discussions, leaning in to one another as close as conspirators as they filtered out into the corridor. A pair of junior aides swept into the room and checked that no sensitive notes or errant document had been left behind.

As Chowdhury migrated back to his desk, his boss, Trent Wisecarver, found him. “Sandy…” Like a child who can tell whether he is in trouble from the inflection of a parent’s voice, Chowdhury could tell immediately that Wisecarver was upset with him for speaking out of turn in the meeting. Chowdhury began to equivocate, apologizing for his outburst and making assurances that it wouldn’t happen again. More than a decade before, Wisecarver’s young son had perished in the coronavirus pandemic, an event many attributed to Wisecarver’s hawkish political awakening and that made him adept at projecting fatherly guilt onto those subordinates he treated as surrogate children.

“Sandy,” repeated Wisecarver, though his voice was different now, a bit softer and more conciliatory. “Take a break. Go home.”

At first Wedge thought he was home. He’d woken up in a dark room, in a bed, with clean sheets. He couldn’t see a thing. Then he noticed a single bar of light beneath what must have been a shut door. He lifted his head to take a closer look. That’s when the pain hit him. And with the pain came the realization that he was very far indeed from home. He returned his head to the pillow and kept his eyes open to the dark.

He couldn’t quite remember what had happened at first, but slowly, details began to emerge: his starboard wing dancing along the border… losing flight control… his attempt to eject… his descent toward Bandar Abbas… his smoking a Marlboro on the tarmac… the man with the scars… the pressure of that three-fingered grip against his shoulder. It took an entire night for these details to resurface.

He ran his tongue through his mouth and could feel the gaps among his teeth. His lips felt fat and blistered. Light began to suggest itself at the rim of the curtains. Wedge was soon able to take in his surroundings, but his vision was blurred. One of his eyes was swollen shut, and he could hardly see through the other.

Without his vision, he’d never fly again.

Everything else would heal. Everything else could be undone. Not this.

He tried to reach his hand to his face, but his arm couldn’t move. His wrists were cuffed to the frame of the bed. He pulled and then pulled again, his restraints rattling as he struggled to touch his face. A hurried procession of footsteps advanced toward his room. His door opened; balanced in the brightly lit threshold was a young nurse wearing a hijab. She held her finger to her mouth, shushing him. She wouldn’t come too close. She formed both hands into a pleading gesture and spoke softly in a language Wedge didn’t understand. Then she left. He could hear her running down the corridor.

There was light in his room now.

Hanging from a metal arm in the far corner was a television.

Something was written on its bottom.

Wedge relaxed his throbbing head against the pillow. With his un-swollen eye, he focused on the television and the piece of text embossed at its base. It took all of his concentration but, slowly, the letters became sharper, shoring up around the edges. The image gathered itself, coming into focus. Then he could see it, in near twenty-twenty clarity, that fantastic and redeeming name: panasonic.

He shut his eyes and swallowed away a slight lump of emotion in his throat.

“Good morning, Major Wedge,” came a voice as it entered. Its accent was haltingly British, and Wedge turned his attention in its direction. The man was Persian, with a bony face cut at flat angles like the blades of several knives, and a precisely cropped beard. He wore a white orderly coat. His long, tapered fingers began to manipulate the various intravenous lines that ran out of Wedge’s arms, which remained cuffed to the bed frame.

Wedge gave the doctor his best defiant stare.

The doctor, in an effort to ingratiate himself, offered a bit of friendly explication. “You suffered an accident, Major Wedge,” he began, “so we brought you here, to Arad Hospital, which I assure you is one of the finest in Tehran. Your accident was quite severe, but for the past week my colleagues and I have been looking after you.” The doctor then nodded to the nurse, who followed him around Wedge’s bedside, as though she were the assistant to a magician in the midst of his act. “We very much want to return you home,” continued the doctor, “but unfortunately your government isn’t making that easy for us. However, I’m confident this will all get resolved soon and that you’ll be on your way. How does that sound, Major Wedge?”

