The Ghost War jw-2

by Alex Berenson

  Cao’s explanation stretched the limits of his English, but eventually Wells understood: Li was afraid to tell the Standing Committee that Cao had defected. Cao was Li’s closest aide, so Cao’s treachery would reflect badly on him. Li’s opponents might use it to undo Li’s grip on power, which was still tenuous.

  But without the approval of the Standing Committee, Li couldn’t simply shut all of China down. So the roads were still open. Li was depending on roadblocks to catch them, and the Navy if they somehow got to the Yellow Sea.

  “So there’s a window.”

  “Yes. Window.”

  And with that, Wells closed his eyes uneasily. He tried to imagine what would happen after he handed the papers over and explained what they meant. Treasury would connect the Banco Delta Asia accounts with Kowalski’s accounts in Zurich and Monte Carlo. The Pentagon would give the State Department the confession from Sergei, the Russian Spetsnaz that Wells had captured in the cave.

  Then the American ambassador would ask Li’s enemies on the Standing Committee for a secret meeting. There he’d give Minister Zhang the proof of what Li had done.

  Zhang and the rest of the committee would know they had to act. They’d know that if the United States publicized China’s support for the Taliban, world opinion would turn in America’s favor. After all, American soldiers weren’t the only ones fighting the Talibs in Afghanistan. By supporting the guerrillas, China had committed an act of war against all of NATO.

  Zhang wouldn’t need much convincing, anyway. He and Li’s other enemies on the committee were looking for any excuse to stop Li. This was a good one. They wouldn’t care that it had come from the United States.

  For the first time, Wells allowed himself to believe that they might actually get out of this mess. He pressed his hands together in front of his face. Here’s the church and here’s the steeple. Open the door and there’s the people. He and Exley wouldn’t have a church wedding, though. Not a mosque wedding either. They’d go down to city hall and do it quick and dirty. Exley liked it quick and dirty….

  He knew he was drifting and didn’t mind. Drifting made the shooting pains in his belly easier to take. And so he drifted, dozed, woke, drifted again. All the while, the truck rolled on. Eventually they left the highway and passed along a series of narrow switchbacks, rising and falling, not mountains exactly but certainly good-sized hills. Wells snapped awake as the truck took a turn too hard, its left rear wheels briefly leaving the pavement.

  “Shandong,” Cao said. “Back roads.”

  “How long?”

  Cao lit his watch—12:45. “One hour, maybe two. No more.”

  It was 12:45 P.M. in Washington, Wells thought. The attack on the Decatur had happened about twelve hours before. He wondered whether Exley had persuaded Duto and the White House to hold off. Surely the president would be speaking to the country tonight, and politicians on both sides would be pushing for action. God. Until now he hadn’t even considered the possibility that they’d make it to South Korea and still be too late.

  THEN THE TRUCK SLOWED, HARD, pushing forward on its shocks—

  And stopped.

  Again the engine went quiet. Again voices shouting in Chinese. Again the back panel slid up.

  But this time two men stepped into the truck. This time the flashlight searched the compartment much more thoroughly than it had before.

  This time the cops smelled something wrong, Wells thought. Maybe the fact that the truck had two drivers. Maybe the route they were taking, running back roads in the middle of nowhere at 1:00 A.M. Maybe the cops were just having a little fun, looking for a television or something to steal. Whatever it was, these guys weren’t giving up until they turned the compartment inside out.

  Wells wondered how many there were. How many he’d have to kill. A country roadblock in the middle of the night. Two cops, maybe? Two in the truck, two out? Four at most.

  Now the cops were shouting and throwing furniture out of the back of the truck as the drivers yelled. Cao leaned forward and whispered to Wells.

  “They say, ‘You four have no right.’ Four. Understand?”

  “Four.”

  Crash! A couch landed on the ground. The flashlight closed in. Wells drew his.22, cocked the hammer, pulled himself to a squat, braced himself against the side wall. The empty bookcase scraped sideways and started to tip. The compartment echoed with shouts in Chinese. Not so long ago, Wells had told Exley the secret to surviving these moments: Shoot first. Don’t wait. He was about to follow his own advice.

  He pushed himself up, ignoring the agony in his stomach. As the bookcase tipped, Wells saw the cops, five feet away, tugging at the case. They reached for their guns as they saw him. Too late. He squeezed the pistol’s trigger, twice.

  And then they were dead.

  The bookcase fell. Wells dropped behind it. The other two cops stood at the back of the truck. They should have gone for cover. Instead, they were shooting, but wildly, high. A mistake, the last they would ever make. Wells focused and fired, hearing the pfft of Cao’s silenced pistol beside him. One of the cops twisted, his head turned at an unnatural angle, and dropped. The other doubled over, his hand on his stomach, beginning to yell. Wells moved his pistol a fraction of an inch and fired again. This time the shot caught the cop in the shoulder. He dropped his gun and fell, still yelling.

  Wells staggered out of the cargo compartment. He took aim at the moaning cop at his feet and then lowered his.22 without firing. Let Cao do it. Let someone else. Anyone.

  Then he raised his gun again, took aim. He was what he was. No point in pretending otherwise. No point in making someone else do his dirty work. He fired. The cop’s body twitched and went still.

  The roadblock had been in front of a bridge over a narrow canal. A police car and a jeep sat at the edge of the road, their emergency lights still flashing. Wells leaned against the truck, looked around. The hills behind them were forested and seemed empty, but a couple of miles ahead Wells saw the beginnings of a town, red smokestack lights blinking in the night. Fortunately, the two-lane road was silent. For now.

  Cao jumped down from the truck, yelling at the men who’d driven them. Wells understood his frustration, but there wasn’t time. They couldn’t hide this. They had only one choice.

  “Cao.” Wells grabbed the smaller man’s shoulder. “Tell them, put the cops in the truck. Leave everything else. Let’s go. Now.”

  Cao looked around, nodded. He said something to the men and they threw the bodies in the truck as casually as if they were slinging sacks of rice. Wells stumbled over one of the corpses as he stepped back into the truck. The body was still warm. Practically still alive. Except it wasn’t.

  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.