The Ghost War

by Alex Berenson

  In these valleys, the ride got dangerous. Fly too high, you opened yourself to a lucky shot with an RPG or a SAM. Fly too low, especially at night, you could get taken out by a canyon wall. The topo charts for these valleys were notoriously sketchy. The pilots usually stayed low, figuring they could dodge a mountain more easily than a missile.

  The helicopter pulled up steeply as the valley tightened. Ahead, a trickle of water coursed down a near-vertical rock face. The Black Hawk banked right and cut through a gap in the rocks, its skids skimming the tops of the stubbly oak trees that speckled the mountain. The helo topped the ridgeline, and a new valley opened beneath. The Black Hawk followed the contours of the mountain downward, changing pitch and direction like a supercharged roller coaster.

  “In my next life I want to be a helicopter pilot,” Wells yelled to Hughley.

  “I know what you mean.”

  Suddenly, Wells was cold. A few minutes before, they’d been in the sun at 6,000 feet. Now they were in shadows at 10,000, and the temperature had fallen twenty degrees. He was glad he’d followed Hughley’s advice and thrown thermals in his pack. Even if the mission went perfectly, they’d be out all night.

  1930. THE BLACK HAWKS SLOWED while the Apaches raced ahead. Part of the plan. The Apaches didn’t carry soldiers, but without them the operation had little chance of success. The Apaches—AH-64 helicopters, each carrying a crew of two—were the secret weapon that would enable twenty-two American soldiers to take on fifty guerrillas. In the Army’s dry jargon, the Apaches would “prepare the battlespace for the insertion.”

  In the cabin of Wells’s Black Hawk, the crew chief held up five fingers, silently signaling that the helicopter would reach the landing zone in five minutes. The soldiers nodded, their faces expressionless. The silence was anticipation, not fear, Wells thought. These men wanted to get on the field and play.

  1933. THE BLACK HAWKS SWUNG over a ridge and hovered at the southern end of the Chonesh Valley. Two hundred yards ahead, the Apaches were preparing the battlespace. Their preparation consisted of firing AGM-114N Hellfire missiles at the guerrilla camp.

  The Army had developed Hellfires at the height of the Cold War to defeat the armor of Soviet T-80s. A generation later, the missiles were reengineered to take out an enemy that preferred caves to tanks. In place of shaped charges to cut through steel, these Hellfires held a fine aluminum powder wrapped around high explosive. The twenty-pound warheads sprayed molten shrapnel in every direction, killing anyone in a twenty-five-foot radius.

  As Wells watched, the forward Apache fired two missiles. The Hellfires glowed in the dusk, trailing brilliant white exhaust as they screamed toward the plateau and exploded in orange fireballs. Seconds later the sounds of their impact reached the Black Hawks, echoing off the valley’s rock walls and into the night.

  Whoomp!Whoomp!The trailing Apache fired two more missiles. For the first time, the guerrillas responded. A small white burst flared toward the helicopters, a rocket-propelled grenade fired blindly into the night. At this distance, the RPG was as harmless as a baby’s fist. It ran out of propellant short of the Apaches and crashed to the valley floor.

  The Apaches fired their last Hellfires, then pulled up to make way for the Black Hawks. Time to go in. Wait too long, and the guerrillas would regroup, or just disappear into the caves. The Black Hawks accelerated toward the plateau. Wells pulled on his night-vision goggles for a closer look. Already the guerrillas were reorganizing. Two men ran out of a cave holding an RPG launcher. They twisted toward the Black Hawk and fired. Again they missed, but not as badly as before.

  “No white flag,” Wells yelled to Hughley.

  “You were expecting one?”

  “Surrender’s not part of their playbook. They’d rather die.”

  “Let’s help ‘em, then.”

  1935. THE BLACK HAWKS REACHED the landing zone. The men in the cabin leaned forward, poised to unhook their harnesses and rappel down. Side by side, the Black Hawks descended—a hundred feet, ninety, eighty—

  Whoosh! An RPG sailed between the helicopters, exploding against the side of the mountain. On the plateau below, guerrillas fired AK-47s, the rounds clattering off the Kevlar floor mats that protected the Black Hawk’s cabin. The Black Hawk’s gunners perched over the mini-guns, firing back in controlled bursts. The brass jackets from spent machine-gun rounds poured out of the guns and into the night. The helicopter lurched downward, leveling out fifty feet above the ground. The lead gunner raised his left fist, the signal to drop.