Wedge still didn’t say anything. He simply continued on with his stare.

“Right,” said the doctor uncomfortably. “Well, can you at least tell me how you’re feeling today?”

Wedge looked again at the television; panasonic came into focus a bit more quickly this time. He smiled, painfully, and then he turned to the doctor and told him what he resolved would be the only thing he told any of these fucking people: His name. His rank. His service number.

He’d done as he’d been told. Chowdhury had gone home. He’d spent the evening with Ashni, just the two of them. He’d made them chicken fingers and french fries, their favorite, and they’d watched an old movie, The Blues Brothers, also their favorite. He read her three Dr. Seuss books, and halfway through the third—The Butter Battle Book—he fell asleep beside her, waking after midnight to stumble down the hall of their duplex to his own bed. When he woke the next morning, he had an email from Wisecarver, subject: Today, text: Take it off.

So he dropped his daughter at school. He came home. He made himself a French press coffee, bacon, eggs, toast. Then he wondered what else he might do. There were still a couple of hours until lunch. He walked to Logan Circle with his tablet and sat on a bench reading his news feed; every bit of coverage — from the international section, to the national section, to the opinion pages and even the arts — it all dealt in one way or another with the crisis of the past ten days. The editorials were contradictory. One cautioned against a phony war, comparing the Wén Rui incident to the Gulf of Tonkin, and warned of opportunistic politicians who now, just as seventy years before, “would use this crisis as a means to advance ill-advised policy objectives in Southeast Asia.” The next editorial reached even further back in history to express a contradictory view, noting at length the dangers of appeasement: “If the Nazis had been stopped in the Sudetenland, a great bloodletting might have been avoided.” Chowdhury began to skim, coming to, “In the South China Sea the tide of aggression has once again risen upon the free peoples of the world.” He could hardly finish this article, which sustained itself on ever loftier rhetoric in the name of pushing the country toward war.

Chowdhury remembered a classmate of his from graduate school, a Navy lieutenant commander, a prior enlisted sailor who’d gotten his start as a hospital corpsman with the Marines in Iraq. Walking past his cubicle in the study carrels one day, Chowdhury had noticed a vintage postcard of the USS Maine tacked to the partition. When Chowdhury joked that he ought to have a ship that didn’t blow up and sink pinned to his cubicle, the officer replied, “I keep it there for two reasons, Sandy. One is as a reminder that complacency kills — a ship loaded out with fuel and munitions can explode at any time. But, more importantly, I keep it there to remind me that when the Maine blew up in 1898—before social media, before twenty-four-hour news — we had no problem engaging in national hysteria, blaming it on ‘Spanish terrorists,’ which of course led to the Spanish-American War. Fifty years later, after World War Two, when we finally performed a full investigation, you know what they found? The Maine blew up because of an internal explosion — a ruptured boiler or a compromised ammunition storage compartment. The lesson of the Maine—or even Iraq, where I fought — is that you better be goddamn sure you know what’s going on before you start a war.”

Chowdhury closed his newsfeed. It was nearly lunch time. He walked home lost in thought. His desire for de-escalation didn’t stem from any pacifistic tendencies on his part. He believed in the use of force — after all, he worked on the National Security Council staff. His fear of escalation was more instinctual. Inherent in all wars, he knew, was a miscalculation; by their nature it had to exist. That’s because when a war starts both sides believe that they will win.

As he walked, he struggled to put words around his reservations as if he were writing a white paper to himself. His opening sentence came to him. It would be, The America that we believe ourselves to be is no longer the America that we are….

He thought this was a true statement. He pondered just how fraught a statement it was, how an overestimation of American strength could be disastrous. But it was lunch time, and there was nothing he could do about such existential questions, at least at this moment. This crisis, like every other, would likely pass. Cooler heads would prevail because it seemed that they always did.

He rooted around in the fridge. Not much there.

In the background CNN was playing. The anchor announced some breaking news. “We have obtained exclusive video of downed Marine pilot Major Chris Mitchell….”

