Drone Command

Within ten minutes, the entire crew was subdued, reduced to a heap of quivering bloody worms writhing on the deck. Radios and other electronic equipment were smashed to pieces. Two Chinese went below the waterline, disabled the engine, cut the fuel lines, smashed the controls.

All of the Rising Sun headbands were ripped from their owners and tossed over the side with a laugh, along with the patriotic banners, as other Chinese crewmen leaped from their trawler and secured the Japanese dive boat with ropes. The rest of the marauding Chinese scrambled back aboard their vessel and the trawler towed the dive boat five kilometers away, dragging the hapless diver behind it a hundred and twenty meters below the surface like a baited hook.

The small skiff trailed on the water behind them, keeping its distance. The driver fished out the first crewman who had been tossed off the dive boat when the ships collided. The two of them barely managed to haul up the furious captain, who was cursing the Chinese despite his broken jaw after he had been thrown overboard like a bag of garbage.

Through it all, the excited cameraman never wavered. He caught everything on his Sony digicam, filling up the flash drive, eager to upload the savage imagery on the Internet as soon as he got to shore.

THIRTEEN

THE PENTAGON

ARLINGTON COUNTY, VIRGINIA

7 MAY 2017

It was Lane’s first trip to the Pentagon as president.

Hell, his first trip ever.

The enormous five-sided structure was synonymous with American military power. In reality, the seven-story building was 3.7 million square feet of office space connected by seventeen and a half miles of corridors. Its most important occupant was a civilian bureaucrat, the secretary of defense, who ran the federal government’s oldest and largest bureaucracy, and the country’s single largest employer, with more than two million active-duty and civilian personnel.

Big bureaucracy, big office building.

The most important room in the Pentagon office complex was the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) conference room, long known as the Tank, located on corridor nine in the outermost E ring on the second floor (which is really the main floor) near the river entrance.

The legendary Tank was where the highest ranking flag officers of the U.S. armed services hashed out the most important security issues of the day.

Today was unlike most days in the Tank. In a symbolic gesture, President Lane left the White House and crossed the Potomac in order to meet with the chairman of the JCS and the other service chiefs.

Ironically, despite their supreme military ranks, none of the service chiefs had any operational authority, including the chairman of the JCS. Only the president and, by extension, the secretary of defense, could order troops, ships, and planes into battle. Civilian control of the military was a central tenet of Western liberal democracies. Militaries were by their nature antidemocratic and, presumably, a threat to democratic institutions if left unchecked. Democracies were also peaceful.

Or so the theory went.

In reality, the DoD and the respective military branches were far more risk averse than their elected counterparts, especially since the failure of Vietnam. In recent years, it was usually the Pentagon that had to be dragged into war by presidents, not the other way around. The Pentagon prepared for war but, whenever possible, did everything in its power to avoid it, in part because the politicians often went into war without a clear sense of the goals or conditions for victory. The men and women who did the actual fighting and dying were loyal to the core but had very little interest in sacrificing themselves in unwinnable wars.

Despite their merely advisory role, however, the chiefs carried a great deal of weight with their respective services as well as with Congress. If they spoke, you listened, even if you were the commander in chief. Especially if they spoke with one voice.

Today they did.

The chiefs were concerned. War between China and Japan appeared imminent. And because of America’s de facto treaty obligations and strategic interests, that meant war between China and the United States. A war that must be avoided at all costs. And it could only be avoided, in their opinion, by confronting the PRC with a significant show of force. This they all agreed upon. But that was about it.

Many urgent questions remained. The chiefs wanted answers and time was running out. The president had choices to make.

Now.

This was Lane’s first foreign policy crisis. It would set the tone for the rest of his administration and communicate to America’s friends and enemies around the world what kind of global leader the inexperienced young president would be. Khrushchev’s perception of JFK’s weakness at their first meeting in the 1961 Vienna summit led directly to the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, just a trigger pull away from World War III.