James Barrington - Foxbat

Dekker slid the folding ladder from the trooper’s Bergen frame and laid it out flat on the ground. Most collapsible ladders have joints that click loudly when they snap into place, but this one had been specially manufactured for the Regiment. It was absolutely rigid when assembled, but the joints closed in complete silence.

In less than a minute the ladder was ready. They checked in all directions, making sure that they were still unobserved, then Dekker stepped forward and leant the ladder against one of the steel posts supporting the fence. The ladder itself was twelve feet long, since the analysts at JARIC had calculated the height of the fence at ten feet, based upon the length of the shadows they’d observed on the satellite imagery.

Richter climbed up swiftly, swung his leg over so that he straddled the fence, his feet resting safely on one of the horizontal steel cables, pulled the ladder up and over, then lowered its base to the ground inside the airfield. Then he slid down it, lifted the ladder away from the fence and placed it flat on the ground.

Outside the wire, Dekker gave him a thumbs-up, then the two men melted away into the night.

Richter was inside. Now all he had to do was complete the mission and get out again. It sounded easy enough if you said it quickly.

Monday

Pyoksong, North Korea

North Korea maintains a huge standing army of just over a million men – almost as many as the United States – with a further five million troops in reserve. It has some eight hundred combat aircraft, three thousand five hundred tanks and over ten thousand artillery pieces. Almost without exception, these men, aircraft and weapons are located within forty miles of the border with South Korea, not least because technically the two nations are still at war, despite the armistice signed in 1953. Virtually every battle plan that the North Korean forces have prepared is aimed at either repelling an invasion from the south, or actually launching an attack on its more prosperous neighbour.

The gulf between the two countries is vast. South Korea is about twenty per cent smaller than its brother nation, but has twice the population, a gross domestic product four hundred times greater, and the average worker there earns about twenty times more than a North Korean. The North spends around thirty per cent of its national income on the military budget: the South less than three per cent. South Korea is a major manufacturing nation, selling its products – everything from cars to computer components – around the world. North Korea has only one major export: hard drugs, produced with the active support and compliance of the government and frequently shipped out using diplomatic privilege to avoid confiscation.

What North Korea hates – and fears – more than anything is the nation immediately south of the Demilitarized Zone. Or, more precisely, that nation’s huge silent partner, America.

For any country with an extensive coastline, and especially one suffering from what amounts to government-orchestrated paranoia, radar surveillance of all its borders and seaward approaches is essential. In the south-east of its territory, North Korea has radar heads located on the Kuksa-bong peninsula, the island of Sunwi-do, and on the promontory extending due west of the South Korean island of Gyodong-do. All are left unmanned, their signals fed through a combination of cables and microwave links to a central radar station just outside Pyoksong.

The South Korean National Intelligence Service had been absolutely right: the silenced outboard motor did have about the same radar signature as a large bird. But what Yi Min-Ho hadn’t considered, as he made his clandestine approach to the landfall south of Suri-bong, was that birds very rarely fly in a straight line.

The signal generated by the intruders’ motor was detected by the Kuksa-bong radar head immediately the inflatable moved away from the fishing boat, but at first the operator at Pyoksong had ignored it, just as he ignored all other small and intermittent returns. It was only when this ‘bird’ began following an arrow-straight track directly towards the North Korean coastline that he called over his watch supervisor to investigate.

The so-ryong – the rank equivalent to major – stared at the radar screen for a couple of minutes, then issued a curt instruction. ‘Keep tracking it,’ he snapped, ‘and tell me the moment it makes landfall.’

Then he strode back to his own desk and picked up the telephone.

Aïn Oussera Air Base, Algeria

The task was simple enough. There were three hangars in front of him, and Richter needed to get himself into the middle one, or at least take a look inside it. The problem was that while the two hangars on either side each had a single guard stationed in front of its huge sliding doors, the middle building had six men watching it – one posted at each of its four sides and a two-man roving patrol. Getting in undetected was not a viable option from the ground, so he was going to have to try the roof. Or, to be precise, the lighting gantry.

The satellite photographs supplied by the Americans had revealed one single dark line cutting across the fronts of all three buildings, and their analysts’ best guess had been an overhead duct carrying power cables. Looking from where Richter now lay, concealed behind a stack of empty oil drums near the perimeter fence, their assumption was clearly correct, but the structure also carried banks of spotlights to illuminate the hardstanding immediately in front of the three hangars. Since it carried massive lights whose bulbs would periodically need replacing, this meant the gantry had to be strong enough to support a man’s weight, and therefore Richter could crawl along it to reach the target hangar. The trick now was getting up onto the roof of the first one in line.

All three hangars had been built to the same design: windowless brick walls supporting a metal roof, with aircraft-width doors at the front, pedestrian doors at the back and on both sides – each with a single light burning above it. These doors would obviously be locked, but that wasn’t an insurmountable problem. The difficult bit would be managing to open one of them without collecting a bullet from a sentry.

For a while Richter just waited and watched what the guards were up to. From his confined position he could see only the rear and one side of the left-hand hangar, and the backs of the two others further along. The sentry guarding the nearest hangar occasionally appeared at the far end, glancing directly along the side of the building before returning to his post at the front. But while Richter watched he never bothered to walk the full distance to check round the back. The rear door at first seemed to offer the best chance of getting inside without this particular guard spotting him, but that wasn’t going to work because of the roving patrol and the single sentry stationed at the back of the middle hangar. The moment Richter approached he’d be seen by one or other of them.

The side door therefore was his best, in fact his only, option. He’d just have to somehow crack the lock on the door as quickly as possible. For almost half an hour Richter patiently watched the sentry’s routine, trying to work out a pattern to his timing, but there didn’t seem to be any. Sometimes the man would check the side of the hangar twice inside five minutes, then he might not reappear for another ten. There was no point, Richter decided, in waiting any longer. The guard’s unpredictable movements were working against him, and he was just going to have to take his chances.

He carefully studied the side door through his binoculars. It appeared to have both a mortise and a Yale-type lock, which was irritating, since two locks would obviously take longer to crack than just one. Richter opened his leather wallet and selected two picks – a snake and a half-diamond – and also a tension wrench. From another pocket he took a device that looked something like an electric toothbrush, actually a SouthOrd Model E100C Electric Pick, then inserted a thin steel probe called a needle into the pivot arm at the end, and tightened the hexagonal screw.