2034: A Novel of the Next World War(65)

Sufficiently chastised, Chowdhury and Farshad sat silently next to one another in the den. The only movement was from the television in the corner, where their eyes instinctively wandered. Patel turned up the volume. On the screen, the troupe of dancers had yielded to a single woman, hardly more than a teen, who wore a sari of green silk, with golden bangles on her wrists and henna on her hands, palms, and the bottoms of her bare feet, which she kicked in the air as she pirouetted in time with a quick drumming. Patel said, “This is the Tandava,” as if Farshad, or at least Chowdhury, would be familiar with the dance. Their blank expressions made it clear that neither were. “Performed in a cycle, it channels the cosmic evolution of life.”

“How so?” asked Farshad, his eyes fixed on the screen.

“The Tandava was first danced by Lord Shiva,” answered Patel.

“Shiva?” said Chowdhury, as he reached back in his memory for the identity of that particular deity.

His uncle filled in the gap. “Yes, Lord Shiva. He is both the Creator and Destroyer.”

A phone rang in the back of the house. Patel excused himself, leaving Chowdhury and Farshad alone in the den. Neither of them had an inclination to speak without Patel in the room, so they sat wordlessly while the tempo of the drum, flutes, and accompanying sitars continued to accelerate the dance that played out on the television.

Chowdhury believed that the situation would soon resolve itself. The Iranian position was untenable. They couldn’t shut down the Strait of Hormuz for much longer. The risk of a broader Indian intervention was too great, not only for Tehran but also for Tehran’s ally Beijing. Such an intervention would be enough to tip the scales decidedly in favor of the United States. However, as Chowdhury reached this conclusion, a certain melancholy came over him. His country was the one that intervened—whether in the First World War, or the Second, in Korea or Vietnam, in the Balkans and later in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria. American intervention, if only occasionally successful, was always decisive among nations. But no longer.

His uncle, having finished his call, appeared in the doorway. His mouth opened slightly as if to speak, but then he sealed it. He sat back in his chair with whatever he had to say trapped inside of him. Before he could deliver his message, a ticker unspooled itself across the bottom of the television’s screen. It was a news update in both Hindi and English. Before Chowdhury or Farshad could read further, Patel exhaled once, as if in anguish, only to say in a voice like doom, “San Diego and Galveston.”

They sat, the three of them. In the room the only sound was the music. Not a word was spoken. The sole movement came from the television. The ticker continued to run, articulating the news, while above it was the girl, joyously articulating the movements of the Tandava. On and on she seemed to dance.





6





The Tandava


21:47 July 20, 2034 (GMT+8)

Beijing

Lin Bao was alone when the first images came in. He’d arrived at the Defense Ministry three hours before the strike, sequestering himself in the conference room, and he waited. The Zheng He had dispatched long-dwell drones, whose radar and infrared profiles were the size of gnats, over San Diego and Galveston. The static-filled live feed projected ghostly gray onto a screen at the far end of the room. While Lin Bao sat in his armchair at the head of the table, he listened to the drone operator’s disembodied voice as it described what it saw: the blast circumference of the crater; the black rain of several pyrocumulus clouds; the otherworldly annihilation of two cities, which appeared as though a wrathful deity had inhaled them up from the earth. The voice was giving words to this single greatest act of human destruction. The more it spoke, the more it took on larger proportions, so that to Lin Bao it soon sounded less and less like the voice of a man and more as though it were the voice of God Himself.

If Lin Bao possessed any reservations about his decision to leave the Navy and government service, watching the fallout over San Diego and Galveston gave him complete conviction that his time as a military officer was through. The only question was how to extract himself safely—not a small task, he realized. After their meeting at Mission Hills, Zhao Leji had, by default, made himself Lin Bao’s direct superior. Even though no table of organization existed that showed Lin Bao and Zhao Leji in the same chain of command, no official would accept Lin Bao’s resignation without Zhao Leji’s explicit approval.

And so Lin Bao could submit his resignation to one person alone: Zhao Leji.

However, since leaving Mission Hills, he and Lin Bao had had no direct communication. Not a telephone call. Not a meeting. Not an email. Zhao Leji had become a ghost, as distant and disembodied as the drones circling the destroyed American cities.

Although Lin Bao had heard nothing from Zhao Leji, he did nothing without the old man’s tacit approval. That formal approval would, of course, never arrive with Zhao Leji’s name on it, or anyone else’s name on it for that matter. The Politburo Standing Committee expressed itself in the language of bureaucratic obfuscation. Direct intent from an individual (or a collection of individuals) was laundered through existing offices, and not infrequently through nonexistent ones. The routing on any memo—the “FROM:”—often took up the entire first page. Names hardly ever appeared, only those obscure office titles. If a decision from the Politburo Standing Committee went awry, one of these intermediary offices could take any or all of the blame.