Foxbat (15 page)

Richard Muldoon sat down at the conference table and opened a red folder. ‘Our second
rescheduled Keyhole bird has taken some more pictures,’ he began, and passed a sheaf of photographs across the table to Walter Hicks.

‘Talk me through them, Richard.’

‘N-PIC have sent over a dozen pictures, fully annotated. There are five aircraft on the
taxiway, heading for the end of the runway, presumably preparing to leave T’ae’tan for some other base. From the paint jobs and markings we’ve confirmed that these
aren’t the same ones we
saw in the first set of images, so that means the DPRK has at least ten of these aircraft.’

‘Right,’ Hicks said, scanning the pictures. ‘And how many could they have in
total?’

‘Frankly, we’ve no idea, as we don’t know the size of the new hangars they
built at T’ae’tan. If they excavated deep enough into the hillside, each could hold maybe ten or fifteen aircraft the size of a Foxbat, but it’s a flexible feast.
They’ve still got some F-5 fighters there at the airfield, and they’re parked in hangars as well. So the numbers could range from the ten we already know about up to maybe forty
or fifty maximum.’

‘Any way we can refine that?’

‘Not unless they happen to move more of the aircraft while one of our birds is overhead.
We’ve no assets on the ground that I know of, and I don’t think flying a reconnaissance aircraft over North Korea would be too smart an idea. Even if we pulled a U-2 and flew
that, I doubt we’d gather any useful data. The hangar doors are probably kept closed except when they’re manoeuvring aircraft, and even if they were open there’s a limit to
what we’d be able to see because of the overhang of the hillside.’

Hicks pulled out a pack of small cigars and put them on the table beside him. ‘What
about sending in a Predator?’ he asked.

‘The same arguments, really. Unless we had one flying right past the hangar doors just
when they opened them, the same limitations would apply. The Eighth Army already has several Shadow UAVs operating over the Demilitarized Zone. They’re pure reconnaissance drones, and
their main task is monitoring North Korean activity close to the DMZ. They’ve overflown nuclear sites and airfields, but only occasionally, and as far as I know they’ve never
detected anything particularly useful. It’s also worth stating the obvious, that if we
did
fly a Predator over
T’ae’tan at low level, the North Koreans would probably shoot it down, and then they’d know for certain we were on to them.’

‘Yeah, I see what you mean. So the short version is that we know the DPRK has a minimum of
ten Foxbats, and maybe as many as fifty, but we still don’t know
why
they’ve got them. Did the N-PIC analysis of the
pictures identify anything else?’

‘Yes.’ Muldoon nodded. ‘There’s a road convoy of eight trucks leaving
T’ae’tan, all about three tons. They look like standard army lorries. Obviously we can’t be certain what they’re carrying, but we
can guess because N-PIC knows exactly where they’re heading.’

‘How come?’ Hicks asked, selecting a cigar and carefully lighting it.

‘Two subsequent Keyhole passes showed the same vehicles heading for Nuchonri. If the North
Koreans are planning some kind of action against the South, dispersal of those Foxbats to several different airfields makes sense. In which case, logic suggests the trucks are probably
carrying spares and munitions for the same aircraft.’

Hicks stared down at the images for a minute or so, drawing slowly on his cigar, then he
gathered the photographs together and passed them back across the table.

‘Forget the hard evidence. What’s your gut feeling about this, Richard? What do
you think the North Koreans are planning?’

‘I really don’t know, but I don’t like it. I don’t, too, like the fact
that they’ve got hold of an unknown number of Foxbats, and I particularly don’t like knowing that they managed to sneak them into the country without being detected – by us
or by anyone else. But I think what worries me most is the truck convoy. That suggests T’ae’tan might have been used as the base for training and so on, but now the assets are
being dispersed because the North Koreans are almost ready to launch whatever plan they’ve been hatching.’

Hicks nodded slowly, stood up and walked across to his desk. He picked up the internal phone and
ordered coffee for two, then came and sat down again at the conference table.

‘What did the DNI think?’ Muldoon asked.

‘The Director of National Intelligence is a diplomat, not an intelligence professional,
and it doesn’t help, either, that he’s an idiot,’ Hicks said, now treading familiar ground. ‘In fact, he knows as much about intelligence analysis as I know about the
dark side of the moon. He thinks we’re overreacting, and it’s just a coincidence that the DPRK has bought itself a bunch of Foxbats. He actually believes Pyongyang is just
re-equipping its armed forces.’