Chowdhury banged the back of his head as he startled up from the fridge. Before he could get to the television, he heard the warning that the video was graphic, that it might prove disturbing to some audiences. Chowdhury didn’t wait around to see it. He already knew how bad it was. He climbed in his car and rushed to the office, forgetting to turn off the television.

He texted his mother to see if she could pick up Ashni from school, lest he appear negligent to his ex-wife. His mother wrote back immediately and, uncharacteristically, didn’t complain about yet another change in plan. She must have already seen the video, thought Chowdhury. He was listening to the radio on his fifteen-minute drive into work; MSNBC, Fox, NPR, WAMU, even the local hip-hop station WPGC — everyone was talking about what they’d just seen. The image quality was grainy, pixilated, but what they all fixated on was how Wedge — lying on his side, with that brute of an Iranian officer standing over him, kicking him in the ribs and head — kept repeating only his name, rank, and service number.

The divergence of views Chowdhury had read in the paper that morning was quickly yielding to a consensus. Every voice he heard on the drive into work agreed: the defiance displayed by this downed flyer was an example to us all. We wouldn’t be pushed around, not by anyone. Had we forgotten who we were? Had we forgotten the spirit which made us that single, indispensable nation? Chowdhury thought of yesterday’s debate in the Situation Room and the president’s policy of de-escalation. With the release of this video, such a policy would become untenable.

When he barged into his office, the first person he saw was Hendrickson, whom he hadn’t seen since the crisis began. The offices of the national security staff were packed with Pentagon augments who were helping with — or at times getting in the way of — the administration’s response to the Iranians. “When did the video come in?” Chowdhury asked Hendrickson.

He pulled Chowdhury into the corridor. “It came in last night,” he said in a conspiratorial whisper, glancing side to side as though he were about to cross the road. “A signals intercept from Cyber Command — weird that it didn’t come from NSA. It seems this Iranian brigadier in the video lost his cool. He’s well connected and his superiors didn’t quite believe what he’d done until a video circulated internally of the interrogation. We picked it up in their email traffic. Cyber defense has never been a strong suit for the Iranians. They have a tendency to focus on offensive cyber, but kind of forget to guard the barn door.”

“How did it get to the press?” asked Chowdhury.

Hendrickson gave him a look, one Chowdhury had seen many times before when they’d attended the Fletcher School and either Chowdhury or one of his classmates had asked a question with an answer so obvious that its very asking annoyed Hendrickson. Nevertheless, Hendrickson obliged with an answer. “How do you think? A leak.”

Before Chowdhury could ask Hendrickson who he thought had leaked the video, Trent Wisecarver stepped out from the office and into the corridor where the two stood. His frameless glasses were balanced on the tip of his nose, as if he’d been reading. Under his arm were several binders marked top secret//noforn. Based on their thickness and on the fact that they were paper, not electronic, Chowdhury assumed them to be military operational plans of the highest sensitivity. When he saw Chowdhury, Wisecarver made a face. “Didn’t I tell you to take the day off?”

Captain Sarah Hunt ventured out to the commissary on foot. For three weeks she’d been trapped on base without a car, living in a room at the bachelor officers’ quarters, its only amenities a television that played the antiseptically boring American Forces Network and a kitchenette with a mini-fridge that didn’t make ice. Why the Navy chose to perform her board of inquiry here, at Yokosuka, instead of her home port of San Diego, was a mystery to her. Her best guess was that they wanted to avoid any undue attention paid to the proceedings, but she couldn’t be certain. The Navy wasn’t in the business of explaining its decisions, not to anyone, and most certainly not to itself, at least at her level of command. And so she’d spent the intervening weeks since the Battle of Mischief Reef stowed away in this crappy room, reporting to a nondescript office building once or twice a day to give tape-recorded answers to questions and hoping that the deliberations in progress might clear her name so that the administrative hold she’d been placed under would soon lift, allowing her to retire in peace.

