Foxbat

by James Barrington

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.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘Take your pick. If that aircraft opening to the north-east is already on track, it could be heading for the Air Command headquarters at Chunghwa, or else to the coastal airfields at Kuupri and Wonsan. Or maybe even the Third Air Combat Command base at Hwangju. If the North Koreans now have a squadron or two of Foxbats based anywhere, it means they’ve been very clever at evading the Keyhole overflights. We only got these shots because we’d already modified the orbit of a second bird. If it had still been on its original track, these aircraft’ – Muldoon tapped one of the pictures with his index finger – ‘would have been long gone before it got within range of the base.’

  ‘OK, Richard, we now know that the North Koreans have obtained at least five Foxbats. What we still don’t know is what they plan on doing with them, and I can’t think of an easy way to find out. So what’s your recommendation?’

  ‘We kick this upstairs to the ODNI right now. Something’s going on over there, and deciding what to do about it is way above my pay scale, and probably yours too.’

  North Korea

  North Korea is a country somewhat smaller than the state of Mississippi, has a population of a little over twenty-two million, and a Gross Domestic Product of about twenty-three billion dollars US. Over thirty per cent of that GDP goes straight into the military budget, and almost one in every four North Koreans is either on active service or a reservist.

  Facing them on the southern side of the Demilitarized Zone is about the same number of troops. The South Koreans have around three-quarters of a million active-service personnel – including some forty thousand American forces stationed in the country – and four and a half million in the reserves. But the North Koreans have the advantage in armour and artillery pieces. Only in combat aircraft are the numbers more equal, both forces being able to field about eight hundred, but here the advantage lies very definitely with South Korea. Not only does that country enjoy a slight numerical superiority but, far more important, North Korea’s aircraft are older, slower and a lot less capable.

  Instructions for the ‘Silver Spring’ exercise had been prepared and dispatched months earlier, but the ‘Golden Dawn’ orders had been sent only three weeks ago, sealed in envelopes with explicit written instructions that they were to be opened only when Pyongyang so ordered. In military bases, strung like beads on a string all along the northern perimeter of the Demilitarized Zone, active service troops now began preparing for the coming exercise and – though they didn’t know it – the invasion of South Korea.

  Vehicle maintenance was given the highest priority – when the order was finally given by Pyongyang, everything had to work perfectly – so extreme care was being taken to ensure that all tanks and artillery pieces were ready for action. Communication systems were checked, and then checked again, because a battle could be lost if command and control functions didn’t work properly. Further down the line, foot soldiers were given extra practice on the rifle ranges. Reserve troops were called up and issued with equipment and ammunition, but not yet weapons. Those would be handed out at the last moment, as Kim Yong-Su didn’t relish the thought of having four and a half million armed men roaming the country, even if they were official reservists.

  There had been a succession of exercises leading up to ‘Silver Spring’. Those had admittedly been just paper exercises, partly because the country didn’t have the fuel or resources to squander on real-life manoeuvres, but mainly to avoid the American spy satellites detecting their activities. As in all invasions throughout history, secrecy and surprise were essential.

  Each such exercise had followed the same basic scenario: a blitzkrieg offensive followed by a rapid advance using overwhelming force. A pounding artillery assault to destroy and demoralize the enemy, then wave upon wave of tanks, followed by the infantry, because a war on the Korean Peninsula would be won or lost on the ground.

  Overhead, the North Korean Air Force would engage and try to neutralize the opposition fighters, though the best they could have realistically hoped for was a draw. But that, of course, was before Pak Je-San had devised the radical concept behind ‘Golden Dawn’, and then secured his secret force of MiG-25s.

  The Foxbat is the fastest interceptor ever manufactured, able to outrun any fighter or bomber, and it carries a formidable array of weaponry. That, plus the fact that, as far as Kim knew, neither the South Koreans nor the Americans had any idea these squadrons existed, should give them all the edge they would need. In one sense, everything now rested on Pak Je-San’s shoulders.

  And the new instructions from Pyongyang were highly specific: each commander was to open his copy of the sealed ‘Golden Dawn’ ope
ration orders, prepare his troops, and await the executive command.

  But what none of them yet knew was the secret, hidden component of Pak Je-San’s plan that might ensure the invasion would be a walkover.

