The Ghost War

by Alex Berenson

  The truck rolled off. Wells slumped against the floor of the cargo compartment and tried to think through what would happen next. Assuming the Chinese had any command-and-control at all, they’d discover the missing police well before daybreak. Two hours, say.

  Li wouldn’t know exactly what had happened, but he would be able to make a very good guess. He would assume that Cao and Wells were trying to escape by boat. He would blanket the eastern half of the province, and the sea around it, with every soldier and ship he could muster. He’d declare a state of emergency covering the province and the coast, order all civilian boats to stay docked for the day. All China would be hunting them. They had to get off the mainland as soon as possible. Even if they could stay hidden somehow, Wells didn’t think he could last another day unless he got to a hospital. He felt flushed and weak, and his stomach was dangerously tender from the blood he’d leaked. A surgeon could fix him easily, he had no doubt. But with no surgeon he’d bleed to death, or die of an internal infection when the bacteria in his gut crossed into his bloodstream.

  “Cao.”

  “Time Square Wells.” Cao flicked on a lighter and touched the dim yellow flame to a stubby cigarette clenched in his teeth. He held out the pack. Wells shook his head, realizing that Cao hadn’t smoked before because he hadn’t wanted to give away their presence in the compartment. But now being discreet was pointless. Their hiding place had become a slaughterhouse.

  “How far?”

  Cao flicked on his watch. “One hour maybe. Hundred ten kilometers”—seventy miles. “No more back road.”

  As if to prove his words, the truck accelerated, throwing Wells against the side of the cargo compartment. He groaned and caught his breath. “The highway goes all the way to Yantai?”

  “Yes. Then east, twenty kilometers, Chucun. Boat there.”

  “And the boat, what kind is it?”

  The tip of Cao’s cigarette glowed brightly. “We see.”

  Wells laughed. It was all he could do.

  IT WAS 2:20 A.M. They’d made good time. The cove was a pleasant surprise, a narrow semicircular strip of white sand protected by thick trees. The boat was another story, not much more than an oversized rowboat, maybe twenty feet long, with a big outboard engine. It sat low in the water, its black paint peeling, fishing nets hanging off its hull, four red plastic canisters of gasoline tucked under the wide wooden slats that served as seats. A Chinese man, sixty-five or so, sat on its side.

  Wells knew the Yellow Sea was flat, but still he couldn’t believe this bathtub with an engine could reach Incheon, three hundred miles away across open water. And even if it could, they would need twelve hours or more, with the Chinese navy chasing them. Suddenly their odds seemed worse than hopeless.

  “No way,” Wells said.

  “No choice.” Cao hugged the men who’d driven them, spoke a few words in Chinese to the old man beside the boat. Wells wondered what their helpers would do next. Probably ditch the truck as best they could and disappear.

  Cao stepped inside, his plastic leg thunking on the side of the boat. Wells followed, nearly falling over as he did. Cao was right. They didn’t have a choice. In the distance he heard a helicopter. He sat down heavily on the wooden bench and rubbed the bandage that covered his broken chest. He felt light-headed and feverish despite the cool night air. He wondered if he could last even twelve hours.

  The drivers and the fisherman stepped forward and pushed the boat off the sand. It slid forward easily, lolling on the flat waves. Cao jabbed at a red button on the side of the outboard and the engine grumbled to life. He turned the tiller sideways and they cruised into the cove. The men on shore waved.

  “Cao, do we even have a compass?”

  Cao handed Wells a compass. “Straight east. Easy.”

  “Incheon or bust.”

  36

  OSAN AIR BASE, SOUTH KOREA

  THE C-130J HERCULES LUMBERED DOWN THE RUNWAY, slowly accelerating as it bounced over the tarmac. Not far from the grass overrun at the end of the 9,000-foot strip, its nose finally lifted. Inside the cockpit Lieutenant Colonel Paul Bosarelli exhaled. The C-130 was a sturdy beast, but he wouldn’t have wanted to skid off in this particular plane.

