Foxbat (11 page)

‘You didn’t give us a hell of a lot to work with, Viktor,’ Richter said as
he opened up the laptop. They’d moved to a corner of one of the snack-bars that was temporarily closed – Richter presumed Bykov had organized that – so that nobody could
overhear them or see the computer screen.

‘I know, but getting any kind of information out of the airfields and squadrons was very
difficult. Eventually I had my staff comb the local air traffic control records for the aircraft side-numbers, and simply noted the date and time of their last known take-off. I also asked
for tracing action for the missing aircraft at all military airfields within the CIS. Sometimes that helped, but more often it didn’t.’

Richter was silent for a few moments as he plugged in the computer and switched it on. Simpson
hadn’t given him any definite instructions about the information he could provide, but his recent experience in Aïn Oussera was quite probably relevant to the problem the Russians
had uncovered.

‘It may not just be
your
Foxbats that are going missing, Viktor,’ he said, then outlined what he and the SAS team had discovered in Algeria.
‘According to our transatlantic cousins, or
more specifically the NSA, the Iranians may have lost an aircraft as well.’

‘This problem could be bigger than we thought, then,’ Bykov murmured as he produced
a red-bound notebook from an inside pocket of his jacket. He opened it at a page that listed dates, times and sets of coordinates. Once the Dell’s operating system had loaded, Richter
double-clicked an icon that represented a map, and waited while the graphics program started.

The screen changed and an aerial photograph was displayed. It looked as if it covered about a
ten-mile-square block of territory, and in the top left-hand corner was indicated an airfield.

‘The centre of this image is the first set of coordinates you gave us,’ Richter
said. ‘What our techies have done is provide a series of overlays so that idiots like me can understand what the pictures show. We can zoom in to see the details better, but this scale
is probably best for what we want. The analysts have already worked on each picture and identified all the aircraft, ignoring everything except the MiG-25s.’

He manoeuvred the cursor over a symbol at the top of the screen and clicked the left-hand button
below the touchpad. Instantly a grid overlay appeared, letters running horizontally and numbers vertically.

‘According to my briefing, there’s an aircraft contact in square delta five,’
Richter said.

Bykov looked carefully at the screen. ‘Yes, I can see something.’

Richter chose another icon, and a tiny red circle appeared more or less in the centre of the
grid square. Inside this was a small silver dart.

‘Right, that’s the aircraft. Now, the satellite took several pictures of this
specific area, but we’ve only been able to identify the same aircraft in three of them. That’s just because of the high relative speed of the bird in its polar orbit. Rather than
look at each picture individually, the techies have plotted the other two images of the aircraft onto this frame, so it’s easier to see where it’s heading.’

Richter clicked another icon twice, and two more small red circles appeared, a tiny silver
object in each, tracking south-east. He clicked another button and a blue dotted line appeared on the screen, one end terminating at the airfield runway, the other extending beyond the third
image of the aircraft itself.

‘That’s the Foxbat’s apparent track. The problem is that we don’t know
if it continued heading south-east, or changed direction some time after the satellite’s pass. And that, really, is the problem with all these pictures. At best, the satellite
photographed the aircraft in four frames. Usually it was only two or three frames, and for several of the coordinates there were no birds within range at the time you specified.’

Richter leant back in his seat. ‘I can show you the rest of the images if you’d
like, but we’ve already done an analysis. In most cases the aircraft were detected heading south or south-east. Extrapolating the tracks doesn’t really help, because there are so
few coordinates, but about all we can be sure of is that the aircraft weren’t making for Western Europe or the North Pole. Almost anywhere else is a possibility, though.

‘The other obvious problem is the Foxbat’s range, which is pretty short.
There’s no way these aircraft could have been flown out of Russia even with full tanks, so you’re either looking at several refuelling stops or possibly the MiG being loaded into
a transport aircraft or onto a ship, and then delivered somewhere as a piece of cargo.

