Foxbat

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 Ain 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.