Red Cell

by Mark Henshaw

  “You never win big and you can always still lose,” Pollard agreed. “But we’re getting some help to keep the PLA Navy off our backs.” He reached into his pocket and passed a hard copy of CINCPACOM’s orders to Nagin, who turned it over in his hand and began to study the small type. “Honolulu, Tucson, Virginia, and Gettysburg.” The first three were attack submarines: the two named for cities were Los Angeles–class, the third was the lead boat of the more modern Virginia class. Gettysburg was a Ticonderoga-class cruiser. “The subs will join us by day after tomorrow. Gettysburg is coming up from the south. She’s already in the Balintang Channel, so she’ll beat us there by a day or so. Washington is getting the Salt Lake City, Columbia, New Mexico, and Leyte Gulf. Not a bad start.”

  “Maybe Gettysburg will clear out the water for us and save us the trouble,” Nagin said, hopeful. “We’ll be in the PLA’s ocean by Saturday.” Chinese submarines had shadowed US carriers in past years, at least one as far north as Okinawa. The US Navy usually found the PLA units and chased them off, but everyone on both sides understood that practice made perfect and the Chinese were only getting better. “Even with the help, the numbers will still be six to one in the PLA’s favor.”

  “It’ll be a target-rich environment if we have to go ‘weapons free,’” Pollard said. “Intel says that at least half of the Chinese sub fleet are old Russian Romeos. Those are easy. It’s the Kilos and the Hans that worry me. Imagery puts the Hans to the north, closer to Washington’s AOR, so we’ll probably be facing Kilos if the PLA decides to take a shot at us. Diesel-electrics, nice and quiet, but they’re getting old,” Pollard said. “If we’ve got the island between us and them, they’ll have to approach us from the south. Washington will close off the north unless they want to take the really long route around. That’ll limit their approach vectors.”

  “Not looking to take us into the Strait?” Nagin asked. The attempt at humor wasn’t even halfhearted.

  “Not if I can help it,” Pollard replied. “Too close to too many PLA bases for my taste. I’d prefer not to be the one who has the limited approach options.”

  “Nimitz did it back in ninety-six,” Nagin observed.

  “The Chinese weren’t ready to take a shot at a US carrier in ninety-six. Maybe they are now,” Pollard told his subordinate. “And I’d rather make the PLA come to us. We’ve sold the Taiwanese enough weapons over the years. No sense in us being the first line of defense for them.”

  Nagin lifted his helmet and held it in both hands, looking at it. He’d been to Pollard’s office upstairs and seen the admiral’s own flight helmet behind the desk. The moniker Tycho was stenciled across the front, scratched and faded. Nagin had shared plenty of beers in plenty of bars with Pollard and heard the old man’s war stories from Iraq and Bosnia. The admiral had earned his rank the right way. The man had been ordered into a fight, flown his own fighter straight onto the enemy’s home field, fired his guns in anger, and taken fire in return. Nagin respected the man and not just his rank. The admiral didn’t fly combat missions anymore, but the old man had been into the devil’s own home more than once and could tell his men the color of the paint on the walls inside. Admirals were considered too valuable for that, so Pollard had to settle for sitting on the carrier watching his pilots launch into unfriendly skies. It was the order of military life, and Nagin’s turn to leave the cockpit and watch others fly was coming soon enough.

  Nagin squared his shoulders and faced the admiral. “If Tian wants to take it that far, we’ve had a long time to get ready for it.”

  Pollard smiled. “So have they.”

  CHAPTER 7

  SATURDAY

  DAY SEVEN

  BEIJING

  Pioneer owed his freedom to the habit of catching his mistakes before he made them. He controlled his thoughts with discipline that a monk would have coveted and he always thought twice before moving once. Though he knew it wasn’t true, he assumed the enemy would never make an unforced error and that only by doing the same could he survive. He had conditioned himself to settle for winning by stalemate, so it had never occurred to him that misfortune would stalk his enemy the way it had always stalked him.