‘That’s it?’

‘That’s it,’ Hicks confirmed.

Muldoon opened his mouth to reply, then closed it on hearing a
double knock on the door. A young blonde girl walked in carrying a tray of coffee. She placed it on the conference table, smiled at them both, and left.

Hicks reached over and pulled the tray towards him. ‘So what’s your
recommendation?’

‘If the DNI won’t do anything, we won’t be able to pass it up the line to
the White House or across to the Pentagon – or not officially, anyway. I mean, I can make some calls, give some people a heads-up on what we’ve seen, but that’s about all.
But I do think we should watch the situation, and it wouldn’t hurt to find out what assets we have located in the area. I know what military forces we have in South Korea, but I’d
like to know what the Navy’s got thereabouts, and what other battle groups could get there inside a week.’

‘That’s not really within our terms of reference, Richard, but if this does blow up
in our faces, some wise-ass is bound to ask why we didn’t know, and it would be nice to have our answer ready. I’ll make a couple of calls to the Pentagon, try to shake a few
trees over there.’

The An-72 Coaler landed at Chkalovsky military airfield late that evening. Hidden away amidst
woods in the eastern suburbs of Moscow, Chkalovsky, designated Scheikovo on most aeronautical charts, is the training centre for Russian cosmonauts, and is better known as ‘Star
City’.

Once they’d deplaned, Bykov organized transport to take Richter back to the Rossyia, then
himself climbed into a car with a uniformed driver for the journey to his office at Khodinka airfield.

At the Rossyia, Richter deposited his bags in his hotel room, then headed downstairs to grab a
late dinner. Returning to his room, he set up the laptop and logged on to the internet, first checking flight times, with prices and availability. What he saw made him whistle softly, but he
printed the relevant page on his portable ink-jet, then locked his room and walked out of the hotel.

Clear of earshot, he used the Enigma to dial the Duty Officer’s number at
Hammersmith.

‘Richter,’ he announced.

‘Are you in Seoul yet?’

‘You’ve got to be bloody joking. About the only places in Russia where I can get a
flight to South Korea are Moscow and Vladivostok and, when I worked out that I was a lot closer to Moscow, I came back here.’

‘So when’s your flight?’

‘The earliest is about seven-thirty tomorrow morning – but I won’t be on
that.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because, for reasons that don’t make any sense to me, all the morning and afternoon
departures out of Moscow head
west
to get to South Korea, not east as you might expect. They then all change in Frankfurt, Amsterdam
or Paris, which bumps the flight time up to fifteen or twenty hours. I’ve no intention of sitting around in some antique Aeroflot heap for that length of time.’

‘So?’ The man sounded bored.

‘So I’m taking an evening flight. The Aeroflot five seven three leaves here at
eighteen-twenty tomorrow. It’s still a twelve-and-a-half-hour flight, because it routes via Beijing, but that’s a hell of a lot better than twenty hours. It reaches Seoul about
noon the following day, so can you pass that information on to Simpson?’

‘Is that it?’

‘No. I’ve just checked the ticket prices, and the economy-class single fare is a
couple of thousand dollars American. Tell Simpson I’m booking a Business Class seat, which I hope will mean the stewardess looks like a woman instead of an all-in wrestler, and
I’m not surrounded by goats and Russian peasants. That’ll cost him about three or four thousand dollars, so he’d better make sure the credit card he gave me is good to cover
it. If the card maxes out I’ll be using the return half of the ticket I’ve already got to come back to Heathrow. OK?’

‘OK. Have a good flight – whichever one you catch.’

Pak Je-San was getting worried. When he’d sent his emissaries over to the Russian
Federation to source aircraft, spares and munitions, he had imposed a rigid communications schedule. All of them were expected to contact him by telephone at least once every twenty-four
hours, though he never specified precise times.

Of all his agents, Ryu Chang-Ho was probably the most reliable, and Pak now hadn’t heard
from him since Wednesday afternoon. Ryu had been in Perm that evening, and Pak had been expecting his call, even if only to hear that his second approach had been turned down.

