The Ghost War jw-2

by Alex Berenson

  “You speak Chinese?” He looked up at Wells, his chin jutting out, his face square and unfriendly.

  “No, sir.”

  “Of course not. First trip to China?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why you come now?”

  “There’s a computer conference starting tomorrow. I’m looking to hire some programmers—”

  The officer held up his hand. Enough.“How long you staying?”

  “Five days.”

  “You doing anything for United States this trip?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You don’t understand? I’m asking you if anyone in America told you to report back on what you see here,” the officer said. “Military preparations.”

  Wells raised his hands defensively. “No, no. I’m a businessman.”

  “If someone did, it’s better to tell now. We put you on a plane, send you home.”

  “Nothing like that.”

  “This bad time for Americans in China,” the colonel said to him. “Be careful. If we catch you by military base—” He left the threat unfinished, handed Wells back his passport, and waved the cab through.

  A MINUTE LATER WELLS WALKED through the hotel’s big glass doors and felt whipsawed again. A giant pot of fresh-cut orchids and tulips sat on a marble table near the front door, filling the lobby with fragrance. The air was cool and calm, the doormen brisk and efficient. At the front desk, a smiling concierge upgraded him to a suite, telling him that cancellations had left the hotel empty.

  And finally, Wells lay on his bed, hands folded behind his head, watching CNN International play silently on the flat-panel television, constant updates on “The China Crisis” scrolling across the bottom of the screen, accompanied by stock footage of F-14s soaring off an aircraft carrier. The correspondents were doing their best to manufacture news, though not much had changed since Wells took off from San Francisco.

  Following the sinking of the fishing boat by the Decatur, China had ordered the United States to pull all its vessels at least 1,000 kilometers—620 miles — from the Chinese coast. The Chinese had also threatened to blockade Taiwan, and even made noise about dumping their trillion-dollar foreign reserve, a move that would send the dollar’s value plunging and put the United States into recession. In response, the United States insisted that China needed to end its support for Iran and stop threatening Taiwan before it would even consider pulling back. America also warned China not to “play games with the world economy.” The sinking was an accident and shouldn’t impact the broader crisis, the White House said.

  Wells closed his eyes and heard the hotel’s thick windows rattle as fighter jets rumbled in the distance. He supposed Exley and Shafer were right. He shouldn’t have come. He was meeting a man he’d never seen or even spoken with, a man who might already have been doubled. He was here on a contingency plan that was a decade old and that no one had ever expected to use. At best, this trip was the equivalent of heading out for a three-day backcountry hike in March without a backpack or even a compass. If nothing went wrong, he might get home with a touch of frostbite and an empty stomach. But he had no margin for error. And, of course, if Cao Se had been doubled and the Chinese knew he was coming, he was as good as dead already.

  His actual instructions for the meeting were simple. Since Cao didn’t know how to recognize or reach him, he was using what the agency called a 2-F protocol. Fixedlocation, fixed time. Essentially, Wells would show up at the meeting point and follow the instructions of whoever met him. Ideally, Cao Se would be waiting. More likely he would be greeted by a courier, by the police, or no one at all. If nobody showed up, Wells had no backup spot. He was simply supposed to return to the meeting point an hour later, then once more the following day. If Cao didn’t show by the third meeting, Wells would leave — assuming the flights between China and the United States were still running. The embassy and station chief had no idea he was here, of course. The agency assumed that the mole had compromised all its networks in China. Wells had to come in alone to have any chance of staying clandestine.

  Wells flicked off the television and lay on the floor. The opulence of the suite made him uncomfortable. He didn’t like having his bags carried, or fancy soap and shampoo in the marble bathroom. Strange but true: he’d rather be on a cot in Afghanistan. The room’s luxury made the danger of the mission seem less real. What could possibly go wrong inside a five-star hotel? Would he choke to death on an undercooked steak?

