Foxbat

by James Barrington

  Richter raced straight for the section of fence where he’d stashed the ladder, lifted it up and leant it against a post. In front, he could see Dekker moving quickly towards him in a crouch, another SAS soldier right behind him. Richter climbed up and perched for a moment on top of the fence, while he swung the ladder over, then slid down to the open ground outside.

  ‘Time we got out of here,’ Dekker observed.

  ‘Roger that.’

  As they turned away from the fence, Richter felt a slight tug on his left boot. He glanced down and spotted what they’d all missed, but it was now too late. The thin silver trip-wire gleamed in the darkness.

  ‘Oh, shit.’

  Behind him security lights suddenly flared into life, illuminating the boundary fence and the open ground outside it. Simultaneously, sirens started their atonic wailing. Their supposedly covert insertion and surveillance operation had just turned very overt indeed.

  North Korea

  The truck seemed to come out of nowhere. One minute the road was empty as far as Yi Min-Ho could see. Then headlights came stabbing through the darkness directly towards him. The unmistakable sound of a big diesel engine shattered the silence of the night.

  He’d just crossed the bridge over the river that drains into the Teiton Wan bay at Ugom, and was about to leave the road and strike out across country, heading for a narrow gap through the double line of hills that lay north of the town.

  For an instant Yi didn’t move, a combination of fatigue and surprise momentarily dulling his reactions, then he stepped unhurriedly off the verge – if the truck contained police or soldiers, a sudden movement would immediately attract their attention – and headed into the adjacent field. But the moment he was clear of the headlight beams, he ran like hell.

  The truck growled to a halt and Yi could clearly hear men shouting, followed by the sound of their boots clumping loudly on the metalled surface of the road. He concentrated totally on keeping his footing on the uneven soil, and covering the ground as swiftly as possible.

  The sudden flare of the truck’s headlights had impaired his night vision, and Yi stumbled and almost fell three times in his desperate escape. But the men behind him experienced exactly the same problem, and the dancing beams of their torches were of little help because he already had a substantial lead of about one hundred metres.

  The ground beneath his feet began to change as scrubby farmland gave way to the uncultivated terrain leading up to the foothills. Running across rough ground is very tiring, and Yi’s breath now came in short, painful gasps. He would be forced to stop soon, despite his desperate situation.

  Around him were clumps of bushes and stunted trees, and he realized that these offered the best cover he was likely to find. He slowed down and skidded behind two trees growing close together, looking back down the slope towards the lights of his pursuers. They were now even further away, probably two hundred metres, but Yi could clearly sense the determination in their pursuit.

  What had started out seemingly as a simple chase was now transformed into a methodical search, with about fifteen men spread out in a line and walking up the hill towards him. Making a conscious effort to slow his breathing, Yi pulled out his binoculars and focused them.

  The moonlight was bright enough for him to detect that they were soldiers, assault rifles slung over their shoulders. He’d obviously been unlucky enough to run into a North Korean Army patrol, but the surprise was that they hadn’t already started firing in his direction. Because these were military, rather than the police, he didn’t imagine they would give up the chase easily, but whatever happened, he mustn’t get caught. Realizing he would now have to put as much distance as possible between himself and such a determined pursuit, Yi replaced the binoculars in his pocket, turned northwards and jogged on up the hill.

  In fact, luck had nothing to do with this encounter. The moment Pak Je-San ended the call from the radar-watch supervisor at Pyoksong, he had proceeded to mobilize troops from the closest military establishment, which was the fighter airfield at T’ae’tan. There were very few roads in that part of the country, so anyone landing south of Suri-bong had little option but to head east. And therefore Pak had guessed exactly where his quarry was going.

  Aïn Oussera Air Base, Algeria

  Suddenly the base came alive with the sound of vehicle engines revving up and with loudly shouted orders. The sentries around the various hangars left their posts and began running towards the perimeter fence. It was only a matter of seconds, Richter realized, before they started shooting.

