Foxbat

by James Barrington

  ‘And will we do that?’

  Muldoon nodded. ‘We don’t have a lot of options, as Oplan 5027 commits us to lending our support to South Korea, and this request falls well within the parameters. So I’ve already confirmed the tasking – and I’d quite like to know what’s going on over there myself.’

  Yongbyon, North Korea

  Yongbyon is a small and unremarkable town located about one hundred kilometres north of Pyongyang. In the mid-1960s the North Koreans established a large-scale nuclear research facility there, and ten years later they began construction of a nuclear reactor on the site. Within a further ten years they’d also erected a reprocessing facility that would allow them to extract plutonium from nuclear fuel, and a separate research reactor rated at five megawatts. The DPRK built other reactors, including a two-hundred-megawatt installation at Taechon, but it was the Yongbyon complex that worried everyone most.

  Estimates prepared by South Korea, America and Japan, based upon an IAEA calculation of the radioactive isotope content of nuclear waste unloaded from the five-megawatt reactor, suggested that by the end of 2004 the North Koreans could have extracted between twelve and twenty-four kilograms of plutonium.

  In fact, they’d extracted rather more than even the most optimistic – or pessimistic, depending on point of view – of the estimates, but hardly any plutonium now remained in the lead-lined subterranean storage room at Yongbyon.

  A modern twenty-kiloton nuclear warhead contains eight kilograms of fissionable material, so most assessments suggested that the DPRK might have enough plutonium to construct two or three nuclear weapons of this size. That assumed the North Korean scientists were constructing a weapon of modern design, using shaped charges known as lenses to initiate the detonation sequence. But no matter what method they were using to trigger the device, they certainly had enough plutonium to build at least one weapon, even if it was the size of a truck, as one Western scientist had sneered.

  There are several problems associated with the production of nuclear weapons, but one of the most intractable is size.

  The ‘Little Boy’ bomb that the USAF dropped on Hiroshima was about three metres long and weighed almost four thousand kilograms. It contained sixty-four kilograms of uranium 235, but the so-called ‘gun’ design was so primitive and ineffective that a mere 0.7 kilograms of the material underwent nuclear fission. But it still had a yield approaching fifteen kilotons and killed about one hundred and fifty thousand people.

  The ‘Fat Man’ weapon dropped three days later on Nagasaki was even bigger and a lot heavier, with a slightly higher yield, and employed shaped charges to compress a core of plutonium into a critical mass. Plutonium is slightly easier to produce than uranium 235, and is the favoured material for regimes that are taking the first steps towards becoming full members of the ‘nuclear club’.

  The most important point about the first two American atomic weapons is that they were massive, and that was the problem the North Korean nuclear scientists had been struggling with. They could build such a weapon – since the October 2006 nuclear test in Hamgyeong province in North Korea that hadn’t been in dispute – but constructing a weapon that was light and small enough to be carried by one of the regime’s ballistic missiles was another story entirely. Nevertheless they’d succeeded, and the warhead they’d produced was designed to fit inside the nose cone of every missile in the North Korean inventory, from the old and basic Scud to the three-stage Taep’o-dong 2. They’d fabricated three ten-kiloton nuclear warheads using eighteen kilograms of fissionable material, and these had all been sent to the Chiha-ri missile site located a short distance north of the DMZ.

  Just over a year earlier, the Yongbyon scientists had been given the most explicit instructions from Pyongyang – by Kim Yong-Su himself, in fact – to use a further twelve kilograms of plutonium in fabricating a twenty-kiloton weapon and detonation system for a highly classified project. That all made sense, but what didn’t make sense were the additional orders. They were also to prepare four standard-size warhead casings, but fill them with scrap metal.

  In a totalitarian regime like North Korea, survival usually comes down to quietly doing what you’re told, so that’s exactly what the scientists did.

