Foxbat (13 page)

Kim Yong-Su sat in his office in the centre of Pyongyang and checked everything one last
time. When Pak Je-San had first explained his plan back in the autumn of 2003, Kim had realized two things.

First, the timing was absolutely crucial: they had to make their move when the nearest American
aircraft carrier was at least forty-eight hours sailing time distant, and no Aegis cruisers were in the vicinity of the Korean Peninsula. In its final phase, the plan would only work if they
could achieve some measure of air superiority – though he knew they could never achieve total control, because the South Korean aircraft were much more up-to-date than those of the
DPRK. That meant having no American carriers around, with squadrons of F/A-18 Super Hornets embarked.

Second, and equally important, they had to maintain an appearance of normality until the last
possible moment. That involved two operation orders. The first, ‘Silver Spring’, had been prepared for public dissemination: just another routine, no-notice exercise to check the
operational readiness of the North Korean forces to respond if faced with an unprovoked assault from south of the DMZ. He’d sent copies to Seoul so that South Korea would be pre-warned
about this exercise, and had also alerted Moscow and Beijing. All nations advise their neighbours whenever they plan to run military exercises, just to ensure that such operations are not
mistaken for anything else.

And following this convention, Kim believed, was his master-stroke, because while the South
Koreans and their American lackeys were carefully watching the ‘Silver Spring’ manoeuvres, the preparations for ‘Golden Dawn’ – his hidden plan for the
occupation of South Korea – could continue undetected. And once it was executed, the results would be as devastating as they were unexpected.

Kim nodded in satisfaction, then instructed his aides to send the
preparation signal for ‘Silver Spring’, as an unclassified message, while simultaneously dispatching a Top Secret signal to begin the initial phase of ‘Golden
Dawn’.

Less than two hours after arriving back at T’ae’tan, Pak Je-San was called to the
station commander’s office to take an urgent telephone call from Pyongyang. He ran up the stairs and into the room, and snatched up the receiver. The commander was still sitting behind
his desk, so Pak dismissed him with a curt gesture, and waited until the man had left the room before he spoke.

‘This is Pak Je-San.’

‘I have been waiting to speak to you for almost five minutes,’ barked the
unmistakable voice of Kim Yong-Su. ‘We have begun the countdown. Begin the dispersal of your assets.’ And the line went dead.

For a few seconds, Pak still held the receiver to his ear, listening to an echoing silence. Then
he slowly lowered the handset to its cradle, and turned to go. Outside the door, the station commander was waiting to regain possession of his office. The expression on Pak’s face
instantly told him that the call from the capital had been important.

‘They’ve started the countdown?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ Pak agreed, ‘the clock’s running.’ Then he headed briskly
for the stairs. There was a lot to do and very little time to do it. The Dobric missiles might arrive before Kim gave the final order, but Pak knew there was now almost no chance of getting
those last two MiG-25s.

The lights had burned in the hangars throughout the night as maintainers struggled to get
every Foxbat ready and, as the sky next lightened with the dawn, twenty out of the twenty-four aircraft were ready to fly, a better result than Pak Je-San had expected.

He hadn’t slept at all. He had been too busy working out the logistics of the dispersal of
the interceptors and, equally important, of the personnel, stores and supplies that would need to be transported by road, and it had still taken him most of the night just to get everything
in place.

One of his biggest headaches was the regular overflight of surveillance satellites, and this
wasn’t just a matter of the orbiting American vehicles. Pak knew that relations were much improved between the West and the Confederation of Independent States, formerly known as the
USSR, so he also had to avoid Russian platforms, and even the Japanese had four orbiting spy satellites, specifically intended to provide surveillance of the Korean Peninsula. Yes, the
Japanese were continually worried about what the North Koreans might get up to – as well they should be, Pak reflected, with a grim smile.

