The Ghost War

by Alex Berenson

  “Bring us in,” Beck said to Choe. “But slow. And be ready to take off.”

  “Slow,” Choe said. He eased the throttle forward. They were two hundred yards from shore, then one hundred, and through his binoculars Beck could clearly see the birthmark.

  “That’s him,” Beck said. He waited for the trap to spring, for North Korean soldiers to pour out of the trees. But the woods stayed silent. Sixty yards out, the depth finder beeped.

  “Any closer and we beach,” Kang said.

  Choe was already swinging the Phantom around. Beck stepped out the back of the pilothouse and waved for Sung to swim out to the boat.

  The North Korean limped into the sea. Halfway out, with the water at his shoulders, he began to yell.

  “He can’t swim,” Kang said.

  “He can’t swim? Maybe he should have thought of that before he chose this godforsaken beach for his pickup.” Beck took one more look at the shore. Still silent. “I guess this is why I get the big bucks.”

  Beck pulled off his clothes and his pistol and put them in a pile and dove off the Phantom into the cool salty water. He swam underwater as long as he could, coming up for air a few feet from Sung. He reached Sung and wrapped his arms under Sung’s shoulders, the grip lifeguards used to save drowning swimmers. Sung’s body was flabby in his hands.

  Panic filled Sung’s face and he struggled, from fear or surprise or both, his arms swinging wildly. But Beck overcame his thrashing and dragged him back to the Phantom, where Kang pulled him up.

  “GO,” BECK YELLED as soon as he’d hoisted himself out.

  Choe pushed the throttle forward and the boat took off, swinging hard right, throwing Beck against the pilothouse wall.

  “Dammit, Choe.”

  Choe let up on the throttle and the Phantom straightened out. They headed southwest, skimming the waves at fifty-five knots.

  “You all right?” Kang said.

  “Fine.” Beck’s forehead was throbbing, but he counted himself lucky. They were halfway home. Sung chittered at them in Korean.

  “He says he’s sorry he doesn’t know how to swim,” Kang said.

  “Me too.” Beck flipped on the pilothouse lights. The birthmark was unmistakable.

  “Calm down,” he said to Sung in Korean. “You’re safe.” He pushed Sung onto a bench at the back of the cabin. “Just sit.”

  Beck grabbed dry clothes from his bag, pulled them on, tucked his pistol into his pants. He had a lot of questions for Sung, but they would have to wait until the Phantom got into international waters. “Run a sim,” he said to Kang.

  Kang tapped on his keyboard, projecting the Phantom’s position and those of the enemy boats for the next half-hour, assuming both sides stayed on their current tracks.

  “On this heading, the boat to the west is our biggest problem,” he said. “We’ll make contact in roughly five minutes.”

  “How about the jets?”

  “One’s heading straight for us. The other west in case we run for the open sea. And there’s this.” Kang pointed at two more yellow blips moving toward them. “Those are airborne, less than a thousand feet, a hundred fifty knots.”

  “Helicopters,” Beck said. “They’re pulling out all the stops.”

  “Anxious to make our acquaintance.”

  Beck examined the screen. None of the enemy boats or planes were headed directly for the Phantom. “Doesn’t look like they have a fix on us, though.”

  “They need visual contact. Radar’s their big weakness.”

  “So we hope,” Beck said. The helicopters were the real problem, he thought. The boats couldn’t catch them, and the jets couldn’t fly low or slow enough to spot them. But helicopters could. Which meant that—

  “Tell Choe not to follow the coast,” Beck said. “I want him to run southwest. Two hundred fifteen degrees.” Into the open water of the Yellow Sea. They’d still have to get by at least one boat, but at least they’d be separating from the helicopters.

  The North Koreans had obviously chased Sung toward the pickup point. But they hadn’t expected a speedboat, Beck thought. Without a radar fix, they were tightening the net methodically, coming from all directions, hoping to get a visual fix on the Phantom and blast it out of the water.

  But the North Koreans didn’t know how fast the Phantom could run. The speedboat had geometry on its side. Only one enemy cutter stood between it and the open sea. And with each mile the Phantom ran, the search area widened, making it harder to find. In forty-five minutes they’d be in international waters, with F-16s, the world’s best babysitters, watching over them.

