The Ghost War

7

THE TARMAC AT MEHRABAD AIRPORT, outside Tehran, was a living graveyard of aviation. Baggage carts and tanker trucks jostled for space with planes that had long ago become extinct at more modern airports: 727s, DC-10s, even Russian Tu-154s cast off by Aeroflot. At the end of the terminal sat a four-engine 707, the original Boeing passenger jet, introduced in 1958 and a favorite of aviation buffs. In America, the plane would have been a museum piece. Here it was transportation.

In the midst of this muddle, three Iranian Army jeeps and two Mercedes limousines sped along, horns honking, headlights flashing. The convoy was led by a black Toyota Land Cruiser with tinted windows, a distinctive rising siren, and a single red light on its roof, like a 1960s police cruiser.

The light and siren identified the Toyota as belonging to Vevak, Iran’s fearsome secret police force. As the Toyota approached, baggage handlers jumped back and the Tata tanker trucks made way, their drivers ducking their heads. Avoiding Vevak’s attention was critical to a long and healthy life in Iran.

The Land Cruiser pulled up beside an Airbus A340 painted in the distinctive white-and-gold of Air China, the state-owned Chinese national airline. Four Chinese men stepped out of the first limo and positioned themselves around the second. Only then did the doors of the second Mercedes open. Five men emerged, two bodyguards in suits and three older men wearing the uniforms of the People’s Liberation Army.

The last man to step out was taller than the rest, broad-shouldered, deep into middle age, with short black hair and shining golden sideboards on his green uniform. He was General Li Ping, chief of the People’s Liberation Army and one of the nine members of China’s Politburo Standing Committee, the group that ruled the world’s most populous nation.

Li and his bodyguards strode up the jetway as the Land Cruiser and limousines rolled away. A few minutes later, the Airbus accelerated down the runway, its engines purring, and lifted into the cloudless night.

From the outside, this Airbus looked like the usual Air China A340 widebody that flew the 5,000-mile route from Beijing to Tehran three times a week, down to the stylized red phoenix painted on its tail. But inside, this jet was very different. In place of the usual complement of three hundred seats, it held twenty lie-flat recliners. Near the front of the plane were two staterooms, with king-sized beds, bathrooms, and showers. The jet also came equipped with its own full-time crew from the Chinese air force, as well as three armed guards who lived in a suite at the back and never left the plane unattended.

For despite its markings, this Airbus was far from an ordinary commercial jet. Only the nine men on the Standing Committee had the right to use it. Naturally, China had official state aircraft as well, painted with the country’s five-starred red-and-yellow flag. But the A340 offered advantages for those times when Politburo members wanted to keep their travel plans secret. American spy satellites watched over all the major airports in Iran. But they weren’t looking for an Air China widebody. The jet gave General Li a way to travel invisibly to his meetings in Tehran, meetings he’d been having more and more often.

IN SOME WAYS, China and Iran had every reason to get close. Both nations had long and proud histories. Both had suffered during the twentieth century from invasions and internal strife. Both were now powerful once again, though for different reasons. China’s strength was built on two decades of spectacular economic growth. Iran’s gains were based on oil and the failure of American policy in the Middle East. The Islamic Republic now dominated the Persian Gulf and had the ability to choke off half the world’s oil.

Any serious threat of war between Iran and the United States would take the price of crude to $100 a barrel. An actual American attack on Iran would move oil closer to $200 and put the world into recession. If Iran retaliated by destroying the giant fields to its west in Saudi Arabia, the world would have to ration oil for the first time since the original wells had been drilled in Pennsylvania 140 years before.

And despite what environmentalists liked to pretend, the modern world could hardly exist without oil. Airplanes would be grounded. Electricity and fertilizer would double or triple in price. Middle-class Americans and Europeans would be squeezed, and the lives of the poor everywhere would grow more desperate. So Iran was not just another third-world country that got the world’s attention only for plane crashes and earthquakes. When its leaders spoke, London and Washington had to listen. But America didn’t enjoy being at Iran’s mercy, a fact that the leaders of the Islamic Republic knew only too well. To make sure that the United States never tried “regime change” in Iran as it had in Iraq, they wanted a nuclear arsenal.

Li understood the Iranian desire for nukes. It was no coincidence that the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council — China, America, Russia, Britain, and France — were the five countries with the largest nuclear stockpiles. Because of their unique destructive power, nukes guaranteed national security like no other weapon. No country that openly possessed a nuclear stockpile had ever been invaded. With nuclear weapons to give it cover, Iran could push its neighbors around even more aggressively.

For that reason, Washington and Jerusalem had vowed to stop Tehran from getting even one bomb. In response, Iran had turned to China for support.

And China? China had reasons to help Iran. Li had reasons too, his own reasons, ones that not even his fellow ministers on the Politburo Standing Committee could imagine.

THUS LI HAD MADE the trip to Tehran three times in the last year, each time in secret on this Airbus 340, for talks with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president.

The trips hadn’t been easy. China and Iran might need each other, but they didn’t necessarily trust each other. Li found the atmosphere in Tehran as suffocating as the long black robes the women wore, and the national obsession with Islam as bewildering as the calls to prayer that rang through the presidential palace.

Before Li’s first visit to Iran, his staff had prepared a thick book for him about Islam. He had skimmed a few pages and then tossed the binder aside. Prophets, angels, devils, an all-knowing God. Islam was just like Judaism and Christianity. Li didn’t believe in any of them. Like many Chinese, he wasn’t very religious, though every so often he burned fake money to honor his father and mother, both long dead. He wanted to make his mark in this world, not wait for another life. Meanwhile he had a question for his hosts, one he didn’t plan to ask: If the Iranians had such faith in Allah, why were they so desperate for nuclear bombs?

The A340 reached 38,000 feet and leveled off. Li touched a button on his leather recliner. Sun Wei, the Airbus’s steward, appeared in seconds. “General.”

“Please ask the pilots if we can expect a smooth flight.” Chinese men his age rarely exercised — at most they contented themselves with tai chi — but Li took his workout regimen very seriously. He always brought an elliptical trainer with him on the Airbus.

Wei disappeared. A minute later he was back, holding a gym bag packed with Li’s exercise clothes. “The winds are with us, General. A smooth flight.”

In the main stateroom, Li changed in silence and alone. Some other members of the Standing Committee had valets to help them dress. Li hadn’t fallen so far into bourgeois decadence, not yet anyway. Though he had to admit that he’d grown used to great luxury. He had chauffeurs, guards, housekeepers. Still, he always tried to remember that he served the people, not the other way around. Unlike other leaders, he hadn’t used his position to make a fortune from bribes or corrupt business deals. He had no hidden bank accounts, no villas in Hong Kong.

For the next hour Li forgot himself on the trainer. When he was finished, he stretched and showered and returned to his chair. A glass of freshly squeezed orange juice awaited him. Sun Wei knew the favorite drinks of everyone lucky enough to be a regular passenger on this plane.

Li sipped his juice and tried to relax. As always, he was glad to be free of Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, a scrawny man with hard black eyes. At their first meeting, a year earlier, Ahmadinejad had begun by haranguing Li about the United States and Israel, the eternal enemies of Muslims everywhere. The words spilled from Ahmadinejad’s mouth so quickly that Li’s translator could hardly keep up. Though the Iranians kept the presidential palace frigid, sweat rolled down Ahmadinejad’s face as his voice rose.

For half an hour, Li had sat across from Ahmadinejad, hands folded patiently in his lap, waiting for the man to exhaust himself. He was used to sitting through boring speeches, though usually they came in his own language. The Iranian poured out words, a river of nonsense. He seemed to be preaching at an audience of thousands, an audience that only he could see. Finally Li broke in.

“Mr. President,” he’d said, first in Chinese, then in English. “Mr. President.

“The Chinese people appreciate your grievances with the global hegemon, the United States. We agree that every state has the right to rule itself.”

“Yes, yes. But the problem is deeper. The Zionists—”

Li had no intention of sitting through another rant. “And I thank you for your hospitality. But I must return to Beijing tomorrow, and we have much to discuss.”

Ahmadinejad seemed to have forgotten that Li was an emissary from a country more powerful than his own, not a rival to be bullied. “General, before we can continue, you must understand—” But Li never found out what he had to understand. Before Ahmadinejad could go on, the clean-shaven man beside him whispered into his ear.

The man was Said Mousavi, the head of Iran’s secret police, and whatever he had said, his words were effective. Ahmadinejad ran his hand through his coarse black beard and whispered back to the security minister. From then on, his conversations with Li had been mostly businesslike, though Ahmadinejad still blustered occasionally about Zionist conspiracies. Yet by the end of their second meeting, Li realized that the Iranian was more subtle than he appeared. As much as anything, his windy speeches were intended to distract, to hide Iran’s real ambitions.

If outsiders had known of these meetings, they would have assumed China had the upper hand. Yet it was Li who flew to Tehran, not Ahmadinejad to Beijing. The men who ran Iran took such eagerness as a sign of China’s weakness. Li didn’t try to change their minds. He had his own reason for wanting these meetings in Tehran instead of Beijing. This way, only he and his closest aides knew exactly what he was telling Ahmadinejad. Of course, he reported back to his fellow ministers on the Standing Committee after each meeting. But he didn’t report everything.

As they tried to build a bomb, the Iranians needed engineering help, lots of it. Even for a sovereign country with a multibillion-dollar budget, building a nuclear weapon was harder than it looked.

Nuclear weapons are both complicated and very simple. Conventional explosives get energy from breaking chemical bonds between atoms. Nuclear bombs release the energy bound up inside individual atoms, a far bigger source of power. The difference in power is staggering. Fat Man, the bomb that the United States dropped on Nagasaki in 1945, used fourteen pounds of plutonium to produce a blast with the energy produced by 42 million pounds of conventional explosive. The bomb killed 70,000 people immediately and tens of thousands more over the next generation. Yet by modern standards, the Fat Man bomb is puny.

Fortunately for humanity’s survival, most types of atoms can’t be used in nuclear weapons. The exceptions are plutonium and a certain kind of uranium, called U-235, so-called fissile materials. The United States and other major nuclear powers prefer plutonium for their bombs, because plutonium is even more potent than uranium. But plutonium is also harder to handle, and it doesn’t exist naturally. Making it requires nuclear reactors, big buildings that are prime targets for guided missiles or bombs. So uranium is the nuclear material of choice for countries like Iran, which need to make bombs in secret.

Still, uranium can’t simply be pulled out of the ground and plugged into a nuclear weapon. In its natural state, uranium ore consists of two different isotopes, U-235 and U-238. They look the same, a heavy silver-gray metal. But they have different atomic structures. U-235 can be used to make a bomb. U-238 can’t.

In its natural state, uranium is made up of 99.3 percent U-238, the useless kind, with just 0.7 percent U-235 mixed in. To separate the valuable U-235 from U-238, weapons builders used centrifuges, enclosed chambers that spin very fast, enabling them to pull the lighter U-235 out of the U-238.

In theory, the centrifuge procedure is relatively straightforward. But as the Iranians had found out, bridging the gap between theory and reality could be difficult. Even under the best of circumstances, it required a small army of well-trained engineers and physicists. The Iranians had an added challenge. Because of the threat of the Israeli air force, they were working in labs buried seventy feet underground.

UNTIL THIS MEETING, Ahmadinejad hadn’t told Li exactly what problems the Iranians were having. In part, his reticence was a matter of national pride. The Iranians hated to admit that they had failed where North Korea had succeeded. At the same time, Tehran worried that Beijing might be cozying up to them just to betray them to the United States.

To overcome that suspicion, Li had gone to great lengths. Not even the other members of the Politburo Standing Committee knew the steps he had taken. Now, finally, his efforts were paying off. This time around, Ahmadinejad and his scientific advisers had made very specific requests, asking if China could lend Iran electrical engineers, metallurgists, and physicists — a hiveful of highly trained worker bees to build a very large stinger. In return, Ahmadinejad offered to name China as Iran’s preferred partner for oil and natural gas development, and to give China first call on Iranian crude in case of a worldwide shortage.

Li hadn’t tried to hide his excitement at the offer. An alliance between China and Iran would be a giant shift in world politics. For the first time since the end of the Cold War, major nations would align in open defiance of America.

Naturally, Li agreed. The approval of the Standing Committee would be a formality, he said. And why would the Iranians doubt him? He’d given them reason to believe that China hated the United States as much as they did.

Li knew this alliance was risky. He didn’t fully trust the Iranians. But he needed their help, needed it now. He was setting China on a collision course with the United States. Without Iran’s support, his plan couldn’t succeed. And despite what he’d told the Iranians, the plan was his, his alone. The other eight members on the Politburo Committee didn’t know what he was doing. They would never have supported him.

Li believed he had sound reasons for taking this path. The others on the committee were cowards and thieves. He needed to act, and quickly. One day, the full truth would come out, and the world would judge his actions. By then he’d be dead, though not forgotten. Never forgotten. In the meantime, though, he needed to keep his scheme secret. For if the Standing Committee learned exactly what he’d done, his future would be short and bleak.

LI TURNED HIS CHAIR to face Cao Se. Technically, Cao was only the seventh-ranking officer in the PLA, but in reality he was closer to Li than anyone else. Li and Cao had served together in China’s three-week war in Vietnam in 1979. Li had come out unscathed, but not Cao. A mine had taken off his left leg below the knee. Sometimes Li wondered whether Cao was marked to take the misfortune for both of them. Perhaps in a previous life he had served Cao. Now the roles were reversed. Where Li was tall and handsome, Cao was small, his face pockmarked. His wife had died in childbirth in 1986 at a Shanghai hospital, and he had never remarried.

A few years before, Li had caught Cao staring at him. The look wasn’t sexual, more like the devotion that a child lavished on a distant father. Sometimes Li wondered if a more independent adviser would have served him better. Yet loyalty like Cao’s was rare, and Li needed at least one man he could trust completely.

Cao knew more about Li’s plan than anyone else. Even so, Li hadn’t told Cao exactly what he was doing. As much as he trusted Cao, he couldn’t take that chance. Not yet.

“General.” Cao was drawing intently in a spiral notebook, his lips pursed tight, his face rapt. At the sound of Li’s voice, Cao snapped the notebook shut.

“Keeping secrets, Cao?”

“You know I have no secrets.”

“Let’s see.” Li reached out for the notebook.

“It’s nothing to do with anything, General.” Nonetheless, Cao handed it over.

The book’s pages were filled with sketches of buildings in thick black ink, skyscrapers and highways and apartment complexes. Long flowing strokes that caught the motion and vitality of city life. Li recognized the giant Jin Mao Tower in Shanghai, the Empire State Building. Other buildings seemed to be of Cao’s own creation, narrow towers that stretched to the sky, stadiums with cantilevered roofs.

“Cao. These are excellent.”

“A way to pass the time.”

“No. Truly. You could have been an architect. You have a talent.” At this, Cao smiled. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t think you’d be interested, General.”

Li handed back the book. And wondered, What other secrets have you been keeping from me all these years, little Cao?

“So what did you think of Ahmadinejad today?” This conversation would necessarily be limited. Li and Cao knew that the A340 had a dozen bugs scattered through its cabin. As defense minister, Li controlled most of them. But not all.

“These Iranians are strange people,” Cao said. “In a way, they’re like the Red Guards”—the young revolutionaries who had tormented China in the late 1960s. “They don’t mind tearing everything down. They take a certain pleasure in it. If they got the special weapon, they might actually use it.”

“They think the world could end tomorrow. It gives them freedom.”

“At first I didn’t think we could trust them. But now. Our interests are aligned. We help them, they help us. We’re in different beds but we have the same dream.”

Li smiled. Cao had reversed the Chinese proverb of “different dreams in the same bed.” The implication of the saying was that no two people could fully trust each other. Even a husband and wife who’d slept beside each other for fifty years had different dreams.

In this case, though, Li and Ahmadinejad knew that they were in a marriage of convenience. Their opposition to the United States had brought them together. They didn’t need to trust each other, as long as their interests were aligned.

“Different beds, same dream,” Li said. “It’s enough for a partnership.”

“For now.”

“It won’t have to be forever, Cao.”

8

THE GOLDEN RETRIEVER LUNGED after a fat gray squirrel, dragging the man in the green windbreaker forward. He fell on the muddy ground, banging his knee against a bulbous stone, his curses echoing through the empty woods. The dog ran off, chasing the squirrel until it darted up a birch tree and disappeared.

“Lenny! You moron! Come here.”

The dog stared stupidly at him, then trotted back, his leash trailing on the muddy ground. The man could only shake his head. For months Janice had told him to get that dog-training video with the Mexican guy. He would have bought it already if she hadn’t nagged him so much. Even when she was right, she was wrong.

“Lenny. You dope.”

He patted the dog’s flank. Lenny licked his hand by way of apology before flopping onto the ground. Rain had fallen all night, leaving the earth soaked. The dog rolled from side to side on his back, ecstatic at the chance to cover himself in dirt.

No wonder this stupid animal was his favorite creature in the world, the man thought. This simple sense of joy that he had lost long ago. If he’d ever had it. Certainly he preferred Lenny to his wife. If their house were burning and he could save only one, he’d probably grab the dog.

“Enough. You’re making a mess.”

He took Lenny’s leash and stood, trying not to lean too hard on his knee. The rain had let up before dawn, but a drizzle continued, spotting his forehead. He breathed in deeply, hoping the cool damp air would soothe his lungs.

The man looked around the leafy woods to be sure he was alone. Wakefield Park lay in suburban Virginia, just west of the Beltway. But it seemed to belong somewhere more rural. Sparrows darted through beech trees, and foxes regularly made their way to the creek in the center of the park. In the early mornings, the place was deserted aside from a few mountain bikers — and the man in the green windbreaker.

It was the perfect spot for dead drops.

The man checked the gold Rolex he wore only outside the office: 6:07. Time to move, before the bikers showed up. He tugged on Lenny’s leash and off they went, Lenny’s head twisting from side to side as the idiot dog looked for more squirrels to chase.

TEN MINUTES LATER THE MAN stopped near a granite outcropping beside a burned-out tree stump. He was alone, though he could hear the morning’s first biker yodeling gleefully over a rise to the east.

From his jeans the man pulled a little black plastic case that looked like the control for a car alarm. The case had two buttons, one black, one red. He pushed the black button.

To the west, up a slight hill, he heard two chirps. Maybe 150 feet away. He walked up the hill and pushed the black button again. This time the beeps were closer, thirty feet. He paced closer, one careful step at a time. He looked around, making sure he was still alone. He was. Once more he pushed the button. The beeps came again—

There. It lay by a tree, a broken oak branch like any other. Only it wasn’t. It was the dead drop to end all dead drops. The branch was genuine, and originally from this park. But at a lab outside Beijing it had been hollowed out, its center replaced with a waterproof plastic compartment big enough to hold two thin sheets of paper — or a flash memory drive. Big enough to betray the CIA’s most important secrets.

The Chinese had installed a receiver in the branch that responded to a signal in the plastic case the man held. The technology was simple, basically a car alarm with better encryption, but foolproof. He and his handlers could make drops just about anywhere. For the last three years, they had used Wakefield, a perfect spot, a fifteen-minute walk from his house.

He reached down for the branch—

And a squirrel ran by and Lenny tugged on his leash. Stupid dog.

“Go. You deserve each other.” He dropped the leash. The retriever took off.

“Alone at last,” the man said. He picked up the branch, rubbing his fingers over its bark, feeling for the hidden pressure points at each end. If they were pressed simultaneously — and only if they were pressed simultaneously — they would release an electromagnetic lock and pop open the center compartment.

There. He found the first pressure point. Now where was the other? He probed the bark. There. No, there—

“Hey! Buddy!”

Dammit. He turned to see a mountain biker ped aling toward him. The guy was wearing the ridiculous gear they loved, a neon-yellow reflective jacket and tight Lycra shorts.

