by Tom Clancy
"Shar, I love you both—"
"I know. You've got to go."
"I do," said Hood. "I'm sorry."
"Don't be. You did all right today. Have I thanked you for stopping by before?"
"I think so."
"If I didn't, thanks," Sharon said. "I love you."
"Kisses to Alex."
Sharon hung up and Hood lay the receiver gently in its cradle. "My son's okay and my wife's not mad at me," he said, looking from one man to the other. "If you've got bad news, now's the time to give it."
McCaskey stepped forward. ' That Recon Officer who was killed, Judy Margolin? Seems one of her last photos was a shot of the oncoming MiGs."
"Someone leak them to the press?"
"Worse," said McCaskey. "The computer guys at the Pentagon were able to read the numbers on the plane. They did a search through all the recent reconnaissance photos to find out where it's based."
"God, no—"
"Yes," said Herbert. "The President just authorized the Air Force to go in after it."
CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE
Wednesday, 3:30 A.M., Sariwon
Sariwon, North Korea, was located 150 miles west from the Sea of Japan, fifty miles east of the Yellow Sea, and fifty miles due south from Pyongyang.
The air base in Sariwon was the first line of defense against an air or missile strike from South Korea. It's one of the oldest bases in the country, having been built in 1952 during the war and being upgraded only as technology from China or the Soviet Union was made available. That wasn't as often as Pyongyang would have liked: it had always been the fear of North Korea's allies that eventual reunification with the South would give the West access to up-to-date military hardware and technology, so the North was always kept several steps behind Moscow and Beijing.
Sariwon had radar that was effective up to fifty miles, and able to read objects at least twenty feet in diameter. That gave them the capability of picking up virtually any aircraft headed their way. In drills, an attack from the west didn't give the base time to scramble their fighters, though even an assault from Mach 1 fighters gave them time to man the antiaircraft guns.
An aircraft's radar cross section— or RCS— read larger from the sides than from the front. Bombers like the old B-52s had a very high RCS value, up to one thousand square meters, which made them easy to spot and target. Even the F-4 Phantom II and F-15 Eagle were easy to spot, at RCS readings of one hundred for the Phantom and twenty-five for the Eagle. On the opposite end of the scale was the B-2 Advanced Technology bomber, with an RCS profile of one millionth of a square meter— roughly that of a hummingbird.
The Lockheed F-117A Nighthawk had an RCS of.01. Its profile was reduced by its unique "cut diamond" architecture, which used thousands of flat surfaces, angled so as not to share a common reflective angle with other surfaces. The RCS was further cut by the material used in the plane's construction. Only ten percent of the airframe's weight was metal: the rest was reinforced carbon fiber that absorbed and dissipated radar energy as well as the F-117A's infrared reading, and Fibaloy, an outer-skin plastic filled with bubbles and glass fibers that also reduced the RCS reading.
The black aircraft was fifty-six feet long, sixteen feet high, and had a wingspan of forty feet. Operational since October 1983, the F-117A was assigned to the 4450th Tactical Group at Nellis AFB, Nevada; the Team One Furtim Vigilans unit— "Covert Vigilantes" — was permanently based at "the Mellon Strip" there, located in the northwest section of the Nellis Test Range. Since Desert Storm, however, planes from the unit had been much on the move. Its wings folded, the F-117A could be tucked into the body of a C-5A transport, which was the only way it could be moved long distances undetected, since the refueling receptacle would be picked up by radar if used in-flight.
Flying at a top speed of Mach 1, the Nighthawk could cover fifty miles in four minutes. Powered by two 12,500-pound GE F404-HB nonafterburning turbofans, it had a combat radius of four hundred miles.
The F-117A was onboard the aircraft carrier Halsey, which had sailed north from the Philippines at Defcon 4 and was deep in the East China Sea. Taking off and heading due north, lights out, the F-117A shot up along the west coast of South Korea, climbing all the while, and angled northwest into the Yellow Sea. Flying at just ten thousand feet, it accelerated from Mach 8 to Mach 1 and tore into North Korean airspace, its backswept wings and upright swallowtail fins slicing the air with imperceptible resistance.
