USS KANDAHAR, 1014 HOURS, 15 JANUARY 2021

The marines wouldn’t have been surprised at all to discover that someone like Adil was watching over them. In fact, they assumed there were more than two hundred million pairs of eyes
turned their way as they prepared to deploy into the Indonesian Archipelago.
Nobody called it the Caliphate. Officially the United States still recognized it as the sovereign territory of Indonesia, seventeen thousand islands stretching from Banda Aceh, three hundred
kilometers off the coast of Thailand, down to Timor, just north of Australia. The sea-lanes passing through those islands carried a third of the world’s maritime trade, and officially they
remained open to all traffic. The Indonesian government-in-exile said so—from the safety of the Grand Hyatt in Geneva where they had fled, three weeks earlier, after losing control of Jakarta.
Unofficially though, these were the badlands, controlled— just barely—by a revolutionary Islamic government calling itself the Caliphate and laying claim to all seventeen thousand
islands, as well as the territory of Malaysia, the Philippines, Brunei, East Timor, Papua New Guinea, Bougainville, and, for good measure, northern Australia. Nonbelievers were not welcome.
The spiritual leader of the Caliphate, Mullah Ibn Abbas, had proclaimed this as the will of Allah.
The Eighty-second Marine Expeditionary Unit begged to differ.
And on the hangar deck of the USS Kandahar, a Baghdadclass littoral assault ship, they were preparing a full and frank rebuttal.
The hangar was a vast, echoing space. Two full decks high and running nearly a third of the length of the slab-sided vessel, it still seemed crowded, packed tight with most of the Eightysecond’s air wing—a small air force in its own right consisting of a dozen Ospreys, four aging Super Stallions, two reconditioned command Hueys, eight Sea Comanche gunships, and
half a dozen Super Harriers.
The Harriers and Super Stallions had been moved onto the “roof”—the flight deck, thus allowing the ground combat element of the Eighty-second MEU to colonize the space that had been opened up. The GCE was formally known as the Third Battalion of the Ninth Regiment, Fifth Marine Division. It was also known as the Lonesome Dead, after their passably famous
CO, Colonel J. Lonesome Jones.
Not all of 3 Batt were embarked upon the Kandahar. The battalion topped out at more than twelve hundred men and women, and some of their number had to be berthed elsewhere in the
three ships that were carrying the Eighty-second into harm’s way. The USS Providence, a Harper’s Ferry–class amphibious landing dockship (LSD), took the battalion’s four Abrams tanks, a rifle company, and the amphibious assault vehicle platoon. The Kennebunkport, a venerable LPD 12, carried the recon platoon, the regiment’s Humvees, two more Hueys, the drone platoon, and the Navy SEAL team that would be providing security to the Eighty-second during their cruise through the archipelago.
Even as Adil unwrapped his rice cake and squinted into the blue expanse of the Wetar Strait a six-man detachment from the SEAL team was unpacking their gear on the hangar deck of
the Kandahar, where they were getting set to train the men of C Company, 3 Batt.
Charlie Company doubled as Colonel Jones’s cliff assault and small boat raiding squadron, and the SEALs had come to acquaint them with a new toy: the G4, a lightweight assault riflethat fired strips of caseless ceramic ammunition and programmable 30mm grenades. It was to become standard equipment throughout the U.S. armed forces within twelve months. The marines, however, were always at the bottom of the food chain, and would probably have waited two years before they laid hands on these babies. But the battalion logistics officer, Lieutenant
Colonel Nancy Viviani, was an inventive and talented S4. As always, Viviani was determined that the battalion should have the very best equipment other people’s money could buy.
Not that long ago she would have been known as a scavenger, a scrounger, and would have done her job under the cover of darkness with a pair of wire cutters and a fast getaway jeep. She
would have been a man, too, of course. But Lieutenant Colonel Viviani carried two master’s degrees into combat, one of them an MBA from the London School of Economics, and the graduates of that august institution didn’t stoop to anything so crude as petty theft. Not when they could play the Pentagon’s fantastically complex supply programs like an antique violin.
Six and a half hours of extracurricular keyboard time had been enough to release a shipment of G4s from pre-positioned supply vessels in Darwin. Viviani’s genius was in making the process
appear entirely legitimate. Had the Senate Armed Forces Committee itself spent a year inspecting her electronic audit trail, it would have found everything in order with absolutely nothing linking the G4 shipment to the loss of a similar supply package scheduled for delivery to an army public relations unit. “This is the Remington G-four,” CPO Vincente Rogas barked
at the members of C Company. “By the end of today’s lecture you will be familiar with the procedure for maintaining this weapon in the field.” It sounded more like a threat than a
promise. “The G-four is the first solid-state infantry weapon,” he bellowed. “It has very few moving parts.” A slight murmur passed through the tight knot of marines. They were familiar with the weapons specs, having intensively trained with them back in the United States. But still, it was a hell of a thing to wrap your head around. “And this is the standard battle load.” His audience stared at the long thin strip of ceramic munitions like children at their first magic show. “The ammo strip is placed in the barrel like this. An electrical charge ignites the propellant casing, driving the slug out with such velocity that, even with a three-round burst, you will feel no kickback—at least not before the volley leaves the muzzle. “Tomorrow, when we move ashore to the range, each of you will be allotted three hundred rounds. I suggest very strongly that
before then youtake advantage of the full VR tutorial we’ve loaded into your training sets. The base software package is a standard Asian urban conflict scenario, but we’ve added modules
specifically tailored for operations in Jakarta and Surabaya.” With deployment less than a fortnight away, similar scenes were being replayed throughout the U.S.-led Multinational
Force accompanying the Kandahar. Twelve thousand very serious men and women drilled to the point of exhaustion. They were authorized by the UN Security Council to use whatever
force was necessary to reestablish control of the capital, Jakarta, and to put an end to the mass murder of Indonesia’s Chinese and Christian minorities. Everybody was preparing for a slaughter. In the hundred-bed hospital of the Kandahar the Eighty-second’s chief combat surgeon, Captain Margie Francois, supervised her team’s reaction to a simulated missile strike on an armored hovercraft carrying a marine rifle company into a contested estuary.
Two thousand meters away, the French missile frigate Dessaix dueled with a pair of Raptors off the supercarrier USS Hillary Clinton. In the other direction, three thousand meters to the west, two British trimaran stealth destroyers practiced their response to a successful strike by suicide bombers whose weapon of choice had been a high-speed rubber boat. Indeed, Captain Karen Halabi, who had been on the receiving end of just such an attack as a young ensign, drilled the crew of the HMS Trident so fiercely that in those few hours they were allowed to sleep, most
dreamed of crazy men in speedboats laden with TNT.