A handful of passing satellites obviously wouldn’t stop the operation, but it still made
sense to avoid alerting Japan or the West unnecessarily. Pak wanted, therefore, to get the road convoys away from T’ae’tan while all those spies in the sky were well out of range.
And equally he wanted the MiG-25s to taxi out of the hangars and launch within that same brief window.

He’d already decided to send five of his precious Foxbats to Nuchonri, the closest
military base to Seoul, and the same number to the airfields at Kuupri and Wonsan, on the east coast, facing the Sea
of Japan. That would leave him with
just five serviceable MiG-25s at T’ae’tan, and a further four being worked on. The aircraft maintainers had estimated that they might get one or even two of the remaining aircraft
operational within forty-eight hours, which might be time enough.

Pak checked his computer once again, studying the list of satellite transit times. For this he
was using, with some amusement, a program called Orbitron that he’d downloaded from a Polish website. Despite being freeware, it was a very powerful and comprehensive program with a
database containing over twenty thousand satellites. For obvious reasons, it didn’t include all the classified surveillance birds, but Pak had already added those manually, and he
reckoned this database was now about as accurate as any others available.

What he did not know was that the CIA had now altered the orbits of two of the Keyhole
satellites, so the tracks the Orbitron program displayed were substantially inaccurate.

That was why, when the first five Foxbats, bound for Wonsan, taxied out of the hardened shelter
and headed for the runway, one Keyhole bird was only ten minutes from reaching a point almost directly above the airfield. And when this satellite passed overhead, travelling at a little over
seven kilometres a second, its cameras were able to record all five aircraft – one airborne and tracking north-east, one rolling down the runway and the other three lined up waiting to
enter it.

Viktor Bykov had been right: the boat was registered to someone. Irritated by the failure of
his force to capture the three fugitives the previous evening, Superintendent Wanov ordered the remains of the boat to be thoroughly checked as soon as his men had hauled the wreckage
ashore.

Screwed to the transom was a registration plate and, after cleaning off a deposit of soot and
other muck, they’d identified its owner as a small company in Perm itself that owned a dozen similar craft. The moment they opened their doors for business that morning, Wanov had
appeared in person, demanding to inspect all their hire records. This produced the address of a hotel on the outskirts of Perm, so just after ten that morning
Bykov and Richter found themselves standing in one of the rooms that three guests had been occupying for the last two weeks.

All around them, police officers and forensic scientists were prodding and poking, taking
pictures or lifting prints to try matching against the fingertips of the burnt corpses recovered from the river that morning. Unsurprisingly, given the circumstances, all three men had
drowned, and the routine autopsies would be carried out later that same day.

So far, nothing significant had turned up in any of the hotel rooms. The three had been
travelling light: the closets held few clothes, and most of the drawers were empty. Everything they had found so far would have fitted easily into three airline carry-on bags – which
was presumably the point.

In one room, however, they’d found a locked briefcase, which had yielded easily enough to
the point of a screwdriver. Inside were almost fifty thousand American dollars in medium-denomination notes – doubtless a residue of the funds used for bribing senior officers at
military bases – and two boxes of nine-millimetre Parabellum ammunition. One of these boxes was full, the other held about twenty rounds, and the rest of its contents were probably now
lying at the bottom of the river along with a Samopal 68 Skorpion machine-pistol and whatever other weapons the mystery men had been carrying.

But of personal documents there was not a sign, or anything else that could identify them, where
they came from, or what they wanted here.

Feeling defeated, Richter walked out of the hotel room and found Bykov in the corridor. The
Russian smiled and held up his mobile phone. ‘We may have something here,’ he said. ‘The mortuary staff have recovered a notebook from one of the corpses. It’s
waterlogged, but we may find something useful inside it, once it’s dried out. The car’s waiting for us outside. Let’s go.’

‘You were right,’ Walter Hicks said, looking down at the photographs Muldoon had
placed on his desk. Both men had arrived at work much
earlier than usual, precisely to check on any overnight images that the surveillance birds might have
obtained.

