The Ghost War

Book 2: A John Wells Novel

by Alex Berenson

Genres: War & Military; International Crime & Mystery; Spy Thrillers

Synopsis

Alex Berenson's best-selling debut thriller earned him the 2007 Edgar Award for Best First Novel. In his second book, Berenson brings back powerhouse CIA operative John Wells for more high-stakes intrigue and explosive action. After proving his mettle obliterating an al-Qaeda camp in Afghanistan, Wells must return to that strife-ridden land to fight a new crop of evil-doers-including deadly emissaries from China, North Korea, and Iran.

Release date: January 27, 2009

Publisher: G.P. Putnam's Sons

Print pages: 576

Sample

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

 

PART 1

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

 

PART 2

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

 

PART 3

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

 

PART 4

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

 

EPILOGUE

Acknowledgements

Teaser chapter

“A very sophisticated vision . . . Geopolitically savvy.”—The New York Times

 

“A fast-paced story of international intrigue and espionage... Wells is a fine character who will likely propel Berenson’s thrillers to success for some time to come.”—Chicago Sun-Times

 

“Mesmerizing . . . an extraordinary achievement.”

—The (Raleigh, NC) News & Observer

 

“Terrific and relentless suspense and action.”

—Kirkus Reviews

 

“Berenson marshals turncoats, the Taliban, and testosterone to produce a tautly paced, credible, and gripping scenario guaranteed to buttress Berenson’s niche as one of the stars in the suspense firmament.”

—Library Journal

 

“Stellar . . . Wells is a fascinating, tortured soul, and his attempts to live a normal life create a gripping narrative. The authenticity Berenson brings to his ripped-from-the-headlines stories makes them seem as vividly real and scary as nonfiction or the nightly news.”—Booklist

 

“The author’s plausible scenario distinguishes this from most spy thrillers.”—Publishers Weekly

 

Praise for
THE FAITHFUL SPY
Winner of the Edgar® Award

“A well-crafted page-turner that addresses the most important issue of our time. It will keep you reading well into the night.”—Vince Flynn

 

“One of the best espionage books of all time.”

—William Stevenson, author of A Man Called Intrepid

 

“An intriguing thriller studded with alarming possibilities.”—New York Daily News

 

“The best spy thriller in a long, long while.”

—The Kansas City Star

 

“Berenson offers a very American story—a sort of terrorist High Noon . . . Exciting.”—The New York Times

 

“A hold-your-breath thriller. . . a grabber.”

—St. Louis Post-Dispatch

 

“Mounting suspense, a believable scenario, and a final twist add up to a compelling tale of frightening possibilities. It’s not for the squeamish, though: the torture sequences and bombing descriptions are graphic and chillingly real.”—Publishers Weekly

 

“Berenson has done a sharp job of pulling together possible what-ifs and combining them with a journalist’s knowledge of how government and the military operate.”—Rocky Mountain News

 

“[An] unsettling first novel. . . Dirty bombs and biological contamination riddle this novel with paranoia and the frightening realization that an attack on the United States, as it’s laid out in The Faithful Spy, appears highly plausible, even inevitable.”—USA Today

 

“A thriller worthy of Le Carré . . . The payoff is tremendous.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

 

“A well-informed, often chilling look at how al Qaeda might launch a major new attack in the United States—and how one intrepid undercover agent might do his darnedest to foil it . . . A timely reminder of the extremely precarious way we live now.”

—The Washington Post

 

“Berenson is clearly a go-getter . . . [His] debut is gritty and fast-moving.”—The Observer (UK)

 

“This is New York Times reporter Alex Berenson’s first novel, but you wouldn’t know it by the writing or the plot, both of which are razor sharp . . . Crisp writing, understatement, and an aversion to the sort of caricatures that have sunk other books without a trace make this story sing . . . This high-voltage thriller has major motion picture written all over it.”

 

—Minneapolis Star Tribune

 

“Berenson is a crackerjack researcher and possesses a seemingly native ability to write entertaining fiction. He quickly sets his story in motion, creating engrossing scenes.” —Chicago Tribune

 

“As a reporter for the New York Times, Alex Berenson has spent time in Iraq. He draws on his experience in writing this taut and quite chilling thriller . . . Berenson has written a solid debut novel notable for its relevancy and great sense of reality.”