  Perm, Russia

  Mortuaries have a particular smell. No matter what air-conditioning or ventilation system they possess, there’s always the pervading odour of formaldehyde overlaid with faint olfactory echoes of urine, faeces and partially digested food. The Perm mortuary was no exception, and Richter could detect that same smell even before Bykov pushed through the double doors and they entered the building.

  The Russian flipped open a leather wallet to show his identification, which the white-coated receptionist studied carefully, then gestured for them to follow him through another set of double doors and down a corridor. At the end was a small seating area, with half a dozen armchairs and a low table, brightened by a vase of wilting flowers. The receptionist pressed a button on the wall, invited them to sit, and retraced his steps.

  Richter sat down immediately. He had spent long enough in the Royal Navy to subscribe to the philosophy that there’s no point in standing if you can sit. Or, for that matter, being awake if you can be asleep. Bykov stood or, to be accurate, paced.

  A couple of minutes later a short, red-faced, cheerful-looking man pushed through the door to one side, drying his hands on a paper towel.

  ‘General Bykov? My name is Marshek, and I’m the pathologist.’ He extended his right hand and Bykov shook it readily. Richter remained seated, his hands firmly in his pockets. He guessed that Marshek had washed his hands properly after rooting through the intestines of some corpse, but didn’t feel like risking physical contact just for the sake of politeness.

  ‘You’ve found a notebook, I understand?’ Bykov began.

  ‘Indeed, as I informed the police earlier. It was inside a buttoned trouser pocket on one of the dead men. All his other pockets were empty, apart from the obvious stuff like handkerchiefs and combs. We found nothing else on any of their clothing, not even manufacturer’s labels. Do you want to see the bodies now?’

  ‘Not unless we need to. How did they die?’

  ‘All three of them drowned, but they’d already suffered severe burns before they entered the water, and one had also received a bullet wound. But it was the temperature that really killed them. Cold shock,’ he added, by way of explanation.

  ‘You mean hypothermia?’

  ‘No. I mean cold-shock reflex. They didn’t survive long enough for hypothermia to be a problem. If you enter water that’s significantly colder than your normal body temperature, there’s a natural reflex action and you gasp for air. If that gasp occurs under the surface, the lungs will fill with water, and that’s pretty much it. Even if you survive the immersion, extremely cold water will chill the body rapidly, and the river temperature last night was around five degrees centigrade. You become unconscious once your core temperature drops to about thirty degrees, and you’ll be dead when it reaches twenty-five. Hypothermia is only a factor to consider if you survive the initial immersion and the rapid cooling.’

  ‘The notebook?’ Richter prompted, in Russian. He wasn’t there to listen to a lecture on cold-water survival criteria.

  The pathologist looked at him as if seeing him for the first time. ‘Just a moment,’ he said, and pushed his way back through the door. He returned in a few moments holding a plastic bag inside which there was a small notebook with a blue cover.

  ‘We dried it out as best we could. Some of the pages are still stuck together, but most can now be separated. Its owner used a ball-point pen rather than ink, so what’s there is fairly legible.’

  He handed the bag to Bykov, who looked at it questioningly.

  Marshek shook his head. ‘It’s already been checked, and there aren’t any fingerprints. I would be amazed if there had been, after immersion in the river overnight. When you’ve finished looking at it, please leave it with the receptionist on your way out.’

  Bykov merely nodded, then pulled the notebook out of the bag and opened it on the table in front of Richter. Only the first dozen or so pages had been used, and most of what was recorded there was not in either the Roman or Cyrillic alphabets. Instead, the notes used some form of pictogram, interspersed with the occasional word in Russian.

  ‘Do you recognize it?’ Bykov asked.

  Richter shook his head. ‘It if isn’t a pictorial code of some kind, it has to be one of the Oriental languages – like Chinese or maybe Japanese – but I don’t know enough to even recognize which. You must have people on your staff who could identify it?’

  ‘Of course. The trouble is, they’re back at headquarters, not out here in Perm. I’ll need to scan these pages and email them to Moscow.’

  ‘What about the words written in Cyrillic? Do any of those mean anything to you?’

  Bykov flipped through the pages rapidly, shaking his head occasionally. ‘No, nothing here. These are just the names of towns and cities, perhaps where they’d developed contacts. It was probably easier to use the Russian name instead of trying to transcribe it into the other language they used. Look here. That’s “Moscow”, then “Letneozerskiy” – where two MiG-25s went missing, and so on.’ His voice died away as he stared at two words on the last page.

