The Art of War: A Novel

by Stephen Coonts

  She opened the wine bottle, poured for the both of us and handed me a glass. After she had an experimental sip, she asked, “If they fire you, where would you go?”

  “I don’t know. Haven’t thought much about it. Maybe trade the Benz in on a used motorcycle and just hit the road. There’s a lot of America I haven’t seen. There are days when I think I ought to be out there in the middle of it while it’s still America.”

  She looked at me and I looked at her.

  “When is Anna’s funeral?”

  “There won’t be one. They released her remains and I had them cremated. She was in tiny little pieces.” I had to swallow a couple of times. “I’m picking up the ashes tomorrow at ten and taking them to Hot Springs, Virginia. Gonna scatter them there. We had good times there, at the Homestead. I think she would have approved.”

  Sarah was watching me over the rim of her glass. After a bit she said, “The doctors amputated Fish’s arm yesterday. Not enough circulation to his lower arm.”

  I didn’t say anything. Just stood holding the wineglass, wishing I had killed the bastard.

  “Tommy?”

  “Your key is on the counter,” I said, trying to keep my voice normal. “I’m not hungry. How about a rain check?”

  I placed my glass of wine, still full, on the counter. Got my coat and let myself out.

  *

  Lieutenant Commander Zhang of the People’s Liberation Army Navy also saw the television news feature about the “routine security exercise” at the Norfolk naval base, and although he didn’t understand most of the English, the footage of a carrier coming into the carrier piers captured his attention. He resolved to buy a newspaper in the morning and have Choy Lee translate it for him. He was becoming more and more concerned about Choy’s fixation upon Sally Chan, the daughter of the man who owned the restaurant, yet he still needed his translation skills. For a little while, anyway.

  Zhang wondered what Choy had told Sally. Had he compromised the mission? Whispered secrets had a way of spreading quickly, like wildfire in dry grass.

  He automatically fingered his cell phone, which was charging on his nightstand, and lit a cigarette. If Chinese agents in Washington or up and down the coast, or communications hackers in China, learned that the American navy had changed its plans and diverted carriers elsewhere, he would get an encrypted message on his iPad. Or a telephone call with a code word. Thinking about the contingencies, Zhang realized he must be ready to detonate the bomb with minimum warning. Better too early than too late. On the other hand, the richer the target, the greater the reward.

  At heart Zhang was a gambler. Admiral Wu knew that, which was why he had chosen him for this mission. No panic, but a nice judgment about when to get as much as possible. That was what Wu and Zhang both wanted. That was what China needed if it was to become the major power in Asia.

  He sat for a moment staring at the television with unseeing eyes, thinking of the Japanese navy’s mistakes at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. They had a great plan and they pulled it off magnificently, yet the ships they sank were battleships, obsolete weapons in the fledgling air age. The real prizes, the real strategic assets, were the U.S. Navy’s three aircraft carriers. They were at sea when the blow fell on Pearl, so were untouched. Had the Japanese ignored the battleships and waited for the carriers, or lingered to hunt the carriers in the open sea … Well, undoubtedly the war in the Pacific would have gone a lot differently, and probably better, for Japan.

  The Japanese also failed to damage or destroy the aboveground storage tanks at Pearl that contained the fuel oil the fleet burned. Had they done so, the Americans would have had to transport fuel from the American West Coast and would have had no place to store it, which would have severely limited the fleet’s combat radius until new tanks could be constructed.

  The Chinese plan was better than the Japanese. Today’s American carriers were all nuclear powered, but the facilities to build, repair and refuel them were in Newport News; the explosion would put that shipyard out of action for years, if not for decades.

  The Japanese overestimated America’s readiness. Had they an inkling of the true state of affairs in Hawaii, they could safely have taken much greater risks and probably achieved greater, perhaps decisive, results.

  Zhang didn’t think he had made Japan’s error. No, the danger here was erring the other way: underestimating the enemy’s readiness. He had only one bomb, which would do catastrophic damage, and he had taken every precaution he could.

