2034: A Novel of the Next World War

5 On Death Ground

From the nose cone rearward, his eyes ran the line of the fuselage. He ducked under the flared wings and walked in a crouch to each of their tips, brushing their leading edge with the pads of his four fingers as he checked for a dent, a loose coupling, any compromise in their aerodynamics. He made his way back to the dark, gaping exhaust of the twin engines. He stuck his head inside each afterburner, inhaled deeply, and shut his eyes. God, how he loved that smell: jet fuel. Next, in a single leap, like a house cat assuming its perch on a favorite windowsill, he hoisted himself onto the back of the Hornet. Wedge walked forward to the open cockpit and sat inside. He placed one hand on the inert throttle, the other on the stick, leaned against the headrest, and shut his eyes.

It was the middle of the night and the hangar deck was empty. Wedge had arrived on the Enterprise only a few hours before, after a brief layover in Yokosuka. On the flight in he observed the sun setting with a particular brilliance in the west, in the direction of Zhanjiang. It was the reddest he’d ever seen — red like a wound. He could think of no other way to describe this, his first glimpse of nuclear fallout. Although the strike had only used a tactical nuke, it was a significant escalation and the possibility of a strategic attack was on the rise. The Indians were making noises about trying to negotiate some kind of ceasefire, but that wasn’t going anywhere. Wedge hardly considered himself a strategist, but he knew enough to understand that a single miscalculation on either side could take this whole war high-order nuclear — that meant the big stuff, the end-of-days stuff.

What a goat fuck, Wedge thought to himself.

Followed by, Pop-Pop would’ve loved this.

The jet lag had eventually brought him down to the hangar deck, to check out the aircraft assigned to his new command, VMFA-323, the Death Rattlers. Even without the time change, the excitement of this assignment would have likely kept him up. After the chance meeting at the officers’ club in Miramar with the Death Rattlers’ old colonel, he’d had the idea to call the master sergeant who’d played chaperone to him while he was in Quantico. When Wedge asked whether the air wing had assigned another officer to take over the underequipped and understaffed Death Rattlers, the master sergeant explained that the vacancy was low-priority because the Corps’ unchanged policy was to fill vacancies in its F-35 squadrons, not its antiquated Hornet squadrons. At that point their conversation went the same as nearly all of their conversations before (“Nobody’s in command? Are you shitting me?” “Negative, sir.”). With a few deft strokes of his keyboard and a phone call to a soon-to-retire general, the master sergeant was able to cut Wedge a new set of orders.

How long had he waited for those orders? Really, since he’d been a kid. He had a sense as he sat in the cockpit that his entire life — everything he had ever hoped to be — came down to this assignment. With his eyes shut, he continued to manipulate the Hornet’s controls, juking the stick, stamping the rudder pedals, adding and easing off the throttle, while in his imagination he sequenced through a Split-S, a Low and High Yo-Yo defense, an Immelmann, and High-G Barrel Roll. As a child, he used to make a cockpit out of a cardboard box and wear one of his father’s old flight helmets. He would visualize dogfights, as he did now (Three-quarters throttle. Even rudder… closing, closing…), epic battles in which sometimes he was the victor (Full-throttle, break right!), and other times he was blown out of the sky (On your tail! Eject! Eject!) facing impossible odds. But always there was glory.

When he was ten years old, he’d put his cardboard box cockpit on the top of the stairs. Wearing his prized helmet, he sat inside. He wanted to feel what it was like to fly. His mother told him it wasn’t a good idea, and though she wouldn’t stop him from trying, she refused to be the one to give him the push. So he balanced his box on the lip of the stairs and then he leaned himself forward. The box tipped over the edge. And he flew…

For about five stairs.

Then the front of the box caught the sixth stair. It pitched over, violently. Wedge went face-first into the floor. The crash landing split his lip open. He still had the scar, ever so slight, on the inside of his mouth. He ran the tip of his tongue over it now.

“Can I help you, Major?”

Wedge glanced over the side of the cockpit, to find a senior chief with an unlit cigarette dangling from his mouth. He introduced himself to the senior chief and explained who he was. As he was the new commanding officer of the Death Rattlers, these were, in fact, his planes, so there was nothing to worry about; he could sit where he wanted.

“Your planes, Major?” said the senior chief, gazing out at the Hornets. The ten aircraft were gathered nearest the elevator that led to the flight deck, in the ready position, and crowding out the dozens of F-35s that had proven useless. The senior chief laughed to himself incredulously as he pulled a ladder up to the side of the cockpit. “Your predecessor thought these were his planes too. Admiral Hunt didn’t much appreciate that.”

Wedge had an in-brief with the admiral scheduled sometime in the next week. At the evocation of her name, he chose to listen a bit more closely to the senior chief, who introduced himself only as “Quint” and who Wedge suspected might possess some shred of wisdom to keep him in the good graces of his boss, or at least from meeting the ignominious fate of his predecessor. Quint then powered on the avionics in the cockpit. Any interface with a computer, a GPS, or that could conceivably be accessed online, Quint had disabled. Munitions would be deployed via manual weapons sights and manual releases. Navigation would be performed off charts, with flight times calculated using a wristwatch, pencil, and calculator. Communications would be handled via a custom-installed suite of VHF, UHF, and HF radios. For Wedge, who already knew that his Hornets had undergone some modifications, the tour Quint gave of their streamlined cockpits both under- and overwhelmed him.

It underwhelmed him because — even though he should’ve known better — he couldn’t believe the bare-bones nature of the onboard systems. It overwhelmed him because he couldn’t believe that he would have the chance to fly how they used to fly, before pilots became technicians, which was to say on instinct.

Inadvertently, Wedge succumbed to a heedless smile.

“You all right there, Major?” Quint asked.

Wedge turned toward him, the expression still stamped to his face. “Fine, senior chief. Just fine.” He ran the tip of his tongue on the inside of his lip, tracing the outline of his boyhood scar.

The destruction of the undersea cables was accepted with equanimity, if not a measure of outright enthusiasm, by Farshad’s old colleagues in the Revolutionary Guard Corps. Major General Mohammad Bagheri, chief of staff of the armed forces, was somewhat more taciturn. A dispatch directly from the general arrived on Farshad’s encrypted laptop within hours. It gave a single instruction: Continue to keep us apprised of all developments. Farshad couldn’t help but wonder what the Russians would come up with next.

The following week, the Rezkiy, Pyotr Velikiy, and Kuznetsov altered their course southward, toward Kaliningrad. Farshad didn’t believe this merited notification of Bagheri’s staff in Tehran. They would, he assumed, be returning to their home port. But when the Kuznetsov held fifteen miles short of Kaliningrad and began preparing for flight operations in Gdańsk Bay, Farshad knew they weren’t returning to port, at least not yet. When the first sorties of Su-34 Sukhoi attack aircraft catapulted off the deck of the Kuznetsov, their wings drooping with munitions, Farshad disappeared into his cramped quarters and quickly fired off another dispatch to his superiors, notifying them of developments but providing no analysis of his own. Farshad knew enough to know that an incorrect analysis of the situation could only be used against him later and that a correct analysis would gain him little. Before he could shut down his laptop, a cursory reply arrived from the General Staff: Acknowledged. Continue to monitor.