She’d begun to think that the board of inquiry might never reach its conclusion when an optimistic note arrived in the form of a voicemail left by her old friend Rear Admiral John Hendrickson, in which he announced that he “happened to be on base” and asked if he could stop by for a drink. When he was a lieutenant on faculty at Annapolis, Hendrickson had volunteered as one of the softball coaches. As a midshipman, Hunt had been one of his star players. She’d been the catcher. And Hendrickson and the other players had affectionately nicknamed her “Stonewall” for the way she guarded home plate. On occasions too numerous to count, a runner rounding third would find herself flat on her back along the baseline, staring up at an expanse of sky, while Midshipman Sarah “Stonewall” Hunt stood triumphantly over her, ball in hand, with the umpire bellowing, “Ouutt!”

Sarah Hunt now stood in the checkout line of the commissary. She’d bought two six-packs of IPA, a jar of Planters mixed nuts, some crackers, some cheese. While she waited in line, she couldn’t help but feel as though the other sailors were eyeing her. They knew who she was, stealing glances while trying to pretend that they didn’t notice her. She couldn’t decide whether this reaction was awe or contempt. She had fought in her country’s largest naval battle since the Second World War. She was, at this moment, the only officer who had ever held command at sea during a peer-level naval engagement, her three subordinate commanders having gone down with their ships. As she worked her way through the checkout line, she wondered how the sailors at Pearl Harbor felt in the days after that iconic defeat. Although eventually they had been celebrated, were the veterans of that battle first vilified? Did they have to suffer through boards of inquiry?

The cashier handed Hunt her receipt.

Back in her room, she put the nuts into a plastic bowl. She laid the crackers and cheese on a plate. She popped open a beer. And then she waited.

It didn’t take long.

Knock, knock, knock… knock… knock… knock… knock, knock, knock…

Unreal, thought Hunt.

She called out for him to come in. Hendrickson opened the unlocked door, crossed the room, and sat across from Hunt at the small table in the kitchenette. He exhaled heavily, as though he were tired; then he took one of the beers that sat sweating condensation on the table, as well as a fistful of the salty nuts. They knew each other so well that neither had to speak.

“Cute with the knocks,” Hunt eventually said.

“SOS, remember?”

She nodded, and then added, “But this isn’t Bancroft Hall. I’m not a twenty-one-year-old midshipman and you aren’t a twenty-seven-year-old lieutenant sneaking into my room.”

He nodded sadly.

“How’s Suze?”

“Fine,” he answered.

“The kids?”

“Also fine… grandkid soon,” he added, allowing his voice to perk up. “Kristine’s pregnant. The timing’s good. She just finished a flight tour. She’s slated for shore duty.”

“She still with that guy, the artist?”

“Graphic designer,” Hendrickson corrected.

“Smart girl,” said Hunt, giving a defeated smile. If Hunt had ever married, she knew it would’ve needed to be an artist, a poet, someone whose ambition — or lack thereof — didn’t conflict with her own. She had always known this. That was why, decades before, she’d broken off her affair with Hendrickson. Neither of them was married at the time, so what made it an affair — because affairs are illicit — was their discrepancy in rank. Hendrickson thought after Hunt’s graduation from Annapolis they could be out in the open. Despite Hunt’s feelings for Hendrickson, which were real, she knew she could never be with him, or at least never be with him and have the career she wanted. When she explained this logic weeks before her graduation, he had told her that she was the love of his life, a claim that in the intervening thirty years he’d never disavowed. She had offered him only the same stony silence they now shared, which in that moment again reminded him of her namesake from those years ago — Stonewall.

“How you holding up?” Hendrickson eventually asked her.

“Fine,” she said, taking a long pull off her beer.

“The board of inquiry’s almost finished with its report,” he offered.

She looked away from him, out the window, toward the port where she’d noticed over the past week an unusually heavy concentration of ships.

“Sarah, I’ve read over what happened…. The Navy should’ve given you a medal, not an investigation.” He reached out and put his hand on her arm.

