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’.
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
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.
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.
