The Ghost War

by Alex Berenson

  PAST THE TELEVISION TRUCKS, the crowd quickened. They were close now. Just ahead the avenue opened into Tiananmen like a river pouring into a lake, and Wells saw the astonishing breadth of the square. He’d expected something like the Washington Mall. A manicured space, carefully maintained. Instead Tiananmen was a fixer-upper, a hole in the middle of a giant city, all the more powerful for its rawness.

  From its northeast corner, where Wells had walked in, Tiananmen stretched south a half-mile, west a quarter-mile. The thick red walls of the Forbidden City marked its north side. The hall housing Mao’s body sat in the southern half of the square, behind a tall granite obelisk, a smaller version of the Washington Monument.

  As Wells oriented himself, protesters flooded by, joining the hundreds of thousands of people already huddled in the center of Tiananmen. Shouts came in bursts from the loudspeakers around the square. Warnings or exhortations to the crowd? Wells didn’t know. There was so much he didn’t know today. All his life he’d felt privileged, and sometimes cursed, by what he’d been allowed to see. But he had never, not even on his first day in Afghanistan, been so much of an outsider. He was in the eye of a human hurricane, watching a maelstrom whose physics were beyond his understanding, a force of nature uninterested in him, yet with the power to tear him apart.

  THE SECURITY FORCES HAD LEFT the center of Tiananmen to the protesters. But at the northwest corner, where an avenue led toward the Zhongnanhai leadership compound, a green wall of soldiers stood shoulder to shoulder before a phalanx of armored personnel carriers. Hundreds more soldiers blocked the entrance to the Forbidden City, where a giant banner of Mao hung from the outer wall of the palace.

  Wells turned right, toward the banner, where the police had opened a path for any tourists brave or dumb enough to come to the Forbidden City today. An archway cut through the outer palace wall, directly under the portrait of Mao. This was the Gate of Heavenly Peace, the southern entrance to the palace complex.

  And as Wells walked through the gate, it lived up to its name. The crackle of the Tiananmen loudspeakers faded away. “Open?” Wells asked the sweet-faced girl inside the ticket booth. He still couldn’t quite believe it. But she nodded.

  As she handed him a ticket, a man grabbed his elbow. “You American? I student. Beijing University. Name is Sun.”

  “Sure you are,” Wells said. Cops looked the same everywhere. This guy could have been the brother of the cabbie Wells had ditched two hours before. His shoes—black lace-up boots—were polished. Had any student anywhere ever polished his shoes?

  “I take you,” Sun said. “Practice my English. Free.”

  “I’ll pass. I’m kind of antisocial.” Wells held up the audio guide, which, weirdly, was narrated by Roger Moore. “Besides, I got the tour and everything.”

  Wells handed over his ticket to the guard and walked through the front entrance. When he looked back, he wasn’t surprised to see Sun about a hundred feet behind, conspicuously tailing him. What would Jim Wilson do? Wells turned around.

  “This is my only day sightseeing and I don’t know why you’re bothering me.”

  “Not bothering,” Sun said. “Just watching out. Not good day for American here.”

  “So I’m told.”

  But Wells decided not to argue further. It was only 9:45 A.M., and the meet was supposed to be at noon, so he had two hours to lose this guy. He wandered through the palace, doing his best impression of a half-bored, half-awed American tourist. Which wasn’t difficult. The Forbidden City wasn’t a European-style palace like Versailles, a mansion filled with decorated rooms. Instead, the complex consisted of empty courtyards divided by ceremonial halls. The Hall of Complete Harmony. The Hall of Preserving Harmony. The Hall of Supreme Harmony. The emperors had been big on harmony. They wouldn’t have been happy today, Wells thought.

  To the north, the inner palace held the emperor’s living quarters, elaborately carved wooden pavilions, painted deep red to symbolize the emperor’s power. The average Chinese had been barred from the complex on pain of death—hence the palace’s name. But over the years, the palace had been ransacked so many times that today its buildings were mostly empty. Without Roger Moore to guide him, Wells wouldn’t have known what he was seeing.