The pictures were the raw ‘take’ from the Keyhole satellite, flashed to N-PIC via a
ComSat bird over the Pacific Ocean, and forwarded from there direct to Langley. The fully annotated photographs would follow as soon as the N-PIC staff had completed their interpretation. But
what these pictures showed was quite obvious, even to untrained eyes. Four aircraft were clearly visible, three waiting on the taxiway and one on the runway itself. And a fifth had just taken
off and was opening to the north-east, away from T’ae’tan.

‘They’re all Foxbats,’ Muldoon said. ‘The only other aircraft they could
possibly be is the MiG-31 Foxhound, but the ‘hound’s twin jet pipes are a different shape, and it’s got fairings at the leading edge of the wing root, so I’m satisfied
these are Foxbats. We’ll have to wait for N-PIC to confirm it, but I’d bet my pension against them being anything else.’

‘Where are they going, and what were they doing at T’ae’tan?’

Muldoon shrugged. ‘My guess – and that’s all it is at the moment – is
that the North Koreans have converted T’ae’tan into a maintenance or holding facility, and they’ve been storing the Foxbats there. I don’t think these aircraft we see
are just getting ready to do a few circuits and bumps. They’ve probably been repaired or serviced or something, and are returning to whatever base they came from.’

‘Which is?’

‘Take your pick. If that aircraft opening to the north-east is already on track, it
could be heading for the Air Command headquarters at Chunghwa, or else to the coastal airfields at Kuupri and Wonsan. Or maybe even the Third Air Combat Command base at Hwangju. If the North
Koreans now have a squadron or two of Foxbats based anywhere, it means they’ve been very clever at evading the Keyhole overflights. We only got these shots because we’d already
modified the orbit of a
second
bird. If it had still been on its original track, these aircraft’ – Muldoon tapped one of
the pictures with his index finger – ‘would have been long gone before it got within range of the base.’

‘OK, Richard, we now know that the North Koreans have obtained at least five Foxbats. What
we still don’t know is what they plan on
doing with them, and I can’t think of an easy way to find out. So what’s your
recommendation?’

‘We kick this upstairs to the ODNI right now. Something’s going on over there, and
deciding what to do about it is way above my pay scale, and probably yours too.’

North Korea is a country somewhat smaller than the state of Mississippi, has a population of
a little over twenty-two million, and a Gross Domestic Product of about twenty-three billion dollars US. Over thirty per cent of that GDP goes straight into the military budget, and almost
one in every four North Koreans is either on active service or a reservist.

Facing them on the southern side of the Demilitarized Zone is about the same number of troops.
The South Koreans have around three-quarters of a million active-service personnel – including some forty thousand American forces stationed in the country – and four and a half
million in the reserves. But the North Koreans have the advantage in armour and artillery pieces. Only in combat aircraft are the numbers more equal, both forces being able to field about
eight hundred, but here the advantage lies very definitely with South Korea. Not only does that country enjoy a slight numerical superiority but, far more important, North Korea’s
aircraft are older, slower and a lot less capable.

Instructions for the ‘Silver Spring’ exercise had been prepared and dispatched
months earlier, but the ‘Golden Dawn’ orders had been sent only three weeks ago, sealed in envelopes with explicit written instructions that they were to be opened only when
Pyongyang so ordered. In military bases, strung like beads on a string all along the northern perimeter of the Demilitarized Zone, active service troops now began preparing for the coming
exercise and – though they didn’t know it – the invasion of South Korea.

Vehicle maintenance was given the highest priority – when the order was finally given by
Pyongyang, everything had to work perfectly – so extreme care was being taken to ensure that all tanks and artillery pieces were ready for action. Communication systems were checked,
and then
checked again, because a battle could be lost if command and control functions didn’t work properly. Further down the line, foot soldiers
were given extra practice on the rifle ranges. Reserve troops were called up and issued with equipment and ammunition, but not yet weapons. Those would be handed out at the last moment, as
Kim Yong-Su didn’t relish the thought of having four and a half million armed men roaming the country, even if they were official reservists.

