2034, Part II: Blackout in Washington, DC

“So much was happening—the Wén Rui, the F-35, Air Force One, which had seemed to vanish—and yet they had no news. Everything had been compromised.”
soldiers with guns drawn on a person who is cuffed and blindfolded
Illustration: Owen Freeman

2034: A Novel of the Next World War

18:42 MARCH 12, 2034 (GMT-4)
WASHINGTON, D.C., EN ROUTE TO BEIJING

Anyone who lived through the war could tell you where they were the moment the power went out. Captain Sarah Hunt had been on the bridge of the John Paul Jones, fighting to keep her flagship afloat while trying to ignore the panicked cries coming from belowdecks. Wedge had his wrists flex-cuffed in the small of his back as he was driven blindfolded under armed escort across the tarmac of Bandar Abbas airfield. Lin Bao had recently departed Dulles International Airport on a Gulfstream 900, one of a suite of private jets made available to members of the Central Military Commission.

Lin Bao had, over the course of his thirty-year career, flown on these jets from time to time, either as part of a delegation to an international conference or when escorting a minister or other senior-level official. However, he'd never before had one of these jets sent for him alone, a fact that signified the importance of the mission he'd now completed. Lin Bao had placed his call to Chowdhury right after takeoff, while the flight attendants were still belted into their jump seats. The Gulfstream had been ascending, cresting one thousand feet, when he hung up with Chowdhury and sent an encrypted message to the Central Military Commission, confirming that this final call had been placed. When he pressed send on that message the response was immediate, as though he had thrown a switch. Below him, the scattered lights of Washington went dark and then came right back on. Like a blink.

Lin Bao was thinking of that blink while he watched the eastern seaboard slip beneath the Gulfstream, as they struck out into international airspace and across the dark expanse of the Atlantic. He thought about time and how in English they say, it passes in the blink of an eye. While he sat alone on the plane, in this liminal space between nations, he felt as though his entire career had built to this one moment. Everything before this day—from his time at the academy, to his years shuffling from assignment to assignment in the fleet, to his study and later grooming in diplomatic postings—had been one stage after another in a larger plan, like a mountain's ascent. And here he stood at the summit.

He glanced once more out of his window, as if expecting to find a view that he might admire from such a height. There was only the darkness. The night sky without stars. The ocean below him. Onto that void, his imagination projected events he knew to be in progress half a world away. He could see the bridge of the carrier Zheng He, and Rear Admiral Ma Qiang, who commanded that battle group. The trajectory of Lin Bao's life, which had made him the American defense attaché at this moment, had been set by his government years ago, and it was every bit as deliberate as the trajectory set for Ma Qiang, whose carrier battle group was the perfect instrument to assert their nation's sovereignty over its territorial waters. If their parallel trajectories weren't known to them in the earliest days of their careers, when they'd been contemporaries as naval cadets, they could have been intuited. Ma Qiang had been an upperclassman, heir to an illustrious military family, his father and grandfather both admirals, part of the naval aristocracy. Ma Qiang had a reputation for cold competence and cruelty, particularly when it came to hazing underclassmen, one of whom was Lin Bao. In those days Lin Bao, an academic prodigy, had proven an easy target. Despite eventually graduating first in his class, with the highest scholastic record the faculty could remember, he'd arrived as a sniveling, homesick boy of half-American, half-Chinese descent. This split heritage made him particularly vulnerable, not only to derision but also to the suspicions of his classmates—particularly Ma Qiang.

But that was all a long time ago. Ultimately, it was Lin Bao's mixed heritage from which his government derived his value, eventually leading him to his current position, and it was Ma Qiang's competence and cruelty that made him the optimal commander of a fleet that at this moment was striking a long-anticipated blow against the Americans. Everyone played their role. Everyone did their part.

Part of Lin Bao wished he were the one standing on the bridge of the Zheng He, with the power of an entire carrier battle group arrayed in attack formation behind him. After all, he was a naval officer who had also held command at sea. But what offset this desire, or any jealousy he felt about his old classmate Ma Qiang's posting, was a specific knowledge he possessed. He was one of only a half dozen people who understood the scope of current events.

Ma Qiang and the thousands of sailors under his command had no idea that on the other side of the globe an American F-35 stealth fighter had been grounded by a previously unknown cyber capability their government had deployed on behalf of the Iranians, nor how this action was related to his own mission. Those qualities Lin Bao had always admired in the Americans—their moral certitude, their single-minded determination, their blithe optimism—undermined them at this moment as they struggled to find a solution to a problem they didn't understand.

