Farshad opened his mouth to speak, but his words were drowned out by another section of Sukhois catapulting off the deck of the Kuznetsov. Ribbons of dark smoke began to tower upward on the horizon as the fighters struck their targets and advancing Russian ground forces seized their objectives. Farshad thought to disappear to his quarters belowdecks, to check if he had received another message from the General Staff in Tehran. His Russian counterparts would have thought little of it. They wanted him reporting back their every move, particularly on a day like this, in which each move brought them greater success.
Farshad thought the operation was reckless, even by Russian standards. Poland was a NATO member nation. Perhaps President Putin, now an octogenarian, had made a disastrous miscalculation in his old age. He looked up at the jets and wondered when NATO would respond. American disinterest over the previous decades had crippled the alliance. It felt antiquated, irrelevant, a shadow of its Cold War self. This year it had celebrated its eighty-fifth birthday. But it still had teeth, surely? Maybe not. Maybe of the two octogenarians locked in this conflict, it was Putin who’d kept his teeth over the years.
Before Farshad could send a further report from his quarters there was a commotion on the bridge. A single fighter had threaded its way between the Kuznetsov and the Rezkiy. It had come in low and fast, at less than one hundred feet, so that its twin engines blew ripples across the water’s surface. With the continuous comings and goings of the Russian Sukhois, it must’ve gotten confused in the mix. The aircraft was a MiG-29, its wings clearly marked with the red-and-white checkerboard pattern of the Polish Air Force. Everyone seemed to see it at once: Farshad, Kolchak, the entire crew of the Rezkiy. The collective shock of finding an enemy aircraft at so close a range caused them all to freeze, and in that moment a great silence enveloped them.
That silence was broken when the MiG-29 engaged its afterburners, arching upward, gathering altitude as it bled off speed. One thousand, two thousand, three thousand feet, it hung suspended above the flight deck of the Kuznetsov. Beneath the single Polish MiG, dozens of heavily armed Sukhois and their ground crews were, suddenly, exposed.
The MiG barreled over, nosing downward into its angle of attack.
Farshad glimpsed the MiG’s belly as it pirouetted. It wasn’t even outfitted with a full complement of munitions. Two bombs hung from a single rack; that was it. But that would be enough.
A flash and then a trail of smoke on the deck of the Rezkiy as it fired on the MiG.
The smoke coiled upward.
On the belly of the MiG, Farshad could see the bombs leave their rack, where they hung for a moment, suspended in air. Farshad could also see the profile of the pilot, a determined speck in the canopy. The last thing Farshad saw before the rocket fired from the Rezkiy destroyed the MiG and the twin bombs it attempted to drop, as well as the pilot who never had a chance to eject, was the gun ports on the aircraft.
They were clean, not soot-darkened like the returning Sukhois. Because in the end, after all of the commotion, the pilot of the MiG never got off a shot.
Farshad went belowdecks to send his report to Tehran.
Lin Bao’s summons from the Politburo Standing Committee had come in the middle of the night. The unmarked transport that flew him off the deck of the Zheng He an hour later wasn’t one of his; it was sourced from another command. There were only two additional passengers aboard, both large, dark-suited men, clearly from one of the internal security branches. Lin Bao thought he recognized them from his last meeting with Minister Chiang in the British Airways lounge, though he couldn’t be sure. Thugs like these usually defied differentiation.
By first light, Lin Bao was sandwiched between those two security men in the back of a black sedan as it wound up a long, twisting ribbon of driveway to its improbable location, the front entrance of the Mission Hills Golf Club and Resort in Shenzhen. To his surprise, when he stepped from the sedan, Lin Bao was met by a lithe twentysomething woman. She had an orchid pinned in her long black hair, wore a name tag that announced her title: hospitality associate. She handed Lin Bao a glass of cucumber-infused water. He sipped it, cautiously.
She escorted Lin Bao along the labyrinthine route to his junior suite, while the two security men disappeared amid the bland furniture of the echoing reception hall. When they arrived in his suite, the hospitality associate gave Lin Bao a quick tour, pointing out the mini-fridge and the sofa that pulled out into a second bed, then drawing back the curtains so he could appreciate the expansive green-lawned view overlooking the more than two hundred holes of golf at Mission Hills. Everything would be provided for Lin Bao, she explained, pulling out a drawer that contained a change of civilian clothes and gesturing to his fully stocked bathroom. She knew he had traveled a great distance, so it was now time to relax. If Lin Bao was hungry, he could order some lunch from room service. She would also send up the valet to clean and press his uniform, which wasn’t appropriate attire at a resort. The hospitality associate was polite and methodical in her speech, missing no detail, her chin raised slightly, the tense line of her throat expressing her words with a practiced efficiency that by the end of their exchange had Lin Bao wondering whether she was employed by the resort or by the same branch of internal security as the darkly suited men who’d brought him this far.
It hardly mattered, Lin Bao concluded as she left him alone.
But not really alone. Lin Bao sat on the edge of the bed, his left hand on his left knee, his right hand on his right knee, his back rigidly straight. He searched the room with his eyes. The air-conditioning vent most likely contained a listening device and pinhole-sized camera. The mirror that hung above the bed most likely contained the same. The hotel phone was certainly monitored. He walked to his window, which overlooked the golf course. He tried to open it — the window was sealed.
Lin Bao returned to the edge of the bed. He took off his boots and his fatigues and wrapped a towel around his waist. He crossed the suite and turned on the shower. A fresh tube of toothpaste was balanced on its cap by the sink. He touched the bristles of the hotel toothbrush; they were damp. Lin Bao brushed with his finger. Before he could step into the shower, a valet knocked on his door.
Did he have any dry cleaning?
Lin Bao gathered his uniform and handed it to the valet, who told him that his colleagues would be ready for him that afternoon. Who those colleagues were, Lin Bao didn’t know, and likely neither did the valet, who left with the bundle of clothes tucked beneath his arm. Lin Bao showered, ordered a light lunch for which he had little appetite, and dressed in the khakis and golf shirt that had been left for him. He sat in a chair by the window and looked out at the nearly vacant course, its acres and acres of grass rolling outward like an ocean.
For the first time, he allowed himself to wonder if he would ever gaze at the ocean again. Since being summoned here from the Zheng He, he’d disciplined himself against such thoughts, but his anxiety got the better of him as he waited in his room. He had heard of such “summonses” before. A national disaster had occurred in Zhanjiang, with millions killed, incinerated, while many others slowly perished in hospital beds around the country — in hospital beds not far from here. Someone would be held accountable. The Politburo Standing Committee would purge what it identified as the single point of failure. Which would always be a person.