  He’d come to Jingshan Park to clear his mind. It was a more sultry day than usual for Beijing’s winters when he arrived, and others had flocked to the park to enjoy the warmth. He found a group of older men standing near the Pavilion of Everlasting Spring—not living up to its name this season—practicing the art of water calligraphy on the cement sidewalk stones near the gardens. Each man held a brush with a white handle long enough for the horsehair tip to touch the ground. They would dip the instrument in water, roll the end on the ground until it came to a fine point, and write pictograms on the stone walkway. It was a practice thought to stimulate the mind, and Pioneer found it calming to watch. He was no artist, but when one of the elderly men had offered him a turn, he took the brush without protest and joined in the craft. His unnamed patron left him the brush, the chill in the air finally reaching his old bones and forcing him to go home for some relief.

  Pioneer’s characters weren’t elegant. There was such a thing as sloppy Chinese handwriting, but artistry wasn’t the point. He stayed for hours, finding it easy to lose himself in the hobby, and he paid little attention to the crowd of tourists and locals that he and the other men drew. He wasn’t a natural showman. Espionage had taught him to shun public attention, but he felt very peaceful at the moment and he wasn’t engaged in an operational act, so there was nothing illegal for anyone to see. Some of their spectators watched them for only a few minutes before moving on; others stayed for an hour or more despite the chill. There was more than enough artwork for them to see. The characters would have disappeared quickly during any other season. A warmer sun would have evaporated the water almost as fast as they were written, but that was not the case today. The temperature fell as the evening approached, and the ground grew colder than the air. The wet pictographs remained, forcing Pioneer and the others to move down the sidewalk to keep a clean canvas in front of them, the crowd moving with them. Finally, the cold became too much for him and Pioneer handed the brush to another old man and walked north to Lotus Lane, a strip along the south shore of Qianhai Lake lined with restaurants and bars. He began searching for something warm to drink. There were a number of coffeehouses, and Pioneer had developed a taste for the Western brew.

  In retrospect, the man on the bicycle should have struck Pioneer as being out of place. Normally he was observant enough to notice such things, but his focus on the water calligraphy had been total and he hadn’t seen the man ride past him in Jingshan Park three times. As Pioneer entered the pedestrian-only zone of Lotus Lane, the man followed behind him and attempted to dismount his bicycle before it came to a complete stop. The front wheel hit an icy patch on the road and the bicycle shot out from under him as the cyclist put his foot down to catch himself. His shoe landed on the same black ice and went sideways, and its owner collapsed in an ungraceful heap, taking a pair of nearby pedestrians with him. His leg broke under his weight in two places and he cried out in shock at the sharp pain. One of the pedestrians, a woman, shouted in surprise as the bicycle struck her behind the knees, pitching her forward onto her face. Her reactions were slowed by the several drinks she’d had midafternoon, and her face smashed into the concrete, breaking her nose with a cracking noise that Pioneer could hear. The second victim, a man, stumbled as the woman struck him on the way down, throwing him forward onto the decorative cement rail to his right. He caught himself before he went over but couldn’t get his own footing on the ice and fell to the ground bruised but still luckier than the other two.

  Pioneer turned toward the ruckus, not fast enough to see the accident, but quickly enough to see the full aftermath. The woman was lying on her stomach in shock, blood streaming from her broken nose. He saw the man lying near the rail, a look of pain on his face but trying to get to his feet. The cyclist was clutching his leg, which was bent at an unnatural
angle that made Pioneer sick. Without thinking, he moved toward the man to help him. The man rolled onto his side, and Pioneer saw a two-way radio fall from his coat. It was a Motorola, black, somewhat larger than the kind that a tourist might have for personal use, and was attached by wire to a clear acoustic tube speaker that it had ripped from the cyclist’s ear on its way to the ground. The man tried to grab for the radio and earpiece but they were out of reach, and then he made the mistake that fully destroyed his cover.

