2034: A Novel of the Next World War(66)
As Lin Bao watched the live feed from the Zheng He, one of these bureaucratic messages sat on the desk in front of him. Like the strike’s launch order, it had arrived in a sealed envelope. It, too, had an extensive administrative routing directive on its first page. Lin Bao wondered what would happen if he composed his letter of resignation with a reverse of this routing? Like a trail of bread crumbs, would it lead back to Zhao Leji and the Politburo Standing Committee? He doubted it. He knew, instinctually, that a matter as sensitive as the resignation of a senior admiral couldn’t be handled through such channels. If only his departure was as simple as properly formatting a memo.
His thoughts inexplicably turned to the one-way radios on the Soviet tanks during the Second World War, that cautionary case study at the US Naval War College about overly centralized command structures. His wife and daughter had loved Newport, the winter snowstorms spent huddled by the fireplace and that single glorious summer when on weekends they would rent a dinghy from Goat Island and then let out full-sail, passing beneath the Claiborne Pell suspension bridge as they headed toward the hulking gray facade of the historic Naval War College, where they’d beach their dinghy and spread a picnic on a blanket in the sand. With his shoes off, reclining alongside his family, Lin Bao had talked about his retirement back then too. His idea: to teach at the war college.
He smiled self-consciously even thinking of it. How preposterous it seemed now.
The disembodied voice interrupted: “Twenty-two minutes onstation time remaining. Standing by for additional taskings. . . .” The combat information center on the Zheng He responded, sending the unmanned flight out into the spectral blast-scape to further confirm what was obvious at a glance: the destruction of everything.
I would have taught history, thought Lin Bao, his mind wandering as he considered the live feed. His dream to teach was one that he didn’t speak of to anyone, not even his wife. Had he acted on it those years ago he never would have made admiral. He would have retired from the Navy as a commander, a respectable rank. His dual US citizenship and his doctorate would have been enough to land him a job. As a former Chinese naval officer, he would have brought a unique perspective to the faculty. He had never quite relinquished the dream. Over the years, he had composed a curriculum for a few classes in his mind. He never dared write them down; that would have made the dream too real, and deferring it too painful.
He imagined himself at the lectern discussing the ancient Greeks to his American students: “The First Persian War, in which Miltiades defeats Darius at Marathon in 490 BC, leads to the Second Persian War, in which the Athenian navy commanded by Themistocles destroys the Persian navy under Xerxes at Salamis in 480 BC. Ten years of war gives the Greeks fifty years of peace, a golden age. The Athenians secure peace on the Hellespont through the Delian League, a mutual-security pact in which the other Greek city-states pay Athens a tribute to protect them against future Persian aggression. Sound familiar?” Lin Bao would then imagine himself looking out at his class, at their blank expressions, in which the past held no relevance, in which there was only the future and that future would always be American.
Then, in his imagined class, Lin Bao would tell his students of their past but also of their future. He would explain how America’s golden age was born out of the First and Second World Wars, just as Greece had found its greatest era of prosperity in the aftermath of the two Persian Wars. Like the Athenians with the Delian League, Lin Bao would explain how the Americans consolidated power with mutual-security pacts such as NATO, in which they would make the largest contributions in exchange for military primacy over the western world—much as the Athenians had gained military primacy of the then-known world through the Delian League.
Lin Bao would always wait for the question he knew was coming, in which one of his students would ask why it all ended. What external threat overwhelmed the Delian League? What invader accomplished what the Persian fleet could not at Salamis? And Lin Bao would tell his students that no invader had come, no foreign horde had sabotaged the golden age forged by Miltiades, Themistocles, and Greece’s other forefathers.
“Then how?” they would ask. “If the Persians couldn’t do it, who did?”
And so, he would say, “The end came—as it always does—from within.”
He would explain this patiently, like a father telling a beloved child that the Easter Bunny or another cherished fairy tale didn’t exist, and while his students’ puzzled expressions fixed on him, he would tell them about the jealousy of the Spartans, the fear they felt for the broadening powers of the Delian League. He would also tell them about Athens, drunk on its own greatness, blinded by narcissism and decadence. “Look over the ages,” he would assert, “from Britain, to Rome, to Greece: the empire always rots from within.” Most of his students, he knew, would underwhelm him. They would stare back in disbelief, or even hostility. Their assumption would always be that the time in which they lived could never be usurped; it was singular, as they believed themselves to be singular. Endemic dysfunction in America’s political life hardly mattered because America’s position in the world was inviolate. But a few of his students, their faces clear in his imagination, would return his stare as if his understanding had become their own.
What Lin Bao wondered now, as he watched the last of the live feed, the skeletal remains of buildings, the rush-hour commute left incinerated on the highway, was what rank those few American students would hold today. Some would likely be admirals, like himself.