Farshad returned to the bridge to find Kolchak in command of the Rezkiy as they circled the Kuznetsov, screening for threats to the much larger carrier, close as they were to the coastline. Farshad could see the shore through his binoculars, a ribbon of dark rocks in the hazy distance. He estimated it was perhaps a dozen miles off. Not even an hour had passed since the first launch of Sukhois and already they’d returned across the coast and were “feet wet,” safely over the water. Farshad observed them through his binoculars: their wings were empty. The Sukhois had dropped their munitions. When the aircraft came a little closer and entered the flight pattern to land on the Kuznetsov, he could make out soot-darkened smudges on the gun ports at either side of the cockpit. The cannons within those gun ports had been firing.

Kolchak saw it too. With his binoculars raised he watched the Sukhois as they landed. “Looks like they got in pretty close,” he said, and then called out a new heading and speed to the helmsman before smiling triumphantly at Farshad, who struggled to know how he should react to his ally’s apparent victory, given that his Russian counterparts had not as of yet taken him into their confidence as to their mission.

As the first sorties landed, refueled, and rearmed, all within sight of the Rezkiy, Kolchak explained to Farshad that aircraft from the Kuznetsov were flying close air support for an invasion force that, at this very moment, was “reclaiming ancestral territories that connect the Rodina to its northern ports on the Baltic Sea.” That these ancestral territories were part of present-day Poland mattered little. Weeks before in the wardroom, Kolchak had foreshadowed Russia’s interests in seizing a ribbon of land that would connect its mainland to its Baltic port at Kaliningrad. While the world’s attention was diverted to the Far East, they would use that crisis to their benefit. “Who will object?” Kolchak now asked Farshad rhetorically. “Not the Americans. They’re hardly in a position to lecture us on ‘sovereignty’ and ‘human rights,’ particularly not after Zhanjiang. As for the Chinese, they understand our actions intuitively. In their language the word for crisis and opportunity are one and the same. Look at the map.” Kolchak fingered it while his cigarette smoldered between his knuckles. “We carve this slice from Poland and connect it to us through Belorussia. The Poles will complain, but they won’t really miss it. And it sews up a tidy ribbon around Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia. They, too, will soon return home to the Rodina.”

Farshad opened his mouth to speak, but his words were drowned out by another section of Sukhois catapulting off the deck of the Kuznetsov. Ribbons of dark smoke began to tower upward on the horizon as the fighters struck their targets and advancing Russian ground forces seized their objectives. Farshad thought to disappear to his quarters belowdecks, to check if he had received another message from the General Staff in Tehran. His Russian counterparts would have thought little of it. They wanted him reporting back their every move, particularly on a day like this, in which each move brought them greater success.

Farshad thought the operation was reckless, even by Russian standards. Poland was a NATO member nation. Perhaps President Putin, now an octogenarian, had made a disastrous miscalculation in his old age. He looked up at the jets and wondered when NATO would respond. American disinterest over the previous decades had crippled the alliance. It felt antiquated, irrelevant, a shadow of its Cold War self. This year it had celebrated its eighty-fifth birthday. But it still had teeth, surely? Maybe not. Maybe of the two octogenarians locked in this conflict, it was Putin who’d kept his teeth over the years.

Before Farshad could send a further report from his quarters there was a commotion on the bridge. A single fighter had threaded its way between the Kuznetsov and the Rezkiy. It had come in low and fast, at less than one hundred feet, so that its twin engines blew ripples across the water’s surface. With the continuous comings and goings of the Russian Sukhois, it must’ve gotten confused in the mix. The aircraft was a MiG-29, its wings clearly marked with the red-and-white checkerboard pattern of the Polish Air Force. Everyone seemed to see it at once: Farshad, Kolchak, the entire crew of the Rezkiy. The collective shock of finding an enemy aircraft at so close a range caused them all to freeze, and in that moment a great silence enveloped them.

That silence was broken when the MiG-29 engaged its afterburners, arching upward, gathering altitude as it bled off speed. One thousand, two thousand, three thousand feet, it hung suspended above the flight deck of the Kuznetsov. Beneath the single Polish MiG, dozens of heavily armed Sukhois and their ground crews were, suddenly, exposed.

The MiG barreled over, nosing downward into its angle of attack.

Farshad glimpsed the MiG’s belly as it pirouetted. It wasn’t even outfitted with a full complement of munitions. Two bombs hung from a single rack; that was it. But that would be enough.

A flash and then a trail of smoke on the deck of the Rezkiy as it fired on the MiG.

The smoke coiled upward.

On the belly of the MiG, Farshad could see the bombs leave their rack, where they hung for a moment, suspended in air. Farshad could also see the profile of the pilot, a determined speck in the canopy. The last thing Farshad saw before the rocket fired from the Rezkiy destroyed the MiG and the twin bombs it attempted to drop, as well as the pilot who never had a chance to eject, was the gun ports on the aircraft.

They were clean, not soot-darkened like the returning Sukhois. Because in the end, after all of the commotion, the pilot of the MiG never got off a shot.

Farshad went belowdecks to send his report to Tehran.

Lin Bao’s summons from the Politburo Standing Committee had come in the middle of the night. The unmarked transport that flew him off the deck of the Zheng He an hour later wasn’t one of his; it was sourced from another command. There were only two additional passengers aboard, both large, dark-suited men, clearly from one of the internal security branches. Lin Bao thought he recognized them from his last meeting with Minister Chiang in the British Airways lounge, though he couldn’t be sure. Thugs like these usually defied differentiation.

By first light, Lin Bao was sandwiched between those two security men in the back of a black sedan as it wound up a long, twisting ribbon of driveway to its improbable location, the front entrance of the Mission Hills Golf Club and Resort in Shenzhen. To his surprise, when he stepped from the sedan, Lin Bao was met by a lithe twentysomething woman. She had an orchid pinned in her long black hair, wore a name tag that announced her title: hospitality associate. She handed Lin Bao a glass of cucumber-infused water. He sipped it, cautiously.

She escorted Lin Bao along the labyrinthine route to his junior suite, while the two security men disappeared amid the bland furniture of the echoing reception hall. When they arrived in his suite, the hospitality associate gave Lin Bao a quick tour, pointing out the mini-fridge and the sofa that pulled out into a second bed, then drawing back the curtains so he could appreciate the expansive green-lawned view overlooking the more than two hundred holes of golf at Mission Hills. Everything would be provided for Lin Bao, she explained, pulling out a drawer that contained a change of civilian clothes and gesturing to his fully stocked bathroom. She knew he had traveled a great distance, so it was now time to relax. If Lin Bao was hungry, he could order some lunch from room service. She would also send up the valet to clean and press his uniform, which wasn’t appropriate attire at a resort. The hospitality associate was polite and methodical in her speech, missing no detail, her chin raised slightly, the tense line of her throat expressing her words with a practiced efficiency that by the end of their exchange had Lin Bao wondering whether she was employed by the resort or by the same branch of internal security as the darkly suited men who’d brought him this far.

