The Art of War: A Novel

by Stephen Coonts

  Sally Chan just stared at Grafton. “Our relations with China.”

  Grafton nodded.

  “You people aren’t just going to let them get away with all this, are you?” she demanded hotly.

  “I don’t run the government,” Grafton replied, a bit evasively, I thought. “But I hope not.”

  “Are you really the interim director of the CIA?”

  “Yes.”

  As we ate dinner, Sally talked about Choy Lee. “He thought of himself as an American, there toward the end,” she said. “After he became suspicious of Zhang, he was so conflicted.”

  She chattered on, speaking directly to Jake Grafton, who looked like the father you wished you had had. Nonjudgmental. Understanding. A man you could talk to.

  He looked that way, anyhow. And maybe he did understand people, with all their diverse emotions and motivations, strengths and weaknesses. Yet a harder man I have never met. I thought Choy Lee and Zhang Ping were lucky that they were already dead.

  Grafton gave Sally a hug as we were leaving. She hugged him back fiercely.

  Grafton stayed in Norfolk for a few more days, and I went home the following morning on one of the endless stream of helicopters that plied back and forth between Norfolk and Washington.

  Before I left I saw Grafton talking to the CO of the base, Captain Butler Spiers. After a few minutes Grafton shook Spiers’ hand, then came over to wish me good-bye.

  “Thanks for pulling the trigger on Zhang,” he said. “If you had waited a few more seconds, more people would have died.”

  I didn’t say anything to that. If I had shot a coastie, even Grafton couldn’t have saved me. The safe course would have been to wait until the guy started squirting bullets. Maybe the truth was I no longer gave a damn about playing it safe. If that were true, I wasn’t long for this world.

  “How is everything with Spiers?” I asked, because I had to say something.

  “He’s waiting for the shoe to fall. NSA is doing a study of the Internet traffic that spilled the beans about the possible threat to the base and triggered the panic. They’ll have the result in a couple of days. Someone started the rumor, and it won’t be that difficult to track down that person.”

  “It could be anybody,” I suggested.

  “Oh, no. That was a very tightly held secret. And hot. Smoldering. Someone found it too hot to hold. We’ll find out who. See you back at Langley.”

  We shook hands, and I climbed aboard the giant eggbeater. When it lifted off, Grafton was already out of sight.

  *

  Sarah Houston was in her office when I rapped on her door. She let me in, then sat back down and stared at me.

  “Did I forget your birthday?” I asked.

  “I thought you were soon to be gone. Permanently gone. Now you are back. I am trying to figure out how to deal with that.”

  “There’s no way you rationally can,” I admitted.

  “I’m beginning to understand that.”

  “Wanna go get some lunch?”

  “Not today. Maybe tomorrow. Or the day after. Ask me then.”

  “Sure.”

  I hit the road. Closed the door behind me. Stood in the hallway feeling like dog crap for a minute or so. Perhaps this was a good thing. The truth is I was womaned out. Maybe celibacy would be good for me. At least for a while.

  Grafton’s executive assistants, Anastasia Roberts and Max Hurley, were glad to see me. They were full of curiosity about what had actually happened in Norfolk, but since it was all classified to the hilt, they didn’t ask. And I didn’t tell them. We talked about holiday plans.

  I stirred through the stuff on my desk, decided I didn’t want to deal with any of it and gave myself a meritorious day off.

  That afternoon Willie the Wire and I made the rounds of the used car lots. At the third one we visited I fell in love with a 1974 Mercedes 450SL, a hardtop/ragtop convertible, in a pale robin’s-egg blue. Willie was appalled.

  “That thing is already forty years old, Tommy. Can’t you drive somethin’ younger than you are?”

  “Hey, this baby only has a hundred and forty-two thousand on it. It’s just getting broken in.”

  “That odometer has probably been around the world more times than a hooker on crack,” Willie observed.

  When the paperwork was finished and signed, I dropped Willie at the lock shop and took my new ride out on the road. I was feeling perky. Headed north, toward Philadelphia.