‘For what it’s worth, our intelligence people have prepared a shortlist of likely
client states. We’ve assumed that these aircraft have been obtained by a nation rather than some power-crazed individual. We’re suggesting you should look at Afghanistan, China,
India, Iran, North Korea, Pakistan and Taiwan.’

Bykov nodded slowly. ‘Your analysis matches our opinions. But we don’t think India
or Pakistan are likely customers, simply because both nations could have bought the aircraft legitimately from us if they’d wanted to. Afghanistan is too closely watched by the
Americans for anyone to have flown either individual interceptors or a large transport aircraft into an airfield there without being detected. Taiwan seems unlikely, so that leaves China,
Iran or North Korea.’

‘But if the NSA is right,’ Richter pointed out, ‘Iran itself might be missing
a MiG-25.’

Bykov nodded again. ‘So that suggests China or North Korea. We’ve always feared
China’s intentions towards us. It’s possible the sleeping giant is awakening and flexing its muscles, but our relations with
Beijing have been fairly cordial
lately. Not,’ he added, ‘that that means very much these days.’

As Richter reached out to close the lid of the laptop, Bykov’s mobile phone rang. He stood
up, pulled it from his pocket and moved out of earshot before answering the call. Then he closed the phone and walked back.

‘We may have a lead,’ he said, and Richter looked interested. ‘A young
man’s body has been found in the woods outside Perm. He was murdered, a single bullet through the head, and apparently robbed.’

‘So?’ Richter asked. ‘Why has the GRU been informed about a murder in the
middle of Russia?’

‘Patience, Paul, and I’ll tell you. Perm lies at the southern end of the Ural
mountains, more or less on the edge of Siberia. The closest airfield is Bolshoye Savino, a mixed-use military and civilian airfield. One of the squadrons there flies the MiG-31, the
development of the MiG-25 that you call the Foxhound, and there are half a dozen Foxbats based there as well. The GRU’s been informed because the murder victim, Georgi Lenkov, was a
front-line MiG-31 pilot. Perhaps he was approached to steal an aircraft and refused, which means that whoever’s orchestrating these thefts had him killed to stop him talking.

‘More importantly,’ Bykov went on, ‘as far as I’m aware, no MiG-25s or
MiG-31s have been reported missing from Bolshoye Savino, so perhaps the thieves are still in the area, looking for another pilot who
will
accept their offer. I think, my friend, we should take a trip to Perm.’

Every time any nation on Earth launches a satellite, the American Space Command organization,
co-located with NORAD at Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado, starts tracking it, and will continue to track it until it falls back to Earth. In fact, Space Command constantly monitors around ten
thousand objects in orbit around the planet, ranging in size from fully operational communications, broadcast television and surveillance satellites down to space debris: bits and pieces of
failed or damaged satellites, some as small as half an inch across.

The purpose of the monitoring is twofold. First, and most important, a launch from somewhere
in Asia could simply be a nation using a redundant Soviet rocket to boost its latest scientific satellite into orbit. Or it could be a renegade Russian general with a chip on his shoulder and
access to a bunch of rail-mounted ICBMs, trying to start World War Three. In either case, NORAD staff have about two minutes to decide whether or not this launch shows hostile intent and, if
it does, what they should do about it apart from blowing the whistle and closing the blast doors inside the mountain.

The second reason for the monitoring process is that space craft are fragile, and the
consequences of, say, the Space Shuttle hitting a one-inch bolt travelling at a couple of thousand miles an hour would be catastrophic. So before every launch, the Cheyenne Mountain people
check their records to ensure that the flight-path of the launch vehicle is as danger-free as possible.

A spin-off from the monitoring system is that the paths of surveillance satellites of all
nations are well known. By their nature, these vehicles behave unlike almost all other satellites because of their need to overfly as much of the surface of the planet as possible. They
travel in polar, rather than equatorial, orbits at fairly low altitudes – typically between about one hundred and two hundred miles up – and move very quickly. In late evening you
can sometimes see one, a fast-moving white dot illuminated by the rays of the setting sun.