  “And tell him to stay straight, max us out,” Beck said to Kang. Best to get out of danger as fast as possible. Their speed would save them. Kang said something to Choe, and suddenly the Phantom was flying across the flat sea at seventy-five knots, kicking up long, low waves of foam. Despite the danger, Beck couldn’t help but be amazed by the boat. Under other circumstances he would have liked to sit beside Choe and watch the ocean roll by, Corona in hand.

  But not tonight. Even before it reached the enemy cutter, the Phantom had to run another obstacle: two small islands five miles off the coast, separated by a three-mile-wide channel. Both islands had naval stations, according to the satellite photos.

  Overhead, the clouds were lifting slightly and the night sky was brightening, showing a sliver of moon, not what Beck wanted. He scanned the islands. Changnin, to the east, was silent, and for a moment he wondered if the satellites were wrong. Then, to the west, a stream of red tracers lit the night. The bullets landed far short of the Phantom, but they meant trouble nonetheless. Whoever was on that island had seen the boat pass.

  As Changnin disappeared behind them, Beck heard the faint whine of jet engines. “How close?” he said to Kang.

  “At least five minutes out.”

  “And the cutter?”

  “We’ll cross him in three minutes.”

  “Range?”

  “A thousand meters, give or take.”

  Beck could have adjusted their heading to give them more room around the enemy boat. But running straight ahead meant that the two boats would cross each other for only a few seconds, giving the enemy ship little chance to fix its guns on the Phantom.

  In the corner, Sung huddled in his chair, arms folded, clothes soaked, thin black hair matted against his skull. Beck wondered what was wrong with him. He didn’t look like a man who had just escaped the world’s most repressive regime. Maybe he was afraid of what would happen to his family. According to his dossier, he was married and had two teenage sons.

  “You’re safe now,” Beck said in his halting Korean.

  Sung just groaned and shook his head. Beck turned to Kang. “We’ve got to find out what’s wrong with him.”

  “Right now we’ve got bigger problems,” Kang said. “That fighter’s closing.”

  Through the cabin’s tinted windows Beck saw the North Korean jet, its running lights blinking in the night. The fighter was moving south-southwest, a couple of miles behind them but closing, the screech of its engines intensifying by the second.

  “Either he’s got X-ray vision or they bought new radar when we weren’t looking,” Beck said. The jet banked steeply, looking for an angle to fire.

  “He’s under two thousand meters,” Kang said. “Fifteen hundred . . . one thousand . . .”

  The fighter had stubby wings high on its fuselage and eight rocket pods under its wings. A Russian-made Su-25, a single-seat jet introduced in the 1980s. Obsolete by Western standards but still plenty lethal.

  The Phantom shook as the Su-25 screamed by and unleashed a pair of rockets. The surfboard-sized missiles crashed into the water behind the boat, the force of their explosions sending five-foot-high waves across the sea. The Phantom jumped out of the water and crashed down, jumped and crashed, slap-slap-slap, until the waves finally subsided. Beck put a hand against the cabin wall and stayed upright this time.

  The noise of the jet faded
as the fighter prepared to swing around for another pass. Then the North Korean cutter appeared out of the darkness, a gray-black boat with heavy machine guns mounted behind the cabin. The cutter’s twin spotlights swung left and right, searching for the Phantom, finding it and for a moment filling the pilothouse with a white light, implacable and all-knowing. As if God himself were watching.

  In the sudden brightness, Beck saw Sung trembling in his chair. The cutter’s machine guns opened up, their rounds thunking into the Phantom’s hull and the glass of the pilothouse. The windows shook and began to crack, long white scars cutting through the clear plastic. So much for running straight at the enemy, Beck thought. Time for Plan B.

  “Choe! Hard right! Heading two-seven-zero! Now!”

  Beck threw Sung down and lay on top of him and waited for the Phantom’s twin engines to get them out of trouble. Choe swung the boat west, easing off the throttle as he did, just enough that the boat wouldn’t tip. Beck closed his eyes and heard windows shatter as shards of fiberglass cut into his neck.