It hardly mattered, Lin Bao concluded as she left him alone.

But not really alone. Lin Bao sat on the edge of the bed, his left hand on his left knee, his right hand on his right knee, his back rigidly straight. He searched the room with his eyes. The air-conditioning vent most likely contained a listening device and pinhole-sized camera. The mirror that hung above the bed most likely contained the same. The hotel phone was certainly monitored. He walked to his window, which overlooked the golf course. He tried to open it — the window was sealed.

Lin Bao returned to the edge of the bed. He took off his boots and his fatigues and wrapped a towel around his waist. He crossed the suite and turned on the shower. A fresh tube of toothpaste was balanced on its cap by the sink. He touched the bristles of the hotel toothbrush; they were damp. Lin Bao brushed with his finger. Before he could step into the shower, a valet knocked on his door.

Did he have any dry cleaning?

Lin Bao gathered his uniform and handed it to the valet, who told him that his colleagues would be ready for him that afternoon. Who those colleagues were, Lin Bao didn’t know, and likely neither did the valet, who left with the bundle of clothes tucked beneath his arm. Lin Bao showered, ordered a light lunch for which he had little appetite, and dressed in the khakis and golf shirt that had been left for him. He sat in a chair by the window and looked out at the nearly vacant course, its acres and acres of grass rolling outward like an ocean.

For the first time, he allowed himself to wonder if he would ever gaze at the ocean again. Since being summoned here from the Zheng He, he’d disciplined himself against such thoughts, but his anxiety got the better of him as he waited in his room. He had heard of such “summonses” before. A national disaster had occurred in Zhanjiang, with millions killed, incinerated, while many others slowly perished in hospital beds around the country — in hospital beds not far from here. Someone would be held accountable. The Politburo Standing Committee would purge what it identified as the single point of failure. Which would always be a person.

Lin Bao suspected that he was perfectly positioned to be that person.

He continued staring at the golf course. What an improbable venue for it all to end.

Hours passed until there was a gentle knock on his door. It was the same pleasant young woman, the hospitality associate. “Were you able to get some rest, Admiral Lin Bao?” Before he could answer, she added, “Do the clothes fit all right?” Lin Bao glanced down at his khakis and shirt. He nodded, allowing himself to smile at the woman and restraining himself from thinking of his own wife and daughter, neither of whom he expected to see after today. Then the young woman said, “Your colleagues are ready for you now.”

Home felt lonely and Chowdhury was trying to spend as little time there as possible. His mother and daughter had left Dulles International two days before, bound for New Delhi. Young as she was, Ashni would’ve asked few questions, but Chowdhury felt compelled to give the little girl an explanation as to where she was going and why — an explanation that approximated the truth. “You’re taking a trip to see where our family is from,” was what Chowdhury had settled on, even though his mother still struggled with the idea that her own brother could be considered family, let alone trusted.

The idea of trust was very much on Chowdhury’s mind as he considered what he had to do next, which was to inform his ex-wife, Samantha, that without her permission or foreknowledge he had flown their daughter across the world, to New Delhi, with an indefinite date of return. As he calculated what lay ahead, Chowdhury thought there existed a two-in-three chance of a strategic nuclear exchange with China. The idea that tactical nuclear exchanges wouldn’t escalate to strategic ones seemed wishful thinking at best. And so, he needed to get his daughter a long way from Washington. What Chowdhury understood — or had at least resigned himself to — was that no matter what his ex-wife said, no matter what custody court she dragged him into, no matter what international convention she evoked to have their daughter returned, he would fight and stall and writhe and obfuscate until he felt certain that it was safe for Ashni to come home. And if that day never arrived, then she would never return; he would simply alter his life accordingly.

But he didn’t need to deal with the rest of his life now; he only needed to inform Samantha of what he’d done and brace himself for her reaction. He sent her a text message, asking if they could meet for dinner. It was an odd request, to be sure; the two of them could hardly get on the phone without one hanging up on the other. However, Samantha replied immediately to the invitation — that is, Chowdhury could see the floating ellipses on the message thread, which meant that Samantha was typing, or typing and then deleting, which was likely the case because her reply after nearly a minute read only: Ok.

To which he replied: Name a place.

More ellipses before she answered: City Lights.

He nearly threw his phone across his empty apartment. The choice was so typical of her. Typical of her passive aggression. Typical of her moralizing. Typical of her need — since his one, fleeting infidelity, which led to their divorce — to belittle him whenever the opportunity presented itself. City Lights was a Chinese restaurant.

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

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

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

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

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

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

She flagged down their waiter.

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

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

The waiter receded toward the kitchen.

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

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

She glanced once at him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chowdhury made a slight, deferential nod.

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

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

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

“Like what?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You don’t mind?” she asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But it had been done.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wedge was aware.

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

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

Slowly, his smile revealed itself.

“Does some part of this amuse you?”

The smile vanished. “No, ma’am.”

“Then what’s with the smile?”

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

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

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

“When?”

“The night I got here,” he answered. “I met your communications senior chief, Quint. Nice guy. I was still on West Coast time, so I stayed up to walk around the hangar. The planes look good, ma’am.”

She leaned back in her chair, pleased that he thought so. For what she suspected would not be the last time, she allowed herself to feel a measure of affection for Wedge. She also felt sympathy. A great deal would be asked of him. She thought of her own sleeplessness. “If you’re having trouble getting rest, I can have the ship’s doctor prescribe you something.”

Wedge shook his head. “That won’t be necessary, ma’am. It’s never really been a problem for me. Plus, out here, I sleep like a baby.” He popped back to attention, then disappeared from her office, into the bowels of the ship.

The frail little man shuffled along the crest of the perfectly manicured grass hill, a golf club choked in his grip, the afternoon sun framing his silhouette. The same hospitality associate who’d taken Lin Bao to his junior suite now drove him toward the hill. Although Lin Bao had never met this man, he soon recognized him as Zhao Leji, member of the Politburo Standing Committee, secretary of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection — the CCDI.

Those four letters, and the little man who embodied them — Lin Bao had feared both his entire professional life.

His golf cart arrived on the crest of the hill right as Zhao Leji was entering his backswing. Lin Bao sat completely still. If he had any lingering belief that the hospitality associate wasn’t involved with the communist party and its internal security apparatus, if he held on to a hope that she was simply a young woman from the provinces who’d come to Shenzhen and found a good job at Mission Hills, it was dispelled when Lin Bao noticed how she, too, sat completely still, equally fearful of distracting Zhao Leji.

