Foxbat

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 Ain 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 outlined 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,