‘Great,’ the President muttered. ‘So now they want us to sit back and do nothing while they head straight for Seoul. Well, we’re not going to do that. You clearly told them we’d be prepared to use all our military assets, including missiles, to defend our allies?’
‘Yes, and they insisted it was just an exercise. And then warned that any attack by us or South Korea would be vigorously repulsed.’
The President stood up and paced back and forth behind his huge desk for a minute or so. He sometimes found that walking helped clarity of thought.
‘Let me just summarize the information I’ve already been given. The North Koreans could invade the South and there wouldn’t be a hell of a lot we could do to stop them. But they don’t have the resources to consolidate their advance, and we’d be able to land enough troops and armour to drive them back within a few weeks. Is that a fair assessment?’
‘Yes, Mr President.’
‘And presumably they know this as well as we do?’
‘I can’t speak for the leadership in Pyongyang, but I think their senior military officers will be aware of the limitations in their supply system, yes.’
‘So let me ask the obvious question. Why would they do it? Why would North Korea consider mounting an invasion that they know must ultimately fail? What’s their objective? And would they use nuclear weapons to achieve it?’
The Secretary of Defense, faced with not one but four ‘obvious questions’, guessed that the one the President really wanted an answer to was the last of them.
‘Frankly, Mr President, I’m not convinced, for several reasons. We know the North Koreans have developed nuclear weapons, because of the underground test they carried out in the fall of 2006. But detonating a small atomic device in some kind of test rig isn’t the same as bolting one to a bus on the top of a missile and dropping a cone over it. The miniaturization process is difficult and complicated, and I still think it’s beyond the North Koreans’ technical competence. The CIA believes they’ve been in contact with Iranian scientists, but it’s not clear who’s advising who, and I still say it’s significant that neither nation has so far demonstrated that they have a long-range nuclear delivery capability.’
‘But you do accept that they possess the raw material to manufacture nuclear weapons?’
The Secretary of Defense nodded. ‘Yes, obviously. All our analyses suggest that the Yongbyon reprocessing plant has been producing weapons-grade fissionable material for some time. We don’t know how much they have, but the IAEA calculated a maximum of about thirty-five kilograms. A twenty-kiloton weapon needs eight kilograms of plutonium, so that suggests they could have manufactured four fairly low-yield devices at the most. They obviously used some of it for the Hamgyeong province tests, so our best guess is they’ve got no more than three functioning devices, and that’s not enough to make a credible threat against South Korea – or anywhere else, for that matter.’
The President sat down again. ‘I hear what you say, and I don’t disagree with your conclusions, but the facts remain. North Korea appears to be planning an incursion across the border. Unless the leadership in Pyongyang has completely flipped, they must have a good reason for doing it, and also be confident they can get away with it. So we’ll work on that premise. First, let’s call the roll. What have we got in South Korea right now?’
The Secretary of Defense settled back in his chair. ‘Militarily, the two countries are unevenly matched in almost every sector.’ And he outlined the discrepancies in their inventories. ‘You should also be aware, sir, that defeating North Korea by military means, if it comes to that, is not going to be an easy option. Before you make any decisions, you need to be fully informed of the likely consequences.
‘The public perception is that North Korea is a grindingly poor country with a starving and dissatisfied population ruled by two psychopaths, one of them now dead.’
This is literally true. Kim Il Sung – the ‘Eternal Leader’ – died in 1994 but is still the official ruler and has, since his death, made no decisions worse than he did during his live tenure. The functional head of state is the ‘Dear Leader’, his son. This scenario led the CIA to describe North Korea’s system of government as the ‘CFC Gambit’ – the acronym standing for ‘crippled, fearsome and crazy’.
‘The reality,’ the Secretary of Defense went on, ‘is somewhat different. The nation is a poor country by Western standards, but the vast majority of the people are unswervingly loyal to their leader, and would happily fight to defend him and their homeland. He almost certainly is a psychopath, and he’s definitely deluded – he claimed not long ago that he’d shot five holes-in-one during a single round of golf, which would make anyone who’s ever picked up a golf club doubt his sanity.’
The President laughed briefly.
‘More seriously, the country’s been in a state of siege ever since the nineteen-fifties, and the bulk of their GNP is spent annually on preparations for war. And, by any standards, they are very well prepared for conflict.
‘Just to give you a few examples: most of their fighter and bomber aircraft aren’t kept in hangars the way ours are. The North Koreans excavate deep into the northern slopes of the mountains, which are mainly granite, and there create huge underground spaces for their aircraft. They choose the north side because our bombs or missiles would have to be dropped or fired from the south, so the bulk of the mountain would be in the way. The rock above the tunnelled-out hangars is far too thick for bunker-busting bombs to penetrate. To be specific, our GBU-28 can cut through twenty feet of reinforced concrete: most of the North Korean bunkers are protected by around two hundred sixty feet of granite.
‘According to the latest estimate, North Korea has well over eight thousand individual underground sites linked by three hundred fifty miles of tunnels. That’s enough to shelter most of their air force from any attack we could launch using conventional weapons. There’s also nothing we could do to cut their lines of communication or to try to decimate their military command structure, because they’re underground as well. One report suggested that their bunkers hold over a million tons of food, one and a half million tons of fuel and nearly two million tons of ammunition and stores. In short, we could launch a massive bombardment of all known North Korean military facilities and achieve virtually nothing in terms of affecting their ability to wage war.
