The Ghost War

Zodiac raft. But they probably couldn’t get to it before the torpedo hit, and even if they could, they’d have to leave Sung behind. Beck wasn’t willing to abandon the North Korean, even though his treachery had put them in this jam. He’d suffered more than any of them.

The seconds ticked by miserably. 00:03:40. 00:03:41… “Range?”

“Seven hundred fifty yards and closing.”

Beck wished they could do something more. Take evasive action. Drop chaff. Fire their own torpedo. Call in air support to blast that damned sub out of the water. But they could only run, and hope.

00:05:56… “Range?”

“Three hundred fifty yards. Still on us.”

“Is he slowing?” The torpedo wouldn’t stop all at once. It would sputter to a halt as it exhausted its stores of kerosene and hydrogen peroxide.

“Not yet.” Kang turned the Dolphins hat around. “Time for a rally cap.”

00:07:03… “Range?”

“Under two hundred. a hundred fifty now.” Kang’s tone was steady. “Wait. he’s slowing.” Hope crept into his voice. “He’s at thirty-eight knots. Thirty-seven.” The hope faded. “He’s still coming. A hundred yards now.”

Even so, the torpedo was now hardly gaining ground on the Phantom — and it was near the end of its effective range. If they could just stay ahead for a minute longer, they might get free.

“Sixty-five yards. Sixty. but he’s lost another two knots. Down to thirty-four. He’s hardly catching us now. Fifty yards.”

And now Beck could see the wake of the torpedo, cutting through the flat waves, chasing them, trying to destroy them. It was just a mindless piece of steel, but Beck hated it more than he’d ever hated anything.

“Only forty yards,” Kang said. Then his voice lifted. “He’s down to thirty-three.” At thirty-three knots the torpedo wasn’t closing anymore.

“That’s right,” Beck said to the thing behind them. “Die. Get lost and die.”

“Thirty-two.” Kang didn’t try to hide his joy. “We’re outrunning him!”

In their excitement neither Beck nor Kang noticed that a red warning light had flared on the dashboard. “Oil!” Choe yelled. “Oil!”

“What?”

Choe pointed at the light, the engine oil-pressure warning light. They’d run the damaged Mercury too hot for too long. Minute by minute, the oil leak had worsened. They’d dripped oil like blood across the sea. Now the engine had no oil left at all, and—

With a loud thunk, it seized up, leaving the Phantom without power.

And no power meant the Phantom was a floating paperweight.

With only its momentum to carry it along.

But the torpedo hadn’t forgotten them.

And even as Beck put all this together, the Alligator slammed into the Phantom’s keel. The torpedo’s firing pin smashed backward. Electricity flowed into the firing cap, setting off the charge. A fraction of a second later, the Alligator’s warhead exploded, blasting the boat with 670 pounds of explosive.

The Russians had designed the Alligator to sink destroyers and cruisers, big ships with thick steel hulls. The Phantom didn’t stand a chance.

The explosion threw the speedboat twenty feet in the air. The blast wave tore through the cabin in a fraction of a second, splitting the four men inside into unrecognizable bits. They had no time for last words or even last thoughts, just a bright flash of pain followed by the unknown and unknowable. By the time the blasted hull of the Phantom crashed into the sea, they were dead.

The boat itself lasted longer. It burned for ninety seconds, a floating funeral pyre visible in the night for miles. Then water filled its hull and it sank, taking its crew of corpses to the bottom of the sea.

6

EVEN BEFORE THE PHANTOM DISAPPEARED beneath the waves, word of its destruction was spreading.

The North Koreans knew first, of course. The sonar operators on the Nampo, the submarine that had launched the torpedo, picked up the explosion immediately. After radioing its commanders, the Nampo chugged toward the wreckage, seeking survivors. It found no life, just an oil slick and pieces of the Phantom’s hull.

The torpedo had blown apart the Phantom at 12:08 A.M. By 12:25, word of its sinking had reached North Korean’s military headquarters in Pyongyang, a crumbling concrete building ringed with antiaircraft guns and missile batteries. Five minutes later, Kim Jong Il, the chubby gnome who ruled North Korea, received a report of the Phantom’s sinking at his palace in Pyongyang. He celebrated with a glass of Johnnie Walker Blue, his favorite scotch. He had taken the Drafter’s betrayal personally. He knew only too well that his survival depended on the nuclear arsenal he had so carefully assembled. Kim had personally ordered Sung’s arrest and castration, an object lesson to anyone else who might betray him. Kim had no regrets about what he’d done. Regret had no place in his vocabulary. Loyalty, on the other hand, was a word he understood. The fact that a boat had come for Sung proved the man’s treachery beyond any doubt. His death was fitting punishment.

Now Kim had a call to make — to the man who had informed him of the Drafter’s treachery. He didn’t like depending on the Chinese. They used him and his people as pawns against the United States. But he couldn’t deny that this time, they’d proven valuable.

WASHINGTON LEARNED OF THE PHANTOM’S sinking not long afterward. At 00:08:02 local time, the boat disappeared from the screens of the E-2 Hawkeye. The plane immediately passed a message to the sonar operators on the USS Decatur—the destroyer in the Yellow Sea — advising them to listen for shock waves that might signal an explosion.

The Decatur didn’t have long to wait. The blast from the Alligator created a pressure wave that passed through the water at a mile a second, reaching the destroyer in under a minute. The sonar operators aboard the Decatur were used to tracking quiet Soviet submarines. To their trained ears, the blast wave sounded like a scream.

The Decatur reported the explosion to the combat information center at the USS Ronald Reagan, an aircraft carrier steaming in the Korea Strait. The Reagan sent the news to Osan Air Base. From there it went to the CIA station in Seoul. A few minutes later, the South Korean coast guard station at Incheon passed word that two containerships were reporting a fire in the Yellow Sea.

At this point, Bob Harbarg, the chief of Seoul station, decided he had to tell Langley. He fired off a Critic- coded message, the highest priority, reporting that the Phantom was missing and presumed lost. The agency hadn’t saved the Phantom, but it had done a fine job watching the boat sink.

The only question left was whether Ted Beck and his men had somehow escaped the boat. Four Chinooks scrambled from Osan Air Base to search for signals from the transponders that Beck, Kang, and Choe carried. A Predator drone was launched to photograph the site of the explosion. But the Chinooks and Predator found nothing. As the hours ticked by, the sailors on the Decatur, the crews on the Chinooks, and the spies in Virginia had to accept the truth. The men aboard the Phantom were lost.

On the Decatur and at Osan, the mission ended there. But at Langley, the Phantom’s sinking brought new urgency to a different set of questions.

THAT NIGHT, WELLS AND EXLEY walked down the Mall under a cloudless sky. The moon hung behind them, the Washington Monument rising toward it like a needle poised to pop a balloon. Aside from the joggers and Frisbee players sweating in the night air, they had the open green field to themselves. The hard-packed Mall path crunched under their feet, a sound Exley found oddly satisfying. She reached for Wells’s hand, squeezed it. He squeezed back.