The Ghost War jw-2

by Alex Berenson

  “Duels are dumb. And dangerous.”

  “War’s no game. Ships like this are deceiving. We’re so big that maybe we seem unsinkable. But put a deep enough hole in the hull and we’ll go down fast. I don’t intend to let that happen to my crew.”

  “Can I quote you on that?”

  “Of course. And be at the CIC at 1100 tomorrow. You can stay all day.”

  “Thanks, Captain.”

  Just then Williams’s phone rang. “Yes?”

  “Skipper, you might want to get down here.” The Decatur‘s TAO, tactical action officer, was calling from the Combat Information Center. “We have a situation.”

  “Be there in five.” Williams cradled the receiver.

  “What was that?” Jackie said.

  “Looks like we may get some action sooner than I thought.”

  “Can I—”

  Williams shook his head. “Sorry, Ms. Wheeler. No tour tonight.”

  IF THE DECATUR’S FOUR GIANT TURBINE ENGINES, capable of 100,000 horsepower at full throttle, were its heart, the Combat Information Center was its brain. The CIC was a well-lit room, fifty feet long, forty wide, in the center of the ship, equally protected from missiles and torpedoes. The windowless space looked like an air traffic control center at rush hour. Dozens of pasty-faced men and women huddled over blinking consoles that pulled in information from the Decatur’s radar and sonar systems, as well as the E-2 Hawkeye overhead. Williams sat near the front of the room, facing away from the chaos and toward the big, bright blue flat-panel screens that offered an integrated view of the threats facing the Decatur from sea, air, and land.

  As an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, the Decatur came equipped with an Aegis combat system, which linked the ship’s radar and sonar systems with its missile batteries. The Aegis could simultaneously track scores of planes and ships, labeling each as hostile, friendly, or unknown. In case of open war, the system could be put on full automatic mode, taking control of all the ship’s weapons. Besides its cruise missiles, the Decatur carried surface-to-air missiles, antiship missiles, antisubmarine rockets and torpedoes, an artillery launcher, and 20-millimeter cannons for close-in defense, should all else fail. With the Aegis on full automatic, the Decatur could probably blockade Shanghai all by itself.

  But the Aegis wasn’t on full automatic. This wasn’t open war. And Williams didn’t want to overreact to provocations and bluffs aimed at tricking him into firing the first shot. Under the rules of engagement governing this mission, Willams didn’t have to wait until he’d been acted upon before firing. He could launch first if he believed the Chinese were about to attack. “The commanding officer is responsible for defending his ship from attack or the imminent threat of attack,” the rules read.

  Williams almost wished the orders were stricter. Under these rules, if the Chinese hit the Decatur with a first strike, he’d face terrible second-guessing about his decision not to launch first. And the Chinese had turned increasingly aggressive as the Decatur closed on their coast.

  For a day, two Chinese frigates had shadowed the ship. Now, with the Decatur barely thirty miles from Shanghai, two more frigates had moved in. They were Jianwei-class, among the more modern ships in the Chinese fleet. Still, they were only one-quarter the size of the Decatur. Williams could destroy them easily, especially with the help of the F/A-18s from the Reagan circling overhead, as the Chinese surely knew.

  In other words, the frigates weren’t there to fight. Still, Williams didn’t want to give them an excuse. Over the last few hours, he had turned south and slowed to fifteen knots. The Decatur was now heading roughly parallel to the coast, not closing on it. Still, the Chinese boats had ignored repeated warnings from the Decatur to back off.

  Making matters worse, the Decatur was close to the Shanghai shipping lanes, forcing it to navigate around freighters and oil tankers. And in the last few hours, civilian Chinese boats had shown up. Motor-boats, fishing vessels, even a couple of sailboats, all flying the Chinese flag and carrying signs in Chinese and English: “Hegemonists out of East China Sea!” “Taiwan and China! One people, one nation!” “US Navy go home!”

  Williams thought that being ordered this close to the coast was unnecessarily provocative. But provocation seemed to be the point. Two days before, Rear Admiral Jason Lee, the commander of the Reagan, had told Williams and the other captains in the carrier’s battle group that the White House wanted to send the Chinese government a stern message about the risks a deal with Iran would bring.

