The Ghost War

by Alex Berenson

Then he tripped.

  He banged down hard. Hard and loud. Wells heard the Russians scrambling. A flashlight beamed at him, no more than twenty yards away.

  Seconds later, the shooting started.

  16

  GUANGZHOU, CHINA

  THE THREE ELEVATED HIGHWAYS CAME TOGETHER in a jumble of ramps that soared above the warehouses of northern Guangzhou. Once called Canton, the city had been a commercial center in China for centuries. Now Guangzhou was a metropolis of eight million people, the manufacturing heart of southeastern China. The trucks and buses on its highways never stopped, even on damp nights like this one, when rain pounded down and the air seemed too humid to breathe.

  Beneath the highway junction lay a darker world. The concrete pillars that supported the roads formed a kind of room, noisy with the thrum of big engines in low gear. The space had no lights, but it was illuminated secondhand by cars passing on the nearby surface roads. Their headlights gave the space the unsteady glow of an after-hours club, offering glimpses of the rats that dodged through the pylons. The place wasn’t exactly a five-star hotel.

  But it was dry, Jordan Weiging thought. He had walked for hours, looking for a place to escape the rain, ever since those cops had chased him from Huangshi Boulevard. Damned cops. Jordan had learned to hate the police since he came to Guangzhou six months before. They seemed to be everywhere, and they were quick to use their sticks.

  Jordan hadn’t been looking for trouble on Huangshi, only a doorway where he could sleep in the shadows of the street’s skyscrapers. He hadn’t thought anyone would care. Huangshi was Guangzhou’s version of the Las Vegas Strip, giant hotels beside low-rent two-story bars. Even in the rain, whores walked the avenue, smiling and blowing kisses at the men who surveyed them. They wore thigh-high skirts and tight tank tops and were barely in their teens. Even the ugliest ignored Jordan, though. In their own way, they were showing him mercy. He was so obviously broke that tempting him would have been unkind.

  But the police hadn’t been so polite. Tonight they had pulled up as he rested in the shadow of the Guangdong International Hotel and told him to move on. He pleaded with them for mercy, told them he meant no harm, and one seemed ready to let him stay. But the other, a skinny man with dirty yellow teeth, spat at his feet.

  “Damned migrant,” the cop said. “We have too many of you rats already.”

  “What about them?” Jordan pointed to four street-walkers. The girls cocked their hips and cooed like pigeons at the cops.

  “The hotels don’t mind them. Anyway, they pay us in ways you can’t.” The cop tapped his wooden nightstick against his hand. “Now move.”

  SO JORDAN MOVED. The rain cut through his jacket and sweatpants and soaked his feet until he couldn’t feel them. He wanted to lie down on the cracked sidewalk and let the water wash him away. Let the cops find him and do their worst. Then he stumbled onto the space under the junction, where the North Ring Highway met the Airport Toll Road.

  The McDonald’s wrappers and dirty blankets showed him he wasn’t the first to find the space. Jordan wondered why anyone who could afford the luxury of eating at McDonald’s would sleep here. Probably the wrapper had come from the road above.

  At least he was out of the rain. He pulled off his jacket and folded it neatly, then slumped against a pylon on the cleanest patch of ground he could find. Whoever had been here before had a taste for Red Star Erguotou—cheap, strong sorghum liquor. Empty bottles of the stuff littered the place. Jordan reached for one, hoping for a few drops. He was amazed when he heard liquid sloshing inside, almost half a bottle. He took a tiny sip, coughed as the liquor burned his mouth.

  He waited a moment to be sure the bottle wasn’t contaminated, then took a longer swig. His stomach was empty—he hadn’t eaten all day—and the liquor hit him quickly. He rubbed his eyes. He wanted to believe that this bottle proved that his fate had changed. One day, when he was rich, he’d hold it up and explain to his children how he’d come to Guangzhou and built a fortune from nothing.

  He looked at the Red Star bottle, still a quarter full. He ought to save it, he knew, but he couldn’t help himself. Tonight he would drink like a rich man. He tipped up the bottle and gave himself another slug.

