Foxbat (2 page)

One of the standing jokes about the venerable C-130 Hercules transport aircraft –
colloquially known as a ‘Fat Albert’ – is that Lockheed solved the noise problem by putting it all inside the fuselage. After the long flog south to Meknes from Lyneham via
Gibraltar, Paul Richter fully appreciated the point. It was incredibly noisy in the back of the Herc: a constant, nerve-jangling, whining roar that penetrated all too easily through the
headset he was wearing. It was better in the enormous cockpit, and he could now see why the two loadmasters stayed up there with the pilots instead of occupying the pull-down seats that lined
the cavernous hold.

In front of him, and clearly visible even with only the red ‘night-vision’ lights
illuminated, were two open long-wheelbase Land Rover Defender 110s, lashed down along the centreline of the hold and facing aft towards the loading ramp. Known as ‘Pink Panthers’
or just ‘Pinkies’ from the strange shade of camouflage paint SAS vehicles had sported during the Second World War, these two had been specially prepared for this one particular
mission, their engine and chassis numbers removed, and all their identifying marks stripped off. They were fitted with diesel engines, long-range fuel tanks, water containers, emergency
rations – though nobody expected to have time to eat anything – ruggedized satellite navigation systems, and plenty of ammunition for the half-inch Browning M2 machine-guns. They
were also carrying Mark 19 40-millimetre grenade launchers and Milan anti-tank missiles.

The 47 Squadron Special Forces Flight aircraft had lifted off from Meknes, with full tanks, just
under an hour earlier and headed east at
about ten thousand feet. Now, Richter realized from the angle of the floor and the popping in his ears, it was in a steep
descent.

‘Border in ten,’ the pilot declared laconically over the intercom, and the Hercules
began turning to port, as it levelled at just over two hundred feet. Eleven minutes later, the pilot spoke again: ‘Welcome to Algeria, gentlemen. We’re now in breach of
international law, and things are about to get bumpy.’

Richter grinned at the man sitting next to him. ‘Here we go again,’ he said, almost
at a shout.

Colin Dekker smiled, but didn’t respond. Short, wiry and compact, like a lot of SAS
personnel, he was a captain in the Royal Artillery and the commander of Troop 3, D Squadron, 22 Special Air Service Regiment. He was also in overall charge of this mission, and was using a
pencil torch to examine a high-definition satellite photograph of their objective. It was force of habit rather than any particular need – the eight SAS men had studied all the
available maps and photographs when they’d been given their briefing back at Hereford, and they’d had plenty of time to remind themselves of the route and terrain during the
flight south to Morocco. But Dekker was a professional, and professionals check everything repeatedly.

The last time Richter had worked with the Special Air Service had been in France, with appalling
penalties for failure. This operation, in contrast, was low-risk and relatively straightforward. As the briefing officer – a lanky bespectacled desk jockey from Vauxhall Cross –
had put it: ‘Fly in, take a look and fly out. A piece of piss.’

It had sounded so easy in the Hereford briefing room, but both Richter and Dekker knew –
from intimate personal experience – that the simplest operation could, and frequently did, turn to rat-shit in the blink of an eye. So Dekker was checking the photograph again, looking
for anything they might previously have missed.

The pilot hadn’t been kidding about the flight. Richter didn’t know if it was heat
rising from the desert or wind shear or something else, but the Hercules was bouncing violently as it tracked east. And the hard turns the pilot kept making didn’t help either. For
obvious reasons, the route into Algeria had been carefully plotted to bypass all military establishments, and even every settlement the satellites had identified,
while
simultaneously having to stay at low level to keep below radar cover. The result was a flight path like the meanderings of a drunken snake, the pilot barely ever able to fly straight and
level, but twisting constantly to avoid one potential hazard or another.

‘I’m going up-front,’ said Richter, leaning across to Dekker, who nodded that
he’d understood.

Richter unbuckled his seatbelt, stood up and inched his way forward. There was no need,
operationally or otherwise, for him to visit the cockpit, but the truth was that, like many qualified pilots, he was a lousy passenger. He knew the two men in the driving seats had been
picked from the cream of the Royal Air Force for the Special Forces Flight, but he’d still rather be flying the aircraft himself.

He pulled open the cockpit door, surprised as before at how spacious the Hercules’ flight
deck was, and how quiet it was compared to the noise at the rear. The co-pilot, a senior flight lieutenant, glanced back to acknowledge him, but the pilot didn’t take his gaze away from
the view through the cockpit windows, as he pulled the Hercules into yet another turn to starboard.

‘Problem?’ Adam Johnson asked.