But no call had come through, and since Wednesday Pak himself had barely drawn breath as the
plan moved inexorably towards completion. He’d been totally committed to organizing the dispersal of the aircraft and stores, and with trying to achieve all that whilst still avoiding
detection by the American spy satellites. But at the back of his mind he’d been getting more and more concerned about Ryu, and he now realized he could wait no longer.

He picked up his desk phone and dialled the number of Ryu’s mobile, but all he heard was a
recorded message. That meant the phone itself was either switched off or currently outside the range of the nearest cell.

Pak depressed the receiver and dialled the other number Ryu had given him, for a landline in
Perm. It rang six times, then a deep male voice answered with a single Russian word: ‘
Da
?’ – ‘Yes?’ Pak
immediately ended the call since the voice definitely wasn’t Ryu’s.

Clearly something had gone wrong and, if Ryu had been rumbled, it meant that the Russians
probably now knew that their missing aircraft were in North Korea. If he was already dead, it was possible the authorities
in Perm had fitted call-tracing
equipment, which was exactly why Pak had ended the call so abruptly. In the few seconds he’d been connected, his precise location couldn’t have been traced, but they might still
have been able to identify which country he was calling from.

But now, with Operation ‘Golden Dawn’ already under way, what the Russians knew or
didn’t know would hardly matter.

It’s one thing to schedule aircraft movements so as to avoid them being spotted by
surveillance satellites, though even that’s extremely difficult because of the sheer number of orbiting vehicles currently scanning the planet’s surface. But it is quite a
different matter when massed troop movements are involved. For these simply cannot be hidden from view, and as soon as the first phase of ‘Silver Spring’ began, successive passes
by KH-12 birds, recording images every five seconds, started detecting everything from the heat blooms of tank and truck engines to the numbers of individual soldiers.

The moment the N-PIC analysts saw these pictures, they flashed them straight to Langley. The
CIA duty staff immediately called in Richard Muldoon, and after a brief glance at the images he telephoned Walter Hicks.

‘What’s your take on this, Richard?’

‘I don’t think we need too much analysis here, Walter,’ Muldoon replied,
spreading a selection of photographs across the table. ‘Starting from the west side of the Korean Peninsula, we’ve got the 815th Mechanized Corps moving south-east from Kobuldong
towards the DMZ. The 820th Armoured Corps is doing the same from Songwŏlni, and over to the east the 9th Mechanized Corps is heading south from Kosan.

‘At all the southern airfields there are clear indications of increased activity, loads of
aircraft parked on hardstandings with fuel bowsers and armament trolleys alongside them. The southerly missile bases are also very active, and so are those on the east coast – Hochon,
No-dong, Mayang and Ok’pyong in particular.

‘The North Koreans have made us aware of a scheduled no-notice exercise.’ Muldoon
opened a folder and extracted a single sheet of paper. ‘It’s called “Silver Spring” and it’s the usual scenario: faced with an unprovoked assault from the
capitalist lackeys in Seoul, the brave North Korean forces will fight to the last man to repel the evil invaders.

‘Two things worry me about this, though. First, the DPRK forces usually busy themselves
conducting paper exercises, not real-world stuff. Second, while all these troop movements could be entirely innocent, if they
are
planning an invasion, deployment of these forces is just what you’d expect. My concern is that what we’re looking at now is the implementation of a secret movement order from
Pyongyang, under the cover of this “Silver Spring” exercise, and that when the moment’s right they’ll head south across the border, catching everyone wrong-footed. In
that case, we’re watching the DPRK transitioning to war – and there are no prizes for guessing which country will be under attack.’

‘There’s no chance that they really are just conducting an exercise?’

‘I wouldn’t put any money on it. Don’t forget the Foxbats. N-PIC have
identified the munitions on the trolleys beside them as R-40 air-to-air missiles – AA-6 Acrids – and probably the T variant. They’re loading the ’bats with warshots,
and that means they expect to use them.’

‘OK,’ Hicks said, ‘I’ll take this evidence to the DNI and see if he
still thinks the North Koreans are just undertaking a service upgrade. I already checked with the Pentagon about our force dispositions, and we’ve nothing local to the Korean Peninsula.
Our closest maritime support – that’s the
Enterprise
Carrier Battle Group – is about three days away in the north
Pacific Ocean. We’ve got a couple of frigates off Busan in South Korea, and a hunter-killer submarine about a thousand miles south of the peninsula.’

‘That’s all?’

