Foxbat (10 page)

The Rossyia is vast: twelve floors containing three thousand two hundred rooms; nine
restaurants, two of which can each accommodate a
thousand diners; six bars; fifteen snack bars, and the world’s biggest ballroom. It also possesses a huge cinema, the
Zaryadye, that can hold three thousand people. Publicity material relating to the hotel dubs it ‘The Palace’ but, as the black Mercedes approached the vast structure squatting
beside the Moskva river, Richter could see why it had attracted that other, less complimentary, epithet, ‘The Box’.

Bykov had booked him a room on the sixth floor, and the GRU officer suggested they adjourn to a
bar, once Richter had deposited his bag there.

‘We checked the room thoroughly for bugs yesterday,’ he explained, ‘but in
Moscow you never really know who’s listening to you. That’s why I’d feel more comfortable in the bar. I regret to say that your presence here has not been met with universal
approval, and I’ve been instructed that you should not to be allowed to visit my office or any other building used by the GRU or SVR.’

‘Hotels and bars are fine with me,’ Richter assured him.

They found a booth at the back, ordered drinks and waited till they were placed on the table in
front of them.

‘Right, Viktor, I’m all ears.’

Despite his fairly fluent English, for a moment Bykov looked confused – he hadn’t
heard that expression before – but then his face cleared. ‘Very well. Let me start at the beginning. Since the break-up of the Soviet Union our armed forces have remained in a
state of flux. For a long time it wasn’t always clear exactly what weapons or aircraft were located at what bases, nor who had control of those assets. Salaries weren’t being
paid, officers and men weren’t getting relieved at the ends of their tours of duty, all that kind of thing. It was a total mess, an administrative nightmare.’

Richter nodded. ‘The West was very concerned about what was going on. But now you seem to
have got everything sorted out, yes?’

‘Yes, we have – or most of it, anyway. But as Moscow re-established positive control
of all branches of the armed forces, and as a matter of routine began comparing listed inventories with the assets that could actually be located and identified, some accounting discrepancies
were discovered.’

‘“Accounting discrepancies”?’

‘That’s what Moscow called them, yes. At some of the more remote, less
well-supervised military bases, it became apparent that some officers had been supplementing their salaries by disposing of certain equipment they decided was surplus to requirements.
Basically, they would write off a few cases of AK47s, say, on the grounds that they had been damaged by immersion in water, and then sell them to anyone who wanted them. Once this came to
light, Moscow finally understood why the Chechen rebels seemed so well-armed – they’d obtained most of their weapons and ammunition direct from Russian regular forces.’

‘You didn’t bring me all the way out here to talk about a few black-market
Kalashnikovs, Viktor. What else went missing?’

A look of embarrassment flitted across Bykov’s face. ‘You’re quite right.
Missing small arms are a matter of concern, obviously, but we soon discovered that some larger and more expensive pieces of military equipment also couldn’t be accounted for. In
particular, we seemed to be missing a few aircraft.’

‘What aircraft, precisely?’

‘The Russian Air Force reported that it couldn’t locate fourteen of its
Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-25 interceptors: the aircraft NATO has codenamed the Foxbat.’

Richter stared at him. ‘Jesus, Viktor, you can’t misplace something that size, and
certainly not fourteen of them.’

‘I agree. Yesterday,’ Bykov added, looking even more unhappy, ‘that number
went up to sixteen. An inspection team sent to the Letneozerskiy interceptor base – you might know it as Obozerskiy Southeast – in Karelia, near the Finnish border, couldn’t
account for two MiG-25s that were supposed to be on the strength of 524 IAP. What’s even more disturbing is that all the members of the inspection team were killed outright when their
aircraft crashed shortly after leaving the same base. An initial inspection of the wreckage suggests that it exploded in midair. We only know about the missing MiGs because the team leader
telephoned Moscow two days earlier to explain that he’d have to go in person and check if they were currently at a maintenance facility in the Ukraine before he rendered his final
report. I’ve since checked with Zaporizhia, the facility in question, and the MiGs definitely aren’t there.’

For a few moments Richter was silent, then he spoke slowly. ‘I can see your problem,
Viktor. What I’m not sure about is how you think I can help you solve it.’

Bykov raised a hand to the waiter and requested another round.