  ‘What does it say?’ Richter asked.

  ‘Slavgorod North,’ Bykov said, clearly puzzled. ‘But I’ve not been notified of anything happening there, and they don’t even operate MiG-25s as far as I recall.’

  ‘Where is it, exactly?’

  ‘It’s a military airfield lying about sixteen hundred kilometres east of here.’

  ‘That falls well within the cruising range of a MiG-25, so if they’d managed to persuade Lenkov to steal one, maybe they were intending to refuel it there before flying it out of the country. We need to go there immediately, Viktor.’

  ‘I agree.’ Bykov nodded. ‘We can’t handle something this sensitive over the telephone. I’ll get the jet warmed up.’

  That, Richter reflected as the Russian general pulled a mobile phone from his pocket and began dialling a number, sounded more impressive than it was in reality.

  They’d flown to Perm in a Russian Air Force Antonov An-72 transport aircraft, confusingly painted in Aeroflot livery. Known to the West by the NATO reporting name ‘Coaler’, it wasn’t exactly an executive jet, having been designed as a small, general-purpose STOL transport capable of carrying either cargo or up to thirty-two passengers on drop-down seats attached along the sides of the cabin. Powered by two Lotarev turbofan engines, mounted above and in front of the wings, which gave the aircraft a peculiarly hunched appearance, it was reasonably fast and had a range of well over two thousand miles.

  Their journey out from Moscow had been very noisy and relatively uncomfortable, but a lot faster than trying to get seats on a commercial aircraft. And anyway it was, Richter guessed, the only aircraft Bykov had been able to commandeer at such short notice. As the Russian general headed for the door, Richter again wished he’d had the foresight to bring earplugs.

  T’ae’tan Air Base, North Korea

  By late morning, the last of the departing MiG-25s had lifted into the air and roared away from T’ae’tan, heading for Wonsan. It was the final departure Pak Je-San had scheduled. This particular Foxbat had originally been one of the first flights planned, but it had gone unserviceable on engine start. Fortunately, it involved a relatively minor problem that the maintainers had rectified within a couple of hours, so the only subsequent delay was having to wait for a clear window between the regular surveillance satellite overflights. Once Pak felt confident none was within range, he had ordered the aircraft to be towed out of the hangar and started up. Just five minutes later it had accelerated down the runway.

  Arranging the road convoys had presented far less of a problem, and considerably less of a security headache. There had been no mechanical problems at all with the trucks, and he was now merely waiting for final confirmati
on that they’d arrived safely at their destinations. That, however, would not take place before early evening at the soonest.

  Chapter Eleven

  Thursday

  Slavgorod North, Russia

  The Antonov An-72 transport aircraft touched down smoothly, the powerful brakes and reverse thrust stopping it within a remarkably short distance. This aircraft had been designed specifically for short-field operations.

  As the Coaler turned off the runway, Richter glanced out of the window and noticed a hulking shape on the far side of the airfield.

  ‘That’s interesting.’ He raised his voice over the noise of the engines. ‘There’s a Condor parked over there.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A Condor – an Antonov An-124.’

  Even bigger than the massive American C-5 Galaxy, the Condor, which the Russians call a ‘Ruslan’, is the world’s biggest aircraft. It was originally designed by the Antonov Bureau to transport a complete SS-20 intercontinental ballistic missile system. It has an enormous payload of one hundred and fifty thousand kilograms – nearly one hundred and fifty tons – and has an eighty-eight-seat passenger cabin located behind the wing. It’s able to transport almost anything, including main battle tanks and helicopters. And, as it immediately occurred to Richter, fighter aircraft.

  ‘That could be the link we’re looking for,’ he said. ‘Maybe the Foxbats aren’t being flown out of Russia. Maybe these comedians have organized heavy transport aircraft to take them to their ultimate destination. You might be able to get one inside that Antonov.’

  Bykov crossed the cabin and looked out. ‘The MiG-25’s bigger than you think, Paul. Unless you took the wings and rudders off, it simply wouldn’t fit in there. And disassembling the MiG is a major job. Trust me, it would be much easier to fly it out of the country.’