There had been a succession of exercises leading up to ‘Silver Spring’. Those had
admittedly been just paper exercises, partly because the country didn’t have the fuel or resources to squander on real-life manoeuvres, but mainly to avoid the American spy satellites
detecting their activities. As in all invasions throughout history, secrecy and surprise were essential.

Each such exercise had followed the same basic scenario: a blitzkrieg offensive followed by a
rapid advance using overwhelming force. A pounding artillery assault to destroy and demoralize the enemy, then wave upon wave of tanks, followed by the infantry, because a war on the Korean
Peninsula would be won or lost on the ground.

Overhead, the North Korean Air Force would engage and try to neutralize the opposition fighters,
though the best they could have realistically hoped for was a draw. But that, of course, was before Pak Je-San had devised the radical concept behind ‘Golden Dawn’, and then
secured his secret force of MiG-25s.

The Foxbat is the fastest interceptor ever manufactured, able to outrun any fighter or bomber,
and it carries a formidable array of weaponry. That, plus the fact that, as far as Kim knew, neither the South Koreans nor the Americans had any idea these squadrons existed, should give them
all the edge they would need. In one sense, everything now rested on Pak Je-San’s shoulders.

And the new instructions from Pyongyang were highly specific: each commander was to open his
copy of the sealed ‘Golden Dawn’ operation orders, prepare his troops, and await the executive command.

But what none of them yet knew was the secret, hidden component of Pak Je-San’s plan that
might ensure the invasion would be a walkover.

Mortuaries have a particular smell. No matter what air-conditioning or ventilation system
they possess, there’s always the pervading odour of formaldehyde overlaid with faint olfactory echoes of urine, faeces and partially digested food. The Perm mortuary was no exception,
and Richter could detect that same smell even before Bykov pushed through the double doors and they entered the building.

The Russian flipped open a leather wallet to show his identification, which the white-coated
receptionist studied carefully, then gestured for them to follow him through another set of double doors and down a corridor. At the end was a small seating area, with half a dozen armchairs
and a low table, brightened by a vase of wilting flowers. The receptionist pressed a button on the wall, invited them to sit, and retraced his steps.

Richter sat down immediately. He had spent long enough in the Royal Navy to subscribe to the
philosophy that there’s no point in standing if you can sit. Or, for that matter, being awake if you can be asleep. Bykov stood or, to be accurate, paced.

A couple of minutes later a short, red-faced, cheerful-looking man pushed through the door to
one side, drying his hands on a paper towel.

‘General Bykov? My name is Marshek, and I’m the pathologist.’ He extended his
right hand and Bykov shook it readily. Richter remained seated, his hands firmly in his pockets. He guessed that Marshek had washed his hands properly after rooting through the intestines of
some corpse, but didn’t feel like risking physical contact just for the sake of politeness.

‘You’ve found a notebook, I understand?’ Bykov began.

‘Indeed, as I informed the police earlier. It was inside a buttoned trouser pocket on one
of the dead men. All his other pockets were empty, apart from the obvious stuff like handkerchiefs and combs. We found nothing else on any of their clothing, not even manufacturer’s
labels. Do you want to see the bodies now?’

‘Not unless we need to. How did they die?’

‘All three of them drowned, but they’d already suffered severe burns
before they entered the water, and one had also received a bullet wound. But it was the temperature that really killed them. Cold shock,’ he added, by way
of explanation.

‘You mean hypothermia?’

‘No. I mean cold-shock reflex. They didn’t survive long enough for hypothermia to be
a problem. If you enter water that’s significantly colder than your normal body temperature, there’s a natural reflex action and you gasp for air. If that gasp occurs under the
surface, the lungs will fill with water, and that’s pretty much it. Even if you survive the immersion, extremely cold water will chill the body rapidly, and the river temperature last
night was around five degrees centigrade. You become unconscious once your core temperature drops to about thirty degrees, and you’ll be dead when it reaches twenty-five. Hypothermia is
only a factor to consider if you survive the initial immersion and the rapid cooling.’