  Didn’t actually get into the city. Stopped at a truck stop on the edge of town and bought a postcard of the Liberty Bell. I took it into the little diner where the truck drivers eat and sat at a booth.

  Using block letters, I addressed the card to Cuthbert Gordon, Mom’s boyfriend, out there in California. I noodled my message for a while, then wrote, “FISH HAS THE CONTRACT.” It was doubtful, I thought, that Cuthbert knew of Fish’s recent disability. I signed the card “A FRIEND.” That was a stretch because ol’ Bertie probably never had any friends, but you never know.

  I bought a stamp, peeled the thing off its backing using my fingernails, and affixed it to the card. Then I rubbed the front and back of the card on my jeans to smear whatever prints were on there.

  After I mailed it, I hit the road back to Washington. I liked the way my new ride handled and resolved to trade cars every ten years, whether I needed to or not.

  *

  When Jake Grafton got back to Langley, he called Sal Molina. “We need to talk,” he said. “McKiernan and I want to see the president.”

  “Maybe you and I ought to visit first.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Come over to my house this evening after dinner. We’ll have a beer.”

  “Okay.”

  So Jake drove to Bethesda and said hello to Mrs. Molina and followed Sal to the basement. When they each had a cold beer in hand, Jake got to it. “We’re going to have to do something that teaches the Chinese they can’t screw with us.”

  “Jesus, we’re like the Mafia now?”

  “The Chinese decided to try to wipe out the Atlantic Fleet’s capital ships. They saw an opportunity and leaped for it. The murders and the shootdown of Air Force One were all diversions intended to keep our eyes off the ball. And it was going their way when, for some reason, Zhang decided, or was told, to trigger the bomb with only three carriers in port. Perhaps the Internet storm panicked the people in Beijing.”

  Molina nodded and sipped beer.

  “The question that we can’t answer is why Zhang was returning to the radar reflector that he used to trigger the bomb.”

  “Maybe he wanted to die.”

  “He could have done that anywhere.”

  After a bit, Molina said, “Okay. Answer the riddle.”

  “I think he was probably coming back to safety the thing. I think Beijing changed their minds.”

  Sal Molina rubbed his forehead and eyes. “Got anything to substantiate that think?”

  “There is no other logical explanation. His superiors ordered him back. NSA has a recording of at least one Chinese-language conversation that took place on the cell network that could be the one. Zhang died two and a half hours later.”

  “Which gets us where?” Molina asked.

  “We must convince them that we know that they did it. We know that they intended to kill a couple million Americans and cripple our navy, even if they did change their minds at the last minute. And they had better never try something like this again. Not even think about it.”

  “How do you propose that we accomplish all that?”

  Jake Grafton told him.

  *

  In the days that followed the president’s press conference and the arrival of the final two Atlantic Fleet carriers in Norfolk, the world got back to normal, more or less. Most of the people in southeastern Virginia went home, Christmas came and went, the politicians flanged up another deal to raise the federal debt ceiling, and in January three of the carriers and their battle groups sailed away.


  Captain Butler Spiers’ grandson arrived in the world in the usual manner, more or less on schedule.

  He and his wife, Kat, talked repeatedly by telephone in the evenings. Finally he asked her, “Did you send any e-mails telling your friends to evacuate Norfolk?”

  She denied it, of course, and he knew she was lying. He knew her. He didn’t press it.

  The fact of the matter was that he had betrayed his trust by revealing classified information to her. He had! At the time he thought he had a good reason, and no doubt he did. And so did every other single person who was entrusted with the secret. Most of them didn’t reveal the secret, but he had.

  He wondered if the NSA investigation of the e-mail trails would get back to his wife. Perhaps. Or perhaps not.

  Regardless, the fact that he had betrayed his trust weighed heavily upon him. Numerous people, twenty at latest count, had died in car wrecks trying to get out of the Norfolk/Virginia Beach area. He hadn’t caused the car wrecks, yet still, he wondered if in some small way he wasn’t responsible.