The armed forces of most nations know these routes, and the times that these satellites are due
overhead, and take extreme care to ensure that nothing sensitive can be observed by these silent and watchful ‘eyes in the sky’. Submarines, for example, will avoid being on or
near the surface when a satellite may pass overhead.

Originally, overhead times for the satellites were listed in tables that – depending on
the country of origin – varied in security classification from ‘Restricted’ up to ‘Secret’, but these days simple computer programs provide the same information
in a much more accessible form that is infinitely easier to understand.

T’ae’tan Air Base had such a program, and Pak Je-San was scrupulous in ensuring that
none of his MiG-25s were ever outside their hangars when a pass was due. He was slightly less concerned about aircraft
actually in the air, because surveillance satellite
optics are optimized for surface surveillance, not fast-moving airborne contacts.

But, as with all computer programs, the information that comes out can only ever be as good as
the data that goes in, and Pak Je-San was unaware that the Americans had been asked by the South Korean National Intelligence Service to ensure that a satellite passed directly over
T’ae’tan as soon as possible. Because of the extreme sensitivity regarding the Korean Peninsula, the Americans had complied almost at once. They’d used the manoeuvring
engines to make a slight change to the orbit of a KH-12 bird that had just started its northbound track from Antarctica, with the result that the satellite passed directly over
T’ae’tan when otherwise its programmed orbit would have taken it north up the Yellow Sea and straight over China, avoiding North Korean territory altogether.

So the Foxbat that was being returned to the hangar by the ground crew wasn’t quite inside
the building when the satellite moved within range, currently one hundred and thirty-five miles above the surface. The first image recorded by its cameras was taken from a slightly oblique
angle, while the huge twin rudders and jet exhausts of the MiG-25 were still visible outside the hangar, but by the time the second picture was taken the aircraft had vanished.

Unlike its more primitive forebears, the KH-12 doesn’t use any form of photographic
plate or medium: it automatically converts the images into digital form and then transmits the data to one of several communications satellites in geostationary orbit above it. The data is
then either transmitted directly, or possibly via another communications bird, to the Mission Ground Site at Fort Belvoir, near Washington, DC. From the Ground Site, the images are sent to
the National Photographic Interpretation Centre – N-PIC – located in Building 213 in the Washington Navy Yard. This technology means that the data is available in near real-time,
within minutes of the picture being taken.

Seventy-five minutes after the Keyhole had overflown T’ae’tan, Richard Muldoon was
looking at the first of six images on the twenty-one-inch flat-panel monitor of his desktop computer, sent by secure electronic transfer direct from Building 213. Muldoon’s Priority One
instructions had ensured that an initial analysis had been undertaken the moment the N-PIC staff received the pictures.

Not that too much analysis was needed. Muldoon took one look at the distinctive tail-end of the
aircraft sticking out of the hangar, and muttered ‘Fuck me, they’ve got a Foxbat.’

‘I don’t care who you are or what branch of the military you represent. You
can’t just walk in here and expect to take over a murder investigation.’ The Perm chief of police was a short, fat, red-faced man, his complexion growing angrier and more choleric
by the minute. So far Bykov hadn’t been getting anywhere with him.

The previous evening, he and Richter had flown in to Perm, a city about seven hundred miles east
of Moscow, arriving too late to achieve anything useful that day. Bykov had left his card at the main police station, with a demand that the police chief make himself available for a meeting
first thing next morning. The somewhat peremptory tone the GRU officer had used, Richter guessed, was probably the main reason why Kolya Wanov was so clearly unwilling to cooperate.

‘Superintendent Wanov,’ Bykov tried again, ‘we’re not here to either
investigate the murder or impede your inquiries in any way. We just want answers to some questions. We understand that Georgi Lenkov’s wallet had been stolen, so why are you so certain
he wasn’t killed in the course of a routine mugging that escalated out of control?’

