James Barrington - Foxbat

‘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.

Thursday

T’ae’tan Air Base, North Korea

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.

Perm, Russia

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.’

Office of the Associate Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Langley, Virginia

‘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.’