The Ghost War

by Alex Berenson

  To the south, the coast grew rockier. During the day, the development was probably obvious. But tonight, under the weak light of a quarter-moon, the land looked surprisingly unspoiled. Wells supposed that even China had a few places that hadn’t been overrun.

  The lights of the coast grew sparser and sparser, then faded entirely.

  “Tianjintou,” Cao said. He pointed south. In the distance, the land ended in a rocky spit, waves kicking up narrow white flumes around it.

  “Tianjintou?”

  “Means ‘end of the world.’ Farthest east place in Shandong. Only water now.”

  “Let’s hope we don’t have to swim.”

  A HALF-HOUR LATER, Wells’s line looked more like a prophecy than a joke. Two helicopters shined their spotlights along the coast behind them. And in the distance to the west, Wells saw the lights of three boats. At least one was a destroyer or a frigate, something big. The boats were heading east, into the open water. Chasing Wells and Cao, even if they didn’t know it yet.

  Then, to the south. Two boats. Small and fast. Wells couldn’t hear them, not yet, but he could see their spotlights. He tapped Cao’s shoulder, pointed. Cao just shrugged.

  They weren’t going to make it, Wells thought. With the cloud cover helping them, they would last until sunrise. But once the sun came up, they wouldn’t be able to hide. They’d be caught far before Incheon.

  Wells focused on the rolling dark water ahead of them, stale and brackish. In college, he had been a decent swimmer. Not his favorite sport, but he’d liked it in the winter, as a way to rebuild his muscles after the pounding of football. But even if he hadn’t had a chestful of broken ribs, swimming two hundred miles to Korea would have been a hopeless fantasy. Like the rest of this mission, Wells thought. But he didn’t regret taking the chance. He knew the secret now, the reason for this war. If only he and Cao could survive, they could stop it.

  Anyway, he’d been playing with house money ever since Exley had saved him in New York. He didn’t want to die, not like this, but some part of him had accepted the fact that he would. If not today, soon enough. He would push his luck until it snapped. He could excuse himself for risking this mission, because it meant so much. But what was his excuse for screaming down 1-95 at 125 miles an hour? How could he ask Exley to trust him?

  He remembered an old joke from an intro philosophy class in college: I’m an optimist, not a fatalist. Anyway, if I were a fatalist, what could I do about it? Or in the words of that great philosopher Bruce Springsteen, Everythingdies, baby, that’s a fact. Wells was drifting again. Tianjintou. End of the world. He sagged down and the curtains closed on him.

  AT 22,000 FEET THE NIGHT AIR was smooth, though the clouds were thickening quickly beneath the C-130. Bosarelli eased back on the engines, slowing the plane to 180 knots. Osan had asked him to slow down, give the flotilla on the water beneath him a chance to get a few miles farther west.

  “Ninety-five hundred rpm,” Keough said. “One hundred eighty knots, heading two-seven-zero.” Straight west.

  “Taking us down to sixteen thousand.” Bosarelli extended the wing flaps to begin the descent. As he did, an alarm briefly sounded and the flat-panel display before Bosarelli flashed red before returning to its normal black background. The Chinese J-10s were now within a hundred nautical miles—less than eight minutes on afterburner.

  For now Bosarelli wasn’t too worried about them. He was over international waters and flying slow and straight—hardly signs of hostile intent. He looked down through the cockpit’s glazed windows, and through the clouds he saw the lights of a ship beneath him, heading west. A friendly, he hoped. “Everything set back there?”

  “Sure hope so,” Keough said.

  Bosarelli leveled them out when they got to 16,000 feet, and for another fifteen minutes the plane cruised steadily. Bosarelli and Keough hardly spoke. After thousands of hours in these C-130s, Bosarelli could fly them, almost literally, in his sleep. And there wasn’t much to say anyway. Beneath them the clouds became an unbroken white mass, glowing under the moon and the stars like a little girl’s dream. Under other circumstances, Bosarelli would have considered the clouds beautiful. Tonight he would rather have seen the water. A crosswind kicked up, lightly rocking the plane.

