The Ghost War Read online

  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 FaithfulSpy, 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 WashingtonPost

  “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 TampaTribune

  “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 JournalStar

  “Alex Berenson [has] concentrated on building suspense, maintaining thrills, and plotting a frighten- ingly plausible scenario... a worthwhile first effort... The FaithfulSpybrims 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)

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  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.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form

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  For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

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  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  eISBN : 978-1-429-59753-1

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  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

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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 Mac-Arthur 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 Is 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 goi
ng 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.