Then the second Algerian jeep drove back into view, the driver making for a group of rocks over to their right, with the clear intention of trying to outflank them. Richter swung the Browning around on its mount and fired a six-round burst, but the vehicle was too quick for him. It reached the shelter of the boulders and lurched to a halt, and he had no doubt that within a matter of seconds they’d be taking fire from two positions simultaneously. They had to start moving out, and quickly.
‘Colin,’ he called. ‘We’ve got to get out of here.’
‘We’re ready,’ Dekker gasped, as he and two other troopers lifted a wounded comrade into the Pinky. The soldier was obviously in great pain, his left leg below the knee a bloody mess, a section of bone protruding below the makeshift tourniquet someone had applied. Yet as soon as they’d got him seated, the man painfully reached for a 203 and brought it up to the ready position.
Dekker and his men went back to the wrecked Land Rover and returned moments later carrying another soldier, but this one was clearly beyond medical help. Silently, they laid the body in the rear section of the vehicle.
‘Broken neck,’ Dekker muttered shortly. ‘Right, everyone, mount up. John, get us out of here.’
The driver climbed into his seat, jammed the Land Rover into gear, and gunned the engine. Wallace resumed his position at the Browning machine-gun, heedless of the bullets still spraying all around them, and fired a long burst that traversed from left to right, to include most of the positions where the Algerian soldiers might have taken cover. Two of the others followed his example with their assault rifles, while Richter and Dekker joined in by firing forty-millimetre grenades from a couple of the 203s.
Just thirty seconds after they took off, Richter heard an explosion close behind. The overturned Pinky had exploded in a ball of fire.
‘High explosive and thermite?’ he asked, above the din of the automatic-weapon fire.
‘You got it,’ Dekker said, changing the magazine on his 203. ‘No better way to sanitize that vehicle.’
North Korea
In the pale light of early morning, Yi Min-Ho watched silently as the searching soldiers paused in their advance and assembled in a field lying about three hundred metres below his vantage point. He at first presumed they were being briefed on new search tactics, but after a minute they turned and headed back towards the road where their lorry was parked.
It looked as if the pursuit had been called off, but Yi feared that it might be a diversionary tactic, encouraging him to stand up and resume his journey. They could easily have left a couple of men behind, hidden in the undergrowth, waiting for him to move, so for ten minutes he lay there motionless, scanning the fields below with his binoculars. But there was no sign of life and he was certain the army lorry had definitely left the area, having watched it drive away down the road leading to the east, the sound of its exhaust gradually fading into silence.
Yi carefully checked the land lying above him, identifying the next available cover. He eased up into a low crouch, backed away from his hiding place and moved slowly up the hill. When he reached another clump of bushes, he slid in behind it and again studied the land below through his binoculars. Still nothing moved.
Cautiously, he stood upright for just five seconds, then ducked down again. No shots were fired, and the hillside remained empty and innocent-looking. They must have gone, he decided, whereupon he turned and ran quickly up the slope, stopping after a couple of hundred metres to check behind him again. He should be at least five hundred metres from where he’d last seen his pursuers, so unless some stay-behinds had somehow out-flanked him, he was already beyond effective range of their weapons.
He shrugged, and strode on, now making for a gap in the Kungnaksan range of hills that rose in front of him. His objective, T’ae’tan Air Base, lay directly to the east, but his aim was to get himself to the north side of the runway, so he chose a longer, north-eastern route.
Algeria
The Pinky was now overloaded by any standards. Designed to carry only four or five, it currently had nine on board, one of them dead and another badly injured. The rest hung on as best they could as the driver pushed the vehicle to its limits, the Land Rover bouncing and jolting alarmingly over the rough surface.
But hanging on was the least of their worries. About five hundred yards behind them, and gaining steadily, was the remaining Algerian jeep. Its driver clearly knew the terrain, and was currently following a parallel route across the desert that looked a lot smoother. His machine-gunner would fire occasional bursts after the fleeing Land Rover, with almost no chance of finding his mark in those conditions and at that range.
