Foxbat (27 page)

Flying in formation at well over four hundred miles an hour and less than five hundred feet
above the surface of the sea, a pilot’s concentration has to be absolute. A split-second’s inattention and the Harrier could plunge into the waves or plough into another aircraft,
and the four GR9s had widened their formation slightly to provide an added margin of safety.

‘Vipers, Cobra One. Stand by for split in thirty seconds.’

Richter took his eyes off the view through the windscreen for the bare few seconds it took to
visually check his cockpit, then looked back.

‘Split now, now, now. Good hunting, Vipers.’

But as the tracks of the two pairs of Harriers diverged, the AEW Sea King radar controller
passed his first traffic information message, and it wasn’t good news.

‘Cobras, Vipers, November Alpha. Picture Charlie. Launches from the airfields at
T’ae’tan, Nuchonri, Kuupri, Wonsan, Toksan and Ŏrang. Multiple bandits, all tracking towards the east coast of the peninsula. Stand by for numbers and locations.’

‘Shit,’ Richter muttered. ‘That’s all we needed.’

The first Hornet taxied to the starboard bow catapult, expertly directed by a marshaller, and
stopped with its nosewheel in precisely the right spot. The holdback – a steel bar designed to stop the aircraft moving forwards when the engines were run up to full power prior to
launch – was attached to the rear of the nosewheel landing gear, and the front hitched to the catapult itself. Steam swirled around the men carrying out these tasks, giving the scene a
somewhat surreal appearance.

The blast deflector was raised behind the Hornet and the pilot ran up the two General Electric
F414-GE-400 turbofans to full cold military power, then cut in the burners. The noise of the engines rose to a scream, and almost immediately the aircraft lurched forward as the catapult
accelerated it down the deck. At the far end, the Hornet dipped down briefly towards the sea, then rose quickly and climbed away, but nobody except the officers in PriFly were watching it.
Instead, they were busy preparing for the next launch, and the Hornet on the port bow catapult was already in place and spooling up its engines.

Five seconds later, the second Super Hornet was airborne, and in under three minutes all eight
aircraft were in the air and climbing away from the
Enterprise
. They formed into two groups of four, climbed to thirty-five thousand
feet and took up a south-westerly heading.

The
tab-ryong
was scanning the
surveillance radar screens when a shout from one of his controllers drew his attention to two very fast-moving contacts approaching from the south-east. They were travelling at around five
hundred miles an hour, and were heading straight towards the missile base.

‘Excellent,’ the colonel murmured, then picked up a microphone to make a
broadcast.

‘Air raid warning! Air raid warning! Two aircraft approaching from the south-east. All
anti-aircraft crews stand by. Fire at will, but wait until you are certain of your targets.’

Outside the bunker, every surface-to-air missile battery and antiaircraft gun position was fully
manned, and the
tab-ryong
had also stationed an additional fifty soldiers armed with shoulder-launched missiles around the perimeter
of the base. His orders had been most specific: the attacking aircraft were under no circumstances to be allowed to escape.

Next the colonel dialled a telephone number from memory, which connected him with the senior
controller at Toksan, the closest interceptor base.

‘This is Mayang,’ he said. ‘We have two fast-moving contacts approaching on
bearing one five zero, range twenty miles.’

‘Very good. We’ll vector four of our interceptors towards you. Ensure your crews
hold fire when our fighters approach. I’ll advise you once they reach five miles from your boundary.’

‘Understood,’ the
tab-ryong
replied, then used his microphone to warn his gun and missile crews.

Richter followed the Senior Pilot in a turn to port. When he’d steadied, he glanced
briefly out to starboard to see the Vipers heading away to the north. He checked his weapon controls, making sure he knew
exactly where the switches were, and almost
immediately his Radar Warning Receiver sounded.

He studied the Zeus ‘frying pan’ display that surrounded the GR9’s HUD. A
single line was showing in the ten o’clock position, meaning his aircraft was being intermittently irradiated by the lowest lobes of a North Korean surveillance radar somewhere on the
coast to the southwest. That wasn’t a problem, but it was a definite attention-getter.

He checked the INGPS. They were seventeen miles from Mayang, their first target, and the coast
of the Korean Peninsula was now clearly visible in front of them.

‘Two from One. Master arm on.’

