Enough, Wells thought. No more thinking. He’d volunteered to come back here. He had a job to do. “Hoo-ah!” he said to himself. He chugged half a bottle of water in one gulp, soothing his raspy throat, then poured the rest over his head, smiling in satisfaction as the lukewarm liquid ran down his face. He pulled a towel from the pack under his feet and wiped himself dry.
“Love those whores’ showers,” Lieutenant Gower said with a smirk. He was a sturdily built black man, twenty-six or so. Wells liked him, mainly because Gower, despite his obvious curiosity, hadn’t asked Wells anything about who he was. For twenty hours they’d talked about sports, played chess—Gower had beaten him handily—and otherwise ignored the question of how Wells had found his way onto this particular plane.
“Got that right,” Wells said. He decided to pull Gower’s chain. “Reminds me of ‘Nam.”
Gower’s eyes widened. “You served in Vietnam? For real?”
“Tet, Khe Sanh, all of it. I got a wall full of ears at home. Now, that was a war.”
“Serious?” Gower looked at Wells. “You’re messing with me.”
“Yeah, I am. Do I really look that old? I’d be sixty.”
“We all look sixty right about now. Tell you what, though. You got some juice. Not just anyone can get on a fully loaded C-17 on two hours’ notice.”
“I thought this was a Hooters charter to Bangkok.”
“Understood, sir,” Gower said. “Figured I’d give it a shot.”
THE CABIN’S SPEAKERS CLICKED ON. “From the cockpit. We know you love it up here, but it’s my duty to inform you we’ll be on the ground in Bagram in about thirty minutes.”
The inevitable “Hoo-ah!” passed through the cabin.
“Those of you who have visited fabulous Afghanistan before know that we like you to saddle up at this point in your trip. This is not optional.”
Throughout the cabin, soldiers pulled on their body armor and helmets. Wells reached down for his bulletproof vest, standard police-issue protective gear, far thinner than the flak jackets everyone else wore.
“That all you got?” Gower said, looking at the vest. “It’ll hardly stop a nine.” A pistol-fired, low-velocity 9-millimeter round. The plates in the Army’s flak jackets were designed to handle high-velocity 7.62-millimeter AK-47 rounds, which would shred Wells’s vest.
“I like to travel light.” Wells pulled on his helmet.
The intercom clicked on again: “For your safety, this will also be a red-light landing. We know you Army boys get friendly in the dark, but please try to keep your hands to yourself.”
The overhead lights flicked off, replaced by the eerie glow of red lights mounted in the cabin walls. “We will be coming in tactically, so strap in tight and enjoy the ride.”
Around the cabin, men buckled themselves into the harnesses attached to the walls of the C-17. “Anyway, we hope you’ve enjoyed your trip,” the pilot said. “Thanks for flying this Globemaster III. We know you have a choice of airlines, and we appreciate—Oh, no you don’t. Forget it.”
“Funny man,” Gower said.
“Wishes he was flying an F-16.” Wells tightened his harness around his shoulders. The C-17 swung hard right and tipped forward into a dive.
“He best not go all JFK Jr. on us,” Gower said. He laughed, but Wells could hear the tension in his voice.
“Don’t like flying, Lieutenant?”
“I know what you’re thinking. Why’d I sign up for the Airborne? Wife says the same thing.”
“And you tell her a man’s got to face his fears.”
“That’s right. So what are you afraid of, Mr. Brown?”
The question stopped Wells. “I’m not sure.”
“Gotta be something. Everybody’s afraid of something.”
“Failure, maybe.”
“Good answer. Gives nothing away.” Gower sounded disappointed.
But Wells knew there was another answer, one he would never share with Gower: Myself. I’m afraid of myself.
POP! POP! CHAFF FLARES EXPLODED off the C-17’s stubby wings. Then the jet swung into a corkscrew. Gower’s fists were clenched in his lap. The plane leveled out suddenly. Seconds later it touched the ground, bounced, then touched down again, rocketing along the 10,000-foot runway.
