2034: A Novel of the Next World War(15)
Waiting in the empty office in Bandar Abbas, Farshad thought again of that last meeting with Soleimani. He felt certain his fate wouldn’t be like his father’s. His fate would be to die in his bed, like the old general nearly had. And if he was in a sour mood that day at Bandar Abbas, it was because of this. Another war was brewing—he could feel it—and it would be the first war in his life from which he wouldn’t walk away with a scar.
A young trooper with a freshly washed and perfectly creased uniform stood at the door. “Brigadier Farshad, sir . . .”
He looked up, his gaze eager to the point of cruelty. “What is it?”
“The prisoner is ready for you now.”
Farshad stood slowly. He pushed his way past the young trooper, toward the cell with the American. Whether he liked it or not, Farshad still had a job to do.
* * *
21:02 March 12, 2034 (GMT-4)
Washington, D.C.
Sandy Chowdhury knew the situation was bad. Their government email accounts, their government cell phones, even the vending machine that took credit cards and operated off a government IP address—all of it was down. No one could log in. Not a single password worked. They’d been locked out of everything. This is bad, this is bad, this is bad; it was all Chowdhury could think.
He couldn’t contact Central Command or the Indo-Pacific Command, and his imagination raced as he projected a host of possible outcomes for the F-35 they’d lost, as well as the fate of the John Paul Jones and its sister ships in the South China Sea. In this gathering panic, Chowdhury’s thoughts wandered unexpectedly.
A memory kept reoccurring.
When he was in high school in Northern Virginia, he’d run hurdles. He was quite good too, until an accident curtailed his track career. He’d broken an ankle on the anchor leg of the 4x400-meter relay. It was junior year, at the regional championships. When he fell on the track, he could feel his skinned knee and palms, the burn of sweat in those cuts, but he couldn’t feel his badly broken ankle. He simply sat there in the middle of the race, his competitors passing him by, staring dumbfounded at his foot as it dangled numbly from the bottom of the joint. He knew how much it would soon hurt, but it hadn’t started hurting yet.
That was what this moment was like; he knew something had broken, but he felt nothing.
Chowdhury, Hendrickson, and their modest staff scrambled about, tapping at keyboards, unplugging and re-plugging phones that refused to give a dial tone, troubleshooting systems that refused to be troubleshot. Air Force One had been scheduled to land at Andrews more than an hour ago, but there was still no word as to its status. There was no way to get a call into Andrews. Their personal cell phones worked, but no one wanted to dial through an unsecure line, particularly after Lin Bao had proven to Chowdhury that his own phone had been compromised.
Time passed strangely in the hours after the blackout. Everyone knew the minutes were critical, everyone could intuit that events of the type that shape history were unfolding at this very moment. But no one understood their form; no one understood what those events were or what that history would be. So much was happening—the Wén Rui, the F-35, Air Force One, which had seemed to vanish—and yet they had no news. Frantic as they were to understand the scope of this attack, they couldn’t even make a secure phone call. Everything had been compromised.
They carried on in a general, ineffectual frenzy, with Chowdhury and Hendrickson bunkered up in the Situation Room, leaning over its conference table, scribbling on legal pads, hatching plans and then discarding them. Until after a few hours Chowdhury’s boss, Trent Wisecarver, the national security advisor, stood in the open doorway.
At first they didn’t notice him.
“Sandy,” he said.
Chowdhury glanced up, stupefied. “Sir?”
Decades before, Wisecarver had played tailback at West Point, and he still looked the part. His shirtsleeves were rolled up over his thick forearms, his tie was loosened around his trunk of a neck, and his flop of salt-and-pepper hair was uncombed. He wore a pair of frameless eyeglasses (he was severely myopic) and looked as though he’d slept in his rumpled Brooks Brothers suit. “How much cash do you have?”
“Sir?”
“Cash. I need eighty bucks. My government credit card isn’t working.”
Chowdhury fished through his pockets, as did Hendrickson. Between them they came up with seventy-six dollars, three of which were in quarters. Chowdhury was passing the handful of coins and the crumple of bills to Wisecarver as they marched from the West Wing out toward the White House vestibule and North Lawn, where, pulled up on the curved driveway by the fountain, there was a metro taxi. A uniformed Secret Service guard handed Chowdhury the taxi driver’s license and registration and then returned to his post. Chowdhury’s boss curtly explained that his plane had been forced to divert to Dulles and land under the guise of a civilian aircraft. That meant no escort to meet them, no Secret Service motorcade, no elaborate security detail. POTUS herself was due back at Andrews within the hour. From Air Force One her communications proved limited, she could reach the four-star commanding general at Strategic Command and had spoken to the VP, but these carve-outs in their communications hierarchy were clearly designed by whoever instigated the attack as a way to avoid an inadvertent nuclear escalation. Beijing (or whoever did this) surely knew that if she had no communications with her nuclear capability, protocols were in place for an automatic preemptive strike. She did, however, have no direct communications with the secretary of defense, or any of her combatant commanders in the field other than Strategic Command. Establishing contact with them was Wisecarver’s job. Refusing to wait for official travel arrangements when his plane landed, he had rushed into the main terminal at Dulles and gotten in a cab so he’d have communications working at the White House by the time POTUS arrived. And here Wisecarver was, without a dime to pay the fare.