  “One hundred NM west of Incheon,” Keough said. “Two minutes to centerline.” Incheon was about 210 nautical miles west of the tip of the Shandong Peninsula. In two minutes, the plane would be closer to China than Korea, a fact that would set off alarms for the Chinese jets.

  “Two minutes to centerline, twelve minutes to Z point.” Bosarelli throttled back again, to 150 knots, not much above the plane’s stall speed.

  Their last F-16 escorts peeled off, one turning north, the other south, looping back toward Osan. Now Bosarelli and Keough had no cover at all, though for the moment the sky ahead was clear. For some reason—maybe the same reason that they were on this mission—the Chinese J-10s had swung back west, toward the Shandong coastline, and dropped to about 4,000 feet.

  But Bosarelli knew the Chinese fighters could easily reverse course again and tag the C-130, which wouldn’t have a chance, especially with this payload. Here pilots liked to joke that the plane’s antimissile system consisted mainly of an alarm to let them know that their ride was about to explode.

  Bosarelli hadn’t been this scared since his first roller-coaster ride, at the Six Flags in Arlington, Texas. He was seven. His older brother had spent a whole week telling him how great it was. Bosarelli had pleaded to go until his dad finally took him. But when the coaster had clanked slowly up over the flat Texas plains, getting ready for that first drop, Bosarelli had wanted to puke his guts out. He hadn‘t, though. And once they’d finally gotten over the hill, he’d had a blast—though that probably wasn’t the best choice of words right now.

  “FIVE MINUTES,” KEOUGH SAID.

  “Five minutes.” Again Bosarelli extended the flaps. “Taking us to twelve thousand.”

  At 12,000 feet, Bosarelli again leveled out. “Chutes and helmets on.”

  Bosarelli reached for his parachute and pulled it onto his shoulders. Keough did the same. They’d packed their chutes themselves at Osan, watched over by a Special Forces major who had completed 250 jumps. Now Bosarelli had to stand over the control panel, since he couldn’t fit in his seat anymore. The designers of the C-130 hadn’t expected that the plane’s pilots would be wearing parachutes.

  “Check your transponder.” They were both carrying emergency beacons, black plastic boxes attached to their waists.

  “Check.”

  “One twenty-five NM from Incheon,” Bosarelli said. “Twenty NM west of the centerline.”

  “Two minutes,” Keough said. His screen flashed red and an alarm beeped loud and fast in his headset. Just in the last fifteen minutes the Chinese had a half-dozen more fighters in the air. Two of them had now decided to check out the C-130.

  Now another alarm went off, higher-pitched and more urgent than the first. One of the Chinese fighters had painted the Here with its targeting radar, a wordless warning that if it broke into Chinese airspace it could expect to be hit with an air-to-air missile.

  “One minute to Z point,” Keough said.

  “One minute.” Bosarelli flicked the Here’s transponder to 7700, the signal for an aircraft emergency.

  “Ready, Jim?”

  “Ready.”

  The radar warning alarm sounded again, for a full fifteen seconds this time. “I’ll get it,” Bosarelli said. He flipped the Here’s radio to the Military Air Distress band, 243.0 MHz. The warning, in heavily accented English, was what he expected: “You are approaching Chinese airspace. Turn back or face immediate action.” Pause. “You are approaching Chinese airspace. Turn back ...”

  “I’ll take that under advisement,” Bosarelli murmured. He flipped off the radio.

  “Thirty seconds to Z.”

  “Thirty seconds. Flaps fifty.” Again, Bosarelli extended the plane wing’s flaps. “Now, Jim
. Go.”

  Keough stepped out of the cockpit. Bosarelli heard a loud whooshas he popped open the crew entry door a few feet behind the cockpit. The plane began to shake. Again the radar alarm rang in his headset.

  Now. Bosarelli pushed the power levers past flight idle to turn off the engines. Then he reached over to Keough’s station and flipped off the fuel pumps.

  Just like that, the C-130 turned into a sixty-five-ton glider. Alarms began screaming, both in his headset and in the cabin, as the engines lost power. The propellers still had some leftover momentum, so the plane didn’t dive immediately, but Bosarelli knew he didn’t have long. Time to get out. He stepped out of the cockpit. Keough was standing in the open door of the plane, waiting. When he saw Bosarelli, he nodded and stepped out of the plane, hands at his sides. In an instant, he was gone.