“This your dog?” Lenny trailed after the bike.

The man in the green windbreaker felt his heart thump crazily. “Yeah. His name’s Lenny. He thinks one day he’s gonna catch himself a squirrel. Thanks for bringing him back—” Stop talking, he thought. You’re just a guy out walking your dog.

He snapped his mouth closed. He dropped the branch and reached for Lenny. “You dummy,” he said to the retriever. “You’re gonna get lost.”

“Ought to keep an eye on him. I almost hit him.”

“You’re right. My mistake.”

The biker rolled closer. The man felt oddly light-headed. He knows. I’m not sure how, but he knows. Why had he left his Smith & Wesson in his basement?

“Well?”

“Well what?”

“Shouldn’t you put him back on the leash?”

“Sure. Of course.” He reattached the leash. “Thanks for bringing him back.”

“No prob, man.” The biker nodded victoriously and turned down the hill. The man in the windbreaker sat down and waited for his pulse to return to normal. After all his years of tradecraft, he couldn’t believe that a jackass on a souped-up twelve-speed had almost busted him.

“Lenny. You almost caused me big trouble.”

Instead of answering, the dog squatted to relieve himself. Or maybe that was his answer, the man in the green windbreaker thought. He let Lenny take his time, waiting until he could no longer see the biker, until he could no longer feel his heart thumping sideways in his chest. When he was sure he was alone, he turned back to retrieve the branch — and the instructions inside.

9

WELLS WALKED DOWN A WHITE SAND BEACH, dipping his feet into the waves lapping along the shore. The water was the clearest blue imaginable, so bright it almost seemed neon. Exley lay on the beach under an umbrella, wearing a modest bikini that changed color as he looked at it, now red, now yellow, now green with camouflage stripes. That’s wrong, he told her. War isn’t sex. But she didn’t hear.

He turned back to the ocean. Instead of sand, the water covered a bank of fluorescent lights. Off, he said to Exley. Turn them off. She ignored him, and when he looked for her, she was gone. He tried to run for her, but the waves ripped him away from the beach, away from her—

“Mr. Brown.”

Wells woke, muzzy-headed, to a hand shaking his shoulder. Instead of a beach, he was on a C-17. The cabin stank of sweat and stale unwashed bodies. They’d been airborne for twenty hours.

“You okay, sir? Look a little green.”

“Fine, Lieutenant.” Wells rolled his head, futilely trying to unlock the scar tissue in his back. Instead of standard seats, the military plane had plastic benches screwed to its walls. They seemed designed to torture the spine.

“Lieutenant, how long was I out for?”

“Five hours, give or take,” the lieutenant said. “We’ll be down in forty-five. Pilot just turned on the lights.”

The lights. That accounted for his dream, Wells thought. All around him, men in fatigues were slapping themselves awake, swigging mouthwash, stretching, anything to shake off the boredom of an 11,000-mile journey. Wells had hitched a ride to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan with the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 82nd Airborne, which was being sent overseas for the third time in five years. Macho chatter filled the cabin, soldiers psyching themselves up for the grueling days to come:

“Ready to land?”

“Heck no, Sergeant. Let’s spend another day in this tin can.”

“Ramirez, is that my toothbrush?”

“Nuh-uh, moron. Check your ass — it’s probably stuck there.”

“Think this is what it’s like to be an astronaut? When I was a kid, I always wanted to be an astronaut.”

“You can’t even find Uranus, Roberts — get it? Uranus. Like—”

“I get it.”

“All right, who farted?”

“Who didn’t?”

Then, from the back of the cabin, the all-purpose Army cheer: “Hoo-ah!”

“Hoo-ah!”

“Those Talibs ain’t gonna know what hit ‘em! They going down like Chinatown!”

“Hoo-ah!”

“Like your sister on prom night!”

“Hoo-ah!”

“We’re sending Osama straight to hell!”

“Hoo-ah! Hoo-ah!” At first out of sync, but then melding into one giant “HOO-AH!” so loud the cabin rattled.

Hoo-ah: short for “Heard, Understood, Acknowledged.” “I get it,” “yes sir,” and “rock on,” all in one. Not just following an order but being proud to follow it. Nothing like hoo-ah, the word or the spirit, existed in civilian life. Wells couldn’t help but smile. He felt privileged to be with these guys. After all these years of war in the desert and the mountains, the United States Army was still the world’s finest fighting force. Though the Marines might disagree.

Now, the men in charge, they were another story. They — their kids, at least — ought to do some time over here, and not on the guided two-day tours the Army gave them so they could tell the talk shows how they’d been to the front lines. Let them spend months dodging mortars and roadside bombs, feel for themselves how a base could turn into a prison after a while.

Enough, Wells thought. No more thinking. He’d volunteered to come back here. He had a job to do. “Hoo-ah!” he said to himself. He chugged half a bottle of water in one gulp, soothing his raspy throat, then poured the rest over his head, smiling in satisfaction as the lukewarm liquid ran down his face. He pulled a towel from the pack under his feet and wiped himself dry.

“Love those whores’ showers,” Lieutenant Gower said with a smirk. He was a sturdily built black man, twenty-six or so. Wells liked him, mainly because Gower, despite his obvious curiosity, hadn’t asked Wells anything about who he was. For twenty hours they’d talked about sports, played chess — Gower had beaten him handily — and otherwise ignored the question of how Wells had found his way onto this particular plane.

“Got that right,” Wells said. He decided to pull Gower’s chain. “Reminds me of ‘Nam.”

Gower’s eyes widened. “You served in Vietnam? For real?”

“Tet, Khe Sanh, all of it. I got a wall full of ears at home. Now, that was a war.”

“Serious?” Gower looked at Wells. “You’re messing with me.”

“Yeah, I am. Do I really look that old? I’d be sixty.”

“We all look sixty right about now. Tell you what, though. You got some juice. Not just anyone can get on a fully loaded C-17 on two hours’ notice.”

“I thought this was a Hooters charter to Bangkok.”

“Understood, sir,” Gower said. “Figured I’d give it a shot.”

THE CABIN’S SPEAKERS CLICKED ON. “From the cockpit. We know you love it up here, but it’s my duty to inform you we’ll be on the ground in Bagram in about thirty minutes.”

The inevitable “Hoo-ah!” passed through the cabin.

“Those of you who have visited fabulous Afghanistan before know that we like you to saddle up at this point in your trip. This is not optional.”

Throughout the cabin, soldiers pulled on their body armor and helmets. Wells reached down for his bulletproof vest, standard police-issue protective gear, far thinner than the flak jackets everyone else wore.

“That all you got?” Gower said, looking at the vest. “It’ll hardly stop a nine.” A pistol-fired, low-velocity 9-millimeter round. The plates in the Army’s flak jackets were designed to handle high-velocity 7.62-millimeter AK-47 rounds, which would shred Wells’s vest.

“I like to travel light.” Wells pulled on his helmet.

The intercom clicked on again: “For your safety, this will also be a red-light landing. We know you Army boys get friendly in the dark, but please try to keep your hands to yourself.”

The overhead lights flicked off, replaced by the eerie glow of red lights mounted in the cabin walls. “We will be coming in tactically, so strap in tight and enjoy the ride.”

Around the cabin, men buckled themselves into the harnesses attached to the walls of the C-17. “Anyway, we hope you’ve enjoyed your trip,” the pilot said. “Thanks for flying this Globemaster III. We know you have a choice of airlines, and we appreciate — Oh, no you don’t. Forget it.”

“Funny man,” Gower said.

“Wishes he was flying an F-16.” Wells tightened his harness around his shoulders. The C-17 swung hard right and tipped forward into a dive.

“He best not go all JFK Jr. on us,” Gower said. He laughed, but Wells could hear the tension in his voice.

“Don’t like flying, Lieutenant?”

“I know what you’re thinking. Why’d I sign up for the Airborne? Wife says the same thing.”

“And you tell her a man’s got to face his fears.”

“That’s right. So what are you afraid of, Mr. Brown?”

The question stopped Wells. “I’m not sure.”

“Gotta be something. Everybody’s afraid of something.”

“Failure, maybe.”

“Good answer. Gives nothing away.” Gower sounded disappointed.

But Wells knew there was another answer, one he would never share with Gower: Myself. I’m afraid of myself.

POP! POP! CHAFF FLARES EXPLODED off the C-17’s stubby wings. Then the jet swung into a corkscrew. Gower’s fists were clenched in his lap. The plane leveled out suddenly. Seconds later it touched the ground, bounced, then touched down again, rocketing along the 10,000-foot runway.

And then they were done. The brakes and thrust reversers kicked in, and the C-17 stopped in one long, smooth motion. “Welcome to Bagram Air Force Base, thirty miles north of beautiful Kabul, Afghanistan. Local time is 0200 hours,” the pilot said. No cheer this time. The abrupt landing had reminded the soldiers of the danger they were about to face, Wells thought. He scanned the tense faces around him. Many of the men in this cabin had never seen combat. Their commanders would have to help them channel their adrenaline, turning it from fear into the vigilance that might save their lives.

The Pentagon liked to think of training soldiers as a science. It was really alchemy, an unquantifiable process. Some of these men would freeze under pressure, make bad decisions, get themselves or their buddies killed. Others would find calm in the heat of battle, outthink the enemy, save themselves in seemingly impossible situations. And no test could tell them apart. Only live ammunition could.

Of course, even the best-equipped, most able soldiers didn’t always survive. Sometimes every choice was wrong. Wells had never seen Ted Beck in action, but he knew Beck’s skills. If I’d been on that boat, would I have survived? Would I have seen something he missed? Wells couldn’t say for sure, but the odds were against it.

“Ever been in combat, Lieutenant?” he said to Gower.

“Not yet, sir,” Gower said. “Anything I should know?”

“Just stay calm. You’ll be good. I can tell.” Wells hoped he was right.

The overhead lights flicked on, replacing the spectral red glow of the landing lights. Wells blinked against the white glare, remembering his dream.

“Good luck, Lieutenant.” He offered Gower his hand.

“Luck, Mr. Brown. If the 504th can be of service, lemme know.”

Wells looked at the portable chess set in Gower’s pack. “Next time, you have to teach me some openings so I can give you a game.” He felt oddly disappointed as he turned away from Gower. Another good soldier he would never see again.

BUT WHEN HE STEPPED ONTO the tarmac, a pleasant surprise awaited him. Glen Holmes stood outside the C-17, a bit thicker than he’d been when Wells had met him in 2001, but otherwise instantly recognizable.

“Mr. Wells. It’s been a long time. The Special Forces welcomes you to Bagram.”

Wells looked at the eagle on Brown’s shoulder-boards. “Colonel Holmes. You’ve moved up in the world.”

“Yeah, I’m a real trailer queen these days. Hardly leave the base.”

“Trailer queen?” Wells had to smile. “Never heard that before.”

“You’ve done all right yourself since we last met, John.” Holmes grinned. “That might be the biggest understatement of my life. You need a nap, or can I interest you in a cup of coffee?”

“Coffee sounds great.”

A few minutes later they sat in Holmes’s B-hut as a lieutenant carried in two oversized plastic tankards. “Starbucks,” Holmes said. “My wife sends it every month.” The lieutenant lingered by the door. “Thank you, Carlo,” Holmes said. “Dismissed.”

“Yes, sir.” He saluted smartly and was gone.

“Funny,” Holmes said. “He never hangs around when it’s just me.”

“Everybody here know who I am?”

“Not the regular units. But SF is too small to keep secrets. Only a few hundred of us in the whole country. Anyway, you must be used to it by now.” Holmes grinned at Wells.

“Langley seems to wish I would disappear.”

“Well, you’re among friends here.”

“You sure? Vinny Duto never shot me. More than I can say for you.” Wells tugged up his sleeve to show Holmes the scar on his biceps, left over from the night in 2001 when he’d first met Holmes.

“If I recall, you asked me to. The most surreal night of my life,” Holmes said. “I sure didn’t expect to see you again.”

“All these years—”

“And look how far we’ve come.”

Wells smiled. “Yeah, about thirty miles. So how is it these days?”

“Had to spoil the trip down memory lane,” Holmes said. “Still mostly okay. Afghanistan isn’t Iraq. Not yet, anyway. But the Talibs are getting tougher. They’ve got new tactics this year. Their snipers are more accurate. And there are these rumors they’ve got professional help.”

“Why I’m here.” Plus I’m driving the woman I love crazy, Wells didn’t say.

“If we had another division, even a couple brigades, things would be different.”

“But we don’t.”

“No, we don’t. They’re busy you know where.”

“They’d do a lot more good here.”

“We just do what we’re told.” From a file cabinet, Holmes pulled out a silver flask and two smudged glasses stamped with the Army’s “Black Knight” football logo.

“Would you be offended if I offered you a drink?”

“Not at all.”

“Glad to hear it.” Holmes poured them both a healthy shot. “Macallan, eighteen-year-old. Been saving it for the right visitor.”

“To the men you lead,” Wells said, thinking of the soldiers on the C-17.

They raised their glasses. The scotch hit Wells immediately. He wanted nothing more than to lie on the wooden floor of Holmes’s hut and sleep.

“You must be beat, John,” Holmes said. “Carlo will find you a rack. Check it before you bunk down. A scorpion stung one of my guys last week. On the ass.”

“Ouch.”

“Yeah. Got his share of shit for it too. Swing by at 1300. I’ll fill you in on what we’re planning. Your office did great work on these foreign guys. Caught something we should have figured out a while ago. It’s time for us to hit them where they live.”

“Sounds like a plan to me.”

10

“EDDIE! DINNER!”

Even in the basement, through the locked door, her voice grated on his ears.

“In a minute,” he mumbled. He tapped a Marlboro from the box on the cluttered coffee table, touched lighter to cigarette with practiced hand. He closed his eyes in satisfaction as smoke filled his lungs. A nasty habit, but so what? Everybody died sometime. He exhaled through his nose, feeling his nostrils tingle.

He was stocky but solidly built. A touch under six feet, with thinning gray hair and a forgettable face, jowly and middle-aged. The face of a manager who’d never make vice president. The smoking and the Dewar’s didn’t help. His eyes were his only memorable feature: the right brown, the left green, with a striking black stripe that cut through the iris. The flaw was purely cosmetic and didn’t affect his vision.

He was a mole, a double agent. For seven years, he had sold secrets to China. An act of treason. Punishable by life in prison. Or death.

He looked around the windowless room. A dirty white shag rug covered the floor. The walls were paneled with cheap imitation wood and decorated with framed pictures he’d taken in Hong Kong decades before. His only overseas assignment. A softball trophy from the Reston summer league sat on his desk.

He kept the trophy as an ironic joke. But what good was a joke that no one got? Everyone he knew — coworkers, neighbors, even the Mexicans who cleaned his Acura — pegged him as a capital-L loser. On pain of death, he had to hide the only interesting part of his life. Tragic. He was tragic. He puffed on the cigarette, and a kind of pride filled him with the smoke. Tragic, but heroic. He broke society’s rules, lived apart from the common mass of men. He knew the chances he took, and he—

“Eddie!”

Where had his wife learned to howl like that? He ignored her and reached for the envelope inside his green windbreaker, the letter he had picked up that morning. The paper inside was neatly folded, a single sheet printed in the oversized Arial font the Chinese always used.

“Dear Mr. T.”—he always smiled at that, a cultural reference his handlers probably didn’t get—“As always, we most appreciate your work. You are truly our most valued asset. A bonus pay of three months has been received in your account for your service. Also please accept this gift.”

The English wasn’t perfect, but he got the point. They were happy. A gold Krugerrand had been taped to the paper. Nice touch, the mole thought. They’d never given him gold before. He flicked open his Swiss Army knife and cut the coin off the letter. The springbok stamped across its back gleamed even in the smoky basement air. It felt dense enough to stop a bullet. He flipped the coin in the air and caught it neatly. And a three-month bonus? That was an extra seventy-five grand.

“Eddie! The roast will be cold!”

Janice. Always spoiling his rush.

“For the love of God, shut up!” he yelled upstairs.

He slipped the coin into his pocket and returned to the letter. The rest was routine, until the end: “In light of the most recent events prudence dictates that we Discontinue”—he wasn’t sure why they’d capitalized the word—“Marco Trap immediately.”

Marco Trap was a mailbox on Moncure Avenue, just off the Columbia Pike, that he and the Chinese used as a signaling station. A vertical chalk stripe meant he’d left documents or a flash drive at the dead drop in Wakefield. Two horizontal stripes meant they’d picked up the papers. A diagonal yellow stripe meant he or they needed an urgent face-to-face meeting. A red stripe meant an emergency, a same-day meeting.

“Please begin use Tango Trap,” the letter continued. “All other procedures remain. We regret any inconvenience but you are too worthy to take chances. Most gratefully, your friend, George.”

George, aka Colonel Gao Xi. Officially, George was a cultural liaison at the Chinese embassy, responsible for bringing pandas and acrobats to America. In reality, he ran the Washington branch of the Second Department of the Chinese army — the main intelligence service of the People’s Republic. Put another way, George was China’s top spy in America. For three years, he had served as Eddie’s personal handler. There was no greater proof of the value of the secrets Eddie delivered.

The mole skimmed the letter again, wondering why the Chinese had changed the mailbox. He couldn’t imagine their signals had been noticed. Maybe they were nervous because of what had happened in the Yellow Sea. The North Koreans hadn’t exactly been subtle. But the mole didn’t think anyone had connected the Drafter with him.

Anyway, the CIA lost sources all the time. It was part of the game. Sure, the Drafter was more valuable than most, and the fact that the agency had lost its own men trying to rescue him guaranteed that the incident would get attention. But the CIA had been in perpetual crisis in the years since September 11. The mole didn’t figure the loss of one agent would be at the top of anyone’s agenda. The East Asia desk would wind up issuing a report about the dangers of emergency exfiltrations that no one would read. By the time anyone put together what had happened in North Korea with the agency’s continuing problems recruiting in China, the mole would have retired.

The Chinese were just being paranoid, the mole decided. They’d used Marco for eighteen months. Time for someplace new. Fine with him. He got the information. George kept him safe. They were partners.

The mole took a final drag of the Marlboro, then touched its burning ember to the letter until flames swallowed up the paper and smoke filled the basement.

“Eddie! Is something burning?”

The mole picked up the.357 Smith & Wesson snubnose on the coffee table and pointed the gun at the ceiling. The thought of killing his wife was oddly comforting, but he knew he would never follow through.

He popped open the revolver’s cylinder and dropped five of the six rounds into the ashtray on the table. He pushed the cylinder shut and gave it a long spin, watching life and death click through the revolver. Life — life — life — life — life — death. Life — life — life — life — life — death. Smooth as traffic light turning green to red and back again.

“Round and round she goes, where she stops, nobody knows,” he said.

The cylinder stopped. The mole pointed the gun at his eye and looked down the barrel at infinity. Or, more likely, at an empty chamber. He didn’t plan to kill himself anyway. Why give the world the satisfaction? He slipped the bullets back into the cylinder, unlocked a file cabinet, and dropped the Smith & Wesson and the Krugerrand inside. He poured a healthy shot from the bottle of Dewar’s that was a fixture on the coffee table and downed the scotch in one burning swallow.

“Be right up, dear,” he yelled up the stairs.

THE KITCHEN SMELLED of pot roast and string beans. Janice might be the only woman alive who still cooked pot roast. The room was dark, lit only by a brass lamp in the corner. Janice didn’t like bright lights. They hurt her eyes, she said. She sat at the table, chewing steadily, eyes down. Lenny lay under the table, tongue hanging wetly out of his mouth as he waited for scraps. The world was in the twenty-first century and this house was stuck in 1958, down to the fresh-cut daisies on the kitchen table.