‘Defeating the Iraqis was easy: they had low morale and faced overwhelming odds. The battles took place on almost ideal terrain for our forces – wide open deserts – and we achieved virtually immediate air superiority. North Korea, however, is mountainous, and even if we did gain control of the skies – which is by no means certain – that probably wouldn’t help much. The battles there will be won or lost on the ground.
‘I mentioned their superiority in numbers of tanks. The North Koreans not only have more tanks than our combined forces can field, but most analysts believe they’re better vehicles as well. They’re faster, with thicker armour and more powerful main guns. They’ve also developed tanks specifically for fighting in the hills and valleys of their country. They’re designed to manage better on steep slopes, and they can ford the deepest rivers.
‘And that’s just one way in which the North Koreans have prepared for a war that they’re actually expecting to fight. They’ve also got the biggest special force in the world – about one hundred twenty thousand men. They’ve got twelve thousand anti-aircraft guns, fifteen thousand shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles, and about seven hundred high-speed patrol boats, most carrying surface-to-surface missiles, plus long-range anti-ship missiles.
‘Their fighter aircraft are mainly old and slow, but North Korea’s a very small country, and any air battles will be more like Second World War dogfights than the kind of combat our pilots are generally trained for. There just won’t be the opportunities for our guys to engage targets at long and medium range, because the North Korean aircraft will pop up from behind a mountain, fire a salvo and drop d
own again. The air war will be messy and fought at very close quarters, which is exactly how their pilots have been trained to fight.
‘The last point to remember is probably the most important: North Korea expects to fight a war. South Korea is seen as enemy territory, but is also regarded as merely a client state of America, and therefore of little real importance. America itself is and always has been North Korea’s main enemy, so their leadership believes that the war will ultimately be a contest between these two countries. Pyongyang does not expect China or Russia or anyone else to intercede on its behalf, or to offer any kind of assistance, and all its preparations are directed towards a fight to the death between them and us. If we attempt to invade them, Pyongyang will respond with all the forces at its disposal, including whatever weapons of mass destruction its scientists have been able to fabricate. It will do its very best to destroy the United States and kill as many of our citizens as possible. That is their leader’s philosophy, and that’s what really scares me.’
‘You’ve done a pretty good job of scaring me too,’ the President said. ‘So what response do you suggest?’
‘As you know, Mr President, we’re committed to developing a defence shield between the two Koreas, and we’ve allocated an eleven-billion-dollar budget to achieve that. The problem is that we’ve done almost nothing so far. We’ve withdrawn a lot of our troops from the area immediately south of the DMZ simply to reduce possible tension. And we’re also in the process of upgrading the Patriot missile systems we’ve positioned there from PAC-2 to PAC-3, but that’s about all.
‘What we can’t now do is reinforce our troops there very quickly, because of the logistics involved. This situation has blown up really quickly. The Joint Chiefs anticipate it will take a minimum of a week to assemble the men and supplies we’d need, and probably another week to ship them to the peninsula. If the invasion starts within the next few days, South Korea simply won’t have the ability to stop the advancing troops. The South can slow them up, but ultimately the North will just roll over the defenders.
‘The other problem is that right now we don’t have any surface assets that close. The Enterprise Carrier Battle Group is currently in the North Pacific, and they’ve been ordered to head towards Korea, but we’re still talking days before they get within striking distance.
‘The only options we’d then have would be to hit the attacking forces with bombs from our aircraft at Andersen on Guam, or use ICBMs from here in the States, or our boomers – missile-carrying nuclear submarines – but they wouldn’t be able to stop a ground assault.’
‘Why not?’
‘Numbers, Mr President, numbers. As I’ve said, the North Koreans can field over a million front-line troops and almost five million reservists. Unless we carpet-bombed or nuked the entire front, we’d have no hope of stopping them, and anyway tactics like that are considered politically unacceptable in the current international climate. If we did get involved, we’d be expected to use smart munitions and carry out precision attacks. Using those tactics against the sort of forces the North Koreans can field would be like a mosquito biting an elephant.’
‘So what’s your own recommendation?’
‘From what I witnessed at the United Nations, diplomacy isn’t going to work here. I think we should carry on with what we’re doing already. We prep Andersen and get the bombers moving, fly them towards the Korean Peninsula but hold them clear of territorial waters, just to let Pyongyang know we’ve got the capability to strike if they do launch an invasion. That’s one threat. Against the possibility of North Korea escalating this to a nuclear conflict, keep the ICBMs and the boomers at a high alert state, so that we can respond real fast if we have to.’
‘The missiles are holding at Alert Sixty now.’
‘It’s your decision, Mr President, but I suggest bringing them to Alert Thirty fairly soon, and I’ll make sure Pyongyang knows that we’ve done so. It may not stop them, but it’ll sure as hell make them stop and think.’