  Besides the audio tour, he’d brought his own pocket-sized guide to the Forbidden City. He thumbed through it as Sun trailed behind, the world’s slowest chase. Wells shooed him off a couple times, to no effect. The complex got slightly busier as the morning went on. At 11:00, a dozen nervous-looking American tourists walked past, watched by two bored police officers. Wells guessed they’d come through the palace’s northern gate, not the Tiananmen entrance. He wondered what they were making of this. Joe and Phyllis from Sacramento probably hadn’t expected war when they signed up for seven nights in China.

  Finally, at 11:45, in the northwestern corner of the palace complex, where narrow cobblestone corridors connected irregularly shaped courtyards, Wells found a way to lose Sun. He reminded himself not to run.

  Wells ducked through a group of Japanese sightse ers and into a wooden pavilion housing a display of court costumes. As the Japanese clustered at the entrance, blocking Sun for a precious few seconds, Wells jogged through the pavilion and hopped over a railing into an alley, then sprinted along the side of the building. Thirty yards down, the building ended and the alley formed a T-intersection with another pathway. Wells swung right, ran a few feet along the pavilion, then hopped over another railing and back inside the building.

  He flattened himself against a display case and peeked out. Sun reached the intersection, panting. He twisted left and right, looking for Wells. Finally he trotted left, toward the center of the complex. Perfect. Wells waited a few seconds more, then walked out the pavilion’s front entrance. He felt as though he’d rid himself of a piece of gum stuck to his shoe. Losing Sun wouldn’t matter if the cops were watching the meeting site, but Wells was glad to be rid of the guy anyway.

  He made his way into the palace’s northeast corner, a quiet area filled with narrow pavilions and gardens. Over the years, emperors had competed to build the most beautiful spaces, adding narrow cypress trees whose bodies twisted like flames and the Buddhist rock gardens more common in Japan. The meeting with Cao was supposed to happen in a garden famous for a sculpted piece of rock known as “The Stone That Looks Like Wood.” All morning Wells had wondered if he’d recognize it. But when he stepped into the garden where the stone stood, he knew he was in the right place.

  Unfortunately, the stone wasn’t the reason.

  Until now, Wells had seen no Chinese tourists in the palace today. Understandable, considering the protests in Tiananmen. But this garden was the exception. Five Chinese had decided it was a perfect place to relax. A young couple sat side by side on a bench, holding hands. Three men in their early twenties sketched a cypress tree, their hands flying over their pads.

  Why here?Why now? Wells knew. The agents were good, nonchalant, and yet their nonchalance was a tip-off as obvious as Sun’s polished shoes. Two hours before, when he’d walked through the Gate of Heavenly Peace, he’d stepped into the open maw of the People’s Republic, and yard by yard he’d slipped into its gullet. The game he’d played with Sun seemed absurdly childish now.

  Maybe Cao had been set up too. Or maybe Shafer and Exley had been right all along, and Cao was part of the trap. But the bad guys knew about the meeting for sure. Somewhere nearby a squad of secret police was waiting to arrest him.

  Wells kept walking. Turning and running wouldn’t help. He had nowhere to go. He might as well see who showed up. He stopped beside the stone that looked like wood. It did, too, like a piece of flotsam sculpted smooth by waves. Wells checked his watch—12:00. In a minute, or two, he would walk on, casually, leave the garden. Then—

  “Hey, mister!” A kid scuffled into the garden, waving at him. A kid?

  Per Cao’s instructions, Wells was wearing a green T-shirt, the contact signal. The kid, also wearing a gree
n shirt, walked over. “Mr. Green,” he said.

  “Is this a joke?” Wells couldn’t help himself. Was this part of the setup? Why didn’t they just arrest him?

  “You Mr. Green, right? I meet you at stone like wood.” The kid seemed to be enjoying himself. “I know code word,” he said.

  Somewhere over the walls of the courtyard, a man shouted in Chinese. The students dropped their sketch pads and walked toward him.

  “Tell me,” Wells said.

  “Ghost.”

