2034: A Novel of the Next World War(13)

“My log-in and password don’t work.”

Chowdhury pushed Hendrickson aside. His didn’t work either.





2





Blackout


18:42 March 12, 2034 (GMT-4)

Washington, D.C., en route to Beijing

Anyone who lived through the war could tell you where they were the moment the power went out. Captain Sarah Hunt had been on the bridge of the John Paul Jones, fighting to keep her flagship afloat while trying to ignore the panicked cries coming from belowdecks. Wedge had his wrists flex-cuffed in the small of his back as he was driven blindfolded under armed escort across the tarmac of Bandar Abbas airfield. Lin Bao had recently departed Dulles International Airport on a Gulfstream 900, one of a suite of private jets made available to members of the Central Military Commission.

Lin Bao had, over the course of his thirty-year career, flown on these jets from time to time, either as part of a delegation to an international conference or when escorting a minister or other senior-level official. However, he’d never before had one of these jets sent for him alone, a fact that signified the importance of the mission he’d now completed. Lin Bao had placed his call to Chowdhury right after takeoff, while the flight attendants were still belted into their jump seats. The Gulfstream had been ascending, cresting one thousand feet, when he hung up with Chowdhury and sent an encrypted message to the Central Military Commission, confirming that this final call had been placed. When he pressed send on that message the response was immediate, as though he had thrown a switch. Below him, the scattered lights of Washington went dark and then came right back on. Like a blink.

Lin Bao was thinking of that blink while he watched the eastern seaboard slip beneath the Gulfstream, as they struck out into international airspace and across the dark expanse of the Atlantic. He thought about time and how in English they say, it passes in the blink of an eye. While he sat alone on the plane, in this liminal space between nations, he felt as though his entire career had built to this one moment. Everything before this day—from his time at the academy, to his years shuffling from assignment to assignment in the fleet, to his study and later grooming in diplomatic postings—had been one stage after another in a larger plan, like a mountain’s ascent. And here he stood at the summit.

He glanced once more out of his window, as if expecting to find a view that he might admire from such a height. There was only the darkness. The night sky without stars. The ocean below him. Onto that void, his imagination projected events he knew to be in progress half a world away. He could see the bridge of the carrier Zheng He, and Rear Admiral Ma Qiang, who commanded that battle group. The trajectory of Lin Bao’s life, which had made him the American defense attaché at this moment, had been set by his government years ago, and it was every bit as deliberate as the trajectory set for Ma Qiang, whose carrier battle group was the perfect instrument to assert their nation’s sovereignty over its territorial waters. If their parallel trajectories weren’t known to them in the earliest days of their careers, when they’d been contemporaries as naval cadets, they could have been intuited. Ma Qiang had been an upperclassman, heir to an illustrious military family, his father and grandfather both admirals, part of the naval aristocracy. Ma Qiang had a reputation for cold competence and cruelty, particularly when it came to hazing underclassmen, one of whom was Lin Bao. In those days Lin Bao, an academic prodigy, had proven an easy target. Despite eventually graduating first in his class, with the highest scholastic record the faculty could remember, he’d arrived as a sniveling, homesick boy of half-American, half-Chinese descent. This split heritage made him particularly vulnerable, not only to derision but also to the suspicions of his classmates—particularly Ma Qiang.

But that was all a long time ago. Ultimately, it was Lin Bao’s mixed heritage from which his government derived his value, eventually leading him to his current position, and it was Ma Qiang’s competence and cruelty that made him the optimal commander of a fleet that at this moment was striking a long-anticipated blow against the Americans. Everyone played their role. Everyone did their part.

Part of Lin Bao wished he were the one standing on the bridge of the Zheng He, with the power of an entire carrier battle group arrayed in attack formation behind him. After all, he was a naval officer who had also held command at sea. But what offset this desire, or any jealousy he felt about his old classmate Ma Qiang’s posting, was a specific knowledge he possessed. He was one of only a half dozen people who understood the scope of current events.

Ma Qiang and the thousands of sailors under his command had no idea that on the other side of the globe an American F-35 stealth fighter had been grounded by a previously unknown cyber capability their government had deployed on behalf of the Iranians, nor how this action was related to his own mission. Those qualities Lin Bao had always admired in the Americans—their moral certitude, their single-minded determination, their blithe optimism—undermined them at this moment as they struggled to find a solution to a problem they didn’t understand.

Our strengths become our weaknesses, thought Lin Bao. Always.

The American narrative was that they had captured the Wén Rui, a ship laden with sensitive technologies that Lin Bao’s government would do anything to retrieve. For the Wén Rui’s capture to precipitate the desired crisis, Lin Bao’s government would need a bargaining chip to force the Americans’ hand; that’s where the grounded F-35 came in. Lin Bao knew that the Americans would then follow a familiar series of moves and countermoves, a choreography the two nations had stepped through many times before: a crisis would lead to posturing, then to a bit of brinksmanship, and eventually to de-escalation and a trade. In this case, the F-35 would be traded for the Wén Rui. Lin Bao knew, and his superiors knew, that it would never occur to the Americans that pilfering the sensitive technology on the F-35 was a secondary objective for their adversary and that whatever was on the Wén Rui was of little value. The Americans wouldn’t understand, or at least not until it was too late, that what Lin Bao’s government wanted was simply the crisis itself, one that would allow them to strike in the South China Sea. What the Americans lacked—or lost somewhere along the way—was imagination. As it was said of the 9/11 attacks, it would also be said of the Wén Rui incident: it was not a failure of American intelligence, but rather a failure of American imagination. And the more the Americans struggled, the more trapped they would become.