Now, at the apex of his swing, the head of Zhao Leji’s club floated in the air, his entire body conforming to this upward articulation. With a swoosh, the club made a clean decapitation of the ball from its tee, his shot sailing out toward the horizon, where it disappeared into the mix of sun and afternoon smog. As Zhao Leji slid his club back into his bag, he noticed Lin Bao.

“Not bad for an old man,” said Zhao Leji, hoisting his clubs onto his shoulder. He would walk to the next hole, preferring the exercise, while his security detail trailed behind in a squadron of golf carts. He motioned for Lin Bao to join him, and to grab a set of clubs off the back of one of the carts. As Lin Bao followed after Zhao Leji, he noticed that the hospitality associate would not look at him, as if she suspected Lin Bao was about to meet a fate she had long feared for herself.

It was soon only the two of them, Lin Bao and Zhao Leji, hoofing it across the golf course, each burdened by their bag of clubs. Eventually, Zhao Leji began to talk. “These days, hiking across a golf course is the closest I get to honest labor….” He was breathing heavily. “I began my career during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, digging trenches on a commune…. You do the work yourself…. There is satisfaction in that…. You grew up in America, yes?” When he turned to face Lin Bao, Zhao Leji’s eyes became like tunnels. “That makes us very different, doesn’t it. Take our game of golf, for instance. Americans like to ride around in a cart and play with a caddy. When they take their caddy’s advice and win, they claim the win as their own. When they take that advice and lose, they blame their caddy…. It’s never good to be the caddy.”

They arrived at the next hole, a par-4.

Zhao Leji took his swing. It landed on the fairway.

Lin Bao took his swing. It landed in the trees.

Zhao Leji began to laugh. “Go on, my young friend. Try again.” Lin Bao said that it was all right, he didn’t need a second chance, he didn’t want to cheat. But Zhao Leji would hear nothing of it. “It’s not cheating,” he insisted, “if I make the rules.”

Lin Bao switched clubs.

He put his second shot on the fairway, a bit behind Zhao Leji’s, and as they walked to their balls, Zhao Leji resumed their conversation. “Some might say that after what happened at Zhanjiang, it’s frivolous for a man in my position to be out playing golf. But it’s important for our people to know that life goes on, that there is steady leadership at the helm, particularly in light of what might be coming next. If our intelligence is correct — and I suspect that it is — the Americans will have three carrier battle groups in position to blockade our coastline within the next two weeks. You’ve worked very closely with Minister Chiang, but I feel that I must let you know that he’s expressed some reservations as to your competence. He believes that you might have given him, and by that virtue the Politburo Standing Committee, bad advice with regard to American intentions. Your mother was American, correct? Minister Chiang believes that your affinity for her country might have clouded your judgment when advising him.”

The two gazed out at the next hole. The oblong fairway extended in front of them for almost two hundred yards. Then it cut sharply to the left, running between a copse of trees and a water obstacle. After reading the ground, Lin Bao concluded that if he hit too short, he’d wind up in the trees — which was recoverable. However, if he hit too long, he’d wind up in the water — which was not.

Zhao Leji stepped to the tee with a 3-wood.

Lin Bao stood behind him with a 2-iron.

As Zhao Leji sunk his tee into the green, he commented on Lin Bao’s club selection, noting that a 2-iron wouldn’t give him enough range. “It seems we’ve looked at the same problem and reached a different set of solutions,” he said.

Lin Bao averted his eyes to avoid any outward disagreement with Zhao Leji. But if he thought to exchange his 2-iron for a 3-wood, something within Lin Bao wouldn’t allow it; perhaps it was his pride, or dignity, or willfulness. Whatever it was, the defiance he felt when confronted by someone more powerful was familiar. He’d felt it as a naval cadet when older boys had teased him about his American heritage, or when he’d first been passed over for command of the Zheng He in favor of Ma Qiang, and now, staring at his 2-iron, he even felt that defiance when questioned by a man who with a single word could have a dark-suited thug put a bullet in his head. And so, Lin Bao explained, “A 3-wood is going to give you too much range. If you overplay, you’re going to wind up in the water. There’s no recovery then. If you underplay and wind up in the trees, at least you’ll be in a better position for your next shot instead of all the way back here on the tee. When the range falls between two clubs, it’s a better strategy to select the less ambitious choice.”

The old man nodded once, planted his feet firmly on the ground, and, with his 3-wood gripped tightly, reached into his backswing. His ball exploded off its tee, the sound alone signaling a perfect connection, which arced ever higher. When its trajectory reached its apex, it became apparent that Lin Bao was right. The 3-wood was too powerful of a club.

Zhao Leji’s ball sailed into the water with a plunk.

He bent over, picked up his tee, and then faced Lin Bao, who searched for any expression of disapproval or even disappointment in the old man. There was none; he simply made way for Lin Bao, who sunk his tee into the stubby grass. The thought did occur to him that he could angle his shot into the rough. He imagined that someone more obsequious — someone like Minister Chiang — might throw his game in favor of a senior official like Zhao Leji. But Lin Bao had only risen as far as he had because he’d never indulged the weaknesses of a superior, even when that superior could harm his career or — as was the case with Zhao Leji — end his life.

His 2-iron connected with the ball.

Its trajectory was low and fast, rocketing toward the bend in the fairway. His shot was gaining altitude, but it wasn’t certain that it would be enough to clear the trees. It was like watching an overburdened aircraft attempt to climb above a particularly treacherous mountain face. Lin Bao found himself gesturing with his hands, up, up, up. And then he noticed that Zhao Leji was doing the same; it was as if the old man wanted to be proven wrong. When the ball clipped the top of the trees, it kept going, landing on the fairway right as a few agitated birds took flight from the topmost branches.

“Looks like I’m one stroke behind,” said Zhao Leji through a broad smile. Then the old man stepped over to his golf bag and replaced his 3-wood with a 2-iron.

They spent the better part of the afternoon on the course. That would be the only hole Lin Bao won against Zhao Leji. Though Lin Bao played his best, the old man was a far superior golfer, and it soon became obvious how remarkable it was that Lin Bao had outfoxed him on even a single hole. While they made their circuit around the course, the conversation turned to Lin Bao’s duties and “their natural evolution,” as Zhao Leji put it. He would no longer report directly to Minister Chiang. The disaster at Zhanjiang had forced the Politburo Standing Committee to “reorganize the military command structure,” a statement that Lin Bao recognized for the disciplinary euphemism it was. Zhao Leji then reminded Lin Bao that the People’s Republic was “on death ground,” in an echo of the language used by Minister Chiang, while not attributing that language to him or his subsequent conclusion: “We must fight.” When it came to the details of that fight, Zhao Leji was prepared only to say, “We must take commensurate action to the Americans’ strike at Zhanjiang.”

