Unfortunately, the stone wasn’t the reason.
Until now, Wells had seen no Chinese tourists in the palace today. Understandable, considering the protests in Tiananmen. But this garden was the exception. Five Chinese had decided it was a perfect place to relax. A young couple sat side by side on a bench, holding hands. Three men in their early twenties sketched a cypress tree, their hands flying over their pads.
Why here?Why now? Wells knew. The agents were good, nonchalant, and yet their nonchalance was a tip-off as obvious as Sun’s polished shoes. Two hours before, when he’d walked through the Gate of Heavenly Peace, he’d stepped into the open maw of the People’s Republic, and yard by yard he’d slipped into its gullet. The game he’d played with Sun seemed absurdly childish now.
Maybe Cao had been set up too. Or maybe Shafer and Exley had been right all along, and Cao was part of the trap. But the bad guys knew about the meeting for sure. Somewhere nearby a squad of secret police was waiting to arrest him.
Wells kept walking. Turning and running wouldn’t help. He had nowhere to go. He might as well see who showed up. He stopped beside the stone that looked like wood. It did, too, like a piece of flotsam sculpted smooth by waves. Wells checked his watch—12:00. In a minute, or two, he would walk on, casually, leave the garden. Then—
“Hey, mister!” A kid scuffled into the garden, waving at him. A kid?
Per Cao’s instructions, Wells was wearing a green T-shirt, the contact signal. The kid, also wearing a green shirt, walked over. “Mr. Green,” he said.
“Is this a joke?” Wells couldn’t help himself. Was this part of the setup? Why didn’t they just arrest him?
“You Mr. Green, right? I meet you at stone like wood.” The kid seemed to be enjoying himself. “I know code word,” he said.
Somewhere over the walls of the courtyard, a man shouted in Chinese. The students dropped their sketch pads and walked toward him.
“Tell me,” Wells said.
“Ghost.”
“You’re crazy, kid.”
“For you.” The kid reached into his pocket for a package hardly bigger than a pack of Juicy Fruit. A flash drive. He handed it to Wells and ran away. He didn’t get far. The students grabbed him roughly. Then footsteps clattered behind Wells.
He turned to see two men, the biggest Chinese he’d ever seen, as tall and muscular as NBA power forwards. They reached for him, wrapped their meaty hands around him. He didn’t try to fight. Another man followed. And as the power forwards twisted Wells’s arms behind his back, the third man reached into his pocket for a black canvas hood.
“Wait—” Wells said. But the world went black, and around his neck the string drew tight.
31
THE DARK BLUE BUOY, about the size of a basketball, popped to the surface of the East China Sea and fired an electronic burst into the atmosphere. A fraction of a second later, the Bei, a satellite 22,000 miles overhead, registered the buoy’s electronic signature and responded with an encrypted transmission of its own.
Just that quickly, the Xian, the newest submarine in China’s fleet, was in contact with its masters onshore — all the while remaining five hundred feet below the surface of the ocean, connected to the buoy by a fiber-optic cable. The technology was the most advanced in the world, a generation ahead of similar systems on American submarines. The Xian could even get real-time video imagery of ships all over the western Pacific, thanks to a network of Chinese satellites in low earth orbit that were connected to the Bei through a control center near Beijing.
Of course, the Xian had to be careful not to stay connected for too long. The United States monitored Chinese satellites, and after a few seconds, American signals-intelligence equipment on Guam, Okinawa, and Alaska could begin to target the buoy’s location. To protect itself, the Xian made contact with the Bei only twice a day.
Still, the satellite link had proven extraordinarily useful, Captain Tong Pei thought. Especially now, with American ships searching for Chinese subs. Thanks to the link, the Xian could get orders while staying hidden at the bottom of the thermocline — a layer of water where the ocean’s temperature dropped quickly, distorting sound waves and making the Xian much harder to find.
Before taking over the Xian, Tong had commanded attack submarines for almost two decades. He was the most experienced commander in China’s fleet. But he had never commanded a boat remotely like the Xian. And he had never been on a mission like this one.
Twelve hours before, at 0100, Tong had received his initial orders for this operation. He expected that the transmission they’d just received would include the final confirmation. He was glad to have the fail-safe of two separate orders. He wasn’t nervous, not exactly, but what he was about to do would echo around the world, and he wanted to be sure he wasn’t making a mistake.
THE XIAN WAS THE THIRD of China’s new Shanghai-class subs, by far the most advanced submarines that China had ever built. Until a few years before, China’s armed forces had relied on leaky ships, rusting submarines, and fighter jets whose design dated from the Korean War. China had refused to show its weapons to visiting American generals, for fear that they would sneer at the country’s weakness.
These days, China still kept its ships and jets secret. But now the country wanted to hide its strength. Chinese students studied engineering and software and fluid dynamics at the top universities in the United States. Some stayed in America and made fortunes in Silicon Valley. But most came home, and more than a few were working for China’s navy — whose top priority was building a submarine that could challenge the American fleet.
China’s focus on undersea warfare was pragmatic. Building surface ships capable of challenging the United States would cost hundreds of billions of dollars, more than China could afford, at least for now. Even a single nuclear-powered aircraft carrier was a massively expensive proposition. No country, not even the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War, had tried to compete with the United States in aircraft carriers.
But submarines were much cheaper, billions of dollars instead of hundreds of billions. And a lone sub could wreak havoc on an opposing fleet. In World War II, a single German submarine had sunk forty-seven boats in less than two years. Of course, the Xian wouldn’t sink forty-seven American ships, but if it scuttled even one it would change the balance of power in the western Pacific, forcing the Americans to back off China’s coast.
Taking out an American boat wouldn’t be easy. The American navy had not been seriously challenged since the Battle of Midway in World War II, when it decimated the Japanese fleet and started the United States on the path to victory in the Pacific. The collapse of the Soviet Union had only lengthened its lead. Its aircraft carriers, destroyers, and nuclear attack submarines were the best in the world.
But if any submarine could successfully break through the American defenses, it was the Xian. Put into the water just last fall, the Xian was the most advanced diesel-electric submarine ever built — in China or anywhere else. Noise-reducing anechoic tiles coated its hull. A seven-blade skewed propeller enabled it to slice through the water almost silently. Advanced electric batteries powered it, allowing it to stay underwater for weeks.
Further, the PLA’s engineers had greatly improved the Xian’s secondary power source. Besides its batteries, the sub had an “air-independent propulsion” system of hydrogen fuel cells. When the batteries and fuel cells ran together, they could push the Xian to thirty knots in short bursts, almost as fast as American nuclear subs.