The Ghost War

by Alex Berenson

“Reduce speed to ten knots,” he said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Do we have final visual confirmation?”

  The operations officer tapped his screen again, and there it was, a recon photo straight from the satellite overhead, time-stamped 12:55, the big gray boat cutting sturdily through the waves, the photograph’s resolution good enough to reveal the big “73” painted in white on its side.

  The DDG-73. The USS Decatur.

  Tong admired the precision with which his commanders had calculated this mission. Despite all China’s progress, America still thought that China was a poor backward nation unworthy of respect. The Decatur had killed twenty-two Chinese, and the United States had not even apologized.

  Today China would have its revenge. The Xian would fire one Typhoon, enough to cripple the destroyer but not sink it. An eye for an eye, as the Americans said. And the Americans would learn what they should have already known, that they needed to treat the People’s Republic as an equal.

  “Reduce speed to three knots.” The Typhoons had one great weakness. They could be launched only when the Xian was nearly stopped. But since the Decatur had no idea that the Xian was in the vicinity, the submarine’s speed hardly mattered.

  “Yes, sir.” The Xian slowed perceptibly.

  “Prepare to dive to two hundred meters on my command.” Hit or miss, Tong didn’t plan to hang around once he launched. The Americans would expect him to flee west, to the Chinese coast. Instead he planned to take the Xian southeast, into the open ocean, and depend on the sub’s ability to stay silent.

  The combat center was hushed now, every man looking at Lieutenant Han, the sub’s weapons control officer. Tong nodded to Han. “Fire.”

  “Away,” Han said quietly.

  The Xian shifted slightly as the Typhoon left its hull. Tong heard—or maybe just felt—the hum as the underwater missile accelerated away. A couple of his men gave each other tentative thumbs-up signals, but Tong didn’t even smile. “Now dive,” he said. They would have time later to savor what they’d done. If they survived.

  TWO HUNDRED FEET ABOVE THE XIAN, and ten miles north, Captain Henry Williams sat in the Decatur‘s combat information center. He was glad to be well off the coast, out of range of Chinese captains who might want to avenge the previous week’s accident by trying to ram his ship.

  The Navy had finished its preliminary inquiry into the crash. As Williams had expected, it had found he’d done nothing wrong. Still, the days since the accident had been difficult. Willams couldn’t understand why a bunch of college students had thought that playing games with an American destroyer would be a good idea.

  So now the Decatur was cruising loops in the East China Sea, and Williams was splitting his time between his ship and the Reagan, where he’d met three times with the Navy’s internal investigators. He’d even lost the pretty L.A. Times reporter, Jackie, who’d gotten bored after a couple days sailing laps and headed back to the Reagan. Probably for the best, Williams thought glumly. Neither he nor his men believed they had caused the accident, but killing twenty-two civilians didn’t do wonders for morale. Even in the combat center, his officers seemed to be moving at three-quarters speed. Maybe he ought to call a meeting, make sure his men knew they’d done nothing wrong.

  The torpedo alarm blared, jolting Williams to full attention. Had to be false, he thought. No way could a Chinese sub get close enough to launch on them without being picked up by his sonar operators.

  Next to Williams, Lieutenant Umsle, the Decatur’s tactical action officer, was already on his phone. “Sonar’s confirming a launch, sir.”

  In an instant, the ship’s morale became the least of Williams’s problems. “General quarters!” he said. “Immediately !”

  A siren rang across the ship. “General quarters! All hands to battle stations! This is not a drill!”

  Umsle listened for a few seconds more before hanging up. “The good news is we should have plenty of time. It’s way out. Twenty thousand meters.”

  Even a fast torpedo covered only forty-five knots an hour, about 1,300 meters a minute. The Decatur would have at least fifteen minutes for evasive action, and the fish would probably run out of fuel before it reached the Decatur. Obviously, the Chinese captain had been so worried that he would be spotted that he had been afraid to launch from close in.

  “Full power to the turbines and hard left,” Williams said. Preserving his ship was the first priority. Then the Navy could bring its attack subs into the area and take out the Chinese sub that had been foolish enough to make this hopeless swipe.