‘As you well know, we have adequate technical intelligence resources – satellites,
phased-array radars and the like. Our problem is that our satellites carry out surveillance only of countries we consider to be hostile or potentially hostile to Russia. Likewise, our radars
look outwards, across our borders, into China, Scandinavia and all the other countries that surround us. What we don’t have is much satellite coverage of activity here
inside
Russia, and before we can work our where the MiG-25s have gone, we need to get access to the take from whatever satellites the Americans
had within range when those aircraft went missing. So I supplied whatever dates and locations I could deduce to your section, and requested that you brought the images with you.’

‘I’ve got them right here,’ Richter said, touching his briefcase,
‘together with our analysts’ best guesses about the aircraft they’ve spotted on the films. I’ve also got JARIC and N-PIC analysts standing by to talk to your people if
necessary.’

‘Thank you.’

‘But first I have a question. In fact, I’ve got two. If somebody’s buying or
stealing Foxbats, that’s only half the equation. Without munitions, spares, maintenance people and, obviously, pilots, the aircraft’s just a thirty-ton paperweight. Are you
missing any pilots or maintainers as well?’

Bykov nodded. ‘I don’t have exact figures, but I understand that a number of
qualified Air Force personnel cannot currently be located. And your other question?’

‘Why are you bothered? So what if some nation wants to beg, borrow or steal a handful of
obsolete interceptors? Remember, the MiG-25’s a forty-year-old design. If somebody had walked off with a dozen of your latest air-superiority fighters I could understand your concern.
After all, you sell fighter aircraft around the world, and you’ve supplied that aircraft to a lot of countries – off the top of my head Algeria, Iraq and Syria to name but three
– so what’s so special about these sixteen antiquated Foxbats?’

‘Let me ask
you
a
question,’ Bykov responded. ‘Why did we build the MiG-25?’

For a few moments Richter just stared at the Russian. ‘I don’t see where
you’re going with this, Viktor.’

‘It’s crucial. When you know why we built the aircraft, you’ll know why
we’re so worried about who’s got them now.’

Richter nodded. ‘OK, I’ll play the game. We believe you originally designed the
Foxbat to counter the American XB-70 Valkyrie Mach three bomber.’

‘That wasn’t in fact the case, but even if it was, the XB-70 project was cancelled
well before the first prototype MiG-25 flew. We knew that the Americans had no other supersonic bombers planned, so why did we continue developing the aircraft?’

‘Probably to counter the SR-71A Blackbird spy-plane. To catch it you’d have needed a
Mach three interceptor.’

‘Wrong again,’ Viktor Bykov said. ‘The Blackbird was never a real threat to
us. That aircraft carried no weapons: all it could do was take pictures, obtain radar images and measure radiation.’

‘So why
did
you build the
Foxbat?’ Richter demanded.

‘Let me ask you another question,’ Bykov said, clearly determined to spin this out.
‘In September 1976 a renegade pilot called Viktor Belenko defected to the West from our airfield at Chuguyevka in a MiG-25 and landed it at Hakodate airport in Japan. The American
Central Intelligence Agency and the Foreign Technology Division at Wright-Patterson took the aircraft totally to pieces before giving it back to us. You heard about that, no doubt?’

‘It was before my time, but I’ve read some reports,’ Richter replied
cautiously.

‘Do you remember what those reports said about the avionics and radar fit?’

Richter shook his head. ‘Not in any detail.’

‘Let me refresh your memory, then, though I didn’t read the same reports that you
did.’

‘I’m certainly glad to hear that,’ Richter murmured grimly.

Bykov smiled, then continued. ‘The reports probably highlighted the lack of solid-state
electronics in the avionics. Everything was old-style,
with valve-driven circuits and equipment, and a massively powerful radar. I’m sure there was a certain amount
of self-satisfied chuckling in the corridors of Whitehall and the Pentagon at the poor old Russians and their old-fashioned fighter.’

Richter shifted slightly in his seat. What Bykov was saying was indeed a fairly accurate
paraphrasing of the classified analyses that had circulated in Western intelligence services following the examination of the misappropriated Foxbat by American technical experts.

‘It apparently never occurred to anybody to ask
why
.
Why had we used valves
instead of printed-circuit boards and transistors? After
all, in our other fighter aircraft we used similar technology to the latest American fighters. In fact,’ Bykov added with a chuckle, ‘some of the avionics we used were actually
stolen from the Americans.