Half a mile further behind, two other sets of headlights bored through the morning twilight. The three-ton trucks had not given up the chase.
‘Foxtrot November, Alpha One,’ said Dekker into his radio microphone, almost having to shout over the roar of the turbo-charged diesel and the rattling of equipment. ‘We’re heading back, with hostiles in pursuit. We’re now in one vehicle only. I say again, one vehicle only. Our estimate is minutes zero six. Get those engines started, and drop the ramp.’
‘Alpha One, roger. Call when you’re thirty seconds out, and we’ll hit the lights and start rolling.’
The Algerian jeep had closed to less than three hundred yards, and its machine-gun started up again, bullets striking the rocks around them, uncomfortably close. Though none actually hit the Land Rover, Richter guessed it was only a matter of time.
‘We’re not going to make it unless we stop those bastards,’ Dekker called out.
‘Fucking risky. If we slow down they’ll be all over us.’
‘Yes, but if we don’t they’ll catch us before we get to the plane. John, next big clump of rocks you see, dive behind it and stop. Then kill the lights.’
‘Got it, boss.’
Two minutes later the headlights picked out a handful of large boulders off to the right of their path.
‘That’ll do,’ Dekker called, and the Pinky changed course slightly to make towards them. ‘We’ll try to discourage them a bit, so use grenades.’
Richter, Dekker and two of the troopers began loading forty-millimetre grenades into their 203s. Then, on Dekker’s command, they fired them back towards the vehicle in pursuit. There was no chance of hitting it, but this sudden display of firepower might make the Algerians back off.
The driver braked hard – the vehicle had no rear lights, so the pursuers wouldn’t notice it slowing down – and slewed the Pinky around in a circle behind the rocks. He switched off the headlights as he came to a halt.
‘Dave, you take the Browning. Everyone else, spread out. Don’t fire until I give the order.’
Richter checked the magazine on his 203, found he had only four rounds left. He paused to change it, then ran over to a boulder looming by itself. He aimed the assault rifle towards the approaching jeep and waited.
The Algerian vehicle had already slowed down, and it suddenly veered off, heading away from their location. Somebody on board must have noticed that their quarry’s lights had vanished, and guessed they could be driving into a trap.
‘Fuck, these guys are good,’ Dekker muttered. ‘Dave, hit them with the Browning. Everyone else, get back in the Pinky. John, take us out of here – no lights.’
Wallace fired off several short bursts from the machine-gun, but the enemy jeep was already virtually invisible behind a rocky outcrop.
‘Grenades, go,’ Dekker ordered, and the night air filled with the sound of explosions as the Land Rover accelerated away.
They’d covered only about a quarter of a mile when Richter spotted the jeep behind them again, with its headlights switched off. The sky was lightening almost by the minute, and the Algerians had obviously seen the Land Rover get moving again. And now the visibility was good enough to enable fast driving without any lights at all.
‘How far to the Herky-bird?’ Richter inquired.
Dekker checked his GPS. ‘
Around a mile and a half.’ Just then the machine-gun mounted on the pursuing jeep began firing again.
Wallace immediately stood up, grasped the Browning, and began returning fire. Meanwhile, two of the SAS soldiers loosed off with their 203s. As before, the Pinky kept bouncing around too much for accurate shooting, but their onslaught might help keep the Algerians at a suitable distance.
‘Foxtrot November, Alpha One. We’re approaching one mile. Are you ready for us?’
‘Affirmative, Alpha One. We’re turning and burning, ramp down, lights off.’
Dekker looked back to check the position of the Algerian jeep, then focused forward, searching for the C-130. ‘There it is.’ He tapped the driver on the shoulder and pointed.
‘I see it now.’
The Land Rover swerved slightly so as to approach the Hercules from directly behind.
‘Foxtrot November, thirty seconds.’
‘Roger.’
