The Art of War: A Novel (31 page)

“Okay.”

“Put a tourniquet on that arm. He’s still bleeding. And tape his mouth shut. He talks to no one.”

“Okay.”

“So your Benz has a bomb in it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Call the bomb squad. You’re no EOD specialist. See you in my office at ten.” He glanced at his watch. “This morning. And don’t forget you have an appointment at the Willard at noon.”

“Yes, sir.”

The admiral didn’t look at Fish again. Said hello to Willie, who had been sitting on a stool watching and listening, then walked out.

When I came back from locking the front door, Willie was putting his jacket on. “Damn,” he said. “That Grafton is somethin’ else.”

“Oh?”

“I was gettin’ around to kinda feelin’ sorry for this murderous son of a bitch after what you did to him, which God knows he had comin’, but that Grafton … He ain’t got a quarter ounce of sympathy in his whole body.”

“Sympathy isn’t one of his virtues,” I agreed sourly. “And I’m running a little short of it myself these days. Let’s get this asshole to a hospital before temptation gets the better of me. I’d sleep better nights if I killed him and dumped what’s left in a sewer.”

*   *   *

Admiral Cart McKiernan answered his phone after ten rings. He sounded sleepy, too.

“Couldn’t you have called in the morning?” the CNO asked, after Jake told him he wanted to see him at eight.

“I need to see you in the morning, as soon as possible.”

McKiernan sighed. “I have a Joint Chiefs meeting in the morning. Can this wait until lunch?”

“Yes, but I’d rather you come to Langley so I won’t be seen around the E-ring. I’ll buy your lunch.”

“A free meal! How can I refuse? See you then.”

Jake tapped on the glass that separated him from the driver’s compartment. The driver opened the window. “Langley,” Jake said.

Sitting in the chair behind the director’s desk, Jake sighed. He now knew who had killed Mario Tomazic, Reinicke and Maxwell, planted the bombs in his condo and Carmellini’s apartment, and gone to Seattle and killed one of the Russians who attempted to assassinate the president. Fish. Zoe Kerry had hired him for the DC hits. A Chinese man hired him for the Russian hit, a man Fish knew in Boston who was Kerry’s control. Fish had dumped the bag, even giving Carmellini the name of his Boston contact and his telephone number, plus a description of the Chinese man who met him in Seattle.

All that was left was the why. Staring at the map of Norfolk on his desk, Jake thought he had a glimmer about the why.

Zoe Kerry. What did she know?

If arrested and interrogated, would she talk or clam up?

If she was removed from the board, would her controller sound the alarm … in Beijing or Moscow, to whoever paid for murder and mayhem? Who was the controller? Someone was providing the money. Kerry certainly couldn’t be paying Fish for assassinations out of her own pocket.

He had told Tommy to take Fish to a hospital. He could be held there incommunicado and the word could be passed that he was not talking to anyone. Still, Zoe Kerry would eventually find out Fish was locked up. Criminals who commit serious crimes think they will never be caught; if they admitted the possibility, they wouldn’t do the crime. What would Kerry do when she heard about Fish? Disappear?

He thought about it. With Harry Estep’s help, she could be kept under twenty-four-hour discreet surveillance. Every phone call could be monitored. Except if she used a public telephone booth—that was the risk.

Kerry had had two shooting scrapes in cases involving Chinese intelligence operations in America. Had she tried to arrest spies or protect them? The Chinese had hacked into the navy’s computer systems. Five carriers were going to be in Norfolk over the holidays, and presumably the Chinese knew that. He asked Ilin for backdoor cooperation, and Ilin produced a map of Norfolk that he said was Chinese, a map that could be construed as showing the blast effect of a nuclear weapon. A team of Russians tried to assassinate the president. A man controlled by a rogue FBI agent killed the director of national intelligence, the director of the CIA and the director of the FBI. The same man, perhaps, was paid by a Chinese agent to kill one of those Russians with a car bomb in a parking lot at Sea-Tac Airport, and did so.

Add it all up, and what do you have?

Jake wrote a note to the receptionist asking to be awakened when she arrived, put it on her desk, closed his office door and stretched out on his couch.

If the Chinese hacked into the navy’s computer system, so could someone else. Like the Russians. Perhaps the North Koreans, but not likely. The Iranians had certainly been trying. Al Qaeda? The Venezuelans? What if …

If you are going to blow up half the American navy, why assassinate high-ranking intel officials? The director of the FBI? Why kill the president?