  Zhang took a last long drag on his cigarette, stubbed out the butt and lit another. Wait for the carriers, he told himself. But don’t wait too long.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  If you’re going through hell, keep going.

  —Winston Churchill

  Kat Spiers managed to convince Harold and Ellie that they must leave. They refused to go, of course, as she had predicted, until she figuratively dropped the bomb: The Chinese were believed to have a nuclear warhead secreted at the naval base, and while the navy was looking, it might detonate at any time.

  Being very human and mortal, Harold and Ellie agreed to leave. No one got any sleep that night, waiting, waiting … for the detonation. The next morning Harold called the college and pleaded a death in the family. He would return, he said, for the beginning of the next semester. Ellie emailed the women who were coming to the baby shower and said that, due to a death in Harold’s family, it would have to be postponed. She would let them know.

  Then they packed and got on the road about noon. Kat drove. Through the Hampton Roads Tunnel and up the interstate toward Richmond. They were so frightened they didn’t relax until they were almost to Fredericksburg, when they decided to pull off and eat a late lunch at a Cracker Barrel restaurant.

  The trio ate in silence, each absorbed with his or her own thoughts. Now that they were safe, relatively, the enormity of the disaster that might engulf every one of their friends weighed on them. Oh, Kat had stressed that they couldn’t tell anyone, because the information was classified and might lead to panic. Mass panic. And if the media got it, it might even cause the triggerman to detonate the weapon.

  Heavy, Harold thought. Very heavy. Then he began thinking of his friends. He had a few he trusted, friends he knew who wouldn’t tell anyone else, who would appreciate the opportunity to escape. If they knew. And what if he didn’t tell them and the bomb went off? How would he live with that? It is one thing, he thought, to take your wife and her unborn child to safety, but leaving your friends to die when it would be so easy to warn them?

  He made up his mind, and while he waited for his entrée to arrive at the table, he excused himself and went to the men’s room. Sitting on a throne, he got out his cell phone and turned it on. He had six friends that he thought would do the same for him, if they knew. So he sent them an e-mail. The Chinese were believed to have a bomb at the Norfolk naval base. He had it on excellent authority that the navy was looking, but they might be too late. He advised his friends to leave the area. And, of course, not to tell any of their friends about this. No Facebook, no e-mails, no Twitter, no nothing. Just pack and go. Somewhere safe.

  Then he pushed the SEND button and the little telephone sucked the e-mail into cyberspace.

  He went back to the table and felt a little better. Yeah, he was taking his family to safety, but he had given his friends a warning. They had families, too. He attacked his hamburger.

  Ellie played with her salad. Ate some of it and drank unsweetened ice tea. When she finished, she went to the restroom, taking her purse. She consulted her contact list. Thought about each one as she selected the name. The message ultimately had ten names, after she put over a dozen on and deleted a few after deliberation. She demanded that they tell no one else what she told them. She knew they wouldn’t, because they were trustworthy and they would understand that the news could cause catastrophic damage if it got out. There were another twenty or so people on her list of contacts that Ellie wished she could t
ell, because they were so nice, but she knew she couldn’t rely upon them to keep the secret, so she sent no warning. She told herself she was just being realistic and, being Ellie, dismissed the moral dilemma of warning some friends and not others without further thought.

  When Ellie returned to the dining room, Kat excused herself. She too went to the ladies. She had two good friends from church, almost like sisters, who lived in the Virginia Beach suburbs. They weren’t military, nor were their husbands. They had grown children and several grandkids. She told them the news she had gotten from her husband, not mentioning her source, and advised the strictest secrecy. Although she knew they would know her husband had told her—that was the power of the warning and the reason it would be believed—it wasn’t fair to him to name him. She advised her two girlfriends to get out of the area as quickly as possible, taking their families with them. If nothing happened, well and good. If something did, at least they would be safe. And say nothing to anyone.

  She sent the message and took a deep breath. Butler would be angry she sent it, but he would understand. It was he who had demanded she leave the area with her daughter and son-in-law. And the baby soon to be born. What a world this child would arrive in!