Lin Bao had felt tempted to remind Zhao Leji of the lesson from only moments ago: when selecting between two nearly equal courses of action it was always best to choose the least ambitious, lest you overplay. But correcting the secretary of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection on his golf game was one matter; correcting him on affairs of state was quite another. Lin Bao possessed enough gumption for the former but not yet the latter.

If he didn’t speak up against a potential nuclear strike on the United States, he nearly spoke up when Zhao Leji explained what he had planned next for him.

“Some people within the party hold you responsible along with Minister Chiang for Zhanjiang. I wasn’t sure myself until today. My belief is that you advised him as best you could. Perhaps, if he’d kept you closer, we might have avoided that tragedy — provided he would’ve listened to you, which I also doubt. From this point forward, I have taken on his responsibilities in the Defense Ministry. And I will need sound advice… a caddy, as it were.” And he smiled at Lin Bao. “Someone to provide an alternate viewpoint. So, you won’t be returning to your carrier. You’ll return to Beijing instead, to serve as my deputy within the ministry.”

Zhao Leji flagged down a member of his security detail, who appeared swiftly alongside them in a golf cart. The wily old man surely knew that the loss of Lin Bao’s command would be a demoralizing blow, which is why he didn’t wait for his reaction. As Lin Bao climbed next to the driver, Zhao Leji said his goodbyes, telling Lin Bao only, “I will see you in Beijing before long.” He turned to study the fairway and began to select the next club from his bag.

When Lin Bao arrived at reception, the hospitality associate seemed almost surprised to see him again. The member of Zhao Leji’s security detail spoke a few words to her and she escorted Lin Bao back to his room. As she had checked him into Mission Hills, Lin Bao now asked what he would need to do in order to check out. She seemed confused, saying only, “I’ll look into that,” as if she were unfamiliar with the procedure herself and Lin Bao was the first person she had ever needed to check out. When she left him at his door, she asked if he required anything else. Lin Bao reminded her about his dry cleaning, the uniform he’d sent out that morning. He couldn’t make the return trip in his golf clothes. The young woman again seemed unsure and repeated, “I’ll look into that.”

While Lin Bao packed up his few possessions in a shapeless bag, his mind began to wander. Despite Zhao Leji’s obvious frustration with Minister Chiang, he and the Politburo Standing Committee agreed with Chiang’s assessment of the situation. An American blockade off their coast was unacceptable. A counterstrike was the only option. But what form would that counterstrike take? Lin Bao understood that he would be required to have an opinion on the matter as he advised Zhao Leji. And like Minister Chiang, he would be held accountable for that opinion if it proved incorrect. The idea unsettled Lin Bao. He would be in Beijing soon and perhaps he would seek out Minister Chiang. Perhaps his old boss could quietly advise him, even if he had fallen out of favor with the Politburo Standing Committee and Zhao Leji. Perhaps Chiang could help him navigate his new role among these powerful and dangerous men.

A knock at the door interrupted these thoughts.

A young valet stood in the threshold. “This is the dry cleaning I have for your room.”

Lin Bao thanked him and took the hangers covered in transparent plastic. He laid them on the bed next to his bag. As he tore off the plastic, he noticed that the first uniform seemed a larger size than what he wore. It was wider in the stomach. The sleeves extended almost to the jacket’s hemline. When he read the embroidered name tape sewn above the breast pocket, it wasn’t his own — but it was familiar, nevertheless.

It read, Chiang.

What a coincidence, thought Lin Bao — but he only thought this for a moment. He suddenly felt utterly alone. He wouldn’t have his old boss to rely on for advice when he returned to Beijing. It was no coincidence that he and Minister Chiang had stayed in the same room. Nor was it a mistake that Minister Chiang’s uniform had been left behind.

By any objective measure Farshad had witnessed a spectacular success. His Russian naval counterparts had in a two-week period supported a land campaign conquering several hundred square miles, thus fulfilling a multigenerational strategic imperative: Russia now had direct overland access to its Baltic ports. Atrophied bodies of international governance and alliance, the United Nations and NATO, decried this “aggression,” but Farshad suspected that woven between their declamations was grudging respect. Decades of miscalculation in Washington and Beijing had sown discord into the world order; all the Russians had done was reap the harvest. That other nations — namely Farshad’s own — would try to reap a similar harvest in other locales seemed unsurprising. Equally unsurprising was that his countrymen would bungle it.

While Farshad was immersed in Russia’s advance into Polish territory, pleased to have found himself useful to naval commanders supporting a ground invasion, a hawkish faction of the Revolutionary Guards decided it was time for Iran to assert control of the long-contested Strait of Hormuz. The Revolutionary Guards, using their smaller fleet of speedboats, had brashly chosen to seize the first large international ship making the transit, a freighter owned by TATA NYK, the company’s name being an alphabet soup of meaningless letters that proved relevant to Farshad in only one way: the ship was Indian.

It was a particularly foolish choice for the Revolutionary Guards, who’d acted without the express approval of the chief of staff of the Armed Forces, Major General Bagheri, although his detractors speculated he’d known all along. Now Farshad’s government was in the unenviable position of having to de-escalate tensions while also not losing face or delegitimizing its long-running claim over the strait. In short, what General Bagheri needed was someone who had ties to both the Revolutionary Guards and to the regular military. Someone who could speak credibly for both. And who was a naval officer. Farshad knew, before the message ever arrived for him from Tehran, that he was the single person who fit this description.

He had flown commercial out of Moscow direct to New Delhi. This wasn’t because the Russian or Iranian military lacked the resources to fly him officially, but because neither his government nor the Indians had officially acknowledged they were willing to negotiate. He would, ostensibly, be traveling to New Delhi as a private citizen. Farshad’s mission was a delicate one. He understood that India’s old adversary, Pakistan, would be more than willing to aid his country if asked, and he also understood that the Indians could potentially throw their weight behind the Americans if pushed too far. The slightest misstep by either party could lead to a further escalation of what was already a global conflict, or, put another way, a world war.

Crammed into a center seat on his Aeroflot Airbus A330, he followed his flight’s progress. On the monitor affixed to the seatback in front of him, an icon of their plane left a tiny trail of bread crumbs across the globe. As he considered the map, Farshad reflected on how quickly tensions had escalated between the Americans and Chinese, two nations, unlike his own, that had a major stake in preserving the world order. From the Wén Rui incident, to the succession of naval battles fought between the US and Chinese fleets, to the invasion of Taiwan and the US nuclear strike on Zhanjiang, so much of what had occurred since March defied the logic of both nations’ interests.

Unless that logic had changed.

No one — neither politicians nor pundits — had yet to refer to this conflict as the Third World War. Farshad wondered if India’s involvement, or perhaps even Pakistan’s, would be enough to bestow on this crisis that grim name, with its apocalyptic connotations. Farshad doubted it.

The involvement of other nations wasn’t what would make this a Third World War. It would take something else….

At Zhanjiang the Americans had used a nuclear weapon, but it was tactical, its payload and the fallout both manageable and imaginable — the equivalent of a single, devastating natural disaster. No nation — America, China, or otherwise — had yet to dip into its arsenal of strategic nuclear weapons. The doomsday weapons.

