2034: A Novel of the Next World War(36)

Chowdhury stood silently in front of the photograph.

“It isn’t only in America where people can change their fortunes,” his uncle said. “America is not so special.”

Chowdhury removed his phone from his pocket and snapped a photograph of his ancestor’s face. “How do you think your government will respond?” he asked, gesturing toward the television and the breaking news about what seemed to be the certainty of an impending war.

“It’s difficult to say,” his uncle told him. “But I believe we’ll make out very well.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because we have learned the lessons that you have forgotten.”



* * *





11:42 May 13, 2034 (GMT+9)

Yokosuka Naval Base

First it was her flight home that was canceled.

Then her orders.

A medical evaluation was scheduled for her at the naval hospital.

This time she passed it.

A below-the-zone promotion came next, to rear admiral (lower half)—a one-star. A new set of orders followed. The assignment shocked her. The Navy was giving her command of the Enterprise Strike Group, which included the carrier itself as well as nearly twenty other ships. This all took a week. In another week she’d meet the flotilla at Yokosuka. The night before the Enterprise arrived, Hunt had the first of the nightmares that would come to plague her.

In them, she is watching what is left of the Ford and Miller carrier strike groups limp into port, just three ships. She stands on the dock, where one of the ships, a destroyer, drops its gangplank. But the destroyer isn’t part of the group that went out with the Ford and Miller; no, it’s her old flagship, the John Paul Jones. Her crew files down the gangplank. She recognizes many of the young sailors. Among them is Commander Jane Morris. She is smoking a cigar, the same cigar they shared on the bridge of the John Paul Jones those weeks before. Which feel like a lifetime before. When Hunt approaches Morris, her former subordinate walks right past her, as if she doesn’t exist. There’s no malice in Morris’s reaction; rather it is as though Hunt is the ghost and these ghosts are the living. Then, while Hunt is trying to gain Morris’s attention, she glimpses a young petty officer coming down the gangplank and onto the dock. Hunt is drawn to him because unlike the other sailors he is wearing his dress whites, the wide bell-bottoms flaring out over his mirror-shined leather shoes. Two chevrons are sewn to his sleeve. His Dixie cup hat balances on his head at a jaunty angle. He can’t be more than twenty-five years old. And although he’s a young petty officer, he wears a dizzying array of medals and ribbons, such as the Navy Cross, lesser awards for valor, and several Purple Hearts, to include the one that got him killed. He’s a SEAL. He crosses the dock, comes right up to Hunt, and takes her by the hand. He squeezes it three times— I LOVE YOU—just as her father used to do. He looks at her, still holding her hand, still waiting. He is clean-shaven, strong; his torso angles toward his waist in a V. And his palm is soft. She can hardly recognize him. In her memory he is always older, worn down; she never remembered her father’s medals and ribbons as shining. But they shine now, spectacularly so. His blue eyes are fixed on hers. She squeezes his hand four times—I LOVE YOU / TOO.

He looks at her and says, “You don’t have to do this.”

Then he drops her hand and walks away.

She calls after him, “Do what?” but he doesn’t turn around.

This is where the dream always ends. Hunt had just woken from it on the morning the Enterprise pulled into port. She was still shaken by the question in the dream as she met her crew on the docks of Yokosuka. She caught herself looking around, as if she might see him, or even Morris, wandering among the other sailors as they descended the gangplank. Her crew was young. Most of the officers and enlisted filled positions that were one or two grades senior to their rank, a result of the Navy struggling to account for its most recent losses at sea as well as what in recent years had become perennial manpower shortages. Hunt consoled herself with the idea that if the crew was young, then it was also hungry, and she would take enthusiasm over experience.

The Enterprise was scheduled for a week in port after an arduous transit from Fifth Fleet and the Arabian Gulf. Its sister carrier, the Bush, had recently suffered the ignominy of losing a pilot over Iranian airspace, and the crew of the Enterprise seemed determined to avoid a similar humiliation in the performance of their mission. As to the specifics of that mission, they remained unclear. They knew the Chinese navy possessed an offensive cyber capability that they’d yet to effectively counter, and that this capability reduced their high-tech platforms—whether it be navigation, communications, or weapons guidance systems—to little more than a suite of glitching computers. Nevertheless, they understood that whatever their specific mission was, it would certainly include the more general objective of destroying, or at least neutralizing, the flotilla of Chinese vessels that threatened to destabilize the balance of power in the region.

First, however, they would need to find the Chinese fleet, specifically the Zheng He Carrier Battle Group. If the Wén Rui incident and the sinking of the Ford and Miller demonstrated anything, it was that China’s cyber capability could effectively black out a vast swath of ocean. While Hunt was having her retirement canceled by Seventh Fleet Headquarters, that same headquarters had scrambled reconnaissance drones across the South China Sea and even the far reaches of the Pacific in an effort to map the disposition of Chinese naval forces and infer their next move. A variety of drones were tasked, from the latest stealth variants of MQ-4C Tritons, to RQ-4 Global Hawks, to even the CIA’s RQ-170 Sentinels, each fully integrated into America’s network of satellites. However, as was the case with the F-35 at Bandar Abbas, the Chinese were able to take control of these drones once they came into a certain range, disabling their sensors and controls. The result was that all Hunt had from Seventh Fleet was a circular black hole with a radius of nearly eight hundred nautical miles. This included the waters around Japan, Vietnam, Taiwan, and the Philippines. Somewhere in that black hole was the Zheng He and the rest of the Chinese fleet. And she would be expected to find and destroy it.