Richter clicked his press-to-transmit button in acknowledgement, and made the switch, arming
his weapon systems. Fifteen miles to go. The RAW, part of the Marconi Zeus ECM system, was now detecting numerous radar transmissions, but only from surveillance radars. No SAM fire-control
radars or fighter sets yet but, if the Sea King bagman was right, that was going to change very soon.

And then Richter suddenly realized what had been bugging him ever since he’d seen those
first satellite pictures of the North Korean missile sites. And he now deduced the probable reason for the sudden flurry of aircraft take-offs from the North Korean airfields.

‘All callsigns, Cobra Two. Abort! Abort! Abort! Vipers and Cobras abort. Haul off and
reverse course. Cobras turn port, Vipers starboard. Opening heading south-east. Get the hell out of here, buster. Vipers acknowledge.’

And as he said the words Richter hauled his GR9 round in a tight turn to port.

‘Vipers, all copied. Reversing course.’

‘Cobra Two, Leader. What the fuck’s going on?’

Richter didn’t reply immediately, concentrating on getting his aircraft heading away from
the hostile shore.

‘We’ve been sold a pup. It’s a trap. I suddenly realized what didn’t
make sense. The North Korean military does almost everything underground. They’ve got the facilities to prepare their missiles in hardened shelters, so why are there four missile launch
pads with No-dongs
sitting on them, right out in the open and close to the coast, so they’re a really attractive target?’

‘To persuade us or the Americans to attack them?’

‘Exactly. And once we’d carried out the raid, and probably got our arses blown out
of the sky in the process, Pyongyang would launch an attack across the DMZ and be able to claim they were acting in self-defence.’

Dick Long pulled alongside Richter’s Harrier as the two aircraft headed south-east at
better than five hundred miles an hour. Before Long could reply, the AEW Sea King bagman broke in.

‘Cobra Two, November Alpha, all copied. Understand the hunt is off. Break, break. Vipers,
Cobras right one o’clock range eight, similar heading. Call visual.’

‘Vipers visual with Cobras.’

‘So what now?’ Dick Long asked.

‘Right now,’ Richter said, ‘I don’t know. Let’s get south of the
DMZ, just in case some of those aircraft November Alpha detected were Foxbats, out looking for an easy kill.’

‘Sir, the Hawkeye reports multiple aircraft contacts launching from the southerly
airfields in North Korea, principally Kuupri, Nuchonri, Ŏrang, T’ae’tan, Toksan and Wonsan. Judging by their speed and rate of climb, they look like interceptors. And
I’m – stand by. Sir, the four British fighters have turned back.’

Rodgers acknowledged the call and concentrated on the display in front of him, where the JTIDS
was showing exactly that. Numerous new contacts were being displayed over the North Korean landmass, but Rodgers wasn’t interested in those – at least, not for the present.
Instead, he focused on the Harriers. The southerly pair had turned hard to port, and the other two to starboard, and all were now heading away from the east coast of North Korea at a speed
the computer calculated at around five hundred miles an hour, clearly aiming to link up into a formation of four in a matter of minutes.

‘What the hell happened?’ the captain murmured. Then, louder. ‘Did you detect
any stand-off weapon release? Any sign that they’ve used long-range air-to-surface missiles?’

‘Nothing showing on JTIDS, sir. Stand by, just checking with Alpha Three.’ There was
a short pause. ‘Negative from the Hawkeye, sir. No weapon release seen. It looks like they just changed their minds and decided to go back home.’

The
tab-ryong
was staring in
disbelief at the radar screen beside his desk. The aircraft he’d been told would be trying to attack his site had
suddenly turned around, and were already over
twenty miles away, all without a shot being fired or a single surface-to-air missile launched. What could have gone wrong?

The colonel had prepared the missile site exactly as Pyongyang had ordered, with an old and
battered No-dong, previously used for engine tests and other development work, mounted in the firing gantry, and with the fake warhead inside the nose-cone. He’d been instructed to take
as long as he could to mount the warhead, to make sure the American spy satellites got at least one good picture of it.

He’d done all that, and he guessed that officers in charge of other missile bases on the
east coast of North Korea had probably received similar orders. The American aircraft – he assumed they were American – had clearly been flying on an attack vector, but had broken
off at almost exactly twelve miles range.