Our strengths become our weaknesses, thought Lin Bao. Always.

The American narrative was that they had captured the Wén Rui, a ship laden with sensitive technologies that Lin Bao's government would do anything to retrieve. For the Wén Rui's capture to precipitate the desired crisis, Lin Bao's government would need a bargaining chip to force the Americans' hand; that's where the grounded F-35 came in. Lin Bao knew that the Americans would then follow a familiar series of moves and countermoves, a choreography the two nations had stepped through many times before: A crisis would lead to posturing, then to a bit of brinksmanship, and eventually to de-escalation and a trade. In this case, the F-35 would be traded for the Wén Rui. Lin Bao knew, and his superiors knew, that it would never occur to the Americans that pilfering the sensitive technology on the F-35 was a secondary objective for their adversary and that whatever was on the Wén Rui was of little value. The Americans wouldn't understand, or at least not until it was too late, that what Lin Bao's government wanted was simply the crisis itself, one that would allow them to strike in the South China Sea. What the Americans lacked—or lost somewhere along the way—was imagination. As it was said of the 9/11 attacks, it would also be said of the Wén Rui incident: It was not a failure of American intelligence but rather a failure of American imagination. And the more the Americans struggled, the more trapped they would become.

Lin Bao remembered a puzzle he'd seen in a novelty shop in Cambridge, when he'd been studying at Harvard's Kennedy School. It was a tube made of a woven mesh material. The man behind the counter of the store had seen him looking at the puzzle, trying to figure out what it was. “You stick your fingers in either end,” he had said in one of those thick Boston accents Lin Bao always struggled to understand. Lin Bao did as he was told. When he went to remove his fingers, the woven mesh cinched down. The more he tugged, the more tightly his fingers became stuck. The man behind the counter laughed and laughed. “You've never seen that before?” Lin Bao shook his head, no. The man laughed even harder, and then said, “It's called a Chinese finger trap.”

05:17 MARCH 13, 2034 (GMT+4:30)
BANDAR ABBAS

Brigadier General Qassem Farshad sat on a plastic fold-out chair in an empty office next to one of the holding cells. It was early in the morning, and he was in a sour mood. But no one seemed to notice, because his appearance was always fearsome. His reputation equally so. This made it difficult to gauge his moods, as his expression at rest seemed to convey mild annoyance or even low-level rage, depending on who was looking at him. Farshad had scars, plenty of them. Most prominent was his right hand, where he'd lost his pinkie and ring finger when assembling an IED in Sadr City on his first assignment as a young lieutenant. This misstep had almost cost him his job within the elite Quds Force. But Farshad's namesake, Major General Qassem Soleimani, the commander of the Quds Force, had intervened, blaming the incident on the incompetence of the Jaish al-Mahdi militiamen whom Farshad was advising.

This was the only time in his more than thirty years working within the Quds Force that Farshad had ever used his special connection with Soleimani to his advantage. His father, who had achieved the rank of lieutenant colonel, had died subverting an assassination attempt on Soleimani's life weeks before Farshad was born. The particulars of that incident had always remained shrouded in mystery, but the idea that Soleimani—one of the great protectors of the Islamic Republic—owed a debt to the elder Farshad lent the younger's career an aura of mystique as he ascended the ranks of the Revolutionary Guards. This mystique endured even after Soleimani's death, magnified by Farshad's inherent competence and daring.

The history of his exploits was etched across his body in scar tissue. When advising Syrian government forces in the Battle of Aleppo, a piece of shrapnel from a mortar had sliced a tidy diagonal gash from above his eyebrow to below his cheek. When advancing on Herat after the 2026 collapse of Afghanistan's last Kabul-based national government, a sniper's bullet had passed through his neck, missing his jugular and arteries, leaving a coin-sized entrance hole at one side of his neck and the same-sized exit wound at the other. That scar made his neck appear like Frankenstein's with the bolts removed, which inevitably led to a nickname among the younger troopers. And lastly, in the battle that was the pinnacle of his career, he'd led a regiment of Revolutionary Guards in the final assault to retake the Golan Heights in 2030. In this, his crowning achievement, the one that would earn him his nation's highest award for valor, the Order of Fath, the retreating Israelis had fired a cowardly but lucky rocket that had struck beside him, killing his radio operator and severing his right leg below the knee. He still limped slightly from this wound, although Farshad hiked three miles each morning on a well-fitted prosthetic.