  Pioneer leaned toward the downed man. The cyclist saw him approaching and froze. He was a junior officer who lacked experience, and his panic was strong enough to override the few months of training he did have. His instincts told him to avoid contact with the target—usually the right response, but not now at a moment when the target was entirely focused on him. The officer jerked away, exactly the wrong move for a crippled man in need of immediate help. The cyclist realized his mistake and made a second by looking directly at Pioneer to see if the target had penetrated his cover, as if the earpiece hadn’t been enough. The clear plastic coil would have screamed security service in any country.

  Pioneer looked directly at the crippled man’s face and saw . . . recognition. He was quite sure they had never met. Pioneer’s memory for faces was good. It was the necessary by-product of years of counter-surveillance practice, but the injured man’s look settled the question in Pioneer’s mind as to who he was. Pioneer reflexively held his own features rigid to show nothing in return. His mind sorted the possible responses and only one fell out that would preserve any hope of his continued survival at all.

  He retrieved the radio and earpiece and held them out to the man.

  The cyclist’s face showed as much surprise as pain as he took them from his prey. It was not an act he would have expected. Maybe this target hadn’t figured out that he belonged to the MSS? Was that possible?

  Pioneer wasn’t nearly stupid enough for that, though he didn’t know that the woman with the broken nose and the man by the railing were MSS as well, as were six other people in the immediate vicinity. Pioneer helped the cyclist to stand on his one good leg and moved him inside to a bar ten feet away, where he could at least be warm while he waited for medical assistance. He retrieved a rag with ice from the bartender and returned outside to the woman, who had been helped to a sitting position by her MSS partners. Her coat was ruined by the bloodstains and Pioneer feared she would faint if she took a look down at herself. He gently tilted her head back and applied the ice, then helped her stand and moved her into the bar to sit next to her partner.

  The medics arrived, splinted the cyclist’s leg, and wheeled him out of the bar on a gurney while helping the woman to the ambulance. Pioneer watched them go and then went on his way to the coffeehouse. He was moving entirely on automatic pilot, keeping up the good show even while his brain screamed that it was futile.

  They know.

  How did they know? When and where exactly had he made the mistake that had tipped them off? He couldn’t come up with an answer but he couldn’t stop thinking about it. Finally, he forced his mind away from the obsession as best he could. It was a riddle without a solution. Other spies had been exposed by the most trivial of errors, and his error surely had been trivial because he could not, for the life of him, identify what it had been. He likely would never learn how they had been tipped off to him unless they wanted to tell him at his trial, and that was unlikely. It would be a closed-door hearing with him absent in a cell.

  His time as a spy was over, but he still had one operational act left to perform. After that, the sole remaining question of how long he might live would be completely out of his control. Would the CIA fight for him? Even if the Americans had the will to exfiltrate him, time was still not his friend and never had been. Before, it had at least left him alone. Now it would torture him. Assuming that they would decide to save him, the CIA would need time to position enough assets to act, while the MSS could arrest him almost at its leisure. Why hadn’t they done so? Maybe they had only recently become aware that he was a traitor? They didn’t know the extent of his crimes and were still exploring the magnitude of his treason? He had no answers to questions that he wouldn’t be able to stop asking. They would be like a merciless children’s song playing over and over in his head until he was ready to scream.

  Answers wouldn’t change the fact that Pioneer was now a dead man walking free with one hope only. Every case officer he’d ever worked with had promised to get him out of China if he were compromised. It was time for one of them to keep the promise.

  CHAPTER 8

  SUNDAY

  DAY EIGHT

  BEIJING

  Mitchell was driving, which was no small feat for an American in Beijing. The written driving test had a hundred questions and the English version was nearly incomprehensible. Most of Dunne’s people who had licenses had taken the test repeatedly, often sharing and memorizing the right and wrong answers among themselves to improve their scores. Mitchell took the test in Mandarin, a notable feat itself, and passed with a perfect score, which was unheard-of for an American. Yet he still preferred to use the railways as a matter of course. Traffic in Beijing flowed through the streets like floodwaters through a Venetian canal, and the rules of maneuver were mostly unwritten. Motorists acted on instinct and moved like schools of fish, where a single car’s turn could lead a wave behind it. It had taken Mitchell months to develop a feel for the flow and pace of traffic here, but it was worth the effort. It made life miserable for the Chinese security officers who had to conduct surveillance.

