Alex Berenson: The Ghost War

“On this heading, the boat to the west is our biggest problem,” he said. “We’ll make contact in roughly five minutes.”

“How about the jets?”

“One’s heading straight for us. The other west in case we run for the open sea. And there’s this.” Kang pointed at two more yellow blips moving toward them. “Those are airborne, less than a thousand feet, a hundred fifty knots.”

“Helicopters,” Beck said. “They’re pulling out all the stops.”

“Anxious to make our acquaintance.”

Beck examined the screen. None of the enemy boats or planes were headed directly for the Phantom. “Doesn’t look like they have a fix on us, though.”

“They need visual contact. Radar’s their big weakness.”

“So we hope,” Beck said. The helicopters were the real problem, he thought. The boats couldn’t catch them, and the jets couldn’t fly low or slow enough to spot them. But helicopters could. Which meant that—

“Tell Choe not to follow the coast,” Beck said. “I want him to run southwest. Two hundred fifteen degrees.” Into the open water of the Yellow Sea. They’d still have to get by at least one boat, but at least they’d be separating from the helicopters.

The North Koreans had obviously chased Sung toward the pickup point. But they hadn’t expected a speedboat, Beck thought. Without a radar fix, they were tightening the net methodically, coming from all directions, hoping to get a visual fix on the Phantom and blast it out of the water.

But the North Koreans didn’t know how fast the Phantom could run. The speedboat had geometry on its side. Only one enemy cutter stood between it and the open sea. And with each mile the Phantom ran, the search area widened, making it harder to find. In forty-five minutes they’d be in international waters, with F-16s, the world’s best babysitters, watching over them.

“And tell him to stay straight, max us out,” Beck said to Kang. Best to get out of danger as fast as possible. Their speed would save them. Kang said something to Choe, and suddenly the Phantom was flying across the flat sea at seventy-five knots, kicking up long, low waves of foam. Despite the danger, Beck couldn’t help but be amazed by the boat. Under other circumstances he would have liked to sit beside Choe and watch the ocean roll by, Corona in hand.

But not tonight. Even before it reached the enemy cutter, the Phantom had to run another obstacle: two small islands five miles off the coast, separated by a three-mile-wide channel. Both islands had naval stations, according to the satellite photos.

Overhead, the clouds were lifting slightly and the night sky was brightening, showing a sliver of moon, not what Beck wanted. He scanned the islands. Changnin, to the east, was silent, and for a moment he wondered if the satellites were wrong. Then, to the west, a stream of red tracers lit the night. The bullets landed far short of the Phantom, but they meant trouble nonetheless. Whoever was on that island had seen the boat pass.

As Changnin disappeared behind them, Beck heard the faint whine of jet engines. “How close?” he said to Kang.

“At least five minutes out.”

“And the cutter?”

“We’ll cross him in three minutes.”

“Range?”

“A thousand meters, give or take.”

Beck could have adjusted their heading to give them more room around the enemy boat. But running straight ahead meant that the two boats would cross each other for only a few seconds, giving the enemy ship little chance to fix its guns on the Phantom.

In the corner, Sung huddled in his chair, arms folded, clothes soaked, thin black hair matted against his skull. Beck wondered what was wrong with him. He didn’t look like a man who had just escaped the world’s most repressive regime. Maybe he was afraid of what would happen to his family. According to his dossier, he was married and had two teenage sons.

“You’re safe now,” Beck said in his halting Korean.

Sung just groaned and shook his head. Beck turned to Kang. “We’ve got to find out what’s wrong with him.”

“Right now we’ve got bigger problems,” Kang said. “That fighter’s closing.”

Through the cabin’s tinted windows Beck saw the North Korean jet, its running lights blinking in the night. The fighter was moving south-southwest, a couple of miles behind them but closing, the screech of its engines intensifying by the second.

“Either he’s got X-ray vision or they bought new radar when we weren’t looking,” Beck said. The jet banked steeply, looking for an angle to fire.

“He’s under two thousand meters,” Kang said. “Fifteen hundred. one thousand. ”

The fighter had stubby wings high on its fuselage and eight rocket pods under its wings. A Russian-made Su-25, a single-seat jet introduced in the 1980s. Obsolete by Western standards but still plenty lethal.

The Phantom shook as the Su-25 screamed by and unleashed a pair of rockets. The surfboard-sized missiles crashed into the water behind the boat, the force of their explosions sending five-foot-high waves across the sea. The Phantom jumped out of the water and crashed down, jumped and crashed, slap-slap-slap , until the waves finally subsided. Beck put a hand against the cabin wall and stayed upright this time.

The noise of the jet faded as the fighter prepared to swing around for another pass. Then the North Korean cutter appeared out of the darkness, a gray-black boat with heavy machine guns mounted behind the cabin. The cutter’s twin spotlights swung left and right, searching for the Phantom, finding it and for a moment filling the pilothouse with a white light, implacable and all-knowing. As if God himself were watching.

In the sudden brightness, Beck saw Sung trembling in his chair. The cutter’s machine guns opened up, their rounds thunking into the Phantom’s hull and the glass of the pilothouse. The windows shook and began to crack, long white scars cutting through the clear plastic. So much for running straight at the enemy, Beck thought. Time for Plan B.

“Choe! Hard right! Heading two-seven-zero! Now!”

Beck threw Sung down and lay on top of him and waited for the Phantom’s twin engines to get them out of trouble. Choe swung the boat west, easing off the throttle as he did, just enough that the boat wouldn’t tip. Beck closed his eyes and heard windows shatter as shards of fiberglass cut into his neck.

THE GUNS FADED as the Phantom pulled away. Beck stood and shook plastic shards off his clothes. The windows at the back of the cabin had been partly shot through. Even supposedly bulletproof glass couldn’t hold up to close-in machine-gun fire. The roar of the engines filled the pilothouse.

Boom! Sparks flew from the engines. The cabin shook and the boat’s nose lifted out of the water. The Phantom slowed and dragged right. Choe laid off the throttle. “Engine! Engine!” he yelled in English, before switching to Korean.

“He says we lost one of the Mercurys and the other one is light on oil,” Kang told Beck a few seconds later. “We can’t do better than thirty-three knots and we’ll be better off at twenty-five.”

Under other circumstances, thirty-three knots, or even twenty-five, would have been fine. Not tonight, Beck thought.

“How come they’re finding us so easily?” Kang looked at Sung.

“I was wondering that too.” Beck grabbed Sung’s backpack. Sung tried to stop him, but Beck lashed him, a hard flat chop that snapped the North Korean’s head sideways and sent him sprawling. Beck flipped over the pack. A pair of threadbare nylon pants, a thin cotton shirt, cheap black shoes, all drenched—

And, inside a waterproof bag, a plastic box, twelve inches by eight by four, three lights blinking red and green on its top. A transponder, broadcasting the Phantom’s location to every North Korean ship and jet within twenty miles. The man they’d come to rescue had betrayed them.