  ‘All callsigns, Alpha One,’ Dekker shouted. ‘Let’s get the fuck out of here. Break, break. Delta One and Two, get the Pinkies moving, immediate.’

  The response from the two SAS troopers guarding the Land Rovers was instant. ‘Deltas mobile, heading straight for you.’

  The six SAS men were already up and running, weaving and dodging unpredictably from side to side to make themselves as difficult targets as possible, but all the time heading away from the fence and the glare of the security lights.

  ‘Regroup in two hundred yards,’ Dekker instructed, as the metallic clatter of a couple of Kalashnikovs on full auto echoed behind them, bullets spraying randomly in their direction. ‘But don’t return fire.’

  They were already well away from the fence, so he knew the Algerians had to be firing blind. Shooting back would just confirm their position, giving the enemy something definite to aim at.

  Richter could see two pairs of headlights approaching, half a mile away to their right, the vehicles bouncing wildly over the desert floor.

  ‘Regroup on me,’ Dekker called out, as he slid to a halt behind an outcrop of rock. ‘Anyone hurt? Any problems?’ It took less than ten seconds to confirm that none of them had suffered any injuries, then they started running again, this time in two loose groups heading directly towards the approaching Land Rovers.

  Behind them, the main gates of Aïn Oussera were open, and the first of the Algerian Air Force trucks, loaded with heavily armed soldiers, were heading out in pursuit. Unfortunately the headlights of the SAS Pinkies would soon give them a clear target.

  ‘Delta One and Two, kill the lights,’ Dekker ordered. ‘Home in on our torches.’

  Immediately the headlights were extinguished, which would obviously slow their escape, but not having the lights blazing might buy them a few precious seconds, or even minutes, while the Algerians tried to locate them. Meanwhile two of the troopers took out their torches and shone them steadily, like beacons, in the direction of the approaching Land Rovers.

  Dekker called a halt for a few seconds, while he looked back towards the airfield, checking the disposition of the enemy troops. A couple of large trucks had emerged and were now heading in their general direction, but obviously the drivers had no firm idea where their quarry was located. Richter wasn’t bothered about such vehicles – the Pinkies could outrun them, no problem – but the three smaller ones were a definite concern. In the lights from the perimeter fence, they looked like either open jeeps or Land Rovers, and in each one he could discern the unmistakable shape of a heavy machine-gun, set on a pillar right behind the driver. Whatever those vehicles were, they had pretty much the same armament as the Pinkies, and could also probably match them for speed. But before Richter could suggest any action against them or their occupants, Dekker was already issuing orders.

  ‘Alpha Two, Bravo One, take out their jeeps.’

  ‘Roger.’

  As Richter watched, Wallace unslung his sniper rifle, dropped into a prone position and rested the bipod on an almost flat rock in front of him. He paused for a few seconds, slowing his breathing as he took aim at the moving target still nearly a quarter of a mile away. Then the rifle kicked in his hands, the sound of it a flat slap in the desert night. Outside the gate, the front tyre on one of the jeeps suddenly exploded, the vehicle lurching to one side and stopping immediately. It was a hell of a shot in the circumstances.

  ‘Brilliant
shot,’ Richter muttered.

  ‘I was aiming at the driver,’ Wallace confessed.

  At that moment the other sniper fired but missed: the bullet’s impact with a rock somewhere near the gates was clearly audible. The Algerian soldiers reacted immediately. Half a dozen of them moved forward to whatever cover they could find, and began loosing off shots from their Kalashnikov assault rifles towards the SAS troops. They weren’t aimed rounds, just supporting fire designed to make their unknown attackers keep their heads down. Behind them, the two remaining jeeps manoeuvred to the rear of the three-ton trucks and out of sight.

  ‘One down, two to go,’ Dekker muttered. Behind him, the two Land Rovers lurched to a halt side by side amid swirling dust. ‘Mount up and let’s get the hell out of here.’

