The Ghost War

28

EVERY MORNING MORE PROTESTERS SHOWED UP in Tiananmen Square: peasants stooped by age and work, university students, factory hands, even office workers. They came on bicycles and buses that dropped them by the McDonald’s at the south end of the square. They carried bags of fruit and dumplings so they could stay all day. Each evening they emptied out, as thousands of police officers watched. And all day, under the hazy sky, they sang and chanted and waved banners:

“The will of the people is strong!”

“One people, one China!”

“Hegemonists apologize! No more American war crimes!”

“U.S. out of China Sea! China will never forget the twenty-two murdered martyrs!”

A few of the sloganeers even showed sly humor:

“1.5 billion Chinese can’t be wrong.”

“The American century is over! The Chinese mil lennium begins today!”

The first morning after the Decatur sank the fishing trawler, 50,000 people came to Tiananmen. Two days later, the Beijing police estimated the crowd at 150,000. Similar crowds filled People’s Park in Shanghai, Yuexiu Park in Guangzhou, and the central squares in the rest of China’s metropolises.

On the fifth day, with the Beijing police estimating the crowd in Tiananmen at a quarter-million, Li Ping took a helicopter over the square and looked down on the people, his people. They weren’t yet close to filling the square — Tiananmen could hold a million or more — but even so Li’s heart swelled at the sight.

What a change from 1989, the last time Tiananmen had been so full, Li thought. Then the people had been angry at their leaders. Not this time. The peasants were glad to have an officially sanctioned outlet for their fury at being left behind. The middle class wanted to show the world that China could no longer be cowed. The sinking of the trawler had brought them together. Li had brought them together. This outpouring was the living emblem of his will. Soon he would replace Zhang as the unofficial leader of the Standing Committee. Two of the liberals on the committee had already reached out to him, hinting they would support him if he promised not to push them off the committee when he took charge.

Then, at the next Party Congress, he’d take over from Xu as the party’s general secretary. It was time for the old man to retire. Li would be the head of the army and the party, the most powerful leader since Mao. He would remake China, making sure ordinary people shared in its prosperity, while building up the armed forces. No longer would the United States be the world’s only superpower. This was China’s destiny, and his own. Around him the great city rose in every direction, Beijing’s apartment buildings and office towers stretching through the haze, traffic thick on the ring roads and boulevards, and Li thought: Mine. All this. Mine.

But first he needed to press his advantage. The people filling the square beneath him were crucial to his next step toward power. Zhang, that weakling, wouldn’t like his new proposal. But Li believed that old man Xu saw the situation the same way that he did, though the general secretary was too canny to promise his support explicitly. Li waved to the crowds below — not that they could recognize him — and checked his watch. 11:18. Good. A lucky time. He tapped his pilot on the shoulder and they swung back to the landing pad inside Zhongnanhai.

THE MEETING BEGAN TWO HOURS LATER, in the banquet hall in Huairentang, the Palace Steeped in Compassion. The foreign minister spoke first, discussing the international reaction to the sinking. The world had sided with China. The United Nations had voted to condemn the United States for its “unprovoked aggression against a civilian boat.” Even America’s closest allies, like Britain and Poland, agreed that the United States had overstepped its bounds and provoked the confrontation.

“We must remember, if a Chinese warship rammed an American boat near New York, the American anger would be unsurpassed,” the French prime minister said. The United States had refused to apologize for the collision, arguing that it had happened in international waters and the Decatur had warned the trawlers away. In the days since the accident, the Decatur had pulled back two hundred miles off the coast, but other American warships had taken its place.

“The world has seen the violence of the Americans,” the foreign minister said. “Our position is secure. Of course, if we act rashly, we may lose support.”

“Thank you, Foreign Minister,” Xu said. “Now, Minister Li.”

“The People’s Liberation Army is prepared to carry out the will of the Standing Committee, General Secretary. Whatever we decide.”

“And what is your view of the correct action?”

“We must punish the hegemonist aggression.”

“But what about the risks?” This from Zhang. Li looked around the room, as if the interruption were hardly worth answering.

“Do you know why the Mongols burst through our walls eight hundred years ago, Comrade Zhang?”

“I’m not a general, Comrade Li. I imagine their troops were strong, like the Americans.”

“Wrong. They defeated us because we let them. And then we blamed them for being stronger than we were. The people want us to show our strength. They remember what the Americans did in Yugoslavia.” In 1999, American jets had bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, killing three Chinese. The United States had always insisted the bombing was accidental, but many Chinese didn’t accept that explanation. “The people are tired of excuses from the hegemonists. They want us to act.”

“And when the Americans counterattack, when they destroy our navy, what will the people say then?”

“The Americans won’t attack us, Comrade Zhang. The world won’t allow it.”

“Perhaps the world won’t stop it.”

“We will push them once more, just once, and then give them a way out.”

“What do you mean, push them? Speak clearly now.”

The moment he’d been working toward for all these months had arrived, Li knew. He explained his plan. When he was finished, the room was silent.

“And you think the Americans won’t respond.”

“As long as they understand that we don’t intend to invade Taiwan, they’ll accept our response as justified. They know they’ve overstepped their bounds even if they won’t admit it. Besides, our action will give them a new respect for our capabilities.”

Zhang pounded a fist against the table. “Comrade Li, go back to your tanks and leave strategy to wiser men. We’ve gone up the mountain twice now, first with the agreement with Iran and then with our missile tests. Now you want us to go up a third time. We will surely encounter the tiger.”

“The Americans aren’t the tiger. Our people are the tiger, Minister Zhang. If we don’t defend the honor of the Chinese nation, they won’t forgive us.”

“The honor of the Chinese nation?”

“Perhaps you’ve forgotten what those words mean.”

“Because I’m not a warmonger?”

Xu pushed himself to his feet. “Ministers. We are all servants of the people. There is no need for this. Now. I have decided.”

“You have decided?” Zhang couldn’t hide his astonishment at the old man’s tone.

“I have, Economics Minister. Am I not the general secretary?”

Xu paused. And Li realized that the old lion was enjoying himself. For years, Zhang had usurped Xu’s power, leaving Xu as a figurehead. Now Li’s challenge to Zhang had given Xu a taste of his lost power. So Xu’s next words didn’t surprise Li.

“General Li. Please use our forces to carry out the plan you’ve outlined.”

“Thank you, General Secretary.” This time, Li didn’t even bother to look at Zhang as he walked out of the room.

Outside the hall, Li’s limousine waited to ferry him to his offices. As he trotted toward it, another limousine pulled up. General Baije Chen, head of the PLA’s intelligence directorate, jumped out.

“Minister. I’m sorry to disturb you. There’s something you need to see. May we speak alone?”

“As you wish.” Li followed Baije into the parking lot beside the hall. Whatever Baije wanted, it must be important. He lived on pots of green tea and rarely left his office. When they were well away from the entrance, Baije handed Li two sheets of paper, one in English, the other in Chinese.

“As you can see, it’s from our contact at the American embassy—”

Li raised a finger to his lips. He’d read the note for himself. When he was done, he had to call on all his discipline to keep from shouting curses at the sky. All his work, all his planning, and now this? A traitor among them?

“When did this come in?”

“This morning.”

“And it’s reliable?”

“Yes, General.”

Nearly a year before, Matt Kahn, a Marine guard at the American embassy, had fallen hard for Hua, a waitress in Sanlitun, a northeast Beijing neighborhood where expats gathered to drink cheap beer and watch day-old football and soccer. Only after they had been together for three months did the unfortunate Marine discover that his girl Hua was actually a boy named Hu. By the time the Beijing police arrived at Hu’s apartment, Kahn had gouged out one of Hu’s eyes and both of his testicles. The officers called in their captain, who saw the situation’s potential as soon as he learned where Kahn worked. Within an hour, the police had sent the case to the Second Directorate, who offered Kahn a choice. He could face a court-martial and public humiliation on two continents. Or he could give the Chinese a peek at the embassy’s intelligence files, whatever he could get in a quick one-time sweep.

“It will take only a few minutes,” the Second Directorate colonel told Kahn. “And then all this”—he gestured to the slim, hairless man in the bloody dress in the corner—“will be over.” For Kahn, the choice was no choice at all.

But Kahn realized too late that spying was easier to get into than out of. The colonel came back to him a month later, and a month after that, each time demanding more information. Now Kahn wished he’d taken his punishment at the beginning instead of stepping into this pit. Three times, he put his pistol into his mouth and wished he had the guts to pull the trigger. But he didn’t. Meanwhile, he needed to keep the Chinese happy. And so twice a month he filled a flash drive with all the files he could get and passed them to the Second Directorate.

This time, the files included Cao Se’s note to the agency asking for a meeting. Of course, he hadn’t used his name in the note. Still, its importance was obvious as soon as it was translated. It reached Baije in hours.

Li reread the note, to be sure he understood. A Chinese spy, code-named Ghost, was asking for an immediate meeting with a CIA operative, someone who had never worked in China. “How?” Li said, under his breath, more to himself than to Baije. He had been sure that his American mole had rooted out all of the CIA’s spies inside China. But he’d been wrong.

Yet this spy, whoever he was, obviously didn’t know that the Second Directorate’s had penetrated the embassy. The note explicitly set out the time and place of the meeting.

“Of course, the Americans may not respond,” Baije said. “They know we’ve penetrated them. They may think this Ghost of theirs has been doubled too.”

“General Baije.” Li put a finger into the smaller man’s chest. “Don’t tell me what the Americans may or may not do. Tell me that our men are tracking every American who comes into Beijing this week. Tell me that we are going to catch this agent, and the traitor who’s helping him. Those are the only words I want to hear.”

29

EVEN BEFORE HE REACHED THE CENTER OF BEIJING, Wells felt the electricity of approaching war on the avenues of the giant city. Enormous banners in Chinese and English dangled from overpasses: “China stands as one!” “America will be sorry!” A torn American flag fluttered off the skeleton of a half-finished office tower, while the flag of the People’s Republic, five yellow stars against a blood-red background, waved off every car and truck.

As his cab swung from the airport expressway onto the third of the ring roads that surrounded Beijing, Wells saw a dozen mobile antiaircraft missile batteries, their green-painted rockets pointing in every direction. Hundreds of Chinese surrounded the launchers, taking pictures, saluting the PLA soldiers in their crisp uniforms. Their excitement was palpable. They were standing up to the United States, and the show was about to start. The First Battle of Bull Run must have felt this way, Wells thought, the crowds turning up to watch the Rebs and the Union boys fight, shocked when the pageantry ended and blood began to flow.

Indeed, aside from the flags and banners, life in Beijing seemed to be proceeding fairly smoothly. The immigration officers at Beijing airport hadn’t been overly hostile to Wells or the other Americans who’d come in from San Francisco. The cabbie outside the terminal had shown no irritation when Wells told him to head to the St. Regis, a five-star hotel close to the United States embassy and favored by Americans. Workers were hammering away everywhere on new buildings. And the traffic was the worst Wells had ever seen, making Washington’s supposedly busy roadways look like racetracks in comparison.

As the cab again stopped dead, the driver glanced at Wells in his rearview mirror.

“Where from?”

“California.” So his passport said, anyway. Wells waited for the driver to explode in anti-American slurs, or throw him out of the cab and make him walk the rest of the way. Instead the driver turned to Wells and smiled, revealing a mouthful of broken yellow teeth.

“Ca-li-fornia. My cousin — Los Angeles.”

“I’m from Palo Alto,” Wells said. His cover story. “Northern California. Near San Francisco.”

But the cabbie wasn’t interested in Palo Alto. “Los Angeles,” he said again. “Hollywood. Hungry.” The cabbie offered a thumbs-up.

“Hungry?”

“Gong-ri.” The cabbie held up a glossy magazine, a Chinese tabloid that featured a beautiful woman on the cover. Amid the Chinese characters were the English words “Gong Li.”

“Gong Li. She’s an actress, right? I don’t see too many movies.”

“Gong-ri. Holly-wood.”

“Got it. I guess we’ll save the serious discussion for next time. You have no idea what I’m saying, do you? I mean, I could be offering to sell you my sister for all you know. If I had a sister.” Wells felt a pang of guilt. He hadn’t talked to Evan, his son, in weeks. When he got back, he was taking the boy fishing in the Bitterroots — the mountain range on the Montana-Idaho border, just outside his hometown of Hamilton. Maybe hunting too, if Heather, his ex, would let him. But fishing for sure. Whenhe got back. Not if.

The cabbie grinned and gave Wells another big thumbs-up, then reached back through the cab’s plastic barrier with a crumpled pack of 555s. “You like cigarette?”

“No, thanks.”

“You like China?”

“Sure.”

And with that, the cabbie seemed to have exhausted his English. He popped a 555 in his mouth and smoked silently until they reached the hotel a half-hour later.

BUT OUTSIDE THE ST.REGIS, the mood turned grim. Four jeeps and a dozen soldiers formed a makeshift barricade that blocked the driveway. As the taxi stopped, a young officer rapped on Wells’s window.

“Passport,” he said. The passport, sent by courier to the Chinese consulate in San Francisco for an expedited visa application, identified Wells as James Wilson, a thirty-seven-year-old from Palo Alto. If anyone asked, Wilson was the founder of Prunetime. com, an Internet start-up that specialized in small-business software. The business was real, at least on paper — one of the dozens of ghost companies that the agency had created over the years. Prunetime had a bank account, a Dun & Bradstreet credit report, a record of incorporation with the California secretary of state, even an office in San Francisco. Wilson was real too. Besides his passport, he had a California driver’s license, a working Social Security number, and a wallet full of credit cards.

Of course, none of those records could answer the red-flag question: Why was James Wilson so anxious to get to Beijing at this moment, with China and America close to war? Why had he applied for a visa on such short notice? But Wells had a plausible cover, a three-day trade fair for software and Internet companies. And despite the rising tensions, he was hardly the only American in China. His 747 from San Francisco had been half full, mostly Chinese but a couple of dozen Americans too, joking nervously that they hoped the bombs would wait until they got home.

“Passport,” the Chinese officer said again. Wells reached into his bag and handed it over. The officer flipped through it nonchalantly. “Out.” As Wells unfolded himself from the cab, the officer walked off, passport in hand, disappearing into a windowless black van behind the jeeps. Wells leaned against the cab and waited. A few minutes later, an older officer in a pressed green uniform stepped out of the van and waved him over.

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

“No, sir.”

“Of course not. First trip to China?”

“Yes.”

“Why you come now?”

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

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

“Five days.”

“You doing anything for United States this trip?”

“I don’t understand.”

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

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

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

“Nothing like that.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How accurate are these positions?”

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

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

“That’s correct, General.”

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

“And when does the Xian next report?”

“At 0100, sir.”

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

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

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

“I’m certain, sir.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then he looked at the book again.

Unless it would.

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

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

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

No. Even if Li was right, he couldn’t be allowed to take such insane risks. Cao pushed the pedal to the floor. He didn’t have much time.

WELLS DIALED A NUMBER he’d never called before, a 415 area code. Exley answered on the first ring. “Hello?”

“Jennifer?”

“Jim.” His cover name sounded strange in her mouth. She kept her voice steady, but still he could hear the tension. “Was your flight okay?” In the background he heard CNN.

“Everything’s fine. The hotel’s great. Might as well be Paris.” Wells wanted to keep this conversation as banal as possible. No doubt the Chinese were monitoring every phone call into and out of the St. Regis tonight.

“What time is it there?”

“Two A.M. But I’m wide awake. Jet lag. Is anything happening? Anything I should know about?” This would be her only chance to tell him if his cover was blown.

“No. The kids are fine. Everyone misses you.” An all-clear, or as close as he would get.

“Tell them I miss them too. How’s my niece?”

“Still hasn’t called. Your brother’s worried sick.” So the mole was still gone.

“Well, tell him not to worry. Listen, honey, this call’s costing a fortune, so… I just wanted to check in, say I love you.”

“I love you too, honey. Stay safe, huh? You’re on your own this time.” A reference to the way she’d saved him in New York. Her voice cracked, and before he could say anything else, she hung up.

30

“SIR.” THE CONCIERGE, A SMALL MAN in a three-button suit, waved frantically as Wells strode toward the St. Regis’s front door. “Good morning, sir. A moment, please. We are asked to give this to our American guests.”