  JORDAN’S REAL NAME WAS JIANG. Jiang Weiging, in the traditional Chinese style, family name first and given name last. But he thought of himself as Jordan, hoping that some of the luck of Michael Jordan’s name would rub off. In his pack, he carried a dirty Chicago Bulls cap, black with a snorting, red-faced bull over the brim. His most prized possession.

  He had loved basketball as long as he could remember. During the good years, before his father got sick, his family had enough money for a television and a VCD player—a cheap Chinese version of a DVD. Jordan’s father liked basketball too. Together they’d watch highlights from the NBA that had been copied onto video disks and sold for two yuan, barely a quarter, at the market in Hanyuan.

  In his heart, Jiang knew he wasn’t much of a player. He was strong but small, barely five feet. When he was seven, he’d lost his left pinkie and ring fingers to the spokes of his father’s bicycle. So he’d never play in the NBA, the National Basketball Association—he felt a chill at the mere thought of the words, and he wondered whether the rain and the Red Star were making him sick—but he loved the game anyway.

  Americans thought the Chinese liked basketball because China was jealous of America, Jordan thought. But he didn’t want to be American. He couldn’t even imagine what it would be like to be American. He didn’t care about other American sports. But the flow of basketball, the mix of grace and power in the game, felt natural to him.

  Jordan reached into his pack and pulled out his Bulls cap. He rubbed its logo and a genuine smile creased his face. Even now he could see his namesake jumping high, slamming home a dunk.

  Jordan had come to Guangzhou from Chenhe, a village in Sichuan Province. Ziyang, his father, had died of AIDS three years before, after getting HIV from a contaminated needle. He’d been infected while selling plasma to raise money for Jordan’s school fees. To save money, the plasma collection stations reused needles, a horribly efficient way to spread the virus. Whole villages were infected before Beijing outlawed the practice.

  After Ziyang got sick, Jordan took his father’s place in the fields. He couldn’t afford more school anyway. “Without money you can’t expect a miracle,” his mother told him. Jordan had gotten seven years of school, and he figured that was enough. He could add, subtract, multiply, and divide. He read well enough to get by, though the complicated characters confused him. For two years, he and his mother muddled along.

  Then she took sick, losing weight, coughing furiously, clots of phlegm and blood. Jordan brought her to the hospital in Hanyuan. The doctors looked her over and said they couldn’t do anything, even if she could have afforded treatment. She died a few months later, leaving Jordan alone. His nearest relatives were his second cousins, who lived in a village a few miles away and could hardly feed their own children.

  He collected a few yuan by selling off his mother’s clothes and the little television, and set off for Guangzhou, the heart of the Chinese manufacturing miracle. He’d just turned sixteen. Everyone knew there was work to be had in Guangzhou and Shenzen, the twin boomtowns of Guangdong Province. Boys not much older than Jordan had come back from Guangzhou with motorcycles and computers. Some had even built houses for their families. He would find a job too.

  But he didn’t.

  What Jordan didn’t know, what he couldn’t be expected to understand, was that China was a victim of its own success. The factories that made toys and shoes and cheap furniture, the low-skill products that had provided jobs for tens of millions of migrants like Jordan, were themselves migrating to other Asian countries. In Indonesia and Vietnam, land was cheaper, construction costs lower, the workers equally diligent. In higher-end manufacturing for laptops and televisions and cars, China was still growing. But no chip company would hire a sixteen-year-old
boy with eight fingers and a seventh-grade education. For the low-end jobs that were left, in construction and basic laboring, Jordan was competing with men who were older and stronger than he. The cop who’d rousted him was right. Guangzhou had too many migrants.

  So Jordan joined the endless stream of workers who trudged between construction sites and run down factories, offering their labor for a few yuan a day. Some days he found work, and on those nights he slept with his belly full. But even in the last few weeks the jobs had gotten scarcer, the crowds outside the factories bigger. He’d worked only three times in the last week. He’d spent his money as carefully as he could. He hadn’t permitted himself a bottle of Coke, his favorite treat, in months. Even so, he was down to his last twenty yuan—less than three dollars—hidden in the brim of his Bulls hat. He didn’t want to spend those two crumpled ten-yuan bills, didn’t want to be left with nothing. So he was holding on to them, even though he felt faint with hunger and had begun to hear the voice of his father in his head telling him to eat.

