In the background CNN was playing. The anchor announced some breaking news. “We have obtained exclusive video of downed Marine pilot Major Chris Mitchell….”
Chowdhury banged the back of his head as he startled up from the fridge. Before he could get to the television, he heard the warning that the video was graphic, that it might prove disturbing to some audiences. Chowdhury didn’t wait around to see it. He already knew how bad it was. He climbed in his car and rushed to the office, forgetting to turn off the television.
He texted his mother to see if she could pick up Ashni from school, lest he appear negligent to his ex-wife. His mother wrote back immediately and, uncharacteristically, didn’t complain about yet another change in plan. She must have already seen the video, thought Chowdhury. He was listening to the radio on his fifteen-minute drive into work; MSNBC, Fox, NPR, WAMU, even the local hip-hop station WPGC — everyone was talking about what they’d just seen. The image quality was grainy, pixilated, but what they all fixated on was how Wedge — lying on his side, with that brute of an Iranian officer standing over him, kicking him in the ribs and head — kept repeating only his name, rank, and service number.
The divergence of views Chowdhury had read in the paper that morning was quickly yielding to a consensus. Every voice he heard on the drive into work agreed: the defiance displayed by this downed flyer was an example to us all. We wouldn’t be pushed around, not by anyone. Had we forgotten who we were? Had we forgotten the spirit which made us that single, indispensable nation? Chowdhury thought of yesterday’s debate in the Situation Room and the president’s policy of de-escalation. With the release of this video, such a policy would become untenable.
When he barged into his office, the first person he saw was Hendrickson, whom he hadn’t seen since the crisis began. The offices of the national security staff were packed with Pentagon augments who were helping with — or at times getting in the way of — the administration’s response to the Iranians. “When did the video come in?” Chowdhury asked Hendrickson.
He pulled Chowdhury into the corridor. “It came in last night,” he said in a conspiratorial whisper, glancing side to side as though he were about to cross the road. “A signals intercept from Cyber Command — weird that it didn’t come from NSA. It seems this Iranian brigadier in the video lost his cool. He’s well connected and his superiors didn’t quite believe what he’d done until a video circulated internally of the interrogation. We picked it up in their email traffic. Cyber defense has never been a strong suit for the Iranians. They have a tendency to focus on offensive cyber, but kind of forget to guard the barn door.”
“How did it get to the press?” asked Chowdhury.
Hendrickson gave him a look, one Chowdhury had seen many times before when they’d attended the Fletcher School and either Chowdhury or one of his classmates had asked a question with an answer so obvious that its very asking annoyed Hendrickson. Nevertheless, Hendrickson obliged with an answer. “How do you think? A leak.”
Before Chowdhury could ask Hendrickson who he thought had leaked the video, Trent Wisecarver stepped out from the office and into the corridor where the two stood. His frameless glasses were balanced on the tip of his nose, as if he’d been reading. Under his arm were several binders marked top secret//noforn. Based on their thickness and on the fact that they were paper, not electronic, Chowdhury assumed them to be military operational plans of the highest sensitivity. When he saw Chowdhury, Wisecarver made a face. “Didn’t I tell you to take the day off?”
Captain Sarah Hunt ventured out to the commissary on foot. For three weeks she’d been trapped on base without a car, living in a room at the bachelor officers’ quarters, its only amenities a television that played the antiseptically boring American Forces Network and a kitchenette with a mini-fridge that didn’t make ice. Why the Navy chose to perform her board of inquiry here, at Yokosuka, instead of her home port of San Diego, was a mystery to her. Her best guess was that they wanted to avoid any undue attention paid to the proceedings, but she couldn’t be certain. The Navy wasn’t in the business of explaining its decisions, not to anyone, and most certainly not to itself, at least at her level of command. And so she’d spent the intervening weeks since the Battle of Mischief Reef stowed away in this crappy room, reporting to a nondescript office building once or twice a day to give tape-recorded answers to questions and hoping that the deliberations in progress might clear her name so that the administrative hold she’d been placed under would soon lift, allowing her to retire in peace.
She’d begun to think that the board of inquiry might never reach its conclusion when an optimistic note arrived in the form of a voicemail left by her old friend Rear Admiral John Hendrickson, in which he announced that he “happened to be on base” and asked if he could stop by for a drink. When he was a lieutenant on faculty at Annapolis, Hendrickson had volunteered as one of the softball coaches. As a midshipman, Hunt had been one of his star players. She’d been the catcher. And Hendrickson and the other players had affectionately nicknamed her “Stonewall” for the way she guarded home plate. On occasions too numerous to count, a runner rounding third would find herself flat on her back along the baseline, staring up at an expanse of sky, while Midshipman Sarah “Stonewall” Hunt stood triumphantly over her, ball in hand, with the umpire bellowing, “Ouutt!”
Sarah Hunt now stood in the checkout line of the commissary. She’d bought two six-packs of IPA, a jar of Planters mixed nuts, some crackers, some cheese. While she waited in line, she couldn’t help but feel as though the other sailors were eyeing her. They knew who she was, stealing glances while trying to pretend that they didn’t notice her. She couldn’t decide whether this reaction was awe or contempt. She had fought in her country’s largest naval battle since the Second World War. She was, at this moment, the only officer who had ever held command at sea during a peer-level naval engagement, her three subordinate commanders having gone down with their ships. As she worked her way through the checkout line, she wondered how the sailors at Pearl Harbor felt in the days after that iconic defeat. Although eventually they had been celebrated, were the veterans of that battle first vilified? Did they have to suffer through boards of inquiry?
The cashier handed Hunt her receipt.
Back in her room, she put the nuts into a plastic bowl. She laid the crackers and cheese on a plate. She popped open a beer. And then she waited.
It didn’t take long.
Knock, knock, knock… knock… knock… knock… knock, knock, knock…
Unreal, thought Hunt.
She called out for him to come in. Hendrickson opened the unlocked door, crossed the room, and sat across from Hunt at the small table in the kitchenette. He exhaled heavily, as though he were tired; then he took one of the beers that sat sweating condensation on the table, as well as a fistful of the salty nuts. They knew each other so well that neither had to speak.
“Cute with the knocks,” Hunt eventually said.
“SOS, remember?”
She nodded, and then added, “But this isn’t Bancroft Hall. I’m not a twenty-one-year-old midshipman and you aren’t a twenty-seven-year-old lieutenant sneaking into my room.”
He nodded sadly.
“How’s Suze?”
“Fine,” he answered.
“The kids?”
“Also fine… grandkid soon,” he added, allowing his voice to perk up. “Kristine’s pregnant. The timing’s good. She just finished a flight tour. She’s slated for shore duty.”
“She still with that guy, the artist?”