At six-twenty Paul Richter pushed open the door of the Bar Moskva and walked inside. He ordered an orange juice and a glass of water, and took the drinks over to a high stool situated at one end of the bar. From that position, he could easily see the door, the tables close to it, and anyone who happened to come in.
He’d been there for less than two minutes when his mobile rang. He looked at the number, recognizing it as Simpson’s private line, but checked his watch to ensure that he had time in hand, and only then answered the call.
‘Richter,’ he announced briefly
‘Are you in a secure location?’ his superior demanded, without preamble.
‘More or less. I’m sitting by myself in a Russian bar. Why?’
‘Taken to drink at last, have you?’
‘Not yet, but I’m working on it. I’m also in a hurry here, so what do you want?’
‘A possibly related matter.’ Simpson then outlined what FOE had learned about the robbery in Dobric. ‘We don’t know for sure that these Acrids were taken by whatever group has been acquiring the Foxbats, but being the missile of choice for the MiG-25, that’s at least likely. Where are you? What progress are you making?’
‘Not a lot so far, but I might have something concrete later this evening. I’m currently about seven hundred miles east of Moscow, in Perm, waiting for a couple of bad guys to meet with a MiG pilot from the local air base. If anything comes of it, I’ll brief the duty officer tonight. Anything else you need to know?’
‘No, that’s it. Just keep in touch.’
Five minutes after Richter had ended the call, Pavel Bardin walked through the door. He ordered a vodka, and knocked it back in one as soon as the bartender had placed it in front of him. Then he ordered another, carried it across to a table beside the door, pulled out a newspaper and began reading. Or, at least, appearing to read, for every time the door opened, he looked up to scan the faces of the new arrivals.
The Russian was, Richter realized, both amateurish and terrified, which wasn’t the best combination when about to encounter people who had killed at least once during the past week. But it was too late to do anything about that now, and what could he do anyway, because Bardin was the only one who might recognize the three men who had almost certainly killed Georgi Lenkov.
Seven came and went, and the door opened regularly to admit new arrivals, or to allow customers to leave. On each occasion, Bardin glanced at Richter across the bar and shook his head. The man was being about as subtle as a flying brick, and Richter knew the expected agents would twig what was up the instant they stepped through the door. The idiot would have to be warned.
He stood up to do so, and had taken no more than a couple of steps towards Bardin’s table when the street door suddenly opened again, and two men entered. The pilot looked up at them, then turned towards Richter and nodded. He might just as well have waved a banner over his head carrying the words ‘This is a trap.’
The men stopped dead, then turned round, yanked open the door and hurried outside. Richter muttered a curse and followed them.
He’d expected them to turn either left or right, making for wherever they’d left their car. But instead they sprinted straight across the road, towards the river. Off to his left, Richter saw the brief flash of headlamps, the signal agreed with Bykov to indicate that he’d radioed for the police cordon to be set up. But that now seemed rather academic, because Richter had realized there was a huge hole in their plan. If the bad guys had a boat waiting for them on the river, the police cordon became irrelevant. They’d covered all the surrounding streets, but not the water.
So Richter ran. But he’d barely left the bar when one of the running men looked back, then stopped and turned, tugging open his jacket. The moment Richter recognized the weapon, he dropped flat on the tarmac surface of the road. Because, in the uncertain light of the street lamps, he’d seen the unmistakable outline of a Skorpion machine-pistol and, with only the Yarygin, he was hopelessly outgunned.
The man in front of him squeezed the trigger, sending a stream of nine-millimetre bullets screaming over Richter’s head to smash into the wall and windows of the bar behind him. As glass shattered, he heard shouts of alarm intermingled with cries of pain. Sighting down the barrel of the Yarygin, he loosed off two snap shots, barely aiming, just wanting to discourage the barrage of fire.
Both his shots missed, but the two men began running again, then abruptly disappeared from view as they reached the far edge of Kama Boulevard, and ran on down a flight of stone steps leading towards the river.
Richter jumped to his feet and chased after them, but slowed to a walk as he approached the top of the steps. That was just as well, because the moment he raised his head over the low parapet bordering the pavement, the guy with the Skorpion opened up again, a hail of copper-jacketed slugs knocking lethal chips of stone out of the wall as Richter dropped back down. A couple of the flying shards hit him in the face, opening up a long but shallow cut across his forehead.
He raised his right hand over the top of the parapet and fired two shots in the general direction of his quarry, then slid sideways until he was lying right beside the gap in the wall at the top of the steps. Behind him he could hear the sound of running footsteps. Glancing to his left, he saw Bykov approaching, pistol in hand, and gestured for him to keep back.