Who else was on Kerry’s list? Well, heck, he was. He knew
that.
But why?

He was thinking about the map when he went to sleep.

*   *   *

In Norfolk, Choy Lee had dinner with Sally Chan in the Chans’ restaurant. Sally’s father cooked the rockfish, which he served on a bed of rice with some traditional Chinese vegetables. He and his wife joined Choy and Sally at the table. It was a convivial meal, full of good cheer, happy conversation and smiles. The conversation was all in English, American English.

Choy wondered what the senior Chans would say if they knew he was a Chinese agent. But mainly he wondered what Sally would say if he told her. Would she drop him like a hot potato and immediately call the FBI?

He considered the problem from every angle as he sipped traditional tea.

“You are so preoccupied tonight,” Sally said. “What is on your mind?”

He shrugged. Now was not the time, nor was this the place.

“You need to get a real job,” Sally said seriously, gazing into his eyes. “Fishing all day and loafing is not an honorable occupation for a man of your youth.”

“I have earned my retirement,” he said defensively.

“No doubt, but what are you accomplishing?”

“I catch good fish.”

“Congratulations. Maybe you should become a commercial fisherman.”

“You are serious, aren’t you?”

“Indeed I am,” she said, still watching his eyes.

“I’ll think about it.”

Sally Chan still had his eyes pinned. “I think you are in love with me, and I am in love with you. You haven’t mentioned the L-word, but I think I know what is in your heart.”

Choy Lee’s blood pressure rose ten points.

He finished his tea and pushed the cup away. Like every other Chinese restaurant in America, this one gave out fortune cookies when the waitress brought the check. There was no check tonight, of course, but the waitress brought the cookies anyway. Choy smiled at her and examined the two on the small plate.

“Which one do you want?” he murmured to Sally.

“The one you don’t pick.”

He leaned forward, pretending to examine them, then seized the one nearest to him, broke it and extracted the small slip of paper. He unfolded it and read silently, “Important decisions await you.”

He crumpled it in his fist. Popped a piece of the cookie in his mouth.

“What does it say?” Sally demanded.

“I don’t know that I want to share. Open yours.”

She did so, and read aloud, “Romance is in your future.” She eyed him again. “Now yours.”

Choy saw no way out. He passed it to her. She smoothed the paper and read it.

“Prophetic, I would say,” she told him, and pocketed both of the small slips.

Choy Lee didn’t smile. He sat staring at her.

CHAPTER
EIGHTEEN

Invincibility lies in the defense; the possibility of victory in the attack.

—Sun Tzu

Lieutenant “Gnuly” Neumann and Lieutenant “Whitey” Sorenson were at the controls of a U.S. Navy P-8A Poseidon over the South China Sea on a routine surface surveillance mission. The Poseidon, the replacement for the navy’s forty-year-old turboprop P-3 Orion patrol airplane, had a surface search radar in a pod on the belly, which had been lowered hydraulically so the radar’s scan wouldn’t be limited by the engine nacelles.

Two naval flight officers (NFOs) and three enlisted naval aircrewmen sat at the operators’ stations along the port side of the aircraft behind the cockpit. Only the pilots had windows. Today they were busy tracking the ships and fishing boats in the South China Sea.

It was a dull mission. The plane and crew were based at the old naval air station runway at Subic Bay in the Philippines. The United States had turned over the base to the Philippine government in 1992 after the Philippine Senate demanded the U.S. military leave, but the rising aggressiveness of China had changed political reality in Manila. The Philippines decided they needed the United States as military allies. In 2012 the U.S. Navy was invited back to Subic Bay, the finest deep-water port in the western Pacific. Fortunately for the Americans, the saloons and whorehouses of Olongapo, the city beside the base, had welcomed the Americans back with open arms, as had all the Filipinos who once again had jobs at the base.

Gnuly was thinking about how the world had turned, again, when the senior NFO, Lieutenant (junior grade) Doug Shepherd, said on the intercom, “We have a high-speed bogey at three o’clock. Thirty miles and closing fast. On a course to intercept. It’s above us and descending.”

“How far are we from China?”

“One hundred and forty-five miles east of Hainan Island.”

