coffee for two, then came and sat down again at the conference table.
‘What did the DNI think?’ Muldoon asked.
‘The Director of National Intelligence is a diplomat, not an intelligence professional, and it doesn’t help, either, that he’s an idiot,’ Hicks said, now treading familiar ground. ‘In fact, he knows as much about intelligence analysis as I know about the dark side of the moon. He thinks we’re overreacting, and it’s just a coincidence that the DPRK has bought itself a bunch of Foxbats. He actually believes Pyongyang is just re-equipping its armed forces.’
‘That’s it?’
‘That’s it,’ Hicks confirmed.
Muldoon opened his mouth to reply, then closed it on hearing a double knock on the door. A young blonde girl walked in carrying a tray of coffee. She placed it on the conference table, smiled at them both, and left.
Hicks reached over and pulled the tray towards him. ‘So what’s your recommendation?’
‘If the DNI won’t do anything, we won’t be able to pass it up the line to the White House or across to the Pentagon – or not officially, anyway. I mean, I can make some calls, give some people a heads-up on what we’ve seen, but that’s about all. But I do think we should watch the situation, and it wouldn’t hurt to find out what assets we have located in the area. I know what military forces we have in South Korea, but I’d like to know what the Navy’s got thereabouts, and what other battle groups could get there inside a week.’
‘That’s not really within our terms of reference, Richard, but if this does blow up in our faces, some wise- ass is bound to ask why we didn’t know, and it would be nice to have our answer ready. I’ll make a couple of calls to the Pentagon, try to shake a few trees over there.’
The An-72 Coaler landed at Chkalovsky military airfield late that evening. Hidden away amidst woods in the eastern suburbs of Moscow, Chkalovsky, designated Scheikovo on most aeronautical charts, is the training centre for Russian cosmonauts, and is better known as ‘Star City’.
Once they’d deplaned, Bykov organized transport to take Richter back to the Rossyia, then himself climbed into a car with a uniformed driver for the journey to his office at Khodinka airfield.
At the Rossyia, Richter deposited his bags in his hotel room, then headed downstairs to grab a late dinner. Returning to his room, he set up the laptop and logged on to the internet, first checking flight times, with prices and availability. What he saw made him whistle softly, but he printed the relevant page on his portable ink-jet, then locked his room and walked out of the hotel.
Clear of earshot, he used the Enigma to dial the Duty Officer’s number at Hammersmith.
‘Richter,’ he announced.
‘Are you in Seoul yet?’
‘You’ve got to be bloody joking. About the only places in Russia where I can get a flight to South Korea are Moscow and Vladivostok and, when I worked out that I was a lot closer to Moscow, I came back here.’
‘So when’s your flight?’
‘The earliest is about seven-thirty tomorrow morning – but I won’t be on that.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because, for reasons that don’t make any sense to me, all the morning and afternoon departures out of Moscow head
‘So?’ The man sounded bored.
‘So I’m taking an evening flight. The Aeroflot five seven three leaves here at eighteen-twenty tomorrow. It’s still a twelve-and-a-half-hour flight, because it routes via Beijing, but that’s a hell of a lot better than twenty hours. It reaches Seoul about noon the following day, so can you pass that information on to Simpson?’
‘Is that it?’
‘No. I’ve just checked the ticket prices, and the economy-class single fare is a couple of thousand dollars American. Tell Simpson I’m booking a Business Class seat, which I hope will mean the stewardess looks like a woman instead of an all-in wrestler, and I’m not surrounded by goats and Russian peasants. That’ll cost him about three or four thousand dollars, so he’d better make sure the credit card he gave me is good to cover it. If the card maxes out I’ll be using the return half of the ticket I’ve already got to come back to Heathrow. OK?’
‘OK. Have a good flight – whichever one you catch.’
Chapter Twelve
Friday
Pak Je-San was getting worried. When he’d sent his emissaries over to the Russian Federation to source aircraft, spares and munitions, he had imposed a rigid communications schedule. All of them were expected to contact him by telephone at least once every twenty-four hours, though he never specified precise times.
Of all his agents, Ryu Chang-Ho was probably the most reliable, and Pak now hadn’t heard from him since Wednesday afternoon. Ryu had been in Perm that evening, and Pak had been expecting his call, even if only to hear that his second approach had been turned down.
But no call had come through, and since Wednesday Pak himself had barely drawn breath as the plan moved inexorably towards completion. He’d been totally committed to organizing the dispersal of the aircraft and stores, and with trying to achieve all that whilst still avoiding detection by the American spy satellites. But at the back of his mind he’d been getting more and more concerned about Ryu, and he now realized he could wait no longer.
He picked up his desk phone and dialled the number of Ryu’s mobile, but all he heard was a recorded message. That meant the phone itself was either switched off or currently outside the range of the nearest cell.
Pak depressed the receiver and dialled the other number Ryu had given him, for a landline in Perm. It rang six times, then a deep male voice answered with a single Russian word: ‘
Clearly something had gone wrong and, if Ryu had been rumbled, it meant that the Russians probably now knew that their missing aircraft were in North Korea. If he was already dead, it was possible the authorities in Perm had fitted call-tracing equipment, which was exactly why Pak had ended the call so abruptly. In the few seconds he’d been connected, his precise location couldn’t have been traced, but they might still have been able to identify which country he was calling from.
But now, with Operation ‘Golden Dawn’ already under way, what the Russians knew or didn’t know would hardly matter.
It’s one thing to schedule aircraft movements so as to avoid them being spotted by surveillance satellites, though even that’s extremely difficult because of the sheer number of orbiting vehicles currently scanning the planet’s surface. But it is quite a different matter when massed troop movements are involved. For these simply cannot be hidden from view, and as soon as the first phase of ‘Silver Spring’ began, successive passes by KH-12 birds, recording images every five seconds, started detecting everything from the heat blooms of tank and truck engines to the numbers of individual soldiers.
The moment the N-PIC analysts saw these pictures, they flashed them straight to Langley. The CIA duty staff immediately called in Richard Muldoon, and after a brief glance at the images he telephoned Walter Hicks.
‘What’s your take on this, Richard?’
‘I don’t think we need too much analysis here, Walter,’ Muldoon replied, spreading a selection of
