The Ghost War

by Alex Berenson

  “Fuck. Animals.”

  Tears ran down Sung’s cheeks, mixing with the blood still streaming from his nose, the combination a ghastly purple under the cabin’s blue running lights. More than ever, Beck was glad for the little glass capsules in his pocket. He pulled up Sung’s sweatpants as gently as he could. Sung was talking again, his shoulders shaking.

  “He says, he says they told him he would die no matter what,” Kang said. “For betraying Kim Jong Il. But they said if he warned us, they’d hurt his sons and his father also, the same way they hurt him.”

  “Tell him he’s not gonna die. We’re not letting him die. Even if he wants to.”

  NOW THAT BECK HAD DUMPED the transceiver, the North Koreans had lost them, at least temporarily. The radar feed from the Hawkeye showed that the Su-25 and the helicopters had made two loops around the transceiver. Soon enough they’d realize their mistake and widen the search.

  Meanwhile, Choe had changed the Phantom’s course, turning the boat to 165 degrees, south-southeast, angling slightly toward South Korea. If they had both engines running, they could have gotten to international waters in twenty minutes. Instead they had an hourlong ride. Still, Beck wanted to believe the worst was over. With every minute that passed, they were closer to getting out.

  Sung lay curled against the wall, a hand covering his crotch, his body shaking. Beck wanted to ask more questions, but this obviously wasn’t the time. Beck reached for his emergency first-aid kit. He grabbed a bottle of forty-milligram OxyContin and shook one and then another of the yellow pills into Sung’s hand. The North Korean popped them into his mouth with a hopeless shrug and choked them down. Whatever you’re giving me, his eyes said, whatever it does, I’ll take it.

  FIVE MINUTES PASSED, and another five. Sung sighed and closed his eyes, and Beck hoped the Oxy had knocked him out, or at least dulled his pain. The feed from the Hawkeye showed that the helicopters and the Su-25 had split up, circling south and west as they searched for the Phantom. Through the blown-out windows at the back of the cabin, Beck saw one of the helicopters making long diagonals to the north, its spotlight shining down on the empty black waves. We might get out of this, Beck thought. Busted engine and all. We really might.

  Then—

  Ping! Ping! Ping!

  The pilothouse vibrated as the sonar waves bounced off the Phantom’s hull, three in a row in quick succession. Beck had never felt sonar so strong. The boat’s sonar-detection system began to sound its automatic alarm, the whine of its horn filling the cabin, telling them what they already knew: a submarine had targeted them. From very, very close. Just like that, they were in worse trouble than ever.

  “Where is he?” Beck said.

  “Six hundred yards east. Periscope depth. Want me to ping him back?”

  “No.” What was the point? They had no torpedoes or depth charges, and on the one-in-a-million chance that the sub had missed them, they might as well stay quiet.

  “Choe,” Beck said. “Heading two-one-five.” Southwest again.

  “Two-one-five.” Choe began to turn the helm.

  “Tell him to push that engine as fast as he can,” Beck said to Kang.

  “I think he figured that out all on his own.” But Kang said something in Korean to Choe nonetheless. Without looking up, Choe said in English, “Thirty-three knots.” He spat a stream of Korean, a language that had never sounded uglier to Beck than at this moment. Beck knew enough of what Choe was saying to understand that Choe was cursing him for leading them on a mission doomed to failure even before it began. Nonetheless, Choe pushed the throttle forward and the Phantom picked up speed.

  Ping!

  Again the cabin rattled. The sub was double-checking its range. Its skipper couldn’t believe how close he was either. But Beck didn’t think the sub would fire without being certain it wasn’t accidentally targeting a fishing trawler.

  He looked east but couldn’t see the periscope. He wondered if the sub had tracked them all the way from the rendezvous point. Probably not. The North Koreans had ordered it here in case the Phantom somehow escaped their cordon. Running across the sub was nothing more than bad luck. The kind of bad luck that would kill them all.

  Still, as long as it could move, the Phantom had a chance, Beck knew. North Korean subs were badly made copies of Russian Romeo-class subs, whose basic design was fifty years old. Thus the telltale active sonar pings. Unlike modern subs, the Romeos needed active sonar to lock on their targets, even at close range.