Cautiously he peered around the solid stone, ready to draw back at once. But there seemed no immediate danger as the two men had by now moved to the water’s edge, where a third figure was waiting in a boat with a hefty outboard motor attached to the stern. Even as Richter watched, the boat swung away from the jetty and began accelerating fast towards the opposite bank of the river.
‘Shit,’ Richter muttered, realizing there almost certainly wasn’t enough time to get the Perm police to arrange a reception committee on the other side. He stood up and hurtled down the steps, the Yarygin ready in his hand.
At the water’s edge he stopped, feet apart, and raised the pistol to take careful aim, supporting his right hand with his left to steady the weapon. The boat was probably thirty yards away as he fired his first shot. It was bobbing and bouncing on the water as it gathered speed, its three occupants crouching low.
The moment his shot rang out, one of the figures turned, and seconds later the Skorpion began to return fire. But a bouncing boat is too unstable a platform from which to shoot accurately, and although Richter flinched when a couple of rounds struck the jetty a few feet away, he knew it would be a miracle if any of the bullets hit him.
His advantage was to be standing on solid ground, so he concentrated on making each shot count. His second shot also missed, but the third scored a hit. One of the men gave a yell of pain and slumped forward, while the boat suddenly veered to the left. But it was Richter’s fourth bullet that did the real damage.
It hit the outboard motor’s fuel tank, sending a spray of petrol right across the open cockpit. The man armed with the Skorpion was still firing, and whether it was due to muzzle flash from the machine-pistol or a spark from one of Richter’s bullets ricocheting off something metallic he’d never know, but with a sudden roar the vessel erupted in a ball of flame.
Richter lowered his pistol, the weapon instantly irrelevant, and just watched the conflagration. The petrol-soaked clothing of the fugitives caught fire immediately. Illuminated by the burning fuel, their three indistinct figures gyrated in violent, panicky movements as they frantically tried to beat out the spreading flames with their bare hands.
It was never going to work, and almost simultaneously they reached the same conclusion and leapt overboard. The water doused the flames straight away, but the boat was still fully ablaze and only a madman would attempt to climb back on board. Richter guessed that the three men would try to swim for the opposite bank of the river.
‘I had hoped to question them.’ Bykov was panting slightly as he stopped beside Richter and looked out at the ball of flames where the powerboat was now drifting slowly on th
e current.
‘We might still be able to, if any of them manage to reach the shore.’
‘I’ve asked Wanov to send some of his men over to the other side, and to organize a couple of boats to recover the wreck, but they’ll take a while to arrive and it’ll be dark soon. This is his town, and he really should have arranged something to cover the river.’
‘We should have thought about it ourselves, Viktor. With hindsight it’s an obvious escape route. You can’t blame Wanov – he did exactly what we asked him to.’
Bykov shrugged. ‘You’re right, but it’s too late now. Maybe we’ll find some clue on whatever’s left of that boat. It has to be registered to somebody.’
Pyongyang, North Korea
Kim Yong-Su sat in his office in the centre of Pyongyang and checked everything one last time. When Pak Je-San had first explained his plan back in the autumn of 2003, Kim had realized two things.
First, the timing was absolutely crucial: they had to make their move when the nearest American aircraft carrier was at least forty-eight hours sailing time distant, and no Aegis cruisers were in the vicinity of the Korean Peninsula. In its final phase, the plan would only work if they could achieve some measure of air superiority – though he knew they could never achieve total control, because the South Korean aircraft were much more up-to-date than those of the DPRK. That meant having no American carriers around, with squadrons of F/A-18 Super Hornets embarked.
Second, and equally important, they had to maintain an appearance of normality until the last possible moment. That involved two operation orders. The first, ‘Silver Spring’, had been prepared for public dissemination: just another routine, no-notice exercise to check the operational readiness of the North Korean forces to respond if faced with an unprovoked assault from south of the DMZ. He’d sent copies to Seoul so that South Korea would be pre-warned about this exercise, and had also alerted Moscow and Beijing. All nations advise their neighbours whenever they plan to run military exercises, just to ensure that such operations are not mistaken for anything else.
And following this convention, Kim believed, was his master-stroke, because while the South Koreans and their American lackeys were carefully watching the ‘Silver Spring’ manoeuvres, the preparations for ‘Golden Dawn’ – his hidden plan for the occupation of South Korea – could continue undetected. And once it was executed, the results would be as devastating as they were unexpected.
Kim nodded in satisfaction, then instructed his aides to send the preparation signal for ‘Silver Spring’, as an unclassified message, while simultaneously dispatching a Top Secret signal to begin the initial phase of ‘Golden Dawn’.