Oh hell,
Gnuly thought,
here we go again.
The Chinese had already harassed U.S. patrol planes three times this year. Twelve or thirteen years ago, one hit a P-3. Killed the fucking Chinese bastard in the fighter—he went into the ocean—and the P-3 made an emergency landing in Hainan, where the Chinese held the crew for eleven days before releasing them. The pilot was now a commander; Gnuly had met him once. All these thoughts shot through his head in a second or two.

Gnuly left the plane on autopilot. A steady course might prevent some damn fool chink from inadvertently hitting him. Not that there was much he could do about a Chinese aircraft zooming around, with or without hostile intentions. The Poseidon had no antiaircraft weapons whatsoever. Nor was it aerobatic or supersonic. It was a military version of the Boeing 737-800, an airliner.

“Hell,” Whitey said, and stared out his window, trying to catch a glimpse of the oncoming airplane.

Then he saw it, slightly above them, descending toward them. “Collision course,” he said, his voice rising. “Right at us! Holy damn.”

The airplane, a fighter, slashed right in front of them, missing by what seemed a few feet. The Poseidon jolted as it went through the fighter’s wake. The fighter went out to the left in a climbing turn. Gnuly watched it. It was high, curving around to come in behind them.

“You guys in back get ready. This guy is gonna buzz us again.”

“Or hit us,” Whitey muttered. He concentrated on the instrument panel. If the autopilot kicked off, he wanted to be ready to hand-fly this beast.

The Chinese pilot came zooming in, seeming to aim his plane right at the cockpit. It looked like he was going to ram, yet at the very last second he dipped his wing and passed in front of them on knife-edge, a ninety-degree angle of bank, so close they could see his helmeted head in the cockpit. Extraordinarily close. Once again the Poseidon bucked as it crossed the fighter’s wash.

“Jesus!” Whitey roared. “He damn near got us.”

Gnuly took several seconds to get himself under control. He had thought they were going to die. “How close is the cavalry?” Gnuly asked Shep. He meant American fighters, of course.

“An hour away, at least,” was the answer.

“Get on the horn. Get them coming this way. Have Mike tell base ops what is going on.” Mike was the other NFO, Lieutenant Mike Fischer. “Give them our position. If we go down, at least they’ll know where to look.”

“Yep,” Shep said, and changed radio channels.

“Got it,” Mike echoed.

“There’s another fighter a thousand feet above us, crossing our nose right to left,” Whitey said. “Got him in sight.”

“The wingman,” Gnuly said.

“Yep.”

“Gimme a camera, somebody. I want a photo if he comes by again.”

The fighter did make another pass, but Gnuly was still trying to get the camera that had been passed to him turned on and focused when it came up the port side in afterburner and crossed right in front of them, seeming close enough to touch, its wingtip almost scraping the cockpit. Gnuly managed a photo as the fighter headed west, toward Hainan. It was at least two miles away when he clicked the shutter.

Then they were gone and the incident was over. Two fighters disappearing into the haze toward Hainan, the Poseidon still on autopilot, the crew wondering what it all meant. If anything.

It was an international incident, reported worldwide. Another Chinese-American incident. A Chinese spokesman said, “Continued surveillance by the United States threatens to undo previous diplomatic efforts.”

Jake Grafton read the article in
The Washington Post
. So did Sally Chan, in Norfolk, in
The Virginian-Pilot
. Choy Lee read that article, too.

*   *   *

After two FBI agents showed up at the hospital, Willie Varner and I took the van back to the shop. We got into his car and headed back to his place, where I was bunking.

“I guess you don’t need me watchin’ that feed from Grafton’s anymore.”

“You’re done.”

“Maybe that Kerry bitch will kill someone else.”

“I don’t think so. Grafton will take care of her.”

“Gonna be a nice little check, when I get it.”

“Hold that thought.”

Willie the Wire looked me over and shook his head. “This shit ain’t good for your soul, Carmellini,” he said. “Mine either.”

“Meet you in hell,” I muttered.

At his place he got out a bottle of bourbon, poured a glass neat, handed it to me, then went to bed.

I sipped bourbon and thought about the interrogation. I almost killed Fish when he told me about planting the bomb in my apartment. Of course, he had lots more to spill at that point, so I didn’t. Just caused him more pain. Lots more. Killing him would have given me a lot of satisfaction, but it would have been an easy out for him. Toward the end, he was begging me to shoot him. That’s when I was glad I hadn’t finished him. Now I was wishing I had.