  The North Korean torpedoes were equally dated, copies of old Russian 53-61 Alligators, with a top speed of forty knots and a range under ten miles. With both engines, the Phantom could easily have outrun the torpedo. Instead, the boat’s fate would depend on how quickly the North Koreans could load and fire, how badly the years of famine had degraded their readiness.

  Beck’s watch read 00:00:30. A new day. He hoped he’d see the end of it.

  Thirty seconds later, Kang looked up from his screen. “They’ve launched,” he said.

  “Range?”

  “Twelve hundred yards.”

  Now it’s just math, Beck thought. Either that Alligator runs out of juice before it gets to us, or it tears us up. The torpedo was running 1,200 yards a minute, give or take. With its blown engine, the Phantom was limited to about 1,000 yards a minute. The torpedo had started 1,200 yards behind, but it was picking up roughly 200 yards a minute, maybe a little less. Unless it ran out of fuel, it would be making their acquaintance in six minutes, seven at most.

  For a moment, Beck thought about ordering Choe to stop the Phantom so they could try to launch the Zodiac raft. But they probably couldn’t get to it before the torpedo hit, and even if they could, they’d have to leave Sung behind. Beck wasn’t willing to abandon the North Korean, even though his treachery had put them in this jam. He’d suffered more than any of them.

  The seconds ticked by miserably. 00:03:40 . . . 00:03:41 ... “Range?”

  “Seven hundred fifty yards and closing.”

  Beck wished they could do something more. Take evasive action. Drop chaff. Fire their own torpedo. Call in air support to blast that damned sub out of the water. But they could only run, and hope.

  00:05:56 ... “Range?”

  “Three hundred fifty yards. Still on us.”

  “Is he slowing?” The torpedo wouldn’t stop all at once. It would sputter to a halt as it exhausted its stores of kerosene and hydrogen peroxide.

  “Not yet.” Kang turned the Dolphins hat around. “Time for a rally cap.”

  00:07:03 ... “Range?”

  “Under two hundred . . . a hundred fifty now.” Kang’s tone was steady. “Wait . . . he’s slowing.” Hope crept into his voice. “He’s at thirty-eight knots. Thirty-seven.” The hope faded. “He’s still coming. A hundred yards now.”

  Even so, the torpedo was now hardly gaining ground on the Phantom—and it was near the end of its effective range. If they could just stay ahead for a minute longer, they might get free.

  “Sixty-five yards . . . Sixty . . . but he’s lost another two knots. Down to thirty-four. He’s hardly catching us now. Fifty yards.”

  And now Beck could see the wake of the torpedo, cutting through the flat waves, chasing them, trying to destroy them. It was just a mindless piece of steel, but Beck hated it more than he’d ever hated anything.

  “Only forty yards,” Kang said. Then his voice lifted. “He’s down to thirty-three.” At thirty-three knots the torpedo wasn’t closing anymore.

  “That’s right,” Beck said to the thing behind them. “Die. Get lost and die.”

  “Thirty-two.” Kang didn’t try to hide his joy. “We’re outrunning him!”

  In their excitement neither Beck nor Kang noticed that a red warning light had flared on the dashboard. “Oil!” Choe yelled. “Oil!”

  “What?”

  Choe pointed at the light, the engine oil-pressure warning light. They’d run the damaged Mercury too hot for too long. Minute by minu
te, the oil leak had worsened. They’d dripped oil like blood across the sea. Now the engine had no oil left at all, and—

  With a loud thunk, it seized up, leaving the Phantom without power.

  And no power meant the Phantom was a floating paperweight.

  With only its momentum to carry it along.

  But the torpedo hadn’t forgotten them.

  And even as Beck put all this together, the Alligator slammed into the Phantom’s keel. The torpedo’s firing pin smashed backward. Electricity flowed into the firing cap, setting off the charge. A fraction of a second later, the Alligator’s warhead exploded, blasting the boat with 670 pounds of explosive.

  The Russians had designed the Alligator to sink destroyers and cruisers, big ships with thick steel hulls. The Phantom didn’t stand a chance.