  He made the turn onto the Wangfujing Dajie road and pressed the accelerator. His eyes moved back and forth between the road and the rearview mirror every few seconds. The MSS was back there. Vehicular countersurveillance was a difficult skill to master, largely because it meant the driver had to spend more time looking to the rear than ahead at the road. But the Russians, giving Mitchell no end of practice, had quickly fixed the habit in him.

  At least five cars had made the last three turns with him. He wasn’t sure which were driven by security officers, but he was certain at least two and possibly three of them were following him. He had no issues with that. His only stop tonight would be for gas.

  Pioneer stood in front of the Capital Theater, watching the traffic as though waiting to flag down a taxi. It was his preferred site for such operations. Pioneer enjoyed the performing arts and could speak intelligently about a broad range of plays, particularly Western musicals. The music of Les Misérables haunted him. Jean Valjean’s story of a man living a life of secrets felt like his own, and Pioneer had learned some of his limited English by following the libretto’s text as he listened to the album in his apartment.

  It was cold enough that Pioneer’s breath was visible in the air; yesterday’s warmth was gone. He wore a black overcoat and red scarf—not the blue one that he usually wore—positioned not to obscure his face. This operational act didn’t require him to do anything except be recognizable from a short distance. Pioneer carried no classified material tonight. There was nothing on his person that could incriminate him if he were searched, and yet he was more tense tonight than he had been any other night he could remember. Perhaps the evening he had first walked in and volunteered to work for the CIA could compare, but his stress that night almost twenty-five years before had merely been compounded by nervousness. Ignorance worked in his favor then. Now his anxiety was multiplied by experience. He wondered if the MSS had tracked how often he changed the colors of his scarves, the answer to which was never until tonight. He hoped that they wouldn’t realize that the change had to do with something more than mere fashion.

  Mitchell approached the theater. He moved the car one lane to the left out of the rightmost lane. It was a purely diversionary maneuver that forced the MSS officers in the cars behind to watch his car instead of the sidewalk to his right as he passed the Capital Theater. The patrons, both Chinese and foreigners, were still mingling in front in a siza
ble crowd. Mitchell wished that he could park the car and buy a ticket to whatever was playing. The Monkey King, which had been as good as the reviewers claimed, had left the station chief thinking about another night out at the theater with his wife.

  The time window for the sign of life was five minutes. There would be no contact between them, which would make it impossible for some counterintelligence analyst to prove that the close proximity wasn’t a coincidence. That was the theory. Proximity might be enough to set the MSS off, depending on their level of paranoia, if they were watching Pioneer . . . and the Chinese were a paranoid bunch.

  Mitchell didn’t slow the car or turn his head to look for the asset. It was all done with the eyes. He looked right. Pioneer was there as scheduled.

  Sign of life. He’s still free, Mitchell thought. But Pioneer was wearing the red scarf, not the blue, and the CIA officer was sure he felt his chest seize up.

  They’re watching him.

  He made the left turn onto the Jianguomennei Dajie, the artery road that passed between the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square, both landmarks west of his position. He straightened out the car and drove east toward the embassy district. He said nothing until he arrived at his office, closed and locked the door, and dialed the number for Barron’s office. Only here could Mitchell open up. The room was swept for microphones and other such gear on a schedule. “Hey, boss.”

  “How’d it go?” Barron asked.

  “He’s alive and running loose, but they’re on him,” Mitchell said.

  “Then why not pick him up? Any chance that the locals don’t really know?”

  “Maybe, but I wouldn’t bank on it. Pioneer called it, not me,” Mitchell said. “And it could explain why the package wasn’t at the drop site.”

  “That means there’s a high probability that you’ve been burned too,” Barron said. “Betcha the MSS had a microcamera inside that bathroom or outside pointing at the door.”