  “Yes, sir.” A jolt of power ran through the ship as the engines began to produce peak power.

  Umsle’s phone rang again. He listened, then handed Williams the black handset. “You need to hear this, sir.”

  “Sir.” It was Terry Cyrus, the Decatur’s sonar chief. “We’re getting an unusual read. The bogey looks like it’s running at two hundred fifty knots.”

  “That can’t be right.”

  “I know. But it is.”

  A Shkval? Those were Russian, and anyway they didn’t work.

  “You’re certain?”

  “Certain, sir. The arrays are running perfectly. It’s unmistakable.”

  “Is it on us?”

  “Unclear. It may be a two-stager.” In other words, the missile would slow once it got close to the Decatur and become a conventional acoustic wake-homing torpedo.

  “Okay. Assuming it’s on us, how many minutes to impact?”

  “Three.”

  Three minutes. “Thank you, chief.” Williams turned to Umsle. “Hail the XO”—the executive officer, the Decatur‘s second-in-command, currently on the bridge—“and tell him to get the damage teams ready for impact in three minutes. We’re not outrunning this thing.”

  THE NEXT MINUTES SEEMED to pass in a single breath. The torpedo-missile, whatever it was, closed steadily. It seemed to be running blind, not changing course to track the Decatur, but that didn’t comfort Williams. It surely would deploy a second guidance system once it got close. Indeed, two miles from the Decatur, the torpedo surfaced briefly and corrected its course, turning toward the destroyer.

  What Williams didn’t know was that the Typhoon had a GPS system and a satellite transceiver that linked it to the Bei overhead, enabling it to home in on the Decatur effortlessly. The Decatur‘s towed array, which created a noisy “wake” capable of confusing a conventional acoustic homing torpedo, had no chance of stopping the Typhoon.

  Once the torpedo corrected its course, Williams accepted the inevitable. Time to focus on saving his men. “Clear the turbine room,” he said to Umsle. The engine rooms were close to the waterline and filled with heavy equipment—among the most vulnerable spaces on the ship. “And tell everyone else to buckle down for impact.”

  For just a second, Williams let himself pray. Please, God, make it a dud.

  It wasn’t.

  The explosion cut through the destroyer’s half-inch-thick steel hull, tearing a twelve-foot hole just above the waterline. For a few moments, chaos ruled. The 8,000-ton warship shuddered with the impact, then began to list. Water roared through the hole in the armored plates, flooding the turbine room. Eleven sailors died in the explosion, and six others were swept into the ocean, their bodies never recovered. Fuel poured out of a line burst by the explosion, setting off two small fires.

  Still, Williams was proud of the way his crew and his ship responded after the explosion. The years of emergency training had paid off. Within three minutes, the Decatur‘s firefighting squads had put out the fires, the most serious threat to the integrity of the ship. Within seven minutes, the bulkheads were sealed and Williams had his first damage report. And five minutes after that, the most seriously injured sailors had been evacuated and were receiving medical attention in the infirmary, awaiting helicopter transfer to the Reagan.

  At that point Williams allowed himself to think for the first time of what the Chinese had done. The sub wa
s gone. The explosion had damaged the Decatur’ s sonar gear, and even if he could find the sub, Williams was in no position to chase it. Not with his boat crippled, not facing this silent submarine and mysterious supertorpedo. Already the Navy had begun to search for the sub, moving a half-dozen surface ships and three attack submarines toward its last known location. Williams wondered if they’d find it. It had sure sneaked up on his sonar operators, and they graded above average every time the Navy tested them. The Chinese had obviously improved their technology in the last couple of years. The fleet was going to have to be much more careful out here, Williams knew that much.

  He knew something else too. New torpedoes, new sub, new whatever, the Chinese had made a big mistake today. Did they really think that the United States wouldn’t punish them for what they’d done?

  32

  WELLS SNAPPED AWAKE.

