The Ghost Agent

by Alex Berenson

  ‘Even Utah isn’t Utah,’ Exley said. He looked at her questioningly. ‘When I was a kid, I used to love to ski. Before everything went bad with my family.’ She slipped a hand around his shoulder. ‘Nothing scared me. Bumps, steeps, any of it. I didn’t want to hit puberty because I thought having a chest would mess up my balance. And it did.’

  She arched her back, jokingly thrusting out her breasts, and despite his gloom Wells felt himself stir. He imagined her, a narrow boyish body cutting down the mountain, her ponytail tucked away. ‘They must have been surprised when they saw you were a girl.’

  ‘Mainly we went to Tahoe. We did it on the cheap, stayed in motels, brought sandwiches to the mountain. The most fun I remember having as a kid. But I always wanted to go to Utah.’ She ran a hand down his arm. ‘My dad didn’t want to. Said we didn’t have the money. But I pestered him and finally, when I was twelve, we flew to Salt Lake City. Me, my brother, my mom and dad. The whole happy family. My mom didn’t ski much, but she always came.’

  ‘She was afraid to leave him alone,’ Wells said. ‘Poor Exley.’ He kissed her neck softly.

  ‘Lots of people have alcoholic dads.’

  Yeah, but you’re the one I love, he thought. And didn’t say, though he didn’t know quite why.

  Outside the sirens faded. Wells walked to the window, looked at the agency’s guards in the Crown Victorias. He turned back to the bed. Exley had her legs folded under herself kittenishly now.

  ‘You listening, John?’

  He laid a hand on her knee.

  ‘Anyway. It’s snowing when we get to Utah. Snows all night. The next morning we drive up to Alta. I’m so excited. The best skiing in the world. And we get there, we buy our tickets. We get on the lift . . .’

  He tried to slide his hand between her legs, but she squeezed them tight.

  ‘We get to the top. And we ski down.’

  ‘So you ski down? That’s the story? How was it?’

  ‘Great. But, you know. It was skiing, like Tahoe. Just skiing. And I kept thinking that it was costing money we didn’t have, and I should have loved it, not just liked it. So somehow I was disappointed, even though I knew I shouldn’t be. I didn’t say anything. But my dad, he figured it out. Because at the end of the day, he said to me, “Even Utah isn’t Utah, huh?”’ She paused, then continued. ‘There’s no magic bullet. Nobody in the world will blame you for feeling like hell, needing time to put yourself back together. But this – you’re not being fair to yourself. Or me.’

  He knew she was right. But he wanted to ask her, how long until I don’t dream about tearing men apart, gutting them like fish? How long until I sleep eight hours at a stretch? Six? Four? Until I can talk about what I’ve seen without wanting to tear up a room?

  ‘You’re not crazy, John,’ she said. ‘You don’t have to talk to me if you don’t want to. People specialize in this stuff.’

  ‘A shrink?’

  ‘They’re professionals.’ The desperation in her voice disturbed Wells more than anything she’d said, gave him a clue how hard he’d made her life.

  ‘I’ll be okay. I just need to figure out what’s next. I promise.’ He felt himself close up again. Good.

  ‘Or me. You can talk to me if you want.’

  ‘I will. But not now.’ Instead he reached for her. She pushed him away, but just for a moment. And for a little while they thought only of each other.

  THREE

  THE NORTH KOREAN shoreline was just a mile away, but Beck hardly would have known if not for the blue line on the laptop screen that marked the coast. Thick clouds blotted out the stars, and even through his night-vision binoculars Beck saw no buildings, roads, or cars. No signs of life at all. Just an inky darkness stretching to eternity.

  The Phantom crept in at ten knots an hour, its twin engines rumbling quietly. Beck, Choe, and Kang had traveled 120 miles west, past the tip of the North Korean coast. Now they were swinging back east-northeast toward Point D. With any luck the Drafter, and not the North Korean army, would be waiting.

  Beck’s Timex glowed in the night, its blue numbers telling him they were right on time: 2320. The trip had been quiet so far, their biggest excitement coming in Incheon harbor a few minutes after they left. Choe cut too close to a containership, and the Phantom hit the boat’s giant wake. It sprang out of the water like a forty-five-foot-long Jet-Ski and thudded down, sending Beck sprawling. He wasn’t sure, but he thought Choe had hit the wave on purpose, revenge for Beck’s offer of the cyanide pills.

  They’d run at twenty knots most of the way, using the radar feed from the Hawkeye overhead to dodge the handful of ships along the coast. The dark sky had helped too. Beck had seen only two boats in the last hour, and neither had spotted the Phantom.

  They closed on the coast, barely five hundred yards away now. Through his binoculars Beck saw a broken rock wall, its stones crumbling and scattered. But still no signs of life.

