2034: A Novel of the Next World War(16)

Chowdhury examined the taxi’s registration. The driver was an immigrant, South Asian, with a last name from the same part of India as Chowdhury’s own family. When Chowdhury stepped to the taxi’s window to hand back the documents, he thought to mention something about it but decided not to. This wasn’t the time or the place. Wisecarver then paid the driver, meticulously counting out the fare from the wad of cash and coins, while the twitchy Secret Service agent he’d traveled with scanned in every direction for threats, whether real or imagined.



* * *





10:22 March 13, 2034 (GMT+8)

Beijing

Lin Bao hadn’t slept much on the flight. When the Gulfstream touched down, he was shepherded by a heavily armed official escort—dark suits, dark sunglasses, concealed weapons—to the Ministry of National Defense headquarters, an ominous building in the heart of the smog-choked capital. Lin Bao guessed his escorts were officers of the Ministry of State Security but couldn’t be sure. Without a hello or goodbye or any pleasantry whatsoever, they brought him up to a windowless conference room on the building’s sixth floor and shut the door behind them.

Lin Bao waited. The conference table in the room’s center was massive, designed to receive international delegations and to host negotiations of the highest sensitivity. In a vase at the center of the table were some flowers, peace lilies, one of the few species that required no sunlight to grow. Lin Bao ran his fingers beneath their white, silky petals and couldn’t help but appreciate the irony of the choice in this place.

Also on the table were two silver platters, piled with packets of M&M’s. He noticed the writing on the packets: it was in English.

Two double doors at the opposite end of the conference room swung open. Startled, Lin Bao sat up straight.

Mid-level military officers flowed into the room, dropping down a projection screen, establishing a secure video-teleconference connection, and arraying fresh pitchers of water on the table. Then, like a tidal surge, they moved back through the door as quickly as they had appeared. In their wake a diminutive man entered the room, his chest glinting with a field of medals. He wore a tobacco-colored dress uniform made of fine but poorly cut fabric, the sleeves extending almost to his knuckles. His demeanor was gregarious and his earlobes pendulous, framing his very round face whose full cheeks creased in a fixed smile. His arm was extended in a handshake like an electric plug in search of a socket. “Admiral Lin Bao, Admiral Lin Bao,” he repeated, turning the name into a song, a triumphal anthem. “Congratulations. You have done very well.”

Lin Bao had never met the Defense Minister General Chiang, but that face was as familiar as his own. How often had he seen it hung in one of those hierarchical portrait collages that adorned the anodyne military buildings in which he’d spent his career? It was the minister’s smile that set him apart from the rest of the party officials who so assiduously cultivated their dour expressions for the photographer. His habitual courtesy, which could have been interpreted as weakness, was the smooth sheath that contained the force of his office. Minister Chiang gestured toward the silver platters spread across the conference table. “You haven’t touched your M&M’s,” he said, barely suppressing a laugh.

Lin Bao felt a sense of foreboding. If he assumed that Minister Chiang and the Central Military Commission had recalled him for a debriefing, he was quickly disabused of this belief. They knew everything already, including the smallest of details. Every exchange. Every gesture. Every word. Down to a single comment made about M&M’s. This was the point of the platters: to let Lin Bao know that nothing escaped their attention, lest he come to believe that any individual might assume an outsize role in this enterprise, lest he ever think that any one person could become greater than a single cog in the vast machinery of the People’s Republic—their republic.

Minister Chiang reclined in his plush office chair at the head of the conference table. He gestured for Lin Bao to sit beside him. Although Lin Bao had served nearly thirty years in his country’s navy, this was the first time he’d ever met directly with a member of the Central Military Commission. When he’d studied at Harvard’s Kennedy School as a junior officer and later at the US Naval War College in Newport as a mid-level officer, and when he’d attended exercises with his Western counterparts, he was always fascinated by the familiarity so common among senior-and junior-level officers in their militaries. The admirals often knew the first names of the lieutenants. And used them. The deputy assistant secretaries and secretaries of defense had once been Annapolis or officer candidate school classmates with the commanders and captains. The egalitarian undercurrents ran much deeper in Western militaries than in his own, despite his country’s ideological foundation in socialist and communist thought. He was anything but a “comrade” to senior officers or officials, and he knew it well. While at the war college in Newport, Lin Bao had studied the Battle of Kursk, the largest tank engagement of the Second World War, in which one of the great flaws of the Soviet army was that only command-variant tanks possessed two-way radios. The Soviets couldn’t see any reason for subordinates to speak up to their commanders. The subordinate’s job was solely to follow orders, to remain a cog in the machine. How little had changed in the intervening years.

The screen at the far end of the conference table flickered to life. “We’ve won a great battle,” explained Minister Chiang. “You deserve to see this.” The secure connection was perfect, its sound clear, and the image as unfiltered as if they were staring through a window into another room. That room was the bridge wing of the carrier Zheng He. Standing center frame was Ma Qiang.