  “We’re not backing down this time. Up close and personal, that’s what the big man wants. Make them blink. Our intel says that’s the right move. And if that’s what the big man wants, that’s what he gets. Now, I don’t want you to do anything rash, but if you need to protect your ships, no one’s going to second-guess you. We’ve got three flattops out here, we can turn their navy into scrap in about twenty minutes, and we’re not backing down. Understood?”

  No one said anything when Lee was finished.

  BUT THERE WERE GOOD TACTICAL reasons to stay farther offshore, Williams thought. Carrier battle groups were lethal on the open ocean, so-called blue-water combat. The Reagan’s jets could destroy enemy aircraft and ships long before the hostile boats got close, and the nuclear attack subs that served as its escorts were faster and had sonar superior to that of the diesel subs most other fleets used.

  But this close to shore, the carrier group’s advantages shrank. First off, the Reagan’s jets no longer completely controlled the air. Land-based aircraft could take off from Chinese bases and be on top of the Decatur in minutes. Making matters worse, with hundreds of civilian planes taking off from Shanghai’s airports every day, even the Aegis system had a hard time tracking all the traffic in the air.

  China’s submarines were also a serious threat in these shallow waters. The diesel-electric subs that made up the Chinese fleet could operate almost silently, and they didn’t have to worry about being outrun by the faster U.S. subs so close to shore. They hardly needed to move at all — the American fleet was coming to them.

  Add the tactical problems to the strategic uncertainty, and Williams knew he’d been given a difficult job. Now the Chinese seemed to want to bring matters to a head, much sooner than Williams had expected.

  Williams took his seat at the center console, beside Lieutenant (j.g.) Stan Umsle, his tactical action officer, a bespectacled man with a Ph.D. in engineering from Purdue. “Lieutenant, talk to me.”

  “Didn’t want to bother you, sir, but we have two issues. First off, there’s one fishing boat aft and three starboard running steadily closer to us. Looks like they’re coordinating their movements with the frigates. In the last half-hour they’ve gone from two thousand yards to eleven hundred”—just over a half mile away.

  “Any weapons?”

  “None we can see. We’ve signaled and radioed them to leave, sir. Told them they’re subject to imminent defensive action if they come any closer.”

  “In English.”

  “Yes, sir.” Umsle didn’t have to tell Williams that no one on the Decatur spoke Chinese. Another reason the destroyer ought to back off a little, Williams thought.

  “All right. If they get to five hundred yards, splash them with the Phalanx for five seconds. Warning shots only. No contact. And let’s don’t hit the frigates by mistake.” Williams hoped the Decatur could scare off the fishing boats with its cannons, which fired depleted-uranium shells that could cut the trawlers apart.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Also let’s throttle up to thirty knots, get some distance from those frigates.”

  “That’s the second problem, sir. There’s a red”—enemy—“destroyer in our path.” Umsle pointed to the Aegis display, where a red blip was moving toward the Decatur. “Twenty NMs”—nautical miles—“to our south, closing at twenty-five knots. It’s painted us twice already.” Meaning that the enemy destroyer had hit the Decatur with radar, possibly in preparation for a missile launch.

>   “Do we have positive identification?”

  “Believe it’s one of their Luhas, sir. And the Hawkeye just picked up emissions from another hostile. Seventy NMs south.” The radar plane overhead could track a far larger area than the Decatur’s radar. “The Hawkeye believes it may be a Sovremenny-class boat.”

  “We need visual confirmation on that ASAP. Tell the Reagan.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Since the late 1990s, China had bought four Sovremenny-class destroyers from Russia. The Sovre mennys were the only surface ship in China’s fleet that posed a serious threat to the Decatur. They carried supersonic antiship missiles with a range of a hundred miles and a nasty radar guidance system. Though the missiles could be detected by infrared sensors because of the massive heat they generated, they were nearly impossible to intercept, because of their speed and the fact that they flew less than fifty feet above the water’s surface. Worse, they carried a 660-pound warhead, big enough to cripple the Decatur.

