The Ghost War by Alex Berenson

The Taliban's tactics have improved. Flanking maneuvers, short bursts of automatic weapons fire instead of emptying a clip every 2 seconds, decoying. The Taliban has become a skilled opponent. Someone's helping them. There is rumor that China and Iran are working on a deal exchanging nukes for oil and a Chinese nuclear engineer on the CIA's books ends up dead and no one has any clue how or why. Connections?

John Wells is somewhat legendary after the Times Square incident at the end of The Faithful Spy, at least in the law enforcement community. But he is bored living in DC so he rides his motorcycle at all hours of the night at 100+ on the Beltway. The suits in the CIA and the brass at the Pentagon want to know how the Taliban has gotten so good and both buildings think Wells would be a good option to go digging around the caves of Afghanistan.

He joins a special forces unit with the goal of trying to capture one of these 'advisors' and in the firefight, Wells manages to do just that . . . and he's Russian.

Russian? Why would a Russian want to help any Afghan? Their memory can't be that short. The Afghans embarrassed the Russians. But this particular Russian is fairly chatty and gives up an arms dealer who is paying Russian mercs and this dealer has a connection inside China.

A 2nd level Chinese colonel is worried that his boss, in trying to gain more power, is dangerously close to starting a war between the US and China. Turns out this aide was once a CIA informant who has been dark for about 10 years, but in order to stop a war, he makes contact and wants to meet with someone who has never been to China, pass along what his boss is doing, and get the hell out of Dodge before the world blows up.

Who better than Wells? He travels to Beijing, despite the rising tensions between the two countries as a surge of Chinese nationalism as they stand up to the USA. He follows the plan for the meet, but gets picked up by Chinese security (was he set up?), is tortured harshly, and is doing his best to hold his cover when our colonel comes in, shoots the interrogators and pulls Wells out.

The dash is on to get out of Beijing to the coast where they can get rescued, pass info to Washington, and stop this insane war before things really get out of hand.

This is the 2nd in the John Wells saga by Berenson. While The Faithful Spy was a high intensity, fast-paced chase to thwart a catastrophic attack on Times Square, this book is more espionage and skullduggery as Wells tries to string together seemingly unrelated bits of information into a coherent series of connections between Washington, Beijing, Afghanistan, and this mysterious arms dealer.

If you are into this genre of books, you could do far worse. I've already requested the next in the series, The Silent Man, 3rd in the series of 5, so I suspect I'll move quite quickly through his work. He is that good . . . and productive as he has 5 novels in 5 years.

So . . . what are you waiting for?

East Coast Don