  Bosarelli flipped on his goggles and stepped to the open hatch. Instead of the normal noise of the turboprops, he heard only the klaxons in the cockpit and the rush of the wind. He looked into the night sky, and for a moment his nerve failed him. He thought of running back to the cockpit and trying to restart the engines. But he knew better. Down was the only way out.

  And before he could change his mind again, he pushed himself forward and stepped into the cool night air.

  WITH ARMS AND LEGS EXTENDED, the human body falls at a maximum speed of about 125 miles an hour—a thousand feet every five seconds. Bosarelli was holding his arms tight to his chest and extending his legs straight down, hoping to top out closer to two hundred. He wanted to separate from the Herc quickly to lessen the chances he’d be caught in the plane’s blast wave.

  Then a wind gust ripped Bosarelli sideways, twisting his back and throwing his shoulders outward. He raised his arms for balance and instead began to spin, bouncing through the air like a pebble caught in a wave. Suddenly he was in no position to pull his chute. He breathed deeply and tried to remember his training as the seconds ticked by. And then he reached the cloud layer and the air around him turned white and suffocating.

  Relax. He extended his arms and legs as far as he could and arched his back to create maximum drag. He emerged from the clouds. He was no longer spinning, but the sea was close beneath him, a couple of thousand feet at most, the water dark and featureless. He could already see two boats chugging west. They’d find him. If he could just get to his chute. Bosarelli reached across his body and grabbed the cord, praying it would open smoothly. He wasn’t sure he had time to get to the reserve.

  Then—

  His body jerked upward as the chute snatched him from gravity’s grasp. He looked up to see an open canopy, spreading above him like an angel’s wings.

  A MILE AHEAD, THE EMPTY C-130 plunged toward the Yellow Sea, its nose tipped nearly straight down, klaxons sounding uselessly in its cockpit. Four thousand feet. The bombs and barrels of gasoline strained against the netting, securing them to the floor of the cargo bay, but the thick nylon held.

  Three thousand feet. The C-130 was approaching the speed of sound, six hundred miles an hour, a thousand feet a second. As the plane accelerated, the massive g-forces generated by the dive began to shear the left wing from the hull—

  Two thousand feet—

  The ghost plane began to break apart, but by then its structural failure no longer mattered. The Herc had done its job.

  One thousand feet—

  Five hundred—

  The altitude fuses on the GBU-29s blew, setting off 3,000 pounds of high explosive. In a fraction of a second, the cargo compartment turned into an inferno, and the jellied gasoline in the oil barrels blew up.

  BOSARELLI SAW THE EXPLOSION BEFORE he felt it. The night came alive with a second sun, a yellow-gold cloud that exploded up and out, forming a classic mushroom cloud, like a miniature nuclear bomb. So bright, so beautiful. A couple of seconds later the blast wave hit him, hotter than he’d expected, rich with gasoline and benzene vapor, but by then he was close enough to the water that he knew he’d survive.

  He only hoped the bomb had done its job.

  38

  WELLS THOUGHT HE WAS DREAMING WHEN THE SKY turned white. Then he heard Cao shouting and knew he wasn’t. He started counting, one one-thousand, two one-thousand, three one-thousand, waiting for the sound of the explosion to reach them, trying to calculate how far off they were. On his twelfth “Mississippi,” the blast filled his ears. Maybe fifteen seconds—three miles, give or take.

  In the last hour the Chinese had put more and more helicopters in the air, and he’d had a bad moment a few minutes before when a helicopter swung by them, its searchlight missing them by no more than a few hundred yards. Now this explosion, which couldn’t possibly be a coincidence. Had a Chinese jet or copter exploded? No, this fire was far too large. It looked to be slightly southeast of them, burning in the night like a beacon.

  Like a beacon.

  Cao was steering the boat north, away from the blast. Wells tapped his shoulder. He pointed to the white fireball, already losing its shape, melding into the clouds, but still burning brightly. “Go toward it.”

