The Ghost Agent

by Alex Berenson

  ‘Not at the moment. They have other priorities. And it’s in a very difficult location. Way up in the mountains. I think we should get a satellite up to take a look at it.’

  ‘Sounds reasonable. And then?’

  ‘I don’t know. Depends on what we see. Maybe we can convince the SF to go after it.’

  ‘Okay. Talk to Greg Levine at NSA.’ Shafer scribbled a number for her and handed back the files. ‘If he gives you any lip, tell him to call me. And Jennifer – do you want me to say anything to John?’

  She walked out without answering. Let somebody else deal with Wells for once.

  Three hours later, Exley walked into Shafer’s office at Langley. Wells was already there. A nice surprise. She’d called and asked him to show up, but she hadn’t been sure he would.

  ‘We got them already?’ Shafer said. ‘This must be a record.’

  ‘Levine said they had a satellite right there and it would be no problem as long as I had a cost center for him,’ Exley said. ‘I told him to put it on your tab.’ As part of the government’s internal accounting procedures, the National Security Agency dunned the CIA whenever Langley asked for photographs that required the NSA to alter the orbit of its satellites. The agencies had teams of auditors to squabble over the accounts, though in the end the American taxpayer footed the bill for everything. The system was either a necessary check on spending or a cosmic joke, depending on who was explaining it.

  ‘There it is. Your tax dollars at work.’ Shafer clicked on a folder on the workstation in the corner, which was linked to a fiber-optic network that transferred encrypted images between Langley, the Pentagon, and NSA headquarters. The agency refused to extend the network to the offices at Tysons Corner, so they had to come to Langley to see photographs like these.

  The folder popped open, revealing dozens of graphical files. Shafer clicked one and turned to the fifty-inch flat-panel screen that hung on one wall of his office. But the screen stayed dark.

  ‘Wow, the Eiffel Tower,’ Exley said.

  ‘No, it’s the rain forest,’ Wells said. He was lounging on the couch, his long legs stretched on Shafer’s coffee table. He showed no ill effects from his ride the night before. Exley noticed that he’d even shaved.

  ‘Everybody’s a critic,’ Shafer said. He fiddled with the back of his workstation and clicked again. This time a remarkably clear image of the Afghan mountains filled the flat panel. At the end of the Cold War, American spy satellites had been celebrated for their ability to read license plates from space. Now they could read not just license plates but newspaper headlines.

  Shafer focused on a patch of flat ground several hundred yards long, the most likely spot for a camp. Wells lifted himself off the couch and stared. The mountains had woken him up, Exley thought. She hadn’t seen him so alert in months.

  ‘It’s a camp for sure,’ Wells said. ‘A big one.’

  ‘Then where is everybody?’ Exley said. Only two men were visible in the photograph. They sat against the side of the mountain, rifles slung over their shoulders. ‘These were taken a couple of hours ago. Near dusk over there. Dinnertime. Shouldn’t they be lining up?’

  ‘They’ll be back soon. Look, there’s two campfires going. You don’t do that unless you’ve got a lot of guys to feed. And over here –’ Wells stepped close to the screen and pointed to the southern part of the camp, where holes were dug behind a makeshift rock wall. ‘Those are privies. At least five of them. Another sign they’ve been there awhile, and they’re decently organized.’

  ‘The report says forty to fifty men.’

  ‘At least that. Ellis, pull it back. Give me the widest view you can.’ Wells ran his finger over the screen, tracing a line from the ridge, south, into the valley. ‘See this?’

  Shafer got it first. ‘A trail, down the side of the mountain.’

  ‘Follow it south, south –’ Shafer scrolled down the screen, leaving the plateau and moving into the valley.

  ‘No wonder the evil American infidels always knew where we were, back in the day,’ Wells said. ‘If we’d had one of these, it would have been a fairer fight.’ He grinned at Shafer. His confusion of ‘we’ and ‘they’ was no accident, as Shafer and Exley well knew.

  ‘Want to switch sides again?’ Shafer said.

  ‘I’m not so sure they’d have me, Ellis.’

  ‘Anyway, where would you ride your bike?’ Exley said.

  ‘Children,’ Shafer said. ‘Focus, please.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ Wells said. He stepped closer to the screen. ‘Can you scroll farther down?’

  ‘This set doesn’t run any farther south. We get another pass tomorrow.’