  Nobody joined the Air Force to fly C-130s. But during eighteen years as a Here pilot, Bosarelli had grown fond of the ugly old birds, the four-propeller workhorses of the Air Force. They weren’t as sexy as F-22s or B-2s, but they were far more useful most of the time. They could endure massive damage and still take off or land just about anywhere. Besides hauling cargo and airdropping special-ops units, they worked as fuel tankers, firefighters, even gunships.

  But Bosarelli guessed that in the five decades since the first C-130 joined the Air Force fleet, none had ever carried a load like this one.

  And that was probably for the best.

  THE TACTICAL OPERATIONS CENTER AT OSAN had received the first reports of the attack on the Decatur three minutes after the Chinese torpedo smashed the destroyer’s hull. With no way to know whether the attack was a one-off or part of a larger Chinese assault, the center’s director, Brigadier General Tom Rygel, had put the base on Force Protection Condition Charlie-Plus, the second-highest alert level—just short of Delta, which signaled imminent attack. Rygel’s decision was understandable, for Osan was the closest American base to China. The PRC’s border with North Korea was just three hundred miles to the north, a distance that China’s newest J-10 fighters could cover in fifteen minutes on afterburner.

  Within an hour of the Decatur attack, Osan’s 51st Fighter Wing had put six F-16s in the air to join the two already on patrol. Eight more jets waited on standby. Of course, the sixteen fighters were vastly outnumbered by the hundreds of Chinese jets waiting over the border. But the American planes were so much more capable than even the most advanced J-10s that the Chinese would be insane to challenge them. Though the skipper of the Decatur had probably made the same assumption, Bosarelli thought.

  While the fighters soared off, Bosarelli had nothing to do except drink coffee in the ready room and try to ignore the acid biting at his stomach. Ninety percent of the time—heck, ninety-five—he had more to do than the fancy boys. But at moments like this, he felt like a fraud. Against a fighter jet, any fighter jet, his C-130 was nothing but a flying bull‘s-eye.

  Then the door to the ready room opened. A lieutenant looked around and headed straight for the table where Bosarelli sat. “Colonel Bosarelli.”

  “Yes.” Bosarelli knew the guy’s face, though not his name. He was one of Hansell’s runners. Lieutenant General Peter Hansell, the commander of the 7th Air Force, the top officer at Osan.

  “Colonel, General Hansell would like to see you.”

  HANSELL’S OFFICE WAS in the Theater Air Control Center, a squat building that everyone at Osan called Cheyenne Mountain East because of its ten-foot-thick concrete walls. As he trotted through the center’s narrow corridors, Bosarelli wondered what he’d done wrong. Or right.

  Before Bosarelli could figure it out, they reached Hansell’s office. “This is where I get off,” the lieutenant said. “Go right in. He’s expecting you.”

  Bosarelli wished he had a minute or two to shine his shoes and make sure his uniform was squared away. But he wasn’t about to keep Hansell waiting. He threw back his shoulders, stepped inside, and gave the general the crispest salute that he’d offered anyone since his first year as a cadet in Colorado Springs.

  “Sir.”

  “Colonel. Please sit. You’ve been flying the Here for eighteen years, is that right?” It wasn’t a question. Bosarelli nodded. “Your record’s spotless. Two years ago, you landed in Bagram on one engine.”

  Bosarelli was thoroughly nervous now. Three-stars didn’t butter up lieutenant colonels this way unless they wanted something.

  “And you requalified on the chutes just last year.”

  “That’s correct, sir.”

  “I have a mission to discuss with you, Colonel. An unusual mission. You�
�re the first Here pilot I’m offering it to. But I want you to understand. This is a request. Not an order. No hard feelings if you say no.”

  “Yes, sir. I accept, sir.”

  “Thank you,” Hansell said. “But first I need to know if it’s even possible.”

  For the next five minutes, Bosarelli sat silent as Hansell outlined what he wanted.

  “So? Can we do it?” Hansell said when he was done. “I’d rather use a Predator”—a lightweight unmanned drone—“but they just don’t have the payload to make it work.”

  Bosarelli wished he could ask who’d okayed this insane idea, and why. On second thought, he didn’t even want to know. Somebody up the chain, that was for sure. Way high up. Maybe all the way. He looked at the ceiling, avoiding Hansell’s ice-blue eyes, visualizing the steps he’d take.

  “And we’d be doing this—”

  “Tonight. The goal is four A.M.”