  ‘Stop,’ he said. The engines quieted and the boat rocked gently on the sea’s dull waves. The lights mounted in the pilothouse filled the cabin with a dim blue-black glow.

  ‘Depth?’ Beck said to Kang.

  ‘Twenty-four feet. Lucky we ride high. This thing’s just a big lake.’ Indeed, the Yellow Sea was exceptionally shallow. It got its name from China’s Yellow River, which filled it with mountains of silt. Its average depth was less than 150 feet.

  ‘Anything in our way?’

  ‘Smooth the whole way in.’

  From here, the Phantom could reach shore in thirty seconds, but Beck didn’t want to move until he knew what awaited them. A couple of miles east, a cluster of lights, seemingly placed at random, glowed weakly. Through his night-vision binoculars, Beck looked west and east as far as he could, then tried again with his thermal scope. He saw nothing but the lights and the dying stone wall.

  ‘Cut the engines,’ he said.

  The twin Mercurys stopped. In the hush that followed Beck heard only the breathing of the men around him, the listless slap of the waves, the faint beeping of the Phantom’s radar. There were birds and animals and people too in the hills up ahead. Had to be. But they were silent as ghosts.

  ‘Must be what the moon is like,’ Kang said.

  ‘Imagine living here.’

  A whistle sounded to the north, eerie and distant. Choe said something in Korean.

  ‘He says it’s a steam train,’ Kang said. ‘The North Koreans still run coal locomotives.’

  The whistle faded. Beck signaled to Choe to turn the engines back on and a moment later heard their reassuring rumble.

  ‘Bet you can pick up waterfront property cheap around here.’

  ‘Seth, was it this dark when you came over here before?’

  ‘Once yes, once no. You’re figuring –’

  ‘Not figuring anything yet.’

  An alarm on Kang’s laptop beeped. He tapped a few keys and the monitor opened up. ‘Well, this isn’t good. Two boats, coming around Kudol’ – a spit of land about ten miles southeast. ‘They were hanging close to the coast before, so the Hawkeye didn’t pick them up.’

  ‘How fast?’

  ‘Twenty, maybe twenty-five knots.’

  ‘Aiming for us.’

  ‘Looks that way.’ The laptop beeped again. ‘More bad news.’ Kang pointed to the screen. Another white blip was moving toward the Phantom, this one from the southwest. ‘He was stopped in open water, maybe twenty-five miles out. I had him figured for a fishing trawler. Now he’s moving our way.’ The screen beeped again. ‘This one too, straight in from the west.’

  ‘They’re setting up a cordon?’

  ‘Looks that way.’

  ‘Can we outrun it?’

  ‘Shouldn’t be a problem. For a few minutes.’

  Beck checked his watch. 2330. No way was he waiting a half-hour. He would give the Drafter ten minutes, no more. He had been in tight spots before. During the first Gulf War, his SEAL team had landed in Kuwait City to sabotage a Republican Guard t
ank brigade. In the Philippines, he’d helped fight an ugly counterinsurgency against the Muslim guerrillas of the Jemaah Islamiyah.

  But this mission felt different, not like a fight at all, more like they were bait dangled before a hungry animal. He was sure they’d been set up. Though all this activity could still be a coincidence, North Koreans out on pleasure cruises in the middle of the night.

  Yeah, right.

  Point D was a small inlet formed by a creek that flowed into the Yellow Sea from the northeast. A good spot for a pickup, easy to find in satellite photographs. And with the tide high, the Phantom could ride in nearly all the way to the beach.

  ‘Ted,’ Kang said urgently, ‘these just popped.’ He pointed at two yellow blips on the radar screen. ‘Jets,’ Kang said. ‘At three thousand feet. Just under the cloud cover. Running at three hundred fifty knots.’

  ‘How far?’

  ‘Sixty kilometers. Six, seven minutes, give or take.’

  Choe sputtered in Korean and pointed at the shore. A man in a baggy nylon jacket had stepped out of the woods, walking strangely, almost limping. He raised a pair of binoculars and slowly scanned the water. As he spotted the Phantom, he waved slowly, metronomically. A backpack was slung across his shoulders.

  ‘Well, hello, soldier,’ Kang said.

  Beck stared at the man through his own binoculars, trying to decide if he was looking at Sung Kwan, the Drafter. The CIA had secretly taken long-lens photographs of Sung at its meetings with him. Twelve hours before, in a secure room in the American embassy in Seoul, Beck had stared at those pictures, trying to memorize Sung’s face.

  But Sung had few distinguishing characteristics. He was short and squat, like many Koreans, and wore the oversized glasses that Korean and Chinese men favored. His most notable feature was a birthmark on his left cheek. Beck peered through his own binoculars, looking for the birthmark. He thought he saw a smudge on the man’s cheek, but couldn’t be sure. Too bad Sung wasn’t seven feet tall or missing an arm.

  ‘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 simulation,’ 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.