  Wells supposed his uneasiness here proved he was a less than perfect spy. A true master could fit in everywhere, from a Siberian prison camp to a Des Moines mall to a Brazilian beach. That was the theory, anyway. Wells had his doubts such an animal existed in real life. A spy who could infiltrate an Iraqi insurgent network probably didn’t have much in common with one who could talk his way into a private casino in Moscow.

  Wells shucked his clothes, padded into the bathroom, turned on the shower. No low-flow shower-heads here, and no waiting for the water to heat up. He had to admit that staying at a five-star hotel had some advantages.

  AT THE HEIGHT OF CHINA’S tensions with the Soviet Union in the 1960s, Mao had ordered the building of a bunker under Zhongnanhai capable of surviving a direct hit from a nuclear warhead. The vault had been expanded over the years. It was now a miniature underground city, sprawling across six acres, with its own electrical supply, food stocks, even a seven-room hospital.

  But the bunker’s newest and most technically advanced room was the strategic-operations center that the People’s Liberation Army had opened just six months before. A room 150 feet square, the operations center was more advanced than the White House Situation Room or the Air Force’s NORAD facility inside Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado. Video feeds allowed the PLA’s generals to watch takeoffs and landings at China’s air bases in real time. Secure fiber-optic links connected them with the silos that housed China’s nuclear arsenal. One wall was devoted to a giant digital map of the eastern Pacific that of fered an integrated view of the positions of the Chinese and enemy fleets.

  The room was crowded but not claustrophobic, thanks to its twenty-foot-high ceilings, and surprisingly quiet. Its humming hard drives and clicking keyboards provided background music that was as soothing in its own way as ocean waves, and as unceasing. All the while, information moved up the chain of command, orders back down. They met at a raised platform in the center of the room, where Li stood, reading a message from the Xian.

  When he was done, Li turned to the wall-sized map of the Pacific.

  “Highlight the Xian and the target,” he said to Captain Juo, the commander of the center’s Eastern Pacific Defense Unit.

  “Yes, sir.” Juo tapped his keyboard, and suddenly two lights began to blink on the screen, a red circle indicating the Xian, and a green square for the target.

  “How accurate are these positions?”

  “For the Xian, we’re estimating based on its last known position forty-five minutes ago. For the target, we’re accurate to fifty meters. We’re watching it in real time with the Tao 2”—a new recon satellite that the PLA had named after the Houston Rockets center.

  “So we know the enemy’s location better than our own ship.”

  “That’s correct, General.”

  The paradox of submarine warfare. The Xian could communicate only irregularly with its commanders, lest it betray itself to the Americans. But China’s satellites could track enemy ships with ease.

  “And when does the Xian next report?”

  “At 0100, sir.”

  “How confident are you in your identification of the target?”

  “I’ve looked at the photographs personally, General.”

  “And you’re certain.” Li wanted to hear the captain say the words.

  “I’m certain, sir.”

  Li put a hand on Cao’s elbow and guided him out of the captain’s earshot. “What do you think, Cao?”

  Cao’s lips barely moved. He spoke so quietly th
at Li had to bend in to hear him. “I think we should wait. I also think that what I think doesn’t matter. You’ve decided.”

  “And you’re right.” Li turned to Juo. “Captain, I won’t be here when the Xian reports in next. But here’s the message that I’d like you to send.”

  THE PEN SPUN OVER the sketch pad, leaving behind a tiny blurred city of palaces and cathedrals. Cao had never visited Paris, but he’d seen pictures. Sketching cleared his mind, helped him think. He threw in a couple of gargoyles atop a cathedral that might have been Notre Dame and eyed what he’d done. Not his best work.

  He shoved the pad aside and stared out at the Beijing sky, tapping his pen on the plastic stump of his lower left leg. Midnight had come and gone, but the sky was more white than black, the lights of the city reflecting off clouds and smog, turning night into a perpetual half dawn.

  Cao lived in a four-room apartment in an Army compound near Zhongnanhai. His place was simple and spare, decorated in traditional Chinese style. Scrolls hung from the walls, long rice paper sheets covered with stylized characters in thick black ink. As a senior officer, Cao could have had a much bigger apartment if he’d wanted. But he preferred this space. With no family, he’d be lonely in anything bigger. Besides, he spent most of his time visiting bases and traveling with Li.