  ‘Magnify it. The southern edge.’ Wells looked at Exley. ‘See what they did at the base of the valley? Just left of where the trail ends.’

  ‘Those branches?’

  ‘See how they’re arranged? They look like they’re part of the forest, but they’re not. They’re thicker.’

  Slowly, Exley recognized the hidden shapes under the branches. ‘Trucks?’

  ‘Pickups, at least four. Toyotas most likely. All with fifty-cals. When I was with them, they never would have bothered to hide them.’

  ‘Which means –’

  ‘It doesn’t prove anything,’ Wells said. ‘But yeah, it’s evidence they’re getting lessons.’ He looked at Exley. ‘Well done, Jenny. Though I have to admit I don’t get it. Who would be crazy enough to help the Taliban right now?’

  ‘What do you think we should tell Bagram?’ Bagram Air Base, north of Kabul, the headquarters of the American military command in Afghanistan.

  ‘They’ve got to hit it,’ Wells said. ‘Find out if it’s real. Though it’s gonna be tough. Whoever’s up there can enfilade anyone coming up that trail something vicious. And I’ll bet they’ve got heavy stuff in those caves. Mortars, RPGs, some SAMs’ – rocket-propelled grenades and surface-to-air missiles.

  ‘You want to go? Summer vacation in Afghanistan? For old times’ sake?’

  Shafer had asked the question, but Wells looked at Exley instead. She hated to see the eagerness in Wells’s face. He looked like a hound that had just sniffed out a fox. Did killing thrill him so much? She wasn’t sure she wanted to know the answer. Anyway this mission was what she’d told Shafer she wanted for Wells. Something that would test him, get him out of his funk.

  ‘Go for it, John.’ Anything beats the bike, she thought.

  ‘If the guys at Bagram will have me, I’ll think about it.’

  ‘It may take a few days to put together, but you’re right,’ Shafer said. ‘We have to hit it. And they’ll have you.’

  Shafer’s phone trilled. Shafer held a finger to his lips, warning Exley and Wells to stay quiet, and picked up. ‘Hello, Mr Tyson.’ George Tyson was deputy director for counterintelligence, the man in charge of making sure that foreign intelligence services didn’t infiltrate the CIA.

  ‘When? Where? Tomorrow would be better . . . No . . . if it’s urgent, okay. We’ll see you there. Yes. We. Me and the two musketeers.’

  He cradled the phone. ‘Strange. Tyson wants to talk to us tonight. Not here. Says something’s happening in Korea.’

  FIVE

  BETRAYED. THE WORD rang in Beck’s mind as he opened the Phantom’s hatch and hurled the transponder as far as he could into the foaming water. Betrayed. He threw Sung against the side of the cabin. Betrayed. He drove his right fist into Sung’s soft belly until the North Korean’s mouth flopped open and his legs went flaccid. Sung slid to the floor, gasping, wordlessly begging for oxygen.

  ‘Ask him,’ Beck said to Kang. ‘Ask him why he’s killing us.’ Beck was even more furious with himself than with Sung. He should have checked the bag as soon as Sung got on board. But he simply hadn’t imagined that Sung would destroy his own chance for escape.

  ‘If he doesn’t start talking, I’ll put a bullet in him.’ Beck drew his pistol. ‘I will, too. Tell him.’

  Kang finished translating. The
cabin was silent. Then Sung spoke, the words coming in broken spurts.

  ‘He says the security services have his family. Wife, parents, children, cousins. They’ll all die if he doesn’t follow orders.’

  ‘How did he blow his cover?’ When Sung heard Kang’s translation, he shook his head before muttering a response.

  ‘He didn’t. He’s sure. It must have been someone on our side. One day the police came. Nothing he said mattered. They knew.’

  ‘Why didn’t they just arrest us, sink the boat, when we landed?’

  This time Sung said nothing at all. Beck put aside his pistol and kneeled on Sung’s chest and hit him in the face, twice. He got his shoulder behind the second punch and felt Sung’s flat nose break under his fist. ‘There’s no time for this.’

  Sung spoke, the words so quiet that Kang had to lean in to hear. ‘He doesn’t know. He thinks they wanted to see where we were going, who would meet us.’

  ‘Why didn’t you warn us?’ Beck asked Sung directly in Korean. The North Koreans had forced Sung to ask CIA for the pickup, of course. But he could have flashed a different code, one that told them that he’d been compromised.