  And wished he hadn’t. Lava burned through his right shoulder, the one he’d dislocated in Afghanistan. He twisted his head, looking around, trying to get his bearings. He seemed to be ... he was ... hanging off the ground, trussed like a pig in a slaughterhouse. His wrists were handcuffed over his head, dangling from a steel chain attached to the wall behind him. His ankles were pulled up behind so they were at waist height and attached to shackles mounted directly to the wall. His knees and shoulders bore all his weight, and his body tilted forward, over the cement floor. If his arms were cut loose, he’d slam his head on it before he could get his hands down to break his fall. He tried to hold himself still; the slightest twitch caused the pain in his shoulder to spike, tendons catching fire one by one.

  Wells looked around the room. His pants, shirt, and shoes and socks sat neatly in a corner. But they hadn’t taken off his black, Halloween-themed boxers. Exley had tried to switch him to boxer-briefs, promising that they’d flatter him, her only effort to upgrade his wardrobe. Now he was glad he’d refused. Though even formfitting shorts might be less ridiculous than smiling jack-o‘-lanterns. Trick or treat indeed. What underwear went best with torture, anyway? Wells supposed the question was unanswerable. Black might be good choice. Hide the blood.

  A tiny part of him admired the precision of the setup. His captors could get at his face, his legs, his neck, his everything, without repositioning him. Escape was a fantasy. The shackles were so tight he could hardly feel his hands and feet. He would be up here until they let him out. Or he died.

  THE CELL AROUND HIM wasn’t reassuring. Twenty feet square, with only a couple of battered wooden chairs for furniture. Windowless, of course. White-tiled walls. The floor stained with dark whorls, remembrance of agonies past. A drain set in the middle of the floor, to ease the disposal of blood and vomit. A sour smell, half locker room, half slaughterhouse. The only comforting item was the security camera mounted in a corner, its black-rimmed lens making slow circuits of the room.

  At the end of the cell, a wide steel door with a tiny peephole. But Wells couldn’t hear anything of the world outside. The walls were soundproofed, he supposed. He had no idea where he was, or even if it was day or night, though he didn’t feel as though much time had passed since his arrest. As soon as they’d gotten him out of the courtyard, they’d knocked him out with some kind of fast-acting anesthetic. Maybe the same stuff he’d used on Kowalski’s men.

  Wells’s stomach tightened. Shafer had been right. Cao Se was a treacherous bastard. Or maybe the mole had given Wells up somehow. Either way the Chinese had known he was coming. Now he would just have to take his punishment, and stick to his story.

  James Wilson. Thirty-seven. His first trip to China. Prunetime.com. Here to recruit engineers. A three-bedroom split level. Palo Alto. A wife. Jennifer, a doctor. Two kids, in grade school. Amanda and Jim Jr. Button-down blue shirts and pressed khakis. Marathons in his spare time. A comp sci degree from the University of Illinois. The biggest mistake of his life: passing on a job offer from Google in 2001. Until now, anyway. He didn’t know what he’d done, but this was all a misunderstanding. They had to let him go.

  Would they believe him? No chance, Wells thought. But maybe he could make them doubt themselves, slow them down. At least notify the embassy, get the diplomats involved.

  Wells knew he didn’t deserve what was about to happen. And yet he wondered if he did. Primordial justice for the killing he’d done over the years. Or maybe for something more: For the way his country had walked away from the Geneva Conventions. For Abu Ghraib and the ghost prisoners whose names the CIA had never given to the Red Cross. For water-boarding and stun guns and the torture that the lawyers had decided wasn’t torture at all. For the madness that had descended on Iraq since the invasion, the uncounted men and women and children who’d died because the fools in the White House told themselves the mission was accomplished back in May 2003. And the soldiers who’d been blown to bits because armchair generals in the Pentagon thought armored Humvees were a luxury, not a necessity. For everything that had happened in the lost days since 9/11.

  Judge not, lest ye be judged. A stupid, stupid way to think. He wasn’t America, and the agony he was about to face would be real, not metaphorical. And yet Wells clung to the idea that he was due for this, for whatever happened next.

  He didn’t know how else to endure it.

  THE DOOR AT THE FAR END of the cell slid open, and the two power forwards who’d grabbed him at Tiananmen walked in. They were dressed for a workout, wearing T-shirts and sweatpants. They wore latex gloves and cheap rubber galoshes and carried identical zippered canvas bags. Metal batons dangled from belts on their hips.

