Free The Ghost War by Alex Berenson

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.
    “Jenny.” His voice was hardly above a whisper. “I won’t go if you don’t want me to.” She knew what he meant. Afghanistan.
    “Shh.” She put her arm over his broad back, rubbing the scar tissue left over from his run-in with the police in Times Square. “Does it still hurt?”
    “It’s fine.”
    Would you tell me if it did? she wondered. Not a chance.
    About thirty yards away a fat man in a gray suit sat reading the Post . He waved to them and pushed himself up, grunting like a loaded semi heading up a mountain pass. He was at least three hundred pounds, a coronary waiting to happen. He pulled a white handkerchief from his pocket and mopped his head.
    “George Tyson. You must be