But the mole couldn’t deny that he’d built his own prison. He’d met Janice playing softball on the Mall in 1996, back from Hong Kong after his humiliation there. She was an Alabama girl, a kindergarten teacher in Reston who hung out with the Langley admins. She was the prettiest woman he’d ever dated. But even at the beginning she’d been high-strung, a Thoroughbred prone to anger and depression. And drinking, though he hadn’t realized how much until after they married. Of course, he drank more these days too.

Still, they would probably have been okay if not for their son. Janice had had a difficult pregnancy. They had needed two years, and four cycles of in vitro, before they finally conceived, and Janice had spent most of her last trimester in bed. But Mark, their baby, came out of her healthy and strong. He stayed that way for almost two years. Then one day he had a stomachache and diarrhea and a touch of fever. Dr. Ramsey, their pediatrician, took his temperature and sent them home. The second night his fever spiked to 103. Ramsey told them to put a cool towel on Mark’s head, put the boy to bed, and bring him in first thing in the morning.

At 3:00 A.M. Mark woke up, screaming, a thin red gruel dripping out of his mouth. Janice held him in her arms as they drove to the hospital, the mole running red lights on Arlington Boulevard, using his emergency driving training from the Farm for the first and only time. Even now he could remember the fear in the young emergency room doctor who examined his son. Janice wouldn’t agree, but for him that moment was the worst of all. He’d never seen a doctor look frightened before.

The rest came as inevitably as an avalanche rolling downhill: intravenous antibiotics, oxygen mask, organ failure, last rites. He would always believe that Mark knew he was dying. Even at the end, even after the boy had stopped moving, his eyes never closed, trying to grab as much of this lousy world as he could. He was dead four days after that first stomachache. A freak bacterial infection, the doctors said. Nothing anyone could have done.

Sometimes the mole thought Janice had died along with their son. She wouldn’t even try to get pregnant again. After a few months, he asked her to stop taking her birth control. She said she would. But a new tray of twenty-eight foil-wrapped pills kept appearing in their bathroom each month. Eventually the mole stopped asking.

She stopped working too. Teaching kindergarten was too stressful. All those little ones running around. Instead she stayed home. To catch up on her reading, she said. Two years later, they moved. She said she didn’t care, but he insisted, figuring a new house would be a new start. He pushed her to find a new job, work at the mall in Tysons Corner, anything to get her out of the house. And she did, part-time. But something in her was broken. About then he approached the Chinese.

Janice wasn’t quite an alcoholic, but when her moods turned black she sat on the couch, watching soaps and sipping the afternoon away. The mole knew he ought to divorce her, but he felt bound to her. She was the price he paid for letting his son die, the price he paid for spying. And she could be sweet. Every so often she reminded him of the woman she’d been, the beautiful girl who took him to the National Gallery and showed him her favorite paintings. But his loyalty didn’t stop him from spending nights at the Gold Club. And his narcissism was so complete that he never wondered if she might be happier without him.

He poured himself a glass of wine from the half-empty bottle and regarded his wife. She gave him a sweet, cockeyed smile. This was sloshed, happy Janice, infinitely preferable to drunk, sad Janice. He sipped his wine, feeling its mellow glow smooth the burn of the Dewar‘s, and sliced off a piece of the roast, slipping it under the table for Lenny. He was suddenly ashamed of his joke downstairs with the Smith & Wesson.

“This is great.” He chewed the meat heartily and sucked down his wine, then retopped her glass and his until the bottle was empty. Why not? They had cases more in the basement. Jan didn’t like the idea of running short, and he supposed he didn’t either.

“Not overcooked?”

“Not a bit. And you look great today, honey.” He tried not to think about the fact that she’d look even better if she lost the forty pounds she’d gained since Mark died. Her stomach had turned as soft as her mind. They still had sex every so often, mainly for old times’ sake.

“How was work?”

“Great,” he said sincerely, thinking of the $75,000 the Chinese had thrown him. There was more where that came from, for sure. The Chinks had money to burn from selling all those toys and computer chips. The Chinese were the future. The good ol’ U.S.A. was over. Always best to bet on the come. In his own way he was helping the trade deficit.

Anyway, he’d played them just right, not giving up too much at once, always leaving them wanting more. Doling out secrets slowly wasn’t just greed — it was self-protection. In the mid-1980s, Aldrich Ames, the worst traitor in the CIA’s history, had almost overnight given nearly all of the agency’s top Soviet spies to the KGB. Then he’d watched in agony as the Soviets arrested them all.

“You’re going to get me arrested!” Ames had complained to his handlers. “Why not just put up a big neon sign over the agency with the word mole written on it?” Eddie hadn’t made the same mistake, and he didn’t intend to.

He sipped his wine and smiled at his wife. “Yeah, Gleeson”—his khaki-wearing, infinitely stupid boss—“hinted I might be up for a promotion.” Unlike much of what he told Janice, this was true.

“Well. that’s great. I don’t suppose you can tell me the details.” She smiled like a girl hoping against hope for a pony on her birthday.

“It would be a transfer within East Asia. More responsibility, more counterintelligence work.”

In fact Joe Gleeson probably just wanted to get rid of him. But the mole didn’t care. If the move went through, he’d be the senior counterintel officer for all of East Asia, with access to every operation from Tokyo to Tibet. More details for the Chinese, more bo nuses for him.

“Counterintelligence.”

“You know, Spy versus Spy, all that stuff. Find their guys before they find yours.”

“Would we be traveling?” Janice clung to the ridiculous hope that he would get another foreign post. Ridiculous both because she could barely function even in suburban Virginia and because the agency would send him to Mars before it gave him another front-line job.

“Maybe a little, but it would be based at Langley.”

“Well, that sounds nice.” She finished her wine and poured herself another glass from a new bottle.

“How about you?”

“It was such a busy day.”

He tried not to smile.

“I took the car in this morning. You know how the brakes have been squeaking.” Janice brought in her Volvo to be serviced about once a week. The mole sometimes wondered if she was screwing a mechanic at the dealership. He hoped so. “Then this afternoon there was a sale at Macy‘s — I found this great dress I want you to see.”

“Just buy it, honey.”

“Really? It’s not on sale.”

“Do I ever say no?”

“Umm. ” He’d meant the question rhetorically. Janice’s requests were usually modest, and his second career meant that he never had to turn her down. He even surprised her with the occasional diamond bracelet, though nothing too extravagant. He didn’t want her showing off to the Knausses or their other so-called friends in the neighborhood.

Her face cleared as she arrived at an answer. “No, sugarplum. I don’t guess you do.” She stood, tottered over to him, leaned down to give him a sloppy kiss, running her tongue down his cheek until she found his mouth. “You’re the best.”

LYING BESIDE JANICE THAT NIGHT, the mole wondered what to do with his bonus. Maybe he should give Evie a present, that diamond tennis bracelet she wanted. But he was sick of Evie. When he’d met her at the club, she’d entranced him. Those fine long legs. And she’d seemed smart, at least compared with the other girls. He’d spent months tipping her extravagantly for her lame lap dances, until finally she agreed to have dinner.

Six months later they were still seeing each other. But her charm had worn off. She never shut up, and she was no genius, though she sure thought she was. Like she was the only stripper ever to go to college. If he had to listen to her talk about Occupied Palestine, as she called it, one more time. And the yoga. He didn’t mind that she liked it. It kept her flexible, that was for sure. But she took it so seriously. For a year she’d been training to be an instructor. A year? How much preparation could a yoga instructor possibly need? It was stretching, with a little bit of chanting, for God’s sake. He’d thought she was joking when she told him the classes cost $1,500 a month. He’d laughed out loud and she’d stamped off. He hadn’t even gotten laid that night.

Okay, forget the tennis bracelet. Forget Evie. Time for a new stripper, one who didn’t have any illusions about being a rocket scientist.

Somewhere in the night a dog barked. The mole folded his hands behind his head, feeling the rough skin of his scalp. He imagined God looking down on all the honest souls asleep in their beds. And him, awake, his house a tumor glowing red in the night. Could the neighbors feel it? The mole made sure his lawn was mowed, his gutters cleaned. He and Janice brought apple pie and beer to the neighborhood barbecues. But the neighbors knew, he was sure. They knew something was wrong, though they would never guess what.

Damn. He’d felt so good a minute before, thinking about the bonus. Now the glow was gone. People thought they understood him when they didn’t understand anything at all. Until the Chinese, no one had respected his talents. The agency had always pigeonholed him as a back-office loser.

IT HAD STARTED WITH DICK ABRAMS, the old Hong Kong station chief. That snotty Yalie, with his fake half-British accent. “We think you belong back at Langley,” Abrams had said. “You’re too cerebral to be in operations. Take it as a compliment.”

Too cerebral. The words were almost twenty years old, but the mole heard them so clearly that he half-expected to see Abrams beside him tonight instead of Janice. He flushed at the memory. They’d been in Abrams’s immaculate office, sitting on the couch that Abrams used for his quote-unquote informal chats. No matter where the mole looked, he couldn’t avoid the photograph of Abrams and Bill Casey, the old director, a legend in the Directorate of Operations. Abrams hadn’t bothered with a picture of William Webster, Casey’s replacement — his way of letting visitors know that he would be around long after Webster was gone.

The mole sneaked a peek at his watch: 3:15. He was suddenly thirsty. Knowing that this meeting was coming, he had skipped his usual lunchtime scotch-and-soda. Now he wished he’d had a double instead.

“Is this about the incident?” the mole said.

“The incident?” Abrams had said, icy and smooth. The mole focused on meeting Abrams’s eyes. As a kid, he’d found eye contact difficult. Over and over, his mother had told him, “Look me in the eye. Don’t be weak.” Her words only made the task harder. But he knew she was right. He practiced, staring at teachers, his friends, even strangers at bars. He pretended they weren’t real, that he was watching television. Now he could look the devil himself in the eye. He raised his head and stared at Abrams.

“The incident?” Abrams said. “You mean when you got drunk and propositioned the Italian ambassador’s wife?”

“His daughter, you mean.” Even as the mole blurted out the words, he realized that Abrams had intentionally misspoken to trap him.

“Right,” Abrams said, drawing out the word. “His daughter. She was sixteen, right?” She didn’t look sixteen, the mole thought. Not in that dress. And maybe I’d had a few too many Dewar‘s, but so what? The CIA, especially the Directorate of Operations, was filled with hard drinkers. In stations like Rome or Hong Kong, where not a lot was happening, getting sloshed at lunch was practically a necessity.

But trying to justify what had happened would only make matters worse, the mole knew. Abrams didn’t care. He was enjoying himself, enjoying the chance to make sure the mole knew what a flop he’d been. The mole wished he could lean over and lock his fingers around Abrams’s neck.

“Anyway, we think you’d be better off back at Langley,” Abrams said in that maddening voice of his. “Not in a front-line operational role.”

SO BACK HE’D GONE to Langley, where he could never outrun what had happened in Hong Kong. Other officers padded their expense accounts, stole petty cash, screwed secretaries. But the comic value of what he’d done ensured it would never be forgotten. He’d become a walking punch line, an object lesson for a generation of case officers. Whateveryoudo,don’t put the moves on the ambassador’s daughter.He’d made matters worse by refusing to bend to drones like Joe Gleeson. He’d never learned how to kiss the right asses. How to play golf. Silly him. He’d figured that intelligence counted for something at the Central Intelligence Agency.

The mole felt his mood changing again. So what? Forget golf. Without wasting a single Sunday chasing a little white ball around, he’d beaten them all. Today alone, he’d made $75,000. That was a year’s pay, after taxes, for Joe Gleeson. For him it was walking-around money.

Suddenly he knew how he would spend his bonus. The Corvette. He smiled in the dark. A‘67 Sting Ray convertible, silver. The eBay listing said the car was in Tampa. He could pick it up there, drive it to Miami, garage it with his M5, another beautiful piece of steel. Too bad nobody at Langley would ever see it. The mole could imagine jaws dropping as he cruised through the parking lot with the top down.

Of course he wouldn’t keep the ‘Vette in his name. Ditto the M5, or the condo in Miami he’d bought a few years back. A Florida company, London Two, owned everything. In turn, London Two’s shares were held by a shell company based in the Caymans.

From there the trail went to Rycol Ltd, a shell corporation in Singapore that got $25,000 every month from the Fung Long Jack Co. Fung Long was a real business, a shipping company owned by a Chinese businessman in Singapore. If anyone asked, and no one ever would, the monthly payments were commissions that Fung Long paid Rycol for buying fuel for its fleet. Even Fung Long’s owner didn’t know what the money was really for. He just knew that his cousin, a senior Chinese general, had asked him to make the payments, and that $25,000 a month was a small price to keep his cousin happy.

Originally, the mole’s handlers had paid him the old-fashioned way, leaving cash at dead drops. But the mole quickly learned that using cash for big transactions was risky. Strange but true: banks hated handling cash. Especially after September 11, they strictly enforced the rules requiring them to report deposits of more than $10,000 to the Treasury Department. So he’d set up this system, which so far had been foolproof.

The mole had decided even before he approached the Chinese that he wouldn’t spy unless he could enjoy his money, and that meant finding ways to use it legally. He had no interest in stashing a million bucks in his basement. Of course, the paper trail would provide ironclad confirmation of his spying if he was ever caught.

But he didn’t expect to get caught. The agency had a dismal record of finding double agents. Both Ames and Robert Hanssen, an FBI agent who became a mole in the mid-1980s, worked with impunity until their Soviet handlers betrayed them — and Ames and Hanssen had been far less cautious than he was.

Over the years, the mole had realized that stealing secrets was easier than it looked. Case officers in China, and everywhere else, sent in torrents of reports to justify their existence. They filed everything: contacts with Communist officials, requests for authorization to approach potential agents, gossip about new programs the government was considering. The briefings piled up on his desk. The mole read them all, one reason his superiors valued him, despite his occasional outbursts of temper. His biggest problem was deciding which documents were important enough to steal. For the mole had realized something else since he’d switched sides: The most vital information was the simplest — the names of the agency’s operatives in China and Taiwan, and the spies they’d recruited. If actual names were unavailable, specific information about where the agents worked. The locations of drop points. The objectives of active operations. The agency’s assessment of China’s military capabilities.

No, the hardest part of being a double agent wasn’t the actual spying. It was resisting the temptation to brag. Destroying the letters George sent him instead of saving them. Never encouraging Janice to wonder why he spent so much time in the basement.

All these years, he’d kept his mouth shut. It wasn’t always easy, especially at the Gold Club after he’d had too many scotches. He comforted himself with the knowledge that the strippers wouldn’t believe him anyway. The scene was only too easy to imagine: “Want another dance?” Candy, or whoever was working him that night, would ask, after slipping his twenty dollars into her garter. She’d go through the motions of dancing, not even pretending to be interested, as some horrendously predictable song ticked away: Don’t you wishyour girlfriend was a freak like me? Don‘tcha, don’tcha?

“Hey, Candy, ever wonder where I work?”

“Not really.” Pause, as she figured out he wanted her to ask. “Where?”

“Over at Langley.”

A genuinely puzzled look from Candy. “Langley? That a hospital?”

He’d be flattered. “Do I look like a doctor?”

“Not exactly, no.” By now she would have used the conversation as an excuse to stop dancing.

“Langley. You know, the CIA.”

“You work for the CIA. Kidding, right?” She’d be leaning in, looking at his eyes, drunk herself, unable to see him as anything more than a middle-aged groper.

“Uh-uh. Dead serious.”

“Serious, huh?” A big stripper smile, then a finger pointed at him in imitation of a pistol. She’d put her hand on his leg. “Well, let’s see your gun, big boy.”

“Wanna know something else? I’m a double agent.”

“You go both ways? I thought you might. That’s cool. I got a couple friends—”

“No!”

“Sorry, baby. Didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”

“I mean, not like that. I spy for the Chinese government. Treason.”

“Treason? What’s that?”

And the song would end.

Ugh. Forget it. One day, after he’d retired and Janice had died of cirrhosis and he was living someplace with no extradition treaty, he’d write his memoirs and name every name he could remember. Until then, he would keep his mouth shut. He closed his eyes and imagined Corvettes, a flotilla of shiny convertibles, until sleep took him.

11

THE BLACK HAWK’S ROTORS BEGAN TO SPIN, first slowly, then faster and faster. At rest, the twenty-six-foot blades drooped under their own bulk. But they stiffened as they accelerated. In seconds they disappeared into a relentless blur. Wells felt himself instinctively pull his head back, though he stood fifty feet from the helicopter. Those rotors could liquefy a skull.

Wells checked his watch. 1655. Five minutes to takeoff. Then the rotors slowed. Inside the cockpit, the pilots hunched over the Black Hawk’s instrument panel.

The blades dribbled to a stop, and the helicopter’s crew chief hopped onto the tarmac. With his green flight helmet and black goggles, he looked like the love child of a palmetto bug and a Green Bay Packers punter. “Warning light on the hydraulics,” he yelled. “Take a few minutes to check.” He scrambled back inside the cabin.

Any delay was bad news, Wells thought. They needed to be in the air soon to hit the campsite at dusk. Sweat prickled his chest, though he wore only a faded green T-shirt under his bulletproof vest. He reached for a bottle of water from the cooler at his feet and sucked it down in one long gulp.

Around him, men in Kevlar vests squatted over topo maps and double-checked their radios. A and B Companies of the 3rd Battalion. Twenty Special Forces soldiers in all. Two squads of the best-trained fighting men anywhere, about to head into the Hindu Kush.

Wells unholstered his pistol, checking that its slide was smooth and its magazine full. As he finished, he noticed Greg Hackett staring at the 9-millimeter Makarov. Hackett was the youngest member of B Company, a short man whose head seemed to rise directly out of his massive shoulders. He had a heavy brow and a thick nose, the face of a half-finished marble bust that a sculptor had decided not to finish.

“Mr. Wells, sir. Permission to ask a question.”

“If you promise to stop calling me sir, Hackett.”

“Yes, sir — I mean John.” Hackett looked at the pistol. “Is that the one you used?”

Wells didn’t know what Hackett meant, and then he did. “On Khadri, you mean.”

Hackett nodded. He couldn’t keep his eyes off the weapon.

“Since you ask. Yeah.” Wells handed the Makarov to Hackett. The sergeant cradled the pistol like a newborn.

“No need to fetishize it, Sergeant. It’s just a gun.”

Hackett handed the pistol back. “Can I ask one more question, sir? How does it feel to be back here?”

“Sergeant, don’t you have something to do?”

WELLS HAD COME TO AFGHANISTAN years before September 11, when most Americans had never heard of Osama bin Laden. He’d fought alongside Qaeda and Taliban guerrillas for almost a decade. He had even become a Muslim during those years. Eventually, the guerrillas had accepted him as a believer.

But Wells was happy to hunt his former allies today. He didn’t count himself as Muslim anymore. He couldn’t honestly say whether he believed in God after everything he’d seen. And even during the years when he had accepted Islam as the one true faith and prostrated himself to Allah five times daily, he had hated bin Laden’s nihilistic vision of the religion. The Taliban and Qaeda gloried in encouraging teenagers to become suicide bombers. They were unworthy of Islam.

And they were unworthy of Afghanistan. Afghans were tribal to a fault, splintered into narrow sects whose hatreds dated back centuries. The Taliban had taken advantage of Afghanistan’s internal fractures to impose a vicious dictatorship in the 1990s. Seemingly out of spite, they had undone what little progress Afghanistan had made during the twentieth century, destroying the country’s hospitals and schools. During the American invasion after September 11, the planners at the Pentagon joked that the United States would bomb Afghanistan up to the Stone Age.

The American attack had forced the Talibs out of power. Now Afghanistan was stumbling toward modernity and democracy. But the Taliban hadn’t gone away. The guerrillas were trying to turn tribal leaders against the United States and its allies. They had a real chance of succeeding, because in any crisis Afghans turned inward. Wells understood why they depended on themselves. For hundreds of years, outsiders had come and gone, most often leaving the country in worse shape than they found it in. But—

A hand on his shoulder interrupted his thoughts.