The missing fingers. The scar on his face. The leg lost below the knee. All those wounds were on his right side. His left side—apart from the scar on his neck—had never been touched. If his troopers called him “Padishah Frankenstein” (which translated to English as “Great King Frankenstein”), the intelligence analysts at Langley had given him a different nickname, one that corresponded with his psychological profile. That name was “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” Farshad was a man with two sides, the one with the scars and the one without. He was capable of great kindness but also great rage. And that rageful side, the one that easily moved him into his reckless tempers, was very much present now as he waited in the empty office next to the holding cell at Bandar Abbas.

Five weeks before, the General Staff of the Armed Forces had issued Farshad his orders directly. His government planned to down an American F-35, and Farshad was to interrogate the pilot. He would have two days to extract a confession. The plan was to create one of those videos his government could use to shame the Americans. After that, the pilot would be released, and the aircraft's technology exploited and then destroyed. When Farshad protested that this was the work of an interrogator far junior to him in rank, he was told that he was the most junior person who could be entrusted with so sensitive a task. This could, the General Staff had explained, bring their two nations to the brink of war. The incident his government would precipitate was delicate. And so Farshad had been ordered to remain at this remote airfield for more than a month, waiting for the Americans to fly their plane overhead.

I've been reduced to this, Farshad thought bitterly. The most junior man who can be trusted.

Gone were his days of active service. Farshad had accumulated all of the scars he ever would. He remembered General Soleimani's end. When the Americans killed him, cancer had already developed in his throat and was slowly eating the great commander alive. Several times over those months, the disease had confined his father's old friend to his bed. During a particularly dire episode, he had summoned Farshad to his modest country house in Qanat-e Malek, a hamlet three hours' drive outside of Tehran where Soleimani had been born. The audience hadn't lasted long. Farshad was brought to the general's bedside, and he could see slow death in the smile that greeted him, the way Soleimani's gums had receded, the purple-white shade of his chapped lips. He told Farshad in a raspy voice that his father had been the lucky one, to be martyred, to never grow old, this was what all soldiers secretly desired, and he wished a warrior's death for the son of his old friend. Before Farshad could answer, Soleimani abruptly dismissed him. As he traveled out of the house, he could hear the old man retching pathetically from behind his closed door. Two months later, Soleimani's great adversary, the Americans, would grant him the most generous of gifts: a warrior's death.

Waiting in the empty office in Bandar Abbas, Farshad thought again of that last meeting with Soleimani. He felt certain his fate wouldn't be like his father's. His fate would be to die in his bed, like the old general nearly had. And if he was in a sour mood that day at Bandar Abbas, it was because of this. Another war was brewing—he could feel it—and it would be the first war in his life from which he wouldn't walk away with a scar.

A young trooper with a freshly washed and perfectly creased uniform stood at the door. “Brigadier Farshad, sir …”

He looked up, his gaze eager to the point of cruelty. “What is it?”

“The prisoner is ready for you now.”

Farshad stood slowly. He pushed his way past the young trooper, toward the cell with the American. Whether he liked it or not, Farshad still had a job to do.

21:02 MARCH 12, 2034 (GMT-4)
WASHINGTON, D.C.

Sandy Chowdhury knew the situation was bad. Their government email accounts, their government cell phones, even the vending machine that took credit cards and operated off a government IP address—all of it was down. No one could log in. Not a single password worked. They'd been locked out of everything. This is bad, this is bad, this is bad; it was all Chowdhury could think.

He couldn't contact Central Command or the Indo-Pacific Command, and his imagination raced as he projected a host of possible outcomes for the F-35 they'd lost, as well as the fate of the John Paul Jones and its sister ships in the South China Sea. In this gathering panic, Chowdhury's thoughts wandered unexpectedly.

A memory kept reoccurring.

When he was in high school in Northern Virginia, he'd run hurdles. He was quite good too, until an accident curtailed his track career. He'd broken an ankle on the anchor leg of the 4 x 400-meter relay. It was junior year, at the regional championships. When he fell on the track, he could feel his skinned knee and palms, the burn of sweat in those cuts, but he couldn't feel his badly broken ankle. He simply sat there in the middle of the race, his competitors passing him by, staring dumbfounded at his foot as it dangled numbly from the bottom of the joint. He knew how much it would soon hurt, but it hadn't started hurting yet.