  The explosion threw the speedboat twenty feet in the air. The blast wave tore through the cabin in a fraction of a second, splitting the four men inside into unrecognizable bits. They had no time for last words or even last thoughts, just a bright flash of pain followed by the unknown and unknowable. By the time the blasted hull of the Phantom crashed into the sea, they were dead.

  The boat itself lasted longer. It burned for ninety seconds, a floating funeral pyre visible in the night for miles. Then water filled its hull and it sank, taking its crew of corpses to the bottom of the sea.

  6

  EVEN BEFORE THE PHANTOM DISAPPEARED beneath the waves, word of its destruction was spreading.

  The North Koreans knew first, of course. The sonar operators on the Nampo, the submarine that had launched the torpedo, picked up the explosion immediately. After radioing its commanders, the Nampo chugged toward the wreckage, seeking survivors. It found no life, just an oil slick and pieces of the Phantom’s hull.

  The torpedo had blown apart the Phantom at 12:08 A.M. By 12:25, word of its sinking had reached North Korean’s military headquarters in Pyongyang, a crumbling concrete building ringed with antiaircraft guns and missile batteries. Five minutes later, Kim Jong Il, the chubby gnome who ruled North Korea, received a report of the Phantom’s sinking at his palace in Pyongyang. He celebrated with a glass of Johnnie Walker Blue, his favorite scotch. He had taken the Drafter’s betrayal personally. He knew only too well that his survival depended on the nuclear arsenal he had so carefully assembled. Kim had personally ordered Sung’s arrest and castration, an object lesson to anyone else who might betray him. Kim had no regrets about what he’d done. Regret had no place in his vocabulary. Loyalty, on the other hand, was a word he understood. The fact that a boat had come for Sung proved the man’s treachery beyond any doubt. His death was fitting punishment.

  Now Kim had a call to make—to the man who had informed him of the Drafter’s treachery. He didn’t like depending on the Chinese. They used him and his people as pawns against the United States. But he couldn’t deny that this time, they’d proven valuable.

  WASHINGTON LEARNED OF THE PHANTOM’S sinking not long afterward. At 00:08:02 local time, the boat disappeared from the screens of the E-2 Hawkeye. The plane immediately passed a message to the sonar operators on the USS Decatur—the destroyer in the Yellow Sea—advising them to listen for shock waves that might signal an explosion.

  The Decatur didn’t have long to wait. The blast from the Alligator created a pressure wave that passed through the water at a mile a second, reaching the destroyer in under a minute. The sonar operators aboard the Decatur were used to tracking quiet Soviet submarines. To their trained ears, the blast wave sounded like a scream.

  The Decatur reported the explosion to the combat information center at the USS Ronald Reagan, an aircraft carrier steaming in the Korea Strait. The Reagan sent the news to Osan Air Base. From there it went to the CIA station in Seoul. A few minutes later, the South Korean coast guard station at Incheon passed word that two containerships were reporting a fire in the Yellow Sea.

  At this point, Bob Harbarg, the chief of Seoul station, decided he had to tell Langley. He fired off a Critic-coded message, the highest priority, reporting that the Phantom was missing and presumed lost. The agency hadn’t saved the Phantom, but it had done a fine job watching the boat sink.

  The only question left was whether Ted Beck and his men had somehow escaped the boat. Four Chinooks scrambled from Osan Air Base to search for signals from the transponders that Beck, Kang, and Choe carried. A Predator drone was launched to photograph the site of the explosion. But the Chinooks and Predator found nothing. As the hours ticked by, the sailors on the Decatur, the crews on the Chinooks, and the spies in Virginia had to accept the truth. The men aboard the Phantom were lost.

  On the Decatur and at Osan, the mission ended there. But at Langley, the Phantom’s sinking brought new urgency to a different set of questions.

  THAT NIGHT, WELLS AND EXLEY walked down the Mall under a cloudless sky. The moon hung behind them, the Washington Monument rising toward it like a needle poised to pop a balloon. Aside from the joggers and Frisbee players sweating in the night air, they had the open green field to themselves. The hard-packed Mall path crunched under their feet, a sound Exley found oddly satisfying. She reached for Wells’s hand, squeezed it. He squeezed back.

  “Jenny.” His voice was hardly above a whisper. “I won’t go if you don’t want me to.” She knew what he meant. Afghanistan.