Her gaze remained fixed on the acres of anchored gray steel. What she wouldn’t give to be on the deck of any of those ships instead of here, trapped in this room, at the end of a career cut short. “They don’t give medals,” she said, “to commodores who lose all their ships.”

“I know.”

She glared at him. He was an inadequate receptacle for her grievances: from the destruction of her flotilla; to her medical retirement; all the way back to her decision never to have a family, to make the Navy her family. Hendrickson had gone on to have a career gilded with command at every level, prestigious fellowships, impressive graduate degrees, and even a White House posting, while also having a wife, children, and now a grandchild. Hunt had never had any of this, or at least not in the proportions that she had once hoped. “Is that why you came here?” she asked bitterly. “To tell me that I should’ve gotten a medal?”

“No,” he said, taking his hand off her arm and coming up in his seat. He leaned toward her as if for a moment he might go so far as to remind her of their difference in rank, that even she could push him too far. “I came here to tell you that the board of inquiry is going to find that you did everything possible given the circumstances.”

“What circumstances are those?”

Hendrickson grabbed a fistful of the nuts, dropping them one at a time in his mouth. “That’s what I was hoping you might tell me.”

The board of inquiry wasn’t the only reason Hendrickson had flown from Washington to Yokosuka. This should’ve been obvious to Hunt, but it hadn’t. She was so ensconced in her own grief, in her own frustration, that she hadn’t given much thought to broader events. “You’re here to coordinate our response?” she asked.

He nodded.

“What’s our response going to be?”

“I’m not at liberty to say, Sarah. But you can imagine.”

She glanced back out to the port filled with ships, to the twin carriers at anchor studded with parked fighters on their decks, to the low-set submarines brooding on the surface, and then to the new semisubmersible frigates and the more traditional destroyers with their bladelike hulls facing out to sea.

This was the response.

“Where are you and your bosses going to send these ships?”

He didn’t answer, but instead held forth on a range of technical issues. “You told the board of inquiry that your communications shut down. We haven’t figured out how they did this, but we have some theories….” He asked her about the frequency of the static she heard from her failing radios, about whether the Aegis terminal turned off or simply froze. He asked a series of more runic questions above the classification level of the board of inquiry. She answered — at least as best she could — until she couldn’t stand it anymore, until Hendrickson’s questions began to prove that whatever response he and his masters at the White House had planned against their adversaries in Beijing was fated to be a disaster.

“Don’t you see?” she finally said, exasperated. “The technical details of what they did hardly matter. The way to defeat technology isn’t with more technology. It is with no technology. They’ll blind the elephant and then overwhelm us.”

He gave her a confused, sidelong glance. “What elephant?”

“Us,” she added. “We’re the elephant.”

Hendrickson finished off the last of his beer. It’d been a long day and a tough few weeks, he told her. He’d return in the morning to check on her and then he had a flight out the following afternoon. He understood what she was saying, or at least wanted to understand. But the administration, he explained, was under enormous pressure to do something, to somehow demonstrate that they wouldn’t be cowed. It wasn’t only what had happened here but also this pilot, he said, this Marine who’d been brought down. Then he ruminated on the curse of domestic politics driving international policy as he stood from his seat and made for the door. “So, we’ll pick up again tomorrow?” he asked.

She didn’t answer.

“Okay?” he added.

She nodded. “Okay.” She shut the door behind him as he left.

That night her sleep was thin and empty, except for one dream. He was in it. And the Navy wasn’t. It was the two of them in an alternative life, where their choices had been different. She woke from that dream and didn’t sleep well the rest of the night because she kept trying to return to it. The following morning, she woke to a knock at her door. But it wasn’t him; it wasn’t his familiar SOS knock, just a plain knocking.

When she opened her door, a pimply faced sailor handed over a message. She was to report to the board of inquiry that afternoon for a final interview. She thanked the sailor and returned to her dim room, where the darkness congealed in the empty corners. She threw open the drapes to let in the light. It blinded her for a moment.

She rubbed at her eyes and looked down onto the port.

It was empty.