  Feeling she had done her duty to her closest friends, both Christian ladies who had endured their share of adversity and then some, while not betraying her husband, Kat walked back to the table, left a cash tip, took the bill to the register, paid it with a credit card and accompanied Ellie and Harold to the parking lot and the waiting car.

  Sitting behind the wheel with her seat belt on, she sent a text to Butler, who was probably in it up to his eyeballs. “In Fredericksburg,” she typed. She put the phone in her purse, started the car and put it in gear. He never received the text. Kat didn’t know it, but cell phone service to the Norfolk metropolitan area had been disabled on order of the military authorities. For the duration of the security exercise. However, the e-mails the trio had sent did go through, on landlines. The recipients would find them when they turned on their hardwired computers.

  *

  At one o’clock in the afternoon Captain Joe Child’s SEALs finished searching the Craney Island Corps of Engineers Depot, across the broad mouth of the Elizabeth River from the carrier piers. They had been at it since dawn. Hundreds of acres of mountains of silt and mud dredged from the mouth of the Elizabeth River and the Hampton Roads estuary over the years made the task one of the labors of Hercules. To truly search that morose, stinking landscape would take a half-dozen bulldozers and a hundred man-years. All his forty men could do was walk over it with metal detectors and look for anything suspicious. That they had done.

  Then they tackled the monstrous junkyard of old naval equipment. Bulldozers, vehicles of every kind and description, equipment that went on the highway or didn’t, things taken off ships, stuff no one could name and stuff that was probably a worn-out one-off constructed for some project long forgotten—they looked, concluded that there was nothing there and gathered around their team leaders. Buses were waiting to take them to the next areas on the list. Child used a landline to call Admiral McKiernan, who had demanded to be kept personally informed.

  McKiernan called Jake Grafton, who was at CIA headquarters in Langley. “They’ve done Craney Island,” he said. “Results negative. The SEALs said it was like searching a hog pen for a diamond.”

  “It must be in the water, under a Carley float, on a tug or barge, somewhere in that yard.”

  “Or on a ship. Or it isn’t there at all. I am beginning to like the idea it is on a boat that will come roaring in off the Chesapeake.”

  Jets were overhead, helicopters were buzzing around, the base was sealed due to the “routine security exercise,” and Patriot missile batteries were standing by in case anyone penetrated the prohibited zone the FAA had established over the Hampton Roads area. The Coast Guard and navy patrol boats from the amphib base at Little Creek were patrolling around the clock.

  “It’s not on a boat,” Jake said. “Too iffy. Too many things can go wrong. It’s there now. It was there yesterday and it hasn’t moved.”

  At two o’clock Sarah Houston came in with Jerry Chu’s laptop, thumb drive and cell phones. “I’ve gotten everything I could and sent the rest to NSA. Maybe some of the mathematicians can make something of the crypto stuff, but it will take a long time.” As Jake knew, NSA employed more Ph.D. mathematicians than any other company, university or government agency on the planet.

  “Phones?”

  “We have the numbers and are working them. Nothing for Zoe Kerry. But you knew there probably wouldn’t be. If she calls him or he calls her, they will ditch the phone.”

  And ditto the watcher, Jake thought. If Jerry Chu had a number, it was in his head. And he’d never tell.

  “Get a car and take that stuff over to the FBI. Sign a chain-of-custody form and get signatures when you turn it over. Then come back here. You and I need to talk about China.”

  “Yes, sir.” She walked out with Tommy’s trophies.

  *

  The autumn leaves were all gone, but the sun was out in the mountains of Virginia. I drove along with the top down and the heater going, taking my time. I thought about Anna for a while, then about our times together, all too brief, and then about nothing at all. I wondered where Zoe Kerry was. Not in the States, I decided. She was long gone. Not to China. I couldn’t visualize her in China. She was a Europe kind of person. Germany or France, maybe Switzerland or Italy. Not the Balkans. Not Russia. Certainly not the Middle East or Egypt.