The concierge handed Wells a paper embossed with the State Department’s logo and headlined “Notice to Americans.”

“Last nightthe U.S. consulate in Guangzhouwas informed that an American couple visiting China for an adoption had been attacked. The incident was apparently motivated by anger at deteriorating American-Chineserelations.” Bureaucrats and diplomats loved the word incident, Wells thought. It avoided touchy issues, like what had really happened and who was to blame.

“So far this incident appears isolated. However, U.S. citizens should keep a low profile and avoid anti-American demonstrations”—good call—“andlarge groups of Chinese.” With 1.5 billion people in the country, that might be tough. “The situation is fluid and updates will be issued as conditions warrant.”

“Maybe you stay in the hotel today, sir,” the concierge said.

“And miss my chance to see Beijing?”

“WHERE TO, SIR?”

“Tiananmen Square.”

The St. Regis doorman looked unhappy. “No cars in Tiananmen today, sir.”

“Just have him get as close as he can. I want to see the Forbidden City”—the former Chinese imperial palace, north of Tiananmen. “Forbidden City is open, right?” It better be, Wells thought. He was supposed to meet Cao Se there.

“Yes.” The doorman waved a taxi forward, but his frown didn’t disappear, not even after he palmed Wells’s tip.

Wells wasn’t surprised to see that the cabbie had a soldier’s close-cropped hair. Everyone who left the St. Regis today would be watched. He’d have to assume that Cao had planned for the surveillance. Trying too hard to ditch his watchers would only draw more attention. Though if he could lose them without seeming to work at it, he would.

“So what do you think about this mess?” Wells said to the cabbie. “I think we’ll work it out. In two years it’ll be like it never happened.” Jim Wilson was an optimist. Wells wasn’t so sure.

“No English.”

“Oh. Not that many Chinese speak English, I’m noticing. Course, I don’t speak any Chinese, so there it is. The language of the future, everyone says.” The driver just shrugged.

As they moved west toward Tiananmen, the traf fic slowed to a standstill. Ahead the road was blocked and police were diverting cars off the avenue. Around them a steady flow of Chinese walked west. Wells saw his chance. He handed a hundred-yuan note to the driver and popped out, ignoring the cabbie’s sputtering.

Wells picked his way through the soot-belching trucks, packed minibuses, and shiny black Mercedes limousines jammed together on the wide avenue. The sweet smell of benzene mixed with the stink of unburned diesel. He joined the Chinese heading west on the sidewalk, following the human current toward Tiananmen, and peeked back at the cab. The driver had a radio to his mouth, no doubt warning other agents to watch for Wells. Which wouldn’t be easy in this crowd. Mostly men, they had the same buoyant mood he’d sensed the day before. They waved Chinese flags and didn’t seem to mind having Wells among them. Two men traded a camera back and forth, snapping pictures, holding their hands high in a V-for-victory salute. Though Wells knew from his years in Afghanistan that under the wrong circumstances a crowd like this could become a mob in seconds.

He felt a tug on his elbow. “American?” A tall man in a fraying blue sweatshirt pointed an angry finger at him.

“Canada,” Wells said. No need to start a riot. He was taking enough risks today. His questioner pushed by and was swallowed in the crowd. After the next intersection the road was clear. Men surged onto the pavement. Police clustered around cruisers and paddy wagons, watching for trouble but not interfering with the flow.

Farther on, a herd of television trucks sat close together, Chinese channels that Wells didn’t recognize, along with CNN, Fox, BBC, NHK. The wholeworld is watching.A company-sized detachment of soldiers massed near the trucks, to protect the reporters, or maybe to intimidate them.

For ordinary Chinese — and their rulers — this moment had to be thrilling and frightening, Wells thought. Every person in this crowd was both a spectator and a participant in the action. They wanted to remind the world, and themselves, of that most easily forgotten fact: that they existed. Wells half expected to see Gadsden flags — the yellow banners flown by colonists during the Revolutionary War, emblazoned with a coiled rattlesnake and the words “Don’t Tread on Me.” The crowd was delivering that message to America. But their rulers in Zhongnanhai would have to hear it too.

And yet… after the Tiananmen massacre of 1989, ordinary Chinese had given up politics and focused on the economy. Maybe this demonstration, big as it was, would be forgotten in a few weeks. Or maybe—

“Maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about,” Wells murmured. He’d been in China not even twenty-four hours, didn’t speak the language, and now was forecasting the country’s future. Classic American arrogance. He ought to spend less time making predictions, more time figuring out if anyone was watching him.

PAST THE TELEVISION TRUCKS, the crowd quickened. They were close now. Just ahead the avenue opened into Tiananmen like a river pouring into a lake, and Wells saw the astonishing breadth of the square. He’d expected something like the Washington Mall. A manicured space, carefully maintained. Instead Tiananmen was a fixer-upper, a hole in the middle of a giant city, all the more powerful for its rawness.

From its northeast corner, where Wells had walked in, Tiananmen stretched south a half-mile, west a quarter-mile. The thick red walls of the Forbidden City marked its north side. The hall housing Mao’s body sat in the southern half of the square, behind a tall granite obelisk, a smaller version of the Washington Monument.

As Wells oriented himself, protesters flooded by, joining the hundreds of thousands of people already huddled in the center of Tiananmen. Shouts came in bursts from the loudspeakers around the square. Warnings or exhortations to the crowd? Wells didn’t know. There was so much he didn’t know today. All his life he’d felt privileged, and sometimes cursed, by what he’d been allowed to see. But he had never, not even on his first day in Afghanistan, been so much of an outsider. He was in the eye of a human hurricane, watching a maelstrom whose physics were beyond his understanding, a force of nature uninterested in him, yet with the power to tear him apart.

THE SECURITY FORCES HAD LEFT the center of Tiananmen to the protesters. But at the northwest corner, where an avenue led toward the Zhongnanhai leadership compound, a green wall of soldiers stood shoulder to shoulder before a phalanx of armored personnel carriers. Hundreds more soldiers blocked the entrance to the Forbidden City, where a giant banner of Mao hung from the outer wall of the palace.

Wells turned right, toward the banner, where the police had opened a path for any tourists brave or dumb enough to come to the Forbidden City today. An archway cut through the outer palace wall, directly under the portrait of Mao. This was the Gate of Heavenly Peace, the southern entrance to the palace complex.

And as Wells walked through the gate, it lived up to its name. The crackle of the Tiananmen loudspeakers faded away. “Open?” Wells asked the sweet-faced girl inside the ticket booth. He still couldn’t quite believe it. But she nodded.

As she handed him a ticket, a man grabbed his elbow. “You American? I student. Beijing University. Name is Sun.”

“Sure you are,” Wells said. Cops looked the same everywhere. This guy could have been the brother of the cabbie Wells had ditched two hours before. His shoes — black lace-up boots — were polished. Had any student anywhere ever polished his shoes?

“I take you,” Sun said. “Practice my English. Free.”

“I’ll pass. I’m kind of antisocial.” Wells held up the audio guide, which, weirdly, was narrated by Roger Moore. “Besides, I got the tour and everything.”

Wells handed over his ticket to the guard and walked through the front entrance. When he looked back, he wasn’t surprised to see Sun about a hundred feet behind, conspicuously tailing him. What would Jim Wilson do? Wells turned around.

“This is my only day sightseeing and I don’t know why you’re bothering me.”

“Not bothering,” Sun said. “Just watching out. Not good day for American here.”

“So I’m told.”

But Wells decided not to argue further. It was only 9:45 A.M., and the meet was supposed to be at noon, so he had two hours to lose this guy. He wandered through the palace, doing his best impression of a half-bored, half-awed American tourist. Which wasn’t difficult. The Forbidden City wasn’t a European-style palace like Versailles, a mansion filled with decorated rooms. Instead, the complex consisted of empty courtyards divided by ceremonial halls. The Hall of Complete Harmony. The Hall of Preserving Harmony. The Hall of Supreme Harmony. The emperors had been big on harmony. They wouldn’t have been happy today, Wells thought.

To the north, the inner palace held the emperor’s living quarters, elaborately carved wooden pavilions, painted deep red to symbolize the emperor’s power. The average Chinese had been barred from the complex on pain of death — hence the palace’s name. But over the years, the palace had been ransacked so many times that today its buildings were mostly empty. Without Roger Moore to guide him, Wells wouldn’t have known what he was seeing.

Besides the audio tour, he’d brought his own pocket-sized guide to the Forbidden City. He thumbed through it as Sun trailed behind, the world’s slowest chase. Wells shooed him off a couple times, to no effect. The complex got slightly busier as the morning went on. At 11:00, a dozen nervous-looking American tourists walked past, watched by two bored police officers. Wells guessed they’d come through the palace’s northern gate, not the Tiananmen entrance. He wondered what they were making of this. Joe and Phyllis from Sacramento probably hadn’t expected war when they signed up for seven nights in China.

Finally, at 11:45, in the northwestern corner of the palace complex, where narrow cobblestone corridors connected irregularly shaped courtyards, Wells found a way to lose Sun. He reminded himself not to run.

Wells ducked through a group of Japanese sightse ers and into a wooden pavilion housing a display of court costumes. As the Japanese clustered at the entrance, blocking Sun for a precious few seconds, Wells jogged through the pavilion and hopped over a railing into an alley, then sprinted along the side of the building. Thirty yards down, the building ended and the alley formed a T-intersection with another pathway. Wells swung right, ran a few feet along the pavilion, then hopped over another railing and back inside the building.

He flattened himself against a display case and peeked out. Sun reached the intersection, panting. He twisted left and right, looking for Wells. Finally he trotted left, toward the center of the complex. Perfect. Wells waited a few seconds more, then walked out the pavilion’s front entrance. He felt as though he’d rid himself of a piece of gum stuck to his shoe. Losing Sun wouldn’t matter if the cops were watching the meeting site, but Wells was glad to be rid of the guy anyway.

He made his way into the palace’s northeast corner, a quiet area filled with narrow pavilions and gardens. Over the years, emperors had competed to build the most beautiful spaces, adding narrow cypress trees whose bodies twisted like flames and the Buddhist rock gardens more common in Japan. The meeting with Cao was supposed to happen in a garden famous for a sculpted piece of rock known as “The Stone That Looks Like Wood.” All morning Wells had wondered if he’d recognize it. But when he stepped into the garden where the stone stood, he knew he was in the right place.

Unfortunately, the stone wasn’t the reason.

Until now, Wells had seen no Chinese tourists in the palace today. Understandable, considering the protests in Tiananmen. But this garden was the exception. Five Chinese had decided it was a perfect place to relax. A young couple sat side by side on a bench, holding hands. Three men in their early twenties sketched a cypress tree, their hands flying over their pads.

Why here?Why now? Wells knew. The agents were good, nonchalant, and yet their nonchalance was a tip-off as obvious as Sun’s polished shoes. Two hours before, when he’d walked through the Gate of Heavenly Peace, he’d stepped into the open maw of the People’s Republic, and yard by yard he’d slipped into its gullet. The game he’d played with Sun seemed absurdly childish now.

Maybe Cao had been set up too. Or maybe Shafer and Exley had been right all along, and Cao was part of the trap. But the bad guys knew about the meeting for sure. Somewhere nearby a squad of secret police was waiting to arrest him.

Wells kept walking. Turning and running wouldn’t help. He had nowhere to go. He might as well see who showed up. He stopped beside the stone that looked like wood. It did, too, like a piece of flotsam sculpted smooth by waves. Wells checked his watch—12:00. In a minute, or two, he would walk on, casually, leave the garden. Then—

“Hey, mister!” A kid scuffled into the garden, waving at him. A kid?

Per Cao’s instructions, Wells was wearing a green T-shirt, the contact signal. The kid, also wearing a green shirt, walked over. “Mr. Green,” he said.

“Is this a joke?” Wells couldn’t help himself. Was this part of the setup? Why didn’t they just arrest him?

“You Mr. Green, right? I meet you at stone like wood.” The kid seemed to be enjoying himself. “I know code word,” he said.

Somewhere over the walls of the courtyard, a man shouted in Chinese. The students dropped their sketch pads and walked toward him.

“Tell me,” Wells said.

“Ghost.”

“You’re crazy, kid.”

“For you.” The kid reached into his pocket for a package hardly bigger than a pack of Juicy Fruit. A flash drive. He handed it to Wells and ran away. He didn’t get far. The students grabbed him roughly. Then footsteps clattered behind Wells.

He turned to see two men, the biggest Chinese he’d ever seen, as tall and muscular as NBA power forwards. They reached for him, wrapped their meaty hands around him. He didn’t try to fight. Another man followed. And as the power forwards twisted Wells’s arms behind his back, the third man reached into his pocket for a black canvas hood.

“Wait—” Wells said. But the world went black, and around his neck the string drew tight.

31

THE DARK BLUE BUOY, about the size of a basketball, popped to the surface of the East China Sea and fired an electronic burst into the atmosphere. A fraction of a second later, the Bei, a satellite 22,000 miles overhead, registered the buoy’s electronic signature and responded with an encrypted transmission of its own.

Just that quickly, the Xian, the newest submarine in China’s fleet, was in contact with its masters onshore — all the while remaining five hundred feet below the surface of the ocean, connected to the buoy by a fiber-optic cable. The technology was the most advanced in the world, a generation ahead of similar systems on American submarines. The Xian could even get real-time video imagery of ships all over the western Pacific, thanks to a network of Chinese satellites in low earth orbit that were connected to the Bei through a control center near Beijing.

Of course, the Xian had to be careful not to stay connected for too long. The United States monitored Chinese satellites, and after a few seconds, American signals-intelligence equipment on Guam, Okinawa, and Alaska could begin to target the buoy’s location. To protect itself, the Xian made contact with the Bei only twice a day.

Still, the satellite link had proven extraordinarily useful, Captain Tong Pei thought. Especially now, with American ships searching for Chinese subs. Thanks to the link, the Xian could get orders while staying hidden at the bottom of the thermocline — a layer of water where the ocean’s temperature dropped quickly, distorting sound waves and making the Xian much harder to find.

Before taking over the Xian, Tong had commanded attack submarines for almost two decades. He was the most experienced commander in China’s fleet. But he had never commanded a boat remotely like the Xian. And he had never been on a mission like this one.

Twelve hours before, at 0100, Tong had received his initial orders for this operation. He expected that the transmission they’d just received would include the final confirmation. He was glad to have the fail-safe of two separate orders. He wasn’t nervous, not exactly, but what he was about to do would echo around the world, and he wanted to be sure he wasn’t making a mistake.

THE XIAN WAS THE THIRD of China’s new Shanghai-class subs, by far the most advanced submarines that China had ever built. Until a few years before, China’s armed forces had relied on leaky ships, rusting submarines, and fighter jets whose design dated from the Korean War. China had refused to show its weapons to visiting American generals, for fear that they would sneer at the country’s weakness.

These days, China still kept its ships and jets secret. But now the country wanted to hide its strength. Chinese students studied engineering and software and fluid dynamics at the top universities in the United States. Some stayed in America and made fortunes in Silicon Valley. But most came home, and more than a few were working for China’s navy — whose top priority was building a submarine that could challenge the American fleet.

China’s focus on undersea warfare was pragmatic. Building surface ships capable of challenging the United States would cost hundreds of billions of dollars, more than China could afford, at least for now. Even a single nuclear-powered aircraft carrier was a massively expensive proposition. No country, not even the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War, had tried to compete with the United States in aircraft carriers.

But submarines were much cheaper, billions of dollars instead of hundreds of billions. And a lone sub could wreak havoc on an opposing fleet. In World War II, a single German submarine had sunk forty-seven boats in less than two years. Of course, the Xian wouldn’t sink forty-seven American ships, but if it scuttled even one it would change the balance of power in the western Pacific, forcing the Americans to back off China’s coast.

Taking out an American boat wouldn’t be easy. The American navy had not been seriously challenged since the Battle of Midway in World War II, when it decimated the Japanese fleet and started the United States on the path to victory in the Pacific. The collapse of the Soviet Union had only lengthened its lead. Its aircraft carriers, destroyers, and nuclear attack submarines were the best in the world.

