Shadow Catcher

  CHAPTER 18

  General Zheng tapped the map lying on the defense minister’s desk. “Thus, if we attack now,” he said, “while the US Seventh Fleet is out of position, we can overwhelm Taiwan in one strike.” He took a conclusive step back and smiled. “Once we occupy the island, the Americans will do nothing. Their politicians will not allow it.”

  Zheng had spent the morning in the minister’s austere Beijing office, detailing his plan to wipe out Taiwan’s Patriot air defenses with short-range stealth missiles, allowing the PLA to overrun the island before the United States could react. Defense Minister Liang had listened attentively, patiently watching as Zheng maneuvered maps and charts about his wide ebony desk. Now he sat in silence, his chin resting on his hands, studying the maps. Surely he could see the undeniable wisdom of the plan.

  Finally, Liang leaned back in his brown leather chair. He gave a short sigh of frustration. “How long have I nurtured you as my protégé?” he asked. “How many years have you observed my actions and decisions, listened to my counsel?”

  The smile fell from Zheng’s lips.

  “And now you bring me this outlandish plan,” continued Liang. He spread his hands over the maps. “This is utter madness.”

  For a moment Zheng could not speak. He knew that Liang might have reservations, but to call his plan madness? He had underestimated how weak the minister had become, a most unfortunate turn of events.

  The defense minister slowly shook his head. “You still have not accepted our need for the Americans as an ally. The United States is the springboard from which China now leaps into an age of unprecedented prosperity. It is unwise to spurn such a lucrative partnership.”

  Zheng’s disappointment turned to simmering anger at the mention of America as an ally, but when he heard the word partnership, he exploded. “Partnership?” he spat out the word. “We own the Americans! They depend on our loans, our exports. Without us, their economy would crumble.” He tried to control his temper. He breathed deeply so that he could explain the realities of the situation to this ignorant old man. “Allowing the Americans to keep us from Taiwan is like allowing an impudent servant to keep his master from his own house. It defies logic.” He leaned forward and slapped a heavy hand down on the maps. “With this plan, we can occupy Taiwan without American interference. Once we are established, politics will take over. A victory is inevitable.”

  “An impudent servant?” Liang responded in a cool, pedagogic tone. “You talk more like a Qing warlord than a practical communist soldier.” He put his elbows on the desk, resting them on the scattered pieces of Zheng’s plan, as if they were not even there. “Let’s set aside our disagreement about the political ramifications for a moment. Even then, your whole operation depends on stealth technology that we do not have.”

  “We have ten operational DF-21 anti-ship missiles,” argued Zheng, “as well as the J-20 stealth plane.”

  “Pure fiction. Propaganda, and you know it,” countered Liang. “Do you think me an old fool? Or are you beginning to believe your own lies?” His eyes narrowed. “You are the one who brought that con man to my predecessor back in 2003. He was no more the father of American stealth than I am.”

  Zheng struggled to keep his features flat. Inside, he winced at the mention of Noshir Gowadia. The American traitor had come to him with a convincing résumé as a lead Northrop Grumman engineer, and Zheng staked his career on pushing the intelligence forward. The previous defense minister, General Chi, authorized billions to develop stealth technology based on Gowadia’s designs. None of it worked, not even their new stealth jet. The children who made plastic F-22s for sale to American toy stores could have achieved a similar result. If not for Gowadia’s fraud, Zheng might have followed Chi as defense minister. Instead, he had to spend the last eight years sucking up to Liang.

  “None of our attempts to acquire American stealth have achieved success,” said Liang, folding his arms. “Even the scraps sold to us by the Iranians and the Pakistanis proved worthless.”

  Zheng clenched his teeth and forced another smile. “I have abandoned my attempts to recruit American engineers or purchase black-market materials,” he said, trying to regain control of the debate. “Instead, I have operations under way to acquire the materials directly. I expect favorable results in a matter of days from—”

  “You mean your little Arabian diving expedition?” interrupted Liang.

  Zheng’s forced calm cracked, his nostrils flared.