  It could go either way, Spiers thought. Someone, his boss probably, would call him in and say NSA traced it to your wife, Kat. Or to Ellie or that dweeb Harold. We’re going to interrogate them under oath, ask Kat if she got the information from you, ask Ellie and Harold if they got it from you or Kat.

  On the other hand, the word would filter down that someone else was the leak. Either way, the bald fact was that he, Captain Butler Spiers, commanding officer of Naval Base Norfolk, had leaked classified information to a person not authorized to have it. If the Chinese agent had been able to read English and had seen and heard the mass panic, he might have detonated the bomb then and there. It was a miracle he didn’t. Regardless of who got blamed, Spiers knew he had seen the ghost and failed. As a man and a naval officer.

  One evening Butler Spiers sat at home brooding over all this. He drank a Jack Daniel’s on the rocks, then went to the basement and found a good piece of rope that he’d used several years ago to tie up his small fishing boat. He stopped in the kitchen, poured one more drink, then went to the garage and got out his big stepladder.

  His wife’s car was missing, of course, so there was plenty of room in there. He erected the stepladder, climbed up on it and tied the rope to the highest beam he could find. He tied a noose in the rope and let it dangle.

  Butler Spiers climbed back down and finished the drink as he eyed the height of the noose. He was going to have to keep his knees up. He put the glass on a little workbench he had against one wall. He climbed the ladder, put the noose around his neck with the knot under his left ear, took a deep breath, remembered his knees and jumped.

  He had figured the drop just right. The noose snapped his neck like a dry twig and he died instantly.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  War is very simple, direct and ruthless. It takes a simple, direct, and ruthless man to wage war.

  —George S. Patton

  In early January, Captain Joe Child was summoned to the Pentagon for a classified briefing. To Child’s surprise, the briefing wasn’t classified Secret, but Top Secret.

  There were at least six admirals in attendance, and the CNO, Admiral Cart McKiernan. The interim DNI was there, along with Jake Grafton, the interim director of the CIA. They sat in the back of the conference room and didn’t say a word.

  “Captain,” the CNO said, “your mission is to sink a ship, the Chinese aircraft carrier Liaoning.”

  That ship was, Child was told, the former Soviet carrier Varyag. After the breakup of the old Soviet Union, Ukraine inherited the Varyag, a ski-jump carrier of about fifty-nine thousand tons when fully loaded. But money was impossible for the Ukrainian navy to find, so she was stripped of engines and equipment, and the hulk was finally sold to a Chinese consortium from Macau that intended, they said, to turn her into a floating casino. That didn’t happen, but the PLAN got hold of her and decided to rebuild her as a carrier.

  The briefer went into all of this at length, then got past the history lesson and discussed the PLAN’s first aircraft carrier. “She’s operational now, with an air wing and a capability that is superior to anything in the Philippine or Vietnamese navies.”

  “You want me to sink her?” Child said incredulously.

  “Yes.”

  Joe Child turned to McKiernan, who was sitting off to one side. “Sir, may I ask why?”

  “You know about the nuke we found at Norfolk” McKiernan said. “We are going to try to convince the Chinese navy that messing with us is a bad idea, and they’d better not do it again.”

  Four days later Joe Child was in Pearl watching two high-speed stealth Sealions, being off-loaded from two air force C-5M Super Galaxies. A SEAL team had arrived a day earlier from Naval Air Station North Island in San Diego.

  Sealions were experimental stealth commando boats and had never become operational. Each boat measured seventy-one feet long and required two sailors to operate it. Each was a semi-submersible, which meant that once loaded with SEALs and weapons, it could submerge until only the pilothouse, a stealth shape that dispersed radar waves trying to locate it, was above water, and carry its commandos and their weapons into a beach or other landing without the enemy being aware of its presence. Good for about forty knots in calm water and a bit less in an unsettled sea, Sealions were the armored personnel carriers of the naval commandos.

  Captain Joe Child was in charge of the operation. The two Sealions were checked and, after necessary minor repairs were accomplished, taken out for night runs in Pearl Harbor. After more repairs and a minor modification to the internal lights, Joe Child pronounced himself satisfied, so the Sealions were loaded aboard USS Hornet, a Wasp-class amphibious assault ship.