But if any submarine could successfully break through the American defenses, it was the Xian. Put into the water just last fall, the Xian was the most advanced diesel-electric submarine ever built — in China or anywhere else. Noise-reducing anechoic tiles coated its hull. A seven-blade skewed propeller enabled it to slice through the water almost silently. Advanced electric batteries powered it, allowing it to stay underwater for weeks.

Further, the PLA’s engineers had greatly improved the Xian’s secondary power source. Besides its batteries, the sub had an “air-independent propulsion” system of hydrogen fuel cells. When the batteries and fuel cells ran together, they could push the Xian to thirty knots in short bursts, almost as fast as American nuclear subs.

The Chinese had also nearly closed the gap with the electronics and sonar systems that the U.S. Navy used. The Xian’s computers ran noise-filtering and noise-recognition software that made the Xian’s sonar operators, for the first time, competitive with those on American submarines. And the Xian’s satellite link meant that it could get regular updates on ships far outside its sonar range. The combination meant that the Xian could avoid the submarines and frigates that formed the outer cordon of American battle groups and get within torpedo range of the big prizes, the destroyers and cruisers and carriers that were the heart of the United States fleet.

And at that point the Xian had an even more unpleasant surprise for the American navy.

INSIDE THE XIAN, Tong read over the order one final time and tucked it into his pocket. “Retract the buoy,” he murmured to his communications officer. Then, to his operations officer, “Any change in the target’s direction?”

“No, sir. Still one-eighty at twenty knots”—directly south, toward the Xian, which was cruising north—“at fifteen knots. Range now seventy kilometers”—about forty miles.

“Take us to sixty meters”—two hundred feet, in the middle of the thermocline.

“Yes, sir.” The ops officer tapped the touch screen in front of him a few times and the Xian began to ascend, so gracefully that Tong could hardly feel it rise.

“Set us on combat status.”

“Yes, sir.” The officer tapped his screen three more times. All over the submarine, LCD panels turned from a steady green to a flashing yellow, warning the Xian’s crew that an attack might be imminent and that silence — always important on a submarine — was more crucial than ever.

“And ready the Typhoons for launch.”

Tong felt the surprise in the room as he spoke. The ops officer paused, only for a second, before he answered.

“The Typhoons. Yes, sir.”

The control room was nearly silent now. On his control monitor Tong saw the Xian slowly rise toward the surface: 150 meters… 140… 130… The officers and crew moved precisely, no wasted motion, not even wasted breath, yet the anticipation in the cramped room was palpable. These men all knew now what they were about to do. And they were ready.

TWENTY MINUTES LATER TONG’S MONITOR briefly flashed red, alerting him that they were now twenty kilometers — about twelve miles — from the target, within range of the Typhoons. The Xian carried two of them, Chinese versions of the Russian VA-111 Shkval.

Though they were called torpedoes, Shkvals were basically short-range cruise missiles that targeted ships, and the Russians had never been able to make them work properly. They often outran their guidance systems and badly missed their targets. They also had an unnerving habit of swinging back on the subs that launched them. When the Kursk, a Russian nuclear sub, sank in the Barents Sea in 2000, there were rumors, never proven, that a malfunctioning Shkval had caused the accident. For whatever reason, after the Kursk went down, the Russians stopped trying to build Shkvals.

Despite those problems, China’s admirals had seen the Shkval’s potential as they searched for a weapon that might overcome the American fleet. At a secret lab outside Shanghai, their naval scientists had spent five years redesigning the missile’s guidance systems and engine. And they’d succeeded. In tests off Hong Kong in the last two years, the Typhoon had proven capable of successful launches from as far as twenty-five kilometers out — about fifteen miles.

But those targets were obsolete oil tankers, not American destroyers with the most advanced counter-torpedo systems in the world. No one in the Chinese navy really knew how the Typhoon would perform in combat.

They were about to find out, Tong thought.

“Reduce speed to ten knots,” he said.

“Yes, sir.”

“Do we have final visual confirmation?”

The operations officer tapped his screen again, and there it was, a recon photo straight from the satellite overhead, time-stamped 12:55, the big gray boat cutting sturdily through the waves, the photograph’s resolution good enough to reveal the big “73” painted in white on its side.

The DDG-73. The USS Decatur.

Tong admired the precision with which his commanders had calculated this mission. Despite all China’s progress, America still thought that China was a poor backward nation unworthy of respect. The Decatur had killed twenty-two Chinese, and the United States had not even apologized.

Today China would have its revenge. The Xian would fire one Typhoon, enough to cripple the destroyer but not sink it. An eye for an eye, as the Americans said. And the Americans would learn what they should have already known, that they needed to treat the People’s Republic as an equal.

“Reduce speed to three knots.” The Typhoons had one great weakness. They could be launched only when the Xian was nearly stopped. But since the Decatur had no idea that the Xian was in the vicinity, the submarine’s speed hardly mattered.

“Yes, sir.” The Xian slowed perceptibly.

“Prepare to dive to two hundred meters on my command.” Hit or miss, Tong didn’t plan to hang around once he launched. The Americans would expect him to flee west, to the Chinese coast. Instead he planned to take the Xian southeast, into the open ocean, and depend on the sub’s ability to stay silent.

The combat center was hushed now, every man looking at Lieutenant Han, the sub’s weapons control officer. Tong nodded to Han. “Fire.”

“Away,” Han said quietly.

The Xian shifted slightly as the Typhoon left its hull. Tong heard — or maybe just felt — the hum as the underwater missile accelerated away. A couple of his men gave each other tentative thumbs-up signals, but Tong didn’t even smile. “Now dive,” he said. They would have time later to savor what they’d done. If they survived.

TWO HUNDRED FEET ABOVE THE XIAN, and ten miles north, Captain Henry Williams sat in the Decatur‘s combat information center. He was glad to be well off the coast, out of range of Chinese captains who might want to avenge the previous week’s accident by trying to ram his ship.

The Navy had finished its preliminary inquiry into the crash. As Williams had expected, it had found he’d done nothing wrong. Still, the days since the accident had been difficult. Willams couldn’t understand why a bunch of college students had thought that playing games with an American destroyer would be a good idea.

So now the Decatur was cruising loops in the East China Sea, and Williams was splitting his time between his ship and the Reagan, where he’d met three times with the Navy’s internal investigators. He’d even lost the pretty L.A. Times reporter, Jackie, who’d gotten bored after a couple days sailing laps and headed back to the Reagan. Probably for the best, Williams thought glumly. Neither he nor his men believed they had caused the accident, but killing twenty-two civilians didn’t do wonders for morale. Even in the combat center, his officers seemed to be moving at three-quarters speed. Maybe he ought to call a meeting, make sure his men knew they’d done nothing wrong.

The torpedo alarm blared, jolting Williams to full attention. Had to be false, he thought. No way could a Chinese sub get close enough to launch on them without being picked up by his sonar operators.

Next to Williams, Lieutenant Umsle, the Decatur’s tactical action officer, was already on his phone. “Sonar’s confirming a launch, sir.”

In an instant, the ship’s morale became the least of Williams’s problems. “General quarters!” he said. “Immediately!”

A siren rang across the ship. “General quarters! All hands to battle stations! This is not a drill!”

Umsle listened for a few seconds more before hanging up. “The good news is we should have plenty of time. It’s way out. Twenty thousand meters.”

Even a fast torpedo covered only forty-five knots an hour, about 1,300 meters a minute. The Decatur would have at least fifteen minutes for evasive action, and the fish would probably run out of fuel before it reached the Decatur. Obviously, the Chinese captain had been so worried that he would be spotted that he had been afraid to launch from close in.

“Full power to the turbines and hard left,” Williams said. Preserving his ship was the first priority. Then the Navy could bring its attack subs into the area and take out the Chinese sub that had been foolish enough to make this hopeless swipe.

“Yes, sir.” A jolt of power ran through the ship as the engines began to produce peak power.

Umsle’s phone rang again. He listened, then handed Williams the black handset. “You need to hear this, sir.”

“Sir.” It was Terry Cyrus, the Decatur’s sonar chief. “We’re getting an unusual read. The bogey looks like it’s running at two hundred fifty knots.”

“That can’t be right.”

“I know. But it is.”

A Shkval? Those were Russian, and anyway they didn’t work.

“You’re certain?”

“Certain, sir. The arrays are running perfectly. It’s unmistakable.”

“Is it on us?”

“Unclear. It may be a two-stager.” In other words, the missile would slow once it got close to the Decatur and become a conventional acoustic wake-homing torpedo.

“Okay. Assuming it’s on us, how many minutes to impact?”

“Three.”

Three minutes. “Thank you, chief.” Williams turned to Umsle. “Hail the XO”—the executive officer, the Decatur‘s second-in-command, currently on the bridge—“and tell him to get the damage teams ready for impact in three minutes. We’re not outrunning this thing.”

THE NEXT MINUTES SEEMED to pass in a single breath. The torpedo-missile, whatever it was, closed steadily. It seemed to be running blind, not changing course to track the Decatur, but that didn’t comfort Williams. It surely would deploy a second guidance system once it got close. Indeed, two miles from the Decatur, the torpedo surfaced briefly and corrected its course, turning toward the destroyer.

What Williams didn’t know was that the Typhoon had a GPS system and a satellite transceiver that linked it to the Bei overhead, enabling it to home in on the Decatur effortlessly. The Decatur‘s towed array, which created a noisy “wake” capable of confusing a conventional acoustic homing torpedo, had no chance of stopping the Typhoon.

Once the torpedo corrected its course, Williams accepted the inevitable. Time to focus on saving his men. “Clear the turbine room,” he said to Umsle. The engine rooms were close to the waterline and filled with heavy equipment — among the most vulnerable spaces on the ship. “And tell everyone else to buckle down for impact.”

For just a second, Williams let himself pray. Please, God, make it a dud.

It wasn’t.

The explosion cut through the destroyer’s half-inch-thick steel hull, tearing a twelve-foot hole just above the waterline. For a few moments, chaos ruled. The 8,000-ton warship shuddered with the impact, then began to list. Water roared through the hole in the armored plates, flooding the turbine room. Eleven sailors died in the explosion, and six others were swept into the ocean, their bodies never recovered. Fuel poured out of a line burst by the explosion, setting off two small fires.

Still, Williams was proud of the way his crew and his ship responded after the explosion. The years of emergency training had paid off. Within three minutes, the Decatur‘s firefighting squads had put out the fires, the most serious threat to the integrity of the ship. Within seven minutes, the bulkheads were sealed and Williams had his first damage report. And five minutes after that, the most seriously injured sailors had been evacuated and were receiving medical attention in the infirmary, awaiting helicopter transfer to the Reagan.

At that point Williams allowed himself to think for the first time of what the Chinese had done. The sub was gone. The explosion had damaged the Decatur’ s sonar gear, and even if he could find the sub, Williams was in no position to chase it. Not with his boat crippled, not facing this silent submarine and mysterious supertorpedo. Already the Navy had begun to search for the sub, moving a half-dozen surface ships and three attack submarines toward its last known location. Williams wondered if they’d find it. It had sure sneaked up on his sonar operators, and they graded above average every time the Navy tested them. The Chinese had obviously improved their technology in the last couple of years. The fleet was going to have to be much more careful out here, Williams knew that much.

He knew something else too. New torpedoes, new sub, new whatever, the Chinese had made a big mistake today. Did they really think that the United States wouldn’t punish them for what they’d done?

32

WELLS SNAPPED AWAKE.

And wished he hadn’t. Lava burned through his right shoulder, the one he’d dislocated in Afghanistan. He twisted his head, looking around, trying to get his bearings. He seemed to be… he was… hanging off the ground, trussed like a pig in a slaughterhouse. His wrists were handcuffed over his head, dangling from a steel chain attached to the wall behind him. His ankles were pulled up behind so they were at waist height and attached to shackles mounted directly to the wall. His knees and shoulders bore all his weight, and his body tilted forward, over the cement floor. If his arms were cut loose, he’d slam his head on it before he could get his hands down to break his fall. He tried to hold himself still; the slightest twitch caused the pain in his shoulder to spike, tendons catching fire one by one.

Wells looked around the room. His pants, shirt, and shoes and socks sat neatly in a corner. But they hadn’t taken off his black, Halloween-themed boxers. Exley had tried to switch him to boxer-briefs, promising that they’d flatter him, her only effort to upgrade his wardrobe. Now he was glad he’d refused. Though even formfitting shorts might be less ridiculous than smiling jack-o‘-lanterns. Trick or treat indeed. What underwear went best with torture, anyway? Wells supposed the question was unanswerable. Black might be good choice. Hide the blood.

A tiny part of him admired the precision of the setup. His captors could get at his face, his legs, his neck, his everything, without repositioning him. Escape was a fantasy. The shackles were so tight he could hardly feel his hands and feet. He would be up here until they let him out. Or he died.

THE CELL AROUND HIM wasn’t reassuring. Twenty feet square, with only a couple of battered wooden chairs for furniture. Windowless, of course. White-tiled walls. The floor stained with dark whorls, remembrance of agonies past. A drain set in the middle of the floor, to ease the disposal of blood and vomit. A sour smell, half locker room, half slaughterhouse. The only comforting item was the security camera mounted in a corner, its black-rimmed lens making slow circuits of the room.

At the end of the cell, a wide steel door with a tiny peephole. But Wells couldn’t hear anything of the world outside. The walls were soundproofed, he supposed. He had no idea where he was, or even if it was day or night, though he didn’t feel as though much time had passed since his arrest. As soon as they’d gotten him out of the courtyard, they’d knocked him out with some kind of fast-acting anesthetic. Maybe the same stuff he’d used on Kowalski’s men.

Wells’s stomach tightened. Shafer had been right. Cao Se was a treacherous bastard. Or maybe the mole had given Wells up somehow. Either way the Chinese had known he was coming. Now he would just have to take his punishment, and stick to his story.

James Wilson. Thirty-seven. His first trip to China. Prunetime.com. Here to recruit engineers. A three-bedroom split level. Palo Alto. A wife. Jennifer, a doctor. Two kids, in grade school. Amanda and Jim Jr. Button-down blue shirts and pressed khakis. Marathons in his spare time. A comp sci degree from the University of Illinois. The biggest mistake of his life: passing on a job offer from Google in 2001. Until now, anyway. He didn’t know what he’d done, but this was all a misunderstanding. They had to let him go.

Would they believe him? No chance, Wells thought. But maybe he could make them doubt themselves, slow them down. At least notify the embassy, get the diplomats involved.

Wells knew he didn’t deserve what was about to happen. And yet he wondered if he did. Primordial justice for the killing he’d done over the years. Or maybe for something more: For the way his country had walked away from the Geneva Conventions. For Abu Ghraib and the ghost prisoners whose names the CIA had never given to the Red Cross. For water-boarding and stun guns and the torture that the lawyers had decided wasn’t torture at all. For the madness that had descended on Iraq since the invasion, the uncounted men and women and children who’d died because the fools in the White House told themselves the mission was accomplished back in May 2003. And the soldiers who’d been blown to bits because armchair generals in the Pentagon thought armored Humvees were a luxury, not a necessity. For everything that had happened in the lost days since 9/11.

Judge not, lest ye be judged. A stupid, stupid way to think. He wasn’t America, and the agony he was about to face would be real, not metaphorical. And yet Wells clung to the idea that he was due for this, for whatever happened next.

He didn’t know how else to endure it.

THE DOOR AT THE FAR END of the cell slid open, and the two power forwards who’d grabbed him at Tiananmen walked in. They were dressed for a workout, wearing T-shirts and sweatpants. They wore latex gloves and cheap rubber galoshes and carried identical zippered canvas bags. Metal batons dangled from belts on their hips.

Three more men followed. Wells recognized them all. The first was the man who’d put the black hood over his head. He’d seen the other two only in photographs. They wore PLA uniforms with stars on their collars.

Cao Se. And Li Ping.

Li and Cao stood at the back of the room silently as the third man rummaged through a bag he held. Wells tried to understand why Cao was here. Did he want to see the fool he’d duped? Was his presence intended to signal Wells that he ought to confess, that the Chinese already knew everything and it would be pointless not to? But then why not just say that? Why play this brutal game? Or did Cao want to let Wells know that he wasn’t alone, that Cao was still on the American side and had come to save him?

Maybe, though the odds were long. Anyway, he couldn’t possibly find out unless Li and the others left him and Cao alone. Meanwhile, Wells had to keep playing the role of terrified American tourist, an act that shouldn’t be too difficult.