Farshad’s ears popped.

The engines on the Airbus A330 groaned as they hurried their descent.

The plane landed and Farshad passed through immigration without incident. He had brought only one carry-on bag and within minutes was standing in the overcrowded arrivals hall, surrounded by the joyful embraces of travelers reunited with their loved ones. However, no one was there to meet him. His instructions from General Bagheri’s staff hadn’t extended beyond this point. He’d been assured that his Indian counterpart would find him here. He sat at a crowded Starbucks without ordering. His mind wandered. Watching the crowd, he began to think of the many names the people in it had for one another — whether it be mother, father, son, daughter, or simply friend—and how that might all vanish in an instant, in a flash, because of that single, other obliterating name we give to one another: enemy.

Interrupting Farshad’s thoughts, a stranger asked if he could sit in the empty seat at his table. Farshad gestured with his hand and the stranger, a man who was perhaps a decade older, joined him. Farshad continued to consider the crowd.

The stranger asked if he was waiting for someone. Farshad said that he was.

“Who?” asked the stranger.

Farshad considered him for a moment. “A friend, I guess.”

The man extended his hand, introducing himself. “I am Vice Admiral Anand Patel, a friend.”

Chowdhury was returning late to the US embassy. Diplomatic tensions being what they were, he was obliged to sleep there. His mother, however, had determined that it would be best if she and his daughter stayed with Chowdhury’s uncle. Though his days had been busy, Chowdhury committed himself to having dinner every night with Ashni. He had been in New Delhi for almost a week and the routine of early mornings, full days, and late-night returns to the embassy from his uncle’s house east of the Yamuna River was quickly wearing him out. He dozed in the back of the cab, remembering the last week as though it were a dream while he skirted Nehru Park. Within hours of the Iranians’ claiming autonomous control of the Strait of Hormuz and seizing the tanker owned by TATA NYK, Trent Wisecarver had called Chowdhury into his office and told him he would be “heading back to New Delhi.”

The way Wisecarver had said “back” hadn’t sat well with Chowdhury. Amid this conflict, a resurgent nativism was beginning to possess the American psyche, as it had in other conflicts, a phenomenon Chowdhury had witnessed that night with Samantha at the empty City Lights restaurant. Perhaps Wisecarver hadn’t meant anything by it; perhaps when he said “back” he was referring to his prior mission to New Delhi to retrieve the downed Marine pilot. But Chowdhury couldn’t shake his suspicions.

After the strike on Zhanjiang, Wisecarver had cleaned house within the national security staff. The country, unlike in generations past, had failed to come together when confronted by the specter of a world war, even a nuclear one. A strike against the American homeland seemed inevitable, though no one could know where or in what shape it would manifest — a dirty bomb planted by a sleeper cell, a warhead on the tip of a ballistic missile, or perhaps both? Decades of partisan division had taken their toll, and the administration was under fire from all sides, from the hawks who believed the tactical nuclear strike hadn’t gone far enough to the doves who believed America had abdicated its moral authority by employing such weapons. To respond to whatever came next, Wisecarver needed true loyalists. Which was to say he needed people who owed their positions in the administration not to their competencies, but to him alone. And so Chowdhury had been quietly sent “back” to New Delhi to deal with the new crisis in the Strait of Hormuz.

When Chowdhury arrived at the embassy, he checked his email a last time before heading to bed and saw that he had a message from another colleague who had been banished in Wisecarver’s putsch, Rear Admiral John Hendrickson: Bunt.

The two had left Washington at about the same time, though Hendrickson’s journey had been longer and more treacherous, and his mission equally complex. It was, in its way, also a diplomatic mission. Sarah Hunt, his “old friend and colleague” (this was how Hendrickson always referred to her), had at Zhanjiang launched the first nuclear strike in almost a century. On her orders millions had been killed. The strain must’ve been enormous. With the leadership in the White House bracing for the Chinese response to Zhanjiang, every commander in the field needed to be ready to deliver a swift counterpunch. Hesitation could be disastrous. Which was why Hendrickson was being sent to check on Hunt, to assess her state of mind. The fuzzy language Wisecarver had given him was “augment her command.”

The message Chowdhury had in his in-box from Hendrickson read simply, Arrived on Enterprise. Hope you’re well. More soon. — Bunt. Chowdhury and Hendrickson had made an arrangement when they’d both left Washington at the behest of Wisecarver, to help each other navigate the increasingly internecine politics of the administration they served. Chowdhury doubted their alliance would amount to much. But he needed all the friends he could muster. Hendrickson did too.

As he finished scrolling through his work emails, Chowdhury’s cell phone pinged with a fresh text message. It was from his uncle:

Come tomorrow 08:00 for breakfast. Have a new friend you should meet.

Hunt couldn’t believe it until she held the flight manifest in her hand. How had life conspired to deliver him here, now? His name on the manifest: Hendrickson, J. T. It appeared in the same order as when it had headed their softball team roster decades before at Annapolis. She checked her watch. From her stateroom she could hear flight deck operations underway. The Death Rattlers had been constantly in the air. Hunt had given Major Mitchell top priority to qualify his pilots on their low-tech avionics. At all hours, she could hear the fiery rumble and metallic screech of their Hornets launching and recovering. Now came an interruption, the hollow, raspy vibrations of a turboprop engine, a V-22 Osprey — the resupply flight with Hendrickson aboard.

Ten minutes or so passed and then with a knock at Hunt’s door a junior sailor announced, “Admiral Hendrickson to see you, ma’am.” When Hendrickson came in, he glumly stood there, his khaki uniform carrying the creases of the many layovers he’d had to endure as he leapfrogged from one base to another on his way out to sea. Dispensing with the naval courtesies, Hendrickson slumped into the chair opposite her desk, cradled his chin in his palm, and said only, “I want you to know that coming out here wasn’t my idea.”

“Why are you out here, then?” she asked.

The office rattled slightly as another Hornet catapulted off the flight deck.

Hendrickson, ever the company man, regurgitated the language Wisecarver had offered him.

“Augmenting my command?” Hunt replied, throwing back his words. “What the hell does that mean? Have you cleared this with INDOPACOM? Though, I guess respecting protocol has never been your thing.” She was angry, and she felt she had every right to be angry. No one had listened to her, not from the start. Hendrickson and his cronies on the national security staff had been so certain of their superiority, of their ability to take on any threat, and that overconfidence had backed them into this corner, cutting squares in the South China Sea, waiting for the imminent strike against their homeland.

“Admiral Johnstone at INDOPACOM is well aware of my visit,” answered Hendrickson. “You can call him on the redline if you want. I stopped in Honolulu and briefed him on my way out here—”

Another Hornet roared as it was catapulted off the flight deck.