Radar picked up a blip at once. The radar technician called over a superior, who confirmed that the blip seemed like an aircraft. He radioed the command center. The process took seventy-five seconds. The base commander was wakened and authorized an alarm to be sounded. Exactly two minutes and five seconds had passed since the blip was first spotted.
The air base was surrounded by guns on four sides, though only the antiaircraft artillery on the east and west were manned to catch the intruder coming and going. Twenty-eight men were sent out, seven to a gun, two guns on each side; it took them one minute twenty seconds to get to their posts. One man at each gun slipped on earphones. Another five seconds.
"Southwest gun to tower," said one. "What is the reading on the intruder?"
"We've got it at 277 degrees, dropping fast, closing at a speed of—"
There was an explosion in the distance as the Night-hawk's ABM-136A Tacit Rainbow antiradiation drone missile tracked, found, and destroyed the radar dish.
"What was that?" the gunner asked.
"We lost it!" the tower replied.
"The plane?"
"The radar!"
The men at the control panel punched in the last-known coordinates, and massive gears ground quietly as the massive black barrels were swung into position. They were still moving when a sonic boom announced that the arrowhead-shaped aircraft had arrived.
Guided by its forward-looking laser radar and a low-light TV screen, the F-117A easily found the ship that had attacked the Mirage. It was sitting on the runway with two other MiGs on either side.
The pilot reached to the left, right beside his knee, and pressed a red button set in a yellow square with diagonal black stripes. At once, the air outside the craft was torn by the loud hiss of the optically guided ABM-65 missile, the slender rocket ripping through the five thousand feet between the plane and the target in just under two seconds.
The MiG was lifted and torn apart in a titanic fireball that turned night into day and then day into flaming dusk. The planes on either side were flipped onto their backs and debris from the explosion was scattered in every direction, the blast itself shattering windows in the tower, the hangars, and in over half the twenty-two aircraft at the field. Flaming pieces of fabric and plastic fell everywhere, starting small fires in buildings and on the brush surrounding the landing strips.
One gunner was killed in the blast, his back pierced by a ten-inch shard of metal.
The commander managed to scramble four jets, but the F-117A had swung back toward the sea and was racing toward the Halsey before they were even airborne.
CHAPTER SIXTY
Wednesday, 3:45 A.M., KCIA Headquarters
Director Im Yung-Hoon was exhausted. Another cup of coffee would keep him going, if it ever got to his office. Along with the report from the lab. They'd fingerprinted the bastard fifteen minutes ago, and scanned it into the computer immediately. The damn thing was supposed to work at the speed of light, or some crap like that.
Yung-Hoon rubbed his cadaverously deep eyes with spindly fingers. He pushed his long graying hair from his forehead and looked around his office. Here he was, the head of one of the up-and-coming intelligence agencies, four floors and three basements packed with the latest analysis and detection equipment, and nothing seemed to work right.
They had fingerprints of all kinds in their database. From police blotters, college records, even pens and glasses and telephones touched by North Koreans. Agents of his had gone so far as to remove doorknobs from North Korean military bases.
How
long should it take to find a match?
The phone rang. He poked the Speaker button.
"Yes?"
"Sir, it's Ri. I'd like to send these prints over to Op-Center in Washington."
Yung-Hoon exhaled hard through his nose. "Have you nothing?"
"So far, no. But these may not be North Koreans or known criminals. They could be from another country."
The second phone rang; his assistant Ryu's line. "Very well," the Director said. "Send them over." He punched off the first phone and poked on the second. "Yes?"
"Sir, General Sam's headquarters just phoned with news: a U.S. fighter just attacked the air base at Sariwon."
"One fighter?"
"Yes, sir. We believe a Nighthawk hit the MiG that attacked their Mirage."
Finally, thought Yung-Hoon, something to smile about. "Excellent. What's the latest on Kim Hwan?"