  But somewhere.

  Gradually she faded and there was only the road, the mountains covered with a forest of naked trees, waiting for snow. Waiting for winter. Under a clear blue sky with lots of sun.

  When I die, I want to be buried on a day like this. A day sent from heaven.

  The plastic urn with Anna’s ashes was beside me, strapped into the passenger seat with the seat belt so it wouldn’t come open in a crash. It was actually a small urn. They had cremated everything they could salvage, they said, but she was so close to the bomb …

  The good news was that she hadn’t felt a thing. Here one heartbeat and then gone forever. No transition. Just … gone.

  Maybe Anna was lucky. I don’t know. No old age, no debilitating illnesses, no nursing homes and endless painful medical procedures, no wishing her life had gone differently, no waiting for the inevitable end, no wondering when it would come … None of that. Boom. And she was gone.

  But that bomb robbed her of a lot of good years. Robbed me of what might have been. Robbed us both of the happiness we so deeply anticipated. If life had worked out the way we wanted. So few things in life do. Work out the way you want, that is.

  Another little tragedy. In a world full of them.

  Aaugh! God damn it all to hell.

  I drove through Hot Springs, by the Homestead, and took the two-lane highway south. Up the highway a ways I turned left on a side road, following the airport signs. Met no traffic. Wound all the way to the top of the mountain to the airport and parked next to the only vehicle in the lot beside the little fixed-base operator’s terminal, a ten-year-old pickup. Went in and looked around.

  “Can I help you?” the man at the counter asked. There were no airplanes on the ramp.

  “Just looking.”

  I went back to the car, started down the hill. At the first overlook I pulled off. Unstrapped the urn, got out and stood looking over the mountains stretching away into the haze to the west. Looked at a hawk up high, circling. Tested the wind. It was from the southeast. No cars here, nor did I hear anyone pulling the grade.

  I opened the urn and trickled the ashes out. The breeze caught them and whisked them away toward the valley below. Some of the bigger pieces reached the ground, pieces of bone maybe; the little stuff was lost on the wind. The rain and melting snow this winter would make the ashes part of the earth.

  Good-bye, Anna.

  When the urn was empty, I put th
e cap back on, got in the car and headed back down the mountain, back to Washington.

  *

  Zhang and Choy Lee spent the day aboard his Boston Whaler fishing offshore of old Fort Monroe in Hampton, across the roadstead from the mouth of the Elizabeth River. At least, Choy fished. Zhang sat at the helm with binoculars and watched the helicopters flying here and there over the base and the open water, the jets running high, navy harbor boats with a machine gun on the bow and two Coast Guard patrol craft. This activity was more than he had seen since he arrived in America, but Choy had translated the newspaper story about a “routine security exercise.”

  Zhang bought it. He knew the lengths his navy went to when their sole operational aircraft carrier, Liaoning, was in port, entering, exiting or under way. She was formerly a Soviet carrier, Varyag, bought from a Ukrainian shipyard 70 percent complete and towed on an epic voyage to the Dalian shipyard in China, where, after much study, her hull was completed and she was fitted with engines, radars, arresting gear and all the equipment necessary to turn the unfinished hull into a real warship, a carrier of armed warplanes that could project Chinese power for many hundreds of miles.

  The Chinese also purchased three other retired carriers, hulks, incapable of operating aircraft, that they studied for years: the Australian carrier HMAS Melbourne and the former Soviet carriers Minsk and Kiev. Finally Melbourne was partially dismantled, and the two ex-Russian carriers were converted to resort/amusement parks to favorably impress the public with the future of their navy. For a reasonable amount, you and your wife, girlfriend or concubine could sleep, gamble and drink aboard a real warship. However, until these hulks were scrapped or converted, the PLAN had kept a watchful eye on them with harbor craft and helicopters. Liaoning, now operational and equipped with Shenyang J-5 fighters, was guarded day and night.

  Unlike these complacent Americans, Zhang thought, the three Chinese fleet naval bases were closed to civilian maritime traffic. And spies.