And then they were done. The brakes and thrust reversers kicked in, and the C-17 stopped in one long, smooth motion. “Welcome to Bagram Air Force Base, thirty miles north of beautiful Kabul, Afghanistan. Local time is 0200 hours,” the pilot said. No cheer this time. The abrupt landing had reminded the soldiers of the danger they were about to face, Wells thought. He scanned the tense faces around him. Many of the men in this cabin had never seen combat. Their commanders would have to help them channel their adrenaline, turning it from fear into the vigilance that might save their lives.
The Pentagon liked to think of training soldiers as a science. It was really alchemy, an unquantifiable process. Some of these men would freeze under pressure, make bad decisions, get themselves or their buddies killed. Others would find calm in the heat of battle, outthink the enemy, save themselves in seemingly impossible situations. And no test could tell them apart. Only live ammunition could.
Of course, even the best-equipped, most able soldiers didn’t always survive. Sometimes every choice was wrong. Wells had never seen Ted Beck in action, but he knew Beck’s skills. If I’d been on that boat, would I have survived? Would I have seen something he missed? Wells couldn’t say for sure, but the odds were against it.
“Ever been in combat, Lieutenant?” he said to Gower.
“Not yet, sir,” Gower said. “Anything I should know?”
“Just stay calm. You’ll be good. I can tell.” Wells hoped he was right.
The overhead lights flicked on, replacing the spectral red glow of the landing lights. Wells blinked against the white glare, remembering his dream.
“Good luck, Lieutenant.” He offered Gower his hand.
“Luck, Mr. Brown. If the 504th can be of service, lemme know.”
Wells looked at the portable chess set in Gower’s pack. “Next time, you have to teach me some openings so I can give you a game.” He felt oddly disappointed as he turned away from Gower. Another good soldier he would never see again.
BUT WHEN HE STEPPED ONTO the tarmac, a pleasant surprise awaited him. Glen Holmes stood outside the C-17, a bit thicker than he’d been when Wells had met him in 2001, but otherwise instantly recognizable.
“Mr. Wells. It’s been a long time. The Special Forces welcomes you to Bagram.”
Wells looked at the eagle on Brown’s shoulder-boards. “Colonel Holmes. You’ve moved up in the world.”
“Yeah, I’m a real trailer queen these days. Hardly leave the base.”
“Trailer queen?” Wells had to smile. “Never heard that before.”
“You’ve done all right yourself since we last met, John.” Holmes grinned. “That might be the biggest understatement of my life. You need a nap, or can I interest you in a cup of coffee?”
“Coffee sounds great.”
A few minutes later they sat in Holmes’s B-hut as a lieutenant carried in two oversized plastic tankards. “Starbucks,” Holmes said. “My wife sends it every month.” The lieutenant lingered by the door. “Thank you, Carlo,” Holmes said. “Dismissed.”
“Yes, sir.” He saluted smartly and was gone.
“Funny,” Holmes said. “He never hangs around when it’s just me.”
“Everybody here know who I am?”
“Not the regular units. But SF is too small to keep secrets. Only a few hundred of us in the whole country. Anyway, you must be used to it by now.” Holmes grinned at Wells.
“Langley seems to wish I would disappear.”
“Well, you’re among friends here.”
“You sure? Vinny Duto never shot me. More than I can say for you.” Wells tugged up his sleeve to show Holmes the scar on his biceps, left over from the night in 2001 when he’d first met Holmes.
“If I recall, you asked me to. The most surreal night of my life,” Holmes said. “I sure didn’t expect to see you again.”
“All these years—”
“And look how far we’ve come.”
Wells smiled. “Yeah, about thirty miles. So how is it these days?”
“Had to spoil the trip down memory lane,” Holmes said. “Still mostly okay. Afghanistan isn’t Iraq. Not yet, anyway. But the Talibs are getting tougher. They’ve got new tactics this year. Their snipers are more accurate. And there are these rumors they’ve got professional help.”
“Why I’m here.” Plus I’m driving the woman I love crazy, Wells didn’t say.
“If we had another division, even a couple brigades, things would be different.”
“But we don’t.”
“No, we don’t. They’re busy you know where.”
“They’d do a lot more good here.”
“We just do what we’re told.” From a file cabinet, Holmes pulled out a silver flask and two smudged glasses stamped with the Army’s “Black Knight” football logo.