Wanov shrugged. ‘There’s not much doubt about that,’ he replied grudgingly.
Despite his belligerence, he knew he had little real choice here. Pissing off a senior GRU general would achieve nothing career-enhancing. ‘First, at some point that evening
Lenkov’s wrists had been shackled with handcuffs. There were abrasions round his wrists consistent with restraints like regular police cuffs. If he’d been handcuffed, there would
have been no need for a mugger to kill him. That’s the first thing.

‘We’ve received a couple of reports that a man answering to Lenkov’s
description was arrested by two police officers in a bar near the river on Monday evening. The problem,’ the superintendent said with a mirthless smile, ‘is that no
police officers were anywhere near that location at the time, and there have been no arrest reports subsequently filed. Muggers don’t usually work in pairs, impersonating police
officers, and they certainly aren’t likely to chase their quarry into a bar where anyone seeing their faces could later identify them.

‘Third, the pathologist wasn’t absolutely certain because of the extensive damage to
the skull caused by the bullet, but he thinks Lenkov received at least one violent blow to the back of his head, probably administered with a cosh or club.

‘And, finally, the body was found in woodland outside the city, and we know for sure he
was killed there. The forensic evidence is overwhelming, even if we didn’t have a witness who actually heard the shot. Anyway, muggers normally look for their prey in city streets. It
was a deliberate act of murder, no mistake.’

Bykov nodded. It looked as if the Perm police had done their work thoroughly.
‘That’s clear enough for us, Superintendent. But we believe the killing of this young Air Force officer may have wider implications affecting national security. We suspect the
perpetrators are still here in Perm, and all we’re asking is that the local police extend us a little cooperation.’

‘What kind of cooperation?’ Wanov asked.

‘We’d like as little publicity as possible. Have you released details of
Lenkov’s name and profession?’

‘Not yet.’ The police officer shook his head. ‘His parents live in Moscow, but
they’re away somewhere at the moment. We can’t release details of the identity of the victim until they’ve been informed.’

‘So who knows about the murder here in Perm?’

‘It was reported in the local newspaper.’

‘What exactly was said?’

‘Just that the body of an unidentified young man had been found apparently murdered in the
woods outside the city.’

‘How did you eventually identify him?’

‘A small stroke of luck. Whoever killed him took away his wallet, and emptied it, then
discarded it. However, they overlooked an internal
pocket where Lenkov kept his identity card. We compared the photograph with what was left of his face, and that was
that.’

‘So who exactly knows he was an Air Force pilot?’

‘Just ourselves, and Lenkov’s commanding officer at Bolshoye Savino. Probably no one
else.’

‘Can you keep it that way for a couple of days?’ Bykov asked.

‘If you can explain why, yes.’

‘Superintendent Wanov, my investigation is classified at a very high level, well above Top
Secret. My colleague here’ – he gestured to Richter, who hadn’t said a word since they’d entered the room – ‘is an intelligence officer representing the
government of Great Britain.’ That was news to Richter, but he said nothing.

Wanov looked at him uncertainly, apparently torn between his desire to find out just what the
hell Bykov was talking about, and his discomfort at having an identified Western intelligence agent sitting there studying him silently.

‘Nothing I’m about to tell you is to leave this room, or is to be discussed with
anyone else, at any level, at any time.’

Wanov nodded, then found his voice. ‘I understand.’

Bykov continued. ‘We believe that Lenkov was approached by agents of a foreign power and
asked to steal a Mikoyan-Gurevich interceptor, one of the aircraft based at Bolshoye Savino. We assume he refused to carry out this act of treachery, and was killed because of that. We also
believe those same agents are still here somewhere in Perm, and that they’ll be currently trying to suborn another officer from the airfield. It’s essential that we find out who
these agents are, and who they represent. That means catching them in the act, and to achieve that we need your assistance and that of your officers.’

‘How are you going to do it?’