“Goggles!” Captain Steve Hughley, the commander of B Company, yelled.

Wells had been so busy figuring out Afghanistan’s future that he’d missed the Black Hawk starting up again. He tucked in his earplugs and pulled down his goggles as the helicopter’s rotors reached full speed, kicking up dust and pebbles from the tarmac.

“Ready?” Hughley yelled.

“Yeah!” Wells screamed back. His enthusiasm was real. He hadn’t flown in a Black Hawk since his days as a Ranger in the mid-nineties. He’d forgotten how magnificent these helicopters were up close. And how loud. Even with his earplugs in, he was nearly overwhelmed by the screech of the Black Hawk’s 1,800-horsepower turbines.

The ten-ton helicopter bounced slightly off the runway in its eagerness to take flight. The crew chief waved B Company forward. Down the tarmac, A Company was boarding its own bird. Wells pulled a windbreaker over his vest and grabbed his pack. Inside the cabin, he settled into his seat — designed to collapse to the floor of the cabin if the Black Hawk crashed — and clicked on his harness.

“Comfy?” The crew chief tugged the six-point harness tight and offered Wells headphones. Wells took them gratefully. Insulation was wasted weight for combat helicopters, so the Black Hawk wasn’t soundproofed. Inside the cabin, the roar of the turbines was overwhelming, a scrum of white noise that made conversation or even thinking nearly impossible.

The crew chief hooked in. When he and the gunner on the other side were set, the helicopter’s frame began to rattle as the turbines spun at peak power for takeoff. The Black Hawk burned three gallons of fuel a minute, so pilots didn’t waste time once the crew strapped in.

The copilot pulled back the Black Hawk’s collective and the helicopter rose effortlessly off the tarmac. Wells knew that the Black Hawk had the aerodynamics of a brick and would plummet if its engines failed. Yet the copter seemed to belong in the air. As soon as it took off, its frame stopped shaking and the scream of the turbines lessened. It banked right and kept climbing, leaving Bagram’s stubby huts behind.

WELLS LOOKED AROUND the Black Hawk’s cabin at B Company, an impressive group, even by Special Forces standards. Three of the soldiers spoke Pashto, a fourth Dari. Their sniper team had finished third in the Army’s shooting competition two years back. Hughley, the company captain, was one of the few black commanders in the Special Forces. He was six-three, with arms that seemed to be carved from oak. At West Point, he’d played defensive tackle. And somewhere along the way, he had picked up fluent Arabic. A few Saudis still lingered in the mountains, fighting alongside the Taliban, and at dinner the night before, Brett Gaffan, the company radioman and unofficial comedian, had told Wells how one Saudi they’d captured had refused to believe that Hughley spoke his language:

“So Abdullah — he’s sitting on the ground, see — he’s peeking over his shoulder, looking all scared. Captain’s like, ‘Calm down, dude. You’re not getting whacked.’ How do you say ‘whack’ in Arabic, Cap?”

“You don’t.” Hughley’s tone was deadpan.

“How ‘bout ’dude‘? They gotta have a word for ’dude,‘ right?”

“You believe the crap I have to listen to every day?” Hughley said to Wells.

“Anyway, this camel jockey, ‘scuse my French, starts looking around harder than Jeff Gordon on turn four, trying to see who’s really talking to him.” Here, Gaffan craned his neck from side to side, imitating the Saudi, before jamming a forkful of mashed potatoes into his mouth. “So Cap gives him some more mumbo jumbo.”

“Finish your dinner, Gaffan.” Hughley turned to Wells. “I told him it was no trick, I was the one talking.”

Gaffan dribbled a glass of lemonade into his mouth and swallowed mightily. “Then Abdullah says something back, and Cap nods at him and tells us to stand him up. Then it gets weird, ‘cause Abdullah gets real close to the captain, like he’s getting ready to give him a kiss.”

“He wasn’t that close.”

“All due respect, sir, he was. Wasn’t he?”

Nods around the table.

“And we’re all confused, wondering if we’re gonna be whacking Abdullah after all. And you know we try not to kill our captures, even though damn sure the other side ain’t showing us the same courtesy.”

More nods.

“But then we’re thinking, maybe Cap wants a kiss. Since he hasn’t seen his wife in six months, and the dude was kinda cute.”

“Now you’re scaring me,” Hughley said.

“Nah, he was cute. Wasn’t he?” Gaffan looked around the silent table. “I know y‘all thought so too, so don’t deny it. anybody?” Pause. “Okay, then. Let’s make like I never said that.”

“Too late,” said Danny Gonzalez, the company’s medic.

“Moving on. Then Cap starts singing—”

“Praying.” Hughley looked at Wells. “The first sura.”

“And Abdullah leans in close, making sure Cap’s really the one talking — How was his breath, by the way, sir?”

“Lemme put it this way, Sergeant. I wouldn’t have kissed him even if I did play on your team.”

“Sir. Uncalled for and untrue. I believe that’s harassment, sir. Anyway, he gets in real close.” Gaffan stood up and leaned so close that Wells could count his pores. “Looking up, because Cap’s maybe a foot taller than he is.”

“Sergeant, did you put Tabasco on your burger?” Wells said, getting a laugh from the table. “‘Cause it sure smells that way.”

Gaffan sat down. “Guess I’ll be brushing my teeth when dinner’s done,” he said sheepishly. “Anyway. Abdullah gets this scared look on his face, like, ‘Damn. It’s no joke. This black dude talks my language. Not only that, he talks it better than me.’ Looked like somebody stole his pet camel.” Gaffan stuck out his lower lip in an exaggerated expression of sadness. Everyone at the table laughed now, Wells too, harder and harder, some pent-up emotion in him pouring out.

“The kicker is, ‘bout ten minutes later, old Abdullah starts blabbing to Cap and won’t shut up. True?”

Hughley nodded. “He was our best source last year.”

JOINED BY TWO APACHE ATTACK HELICOPTERS, the Black Hawks turned east, diving as they left the base. When they leveled off, they were just two hundred feet above the ground, low enough that Wells could see the dust kicked up by a rusty jalopy as it rolled down the two-lane road that angled away from the base. Staying low made them harder to hit with rocket-propelled grenades or surface-to-air missiles.

To the south, a road dead-ended at a massive garbage pile, a hundred-foot-tall monument to Afghanistan’s poverty. No fires were visible on the pile, but a haze of black smoke drifted from the trash. The stench of sewage filled the cabin as the Black Hawk flew through the smoke’s inky tendrils. Women and children trudged over the smoldering debris, looking for rags or scrap metal, anything they might trade for dinner.

In a field nearby, scrawny boys played soccer with a makeshift ball. Wells could see a breakaway develop even before the players did. A kid in a raggedy blue T-shirt cut past his defender, awaiting a pass from the midfield—

But before Wells could see what happened next, the game faded behind him. These Black Hawks cruised at 150 miles an hour. Wells decided to imagine that the kid had scored, in keeping with his newly optimistic outlook. Maybe he should write a self-help book. The power of positive thinking. And shooting first.

The fearsome mountains of the Hindu Kush jutted ahead of the helicopter. The peaks, capped with snow even in summer, stretched hundreds of miles to the northeast. Near Afghanistan’s border with China, they rose above 20,000 feet. Around here they were closer to 15,000 feet, still higher than any in the continental United States. The CIA and the Pentagon believed that bin Laden was hiding in the Kush or just south, in Pakistan’s Peshawar Province. But without solid intelligence, finding anyone in the Kush was impossible. The range was an endless maze of valleys and caves, among the most difficult places on earth to search. Snow fell by October. By December the dirt tracks that the Afghans optimistically called roads were impassable. The guerrillas holed up in tiny villages and waited for spring, knowing that even the best-equipped American units could not touch them. In the summer, the Talibs moved between the mountains and Kabul, planting bombs, hijacking supply trucks, and generally wreaking havoc.

And they were getting more dangerous. A month before, fifty Taliban had attacked a police station east of Kabul. When a rapid-reaction team from Bagram responded, a second band of guerrillas ambushed it. Eight American soldiers died.

Then mortar fire hit the 10th Mountain Division at Camp Blessing, an outpost near the Pakistani border. Six men died. Mortar attacks weren’t uncommon in Afghanistan, but attacks this accurate were. So two squads from camp had hiked into the mountains to talk to the villagers who lived north of the base. Everywhere they went, the soldiers offered gifts: medical supplies, pens and paper, and candy — Afghans loved Tic Tacs, for reasons no one could figure. The idea was to keep the locals friendly, or at least neutral, and get information about the source of the mortars. In most villages, the squads were met with tea, suspicious looks, and little else.

But in a nameless village twenty miles north of Camp Blessing, the soldiers got a surprise. Bashir Jan, the village’s headman, told them about a guerrilla outpost to the west. Besides fifty Taliban, the camp contained several “white fighters,” he said. And why had he given up this precious information? The guerrillas were stealing the village’s goats and refusing to pay, he said.

“The guys said he was furious,” Holmes told Wells. “Couldn’t have been madder if they’d taken one of his wives.”

“Never look a gift goat in the mouth,” Wells said.

Bashir’s report was the one that had spurred Exley to get the satellite photographs. Now the mercenaries, whoever they were, were about get a call from Companies A and B. Two companies from the 10th Mountain Division, including the unit that had first discovered the camp, would provide tactical support. The plan didn’t make the 10th Mountain happy. Their guys were the ones who’d died in the mortar attack, and they had developed the original intel. As far as they were concerned, they deserved the kill.

But the terrain demanded an air attack, as Wells had realized immediately when he’d seen the satellite photographs. Armored vehicles couldn’t get through, and an assault on foot was impossible. The camp-ground was hundreds of feet above the valley. Guerrilla snipers would devastate attacking infantry. Plus the mountains in this part of the Kush were riddled with tunnel networks. If they got advance warning, the guerrillas would disappear into their underground labyrinth before they could be destroyed.

Thus the 10th Mountain had been pulled back like a rottweiler on a choke chain, and the Special Forces ordered in. The helicopters would strike at dusk, destroying the camp before the Talibs could respond. Speed would be key. If the operation worked as planned, the guerrillas would panic. The Special Forces would cut off the caves. With that route blocked, the guerrillas would flee down the mountain, into the unfriendly arms of the 10th Mountain, whose men would wait at the base of the valley.

A high-risk operation, Wells thought. But the soldiers in these helicopters had the best chance in the world of pulling it off. And they had a secret weapon.

THE SUN WAS LOW as the four-helicopter convoy reached Jalalabad, one hundred miles east of Kabul. From here, they would fly northeast along the Pech River and into the mountains. One of the Apaches had briefly flown over the valley two days before, the only live visual recon of the campsite. More overflights might have spooked the guerrillas.

Wells looked at his watch. 1840. They should be at Chonesh in less than an hour, assuming nothing went wrong. An hour after that, they’d know where they stood. If they hadn’t broken the camp by then, they would probably be stuck in a firefight, with little chance for reinforcements until the morning.

Afghanistan was eight and a half hours ahead of Washington, so Exley was probably at work right now, Wells thought. He pictured her in their suite in Tysons Corner, sipping coffee from the ridiculous mugs that Shafer had bought. She knew this mission was happening tonight, and though she hadn’t asked for details, she had to know it wouldn’t be easy. Yet she’d given him her blessing to go, encouraged him even. Because she’d known he needed the action, needed to feel useful.

In truth, the Special Forces were doing him a favor by letting him participate in this mission. Technically, Wells was replacing B Company’s second medic, who had been shot in the leg two weeks earlier and was recovering in a military hospital in Germany. But Special Forces units were often short a soldier or two. Initially, Wells had worried he might distract the other men in the unit, who’d fought together long enough that they knew one another’s moves instinctively.

The night before, he’d told Holmes he’d sit out the attack if Holmes thought he didn’t belong. “No hard feelings if you don’t want me, Glen,” Wells said.

“You kidding?”

“What do you mean?”

“You gonna make me say it out loud? These guys love you. You’re better for morale than the Cowboys cheerleaders.”

“Really?” Despite himself Wells had felt a flush of pride.

“John, look, we’ve got some history. I don’t pretend to know you all that well, but it’s obvious, what happened in New York is all twisted in your head. Put aside the politics for a minute and think on what you did. The people you saved. That’s what these guys see. Believe me. Hughley wants you out there tomorrow. I do too.”

1910. THE PECH RIVER FLOWED shallow and fast beneath the Black Hawk, its clear water reflecting the gold of the sun’s dying rays. Two children stood beside the river, waving their thin brown arms metronomically as the helicopter roared by.

The Black Hawk banked left, turning north into a narrow valley, hidden from the sun by a crumbling rock ridge. In the sudden darkness, the helicopter’s gunners hunched intently over their 7.62-caliber mini-guns.

In these valleys, the ride got dangerous. Fly too high, you opened yourself to a lucky shot with an RPG or a SAM. Fly too low, especially at night, you could get taken out by a canyon wall. The topo charts for these valleys were notoriously sketchy. The pilots usually stayed low, figuring they could dodge a mountain more easily than a missile.

The helicopter pulled up steeply as the valley tightened. Ahead, a trickle of water coursed down a near-vertical rock face. The Black Hawk banked right and cut through a gap in the rocks, its skids skimming the tops of the stubbly oak trees that speckled the mountain. The helo topped the ridgeline, and a new valley opened beneath. The Black Hawk followed the contours of the mountain downward, changing pitch and direction like a supercharged roller coaster.

“In my next life I want to be a helicopter pilot,” Wells yelled to Hughley.

“I know what you mean.”

Suddenly, Wells was cold. A few minutes before, they’d been in the sun at 6,000 feet. Now they were in shadows at 10,000, and the temperature had fallen twenty degrees. He was glad he’d followed Hughley’s advice and thrown thermals in his pack. Even if the mission went perfectly, they’d be out all night.

1930. THE BLACK HAWKS SLOWED while the Apaches raced ahead. Part of the plan. The Apaches didn’t carry soldiers, but without them the operation had little chance of success. The Apaches — AH-64 helicopters, each carrying a crew of two — were the secret weapon that would enable twenty-two American soldiers to take on fifty guerrillas. In the Army’s dry jargon, the Apaches would “prepare the battlespace for the insertion.”

In the cabin of Wells’s Black Hawk, the crew chief held up five fingers, silently signaling that the helicopter would reach the landing zone in five minutes. The soldiers nodded, their faces expressionless. The silence was anticipation, not fear, Wells thought. These men wanted to get on the field and play.

1933. THE BLACK HAWKS SWUNG over a ridge and hovered at the southern end of the Chonesh Valley. Two hundred yards ahead, the Apaches were preparing the battlespace. Their preparation consisted of firing AGM-114N Hellfire missiles at the guerrilla camp.

The Army had developed Hellfires at the height of the Cold War to defeat the armor of Soviet T-80s. A generation later, the missiles were reengineered to take out an enemy that preferred caves to tanks. In place of shaped charges to cut through steel, these Hellfires held a fine aluminum powder wrapped around high explosive. The twenty-pound warheads sprayed molten shrapnel in every direction, killing anyone in a twenty-five-foot radius.

As Wells watched, the forward Apache fired two missiles. The Hellfires glowed in the dusk, trailing brilliant white exhaust as they screamed toward the plateau and exploded in orange fireballs. Seconds later the sounds of their impact reached the Black Hawks, echoing off the valley’s rock walls and into the night.

Whoomp!Whoomp!The trailing Apache fired two more missiles. For the first time, the guerrillas responded. A small white burst flared toward the helicopters, a rocket-propelled grenade fired blindly into the night. At this distance, the RPG was as harmless as a baby’s fist. It ran out of propellant short of the Apaches and crashed to the valley floor.

The Apaches fired their last Hellfires, then pulled up to make way for the Black Hawks. Time to go in. Wait too long, and the guerrillas would regroup, or just disappear into the caves. The Black Hawks accelerated toward the plateau. Wells pulled on his night-vision goggles for a closer look. Already the guerrillas were reorganizing. Two men ran out of a cave holding an RPG launcher. They twisted toward the Black Hawk and fired. Again they missed, but not as badly as before.

“No white flag,” Wells yelled to Hughley.

“You were expecting one?”

“Surrender’s not part of their playbook. They’d rather die.”

“Let’s help ‘em, then.”

1935. THE BLACK HAWKS REACHED the landing zone. The men in the cabin leaned forward, poised to unhook their harnesses and rappel down. Side by side, the Black Hawks descended — a hundred feet, ninety, eighty—

Whoosh! An RPG sailed between the helicopters, exploding against the side of the mountain. On the plateau below, guerrillas fired AK-47s, the rounds clattering off the Kevlar floor mats that protected the Black Hawk’s cabin. The Black Hawk’s gunners perched over the mini-guns, firing back in controlled bursts. The brass jackets from spent machine-gun rounds poured out of the guns and into the night. The helicopter lurched downward, leveling out fifty feet above the ground. The lead gunner raised his left fist, the signal to drop.

“Now!” Hughley screamed above the turbines. “Now!”

12

THE BANQUET HAD BEGUN HOURS BEFORE, but the tables remained spotless, the linens pressed, the buckets of champagne chilled just so. Tuxedoed waiters changed plates and filled glasses with perfect efficiency.

From the outside, the banquet hall looked as drab as every other building in Zhongnanhai, the walled compound in Beijing where China’s leaders lived and worked. But inside, the hall — officially called Huairentang, the Palace Steeped in Compassion — seemed to have been transported directly from Versailles. Mirrors gilded with twenty-four-karat gold lined the walls. Orchids and lilies flowed out of a red ceramic pot, a priceless fourteenth-century treasure. Behind a screen a pianist played Chopin on a Stein way grand. Oversized crystal chandeliers dangled from the ceiling, beaming soft light on the hard faces of the men who sat at the table.

The food, too, was superb: moist dumplings of sweet potatoes and ginger; fresh steamed lobsters, their meat basted with a sweet-spicy chili; the choicest cuts of lamb, sizzled in a slightly bitter soy sauce; shark-fin soup, a Chinese delicacy, the fins succulent and chewy.

Yet the nine men at the table, China’s supreme leaders, had manners more suited to an all-you-can-eat buffet. They ate greedily, lifting slabs of foie gras into their mouths, sucking loudly on giant Alaskan king crab legs. At first glance, the nine could hardly be distinguished. Oversized wire-rim glasses and helmets of black hair framed their faces. They wore black suits and white shirts and red ties knotted tightly around their throats. All but one smoked, sucking deeply on Marlboros and Hongtashans, stubbing out their cigarettes on the sterling silver ashtrays around the table.

They could have been a family of undertakers, very successful undertakers. They were the nine members of the Politburo Standing Committee. And only history could explain their frenzied eating. Even the youngest of them remembered the Cultural Revolution, the decade beginning in 1966 when Mao and the Red Guards upended China. Four of these men had spent their twenties in reeducation camps, brutal places where they spent their days dragging hoes through rocky soil and their nights confessing their sins at “struggle sessions.” All nine had known family members and friends who didn’t escape the camps, who died from pneumonia or famine or beatings by the Red Guards.

No one in this room ever talked openly about those years. But they remembered. And all nine had learned the same lesson that the Cultural Revolution taught everyone in China — though the lesson wasn’t the one that Mao had hoped to teach. Or maybe it was. Take what you can, while you can. Because no matter how secure you think you are, you’ll lose everything if the Party turns on you.

AMONG THE LOOK-ALIKES at the table, Li Ping, the defense minister, stood out. Unlike the rest, he didn’t smoke. He couldn’t avoid drinking. To have skipped the toasts would have been impolite. But he sipped his wine while the others guzzled.