  Three more men followed. Wells recognized them all. The first was the man who’d put the black hood over his head. He’d seen the other two only in photographs. They wore PLA uniforms with stars on their collars.

  Cao Se. And Li Ping.

  Li and Cao stood at the back of the room silently as the third man rummaged through a bag he held. Wells tried to understand why Cao was here. Did he want to see the fool he’d duped? Was his presence intended to signal Wells that he ought to confess, that the Chinese already knew everything and it would be pointless not to? But then why not just say that? Why play this brutal game? Or did Cao want to let Wells know that he wasn’t alone, that Cao was still on the American side and had come to save him?

  Maybe, though the odds were long. Anyway, he couldn’t possibly find out unless Li and the others left him and Cao alone. Meanwhile, Wells had to keep playing the role of terrified American tourist, an act that shouldn’t be too difficult.

  “I don’t know who you guys think I am, but you’re making a mistake,” Wells said.

  No one responded. The third man pulled a black box, slightly bigger than an eyeglass case, from his bag. He stepped toward Wells and held the box open so Wells could see what was inside.

  A small set of pliers, and three scalpels. The steel blades gleamed under the lights. Wells’s stomach clenched. Use the fear, he thought. Any civilian in your position would be terrified. “Please don’t do this.”

  Again the man reached inside his bag. This time he pulled out a red-painted metal canister that looked like an oversized beer can with a nozzle attached to the top. He pushed a button on the side of the can. A blue flame spurted out with a tiny whoosh.A miniature acetylene torch, the kind welders used for close-in work. The man twisted the nozzle until the flame glowed a bright blue, three inches long. He clicked off the canister and put it and the scalpel case on the folding chair.

  “I’m telling you. This is a mistake.”

  The man reached into the bag once more. This time he held up the flash drive that the boy had given Wells in Tiananmen. Li Ping stepped quickly across the cell and in a single fluid motion hit Wells under the ribs, in the solar plexus once, twice, three times—and then three times more.

  Considering his age, Li hit hard, Wells thought. Wells had a boxer’s abs, flat and tough, and the punches themselves didn’t hurt all that much. But every one rolled him side to side in his shackles, sending shots of pain through
his damaged shoulder. Li and the men around him watched him without a word. They were on another planet, in another universe, one where pain didn’t exist.

  Li took the flash drive from the man who’d been holding it. “Who gave this?” he said in broken English.

  “A boy. In Tiananmen. This is all a mistake. Please, sir, I don’t know who you are, but you have to help me.”

  Li spoke in Chinese. “He says, you know very well who he is,” the man who’d been holding the flash drive said to Wells in English. He spoke with a heavy Russian accent. “He is head of the People’s Liberation Army. He wants you to know, he doesn’t speak much English. So he’s going to leave you now. But he wanted to see you for himself. The American spy who was so foolish as to come to the Forbidden City on this day.”

  Li said something more. “And he says it is nothing to him if you live or die. This is your last chance to tell the truth. If you do, maybe the Chinese people will show some mercy. If not—” The interrogator shook his head.

  “Tell him, I promise, he’s making a mistake—”

  The interrogator said a few words to Li. “Okay,” Li said in English. “Your choice.” He stepped away. At the door, he turned to Wells and made a throat-cutting motion. Then he walked out. Cao followed wordlessly.

  AS SOON AS THE DOOR CLOSED, the power forward stepped up, but the interrogator waved him back and reached into the bag. Despite himself, despite everything he’d seen and done, Wells was afraid. He pulled himself back. Think.Stay calm. They want you to imagine your tortures, to hurt yourself before they hurt you.

  The interrogator lifted a piece of paper from the bag.

  “What is your name?”

  “Jim Wilson. James Wilson—”

  The man shook his head. “Your real name. Please.” The interrogator held up the paper for Wells. “The reason you’re here. The letter your embassy received last week. The instructions are quite specific. You are to come to the Forbidden City today. As you did. To wait at the stone that looks like wood at noon. As you did. And finally, you are to wear a green shirt.” The man pointed at the corner where Wells’s shirt lay.