Bykov smiled. ‘At this precise moment, I’ve no idea. A lot will depend on what we
can learn from the dead man’s commanding officer and from his fellow pilots. If we’re right, and he was approached by foreign agents, we’re hoping he might have talked to
someone else about it. That way, we might even be able to get a lead of some kind. That’s our first job, but if we do manage to locate these agents, we’ll need you to provide
enough men to ensure that they don’t slip through our fingers.’

Wanov nodded slowly. ‘That won’t be a problem, but make sure you give me as much
notice as you can.’

Bykov stood up. ‘Right. Now,’ he said, ‘we must get to the airfield. We have
an appointment there in just under thirty minutes.’

‘So the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea has got itself a Foxbat. So
what?’ Walter Hicks leant back in his seat, pulled out a stubby cigar and – in complete defiance of Langley’s rigid no-smoking-anywhere-in-the-building rule, imposed by
William Webster in September 1990 – lit it. ‘So what?’ he repeated.

And that was, Muldoon had to concede, a good question. Why should the CIA – or anyone
else, for that matter – care in the least if the North Koreans had obtained a forty-year-old supersonic interceptor? But he suspected there had to be more to it than that.

‘If it was just one Foxbat, I wouldn’t care either, Walter,’ Muldoon replied,
‘but after seeing that picture from N-PIC I did some investigating, and I don’t like what I found. We only got this image because of the request from the South Koreans. Now, I
think it’s significant that the first and only unplanned reconnaissance pass over T’ae’tan for the last two years should reveal the presence of a Foxbat. It appears the NKs
have been timing their operations to coincide with periods when none of our birds have been in range. Yet, if they’re just upgrading their air force with MiG-25s, why would they
bother?’

‘I suppose the North Koreans might consider re-equipping with Foxbats as an
upgrade,’ Hicks mused, ‘but those aircraft are old and not that easy to fly. I’d have thought they’d be better advised to try stealing a few more Floggers or Fishbeds
– or maybe even Fulcrums if they were feeling ambitious.’

Both the MiG-21 Fishbed and the MiG-23 Flogger are now obsolete, but are still being operated by
North Korea. The MiG-29 Fulcrum was designed by the Russians as a direct competitor to the F-15 and F-16 interceptors, and is perhaps the most manoeuvrable fighter aircraft in
the world, apart from the Harrier. With Mach 2 performance, it’s a formidable adversary.

‘Maybe they couldn’t source any other aircraft type. Don’t forget, their
principal arms supplier now is China, not Russia. And if the NKs did manage to get their hands on some Fulcrums, keeping them in the air might prove a nightmare. Where would they find the
spares? Do they even have maintainers skilled enough to work on them? The Foxbat, however, is an old and tested design with no fancy electronics.’

Hicks nodded. ‘Yes . . . maybe they just thought they needed something quicker than a
Shenyang F-5, and located a source that could supply MiG-25s instead. Perhaps it really is that simple.’

‘I doubt it. I went back to check the Keyhole imagery for T’ae’tan for the
last couple of years. You remember that in October of ninety-five the NKs relocated twenty-odd Ilyushin Il-28 bombers to that same airfield?’

Hicks nodded. ‘Caused some jitters in the South when they realized that put them within
ten minutes’ flying time of Seoul.’

‘Exactly,’ Muldoon nodded. ‘And they still had the F-5 fighters based there.
Well, according to the N-PIC analysts, they haven’t seen a single Ilyushin at T’ae’tan for the last eighteen months, and they’ve only been able to identify ten
individual F-5s. That’s way short of the number we believed was based there.’

‘Perhaps they’ve kicked the bombers somewhere else. Maybe they thought having them
so close to the DMZ was too provocative. As I recall, Seoul did complain about them.’

‘Maybe they did,’ Muldoon nodded, ‘but there are other things that worry me,
like the new constructions we’re seeing there. T’ae’tan was never a major base, just a single runway and a couple of hangars dug into the hillside on the south side of the
field, but the NKs have done a lot of work there recently. It’s difficult to tell from the satellite pictures, because of the overhanging rock, but it looks like they may have excavated
four new hangars, and they’ve certainly built what looks like a new administration block close by.’