“People are worried about you, Sarah.” Hendrickson softened his tone. He couldn’t manage to look at her as he said this, so he stared at his hands, fingering the obnoxiously large Annapolis class ring he still insisted on wearing. “You’ve been through a lot… been asked to take on a lot… emotionally.” Emotionally? Fuck him. Was he referring to events since her command of the John Paul Jones and her central role in the strike against Zhanjiang? Or was he going beyond that, to her days at Annapolis? To what she’d given up — namely, a family, a life, him — so that they could sit here together these many years later, two admirals on the bridge of a US warship. She’d never know. And he’d never say. But she listened to him regardless. “We all realize what’s coming. And it seems the Enterprise will be in the middle of our response. You shouldn’t have to go through it alone. I am here…” And she hoped for a moment he’d leave it at that, a personal statement that affirmed the history between them, except he couldn’t and so added, “… to augment your command.”

Their conversation shifted to the overall readiness of the Enterprise and its ability to inflict a counterstrike. So long as the Chinese didn’t engage with strategic nuclear weapons, the appropriate response would be a multipronged attack on their mainland with tactical nukes. Hunt had concluded that her one squadron of Hornets, the Death Rattlers, would be the most effective. She explained to Hendrickson the reworked avionics system, and her belief that a strike package should consist of the squadron’s nine planes distributed over three target sets: three flights composed of three aircraft each. The squadron’s new commanding officer, Major Chris “Wedge” Mitchell, had been tirelessly preparing his pilots for such a mission.

Hendrickson said, “I thought it was ten aircraft to a Marine Hornet squadron?”

“Wedge lost one aircraft four days ago. We’ve had to modify their targeting computers so that the bomb release is now done manually. We were testing them at sea with live ordnance. One of the pilots had a bomb get stuck, so it was dangling from his wing off its ejector rack. He couldn’t land like that, so he bailed out and put his plane into the drink. These pilots are young; they’re not used to navigating with nothing but a compass and flight chart. He had called in his position and we diverted there. We circled for an entire day, never found him. Maybe someone else picked him up — we were close to the mainland…. You can always hope.”

After a long silence, Hendrickson cocked his head skeptically. “‘Wedge?’ What the hell kind of a call sign is that, anyway?”

His wife and daughter were happy to see him, but home felt unreal to Lin Bao. He was living in the shadow of what was to come.

The Zheng He had already gone dark when Lin Bao returned to Beijing. He monitored it daily from the Defense Ministry as it made creeping progress toward the West Coast of the United States, its complement of stealth technology fully employed, its communications under a blackout. Lin Bao, better than anyone, understood the capabilities of that battle group. All they needed was a target set, which the ministry would transmit to Lin Bao’s replacement, a younger admiral of high competence, once the Zheng He was in position. Although Minister Chiang hadn’t lived to see his plan’s implementation, Lin Bao recognized the plan when it came across his desk. It arrived preapproved by the Politburo Standing Committee in a single manila folder. Lin Bao took it into the secure conference room in the bowels of the ministry, the same conference room where Minister Chiang had once triumphantly received him with heaping bowls of M&M’s. Lin Bao missed the doughy old bureaucrat; he missed his exuberant scheming and his odd sense of humor. Perhaps what Lin Bao missed most of all, as he tucked into Minister Chiang’s old armchair at the head of the conference table, was his boss’s company, the assurance that he wasn’t engaged in this madness alone.

But he was, at this moment, very much alone, by design.

Although the Politburo Standing Committee had approved the plan Lin Bao was about to put into action, he would be the senior-most officer tasked with its execution — the only person in the room. All responsibility fell on him.

Tensely, he collected himself and opened the folder.

It contained two envelopes. The two target sets.

One or another of the junior staffers had left a letter opener on the table for him. He slid the dull blade into the first and then the second envelope. Inside each were four paper-clipped pages, exhaustively stamped, certified, and serialized. On the top was a signature line, confirming receipt. He wrote his name, the only actual name that would appear on any of these documents. Then he skimmed over the authorizations, a labyrinth of anodyne operational language with whole passages that he himself had drafted on behalf of Minister Chiang.

Every detail was accounted for.

Which was to say with Lin Bao’s signature alone on the document, he was accountable for every detail: from the selection of the launch platform (whether it be surface-based, submarine-based, or aircraft-based), to the loading of the fissile material, to the readiness of the crews, to the accurate delivery onto the targets—

The targets…

For Lin Bao, this was the single unknown aspect of the plan. He imagined that Zhao Leji had chosen them himself. After their exchange on the golf course, Lin Bao half expected the old man to consult him as to their selection, to allow him again to assume the role of caddy. If given that chance, Lin Bao would’ve advised him not to overplay. A strike against the largest US cities — such as Los Angeles, or New York — would be too ambitious, the equivalent of choosing the 3-wood that day on the course. It should be two US cities for Zhanjiang, so an escalation. A parity should exist in the choice. Their South Sea Fleet had been based at Zhanjiang, so a similar military target would be appropriate, at least for one of the cities. The other target should be more industrial. Lin Bao thought of the advice he would have given had he been asked. However, Zhao Leji hadn’t needed another advisor. What he’d really needed was a receptacle for blame if his plans unwound.

A fall guy.

A patsy.

Which is what Lin Bao had been reduced to. In that moment, he made himself a promise: This would be the last order he ever followed. He would retire from the Navy.

But for now, he had a job to do.

He flipped to the final page of each document, where he found the coordinates that would serve as ground zero:

32.7157° N, 117.1611° W

29.3013° N, 94.7977° W

He plotted the first on a chart: San Diego. Then the second: Galveston.

Traffic in the city didn’t follow any logical pattern, or at least none that Chowdhury could decipher. During rush hour he’d find the roads empty and during the laziest parts of the day he’d find the roads congested to a standstill. He struggled to arrive at appointments on time. He would either show up awkwardly early, or woefully late. As was the case now, at nearly twenty past eight in the morning, as he struggled to navigate his way to his uncle’s house for a breakfast appointment that the vice admiral, using his military vernacular, had set for 08:00.

Business with his uncle needed to remain “unofficial”: retired Vice Admiral Patel didn’t technically represent his government in any formal capacity, which was why Chowdhury found himself crossing to the east bank of the Yamuna in the back of a taxi as opposed to an embassy car. Chowdhury couldn’t deny that his mother and daughter were safer now, staying with his uncle. But this placed him in an increasingly conflicted position, with the interests of his country not necessarily aligning with the interests of his family. So he reflected as he approached his uncle’s home for the 08:00 breakfast that was now closer to 09:00. And if Chowdhury was tardy to this meeting, he was equally tardy when it came to figuring a solution to his conflicted interests. However, he accepted that certain things, like the traffic, moved with a logic all their own.

When his uncle greeted him at the door, he didn’t mention the delay, and even explained that “his guest” had also arrived late, though not quite as late as his nephew. The house was empty aside from the three of them. At his uncle’s behest Ashni had enrolled in the local primary school, a decision Chowdhury hadn’t felt certain of but that his mother supported, leading to perhaps the first time in decades the two long-estranged siblings had agreed on anything. Chowdhury was glad that at this moment he wouldn’t need to face his mother or daughter as his uncle escorted him into the den.