  “Yes, I know about your failed attempt to recover a piece of a downed B-2,” said the defense minister. “Do not think for an instant that I achieved this position without my own resources.”

  Zheng nodded. “Yes, yes. My agents underestimated their American opponents. However, I have already set in motion a new operation that promises success. The missiles are ready. We will have the materials in a matter of days. We could strike within a week, well inside the window of opportunity.”

  “You do not understand,” said Liang, suddenly pounding the desk with his fist. “There will be no strike, no attack on Taiwan!” He stopped and calmed himself, regarding Zheng with an expression of pity. “Not long ago, I recommended you to the Politburo as my replacement. I had such high hopes for you. But now that my retirement is upon me, I find that our philosophies diverge. Your ideas are too rash, too radical. I fear that as defense minister, you would be a political stumbling block rather than a stepping-stone for the people.”

  Liang stood up from his chair and clasped his hands in front of him. “General Zheng,” he said, “it is with deep regret that I must inform you of my decision to recommend General Ho as my replacement instead of you. I will notify the Politburo of this change during our session tomorrow.”

  Zheng’s eyes lit up with fire. He opened his mouth to respond, but Liang held up a warning hand. “You may leave now, Zheng. That is all.”

  * * *

  Zheng’s anger faded into noble sadness as the ministry compound receded in the rearview mirror. Liang’s betrayal had infuriated him, but in his heart he always knew this moment would come. Had he not been patient? Had he not done his upmost to prevent this confrontation? He had tried to build an ally instead of an enemy, but Liang had finally forced his hand.

  With a heavy heart, Zheng placed a hand on his driver’s shoulder. “Han, we must take a slight detour on the way to the air terminal. You know the way.”

  CHAPTER 19

  “Five hundred eighteen . . . five hundred nineteen.” David Novak rasped out a number each time his bare right foot crunched into the matted subtropical undergrowth. He knew the guards could be right behind, but he could not move any faster through the thick vegetation. Then his counting faltered. He tripped and fell down a short hill, tumbling into twisted, wet scrub. He lay still. The cacophony of the rain forest assaulted his senses. Flashes of blinding light burst through the canopy above. Moisture from the underbrush soaked his ragged prison uniform. Thorns from the vines tore his flesh. And the birds . . . The birds never ceased their shrill squawking. Yet beneath their incessant chatter, he felt sure that he heard the sound of Chinese soldiers yelling.

  Novak could not focus his thoughts. For all the time he’d spent dreaming of escape, he now longed for the quiet solitude of his cell, his home for the last ten years of a twenty-five-year incarceration.

  He picked himself up and stumbled forward through the tangled green. “Five hundred twenty-one . . . five hundred twenty-two.” Fighting the unrelenting racket in his mind, he prayed to God that he had not miscounted. “Five and a half kilometers south, find the road, then two kilometers due west,” he mumbled. With any luck, the cache was still there, still hidden.

  Somewhere in his distant youth, the US Air Force Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape school had taught Novak that he had a thirty-inch stride in rough terrain. That translated to a distance of just over one and a half meters each time his right foot hit t
he ground. When his count reached 660, he knew that he’d traveled about one kilometer, one klick. With that knowledge, he could get to the general vicinity of his objective. After that, he’d have to depend on memory to find the entrance.

  Ten years ago, Novak’s transfer to Detention Center Twenty-six had been sloppy. The Chinese dumped him into the back of a partially covered troop carrier with just one guard. Then they drove him halfway across Fujian without even bagging his head to restrict his vision. It was the best day of his long stay in China. He caught a glimpse of his wingman, learning for the first time that he was still alive. On top of that, there were no beatings; there was fresh air and green trees; and best of all, he had a full view of the roads and signs leading up to his new home.

  With the change in prison came a change in policy. Hong Mo, as his captors liked to call him, would be allowed a few books to pass the time. The commandant personally delivered a stack of reading material for the American Devil’s “reeducation”: the writings of Chairman Mao, a collection of speeches by Deng Xiaoping, a Chinese–English dictionary—the content didn’t really matter. Novak savored the musty smell of the pages, the feel of the bindings in his hands.