  Maybe tomorrow he could convince a restaurant to let him wash dishes in return for some spoiled vegetables or day-old fish. Yes, tomorrow he’d try the restaurants. He closed his eyes and thought of steaming hot soup, thick with dumplings, as his mother had made during the good years. He took another sip of the Red Star and drifted off to sleep.

  HE OPENED HIS EYES to see two men looking curiously at him. He scrambled up, keeping his back to the pylon. He had a knife in his bag, a cheap switchblade that had once been his dad’s.

  But the men didn’t seem threatening. They were much older than he was, and their faces were weary. One was the thinnest man Jordan had ever seen. The other was fat and held a bottle of Red Star. As Jordan looked at him, he sat down slowly. Jordan couldn’t tell if he had meant to sit or just given up on standing.

  “So you’ve found the Hotel Guangzhou,” the thin man said. He laughed, a rasping laugh that became a hacking cough that shook his body. Jordan’s mother had coughed that way a few months before she died. When the cough stopped, the man pulled a crumpled pack of cigarettes from his pocket. He put one in his mouth. “Want a cigarette, boy?”

  “I don’t smoke.”

  “May as well start. You’ll die faster. Less time to suffer.” The man laughed and tossed him the pack and the lighter. Jordan looked at the cigarettes. Basketball players didn’t smoke, he was sure.

  “Try one,” the man said. “You’ll feel less hungry.”

  At that, Jordan put the cigarette to his lips. His hand trembled as he lit it. The sour smoke filled his mouth and he coughed.

  “Easy, boy. A little at a time to start.”

  Jordan took a small puff and choked the smoke into his lungs. His brain seemed to come alive. The feeling wasn’t entirely pleasant, but he hadn’t felt so awake in weeks. He took a longer drag.

  “Not so much, boy, or you’ll regret it.”

  Too late. Nausea filled him. He slumped against the pylon. But he held on to the cigarette, and when the feeling passed he took another, more tentative puff. This time he felt better. And the man was right. His hunger was gone. “It works.”

  The thin man rubbed his hands together. “Yu, I’ve gotten him hooked. My good deed for the day.” He laughed his awful hacking laugh. A moment later, Yu giggled drunkenly back, a high-pitched sound that didn’t fit his heavy body.

  The thin man sat beside Jordan, who flinched. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m not one of those. My name’s Song. What’s yours?”

  “Jiang,” Jordan said.

  “Where do you come from, Jiang?”

  “Sichuan Province. I came here to work.”

  “Of course you did. If only you’d come last year, or the year before that—Well, anyway.” Song braced a hand on the ground and stood, slowly unfolding his skinny limbs. Watching him made Jordan smile. Song moved like a puppet whose strings had gotten tangled.

  “Do you like basketball?” Jordan said. He suddenly very much wanted Song to stay and talk. The skinny old man was the first person who’d treated him with any kindness in months.

  “Sure. Why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “If you like, we can look for work together tomorrow,” Song said. “We may not find any, but at least Yu and I can show you the city. You see what a success we’ve made here.” He kicked ineffectually at Yu, who lay on his side with his eyes closed. “Don’t you want your blanket, fat pig?” But Yu simply rolled away.

  “Good night, Jiang.”

  “Good night, Master Song.”

  And Song laughed again, so hard that he had to lean against a concrete pylon to stay upright. “Master ... master ...”

  Jordan closed his eyes and listened to Song’s hacking. Life had to get better, he thought. It could hardly get worse. He sipped his bottle of Red Star until sleep took him. And as he finally drifted off, he had no way of imagining that soon enough he would provoke a crisis whose repercussions would echo around the world.

  17

  THE FLASHLIGHT FLICKED OFF and in the dark the shots ricocheted past Wells like a jackhammer gone mad. Wells pressed his head down, brushing his lips against the stone and dirt, as shards of rock rained down on him.

  The pace of firing slowed and Wells lifted his head. “Stop!” he yelled in his perfect Arabic. “Stop! It’s Mohammed! Don’t shoot!”