  Six weeks previously, a truck guarded by a troop of heavily armed soldiers had appeared in Yongbyon. The officer in charge had handed the commanding officer a set of orders signed by the highest authority in Pyongyang, and instructed his men to load the genuine nuclear weapon, stored inside a wooden crate, onto the lorry. As soon as it was loaded, the convoy set off again, its destination now the dockyard at Wonsan. The fake warheads were put into a storeroom, and then the scientists got on with their other work.

  That afternoon, another convoy appeared at Yongbyon, this one in the charge of a so-jang – major-general – and within an hour the first of the four fake warheads had been loaded into one of the waiting trucks. From the outside, these specially designed vehicles looked pretty much like regular army three-axle five-ton trucks, albeit with solid sides. Somebody who knew about goods vehicles might have spotted the heavy-duty springs and uprated shock absorbers on the rear axles, but that was about the only indication that in each one of them most of the rear compartment was occupied by a lead-lined safe.

  In fact, calling the structure a safe was to misstate the case. It comprised a fixed base and two long sides, formed from half-inch steel plates lined with lead on the inside. The two ends were made of the same material and hinged at the base, but were so heavy that closing them required the use of hydraulic rams powered by the truck’s diesel engine. The top was even heavier, hinged on its long side and supported by a double set of rams. There were no locks, as the sheer weight of the plates made them superfluous.

  Inside the box was a shaped cradle, and the entire structure had been designed for one purpose only: to carry the North Korean standard-size nuclear warhead. The design would allow the weapon to be lifted directly into the truck and then lowered into the safe.

  Loading the trucks took the rest of the afternoon, and it was early evening before the vehicles were ready to leave. The Yongbyon commanding officer asked the so-jang if his men would like to eat at the facility before they left, but his offer was curtly rejected. They were, the major-general informed him, running on a very tight schedule, and rations had already been provided.

  Five hours after the first of the trucks had entered the Yongbyon complex, the convoy was back on the road, heading east. But almost as soon as the vehicles had cleared the outskirts of Yongbyon they scattered, each of the trucks driving its scrap-filled ‘warhead’ to a different destination, escort vehicles full of armed soldiers positioned in front and behind.

  They were each heading for a missile site on the east coast of North Korea, following orders from Pyongyang that were eminently clear, but which made little sense to any of the men, not even to the officer in command.

  Rossyia Hotel, Moscow

  ‘You didn’t give us a hell of a lot to work with, Viktor,’ Richter said as he opened up the laptop. They’d moved to a corner of one of the snack-bars that was temporarily closed – Richter presumed Bykov had organized that – so that nobody could overhear them or see the computer screen.

  ‘I know, but getting any kind of information out of the airfields and squadrons was very difficult. Eventually I had my staff comb the local air traffic control records for the aircraft side-numbers, and simply noted the date and time of their last known take-off. I also asked for tracing action for the missing aircraft at all military airfields within the CIS. Sometimes that helped, but more often it didn’t.’

  Richter was silent for a few moments as he plugged in the computer and switched it on. Simpson hadn’t given him any definite instructions about the information he could provide, but his recent experience in Aïn Oussera was quite probably relevant to the problem the Russians had uncovered.

  ‘It may not just be your Foxbats that are going missing, Viktor,’ he said, then out
lined what he and the SAS team had discovered in Algeria. ‘According to our transatlantic cousins, or more specifically the NSA, the Iranians may have lost an aircraft as well.’

  ‘This problem could be bigger than we thought, then,’ Bykov murmured as he produced a red-bound notebook from an inside pocket of his jacket. He opened it at a page that listed dates, times and sets of coordinates. Once the Dell’s operating system had loaded, Richter double-clicked an icon that represented a map, and waited while the graphics program started.

  The screen changed and an aerial photograph was displayed. It looked as if it covered about a ten-mile-square block of territory, and in the top left-hand corner was indicated an airfield.

  ‘The centre of this image is the first set of coordinates you gave us,’ Richter said. ‘What our techies have done is provide a series of overlays so that idiots like me can understand what the pictures show. We can zoom in to see the details better, but this scale is probably best for what we want. The analysts have already worked on each picture and identified all the aircraft, ignoring everything except the MiG-25s.’

