The Ghost War

“Then they better get out of our way.” Williams preferred to pick a fight with an unarmed trawler rather than a Chinese destroyer. “Get ready to splash them with the Phalanxes. I want them to know we’re serious.”

“Captain,” his coms officer said, “I have the Reagan.” Williams picked up.

“Captain Williams.” The admiral spoke softly but with absolute authority, as befitted the commander of a 102,000-ton aircraft carrier. “Looks like the Chinese don’t want to grant you shore leave.”

“I could use more air support, Admiral.”

“It’s already happening.”

“Sir, request permission to pull back to the Lake Champlain.”The Lake Champlain,a guided-missile cruiser, was fifty miles northeast, seventy-five miles offshore.

“Understand your concerns, but that would send the wrong signal, Captain. Our intel’s clear on this.”

Easy for you to say in your floating castle, Williams thought. “Yes, sir,” he said aloud. “In that case, I’m going to lose these boats on top of me, open up some space, come back around for another look.”

“Sir, Captain, we’ve just fired warning shots at the trawlers—” This was Umsle, his voice rising. Williams waved a hand. Not now.

“Affirmative, Captain,” the admiral said in his ear. “We’ll have four more eighteens”—F/A-18 Super Hornet attack jets—“in the air for you by 2130.”

“Thank you, sir.” Click. At least he’d gotten approval, in a backhanded way, to pull back a few miles, buy some time.

“Lieutenant, I want us at twenty-five knots, heading of six-zero.” A sixty-degree heading was northeast, a hard left turn from the Decatur’s current path.

“Sir, the trawlers—”

Williams didn’t want to hear about the fishing boats anymore. He had bigger worries.

“We’ve warned them, Lieutenant. Every way we know how. It’s time for them to make way. Now! Hard over.”

* * *

THE COLLISION CAME THIRTY SECONDS LATER.

In the Combat Information Center, men skidded sideways. Manuals and pens and anything else not nailed down spilled to the floor. On the bridge, Wheeler, the Los Angeles Times reporter, banged her knee hard enough to leave it black-and-blue, but she hardly cared. She’d have the lead story in tomorrow’s paper, she knew.

The sailors and officers on the bridge of the Decatur insisted afterward that the trawler refused to move out of the Decatur’s way, as if daring the destroyer to run it down. The Chinese disagreed vehemently, saying that the Decatur had deliberately hit the little trawler, which weighed eighty tons, compared with the Decatur’s eight thousand. Jackie, who was as close to a neutral observer as anyone who saw the collision, wasn’t entirely sure what had happened. Both boats seemed to expect the other to turn away.

But neither did, and so the destroyer’s prow tore the little fishing boat nearly in half, slicing neatly through a banner that read “China Will Not Bow to America!” Besides its usual crew of ten, the boat contained another twenty-four passengers, mostly college students who had come out to protest — and snap some souvenir photographs of the destroyer. Only five people died in the collision, but most of the students couldn’t swim. Seventeen drowned afterward.

The Decatur slowed down after the collison, but before it could put any rescue boats in the water, one of the Chinese frigates fired warning shots at it. After consulting with Admiral Lee, Williams decided to sail away. The Chinese boats were moving quickly to the trawler, and staying around might inflame the situation. Later, the Decatur’s decision not to stop would add to the controversy.

Aside from a few bumps and bruises, no one aboard the Decatur was hurt. But in the days that followed, no one would say the United States escaped the collision unscathed.

27

EVEN WITH TYSON’S HELP AND THE WRITTEN APPROVAL of the agency’s general counsel, Exley needed almost a full day to get the agency’s health insurance records for Keith Robinson. Those showed that Robinson’s wife, Janice, had given birth to a boy, Mark, a decade before. Cross-checking Mark’s date of birth against Social Security death records revealed the boy had died eight years earlier, about the time the mole first contacted the Chinese, according to Wen Shubai’s timetable.

And so Exley and Shafer decided it was time to talk to Robinson. “We don’t have to ask about the dead kid,” Shafer said. “He might get upset.”

“Mr. Tact. Thank God you’re here to help. Of course we’re not mentioning his son. That failed poly gives us plenty of reason to interview him.”

But when Exley called Robinson’s office early Friday evening, he didn’t answer. His voicemail said he was out sick. With a couple of calls, Exley tracked down an admin on the China desk who told Exley that Robinson had seemed fine the day before.

IN THE NEXT OFFICE OVER, Wells was catching up on the mole investigation, poring over the transcripts of Shubai’s interview. He had put aside for now his efforts to find out who was paying Pierre Kowalski to support the Taliban. Without account numbers, the Treasury Department couldn’t trace the payments from Macao that Kowalski had admitted getting. And the CIA’s dossier on Kowalski offered no clues to the mysterious North Korean that Kowalski had mentioned — though the file had enough detail about Kowalski to infuriate Wells.

Kowalski has brokered weapons sales of $100 million or more for dozens of sovereign nations and paramilitary organizations, including Angola, Armenia, China, Congo, FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), Indonesia, Libya, Nigeria, Poland, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen.

This list should not be considered conclusive. Kowalski often operates through intermedi aries in cases where he hopes to sell weapons to both sides in a conflict (i.e., Chad and Sudan). His commission ranges from 2 percent, in cases where he is merely negotiating a price and package of weapons, to 25 percent when he acts as a third-party dealer. Kowalski has earned about $1 billion since 2000, although the exact amount is unknown.

One billion. A thousand million. Maybe on Wall Street or in Congress that number was just another day at the office. But Wells couldn’t get his head around it. In Pakistan, he’d seen kids die from cholera because their parents couldn’t afford antibiotics that cost a few bucks.

The rest of the dossier detailed Kowalski’s personal history. Not surprisingly, he had never served in the military. As far as Wells could tell, he had never been near a battlefield, never seen what his mines and AK-47s and mortars did to the human body. He preferred the bodies in his vicinity to be young and blonde, and he could afford what he liked. Twice divorced, he’d acquired a taste for second-tier Russian models, who cost more up front than a wife but didn’t rate alimony on their way out. More than ever, Wells regretted not having put a bullet between Kowalski’s eyes back in the Hamptons.

After reading the dossier, Wells had paid a visit to the analyst who’d written it, Sam Tarks, a career officer in the agency’s arms control/nonproliferation unit.

“Pierre Kowalski? Nasty man.”

“I’m looking for anything that might have been too juicy to make it into the dossier,” Wells said. “Personal or business.”

“His personal life is about what you’d expect. He’s got a yacht called the Ares.Lots of coke, lots of Eu rotrash. Good times had by all.”

“Ares like the Greek god of war?”

“The one and only. But he doesn’t have any serious glitches as far as we know. I mean he’s not a pedophile