—The Tampa Tribune

 

“This is one of the most unusual and engrossing spy-action books I have read in many decades of perusing such books, starting with the original James Bond novels . . . All this is written in the most realistic style, giving us a very good picture of life on that side of this ongoing war . . . This is a good one. It is action packed, but it is also a sophisticated view of the new and unusual kind of warfare that America and the West face.”

—Lincoln Journal Star

 

“Alex Berenson [has] concentrated on building suspense, maintaining thrills, and plotting a frighteningly plausible scenario... a worthwhile first effort . . . The Faithful Spy brims with knowledge, especially about the frightening tactics used in the name of war.”

—The Baltimore Sun

 

“A complex idea and a multilayered story . . . Berenson takes readers across the world, unveiling al Qaeda’s brilliant and evil plot slowly. For sheer drama, no one can fault Berenson’s plot. His daring leaps in many directions almost always pay off. Scenes of torture and attacks are so clearly written, readers will be able to feel the pain.”—Detroit Free Press

 

“In his debut thriller, investigative reporter Berenson has come up with an intriguing premise . . . Well written.” —Library Journal

 

“A fast-moving, timely thriller with interesting characters and believable events—all ably narrated by Dean, who appears to know just how to tell the tale. His deep, rich tones set just the right mood for CIA agent Wells.” —KLIATT

 

“Berenson paints a realistic picture of a modern-day terrorist attack inside America. His theme is worthy of a John le Carré novel . . . this is a page-turner of a book, putting gripping drama into an all-too-believable cautionary tale.”

—The London (Ontario) Free Press

ALSO BY ALEX BERENSON

The Faithful Spy

 

The Number (nonfiction)

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THE GHOST WAR

 

A Jove Book / published by arrangement with the author

 

 

Copyright © 2008 by Alex Berenson. Excerpt from The Silent Man copyright © 2009 by Alex Berenson.

 

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ISBN: 9781101163368

 

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For Ellen and Harvey, my parents

Let China sleep, for when she wakes, she will shake the world.

—NAPOLEON

 

 

Be subtle. Use your spies for every kind of business.

—SUN TZU,
The Art of War

PART 1

1

INCHEON, SOUTH KOREA

TED BECK WALKED WEST DOWN THE ROTTING PIER, squinting through his wraparound sunglasses into the late-afternoon haze. He moved without haste. He’d arrived early, and the boat he’d come to meet was nowhere in sight.

At the end of the dock, trash from three countries—China and the two Koreas—bobbed in the dank water, the eastern edge of the Yellow Sea. The air was heavy with smoke from the ships that docked at Incheon every day to load up on cars and televisions for the United States. The sun had baked the fumes into a brown smog that burned Beck’s throat and made him want a cigarette.

He fished a packet of Camel Lights from his pocket and lit up. He’d tried to quit over the years. But if he was going to sign up for missions like this one, what was the point? He smoked slowly and when he was done flicked the butt away. It spun into the harbor, joining the empty beer cans and condom wrappers.

Then he heard the low rumble of a boat engine.

Incheon was an industrial port fifty miles west of Seoul and a few miles south of the Demilitarized Zone, the strip that separated North and South Korea. During the Korean War, General Douglas MacArthur had landed here, cutting behind North Korean lines to stop the Communist advance.

A statue of him stood atop a hill not far from this pier. Binoculars in hand, the general looked out to the Yellow Sea, which separated China and the Korean Peninsula. This afternoon, Beck would head into those waters, on a mission smaller than MacArthur’s assault but just as dangerous.

The rumble of the distant boat grew louder. Beck pulled his wallet out of his pocket, a battered piece of cowhide that had seen him through thirty-two countries and three counterinsurgencies. He wasn’t carrying any identification or a passport, just money. About $3,000 in all. And three pictures: his wife and their two sons. He took out the pictures and kissed them.

Then he flicked his lighter to them and watched them burn, holding them as long as he could, until the flames singed his fingers and he had to let them go. Their remnants sank into the water and drifted away.

Beck carried out the same ritual before every mission, for reasons both practical and superstitious. If he was caught, the photographs would give his captors a psychological edge. More important, burning the pictures was his way of accepting the danger of the mission. When he came back, he’d put fresh copies in his wallet. Until the next time.

 

 

 

THE MESSAGE HAD COME IN twelve days before, to a signals-intelligence station at Camp Bonifas, on the edge of the Demilitarized Zone. The six hundred Americans and South Koreans who lived at Bonifas stayed on alert twenty-four hours a day, knowing they would be the world’s tripwire if the North Korean army came over the DMZ. As they waited, they monitored the North’s airwaves, listening for messages from American spies across the border.