And where the other eight were paunchy, Li was trim, thanks to his workouts. Li wasn’t modest about his physique. He challenged army officers half his age to work out beside him and smirked when he left them behind. “It’s the fat pig that feels the butcher’s knife,” he told them.

The others on the committee called him “The Old Bull,” emphasizing the “old,” not-so-subtly implying that he ought to act his age. Li didn’t care. Exercise kept him strong. He wanted to distinguish himself from the men around him, whose bodies and minds were equally corrupt.

To the world outside Zhongnanhai, Li was a “conservative,” a “hard-liner.” He knew his reputation. He couldn’t read English, but each morning his deputies gave him translations of CNN and foreign newspapers. The foreigners didn’t understand him or China, he thought. He wasn’t conservative. He didn’t want to undo the progress of the last two decades. But unlike the “liberals” who ran the Party, he didn’t care about getting rich. His ambitions ran deeper.

China’s elite was composed mainly of technocrats, engineers, and economists who spent their lives doing the Party’s bidding. They rose slowly, running villages, cities, then provinces. Along the way they proved their loyalty to their bosses while building power bases of their own. Li had followed a different path. He’d come up through the Army, the only real soldier in the Party’s top ranks.

Li had served with distinction in China’s last major war, its invasion of Vietnam in February 1979. As a young captain, he’d commanded a company that was among the first units over the border. The war was not even an asterisk in the twentieth century’s bloody history, but Li had never forgotten it.

The Vietnamese had known the Chinese were coming. Their soldiers and militiamen were battle-hardened from a decade of war with the United States. China sent in a huge army, hundreds of thousands of soldiers. But its men were underequipped and unready, peasants who’d received only a few weeks of training before being sent to the border. Some could barely load their rifles.

Li’s company was in the vanguard of a division attacking Lao Cai, a town just south of the border. His unit came under constant fire from the Vietnamese militias. The ground was soft and spongy and the mines were everywhere. The Vietnamese especially liked simple explosives that the Americans called “toe poppers,” pressure mines with just enough power to blow off a man’s foot. Making matters worse, Li’s only medic was killed by a sniper in the battle’s first hours. After that he’d had to leave injured men where they lay. Taking care of the wounded was a luxury the Chinese army couldn’t afford.

In the first two days of fighting, he’d lost fifty men, a third of his soldiers. But somehow he and Cao Se, his first lieutenant, kept his company together even as the units around them collapsed. Finally, facing the prospect of a devastating defeat, the People’s Liberation Army brought up heavy artillery. The big guns surprised the Vietnamese and turned towns near the border into rubble. By the time Li’s unit limped into Lao Cai, only dogs and amputees were left.

Three weeks later the Chinese pulled back across the border, proclaiming the invasion successful. They’d taught Vietnam a lesson, they said. Li had learned a few lessons himself. At first the suffering of his men had stunned him. But over the years, he reconsidered. Strategically, the war had put the Vietnamese in their place. Afterward they treated China with more respect. War ought to be avoided, but sometimes it was necessary, he thought.

For him, too, the war had been a success. The near-disaster in Vietnam frightened the People’s Liberation Army into professionalizing its officer corps. For the first time in decades, fighting skill, not ideological purity, became the most important factor behind promotions. The change helped Li. His abilities had been obvious from the first days of the Vietnam invasion. He intuitively knew how to position his soldiers, when to concentrate fire and when to disperse. He thumped other commanders in the war games at the National Defense University. He rose quickly. By 2004, he’d become chief of staff. Two years later, he was named defense minister and commander of the army.

Of course, skill only went so far. Li would never have become a minister if the others on the Standing Committee had doubted his loyalty. But they didn’t. To them, Li was the ultimate soldier, always following orders. In truth, as long as Li mouthed the right words, the Party’s leaders didn’t care if he believed in “socialism with a human face.” They certainly didn’t. Being rich and powerful in China meant being part of the Party. So the Party’s leaders faithfully recited the “Eight Dos and Don‘ts”—“Know plain living and hard struggle, do not wallow in luxuries”—and then rode limousines home to their mansions. The sayings were the equivalent of a fraternity’s secret handshake. By themselves, they meant nothing. But knowing them got you in.

LI PREFERRED TO BE UNDERESTIMATED. Even when he joined the Standing Committee, the others didn’t view him as a political threat. After all, he hadn’t even succeeded in getting rich from his position. Besides “Old Bull,” the liberals — those members of the elite who had profited the most from the new China — had another name for Li. They called him “Guard Dog,” though never to his face.

But the liberals misunderstood Li. He was greed ier than any of them, though not for money. Li wanted to prove himself the greatest of leaders, the savior of the Chinese nation, remembered eternally for his courage. In his dreams, he lay beside Mao in the massive crypt in Tiananmen Square. Every day thousands of Chinese lined up to glimpse his body. They shuffled by in awe, wishing they could bring him back. The lines grew until the crowds filled Tiananmen and poured into the streets of Beijing. But the people were so eager to see him that no one complained.

When he woke, Li never remembered his dreams. He never consciously realized how deeply he thirsted for glory. He didn’t understand his motives, and that made him dangerous indeed.

SITTING IN HIS USUAL SPOT, two seats from the head of the table, Li lifted his crystal wineglass and studied the burgundy liquid inside. A Château Lafitte ‘92, 10,000 yuan a bottle, $1,300 US. The men around him had gone through a half-case of the stuff tonight. They surely believed they’d earned it.

In May 1989, hundreds of thousands of students had filled Tiananmen — the great open square less than a mile from here, the spiritual heart of all China — to demand democracy. The Western reporters who covered the protests called that time the Beijing Spring. For a few weeks it seemed that China might move from dictatorship to freedom. After all, on the other side of the world, Communist regimes were falling peacefully.

But China wasn’t East Germany or Poland. China had gone through a century of upheaval so terrible that even World War II seemed mild. An invasion by Japan. A long, bloody civil war. The disastrous Great Leap Forward, which led to a famine that killed tens of millions of Chinese. The Cultural Revolution. The Chinese weren’t ready for more turmoil, not so soon. They hardly protested on June 4, 1989, when the men of Zhongnanhai brought in tanks to clear Tiananmen. Hundreds of protesters were killed that day in Beijing. The People’s Liberation Army? On June 4, only the last word was true.

The leaders of the Chinese Communist Party never admitted what they’d done in Tiananmen. Instead they offered their people an unspoken bargain. Don’t challenge us. In return we’ll let you drop the farce of socialism. “To get rich is glorious,” Deng Xiaoping, at the time China’s paramount leader, famously said. “It doesn’t matter if the cat is black or white as long as it catches mice.” Some people said now that those words had never actually crossed Deng’s lips. But the sentiment was real enough.

For two decades, rulers and ruled had stuck to the deal, and China had produced the greatest economic miracle in history. In the 1980s, China was a third-world country, poorer than India. Now it had the third-largest economy in the world, behind only the United States and Japan.

And yet. and yet. Under its glittery surface China’s economy had reached a dangerous tipping point, Li thought. The boom had given hundreds of millions of Chinese a decent standard of living. But it had left hundreds of millions more in the dust.

Li sipped his wine, the smoothest he’d ever tasted—10,000 yuan a bottle. His father Hu had worked at a tire factory until his heart gave out on his fifty-second birthday. Hu hadn’t made 10,000 yuan in his entire life. He’d never owned a television or refrigerator or even a telephone. He’d saved for years to buy his most prized possession, a Flying Pigeon bicycle, a single-geared steel beast that weighed almost fifty pounds.

Yet Li never remembered his parents complaining. They’d never felt poor, since no one they knew was any better off. And they hardly needed money. The tire factory gave them a two-room apartment with a communal bathroom. They didn’t have much, but their lives were secure. They never had to worry that Hu would be fired or the factory would close. Such things simply didn’t happen.

Now, though, factories closed all the time. Real estate developers tore down the cluttered Beijing neighborhoods called hutongs, to build apartment buildings across the giant city. The apartment towers were cleaner than the hutongs. But the hutong families didn’t get to live in the new buildings. They were shipped to hovels on the outskirts of the city, beyond the Fifth Ring Road, where the capital’s wealthy wouldn’t see them.

Today, men like Li’s father knew they were poor. They couldn’t imagine the opulence of this room, or the private clubs in Beijing where the wealthy gathered. But they knew China had left them behind. Fewer and fewer of them were willing to accept their fate. All over China the pot was boiling up. In southwest China, farmers had attacked police stations over land seizures. In north China, coal miners had rioted to demand safety equipment after an explosion at a mine in Hebei killed 180 men.

Even worse, the economy wasn’t booming anymore. So far, the government had hidden the slowdown from the outside world. But Li knew the real numbers. Growth had slowed month after month, from ten percent to eight to five and now to three. And no one, not the economic minister or the governor of the Central Bank, could explain what was happening, not in words that made sense to Li. They said the economy needed more reform, not less.

But Li spent more time outside Zhongnanhai than the other senior leaders combined. He might not be an economist, but he had eyes. He saw old women with bowed heads begging for help, their clothes dirty, empty bowls between their hands. He saw the peasants lined up in Tiananmen to plead for work, even though the police beat them just for being there.

The poet Du Fu had written, 1,250 years earlier, “Within red gates, wine and meat rot, while on the street outside people starve.” Dynasties crumbled when emperors forgot their subjects. Inside Zhongnanhai, life was sweeter than ever. The men around him imagined they could call in the tanks again if they needed to. But this time the rebels wouldn’t be students. They would be miners and peasants and factory workers. They would be men, not boys, and this time they would fight.

Li wouldn’t let that happen. He wouldn’t use the People’s Liberation Army, his army, against civilians. He would take control of the situation, not for his own glory, of course, but to save the nation from the greed of its rulers.

BUT TAKING CONTROL WOULDN’T BE EASY. Li couldn’t openly challenge Zhang Fenshang, the economic minister and the most powerful man on the Standing Committee. Zhang was supposedly ranked second-in-command, behind the general secretary, Xu Xilan. In reality, Zhang was the most powerful man in China. Xu was eighty-two and feeble, a figurehead who “consulted” Zhang before any important decision.

Together, Zhang and the other liberals — Li gritted his teeth to think of the word — held six seats on the nine-member committee. To defeat them, Li needed to outmaneuver them. If he could take control of the committee, the people would rally around him. The rich businessmen might protest. But eventually even they would understand that Li didn’t want to destroy them, just make them share some of their wealth.

Li knew he would have only one chance to take power. If he failed, he wouldn’t just lose his spot on the Standing Committee. At best, he would spend the rest of his years under house arrest. At worst, he would suffer a tragic accident, and his death would be announced to the people in somber tones.

No, he couldn’t fail. And he needed to move quickly, before the people grew so angry that even he couldn’t calm them. In the last few months, he’d put a plan together. And now, after his visit to Iran, he believed he’d found the key to making it work.

“All warfare is based on deception,” Sun Tzu, China’s most famous military strategist, had written 2,500 years earlier. Under normal circumstances, Zhang could easily defeat Li. But what if Zhang suddenly faced a threat beyond his control, a threat not from inside China but from outside?

Li knew his plan was dangerous. But not acting would be even more dangerous.

DESSERT — A RICH PEAR CAKE with ginger ice cream — was served, and the plates cleared. The waiters poured cognac. Then they disappeared, leaving the nine men at the table to the country’s business.

Zhang, sitting beside Xu, the general secretary, raised his glass. “To the glory of the new China.”

“And to the people,” Xu said. “To the wisdom of the Chinese people.”

“Of course, Comrade Xu,” Zhang said. “We must always serve the people.”

Li sipped from his snifter, feeling the glow of the golden liquid in his mouth. Cognac was one of his indulgences. A glass before bed made his sleep pleasant.

The Standing Committee met for the banquets once a month. The dinners always followed the same script. Only when the waiters had left the hall did business begin. Of course, the committee met in regular sessions several times a week, but the truly important decisions were made at this table — with no aides to overhear or record the sessions. Even in here, even speaking only to one another, committee members chose their words as carefully as Mafia dons on a phone line tapped by the FBI. Speaking too clearly signaled weakness, not strength.

“Comrade Zhang,” Xu said. “Please begin.”

“The economic situation has not changed,” Zhang said. “The transition period”—what the liberals called the economy’s slowdown—“is continuing. But there’s no reason for concern. The will of the people is excellent. Business conditions are good.”

Zhang had said the same thing the month before, and the month before that. How much had Zhang stolen from the national treasury and hidden in banks in Singapore? Li wondered. How many bribes had he taken? Five hundred million yuan—$60 million? A billion yuan? Two billion? With money you are a dragon, with no money, a worm.

“Then what is the problem?” Xu said.

“General Secretary,” Zhang said, “just as a farmer must let a field lie fallow from time to time, the economy must slow occasionally before it grows again.” Though he’d lived most of his life in Shanghai, Zhang liked to use farming metaphors with Xu, whose parents had been peasants. “We’re pruning the deadwood so saplings can prosper. If the young trees aren’t rising fast enough, we must prune more vigorously.”

To the men at the table, Zhang’s meaning was clear. The government should close more state-owned factories, like the tire plant where Li’s father had worked. Li couldn’t believe that Zhang had the audacity to propose more layoffs with so many people already jobless. But arguing openly with Zhang would be futile.

“Yes,” Xu said. “I see.”

“I’ll propose a plan for the Congress next month”—the annual Communist Party Congress, which would officially ratify the decisions these nine men made.

“Does anyone else have thoughts on Comrade Zhang’s view?” Xu said. Li held his tongue. Then Xu turned toward him.

“Comrade General Li. How was your visit to Tehran?”

Now or never, Li thought. “Very productive, General Secretary.” He outlined the oil-for-nuclear-help deal he’d discussed with the Iranian president. Li could see that he’d caught Zhang by surprise, as he’d intended.

“Zhang, what do you think?” Xu asked.

Zhang sipped his cognac, trying to buy time. Li could imagine his calculation. An open alliance against the United States would have enormous risks. On the other hand, a confrontation with America would buy time to right the economy. And Zhang didn’t want to appear as though he feared the United States.

Zhang looked at Li. “What’s your view, Comrade General?”

Zhang was hoping to force the responsibility for the decision back on Li. In doing so, Zhang had slipped into Li’s trap. Zhang had never before given up control on an important issue. He would find retaking it more difficult than he expected, Li thought.

“My view, Comrade Zhang?” he said. “Let’s seize this opportunity. The Iranians can give us leverage against the hegemonists”—the Americans. “Our industries will benefit from a guaranteed supply of oil. And the Persians will be a new market for us. They see all that we’ve done. They can help us through the transition period. Anyway, why should we let the Americans decide what nations have certain weapons?”—nuclear bombs. “The Persians don’t threaten us.”

“And the Americans? What will they say?”

“Let them talk,” Li said. “Talk does not cook rice.”

“It isn’t their talk that concerns me,” Zhang said. “What if they misunderstand our peaceful intent?”

Li had to admit that Zhang could turn a phrase. Of course the United States would “misunderstand” if China allied with Iran, America’s biggest enemy.

“The hegemonists aren’t interested in any more wars.”

“You’re certain.”

“Nothing is certain, Comrade Zhang. But they are distracted now, and our army and navy are valiant.”

The table was silent when Li finished speaking, and he knew he’d won. They’d send him back to Tehran to finalize an agreement with Iran. For the first time since the end of the Cold War, the United States would face a challenge to its global dominance.

The Americans would want to respond. But they had their own problems, Li knew. The death of their North Korean spy had cost them their best intelligence on Pyongyang. The war in Iraq had sapped their army. They were on the defensive — and the public announcement of the Chinese/Iranian alliance would irritate them further. Like a wounded bear, they would lash out but with words, not actions. The American president would speak against the agreement, and that would irritate the men around him. No one in this room wanted advice from the United States on how China should conduct its affairs.

But neither Washington nor Beijing would expect the war of words to go any further. What no one at this table realized was that Li intended the agreement with Iran to be only the start of China’s confrontation with America.

“It’s agreed, then?” Li said. “We’ll accept the Iranian proposal?”

Nods around the table. By springing the deal on them this way, Li had given them little choice. Turning down the offer would have made them look weak, and none of these men wanted to look weak, least of all Zhang. If they’d known what he planned next, they would have been more cautious, but they didn’t.

Li raised his glass to his lips. Another step toward the power he’d been chasing for so long. He took a deep sip of cognac, filling his mouth with its sweetness.

13

“NOW!” HUGHLEY YELLED. “NOW!”

Holding the frame of the juddering Black Hawk, Wells tugged on his pack: sixty-three pounds of ammunition, grenades, energy bars, water, bandages, and the other essentials of close combat.

A Kevlar cable was coiled on the floor, its end knotted to the helicopter’s frame. Wells threw it out the side. He shimmied down, hand over hand, feeling the cable’s rough fibers under his gloved fingers. AK-47 rounds whistled by, and he wondered if he should have chosen heavier armor. Five feet from the ground, he jumped, landing lightly despite his gear.

The sun was gone now. But the quarter-moon and stars shined on the open plateau, making Wells’s night-vision goggles a distraction. Wells pulled up the goggles and took stock. The plateau was a half-mile long and five hundred feet wide. Boulders and stunted trees littered the ground, offering decent cover.

Around the drop zone, the Hellfire missiles had done their job. Burned men were strewn across the plateau like trees tossed by a category 5 hurricane, the stench of their barbecued flesh heavy in the air. A guerrilla in a long white robe twitched and moaned beside a rock seventy-five feet away.

As planned, the attack had caught the guerrillas building campfires for dinner. Sheep and goats were tethered near the caves, maybe the same animals that had provoked Bashir Jan, the village headman, to reveal the existence of the camp. Somehow, the animals had survived the missiles. Their desperate bleats cut through the night over the crackle of the automatic rifles and the roar of the Black Hawks. The goats, the fires, the dead men: the scene was a waking dream, a twenty-first-century Goya painting, Wells thought.

The satellite photos had shown three encampments across the plateau. The Apaches had targeted most of their Hellfires at the northern and center camps, trying to drive the guerrillas south, toward the 10th Mountain. But either the southern camp had been the biggest, or the plateau as a whole had held more men than they’d been told. Thirty or more men were scattered behind rocks and trees to the south. A smaller group was half-hidden behind boulders that obstructed the entrance to a cave west of the loading point.

Wells unstrapped his carbine and dropped to the ground. The plateau was cold, more stone than dirt; a rock poked at his groin. The men by the cave were the immediate threat, he thought. They had already almost taken out a Black Hawk with their RPGs. He opened up at them with three-shot bursts, hoping to distract them from the helicopter.

Thump! Thump! Hughley landed beside him, followed by the rest of B Company, as A Company hit the plateau two hundred feet to the southeast. When the last soldier touched the ground, the Black Hawks pulled away.

“We’re in it now,” Wells yelled to Hughley.

“Yeah, and we ain’t getting out till the sun comes up.”

THE MEN OF B COMPANY fanned out in a two-hundred-foot arc. Wells and Hughley lay nearest the caves. A Company had set itself similarly. The position looked more solid than it was, Wells thought. Already the Talibs to the south were spreading out, enlarging the battlefield, giving themselves new angles to fire on the SF soldiers. Guerrillas — like civilians — usually clustered when they came under fire, hoping for safety in numbers. The fact that these men had done the opposite offered more evidence that they were getting professional help.

“Shit!”

Even without looking, Wells recognized Hackett’s voice. The stocky sergeant hopped on his right leg toward Hughley and Wells. Ten yards away, he fell. Wells ran for him, picked him up, and threw his shoulder under Hackett’s arm. Together they struggled toward Hughley like kids in a three-legged race.

“Sir, I took one.” Hackett spoke evenly — he could have been talking about someone else — but the pain in his voice was unmistakable. “Left leg. Bad, I think.”