That was what this moment was like; he knew something had broken, but he felt nothing.

Chowdhury, Hendrickson, and their modest staff scrambled about, tapping at keyboards, unplugging and replugging phones that refused to give a dial tone, troubleshooting systems that refused to be troubleshot. Air Force One had been scheduled to land at Andrews more than an hour ago, but there was still no word as to its status. There was no way to get a call into Andrews. Their personal cell phones worked, but no one wanted to dial through an unsecured line, particularly after Lin Bao had proven to Chowdhury that his own phone had been compromised.

This excerpt appears in the February 2021 issue. Subscribe to WIRED.

Illustration: Owen Freeman

Time passed strangely in the hours after the blackout. Everyone knew the minutes were critical, everyone could intuit that events of the type that shape history were unfolding at this very moment. But no one understood their form; no one understood what those events were or what that history would be. So much was happening—the Wén Rui, the F-35, Air Force One, which had seemed to vanish—and yet they had no news. Frantic as they were to understand the scope of this attack, they couldn't even make a secure phone call. Everything had been compromised.

They carried on in a general, ineffectual frenzy, with Chowdhury and Hendrickson bunkered up in the Situation Room, leaning over its conference table, scribbling on legal pads, hatching plans and then discarding them. Until after a few hours Chowdhury's boss, Trent Wisecarver, the national security advisor, stood in the open doorway.

At first they didn't notice him.

“Sandy,” he said.

Chowdhury glanced up, stupefied. “Sir?”

Decades before, Wisecarver had played tailback at West Point, and he still looked the part. His shirtsleeves were rolled up over his thick forearms, his tie was loosened around his trunk of a neck, and his flop of salt-and-pepper hair was uncombed. He wore a pair of frameless eyeglasses (he was severely myopic) and looked as though he'd slept in his rumpled Brooks Brothers suit. “How much cash do you have?”

“Sir?”

“Cash. I need eighty bucks. My government credit card isn't working.”

Chowdhury fished through his pockets, as did Hendrickson. Between them they came up with seventy-six dollars, three of which were in quarters. Chowdhury was passing the handful of coins and the crumple of bills to Wisecarver as they marched from the West Wing out toward the White House vestibule and North Lawn, where, pulled up on the curved driveway by the fountain, there was a metro taxi. A uniformed Secret Service guard handed Chowdhury the taxi driver's license and registration and then returned to his post. Chowdhury's boss curtly explained that his plane had been forced to divert to Dulles and land under the guise of a civilian aircraft. That meant no escort to meet them, no Secret Service motorcade, no elaborate security detail. POTUS herself was due back at Andrews within the hour. From Air Force One her communications proved limited; she could reach the four-star commanding general at Strategic Command and had spoken to the VP, but these carve-outs in their communications hierarchy were clearly designed by whoever instigated the attack as a way to avoid an inadvertent nuclear escalation. Beijing (or whoever did this) surely knew that if she had no communications with her nuclear capability, protocols were in place for an automatic preemptive strike. She did, however, have no direct communications with the secretary of defense or any of her combatant commanders in the field other than Strategic Command. Establishing contact with them was Wisecarver's job. Refusing to wait for official travel arrangements when his plane landed, he had rushed into the main terminal at Dulles and gotten in a cab so he'd have communications working at the White House by the time POTUS arrived. And here Wisecarver was, without a dime to pay the fare.

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 a 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 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.

“Congratulations, Admiral,” said Minister Chiang, showing his small, carnivorous teeth. “I have an old friend of yours here with me.” He gestured to Lin Bao, who awkwardly leaned into the frame so that he might nod once respectfully.

Ma Qiang returned the gesture, but otherwise ignored Lin Bao. He launched into a situation update: His carrier battle group had sunk two American destroyers, which they'd identified as the Carl Levin and the Chung-Hoon. The former had suffered a massive explosion in its magazine, leaving few survivors among the crew of nearly three hundred, while the latter had taken all night to sink. In these first hours of the morning, Ma Qiang's ships had picked up a few American survivors. The final ship in the flotilla, the crippled John Paul Jones, was taking on water. Ma Qiang had already called for the captain to surrender, but she had flatly refused, replying with an expletive-laced transmission that, at first, Ma Qiang's translator hesitated to put into Mandarin. The Zheng He Carrier Battle Group had been on station for the last thirty-six hours, and Ma Qiang was growing increasingly concerned that the Americans, having heard nothing from their flotilla, might send a contingent of ships to investigate. He sought permission to strike the fatal blow against the John Paul Jones. “Comrade Minister,” Ma Qiang said, “I have no doubt as to our success against any American naval reinforcements, but their arrival would lead to the escalation I've been instructed to avoid. I have a flight of J-31 interceptors ready for launch against the John Paul Jones. Total mission time with recovery is fifty-two minutes. We're awaiting your order.”