  “Shh.” She put her arm over his broad back, rubbing the scar tissue left over from his run-in with the police in Times Square. “Does it still hurt?”

  “It’s fine.”

  Would you tell me if it did? she wondered. Not a chance.

  About thirty yards away a fat man in a gray suit sat reading the Post. He waved to them and pushed himself up, grunting like a loaded semi heading up a mountain pass. He was at least three hundred pounds, a coronary waiting to happen. He pulled a white handkerchief from his pocket and mopped his head.

  “George Tyson. You must be the famous John Wells.” He put the handkerchief away and extended his hand. Wells let it dangle.

  “Right. You don’t like being called famous, Mr. Wells. And you don’t like counterintelligence.” Tyson’s accent was humid and southern.

  “Any reason I should?”

  “I want to tell you that Vinny Duto didn’t ask my opinion of you. Back in the day, I mean. He had strong ideas about you. Still does.”

  “And if he had asked? What would you have said?”

  “A fair question, Mr. Wells. But try to remember how you looked to us back then. With your Quran and your disappearing act. Accept my apologies, then, and shake an old man’s hand.”

  Wells reached out for Tyson’s big paw—and found himself gripping a joy buzzer. He grunted, more from surprise than pain, as the electricity rattled his palm. Tyson smirked. Wells vaguely remembered hearing about his practical jokes, his way of keeping alive the CIA’s traditions from the 1950s, before the agency turned into a bureaucratic monster.

  “Cute, Mr. Tyson.”

  “So now you’re wondering if I’m a fool, or merely pretending,” Tyson said. “Hard to say, I reckon. Maybe both.”

  “Actually I was wondering how many punches I would need to break your jaw.”

  “I’d rather we didn’t find out. It’s interesting, though, the way you responded to an unanswerable question with one that has a definite answer.”

  “Double as a shrink in your spare time?”

  “I’ll bet you don’t like them either, Mr. Wells.” Tyson turned to Exley. “And you must be Jennifer Exley. Where’s Ellis?”

  “Waiting in the car, like you asked,” Wells said. To Exley: “Whatever you do, don’t shake his hand.”

  “I’d never mistreat a lady.”

  They walked on, heading toward the Capitol. Then Tyson turned back toward the Monument, craning his neck like a curious tourist. “Mr. Wells? Would you say there’s anyone on us at the moment?”

  “I’d say no. Why? You have some genius tracker following us? Somebody who can smell bear scat at fifty paces?”


  “As a matter of fact, I don’t. As far as I’m concerned, the fewer people who know about this meeting, the better.”

  “So we’re on the Mall? I see why you’re a master of counterintel.”

  “Come now, Mr. Wells. You know there’s nothing better than a nice open space where we can see anybody who wants to see us. I’m not concerned about these joggers.”

  “Yeah, you don’t strike me as the type to care much about exercise.”

  “John,” Exley said. She turned to Tyson. “Ignore him, George. He’s been acting out recently.”

  “So I hear.”

  “So you hear?” Wells said.

  “Mr. Wells. I heard only from Ellis. He’s concerned about you.”

  “Is that why you’re here? An intervention? To convince me to behave?”

  “Mr. Wells. Believe it or not, I’ve got a few other problems.” Tyson’s syrupy accent faded notably. He stuffed the joy buzzer into his pocket and leaned in close to Wells, putting his hands on Wells’s shoulders. “I said that Mr. Shafer is concerned about you. Not that I am. Others across the river may think that you’re some kind of superspy. You may think so, for all I know.”

  “No, I don‘t—”

  “Please let me finish. Me, I’m not a fan of the great-man theory of history. The Confederacy had all the best generals and we still lost the war. I think you got lucky in Times Square. We all got lucky. You are here tonight because Mr. Shafer wants you to be. Not me. Are we clear?”

  Wells’s face tensed and he stood rigid under Tyson’s heavy hands. He stepped back, shook Tyson’s hands off his shoulders. For a moment Exley thought Wells might actually hit Tyson. Then Wells’s face softened.

  “We’re clear. Thank you.” He stuck out his hand, and after a moment Tyson put out his own. They shook for a long time before Wells finally let go.