  “Now!” Hughley screamed above the turbines. “Now!”

  12

  BEIJING, CHINA

  THE BANQUET HAD BEGUN HOURS BEFORE, but the tables remained spotless, the linens pressed, the buckets of champagne chilled just so. Tuxedoed waiters changed plates and filled glasses with perfect efficiency.

  From the outside, the banquet hall looked as drab as every other building in Zhongnanhai, the walled compound in Beijing where China’s leaders lived and worked. But inside, the hall—officially called Huairentang, the Palace Steeped in Compassion—seemed to have been transported directly from Versailles. Mirrors gilded with twenty-four-karat gold lined the walls. Orchids and lilies flowed out of a red ceramic pot, a priceless fourteenth-century treasure. Behind a screen a pianist played Chopin on a Stein way grand. Oversized crystal chandeliers dangled from the ceiling, beaming soft light on the hard faces of the men who sat at the table.

  The food, too, was superb: moist dumplings of sweet potatoes and ginger; fresh steamed lobsters, their meat basted with a sweet-spicy chili; the choicest cuts of lamb, sizzled in a slightly bitter soy sauce; shark-fin soup, a Chinese delicacy, the fins succulent and chewy.

  Yet the nine men at the table, China’s supreme leaders, had manners more suited to an all-you-can-eat buffet. They ate greedily, lifting slabs of foie gras into their mouths, sucking loudly on giant Alaskan king crab legs. At first glance, the nine could hardly be distinguished. Oversized wire-rim glasses and helmets of black hair framed their faces. They wore black suits and white shirts and red ties knotted tightly around their throats. All but one smoked, sucking deeply on Marlboros and Hongtashans, stubbing out their cigarettes on the sterling silver ashtrays around the table.

  They could have been a family of undertakers, very successful undertakers. They were the nine members of the Politburo Standing Committee. And only history could explain their frenzied eating. Even the youngest of them remembered the Cultural Revolution, the decade beginning in 1966 when Mao and the Red Guards upended China. Four of these men had spent their twenties in reeducation camps, brutal places where they spent their days dragging hoes through rocky soil and their nights confessing their sins at “struggle sessions.” All nine had known family members and friends who didn’t escape the camps, who died from pneumonia or famine or beatings by the Red Guards.

  No one in this room ever talked openly about those years. But they remembered. And all nine had learned the same lesson that the Cultural Revolution taught everyone in China—though the lesson wasn’t the one that Mao had hoped to teach. Or maybe it was. Take what you can, while you can. Because no matter how secure you think you are, you’ll lose everything if the Party turns on you.

  AMONG THE LOOK-ALIKES at the table, Li Ping, the defense minister, stood out. Unlike the rest, he didn’t smoke. He couldn’t avoid drinking. To have skipped the toasts would have been impolite. But he sipped his wine while the others guzzled.

  And where the other eight were paunchy, Li was trim, thanks to his workouts. Li wasn’t modest about his physique. He challenged army officers half his age to work out beside him and smirked when he left them behind. “It’s the fat pig that feels the butcher’s knife,” he told them.

  The others on the committee called him “The Old Bull,” emphasizing the “old,” not-so-subtly implying that he ought to act his age. Li didn’t care. Exercise kept him strong. He wanted to distinguish himself from the men around him, whose bodies and minds were equally
corrupt.

  To the world outside Zhongnanhai, Li was a “conservative,” a “hard-liner.” He knew his reputation. He couldn’t read English, but each morning his deputies gave him translations of CNN and foreign newspapers. The foreigners didn’t understand him or China, he thought. He wasn’t conservative. He didn’t want to undo the progress of the last two decades. But unlike the “liberals” who ran the Party, he didn’t care about getting rich. His ambitions ran deeper.

  China’s elite was composed mainly of technocrats, engineers, and economists who spent their lives doing the Party’s bidding. They rose slowly, running villages, cities, then provinces. Along the way they proved their loyalty to their bosses while building power bases of their own. Li had followed a different path. He’d come up through the Army, the only real soldier in the Party’s top ranks.