“I don’t know who you guys think I am, but you’re making a mistake,” Wells said.

No one responded. The third man pulled a black box, slightly bigger than an eyeglass case, from his bag. He stepped toward Wells and held the box open so Wells could see what was inside.

A small set of pliers, and three scalpels. The steel blades gleamed under the lights. Wells’s stomach clenched. Use the fear, he thought. Any civilian in your position would be terrified. “Please don’t do this.”

Again the man reached inside his bag. This time he pulled out a red-painted metal canister that looked like an oversized beer can with a nozzle attached to the top. He pushed a button on the side of the can. A blue flame spurted out with a tiny whoosh.A miniature acetylene torch, the kind welders used for close-in work. The man twisted the nozzle until the flame glowed a bright blue, three inches long. He clicked off the canister and put it and the scalpel case on the folding chair.

“I’m telling you. This is a mistake.”

The man reached into the bag once more. This time he held up the flash drive that the boy had given Wells in Tiananmen. Li Ping stepped quickly across the cell and in a single fluid motion hit Wells under the ribs, in the solar plexus once, twice, three times — and then three times more.

Considering his age, Li hit hard, Wells thought. Wells had a boxer’s abs, flat and tough, and the punches themselves didn’t hurt all that much. But every one rolled him side to side in his shackles, sending shots of pain through his damaged shoulder. Li and the men around him watched him without a word. They were on another planet, in another universe, one where pain didn’t exist.

Li took the flash drive from the man who’d been holding it. “Who gave this?” he said in broken English.

“A boy. In Tiananmen. This is all a mistake. Please, sir, I don’t know who you are, but you have to help me.”

Li spoke in Chinese. “He says, you know very well who he is,” the man who’d been holding the flash drive said to Wells in English. He spoke with a heavy Russian accent. “He is head of the People’s Liberation Army. He wants you to know, he doesn’t speak much English. So he’s going to leave you now. But he wanted to see you for himself. The American spy who was so foolish as to come to the Forbidden City on this day.”

Li said something more. “And he says it is nothing to him if you live or die. This is your last chance to tell the truth. If you do, maybe the Chinese people will show some mercy. If not—” The interrogator shook his head.

“Tell him, I promise, he’s making a mistake—”

The interrogator said a few words to Li. “Okay,” Li said in English. “Your choice.” He stepped away. At the door, he turned to Wells and made a throat-cutting motion. Then he walked out. Cao followed wordlessly.

AS SOON AS THE DOOR CLOSED, the power forward stepped up, but the interrogator waved him back and reached into the bag. Despite himself, despite everything he’d seen and done, Wells was afraid. He pulled himself back. Think.Stay calm. They want you to imagine your tortures, to hurt yourself before they hurt you.

The interrogator lifted a piece of paper from the bag.

“What is your name?”

“Jim Wilson. James Wilson—”

The man shook his head. “Your real name. Please.” The interrogator held up the paper for Wells. “The reason you’re here. The letter your embassy received last week. The instructions are quite specific. You are to come to the Forbidden City today. As you did. To wait at the stone that looks like wood at noon. As you did. And finally, you are to wear a green shirt.” The man pointed at the corner where Wells’s shirt lay.

“Coincidence. I swear.”

“Coincidences don’t exist in our world. Listen to me. Please. You will save yourself much torment. You must know we examined the Forbidden City very”—with his Russian accent, the word sounded like “wery”—“thoroughly today, Mr. Wilson. Twenty-two other Americans. None with green shirts.” He held up two fingers. “Only two visited the stone. Gerry and Tim Metz. From New York.” He held up a Polaroid of a smiling couple, both in their sixties. “Do they look like spies to you?”

“I don’t know what spies look like.”

“Do you know who I am?”

“No, sir.”

“My name is Feng Jianguo. I specialize in these… discussions. I wish we could talk like men, solve bit by bit this puzzle of who you are. But General Li told me I don’t have time.”

Feng walked to Wells, leaned in, locked his eyes onto Wells.

“Do you understand? I don’t have time. And I must know three things. First, your name. Second, what you were expecting to receive. Third, most important, the name of the man who you meant to meet.”

“I wish I could help.” Again Wells wondered. Was it possible they didn’t know he was here to meet Cao Se? Or were they setting up some larger trap, something he couldn’t see?

“If you are honest. I cannot promise you’ll live. Only Li can do that. But I won’t hurt you unnecessarily.” He paused. He seemed to sense that he was losing Wells. “This way, once we start… even after you beg us to stop. As you will. We won’t stop. Once we start, we must be sure we’ve broken you. Do you understand, Mr.Wilson?”

“Your English is very good. You give this speech a lot?” Wells said nothing more.

Feng’s face never changed. The silence stretched on. Wells focused on the heat in his shoulder. He had an insane impulse to twist in his shackles, amp up the agony for himself before these men did it for him. He restrained himself. Plenty of pain coming. No need to rush.

Feng shook his head, walked away, shuffled the papers back in the bag.

“A quiet American,” he said. “One of the few. And all the worse for you.”

Feng pulled a black towel from his bag and stepped onto a chair. He reached up, draped the towel over the closed-circuit camera, making sure the lens was covered.

The power forwards reached into their pockets and slipped on brass knuckles, the kind that bridged four fingers at once. They stepped forward and set themselves on either side of Wells. Feng sat down, pulled a Coke from his bag. He sipped quietly as he waited for the show to start.

“Ave, Caesar, morituri te salutant,”Wells said under his breath. A bit of Latin said by the gladiators before they entered the ring: Hail, Caesar, we whoare about to die salute you.

And the torture began.

THE POWER FORWARDS TOOK TURNS. The one on the left began, punching quickly, hard jabs, right-left-right-left. When he tired, the other took over, swinging more slowly but more powerfully, long hooks that crashed into Wells’s stomach and ribs. They stayed off his face.

Wells had a tiny advantage at first from the adrenaline he’d mustered when Feng was talking. He kept his stomach tight as long as he could, sneaking in breaths when they weren’t hitting him. But then his body twisted in the shackles, and his shoulder popped out. He lost focus for just a second and a jab caught him unready and his abs loosened and the punches crashed through and then he couldn’t breathe—

Black spots filled the room and the demon-men kept punching and he couldn’t breathe God he had never hurt like this too bad he wasn’t going to tell them anything—

Then the severed head of the guerrilla he’d blown apart in Afghanistan showed up, rolling around like a soccer ball with a face, smirking and chattering nonsense—

And just as the darkness closed in to give his oxygen-starved brain relief from its delusions, they stopped hitting him. Cruelty in the guise of kindness. They stepped back and watched him flail, their flat square faces impassive, like they were watching a lab experiment.

Wells couldn’t breathe, couldn’t get his diaphragm steady, and then finally he remembered. The trick was to relax, let the voluntary muscles go soft and the diaphragm work on its own. He sucked in the room’s stale air and pushed suffocation away. But the agony in his shoulder intensified as he returned to full consciousness. Wells wondered how long they’d been hitting him. Five minutes? At most. Five minutes down, an eternity to go.

They reached side by side into their canvas bags, pulled out water bottles, took a couple of sips each. Bert and Ernie, Wells thought. Or maybe Ernie and Bert. Just as his breath evened out, Bert nodded at Ernie and they stepped toward him.

“Round two,” Wells said aloud. “The beatings will continue until morale improves.”

ROUND THREE FOLLOWED, AND ROUND FOUR. The beatings didn’t get harder to take, but they didn’t get easier either. The brass knuckles shredded his skin, exposing his twitching abdominal muscles. Blood dripped from his stomach, blackening the concrete beneath him.

By round five, Bert and Ernie had tired and were cheating. One of Bert’s punches slipped low, catching Wells full in the testicles. Wells screamed, an inhuman howl, and thrashed against the shackles. Bert and Ernie stepped back as a pure white light filled Wells’s mind—

Bismillah rahmani rahim al hamdulillah—

Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us—

English and Arabic, the Quran and the Bible, mixing inside him—

And tears dripping from his eyes, joining the blood on the floor.

STILL THEY DIDN’T STOP.

AFTER THE FIFTH ROUND they stepped back, wringing their hands, giving Wells a momentary, pointless flash of pleasure. He’d made them work a little, at least. They’d cracked two, maybe three, of his ribs somewhere along the way, he wasn’t sure when.

They stowed the brass knuckles in their canvas bag, dabbed at their foreheads with a little towel that Ernie had brought — an oddly dainty gesture — and took a long drink of water.

“Snack break, gentlemen?” Wells nearly delirious now. “Like Rodney King said, can’t we all just get along?” They ignored him. He wasn’t even sure they could hear him, wasn’t sure he was speaking aloud. “Can I ask you boys something? Are you partners? Not like Starsky and Hutch, but partners. Okay, Starsky and Hutch is a bad example, but you see what I’m saying.”

As an answer, Bert and Ernie pulled out their batons.

The change of weapon seemed to suit them. They worked his legs for a while, mainly his thighs, bringing the steel batons down with gusto. Then Ernie slammed the baton on Wells’s damaged left shoulder, a quick chop. Wells couldn’t help himself. He moaned. Ernie said something in Chinese to Bert and started to work the shoulder hard. The pain doubled and redoubled and redoubled again, all the way to infinity.

Drink this and you’ll grow wings on your feet.

“God,” Wells mumbled. “Please.” He sagged against the shackles. The worst part was that they probably knew already. Most likely Cao Se had set him up. He was enduring all this for nothing.

Then the door slid open and Cao walked in.

33

AS CAO CLOSED THE DOOR, Ernie took one last shot, bringing his baton down so hard that Wells’s shoulder popped out again and didn’t slide back in. A whole new level of hell. Don’t scream. The room whirled, faster and faster. The severed head of the guerrilla stared at him, not on the floor this time but directly in front of him. Wells felt his stomach clench and the room-service eggs he’d eaten that morning at the St. Regis spill out of his mouth and land in a stinking pile at his feet.

The vomit tasted sour and acrid in his throat, but it brought him back to reality. Feng moved behind him and unshackled his legs so he could stand, though his arms remained locked over his head. Ernie and Bert popped his shoulder back in. The pain eased. A little.

Feng turned to him.

“You see now, Mr. Wilson?” He looked at his watch. “You’ve been here three-quarters of an hour. Imagine weeks. Months.”

But Wells was no longer listening. He was looking at Cao, trying to understand if this was the final act in his betrayal. Was Cao working with Li, or against him?

Cao trotted forward, hobbling a bit on his artificial left leg. He looked impassively at Wells’s flayed stomach and bruised legs.

“Name?” he said in English, heavily accented but recognizable.

Wells closed his eyes. He could hardly stay upright, but if he sagged the pressure on his shoulder became unbearable.

A finger poked at his abs. “Name?”

“Wilson. Jim Wilson.” Wells coughed, twisted his head, spat a clot of phlegm, thick and streaked with blood, onto the cell’s concrete floor beside Cao Se’s shiny black boots.

“My name Cao Se.” Cao paused. “You understand?”

Wells felt a glimmer of hope. “Yes,” he said. “Maybe.”

“What you tell them?”

“That I’m here on business—” The effort of speaking left Wells exhausted.

“Nothing. You tell nothing.”

“That’s right. Nothing.” Cao and Wells speaking their own language now, one that Feng the interrogator couldn’t understand no matter how closely he listened. So Wells wanted to believe. Feng said something to Cao, but Cao cut him off and turned back to Wells. A thick scar ran down the left side of his neck, an old jagged wound. Shrapnel, Wells thought.

“You American spy. Arrested in Forbidden City.”

“I’m not a spy.”

Cao twisted Wells’s head in his strong little hands. Wells met his stare.

“Who? Who you meet there?”

“Nobody.” Wells snapped his head out of Cao’s hands, looked at the men standing behind him. Time to jump. Time to find out which side Cao was on. “What do you want me to say? I came to meet Chairman Mao. Only he’s dead. I came to meet you. You. Cao Se. Happy?”

Cao pulled a pistol from his bag, a long black silencer already screwed onto the barrel. “You confess? You spy?”

“Sure. I confess.”

Cao stepped forward and put the silencer barrel to Wells’s temple. Wells wasn’t even afraid, just angry at himself for miscalculating, letting Cao trap him a second time. They’d played him so perfectly. He’d thought—

But what he thought no longer mattered. He closed his eyes, saw his head exploding, brains splattering the floor. Exley came to him then, and Evan—

And Cao fired, three times, the silencer muffling the shots, three quick quiet pops, pfft pfft pfft, a surprised yelp, then two more shots. Wells heard it all and knew he was still alive. Again.

HE OPENED HIS EYES. Three men lay on the floor, Bert and Ernie dead, shot pinpoint between the eyes, Feng still alive, a hole in his face and two in his chest. He’d gotten a hand up. He moaned, low and tired. But even as Cao raised the pistol to finish him, a soft death rattle fluttered from his mouth, the hopeless sound of a balloon deflating, and his chest stilled.

Cao dropped the gun into his bag. He knelt down, careful to keep his boots clear of the blood pooling on the floor, grabbed a set of keys from Feng’s jacket, unlocked Wells’s arms. Wells could hardly stand. He leaned against a wall, fighting for balance.

“You my prisoner now,” Cao said. “Stay quiet. Understand?”

Wells nodded. Already he was pulling on his pants. Even the lightest touch of the cloth set his bruised and swollen legs afire. He tried to put on the green T-shirt but couldn’t get his arms over his head. Coursing under the sharp pain of his broken ribs was a deep throbbing bruising that was getting worse by the minute. He wondered if he was bleeding internally.

Cao gently pulled Wells’s T-shirt over his head. Then he cuffed Wells’s hands behind his back and nudged him forward. They picked their way through the blood and brains on the floor as carefully as children stepping over sidewalk cracks. And not for the first time Wells wondered why he’d been allowed to live, and what price he would pay.

CAO SLID THE CELL DOOR OPEN. Behind it a short corridor ended in another steel door. Cao punched numbers on a digital keypad until the second door snapped open. They walked down a concrete hallway to a double set of gates where a guard sat in civilian clothes. Cao said a few words. The guard nodded and the gates slid open. As they walked through, Cao pointed to the cell where Wells had been held, pointed at his watch, said something sharp. Wells imagined he was warning the guard against entering the cell. He probably didn’t need to explain much. Generals rarely did.

And then they were out, into the Beijing haze. Wells had the strange sense of being on a movie studio back lot, rounding a corner and traveling from New York to Paris in a second. He’d figured they were in the belly of a military base outside the city. Instead they were in the middle of Beijing, and the nondescript building behind them could have been a cheaply built elementary school, two stories high and concrete. In fact Wells could hear children shouting not far away. Only the guardhouse at the front gate and the razor wire atop the property’s outer walls offered a clue to the building’s real purpose.

Cao helped Wells into a jeep. They rolled up to the thick black gate at the front entrance, and a uniformed soldier jumped out of the guardhouse and trotted over. He pointed at Wells, but before he could say a word Cao began to shout. Without understanding a word, Wells knew that Cao was reaming out the soldier for daring to question him. The soldier turned tail and pulled the gate open with almost comic speed.

FIVE MINUTES LATER CAO TURNED into an alley and unlocked Wells’s cuffs.

“What about the kid who gave me the flash drive?” Before anything else happened, Wells needed to hear the kid was okay.

“The kid?”

“The boy. In the Forbidden City.”

“Nothing happen. He not know. I give him fifty yuan, tell him he playing game,” Cao said.

Wells bowed his head. He wanted to rest but feared what he would see if he closed his eyes.

“No other way,” Cao said. “We have spy in your embassy. Know you coming.”

Wells understood. Cao had known that the PLA had intercepted his message to the embassy. He’d known that whoever the CIA sent would be arrested at the meeting point. He had no way to warn his contact off or change the meeting place. But no one would question his presence at the prison afterward with Li.

Still, Wells couldn’t see how he and Cao could possibly escape. As soon as someone found the bodies in the interrogation room, all of China would be searching for them. “Why didn’t you just defect?” Wells thinking out loud. He figured his broken ribs gave him the right to ask.

“Didn’t know about spy in embassy. Wanted to stay in China.”

“When will they find the men you shot?”

