They could see it clearly now, a trawler about seventy feet long, built low amidships to recover its fishing nets, with a high-built prow designed to crest storm surge. Smoke billowed from the aft part of the ship, where the navigation bridge was set behind the nets and cranes — great dense, dark clouds of it, interspersed with orange flames. There was a commotion on deck as the crew of maybe a dozen struggled to contain the blaze.
The flotilla had rehearsed what to do in the event they came across a ship in duress. First, they would check to see if other vessels were coming to render assistance. If not, they would amplify any distress signals and facilitate finding help. What they wouldn’t do — or would do only as an absolute last resort — was divert from their own freedom of navigation patrol to provide that assistance themselves.
“Did you catch the ship’s nationality?” asked Hunt. Inwardly, she began running through a decision tree of her options.
Morris said no, there wasn’t a flag flying either fore or aft. Then she stepped back into the bridge and asked the officer of the deck, a beef-fed lieutenant junior grade with a sweep of sandy blond hair, whether or not a distress signal had come in over the last hour.
The officer of the deck reviewed the bridge log, checked with the combat information center — the central nervous system of the ship’s sensors and communications complex a couple of decks below — and concluded that no distress signal had been issued. Before Morris could dispatch such a signal on the trawler’s behalf, Hunt stepped onto the bridge and stopped her.
“We’re diverting to render assistance,” ordered Hunt.
“Diverting?” Morris’s question escaped her reflexively, almost accidentally, as every head on the bridge swiveled toward the commodore, who knew as well as the crew that lingering in these waters dramatically increased the odds of a confrontation with a naval vessel from the People’s Liberation Army. The crew was already at a modified general quarters, well trained and ready, the atmosphere one of grim anticipation.
“We’ve got a ship in duress that’s sailing without a flag and that hasn’t sent out a distress signal,” said Hunt. “Let’s take a closer look, Jane. And let’s go to full general quarters. Something doesn’t add up.”
Crisply, Morris issued those orders to the crew, as if they were the chorus to a song she’d rehearsed to herself for years but up to this moment had never had the opportunity to perform. Sailors sprang into motion on every deck of the vessel, quickly donning flash gear, strapping on gas masks and inflatable life jackets, locking down the warship’s many hatches, spinning up the full combat suite, to include energizing the stealth apparatus that would cloak the ship’s radar and infrared signatures. While the John Paul Jones changed course and closed in on the incapacitated trawler, its sister ships, the Levin and Hoon, remained on course and speed for the freedom of navigation mission. The distance between them and the flagship began to open. Hunt then disappeared back to her stateroom, to where she would send out the encrypted dispatch to Seventh Fleet Headquarters in Yokosuka. Their plans had changed.
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.