"There is no latest, sir. He's still in surgery."
"I see. Is the coffee ready yet?"
"Brewing, sir."
"Why is everything so slow around here, Ryu?"
"Because we're understaffed, sir?"
"Rubbish. One man successfully attacked Sariwon. We're complacent. This whole thing happened because we're fat and lack initiative. Perhaps we need some changes—"
"I'll pour whatever coffee is made, sir."
"You're catching on, Ryu."
The Director jabbed off the phone. He wanted his coffee, but he was right about what he'd said to Ryu. The organization had lost its edge, and the best of them was on his back in God only knew what condition. Yung-Hoon had been angry when he learned what Hwan had done, hauling in the spy and asking for her help. It just wasn't done that way. But maybe that's why it needed to be done.
Show compassion and trust where you usually show anger and doubt. Shake people up, keep them off balance.
He'd been raised by the old school, and Hwan was the new. If his Deputy Director survived, maybe it was time for a change.
Or maybe he was just balmy with exhaustion. He'd see how things looked after coffee. In the meantime, he lifted his long right hand and gave a small salute to the Americans for having done their part to keep the North off balance.
CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE
Tuesday, 2:00 P.M., Op-Center
The laboratory at Op-Center was extremely small, only nine hundred square feet, but Dr. Cindy Merritt and her assistant Ralph didn't need much more room than that. The data and files were all computerized, and the various tools of the trade were tucked into cabinets and under tables, hooked into the computers for control and observation.
The fingerprints from the KCIA computer came to Merritt's computer over a secure modem; the instant it arrived, the loops and whorls were already being scanned and matched against similar patterns in files that had come from the CIA, Mossad, MI5, and other intelligence sources, along with files from Interpol, Scotland Yard, other police sources, and military intelligence groups.
Unlike the KCIA software that superimposed the entire fingerprint over prints in its file— processing twenty every second— the Op-Center software Matt Stoll had developed with Cindy divided each print into twenty-four equal parts and literally threw them to the wind: if any part of the pattern showed up in another print, the entire prints were compared. This technique allowed them to examine 480 prints a second for every machine being used.
Bob Herbert and Darrell McCaskey had arrived when the print did, and asked Cindy if she could put several computers on the job: the unflappable chemist was able to give them three, and told them to stick around— it wouldn't take long.
She wasn't wrong. The computer had found the print in three minutes six seconds: Ralph brought up the file.
"Private Jang Tae-un," he read. "Soldier for four years, assigned to Major Kim Lee's explosives unit—"
"There you go," said Herbert, an edge of triumph.
" — and is a specialist in hand-to-hand combat."
"As long as the other guy didn't have a gun," Herbert muttered.
McCaskey asked Ralph for a printout of the data, then said to the chemist, "You're a miracle worker, Cindy."
"Tell that to Paul," said the attractive brunette. "We could really use a part-time mathematician to help write software to improve the algorithms we use to model biomolecules."
"I'll be sure to tell him." McCaskey winked as he took the paper from Ralph. "In exactly those words."
"Do," she said. "His son will explain it to him."
* * *
Hood was more concerned with Major Lee than with Cindy's request. With Liz Gordon and Bob Herbert at his side, both looking at the computer monitor, he reviewed the Major's ROK file that General Sam had sent electronically from Seoul.
The Director was finding it difficult to concentrate. More than at any time since the crisis began, he felt enormous pressure to find out who was behind the bombing: not only had the rising tension taken on a life of its own, but he felt that his diplomatic approach had caused the President to push Op-Center aside. Steve Burkow had phoned and informed him about the attack on the airstrip in North Korea just two minutes before it happened. The head of the Korean Task Force hadn't even been a part of the strategy team; the President wanted a fight, and was doing everything he could to provoke one. Which would have been fine if a fight was warranted.
If he was wrong about North Korea's innocence, he'd have more to worry about than losing the President's confidence. He would start to wonder if he'd been in politics so long that he'd actually become the fence straddler he'd once pretended to be. He forced himself to concentrate on what was on the monitor.