“Two, three hours. I warned the guards, don’t go to the room.” Smart. Cao had bought them some time, Wells thought. But soon enough another officer would come along with different orders.

“Anyway, things very bad now with America,” Cao said. “We torpedo Decatur.”

“You really must want war.”

“America not understand what happening,” Cao said.

“So tell me.”

In his strained English, Cao explained to Wells what Li had done. How he’d betrayed the Drafter to the North Koreans, made the deal with the Iranians, and maneuvered the United States and China closer to war. When Cao was finished, Wells felt like a treasure hunter who’d drilled through a mountain to find an empty tomb. But not quite empty. In a corner, a single, tiny gold figurine. One man? One man had brought the world’s two most powerful nations to the brink of war?

“Why doesn’t anyone stop him?” Wells said when Cao was done. “On the Standing Committee.”

“They afraid they look weak. And also, they don’t like America telling China what to do. America should be quiet when China make agreement with Iran.”

“But the defector, Wen Shubai, he said—”

For the first time, Cao raised his voice. “Wen Shubai not real defector! Li Ping send Wen Shubai to fool you.”

“But the mole — Wen gave us enough to catch our mole—” Wells sputtered silent. Of course. Keith Robinson had been the bait that Wen had used to prove his bona fides. Li had known that Robinson’s most useful days as a mole were behind him. He’d told Wen to sacrifice Robinson. That way, Wen’s defection would seem credible.

Then, after Wen had proven his reliability by giving up Keith, he’d encouraged the United States to confront China — exactly the wrong strategy, one that gave Li Ping the leverage he needed internally to take control. Give up a pawn to position your forces for a wider attack. The gambit had worked perfectly. No wonder the agency and the White House hadn’t been able to understand why confronting China had back-fired so badly. Li’s foes on the Standing Committee were probably equally bewildered that the situation had deteriorated so fast. Li had played the United States against his internal enemies, and vice versa. For the biggest prize in history, the chance to rule the most populous nation in the world.

“Li want to be Mao,” Cao said.

“To save China.”

“Yes. But China not need saving.” Cao gestured at the prosperous street behind them. “Li good man, but he not see all this.”

Good man? Wells wasn’t so sure, not after the casual way in which Li had waved a hand across his throat and ordered Wells dead. He says it is nothingto himwhetheryou live or die. The casual cruelty of a man who had risked billions of lives in his quest to rule. But they could save that discussion for later.

“Then what?” he said to Cao. “When he takes over? Does he want war?”

“No war. He think once he take over, he make everything okay.”

“Nice of him.” Wells laughed. A mistake. The agony in his ribs surged and he bit his tongue to keep from filling the jeep with vomit. He closed his eyes and tried to be still. Cao squeezed his shoulder until the pain faded.

“So… General…” Wells fought to stay focused, keep the fog away. “How do we stop him? Can you tell the Standing Committee?”

“Say what to committee? That Li wants power? That I spy for America?”

Wells saw Cao’s point. “Then why did you bring me here if you didn’t have anything?”

Cao was silent. Then: “I don’t know. I thought—”

Wells fought down his anger. He couldn’t spare the energy. He rested a hand against his wounded ribs and tried to think things through. “The committee wants to stop Li. Some of them, anyway.”

“Yes. Minister Zhang hate him. But he afraid.”

“I understand.” Cao might have stars on his collar, but he wasn’t meant to lead, Wells saw already. He was a born subordinate. Smart and tough. But unimaginative. “We need proof he’s planned this all along. Something they can see. What did he hide from the committee?”

“Never told them about Wen.”

Wells felt a flash of hope, but it faded. The agency would need time to prove Wen’s defection was fake, and time was just what they didn’t have. “What else?”

The jeep was silent. Wells waited, meanwhile wondering if Cao had an escape route planned or if they’d be reduced to making a desperate break for the embassy.

“What else. Li had one other operation. Top secret. Started last year. I set up the money.”

“The funding.”

“Yes. Funding. Said United States would be angry if it knew. Was in Afghanistan.”

Just like that, Wells knew. “You were helping the Taliban.”

“He never told me, but I think so. But no Chinese soldiers.”

“No. Russian special forces.” Wells wondered if Pierre Kowalski had known all along where his money had come from.

“The account was in Banco Delta Asia,” Wells said. “In Macao. Yes?”

Cao didn’t hide his surprise. “How you know this?”

“Did he tell you what this was for, Cao?”

“For Iran. All he said.”

Of course. Wells saw the logic of the scheme. The Iranians had worried that China might walk away from the nukes-for-oil deal. By supporting the Taliban, Li had convinced Iran he was serious about standing up to America.

“Cao, those records prove Li has been planning war against America since last year. And he never told the Standing Committee. If you get them, we can stop him.”

If we live long enough to get them out of China, Wells didn’t say. If my guess is right, and they prove the money went to Kowalski. If the White House can get them back to Beijing, and to Zhang. And if Zhang can use them to get control of the committee back from Li.

But first they had to get the records, and get out.

“No war?” Cao said.

“No war.” Maybe.

“Then I get them.”

Cao reversed the jeep onto the road, looking sidelong at Wells as he did. “What your name? Real name.”

Crazy but true. Cao had saved his life, killed three of his own countrymen to do so, and didn’t even know his name. Wells wiped his hand against his mouth and came away with a pungent coating of dried blood and vomit. “John Wells.”

“Time Square Wells?”

“Time Square Wells.” Wells wondered if Cao was ready to move to Florida, live in a witness protection program. No matter what happened next, this would be his last day in China. “But if we get out, you can call me Tiananmen Square Wells. When we go to Disney World.”

“Disney World? Don’t understand.” The jeep hit a bump and Wells moaned a little.

“Me neither, Cao.”

FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER CAO HONKED his way across four lanes of traffic and swung into an alley cluttered with wooden crates. A cloud of flies hovered around a pile of rotten vegetables. Normally the trash would hardly have bothered Wells, but the beating had left him weak and queasy. His green T-shirt was black with his blood. His heart was randomly speeding and slowing—thump, pause, thump,pause, thump-thump-thump-thump. He figured he was coming down off the adrenaline rush that had carried him through the immediate aftermath of the beating. Or maybe they’d done more damage to him than he first thought.

Cao stopped behind a low concrete building with a heavy steel door. The words “Dumping Home” were painted, in black and in English, on a splintered wooden sign. Dumping Home? Wells wondered if he was delirious, but when he looked again, the sign hadn’t changed.

Cao pointed at the building. “Friends inside. Christians.”

Wells wondered if he should mention his own confused beliefs. Probably not the time.

Cao honked. The back door creaked open and a man in a dirty chef’s apron jogged over. He and Cao spoke briefly before he nodded and ran back inside. Cao tapped his watch. Four P.M.

“One hour. If I not back, you go with them. To Yantai—”

“Yantai?” Wells was struck again by how little he knew about this country.

“Port. Five hundred kilometers from here. Shandong Province.”

Now Wells understood, or thought he did. Shandong Province — the name literally meant “east of the mountains”—extended into the Yellow Sea toward the Korean peninsula. They were going to make a run for South Korea.

“They take you to boat.”

“To Korea?”

“Yes. Korea.” Cao’s lips twisted in what could have been a smile. “Make sure not North Korea.” Cao reached into his bag and handed Wells a little revolver, a.22 snub.

Wells checked the cylinder. It was loaded all right. It was too small and inaccurate to be useful at more than thirty feet. Still, better than nothing.

Two men emerged from the Dumping Home and trotted to the jeep.

“Rest,” Cao said.

“Good luck, Cao. Vaya con Dios.” Wells extended a hand and Cao shook it awkwardly. Cao reached across Wells and opened his door. The men helped lift him out, staggering under his weight. Wells could hardly feel the ground under his feet, as if his legs were encased in ski boots that ran from ankle to hip. The men guided him to the door, as Cao put the jeep in reverse and rolled out of the alley.

INSIDE, WELLS FOUND HIMSELF in a busy kitchen. Two women and two teenage boys were making dumplings, their hands flickering over the balls of dough, shaping and smoothing each one before moving to the next. Wells understood now. The Dumping Home was a dumpling restaurant.

The men started to let Wells go, but as they did his legs buckled. One of the women squawked and the men grabbed him and guided him to a storeroom off the kitchen. They sat him down and left. Wells tried to rest, but if he closed his eyes for too long the dizziness took him. He focused on the room around him, looking from shelf to shelf, examining the baskets of vegetables and spices, the glass jars of green tea.

A couple of minutes later, he wasn’t sure how long, the women came in, carrying a pot of bubbling water, a soup bowl, and a big shopping bag. Wells watched mutely as they extracted the tools for minor surgery from the bag: two quart-sized brown plastic bottles, a water bottle, scissors, a knife, a tube of something that looked like antibacterial cream, a roll of surgical tape, and a half-dozen clean white cloths. One of the women, tall and thin, her hair streaked with gray, put a soft hand on his shoulder.

Meanwhile, the other woman, the shorter and stockier of the two, lifted the bowl of soup to Wells’s mouth. He sipped, a few drops at a time. Chicken stock, with a few mushy carrots. Liquid kindness. His stomach clenched, but he held it down. He drank as much as he could, maybe a half-cup, and then shook his head. She nodded and set the bowl aside. Now the gray-haired woman was cutting off his shirt, careful not to touch the flayed skin underneath. When she was done, she gasped, one quick breath. Wells looked down and wished he hadn’t. His chest and abs were skinned raw, and blood was oozing from the wounds. No wonder he couldn’t close his eyes without getting the spins. He had to make sure he stayed hydrated. If he wasn’t careful, the blood loss would put him into shock.

The gray-haired woman dipped a cloth into the pot of boiling water. Then she unscrewed the plastic bottles and poured their contents over the cloth. She held the cloth to his face, giving him a whiff of rubbing alcohol and hydrogen peroxide. Wells understood. She wanted him to know what she was about to do. He nodded. She pressed the cloth to his chest.

After the beating he’d endured, the burn of alcohol and peroxide was barely a pinprick. Wells nodded. The woman seemed to understand. She pulled away the cloth and poured the rubbing alcohol directly onto his chest. She wiped him down with a fresh cloth, then rubbed the antibacterial ointment across his chest. She said something to the other woman. They leaned him forward and slowly they wrapped a long white bandage around his torso, compressing it tightly. Apparently the gray-haired woman had decided Wells had a high pain tolerance.

When they were done, his chest and abs were bound in white. Despite the pressure of the cloth against his broken ribs, Wells felt stronger than he had just a few minutes before. He reached for the soup and slowly sipped it until the bowl was empty.

“Good as new,” he said.

FOR THE FIRST TIME since the beatings started, Wells could think clearly enough to see his next move. He reached into his pockets. There it was. His new phone, bought five days before and registered to Jim Wilson of Palo Alto. Still in his pants. He’d debated carrying it today before deciding that there was no reason an American businessman wouldn’t have a phone with him. Now he was glad he had. Extremely.

He removed the slim Motorola from his pocket, turned it on, saw he had full service. Thank God for technology. Wells wondered whether the Chinese had put a bug in the phone, before deciding they probably hadn’t. They’d had no reason to imagine that he would escape.

Anyway, he had to reach Exley now, before the Chinese cut off all communication to the United States. He’d be as quick as he could. Wells called her cell phone, not the 415 number but her real one, the one she always carried. Three rings. And then—

“Hello. Hello?” Washington was twelve hours behind, Wells remembered. She must have been asleep, or wishing she were.

“Jennifer.”

“Yes. John.” She’d blown his cover, but he didn’t much care. In his name, he heard all her questions: Where are you? Are you okay?

“Remember where Ted Beck went down, Jenny?” In the Yellow Sea, southwest of Incheon.

“Sure.”

“I need a pickup. In that vicinity. Or west. As far west as possible.” Even if the Chinese were monitoring this call, Wells didn’t think they would understand what he meant.

“When?”

Five hundred kilometers to Yantai, then a boat ride. “Eight to twenty-four hours. Any longer, I’m in trouble.”

“Can you help us find you?” Exley was wondering if he had a transponder or any other equipment to aid the search.

“No. But Red Team”—the standard American military description of the enemy—“will be looking. Hard.”

“Figured.”

“One more thing. Whatever they’re planning, make them wait. No counterattacks. I know why it happened, all of it. And we can stop it.”

“I’ll tell them.”

“I love you, Jenny.”

“Love you too, John.” Exley sighed. Even from 6,000 miles away, Wells knew her tone, sad and pride ful at once. “Try not to die.”

Wells hung up and turned off the phone. Now it was up to Exley to find a way to make the White House and the Pentagon back off for a day or two, long enough for him and Cao to get out.

The clock on the wall of the storeroom said 4:45. Cao didn’t have long. The guards at the interrogation center would soon defy his orders and break into the room where Wells had been held. Then he and Cao would be the most wanted men in China. Before that happened, he and Cao had better be on their way to Yantai. Though Wells still didn’t know how Cao planned to get them there.

Wells flexed his legs and tried to stand. Nope. He sat down heavily and the jolt set his ribs on fire. His gray-haired nurse shook a finger at him and clucked in Chinese. Wells could guess her meaning: Rest. Then the two women left him, turning off the lights and shutting the door. In the warm darkness the tang of potatoes and onions surrounded him.

He closed his eyes. His head drooped. But before he slept, he made sure the.22 was curled in his hand, its hammer cocked. If Li’s men came through the door, he planned to take as many of them with him as he could.

34

TWELVE TIME ZONES BEHIND WELLS, Exley pulled on sweatpants and a mostly clean blouse and walked downstairs to Thirteenth Street, where her security guards waited in their black Lincolns under the dark predawn sky. The doors of the front Lincoln opened as she approached, and the guards stepped out.

“Ms. Exley.”

“I need a ride.”

The Lincolns screamed off, a two-car convoy with sirens and flashing lights. Fifteen minutes later she was knocking on Shafer’s door. She hoped he had some ideas. On the ride over, the reality of the odds that they faced had hit her. Wells had no transponder, no way to reach them. He hadn’t even told her what kind of ship he’d be on, much less its name. The Yellow Sea was practically Chinese territory, especially under these circumstances. How would they possibly find him and get him out?

SHAFER OPENED THE DOOR, BLEARY-EYED. He motioned her inside, down to his basement, into the laundry room. “Ellis—”

“Wait. I get the house swept every other month but just in case.” He flicked on the washer and dryer.

“Now,” Shafer said.

“John called.”

“Where from?”

“Beijing.” She explained what Wells had told her.

When she was done, Shafer shook his head. “No hint of what he’s got?”

“No. Just that he could stop it. We have to talk to Duto.”

“And tell him we need to pull out the stops to save John Wells. This’ll be fun.” He motioned her upstairs. “Go home, get dressed. I’ll see you in two hours at Langley.”

“Two hours.”

“Nothing we can do before then. He won’t get off the coast for several hours. Besides, no one’s going to take us seriously dressed like this.” He was wearing Redskins pajamas, a fact she’d chosen to ignore until now.

“Point taken.”

EXLEY AND SHAFER SAT in a windowless, soundproofed conference room at Langley, across from Tyson and Vinny Duto. The stress of being director seemed to be getting to Duto. He was fatter than she remembered, and his hair — always his pride — had receded, offering hints of scalp. But his eyes were as hard as ever.

He listened silently as Exley told him and Tyson what Wells had said. No one spoke when she finished, and for a few seconds the only sound in the room was the drumming of Duto’s fingers against the wooden table.

“So you understand: In the last hour, our satellites have picked up a major mobilization of Chinese forces. Regular army and paramilitary. Increasing by the minute. The White House knows.” Duto opened a black-bordered folder. “They’re putting roadblocks on the highways and main secondary roads in and out of Beijing. Military units at the entrances to every civilian airport. The Friendship Bridge, between China and North Korea, has been shut.”

“Sounds like they haven’t found him yet.”

“Unfortunately, we haven’t found him either,” Tyson said. “And unless you and he are connected telepathically, I’m not sure how we’re going to. Since he has no transponder and didn’t see fit to give us coordinates. Perhaps he should have asked for an airlift out of Tiananmen. It might have been easier.”

Exley’s ears burned. Wells might be dead and Tyson was cracking jokes! Her face must have shown her anger, because Tyson quickly backed off. “I am only saying that the attack on the Decatur proves the Chinese are acting recklessly, Ms. Exley. If we move our ships deep into the Yellow Sea, they may think that we’re intentionally provoking them.”

