The doorbell rang. It was the taxicab.
“The driver will take you to the airport,” said Patel.
“The airport?”
“I imagine you want to get back to Tehran, to speak with General Bagheri. We’ve booked a flight for you. Pass along my regards. Tell him that we’re happily anticipating news that our freighter has been released and that we’re very much looking forward to our partnership.”
Outside the window, the driver stood by his taxi.
“What is this ‘decisive action’ you keep referring to?” Farshad asked. “General Bagheri is going to want to know.” Farshad remained on the sofa, cemented in place as if his returning to Tehran might be contingent on this last piece of information.
Patel gave Farshad a long, appraising look. “What we’re going to do next will be dramatic,” he answered. “But it will end this war. Will you trust me?” Patel placed his hand on Farshad’s arm.
Over and over again, Chowdhury kept calling her. Sitting in the back of the taxicab on the way to the embassy, he was in a panic. Samantha wouldn’t answer her phone. He kept dialing and dialing.
Nothing.
His former mother-in-law, that Texan WASP Chowdhury had never felt any affinity for, lived in Galveston, her health failing, her only enjoyment the ocean air and those periodic visits from her daughter.
As he crossed from the east to the west bank of the Yamuna River, Chowdhury tapped out an email to Samantha: Have tried you many times. Please call — Sandy
A new email popped into Chowdhury’s in-box, an out-of-office reply from Samantha. I will be away from my desk and in Galveston on a family matter until Monday, July 24th. If the issue is urgent, please try my cell phone.
Like that, she was gone.
The grief Chowdhury felt wasn’t for the loss of her; the two hardly had a relationship. It was for his daughter—their daughter. How many times over the years had he secretly hoped that Samantha, his stalwart antagonist, might vanish in such a way? Lost in a plane crash. Incinerated in a fire. Killed in a car wreck. He had, guiltily, harbored such fantasies. However, had any of these fantasies proven true, it would’ve left Ashni motherless. And now that Samantha was gone, his guilt was as acute as if he’d killed her himself. In fact, he couldn’t quite convince himself that he hadn’t.
When he arrived at the embassy, it was eerily quiet. He had expected to find a hive of activity as the ambassador responded to this crisis. Instead, the halls were mostly empty. Here and there, clusters of staff gathered around one cubicle or another. From the hushed tones of conversations, Chowdhury assumed the cubicles’ occupants had lost a loved one in the attack. Otherwise, the mood was stunned silence.
Chowdhury shut the door to the temporary office he’d been assigned. Though he didn’t wish to admit it, he, too, was stunned. As he logged into his email, he hoped to find something that might recall him to his senses. At the top of his in-box there was a message from Hendrickson. The subject line was empty, and even though they were communicating on a classified system, the text was cryptic: Our orders arrived. What do you hear? — Bunt
Chowdhury knew those orders were for a counterstrike led by the Enterprise. It would be against the Chinese mainland. The days of indirect strikes — at power grids, or disputed territories like Taiwan — were over. The counterstrike would follow this pattern of escalation. Zhanjiang had led to San Diego and Galveston, so the next logical step after the destruction of two American cities would be the destruction of three Chinese ones. The only question was which cities, a detail that Hendrickson had no doubt received in the recently arrived “orders.”
While Chowdhury sat in front of his screen struggling to compose a response, his cell phone rang.
It was his uncle. “Our Iranian friend just left.”
“To where?”
“Home,” said Patel. “Are you at the embassy?”
Chowdhury told him that he was.
“Nothing’s going to get accomplished there,” said his uncle. “I’m on my way to the Defense Ministry. Come meet me.”
Chowdhury made a half-hearted protest; he wasn’t in New Delhi on an official diplomatic mission and a meeting at the Defense Ministry broke any number of protocols; he would first need to secure the appropriate authorizations. His uncle listened, or at least the other end of the line fell silent, before he said, “Sandeep, we know the Enterprise has its launch orders… and I know about Ashni’s mother. For that, I am sorry; we can tell her together if you like. But first, we need you to come to the Defense Ministry.”
Chowdhury glanced out his window, to the vacant corridors of the embassy. He knew his uncle was right. Nothing was going to happen here, or at least nothing that might avert a counterstrike by the Enterprise. We’ll take out three of their cities for our two. Then what? They’ll take out four of ours. Then we take out five more. Then come the doomsday weapons…. He could feel his loyalties shifting, not from one nation to another, but between those who wanted to avert an escalation and those who believed that victory, whatever that meant, could exist along this spectrum of destruction. Receiving the appropriate authorizations to visit the Defense Ministry suddenly seemed like an irrelevance. He increasingly felt as though his allegiance didn’t reside with any government but with whoever could reverse this cycle of annihilation.
“All right,” said Chowdhury, returning to his desk. “I’ll be there in thirty minutes.”
His uncle hung up.
Chowdhury couldn’t help but wonder how the Indians knew that the Enterprise had received their launch orders. It could have been a myriad of intercepts made by their intelligence services, but Chowdhury suspected they’d intercepted his correspondence with Hendrickson. If they had, their ability to hack into his classified email demonstrated a level of cyber sophistication beyond what he and his country had previously thought them capable. When Chowdhury crafted his reply to Hendrickson, he now did so with the knowledge that others might be reading it. In response to the question What do you hear? he wrote: The Indians might do something.
It was perhaps the loneliest moment of her life. Hunt stood on the bridge overseeing flight operations, but what she was really there to observe was Hendrickson departing to Yokosuka, then on to Honolulu, and finally back to Washington, where he’d been recalled via an immediate action request, originating from the White House. When Hendrickson received the message, he’d crumpled the sheet of paper, tossed it in a burn bag, and muttered, “Fucking Wisecarver.”
Hendrickson had come to believe that he hadn’t actually been sent to the Enterprise to check up on Hunt; he had been sent to the Enterprise so he would be out of the way when Wisecarver crafted the orders for the nuclear counterstrike. Now that the White House had dispatched those orders, he wanted Hendrickson back in Washington to keep an eye on him. He explained his theory to Hunt.
“But I thought I was the one they didn’t trust?” she asked.
Hendrickson replied, “They don’t trust you. It’s just that they might not trust me either.” In this way, by both being untrustworthy to the same authority, they were once again confederates in the hours that remained before Hendrickson’s departure.
This may have been why, watching his plane dwindle into a speck on the horizon, Hunt felt so spectacularly alone. She returned to her flag cabin. The orders for the counterstrike were locked in her safe, whose combination she struggled with, preoccupied as her mind was. She couldn’t quite bring herself to focus on the detailed planning that would be required of her. Before he’d left, Hendrickson mentioned that he had it “on good authority that the Indians might intervene.”