In front of them, the cargo-bay lights of the transport aircraft suddenly flared into life, so they could see the steel ramp clearly now. They could also see the four Allison turbo-prop engines, with their propellers spinning ever faster as the pilot opened the throttles to start the seventy-ton aircraft moving across the rock-strewn surface of the desert.
Behind them, the Algerian soldiers had obviously also spotted the aircraft, and their jeep now began closing the gap. Wallace quit firing in controlled bursts and let loose an almost continuous stream of bullets at their pursuers. One or two seemed to hit the jeep, but it didn’t slow down, and still the Algerian machine-gunner kept shooting at them. More in hope than expectation, Richter aimed another three grenades at the vehicle, following those with a couple of bursts of 5.56-millimetre bullets.
‘Foxtrot November, twenty seconds,’ Dekker estimated. ‘John, better get this right or else.’
The Hercules was already accelerating away from them, its speed rising steadily. They were now looking straight at the lowered ramp, the two loadmasters standing either side of it at the top, carefully watching their approach.
‘Ten seconds.’
A long burst of fire from the pursuing vehicle raised clouds of dust just to the left of the Land Rover. The driver flinched, twitching the wheel momentarily to the right before resuming his course.
‘Five seconds.’
The Hercules was accelerating through forty knots as the Pinky hit the ramp at fifty miles an hour. Its front wheels bounced, and for a sickening moment Richter feared that the vehicle might lose so much momentum that it wouldn’t make it. But as their driver kept his foot flat on the accelerator, the four-wheel drive kicked in and the Land Rover lurched safely into the cavernous hold, slewing sideways as he hit the brakes.
Almost before it had halted, Richter could hear the whine as one of the loadmasters pressed a button to raise the ramp behind them. The aircraft instantly began accelerating faster, blowing clouds of desert dust and sand behind it.
The Algerian jeep stopped a couple of hundred yards away, to allow the machine-gunner a stable platform. He took careful aim and fired one long continuous burst straight at the rear of the departing aircraft’s fuselage.
The first bullets impacted as the ramp slammed shut, punching easily through the thin aluminium and ricocheting off anything solid in their way.
‘Get down,’ Dekker yelled, and the SAS men tumbled out of the Land Rover and threw themselves flat on the floor of the hold. The two loadmasters moved to follow their example, but one of them got caught in the leg by a couple of the bullets and screamed in agony.
Then the Hercules bounced twice and lifted into the air. Climbing swiftly away, it turned south-west, heading for the safety of the Moroccan border.
T’ae’tan Air Base, North Korea
Yi Min-Ho crouched low on the rocky ledge he’d selected as his observation point, having checked that it wasn’t easily visible from either above or below. It was hardly a comfortable location, but offered an unrivalled view of the air base below him, essential to allow him to complete his mission.
He glanced down the slope at the single east–west runway traversing the bottom of the valley, about fifteen hundred metres below him, then nodded in satisfaction. The OP was a rocky perch near the top of a ridge that dominated the landscape just to the north of the airfield, and he needed to be on this side so that he could see right into the hangars.
Like most North Korean airfields, T’ae’tan appeared to consist of a runway and not much else. Again, like most military airfields in this country, it was built close to a mountainside – or, in this case, a rocky hillside bordering the north side of the narrow valley. The reason for this was simple enough. The North Koreans always tried to construct hardened shelters for their air assets and command centres, and natural rock offered much better protection than concrete. Invariably expecting any attack to come from the south, they almost always began their excavations on the northern slope of the hill or mountain. Locating a hangar’s entrance, its most vulnerable part, to the north ensured that the bulk of the rock obstructed any assault from the south.
Satellite photographs of T’ae’tan had revealed it possessed a long, straight taxiway, big enough to use as a secondary runway in an emergency. It bordered the runway itself on its south side, and extended some distance beyond it. There a spur ran off, splitting into two, and appeared to terminate in the hills fringing the south side of the narrow valley. In fact, these two sections of the taxiway led to the hangars excavated into the hillside, and it was those that Yi Min-Ho was now watching from his current perch on the opposite ridge.