‘Long before we built the MiG-25, we’d perfected solid-state electronics, and we had
off-the-shelf components that we could have used in the aircraft, but we didn’t. We took a step backwards and fitted valves, and all that other old-fashioned equipment. So I ask you
again – why?’

‘Viktor, I have no idea. The Foxbat was your front-line interceptor and—’

‘Exactly,’ Bykov interrupted. ‘But
what
was it intended to intercept? That’s the crucial question.’

‘American bombers? B-1s and B-52s, I suppose?’

Bykov shook his head. ‘To intercept those lumbering giants we would hardly have needed a
Mach three fighter, and certainly not a fighter that can reach a ceiling of over thirty thousand metres. Let me give you a clue – EMP.’

‘EMP? You mean electromagnetic pulse?’ Richter frowned.

‘Exactly. Add EMP to valve-based avionics and a Mach three interceptor with a
thirty-kilometre ceiling, and what do you get?’

For a moment, Richter said nothing, his mind making connections that looked less and less
attractive the more he thought about them. Then he looked back at Bykov.

‘Oh, shit,’ he said.

‘“Oh, shit” is right,’ Bykov agreed. ‘The Foxbat was built for one
role only. It was designed to intercept intercontinental ballistic missiles in
their terminal phase – that’s why it’s so fast and flies so high –
after detonation of one or more nuclear weapons. The EMP from a nuclear blast will fry solid-state electronics, but it has no effect on valve-based systems, and that’s precisely why we
fitted them. The Foxbat was designed as a post-nuclear exchange
survivor
. So the obvious conclusion
is—’

‘The obvious conclusion,’ Richter interrupted, ‘is that whoever’s got
your aircraft is planning on an exchange of nuclear weapons, and is intending to survive that exchange by using your Foxbats to take out the inevitable retaliatory nuclear strike in its
terminal phase.’

‘Is this all he had on him?’ Pak Je-San demanded, staring down at the collection
of objects arranged on a wooden table in front of him. He’d already looked with displeasure at Yi Min-Ho’s bullet-riddled body in the mortuary next door.

‘Yes, sir. We thoroughly checked the ledge he was using as an observation point, and there
was nothing else there. We also surveyed the entire surrounding area, including the spot where the spy was killed, and found nothing further.’

Pak picked up the notebook and read the entries carefully: all related to a handful of F-5
fighters. That was exactly what he’d expected, for as soon as he’d heard about the possible landing of a spy near Suri-bong he’d ordered all operations involving the MiG-25
interceptors to cease. Opening the hangar doors to attract the South Korean agent’s attention while the patrol ambushed him had been, he thought, a master-stroke. But he hadn’t
anticipated the Kyocera satellite phone, and that was a worry because it meant that the spy might possibly have disclosed what he’d seen emerging from the secure hangar.

But Pak doubted if the intruder had enough time. He’d spoken to the
chung-wi
who’d led the patrol, and then to all of his men individually, about the exact sequence of events, and the timing didn’t
seem to work. He knew exactly when the hangar doors had opened, and when the lieutenant had ordered his men forward. There would then have been a short delay while the tractor was hitched to
the aircraft, and another before any part of the MiG-25 could have been visible from the hillside opposite. Then the spy would have had to first identify what he was seeing, switch on the
Kyocera, wait until it had locked on to a satellite,
enter the number, and then wait for his contact in South Korea to answer.

As far as Pak could estimate, all that would take an absolute minimum of two minutes, but the
chung-wi
had assured him that two minutes after the hangar doors had slid open the spy was already dead. At worst, he might have got
through to his contact in South Korea, but he’d certainly had no time to pass on a detailed report.

But whatever had happened, there was nothing else he could do about it now. The spy was dead and
whatever knowledge he had gathered had died with him. Pak had obviously reprimanded the lieutenant for resorting to killing the man – if taken alive they could have used a variety of
sophisticated techniques to loosen his tongue – but at least he hadn’t escaped, and now the final stages of their operation could begin.

The North Korean Air Force was still flying the antiquated Shenyang F-5 at T’ae’tan
but, as Yi Min-Ho had discovered, only a few of the old fighter planes now remained there. All the Ilyushins had already been redeployed to the forward bases at Nuchonri and Kuupri, located
on the west and east coasts respectively, just north of the DMZ.