To the officers at the Bonifas station, the transmission was gibberish, a twenty-two-second series of 1s and 0s. But they knew it meant something, for it came in on a shortwave frequency reserved for the highest-priority messages. They forwarded it around the world to Fort Meade, Maryland, the headquarters of the National Security Agency. From Fort Meade, the message, now decoded, took a shorter trip, across the Potomac to a seventh-floor office at CIA headquarters.

There it caused Vinny Duto, the director of the CIA, to unleash a few uncoded curses of his own. For the message was short, simple—and unwelcome. The Drafter wanted out of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the country-sized prison commonly called North Korea. Immediately if not sooner.

The Drafter’s real name was Sung Kwan. Dr. Sung Kwan. He was a scientist in North Korea’s nuclear program, and by far the most important asset the United States had in North Korea. “Asset” was a rather clinical way to describe Sung, who was after all a person, not a spy satellite or a well-placed bug. But the term was fitting. For Sung had told the United States exactly where the North Koreans held their nuclear weapons—information that was priceless.

Most analysts outside the CIA thought that North Korea hid its nukes in caves, hoping to keep them safe from an American airstrike. They were wrong. In fact, the nukes were kept in a warehouse in Pyongyang, North Korea’s capital. The Dear Leader, Kim Jong Il, wanted them close by, protected by the same army regiment that provided his personal security.

Now the USS Lake Champlain, a guided missile cruiser in the Sea of Japan, had a dozen Tomahawk missiles targeted on the building. If the order came, the Tomahawks could turn the warehouse into rubble in minutes. All thanks to Sung. And now he wanted an emergency exfiltration. No wonder Vinny Duto was upset.

 

 

 

SUNG WAS A CAREFUL SPY. He had met American agents only three times, each time in Pakistan, outside the Orwellian gaze of the North Korean secret police. But now something had gone wrong. In his message, Sung said he was concerned for his safety and believed he needed to get out of North Korea. He didn’t explain more.

At Langley, the officers on the North Korea desk struggled to make sense of Sung’s message. How did he know he was about to be taken in? Had he been interrogated? Or had he been arrested already, strung up and left to rot? In that case, the pickup request was nothing more than bait, an SOS from a man who had already drowned, meant to lure would-be rescuers into an ambush.

The CIA responded to Sung with its own shortwave broadcasts, asking him for more detail. But as the days ticked by, the listening station at Bonifas remained quiet.

Finally Duto decided that the agency had to send in a team. Without proof that the message was a trap, Langley couldn’t ignore Sung’s plea. The agency always promised its moles to respond if they asked for help. The vow was both a moral obligation and a recruiting tool. Moles needed to believe that their agency handlers shared the risks they took.

Three men were going in. Beck, the leader, was a former Navy Seal, now a senior officer in the agency’s Special Operations Group. He was accompanied by Seth Kang, a Korean-American operative who’d infiltrated North Korea before, and Choe Gu, a lieutenant in the South Korean navy. All knew the risks of this mission. But they couldn’t say no, not once they understood the stakes.

 

 

 

THE PHANTOM LOOKED FAST even when it wasn’t moving. The boat was matte black, narrow and long, with an arrow-shaped hull that came to a razor-sharp tip. It was a cigarette boat, the kind favored by drug runners for quick trips in calm seas. But in place of an open deck, like most cigarette boats, the Phantom had a cabin covering its cockpit, topped by a small forest of microwave dishes. Its windows were two-inch-thick bullet-resistant glass. For extra range the Phantom carried three gas tanks that held six hundred gallons in all. For extra protection its hull was coated with Kevlar. And for extra speed it had twin Mercury engines that threw out 650 horsepower apiece. At full throttle, it ran at seventy knots.

Langley had given Beck carte blanche to decide how to pull off Sung’s extraction. A helicopter was out. The North Koreans operated radar stations every few miles on the coast. Beck had considered using a fishing trawler before deciding on the Phantom. The boat was practically invisible on radar, and surprisingly quiet, thanks to the oversized mufflers on the Mercurys. Plus, if the North Koreans were waiting for them, a speedboat would give them a chance of getting away.