‘The notebook?’ Richter prompted, in Russian. He wasn’t there to listen to a
lecture on cold-water survival criteria.

The pathologist looked at him as if seeing him for the first time. ‘Just a
moment,’ he said, and pushed his way back through the door. He returned in a few moments holding a plastic bag inside which there was a small notebook with a blue cover.

‘We dried it out as best we could. Some of the pages are still stuck together, but most
can now be separated. Its owner used a ball-point pen rather than ink, so what’s there is fairly legible.’

He handed the bag to Bykov, who looked at it questioningly.

Marshek shook his head. ‘It’s already been checked, and there aren’t any
fingerprints. I would be amazed if there had been, after immersion in the river overnight. When you’ve finished looking at it, please leave it with the receptionist on your way
out.’

Bykov merely nodded, then pulled the notebook out of the bag and opened it on the table in front
of Richter. Only the first dozen or so pages had been used, and most of what was recorded there was not in either the Roman or Cyrillic alphabets. Instead, the notes used some form of
pictogram, interspersed with the occasional word in Russian.

‘Do you recognize it?’ Bykov asked.

Richter shook his head. ‘It if isn’t a pictorial code of some kind, it has
to be one of the Oriental languages – like Chinese or maybe Japanese – but I don’t know enough to even recognize which. You must have people on
your staff who could identify it?’

‘Of course. The trouble is, they’re back at headquarters, not out here in Perm.
I’ll need to scan these pages and email them to Moscow.’

‘What about the words written in Cyrillic? Do any of those mean anything to
you?’

Bykov flipped through the pages rapidly, shaking his head occasionally. ‘No, nothing here.
These are just the names of towns and cities, perhaps where they’d developed contacts. It was probably easier to use the Russian name instead of trying to transcribe it into the other
language they used. Look here. That’s “Moscow”, then “Letneozerskiy” – where two MiG-25s went missing, and so on.’ His voice died away as he stared
at two words on the last page.

‘What does it say?’ Richter asked.

‘Slavgorod North,’ Bykov said, clearly puzzled. ‘But I’ve not been
notified of anything happening there, and they don’t even operate MiG-25s as far as I recall.’

‘Where is it, exactly?’

‘It’s a military airfield lying about sixteen hundred kilometres east of
here.’

‘That falls well within the cruising range of a MiG-25, so if they’d managed to
persuade Lenkov to steal one, maybe they were intending to refuel it there before flying it out of the country. We need to go there immediately, Viktor.’

‘I agree.’ Bykov nodded. ‘We can’t handle something this sensitive over
the telephone. I’ll get the jet warmed up.’

That, Richter reflected as the Russian general pulled a mobile phone from his pocket and began
dialling a number, sounded more impressive than it was in reality.

They’d flown to Perm in a Russian Air Force Antonov An-72 transport aircraft, confusingly
painted in Aeroflot livery. Known to the West by the NATO reporting name ‘Coaler’, it wasn’t exactly an executive jet, having been designed as a small, general-purpose STOL
transport capable of carrying either cargo or up to thirty-two passengers on drop-down seats attached along the sides of the cabin. Powered by
two Lotarev
turbofan engines, mounted above and in front of the wings, which gave the aircraft a peculiarly hunched appearance, it was reasonably fast and had a range of well over two thousand miles.

Their journey out from Moscow had been very noisy and relatively uncomfortable, but a lot faster
than trying to get seats on a commercial aircraft. And anyway it was, Richter guessed, the only aircraft Bykov had been able to commandeer at such short notice. As the Russian general headed
for the door, Richter again wished he’d had the foresight to bring earplugs.