Elliot Ackerman - 2034

For four hours, a steady stream of reports filtered in from the bridge of the Zheng He back to the Defense Ministry. The blows struck by Ma Qiang’s command fell with remarkable rapidity. Equally remarkable was that they fell at such little cost. Two hours into the battle, they hadn’t lost a single ship or aircraft. Then, the unimaginable happened, an event Lin Bao never thought he would see in his lifetime. At 04:37 a single Yuan-class diesel-electric submarine slipped toward the hull of the Miller , flooded its torpedo tubes, and fired a spread at point-blank range.

After impact, it took only eleven minutes for the carrier to sink.

When this news arrived, there wasn’t any cheering in the Defense Ministry as there’d been before. Only silence. Minister Chiang, who had sat diligently at the head of the conference table all through the night, stood and headed for the door. Lin Bao, as the second most senior officer in the room, felt obliged to ask him where he was going and when he might return—the battle wasn’t over yet, he reminded the minister. The Ford was out there, injured but still a threat. Minister Chiang turned back toward Lin Bao, and his expression, which was usually so exuberant, appeared tired, contorted by the fatigue he’d hidden these many weeks.

“I’m only stepping out for some fresh air,” he said, glancing at his watch. “The sun will be up soon. It’s a whole new day and I’d like to watch the dawn.”

05:46 April 26, 2034 (GMT+5:30)

New Delhi

After Hendrickson hung up with him, Chowdhury knew who he needed to call, though it was a call he didn’t wish to place. He quickly calculated the time difference. Though it was late, his mother would still be up.

“Sandeep, I thought I wasn’t going to hear from you for a few days?” she began, sounding slightly annoyed.

“I know,” he said exhaustedly. And his exhaustion wasn’t as much from his lack of sleep, or even his gathering realization of how dire circumstances had become for the Seventh Fleet, as it was from having to apologize to his mother. He’d said he wasn’t going to phone on this trip. Yet when he needed her, as he did now, she had always been there. “There’s been a problem at work,” said Chowdhury, pausing dramatically, as if to give his mother’s imagination sufficient time to conjure what a “problem at work” currently meant for her son, given the circumstances. “Can you put me in touch with your brother?”

The line went silent, as he knew it would.

There was a reason Chowdhury hadn’t referred to retired Vice Admiral Anand Patel as “my uncle,” but instead as “your brother.” Because Anand Patel had never been an uncle to Chowdhury, and he hadn’t been much of a brother to his sister Lakshmi. The cause of their estrangement was an arranged marriage between a teenage Lakshmi and a young naval officer—a friend of her older brother’s—that ended in an affair, a marriage-for-love to Chowdhury’s father, who had been a medical student with plans to study at Columbia University, which led to Lakshmi’s departure for the United States while the family honor—at least according to her elder brother—was left in tatters. But that was all a long time ago. Long enough that it’d been twenty years since the young naval officer who was meant to be Lakshmi’s husband died in a helicopter crash, and ten years since Sandy’s father, the oncologist, had died of his own cancer. In the meantime, Lakshmi’s brother, Sandy’s uncle, had climbed the ranks of India’s naval service, ascending to the admiralty, a distinction that was never spoken of in the Chowdhury household but that now might prove useful as Sandy scrambled to play the inside hand that would assure Major Mitchell’s release. That is, if his mother would oblige.

“I don’t understand, Sandeep,” she said. “Doesn’t our government have contacts in the Indian government? Isn’t this the sort of thing that gets worked out in official channels?”

Chowdhury explained to his mother that, yes, this was the sort of thing that was usually worked out in official channels, and that, yes, their government did have any number of contacts inside the Indian government and military—to include certain intelligence assets that Chowdhury didn’t mention. However, despite these formidable resources, oftentimes the key to severing the Gordian knot of diplomacy was a personal connection, a familial connection.

“That man is no longer family of mine,” she snapped back at him.

“Mom, why do you think they picked me, Sandeep Chowdhury , to come here? Plenty of others could have been given this assignment. They gave it to me because our family is from here.”

“What would your father say to that? You’re American. They should send you because you’re the best man for the job, not because of who your parents—”

“Mom,” he said, cutting her off. He allowed the line to go silent for a beat. “I need your help.”

“Okay,” she said. “Do you have a pen?”

He did.

She recited her brother’s phone number by heart.

09:13 April 26, 2034 (GMT+5:30)

New Delhi

The swelling on his face had gone down considerably. His ribs were doing much better. When Wedge took a deep breath it no longer hurt. There were some scars, sure, but nothing too bad, nothing that would turn off the girls he imagined hanging on his every word in the bars around Miramar Air Station when he made it home with his stories. A few days before, they’d given him a clean change of clothes, added some sort of stringy meat to his diet, and placed him on a government airplane with stewardesses, fruit juice, and bagged peanuts—all he could eat. He hadn’t been alone, of course. A plainclothes entourage of guards with pistols brandished in their waistbands and mirrored sunglasses masking their eyes kept a watch over him. When Wedge clownishly tossed a few of the peanuts into the air and caught them with his mouth, the guards even laughed, though Wedge couldn’t be certain whether they were laughing at or with him.

The plane had landed in darkness, a choice he assumed was intentional. Then he was whisked from the airport in a panel van with blacked-out windows. No one told him anything until late that night, when he was getting ready for bed in the carpeted room where they’d placed him, more like a drab hotel room than a cell, and nicer than anything Wedge had seen for weeks. Still, no one told him where he’d been flown to. All they told him was that tomorrow a representative from the Red Cross would pay a visit. That night, excited by the prospect, he hardly slept. The image of an attractive nurse, of the type that entertained GIs at USO tours in another era, relentlessly came to mind. He could see her generically beautiful face, her white uniform, her stockings, the cap with the little red cross. He knew that wasn’t how Red Cross women looked these days, but he couldn’t help it. His room was empty, though he assumed a guard was posted outside his door, and in the emptiness of that room his imagination became ever more expansive as he fantasized about this meeting, his first contact with the outside world in nearly two months. He could see her lipsticked mouth forming the reassuring words: I’ll get you home.

When his door opened the next morning and a slight Indian man appeared, his disappointment was acute.

09:02 April 27, 2034 (GMT+4:30)