  Normally, the apartment was calm and quiet, protected by the compound’s high walls, an oasis in the center of Beijing’s tumult. But today Cao heard the rumbling of helicopters over Tiananmen. The last time the square had been this crowded had been 1989. Back then, Cao wondered if the Party’s leaders would survive. But he’d underestimated their ability to hold power. This time the masses had filled Tiananmen to challenge America. But what would they do if they discovered they were being used in a power struggle?

  “The choice of heaven is shown in the conduct of men.” The proverb dated from the fourth century B.C., from Mencius, a follower of Confucius. But what was heaven’s choice now? Cao clasped his hands, closed his eyes, and asked God to help him understand. In 1991, on a trip to Singapore for a regional defense conference, Cao had overheard singing from a blocky concrete building that turned out to be a church.

  He’d never even seen the inside of a church before, but the joy in the voices he heard drew him in. Cao was hooked immediately. To this day he couldn’t explain why, not even to himself. On his next trip to the church, he secretly converted, dunking himself in a bathtub and accepting that he’d been born again. His Christian name was Luke.

  Cao was hardly alone in his faith. Protestant and Catholic missionaries had been active in China since the nineteenth century, and millions of Christians were scattered across China. They were tolerated, but not encouraged. The government saw Christianity as a source of trouble, a possible rival to its power. As far as the men of Zhongnanhai were concerned, Communism and nationalism were the only acceptable faiths in the People’s Republic. Cao could never have become a senior PLA officer if he’d declared his faith openly. Even Li wouldn’t have stood by him.

  So Cao had hidden his faith. Every couple of months, he found his way to a restaurant in southeast Beijing owned by Wei Po, a heavyset man in his late fifties. Wei had been a Christian even longer than Cao, since the mid-1980s. But most of the time, Cao prayed at home. As a senior officer, he didn’t have to worry that his quarters would be searched. Even so, he locked his cross and Bible in a drawer in his desk. He took them out now, running his fingers around the cross, trying to think his way out of the dilemma he faced.

  Cao had been stunned when Li told him that the Second Directorate had discovered a traitor’s message to the embassy. He hadn’t imagined the Americans could be so corrupt. The meeting he’d asked for was supposed to take place in just a few hours, not far from here. And he knew that Li’s men would be watching. The army’s internal security force was tracking every American who’d come to Beijing in the last week, especially anyone traveling alone who had requested an expedited visa. Only about forty-five people fit that profile in all of Beijing, Cao knew. Of course, the CIA could have turned instead to a foreign service, but Cao thought that the Americans wouldn’t take that chance on a mission this sensitive. No, whoever showed up at the meeting would be an American, and he’d be under surveillance.

  But if Cao didn’t show, he’d miss his only chance for contact. The Americans couldn’t reach him. And with the embassy compromised, he effectively had no way to reach them either. After a decade underground, he no longer had active dead drops or signal sites, which was the reason that he’d been forced to send his coded message directly to the embassy.

  Cao could also try to get inside the American embassy and ask for asylum. But Li had anticipated that possibility. Chinese police had surrounded the embassy grounds, claiming their cordon was necessary to protect the Americans inside “from the passions of the Chinese people.”

  Even if Cao did get inside, he’d have forfeited his chance to stop Li. There had to be a way to break Li’s hold on the Standing Committee, but Cao hadn’t figured it out yet.

  Since the war in Vietnam, Cao had considered Li his closest friend. He knew the relationship had been one-sided. Li was tall, handsome, smart. The picture of an officer. Cao was short, his leg a stump, a plodder rather than a philosopher. As they’d risen through the ranks together, other officers had called Li and Cao the “Big and Little Brothers,” as well as other, less friendly names.

  But Cao had never cared. He’d been proud to call Li his friend. “A man should choose a friend who is better than himself,” the proverb went. Cao had never forgotten how Li saved his life in Vietnam. And Li didn’t steal or take bribes, unlike so many officers.