He suddenly remembered that twelve miles was the international limit of territorial waters. Had
the Americans been trying to provoke a response, probing close to the coast and then breaking off just before infringing North Korean territory? He shook his head. No, he didn’t believe
that. It was as if the pilots had suddenly been recalled, after being ordered to abort the raid.

Whatever the reason, he had to report this. And, he expected, the men in Pyongyang would not be
happy with the news.

‘Cobra Leader, November Alpha. No hostiles in pursuit. Most of them appear to be
recovering to their bases.’

‘Roger that. Break. Cobra Two, Vipers, commence climb to thirty-five thousand
feet.’

At low level the Harrier, like all high-performance jet aircraft, burned far more fuel than at
altitude, where the engine worked much more efficiently. They’d dropped their external tanks less than ten minutes earlier, so conserving fuel wasn’t a priority but, as they
seemed safe from pursuit, gaining height was a prudent move.

‘They must have noticed something,’ Pak Je-San insisted. ‘Something must
have made those pilots realize it was a trap.’

‘Very probably,’ Kim Yong-Su agreed, ‘but exactly what happened is irrelevant.
The fact remains that the fighters – and they were British, not American – turned away and didn’t continue their attack, which has put us in a very difficult position. We no
longer have the justification we need to begin our operation against South Korea, and now we must decide what to do next.’

‘I would proceed as planned,’ Pak suggested. ‘Everything is in
place.’

‘Fortunately, that is not your decision,’ Kim hissed. ‘I’m perfectly
aware, as is the “Dear Leader”, that this was your plan, but we’ve both reminded you before that your involvement is now purely practical.
We
will decide all matters of strategy.’

Kim put down the phone and sat in silence for a few moments. But Pak was right: everything
was
in place. The only difference was that by giving the go-ahead now, North Korea would clearly be labelled the aggressor, rather
than a sovereign nation defending its territory against an unprovoked attack. But would that make any difference in the long run? If their plans succeeded, the opinion of any other nation or
international body would probably be irrelevant, because Korea would at last be united.

But, ultimately, the decision wasn’t his to make. He reached forward and picked up the
red telephone.

Four minutes later Kim Yong-Su ended the call with a somewhat shocked expression on his face.
He’d expected that the ‘Dear Leader’ would be disturbed by what he had to tell him, but he’d been completely unprepared for the screaming rage that had resulted.

He’d suggested caution, that the best option might be to try to entice the Americans or
the British to carry out an attack somewhere else, or even for the North Koreans to fake an assault themselves, photographing the destruction of one of their airfields by missiles fired by
their own military, and then claiming it was an act of aggression by the South
Koreans. That would give them the excuse they needed to smash through the Demilitarized
Zone.

The ‘Dear Leader’ had rejected this suggestion out of hand, and issued his own very
specific instructions, and not for the first time Kim wondered at the man’s sanity. But an order was an order, and despite his personal misgivings, he had no doubt at all what would
happen to him if he disobeyed. He sat at his desk for a few moments, collecting his thoughts, then picked up the telephone. His first call was to Pak Je-San, and he simply told him to
implement Phase Two of ‘Golden Dawn’, immediately.

Then he dialled the number that gave him direct access to the commanding officer at the Chiha-ri
missile base.

North Korea’s planned assault strategy against its southern neighbour was simple,
effective and comprehensive.

Western analysts believed the initial attack would probably be a form of electronic warfare,
with highly trained North Korean hackers disrupting American computer-based communication links. That would be followed by assaults using the 120,000 North Korean special forces against
specific American and South Korean military bases, airfields and the like. The main assault would follow, with sustained artillery barrages aimed at Seoul and other strategic targets lying
close to the DMZ. And, whilst that was taking place, North Korean troops would swarm across the Demilitarized Zone through pre-prepared tunnels, dug deep underground, and emerge
behind
the Combined Forces Command lines. Estimates suggest there may be as many as twenty such tunnels running under the DMZ at present, some of
them capable of handling up to 15,000 troops per hour.

That was the conventional view, and it was the battle plan that the Americans and South Koreans
had formulated their own strategies to counter. In fact, the allied Operational Plan was simple enough in concept: the CFC forces would retreat in the face of the North Korean attack, giving
ground as slowly as possible, while American reinforcements
would be deployed to the south of the peninsula, and would then advance northwards, driving the attackers
back.

