James Barrington - Foxbat

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.’

Yellow Sea, south of Suri-bong, North Korea

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.