  Silence. Then another fusillade of shots. For now the darkness and the tunnel were protecting him, making it hard for the Russians to get a bead on him. Only his head and shoulders were visible, making him a very narrow target. They would need a perfect lucky shot to get him. But if they kept shooting from twenty yards out, they’d get that shot eventually. Or they might roll a grenade his way—though blowing up the tunnel would block their only sure escape route.

  The shooting stopped. “Mohammed?” a man shouted.

  “Mohammed, brother of Ahmed.”

  “Brother of Ahmed?” The Arabic was rusty, Russian-accented.

  “Brother of Ahmed!” Wells yelled. He only needed to distract them for a few seconds. “I know these tunnels. I can save us.” Wells braced his right hand, the one holding his Makarov, against the tunnel. A surge of pain ripped through his damaged shoulder and he gritted his teeth.

  With his left hand, Wells reached for his flash-bang grenades. He still intended to take at least one of these men alive. He unhooked the flash-bangs and wriggled his left arm forward until the grenades were in front of him. He braced his right hand, the one holding the Makarov, against the side of the tunnel.

  “Yes, my Russian brothers. I know these tunnels. The path to the left leads—”

  “Wait—speak slowly—” the man at the other end called in his broken Arabic.

  “Topko ubeyte ego!” the second man yelled.

  Wells had heard enough Russian during his days in Chechnya to know what that meant. Just kill him.“Grenade,” the man added, a word that needed no translation.

  “Nyet,” the other man said. Wells relaxed a little. Nyet on the grenade, da on the flashlight, which would make an excellent target.

  He chattered in Arabic down the tunnel. “You must know Ahmed. He wears his robe loose but his shorts tight. Men love him, though sheep fear him—” For the second time in an hour, the thrill of combat filled Wells. Crackheads must feel this elation when they put flame to pipe. Zeus. I am Zeus.

  “Topko ubeyte ego,” the man said again. The unmistakable click of a magazine being jammed into an AK-47 echoed down the tunnel.

  At the end of the tunnel, the flashlight clicked on. This time the Russians wouldn’t fire blindly. They started shooting in short bursts. A rock fragment cut Wells’s cheek, under his eye, and blood flowed warm down his face.

  But now Wells could aim too. He squeezed off two shots from the Makarov. He heard a yelp in Russian and the flashlight dropped to the ground. Now they might be desperate enough to send a grenade at him. Before they could, he tumbled the flash-bangs down the tunnel. As the grenades rolled away, he
buried his head in his hands, closed his eyes, and counted to himself like a kid playing touch football at recess: “One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Missi—”

  THE NAME FLASH-BANG DIDN’T begin to do justice to these grenades. Through his squeezed-tight eyelids, Wells saw a pure white light. The noise from the explosions was louder than anything he had ever heard, something more than sound. A shock wave pummeled his ears. He knew he wasn’t moving, couldn’t be inside the narrow tunnel, yet he seemed to be spinning in two directions at once. The men howled in Russian, their voices barely audible over the noise in Wells’s head.

  Wells opened his eyes and breathed in deeply. The heavy thermite smell of the grenades brought him back to reality. He needed to move fast, before the Russians regained their bearings. On hands and knees, Wells crawled forward in the dark. The tunnel spun around him. He concentrated on the blood flowing down his cheek and didn’t stop moving. His stomach tightened and a surge of nausea overcame him. Before he could hold back, Gatorade and soda crackers burned his throat and poured out of his mouth. He ate lightly before missions and this was why.

  Wells grabbed the side of the tunnel. Somehow he kept moving, pumping his legs forward. Hours passed, or seconds, and then the walls opened up around him. He lost his balance and fell, landing on one of the Russians. The man was twisting sideways, moaning, hands wrapped around his ears. The grenades had blown out his eardrums, Wells thought. The man grabbed feebly at him, but Wells jammed the Makarov into his mouth and pulled the trigger. The Russian’s arm trembled and fell, a last hopeless flutter.

  Wells rolled off the corpse and waited, listening in the dark. He was guessing that the man he’d killed had taken the worst of the flash-bangs. The second one might be able to move, or at least to crawl. He waited, listened, and—

  There.