“They’ve got ten thousand miles of coast. They can’t watch it all,” Shafer said. “He gets twelve miles offshore, he’s not in territorial waters anymore. And there’s still heavy traffic in the Yellow Sea. I checked.” He held up a two-page printout filled with ship names and registry numbers. “All due at Incheon today.”

“Let me point out something you may not wish to hear,” Tyson said. “Mr. Wells told you we should wait, not do anything stupid.”

“Right, he said he had something—”

Tyson knocked her down. “But he didn’t say what.”

“It was an unsecured line.”

“At the same time, he wants us to take an incredibly aggressive action. Bit of a contradiction there, wouldn’t you say?”

“He wants us to save his life,” Exley said.

“Or perhaps the call was a setup arranged by the Chinese.”

“It was him. I know his voice.”

“What if he’s been turned and they’re using him to get at us? To move our ships into a vulnerable position.”

“He wouldn’t. He’d die first.”

“People do strange things when they’re in pain.”

This couldn’t be happening, Exley thought. They weren’t seriously arguing about whether to let Wells die out there. “Then why are they mobilizing their army and all the rest?”

“Part of the setup.”

“You don’t really think that,” she said. “Save me the mirrors within mirrors nonsense.” Her voice rose, and she reminded herself to stay in control, not to give them any excuse to marginalize her. “This was your idea, George. If not for you he wouldn’t be in this mess.”

“Jennifer,” Duto said. “I don’t think we can risk putting our assets that far forward. Let Wells get to Incheon. At least into Korean territorial waters.”

Shafer laughed, a thin angry laugh.

“Something to say, Ellis?”

Shafer waited until they were all looking at him. Normally, he was a jumble of tics and wasted motion. Not now. Exley had never seen him so still.

“Never thought I’d have to play this card, Vinny. I underestimated you. You sent him there and you’d rather let him die than lift a finger. The craziest part is, he might actually get us out of this mess.”

“We don’t know what he has, Ellis, that’s the point. I’m not going to recommend that we put thousands of sailors in harm’s way. Maybe push the Chinese over the edge. To save one man.”

“To stop a war.”

“What if he’s been turned?”

“Where have I heard this song before? It’s not his fault he saved New York while you tried to arrest him. Get over it.” Shafer stood. “Jenny, come on. Over the river and through the woods. To the president’s house we go.”

“Ellis—” Duto said.

“Herr Director. This is so simple, even you can understand it. You tell the president we have a chance to stop this war. You tell him we’re going to go get Wells. Or I will.”

“And what do we tell the Chinese when they ask why half our fleet is twenty miles off their coast?”

“We’ll burn that bridge when we come to it.”

“You’ve forgotten the biggest problem, Ellis,” Tyson said. “We have no idea how to find Mr. Wells. Are you suggesting we sail in circles and hope he paddles up on his wooden raft or whatever he’ll be on? I assure you the Navy will dislike that plan, especially with that Chinese supersub still on the loose.”

“I have an idea,” Exley said.

“Do share,” Tyson said.

“You’re right. We can’t find him. So we’re going to have to make it easy for him to find us.”

Exley outlined her plan. Duto was shaking his head before she was half done. “No way,” he said. “The Air Force will never—

“They will if the big man tells them to,” Shafer said.

“How do you know Wells is even going to understand what we’re doing?”

“He’ll understand,” Exley said.

And suddenly Duto smiled at her, the easy smile of a poker player watching his opponent make a bluff that was doomed to fail. “You, me, Ellis. We’ll ride over there together. You and Ellis can tell the big man whatever you like. I don’t mind. As long as he knows it’s from you.”

35

ASLEEP—

Then awake—

And Wells had the.22 up before he knew where he was. The storeroom. Cao stood in the doorway. He raised his hands as Wells lowered the revolver.

“You okay, Time Square Wells?”

“Perfect.” Wells coughed. His bandage was still white, at least on the outside.

Cao tossed Wells a blue zip-up sweatsuit, and Wells tugged it on. His shoulder was loose in its socket, maybe permanently damaged from the torture. He took a long drink of lukewarm water to soothe his parched throat.

“Ready?”

Wells tucked the gun in his waistband and struggled up. He took a few steps and sagged. Cao’s men helped him out of the restaurant. A dirty white panel truck waited, its engine running. Wooden crates and furniture were stacked high inside the twenty-five-foot-long cargo compartment.

“You need piss?” Cao waved a fist in front of his crotch. “Go now.”

“I’m okay.”

“Then we go.” Cao stepped into the truck and offered a hand to Wells. At the forward end of the cargo compartment, behind a big wooden bookcase, was a space maybe three feet wide. Just big enough for two men to sit, if they didn’t mind a little incidental contact. A blanket covered the compartment’s wooden floor, along with provisions: water bottles, a flashlight, blankets. A handful of airholes ensured they wouldn’t suffocate.

Wells and Cao settled themselves, close enough for Wells to smell the green tea on Cao’s breath. As Cao’s men rearranged boxes and furniture to hide the space, Cao reached into his jacket and handed Wells a manila envelope.

Wells opened it. Three pages of Banco Delta Asia bank records, showing transfers to UBS accounts in Zurich and Monte Carlo, $20 million a month. A fourth page covered with Chinese characters and topped with an official-looking letterhead. Wells wondered if these four pieces of paper could really stop a war.

Cao pointed to the fourth page. “This from Army.”

“Authorizing the transfers?”

“Authorizing, yes. Says money for special operation.” Cao pointed to a raised emblem near the bottom. “Li’s stamp.”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

Wells didn’t plan to ask how Cao had gotten the papers. Presumably he’d just made his final trip inside Zhongnanhai. If Wells hadn’t just seen Cao shoot three of his own soldiers, he might have wondered whether this was all some superelaborate sting operation designed to prove Wells was a spy. But the Chinese had no need for an operation that elaborate. The torture had been working well enough on its own. Cao was a genuine defector.

Wells tried to give Cao back the papers, but Cao shook his head.

One of Cao’s men shouted something. The back panel came down and they were locked in the dark. Wells hardly minded. After the cave, this truck was easy. At least they were above ground.

The truck grumbled into gear and reversed down the alley. A few seconds later horns honked, and they were in Beijing’s traffic.

“Now we run.” In the dark Cao laughed humor lessly.

“Yeah, tramps like us,” Wells said. He liked Cao very much. Probably because the man had saved his life. “What about roadblocks?”

“Roadblock?”

Wells couldn’t figure out how to explain. “Are they looking for us?”

“Very soon.” Cao lit his watch—6:10. “Maybe twenty minutes. New officer come, open door. See bodies.”

Wells thought he understood. There would be a shift change at the interrogation center where Wells had been held. The new commander would insist on seeing the torture room. And once he discovered the bodies, the hunt would be on.

“But isn’t Li Ping wondering where you are?”

“When we leave, I say to Li, let me take care of spy. He trust me. Anyway, he busy. Special meeting with Standing Committee.”

“Must be hard fighting two wars at once.” Wells closed his eyes and tried to settle himself in the darkness. But he had too many questions. “Cao, who are these people helping us?”

Cao said nothing for a minute. Then, finally: “Don’t know.”

Don’t know? Wells waited.

“I tell my pastor last night. About you. He send me these people from his church. They help when Christians get in trouble, need hiding.”

A Christian underground railroad, Wells thought. “Do they know who we are, the risk they’re taking?”

“Yes.”

“But you trust them?”

Again Cao laughed, low and hard. “You have other idea?”

MINUTES LATER THE TRUCK TURNED, accelerated. “Third Ring Road now,” Cao said.

“We’re making good time.”

“Many people stay home now. Scared what America will do.”

And without warning—

The truck scissored down into a pothole. Wells’s broken ribs jumped under the bandage, stabbing from the inside out. The pain in his lungs and stomach was enormous and didn’t fade. Wells bit his lip to keep from screaming.

Thump!Thump!More potholes. Wells braced himself against the side of the truck, feeling his ribs rattle like pencils in a coffee cup. If he wasn’t bleeding internally already, he would be soon.

To distract himself, he thought of Exley, and their little apartment on Thirteenth Street, NW In the utility closet in the front hall, Wells had hung the letters the president had sent them after they’d stopped the attack on New York. “You haveearned the respect and gratitudeof an entire nation…”et cetera, et cetera. No one had ever understood him like Exley, Wells thought. He never had to tell her why the flowery words embarrassed him. Yes, he was proud of what they had done. But he hated being called a hero, especially by men who had never shed blood. Let the president save his soupy words and send his own children off to a battle zone for even one day.

Wells wondered if he could claim to understand Exley nearly as well as she understood him. She rarely talked to him about marriage or having kids. Did she think that having more children would be selfish when she hardly saw the two she already had? Or was it that she couldn’t imagine a future with him? Maybe she decided that as much as they loved each other, they weren’t going to get over the finish line.

When he got home, he would ask her to marry him.

If it wasn’t too late.

THUMP! The truck bounced again, the hardest jolt yet. Wells couldn’t help himself. He screamed. The blackness around him merged with the void in his head and down he went.

LATER — HE HAD NO IDEA how long it was — his eyes opened. His stomach was throbbing and uncomfortably tight. He was bleeding internally now, he was sure. He raised the water bottle to his lips and sipped, trying to force the liquid down.

The truck had stopped, its engine silent. Wells heard voices and footsteps on gravel. The compartment was totally dark, no light coming through the airholes. Night had fallen. How long had he been out?

The footsteps crunched to the back of the truck and—

The back panel opened. Cao gripped Wells’s leg, a warning to stay silent.

A flashlight shined in, making slow loops around the compartment.

A man’s harsh voice, shouting questions.

The replies, soft and deferential.

Then the truck’s springs creaked as someone stepped onto the back bumper.

Wells pulled his snubnose pistol from his waistband, silently dropped the safety.

The light shined around, closer now.

But not finding their compartment.

And the truck came up on its springs as the man stepped down.

The back panel closed. The doors to the truck’s cab opened, slammed shut. The engine groaned and they were off, slowly at first, then more quickly.

Only after they reached highway speed did Cao finally speak. “Close.”

“No kidding,” Wells said. “What time is it?”

Cao flicked on his little digital watch and showed it to Wells—9:15. He’d been asleep at least two hours.

“How much longer?”

Cao shined his flashlight over Wells. “Five hours, maybe. Okay?”

“I’ll get by.” Wells coughed a little black clot of blood and phlegm into his hand. “General, what made you—” Wells stopped, wondering if he was overreaching. He settled on a more neutral formulation. “Why did you decide to leave? After all these years.”

Cao turned the flashlight to his own face, as if interrogating himself. “Why I betray General Li, you mean?” Wells was silent. “I tried to say once.”

“What you thought.”

“What I thought. He never listen.” Cao tapped the flashlight against the stump of his leg. “Li forget what war is like. I don’t forget.”

“Some wars you have to fight,” Wells said.

“Not this one.”

“Not this one.”

THE TRUCK ROLLED ON. The road turned smooth, a blessing, and the compartment cooled as the night air rushed in. They were probably taking a chance on an expressway now, Cao said. The danger had lessened now that they’d reached Shandong Province.

“But why doesn’t Li just shut everything down?” Wells asked. “Put in a countrywide curfew.”

Cao’s explanation stretched the limits of his English, but eventually Wells understood: Li was afraid to tell the Standing Committee that Cao had defected. Cao was Li’s closest aide, so Cao’s treachery would reflect badly on him. Li’s opponents might use it to undo Li’s grip on power, which was still tenuous.

But without the approval of the Standing Committee, Li couldn’t simply shut all of China down. So the roads were still open. Li was depending on roadblocks to catch them, and the Navy if they somehow got to the Yellow Sea.

“So there’s a window.”

“Yes. Window.”

And with that, Wells closed his eyes uneasily. He tried to imagine what would happen after he handed the papers over and explained what they meant. Treasury would connect the Banco Delta Asia accounts with Kowalski’s accounts in Zurich and Monte Carlo. The Pentagon would give the State Department the confession from Sergei, the Russian Spetsnaz that Wells had captured in the cave.

Then the American ambassador would ask Li’s enemies on the Standing Committee for a secret meeting. There he’d give Minister Zhang the proof of what Li had done.

Zhang and the rest of the committee would know they had to act. They’d know that if the United States publicized China’s support for the Taliban, world opinion would turn in America’s favor. After all, American soldiers weren’t the only ones fighting the Talibs in Afghanistan. By supporting the guerrillas, China had committed an act of war against all of NATO.

Zhang wouldn’t need much convincing, anyway. He and Li’s other enemies on the committee were looking for any excuse to stop Li. This was a good one. They wouldn’t care that it had come from the United States.

For the first time, Wells allowed himself to believe that they might actually get out of this mess. He pressed his hands together in front of his face. Here’s the church and here’s the steeple. Open the door and there’s the people. He and Exley wouldn’t have a church wedding, though. Not a mosque wedding either. They’d go down to city hall and do it quick and dirty. Exley liked it quick and dirty….

He knew he was drifting and didn’t mind. Drifting made the shooting pains in his belly easier to take. And so he drifted, dozed, woke, drifted again. All the while, the truck rolled on. Eventually they left the highway and passed along a series of narrow switchbacks, rising and falling, not mountains exactly but certainly good-sized hills. Wells snapped awake as the truck took a turn too hard, its left rear wheels briefly leaving the pavement.

“Shandong,” Cao said. “Back roads.”

“How long?”

Cao lit his watch—12:45. “One hour, maybe two. No more.”

It was 12:45 P.M. in Washington, Wells thought. The attack on the Decatur had happened about twelve hours before. He wondered whether Exley had persuaded Duto and the White House to hold off. Surely the president would be speaking to the country tonight, and politicians on both sides would be pushing for action. God. Until now he hadn’t even considered the possibility that they’d make it to South Korea and still be too late.

THEN THE TRUCK SLOWED, HARD, pushing forward on its shocks—

And stopped.

Again the engine went quiet. Again voices shouting in Chinese. Again the back panel slid up.

But this time two men stepped into the truck. This time the flashlight searched the compartment much more thoroughly than it had before.

This time the cops smelled something wrong, Wells thought. Maybe the fact that the truck had two drivers. Maybe the route they were taking, running back roads in the middle of nowhere at 1:00 A.M. Maybe the cops were just having a little fun, looking for a television or something to steal. Whatever it was, these guys weren’t giving up until they turned the compartment inside out.

Wells wondered how many there were. How many he’d have to kill. A country roadblock in the middle of the night. Two cops, maybe? Two in the truck, two out? Four at most.

Now the cops were shouting and throwing furniture out of the back of the truck as the drivers yelled. Cao leaned forward and whispered to Wells.

“They say, ‘You four have no right.’ Four. Understand?”

“Four.”

Crash! A couch landed on the ground. The flashlight closed in. Wells drew his.22, cocked the hammer, pulled himself to a squat, braced himself against the side wall. The empty bookcase scraped sideways and started to tip. The compartment echoed with shouts in Chinese. Not so long ago, Wells had told Exley the secret to surviving these moments: Shoot first. Don’t wait. He was about to follow his own advice.

He pushed himself up, ignoring the agony in his stomach. As the bookcase tipped, Wells saw the cops, five feet away, tugging at the case. They reached for their guns as they saw him. Too late. He squeezed the pistol’s trigger, twice.

And then they were dead.

The bookcase fell. Wells dropped behind it. The other two cops stood at the back of the truck. They should have gone for cover. Instead, they were shooting, but wildly, high. A mistake, the last they would ever make. Wells focused and fired, hearing the pfft of Cao’s silenced pistol beside him. One of the cops twisted, his head turned at an unnatural angle, and dropped. The other doubled over, his hand on his stomach, beginning to yell. Wells moved his pistol a fraction of an inch and fired again. This time the shot caught the cop in the shoulder. He dropped his gun and fell, still yelling.

Wells staggered out of the cargo compartment. He took aim at the moaning cop at his feet and then lowered his.22 without firing. Let Cao do it. Let someone else. Anyone.

Then he raised his gun again, took aim. He was what he was. No point in pretending otherwise. No point in making someone else do his dirty work. He fired. The cop’s body twitched and went still.