  While this was going on, USS Utah, a Virginia-class attack sub, got under way. Roscoe Hanna, still the skipper, was delighted to get the chance to take the boat to sea one more time. The destination was the Yellow Sea, near the Qingdao naval base, home of the Chinese Northern Fleet.

  Hanna consulted his charts and fretted over the problem. The Yellow Sea was shallow, and the naval base was at the end of the saltwater equivalent of a saucepan. Utah’s job was to make sure that there were no Chinese submarines near the area that might interfere with the SEALs’ mission.

  Naval intelligence didn’t think the Chinese had either acoustic sensors at the mouth of the harbor or submarine nets. The Chinese did, however, have patrol boats equipped with sonar and searchlights, plus small depth bombs that were certainly adequate to kill submerged swimmers if they were detected or suspected, and all the usual machine guns and submachine guns.

  “The problem,” Hanna explained to his officers, “is that the bottom is damned shallow way out into the Yellow Sea. The Chinese don’t think any fool would bring a submarine into water that shallow, and believe me, this fool wouldn’t if there were any other way.”

  “Why don’t we just wait until the carrier sails, then torpedo her?” the XO asked.

  “Orders. Washington wants demolition charges. SEALs will plant them. Washington wants them detonated under the keel, so the ship can’t be raised and repaired.”

  “Sitting right at the pier?”

  “Minimize the loss of life, yet break her back, sink her. That’s the mission.”

  “Who did the Chinese piss off, Captain?”

  “Just about everybody who is anybody.” Hanna didn’t know why Washington wanted the Chinese carrier sunk, but he suspected it had something to do with the recent debacle in Norfolk. No one had ever mentioned that a nuclear weapon had been found there, a fact that was highly classified and would never be confirmed by the United States government. But where there was that much smoke, one suspected there was at least a little fire of some kind.

  “People way above our pay grade decided on this mission,” Roscoe Hanna told his officers, “so we’re going.” Orders are orders. Aye aye, sir.

  While Utah ran across the western Pacific fifteen hundred feet below the surface at twenty-five kn
ots, Hornet and her three escorts, all destroyers with guided missiles for protection from Chinese fighters, prepared to get under way.

  Already in the East China Sea was an aircraft carrier, USS United States, with her battle group. Her aircraft were aloft day and night, around the clock. E-2s, satellites and shipboard radars were watching all the aerial traffic over that ocean, and the ships that sailed those waters. Every plane and ship was assigned a track number and watched. During the day, F/A-18 Hornets did flybys and photographed the ships, and occasionally intercepted aircraft that were thought to be Chinese military.

  All this was out of the ordinary, and the admiral in charge of the battle group, Rear Admiral Toad Tarkington, worried that too much vigilance would make the Chinese suspect that something was in the wind. Still, with the recent aggressive moves by the PLAN against a P-8A Poseidon on patrol, and at Scarborough Shoals, maybe this was the expected U.S. reaction. He hoped so, anyway, and kept signing the operations plan.

  *

  The northern Pacific in January was a stormy ocean, with cold air, clouds, snow or rain, high sea states and low visibility. Many of the sailors on the ships in the small task force centered around Hornet became seasick. Captain Joe Child was one of them. He found the endless pitching, rolling and heaving of the amphibious assault ship impossible to endure inside, so he went to the flight deck and found a place behind a mobile crane where he could huddle out of the wind. The cold air and the openness seemed to help somewhat, but the howling wind and snow made even that refuge a miserable place. Finally he went to the doctor and got some pills. Threw them up. The third time he kept them down, and they seemed to help. The nausea stopped.

  For the first time in four days, he felt like eating. In the wardroom he ran into the doctor, who asked, “How you doing, Captain?”

  “Better, I think. The pills are working.”

  “I thought I gave you suppositories.”

  “Pills.”

  The doctor nodded distractedly, as if trying to remember. “Okay. But I can’t remember whether I gave you placebos or the real stuff. You might just be getting used to the ride.”