  He manoeuvred the cursor over a symbol at the top of the screen and clicked the left-hand button below the touchpad. Instantly a grid overlay appeared, letters running horizontally and numbers vertically.

  ‘According to my briefing, there’s an aircraft contact in square delta five,’ Richter said.

  Bykov looked carefully at the screen. ‘Yes, I can see something.’

  Richter chose another icon, and a tiny red circle appeared more or less in the centre of the grid square. Inside this was a small silver dart.

  ‘Right, that’s the aircraft. Now, the satellite took several pictures of this specific area, but we’ve only been able to identify the same aircraft in three of them. That’s just because of the high relative speed of the bird in its polar orbit. Rather than look at each picture individually, the techies have plotted the other two images of the aircraft onto this frame, so it’s easier to see where it’s heading.’

  Richter clicked another icon twice, and two more small red circles appeared, a tiny silver object in each, tracking south-east. He clicked another button and a blue dotted line appeared on the screen, one end terminating at the airfield runway, the other extending beyond the third image of the aircraft itself.

  ‘That’s the Foxbat’s apparent track. The problem is that we don’t know if it continued heading south-east, or changed direction some time after the satellite’s pass. And that, really, is the problem with all these pictures. At best, the satellite photographed the aircraft in four frames. Usually it was only two or three frames, and for several of the coordinates there were no birds within range at the time you specified.’

  Richter leant back in his seat. ‘I can show you the rest of the images if you’d like, but we’ve already done an analysis. In most cases the aircraft were detected heading south or south-east. Extrapolating the tracks doesn’t really help, because there are so few coordinates, but about all we can be sure of is that the aircraft weren’t making for Western Europe or the North Pole. Almost anywhere else is a possibility, though.

  ‘The other obvious problem is the Foxbat’s range, which is pretty short. There’s no way these aircraft could have been flown out of Russia even with full tanks, so you’re either looking at several refuelling stops or possibly the MiG being loaded into a transport aircraft or onto a ship, and then delivered somewhere as a piece of cargo.

  ‘For what it’s worth, our intelligence people have prepared a shortlist of likely client states. We’ve assumed that these aircraft have been obtained by a nation rather than some power-crazed individual. We’re suggesting you should look at Afghanistan, China, India, Iran, North Korea, Pakistan and Taiwan.’

  Bykov nodded slowly. ‘Your analysis matches our opinions. But we don’t think India or Pakistan are likely customers, simply because both nations could have bought the aircraft legitimately from us if they’d wanted to. Afghanistan is too closely watched by the Americans for anyone to have flown either individual interceptors or a large transport aircraft into an airfield there without being detected. Taiwan seems unlikely, so that leaves China, Iran or North Korea.’

  ‘But if the NSA is right,’ Richter pointed out, ‘Iran itself might be missing a MiG-25.’

  Bykov nodded again. ‘So that suggests China or North Korea. We’ve always feared China’s intentions towards us. It’s possible the sleeping giant is awakening and flexing its muscles, but our relations with Beijing have been fairly cordial lately. Not,’ he added, ‘that that means very much these days.’

  As Richter reached out to close the lid of the laptop, Bykov’s mobile phone rang. He stood up, pulled it from his pocket and moved out of earshot before answering the call. Then he closed the phone and walked back.

  ‘We may have a lead,’ he said, and Richter looked interested. ‘A young man’s body has been found in the woods outside Perm. He was murdered, a single bullet through the head, and apparently robbed.’

  ‘So?’ Richter asked. ‘Why has the GRU been informed about a murder in the middle of Russia?’

  ‘Patience, Paul, and I’ll tell you. Perm lies at the southern end of the Ural mountains, more or less on the edge of Siberia. The closest airfield is Bolshoye Savino, a mixed-use military and civilian airfield. One of the squadrons there flies the MiG-31, the development of the MiG-25 that you call the Foxhound, and there are half a dozen Foxbats based there as well. The GRU’s been informed because the murder victim, Georgi Lenkov, was a front-line MiG-31 pilot. Perhaps he was approached to steal an aircraft and refused, which means that whoever’s orchestrating these thefts had him killed to stop him talking.

