The Art of War: A Novel

by Stephen Coonts

  “Terrific.”

  “They don’t seem to have cracked the heavily encrypted stuff. Both powers have been into the low-grade stuff, such as ship schedules, port visits, that kind of thing.”

  “Okay.”

  “The thing I found a bit hard to understand—the navy has every carrier in the Atlantic Fleet scheduled into Norfolk over Christmas. They did the same thing two years ago during a budget battle with Congress.”

  “All of them?”

  “Yep. All five of the battle groups. Some of the escorts will go to other ports on the East Coast, but the carriers will all go to Norfolk.”

  “Unbelievable,” Grafton muttered. He didn’t bother to tell Sarah he already knew of the navy’s op plans for the carriers over the holidays.

  “The navy has some light maintenance scheduled for the ships,” she continued, “and they are apparently going to be generous with Christmas leave for the sailors. The ships will be there through New Year’s, at least.”

  “Five carriers,” Grafton mused, playing with a pencil while he scanned the report. “What else?”

  “I’m recording phone calls on those numbers you gave me. You are treading on dangerous ground, Admiral.”

  “Anything interesting?”

  “The White House staffers about lost it when the president’s plane went down. That came as a huge shock to them.”

  “Did to me, too.”

  “They keep asking each other, ‘What’s happening?’”

  Grafton used the eraser on his pencil to rub his head. After a moment he asked, “This guy Tommy tried to catch at the airport and you got the photo of, where is that?”

  Sarah Houston said, “Homeland Security called the FBI off.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. A couple of calls on that.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Grafton collected his thoughts. “I think someone told Homeland Security that I sent Tommy to Switzerland. He was thoroughly searched at Dulles when he came back. He said he got the impression they were looking for something. That suggests the possibility of a leak in this agency.”

  She stared.

  “I want you to get the cell phone numbers of all my staff and start recording their calls. And Zoe Kerry, the FBI liaison officer. If someone in this building is leaking classified information to other government agencies, I want to know about it as soon as possible.”

  “Why not just give that to the security people?”

  “Because I don’t trust them either,” Jake said softly. His gray eyes pinned Sarah. “Someone murdered the previous director, Mario Tomazic, and as it stands, the motive could have come from within this building.”

  “I needn’t remind you that evidence acquired through illegal means can’t be used in court.”

  “You got that right. You don’t need to remind me.”

  “Just saying.” She stared back into those gray eyes, not the least intimidated.

  “This isn’t the Department of Justice, Sarah. It’s the Central Intelligence Agency. We don’t do prosecutions.”

  “Your responsibility.”

  “Absolutely. You are goddamned right.” His voice rose. “The president appointed me, and I’m going to do my duty as I see it, come hell or high water. If the president or Congress or the FBI doesn’t like it, they can do whatever they want with it. I didn’t ask for this job, but I’m going to do my damnedest to do it to the best of my ability.” His roar came down to merely loud. “If some son of a bitch is passing classified information to anyone not authorized to have it, I’ll cut out the bastard’s heart and eat it for breakfast. Got it?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  His voice dropped to a conversational volume. “People are being murdered. Anna Modin was merely the latest. Tommy Carmellini was the one they wanted. Someone is doing this shit. There must be a reason. Give me a glimpse. A glimmer. Something there that shouldn’t be. A word, a tone of voice, a hint. Anything.”

  Sarah had been fanged by Jake Grafton before, so this latest episode didn’t raise her blood pressure. “Okay,” she said evenly.

  “I’ll keep this report. You get these other people on the computer and record those phone calls. Listen to them. Anybody says anything suspicious, you bring it here as fast as humanly possible, or sooner. Got it?”

  “I do have it, Admiral.”

  “Get cracking.”

  Sarah Houston left. Grafton stared at the door after she closed it.

  Then he consulted his private telephone list and dialed a call. After he went through a switchboard and an executive assistant, he got the CNO, Admiral Cart McKiernan, on the line.