‘No,’ Richter shook his head. ‘I just felt like a change of scene. It’s
not a lot of fun back there. Where are we just now?’

The co-pilot pointed to the screen of the navigation computer on the console located between the
two seats. ‘Right here. We’re about forty-five minutes from Aïn Oussera flying in a straight line, or around ninety minutes on our selected route.’

Richter gazed through the windscreen at the terrain a bare two hundred feet below them. The
moon was low in the eastern sky but illuminated the landscape reasonably well, and what he could see of it didn’t look inviting. The word ‘desert’ tends to conjure up images
of golden sand dunes extending in gentle waves to a cloudless blue horizon, but the Algerian desert was very different. It was fairly flat, which was the good news, but the ground was studded
with rocks that cast long shadows in the moonlight. It looked like the kind of surface where Richter would have thought twice about landing a helicopter, far less a seventy-ton fixed-wing
aircraft, even one optimized for rough-ground operations.

‘Are you going to be able to land safely on that crap?’ he asked.

‘On that, no,’ Johnson replied, ‘but the area the eyes in the sky have located
for us is fairly clear of rocks. We’ll do a pass over it first, just to check, and if it looks OK we’ll put the Herc down.’

‘And if it isn’t?’

‘We’ll opt for Plan B, head on to the second landing area, and try there.
It’ll mean a longer drive for you and the Regiment guys, that’s all. And if we can’t land there either, we’ll turn round and fly you back to Morocco in time for
breakfast.’

‘That isn’t really an option,’ Richter argued. ‘We
have
to do this. Somehow you have to get us down there.’

‘I know, but trust us, we’ve done this before. This Herky-bird can land pretty much
anywhere.’ Johnson paused for a few seconds. ‘Look, we weren’t privy to your briefing, but what the hell’s going on in Algeria that’s caused half the Mobility
Troop of an SAS Sabre Squadron to be scrambled? We aren’t at war with these guys, are we?’

‘Not yet, as far as I know, but the Algerians are on edge. There’s an extremist
terrorist group called GIA operating within the country. They consider anybody who isn’t a Muslim as fair game, so they’ve assassinated tens of thousands of fellow Algerians and a
bunch of foreigners since ninety-two. According to some authorities, Algeria is the single most dangerous country in the world to visit, including Iraq and Afghanistan.’

‘That must be a real comfort to you.’

Richter grinned at him. ‘You said it. To answer your question, this is a classified
mission, but it’s really pretty simple: we’re doing the Americans a favour. Their Keyhole birds have picked up unusual activity at several Algerian military bases –
increased patrols by fighter planes, extra guards posted, that kind of thing – and at Aïn Oussera they’ve cordoned off one particular hangar and posted armed guards around
it. The Americans are worried that Algeria might be working up its forces to launch an attack on Libya, or maybe Morocco.’

‘You’re kidding.’

Richter smiled grimly in the gloom of the cockpit. ‘Unfortunately not, though I
don’t think the Yanks have any real clue about this region.’

‘Or anywhere else east of New York.’

‘There’s that too. But
something
’s going on out here, which is why we’re bouncing around in this bag of bolts instead of tucked up in bed back at
home.’

‘So what’s with the hangar?’

‘That’s what we’re here to find out. The Americans reckon the Algerians might
have a bunch of new aircraft, or maybe even a nuke or two, tucked away at Aïn Oussera. The only way to find out is to get someone to take a peep inside the building. And that someone is
me.’

‘But you’re not SAS, right?’ Johnson asked. ‘You’re a
spook.’

‘I’ve been called worse,’ Richter admitted. ‘If I was still in the Navy,
I’d be the SLJO.’

‘Right – “Shitty Little Jobs Officer”? We’ve got one of
those.’

‘Everyone has. And in my section it’s usually me.’

Yi Min-Ho opened the wheelhouse door of the fishing boat and stepped inside. He nodded to the
skipper and walked over to the radar display, dimly illuminated by red lighting, and peered at the screen.

‘We’re clear,’ the captain confirmed. A middle-aged South Korean who’d
spent his entire life as a professional fisherman, he was quietly pleased that his vessel had been selected for this task. However, he wouldn’t ever admit that either to his crew or to
the slightly arrogant junior NIS officer now in front of him, who would be carrying out the mission itself.

‘No contacts within five miles of us, and nothing moving on the coast. We’re
tracking south-east, speed just over two knots.’

Yi Min-Ho was tall for a Korean, with pleasant, regular features, but his ingrained air of
authority – or perhaps superiority – had already caused some friction on board. ‘And the radar detector?’ he demanded.