Chapter Fifteen
Saturday
Ok’pyong missile base, North Korea
They stopped the countdown at launch minus eight minutes, awaiting the executive order from Pyongyang that would either see the missile launched or force them to begin the complex process of reversing the actions they’d taken so far. Just under fifteen minutes later, the secure teleprinter spat out half a dozen lines of text, and almost immediately afterwards the direct line from Pyongyang rang. Two minutes after that, once the commanding officer was satisfied with the authenticity of the orders he’d been given, the countdown resumed.
A little after four-fifteen that afternoon, local time, those missile control staff who weren’t manning consoles watched through six-inch-thick armoured glass as an explosion of flames and smoke enveloped the pad. The first stage of the Taep’o-dong ignited with a roar that could be heard miles away, and the bunker shook and vibrated. Slowly, so slowly that it seemed it must fall back to earth, the pointed nose of the missile rose above the conflagration and accelerated steadily into the clear blue sky.
There was a smattering of applause once it became clear that the first stage was performing faultlessly, but the most critical part of the flight was still to come.
HMS Illustrious, Yellow Sea
‘Flash, flash, flash. Homer, Whisky Charlie with flash traffic. Missile launch detected from the east coast of North Korea in the vicinity of Ok’pyong at sixteen seventeen local time, zero one seventeen Zulu. Stand by for initial trajectory estimate.’
‘Whisky Charlie, roger.’
The lieutenant manning the Homer position immediately selected the group line.
‘All positions, Homer. Flash traffic from AEW Sea King Whisky Charlie. Missile launch reported from the vicinity of Ok’pyong, waiting for initial trajectory data.’
There was a moment of dead silence while everyone who had access to a radar screen stared at it, watching the combined ship’s radar and data-linked picture.
‘Flash. Homer, Whisky Charlie. Missile trajectory looks like southeast. No immediate threat.’
On the Operations Room displays, the return was now beginning to open to the south-east. Then it seemed as if everyone started talking at once, before the Group Warfare Officer silenced them and made a broadcast on all group lines and the ship’s main broadcast system.
‘Action stations. Action stations. Air raid warning red. I say again. Action stations. Air raid warning red.’
Then he switched off the broadcast and opened the line to Flyco. ‘Flyco, GWO. What’s the circuit and deck state?’
‘One Merlin on deck, turning and burning. Two Harriers in the range. One Merlin on recovery about half a mile astern. No scheduled movements apart from the Merlin turn-round.’
‘Roger, expedite the recovery and call the moment he’s secured. Shut down the other Merlin and clear all personnel off the deck as soon as possible.’
The GWO went back to the group line and ship’s broadcast. ‘All positions, GWO. Secure all external hatches and openings. Assume Damage Control and NBCD State One. Break. Homer, GWO. What’s the endurance of our airborne assets?’ In the background could be heard the muffled slamming of watertight doors being closed. Although the opening trajectory of the missile was away from the ship’s position, it could always be turned around or, worse, it might just be the first launch of a salvo.
‘Already checked. The two Harriers are twenty-eight minutes to start of recovery, the AEW Sea King and the two Merlins can stay up for a couple of hours.’
‘Good. Keep them out there.’
‘GWO, Flyco, the Merlin’s on deck and secured.’
‘Good. All positions, GWO. Release Goalkeeper to unrestricted operation. Engage full ECM. Advise the ships in company.’
Goalkeeper is a fully autonomous close-in weapon system manufactured by Thales Nederland, specifically designed to intercept incoming shells, and both ballistic and sea-skimming missiles. Its heart is a 30mm seven-barrel Gatling gun �
� the same weapon that’s used as a ‘tank-buster’ on the American A-10 Thunderbolt II – firing four thousand two hundred rounds a minute, guided by an X-band search radar and a combined X-band and Ka-band monopulse Cassegrain engagement radar, backed up by an optical system.
Against a high-speed target like the Russian SS-N-22 Sunburn Mach 2 sea-skimming missile, it’s designed to detect it at 1,500 metres and complete the kill at 300 metres, in just over five seconds. By any standards, it’s a formidable weapon, and the Illustrious, like her sister ship Invincible, was equipped with three of them – one on the bow, the second amidships on the starboard side, and the third on the port side aft, just below the Flight Deck on a custom-designed platform.
In less than three minutes, Illustrious was fully secured, the gas-tight citadel in place, and positive air pressure established – a basic but very effective defence against chemical or biological attack – and the captain had just okayed the Military Flash signal that would be sent by satellite to advise CINCFLEET of the missile launch.
HMS Victorious, 200 miles west of Novaya Zemlya, Barents Sea
The Barents Sea is not the deepest water in the world by a long way. Much of the sea floor, especially to the west and south-west of Novaya Zemlya and to the north-east of Murmanskiy Bereg, is under six hundred feet deep. The captains of ballistic missile-carrying nuclear submarines prefer to lurk in areas where they have more freedom to manoeuvre than such shallows allow, but the latest orders hadn’t allowed Commander Richard Clare such latitude.
His redefined patrol area committed him to maintaining position about three hundred nautical miles to the north of the tip of Poluostrov Kanin, right on the edge of the deeper water of the central Barents Sea.
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