The room was furnished with a love seat, a wing chair, a bookshelf, and a television in the corner on whose screen a troupe of colorfully attired dancers gesticulated about a stage in what looked like the climactic third act of some Bollywood production. A man stood waiting in the center of the room. Before Chowdhury could catch his name, he noticed that he had only three fingers on his right hand. They shook. Chowdhury was introduced as “my nephew, Sandeep, who works for the American government,” while his uncle introduced his guest as “Qassem, a Persian friend.”

A slight duplicity existed in Patel’s introduction, one which Chowdhury didn’t mind but of which he was certainly aware. His uncle evidently assumed that Chowdhury knew nothing of this Iranian officer. Chowdhury knew a great deal. He had read Major Mitchell’s debriefing from his captivity in Bandar Abbas, which included — among other details — a lengthy description of the three-fingered Iranian brigadier who’d beaten him senseless. What Chowdhury didn’t understand was how Farshad, a former senior-level officer in the Revolutionary Guards Quds Force, had wound up here, on a somewhat quixotic diplomatic mission to negotiate the release of an Indian tanker.

The three of them sat in the den, with Patel strategically placed in the wing chair while Farshad and Chowdhury were forced to share the love seat, a seating arrangement that reminded Chowdhury of the interminable sessions he’d spent in marriage counseling years before. Farshad and Chowdhury had begun to speak of their nations’ current dispute with the same low-level acrimony of one of those matrimonial sessions.

It was, said Chowdhury, unacceptable for the Iranians to claim control over the Strait of Hormuz. The consequences to the global economy, which had already suffered enormously due to the current Sino-American War and now teetered on the edge of a depression, would be devastating, to say nothing of the effects on Iran, which would surely suffer further censure and perhaps renewed sanctions, similar to what they’d endured two decades before during their failed nuclear bid.

At the mention of the sanctions, Farshad clenched his hands into fists. His face reddened. No doubt Farshad’s career, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Palestine and Syria, and wherever else he’d fought over the past thirty years, had been inextricably linked to the West’s punitive measures against his country, making Chowdhury’s evocation of sanctions far more personal than a policy disagreement between two nations. And knowing how Farshad had lost control of himself during his interrogation of Major Mitchell, Chowdhury now wondered if he might be the victim of a similar episode. Might he find himself battered to unconsciousness in his uncle’s den by this Iranian?

However, Farshad took a breath. His body language began to change. His shoulders relaxed. His fists opened. His complexion unreddened. Then, in his calmest voice, Farshad said, “I wouldn’t be here if my nation didn’t believe a solution existed to our current problem.”

Chowdhury, seizing upon this, nodded agreement. “We feel the same way. Neither of our countries wish to see a further spread of hostilities. I believe I also speak for our Indian allies when I say that they don’t wish to be brought into this conflict either. They’ve stayed out of our dispute with Beijing, as have our other allies like the Japanese, and it would be foolish for this conflict to take on an even broader dimension due to a”—Chowdhury paused a beat, searching for the correct word—“miscalculation.”

The miscalculation, however, seemed to be in Chowdhury’s choice to speak for Indian interests and in so doing to speak for his uncle, who glowered at him from his place in the wing chair and then silenced him with a dismissive wave. “The fact of the matter is,” Patel began, “that neither of your nations has behaved in its best interest. America’s hubris has finally gotten the better of its greatness. You’ve squandered your blood and treasure to what end?” He looked directly at his nephew but did not wait for an answer. “For freedom of navigation in the South China Sea? For the sovereignty of Taiwan? Isn’t the world large enough for your government and Beijing’s? Perhaps you’ll win this war. But for what? To be like the British after the Second World War, your empire dismantled, your society in retreat? And millions of dead on both sides?” Then Patel turned his attention to Farshad. “Tell me, Lieutenant Commander, how does it serve your nation to provoke us, a neutral power with a population fifteen times the size of your own? We’re more than capable of taking back our ship, if need be. And we’re capable of far more, if further provoked.” Then the retired vice admiral sat a little straighter in his chair, his shoulders rounded backward, his chest filling with air, addressing both Farshad and Chowdhury as though he were again in command on one of his ships and they were subordinates to whom he was issuing a course correction. “You both represent countries that began this war. I represent a country that is capable of finishing it.”

Sufficiently chastised, Chowdhury and Farshad sat silently next to one another in the den. The only movement was from the television in the corner, where their eyes instinctively wandered. Patel turned up the volume. On the screen, the troupe of dancers had yielded to a single woman, hardly more than a teen, who wore a sari of green silk, with golden bangles on her wrists and henna on her hands, palms, and the bottoms of her bare feet, which she kicked in the air as she pirouetted in time with a quick drumming. Patel said, “This is the Tandava,” as if Farshad, or at least Chowdhury, would be familiar with the dance. Their blank expressions made it clear that neither were. “Performed in a cycle, it channels the cosmic evolution of life.”

“How so?” asked Farshad, his eyes fixed on the screen.

“The Tandava was first danced by Lord Shiva,” answered Patel.

“Shiva?” said Chowdhury, as he reached back in his memory for the identity of that particular deity.

His uncle filled in the gap. “Yes, Lord Shiva. He is both the Creator and Destroyer.”

A phone rang in the back of the house. Patel excused himself, leaving Chowdhury and Farshad alone in the den. Neither of them had an inclination to speak without Patel in the room, so they sat wordlessly while the tempo of the drum, flutes, and accompanying sitars continued to accelerate the dance that played out on the television.

Chowdhury believed that the situation would soon resolve itself. The Iranian position was untenable. They couldn’t shut down the Strait of Hormuz for much longer. The risk of a broader Indian intervention was too great, not only for Tehran but also for Tehran’s ally Beijing. Such an intervention would be enough to tip the scales decidedly in favor of the United States. However, as Chowdhury reached this conclusion, a certain melancholy came over him. His country was the one that intervened — whether in the First World War, or the Second, in Korea or Vietnam, in the Balkans and later in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria. American intervention, if only occasionally successful, was always decisive among nations. But no longer.

His uncle, having finished his call, appeared in the doorway. His mouth opened slightly as if to speak, but then he sealed it. He sat back in his chair with whatever he had to say trapped inside of him. Before he could deliver his message, a ticker unspooled itself across the bottom of the television’s screen. It was a news update in both Hindi and English. Before Chowdhury or Farshad could read further, Patel exhaled once, as if in anguish, only to say in a voice like doom, “San Diego and Galveston.”

They sat, the three of them. In the room the only sound was the music. Not a word was spoken. The sole movement came from the television. The ticker continued to run, articulating the news, while above it was the girl, joyously articulating the movements of the Tandava. On and on she seemed to dance.