  ‘No choice.’

  ‘Of course you had a choice,’ Beck said.

  Sung murmured to Kang. ‘He wants to show us something. Says you have to get up,’ Kang said.

  Beck stood. The North Korean shrugged off his nylon sweatpants. He wasn’t wearing underwear, just some surgical gauze over his crotch, stained black-red with blood.

  Sung lifted the patch.

  ‘Jesus,’ Beck said.

  Sung’s penis and testicles had been removed, leaving a raw hole in his crotch that had been pulled together with crude black stitches. A plastic catheter poked from the wound, spilling drops of reddish-tinted urine.

  ‘Fuck. Animals.’

  Tears ran down Sung’s cheeks, mixing with the blood still streaming from his nose, the combination a ghastly purple under the cabin’s blue running lights. More than ever, Beck was glad for the little glass capsules in his pocket. He pulled up Sung’s sweatpants as gently as he could. Sung was talking again, his shoulders shaking.

  ‘He says, he says they told him he would die no matter what,’ Kang said. ‘For betraying Kim Jong Il. But they said if he warned us, they’d hurt his sons and his father also, the same way they hurt him.’

  ‘Tell him he’s not gonna die. We’re not letting him die. Even if he wants to.’

  Now that Beck had dumped the transceiver, the North Koreans had lost them, at least temporarily. The radar feed from the Hawkeye showed that the Su-25 and the helicopters had made two loops around the transceiver. Soon enough they’d realize their mistake and widen the search.

  Meanwhile, Choe had changed the Phantom’s course, turning the boat to 165 degrees, south-southeast, angling slightly toward South Korea. If they had both engines running, they could have gotten to international waters in twenty minutes. Instead they had an hourlong ride. Still, Beck wanted to believe the worst was over. With every minute that passed, they were closer to getting out.

  Sung lay curled against the wall, a hand covering his crotch, his body shaking. Beck wanted to ask more questions, but this obviously wasn’t the time. Beck reached for his emergency first-aid kit. He grabbed a bottle of forty-milligram OxyContin and shook one and then another of the yellow pills into Sung’s hand. The North Korean popped them into his mouth with a hopeless shrug and choked them down. Whatever you’re giving me, his eyes said, whatever it does, I’ll take it.

  Five minutes passed, and another five. Sung sighed and closed his eyes, and Beck hoped the Oxy had knocked him out, or at least dulled his pain. The feed from the Hawkeye showed that the helicopters and the Su-25 had split up, circling south and west as they searched for the Phantom. Through the blown-out windows at the back of the cabin, Beck saw one of the helicopters making long diagonals to the north, its spotlight shining down on the empty black waves. We might get out of this, Beck thought. Busted engine and all. We really might.

  Then –

  Ping! Ping! Ping!

  The pilothouse vibrated as the sonar waves bounced off the Phantom’s hull, three in a row in quick succession. Beck had never felt sonar so strong. The boat’s sonar-detection system began to sound its automatic alarm, the whine of its horn filling the cabin, telling them what they already knew: a submarine had targeted them. From very, very close. Just like that, they were in worse trouble than ever.

  ‘Where is he?’ Beck said.

  ‘Six hundred yards east. Periscope depth. Want me to ping him back?’

  ‘No.’ What was the point? They had no torpedoes or depth charges, and on the one-in-a-million chance that the sub had missed them, they might as well stay quiet.

  ‘Choe,’ Beck said. ‘Heading two-one-five.’ Southwest again.

  ‘Two-one-five.’ Choe began to turn the helm.

  ‘Tell him to push that engine as fast as he can,’ Beck said to Kang.

  ‘I think he figured that out all on his own.’ But Kang said something in Korean to Choe nonetheless. Without looking up, Choe said in English, ‘Thirty-three knots.’ He spat a stream of Korean, a language that had never sounded uglier to Beck than at this moment. Beck knew enough of what Choe was saying to understand that Choe was cursing him for leading them on a mission doomed to failure even before it began. Nonetheless, Choe pushed the throttle forward and the Phantom picked up speed.

  Ping!

  Again the cabin rattled. The sub was double-checking its range. Its skipper couldn’t believe how close he was either. But Beck didn’t think the sub would fire without being certain it wasn’t accidentally targeting a fishing trawler.