  THE GUNS FADED as the Phantom pulled away. Beck stood and shook plastic shards off his clothes. The windows at the back of the cabin had been partly shot through. Even supposedly bulletproof glass couldn’t hold up to close-in machine-gun fire. The roar of the engines filled the pilothouse.

  Boom! Sparks flew from the engines. The cabin shook and the boat’s nose lifted out of the water. The Phantom slowed and dragged right. Choe laid off the throttle. “Engine! Engine!” he yelled in English, before switching to Korean.

  “He says we lost one of the Mercurys and the other one is light on oil,” Kang told Beck a few seconds later. “We can’t do better than thirty-three knots and we’ll be better off at twenty-five.”

  Under other circumstances, thirty-three knots, or even twenty-five, would have been fine. Not tonight, Beck thought.

  “How come they’re finding us so easily?” Kang looked at Sung.

  “I was wondering that too.” Beck grabbed Sung’s backpack. Sung tried to stop him, but Beck lashed him, a hard flat chop that snapped the North Korean’s head sideways and sent him sprawling. Beck flipped over the pack. A pair of threadbare nylon pants, a thin cotton shirt, cheap black shoes, all drenched—

  And, inside a waterproof bag, a plastic box, twelve inches by eight by four, three lights blinking red and green on its top. A transponder, broadcasting the Phantom’s location to every North Korean ship and jet within twenty miles. The man they’d come to rescue had betrayed them.

  4

  TYSONS CORNER, VIRGINIA

  THE ELEVATOR’S DINGY STEEL DOORS GROANED OPEN. Exley stepped onto a threadbare brown carpet that probably hadn’t been vacuumed since Saddam Hus sein was alive. At the end of the corridor a discreet brass nameplate reading “Okay Enterprises” marked a black door. Exley touched her thumb to a security reader, and a deadbolt lock slid back with a heavy thunk.

  The welcome scent of fresh coffee filled her nostrils as the door closed behind her. The office that greeted her was as absurdly ordinary as a dentist’s waiting room. Motivational posters and Thomas Kinkade lithographs covered the walls. Narrow wooden chairs sat next to a table of old magazines for visitors to thumb through. But no one ever read the magazines. No one ever visited Okay Enterprises.

  “Mornin‘, Ms. Exley.”

  “Mornin‘, Tim.” Tim was a solidly built man in his late forties. Today, as every day, he wore pressed khakis and a sport coat to hide his shoulder holster. He rarely spoke. Shafer, Exley’s boss, swore by him. Beside his desk, the coffeemaker burbled happily.

  “Guess I got here just in time.”

  “Brewed it figuring you were coming.” Tim’s accent was unplaceable, sometimes vaguely Southern, sometimes flatter, more Midwestern. He was already tipping steaming coffee into a plastic mug, camouflage print with “Operation Iraqi Freedom” stamped in white on the side. Shafer had bought the mugs at an Army-Navy surplus store. They’d originally cost $9.99 each but were marked down to a dollar. “Pretty good deal,” Shafer had said. “I wanted some with Rumsfeld’s face on the side, but I guess those got pulped a long time ago.”

  Exley took the mug gratefully. “Thanks. Have a nice weekend?”

  “Mmm-hmm.” He turned back to the Post on his desk.

  I’ll take that as a yes, Exley thought. She and Wells had wondered about Tim’s personal life ever since Shafer brought him in. Was he married, divorced, a bigamist, gay? Did he live near the office? Did he spend weekends on Jupiter and come to Earth via warp drive every Monday morning? She’d never know. She wasn’t even sure that “Tim” was Tim’s real name. Shafer, who did, wasn’t telling.

  “Tim’s a very private person,” Shafer said when she asked. “I’m sure you and John can respect that.” And he’d smiled his Cheshire Cat smile. But Shafer had given her one crumb. Tim had never worked for the agency.

  TIM’S PEDIGREE, OR LACK THEREOF, was no accident. These scruffy offices reflected the unique and uneasy position that Wells, Exley, and Shafer occupied at the CIA. They still spent about half their time at the Langley campus, a few miles down the road. But Shafer intentionally kept this space as far outside the agency’s orbit as he could.