The Phantom was based in Miami, where the CIA and Drug Enforcement Administration used it to chase drug traffickers around the Caribbean. Three days before, the agency had chartered a cargo jet and flown the boat in, landing it at Osan Air Base outside Seoul to avoid pesky Korean customs agents.

Beck and his men had spent two nights jetting around the Yellow Sea to learn the Phantom’s quirks. The boat seemed to want to fly. Jam the throttles and its nose lifted from the water as the engines opened up.

Beck hoped that tonight they wouldn’t have to take it anywhere near its limits.

 

 

 

RIGHT ON TIME, 5:00 P.M., the Phantom curled up to the dock. Beck hopped on and stepped into the pilothouse, feeling the slight sway of the boat beneath his feet. Inside, the air was crisp, and the tinted windows provided relief from the sun. Beck slipped his sunglasses into his jacket pocket. As he did, his fingers brushed across the plastic bag he had picked up that morning from the chief of Seoul station.

Before they left this dock he would have to tell Choe and Kang about what he was carrying in the bag. They deserved to know. They deserved the choice.

Kang sat in the navigator’s chair, scrolling through satellite photographs of Point D, the pickup site. North of the DMZ, the Korean Peninsula widened, jutting west into the Yellow Sea toward China. Point D was located on a sliver of land a hundred miles northwest of Incheon. The satellite photos showed unbroken forests on the hills around the inlet. Haeju, the nearest city of any size, was fifty miles east.

Beck and his men would arrive at the landing spot at 2330 and wait thirty minutes. If Sung didn’t show, they would assume he had changed his mind—or been killed—and wait for a new message.

“Simple enough,” Kang had said two days before, when Beck explained. “What could go wrong?”

Beck hardly needed to answer. For starters, North Korea claimed control of the Yellow Sea well past the twelve-mile limit of international law. The North Korean navy had been known to fire on fishing trawlers unlucky enough to cross their path. The Phantom would have to dodge them. Then there were the shore artillery batteries along the coast. And the minefields, some new, others left over from the Korean War.

Not to mention the possibility that the North Koreans already had arrested Sung and set them up. With the help of the NSA, Langley had done what it could to make sure that the Phantom wasn’t heading into an ambush. For the last week, spy satellites had watched the waters around the pickup spot, looking for overflights by the North Korean air force or unusual activity by the navy. So far the satellites hadn’t picked anything up.

Meanwhile, Chinook rescue helicopters and F-16 jets were on standby at Osan and the Navy had moved the USS Decatur, a destroyer, into the Yellow Sea.

But the helicopters had strict orders against violating North Korean territory. Pyongyang would view an American incursion into its airspace as an act of war. And now that the North had nuclear weapons, Washington couldn’t antagonize it needlessly.

But the Phantom was expendable. It didn’t carry American markings, or any markings at all. If North Korea captured it, the United States and South Korea would disavow knowledge of its existence. Beck and his men would have to be well outside the twelve-mile limit, fifty or more miles from the North Korean coast, to expect a rescue. Any closer, and they were on their own.

 

 

 

THE GOOD NEWS WAS THAT they weren’t going in blind. The Phantom carried the newest military and civilian mapping equipment, including a Global Positioning System receiver capable of pinpointing its location to one meter. The receiver was synched to software that plotted the topography of every major body of water in the world. The combination allowed Kang, the navigator, to track their course in real time.

Meanwhile, a satellite transceiver connected the boat to an encrypted radar feed from an E-2 Hawkeye circling above the Yellow Sea. Thanks to the Hawkeye, the Phantom could dodge enemy boats without risking detection by using its own radar. Beck wanted to do everything possible to stay out of sight. If they got caught in a firefight, they’d already lost. They couldn’t outshoot the North Korean navy.

And so Beck had dumped the .50-caliber machine gun the Phantom had carried when it arrived at Osan. In its place, he had added a Zodiac, an inflatable flat-bottomed boat with a small outboard motor. The Zodiac was loaded with fresh water, a first-aid kit, even a spear gun, and hooked to the hull of the Phantom.

Aside from the raft, Beck, Kang, and Choe hadn’t brought much survival gear. They each had a change of clothes, in case they wound up in the water. They had personal transceivers, a more powerful version of the ones used by backcountry skiers, which sent a signal that the Chinooks could track. But they hadn’t bothered with body armor or even helmets. Instead Kang, who’d grown up in South Florida, was wearing a Miami Dolphins hat—for luck, he said. They weren’t being nonchalant or cynical, Beck thought. They knew they would get out quickly or not at all.