  “Jake, how’s everything?”

  “Just fine, sir. I’m calling about those five Atlantic Fleet carriers that you have scheduled to be in Norfolk over the Christmas holidays.”

  “Okay.”

  “Who at the White House told you to schedule them that way?”

  “Didn’t even go through SECDEF’s office. I got a call from some White House weenie. President’s orders, he said.”

  “Which weenie?”

  “Frank Harless. He’s some sort of ass kisser or cigarette lighter or political guru over there. About a month ago.”

  “You sure it was him?”

  “Yep. Told me if I didn’t like it I could talk to Al Grantham.”

  “Did you?”

  “Hell, yes. Told that son of a bitch that putting all those ships in one port was a really stupid idea. Asked him if he’d ever heard of Pearl Harbor.”

  “And…”

  “And he told me that the order came from the president. I asked for it in writing.”

  “What did he say?”

  “The subtle bastard asked if I wanted to retire early.”

  “Thanks, Cart.”

  “Yeah. You hear anything, anything at all, and I’ll keep those ships at sea or dock them somewhere else. They didn’t put it in writing. You know as well as I do that if anything goes wrong, they’ll either flatly deny that they gave me an order or say that they merely suggested a course of action and expected me to use my best professional judgment. If anything goes wrong, it’ll be the navy’s fault. None of the mud or blood is going to stick to them. I’ve been there before and so have you. Fuck Grantham. And fuck the president. He can have a piece of my ass at the country club if he can catch my golf cart.”

  “Okay. Thanks.”

  “Any time, Jake. Don’t be a stranger.”

  *

  Lying in that hospital bed staring at the ceiling was the hardest thing I have ever done. The nurses and doctors came and went occasionally, took vital signs and said nice things. Every few hours one of the guys in the hall popped in, to stay only a few minutes. I had served with them all someplace and liked all four of them. They were guys like me, good on action and no great shakes with words. They tried to say comforting things, but nothing helped.

  Anna was dead and I was just going to have to live with it. She didn’t deserve to die that way, but what victim of insane, random violence does? With no evidence, I was sure that the Dumpster diver dude had fixed up the bomb in my dresser, the same way he had rigged up one to kill Jake Grafton.

  If only I had been more careful. If only I had … checked the dresser myself? Then I’d be dead and Anna would still be alive.

  The guilt ate at me. If-onlys are a poison that can kill you as dead as arsenic. They rob you of the will to live and destroy your ability to cope with life. At some point, all of us have to let go of what-might-have-been and go on down the road of life, wherever it might lead.

  I wasn’t ready yet. Anna’s memory was still too vivid.

  I wanted to get out of this damned bed as soon as possible and make some funeral arrangements. I was thinking about that when I realized that I didn’t even know who her parents were, or where they were. Didn’t know if they were even alive. If she had brothers or sisters. Maybe Grafton could get word to Janos Ilin somehow and he could
see that they were told. They deserved to know. But he had probably already thought of that. Grafton was that kind of guy.

  I also felt sorry for myself. That, and my guilt, made me feel like a real shit. If I got angry enough, maybe I’d pop an artery in my brain and stroke out. Dying right now or crippling myself wouldn’t do. I had a score to settle with that bombing son of a bitch.

  So I tried to calm down. The second morning I was conscious, I turned on the television. Problems overseas, problems here, the White House press secretary answering questions about the investigation into the Air Force One shootdown … I could feel my blood pressure rising, so I turned off the idiot tube.

  Lay there in the bed thinking about Anna. And what might have been.

  Oh God, why her?

  *

  When Willie Varner got the envelope from London in his mail and called Jake Grafton, the admiral climbed in his executive sedan with his bodyguards and went to get it himself.

  “How’s Tommy?” Willie asked.

  “Doing okay, the doctors tell me. A couple more days. They think he can have short visits. If you want to go over to the hospital and visit for ten minutes or so, go ahead.”

  “By God, I will.”

