2034, Part 2: Blackout in Washington, DC

"Everything had been compromised." Read the latest installment, plus more great longreads from WIRED. View this email in your browser  |  Manage newsletter subscriptions  02.02.21 "So much was happening—the Wén Rui, the F-35, Air Force One, which had seemed to vanish—and yet they had no news. Everything had been compromised."   In the second installment of 2034: A History of the Next World War, unseen disasters loom heavy, and things are not what they seem. Read the excerpt below, and catch up on part 1 if you missed it.     18:42 MARCH 12, 2034 (GMT-4) ≫ WASHINGTON, DC, EN ROUTE TO BEIJING Our strengths become our weaknesses, thought Lin Bao. Always. The American narrative was that they had captured the Wén Rui, a ship laden with sensitive technologies that Lin Bao's government would do anything to retrieve. For the Wén Rui's capture to precipitate the desired crisis, Lin Bao's government would need a bargaining chip to force the Americans' hand; that's where the grounded F-35 came in. Lin Bao knew that the Americans would then follow a familiar series of moves and countermoves, a choreography the two nations had stepped through many times before: A crisis would lead to posturing, then to a bit of brinksmanship, and eventually to de-escalation and a trade. In this case, the F-35 would be traded for the Wén Rui. Lin Bao knew, and his superiors knew, that it would never occur to the Americans that pilfering the sensitive technology on the F-35 was a secondary objective for their adversary and that whatever was on the Wén Rui was of little value. The Americans wouldn't understand, or at least not until it was too late, that what Lin Bao's government wanted was simply the crisis itself, one that would allow them to strike in the South China Sea. What the Americans lacked—or lost somewhere along the way—was imagination. As it was said of the 9/11 attacks, it would also be said of the Wén Rui incident: It was not a failure of American intelligence but rather a failure of American imagination. And the more the Americans struggled, the more trapped they would become. Lin Bao remembered a puzzle he'd seen in a novelty shop in Cambridge, when he'd been studying at Harvard's Kennedy School. It was a tube made of a woven mesh material. The man behind the counter of the store had seen him looking at the puzzle, trying to figure out what it was. "You stick your fingers in either end," he had said in one of those thick Boston accents Lin Bao always struggled to understand. Lin Bao did as he was told. When he went to remove his fingers, the woven mesh cinched down. The more he tugged, the more tightly his fingers became stuck. The man behind the counter laughed and laughed. "You've never seen that before?" Lin Bao shook his head, no. The man laughed even harder, and then said, "It's called a Chinese finger trap." Read the Second Installment in Full   2034, Part 2: Blackout in Washington, DC BY ELLIOT ACKERMAN AND ADMIRAL JAMES STAVRIDIS | 23-MINUTE READ "So much was happening—the Wén Rui, the F-35, Air Force One, which had seemed to vanish—and yet they had no news. Everything had been compromised."   You'll receive part 3 next week. For now, here's a preview of what's to come. 11:01 MARCH 13, 2034 (GMT+8) ≫ SOUTH CHINA SEA They charged out of the east, two silvery flashes on the horizon, and made an orbit around the badly wounded John Paul Jones. Nearly half the crew, more than one hundred sailors, had perished since that morning, either incinerated in the blast from the pair of successive torpedo impacts or entombed in the flooded compartments belowdecks that their shipmates had been forced to secure with them still trapped inside. There were very few wounded, mostly dead, as was usually the case in naval engagements, where there was no battlefield for the injured to rest upon, only the consuming sea. When the two planes didn't come in straight for the attack, a collective silence fell over the crew, like a breath sucked in. Within that breath was a fleeting hope that these planes had been sent from Yokosuka, or perhaps launched from a friendly carrier dispatched to their aid. But as soon as the crew of the John Paul Jones glimpsed their wings, which were laden with munitions, and observed that the two aircraft kept a cautious distance, they knew they weren't friendly. But why didn't they strike? Why didn't they drop their ordnance and finish the job? Captain Sarah Hunt couldn't waste her time on speculation. Her full attention remained where it had been since the first torpedo hit the day before. She needed to keep her flagship afloat. And it was, sadly, her ship now. Commander Morris hadn't been seen since the second impact. Hunt hadn't heard from the Levin or Chung-Hoon either. She'd only watched, helplessly, as each was crippled and then sunk. This was the fate that would soon befall her and the surviving members of her crew. Although they'd contained most of the fires on the John Paul Jones, they were taking on more water than they could pump out. As the weight of the water contorted the steel hull, it creaked mournfully, like a wounded beast, as minute by minute it came closer to buckling. Hunt stood on the bridge. She tried to occupy herself—checking and rechecking their inoperable radios, dispatching runners for updates from damage control, replotting their position on an analog chart, since anything that required a GPS had failed. She did this so her crew wouldn't despair at their captain's inactivity and so that she herself wouldn't have to imagine the water slipping over the mast. She glanced up, at the twin attack planes from the Zheng He. How she wished they would stop taunting her, that they would stop their impudent circling, drop their ordnance, and allow her to go down with her ship. "Ma'am … " interjected one of the radiomen standing beside her, as he pointed toward the horizon. She glanced up. The flight of two had changed their angle of attack. They were darting toward the John Paul Jones, flying low and fast, staggered in echelon. When the sun glinted off their wings, Hunt imagined it was their cannons firing. She grimaced, but no impacts came. The flight of two was closing the distance between them. The weapon systems on the John Paul Jones had been taken out of action. On the bridge there was silence. Her command—the hierarchy that was her ship and its crew—it all melted away in these, their final moments. The radioman, who couldn't have been more than 19, glanced up at her, and she, surprising herself, placed her arm around him. The flight of two was so close now, so low, that she could observe the slight undulation of their wings as they passed through the uneven air. In a blink their ordnance would drop. Hunt shut her eyes. A noise like thunder—a boom. But nothing happened. Hunt glanced upward. The two planes turned aerobatic corkscrews around each other, climbing higher and higher still, losing and finding themselves in striations of cloud. Then they descended again, passing a hundred feet or less above the surface of the ocean, flying slowly, right above stall speed. As they passed in front of the bridge, the lead plane was so close that Hunt could see the silhouette of the pilot. Then he dipped his wing—a salute, which Hunt believed was the message he'd been sent there to deliver. The planes ascended and flew back the way they came. The ship's bridge remained silent. Then there was a crackle of static. For the first time in more than a day, one of their radios turned on. 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