T’ae’tan Air Base, North Korea
Less than two hours after arriving back at T’ae’tan, Pak Je-San was called to the station commander’s office to take an urgent telephone call from Pyongyang. He ran up the stairs and into the room, and snatched up the receiver. The commander was still sitting behind his desk, so Pak dismissed him with a curt gesture, and waited until the man had left the room before he spoke.
‘This is Pak Je-San.’
‘I have been waiting to speak to you for almost five minutes,’ barked the unmistakable voice of Kim Yong-Su. ‘We have begun the countdown. Begin the dispersal of your assets.’ And the line went dead.
For a few seconds, Pak still held the receiver to his ear, listening to an echoing silence. Then he slowly lowered the handset to its cradle, and turned to go. Outside the door, the station commander was waiting to regain possession of his office. The expression on Pak’s face instantly told him that the call from the capital had been important.
‘They’ve started the countdown?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ Pak agreed, ‘the clock’s running.’ Then he headed briskly for the stairs. There was a lot to do and very little time to do it. The Dobric missiles might arrive before Kim gave the final order, but Pak knew there was now almost no chance of getting those last two MiG-25s.
Chapter Ten
Thursday
T’ae’tan Air Base, North Korea
The lights had burned in the hangars throughout the night as maintainers struggled to get every Foxbat ready and, as the sky next lightened with the dawn, twenty out of the twenty-four aircraft were ready to fly, a better result than Pak Je-San had expected.
He hadn’t slept at all. He had been too busy working out the logistics of the dispersal of the interceptors and, equally important, of the personnel, stores and supplies that would need to be transported by road, and it had still taken him most of the night just to get everything in place.
One of his biggest headaches was the regular overflight of surveillance satellites, and this wasn’t just a matter of the orbiting American vehicles. Pak knew that relations were much improved between the West and the Confederation of Independent States, formerly known as the USSR, so he also had to avoid Russian platforms, and even the Japanese had four orbiting spy satellites, specifically intended to provide surveillance of the Korean Peninsula. Yes, the Japanese were continually worried about what the North Koreans might get up to – as well they should be, Pak reflected, with a grim smile.
A handful of passing satellites obviously wouldn’t stop the operation, but it still made sense to avoid alerting Japan or the West unnecessarily. Pak wanted, therefore, to get the road convoys away from T’ae’tan while all those spies in the sky were well out of range. And equally he wanted the MiG-25s to taxi out of the hangars and launch within that same brief window.
He’d already decided to send five of his precious Foxbats to Nuchonri, the closest military base to Seoul, and the same number to the airfields at Kuupri and Wonsan, on the east coast, facing the Sea of Japan. That would leave him with just five serviceable MiG-25s at T’ae’tan, and a further four being worked on. The aircraft maintainers had estimated that they might get one or even two of the remaining aircraft operational within forty-eight hours, which might be time enough.
Pak checked his computer once again, studying the list of satellite transit times. For this he was using, with some amusement, a program called Orbitron that he’d downloaded from a Polish website. Despite being freeware, it was a very powerful and comprehensive program with a database containing over twenty thousand satellites. For obvious reasons, it didn’t include all the classified surveillance birds, but Pak had already added those manually, and he reckoned this database was now about as accurate as any others available.
What he did not know was that the CIA had now altered the orbits of two of the Keyhole satellites, so the tracks the Orbitron program displayed were substantially inaccurate.
That was why, when the first five Foxbats, bound for Wonsan, taxied out of the hardened shelter and headed for the runway, one Keyhole bird was only ten minutes from reaching a point almost directly above the airfield. And when this satellite passed overhead, travelling at a little over seven kilometres a second, its cameras were able to record all five aircraft – one airborne and tracking north-east, one rolling down the runway and the other three lined up waiting to enter it.
Perm, Russia
Viktor Bykov had been right: the boat was registered to someone. Irritated by the failure of his force to capture the three fugitives the previous evening, Superintendent Wanov ordered the remains of the boat to be thoroughly checked as soon as his men had hauled the wreckage ashore.
Screwed to the transom was a registration plate and, after cleaning off a deposit of soot and other muck, they’d identified its owner as a small company in Perm itself that owned a dozen similar craft. The moment they opened their doors for business that morning, Wanov had appeared in person, demanding to inspect all their hire records. This produced the address of a hotel on the outskirts of Perm, so just after ten that morning Bykov and Richter found themselves standing in one of the rooms that three guests had been occupying for the last two weeks.
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.
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