Elliot Ackerman - 2034

That had been the plan.

But by late afternoon, there was still no sign of the Americans.

Ma Qiang was on the video teleconference again, updating Minister Chiang as to the disposition of his forces, which at that moment were deployed in a racetrack formation extending over dozens of nautical miles. As Ma Qiang spoke of current conditions at sea, Lin Bao glanced surreptitiously at his watch.

“Why are you looking at your watch?” snapped Minster Chiang, interrupting the briefing.

Lin Bao felt his face turn red.

“Do you have somewhere else to be?”

“No, Comrade Minister. Nowhere else to be.”

Minister Chiang nodded back toward Ma Qiang, who continued on with his briefing, while Lin Bao settled exhaustedly into his chair. His carpool had left fifteen minutes before. He had no idea how he would get home.

04:27 April 26, 2034 (GMT+5:30)

New Delhi

The phone rang. “Are you up?”

“I’m up now.”

“It’s bad, Sandy.”

“What’s bad?” he asked Hendrickson, swallowing the dryness from his throat as he rubbed his eyes, his vision slowly coming into focus so he could read the digital display of his alarm clock.

“The Ford and the Miller , they’re gone.”

“What do you mean gone ?”

“They got the drop on us, or shut us down, or I don’t even know how to describe it. Reports are nothing worked. We were blind. When we launched our planes, their avionics froze, their navigation systems glitched out and were then overridden. Pilots couldn’t eject. Missiles wouldn’t fire. Dozens of our aircraft plunged into the water. Then they came at us with everything. A carrier, frigates and destroyers, diesel and nuclear submarines, swarms of unmanned torpedo boats, hypersonic cruise missiles with total stealth, offensive cyber. We’re still piecing it all together. The whole thing happened middle of last night…. Christ, Sandy, she was right.”

“Who was right?”

“Sarah—Sarah Hunt. I saw her weeks ago when I was in Yokosuka.”

Chowdhury knew that the board of inquiry had cleared Hunt of all culpability in the Battle of Mischief Reef and the loss of her flotilla, but he also knew the Navy had wanted to consign her defeat to a fluke. That would be far easier than taking a hard look at the circumstances that led to it. It would now be impossible for the Navy—or the nation—to ignore a disaster on this scale. Thirty-seven warships destroyed. Thousands of sailors perished.

“How did we do?” Chowdhury asked tentatively. “Did our long-range air score any hits? How many of theirs did we sink?”

“None,” said Hendrickson.

“None?”

The line went silent for a moment. “I’ve heard that we might have scored a hit on their carrier, the Zheng He , but we didn’t sink any of their ships.”

“My God,” said Chowdhury. “How’s Wisecarver reacting?”

He was up now, his bedside lamp on, stepping into each leg of his trousers, which he’d draped over the back of a chair. He’d arrived at these bland quarters in the embassy’s visitors’ annex two days before. While Chowdhury dressed, Hendrickson explained that the news hadn’t yet leaked to the public: one of the benefits of the blackout the Chinese had employed was that it allowed the administration to control the news, or at least to control it until the Chinese used that information against them. Which they had, strangely, not yet done.

Hendrickson explained that the White House had succumbed to panic. “Jesus, what will the country say?” had been the president’s response on hearing the news. Trent Wisecarver had contacted NORAD and elevated the threat level to DEFCON 2, with a request to the president to elevate it to DEFCON 1. In an emergency meeting of the National Security Council he had also requested preemptive authorization for a tactical nuclear launch against the Zheng He Carrier Battle Group, provided it could be found and targeted. Remarkably, his request had not been rejected outright. The president, who only days before had wanted to de-escalate tensions, was now entertaining such a strike.

De-escalation had been the entire reason the administration dispatched Chowdhury to New Delhi. Negotiations surrounding the release of Major Chris “Wedge” Mitchell had progressed to the point where the Iranians agreed to transport him to their embassy in India, and a prisoner swap seemed imminent. Chowdhury believed—and the analysts at CIA backed him up—that the sole reason the Iranians were dragging their feet on the major’s release was because they wanted his wounds to heal a bit more, particularly his face. The last contact Chowdhury had with the Iranians—a contact brokered through officials at India’s Foreign Ministry—they’d assured him that Major Mitchell would be released within a week, as he now explained to Hendrickson.

“A week’s too long,” Hendrickson replied. “Once the Iranians learn what’s happened—if they don’t know already—they’ll take Major Mitchell back to Tehran. You’ve got to get him out now, or at least try. That’s why I’m calling—” There was a pause on the line as Chowdhury wondered how Hendrickson could possibly expect him to accomplish such a task. Then Hendrickson added, “Sandy, we’re at war.” The words might once have sounded melodramatic, but now they didn’t; they had become a statement of fact.

04:53 April 26, 2034 (GMT+9)

Yokosuka Naval Base

Dawn vanished the fog as the day broke bright and pure. Three ships on the horizon. A destroyer. A frigate. A cruiser.

They were sailing slowly, barely moving in fact. The frigate and cruiser were very close together, the destroyer a little further off. This view from Sarah Hunt’s window early that morning was a curious sight. Her flight to San Diego was scheduled for later that day. As she watched the three ships limping closer, she wondered if they would pull into port by the time she left. What she saw didn’t make much sense to her. Where were the Ford and Miller ?

A red flare went up, followed by one and then two more. On the deck of the destroyer was a signal lamp; it began to flash.

Flash, flash, flash… flash… flash… flash… flash, flash, flash…

Three short… three long… three short…

Hunt recognized the message immediately. She ran out of her barracks room toward Seventh Fleet Headquarters.

05:23 April 26, 2034 (GMT+8)

Beijing

Victory had been total. Beyond what they could have hoped for.

It almost unsettled them.

It had been past midnight when Ma Qiang reported contact with the vanguard of destroyers from the Ford Battle Group. He was able to neutralize their weapons systems and communications with the same offensive cyber capability his fleet had employed weeks before to great effect near Mischief Reef. This allowed a dozen of his stealthy unmanned torpedo boats to close within a kilometer of the vanguard and launch their ordnance. Which they did, to devastating effect. Three direct hits on three American destroyers. They sunk in under ten minutes, vanished. That had been the opening blow, delivered in darkness. When the news was reported in the Defense Ministry, the cheers were raucous.

After that, all through the night their blows fell in quick succession.

A single flight of four Shenyang J-15s launched from the Zheng He scored a total of fifteen direct hits divided between three destroyers, two cruisers, and a frigate, sinking all six. A half dozen torpedo-armed Kamov helicopters launched from three separate Jiangkai II–class frigates scored four out of six hits, one of which struck the Ford itself, disabling its rudder. This would be the first of many strikes against both American carriers. Those carriers responded by launching their aircraft while the surface ships responded by launching their ordnance, but they all fired blindly, into not only the darkness of that night but the more profound darkness of what they could no longer see, reliant as they had become on technologies that failed to serve them. Chinese cyber dominance of the American forces was complete. A highly sophisticated artificial intelligence capability allowed the Zheng He to employ its cyber tools at precisely the right moment to infiltrate US systems by use of a high-frequency delivery mechanism. Stealth was a secondary tool, though not unimportant. In the end, it was the massive discrepancy in offensive cyber capabilities—an invisible advantage—that allowed the Zheng He to consign a far larger force to the depths of the South China Sea.