Minister Chiang rubbed his round and very smooth chin. Lin Bao watched the screen. In the background, beyond the hurried comings and goings of the sailors on the bridge, he could see the horizon. A haze hung about the ocean. It took Lin Bao a moment to understand what had caused it—this haze was all that was left of the Carl Levin and the Chung-Hoon. And it would, he suspected, soon be all that was left of the John Paul Jones. Ma Qiang's concern was merited, Lin Bao thought. This operation from its inception had always been limited in scope. Its objective—the final, uncontested control of the South China Sea—could only be undermined in one of two ways: first, if their forces failed to destroy this US flotilla; and second, if through a miscalculation this crisis escalated beyond a single, violent demonstration.

“Admiral,” Minister Chiang began, addressing Ma Qiang, “is it your belief that the John Paul Jones can be saved?”

Ma Qiang paused for a moment, spoke to someone off-screen in a hushed voice, and then returned his attention to the teleconference. “Comrade Minister, our best estimates are that the John Paul Jones will sink within three hours if unaided.” Lin Bao could see that the Zheng He was turning into the wind to be in the most advantageous position to launch its aircraft. Suddenly on the distant horizon a stitch of dark smoke appeared. At first it was so faint that Lin Bao mistook it for an imperfection in the teleconference's connection. Then he understood: It was the John Paul Jones burning a dozen miles off.

Minister Chiang began stroking his chin as he weighed whether to order this final blow. A decisive engagement was essential, but he needed to proceed with caution lest a miscalculation cause the incident to spiral into a broader conflict, one that could threaten his nation's interests further afield than the South China Sea. He leaned forward in his seat. “Admiral, you are cleared for launch. But listen closely; there is a specific message we must deliver.”

06:42 MARCH 13, 2034 (GMT+4:30)
BANDAR ABBAS

“This fucking place stinks.”

The dank air. The putrid scent. If Wedge hadn't known any better, he would've thought he'd been detained in the public restroom of a Greyhound bus terminal. Blindfolded, he sat cuffed to a steel chair bolted to the floor. He couldn't see anything except for the irregular permutations of shadow and ashy light that played around the room from what he suspected was a window near the ceiling.

A door creaked open, heavy on its hinges. From the sound, Wedge could tell it was metal. A set of uneven steps approached, like someone with a slight limp. Then a scrape on the floor as a chair was dragged over. Whoever sat across from him sat clumsily, as if the movement were awkward for them. Wedge waited for the person to say something, but there was only the smell of their cigarette. Wedge wouldn't be the one to speak first. He knew the Code of Conduct for POWs, an exclusive club into which he'd been inducted only hours before.

“Major Chris ‘Wedge’ Mitchell …” came the voice across from him.

Then his blindfold was yanked off. Overwhelmed by the light, even though the room was poorly lit, Wedge struggled to see. He couldn't quite focus on the dark figure across from him, who continued, “Why are you here, Major Wedge?”

Slowly, his eyes adjusted. The man asking questions was dressed in a green uniform with gold embroidered epaulets of some significance. He had an athletic build like a runner and a hostile face with a long, hook-shaped scar that traced from above his eyebrow to below his cheek. His nose was compressed into a triangle, as if it had been broken and reset many times. In his hands he held the name patch that had been velcroed onto Wedge's flight suit.

“It's not Major Wedge. It's just Wedge. And only my friends call me that.”

The man in the green uniform frowned slightly, as if this hurt his feelings. “When we finish here, you will be wanting me as a friend.” He offered Wedge a cigarette, which he refused with a wave. The man in the uniform repeated his question. “Why are you here?”