  Then he found a map in a book about the forests of Fujian. Suddenly he knew exactly where he was.

  Eventually one of the guards noticed the torn page in the middle of the book. The commandant himself administered the beating and found the map stuffed into Novak’s pillow. He took away all of the books, as well as the pillow, but he could not purge Novak’s memory. The American had what he needed. Using simple navigation and a few modern landmarks, he knew he could make it to the cache.

  “Six hundred fifty-nine . . . six hundred sixty.” Novak paused at the top of a short ridge. Only half a klick to go before he reached the road. The birds continued their noisy discourse. Their ridiculous screeching echoed in his brain. Flashes of emerald light blasted his swollen eyes. Novak forced himself to concentrate, straining to focus his blurred vision. He thought he could see the trees thinning in the distance. It must be the road. He had traveled five kilometers, according to his pace count. In a half klick, he should reach a wide paved road, and then he could turn west toward his objective.

  He set off again. He tried to continue his count, but concentrating on the numbers made his head pound. The road was down there. He saw it. Couldn’t he let go of the count for a while? He continued trudging through the undergrowth in silence, willing his body to move forward on autopilot, but with no pace count to focus on, his mind began to lose its hold on reality. A familiar, faraway voice called to him from beneath the noises of the forest. “Relax, we’re almost there.”

  “Yes,” Novak mumbled, “almost there. Relax.”

  Slowly the flashes of light diminished and the trees darkened. The wide, moist leaves brushing against his hands took on the feel of stiff, brittle branches. His bare feet felt the stiff interior of combat boots instead of the painful press of matted vines. The sound of the birds disappeared entirely. In the quiet, the faraway voice became clear and close, right at his side.

  “Zrelaksowac, David. Relax. We’re almost there.”

  Novak looked to his right. His blurred vision seemed to clear. The jade light of the sweltering subtropical forest became the dark hunter green of a cold pine wood at midnight. A smiling camouflaged face gathered into sharp relief.

  “Jozef!” exclaimed Novak. “What are you doing here?”

  Novak’s best friend seemed aghast at the question. “What? You want to leave me behind?” he asked, the slightest hint of a Slavic accent tainting his speech. He smiled, his white teeth shining like beacons against the muted green and brown of his face paint. “Oh, I get it. You finally figured out how to get Anja all to yourself. Well, it won’t be that easy, my friend.”

  Novak fought through his confusion. He searched his memory until he recognized the scene. Pine trees reaching fifty feet in the air, their trunks bare for the first thirty, springy turf covered in brushwood, conical bushes that resembled miniature Christmas trees, the faint scent of butterscotch suspended in the still, cold air. This was a forest on the northwestern edge of the Soviet Union, and judging from the youthful grin on Starek’s face, this was 1986.

  A thought in the back of Novak’s mind screamed for attention, but the idea was so deeply buried that it seemed hardly a whisper. Then Starek’s coaxing voice drowned it out completely. “Where’ve you been? You’ve been silent for the last hour.”

  “Keeping the pace count, I guess,” replied Novak in an unsteady voice.

  “I told you to let that go,” admonished Starek. “I know these woods as well as I know the town I grew up in. Remember? I dodged the Russians here for more than a week last time.”

  Novak nodded, still looking around. He felt the survival vest on his chest, running his fingers over the bulge of the tightly wound extraction line. He started to gain some clarity. “The Canberra.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Starek, laughing and slapping his shoulder. “They’ll give us another one.” He patted a bulky satchel clipped to the webbing of his harness. “I’ve got the camera right here. If the Ruskies ever find that wreck, they’ll find nothing but charred aluminum.”

  Novak forced a smile. He remembered now. He knew exactly where he was, and when. They were lucky to be alive. They’d flown a photoreconnaissance mission out of the Agency’s forward base in northern Poland, the fourteenth mission of Operation Remote Icon.