  Yet the Devil knew every man’s weakness, Cao thought. Li lusted for power the way lesser men chased money. Now that hunger had eaten him up. Perhaps Cao should have tried to stop him sooner. But at first he hadn’t understood what Li planned. Later he’d figured that Li couldn’t possibly succeed, that the others on the Standing Committee would block him.

  But Li had proven them all wrong. He’d manipulated the Iranians, the Americans, even the protesters who filled Beijing’s wide avenues. The confrontation between Beijing and Washington was nearly out of control. The liberals inside Zhongnanhai wanted to back off, but they couldn‘t, not without seeming weak, not after the way the American destroyer had sunk the Chinese trawler. China needed revenge. But whatever Li had told the committee, the Chinese retaliation wouldn’t end the confrontation, Cao thought. The Americans would want their own retribution. At best, tit-for-tat provocations would go on for months. The Americans would blockade Shanghai. China would dump its dollar reserves or fire missiles over Taiwan. Finally both sides would tire of the phony war and turn to the United Nations as cover for a deal.

  And at worst? At worst, the two sides would miscalculate each other’s seriousness. The attacks would get more and more deadly, until nuclear-tipped missiles went soaring over the Pacific. “A sea of glass mingled with fire,” John had written in Revelation 15. Nuclear war. The ultimate sin, Cao thought. Man choosing to bring the end of days, a choice that was God’s alone.

  Even assassinating Li — something Cao knew he could never do anyway — wouldn’t defuse the crisis. Others within the government would take up the fight, seeing, as Li had, that confrontation with the United States was a path to power. Only by finding a way to discredit Li totally could Cao turn back the clock.

  And so, in desperation, Cao had reached out to his old allies at the CIA. He didn’t expect they would have any answers. But at least he wanted them to understand that not everyone in Zhongnanhai wanted confrontation. And he thought they should understand exactly what had happened with the mole and with Wen Shubai, the defector.

  YET HE WONDERED if he would be able to betray Li when the moment came, or if in the end his nerve would fail and he’d stay silent. In the last two weeks, he had suffered the same nightmare a dozen times. He marched next to Li on a muddy Vietnamese road as snipers decimated their company. T
he screams of the wounded raced inside his head. Step by step he neared the mine that he knew would tear off his leg. He tried to turn away but couldn’t. But when the explosion came, he felt no pain. He looked down and saw his body was undamaged. Instead it was Li who writhed helplessly on the dirt beside him, his leg torn in half. Li opened his mouth to speak. And though Cao always woke before Li said a word, he knew that Li meant to call him Judas, to accuse him of the ultimate betrayal.

  He was actually relieved each night when he touched his withered leg and found that nothing had changed.

  But he couldn’t allow his friendship with Li to stop him from doing what he had to do. He wasn’t Judas, and Li… Li wasn’t Jesus. He needed to focus, to figure out how to meet the American agent without betraying himself. He flipped open his Bible, then shut it irritably. The answer wouldn’t be found in there.

  Then he looked at the book again.

  Unless it would.

  As the plan filled his mind, Cao slid the Bible back into his desk. The idea was a long shot, and he would have to trust in the endurance of this American, this American he’d never met. But he had no other options.

  Ten minutes later Cao was in his jeep, navigating through the night, heading east. Armored jeeps and paddy wagons blocked the entrance to Tiananmen, but when the soldiers manning the blockade saw the stars on Cao’s uniform, their scowls turned to salutes and they waved him through.

  To the east of Tiananmen, the traffic picked up again, and the city turned bright and shiny. This stretch of road was Beijing’s answer to Fifth Avenue, chockablock with stores that sold thousand-dollar handbags to China’s elite. Cao passed a Ferrari dealership, low-slung yellow cars glowing under the lights. A Ferrari dealership.Less than a mile from Tiananmen. While all over China farmers and factory workers scrambled to eat. Perhaps Li was right after all. Perhaps China needed him in charge.