“Would you be offended if I offered you a drink?”
“Not at all.”
“Glad to hear it.” Holmes poured them both a healthy shot. “Macallan, eighteen-year-old. Been saving it for the right visitor.”
“To the men you lead,” Wells said, thinking of the soldiers on the C-17.
They raised their glasses. The scotch hit Wells immediately. He wanted nothing more than to lie on the wooden floor of Holmes’s hut and sleep.
“You must be beat, John,” Holmes said. “Carlo will find you a rack. Check it before you bunk down. A scorpion stung one of my guys last week. On the ass.”
“Ouch.”
“Yeah. Got his share of shit for it too. Swing by at 1300. I’ll fill you in on what we’re planning. Your office did great work on these foreign guys. Caught something we should have figured out a while ago. It’s time for us to hit them where they live.”
“Sounds like a plan to me.”
10
“EDDIE! DINNER!”
Even in the basement, through the locked door, her voice grated on his ears.
“In a minute,” he mumbled. He tapped a Marlboro from the box on the cluttered coffee table, touched lighter to cigarette with practiced hand. He closed his eyes in satisfaction as smoke filled his lungs. A nasty habit, but so what? Everybody died sometime. He exhaled through his nose, feeling his nostrils tingle.
He was stocky but solidly built. A touch under six feet, with thinning gray hair and a forgettable face, jowly and middle-aged. The face of a manager who’d never make vice president. The smoking and the Dewar’s didn’t help. His eyes were his only memorable feature: the right brown, the left green, with a striking black stripe that cut through the iris. The flaw was purely cosmetic and didn’t affect his vision.
He was a mole, a double agent. For seven years, he had sold secrets to China. An act of treason. Punishable by life in prison. Or death.
He looked around the windowless room. A dirty white shag rug covered the floor. The walls were paneled with cheap imitation wood and decorated with framed pictures he’d taken in Hong Kong decades before. His only overseas assignment. A softball trophy from the Reston summer league sat on his desk.
He kept the trophy as an ironic joke. But what good was a joke that no one got? Everyone he knew—coworkers, neighbors, even the Mexicans who cleaned his Acura—pegged him as a capital-L loser. On pain of death, he had to hide the only interesting part of his life. Tragic. He was tragic. He puffed on the cigarette, and a kind of pride filled him with the smoke. Tragic, but heroic. He broke society’s rules, lived apart from the common mass of men. He knew the chances he took, and he—
“Eddie!”
Where had his wife learned to howl like that? He ignored her and reached for the envelope inside his green windbreaker, the letter he had picked up that morning. The paper inside was neatly folded, a single sheet printed in the oversized Arial font the Chinese always used.
“Dear Mr. T.”—he always smiled at that, a cultural reference his handlers probably didn’t get—“As always, we most appreciate your work. You are truly our most valued asset. A bonus pay of three months has been received in your account for your service. Also please accept this gift.”
The English wasn’t perfect, but he got the point. They were happy. A gold Krugerrand had been taped to the paper. Nice touch, the mole thought. They’d never given him gold before. He flicked open his Swiss Army knife and cut the coin off the letter. The springbok stamped across its back gleamed even in the smoky basement air. It felt dense enough to stop a bullet. He flipped the coin in the air and caught it neatly. And a three-month bonus? That was an extra seventy-five grand.
“Eddie! The roast will be cold!”
Janice. Always spoiling his rush.
“For the love of God, shut up!” he yelled upstairs.
He slipped the coin into his pocket and returned to the letter. The rest was routine, until the end: “In light of the most recent events prudence dictates that we Discontinue”—he wasn’t sure why they’d capitalized the word—“Marco Trap immediately.”
Marco Trap was a mailbox on Moncure Avenue, just off the Columbia Pike, that he and the Chinese used as a signaling station. A vertical chalk stripe meant he’d left documents or a flash drive at the dead drop in Wakefield. Two horizontal stripes meant they’d picked up the papers. A diagonal yellow stripe meant he or they needed an urgent face-to-face meeting. A red stripe meant an emergency, a same-day meeting.
