“How so?” asked Farshad, his eyes fixed on the screen.
“The Tandava was first danced by Lord Shiva,” answered Patel.
“Shiva?” said Chowdhury, as he reached back in his memory for the identity of that particular deity.
His uncle filled in the gap. “Yes, Lord Shiva. He is both the Creator and Destroyer.”
A phone rang in the back of the house. Patel excused himself, leaving Chowdhury and Farshad alone in the den. Neither of them had an inclination to speak without Patel in the room, so they sat wordlessly while the tempo of the drum, flutes, and accompanying sitars continued to accelerate the dance that played out on the television.
Chowdhury believed that the situation would soon resolve itself. The Iranian position was untenable. They couldn’t shut down the Strait of Hormuz for much longer. The risk of a broader Indian intervention was too great, not only for Tehran but also for Tehran’s ally Beijing. Such an intervention would be enough to tip the scales decidedly in favor of the United States. However, as Chowdhury reached this conclusion, a certain melancholy came over him. His country was the one that intervened — whether in the First World War, or the Second, in Korea or Vietnam, in the Balkans and later in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria. American intervention, if only occasionally successful, was always decisive among nations. But no longer.
His uncle, having finished his call, appeared in the doorway. His mouth opened slightly as if to speak, but then he sealed it. He sat back in his chair with whatever he had to say trapped inside of him. Before he could deliver his message, a ticker unspooled itself across the bottom of the television’s screen. It was a news update in both Hindi and English. Before Chowdhury or Farshad could read further, Patel exhaled once, as if in anguish, only to say in a voice like doom, “San Diego and Galveston.”
They sat, the three of them. In the room the only sound was the music. Not a word was spoken. The sole movement came from the television. The ticker continued to run, articulating the news, while above it was the girl, joyously articulating the movements of the Tandava. On and on she seemed to dance.
6
The Tandava
Lin Bao was alone when the first images came in. He’d arrived at the Defense Ministry three hours before the strike, sequestering himself in the conference room, and he waited. The Zheng He had dispatched long-dwell drones, whose radar and infrared profiles were the size of gnats, over San Diego and Galveston. The static-filled live feed projected ghostly gray onto a screen at the far end of the room. While Lin Bao sat in his armchair at the head of the table, he listened to the drone operator’s disembodied voice as it described what it saw: the blast circumference of the crater; the black rain of several pyrocumulus clouds; the otherworldly annihilation of two cities, which appeared as though a wrathful deity had inhaled them up from the earth. The voice was giving words to this single greatest act of human destruction. The more it spoke, the more it took on larger proportions, so that to Lin Bao it soon sounded less and less like the voice of a man and more as though it were the voice of God Himself.
If Lin Bao possessed any reservations about his decision to leave the Navy and government service, watching the fallout over San Diego and Galveston gave him complete conviction that his time as a military officer was through. The only question was how to extract himself safely — not a small task, he realized. After their meeting at Mission Hills, Zhao Leji had, by default, made himself Lin Bao’s direct superior. Even though no table of organization existed that showed Lin Bao and Zhao Leji in the same chain of command, no official would accept Lin Bao’s resignation without Zhao Leji’s explicit approval.
And so Lin Bao could submit his resignation to one person alone: Zhao Leji.
However, since leaving Mission Hills, he and Lin Bao had had no direct communication. Not a telephone call. Not a meeting. Not an email. Zhao Leji had become a ghost, as distant and disembodied as the drones circling the destroyed American cities.
Although Lin Bao had heard nothing from Zhao Leji, he did nothing without the old man’s tacit approval. That formal approval would, of course, never arrive with Zhao Leji’s name on it, or anyone else’s name on it for that matter. The Politburo Standing Committee expressed itself in the language of bureaucratic obfuscation. Direct intent from an individual (or a collection of individuals) was laundered through existing offices, and not infrequently through nonexistent ones. The routing on any memo — the “FROM:”—often took up the entire first page. Names hardly ever appeared, only those obscure office titles. If a decision from the Politburo Standing Committee went awry, one of these intermediary offices could take any or all of the blame.
As Lin Bao watched the live feed from the Zheng He, one of these bureaucratic messages sat on the desk in front of him. Like the strike’s launch order, it had arrived in a sealed envelope. It, too, had an extensive administrative routing directive on its first page. Lin Bao wondered what would happen if he composed his letter of resignation with a reverse of this routing? Like a trail of bread crumbs, would it lead back to Zhao Leji and the Politburo Standing Committee? He doubted it. He knew, instinctually, that a matter as sensitive as the resignation of a senior admiral couldn’t be handled through such channels. If only his departure was as simple as properly formatting a memo.
His thoughts inexplicably turned to the one-way radios on the Soviet tanks during the Second World War, that cautionary case study at the US Naval War College about overly centralized command structures. His wife and daughter had loved Newport, the winter snowstorms spent huddled by the fireplace and that single glorious summer when on weekends they would rent a dinghy from Goat Island and then let out full-sail, passing beneath the Claiborne Pell suspension bridge as they headed toward the hulking gray facade of the historic Naval War College, where they’d beach their dinghy and spread a picnic on a blanket in the sand. With his shoes off, reclining alongside his family, Lin Bao had talked about his retirement back then too. His idea: to teach at the war college.
He smiled self-consciously even thinking of it. How preposterous it seemed now.
The disembodied voice interrupted: “Twenty-two minutes on-station time remaining. Standing by for additional taskings….” The combat information center on the Zheng He responded, sending the unmanned flight out into the spectral blast-scape to further confirm what was obvious at a glance: the destruction of everything.
I would have taught history, thought Lin Bao, his mind wandering as he considered the live feed. His dream to teach was one that he didn’t speak of to anyone, not even his wife. Had he acted on it those years ago he never would have made admiral. He would have retired from the Navy as a commander, a respectable rank. His dual US citizenship and his doctorate would have been enough to land him a job. As a former Chinese naval officer, he would have brought a unique perspective to the faculty. He had never quite relinquished the dream. Over the years, he had composed a curriculum for a few classes in his mind. He never dared write them down; that would have made the dream too real, and deferring it too painful.