Wedge blinked his eyes. He inventoried the bare room. A single window with bars in one corner, which cast a square of light on the damp concrete floor. His chair. A metal table. And another chair where this man now sat. Based on his epaulets, Wedge guessed he was a brigadier. In the far corner of the room was a pail, which Wedge assumed was his toilet. In the near corner was a mat, which he assumed was his bed. Above the mat a shackle with a chain was bolted into the wall. He realized they planned to restrain him while he slept—if they let him sleep. The room was medieval, except for a single camera. It was hung high in the center of the ceiling, a red light blinking at its base. It was recording everything.

Wedge felt a sinking sensation in the pit of his stomach. He found himself thinking of his great-grandfather, the stories of gunsights marked in grease pencil on his canopy, and Pappy Boyington, the greatest of Marine aces. Pappy had wound up as a prisoner too, finishing the war in a Japanese POW camp. He also thought of his grandfather slinging snake and nape up north in I Corps while kids back home smoked dope and burned their draft cards. Lastly, and in some ways most bitterly, he thought of his own dad. Wedge feared the old man might hold himself responsible if his son wound up rotting in this prison. Wedge had always wanted to be like his dad, even if it killed him. For the first time he entertained the idea that it might.

The brigadier asked him once again why he was there.

Wedge did what he'd been trained to do, what the Code of Conduct demanded: He answered the brigadier's question by giving only his name, rank, and service number.

“That's not what I asked you,” said the brigadier. “I asked why you are here.”

Wedge repeated himself.

The brigadier nodded, as if he understood. He circled the room until he stood behind Wedge. The brigadier rested both his hands on Wedge's shoulders, allowing the three fingers of his mangled right hand to crawl crab-like toward the base of Wedge's neck. “The only way we can resolve this situation is to work together, Major Mitchell. Whether you like it or not, you've trespassed. We have the right to know why you are here so we can resolve this. Nobody wants things to escalate further.”

Wedge glanced toward the camera in the center of the ceiling. He repeated himself for a third time.

“Would it help if I turned that off?” the brigadier asked, looking up at the camera. “You could tell just me. Everything doesn't have to be recorded.”

Wedge knew from his survival training that the brigadier was trying to ingratiate himself and build trust, and then through that trust to elicit a confession. The goal of an interrogation wasn't information but rather control—emotional control. Once that control was taken—preferably by building rapport, but just as often through intimidation, or even violence—the information would flow. But something didn't add up with this brigadier: his rank (he was too senior to be a first-line interrogator), his scars (he had too many of them to have spent a career in intelligence), and his uniform (Wedge knew enough to recognize that he wasn't standard Iranian military). What Wedge felt was nothing more than his intuition, but he was a pilot, reared from a long line of pilots, all of whom had been taught to trust their well-cultivated intuition, both in and out of the cockpit. And it was his trust in this intuition that led him to go on the offense, to make a desperate attempt to gain control of the situation.

The brigadier asked Wedge one more time why he'd come.

This time Wedge didn't answer with his name, rank, and service number. Instead, he said, “I'll tell you, if you tell me.”

The brigadier appeared surprised, as if his reason for being there was obvious. “I'm not sure that I understand.”

“Why are you here?” asked Wedge. “If you tell me, then I'll tell you.”

The brigadier was no longer standing behind Wedge but had returned to his seat across from him. He leaned curiously toward his prisoner. “I'm here to question you,” the brigadier said tentatively, as if this fact embarrassed him in some way he didn't recognize until the very words had escaped his mouth.

“Bullshit,” said Wedge.

The brigadier came out of his seat.

“You're no interrogator,” continued Wedge. “With a face like that you want me to believe you're some intel weenie?”

And that entire face, aside from the scar tissue, began to turn shamefully red.

“You should be out in the field, with your troops,” said Wedge, and he was smiling now, with a reckless grin. He'd taken a gamble, and from the brigadier's reaction he knew he'd been right. He knew he had control. “So why are you in here? Who'd you piss off to get stuck with this shit duty?”

The brigadier was towering over him. He swung back and struck Wedge so hard that he knocked his chair out of the floor where it had been bolted. Wedge toppled over. He hit the ground lifeless as a mannequin. As he lay on his side with his wrists still bound to the chair, the blows fell on him in quick succession. The video camera with its solid red light, high up in the center of the ceiling, was the last thing Wedge saw before he blacked out.


Adapted from 2034: A Novel of the Next World War by Elliot Ackerman and Admiral James Stavridis to be published March 09, 2021, by Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2021 by Elliot Ackerman and James Stavridis.

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Illustrations by Sam Whitney; Getty Images

This excerpt appears in the February 2021 issue. Subscribe now.

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