2034: A Novel of the Next World War(44)
This was why, in the weeks after the president’s address, with the specter of a nuclear exchange on the near horizon, Major Chris “Wedge” Mitchell, a fourth-generation fighter pilot, found himself spending most of each day in the deserted officers’ club trying to beat the high score on Galaga, the vintage arcade game. The console sat in the back, leaning against the wall between a chewed-out dartboard and the bullet-riddled tail section of a Japanese Zero, a trophy from another war. Wedge loved the game’s controls. They were so simple. A stick. A button. That was it. The idea behind the game was equally simple: a lone starship holds off a swarm of invaders. The weapons held by the invader and defender are an equal match. The only advantage the starship had was the skill of its human pilot. The game had been in the Miramar officers’ club for decades—since the early 1980s, Wedge guessed. How many hundreds of pilots had played? Guys who’d come home from Vietnam, who had flown in the Gulf War, in Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria, even in the liberation of Venezuela—they had all touched these controls, striving for that high score. This little red joystick, it was like a holy relic, like the Sword in the Stone. Or at least this was how Wedge allowed himself to think over the quiet mornings and restless afternoons spent in the empty officers’ club.
Every pilot was deployed or getting ready to deploy. Every staffer was working long hours. Which was why Wedge was surprised when a lieutenant colonel wandered into the club one afternoon. Wedge didn’t notice him at first. His concentration was fixed on Galaga. That morning he’d come within a few hundred points of the impossibly high score before his concentration had lapsed. He’d broken for lunch and one fruitless meeting at Wing Headquarters about fixing his orders. He then returned to Galaga, from which he would take only the occasional break to pour over the newspapers for the latest developments in what was beginning to appear like a stalemate around Taiwan.
The lieutenant colonel was sipping a pale beer poured into a frosted glass, his massive shoulders hunched over the bar. His chest was littered with ribbons and badges, to include gold flight wings, and he wore his service alpha uniform, so he was either headed to or coming from a meeting with a more senior officer—probably the commanding general, Wedge guessed. And from the colonel’s loosened tie and hangdog expression, Wedge intuited that the meeting had not gone well. The colonel lifted a newspaper that Wedge had left at the bar. “You mind?” he asked.
“All yours, sir,” said Wedge, who took a break from Galaga to perch himself on a nearby barstool.
The lieutenant colonel began to read, his forehead drawn into horizontal wrinkles. He pointed to an editorial’s headline: the us military’s irrelevant technological advantage. “You see this shit,” he said, flicking the page. Wedge noticed the walnut-sized Annapolis class ring he wore. “They’re calling us irrelevant.”
Wedge leaned a little closer, scanning the editorial, which advocated for a reduced reliance on high-tech platforms as a centerpiece of America’s defense strategy, particularly in light of recent “Sino aggression,” as the article euphemistically referred to the destruction of more than a quarter of the ships in the US Navy and what appeared like the inevitable loss of Taiwan. “Their argument isn’t that we are irrelevant,” said Wedge. “The argument is that our technology is getting in the way.”
The lieutenant colonel placed both of his hands, palms down, on the bar. His bushy Cro-Magnon eyebrows knitted together, as if he were having a hard time understanding how someone could be critical of his aircraft without being critical of him. “What are you doing at the o-club in the middle of the day, Major?”
Wedge nodded toward the Galaga machine. “Trying to beat the high score.”
The colonel laughed deeply from his stomach.
“How about you, sir?” asked Wedge. “What are you doing here?”
He stopped laughing. His eyebrows came together in the same prehistoric way as before. “Until a few days ago, I was the CO of VMFA-323.”
“The Death Rattlers,” said Wedge.
The colonel shrugged.
“I thought you guys were deployed on the Enterprise,” added Wedge. He glanced down at the paper, to the bottom of page A3, where there was a photo of the Enterprise accompanying a lengthy reported piece on recent events in the South China Sea, which concluded that the US was, at this moment, outmatched. “What happened?”
“A real bitch of an admiral runs the carrier strike group, that’s what happened.” The colonel took a long pull on his beer, emptying the glass. He ordered up another and began to talk. “Hunt’s her name. She’s the one that got all those sailors from the John Paul Jones, Levin, and Chung-Hoon killed. I guess losing three ships is what qualifies as combat experience in the Navy these days. One morning, she shows up in our ready room and says I’ve got to rip all the avionics out of my Hornets, that it’s the only platform she’s got that can operate offline. According to her, when the time comes my guys and I are supposed to ‘fly by the seat of our pants’ against the Chinese fleet with dumb bombs and our sights grease-penciled onto the canopies of our cockpits. No fucking way.”
Wedge’s mouth turned dry. “What’d you tell her?”
“Just that. I said, ‘Ma’am, with all due respect, no fucking way.’ So here I am.”
“And who’s running the squadron?”