  ‘More importantly,’ Bykov went on, ‘as far as I’m aware, no MiG-25s or MiG-31s have been reported missing from Bolshoye Savino, so perhaps the thieves are still in the area, looking for another pilot who will accept their offer. I think, my friend, we should take a trip to Perm.’

  T’ae’tan Air Base, North Korea

  Every time any nation on Earth launches a satellite, the American Space Command organization, co-located with NORAD at Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado, starts tracking it, and will continue to track it until it falls back to Earth. In fact, Space Command constantly monitors around ten thousand objects in orbit around the planet, ranging in size from fully operational communications, broadcast television and surveillance satellites down to space debris: bits and pieces of failed or damaged satellites, some as small as half an inch across.

  The purpose of the monitoring is twofold. First, and most important, a launch from somewhere in Asia could simply be a nation using a redundant Soviet rocket to boost its latest scientific satellite into orbit. Or it could be a renegade Russian general with a chip on his shoulder and access to a bunch of rail-mounted ICBMs, trying to start World War Three. In either case, NORAD staff have about two minutes to decide whether or not this launch shows hostile intent and, if it does, what they should do about it apart from blowing the whistle and closing the blast doors inside the mountain.

  The second reason for the monitoring process is that space craft are fragile, and the consequences of, say, the Space Shuttle hitting a one-inch bolt travelling at a couple of thousand miles an hour would be catastrophic. So before every launch, the Cheyenne Mountain people check their records to ensure that the flight-path of the launch vehicle is as danger-free as possible.

  A spin-off from the monitoring system is that the paths of surveillance satellites of all nations are well known. By their nature, these vehicles behave unlike almost all other satellites because of their need to overfly as much of the surface of the planet as possible. They travel in polar, rather than equatorial, orbits at fairly low altitudes – typically between about one hundred and two hundred miles up – and move very quickly. In late evening you can sometimes see one, a fast-moving white dot illuminated by the rays of the setting sun.

  The armed forces of most nations know these routes, and the times that these satelli
tes are due overhead, and take extreme care to ensure that nothing sensitive can be observed by these silent and watchful ‘eyes in the sky’. Submarines, for example, will avoid being on or near the surface when a satellite may pass overhead.

  Originally, overhead times for the satellites were listed in tables that – depending on the country of origin – varied in security classification from ‘Restricted’ up to ‘Secret’, but these days simple computer programs provide the same information in a much more accessible form that is infinitely easier to understand.

  T’ae’tan Air Base had such a program, and Pak Je-San was scrupulous in ensuring that none of his MiG-25s were ever outside their hangars when a pass was due. He was slightly less concerned about aircraft actually in the air, because surveillance satellite optics are optimized for surface surveillance, not fast-moving airborne contacts.

  But, as with all computer programs, the information that comes out can only ever be as good as the data that goes in, and Pak Je-San was unaware that the Americans had been asked by the South Korean National Intelligence Service to ensure that a satellite passed directly over T’ae’tan as soon as possible. Because of the extreme sensitivity regarding the Korean Peninsula, the Americans had complied almost at once. They’d used the manoeuvring engines to make a slight change to the orbit of a KH-12 bird that had just started its northbound track from Antarctica, with the result that the satellite passed directly over T’ae’tan when otherwise its programmed orbit would have taken it north up the Yellow Sea and straight over China, avoiding North Korean territory altogether.

  So the Foxbat that was being returned to the hangar by the ground crew wasn’t quite inside the building when the satellite moved within range, currently one hundred and thirty-five miles above the surface. The first image recorded by its cameras was taken from a slightly oblique angle, while the huge twin rudders and jet exhausts of the MiG-25 were still visible outside the hangar, but by the time the second picture was taken the aircraft had vanished.