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His mother had asked to visit his office several times, but he’d kept her at bay. The idea of an office in the West Wing was far more glamorous than the reality, a desk and a chair jammed against a basement wall in a general crush of staff.
No one else had made it through the two inches of snow that had paralyzed the capital city. Chowdhury
“Don’t you see?” she finally said, exasperated. “The technical details of what they did hardly matter. The way to defeat technology isn’t with more technology. It is with no technology. They’ll blind the elephant and then overwhelm us.”
And so Lin Bao continued his staff work. He continued to carpool into the ministry with officers he deemed inferior to himself. He never again brought up his ambition for command to Minister Chiang, and he could feel the mundane ferocity of time passing. Until it was soon interrupted—as it always is—by an unanticipated event.
"mundane ferocity of time passing" <3
“That man is no longer family of mine,” she snapped back at him. “Mom, why do you think they picked me, Sandeep Chowdhury, to come here? Plenty of others could have been given this assignment. They gave it to me because our family is from here.” “What would your father say to that? You’re American. They should send you because you’re the best man for the job, not because of who your parents—” “Mom,” he said, cutting her off. He allowed the line to go silent for a beat. “I need your help.” “Okay,” she said. “Do you have a pen?” He did. She recited her brother’s phone number by heart.
“In war, it’s not that you win. It’s how you win. America didn’t used to start wars. It used to finish them. But now”—Patel dropped his chin to his chest and began to shake his head mournfully—“now it is the reverse; now you start wars and don’t finish them.”
It made little difference to the Marine Corps’ bureaucracy that this discrepancy in Wedge’s record was likely the result of yet another Chinese cyber hack. The Marine Corps couldn’t put a pilot into the cockpit of a hundred-million-dollar aircraft if that pilot had no record of ever having flown it. That Wedge had been taken down in Iranian airspace piloting an F-35 and that the details of that incident had been widely publicized didn’t matter. If it wasn’t in his flight log, it hadn’t happened.
Lin Bao would always wait for the question he knew was coming, in which one of his students would ask why it all ended. What external threat overwhelmed the Delian League? What invader accomplished what the Persian fleet could not at Salamis? And Lin Bao would tell his students that no invader had come, no foreign horde had sabotaged the golden age forged by Miltiades, Themistocles, and Greece’s other forefathers. “Then how?” they would ask. “If the Persians couldn’t do it, who did?” And so, he would say, “The end came—as it always does—from within.”
On the phone Hendrickson confirmed everything Patel had said in the canteen. Wisecarver had rebuffed the Indian defense attaché when he’d come to the White House. The defense attaché had met with Hendrickson unofficially (at a Starbucks) to reiterate India’s intention to take military action against either party—Chinese or American—who further escalated the crisis.
However, when as part of the New Delhi Peace Accords negotiated by the Indians, the United Nations announced its reorganization, the Supreme Leader astutely leveraged clemency for the imprisoned Russians as a way to secure a permanent Iranian seat on the Security Council, which the Indians had already insisted on relocating from New York City to Mumbai as a precondition of delivering a direly needed multiyear aid package to the United States.
Her mother, the wife of an admiral and a diplomat, now worked fourteen-hour days cleaning rooms at two separate chain hotels. The girl had offered to help, to also get a job, but her mother placed limits on her own humiliation, and seeing her daughter’s education sacrificed to menial labor would have breached those limits. Instead, the girl attended school full-time. In solidarity with her mother, she helped keep the studio apartment they shared impeccably clean.