Wells put Hackett down and shined a penlight on his leg. The bullet had hit low on the thigh, just above the knee. Blood pumped steadily out from the wound, shining under the light. The popliteal artery. Hackett grunted as Wells palpated the area around the wound. Hughley put a flashlight to the sergeant’s face. He was pale, his massive jaw gritted against the pain.

Get a tourniquet on him,Wells thought. Cutting off the artery might cost Hackett his leg, but the alternative was worse. A trauma surgeon could sew up the wound, but the nearest surgeon was in Bagram, so the tourniquet would have to do.

“Take off your pack, Sergeant. I’m gonna wrap it tight.”

“A tourniquet?” Hackett’s voice lifted slightly.

Hackett knew what a tourniquet meant, Wells thought. He wanted to give Hackett a hit of Demerol, but the sergeant had already lost too much blood. An opiate would put him in shock. “It’s gonna sting a little. Bite on this.” Wells found a mouthguard in his pack and pressed it into Hackett’s hand. Beside them Hughley fired short bursts at the cave.

“How we doing?” Wells said to Hughley.

“Worry about my soldier.”

Wells grabbed a combat tourniquet — a black plastic band big enough to fit over a man’s leg, with a sturdy plastic handle attached. He pulled on latex gloves and tugged the band above the spurting wound. The sergeant groaned and bit hard on the mouthguard. Wells pulled the loop of plastic tight around Hackett’s thigh.

“Just a few seconds more.”

“Down!” Hughley yelled as a guerrilla popped up from behind a boulder beside the cave to fire an RPG. It exploded behind them, lighting the night.

“That the best you can do?” Hughley said. He fired a burst at a guerrilla who’d foolishly stood to watch the RPG. The Talib screamed, his hands rising to his throat. He fell hard and didn’t move.

“Hold tight, Sergeant,” Wells said. He turned the handle of the tourniquet, tightening it around the meat of Hackett’s thigh. Hackett’s shoulders trembled. He moaned softly, a low sound hardly recognizable as human.

The blood slowed to a trickle but didn’t stop. Wells wiped down the wound and taped a thick, clean bandage around the sergeant’s leg. He pulled off his gloves, slick with blood. “Sergeant. It’s over. You’re gonna be okay. Just get comfortable. Keep your leg up.”

“Yessir. I’m cold, sir.”

Wells pulled an aluminum blanket from his pack and wrapped it over Hackett’s shoulders, then grabbed a water bottle and dumped in a pouch of Gatorade powder. “Drink this.”

“He gonna make it?” Hughley whispered.

“If I knew, I’d say.”

“All right.” Hughley nodded at the boulders where the men with the RPGs were hiding. “Gotta take them out, protect our flank. Can you handle it with Gaffan? Gonzalez can give you some support while he watches Hackett.”

Two guys against five, maybe more, Wells thought. Not great odds. But he saw Hughley’s problem. B Company was already down two men, since Gonzalez, the medic, would have to take care of Hackett. That left the squad at nine soldiers, including Wells. A Company had ten more. Facing at least thirty guerrillas to the south, Hughley couldn’t spare a third guy on the flank.

“Sure,” Wells said. Through his tactical radio, Hughley ordered Gaffan and Gonzalez to their position. As the men reached Hughley and Wells, another RPG flared out from the boulders.

“Shit!” Gaffan and Gonzalez threw themselves down as the grenade exploded behind them.

Hughley pointed toward the rocks. “Gaffan, you and Wells are taking out that position. Danny, you’re staying with Hackett. I’ll link the rest of the squad up with Alpha.”

“Yessir.”

Hughley sprinted off. They had a long night ahead, Wells thought. Instead of fifty guerrillas, the camp had held a hundred or more before the attack. Even now the bad guys outnumbered the Special Forces two to one. They should have had at least one more squad to even up the odds. But second-guessing the plan now would be a waste of time, and they couldn’t afford to waste time. They had to move fast, get control of the battlespace. The Talibs surely knew of trails that led up the mountain and would give them angles to shoot down on the plateau. If they put snipers above the battlefield, the SF soldiers would be exposed, sitting ducks. Before that happened, Hughley had to drive the guerrillas off the southern end of the plateau and into the valley.

Meanwhile Wells had his own problems to solve. Hackett lay on his back, breathing in fluttery bursts. He would be lucky to get through the night, Wells thought. “Gaffan.” Wells pointed to the rock seventy-five feet away where the guerrilla in the white robe lay. “Let’s move.”

Wells laid out a covering burst as Gaffan sprinted for the rock and slid in. Five seconds later they switched roles, Gaffan firing as Wells ran to the rock. Up close, Wells saw that the wounded guerrilla was in terrible shape, the left side of his face gone. His right eye opened wide as he registered their presence. He twisted away, his hands scratching at the dirt.

“I’ll do it,” Wells said. “Watch the cave.”

“But—”

“Watch the cave, Sergeant.”

Wells leaned close to the man and said in Arabic, “Dear Lord, pour patience upon us and make us die as Muslims.” The Quran, verse 7, line 126. He unholstered his Makarov, shoved it into the man’s mouth, and pulled the trigger. The single shot echoed into the darkness. The guerrilla’s skull exploded, spewing a devil’s volcano of blood and brains. Another thousand sleepless nights, Wells thought. He pushed the corpse away, furious that the man hadn’t had the decency to die on his own. The body flopped over, arms askew. No one who died tonight would get a proper burial.

“Maybe I’m just projecting, but I swear he looked relieved,” Gaffan said.

You’re just projecting, Wells didn’t say. Warned you not to watch. He put the man’s cracked skull out of his mind. He’d save the nightmares for later. “Let’s do this, get close enough to lay a forty in that cave.” A high-explosive 40-millimeter grenade, fired from the M203 launchers attached to the carbines he and Gaffan carried.

Wells pulled open the barrel of his 203, popped in the grenade — a cylinder that looked like a shotgun shell — and cocked the barrel. He pointed to a stunted tree a hundred feet to their right. “Ready?”

Gaffan nodded.

Wells popped up, fired, and dropped down. His grenade blasted into the mountainside, a red-white explosion that faded fast. He’d missed, but not by much. Now let them fire back. The Talibs were loose with their ammo. Let them shoot until their magazines ran dry. Then Wells and Gaffan would break for the tree, where they’d be close enough to do some damage.

But the Talibs refused to play along. Instead of random AK-47 fire, they fired only a few well-aimed shots. Two rounds hit the dead Talib, making the corpse jump, a caricature of resurrection. Gaffan had no chance to move from the shelter of the rock.

“Somebody’s been teaching these guys to shoot,” Wells said.

“I’m thinking that too, sir.”

Now Wells and Gaffan were pinned. The guerrillas had them targeted and would cut them down the next time they poked their heads up. They watched helplessly as two guerrillas emerged from the boulders by the cave and ran left, diving behind a mound of dirt kicked up by a Hellfire missile. From their new position, the Talibs had an angle on Gonzalez and Hackett, who were stuck because of Hackett’s leg. Sure enough, rounds began smashing into the low, flat rocks that sheltered Gonzalez and Hackett.

“Pinned here, sir,” Gonzalez yelled through the night. Then: “_¡Maricón! _¡Puta! Bitch got my Kevlar.” He fired back ineffectually.

Not good.

“NOW WHAT, SIR?”

Wells thought for a few seconds. Could he aim a grenade well enough to drop it over the boulders that hid the guerrillas? Doubtful. But—

“Load up with CS.” CS was a powerful chemical irritant that left its victims temporarily blind and gasping for breath. All SF soldiers carried CS grenades in addition to the traditional high-explosive variety. Wells popped a gray-and-green aluminum CS grenade in the 203.

“But sir—” Gaffan said.

“Sergeant. Stop calling me sir. Call me John, Wells, dogface, whatever. Not sir. Makes me feel like I’m two hundred years old.”

“Yes, Mr. Wells.”

“Mr. Wells? All right, it’ll do. Now stop arguing and load up.” Lying on his stomach, Wells crooked his arms at the elbow so that the barrel of his carbine pointed up like a mortar. He imagined the gas grenade arcing out of the M4 and landing behind the rocks like a perfectly thrown football. He squeezed the trigger. The carbine jerked back as the grenade soared out.

A few seconds later, white smoke drifted down the side of the mountain, a hundred yards above the entrance to the cave. Not close enough. Wells stayed on his stomach, keeping his arms still.

“Gimme your M4 and reload mine,” Wells said. Gaffan put his own carbine in Wells’s hands. Wells tilted his arms back slightly, calculating, again imagining the gas canister landing behind the boulders. He fired. The grenade landed thirty yards short. Better, but not good enough.

AK fire rattled at Wells and Gaffan as the white CS smoke dispersed across the plateau. A rocket-propelled grenade flared out from a gap in the boulders, sailing over their heads. Good. The men behind the boulder were getting anxious.

“Again,” Wells said. Again Gaffan traded carbines with him. Wells lowered the barrel slightly and squeezed the trigger. Pop! This time the canister landed on the rocks where the guerrillas had hidden. Smoke poured out in all directions, as Wells had hoped. He had chosen to use the CS grenades instead of standard high-explosive grenades because with the CS he didn’t have to have perfect aim. If he could get reasonably close, the gas would disperse over the boulders, doing his work for him.

Men yelled in Arabic. Seconds later the coughing began, a vicious hacking as if the men behind the boulder were trying to spit up their poisoned lungs.

“Again.” Again Gaffan handed him a reloaded carbine. Wells adjusted his aim infinitesimally and fired again. This time the shot went slightly long, landing on the mountainside a few yards above the cave. But the smoke seeped down into the area where the guerrillas were hiding. The coughing grew louder.

“Get your mask on,” Wells said. “One more, then we go in.”

Wells fired the fifth canister, then pulled on a gas mask. The mask made breathing a conscious decision rather than an automatic fact. Inhale. Fill your lungs. Exhale. Hear air rattle through the activated charcoal filters. Inhale again.

Wells pulled his helmet back on and popped a fresh grenade — standard high-explosive, not CS — into the 203. Two men in brown robes crawled from behind the boulders, their bodies shaking, clots of white phlegm dripping down their faces.

Gaffan took aim. “Wait,” Wells said. But no more men joined the two.

“Okay. Drop ‘em.”

Gaffan squeezed the trigger of his carbine. The first guerrilla twitched spasmodically and collapsed face-first. The second man stood and turned toward them, raising his arms blindly, in defiance, or surrender. Gaffan didn’t wait to find out. He fired again. The man pressed a hand to his robe, twisted, and fell.

“Looks like we got the dumb ones,” Gaffan said. Behind the boulder, the desperate coughing continued. At least two men left back there, Wells thought. No point in waiting any longer. CS was nasty, but its effects wore off fast. “Cover me,” he said to Gaffan. “On three.”

“I’ll go, John.” Gaffan started to stand.

Wells shoved him down. “You cover.” Wells crouched in the shadow of the rock. It was 250 feet to the boulders in a straight line, though he would be zigzagging to keep the guerrillas from getting a clean shot. He wasn’t as fast as he’d once been, but he was fast enough. He held up three fingers to Gaffan, two, one. He took off.

And as his legs pumped over the plateau’s broken rocks, the mania of hand-to-hand combat filled him. He knew he would survive. God, Allah — whatever He was called, whatever He was—wouldn’t let him die out here. He was invincible. Indestructible.

Wells sprinted, the M4 cradled across his chest, hurdling a low rock, always moving, cutting over the field like a running back who’d made the safety miss and knew the end zone wasn’t far off. When he was a hundred feet away, a man stepped from the shadows of the boulders, white, holding an AK in both hands, wearing a jean jacket—

And a gas mask like Wells.

Agas mask. Choose now or never choose anything again. No point in trying to shoot. He was running too fast to have a chance of hitting the guy. Instead Wells pulled the second trigger on the carbine, launching his high-explosive grenade. Maybe he’d be close enough at least to rattle the man in the mask—

Thata-thata-thata.The guerrilla’s AK exploded with a staccato burst.

Wells dove to his right. He landed hard on his shoulder and rolled, reaching for his carbine.

The grenade blew in an enormous white flash. Wells ducked his head as shrapnel rained around him. When he looked up, the man in the jean jacket no longer existed.

Wells sat up. He didn’t think he’d been hit, but his right arm hung out of its socket and his shoulder felt as though it were on fire. Wells reached across his body and cradled the shoulder in his left hand. He grabbed his right biceps and tugged his arm forward, trying to pop the joint into place. The pain was the worst he’d ever felt. A river of agony flooded through his chest. Tears flooded his eyes and filled his gas mask. Wells dropped his arm.

He caught his breath and again wrapped his left hand around the top of his right biceps. In one convulsive movement he jerked his arm forward. The world spun. He pulled even harder. He could feel the joint give. The stars merged and the sky glowed a chunky white. Wells didn’t stop pulling. Then the joint popped back into place and the pain lessened. Wells tried to lift his arm and was amazed to find he could. Then he picked himself up and ran for the rocks, to see if anyone else was still back there.

BUT WHEN WELLS FINALLY ENDED his 250-foot marathon and reached the mouth of the cave, he didn’t find anyone. Anyone alive, anyway. The grenade had slammed into the chest of the man in the jean jacket, a one-in-a-million shot that had blown him apart. His headless torso lay in a thick pool of blood. The head, still covered with the gas mask, lay ten feet from his body. Through the clear plastic mask its eyes watched Wells, promising to visit him while he slept. “Asshole,” Wells said aloud, unsure if he was talking to himself or the man he had killed.

And he wasn’t finished yet. There was another one. Somewhere in that cave, there was another one.

14

SHAFER WALKED INTO EXLEY’S OFFICE IN LANGLEY, folder in hand. “Mis-ter Mole. Oh Mis-ter Mole. Where are you?”

Exley looked up from the papers she was pretending to read. “Cute, Ellis.”

“How’s the hunt? We any closer to whack-whack-whacking this mole?” Shafer stood in front of Exley’s desk and battered imaginary moles with an imaginary mallet. “Never was any good at that game.”

“Ellis, are you stupid? Did you forget what’s happening rightnow? While you stand in my office with your tongue hanging out like an escapee from Sesame Street?”

“Of course I know. He’s gonna be fine, Jennifer. You said it yourself. He was born for this.”

“He’s in trouble. I know it.” She did, too. She didn’t believe in extrasensory perception or astrology or any of that voodoo. But she knew Wells was in trouble, bad trouble, at this moment.

“You’re just nervous.”

“And you’re just a bureaucrat whose idea of living on the edge is extra-spicy taco sauce. You don’t get what it’s like, having a gun in your hand, killing them before they kill you.” And I do, Exley didn’t say. I’ve only done it once, but once was enough.

“Jennifer—”

“So don’t patronize me, Ellis. Yeah I’m nervous. Until I hear from him, that’s not going to change. Now, can we do some work?”

Without another word, Shafer pulled up a chair. Together they looked at the list Exley had been trying to focus on all morning:

Abellin, Paul

Balmour, Victoria

Baluchi, Hala

Bright, Jerry

The list consisted of everyone who knew the Drafter’s name or enough details about his identity to compromise him. Already it was fifty-three names long, and despite its length, it still wasn’t finished. Tyson had told Exley and Shafer to expect several more names before the updates stopped.

The length of the list testified to Langley’s screwed-up priorities, Exley thought. The agency jealously guarded the information the Drafter provided, while treating his name with a carelessness bordering on negligence. The data was valuable, the source worthless.

After just a couple of weeks working this case, Exley had gained new respect for Tyson’s job. Even under ideal circumstances, when the agency had been tipped to the exact identity of a spy in its ranks, counterespionage was tough. Just showing that a CIA employee had hidden income or had failed a polygraph wasn’t enough. To build ironclad cases, Tyson’s teams needed to catch moles in the act of turning over classified information to their handlers.

Meanwhile, as they investigated, they had to be sure they weren’t following false leads from foreign spy agencies. During the Cold War, the KGB had more than once sent Langley down dead-end paths. The sad truth was that without a tip, discovering who had betrayed the Drafter would be incredibly difficult, Exley thought. At this point they had no suspects. And the North Koreans had made sure that the Drafter wouldn’t be able to help.

For now, Tyson’s work group had put together basic bureaucratic details for each of the fifty-three people on the list: Date of Hire, Pay, Career History/Evaluations, Marital and Family Status, and — maybe most important — Date of Last Polygraph.

No bank records. They would need subpoenas for those. Tyson’s group had run the names through the FBI’s criminal records database, checked for felony arrests or convictions. No one had any, though Virginia and D.C. police records showed two misde meanors. Edmund Cerys, a case officer who’d spent time in Hong Kong in the 1990s, had been caught urinating in public after a Redskins game. And Herb Dubroff, deputy director for the East Asia Division, had gotten himself busted for setting off fireworks on the Fourth of July. Neither arrest exactly screamed double agent.

SHAFER EXTRACTED HIS OWN COPY of the list from his file folder. The names were covered with doodles, evidence of his untidy mind. “Anything jump out?”

“Way too many people had his name. Especially on the DI side.” The DO, or Directorate of Operations, was home to the case officers who managed spies like the Drafter. The DI, or Directorate of Intelligence, had the analysts responsible for thrashing out the reports that the agency sent to the White House. “There’s no excuse for it. Those guys should all get code words only.”

“When you’re an asset that long, your name leaks. It’s inevitable. Both sides of the house, the analysts and the case officers, they all think they deserve to know details about the assets. They say it’s crucial for judging the information.”

“But they’re really just trying to prove what big swinging dicks they have.”

“Now, why would you say something like that?”

“Anyway. There are five on this list who haven’t taken their polys on schedule. Two others showed signs of quote-unquote minor deception on their last test but haven’t been reexamined. All seven now have tests scheduled for next month.”

Any CIA employee with access to sensitive information was supposed to take a polygraph every five years as a routine precaution. In practice the agency was short on polygraph testers. Some mid-level officers went a decade between tests.

“Next month. Glad to see they’re taking this so seriously,” Shafer said. “I’ll call Tyson, ask them to move it up.” He dropped the sheet of names on her desk, stood up, and started to pace. She recognized the signs. He was about to have a “Shafer moment.” In half an hour they’d have a new way of looking for the mole. Maybe it would make sense, maybe not. But at least they’d have some leads to chase.

“Forget the list for a second,” Shafer said. “Who are we looking for? Who is this guy? What kind of man betrays his country?”

“Betrays his country? Isn’t that a little theatrical, Ellis?”

“What would you call it, then?”

“Fine. Betraying his country it is.”

“But in a way you’re right. He’s not betraying his country. He’s betraying us. The agency. He’s been passed over for promotions. His career hasn’t gone how he wanted.”

“That fits half of Langley,” Exley said.

“He’s on his second marriage, or his third.”

“Hanssen was on his first marriage.” Robert Hanssen, the FBI double agent.

“That’s the exception, but okay. Strike the second marriage. He’s a loner for sure. Not many friends at the agency. Middle-aged, forty to fifty-five. Scores well on tests but terrible interpersonal skills. Always sure he’s the smartest guy in the room.”

“I didn’t know you were spying for North Korea, Ellis.”

“I’ll remind you I’m on my first wife.”

“Like Hanssen. Why are you so sure it’s a he?”

“It’s a he, Jennifer. Women aren’t double agents.”

“Because we’re such nurturing souls. Like Paris Hilton.”

“Because women don’t have the stomach for this kind of risk.”

“That’s crap and you’re an MCP.”

“A what?”

“A male chauvinist pig.”

“Wow. Haven’t heard that since Gloria Steinem stopped burning bras. Anyway, I’m right.”

“What about Mata Hari?”

“An exception.”

Exley didn’t bother to argue. “So does he have kids?”

“Possibly. Ames didn‘t, but Hanssen did.”

“Go on. What else?”

“I don’t know, but there’s something. Some sexual tic, maybe.”