Pak wondered if the South Korean spy had noticed the lack of aircraft movements. In fact the
F-5s were there simply as camouflage, something to park on the hardstandings whenever one of the American spy satellites was due to pass overhead.

The real activity at T’ae’tan centred on the four newer, closely guarded aircraft
shelters where Pak had so far assembled twenty-four MiG-25 interceptors, mostly from Russia, but two from Iraq, one from Algeria, another from Iran, and the remaining four from India. And it
wasn’t just the aircraft themselves. Over the last three years he and his most trusted associates had bribed, suborned or blackmailed air force officers and NCOs from a number of
foreign nations, and he now had a full maintenance team living in the curtained rooms of the new building almost adjacent to the hangars, as well as armourers and pilots. It also housed a
virtually full inventory of spares and enough munitions to make the secret squadron of Foxbats a viable force.

The personnel enlisted had all been very well rewarded to change their allegiance – though
not as handsomely as they believed because of the number of ‘superdollars’ included in their handouts of cash – and
had all been promised substantial
bonuses upon successful completion. Pak well knew that his government had no intention of honouring such a commitment. A bullet in the back of the head was a lot cheaper than a bonus of any
size. The risk of loose talk was why all these foreign military personnel were accommodated here in the remote airfield at T’ae’tan rather than in Ugom or any other town.

Pak was now awaiting only the final two aircraft, and imminent delivery of the remaining
munitions – the forty-eight R-40T air-to-air missiles which would bring his total arsenal up to one hundred and sixty-three. Known to NATO as the AA-6 Acrid, this is an essential
component of the Foxbat’s high-level interception system: a Mach 4.5 missile with a thirty-kilometre range and carrying a seventy-kilogram high-explosive fragmentation warhead. Coupled
with the Foxbat’s high-level capability and its immensely powerful Saphir-25 radar – NATO reporting name Fox Fire – it proves a highly effective weapon against high-flying,
high-speed targets.

The Acrids were currently travelling by sea from Varna in Bulgaria, and would route through the
Suez Canal to Bandar Abbas in Iran – the former Shah’s premier naval base – and from there they’d be flown direct to T’ae’tan itself. And once those had
arrived, everything needed would be in place.

Following the events of 11 September 2001, there was a major shake-up in the American
intelligence organization, a community still reeling from shock at the destruction of the Twin Towers and the attack on the Pentagon. And more so from what many perceived to be a series of
inexcusable failures of intelligence collection and analysis.

One of the major changes was the creation of an entire new bureaucracy: the Office of the
Director of National Intelligence. Its function was to integrate and analyse all intelligence – domestic, foreign and military – and assess its impact on both homeland security
and American interests abroad. With the creation of the ODNI, the post of DCI or Director
of Central Intelligence – the head of the CIA and the most senior
intelligence community post in the United States – had ceased to exist.

This was a pity, because Walter Hicks would probably have made a very good DCI. He’d been
the Director of Operations (Clandestine Services), and acting DCI, when a crisis had arisen that took America to the brink of thermonuclear war. His handling of the emergency had impressed
the President. When the previous incumbent had retired for genuine health reasons as opposed to Washington-speak ‘health reasons’ – a euphemism for either sexual misconduct
or some form of financial irregularity – Hicks had indeed been promoted, but not to the post of DNI. That job had gone to a career diplomat, probably because the White House
didn’t trust a professional spook to regulate or represent the interests of other professional spooks.

Instead, he’d become the new Associate Deputy Director of the CIA, and he wasn’t
much enjoying it. Hicks had always been a hands-on, let’s-kick-some-ass kind of guy, and his enhanced salary didn’t entirely compensate for having to be politically correct at all
times and talk nicely to time-serving politicians demanding information that he personally didn’t think they had any right or need to know.

Since his appointment, his already sparse fair hair had begun receding to the point where he was
seriously considering shaving his head completely. He had even sold his forty-five-foot catamaran because he no longer had any spare time to sail her.

So it was with a certain sense of relief that he noted Richard Muldoon’s name showing up
in the appointments diary on his computer. He knew Muldoon well enough to realize that the gangling Head of the Directorate of Science and Technology – nobody had suggested changing the
name of that particular section of the Agency – wouldn’t bother him with anything trivial.

‘Take a pew, and grab a coffee, Richard. What’ve you got?’

