Elliot Ackerman - 2034

“How do we do that?” asked Lin Bao, as he clicked a remote that turned off the rotating hologram. He cleared away their cups of tea so as to reveal the nautical charts that covered the banquette table, as if the two might discuss a naval maneuver.

“It’s nothing we do here,” answered Minister Chiang, disregarding the charts. “We’ll handle it up north, in the Barents Sea. The American Third and Sixth Fleets have left those waters to transit south. With the American fleets gone, our Russian allies have unfettered access to the subsurface 10G internet cables that service the United States. Our allies will help us to, gently, remind the Americans that their power is outdated, that bombs aren’t the only way to cripple a nation—not even the best way. What I need you to do is simple: be ready. This will be a cyber show of force. It will be limited; we’ll only cut a cable or two. We’ll dip the Americans into darkness, allow them to stare into that void. Afterward, either the Legislative Yuan will invite us into Taipei, or we will go of our own accord. Either way, your command must be ready.”

“Is that what you came all this way to tell me?”

“I didn’t come to tell you anything,” said Minister Chiang. “I came because I wanted to stand on this ship and see if you are, in fact, ready.”

Lin Bao could feel the minister’s gaze boring into him. In the days ahead he understood how much would depend on his command’s ability to act quickly, whether through an unopposed landing in Taipei, or alternatively a ship-to-shore assault. Before Minister Chiang could deliver his verdict as to the perceived readiness of Lin Bao and his command, there was a knock at the door, a dispatch from the combat information center.

Lin Bao read the note.

“What does it say?” asked Minister Chiang.

“The Enterprise is on the move.”

“Coming here?”

“No,” answered Lin Bao. “It doesn’t make sense. They’re sailing away.”

11:19 June 18, 2034 (GMT+8)

220 nautical miles off the coast of Zhanjiang

These waters were a graveyard. As the Enterprise set its course, Sarah Hunt knew the countless wrecks she sailed over. The Philippines were to her east. To her west was the Gulf of Tonkin. She considered the names of the ships—the USS Princeton , Yorktown , the Hoel , and the Gambier Bay —whose blasted hulls rested on the seabed beneath her. And Japanese ships as well, battleships and carriers. Hunt and her crew passed silently above them, taking up a position—for what?

Hunt didn’t know.

Her orders had come in quick succession. Every couple of hours she was summoned to the radio room, an antiquated closet in the bowels of the ship that a senior chief, who everyone called Quint, treated as his own personal fiefdom. The nickname Quint came from his uncanny resemblance to the captain of the ill-fated Orca played by Robert Shaw in the film Jaws . Working alongside Quint was his assistant, a young petty officer third class who the crew of the Enterprise called Hooper, not because he looked like Richard Dreyfuss’s character, Matt Hooper—the intrepid, bespectacled, Great White–hunting marine biologist—but simply because he spent every waking hour with Quint.

Hunt, who had spent a career receiving her orders over lengthy briefings via secure video teleconference, accompanied by kaleidoscopic displays of PowerPoint, was slowly getting used to this fragmented manner of communications. With their Chinese adversaries having the upper hand in cyber, the Enterprise had gone into an internet blackout. Indo-Pacific Command, which was in direct contact with the White House, kept tapping out these minimalist communications to Hunt in high-frequency radio bursts, the same long-range bandwidth employed by the US Navy in the Second World War.

Another of these messages had arrived, so Hunt traveled four levels down from her stateroom to the radio room, where she found Quint and Hooper surrounded by a tangle of electronics, the former with a pair of spectacles perched on the tip of his nose as he unsnarled some wires and the latter holding a smoking soldering iron.

“Gentlemen,” said Hunt, announcing herself.

Hooper startled at her voice while Quint sat frozen with his chin tucked down as though calculating his share of the bill at a restaurant. Undisturbed, he continued to focus through his spectacles as his hands worked swiftly at the tangle of wires leading into the radio. “Mornin’, ma’am,” said Quint. An unlit cigarette dangled from his mouth.

“It’s evening, Senior Chief.”

Quint raised an eyebrow but didn’t take his concentration away from the wires. “Then evenin’, ma’am.” He nodded for Hooper to pass him the soldering iron, which he quickly applied to a connection he was grafting onto a circuit board. For the past two weeks, ever since they got underway, Quint and Hooper had been retrofitting a suite of antiquated VHF, UHF, and HF radios into the avionics of the single F/A-18 Hornet squadron aboard the Enterprise . This made the Death Rattlers the only squadron that would be entirely immune to cyber interference. At least that was the plan.

“How many of those have you got left to install?” she asked.

“None,” said Quint. “We finished the last Hornet this morning. This is an upgrade to our ship’s HF receiver.” Quint drew silent for a moment, mustering his concentration. “There,” he said, a ribbon of smoke unspooling from the soldering iron as he handed it back to Hooper. Quint then screwed on the front panel of the radio they’d been tampering with. They powered it on. Its receiver was hooked to a speaker, which emitted a warbling sound.

“Can you turn that down?” asked Hunt.

Hooper glanced at Quint, who nodded, but kept his head canted slightly to the side, his one ear raised, like a maestro fine-tuning his instrument. While Hooper manipulated the dial, Quint gestured alternately with his left hand or his right as they cycled up or down the frequency ladder, searching for… what? Hunt couldn’t say. Then, as if perceiving her curiosity, Quint began to explain himself.

“We’re searching for long-delayed echoes, ma’am. LDEs. When you transmit an HF frequency, it loops around the earth until it finds a receiver. On rare occasions, that can take a while and you wind up with an echo.”

“How long of an echo?” asked Hunt.

“Usually, only a few seconds,” said Quint.

“We picked up some yesterday,” added Hooper.

Hunt smiled at him. “What’s the longest echo you ever heard of?”

While Hooper manipulated the dial, Quint made a gesture with his right hand, as though encouraging a piece of music. He was both speaking to Hunt and listening to the oscillations in frequency. “Old salts I served with said that in these waters they’d picked up conversations from fifty or even seventy-five years ago,” explained Quint. With a wide grin that revealed decades of the Navy’s shoddy dental work, he added, “There’s lots of ghosts out here, ma’am. You just got to listen for ’em.”

Hunt didn’t return Quint’s smile; still, she couldn’t help but imagine the possibility of ages-old conversations lingering in the surrounding atmosphere—the lost pilots searching the darkness for their carriers off the coast of North Vietnam, the frantic gun crews calling out flights of incoming Zeros in the Philippine Sea. However, she needed to turn to the task at hand.

Quint reached across his desk to a piece of paper with the message he’d recently decoded from Indo-Pacific Command. “They aren’t giving you much to go off of, huh?” he said.