  “They’re going to have a psychologist visit him. You can expect that he’s mired up to his eyeballs in post-traumatic stress. And guilt. Anna got it and he didn’t.”

  “Yeah,” Willie Varner said and nodded vigorously. “That’s Tommy.”

  “That’s everybody in his situation,” Jake shot back. “We’re all human.”

  “Most of us, anyway,” Willie replied. “Not that bomber bastard. He’s a fuckin’ animal.”

  Riding back to Langley in the backseat of his executive sedan, Jake put on his reading glasses and opened the envelope. All that was in it was a folded map, which appeared to have been printed off a computer display. When he unfolded it, the sheet was about eighteen inches by eighteen. A map of the Norfolk, Virginia, area. At the center was Naval Base Norfolk. On the carrier pier was a dot. Surrounding the dot were concentric circles, five of them. Here and there were Chinese-language symbols.

  Jake Grafton sat looking at the map. After a while he folded it back up and inserted it back in its envelope.

  He thought about the possibilities. A: The map was real, put together in China. B: The map was fake, made by the Russians to slander the Chinese. C: The map was fake, drawn God knows where, and the number of people who might have made it was legion.

  Assuming the map was made in China, what did it mean?

  When he got back to Langley, Grafton had three Chinese-language experts come to his office. He duplicated the map, then had them translate the characters and mark them on his copy. The original went into an envelope that he stamped TOP SECRET.

  He was studying the copy and its English translations when Harley Merritt came in for his daily appointment.

  Jake handed the deputy director the map and said, “What do you think of this?”

  Merritt pulled his glasses down from his forehead and began looking. After a while he said, “What is this and where did you get it?”

  Jake told him.

  “Holy shit,” Merritt said.

  “I want you to take the original”—Jake passed him the envelope stamped TOP SECRET—“to the forensics lab. I want to know if this was made in China. Have them do an analysis of the paper and ink and the Chinese-language symbols. It looks like a computer print-off, but see what the wizards can learn. I want everything they can tell me. Everything. Then call the air force and navy and get some nuclear weapons experts over here. If that dot represents a nuclear explosion, I want them to estimate the explosive power of the weapon.”

  “Sure,” Merritt said, fingering the envelope and duplicate.

  “Keep the circle of people who know about this as small as possible.”

  Merritt nodded. Then he asked, “What are you going to do with this?”

  “Nothing until the forensic and weapons experts have their say.”

  “Okay.”

  “Even if the map is a Chinese product, it can’t tell us if this represents a contingency plan or an event that is going to happen.”

  “I understand.”

  “Our military makes war plans all the time. China’s probably does, too.”

  They left it there.

  “Our in-house investigation of reasons for Tomazic’s murder is complete,” Merritt told his boss. “Nothing. I am writing a report that I’ll pass along when it is finalized, but there isn’t anything worth mentioning in it.”

  Grafton nodded.

  “If he was murdered, the motive isn’t here at Langley,” Merritt continued. “I’m convinced of that, and I put it in writing.”

  They moved on to other subjects. An hour after he arrived, Merritt left. Jake Grafton went back to studying the map. A retired navy attack pilot, Jake Grafton knew a lot about nuclear weapons. If this map represented the kill-and-damage zone of a nuclear explosion, the explosive power of the warhead would depend on whether it was detonated as an airburst or surface burst. An airburst could be delivered by a plane or an ICBM, or a missile fired by a submarine. Since the warhead detonated well above the target, it could be a smaller weapon.

  A surface burst would need a more powerful warhead to do the same damage … and a surface burst would be more difficult to make happen. It would require a boat or ship or submarine to steam right up to the target, represented by the dot, and detonate the weapon. Unless the weapon was already there, planted on the bed of the harbor or inside something.