  “Toward?”

  “It’s for us.”

  UNFORTUNATELY, THE CHINESE SEEMED TO have come to the same conclusion. Helicopters were buzzing toward the crash site, their spotlights shining over the waves. Jets too. Wells couldn’t see them, but he could hear the whine of their engines. As they made their way west, the sky lightened, the giant fire producing a muddy yellow glare. No way could a helicopter cause such a big explosion. Maybe a 747 had been shot down by accident. Or maybe it wasn’t a plane at all. Maybe it was some kind of oil tanker.

  The good news was that the Chinese didn’t seem to have any boats in front of them. And the heat of the blast would make it hard for the helos to get too close.

  Not that Wells wanted to get too close either. As they moved toward the site of the explosion, the air grew heavy with the stench of burning gasoline and something else too, some kind of plastic, though Wells couldn’t figure out exactly what. Farther on, the air was alive with burning embers that looked like sparks from a backyard barbecue. The strange part was that they kept burning when they landed on the water. As Wells shielded his eyes and looked toward the fireball, he saw patches where the sea itself seemed to have caught fire.

  “Napalm,” he said aloud.

  Cao swung the boat hard left, north. Wells braced himself against the side of the hull and gritted his teeth as his ribs reminded him they were still broken.

  Then a huge secondary explosion, maybe a fuel tank, lit the night. The boat rocked in the blast wave and Wells covered his mouth against the fumes. In the sudden glow Wells knew they were obscenely visible. Even as the firelight faded, a jet swooped toward them, hard and low, its running lights blinking red, the wash from its engines kicking up waves and rattling the boat.

  “Close,” Cao said.

  The fighter screamed off.

  Three minutes later it came back for another pass. This time red flares popped off the wings, not directly on top of them but close, too close, dimly visible through the thick black smoke that was flooding the air. Two helicopters—one from the north, the other from the south—began to converge on the flares, closing like scissor blades.

  And then Wells saw the lights of a ship, barely visible through the smoke. Toward the east, not the west. Toward South Korea.

  “Cao.” Wells pointed at the lights.

  “Could be Chinese.” Nonetheless, Cao swung the tiller, turning the boat east, into the depths of the filthy black soot. The helicopters closed, but they couldn’t fly blind. Wells closed his eyes and tried not to breathe. Then the wind shifted. The smoke lightened and the helicopters closed again. The spotlights swung at them, and one caught the hull of the boat in its glare. Behind them, a heavy machine gun opened up, kicking up flumes on the right side of the boat and then on the left. Cao swung the boat hard right, toward the center of the inferno, the heaviest smoke, and Wells ducked down, all he could do.

  The spotlights s
wung over them and again the machine gun raked the waves around them, an angry hard rattle that blocked out every other sound, until Cao screamed, a short sharp cry. He collapsed, his body slumped over the outboard.

  The engine lifted out of the water and the boat slowed to a creep. A lucky break, since the helos were now ahead of the boat and the wind was shifting direction again, catching the helicopters in the smoke. Wells crawled across the boat to Cao. The general was dead, his neck and chest torn open. “Damn you,” Wells said to nothing and no one, knowing that he’d be joining Cao soon enough, as soon as the wind turned enough to give the helos a clear shot. He pushed Cao aside and dropped the engine into the water. He couldn’t see where he was headed and he supposed it no longer mattered.

  THEN, FROM ABOVE, THE GRINDING SOUND of metal on metal. Followed almost instantly by an enormous explosion, two hundred yards ahead, and a second even closer. Wells bowed his head as sizzling bits of metal crashed around him.

  They’d collided. The wind shift had left the helicopters blind. In their eagerness to get the kill, they’d come too close. They had crashed into each other in the dark and gone down, both of them. This filthy cloud had saved his life. Wells lifted the engine out of the water and looked around, trying to orient himself in the dark, thick air. Distant helicopters behind him. Somewhere overhead, a jet.

  And ahead, a voice. Amplified. American.

  Calling his name.

  He closed his eyes and lowered the engine into the water and steered for it.