  Li had served with distinction in China’s last major war, its invasion of Vietnam in February 1979. As a young captain, he’d commanded a company that was among the first units over the border. The war was not even an asterisk in the twentieth century’s bloody history, but Li had never forgotten it.

  The Vietnamese had known the Chinese were coming. Their soldiers and militiamen were battle-hardened from a decade of war with the United States. China sent in a huge army, hundreds of thousands of soldiers. But its men were underequipped and unready, peasants who’d received only a few weeks of training before being sent to the border. Some could barely load their rifles.

  Li’s company was in the vanguard of a division attacking Lao Cai, a town just south of the border. His unit came under constant fire from the Vietnamese militias. The ground was soft and spongy and the mines were everywhere. The Vietnamese especially liked simple explosives that the Americans called “toe poppers,” pressure mines with just enough power to blow off a man’s foot. Making matters worse, Li’s only medic was killed by a sniper in the battle’s first hours. After that he’d had to leave injured men where they lay. Taking care of the wounded was a luxury the Chinese army couldn’t afford.

  In the first two days of fighting, he’d lost fifty men, a third of his soldiers. But somehow he and Cao Se, his first lieutenant, kept his company together even as the units around them collapsed. Finally, facing the prospect of a devastating defeat, the People’s Liberation Army brought up heavy artillery. The big guns surprised the Vietnamese and turned towns near the border into rubble. By the time Li’s unit limped into Lao Cai, only dogs and amputees were left.

  Three weeks later the Chinese pulled back across the border, proclaiming the invasion successful. They’d taught Vietnam a lesson, they said. Li had learned a few lessons himself. At first the suffering of his men had stunned him. But over the years, he reconsidered. Strategically, the war had put the Vietnamese in their place. Afterward they treated China with more respect. War ought to be avoided, but sometimes it was necessary, he thought.

  For him, too, the war had been a success. The near-disaster in Vietnam frightened the People’s Liberation Army into professionalizing its officer corps. For the first time in decades, fighting skill, not ideological purity, became the most important factor behind promotions. The change helped Li. His abilities had been obvious from the first days of the Vietnam invasion. He intuitively knew how to position his soldiers, when to concentrate fire and when to disperse. He thumped other commanders in the war games at the National Defense University. He rose quickly. By 2004, he’d become chief of staff. Two years later, he was named defense minister and commander of the army.

  Of course, skill only went so far. Li would never have become a minister if the others on the Standing Committee had doubted his loyalty. But they didn’t. To them, Li was the ultimate soldier, always following orders. In truth, as long as Li mouthed the right words, the Party’s leaders didn’t care if he believed in “socialism with a human face.” They certainly didn’t. Being rich and powerful in China meant being part of the Party. So the Party’s leaders faithfully recited the “Eight Dos and Don‘ts”—“Know plain living and hard struggle, do not wallow in luxuries”—and then rode limousines home to their mansions. The sayings were the equivalent of a fraternity’s secret handshake. By themselves, they meant nothing. But knowing them got you in.

  LI PREFERRED TO BE UNDERESTIMATED. Even when he joined the Standing Committee, the others didn’t view him as a political threat. After all, he hadn’t even succeeded in getting rich from his position. Besides “Old Bull,” the liberals—those members of the elite who had profited the most from the new China—had another name for Li. They called him “Guard Dog,” though never to his face.

  But the liberals misunderstood Li. He was greed ier than any of them, though not for money. Li wanted to prove himself the greatest of leaders, the savior of the Chinese nation, remembered eternally for his courage. In his dreams, he lay beside Mao in the massive crypt in Tiananmen Square. Every day thousands of Chinese lined up to glimpse his body. They shuffled by in awe, wishing they could bring him back. The lines grew until the crowds filled Tiananmen and poured into the streets of Beijing. But the people were so eager to see him that no one complained.

  When he woke, Li never remembered his dreams. He never consciously realized how deeply he thirsted for glory. He didn’t understand his motives, and that made him dangerous indeed.

