Elliot Ackerman - 2034

“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.

12:13 April 23, 2034 (GMT+4:30)

Isfahan

Qassem Farshad had taken the deal he was offered. Discipline against him had been decisive and swift. In less than a month he was delivered a letter of reprimand for his excesses during the interrogation of the American pilot, followed by an early retirement. When he had asked if there was anyone else he might appeal his case to, the administrative officer who’d been sent to deliver the news showed him the bottom of the page, which held the signature of the old man himself, Major General Mohammad Bagheri, chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces. When Farshad received the letter, he’d been on suspension at home, at his family’s country residence an hour outside of Isfahan. It reminded him of Soleimani’s home in Qanat-e Malek. It was peaceful there, quiet.

Farshad tried to settle into a routine. In the first few days he hiked his three miles each morning and began to sort through boxes of notebooks he’d kept throughout his career. He had an idea to write a memoir, maybe something that would be instructive to younger officers. However, it was difficult for him to concentrate. He was afflicted by a phantom itching in his missing leg, something he’d never experienced before. At midday he would break from his attempts at writing and take a picnic lunch to an elm tree that sat in a field on the far end of his property. He would rest with his back to the tree and have a simple lunch: a boiled egg, a piece of bread, some olives. He never finished his meal. His appetite had recently waned, and he would leave the remains for a pair of squirrels who lived in the tree and who, with each passing day, edged closer and closer to him in search of his scraps.

He remembered and then re-remembered his last exchange with the old general, how Soleimani had wished him a soldier’s death. Farshad couldn’t help it; he felt as though his outburst in Bandar Abbas had let his father’s old friend down. On the other hand, striking a prisoner had never before been grounds for dismissal for a Revolutionary Guards officer. In Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Syria, and in Palestine, all through his career, intelligence work was often done with fists. He knew many who’d ascended into positions of high command by virtue of their brutality alone. But Farshad’s superiors had expected more from him. They had told him—in no uncertain terms—that he was the most junior person they could trust. And he had betrayed that trust. Although they might have thought that Farshad had momentarily lost control of himself in the presence of an impertinent American flyer, it was more profound than that.

Farshad hadn’t lost control.

Far from it.

He had known exactly what he was doing. He had known exactly how important this American was, even if he hadn’t understood every detail. What he had known was that by beating this American to a pulp, he was pushing his country closer to war with the same alliance of Western powers that had killed both his own father and the old general. Perhaps neither would be disappointed in me after all, thought Farshad. Perhaps they would be proud of me for taking our people one step closer to the inevitable confrontation with the West that our feckless leaders have long avoided. He thought of himself as seizing an opportunity that fate had thrust before him. But it seemed to have backfired and cost him the twilight of his career.

For days and then weeks, Farshad kept to his routine and eventually the phantom itching in his missing leg began to subside. He lived alone in his family’s empty home, hiking his three miles, taking his walk at lunch. Each day, the pair of squirrels who lived in the tree came ever closer, until one of them, whose fur was a very rich shade of brown and who he assumed to be the male (as opposed to the female, whose tail was snowy white), had plucked up enough courage to eat from the palm of Farshad’s hand. After lunch he would return home and write through the afternoon. At night he prepared himself a simple dinner, and then he read in bed. His existence was reduced to this. After a career in command of hundreds and at times thousands of men, it surprised him how he enjoyed being responsible for himself alone.