2034: A Novel of the Next World War(4)
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04:47 March 12, 2034 (GMT-4)
Washington, D.C.
Dr. Sandeep “Sandy” Chowdhury, the deputy national security advisor, hated the second and fourth Mondays of every month. These were the days, according to his custody agreement, that his six-year-old daughter, Ashni, returned to her mother. What often complicated matters was that the handoff didn’t technically occur until the end of school. Which left him responsible for any unforeseen childcare issues that might arise, such as a snow day. And on this particular Monday morning, a snow day in which he was scheduled to be in the White House Situation Room monitoring progress on a particularly sensitive test flight over the Strait of Hormuz, he had resorted to calling his own mother, the formidable Lakshmi Chowdhury, to come to his Logan Circle apartment. She had arrived before the sun had even risen in order to watch Ashni.
“Don’t forget my one condition,” she’d reminded her son as he tightened his tie around the collar that was too loose for his thin neck. Heading out into the slushy predawn, he paused at the door. “I won’t forget,” he told her. “And I’ll be back by the time Ashni’s picked up.” He had to be: his mother’s one condition was that she not be inflicted with the sight of Sandy’s ex-wife, Samantha, a transplant from Texas’s Gulf Coast whom Lakshmi haughtily called “provincial.” She’d disliked her the moment she had set eyes on her skinny frame and pageboy blonde haircut. A poor man’s Ellen DeGeneres, Lakshmi had once said in a pique, having to remind her son about the old-time television show host whose appeal she’d never understood.
If being single and reliant upon his mother at forty-four was somewhat humiliating, the ego blow was diminished when he removed his White House all-access badge from his briefcase. He flashed it to the uniformed Secret Service agent at the northwest gate while a couple of early morning joggers on Pennsylvania Avenue glanced in his direction, wondering if they should know who he was. It was only in the last eighteen months, since he’d taken up his posting in the West Wing, that his mother had finally begun to correct people when they assumed that her son, Dr. Chowdhury, was a medical doctor.
His mother had asked to visit his office several times, but he’d kept her at bay. The idea of an office in the West Wing was far more glamorous than the reality, a desk and a chair jammed against a basement wall in a general crush of staff.
He sat at his desk, enjoying the rare quiet of the empty room. No one else had made it through the two inches of snow that had paralyzed the capital city. Chowdhury rooted around one of his drawers, scrounged up a badly crushed but still edible energy bar, and took it, a cup of coffee, and a briefing binder through the heavy soundproof doors into the Situation Room.
A seat with a built-in work terminal had been left for him at the head of the conference table. He logged in. At the far end of the room was an LED screen with a map displaying the disposition of US military forces abroad, to include an encrypted video-teleconference link with each of the major combatant commands, Southern, Central, Northern, and the rest. He focused on the Indo-Pacific Command—the largest and most important, responsible for nearly 40 percent of the earth’s surface, though much of it was ocean.
The briefer was Rear Admiral John T. Hendrickson, a nuclear submariner with whom Chowdhury had a passing familiarity, though they’d yet to work together directly. The admiral was flanked by two junior officers, a man and a woman, each significantly taller than him. The admiral and Chowdhury had been contemporaries in the doctoral program at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy fifteen years before. That didn’t mean they’d been friends; in fact, they’d only overlapped by a single year, but Chowdhury knew Hendrickson by reputation. At a hair over five feet, five inches tall, Hendrickson was conspicuous in his shortness. His compact size made it seem as though he were born to fit into submarines, and his quirky, deeply analytic mind seemed equally customized for that strange brand of naval service. Hendrickson had finished his doctorate in a record-breaking three years (as opposed to Chowdhury’s seven), and during that time he’d led the Fletcher softball team to a hat trick of intramural championships in the Boston area, earning the nickname “Bunt.”
Chowdhury nearly called Hendrickson by that old nickname, but he thought better of it. It was a moment for deference to official roles. The screen in front of them was littered with forward-deployed military units—an amphibious ready group in the Aegean, a carrier battle group in the Western Pacific, two nuclear submarines under what remained of the Arctic ice, the concentric rings of armored formations fanned out from west to east in Central Europe, as they had been for nearly a hundred years to ward off Russian aggression. Hendrickson quickly homed in on two critical events underway, one long planned; the other “developing,” as Hendrickson put it.
The planned event was the testing of a new electromagnetic disrupter within the F-35’s suite of stealth technology. This test was now in progress and would play out over the next several hours. The fighter had been launched from a Marine squadron off the George H. W. Bush in the Arabian Gulf. Hendrickson glanced down at his watch. “The pilot’s been dark in Iranian airspace for the last four minutes.” He went into a long, top secret, and dizzyingly expository paragraph on the nature of the electromagnetic disruption, which was occurring at that very moment, soothing the Iranian air defenses to sleep.