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 friendlies. 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.
THIRTY-SEVEN
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.
To the south, the coast grew rockier. During the day, the development was probably obvious. But tonight, under the weak light of a quarter-moon, the land looked surprisingly unspoiled. Wells supposed that even China had a few places that hadn’t been overrun.
The lights of the coast grew sparser and sparser, then faded entirely.
‘Tianjintou,’ Cao said. He pointed south. In the distance, the land ended in a rocky spit, waves kicking up narrow white flumes around it. ‘Tianjintou?’ ‘Means “end of the world.” Farthest east place in Shandong. Only water now.’
‘Let’s hope we don’t have to swim.’
A half-hour later, Wells’s line looked more like a prophecy than a joke. Two helicopters shined their spotlights along the coast behind them. And in the distance to the west, Wells saw the lights of three boats. At least one was a destroyer or a frigate, something big. The boats were heading east, into the open water. Chasing Wells and Cao, even if they didn’t know it yet.
Then, to the south. Two boats. Small and fast. Wells couldn’t hear them, not yet, but he could see their spotlights. He tapped Cao’s shoulder, pointed. Cao just shrugged.
They weren’t going to make it, Wells thought. With the cloud cover helping them, they would last until sunrise. But once the sun came up, they wouldn’t be able to hide. They’d be caught far before Incheon.
Wells focused on the rolling dark water ahead of them, stale and brackish. In college, he had been a decent swimmer. Not his favorite sport, but he’d liked it in the winter, as a way to rebuild his muscles after the pounding of football. But even if he hadn’t had a chestful of broken ribs, swimming two hundred miles to Korea would have been a hopeless fantasy. Like the rest of this mission, Wells thought. But he didn’t regret taking the chance. He knew the secret now, the reason for this war. If only he
and Cao could survive, they could stop it.
Anyway, he’d been playing with house money ever since Exley had saved him in New York. He didn’t want to die, not like this, but some part of him had accepted the fact that he would. If not today, soon enough. He would push his luck until it snapped. He could excuse himself for risking this mission, because it meant so much. But what was his excuse for screaming down I-95 at 125 miles an hour? How could he ask Exley to trust him?
He remembered an old joke from an intro philosophy class in college: I’m an optimist, not a fatalist. Anyway, if I were a fatalist, what could I do about it? Or in the words of that great philosopher Bruce Springsteen, Everything dies, baby, that’s a fact. Wells was drifting again. Tianjintou. End of the world. He sagged down and the curtains closed on him.
At 22,000 feet the night air was smooth, though the clouds were thickening quickly beneath the C-130. Bosarelli eased back on the engines, slowing the plane to 180 knots. Osan had asked him to slow down, give the flotilla on the water beneath him a chance to get a few miles farther west.
‘Ninety-five hundred rpm,’ Keough said. ‘One hundred eighty knots, heading two-seventy.’ Straight west.
‘Taking us down to sixteen thousand.’ Bosarelli extended the wing flaps to fifty percent to begin the descent. As he did, an alarm briefly sounded and the flat-panel display before Bosarelli flashed red before returning to its normal black background. The Chinese J-10s were now within a hundred nautical miles – five minutes on afterburner.
For now Bosarelli wasn’t too worried about them. He was over international waters and flying slow and straight – hardly signs of hostile intent. He looked down through the cockpit’s glazed windows, and through the clouds he saw the lights of a ship beneath him, heading west. A friendly, he hoped. ‘Everything set back there?’
‘Sure hope so,’ Keough said.
Bosarelli leveled them out when they got to 16,000 feet, and for another fifteen minutes the plane cruised steadily. Bosarelli and Keough hardly spoke. After thousands of hours in these C-130s, Bosarelli could fly them, almost literally, in his sleep. And there wasn’t much to say anyway. Beneath them the clouds became an unbroken white mass, glowing under the moon and the stars like a little girl’s dream. Under other circumstances, Bosarelli would have considered the clouds beautiful. Tonight he would rather have seen the water. A crosswind kicked up, lightly rocking the plane.
‘One hundred NM west of Incheon,’ Keough said. ‘Two minutes to centerline.’ Incheon was about 210 nautical miles west of the tip of the Shandong Peninsula. In two minutes, the plane would be closer to China than Korea, a fact that would set off alarms for the Chinese jets.
‘Two minutes to centerline, twelve minutes to Z point.’ Bosarelli throttled back again, to 150 knots, not much above the plane’s stall speed.
Their last F-16 escorts peeled off, one turning north, the other south, looping back toward Osan. Now Bosarelli and Keough had no cover at all, though for the moment the sky ahead was clear. For some reason – maybe the same reason that they were on this mission – the Chinese J-10s had swung back west, toward the Shandong coastline, and dropped to about 4,000 feet.
But Bosarelli knew the Chinese fighters could easily reverse course again and tag the C-130, which wouldn’t have a chance, especially with this payload. Herc pilots liked to joke that the plane’s antimissile system consisted mainly of an alarm to let them know that their ride was about to explode.
Bosarelli hadn’t been this scared since his first rollercoaster ride, at the Six Flags in Arlington, Texas. He was seven. His older brother had spent a whole week telling him how great it was. Bosarelli had pleaded to go until his dad finally took him. But when the coaster had clanked slowly up over the flat Texas plains, getting ready for that first drop, Bosarelli had wanted to puke his guts out. He hadn’t, though. And once they’d finally gotten over the hill, he’d had a blast – though that probably wasn’t the best choice of words right now.
‘Five minutes,’ Keough said.
‘Five minutes.’ Again Bosarelli extended the flaps. ‘Taking us to twelve thousand.’
