The Art of War: A Novel by Stephen Coonts Read Free Book Online

Hampton and Newport News, on the northern side of the James River estuary.
    At one time the north shore of Willoughby Spit was lined by huge, ramshackle wooden boardinghouses standing shoulder to shoulder. They were gone now, demolished to make room for apartment and condo complexes. It was progress, maybe.
    From his small balcony that faced Hampton Roads, Choy Lee could watch U.S. Navy ships coming into and going out of the Norfolk naval complex. Going in, the ships had to go around Willoughby Spit, over the tunnel, then turn ninety degrees to the south and go up the Elizabeth River to the Norfolk naval station, or, farther up, the Norfolk naval shipyard at Portsmouth. Going out, they rounded the spit and headed east for the exit from Chesapeake Bay into the Atlantic.
    On blustery or rainy days Choy Lee would often drive out to the public parking area on the end of the spit, adjacent to the tunnel entrance, and fish. He was an avid fisherman and caught more than most of his fellow anglers did. Choy Lee also had a boat, an aluminum runabout with an outboard engine that he pulled around on a trailer behind his SUV. On good, calm days he often motored out into Hampton Roads or down the Elizabeth River adjacent to the naval piers, there to fish and drink beer all day. It was a pleasant life.
    As it happened, Choy Lee was also an enthusiastic amateur photographer. He used a Sony Cyber-shot, very reasonably priced, with a nice zoom capability. He shot pictures of fish that he caught, sunsets, sunrises, storms over the water, rainbows, other fishing boats … and occasionally a passing warship. The backgrounds of the photos often contained ships sitting at piers. He sent a lot of these photos to his sister as attachments to long, chatty e-mails and posted some of the more innocuous ones on Facebook.
    Unfortunately, Choy Lee didn’t have a sister. The person in San Francisco who received the e-mails encrypted them and forwarded them on to an address in Beijing. The system avoided routine NSA scrutiny because the unencrypted e-mail was to an American address, not a foreign one. His bland Facebook posts went all over the world. The encrypted e-mails were merely drops in the raging river of data that flowed through the Chinese cyber-espionage system.
    A friendly fellow, Choy had a girlfriend, Sally Chan, whose father ran a Chinese restaurant that Choy liked to visit. They went to movies together, or to dinner at other modest restaurants in the Norfolk/Virginia Beach area, and occasionally Choy took Sally out in his boat to fish. She didn’t like to touch the live bait or fish, when he caught one, but she laughed like an American and was pleasant and breezy.
    Her presence made Choy feel happy. Life was good. Choy wondered how long it would last. Did he really want to go back to China? He thought about it occasionally, and somehow found himself thinking about life with Sally, in America.
    In early August another Chinese American joined Choy, or so his cover story ran. The man was really Lieutenant Commander Zhang Ping of the PLAN. Five months had passed since Zhang had planted the nuclear weapon in Norfolk. The two seemed like old friends, or new friends in a strange land. Zhang found an apartment he rented by the month in a building near Choy’s. The two were soon fishing together and running the boat down the Elizabeth River. Zhang took many photos of Choy with Choy’s camera, shots that were e-mailed on to Choy’s apparent sister. Some of them, but certainly not a majority of them, had as the background the carrier piers of the Norfolk Navy Yard, usually empty. In late June a carrier came in, then another. Huge ships: Zhang had never seen anything like them. Although some tankers exceeded the carriers in gross tonnage, those ships rode low in the water.
    The carriers, with their huge flight decks and sides rising sixty feet above the waterline, were visually stunning. Their islands, which rose another seventy or eighty feet above