The North Korean leadership in Pyongyang had always recognized that the main obstacle to their
conquest of the South was America’s involvement. Despite their belligerent rhetoric, in a war with the United States, they knew North Korea would ultimately lose, simply because no
small nation, no matter how dedicated and able its forces, can hope to defeat a superpower. The disparity in the sizes of their respective arsenals and military machines ensured this.

That was why Pak Je-San’s plan called for the flight of the Taep’o-dong missile as
an essential first step, because if they could convince the Americans that their involvement in the peninsula would lead to nuclear attacks on the superpower itself, there was a very good
chance that the invasion of South Korea might succeed. American public opinion would surely force the government not to react?

But Pak Je-San had an additional string to his bow. When he’d explained his overall plan
to the leadership in Pyongyang, he’d emphasized that the artillery bombardment of South Korea would ultimately be counter-productive. The ideal solution would be the elimination of a
large proportion of the population of the South, but not the destruction of the country’s infrastructure, and he’d therefore tailored his plan to achieve this objective.

It was to be a four-stage process.
First
, assemble the troops ready to cross the Demilitarized Zone, either on the ground, while supported by tanks and armour, or through the
tunnels.
Second
, destroy the CFC’s ability to repel the invasion.
Third
, launch an attack using short-duration chemical weapons targeted on the major centres of population in and around Seoul.
Finally
, send in the occupying force.

The troops were already in position, and the chemical weapons had been assembled and prepared
for use. North Korea has always designed its chemical and biological weapons to be fired from howitzers and other artillery pieces, but inevitably these are relatively small and lightweight
munitions. To ensure that Seoul suffered a devastating attack that would overwhelm the South Korean government and population, Pak Je-San had planned to use Scud missiles carrying the largest
available chemical warheads. Six such weapons, he had calculated, would be
enough, but these could only be launched once the North Koreans were certain the American
Patriot anti-missile batteries had been eliminated as a viable defence.

And that was now in the hands of the commanding officer at Chiha-ri.

‘Mr President, we’ve had a message from the
Enterprise
. The captain reports that one of their Hawkeyes detected a four-aircraft raid approaching the North Korean missile bases.’

‘Good,’ the President nodded. ‘It looks like the Agency’s idea worked,
General.’

Donald Sterling shook his head. ‘No, sir. The carrier also reports that the raid turned
away from the coast at the last moment, apparently without releasing any weapons.’

‘That’s a fucking disaster,’ interrupted the Secretary of Defense, his voice
loud and angry. ‘If those missiles are still on the launch pads, Japan’s at risk, and there’s nothing we can do about it.’

‘We could still—’ General Sterling began, but was interrupted by the ringing
of one of the telephones on the President’s desk.

‘Just a moment, Don.’ The President picked up the phone and listened for a few
seconds. ‘OK, send them in.’

There was a brief double-tap on the door, and then Walter Hicks and Richard Muldoon entered the
Oval Office.

‘You heard about the British chickening out?’ snarled the Secretary of
Defense.

‘No. What happened?’

Sterling explained about the signal from the
Enterprise
. When he’d finished, Hicks and Muldoon exchanged glances.

‘It looks like somebody over there’s a lot smarter than we are,’ Hicks
said.

‘You need to explain that.’

‘We’ve got the latest analysis from N-PIC. It now looks like the No-dong missiles on
the east coast launch pads are fakes.’

‘Jesus.’

‘We made those bases the highest priority for N-PIC, and we’ve had as near
continuous surveillance as is possible within the constraints of the Keyhole system. We’ve analysed the images, and we’re sure the missiles on the pads are real No-dongs, but
everything else suggests they’re not armed or fuelled. We’ve seen fuelling apparently taking place, but there’s been no change in the temperature of the missiles, which
means although the hoses were connected, no fuel was actually transferred.

‘And we’ve got suspicions about the warheads as well. They looked right in the
satellite photographs, but the maintainers handling them weren’t all wearing protective clothing and at Mayang, in particular, mounting the warhead took far longer than we would have
expected.’

‘Maybe they had a problem with it,’ the President said.

