James Barrington - Foxbat

‘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.’

T’ae’tan Air Base, North Korea

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.

Directorate of Science and Technology, Central Intelligence Agency Headquarters, Langley, Virginia

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.’

Wednesday

Perm, Russia

‘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.