‘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.
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.
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 Kalashnikovs 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.
Then the second Algerian jeep drove back into view, the driver making for a group of rocks over to their right, with the clear intention of trying to outflank them. Richter swung the Browning around on its mount and fired a six-round burst, but the vehicle was too quick for him. It reached the shelter of the boulders and lurched to a halt, and he had no doubt that within a matter of seconds they’d be taking fire from two positions simultaneously. They had to start moving out, and quickly.
‘Colin,’ he called. ‘We’ve got to get out of here.’
‘We’re ready,’ Dekker gasped, as he and two other troopers lifted a wounded comrade into the Pinky. The soldier was obviously in great pain, his left leg below the knee a bloody mess, a section of bone protruding below the makeshift tourniquet someone had applied. Yet as soon as they’d got him seated, the man painfully reached for a 203 and brought it up to the ready position.
Dekker and his men went back to the wrecked Land Rover and returned moments later carrying another soldier, but this one was clearly beyond medical help. Silently, they laid the body in the rear section of the vehicle.
‘Broken neck,’ Dekker muttered shortly. ‘Right, everyone, mount up. John, get us out of here.’
The driver climbed into his seat, jammed the Land Rover into gear, and gunned the engine. Wallace resumed his position at the Browning machine-gun, heedless of the bullets still spraying all around them, and fired a long burst that traversed from left to right, to include most of the positions where the Algerian soldiers might have taken cover. Two of the others followed his example with their assault rifles, while Richter and Dekker joined in by firing forty-millimetre grenades from a couple of the 203s.
Just thirty seconds after they took off, Richter heard an explosion close behind. The overturned Pinky had exploded in a ball of fire.
‘High explosive and thermite?’ he asked, above the din of the automatic-weapon fire.
‘You got it,’ Dekker said, changing the magazine on his 203. ‘No better way to sanitize that vehicle.’
In the pale light of early morning, Yi Min-Ho watched silently as the searching soldiers paused in their advance and assembled in a field lying about three hundred metres below his vantage point. He at first presumed they were being briefed on new search tactics, but after a minute they turned and headed back towards the road where their lorry was parked.
It looked as if the pursuit had been called off, but Yi feared that it might be a diversionary tactic, encouraging him to stand up and resume his journey. They could easily have left a couple of men behind, hidden in the undergrowth, waiting for him to move, so for ten minutes he lay there motionless, scanning the fields below with his binoculars. But there was no sign of life and he was certain the army lorry had definitely left the area, having watched it drive away down the road leading to the east, the sound of its exhaust gradually fading into silence.
Yi carefully checked the land lying above him, identifying the next available cover. He eased up into a low crouch, backed away from his hiding place and moved slowly up the hill. When he reached another clump of bushes, he slid in behind it and again studied the land below through his binoculars. Still nothing moved.
Cautiously, he stood upright for just five seconds, then ducked down again. No shots were fired, and the hillside remained empty and innocent-looking. They must have gone, he decided, whereupon he turned and ran quickly up the slope, stopping after a couple of hundred metres to check behind him again. He should be at least five hundred metres from where he’d last seen his pursuers, so unless some stay-behinds had somehow out- flanked him, he was already beyond effective range of their weapons.
He shrugged, and strode on, now making for a gap in the Kungnaksan range of hills that rose in front of him. His objective, T’ae’tan Air Base, lay directly to the east, but his aim was to get himself to the north side of the runway, so he chose a longer, north-eastern route.