The roadblock had been in front of a bridge over a narrow canal. A police car and a jeep sat at the edge of the road, their emergency lights still flashing. Wells leaned against the truck, looked around. The hills behind them were forested and seemed empty, but a couple of miles ahead Wells saw the beginnings of a town, red smokestack lights blinking in the night. Fortunately, the two-lane road was silent. For now.

Cao jumped down from the truck, yelling at the men who’d driven them. Wells understood his frustration, but there wasn’t time. They couldn’t hide this. They had only one choice.

“Cao.” Wells grabbed the smaller man’s shoulder. “Tell them, put the cops in the truck. Leave everything else. Let’s go. Now.”

Cao looked around, nodded. He said something to the men and they threw the bodies in the truck as casually as if they were slinging sacks of rice. Wells stumbled over one of the corpses as he stepped back into the truck. The body was still warm. Practically still alive. Except it wasn’t.

The truck rolled off. Wells slumped against the floor of the cargo compartment and tried to think through what would happen next. Assuming the Chinese had any command-and-control at all, they’d discover the missing police well before daybreak. Two hours, say.

Li wouldn’t know exactly what had happened, but he would be able to make a very good guess. He would assume that Cao and Wells were trying to escape by boat. He would blanket the eastern half of the province, and the sea around it, with every soldier and ship he could muster. He’d declare a state of emergency covering the province and the coast, order all civilian boats to stay docked for the day. All China would be hunting them. They had to get off the mainland as soon as possible. Even if they could stay hidden somehow, Wells didn’t think he could last another day unless he got to a hospital. He felt flushed and weak, and his stomach was dangerously tender from the blood he’d leaked. A surgeon could fix him easily, he had no doubt. But with no surgeon he’d bleed to death, or die of an internal infection when the bacteria in his gut crossed into his bloodstream.

“Cao.”

“Time Square Wells.” Cao flicked on a lighter and touched the dim yellow flame to a stubby cigarette clenched in his teeth. He held out the pack. Wells shook his head, realizing that Cao hadn’t smoked before because he hadn’t wanted to give away their presence in the compartment. But now being discreet was pointless. Their hiding place had become a slaughterhouse.

“How far?”

Cao flicked on his watch. “One hour maybe. Hundred ten kilometers”—seventy miles. “No more back road.”

As if to prove his words, the truck accelerated, throwing Wells against the side of the cargo compartment. He groaned and caught his breath. “The highway goes all the way to Yantai?”

“Yes. Then east, twenty kilometers, Chucun. Boat there.”

“And the boat, what kind is it?”

The tip of Cao’s cigarette glowed brightly. “We see.”

Wells laughed. It was all he could do.

IT WAS 2:20 A.M. They’d made good time. The cove was a pleasant surprise, a narrow semicircular strip of white sand protected by thick trees. The boat was another story, not much more than an oversized rowboat, maybe twenty feet long, with a big outboard engine. It sat low in the water, its black paint peeling, fishing nets hanging off its hull, four red plastic canisters of gasoline tucked under the wide wooden slats that served as seats. A Chinese man, sixty-five or so, sat on its side.

Wells knew the Yellow Sea was flat, but still he couldn’t believe this bathtub with an engine could reach Incheon, three hundred miles away across open water. And even if it could, they would need twelve hours or more, with the Chinese navy chasing them. Suddenly their odds seemed worse than hopeless.

“No way,” Wells said.

“No choice.” Cao hugged the men who’d driven them, spoke a few words in Chinese to the old man beside the boat. Wells wondered what their helpers would do next. Probably ditch the truck as best they could and disappear.

Cao stepped inside, his plastic leg thunking on the side of the boat. Wells followed, nearly falling over as he did. Cao was right. They didn’t have a choice. In the distance he heard a helicopter. He sat down heavily on the wooden bench and rubbed the bandage that covered his broken chest. He felt light-headed and feverish despite the cool night air. He wondered if he could last even twelve hours.

The drivers and the fisherman stepped forward and pushed the boat off the sand. It slid forward easily, lolling on the flat waves. Cao jabbed at a red button on the side of the outboard and the engine grumbled to life. He turned the tiller sideways and they cruised into the cove. The men on shore waved.

“Cao, do we even have a compass?”

Cao handed Wells a compass. “Straight east. Easy.”

“Incheon or bust.”

36

THE C-130J HERCULES LUMBERED DOWN THE RUNWAY, slowly accelerating as it bounced over the tarmac. Not far from the grass overrun at the end of the 9,000-foot strip, its nose finally lifted. Inside the cockpit Lieutenant Colonel Paul Bosarelli exhaled. The C-130 was a sturdy beast, but he wouldn’t have wanted to skid off in this particular plane.

Nobody joined the Air Force to fly C-130s. But during eighteen years as a Here pilot, Bosarelli had grown fond of the ugly old birds, the four-propeller workhorses of the Air Force. They weren’t as sexy as F-22s or B-2s, but they were far more useful most of the time. They could endure massive damage and still take off or land just about anywhere. Besides hauling cargo and airdropping special-ops units, they worked as fuel tankers, firefighters, even gunships.

But Bosarelli guessed that in the five decades since the first C-130 joined the Air Force fleet, none had ever carried a load like this one.

And that was probably for the best.

THE TACTICAL OPERATIONS CENTER AT OSAN had received the first reports of the attack on the Decatur three minutes after the Chinese torpedo smashed the destroyer’s hull. With no way to know whether the attack was a one-off or part of a larger Chinese assault, the center’s director, Brigadier General Tom Rygel, had put the base on Force Protection Condition Charlie-Plus, the second-highest alert level — just short of Delta, which signaled imminent attack. Rygel’s decision was understandable, for Osan was the closest American base to China. The PRC’s border with North Korea was just three hundred miles to the north, a distance that China’s newest J-10 fighters could cover in fifteen minutes on afterburner.

Within an hour of the Decatur attack, Osan’s 51st Fighter Wing had put six F-16s in the air to join the two already on patrol. Eight more jets waited on standby. Of course, the sixteen fighters were vastly outnumbered by the hundreds of Chinese jets waiting over the border. But the American planes were so much more capable than even the most advanced J-10s that the Chinese would be insane to challenge them. Though the skipper of the Decatur had probably made the same assumption, Bosarelli thought.

While the fighters soared off, Bosarelli had nothing to do except drink coffee in the ready room and try to ignore the acid biting at his stomach. Ninety percent of the time — heck, ninety-five — he had more to do than the fancy boys. But at moments like this, he felt like a fraud. Against a fighter jet, any fighter jet, his C-130 was nothing but a flying bull‘s-eye.

Then the door to the ready room opened. A lieutenant looked around and headed straight for the table where Bosarelli sat. “Colonel Bosarelli.”

“Yes.” Bosarelli knew the guy’s face, though not his name. He was one of Hansell’s runners. Lieutenant General Peter Hansell, the commander of the 7th Air Force, the top officer at Osan.

“Colonel, General Hansell would like to see you.”

HANSELL’S OFFICE WAS in the Theater Air Control Center, a squat building that everyone at Osan called Cheyenne Mountain East because of its ten-foot-thick concrete walls. As he trotted through the center’s narrow corridors, Bosarelli wondered what he’d done wrong. Or right.

Before Bosarelli could figure it out, they reached Hansell’s office. “This is where I get off,” the lieutenant said. “Go right in. He’s expecting you.”

Bosarelli wished he had a minute or two to shine his shoes and make sure his uniform was squared away. But he wasn’t about to keep Hansell waiting. He threw back his shoulders, stepped inside, and gave the general the crispest salute that he’d offered anyone since his first year as a cadet in Colorado Springs.

“Sir.”

“Colonel. Please sit. You’ve been flying the Here for eighteen years, is that right?” It wasn’t a question. Bosarelli nodded. “Your record’s spotless. Two years ago, you landed in Bagram on one engine.”

Bosarelli was thoroughly nervous now. Three-stars didn’t butter up lieutenant colonels this way unless they wanted something.

“And you requalified on the chutes just last year.”

“That’s correct, sir.”

“I have a mission to discuss with you, Colonel. An unusual mission. You’re the first Here pilot I’m offering it to. But I want you to understand. This is a request. Not an order. No hard feelings if you say no.”

“Yes, sir. I accept, sir.”

“Thank you,” Hansell said. “But first I need to know if it’s even possible.”

For the next five minutes, Bosarelli sat silent as Hansell outlined what he wanted.

“So? Can we do it?” Hansell said when he was done. “I’d rather use a Predator”—a lightweight unmanned drone—“but they just don’t have the payload to make it work.”

Bosarelli wished he could ask who’d okayed this insane idea, and why. On second thought, he didn’t even want to know. Somebody up the chain, that was for sure. Way high up. Maybe all the way. He looked at the ceiling, avoiding Hansell’s ice-blue eyes, visualizing the steps he’d take.

“And we’d be doing this—”

“Tonight. The goal is four A.M.”

“No time like the present.” Craziest thing I’ve ever heard, Bosarelli didn’t say. He’d always wanted to be in the middle of the action. Now he was. Be careful what you wish for. “I think it’s possible, sir. In a way it’s a throwback, a big dumb bomb. I’ll need one other officer. Jim Keough ought to be game.” Bosarelli paused. “So assuming he’s in, obviously we’ll want altitude fuses. The JPFs, the new programmable ones. And, ah — Bosarelli stopped, not sure how much the general wanted to hear.

“Go on, Colonel.”

“I assume we’ve got the smart boys at JPL and AFKL”—the engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California and the Air Force Research Laboratory in Ohio—“running sims to figure our trajectory after we flip the switches.”

“We’ll have projections within an hour.”

“Then, yeah, if they sign off. We can do it. And you’ll damn sure be able to see it a long way off.”

“So. Now you know. Are you still game? Take a minute, think it over.”

Bosarelli couldn’t pretend he wasn’t nervous. Any sane man would be. The risks were off the charts. But in Iraq and Afghanistan, soldiers and Marines took chances just as big every day. No way was he turning this down. He got the words out fast, before he could change his mind. “I’d be honored. As long as you promise to come get us quick.”

“Understood. You have my word on that.” This time Hansell was the first to salute. “Thank you, Colonel.”

FOUR HOURS LATER, and Bosarelli and Major Jim Keough, his flight engineer, were at 22,000 feet, flying slowly east-southeast over the Pacific, giving Keough time to arm the fuses that would turn the C-130 into a sixty-five-ton bomb.

What they were planning wasn’t so different from what Mohamed Atta had done on September 11, Bosarelli thought. Though there was one very big difference.

Instead of its usual load of Humvees, Bosarelli’s C-130 carried twenty GBU-29 bombs, upgraded versions of the old MK-82. Each of the bombs held its standard load, 150 pounds of high explosive. They were scattered among forty-gallon drums that held roughly equal amounts of gasoline, benzene, and polystyrene plastic — the basic ingredients of napalm.

Officially, the United States had destroyed all its napalm bombs by 2001. The increasing lethality of conventional bombs eliminated the need for napalm, a jellied gasoline that burned as hot as 5,000 degrees. The stuff had been a public relations nightmare since Vietnam, when an Associated Press photographer had caught on camera the agony of a nine-year-old girl overtaken by a napalm bomb.

But though the premixed bombs were gone, the Air Force still stockpiled the raw ingredients necessary to make napalm. Despite napalm’s terrible reputation, there was nothing magical about it. The polystyrene simply made it a lot stickier than ordinary gasoline, so it was hard to scrape off. Once it touched something — an enemy soldier’s uniform, a little girl’s face — it burned until it was gone. Even more important for this mission, it burned much more slowly than gasoline.

KEOUGH STEPPED INTO THE COCKPIT. “Good to go.”

Bosarelli swung the C-130 to the right, tracing a long slow semicircle over the Pacific until they were heading west, back toward South Korea. It was just after 3:00 A.M. locally—3:00 P.M. in Washington — and the civilian flights into Seoul had ended for the night. The only other planes within thirty miles were friend-lies. Without being too obvious about it, the Air Force had put Bosarelli’s plane inside a bubble of fighter jets. Four F-16s were running interference along the North Korean border, with four more to the west, over the Yellow Sea, though they were being careful to give plenty of room to the Chinese jets patrolling to their west.

Meanwhile, the South Korean navy had been asked to send every ship it had into the Yellow Sea. A flotilla of cutters and frigates had fanned out from Incheon, heading west toward the Shandong Peninsula. Every boat was carrying loudspeakers, and at least one American military observer. But the boats had been absolutely prohibited from coming within eighty miles of the peninsula’s tip. At the same time, every available rescue helicopter, both South Korean and American, had been prepped for takeoff, though none was in the air as yet.

Back in the C-130, Bosarelli permitted himself a brief look through the wispy clouds at the sleeping countries below. The difference was literally white and black. South Korea glowed prosperously; North Korea lay in darkness. Somehow the view reassured Bosarelli. He might never know the point of this mission. But he believed, had to believe, that he was fighting for the right side.

AT LANGLEY, EXLEY AND SHAFER were getting hourly updates. So far, the mission was on track — though so far, nothing had really happened. Exley still couldn’t quite believe the president had agreed to her proposal.

After the confrontation with Duto, the meeting in the White House had been oddly anticlimactic. They’d helicoptered onto the White House lawn and been ushered straight into the Oval Office, where the president and the national security adviser were waiting. Exley had again recounted her conversation with Wells, and told them of her plan to rescue him.

Then Duto had made plain what he thought.

“Not to sugarcoat this, sir. There’s almost no chance of success. If it weren’t for what Ms. Exley and Mr. Wells did in New York, I wouldn’t even have bothered you with it.”

The president murmured something to his national security adviser, who nodded. Exley didn’t like either of them, but she had to admire their composure. She couldn’t tell what they thought of the idea.

The president turned to Duto. “If it doesn’t work? What’s our downside?”

“Well, sir, given the current tensions, the ultimate downside is that the Chinese could view it as an act of war.”

“That’s possible,” Shafer said. “But it won’t be on Chinese territory.”

“Sir,” Duto said.

“It won’t be on Chinese territory, sir,” Shafer said. “We don’t know what Wells has, sir. But I trust him. If he says it’s important, it is.”

“Because tonight I’m going to have to stand up and tell the American people”—Exley winced privately as she heard the words; she hated when politicians talked about the American people—“I’m going to tell the people what we’re going to do about this attack. And you all know the pressure we’re under to come back hard.”

“Sir. Nothing about this locks you into further action. All your options are still open. I agree it’s a long shot, but if the odds are even one percent—”

At that, the president nodded. “All right. Get me a finding”—the official written authorization needed for this kind of black operation. “I’ll sign it.”

“Sir—” Duto said.

“Director Duto. Your objections are noted. For the record. But let’s try not to go to war if we can help it. We’ve all learned a few things since 2003.”

NOW EVERYTHING WAS IN PLACE, or so they’d been told. They didn’t have much time. The sun would rise over the Yellow Sea in barely three hours, and Exley and Shafer knew that if Wells wasn’t in friendly hands by then, he probably wouldn’t make it. The Chinese didn’t have great night-vision equipment — it was one area where they were still a couple of generations behind the United States — but by tomorrow morning, they would have covered the Yellow Sea with their navy. Any civilian boat still on the water would be searched from stem to stern, or simply blown to bits.

Left unsaid was the fact that the plan depended on Wells getting off the mainland in time. If he was still stuck in Beijing, then all they were doing was wasting a planeful of gasoline — and putting a couple of brave pilots at risk.

Shafer’s phone rang. He picked up, listened for a moment. “Good,” he said, and hung up. “Still on track. Our boats are nearing the exclusion zone. They’re projecting another hour or so.”

“I wish the sun would just stop,” Exley said. “Let it stay afternoon here, night over there, until we find him.”

“Do you—” Shafer stopped, cleared his throat. Exley waited.

Finally she couldn’t wait anymore. “What?”

“You wish you were there, Jennifer? With him? I mean, knowing the odds right now…” Shafer trailed off. “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.”

Exley smiled, a thin, sad smile. Let Shafer wonder. She didn’t plan to satisfy his curiosity. But she knew the answer: Yes. In an instant.