  The agency paid for the suite, and CIA electronics countermeasures teams swept it for bugs every month. What Shafer didn’t tell them was that he had his own contractors sweeping the place as well, looking for devices that the agency might have missed—or planted. And instead of having the agency’s guards provide security, Shafer depended on Tim.

  Naturally, Vinny Duto hated the arrangement. He had every right to be unhappy, Exley thought. Shafer was breaking agency regulations, and a dozen laws besides. But after what had happened in New York the year before, Wells, Exley, and Shafer were untouchable.

  Of course, the aftermath of the mayhem in Times Square had been messy. Both Wells and Exley had been shot along the way and needed months to recover. And Wells faced another burden. The agency had never disclosed Exley’s identity, but Wells’s name had come out, though not his picture or biographical details. The agency had offered to announce to the world that Wells had died, and even give him a fake funeral. But Wells had rejected that idea, telling Exley that he didn’t want to have to explain to Evan, his son from his first marriage, that he was alive but pretending to be dead. Anyway the plan wouldn’t work, he said. Too many people, both inside and outside the agency, knew he’d survived. Instead he had to cope with moments like the one with the trooper.

  For everyday life, the agency had given Wells a new identity, complete with driver’s license, passport, and credit cards. To confuse anyone who was looking for him, Langley had created fake websites that claimed to have the truth about him but were filled with disinformation. A few said Wells had died and was buried under a fake name at Arlington. Others claimed that “John Wells” didn’t exist at all and that the attack he’d stopped was a CIA plot to make the War on Terror seem relevant. Still others said he’d retired from the agency and was living under a CIA protection program.

  Fortunately, Wells couldn’t be easily traced. Thousands of men shared his name, and the only pictures of him in circulation were twenty years old. But he couldn’t be completely disguised either. Too many officers at Langley knew him. So did his buddies from the Army and friends from high school and college. Enough fragments about his life were floating around the Internet that a steady stream of tourists now visited his childhood home in Montana.

  Meanwhile, Duto and Wells circled each other warily. They’d never gotten along, and even the fact that Wells had stopped the New York attack didn’t end that hostility. Wells was uncontrollable, the anti-bureaucrat. What he’d done in Times Square made the rest of the agency look incompetent, almost irrelevant. But Duto, no fool, knew that he couldn’t attack Wells directly. So he’d gone the other way, giving Wells, Exley, and Shafer free rein. They had Top Secret/SCI/All Access clearances, the same as Duto’s own. They could crash any meeting, read any analysis, get the details of any
operation they wanted.

  At the same time, Duto had put them outside the agency’s usual chain of command. They reported directly to him, and he’d made clear that he didn’t plan to take responsibility for their mistakes. In a way, they’d become an agency within an agency, a mini-CIA. Exley and Shafer had been in a somewhat similar position years earlier, but now they were a lot more powerful.

  Exley wasn’t sure how to use the carte blanche they’d been given, and she didn’t think Shafer did either. As for Wells . . . Wells spent his time these days working out, riding his motorcycle, and watching westerns. He was in great shape physically, if not mentally. Exley wished she could figure out how to get him out of his funk—a polite word for clinical depression. But she knew better than anyone that pushing on him would only backfire.

  She tapped on Shafer’s door.

  “Enter.” Shafer was stretched on his couch, poking at his laptop. He was legendary among longtime CIA employees for his fashion sense, and not in a good way. At various times Exley had seen him in red pants, a brown suit—something only Ronald Reagan could pull off—and her personal favorite, black leather boots more appropriate for a transvestite hooker. Shafer had worn those on one of Washington’s rare snowy days. When she asked Shafer where he’d found them, he told her that he couldn’t find his winter boots and had stopped at Nordstrom’s for replacements.

  “These were on sale,” he said.

  “I’ll bet.”

  Sometimes Exley thought Shafer intentionally dressed badly to buttress his reputation as an absent-minded genius. Then he’d show up in something like today’s ensemble—a canary-yellow polo shirt coupled with jeans that ended two inches above his skinny ankles—and she’d reconsider. No one would knowingly look so ridiculous.