Muldoon put the file he carried on the conference table and helped himself from the coffee pot
– he sometimes thought Hicks should simply take his caffeine intravenously and save all that messing around with cups and beans and percolators – then sat down opposite the
ADD.

‘We’ve received Flash traffic direct from National Intelligence Service headquarters
at Naegok-dong in Seoul. The request came from
Kang Jang-Ho – who’s number two to Bae Chang-Su – but Bae himself countersigned it.’

‘I’m pretty busy and you’ve read this file, so just give me the short
version.’

Muldoon was used to dealing with Hicks, and had anticipated him. ‘It’s pretty
simple. For the last few months the NIS has been picking up whispers about unusual air activity in and around the south-west corner of North Korea. Unfamiliar aircraft seen flying over the
land and occasionally over the Yellow Sea, even the occasional sonic boom, that kind of thing. They sent out surveillance vessels, mainly commandeered fishing boats to allow an element of
plausible deniability if they were intercepted, but their observers didn’t spot anything they weren’t expecting.

‘The only military airfield in that whole area is T’ae’tan, located right
here.’ Muldoon pulled a map out of his file and opened it on the table. ‘It’s one of the closest North Korean airfields to Seoul, so the NIS has always tried to keep an eye
on any new developments there.’

Hicks looked at the chart where Muldoon was pointing. ‘Yes, got it. Carry on.’

‘T’ae’tan is known to operate Ilyushin Il-28 bombers and Shenyang F-5
fighters, but what some witnesses reported seeing was nothing like either aircraft. The problem for the NIS was that those witnesses weren’t exactly qualified in aircraft recognition,
most of them being fishermen. But they kept getting so many reports they finally decided they needed to check on T’ae’tan and find out exactly what was going on there.

‘So yesterday – Monday – they landed one of their agents just about
here.’ Muldoon pointed again to the map. ‘His instructions were to trek across country to T’ae’tan and set up an observation point. Then he was to count the number of
F-5 fighters and Il-28 bombers he saw and identify any unusual aircraft. He was using a satellite phone to call in reports, and they received his third and last one this morning. It started
with the sound of gunfire, then he yelled “They have new aircraft. I’ve seen a—” And then his satellite phone simply went dead, and it’s been off air ever
since.’

‘That’s it?’

‘That’s it.’

‘And they want us to do what, exactly?’

‘The next time one of our Keyhole birds passes near T’ae’tan, they’d
like us to tinker with the orbit so it’s a bit out of sequence, then take a bunch of pictures to see if we can figure out what’s going on.’

‘And will we do that?’

Muldoon nodded. ‘We don’t have a lot of options, as Oplan 5027 commits us to
lending our support to South Korea, and this request falls well within the parameters. So I’ve already confirmed the tasking – and I’d quite like to know what’s going
on over there myself.’

Yongbyon is a small and unremarkable town located about one hundred kilometres north of
Pyongyang. In the mid-1960s the North Koreans established a large-scale nuclear research facility there, and ten years later they began construction of a nuclear reactor on the site. Within a
further ten years they’d also erected a reprocessing facility that would allow them to extract plutonium from nuclear fuel, and a separate research reactor rated at five megawatts. The
DPRK built other reactors, including a two-hundred-megawatt installation at Taechon, but it was the Yongbyon complex that worried everyone most.

Estimates prepared by South Korea, America and Japan, based upon an IAEA calculation of the
radioactive isotope content of nuclear waste unloaded from the five-megawatt reactor, suggested that by the end of 2004 the North Koreans could have extracted between twelve and twenty-four
kilograms of plutonium.

In fact, they’d extracted rather more than even the most optimistic – or
pessimistic, depending on point of view – of the estimates, but hardly any plutonium now remained in the lead-lined subterranean storage room at Yongbyon.

A modern twenty-kiloton nuclear warhead contains eight kilograms of fissionable material, so
most assessments suggested that the DPRK might have enough plutonium to construct two or three nuclear weapons of this size. That assumed the North Korean scientists were constructing a
weapon of modern design, using shaped charges known
as lenses to initiate the detonation sequence. But no matter what method they were using to trigger the device, they
certainly had enough plutonium to build at least one weapon, even if it was the size of a truck, as one Western scientist had sneered.

There are several problems associated with the production of nuclear weapons, but one of the
most intractable is size.