At 12,000 feet, Bosarelli again leveled out. ‘Chutes and helmets on.’
Bosarelli reached for his parachute and pulled it onto his shoulders. Keough did the same. They’d packed their chutes themselves at Osan, watched over by a Special Forces major who had completed 250 jumps. Now Bosarelli had to stand over the control panel, since he couldn’t fit in his seat anymore. The designers of the C-130 hadn’t expected that the plane’s pilots would be wearing parachutes.
‘Check your transponder.’ They were both carrying emergency beacons, black plastic boxes attached to their waists.
‘Check.’
‘One twenty-five NM from Incheon,’ Bosarelli said. ‘Twenty NM west of the centerline.’
‘Two minutes,’ Keough said. His screen flashed red and an alarm beeped loud and fast in his headset. Just in the last fifteen minutes the Chinese had a half-dozen more fighters in the air. Two of them had now decided to check out the C-130.
Now another alarm went off, higher-pitched and more urgent than the first. One of the Chinese fighters had painted the Herc with its targeting radar, a wordless warning that if it broke into Chinese airspace it could expect to be hit with an air-to-air missile.
‘One minute to Z point,’ Keough said.
‘One minute.’ Bosarelli flicked the Herc’s transponder to 7700, the signal for an aircraft emergency.
‘Ready, Jim?’
‘Ready.’
The radar warning alarm sounded again, for a full fifteen seconds this time. ‘I’ll get it,’ Bosarelli said. He flipped the Herc’s radio to the Military Air Distress band, 243.0 MHz. The warning, in heavily accented English, was what he expected: ‘You are approaching Chinese airspace. Turn back or face immediate action.’ Pause. ‘You are approaching Chinese airspace. Turn back . . .’
‘I’ll take that under advisement,’ Bosarelli murmured. He flipped off the radio.
‘Thirty seconds to Z.’
‘Thirty seconds. Flaps fifty.’ Again, Bosarelli extended the plane wing’s flaps. ‘Now, Jim. Go.’
Keough stepped out of the cock-pit. Bosarelli heard a loud whoosh as he popped open the crew entry door a few feet behind the cockpit. The plane began to shake. Again the radar alarm rang in his headset.
Now. Bosarelli pushed the power levers past flight idle to turn off the engines. Then he reached over to Keough’s station and flipped off the fuel pumps.
Just like that, the C-130 turned into a sixty-five-ton glider. Alarms began screaming, both in his headset and in the cabin, as the engines lost power. The propellers still had some leftover momentum, so the plane didn’t dive immediately, but Bosarelli knew he didn’t have long. Time to get out. He stepped out of the cockpit. Keough was standing in the open door of the plane, waiting. When he saw Bosarelli, he nodded and stepped out of the plane, hands at his sides. In an instant, he was gone.
Bosarelli flipped on his goggles and stepped to the open hatch. Instead of the normal noise of the turbo-props, he heard only the klaxons in the cockpit and the rush of the wind. He looked into the night sky, and for a moment his nerve failed him. He thought of running back to the cockpit and trying to restart the engines. But he knew better. Down was the only way out.
And before he could change his mind again, he pushed himself forward and stepped into the cool night air.
With arms and legs extended, the human body falls at a maximum speed of about 125 miles an hour – a thousand feet every five seconds. Bosarelli was holding his arms tight to his chest and extending his legs straight down, hoping to top out closer to two hundred. He wanted to separate from the Herc quickly to lessen the chances he’d be caught in the plane’s blast wave.
Then a wind gust ripped Bosarelli sideways, twisting his back and throwing his shoulders outward. He raised his arms for balance and instead began to spin, bouncing through the air like a pebble caught in a wave. Suddenl
y he was in no position to pull his chute. He breathed deeply and tried to remember his training as the seconds ticked by. And then he reached the cloud layer and the air around him turned white and suffocating.
Relax. He extended his arms and legs as far as he could and arched his back to create maximum drag. He emerged from the clouds. He was no longer spinning, but the sea was close beneath him, a couple of thousand feet at most, the water dark and featureless. He could already see two boats chugging west. They’d find him. If he could just get to his chute. Bosarelli reached across his body and grabbed the cord, praying it would open smoothly. He wasn’t sure he had time to get to the reserve.
Then –
His body jerked upward as the chute snatched him from gravity’s grasp. He looked up to see an open canopy, spreading above him like an angel’s wings.
A mile ahead, the empty C-130 plunged toward the Yellow Sea, its nose tipped nearly straight down, klaxons sounding uselessly in its cockpit. Four thousand feet. The bombs and barrels of gasoline strained against the netting securing them to the floor of the cargo bay, but the thick nylon held.
Three thousand feet. The C-130 was approaching the speed of sound, six hundred miles an hour, a thousand feet a second. As the plane accelerated, the massive g-forces generated by the dive began to shear the left wing from the hull –
Two thousand feet –
The ghost plane began to break apart, but by then its structural failure no longer mattered. The Herc had done its job.
One thousand feet –
Five hundred –
The altitude fuses on the GBU-29s blew, setting off 3,000 pounds of high explosive. In a fraction of a second, the cargo compartment turned into an inferno, and the jellied gasoline in the oil barrels blew up.
Bosarelli saw the explosion before he felt it. The night came alive with a second sun, a yellow-gold cloud that exploded up and out, forming a classic mushroom cloud, like a miniature nuclear bomb. So bright, so beautiful. A couple of seconds later the blast wave hit him, hotter than he’d expected, rich with gasoline and benzene vapor, but by then he was close enough to the water that he knew he’d survive.
The Ghost Agent Page 35