  “You’re crazy, kid.”

  “For you.” The kid reached into his pocket for a package hardly bigger than a pack of Juicy Fruit. A flash drive. He handed it to Wells and ran away. He didn’t get far. The students grabbed him roughly. Then footsteps clattered behind Wells.

  He turned to see two men, the biggest Chinese he’d ever seen, as tall and muscular as NBA power forwards. They reached for him, wrapped their meaty hands around him. He didn’t try to fight. Another man followed. And as the power forwards twisted Wells’s arms behind his back, the third man reached into his pocket for a black canvas hood.

  “Wait—” Wells said. But the world went black, and around his neck the string drew tight.

  31

  THE DARK BLUE BUOY, about the size of a basketball, popped to the surface of the East China Sea and fired an electronic burst into the atmosphere. A fraction of a second later, the Bei, a satellite 22,000 miles overhead, registered the buoy’s electronic signature and responded with an encrypted transmission of its own.

  Just that quickly, the Xian, the newest submarine in China’s fleet, was in contact with its masters onshore—all the while remaining five hundred feet below the surface of the ocean, connected to the buoy by a fiber-optic cable. The technology was the most advanced in the world, a generation ahead of similar systems on American submarines. The Xian could even get real-time video imagery of ships all over the western Pacific, thanks to a network of Chinese satellites in low earth orbit that were connected to the Bei through a control center near Beijing.

  Of course, the Xian had to be careful not to stay connected for too long. The United States monitored Chinese satellites, and after a few seconds, American signals-intelligence equipment on Guam, Okinawa, and Alaska could begin to target the buoy’s location. To protect itself, the Xian made contact with the Bei only twice a day.

  Still, the satellite link had proven extraordinarily useful, Captain Tong Pei thought. Especially now, with American ships searching for Chinese subs. Thanks to the link, the Xian could get orders while staying hidden at the bottom of the thermocline—a layer of water where the ocean’s temperature dropped quickly, distorting sound waves and making the Xian much harder to find.

  Before taking over the Xian, Tong had commanded attack submarines for almost two decades. He was the most experienced commander in China’s fleet. But he had never commanded a boat remotely like the Xian. And he had never been on a mission like this one.

  Twelve hours before, at 0100, Tong had received his initial orders for this operation. He expected that the transmission they’d just received would include the final confirmation. He was glad to have the fail-safe of two separate orders. He wasn’t nervous, not exactly, but what he was about to do would echo around the world, and he wanted to be sure he wasn’t making a mistake.

  THE XIAN WAS THE THIRD of China’s new Shanghai-class subs, by far the most advanced submarines that China had ever built. Until a few years before, China’s armed forces had relied on leaky ships, rusting submarines, and fighter jets whose design dated from the Korean War. China had refused to show its weapons to visiting American generals, for fear that they would sneer at the country’s weakness.

  These days, China still kept its ships and jets secret. But now the country wanted to hide its strength. Chinese students studied engineering and software and fluid dynamics at the top universities in the United States. Some stayed in America and made fortunes in Silicon Valley. But most came home, and more than a few were working for China’s navy—whose top priority was building a submarine that could challenge the American fleet.

  China’s focus on undersea warfare was pragmatic. Building surface ships capable of challenging the United States would cost hundreds of billions of dollars, more than China could afford, at least for now. Even a single nuclear-powered aircraft carrier was a massively expensive proposition. No country, not even the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War, had tried to compete with the United States in aircraft carriers.

  But submarines were much cheaper, billions of dollars instead of hundreds of billions. And a lone sub could wreak havoc on an opposing fleet. In World War II, a single German submarine had sunk forty-seven boats in less than two years. Of course, the Xian wouldn’t sink forty-seven American ships, but if it scuttled even one it would change the balance of power in the western Pacific, forcing the Americans to back off China’s coast.

  Taking out an American boat wouldn’t be easy. The American navy had not been seriously challenged since the Battle of Midway in World War II, when it decimated the Japanese fleet and started the United States on the path to victory in the Pacific. The collapse of the Soviet Union had only lengthened its lead. Its aircraft carriers, destroyers, and nuclear attack submarines were the best in the world.

