The Ghost War

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