Lee was a twenty-year veteran with a justifiable dislike for the North. His father, General Kwon Lee, had been a field general who was killed at Inchon during the war. The Major's mother, Mei, was captured and hanged for spying on troop trains coming and going at the station in Pyongyang. He was raised in an orphanage in Seoul and joined the army when he was eighteen, and served under now— Colonel Lee Sun, who had been a separatist in high school, handing out leaflets and once having been arrested. Though Lee belonged to none of the underground movements like the Fraternity of the Division and Children of the Dead— the sons and daughters of soldiers who had died during the war— Lee was in charge of an elite counterintelligence group, was unmarried, and did a good deal of reconnoitering in the North to help calibrate U.S. spy satellites, measuring objects on the ground to give the NRO a frame of reference.
"What's it look like to you. Liz?" Hood asked.
"Nothing's ever open and shut in my end of the business, but this looks as close to it as vou're going to get—"
Bugs beeped.
"What is it?"
"Urgent call on the secure line from Director Yung-Hoon at the KCIA."
"Thanks." Hood hit the lighted button. "This is Paul Hood."
"Director Hood," said Yung-Hoon. "I've just received a most interesting radio message from the North Korean spy whom Kim Hwan was with tonight. She says he asked her to radio the North and find out about a theft of boots and explosives from anywhere in the DPRK."
Herbert snapped his fingers and caught Hood's eye. "That was the broadcast Rachel called me about in your office," Herbert whispered.
Hood nodded. He covered his right ear to block out Liz's typing on the keyboard. "What did the North Koreans say, Mr. Yung-Hoon?"
"That several boots, explosives, and handguns were taken from a truck en route to the depot in Koksan four weeks ago."
"They radioed this information to her, and then she told you?"
"That's right. It's very strange, because after she brought Hwan to National University Hospital, she stole a car and left. We're looking for her now."
"Is there anything else, sir?"
"No. Hwan is still in surgery."
"Thanks. I'll be in touch— we may have something."
Reconnoitering in the North, Hood thought. He hung up the phone. "Bob, check with General Sam and find out if our friend Lee was doing any r
econnoitering in the North four weeks ago."
"Of course," Herbert said. He wheeled himself from the office with enthusiasm Hood had never before seen.
Liz Gordon was looking at the computer. "You know, Paul, I think that if there is a plot, this Colonel Sun may be involved as well."
"Why?"
"I just had Sun's file sent over. It says that he doesn't delegate authority."
"So Lee is on a tight leash?"
"Quite the contrary. Sun doesn't appear to have much to do with Lee's operation."
"Which means that he may not be involved—"
"Or that his trust in Lee is so complete he doesn't need to oversee him."
"That sounds like a reach to me—"
"It isn't. It's classic when two people are on the same wavelength. It's a textbook symbiotic relationship for a hands-on type of officer like Sun."
"All right. I'll have Bob check on Sun's whereabouts as well." Hood looked at the countdown clock, then at the partly eaten salad by his elbow. He picked up a piece of warm carrot and started chewing on it. "You know, it took us nearly ten hours to pick up our first real lead, and we needed help from a North Korean spy just to get that. What does that tell you about our operation?"
"That we're still learning."
"I don't buy that. We missed things along the way. We should have contacted the North about a theft. There should have been a channel of communications for that. We also should have had a file on the separatist South Koreans."
"That's Monday morning quarterbacking. We'll have one now. We're actually doing pretty well, considering we're working at cross-purposes with the President and some of his closest advisers."
"Maybe." He smiled. "You were the first one to say that the North Korean President wasn't behind this. How do you feel now that the rest of us here have come around?"
"Scared," she said.
"Good. Just wanted to make sure I wasn't the only one." He saved the ROK files. "Now, I've got to bring Mike Rodgers up to speed, and see if we can use our little Striker force to get Op-Center a piece of the military pie. Who knows? Maybe Mike will have some ideas to surprise even the newly hatched hawks at Pennsylvania Avenue."