  But if any submarine could successfully break through the American defenses, it was the Xian. Put into the water just last fall, the Xian was the most advanced diesel-electric submarine ever built—in China or anywhere else. Noise-reducing anechoic tiles coated its hull. A seven-blade skewed propeller enabled it to slice through the water almost silently. Advanced electric batteries powered it, allowing it to stay underwater for weeks.

  Further, the PLA’s engineers had greatly improved the Xian’s secondary power source. Besides its batteries, the sub had an “air-independent propulsion” system of hydrogen fuel cells. When the batteries and fuel cells ran together, they could push the Xian to thirty knots in short bursts, almost as fast as American nuclear subs.

  The Chinese had also nearly closed the gap with the electronics and sonar systems that the U.S. Navy used. The Xian’s computers ran noise-filtering and noise-recognition software that made the Xian’s sonar operators, for the first time, competitive with those on American submarines. And the Xian’s satellite link meant that it could get regular updates on ships far outside its sonar range. The combination meant that the Xian could avoid the submarines and frigates that formed the outer cordon of American battle groups and get within torpedo range of the big prizes, the destroyers and cruisers and carriers that were the heart of the United States fleet.

  And at that point the Xian had an even more unpleasant surprise for the American navy.

  INSIDE THE XIAN, Tong read over the order one final time and tucked it into his pocket. “Retract the buoy,” he murmured to his communications officer. Then, to his operations officer, “Any change in the target’s direction?”

  “No, sir. Still one-eighty at twenty knots”—directly south, toward the Xian, which was cruising north—“at fifteen knots. Range now seventy kilometers”—about forty miles.

  “Take us to sixty meters”—two hundred feet, in the middle of the thermocline.

  “Yes, sir.” The ops officer tapped the touch screen in front of him a few times and the Xian began to ascend, so gracefully that Tong could hardly feel it rise.

  “Set us on combat status.”

  “Yes, sir.” The officer tapped his screen three more times. All over the submarine, LCD panels turned from a steady green to a flashing yellow, warning the Xian’s crew that an attack might be imminent and that silence—always important on a submarine—was more crucial than ever.

  “And ready the Typhoons for launch.”

  Tong felt the surprise in the room as he spoke. The ops officer paused, only for a second, before he answered.

  “The Typhoons. Yes, sir.”

  The control room was nearly silent now. On his control monitor Tong saw the Xian slowly
rise toward the surface: 150 meters ... 140 ... 130 ... The officers and crew moved precisely, no wasted motion, not even wasted breath, yet the anticipation in the cramped room was palpable. These men all knew now what they were about to do. And they were ready.

  TWENTY MINUTES LATER TONG’S MONITOR briefly flashed red, alerting him that they were now twenty kilometers—about twelve miles—from the target, within range of the Typhoons. The Xian carried two of them, Chinese versions of the Russian VA-111 Shkval.

  Though they were called torpedoes, Shkvals were basically short-range cruise missiles that targeted ships, and the Russians had never been able to make them work properly. They often outran their guidance systems and badly missed their targets. They also had an unnerving habit of swinging back on the subs that launched them. When the Kursk, a Russian nuclear sub, sank in the Barents Sea in 2000, there were rumors, never proven, that a malfunctioning Shkval had caused the accident. For whatever reason, after the Kursk went down, the Russians stopped trying to build Shkvals.

  Despite those problems, China’s admirals had seen the Shkval’s potential as they searched for a weapon that might overcome the American fleet. At a secret lab outside Shanghai, their naval scientists had spent five years redesigning the missile’s guidance systems and engine. And they’d succeeded. In tests off Hong Kong in the last two years, the Typhoon had proven capable of successful launches from as far as twenty-five kilometers out—about fifteen miles.

  But those targets were obsolete oil tankers, not American destroyers with the most advanced counter-torpedo systems in the world. No one in the Chinese navy really knew how the Typhoon would perform in combat.

  They were about to find out, Tong thought.