‘Maybe they’re updating it. Perhaps they’ve got plans to expand the airfield,
add a new runway or lengthen the existing one,’ Hicks suggested.

‘A new runway’s not likely, Walter. T’ae’tan sits at the bottom of a
fairly narrow valley running east–west, with hills enclosing it at the western end, rising to about six hundred feet. The land to the east is more level, but
you’re right – they
have
extended the runway in that direction. It was originally about a mile and a
half long, and they’ve added enough concrete to now make it nearly three miles. That was already picked up by N-PIC when the NKs started construction work, but it didn’t seem
particularly significant just then.’

‘Well, they’d need all of that length to handle Foxbats – those mothers
don’t exactly stop on a dime.’

‘But do you really think the DPRK would go to the expense of nearly doubling the length of
the runway at T’ae’tan just to accommodate one Foxbat? The only scenario making sense is that they’ve now got several of them.

‘Now, I can’t confirm that,’ Muldoon continued, warming to his theme,
‘because absolutely the only photographic evidence we have is the picture of the rear end of a MiG-25 that N-PIC sent over yesterday. All that proves is that there’s at least one
Foxbat at T’ae’tan. We know it’s not a mock-up, because the Keyhole’s thermal imaging sensors recorded that both the engine exhausts were still hot. It had either been
recently flying or doing a ground run, but what the cameras picked up was part of a real aircraft.

‘Meanwhile, there are a few other pointers, like the lengthened runway and the hangars.
Every time the N-PIC analysts have spotted an aircraft on the ground, it’s been parked close to one of the original hangars, not the new ones. When an aircraft’s pulled out of a
hangar to fly or do a ground run or whatever, it’s normally left outside that hangar. That suggests the F-5s are in the two original structures, and there’s something different
kept in the new hangars.’

‘Have they ever spotted anything in or near them?’ Hicks asked.

‘Not so far. Occasionally one of the birds might get a picture when one of the doors is
open, but the hangars are built into the rock on the south side of the airfield, so the interior’s always in shadow. The pass made yesterday was the first time they’ve seen
anything significant. And the other thing is that those four hangars invariably have guards stationed outside them, almost always two-man patrols. So my tentative analysis is that there are
several MiG-25s based at T’ae’tan, maybe
as many as a squadron. But that raises more questions, like where did they come from? We’re talking more freely
to the Kremlin these days, and as far as I know they haven’t sold much to the North Koreans over the last five years.’

‘OK, Richard, let’s assume for the moment that you’re right, and that
there’s a squadron, or at least a significant number, of Foxbats at T’ae’tan. If the Russians didn’t sell the MiGs to the DPRK, where did they come from?’

Muldoon smiled slightly. ‘That, Walter is the big question, but it’s always
possible they stole them.’

‘You’re kidding.’

‘No, I’m not. A couple of days ago the NSA detected some traffic on a military net
in Iran that might have been referring to a missing aircraft. They’re not certain, because it’s possible the two people overheard were talking about a crashed aircraft – the
context was ambiguous. But it could also be that some pilot’s been bribed to fly his MiG out of Iran for a few pieces of silver.

‘And then there’s Aïn Oussera. We asked the Brits to go in there and take a
look inside a heavily guarded hangar. They did, and found the building was empty, so the British SIS reckons the Algerians have also lost one or two aircraft, and the guards were simply there
to preserve the scene while it’s investigated. That sounds far-fetched, I know, but I’m inclined to agree with them. Aïn Oussera’s known to be a Foxbat base, so if they
have lost any aircraft, most likely they’re MiG-25s. And subsequently the Brits fielded a request from the GRU for assistance in tracing certain aircraft movements inside Russia, and
N-PIC supplied some satellite pictures for them. I gather the SIS has a man working with the GRU in Moscow right now.’