  SITTING IN HIS USUAL SPOT, two seats from the head of the table, Li lifted his crystal wineglass and studied the burgundy liquid inside. A Château Lafitte ‘92, 10,000 yuan a bottle, $1,300 US. The men around him had gone through a half-case of the stuff tonight. They surely believed they’d earned it.

  In May 1989, hundreds of thousands of students had filled Tiananmen—the great open square less than a mile from here, the spiritual heart of all China—to demand democracy. The Western reporters who covered the protests called that time the Beijing Spring. For a few weeks it seemed that China might move from dictatorship to freedom. After all, on the other side of the world, Communist regimes were falling peacefully.

  But China wasn’t East Germany or Poland. China had gone through a century of upheaval so terrible that even World War II seemed mild. An invasion by Japan. A long, bloody civil war. The disastrous Great Leap Forward, which led to a famine that killed tens of millions of Chinese. The Cultural Revolution. The Chinese weren’t ready for more turmoil, not so soon. They hardly protested on June 4, 1989, when the men of Zhongnanhai brought in tanks to clear Tiananmen. Hundreds of protesters were killed that day in Beijing. The People’s Liberation Army? On June 4, only the last word was true.

  The leaders of the Chinese Communist Party never admitted what they’d done in Tiananmen. Instead they offered their people an unspoken bargain. Don’t challenge us. In return we’ll let you drop the farce of socialism. “To get rich is glorious,” Deng Xiaoping, at the time China’s paramount leader, famously said. “It doesn’t matter if the cat is black or white as long as it catches mice.” Some people said now that those words had never actually crossed Deng’s lips. But the sentiment was real enough.

  For two decades, rulers and ruled had stuck to the deal, and China had produced the greatest economic miracle in history. In the 1980s, China was a third-world country, poorer than India. Now it had the third-largest economy in the world, behind only the United States and Japan.

  And yet . . . and yet. Under its glittery surface China’s economy had reached a dangerous tipping point, Li thought. The boom had given hundreds of millions of Chinese a decent standard of living. But it had left hundreds of millions more in the dust.

  Li sipped his wine, the smoothest he’d ever tasted—10,000 yuan a bottle. His father Hu had worked at a tire factory until his heart gave out on his fifty-second birthday. Hu hadn’t made 10,000 yuan in his entire life. He’d never owned a television or refrigerator or even a telephone. He’d saved for years to buy his most prized possession, a Flying Pigeon bicycle, a single-geared steel beast that weighed almost fifty pounds.

  Yet Li never remembered his parents complaining. They’d never felt p
oor, since no one they knew was any better off. And they hardly needed money. The tire factory gave them a two-room apartment with a communal bathroom. They didn’t have much, but their lives were secure. They never had to worry that Hu would be fired or the factory would close. Such things simply didn’t happen.

  Now, though, factories closed all the time. Real estate developers tore down the cluttered Beijing neighborhoods called hutongs, to build apartment buildings across the giant city. The apartment towers were cleaner than the hutongs. But the hutong families didn’t get to live in the new buildings. They were shipped to hovels on the outskirts of the city, beyond the Fifth Ring Road, where the capital’s wealthy wouldn’t see them.

  Today, men like Li’s father knew they were poor. They couldn’t imagine the opulence of this room, or the private clubs in Beijing where the wealthy gathered. But they knew China had left them behind. Fewer and fewer of them were willing to accept their fate. All over China the pot was boiling up. In southwest China, farmers had attacked police stations over land seizures. In north China, coal miners had rioted to demand safety equipment after an explosion at a mine in Hebei killed 180 men.

  Even worse, the economy wasn’t booming anymore. So far, the government had hidden the slowdown from the outside world. But Li knew the real numbers. Growth had slowed month after month, from ten percent to eight to five and now to three. And no one, not the economic minister or the governor of the Central Bank, could explain what was happening, not in words that made sense to Li. They said the economy needed more reform, not less.

  But Li spent more time outside Zhongnanhai than the other senior leaders combined. He might not be an economist, but he had eyes. He saw old women with bowed heads begging for help, their clothes dirty, empty bowls between their hands. He saw the peasants lined up in Tiananmen to plead for work, even though the police beat them just for being there.