  He looked east but couldn’t see the periscope. He wondered if the sub had tracked them all the way from the rendezvous point. Probably not. The North Koreans had ordered it here in case the Phantom somehow escaped their cordon. Running across the sub was nothing more than bad luck. The kind of bad luck that would kill them all.

  Still, as long as it could move, the Phantom had a chance, Beck knew. North Korean subs were badly made copies of Russian Romeo-class subs, whose basic design was fifty years old. Thus the telltale active sonar pings. Unlike modern subs, the Romeos needed active sonar to lock on their targets, even at close range.

  The North Korean torpedoes were equally dated, copies of old Russian 53-61 Alligators, with a top speed of forty knots and a range under ten miles. With both engines, the Phantom could easily have outrun the torpedo. Instead, the boat’s fate would depend on how quickly the North Koreans could load and fire, how badly the years of famine had degraded their readiness.

  Beck’s watch read 00:00:30. A new day. He hoped he’d see the end of it.

  Thirty seconds later, Kang looked up from his screen. ‘They’ve launched,’ he said.

  ‘Range?’

  ‘Twelve hundred yards.’

  Now it’s just math, Beck thought. Either that Alligator runs out of juice before it gets to us, or it tears us up. The torpedo was running 1,200 yards a minute, give or take. With its blown engine, the Phantom was limited to about 1,000 yards a minute. The torpedo had started 1,200 yards behind, but it was picking up roughly 200 yards a minute, maybe a little less. Unless it ran out of fuel, it would be making their acquaintance in six minutes, seven at most.

  For a moment, Beck thought about ordering Choe to stop the Phantom so they could try to launch the Zodiac raft. But they probably couldn’t get to it before the torpedo hit, and even if they could, they’d have to leave Sung behind. Beck wasn’t willing to abandon the North Korean, even though his treachery had put them in this jam. He’d suffered more than any of them.

  The seconds ticked by miserably. 00:03:40 . . . 00:03:41 . . . ‘Range?’

  ‘Seven hundred fifty yards and closing.’

  Beck wished they could do something more. Take evasive action. Drop chaff. Fire their own torpedo. Call in air support to blast that damned sub out of the water. But they could only
run, and hope.

  00:05:56 . . . ‘Range?’

  ‘Three hundred fifty yards. Still on us.’

  ‘Is he slowing?’ The torpedo wouldn’t stop all at once. It would sputter to a halt as it exhausted its stores of kerosene and hydrogen peroxide.

  ‘Not yet.’ Kang turned the Dolphins hat around. ‘Time for a rally cap.’

  00:07:03 . . . ‘Range?’

  ‘Under two hundred . . . a hundred fifty now.’ Kang’s tone was steady. ‘Wait . . . he’s slowing.’ Hope crept into his voice. ‘He’s at thirty-eight knots. Thirty-seven.’ The hope faded. ‘He’s still coming. A hundred yards now.’

  Even so, the torpedo was now hardly gaining ground on the Phantom – and it was near the end of its effective range. If they could just stay ahead for a minute longer, they might get free.

  ‘Sixty-five yards . . . Sixty . . . but he’s lost another two knots. Down to thirty-four. He’s hardly catching us now. Fifty yards.’

  And now Beck could see the wake of the torpedo, cutting through the flat waves, chasing them, trying to destroy them. It was just a mindless piece of steel, but Beck hated it more than he’d ever hated anything.

  ‘Only forty yards,’ Kang said. Then his voice lifted. ‘He’s down to thirty-three.’ At thirty-three knots the torpedo wasn’t closing anymore.

  ‘That’s right,’ Beck said to the thing behind them. ‘Die. Get lost and die.’

  ‘Thirty-two.’ Kang didn’t try to hide his joy. ‘We’re outrunning him!’

  In their excitement neither Beck nor Kang noticed that a red warning light had flared on the dashboard. ‘Oil!’ Choe yelled. ‘Oil!’

  ‘What?’

  Choe pointed at the light, the engine oil-pressure warning light. They’d run the damaged Mercury too hot for too long. Minute by minute, the oil leak had worsened. They’d dripped oil like blood across the sea. Now the engine had no oil left at all, and –

  With a loud thunk, it seized up, leaving the Phantom without power.

  And no power meant the Phantom was a floating paperweight.

  With only its momentum to carry it along.

  But the torpedo hadn’t forgotten them.