Although in most respects the craft was just a fishing boat, and would pass any routine
inspection by a North Korean patrol, it had been fitted with several extra items of equipment, all either cleverly concealed or designed to be easily ditched if the vessel looked likely to be
boarded. The radar-warning receiver was one of these items.

‘We’re currently being illuminated by normal coastal surveillance radars, but no
signs of anything unusual.’

The fishing boat had made exactly the same journey three times a week for the last month,
leaving Inchon in South Korea in mid-afternoon and sailing west into the Yellow Sea. Its route took it to a point about twenty miles north-west of the island of Baegryeong-do, before the
craft turned south-east, passing between that island and the mainland, and then paralleling the North Korean coast for a while before returning to its home port.

On every one of those trips, except this one, all the crew had done was catch fish. Twice patrol
boats had approached them closely, but on neither occasion was the vessel boarded. Two days earlier, the National Intelligence Service – South Korea’s espionage agency – had
decided that the mission was a ‘go’, and Yi Min-Ho had finally embarked on the fishing boat. With him came two bulky containers, each of which had needed two men to lift, and a
single haversack holding his personal equipment.

The boat had already made the turn north-west of Baegryeong-do, so the vessel was now about
midway between the island and the largely uninhabited peninsula of Kuksa-bong, virtually the most westerly point of North Korea, jutting out sharply into the Yellow Sea.

‘It’s time,’ Yi said.

The skipper nodded agreement, set the autopilot, and followed the NIS officer out onto the deck,
where three crewmen stood waiting.

‘Open them,’ Yi ordered.

One of the seamen produced a knife and sliced through the cord securing the lid of the
container. He swiftly unlaced the cord from the eyelets, then flipped off the fabric lid to reveal the contents. In the glow cast by the deck lights – for obvious reasons the fishing
boat was displaying the normal lights any patrol craft’s captain would expect to see – it appeared to contain just a single lump of black rubber.

Protruding from one corner of it was a short but rigid hose, which another crewman now attached
to a petrol-powered compressor standing ready on deck. Having secured it, he bent over the compressor, flicked a switch and pulled the starter cord. The engine roared into life, then settled
down to a steady thrum. Almost immediately the black
object began expanding, as the air rushed into it. An inflatable boat was already beginning to take shape.

Yi Min-Ho watched its progress for a few seconds, then turned his attention to the second
container. After the lid was flipped back, two of the crewmen bent over to extract an outboard motor, and placed it carefully on the deck. A small toolkit followed it, then a
twenty-five-litre can of ready-mixed fuel. The outboard had a bulky and unfamiliar look to it, caused partly by its silenced exhaust but mainly by a thick, soft cover enveloping the entire
motor apart from the control arm. This was made of anechoic fabric, designed to absorb radar waves. The NIS had calculated that, despite the mass of metal in the outboard motor, the boat
would have an insignificant radar signature, about the same as a large bird.

Yi nodded to the skipper, and headed back to the wheelhouse to make a last check of both the
radar screen and the radar-warning receiver, and finally to pick up his haversack. He was wearing an all-black jumpsuit, under which were a camouflage-pattern jacket and trousers. In the
haversack was all the equipment he hoped he might need to survive for a week in North Korea: a Kyocera SS66K Iridium satellite phone and spare battery, providing his lifeline to the boat due
to pick him up once his mission was over; a Czechoslovakian CZ75 nine-millimetre semi-automatic pistol with two spare magazines, both fully charged; a GPS receiver; a pair of compact
binoculars; a map; a notebook and pencil; seven days’ worth of American-issue MRE rations and five bottles of water.

By the time he walked back onto the deck, the compressor had fallen silent. The
four-metre-long boat was now fully inflated, and had already been lowered over the side of the fishing vessel facing away from the mainland, just in case anyone there was watching them
through night-vision glasses. The inflatable was carefully secured by a line, while two of the crewmen, one wearing an all-black jumpsuit identical to Yi’s, were fixing the outboard
motor to the wooden transom of the little rubber boat.

With the motor safely in place, the crewmen filled up its tank from the fuel can, and then
both climbed back into the fishing boat.

‘Are you ready?’ the skipper asked. As Yi nodded, he continued, ‘We’ll
see you in about a week.’

The two black-clad figures then scrambled over the side into the inflatable, and one of the
other crewmen passed down Yi’s haversack. The outboard motor started at first pull, the engine barely audible. The inflatable eased away from the side of the fishing boat and turned
east towards the coast of North Korea. The sea was calm, which was just as well, because the inflatable had a long way to go. About twenty miles to the drop-off point, and another fifteen
back to where the fishing boat would then be waiting.

Within seconds the small craft and its occupants were invisible against the darkness of the
water.