 

 

 

BECK SAT BESIDE KANG,who was tracking the radar link from the Hawkeye on a titanium-hulled laptop attached to the Phantom’s dash.

“How’s it look around the LZ?” The landing zone.

“Quiet.” Kang was thirty-eight, though he looked younger. A tattoo of the ace of spades covered his right forearm, near the elbow. Beck had wondered about the tat for weeks, but he hadn’t wanted to ask.

Kang tapped on the laptop’s keyboard and the screen lit up with white blips. “That’s Incheon. What a real port looks like.” He clicked on the keyboard again and the screen returned to the dark area farther west. “And that’s North Korea. Dead as a whatever.”

“The good citizens of the Democratic People’s Republic don’t need the corruptions of the outside world.”

“Yeah. Like food.”

“Well, they managed to come up with a nuke,” Beck said. “How’s the boat running?”

“Choe says it looks great,” Kang said. He said something in Korean to Choe, who nodded vigorously. Beck’s Korean was weak, and Choe’s English was worse, so Kang played translator. Choe tapped the throttles forward. The engines rumbled and the Phantom’s cabin began to vibrate.

Beck looked at his watch. 1725. He wanted to reach the landing zone at exactly 2330. No reason to spend more time in North Korean waters than necessary. The Yellow Sea was flat in the summer. If they wanted, they could run safely at sixty knots. But Beck preferred to keep them in the high teens. The slower pace would save fuel and keep noise to a minimum. They would leave here in five minutes, give themselves plenty of time.

But before they went . . . Beck touched the plastic bag in his pocket. He didn’t want to have this conversation, but he saw no other choice. He motioned to Choe to cut the engine. The Phantom sat beside the dock, bobbing on the low waves.

“Before we go—” Beck pulled out the bag. Inside were three glass capsules. “L pills.”

“L pills?” Choe shook his head in confusion.

“L for lethal. Cyanide.” Choe still wasn’t getting it, Beck saw. “Poison. If they catch us. You bite down on the glass.” He took a capsule out of the bag and pretended to put it in his mouth.

Choe slammed a hand against the dash of the boat and stammered angrily in Korean. Kang put a hand on Choe’s arm, but Choe shook him off.

“He says you’re crazy,” Kang said. “He says—”

“Never, never,” Choe said in English.

“He says it’s a sin.”

“Yes, sin.”

“Fine,” Beck said. “But tell him he knows as well as we do, if we get caught, no one’s coming for us. No prisoner exchange. And the North Koreans, they’ll make it hell. These pills, they’re quick, and they work.”

Kang translated, rapid-fire.

“One more thing,” Beck said. “Tell him, he should at least carry it. So he has the choice.”

Choe shook his head, fired back in Korean, and turned away.

“He says no,” Kang said. “He says even talking about it is bad luck.”

Beck ran his tongue over his teeth. His mouth felt dirty and he knew he’d smoked too many Camels this day. “More for me, then. You want yours?”

Kang reached out. Beck shook the little capsule, hardly an inch long, into his palm.

“Remember to give it back to me when we’re done,” Beck said. “You don’t want these lying around the house.”

“Roger that.”

Beck stuffed the baggie with the other two pills into his jacket. He checked the disposable cell phone he’d bought the day before. His station chief had the number. If Langley had decided to abort the mission, the call would have come to this phone. But Beck hadn’t been expecting a call, and sure enough, none had come. He looked once more at his watch. 1730.

“Let’s go,” he said. “Go west, young man.” Koreans called the Yellow Sea the West Sea.

“Yes, skipper,” Kang said. “A three-hour tour, right?”

“Something like that.” Beck hummed the famous theme song, hoping to clear the cabin of the bad karma the pills had brought. “Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful trip.”

“Think Ginger and Mary Ann will be waiting for us in Pyongyang?”

“Let’s hope we never find out. Sing it with me now. ‘If not for the courage of the fearless crew, the Minnow would be lost.”’

“‘The Minnow would be lost.”’

If Choe got the joke, he didn’t smile. He looked away, out the front window. He pushed forward on the throttle and the Phantom slid away.

2

DRINK THIS AND YOU’LL GROW WINGS ON YOUR FEET.

John Wells wound down the throttle with his gloved right hand. Beneath him the