The Ghost War

by Alex Berenson

  The trooper’s mouth dropped open. Wells was just as shocked. The agency had been watching him? Watching these rides? Did he have no privacy left?

  “Officer,” the man shouted over the whirr of the rotors, “do you know who this man is?”

  The trooper bolstered his pistol. “Well, he said—I mean, he said—but I wasn’t sure—”

  “You believe him now? Or do I have to get somebody with stars on his collar to talk to you?”

  “Yes. I mean no. I mean yes, I believe him.”

  Without another word, the man walked back to the helicopter. As it rose off the side of the highway, the trooper rubbed his eyes like a kid waking up from a dream.

  “Damn.” The statie shoved the identification card into the wallet and tossed it back to Wells. “I’m sorry, Mr. Wells.”

  “You don’t have to apologize. Pulling rank on you like that was a real jerk move.”

  “No, no. If I’d known it was you, I never would have pulled you over. That’s the absolute truth.” The officer stepped over to him and extended his hand. He didn’t seem bothered at all by what had just happened.

  Can’t even get arrested, Wells thought. When did I turn into such a saint? But he knew exactly when. The moment he shot Omar Khadri in Times Square. Wells wasn’t sorry for what he’d done. If he had a hundred more chances to kill Khadri, he’d take them all. But he was sick of being a hero. He shook the officer’s hand, feeling the sweat on the young man’s palm.

  “Won’t you get in trouble, letting me go?”

  “Radar gun’s been on the fritz all week. Says one eighteen when it means fifty-eight.” The trooper turned back to his car, then stopped. “Be careful out there, Mr. Wells. We need you safe.”

  “You too, Officer. Lot of crazy drivers out there.” Wells meant it ironically—crazy like me—but the trooper didn’t laugh. Wells thought sometimes that no one except Exley would ever laugh at him to his face again, no matter how much he deserved it. No one laughed at heroes. How could he trust a world that took him so seriously?

  The trooper returned to his sedan. Wells got back on his bike. At the next exit he turned back to Washington. He kept the Honda at an even sixty-five the whole way home.

  WHEN HE GOT BACKto Logan Circle the black Ford sedans with tinted windows were waiting, one on Thirteenth and the other on N. Two men in each, their engines running. As always. Security guards from Langley, there to watch out for him. And watch him, evidently. Wells hadn’t liked having them around before tonight. He liked them even less now. But Vinny Duto had insisted. If nothing else, they would keep the other residents in the building safe, Duto said. He promised that the guards wouldn’t follow Wells or Exley without their permission. Until tonight, they seemed to have kept their side of the bargain.

  Wells parked his bike in the building’s garage and went upstairs. As quietly as he could, he opened the door to Exley’s apartment. Their apartment, he supposed, though he had trouble thinking of it that way. Down the narrow hall filled with black-and-white pictures of Exley’s kids, past the little open kitchen. His boots smelled of grit and oil and the highway. He tugged them off. Exley’s looked child-sized next to them.

  “Jennifer?” he murmured. No answer. She was asleep, or more likely too angry with him to answer.

  Exley’s old Persian rug scratched his toes as he walked toward the bedroom. She’d picked up the carpet during her posting in Pakistan. It was one of the few possessions she really cared about, its reds faded but the weave still tight. The apartment had only three rooms—this living room, their bedroom, and a spare bedroom where Jessica, Exley’s daughter, slept when the kids stayed over.

  Exley and Wells had talked about finding something bigger, maybe a row house on Capitol Hill so her kids could have their own bedrooms. David, Exley’s son, was ten, too old to sleep on the lumpy couch in the living room. Maybe someplace with a garden for Wells to weed and plant. Someplace they could keep a Lab, a big happy mutt that would slobber all over the house. They had even called a broker, gone to a few open houses. But everything they saw was too expensive, or too run-down, or too big, or small, or... The truth was that the house-hunting filled Wells with dread. He had run so long that he could hardly imagine being penned in by four walls and a roof.

  Left unsaid was the possibility that the new house might be a place for him and Exley to have a baby of their own. Wells didn’t know how he felt about becoming a father, though somehow it seemed less scary than buying a house. He didn’t even know if Exley could get pregnant. She was on the wrong side of forty, but women that age had babies these days. Didn’t they?

  He stepped into her—their—bedroom. The lights were out, but an infomercial for an all-in-one barbecue grill played silently on the little television on her desk. Outside, the sky was just starting to lighten.

  “Jenny? You awake? You won’t believe what happened tonight.” Even as he said the words, he wondered if he should tell her. He didn’t want to admit how fast he was going. Maybe he’d just have to take this up with Duto himself, though he hated visiting the seventh floor of the headquarters building, where Duto had his offices.

  Exley stayed silent as he turned off the television, kissed her forehead, smelling the lemon scent of her face wash. He could tell from her uneven breathing that she was awake, but if she didn’t want to talk he didn’t plan to push. He put the helmet on the night-stand and pulled off his jacket.

  In one quick move she rolled over, grabbed the helmet, and threw it at him. But Wells had played linebacker in college and still had a football player’s reflexes. He caught it easily and put it on her desk.

  “Jenny, I’m sorry. I know I said I wouldn‘t, but I really needed it tonight.”

  “Where’d you go?”

  “Up 95, toward Baltimore.”

  “How fast?”

  “I don’t know, Seventy, seventy-five miles an hour. Nothing I can’t handle.”

  “John. Please. Shafer’s had a helicopter on you the last couple weeks.” Ellis Shafer, their boss at the agency.

  “Shafer what?” So that’s who’d been watching him tonight. “Did Duto put him up to it?”

  “Haven’t you figured out yet that Vinny Duto couldn’t care less about you, John? Shafer did it because I asked him to. He said they clocked you at a hundred ten. I wasn’t going to tell you, but that’s why I asked you to stop.”

  “Jenny—” He guessed he wouldn’t be talking to Duto after all. A small consolation.

  “I swear, John, I wish you were out drinking, screwing somebody else.” Her voice broke. “Anything but this. Every time you leave I think you’re not coming back.” He sat beside her on the bed and put his hand on her hip, but she pulled away. “Do you even care if you live or die, John?”

  “Of course.” Wells tried to ignore the fact that he’d asked himself the same question a few minutes before, with a less certain answer.

  “Then why don’t you act like it?” She searched his face with her fierce blue eyes. He looked away first, down to her breasts, their tops striated with tiny white stretch marks. Her milky white thighs. And the scar above the knee where the bullet had hit.

  “Sometimes I forget how beautiful you are,” he said.

  He heard a police siren whistling to the northeast, one of the precincts of Washington that hadn’t gentrified. The siren wasn’t as close as it sounded, he knew. Wells had spent a decade away from America, living undercover as an al Qaeda guerrilla, slowly ingratiating himself with the group. He’d picked up more than a few survival tricks along the way, including the knowledge that gunshots and sirens carried much farther at night than during the day. Just another bit of wisdom that no longer did him much good.

  “Your hand,” she said. He looked down. His left hand was trembling on his jeans. She caressed it in hers until the shaking stopped.

  “I don’t know what I’m doing anymore,” he said. For a while they were silent. She squeezed his hand and he found his voice again. “You know, I thought w
hen I woke up in the hospital and saw you there that it would all be okay. That I was out on the other side. And now . . .” In the distance a second siren rang out, then a third. Trouble in the night.

  “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.

  3

  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, 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-hou
r. 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 tank 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.