‘Yup, that’s all. The only other Western naval asset anywhere close is the British
Royal Navy’s carrier
Illustrious
, heading for home. It’s currently off the south-east coast of Japan, en route from Tokyo
to Manila. The ship has seven Harriers on board, plus there are three other warships – frigates, I think – and four supply ships in company.’

Muldoon laughed briefly. ‘Seven Harriers? The North Koreans have
got, what, eight hundred plus combat aircraft? I know every little helps, but that’s just ridiculous.’

‘Yes, I know. The DNI won’t be able to ignore these,’ he tapped the
photographs, ‘so, exercise or no exercise, the Joint Chiefs will at the very least hike the DEFCON state. There’s not a hell of a lot more we can do here at Langley, but my guess
is the White House will kick the military into gear. They’ll get the
Enterprise
moving as fast as possible, and warm up the
B-52s and the Minutemen. They’ll try and talk to the North Koreans as well, but at present we don’t have any direct diplomatic contact with Pyongyang, and I doubt if a few stern
words from our current National Security Adviser would cut much ice with them anyway.’

Muldoon nodded. ‘I can’t argue with any of that, but one thing bothers me –
apart from the US getting dragged into yet another shooting war. Pyongyang knows our commitment to South Korea, and their leaders must realize that we’ll oppose them once they cross the
DMZ. OK, they may have timed this action so that we don’t have any naval forces in the immediate area, but they sure as hell know we’d send some real fast. Every analysis
I’ve seen confirms that the North Koreans can start a war, but they don’t have the resources to win one, or even consolidate any territorial gains they might make. So why are they
doing this?’

‘Maybe their “divine leader” is a lot more stupid than anyone’s giving
him credit for.’

‘Maybe . . . or maybe he’s a lot smarter than we thought, and he’s discovered
a wrinkle that he thinks might make this work. And there’s something else. We had a request from the British SIS yesterday, asking for our present force dispositions relative to the
Korean Peninsula. I told you they’ve got this man in Russia looking into the missing Foxbats and according to their source the MiG-25 was built specifically to counter incoming ICBMs.
Maybe Pyongyang has stolen the aircraft to defend the country against any retaliation from us using missiles. And the Foxbats wouldn’t have any trouble carving up our B-52s as
well.’

‘Shit,’ Hicks muttered.

‘That’s about the size of it,’ Muldoon agreed. ‘If I’m right,
it’s a real high-risk strategy, but just because it’s high-risk doesn’t mean it won’t work.’

Walter Hicks gazed around him as he walked into the NMCC at the Pentagon. It was pretty much
as he remembered it from the last time he’d been there, another occasion on which America was confronted with a nuclear exchange, only then the threat had been much closer to home.

The National Military Command Center is a suite of offices situated on the third floor of the
Pentagon. One office processes the raw data, making it a very noisy environment because of the rows of clattering telex machines that print reports and information from sources around the
world. A battery of clocks shows a selection of world time zones, and there’s a permanent map display to indicate the location of America’s strategic assets and the principal
troop dispositions of all other major national armed forces. The Emergency Conference Room is next door, and by comparison extremely quiet.

The ECR comprises two different levels. The Battle Staff, the NMCC’s duty officers, sit on
either side of the ‘leg’ of a huge T-shaped table and collate data. Positioned along the bar of the ‘T’ are four Emergency Action officers, each at a specialized
console equipped with an awesome array of communication links allowing them to contact American forces almost anywhere in the world.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff, essentially the American President’s War Cabinet, have seats on
a raised platform above and to the left of the Battle Staff table. Opposite them are six huge colour television screens that can display maps of any part of the world, plus charts, plans,
surveillance photographs, troop concentration data and other types of graphic or text that might help to clarify a particular situation.

The NMCC forms part of a single vast command structure that includes the White House Situation
Room and the hardened facilities at Cheyenne Mountain; at Offutt, the location of the Underground Complex; and at Raven Rock. All these sites are linked by telephones, faxes, telex machines,
radios, computers and high-speed secure data links. The briefing would be delivered in the Pentagon, but the duty staff at the other sites would also be able to hear every word that was
said.