  Williams turned to his communications officer. “Get me Admiral Lee.” If he was going to war, he wanted his boss to know. Meanwhile, backing off seemed prudent. He looked at Umsle. “Take us to twenty knots and a heading of one-five-zero”—a southeast heading, away from the Chinese coast.

  “What about the trawlers? We’ll be on top of them.”

  “Then they better get out of our way.” Williams preferred to pick a fight with an unarmed trawler rather than a Chinese destroyer. “Get ready to splash them with the Phalanxes. I want them to know we’re serious.”

  “Captain,” his coms officer said, “I have the Reagan.” Williams picked up.

  “Captain Williams.” The admiral spoke softly but with absolute authority, as befitted the commander of a 102,000-ton aircraft carrier. “Looks like the Chinese don’t want to grant you shore leave.”

  “I could use more air support, Admiral.”

  “It’s already happening.”

  “Sir, request permission to pull back to the Lake Champlain.”The Lake Champlain,a guided-missile cruiser, was fifty miles northeast, seventy-five miles offshore.

  “Understand your concerns, but that would send the wrong signal, Captain. Our intel’s clear on this.”

  Easy for you to say in your floating castle, Williams thought. “Yes, sir,” he said aloud. “In that case, I’m going to lose these boats on top of me, open up some space, come back around for another look.”

  “Sir, Captain, we’ve just fired warning shots at the trawlers—” This was Umsle, his voice rising. Williams waved a hand. Not now.

  “Affirmative, Captain,” the admiral said in his ear. “We’ll have four more eighteens”—F/A-18 Super Hornet attack jets—“in the air for you by 2130.”

  “Thank you, sir.” Click. At least he’d gotten approval, in a backhanded way, to pull back a few miles, buy some time.

  “Lieutenant, I want us at twenty-five knots, heading of six-zero.” A sixty-degree heading was northeast, a hard left turn from the Decatur’s current path.

  “Sir, the trawlers—”

  Williams didn’t want to hear about the fishing boats anymore. He had bigger worries.

  “We’ve warned them, Lieutenant. Every way we know how. It’s time for them to make way. Now! Hard over.”

  * * *

  THE COLLISION CAME THIRTY SECONDS LATER.

  In the Combat Information Center, men skidded sideways. Manuals and pens and anything else not nailed down spilled to the floor. On the bridge, Wheeler, the Los Angeles Times reporter, banged her knee hard enough to leave it black-and-blue, but she hardly cared. She’d have the lead story in tomorrow’s paper, she knew.

  The sailors and officers on the bridge of the Decatur insisted afterward that the trawler refused to move out of the Decatur’s way, as if daring the destroyer to run it down. The Chinese disagreed vehemently, saying that the Decatur had deliberately hit the little trawler, which weighed eighty tons, compared with the Decatur’s eight thousand. Jackie, who was as close to a neutral observer as anyone who saw the collision, wasn’t entirely sure what had happened. Both boats seemed to expect the other to turn away.

  But neither did, and so the destroyer’s prow tore the little fishing boat nearly in half, slicing neatly through a banner that read “China Will Not Bow to America!” Besides its usual crew of ten, the boat contained another twenty-four passengers, mostly college students who had come out to protest — and snap some souvenir photographs of the destroyer. Only five people died in the collision, but most of the students couldn’t swim. Seventeen drowned afterward.

  The Decatur slowed down after the collison, but before it could put any rescue boats in the water, one of the Chinese frigates fired warning shots at it. After consulting with Admiral Lee, Williams decided to sail away. The Chinese boats were moving quickly to the trawler, and staying around might inflame the situation. Later, the Decatur’s decision not to stop would add to the controversy.

  Aside from a few bumps and bruises, no one aboard the Decatur was hurt. But in the days that followed, no one would say the United States escaped the collision unscathed.

  27

  EVEN WITH TYSON’S HELP AND THE WRITTEN APPROVAL of the agency’s general counsel, Exley needed almost a full day to get the agency’s health insurance records for Keith Robinson. Those showed that Robinson’s wife, Janice, had given birth to a boy, Mark, a decade before. Cross-checking Mark’s date of birth against Social Security death records revealed the boy had died eight years earlier, about the time the mole first contacted the Chinese, according to Wen Shubai’s timetable.