  “No time like the present.” Craziest thing I’ve ever heard, Bosarelli didn’t say. He’d always wanted to be in the middle of the action. Now he was. Be careful what you wish for. “I think it’s possible, sir. In a way it’s a throwback, a big dumb bomb. I’ll need one other officer. Jim Keough ought to be game.” Bosarelli paused. “So assuming he’s in, obviously we’ll want altitude fuses. The JPFs, the new programmable ones. And, ah—Bosarelli stopped, not sure how much the general wanted to hear.

  “Go on, Colonel.”

  “I assume we’ve got the smart boys at JPL and AFKL”—the engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California and the Air Force Research Laboratory in Ohio—“running sims to figure our trajectory after we flip the switches.”

  “We’ll have projections within an hour.”

  “Then, yeah, if they sign off. We can do it. And you’ll damn sure be able to see it a long way off.”

  “So. Now you know. Are you still game? Take a minute, think it over.”

  Bosarelli couldn’t pretend he wasn’t nervous. Any sane man would be. The risks were off the charts. But in Iraq and Afghanistan, soldiers and Marines took chances just as big every day. No way was he turning this down. He got the words out fast, before he could change his mind. “I’d be honored. As long as you promise to come get us quick.”

  “Understood. You have my word on that.” This time Hansell was the first to salute. “Thank you, Colonel.”

  FOUR HOURS LATER, and Bosarelli and Major Jim Keough, his flight engineer, were at 22,000 feet, flying slowly east-southeast over the Pacific, giving Keough time to arm the fuses that would turn the C-130 into a sixty-five-ton bomb.

  What they were planning wasn’t so different from what Mohamed Atta had done on September 11, Bosarelli thought. Though there was one very big difference.

  Instead of its usual load of Humvees, Bosarelli’s C-130 carried twenty GBU-29 bombs, upgraded versions of the old MK-82. Each of the bombs held its standard load, 150 pounds of high explosive. They were scattered among forty-gallon drums that held roughly equal amounts of gasoline, benzene, and polystyrene plastic—the basic ingredients of napalm.

  Officially, the United States had destroyed all its napalm bombs by 2001. The increasing lethality of conventional bombs eliminated the need for napalm, a jellied gasoline that burned as hot as 5,000 degrees. The stuff had been a public relations nightmare since Vietnam, when an Associated Press photographer had caught on camera the agony of a nine-year-old girl overtaken by a napalm bomb.

  But though the premixed bombs were gone, the Air Force still stockpiled the raw ingredients necessary to make napalm. Despite napalm’s terrible reputation, there was nothing magical about it. The polystyrene simply made it a lot stickier than ordinary gasoline, so it was hard to scrape off. Once it touched something—an enemy soldier’s uniform, a little girl’s face—it burned until it was gone. Even more important for this mission, it burned much more slowly than gasoline.

  KEOUGH STEPPED INTO THE COCKPIT. “Good to go.”

  Bosarelli swung the C-130 to the right, tracing a long slow semicircle over the Pacific until they were heading west, back toward South Korea. It was just after 3:00 A.M. locally—3:00 P.M. in Washington—and the civilian flights into Seoul had ended for the night. The only other planes within thirty miles were friend-lies. Without being too obvious about it, the Air Force had put Bosarelli’s plane inside a bubble of fighter jets. Four F-16s were running interference along the North Korean border, with four more to the west, over the Yellow Sea, though they were being careful to give plenty of room to the Chinese jets patrolling to their west.

  Meanwhile, the South Korean navy had been asked to send every ship it had into the Yellow Sea. A flotilla of cutters and frigates had fanned out from Incheon, heading west toward the Shandong Peninsula. Every boat was carrying loudspeakers, and at least one American military observer. But the boats had been absolutely prohibited from coming within eighty miles of the peninsula’s tip. At the same time, every available rescue helicopter, both South Korean and American, had been prepped for takeoff, though none was in the air as yet.

  Back in the C-130, Bosarelli permitted himself a brief look through the wispy clouds at the sleeping countries below. The difference was literally white and black. South Korea glowed prosperously; North Korea lay in darkness. Somehow the view reassured Bosarelli. He might never know the point of this mission. But he believed, had to believe, that he was fighting for the right side.

