“Graphic designer,” Hendrickson corrected.
“Smart girl,” said Hunt, giving a defeated smile. If Hunt had ever married, she knew it would’ve needed to be an artist, a poet, someone whose ambition — or lack thereof — didn’t conflict with her own. She had always known this. That was why, decades before, she’d broken off her affair with Hendrickson. Neither of them was married at the time, so what made it an affair — because affairs are illicit — was their discrepancy in rank. Hendrickson thought after Hunt’s graduation from Annapolis they could be out in the open. Despite Hunt’s feelings for Hendrickson, which were real, she knew she could never be with him, or at least never be with him and have the career she wanted. When she explained this logic weeks before her graduation, he had told her that she was the love of his life, a claim that in the intervening thirty years he’d never disavowed. She had offered him only the same stony silence they now shared, which in that moment again reminded him of her namesake from those years ago — Stonewall.
“How you holding up?” Hendrickson eventually asked her.
“Fine,” she said, taking a long pull off her beer.
“The board of inquiry’s almost finished with its report,” he offered.
She looked away from him, out the window, toward the port where she’d noticed over the past week an unusually heavy concentration of ships.
“Sarah, I’ve read over what happened…. The Navy should’ve given you a medal, not an investigation.” He reached out and put his hand on her arm.
Her gaze remained fixed on the acres of anchored gray steel. What she wouldn’t give to be on the deck of any of those ships instead of here, trapped in this room, at the end of a career cut short. “They don’t give medals,” she said, “to commodores who lose all their ships.”
“I know.”
She glared at him. He was an inadequate receptacle for her grievances: from the destruction of her flotilla; to her medical retirement; all the way back to her decision never to have a family, to make the Navy her family. Hendrickson had gone on to have a career gilded with command at every level, prestigious fellowships, impressive graduate degrees, and even a White House posting, while also having a wife, children, and now a grandchild. Hunt had never had any of this, or at least not in the proportions that she had once hoped. “Is that why you came here?” she asked bitterly. “To tell me that I should’ve gotten a medal?”
“No,” he said, taking his hand off her arm and coming up in his seat. He leaned toward her as if for a moment he might go so far as to remind her of their difference in rank, that even she could push him too far. “I came here to tell you that the board of inquiry is going to find that you did everything possible given the circumstances.”
“What circumstances are those?”
Hendrickson grabbed a fistful of the nuts, dropping them one at a time in his mouth. “That’s what I was hoping you might tell me.”
The board of inquiry wasn’t the only reason Hendrickson had flown from Washington to Yokosuka. This should’ve been obvious to Hunt, but it hadn’t. She was so ensconced in her own grief, in her own frustration, that she hadn’t given much thought to broader events. “You’re here to coordinate our response?” she asked.
He nodded.
“What’s our response going to be?”
“I’m not at liberty to say, Sarah. But you can imagine.”
She glanced back out to the port filled with ships, to the twin carriers at anchor studded with parked fighters on their decks, to the low-set submarines brooding on the surface, and then to the new semisubmersible frigates and the more traditional destroyers with their bladelike hulls facing out to sea.
This was the response.
“Where are you and your bosses going to send these ships?”
He didn’t answer, but instead held forth on a range of technical issues. “You told the board of inquiry that your communications shut down. We haven’t figured out how they did this, but we have some theories….” He asked her about the frequency of the static she heard from her failing radios, about whether the Aegis terminal turned off or simply froze. He asked a series of more runic questions above the classification level of the board of inquiry. She answered — at least as best she could — until she couldn’t stand it anymore, until Hendrickson’s questions began to prove that whatever response he and his masters at the White House had planned against their adversaries in Beijing was fated to be a disaster.
“Don’t you see?” she finally said, exasperated. “The technical details of what they did hardly matter. The way to defeat technology isn’t with more technology. It is with no technology. They’ll blind the elephant and then overwhelm us.”
He gave her a confused, sidelong glance. “What elephant?”
“Us,” she added. “We’re the elephant.”
Hendrickson finished off the last of his beer. It’d been a long day and a tough few weeks, he told her. He’d return in the morning to check on her and then he had a flight out the following afternoon. He understood what she was saying, or at least wanted to understand. But the administration, he explained, was under enormous pressure to do something, to somehow demonstrate that they wouldn’t be cowed. It wasn’t only what had happened here but also this pilot, he said, this Marine who’d been brought down. Then he ruminated on the curse of domestic politics driving international policy as he stood from his seat and made for the door. “So, we’ll pick up again tomorrow?” he asked.
She didn’t answer.
“Okay?” he added.
She nodded. “Okay.” She shut the door behind him as he left.
That night her sleep was thin and empty, except for one dream. He was in it. And the Navy wasn’t. It was the two of them in an alternative life, where their choices had been different. She woke from that dream and didn’t sleep well the rest of the night because she kept trying to return to it. The following morning, she woke to a knock at her door. But it wasn’t him; it wasn’t his familiar SOS knock, just a plain knocking.
When she opened her door, a pimply faced sailor handed over a message. She was to report to the board of inquiry that afternoon for a final interview. She thanked the sailor and returned to her dim room, where the darkness congealed in the empty corners. She threw open the drapes to let in the light. It blinded her for a moment.
She rubbed at her eyes and looked down onto the port.
It was empty.
3
Blinding the Elephant
Qassem Farshad had taken the deal he was offered. Discipline against him had been decisive and swift. In less than a month he was delivered a letter of reprimand for his excesses during the interrogation of the American pilot, followed by an early retirement. When he had asked if there was anyone else he might appeal his case to, the administrative officer who’d been sent to deliver the news showed him the bottom of the page, which held the signature of the old man himself, Major General Mohammad Bagheri, chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces. When Farshad received the letter, he’d been on suspension at home, at his family’s country residence an hour outside of Isfahan. It reminded him of Soleimani’s home in Qanat-e Malek. It was peaceful there, quiet.
Farshad tried to settle into a routine. In the first few days he hiked his three miles each morning and began to sort through boxes of notebooks he’d kept throughout his career. He had an idea to write a memoir, maybe something that would be instructive to younger officers. However, it was difficult for him to concentrate. He was afflicted by a phantom itching in his missing leg, something he’d never experienced before. At midday he would break from his attempts at writing and take a picnic lunch to an elm tree that sat in a field on the far end of his property. He would rest with his back to the tree and have a simple lunch: a boiled egg, a piece of bread, some olives. He never finished his meal. His appetite had recently waned, and he would leave the remains for a pair of squirrels who lived in the tree and who, with each passing day, edged closer and closer to him in search of his scraps.