  And so Exley and Shafer decided it was time to talk to Robinson. “We don’t have to ask about the dead kid,” Shafer said. “He might get upset.”

  “Mr. Tact. Thank God you’re here to help. Of course we’re not mentioning his son. That failed poly gives us plenty of reason to interview him.”

  But when Exley called Robinson’s office early Friday evening, he didn’t answer. His voicemail said he was out sick. With a couple of calls, Exley tracked down an admin on the China desk who told Exley that Robinson had seemed fine the day before.

  IN THE NEXT OFFICE OVER, Wells was catching up on the mole investigation, poring over the transcripts of Shubai’s interview. He had put aside for now his efforts to find out who was paying Pierre Kowalski to support the Taliban. Without account numbers, the Treasury Department couldn’t trace the payments from Macao that Kowalski had admitted getting. And the CIA’s dossier on Kowalski offered no clues to the mysterious North Korean that Kowalski had mentioned — though the file had enough detail about Kowalski to infuriate Wells.

  Kowalski has brokered weapons sales of $100 million or more for dozens of sovereign nations and paramilitary organizations, including Angola, Armenia, China, Congo, FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), Indonesia, Libya, Nigeria, Poland, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen.

  This list should not be considered conclusive. Kowalski often operates through intermedi aries in cases where he hopes to sell weapons to both sides in a conflict (i.e., Chad and Sudan). His commission ranges from 2 percent, in cases where he is merely negotiating a price and package of weapons, to 25 percent when he acts as a third-party dealer. Kowalski has earned about $1 billion since 2000, although the exact amount is unknown.

  One billion. A thousand million. Maybe on Wall Street or in Congress that number was just another day at the office. But Wells couldn’t get his head around it. In Pakistan, he’d seen kids die from cholera because their parents couldn’t afford antibiotics that cost a few bucks.

  The rest of the dossier detailed Kowalski’s personal history. Not surprisingly, he had never served in the military. As far as Wells could tell, he had never been near a battlefield, never seen what his mines and AK-47s and mortars did to the human body. He preferred the bodies in his vicinity to be young and blonde, and he could afford what he liked. Twice divorced, he’d acquired a taste for second-tier Russian models, who cost more up front than a wife but didn’t
rate alimony on their way out. More than ever, Wells regretted not having put a bullet between Kowalski’s eyes back in the Hamptons.

  After reading the dossier, Wells had paid a visit to the analyst who’d written it, Sam Tarks, a career officer in the agency’s arms control/nonproliferation unit.

  “Pierre Kowalski? Nasty man.”

  “I’m looking for anything that might have been too juicy to make it into the dossier,” Wells said. “Personal or business.”

  “His personal life is about what you’d expect. He’s got a yacht called the Ares.Lots of coke, lots of Eu rotrash. Good times had by all.”

  “Ares like the Greek god of war?”

  “The one and only. But he doesn’t have any serious glitches as far as we know. I mean he’s not a pedophile or a sadist or anything. He likes to party is all.”

  “How about the business side? Is there any country he’s especially close to? The Russians, say?” Wells still didn’t think the Russians would have helped the Taliban, but anything was possible.

  “Not particularly. He sells mostly Russian stuff, but he keeps them at arm’s length. Smart man. And he makes sure to keep his business far from Zurich. Also smart. Pays enough in taxes to keep the Swiss happy and keeps his money in local banks, mainly UBS.”

  “Did he ever work for U.S. companies?”

  Tarks nodded. “Lots of folks wish he still would. The Indian Air Force is looking at a huge order, close to a hundred thirty planes, and the French have hired him to convince the Indians to go with the Mirage”—a French-made fighter jet—“and not the F-16. That would be a very big sale. North of five billion. If we don’t get it, some Lockheed lobbyists”—Lockheed Martin manufactured the F-16—“will tell the Armed Services Committee it’s because we don’t have guys like Kowalski on our team. They’ll say it quietly, but they’ll say it.”