“Please begin use Tango Trap,” the letter continued. “All other procedures remain. We regret any inconvenience but you are too worthy to take chances. Most gratefully, your friend, George.”
George, aka Colonel Gao Xi. Officially, George was a cultural liaison at the Chinese embassy, responsible for bringing pandas and acrobats to America. In reality, he ran the Washington branch of the Second Department of the Chinese army—the main intelligence service of the People’s Republic. Put another way, George was China’s top spy in America. For three years, he had served as Eddie’s personal handler. There was no greater proof of the value of the secrets Eddie delivered.
The mole skimmed the letter again, wondering why the Chinese had changed the mailbox. He couldn’t imagine their signals had been noticed. Maybe they were nervous because of what had happened in the Yellow Sea. The North Koreans hadn’t exactly been subtle. But the mole didn’t think anyone had connected the Drafter with him.
Anyway, the CIA lost sources all the time. It was part of the game. Sure, the Drafter was more valuable than most, and the fact that the agency had lost its own men trying to rescue him guaranteed that the incident would get attention. But the CIA had been in perpetual crisis in the years since September 11. The mole didn’t figure the loss of one agent would be at the top of anyone’s agenda. The East Asia desk would wind up issuing a report about the dangers of emergency exfiltrations that no one would read. By the time anyone put together what had happened in North Korea with the agency’s continuing problems recruiting in China, the mole would have retired.
The Chinese were just being paranoid, the mole decided. They’d used Marco for eighteen months. Time for someplace new. Fine with him. He got the information. George kept him safe. They were partners.
The mole took a final drag of the Marlboro, then touched its burning ember to the letter until flames swallowed up the paper and smoke filled the basement.
“Eddie! Is something burning?”
The mole picked up the .357 Smith & Wesson snubnose on the coffee table and pointed the gun at the ceiling. The thought of killing his wife was oddly comforting, but he knew he would never follow through.
He popped open the revolver’s cylinder and dropped five of the six rounds into the ashtray on the table. He pushed the cylinder shut and gave it a long spin, watching life and death click through the revolver. Life—life—life—life—life—death. Life—life—life�
�life—life—death. Smooth as traffic light turning green to red and back again.
“Round and round she goes, where she stops, nobody knows,” he said.
The cylinder stopped. The mole pointed the gun at his eye and looked down the barrel at infinity. Or, more likely, at an empty chamber. He didn’t plan to kill himself anyway. Why give the world the satisfaction? He slipped the bullets back into the cylinder, unlocked a file cabinet, and dropped the Smith & Wesson and the Krugerrand inside. He poured a healthy shot from the bottle of Dewar’s that was a fixture on the coffee table and downed the scotch in one burning swallow.
“Be right up, dear,” he yelled up the stairs.
THE KITCHEN SMELLED of pot roast and string beans. Janice might be the only woman alive who still cooked pot roast. The room was dark, lit only by a brass lamp in the corner. Janice didn’t like bright lights. They hurt her eyes, she said. She sat at the table, chewing steadily, eyes down. Lenny lay under the table, tongue hanging wetly out of his mouth as he waited for scraps. The world was in the twenty-first century and this house was stuck in 1958, down to the fresh-cut daisies on the kitchen table.
But the mole couldn’t deny that he’d built his own prison. He’d met Janice playing softball on the Mall in 1996, back from Hong Kong after his humiliation there. She was an Alabama girl, a kindergarten teacher in Reston who hung out with the Langley admins. She was the prettiest woman he’d ever dated. But even at the beginning she’d been high-strung, a Thoroughbred prone to anger and depression. And drinking, though he hadn’t realized how much until after they married. Of course, he drank more these days too.
Still, they would probably have been okay if not for their son. Janice had had a difficult pregnancy. They had needed two years, and four cycles of in vitro, before they finally conceived, and Janice had spent most of her last trimester in bed. But Mark, their baby, came out of her healthy and strong. He stayed that way for almost two years. Then one day he had a stomachache and diarrhea and a touch of fever. Dr. Ramsey, their pediatrician, took his temperature and sent them home. The second night his fever spiked to 103. Ramsey told them to put a cool towel on Mark’s head, put the boy to bed, and bring him in first thing in the morning.
The Ghost War Page 9