37

THE WAVES WERE LOW AND FLAT and the boat skimmed over them without too much trouble. Still, Wells felt his ribs rattle every time the sea caught the boat sideways. He sat on the front bench gripping the wood so hard that his hands felt welded to it. There was probably a better way to hold on, but he didn’t know it.

They’d run along the coast for more than an hour, maybe a half-mile from land, Cao handling the tiller. Wells didn’t have much to do. They’d heard helicopters overhead and seen the lights of a boat in the distance, but so far no one had been within hailing distance. They were running the engine full-out, and despite its peeling paint and rusty engine, the boat seemed seaworthy. It wasn’t leaking, anyway, which was the only way Wells could judge. His naval experience was limited to the occasional bath with Exley.

To the south, the coast grew rockier. During the day, the development was probably obvious. But tonight, under the weak light of a quarter-moon, the land looked surprisingly unspoiled. Wells supposed that even China had a few places that hadn’t been overrun.

The lights of the coast grew sparser and sparser, then faded entirely.

“Tianjintou,” Cao said. He pointed south. In the distance, the land ended in a rocky spit, waves kicking up narrow white flumes around it.

“Tianjintou?”

“Means ‘end of the world.’ Farthest east place in Shandong. Only water now.”

“Let’s hope we don’t have to swim.”

A HALF-HOUR LATER, Wells’s line looked more like a prophecy than a joke. Two helicopters shined their spotlights along the coast behind them. And in the distance to the west, Wells saw the lights of three boats. At least one was a destroyer or a frigate, something big. The boats were heading east, into the open water. Chasing Wells and Cao, even if they didn’t know it yet.

Then, to the south. Two boats. Small and fast. Wells couldn’t hear them, not yet, but he could see their spotlights. He tapped Cao’s shoulder, pointed. Cao just shrugged.

They weren’t going to make it, Wells thought. With the cloud cover helping them, they would last until sunrise. But once the sun came up, they wouldn’t be able to hide. They’d be caught far before Incheon.

Wells focused on the rolling dark water ahead of them, stale and brackish. In college, he had been a decent swimmer. Not his favorite sport, but he’d liked it in the winter, as a way to rebuild his muscles after the pounding of football. But even if he hadn’t had a chestful of broken ribs, swimming two hundred miles to Korea would have been a hopeless fantasy. Like the rest of this mission, Wells thought. But he didn’t regret taking the chance. He knew the secret now, the reason for this war. If only he and Cao could survive, they could stop it.

Anyway, he’d been playing with house money ever since Exley had saved him in New York. He didn’t want to die, not like this, but some part of him had accepted the fact that he would. If not today, soon enough. He would push his luck until it snapped. He could excuse himself for risking this mission, because it meant so much. But what was his excuse for screaming down 1-95 at 125 miles an hour? How could he ask Exley to trust him?

He remembered an old joke from an intro philosophy class in college: I’m an optimist, not a fatalist. Anyway, if I were a fatalist, what could I do about it? Or in the words of that great philosopher Bruce Springsteen, Everythingdies, baby, that’s a fact. Wells was drifting again. Tianjintou. End of the world. He sagged down and the curtains closed on him.

AT 22,000 FEET THE NIGHT AIR was smooth, though the clouds were thickening quickly beneath the C-130. Bosarelli eased back on the engines, slowing the plane to 180 knots. Osan had asked him to slow down, give the flotilla on the water beneath him a chance to get a few miles farther west.

“Ninety-five hundred rpm,” Keough said. “One hundred eighty knots, heading two-seven-zero.” Straight west.

“Taking us down to sixteen thousand.” Bosarelli extended the wing flaps to begin the descent. As he did, an alarm briefly sounded and the flat-panel display before Bosarelli flashed red before returning to its normal black background. The Chinese J-10s were now within a hundred nautical miles — less than eight minutes on afterburner.

For now Bosarelli wasn’t too worried about them. He was over international waters and flying slow and straight — hardly signs of hostile intent. He looked down through the cockpit’s glazed windows, and through the clouds he saw the lights of a ship beneath him, heading west. A friendly, he hoped. “Everything set back there?”

“Sure hope so,” Keough said.

Bosarelli leveled them out when they got to 16,000 feet, and for another fifteen minutes the plane cruised steadily. Bosarelli and Keough hardly spoke. After thousands of hours in these C-130s, Bosarelli could fly them, almost literally, in his sleep. And there wasn’t much to say anyway. Beneath them the clouds became an unbroken white mass, glowing under the moon and the stars like a little girl’s dream. Under other circumstances, Bosarelli would have considered the clouds beautiful. Tonight he would rather have seen the water. A crosswind kicked up, lightly rocking the plane.

“One hundred NM west of Incheon,” Keough said. “Two minutes to centerline.” Incheon was about 210 nautical miles west of the tip of the Shandong Peninsula. In two minutes, the plane would be closer to China than Korea, a fact that would set off alarms for the Chinese jets.

“Two minutes to centerline, twelve minutes to Z point.” Bosarelli throttled back again, to 150 knots, not much above the plane’s stall speed.

Their last F-16 escorts peeled off, one turning north, the other south, looping back toward Osan. Now Bosarelli and Keough had no cover at all, though for the moment the sky ahead was clear. For some reason — maybe the same reason that they were on this mission — the Chinese J-10s had swung back west, toward the Shandong coastline, and dropped to about 4,000 feet.

But Bosarelli knew the Chinese fighters could easily reverse course again and tag the C-130, which wouldn’t have a chance, especially with this payload. Here pilots liked to joke that the plane’s antimissile system consisted mainly of an alarm to let them know that their ride was about to explode.

Bosarelli hadn’t been this scared since his first roller-coaster ride, at the Six Flags in Arlington, Texas. He was seven. His older brother had spent a whole week telling him how great it was. Bosarelli had pleaded to go until his dad finally took him. But when the coaster had clanked slowly up over the flat Texas plains, getting ready for that first drop, Bosarelli had wanted to puke his guts out. He hadn‘t, though. And once they’d finally gotten over the hill, he’d had a blast — though that probably wasn’t the best choice of words right now.

“FIVE MINUTES,” KEOUGH SAID.

“Five minutes.” Again Bosarelli extended the flaps. “Taking us to twelve thousand.”

At 12,000 feet, Bosarelli again leveled out. “Chutes and helmets on.”

Bosarelli reached for his parachute and pulled it onto his shoulders. Keough did the same. They’d packed their chutes themselves at Osan, watched over by a Special Forces major who had completed 250 jumps. Now Bosarelli had to stand over the control panel, since he couldn’t fit in his seat anymore. The designers of the C-130 hadn’t expected that the plane’s pilots would be wearing parachutes.

“Check your transponder.” They were both carrying emergency beacons, black plastic boxes attached to their waists.

“Check.”

“One twenty-five NM from Incheon,” Bosarelli said. “Twenty NM west of the centerline.”

“Two minutes,” Keough said. His screen flashed red and an alarm beeped loud and fast in his headset. Just in the last fifteen minutes the Chinese had a half-dozen more fighters in the air. Two of them had now decided to check out the C-130.

Now another alarm went off, higher-pitched and more urgent than the first. One of the Chinese fighters had painted the Here with its targeting radar, a wordless warning that if it broke into Chinese airspace it could expect to be hit with an air-to-air missile.

“One minute to Z point,” Keough said.

“One minute.” Bosarelli flicked the Here’s transponder to 7700, the signal for an aircraft emergency.

“Ready, Jim?”

“Ready.”

The radar warning alarm sounded again, for a full fifteen seconds this time. “I’ll get it,” Bosarelli said. He flipped the Here’s radio to the Military Air Distress band, 243.0 MHz. The warning, in heavily accented English, was what he expected: “You are approaching Chinese airspace. Turn back or face immediate action.” Pause. “You are approaching Chinese airspace. Turn back…”

“I’ll take that under advisement,” Bosarelli murmured. He flipped off the radio.

“Thirty seconds to Z.”

“Thirty seconds. Flaps fifty.” Again, Bosarelli extended the plane wing’s flaps. “Now, Jim. Go.”

Keough stepped out of the cockpit. Bosarelli heard a loud whooshas he popped open the crew entry door a few feet behind the cockpit. The plane began to shake. Again the radar alarm rang in his headset.

Now. Bosarelli pushed the power levers past flight idle to turn off the engines. Then he reached over to Keough’s station and flipped off the fuel pumps.

Just like that, the C-130 turned into a sixty-five-ton glider. Alarms began screaming, both in his headset and in the cabin, as the engines lost power. The propellers still had some leftover momentum, so the plane didn’t dive immediately, but Bosarelli knew he didn’t have long. Time to get out. He stepped out of the cockpit. Keough was standing in the open door of the plane, waiting. When he saw Bosarelli, he nodded and stepped out of the plane, hands at his sides. In an instant, he was gone.

Bosarelli flipped on his goggles and stepped to the open hatch. Instead of the normal noise of the turboprops, he heard only the klaxons in the cockpit and the rush of the wind. He looked into the night sky, and for a moment his nerve failed him. He thought of running back to the cockpit and trying to restart the engines. But he knew better. Down was the only way out.

And before he could change his mind again, he pushed himself forward and stepped into the cool night air.

WITH ARMS AND LEGS EXTENDED, the human body falls at a maximum speed of about 125 miles an hour — a thousand feet every five seconds. Bosarelli was holding his arms tight to his chest and extending his legs straight down, hoping to top out closer to two hundred. He wanted to separate from the Herc quickly to lessen the chances he’d be caught in the plane’s blast wave.

Then a wind gust ripped Bosarelli sideways, twisting his back and throwing his shoulders outward. He raised his arms for balance and instead began to spin, bouncing through the air like a pebble caught in a wave. Suddenly he was in no position to pull his chute. He breathed deeply and tried to remember his training as the seconds ticked by. And then he reached the cloud layer and the air around him turned white and suffocating.

Relax. He extended his arms and legs as far as he could and arched his back to create maximum drag. He emerged from the clouds. He was no longer spinning, but the sea was close beneath him, a couple of thousand feet at most, the water dark and featureless. He could already see two boats chugging west. They’d find him. If he could just get to his chute. Bosarelli reached across his body and grabbed the cord, praying it would open smoothly. He wasn’t sure he had time to get to the reserve.

Then—

His body jerked upward as the chute snatched him from gravity’s grasp. He looked up to see an open canopy, spreading above him like an angel’s wings.

A MILE AHEAD, THE EMPTY C-130 plunged toward the Yellow Sea, its nose tipped nearly straight down, klaxons sounding uselessly in its cockpit. Four thousand feet. The bombs and barrels of gasoline strained against the netting, securing them to the floor of the cargo bay, but the thick nylon held.

Three thousand feet. The C-130 was approaching the speed of sound, six hundred miles an hour, a thousand feet a second. As the plane accelerated, the massive g-forces generated by the dive began to shear the left wing from the hull—

Two thousand feet—

The ghost plane began to break apart, but by then its structural failure no longer mattered. The Herc had done its job.

One thousand feet—

Five hundred—

The altitude fuses on the GBU-29s blew, setting off 3,000 pounds of high explosive. In a fraction of a second, the cargo compartment turned into an inferno, and the jellied gasoline in the oil barrels blew up.

BOSARELLI SAW THE EXPLOSION BEFORE he felt it. The night came alive with a second sun, a yellow-gold cloud that exploded up and out, forming a classic mushroom cloud, like a miniature nuclear bomb. So bright, so beautiful. A couple of seconds later the blast wave hit him, hotter than he’d expected, rich with gasoline and benzene vapor, but by then he was close enough to the water that he knew he’d survive.

He only hoped the bomb had done its job.

38

WELLS THOUGHT HE WAS DREAMING WHEN THE SKY turned white. Then he heard Cao shouting and knew he wasn’t. He started counting, one one-thousand, two one-thousand, three one-thousand, waiting for the sound of the explosion to reach them, trying to calculate how far off they were. On his twelfth “Mississippi,” the blast filled his ears. Maybe fifteen seconds — three miles, give or take.

In the last hour the Chinese had put more and more helicopters in the air, and he’d had a bad moment a few minutes before when a helicopter swung by them, its searchlight missing them by no more than a few hundred yards. Now this explosion, which couldn’t possibly be a coincidence. Had a Chinese jet or copter exploded? No, this fire was far too large. It looked to be slightly southeast of them, burning in the night like a beacon.

Like a beacon.

Cao was steering the boat north, away from the blast. Wells tapped his shoulder. He pointed to the white fireball, already losing its shape, melding into the clouds, but still burning brightly. “Go toward it.”

“Toward?”

“It’s for us.”

UNFORTUNATELY, THE CHINESE SEEMED TO have come to the same conclusion. Helicopters were buzzing toward the crash site, their spotlights shining over the waves. Jets too. Wells couldn’t see them, but he could hear the whine of their engines. As they made their way west, the sky lightened, the giant fire producing a muddy yellow glare. No way could a helicopter cause such a big explosion. Maybe a 747 had been shot down by accident. Or maybe it wasn’t a plane at all. Maybe it was some kind of oil tanker.

The good news was that the Chinese didn’t seem to have any boats in front of them. And the heat of the blast would make it hard for the helos to get too close.

Not that Wells wanted to get too close either. As they moved toward the site of the explosion, the air grew heavy with the stench of burning gasoline and something else too, some kind of plastic, though Wells couldn’t figure out exactly what. Farther on, the air was alive with burning embers that looked like sparks from a backyard barbecue. The strange part was that they kept burning when they landed on the water. As Wells shielded his eyes and looked toward the fireball, he saw patches where the sea itself seemed to have caught fire.

“Napalm,” he said aloud.

Cao swung the boat hard left, north. Wells braced himself against the side of the hull and gritted his teeth as his ribs reminded him they were still broken.

Then a huge secondary explosion, maybe a fuel tank, lit the night. The boat rocked in the blast wave and Wells covered his mouth against the fumes. In the sudden glow Wells knew they were obscenely visible. Even as the firelight faded, a jet swooped toward them, hard and low, its running lights blinking red, the wash from its engines kicking up waves and rattling the boat.

“Close,” Cao said.

The fighter screamed off.

Three minutes later it came back for another pass. This time red flares popped off the wings, not directly on top of them but close, too close, dimly visible through the thick black smoke that was flooding the air. Two helicopters — one from the north, the other from the south — began to converge on the flares, closing like scissor blades.

And then Wells saw the lights of a ship, barely visible through the smoke. Toward the east, not the west. Toward South Korea.

“Cao.” Wells pointed at the lights.

“Could be Chinese.” Nonetheless, Cao swung the tiller, turning the boat east, into the depths of the filthy black soot. The helicopters closed, but they couldn’t fly blind. Wells closed his eyes and tried not to breathe. Then the wind shifted. The smoke lightened and the helicopters closed again. The spotlights swung at them, and one caught the hull of the boat in its glare. Behind them, a heavy machine gun opened up, kicking up flumes on the right side of the boat and then on the left. Cao swung the boat hard right, toward the center of the inferno, the heaviest smoke, and Wells ducked down, all he could do.

The spotlights swung over them and again the machine gun raked the waves around them, an angry hard rattle that blocked out every other sound, until Cao screamed, a short sharp cry. He collapsed, his body slumped over the outboard.

The engine lifted out of the water and the boat slowed to a creep. A lucky break, since the helos were now ahead of the boat and the wind was shifting direction again, catching the helicopters in the smoke. Wells crawled across the boat to Cao. The general was dead, his neck and chest torn open. “Damn you,” Wells said to nothing and no one, knowing that he’d be joining Cao soon enough, as soon as the wind turned enough to give the helos a clear shot. He pushed Cao aside and dropped the engine into the water. He couldn’t see where he was headed and he supposed it no longer mattered.

THEN, FROM ABOVE, THE GRINDING SOUND of metal on metal. Followed almost instantly by an enormous explosion, two hundred yards ahead, and a second even closer. Wells bowed his head as sizzling bits of metal crashed around him.

They’d collided. The wind shift had left the helicopters blind. In their eagerness to get the kill, they’d come too close. They had crashed into each other in the dark and gone down, both of them. This filthy cloud had saved his life. Wells lifted the engine out of the water and looked around, trying to orient himself in the dark, thick air. Distant helicopters behind him. Somewhere overhead, a jet.

And ahead, a voice. Amplified. American.

Calling his name.

He closed his eyes and lowered the engine into the water and steered for it.