The instructions he’d been given by his superior officer at Naegok-dong were clear and simple: he was to observe this airfield and assess its current activity. Specifically, he was to identify and report on the type, numbers and possible tasking of any unusual aircraft he spotted. His secondary task was to confirm the exact numbers of Chinese-built Shenyang F-5 single-seat jet interceptors – an old aircraft design based on the Russian MiG-17 – and also whatever Ilyushin Il-28 bombers the base had operational.
The Ilyushins had arrived at T’ae’tan back in October 1995, as part of a major redeployment of North Korean air assets that saw more than one hundred aircraft moved to forward bases close to the DMZ or Demilitarized Zone. South Korean experts calculated that the Il-28s could reach Seoul within as little as ten minutes, should hostilities break out.
By late morning, he’d already filled a couple of pages of his notebook with observations. His country’s National Intelligence Service is technically advanced, but for counting aircraft Yi Min-Ho needed no more than a pair of binoculars and a pencil and paper. Of the three squadrons of F-5 aircraft known to be based at T’ae’tan, he’d counted only five different planes, and just three of those had so far got airborne. He’d watched the other two being moved from their hardened shelters and parked outside. Either all the remaining aircraft belonging to the squadrons were currently in deep maintenance, Yi surmised, or they’d been moved somewhere else entirely. And so far he hadn’t seen a single Ilyushin.
Four of the six hangar doors he was watching were obviously newly constructed, which meant the North Koreans had recently dug some additional space into the hillside opposite. Yi had already estimated the likely number of aircraft these new shelters could accommodate, from careful observation with his binoculars of the old hangars through their open doors. He’d also noted that the single runway had been extended eastwards, as evidenced by new concrete a different shade to the original surface. This was another vital indication that the airfield’s operational capability was being augmented.
After another scan with his binoculars to confirm nothing new was happening below him, Yi Min-Ho decided he might as well take an early lunch. He had to keep his strength up, but the prospect of consuming another MRE ‘delicacy’ was less than enthralling. He pulled the haversack towards him and picked through its packets to make a selection. As he swallowed the first tasteless mouthful, he comforted himself with the
prospect of stimulating his palate with a chocolate bar afterwards.
On the south side of the airfield below the hidden observer, Pak Je-San’s instructions were being followed to the letter. Twenty hand-picked soldiers, wearing camouflage clothing and equipped with powerful tripod-mounted binoculars, were spaced along the airfield perimeter, invisible from more than a few metres away, each studying their designated section of the hillside opposite.
The moment he learnt about a possible infiltrator, Pak had guessed the agent’s objective would be T’ae’tan, simply because there was nothing else of military significance to South Korea in that sparsely inhabited region. The sighting of an intruder near Ugom had confirmed his suspicion that the unknown agent would be here trying to observe aircraft movements. Because the hangars all lay along the south side, he had deduced that the spy would be watching from the hills to the north.
And Pak was before long proved correct. When Yi Min-Ho raised his binoculars to check the airfield immediately before pausing to eat, their lenses had flashed briefly in the sun. That distant glint had been spotted by one of the watching soldiers, who had noted the spot carefully, then focused his binoculars and waited. Next he’d seen some sort of movement, though too indistinct to make out. That was when he decided to alert his superior officer.
Within five minutes, all the camouflaged soldiers were studying exactly the same location on the hillside opposite. Meanwhile, a six-man armed patrol, on standby since early that morning, was being rapidly tasked with an intercept mission.
Hercules Mark 5 C-130J, callsign Foxtrot November, over Morocco
‘Was it really worth it?’ Colin Dekker wondered, gazing across the cargo bay at the body of his Regiment soldier. In front of the battered Pinky, now securely lashed down to prevent it shifting, four of his men were administering whatever medical assistance they could to the soldier with the broken leg and to the injured loadmaster. The pain-killing injections would certainly help, but one of the bullets striking the loadmaster had severed an artery and, despite the tourniquet and the strapped-on compresses, Dekker realized the man’s life was now hanging in the balance.
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