  AT LANGLEY, EXLEY AND SHAFER were getting hourly updates. So far, the mission was on track—though so far, nothing had really happened. Exley still couldn’t quite believe the president had agreed to her proposal.

  After the confrontation with Duto, the meeting in the White House had been oddly anticlimactic. They’d helicoptered onto the White House lawn and been ushered straight into the Oval Office, where the president and the national security adviser were waiting. Exley had again recounted her conversation with Wells, and told them of her plan to rescue him.

  Then Duto had made plain what he thought.

  “Not to sugarcoat this, sir. There’s almost no chance of success. If it weren’t for what Ms. Exley and Mr. Wells did in New York, I wouldn’t even have bothered you with it.”

  The president murmured something to his national security adviser, who nodded. Exley didn’t like either of them, but she had to admire their composure. She couldn’t tell what they thought of the idea.

  The president turned to Duto. “If it doesn’t work? What’s our downside?”

  “Well, sir, given the current tensions, the ultimate downside is that the Chinese could view it as an act of war.”

  “That’s possible,” Shafer said. “But it won’t be on Chinese territory.”

  “Sir,” Duto said.

  “It won’t be on Chinese territory, sir,” Shafer said. “We don’t know what Wells has, sir. But I trust him. If he says it’s important, it is.”

  “Because tonight I’m going to have to stand up and tell the American people”—Exley winced privately as she heard the words; she hated when politicians talked about the American people—“I’m going to tell the people what we’re going to do about this attack. And you all know the pressure we’re under to come back hard.”

  “Sir. Nothing about this locks you into further action. All your options are still open. I agree it’s a long shot, but if the odds are even one percent—”

  At that, the president nodded. “All right. Get me a finding”—the official written authorization needed for this kind of black operation. “I’ll sign it.”

  “Sir—” Duto said.

  “Director Duto. Your objections are noted. For the record. But let’s try not to go to war if we can help it. We’ve all learned a few things since 2003.”

  NOW EVERYTHING WAS IN PLACE, or so they’d been told. They didn’t have much time. The sun would rise over the Yellow Sea in barely three hours, and Exley and Shafer knew that if Wells wasn’t in friendly hands by then, he probably wouldn’t make it. The Chinese didn’t have great night
-vision equipment—it was one area where they were still a couple of generations behind the United States—but by tomorrow morning, they would have covered the Yellow Sea with their navy. Any civilian boat still on the water would be searched from stem to stern, or simply blown to bits.

  Left unsaid was the fact that the plan depended on Wells getting off the mainland in time. If he was still stuck in Beijing, then all they were doing was wasting a planeful of gasoline—and putting a couple of brave pilots at risk.

  Shafer’s phone rang. He picked up, listened for a moment. “Good,” he said, and hung up. “Still on track. Our boats are nearing the exclusion zone. They’re projecting another hour or so.”

  “I wish the sun would just stop,” Exley said. “Let it stay afternoon here, night over there, until we find him.”

  “Do you—” Shafer stopped, cleared his throat. Exley waited.

  Finally she couldn’t wait anymore. “What?”

  “You wish you were there, Jennifer? With him? I mean, knowing the odds right now ...” Shafer trailed off. “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.”

  Exley smiled, a thin, sad smile. Let Shafer wonder. She didn’t plan to satisfy his curiosity. But she knew the answer: Yes. In an instant.

  37

  THE WAVES WERE LOW AND FLAT and the boat skimmed over them without too much trouble. Still, Wells felt his ribs rattle every time the sea caught the boat sideways. He sat on the front bench gripping the wood so hard that his hands felt welded to it. There was probably a better way to hold on, but he didn’t know it.

  They’d run along the coast for more than an hour, maybe a half-mile from land, Cao handling the tiller. Wells didn’t have much to do. They’d heard helicopters overhead and seen the lights of a boat in the distance, but so far no one had been within hailing distance. They were running the engine full-out, and despite its peeling paint and rusty engine, the boat seemed seaworthy. It wasn’t leaking, anyway, which was the only way Wells could judge. His naval experience was limited to the occasional bath with Exley.