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started shouting at him. Chen heard the words “last warning,” so he raised his hands above his head and nodded.
    He turned toward the tent, noticing something he had missed a few moments ago. Chen stopped and stared beyond the trucks.
    Impossible.
    He hoped his eyes weren’t playing tricks on him. The prominent orange glow above the hills had vanished. The trucks. The camp’s lights. The city. It all made sense. Someone had just thrown the switch over part of the People’s Republic of China. Why had the Americans waited so long to strike back? It didn’t matter. He was deeply satisfied knowing that the people’s lives had been permanently cast into darkness.
    Fuck the people.
     

Chapter 8
    KJ-3000 Airborne Early Warning aircraft
    153 miles east of Guangzhou
     
    Major Xhua Hua stabbed at the button next to the console’s trackball, locking the target in the system. A flurry of voices and movement erupted around him as equipment operators scrambled to report the target to a dizzying array of People’s Liberation Air Force units on the ground. He swiveled his chair to brief his commanding officer, who had already crisscrossed through the maze of consoles to reach him.
    “Colonel, I have an unidentified air track eighteen point two miles north of Guangzhou. Altitude 600 meters and rising. Speed 700 kilometers per hour. Zero horizontal trajectory. Zero squawk. Designating track number eight-five.”
    “Where did it appear?” asked the colonel, leaning in to view the screen.
    “Here,” said Xhua, pointing at his wide-screen display. “Eighteen point two miles north of Guangzhou.”
    “It’s flying straight up?”
    “Affirmative, sir. Altitude eleven hundred meters.”
    “It can’t be a missile or a rocket. It’s too slow,” said the colonel, shaking his head. “And there’s nothing listed on the ground in that area.”
    An officer behind them interrupted. “Colonel Jin! Southern Air Defense Command demands a personal report on the contact!”
    The colonel’s face tightened, and he nodded stiffly to the junior officer before scrambling back to his station toward the front of the aircraft. Xhua turned his attention back to the display and watched the baffling contact profile.
    “Altitude twenty-one hundred meters. Speed steady at seven hundred!” he yelled to the colonel.
    This was a first for Major Xhua. He’d been assigned to airborne early warning aircraft since he joined the People’s Liberation Air Force, rising through the ranks to the second-most senior position in the command and control center aboard the PLA’s premier air defense platform. Only Colonel Jin and one of the pilots outranked him. In all of his eighteen years, he’d never tracked a straight-vertical contact this low to the ground. Military jet aircraft occasionally pulled this kind of maneuver during combat training, but in every case the aircraft started the steep ascent from a two- to three-thousand-meter altitude. Nothing about “eight-five” made sense. Another five seconds passed.
    “Altitude thirty-two hundred meters. Speed holding,” he said. Three kilometers .
    “Review the feeds and confirm that we didn’t miss anything prior to detection!” yelled Colonel Jin.
    “Yes, sir!” he yelled, looking between the consoles behind him to assign the task to one of his junior officers.
    “No! You review the feeds!” screamed the colonel.
    Here we go. Southern Air Defense Command had started their inquisition. He wondered if the phased array ground radars situated further inland had seen anything different. Doubtful. They were focused on higher altitude, over-the-horizon threats. He nodded and opened a separate command window on his screen.
    “Captain Wu, stand by to assume primary tactical actio—” What is this?
    The data window for track eight-five couldn’t be correct. Altitude seventy-three hundred meters? Speed twenty-nine hundred kilometers per hour? Supersonic?
    “Colonel! Track eight-five has increased