  *

  Grafton put the duplicate in his desk and sent for his executive assistants. Regardless of everything else that was happening, he still had an intelligence agency to run. Anastasia Roberts and Max Hurley wanted to talk about Carmellini. “He’s doing okay. The police bomb squad and the FBI are investigating. What they’ll come up with may not help us find the bomber, or it might. We’ll see. Tommy needs peace and quiet.”

  They nodded. Anastasia Roberts reported on her briefing to the White House that morning. Nothing on the possible Russian involvement in the assassination.

  “Nothing from the Russian embassy?”

  “No, sir.”

  They started in on the paperwork.

  After they left an hour later, Grafton worked silently on the paperwork for a while, then went to the cafeteria for lunch.

  He found Sarah Houston there and sat down beside her with his tray.

  “How’s Tommy?” she asked.

  “Docs say he’ll be back to normal soon.”

  “Good.”

  “Whatever normal is for Carmellini. I’ve known him for years and I haven’t figured that out yet.”

  “Me either.”

  They chatted about the news for the rest of their lunch; then Jake asked Sarah to come up to his office.

  When they were there and had the door closed, Jake asked about the telephone intercepts.

  “Nothing to report,” she said. “I would have called you if I heard anything.”

  “Good,” he said. He opened his drawer, got out the map and handed it to her.

  As she studied it he gave her his analysis. Then he said, “I know you’re busy as hell, but I want you to search our database and the navy’s to see if you can find anything suspicious about the Chinese navy.”

  “There is only one of me.”

  “Thank God for that.”

  “What am I looking for?”

  Grafton considered. If he narrowed the search too much, something important or relevant might be missed. On the other hand, a report on the activities of the entire Chinese navy would be voluminous and possibly hide the hint he wanted. If there was anything there to be found.

  “Let’s just look in the Atlantic,” he said. “North and South. Make it during the last year. Everything the Chinese navy has been doing in this hemisphere. There can’t be that much.”

  “Okay.”

  “Thanks, Sarah.”


  *

  Lieutenant Commander Zhang had never in his life seen anything like it. From where he stood looking over the piers of the marina, he could see at least a hundred boats, all for sale. Choy Lee was translating the jabber of the salesman, who sensed he had a sucker on the hook and was in a fine mood.

  “Yes, sir,” he said. “You folks surely came by at the right time. Lots of folks sell their boats in the fall because they don’t want to pay the upkeep and storage and all through the winter. So I got lots of inventory and rock bottom prices. Got the lowest prices of anybody on the Chesapeake—that’s why I sell the most boats. Ask anyone. They’ll tell you if you really want to sell your boat, bring it here. And if you want to find a hell of a value in a boat, this is the place.”

  Zhang listened to all that in Chinese, eyed the man, then said to Choy, “Tell him I want a used boat with a cabin and small head, two engines, all the usual navigation gear. Plus an adequate aft platform to fish from and a built-in holding tank for our catch.”

  The salesman, a heavyset man with a crew cut and an enormous gut, with jowls to match, shook his head vigorously. “I got six or eight like that,” he declared in an old-line Tidewater accent, which Choy appreciated but was way beyond Zhang’s command of the language. “All good values. All good boats. Come on, I’ll show them to you. Got the best one here in the showroom.” He took them inside.

  “Now you understand,” the salesman said, “that a boat with two internal engines is going to be large and cost you a serious amount of change. This one only has one engine, but she’s only two years old and is a sweetheart. Gonna make a great boat for somebody.”

  Zhang climbed up the ladder stand on the floor and went aboard. No doubt, it was a nice boat. He went below and looked at everything as Choy and the salesman chatted.

  He was staring down through the open doors in the stern area at the single engine when Choy said, “This boat was repossessed by the bank when the owner couldn’t make the payments. He’ll sell it for fifty thousand dollars off the new price.”

  Zhang straightened up and said, “Let’s see what else he has.”

  The fifth boat the salesman showed them was the one, in a slip on the third pier surrounded by boats that were too small or too big. Some of these boats were yachts, with prices over a million dollars. These Americans were amazing. What kind of person could afford such a … small ship?