‘Maybe they did, sir, but the alternative explanation is that they
wanted
us to see and recognize the warhead, to convince us that the missile was being prepared for launch against Japan. It’s significant
that the North Koreans usually keep their aircraft and missiles under cover until they’re ready to actually launch them, but at these four bases the No-dongs have been sitting visible
on the pads for the last couple of days. We think these four missile sites were chosen deliberately, because they’re near the coast and relatively easy to attack, and that therefore
Pyongyang’s intention was to entice us to hit them, because that would provide the excuse they needed to cross the DMZ into South Korea. They could then claim they were acting in
self-defence, following an unprovoked attack by us or the South Koreans.’

‘Devious bastards. So what happened with the British Harriers? Did somebody get a message
to them?’

‘We’ve no idea, sir. It’s possible someone on the British carrier put two and
two together, or maybe one of the pilots worked it out. That doesn’t matter. What’s chiefly important is that the raid didn’t happen.’

‘So what now?’

‘We’re not out of the wood yet, obviously. The North Koreans may not have obtained
the excuse they’d like to start an invasion, but that doesn’t mean they won’t go ahead anyway. In fact, we’re reasonably certain that’s exactly what
they’re intending.’

‘You’ve got evidence to back up that assertion?’ the Secretary of Defense
asked.

‘Yes, sir. We’ve seen troops, tanks and armour at North Korean bases moving
towards the DMZ and then holding position, presumably waiting for the word to advance. We’ve detected other foot-soldiers entering what we believe are tunnels running into South Korea,
and there’s a lot of activity in the coastal areas on both sides of the peninsula. We think they could be groups of special forces preparing to infiltrate south of the DMZ. But what
concerns us most, Mr President, is this.’

Walter Hicks opened his briefcase and took out half a dozen black-and-white photographs.
‘These pictures are less than one hour old. This is the North Korean base at Chiha-ri, just north of the DMZ, and we believe this object here’ – he pointed – ‘is
a modified HY-2 Seersucker cruise missile. It’s mounted on a trailer and they’re just moving it into the hardened shelter.

‘The weapon’s a Chinese development of the old Russian P-15 Styx anti-ship
missile, and it’s been exported to a number of countries including Iraq and North Korea. Pyongyang’s been playing about with these since the early nineties. Back in ninety-four
they test-flew one that covered a hundred miles, and three years later they’d increased the range to over one hundred twenty miles. That’s when our military christened the weapon
the AG-1.

‘Until now we’d no idea what else they’ve been doing with the Seersucker, but
these pictures suggest they’ve succeeded in developing a land-based variant, and that’s real bad news. It’s an old design, but it’s still a serious weapon. It’s
big and bulky, but for the North Koreans that’s actually an advantage, because they can put whatever they like in it – different guidance system, bigger fuel tanks or whatever
– without having to modify the basic shape.’

‘What are we talking about here in terms of payload and performance? And will the PAC-3
Patriot batteries south of the DMZ be able to engage it?’

Hicks shook his head. ‘To answer your second question first, Mr President, probably not,
because of its flight profile. The Patriot’s very good at intercepting medium- and high-level targets, but it was never designed to engage fast low-flying targets like cruise missiles.
It’s not
generally known, but in March and April two thousand three, during the Second Gulf War, the Iraqis fired five obsolete Chinese-built cruise missiles into
Kuwait. There were no casualties, and the damage they caused was minimal, but the Patriot radars never even saw them.

‘As for the Seersucker’s performance, the original HY-2 had a liquid-fuelled motor
that gave it just subsonic performance – about Mach zero decimal nine – and a range of about sixty miles carrying a thousand-pound warhead. Its avionics were quite sophisticated,
with a radio altimeter, TV guidance system, infrared seeker head and active radar guidance as it closed with the target.

‘Those data are based on the Chinese version from the early nineties – I’d be
prepared to bet serious money that the North Koreans have made significant improvements in almost all areas. We already know they’ve doubled its effective range.’

‘What do you think they intend doing with them?’

‘If I was running this operation,’ General Sterling answered the question,
‘I’d prepare three or four, strap a low-yield nuclear weapon on each of them and set them to air-burst over South Korea on a line running east–west through Seoul. That would
pretty much wipe out the CFC’s computers and communication systems and everything else that runs on printed-circuit boards. Then I’d use artillery to soften up the enemy troops,
and send in the army. And there wouldn’t be a damn thing we could do to stop it.’