  Inside thirty seconds, the two Pinkies were on the move again, the drivers pushing them as hard as they could which, without lights, wasn’t very fast. The terrain was rocky and uneven, strewn with boulders the size of small cars, which loomed up faster than Richter, for one, was comfortable about. But just as dangerous were the smaller rocks, any one of which could smash a sump or transmission housing, or burst a tyre. The drivers kept swerving violently from side to side, picking the best path they could through the tortured landscape.

  ‘We’re trading speed for invisibility,’ Dekker said, ‘but once we’re clear of this area we can use the headlights. And,’ he added, pointing east, where the first fingers of red and yellow grew visible against the dark blue of the sky, ‘it looks like the sun will be up in about thirty minutes.’

  At that moment two sets of headlights suddenly stabbed through the darkness towards them from behind. The Algerians had sent their two jeeps ahead in pursuit, and they were approaching fast. Like the SAS vehicles, they’d been driving without lights until confident they were getting near to their quarry, but now they were only about a hundred yards behind, and closing quickly. So the moment one of the escaping Land Rovers was briefly illuminated by the pursuers’ dancing headlamp beams, the shooting started.

  Dekker glanced back, and made the obvious decision. ‘Hit the lights,’ he ordered. ‘Now we need the speed, and let’s try to frighten them off.’

  Wallace stood up awkwardly in the bucking vehicle, and seized the grip of the Browning machine-gun. He took the best aim he could and loosed a short burst at their pursuers. Unsurprisingly, none of the bullets appeared to hit its target, but within seconds the headlights behind them started dropping back.

  ‘Good,’ Dekker muttered. ‘Now, if they’ll just stay out of our way until we reach the Herky-bird, we should be OK.’

  And then things seemed to happen in slow motion. As Richter glanced at the other Land Rover, only a few yards in front, its left-side front wheel bounced upwards, being deflected by a football-sized rock. That shouldn’t have been a problem, but at almost the same moment the right-side wheel dropped down into a pothole.

  The Pinky was already unbalanced, and this sudden lurch to the right completed the process. The Land Rover slewed inexorably sideways, the driver fighting for control. Then it toppled over, its right side smashing into the ground. Scattering men and equipment, it continued sliding several yards before impacting a massive boulder, then stopped dead.

  Chapter Four

  Monday

  North Korea

  Kwon In-Ho, the chung-wi, or lieutenant, leading the patrol, had a real problem. They’d spotted the black-clad figure leaving the road and starting to cutting across an adjacent field, which gave them an accurate reference point for their pursuit. The problem now was that, as they’d moved further away from the road, their search fan had of necessity become wider until, Kwon estimated, there were now gaps of fifty to seventy metres separating his soldiers. And that kind of spacing meant there was a good chance their quarry could elude them simply by taking cover somewhere, and then doubling back once they’d passed by. Or he could have moved right over to one side, well away from the searchers, and then carried on heading into the hills in front of them.

  In short, having failed to find their man within the first few minutes, they were now probably just wasting their time. Reluctantly, Kwon called his troops to a halt, and made radio contact with his superior. The response was exactly as he’d expected: he was ordered to return his patrol immediately to T’ae’tan, and then report to the commanding officer. Within the North Korean military, there was no excuse for failure to achieve an objective: such failure was always considered to be either deliberate sabotage or dereliction of duty, no matter what the extenuating circumstances.

  Meanwhile, at T’ae’tan, the unhappy lieutenant’s immediate superior, Lee Chang-Ho, the tab-wi or captain, shut down his radio and gazed with foreboding at the secure telephone nearby. He could certainly put blame on Kwon for not capturing the spy, but he himself might also suffer, if it could be shown that his original orders to the lieutenant had in some way been inaccurate or insufficiently comprehensive. But, whatever the outcome of the night’s activities, he knew he would have to pass on the unwelcome news to Pyongyang.

  Lee reached for the telephone and dialled the number he’d scribbled on a notepad. When Pak Je-San himself answered, the captain explained briefly what had happened, stressing how the failure to capture the infiltrator was entirely due to the incompetence of Kwon and his men. When he finished speaking there was an ominous silence before Pak responded.