Walter Hicks listened with a sense of déjà vu as the Senior Duty Battle Staff
Officer introduced him. It wasn’t the first time he’d briefed the Joint Chiefs but, unlike on the previous occasion, the substance of this briefing would be largely conjecture. He
began almost every sentence with a qualifier – ‘We think’; ‘Analysis suggests’; ‘It is possible’ and so on – and he didn’t like resorting
to that at all. The Joint Chiefs didn’t like it either, and said so, repeatedly.

‘The CIA has been informed, I hope,’ a senior USAF general interrupted almost
immediately, ‘that the North Koreans have a no-notice exercise called “Silver Spring” planned sometime in the next month or so?’

‘Yes, General, the Agency is well aware of that. Our concern, however, is that Pyongyang
may have scheduled this exercise simply to allow them to mobilize their forces for an invasion of South Korea without attracting unwelcome international attention until it’s already too
late.’

‘What proof have you that what’s going on right now in North Korea is anything
more than such an exercise?’

‘Absolute proof is probably impossible to find, because we have no HUMINT resources north
of the DMZ, so we’re entirely dependent upon our interpretation of the technical intelligence obtained. The NSA has intercepted a much higher than normal level of signal traffic in
North Korea, primarily from Chunghwa, their Air Command headquarters, and Hwangju, the headquarters of the Third Air Combat Command. They haven’t managed to decode many of these
messages, because it looks as if the North Korean military are using new encryption routines, but nothing Fort Meade has deciphered so far indicates that this is more than just an
exercise.

‘Despite that, we’re very concerned on two counts. First, most North Korean military
exercises we’ve been made aware of in the past have been paper or tabletop routines. But this time the satellite imagery shows deployments of major forces along a very broad front, all
ultimately heading towards the Demilitarized Zone. These movements include large numbers of troops as well as armoured divisions. We’ve also detected increased activity at various
airfields in the south of the country and at missile launch sites. That might be explained as part of
the exercise, but only if we accept a fundamental
change in the way the North Koreans normally do things. We could easily discuss the implications of these movements all day without reaching a consensus.

‘The second factor is more compelling. Why have the North Koreans secretly acquired at
least ten MiG-25s? We’re concerned that they’ve obtained these Foxbats to counter the more advanced aircraft employed in the South Korean Air Force.’

‘That won’t wash, Mr Hicks,’ the general interrupted again. ‘The
Foxbat is an obsolete design. Yes it’s fast, but it’s not agile. The MiG-25 is
old
technology and there’s no way it
could survive in air combat against modern warbirds like the F-15 or F-16.’

‘That’s your field of expertise, General, not mine,’ Hicks replied equably,
‘and I don’t entirely disagree with you. But there is another possibility that’s more worrying. The British SIS has obtained information from the Russians that the Foxbat
was specifically designed to intercept ICBMs in the terminal stages of flight. So maybe the North Koreans want them as a last-ditch defence against a missile attack.’

This statement was followed by a long silence. The possibility that the MiG-25 was anything
more than just an old, fast interceptor had clearly not occurred to the assembled officers.

‘A missile attack from where?’

‘From us. From a Minuteman in a silo in Montana, or from one of our boomers. As I
understand it, our nearest surface group is at least two or three days’ sailing time away from the peninsula, so if North Korean forces do head south, across the Demilitarized Zone, the
only viable counter to such an invasion might be the missiles in our silos or submarines.’

‘The President would never authorize a first strike against North Korea, Mr
Hicks,’ another general pointed out, ‘and there would be no need for us to take the nuclear option. We’ve got bombers at Andersen Air Base on Guam as a deterrent against
exactly this kind of incursion. They’re B1-Bs, B-2s and B-52s, and they’re more than capable of flattening any advance the North Koreans could achieve. And whether it took us a
few days or even a few weeks, we could easily land enough forces
on the peninsula to push them back using conventional weapons and tactics.’

‘I know,’ Hicks nodded. ‘What concerns the Agency is the other side of the
coin, if you like.
We
may not resort to the use of nuclear weapons, but the fact that the North Koreans have obtained these aircraft
suggests to us that
they
might be intending to do so. We believe they could be planning a blitzkrieg assault across the DMZ, and then
would attempt to stop any counter-attack by threatening to target their nuclear arsenal on any assets we might send in support. As a viable threat, that would stalemate the situation. And
knowing the regime in Pyongyang, we shouldn’t doubt they would carry out this threat if they had to. If this operation goes the way we think it might, we could easily lose South Korea
totally.’