The ‘Little Boy’ bomb that the USAF dropped on Hiroshima was about three metres long
and weighed almost four thousand kilograms. It contained sixty-four kilograms of uranium 235, but the so-called ‘gun’ design was so primitive and ineffective that a mere 0.7
kilograms of the material underwent nuclear fission. But it still had a yield approaching fifteen kilotons and killed about one hundred and fifty thousand people.

The ‘Fat Man’ weapon dropped three days later on Nagasaki was even bigger and a lot
heavier, with a slightly higher yield, and employed shaped charges to compress a core of plutonium into a critical mass. Plutonium is slightly easier to produce than uranium 235, and is the
favoured material for regimes that are taking the first steps towards becoming full members of the ‘nuclear club’.

The most important point about the first two American atomic weapons is that they were massive,
and that was the problem the North Korean nuclear scientists had been struggling with. They could build such a weapon – since the October 2006 nuclear test in Hamgyeong province in
North Korea that hadn’t been in dispute – but constructing a weapon that was light and small enough to be carried by one of the regime’s ballistic missiles was another story
entirely. Nevertheless they’d succeeded, and the warhead they’d produced was designed to fit inside the nose cone of every missile in the North Korean inventory, from the old and
basic Scud to the three-stage Taep’o-dong 2. They’d fabricated three ten-kiloton nuclear warheads using eighteen kilograms of fissionable material, and these had all been sent to
the Chiha-ri missile site located a short distance north of the DMZ.

Just over a year earlier, the Yongbyon scientists had been given the most explicit
instructions from Pyongyang – by Kim Yong-Su himself, in fact – to use a further twelve kilograms of plutonium in fabricating a twenty-kiloton weapon and detonation system for a
highly classified project. That all made sense, but what didn’t make sense were the additional
orders. They were also to prepare four standard-size warhead casings,
but fill them with scrap metal.

In a totalitarian regime like North Korea, survival usually comes down to quietly doing what
you’re told, so that’s exactly what the scientists did.

Six weeks previously, a truck guarded by a troop of heavily armed soldiers had appeared in
Yongbyon. The officer in charge had handed the commanding officer a set of orders signed by the highest authority in Pyongyang, and instructed his men to load the genuine nuclear weapon,
stored inside a wooden crate, onto the lorry. As soon as it was loaded, the convoy set off again, its destination now the dockyard at Wonsan. The fake warheads were put into a storeroom, and
then the scientists got on with their other work.

That afternoon, another convoy appeared at Yongbyon, this one in the charge of a
so-jang
– major-general – and within an hour the first of the four fake warheads had been loaded into one of the waiting trucks. From
the outside, these specially designed vehicles looked pretty much like regular army three-axle five-ton trucks, albeit with solid sides. Somebody who knew about goods vehicles might have
spotted the heavy-duty springs and uprated shock absorbers on the rear axles, but that was about the only indication that in each one of them most of the rear compartment was occupied by a
lead-lined safe.

In fact, calling the structure a safe was to misstate the case. It comprised a fixed base and
two long sides, formed from half-inch steel plates lined with lead on the inside. The two ends were made of the same material and hinged at the base, but were so heavy that closing them
required the use of hydraulic rams powered by the truck’s diesel engine. The top was even heavier, hinged on its long side and supported by a double set of rams. There were no locks, as
the sheer weight of the plates made them superfluous.

Inside the box was a shaped cradle, and the entire structure had been designed for one purpose
only: to carry the North Korean standard-size nuclear warhead. The design would allow the weapon to be lifted directly into the truck and then lowered into the safe.

Loading the trucks took the rest of the afternoon, and it was early evening before the vehicles
were ready to leave. The Yongbyon
commanding officer asked the
so-jang
if his men would like to
eat at the facility before they left, but his offer was curtly rejected. They were, the major-general informed him, running on a very tight schedule, and rations had already been
provided.

Five hours after the first of the trucks had entered the Yongbyon complex, the convoy was back
on the road, heading east. But almost as soon as the vehicles had cleared the outskirts of Yongbyon they scattered, each of the trucks driving its scrap-filled ‘warhead’ to a
different destination, escort vehicles full of armed soldiers positioned in front and behind.

They were each heading for a missile site on the east coast of North Korea, following orders
from Pyongyang that were eminently clear, but which made little sense to any of the men, not even to the officer in command.