“He’s in the closet, cruising Dupont.” Dupont Circle, the center of Washington’s gay population, a few blocks west of Exley’s apartment. “Could you be any more predictable, Ellis?” Exley was enjoying this back-and-forth now. “Maybe he’s just a happy suburban dad, likes it missionary once a week.”

“You don’t do this if you’re happy.”

“Right you are. Does he do drugs?”

“More likely he gets his kicks legally. Gambling. Drinking, maybe.”

“We can track that,” Exley said. “A DUI.”

“With a good lawyer he could get a DUI knocked down to a misdemeanor speeding ticket. And traffic records are a nightmare. Even if we just do Maryland and Virginia, it’ll take weeks. But we can try.”

“And we can send NSLs to Vegas, ask the casinos if anyone on the list is a major player.” NSLs were national security letters. The agency sent them to companies when it was looking for information to aid espionage or terrorism investigations.

“Thought you believed in the Bill of Rights,” Shafer said.

“They’re voluntary. Nobody has to answer.”

“Of course,” Shafer said. With very limited exceptions, the CIA couldn’t operate on American soil, so compliance with the letters was voluntary. They were requests, not warrants. But in the post-9/11 era, big companies didn’t want to get sideways with Langley, so they usually found ways to give the agency the information it asked for.

“Anyway, this is a totally legitimate use,” Exley said. Shafer’s comment stung. She didn’t usually think of herself as the type to trample the Fourth Amendment.

“We’re fishing, Jennifer. We have zero evidence on any of these people. No judge on earth would give us a warrant.” Shafer pointed at the list. “Even if it turns out that Jerry Bright, whoever he is, loses ten grand a week in Vegas, it proves nothing.”

“So you don’t think we should send the letters?”

“I didn’t say that. If Jerry Bright is losing ten grand a week, I want to know where the money’s coming from. When you have no clues, you’ve got to fish.”

“But maybe you’re wrong. Maybe our mole’s not a gambler or drinker or any of it. Maybe he’s a true believer.”

“In the cult of Kim Jong Il? He wants to move North Korea toward its glorious future?”

“Point taken,” Exley said. “He’s not doing it for love. But what if he’s in Seoul? In that case, none of this will get us anywhere.”

“You know what, Jennifer? You’re right. Let’s forget the whole thing, take the afternoon off.”

“That’s not what I mean—”

“Seoul’s been a well-run station for a long time. I think he’s here, not there. And I think that John had it right that night we met Tyson. I think our mole is working for somebody else, not North Korea.”

Exley flinched as Shafer mentioned Wells. For a few minutes, she’d let herself forget the raid. Now she thought of him, wearing the bulletproof vest he insisted on in lieu of the Kevlar plates he said were too heavy.

“So this mole is in it for the money? You think he needs money, Ellis?”

“Not exactly. The money’s how he keeps score.”

“If he’s spending it, it’ll leave a trail.”

“He can hide it. He can put it in his wife’s name, his parents, set up a trust.”

“Whatever name he puts it in, if he’s spending, then we can see it. He’ll have something. A vacation house on the Chesapeake.”

“If you say so.” Shafer sighed, the sound he made when he thought Exley had missed an obvious point. Exley hated that sigh. “Suppose he got a million bucks over the last decade. That would be a big haul, as much as Ames. But over ten years, it’s only a hundred grand a year.”

“Maybe you don’t think so, but a hundred grand a year is a lot of money, Ellis. Especially tax-free.”

“If wifey’s a lobbyist, say, she’s making more than that. A lot more. And he’ll have the nice car and the house on the Chesapeake anyway.”

“What if his wife doesn’t work?”

“Then it would be more obvious, sure.”

“She doesn‘t, Ellis. I’m sure of it. He’s divorced or his wife doesn’t work.”

“Or maybe she works eighty hours a week and the marriage is dead and he’s blowing the money on hookers. He feels emasculated, so he’s getting her back.”

“I don’t think so. The marriage is broken, but they’re not divorced.”

“A completely unfounded, wild-ass guess.”

“As opposed to everything you’ve just said?” Exley looked at her list. “Okay. We’re looking for a man forty to fifty-five, maybe divorced, maybe in an unhappy marriage. He may have a DUI or a public intoxication on his record, but that’s not a requirement. Money that he can’t explain is a bonus.”

“Also a high IQ, but at least one spotty personnel evaluation. That’s the pattern. Doesn’t mean it’s right in this case, but it’s worked in the past. And put in the two guys who failed their polys. That’s an automatic red flag.”

“Minor deception doesn’t mean you failed.”

“It does to me.”

Exley checked off names. “I’m going to count peeing in public as intoxication—”

“Good call.”

“Looks like at least ten guys make the cut. Edmund Cerys, Laurence Condon—”

“I know Condon,” Shafer said. “It’s not him.”

“Now we’re not even sticking with our own made-up rules?”

“Fine. Leave Condon on. But it’s not him.”

“Edmund Cerys. Laurence Condon. Tobias Eyen. Robert Ford. Joe Leonhardt. Danny Minaya. Keith Robinson. James Russo. Phil Waterton. Brad Zonick. Besides Condon, anybody ring a bell?”

Shafer shook his head.

“So I guess…” Exley fell silent. “Now what? Let me guess. Continuing this highly scientific process, we throw darts to decide which of our suspects did it.”

“Try again.”

“Property records, financial disclosure forms, divorce records. We ask around, try to figure out who has a bad marriage, who’s a closet drinker. We get Tyson to authorize the national security letters for them and everyone else on the list.”

“Correct. Toodle-oo.” Shafer grabbed his file and walked out, looking altogether too pleased with himself for Exley’s taste.

“Toodle-oo yourself, you ass.”

“And say hi to John for me,” Shafer called from the corridor. “He’s fine, you know.”

She decided not to rise to the bait. In his own childish way, Shafer was trying to make her feel better. She looked down again at the names. She wasn’t sure Shafer’s theories made sense. Maybe the mole was highly successful, a genius who spied just for the thrill. But at least they were moving. And almost certainly they were coming at the search from a different angle than Tyson’s people.

She picked up the phone and dialed Tyson’s office.

“George? It’s Jennifer Exley. I need help with some names…. Yes. Ten in all.”

15

THE CAVE ENTRANCE WAS A BLACK MOUTH in the side of the mountain, seven feet wide, nearly as tall. Handmade bricks lined the opening, evidence that guerrillas had turned the space inside into a semipermanent refuge. Wells wondered when the bricks had been laid. The Afghans had been defending these mountains for a long, long time. Some of their underground networks had been built not after the Soviet occupation in 1979 but the British invasion of 1838.

Until he went in, Wells couldn’t know if the cave was a cul-de-sac used for weapons storage or a deeper link to a tunnel network. Either way he’d be blindly chasing an armed and desperate guerrilla. Prudence dictated that Wells lob in a couple canisters of CS and hope that whoever was inside came out on his own.

Then Wells thought of Greg Hackett, his life dribbling away through the tourniquet on his leg. The soldier in the cave might be the one who’d taken Hackett down. Prudence was another word for fear.

Wells set his M4 neatly against a rock. Inside the cave’s narrow passages, the rifle would be a hindrance. He would depend instead on his Makarov and his knives. He grabbed his headlamp from his belt, clicked it to be sure it was working, strapped it to his helmet. He stepped toward the cave — then stopped as he heard someone yelling his name. Gaffan.

“John! You all right?” Gaffan said. “Looked like you went down hard.”

As if in answer, Wells’s right shoulder began to ache, a dull pain that Wells knew would worsen. But he could still use the arm, and that was enough.

“Keep watch here. Clean up anyone who sticks his head out. I’m going in.”

“I’m coming with you.”

“We’ll be in each other’s way. You cover me on the way in. Then stay here.”

“You’re the boss, sir.”

Wells didn’t bother to wonder if Gaffan was being sarcastic. He darted across the mouth of the cave and flattened himself against the jagged rocks beside it. As Gaffan positioned himself on the other side of the entrance, Wells peeked inside. He reached for his headlamp, then reconsidered. Not yet. Light would give away his position. Instead he stared into the darkness. Slowly his eyes adjusted enough for him to understand what he was seeing.

The guerrillas had shaped the cave into a tunnel that sloped into the mountain. Rough brick covered parts of its walls, but the ceiling was untouched stone. Wells half-expected to see flint-tipped arrows on the ground, charcoal drawings of men hunting woolly mammoths on the walls.

But this cave had no drawings, and no arrows. A thousand generations of human cleverness had replaced them with deadlier tools. AK-47 rifles lay beside used RPG launch tubes. Aside from the weapons, the space was empty as far as Wells could see. The darkness took over about thirty yards in.

An acrid whiff of the CS gas Wells had fired floated out of the cave, faint but enough to make his nostrils burn. Wells had never thought he’d wish for a faceful of CS. But now he did. The fact that the gas had dispersed so quickly meant that the passage ran deep into the mountain. Not what he wanted.

Across the entrance, Gaffan stood ready. Wells held up three fingers, two, one—

And stepped inside. If someone was watching the entrance Wells was most vulnerable at this moment, his silhouette visible against the sky. He took two steps forward, dove behind an empty crate, and waited. But no shots came. He pushed the crate aside and crawled into the mountain.

INCH BY INCH the rock womb darkened. Soon Wells couldn’t tell if his eyes were open or closed. He straightened up slowly. Before he could stand, his helmet bumped the ceiling, sending a jolt down his neck and into his damaged shoulder. The passageway had shrunk. The ceiling here was lower, no more than five feet. Wells wondered how much smaller it would get.

He leaned back against the wall and tried to orient himself. When he looked back the way he’d come, he could see a pinprick of light — or more accurately, a slightly paler shade of black. The outside world was at most a hundred yards off, but it seemed much farther away. Wells’s pulse quickened. Twice in college he’d gone spelunking. But those had been afternoon trips into the White Mountains with a half-dozen friends and a guide, not excursions into the heart of darkness.

Don’t be dramatic, Wells told himself. If he needed light, he had his headlamp, and a flashlight too, a tiny Maglite hooked to his belt. He closed his eyes and thought back to his days playing linebacker in college, watching the quarterback’s eyes, knowing where the ball was going even before the receivers did, stepping in front of the errant pass and in a few seconds turning the game inside out, the big men on the other team trying to reverse course, all that momentum heading the wrong way as Wells cruised down the sideline to the end zone. Six times in four years he’d returned interceptions for touchdowns. Wells opened his eyes and found that his heart had slowed to its usual pace, forty-eight beats a minute. His fear was gone and he knew he’d be calm for as long as he needed.

The good news was this cave ought to be easy to navigate. The men who used it wanted shelter, not excitement. Its most dangerous passages should be walled off. And knowing that he might have to fight underground, Wells had come prepared with two special pens. One marked rocks with a fluorescence visible in the dark from hundreds of feet. The other gave off a glow visible under a special ultraviolet light he carried. If the tunnel got complicated, Wells would use the pens to mark his return path.

Besides the pens, Wells carried glowsticks and two high-intensity flash-bang grenades, concussive bombs designed to stun rather than kill. The flash-bangs, a more powerful version of the ones that police carried, had two big advantages over standard high-explosive grenades. They kicked up less shrapnel, and they wouldn’t collapse the roof of the tunnel and trap Wells inside the mountain.

Wells also carried an expandable rubber-coated titanium baton, the caver’s equivalent of a blind man’s cane. But he hadn’t bothered with more traditional spelunking equipment, like climbing gear or rope. He had already decided he would turn back if he reached a passage he couldn’t navigate with his hands.

The air in the cave was cool, almost clammy, but surprisingly fresh. The tear gas was gone. Ventilation shafts must connect the cave to the surface, Wells thought. In the distance, water trickled faintly, an underground spring. Air, water… if they had food down here, guerrillas could hide in these tunnels indefinitely. As long as they didn’t go crazy.

Then, somewhere in the distance, Wells heard a hacking cough that started and stopped like a sputtering engine. The sound of a man who was torn between the need for silence and the even more powerful instinct to force out every molecule of tear gas inside him. The coughing went on a few seconds more, then stopped for good. But Wells had heard enough to know he was on the right track.

Baton in hand, Wells edged forward, deeper into the darkness. Rushing would only hurt him now. Either this passage led to a much larger network of tunnels, in which case he couldn’t possibly catch the man ahead of him, or it dead-ended and his enemy was waiting. In that case, silence, not speed, was his most important ally.

Meanwhile, Wells would keep his headlamp dark and hope to sense changes in the layout of the tunnel without seeing them. He would trust his balance, try to handle the curves of the tunnel the same way he felt 1-95 under his bike at 125 miles an hour. Of course, he might wind up crawling into a crevasse. But if the man ahead of him was preparing a trap, silence and darkness would be Wells’s best hope.

The passage twisted right. Wells touched the baton against its walls and ceiling to be sure it hadn’t forked somehow, then edged forward again. A few yards farther on, the tunnel tightened and dropped steeply. Wells tucked his knife sideways into his mouth, his teeth clenched around the rubber handle, and crawled forward inch by inch. He was glad he’d chosen the thin bulletproof vest. A flak jacket would have been uncomfortably tight. The passage here was four feet wide, not quite as high, just big enough to give him space to turn around and crawl back out if he needed to. But if it became much tighter, he would no longer have that option. Had he missed a fork somehow? Was he lost already?

Wells reached for his headlamp — and again pulled his hand away. The ceiling and walls here were still smooth, proof they’d been bored out over the years. He had to trust he was on course. He began to crawl again. He’d never been anywhere so dark. Unmoored from light, his eyes made their own world. White flashes and red streaks darted through the blackness like fish. Wells took a chance and lit up his watch, cupping his hand over the glowing dial. 2130. He’d been in here barely twenty minutes. He would have guessed hours.

Already the T-shirt under his bulletproof vest was damp with sweat. A maddening rivulet of sweat trickled down his nose. He wiped it off twice and then gave up. The burn in his right shoulder worsened steadily. Wells wondered whether the injury would betray him in close combat.

Every couple of minutes, Wells stopped to listen. But he heard only a distant trickle of water. Then he lost even that comfort. Silence and darkness entombed him.

Crawl. Wait. Listen. Nothing.

Crawl. Wait. Listen. Nothing.

Crawl. Wait. Listen. Something.

A scraping in the distance, the sound of a man moving. After a few moments, the noise stopped. Wells crawled on, faster now, but doubly careful to move in silence. At last the tunnel flattened. When Wells stopped again, he felt that the air had changed, freshened somehow. Which meant that ahead of him this tunnel opened up into some kind of cave. And there he’d find his quarry.

Wells moved forward, confident now. His adrenaline surged, a natural high stronger than any drug, strengthening and focusing him. The burn in his shoulder faded. Far better to be the hunter than the hunted.

Yard by yard, the tunnel widened out. Again Wells heard scraping. He unholstered his Makarov.

Then he saw the light — a hundred yards ahead, maybe less. Wells raised a hand to shield his eyes, which had grown used to the darkness. A flashlight, shining down the tunnel toward him, though the beam didn’t reach him directly because of the curve of the tunnel. Wells flattened himself against the rocks and waited. If he’d been seen, the shooting would start soon enough.

But instead of shots, he heard a voice. No, voices. Two men, speaking a language Wells didn’t immediately recognize. Not Arabic or Pashto. Certainly not English. The words were muffled, but the men seemed to be arguing. The light snapped off, on again, off again. Then a word rang clearly through the darkness. “Pogibshiy.” Russian for “lost.”

Wells realized he’d caught an incredible break. These men weren’t Taliban guerrillas. They were Russian, hard as that was to believe. And they were confused. They’d reached a junction, and they didn’t know which path to take. One probably wanted to give up, crawl out and take his chances with the Special Forces. The other wanted to push on and risk getting lost forever. Or maybe just sit tight, wait, and come out in a day or two. But the first man feared that the SF would dynamite the cave entrance and again they’d be stuck.

Because they couldn’t agree, they’d given away their position with their fighting. A stupid mistake, born of fear.

Now that he knew that he faced two men, prudence — that word again — dictated that Wells turn around, crawl out, and wait. In a space as confined as this, they could easily overpower him even if he surprised them. But what if they didn’t come out? What if they went deeper into the cave? They would either find another path out or die in here. Either way, Wells would lose the chance to interrogate them.

And Wells wasn’t willing to lose that chance. He needed to know who’d sent them. The Talibs, brutal as they were, were fighting for their God and their country. These Russians were nothing more than mercenaries, killing American soldiers for money.

Forget prudence.

WELLS CRAWLED FORWARD, Makarov in his hand, flash-bang grenades on his hip. He’d left the baton behind. It was useless to him. He moved fast now, as fast as he could. Which wasn’t all that fast. The tightness of the tunnel restricted him to a crablike scuttle. But he figured he’d reach the end of the passage in less than a minute, and then—

Then he tripped.

He banged down hard. Hard and loud. Wells heard the Russians scrambling. A flashlight beamed at him, no more than twenty yards away.

Seconds later, the shooting started.

16

THE THREE ELEVATED HIGHWAYS CAME TOGETHER in a jumble of ramps that soared above the warehouses of northern Guangzhou. Once called Canton, the city had been a commercial center in China for centuries. Now Guangzhou was a metropolis of eight million people, the manufacturing heart of southeastern China. The trucks and buses on its highways never stopped, even on damp nights like this one, when rain pounded down and the air seemed too humid to breathe.

Beneath the highway junction lay a darker world. The concrete pillars that supported the roads formed a kind of room, noisy with the thrum of big engines in low gear. The space had no lights, but it was illuminated secondhand by cars passing on the nearby surface roads. Their headlights gave the space the unsteady glow of an after-hours club, offering glimpses of the rats that dodged through the pylons. The place wasn’t exactly a five-star hotel.

But it was dry, Jordan Weiging thought. He had walked for hours, looking for a place to escape the rain, ever since those cops had chased him from Huangshi Boulevard. Damned cops. Jordan had learned to hate the police since he came to Guangzhou six months before. They seemed to be everywhere, and they were quick to use their sticks.

Jordan hadn’t been looking for trouble on Huangshi, only a doorway where he could sleep in the shadows of the street’s skyscrapers. He hadn’t thought anyone would care. Huangshi was Guangzhou’s version of the Las Vegas Strip, giant hotels beside low-rent two-story bars. Even in the rain, whores walked the avenue, smiling and blowing kisses at the men who surveyed them. They wore thigh-high skirts and tight tank tops and were barely in their teens. Even the ugliest ignored Jordan, though. In their own way, they were showing him mercy. He was so obviously broke that tempting him would have been unkind.

But the police hadn’t been so polite. Tonight they had pulled up as he rested in the shadow of the Guangdong International Hotel and told him to move on. He pleaded with them for mercy, told them he meant no harm, and one seemed ready to let him stay. But the other, a skinny man with dirty yellow teeth, spat at his feet.

“Damned migrant,” the cop said. “We have too many of you rats already.”

“What about them?” Jordan pointed to four street-walkers. The girls cocked their hips and cooed like pigeons at the cops.

“The hotels don’t mind them. Anyway, they pay us in ways you can’t.” The cop tapped his wooden nightstick against his hand. “Now move.”

SO JORDAN MOVED. The rain cut through his jacket and sweatpants and soaked his feet until he couldn’t feel them. He wanted to lie down on the cracked sidewalk and let the water wash him away. Let the cops find him and do their worst. Then he stumbled onto the space under the junction, where the North Ring Highway met the Airport Toll Road.

The McDonald’s wrappers and dirty blankets showed him he wasn’t the first to find the space. Jordan wondered why anyone who could afford the luxury of eating at McDonald’s would sleep here. Probably the wrapper had come from the road above.

At least he was out of the rain. He pulled off his jacket and folded it neatly, then slumped against a pylon on the cleanest patch of ground he could find. Whoever had been here before had a taste for Red Star Erguotou — cheap, strong sorghum liquor. Empty bottles of the stuff littered the place. Jordan reached for one, hoping for a few drops. He was amazed when he heard liquid sloshing inside, almost half a bottle. He took a tiny sip, coughed as the liquor burned his mouth.