  ‘I will discuss this fiasco with your commanding officer later today,’ he hissed. ‘Neither you nor the idiot you tasked are to leave the base until further notice.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Good. Now, thanks to your abysmal failure, we still have a South Korean spy at large within the area. Fortunately, I believe I know what his objective is, and there may still be time to retrieve the situation. Do you think you can find some men – more competent this time – who can carry out a series of simple instructions?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Since this may be the only chance you’ll get to salvage your career, you should listen carefully.’

  For three minutes the captain jotted down sentences on his notepad. When the call ended, he sat for a few seconds reviewing what he’d written, then reached for the internal telephone.

  Algeria

  Dekker’s driver immediately hit the brakes and slammed his own vehicle to a halt, headlights illuminating the wreckage of its comrade, and the SAS men swung smoothly into action. Two of them leapt out and raced over to the crashed Land Rover. Dekker stood up and looked all around behind them, checking on the positions of the pursuing vehicles, then also jumped out to help. Wallace remained in place and took careful aim with the Browning. Grabbing a 203, Richter climbed out of the Pinky, moved well over to one side of the crash site and took up a position beside a large boulder. If he got fired at, the last thing he wanted was bullets missing him but hitting the injured soldiers behind him. He aimed the weapon towards the path of the approaching vehicles, but held fire till the range reduced enough to allow for accuracy with the small-calibre assault rifle.

  The Algerian jeeps were about two hundred yards away as Wallace started firing off bursts of three or four rounds at a time, the most efficient and accurate way to use the weapon, with the bonus of conserving ammunition. A headlight on the leading jeep was shot out immediately, and then the vehicle slammed to a halt. It seemed likely the Browning’s bullets had done terminal damage to either the engine or the transmission.

  The second jeep doused its lights and turned away, heading for cover over to the right. Basic Infantry Tactics 101: Split your forces so as to deny the enemy the ability to concentrate all his firepower on a single area. Unfortunately, Dekker’s men couldn’t do likewise.

  The sky was brightening quickly, desert dawns being usually of short duration, and Richter could just make out the shapes of the soldiers climbing out of the crippled jeep. But, as he noted, they weren’t running away but taking up positions to return fire. And seconds later the rattle of their Kalashnikov
s became a distant counterpoint to Wallace’s steady bursts of firing.

  At that range their AK47s were hopelessly inaccurate, and Richter wondered why one of them hadn’t stayed in the halted jeep to use the heavy machine-gun. Moments later, the same thought obviously occurred to one of the Algerians, who ran back and climbed into the abandoned vehicle.

  ‘I see him,’ Wallace called out, before Richter could speak. ‘Take the Browning.’

  Wallace grabbed his sniper rifle and stepped away from the Pinky. The Starlight scope and the heavier-calibre bullets – 7.62mm against the 203’s 5.56mm – would make a huge difference. He dropped flat on the ground, spread the bipod legs and settled himself into the aiming position.

  Richter grasped the Browning, pointed it at the jeep and fired a series of short bursts.

  Then the machine-gun on the Algerian vehicle replied, tracer arcing towards them as the soldier corrected his aim. Bullets smashed into the nearby rocks, sending shards and splinters whizzing through the air. Kalashnikov bullets howled overhead, but it was the machine-gun that would kill them, if Wallace couldn’t find his mark soon.

  Richter glanced down as he heard a shot from the sniper rifle, and instantly the Algerian machine-gun fell silent. Looking ahead, he saw a bulky shape tumble backwards out of the jeep, and then shifted his aim from the vehicle to the muzzle flashes of the Kalashnikovs. He wasn’t hopeful of actually hitting any of the Algerian soldiers, but if he could make them keep their heads down, and convince them that trying to get back behind the machine-gun was a really bad idea, it might be enough.

  He looked around him. Dekker and four SAS troopers were struggling to free one of their comrades whose leg was trapped under the wreckage of the crashed Pinky, and beside them another soldier lay ominously still on the ground, his head at an unnatural angle to his body.