  Six RB-57F Canberras ran low-altitude recon missions as deep into Red territory as Moscow. The aircraft had been hidden in Poland since the late sixties. Back then, they flew at their design altitude, above eighty thousand feet. But the Reds’ advanced surface-to-air missile network had forced them out of business. For the next twenty years, the Canberras stayed in mothballs, guarded by the Polish resistance. With the expansions in Soviet intelligence and the advancement of their radar technology, no one at the CIA was crazy enough to try reviving an air operation based behind the Iron Curtain. But the eighties brought with them the most ostentatious DCI in Agency history. He conceived a plan to fly the high-altitude birds at a few hundred feet, well below the radar.

  The plan worked, mostly. Unfortunately, the pilots had to climb higher once in a while to get a better photo.

  Novak and Starek always planned their missions to minimize the chance of a radar lock, but this time a Russian station was pointing at the right place at the right time. Their Canberra got caught on radar.

  The missile took out the left engine and most of their hydraulics. They’d been able to limp away but not far enough. They ejected one hundred klicks from the Belarusian border—on the Russian side. Now the Canberra smoldered in a narrow valley, and six hundred klicks of enemy territory stood between them and the dubious safety of their secret HQ in Poland.

  Novak reached up and felt the freshly crusted blood where the parachute strap had grazed his neck. Maybe the twenty-five-year Chinese ordeal was just a dream. Maybe he was in shock from the ejection. What did he care about the Chinese anyway? He was a Russian specialist.

  “We just have to make it to the extraction point,” Starek interrupted him again, his voice chipper. “I can’t wait to use the cable again. It’s foolproof. The chopper drops the line, we clip on, and woosh!” He waved his arms. “We’re birdmen!”

  Starek had already tested the UH-1 Huey’s extraction cable once. He went down during a scout mission in a one-man light aircraft. Novak remembered his worst fears coming true as he listened to his friend’s last radio call at HQ. Starek made a mayday call, and then the radio went dead. He was down behind enemy lines for more than a week before they heard from him again. Novak flew the chopper for the rescue mission, and Starek became the first Remote Icon operative to pull what the Agency called a Peter Pan, flying over enemy territory, suspended from a line beneath a rescue chopper.

  “It doesn’t seem that simple to me,”
argued Novak. “It also sounds painful,” he added with a smile, letting go of his thoughts and succumbing to his friend’s engaging banter.

  “Nonsense,” replied Starek. “In fact, the pickup is less jarring than the opening shock of a parachute. You took a worse beating a few hours ago.”

  Novak chuckled. “I’ll believe it when I feel it.”

  “I don’t care if it breaks my pelvis.” Starek pulled his flight jacket close around his neck. “I’ll just be happy to get out of this cold, depressing forest. As soon as we get home, I’m going to light a fire in the barracks’ hearth. Hang the Agency’s curfew.”

  “Yes. Home,” Novak repeated. Not so much home as . . . her.

  Remote Icon ran on Polish blood. A few Americans held administrative positions, including Wright, the supervisor in charge, but too many Americans living and working behind the Iron Curtain would draw unwanted attention to an operation that was already outrageously dangerous. The Agency left most of the grunt work to Polish nationals. In fact, Starek and Novak were the only Americans out of eight pilots flying for the operation. They’d been chosen for the assignment because of their Slavic backgrounds. Novak was born in the Midwest, the only child of Polish immigrants. Starek’s parents were Czechoslovakian defectors.

  Three days after Novak and Starek arrived at the base, Wright brought in a gaggle of Polish girls to process the film from the recon runs. One of the new recruits caught Novak’s eye. Tall and slender, with strawberry blonde hair that fell in front of her round-rimmed glasses, Anja struck Novak as the archetype of an earthbound angel. He fell in love.

  So did Starek.

  For the last few months, the American pilots’ competition for Anja’s affections had grown from a friendly game into a friendship-testing rivalry. But lately Novak had gained the upper hand. The night before they left on this mission, he’d even tasted the cool, wet sweetness of her lips. Now he struggled to decide how best to break the news to Starek, afraid that he might lose his closest friend.