He waited a moment to be sure the bottle wasn’t contaminated, then took a longer swig. His stomach was empty — he hadn’t eaten all day — and the liquor hit him quickly. He rubbed his eyes. He wanted to believe that this bottle proved that his fate had changed. One day, when he was rich, he’d hold it up and explain to his children how he’d come to Guangzhou and built a fortune from nothing.

He looked at the Red Star bottle, still a quarter full. He ought to save it, he knew, but he couldn’t help himself. Tonight he would drink like a rich man. He tipped up the bottle and gave himself another slug.

JORDAN’S REAL NAME WAS JIANG. Jiang Weiging, in the traditional Chinese style, family name first and given name last. But he thought of himself as Jordan, hoping that some of the luck of Michael Jordan’s name would rub off. In his pack, he carried a dirty Chicago Bulls cap, black with a snorting, red-faced bull over the brim. His most prized possession.

He had loved basketball as long as he could remember. During the good years, before his father got sick, his family had enough money for a television and a VCD player — a cheap Chinese version of a DVD. Jordan’s father liked basketball too. Together they’d watch highlights from the NBA that had been copied onto video disks and sold for two yuan, barely a quarter, at the market in Hanyuan.

In his heart, Jiang knew he wasn’t much of a player. He was strong but small, barely five feet. When he was seven, he’d lost his left pinkie and ring fingers to the spokes of his father’s bicycle. So he’d never play in the NBA, the National Basketball Association—he felt a chill at the mere thought of the words, and he wondered whether the rain and the Red Star were making him sick — but he loved the game anyway.

Americans thought the Chinese liked basketball because China was jealous of America, Jordan thought. But he didn’t want to be American. He couldn’t even imagine what it would be like to be American. He didn’t care about other American sports. But the flow of basketball, the mix of grace and power in the game, felt natural to him.

Jordan reached into his pack and pulled out his Bulls cap. He rubbed its logo and a genuine smile creased his face. Even now he could see his namesake jumping high, slamming home a dunk.

Jordan had come to Guangzhou from Chenhe, a village in Sichuan Province. Ziyang, his father, had died of AIDS three years before, after getting HIV from a contaminated needle. He’d been infected while selling plasma to raise money for Jordan’s school fees. To save money, the plasma collection stations reused needles, a horribly efficient way to spread the virus. Whole villages were infected before Beijing outlawed the practice.

After Ziyang got sick, Jordan took his father’s place in the fields. He couldn’t afford more school anyway. “Without money you can’t expect a miracle,” his mother told him. Jordan had gotten seven years of school, and he figured that was enough. He could add, subtract, multiply, and divide. He read well enough to get by, though the complicated characters confused him. For two years, he and his mother muddled along.

Then she took sick, losing weight, coughing furiously, clots of phlegm and blood. Jordan brought her to the hospital in Hanyuan. The doctors looked her over and said they couldn’t do anything, even if she could have afforded treatment. She died a few months later, leaving Jordan alone. His nearest relatives were his second cousins, who lived in a village a few miles away and could hardly feed their own children.

He collected a few yuan by selling off his mother’s clothes and the little television, and set off for Guangzhou, the heart of the Chinese manufacturing miracle. He’d just turned sixteen. Everyone knew there was work to be had in Guangzhou and Shenzen, the twin boomtowns of Guangdong Province. Boys not much older than Jordan had come back from Guangzhou with motorcycles and computers. Some had even built houses for their families. He would find a job too.

But he didn’t.

What Jordan didn’t know, what he couldn’t be expected to understand, was that China was a victim of its own success. The factories that made toys and shoes and cheap furniture, the low-skill products that had provided jobs for tens of millions of migrants like Jordan, were themselves migrating to other Asian countries. In Indonesia and Vietnam, land was cheaper, construction costs lower, the workers equally diligent. In higher-end manufacturing for laptops and televisions and cars, China was still growing. But no chip company would hire a sixteen-year-old boy with eight fingers and a seventh-grade education. For the low-end jobs that were left, in construction and basic laboring, Jordan was competing with men who were older and stronger than he. The cop who’d rousted him was right. Guangzhou had too many migrants.

So Jordan joined the endless stream of workers who trudged between construction sites and run down factories, offering their labor for a few yuan a day. Some days he found work, and on those nights he slept with his belly full. But even in the last few weeks the jobs had gotten scarcer, the crowds outside the factories bigger. He’d worked only three times in the last week. He’d spent his money as carefully as he could. He hadn’t permitted himself a bottle of Coke, his favorite treat, in months. Even so, he was down to his last twenty yuan — less than three dollars — hidden in the brim of his Bulls hat. He didn’t want to spend those two crumpled ten-yuan bills, didn’t want to be left with nothing. So he was holding on to them, even though he felt faint with hunger and had begun to hear the voice of his father in his head telling him to eat.

Maybe tomorrow he could convince a restaurant to let him wash dishes in return for some spoiled vegetables or day-old fish. Yes, tomorrow he’d try the restaurants. He closed his eyes and thought of steaming hot soup, thick with dumplings, as his mother had made during the good years. He took another sip of the Red Star and drifted off to sleep.

HE OPENED HIS EYES to see two men looking curiously at him. He scrambled up, keeping his back to the pylon. He had a knife in his bag, a cheap switchblade that had once been his dad’s.

But the men didn’t seem threatening. They were much older than he was, and their faces were weary. One was the thinnest man Jordan had ever seen. The other was fat and held a bottle of Red Star. As Jordan looked at him, he sat down slowly. Jordan couldn’t tell if he had meant to sit or just given up on standing.

“So you’ve found the Hotel Guangzhou,” the thin man said. He laughed, a rasping laugh that became a hacking cough that shook his body. Jordan’s mother had coughed that way a few months before she died. When the cough stopped, the man pulled a crumpled pack of cigarettes from his pocket. He put one in his mouth. “Want a cigarette, boy?”

“I don’t smoke.”

“May as well start. You’ll die faster. Less time to suffer.” The man laughed and tossed him the pack and the lighter. Jordan looked at the cigarettes. Basketball players didn’t smoke, he was sure.

“Try one,” the man said. “You’ll feel less hungry.”

At that, Jordan put the cigarette to his lips. His hand trembled as he lit it. The sour smoke filled his mouth and he coughed.

“Easy, boy. A little at a time to start.”

Jordan took a small puff and choked the smoke into his lungs. His brain seemed to come alive. The feeling wasn’t entirely pleasant, but he hadn’t felt so awake in weeks. He took a longer drag.

“Not so much, boy, or you’ll regret it.”

Too late. Nausea filled him. He slumped against the pylon. But he held on to the cigarette, and when the feeling passed he took another, more tentative puff. This time he felt better. And the man was right. His hunger was gone. “It works.”

The thin man rubbed his hands together. “Yu, I’ve gotten him hooked. My good deed for the day.” He laughed his awful hacking laugh. A moment later, Yu giggled drunkenly back, a high-pitched sound that didn’t fit his heavy body.

The thin man sat beside Jordan, who flinched. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m not one of those. My name’s Song. What’s yours?”

“Jiang,” Jordan said.

“Where do you come from, Jiang?”

“Sichuan Province. I came here to work.”

“Of course you did. If only you’d come last year, or the year before that — Well, anyway.” Song braced a hand on the ground and stood, slowly unfolding his skinny limbs. Watching him made Jordan smile. Song moved like a puppet whose strings had gotten tangled.

“Do you like basketball?” Jordan said. He suddenly very much wanted Song to stay and talk. The skinny old man was the first person who’d treated him with any kindness in months.

“Sure. Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“If you like, we can look for work together tomorrow,” Song said. “We may not find any, but at least Yu and I can show you the city. You see what a success we’ve made here.” He kicked ineffectually at Yu, who lay on his side with his eyes closed. “Don’t you want your blanket, fat pig?” But Yu simply rolled away.

“Good night, Jiang.”

“Good night, Master Song.”

And Song laughed again, so hard that he had to lean against a concrete pylon to stay upright. “Master… master…”

Jordan closed his eyes and listened to Song’s hacking. Life had to get better, he thought. It could hardly get worse. He sipped his bottle of Red Star until sleep took him. And as he finally drifted off, he had no way of imagining that soon enough he would provoke a crisis whose repercussions would echo around the world.

17

THE FLASHLIGHT FLICKED OFF and in the dark the shots ricocheted past Wells like a jackhammer gone mad. Wells pressed his head down, brushing his lips against the stone and dirt, as shards of rock rained down on him.

The pace of firing slowed and Wells lifted his head. “Stop!” he yelled in his perfect Arabic. “Stop! It’s Mohammed! Don’t shoot!”

Silence. Then another fusillade of shots. For now the darkness and the tunnel were protecting him, making it hard for the Russians to get a bead on him. Only his head and shoulders were visible, making him a very narrow target. They would need a perfect lucky shot to get him. But if they kept shooting from twenty yards out, they’d get that shot eventually. Or they might roll a grenade his way — though blowing up the tunnel would block their only sure escape route.

The shooting stopped. “Mohammed?” a man shouted.

“Mohammed, brother of Ahmed.”

“Brother of Ahmed?” The Arabic was rusty, Russian-accented.

“Brother of Ahmed!” Wells yelled. He only needed to distract them for a few seconds. “I know these tunnels. I can save us.” Wells braced his right hand, the one holding his Makarov, against the tunnel. A surge of pain ripped through his damaged shoulder and he gritted his teeth.

With his left hand, Wells reached for his flash-bang grenades. He still intended to take at least one of these men alive. He unhooked the flash-bangs and wriggled his left arm forward until the grenades were in front of him. He braced his right hand, the one holding the Makarov, against the side of the tunnel.

“Yes, my Russian brothers. I know these tunnels. The path to the left leads—”

“Wait — speak slowly—” the man at the other end called in his broken Arabic.

“Topko ubeyte ego!” the second man yelled.

Wells had heard enough Russian during his days in Chechnya to know what that meant. Just kill him.“Grenade,” the man added, a word that needed no translation.

“Nyet,” the other man said. Wells relaxed a little. Nyet on the grenade, da on the flashlight, which would make an excellent target.

He chattered in Arabic down the tunnel. “You must know Ahmed. He wears his robe loose but his shorts tight. Men love him, though sheep fear him—” For the second time in an hour, the thrill of combat filled Wells. Crackheads must feel this elation when they put flame to pipe. Zeus. I am Zeus.

“Topko ubeyte ego,” the man said again. The unmistakable click of a magazine being jammed into an AK-47 echoed down the tunnel.

At the end of the tunnel, the flashlight clicked on. This time the Russians wouldn’t fire blindly. They started shooting in short bursts. A rock fragment cut Wells’s cheek, under his eye, and blood flowed warm down his face.

But now Wells could aim too. He squeezed off two shots from the Makarov. He heard a yelp in Russian and the flashlight dropped to the ground. Now they might be desperate enough to send a grenade at him. Before they could, he tumbled the flash-bangs down the tunnel. As the grenades rolled away, he buried his head in his hands, closed his eyes, and counted to himself like a kid playing touch football at recess: “One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Missi—”

THE NAME FLASH-BANG DIDN’T begin to do justice to these grenades. Through his squeezed-tight eyelids, Wells saw a pure white light. The noise from the explosions was louder than anything he had ever heard, something more than sound. A shock wave pummeled his ears. He knew he wasn’t moving, couldn’t be inside the narrow tunnel, yet he seemed to be spinning in two directions at once. The men howled in Russian, their voices barely audible over the noise in Wells’s head.

Wells opened his eyes and breathed in deeply. The heavy thermite smell of the grenades brought him back to reality. He needed to move fast, before the Russians regained their bearings. On hands and knees, Wells crawled forward in the dark. The tunnel spun around him. He concentrated on the blood flowing down his cheek and didn’t stop moving. His stomach tightened and a surge of nausea overcame him. Before he could hold back, Gatorade and soda crackers burned his throat and poured out of his mouth. He ate lightly before missions and this was why.

Wells grabbed the side of the tunnel. Somehow he kept moving, pumping his legs forward. Hours passed, or seconds, and then the walls opened up around him. He lost his balance and fell, landing on one of the Russians. The man was twisting sideways, moaning, hands wrapped around his ears. The grenades had blown out his eardrums, Wells thought. The man grabbed feebly at him, but Wells jammed the Makarov into his mouth and pulled the trigger. The Russian’s arm trembled and fell, a last hopeless flutter.

Wells rolled off the corpse and waited, listening in the dark. He was guessing that the man he’d killed had taken the worst of the flash-bangs. The second one might be able to move, or at least to crawl. He waited, listened, and—

There.

IN THE BLACKNESS, Wells heard the Russian’s breath, as close and quiet as a seashell in his ear, no more than ten feet away. Where? Wells couldn’t turn on his flashlight without giving away his own position. The Russian must have the same dilemma. Wells crab-scuttled left, silently, silently, his back to the wall of the cave, holding the Makarov in his right hand.

Step. Step.

Then a burst of AK fire.

But Wells was untouched. The Russian was hitting only the corpse of his partner. Wells threw himself off the cavern wall. The Russian spun toward him, but Wells knocked the barrel of his rifle up and away. With a low arcing kick, he swept the other man’s legs out. The Russian fell back, landing hard. Wells jumped him, and with a knee astride his chest landed a clean left to his chin and another to his nose. The fight went out of the Russian fast. As Wells punched him a third and fourth and fifth time, he hardly resisted. Wells didn’t know if he was disoriented or just resigned to his fate.

Wells flipped the Russian onto his stomach and looped flexcuffs — the temporary plastic handcuffs that police sometimes used in place of regular metal cuffs — tight around the man’s wrists and ankles. Then he snapped open a yellow glowstick.

The cavern was small, no more than eight feet high and twenty-five feet around. On one wall, a guerrilla had spray-painted the Arabic phrase “Allahu akbar”—God is great — in black on the grayish-green stone. Small stalactites hung from the ceiling. The walls and floor bulged as if the mountain were laced with tumors.

Three rusty oil drums sat near the far wall, next to a child-sized BMX bicycle. Bizarre. Maybe the guerrillas had been practicing a circus act in their downtime. Aside from those odd relics, the cavern seemed empty. Beside the oil drums two passages led deeper into the mountain. They were just three feet high, narrower than the tunnel that connected the cave with the surface. Wells understood why the Russians had hesitated to take them. If they dead-ended, they’d be little more than traps.

Wells tossed the glowstick aside. “Speak English?” he said to the Russian.

“Sure.”

“Is anyone else here?”

The man spat on the ground. “See anyone?”

“If I do, I’ll kill you first. Understand?”

“I understand. No, we are alone.”

Wells drew his knife. The Russian’s eyes widened. He rolled onto his back and tried to squirm away. “I just want to be sure you’re not hiding anything,” Wells said. He put a knee on the Russian’s chest and slashed at the man’s sweater and T-shirt, pulling them off. Then he hacked away the man’s camouflage pants until the Russian was naked except for ill-fitting cotton briefs. But the guy didn’t seem to have any extra weapons. A surprise. Every decent commando carried an extra knife, just in case.

“Now the boots.” Wells sliced at the man’s boots. The Russian kicked wildly.

“Boots? Nyet. My feet.”

“Nyet?” Wells turned the Russian onto his stomach, grabbed the man’s little fingers, and pulled them sideways until he could feel the tendons about to snap. “Nyet nyet, Vladimir. If I didn’t need you, I’d leave you down here for the spiders. Got it?”

“Okay, okay.”

Wells wondered if he’d meant his threat. He’d killed many men, but never an unarmed prisoner. In New York, he’d spared the life of a Saudi terrorist he’d captured. Treating captives with decency was one way the United States separated itself from its enemies. At least it had been once. Now America seemed to have lost its moorings. Wells wondered if he had too.

Wells flipped the Russian on his back and sliced into the black leather of his boots. He tore them off. The stench of the Russian’s feet filled the cavern. “Time for a bath, Vladimir.”

“I told you leave them on.”

Wells peeled down the man’s socks. As he did, a sharp metal point, warm with body heat, pricked his left palm. A knife was taped to the back of the man’s right leg.

Wells stepped on the Russian’s chest, leaned in with his steel-toed boots until he felt the man’s sternum compress. A slow groan escaped the prisoner’s lips. Wells lifted the Russian’s leg and ripped off the knife. The tape tore, taking a chunk of skin with it. “Now you’re ready for beach season, Vlad.”

“Name is Sergei.”

“Congratulations.” Wells tossed the knife into the darkness. He ran his flashlight over the Russian, looking for other hidden knives or guns, but saw nothing.

“Any other surprises?”

The Russian said nothing.

“I’ll take that as a no.” Wells cut open the flexcuffs binding the Russian’s feet but left his hands tight. “Now. You’re going in there.” Wells pointed to the tunnel that led to the surface. “When you’re in, I’ll cut your hands free so you can drag your ass out of this cave. Understand?”

“What about you?”

“I’ll be right behind you. Please be smart. I’m guessing getting shot in the colon is an unpleasant way to die.”

“Colon? I don’t understand.”

Wells grabbed the Russian’s arms and dragged him toward the entrance to the tunnel. Allowing the prisoner to lead was dangerous, Wells knew. If he had to kill the man in the narrowest part of the tunnel, he might end up stuck behind the corpse. But if he led, he risked the Russian’s jumping him from behind. This way he could easily watch the man. Anyway, he didn’t think this guy wanted to die underground.

At the entrance to the passage, Wells flicked on his headlamp and pushed the Russian to the floor of the cavern. “Lift your arms behind your back.” The Russian obeyed.

Wells put a knee on the man’s back. With his left hand, Wells pressed the man’s head down. With his right, he cut the cuffs. This was the moment of maximum danger, the last chance for the prisoner to lock him up in hand-to-hand combat. When the Russian’s hands were free, Wells stepped back.

“Now crawl.”

“Naked?” His accent lengthened the word—naaaked—so it sounded vaguely pornographic.

Wells kicked him in the ribs. “Not my problem. Anyway, you’re not naked. Crawl.”

TWENTY MINUTES LATER, Wells saw the dim light of the entrance. The Russian hadn’t tried anything. As the tunnel widened out, Wells flexcuffed his hands and legs again and dragged him out.

A flashlight stunned his eyes.

“Halt!” Gaffan yelled.

“It’s Wells. Got a hostile with me.”

“Yessir. Step slowly, now.” Wells stepped forward. “You okay? You’ve got blood all over you.”

Wells had forgotten the cut on his cheek. “Nothing, Sergeant. Looks worse than it is.”

The ground shook with the rumble of a fighter jet. Gaffan quickly filled Wells in. While he was underground, the Special Forces had gotten air support in the form of a pair of F-16s from Bagram. “Those Air Force boys don’t like flying in the mountains at night, but once we told ‘em we could lose two squads if they didn’t get off their asses, they came through all right.”

Because of the tightness of the terrain and the fact that the Special Forces were so close to the Talibs, the jets hadn’t eliminated all the enemy positions. But their presence had given the Americans a chance to regroup. Now the SF had killed at least a dozen Talibs. The rest were trying to escape into the caves or down the mountain. Still, this fight had been anything but a cakewalk. The Special Forces had taken three dead and three more seriously wounded, including Hackett, who probably wouldn’t last the night.

“We shoulda come in with another squad,” Gaffan said. He looked at the prisoner, who sat hog-tied against the side of the mountain. “So who’s he?”

“Good question.” Wells nudged the Russian. “Who are you?” The prisoner strained against the flexcuffs.

“Take these off and I will show you who I am.”

“He went soft in the cave and it looks like he’s not too happy about it,” Wells said. “All I know is his name isn’t Vladimir. It’s Sergei. Who are you, Sergei? Tell us about yourself.”