eased away from the side of the fishing boat and turned east towards the coast of North Korea. The sea was calm, which was just as well, because the inflatable had a long way to go. About twenty miles to the drop-off point, and another fifteen back to where the fishing boat would then be waiting.
Within seconds the small craft and its occupants were invisible against the darkness of the water.
The loadmaster reappeared in the hold, checked that everyone there was wearing a headset, and then gave Richter a thumbs-up as he sat down.
‘We’re about sixty seconds from the first landing strip,’ the captain announced, his voice clear enough through the intercom. ‘We’ll do a low-level fly-by to check the surface, and if it looks OK we’ll land. Check your belts are tight and hold on.’
The Hercules sank even lower, then lurched up slightly, levelling at about one hundred feet.
In the cockpit, the captain had switched on the set of landing lights filtered for NVG use, and was peering through his night-vision glasses at the ground below the aircraft. If he was going to land here, he wanted to be absolutely sure he could do so safely and, even more important, take off again afterwards.
From the cockpit, the desert surface looked firm, and though there were plenty of rocks and a few stunted shrubs evident, none of them looked big enough to do the aircraft any damage.
‘Good enough,’ the captain said. ‘Let’s put her down.’
He discarded his NVGs, pulled the aircraft round in a tight turn to starboard, climbed back up to three hundred feet and started what at an airfield would have been called the downwind leg.
‘Landing checks.’
The co-pilot ran through the list, as the rumble of the main landing gear being lowered echoed through the hold, audible even over the howl of the engines. The Hercules banked steeply to starboard, the pilot holding the turn and easing it onto a final approach heading. He levelled the wings, switched on the normal landing lights and pulled the throttles back, and the C-130 sank gently towards the ground.
The SAS troops rapidly checked their equipment and weapons. Then they held on tight.
‘Alpha and Bravo, check in,’ Dekker ordered, and was rewarded by seven voices responding on their secure radios in proper sequence. Richter was the odd man out, in more ways than one, and he found himself using the radio callsign ‘Spook’, simply because Dekker liked the sound of it.
Touchdown was much bumpier than Richter had expected, the Hercules bouncing violently several times as its speed dropped away. Even before the aircraft came to rest, and the piercing whine of the engines had fallen to a more bearable level, the SAS troopers had unclipped their seatbelts and stood up. Two of them were already releasing the securing straps on the Land Rovers before the loadmaster stepped across to the ramp controls. The remaining five men, plus Richter and Dekker, headed to the rear of the hold and waited. The loadmaster studied the group, noting that all the men had their Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine-guns cocked and held ready, then began lowering the ramp.
Immediately, the lights in the hold extinguished, and they saw a slowly extending oblong open up in front of them, a dark blue sky studded with stars. Then the surface of the desert itself appeared. The moment the ramp grounded, the SAS troopers thundered down it and fanned out, alert for any sign of danger.
In the hold, the engines of the two Pinkies started simultaneously, then they rolled down the ramp and stopped side by side. Once everyone had climbed on board, Dekker checked that all the GPS units were indicating the same location, and that both the satellite navigation systems were working properly. They had to be able to find their objective swiftly and, equally important, find their way back to the Hercules once this operation was over.
Dekker carried out a final radio check to ensure that everyone was on the net, then gave the order to advance. Behind them, the ramp closed and the noise of the C-130’s engines rose to a roar as the pilot began manoeuvring the aircraft into a take-off position. Once he was satisfied, he would shut down the engines and simply wait for the team to return.
They knew it was going to be an uncomfortable ten miles – the satellite photographs had made that abundantly clear – but they weren’t prepared for just how rough the desert terrain actually was. Picking a suitable path through the rocks and boulders tested both drivers to the limit, and they weren’t helped by the covers over their headlamps that reduced the normal beam by about eighty per cent. Richter was hoping to get in and out of Algeria undetected, and bright lights can show up a long way off in the desert. Sound travels far as well, so the vehicles’ engines were fitted with additional silencers, and the engine bays packed with sound-insulating material to reduce the risk of being heard.
Under normal conditions, driving this distance should have taken about twenty to thirty minutes, but it was nearly three quarters of an hour before Dekker looked up from his navigation system and ordered the vehicles to stop. They were now just under a mile from the airfield boundary, nine miles from the waiting Hercules, and that was as close as they could risk taking the Pinkies.
Dekker ordered the two drivers to stay with their vehicles, then led the rest of his men, Richter tagging along behind, towards the east and to Ain Oussera.
Twenty minutes later they were lying prone on the summit of a slight rise, as Dekker and Richter studied the layout of the airfield directly in front of them.
The north coast of the Kuksa-bong peninsula is partially cultivated, but west of Kama-san the south coast is essentially uninhabited. The reason almost nobody lived there was the same reason that Yi Min-Ho couldn’t land there: an extremely inhospitable terrain cut through with deep, heavily wooded valleys ending in steep cliffs overlooking the sea. Instead, the plan called for him to be landed south of Suri-bong, on the north side of the bay known as Daito-wan. Yi himself would have preferred a location even further east, but that was impossible because of the logistics of getting the inflatable back to the fishing boat, and it would also have greatly increased the possibility of detection.
About five hundred metres off the coast the crewman eased the inflatable to a virtual standstill and cut the engine. The boat rocked gently on the waves while the two men scanned the shore through image-intensifying binoculars, looking and listening for any sign of life or movement, but the coastline appeared almost deserted. They could see a few lights – probably from oil lamps, since the mains electricity supply in North Korea is, to put it mildly, erratic – signifying isolated dwellings, but there were no large settlements in this region.
At a gesture from Yi Min-Ho, the crewman restarted the engine and steered towards the beach. This was perhaps the most dangerous phase of the entire operation, and they proceeded very cautiously, checking all around them – not just on the beach ahead – as they neared landfall. Both knew the fate that would await them if they were caught by the North Korean security forces.
The moment the inflatable touched the beach, the crewman jumped out and held the bow steady while Yi Min-Ho shrugged his haversack onto his back and climbed out, his boots crunching on the pebbles. Without a backward glance, the crewman immediately pushed the inflatable away from the beach, and climbed back into it.
Yi looked back once, checking that the boat was well clear of the strand and already heading south-west to rendezvous with the fishing boat, then he tramped across to the cover of the trees that bordered the shore. There he stopped, put down his haversack and took out the Kyocera satellite phone and the GPS receiver to check precisely his current position. He’d landed almost exactly where they’d calculated, and this he hoped was a good omen. He next switched on the Kyocera, made a call that lasted less than fifteen seconds, then turned the unit off.
Yi hefted the haversack onto his back again, tucked the GPS receiver into one of his pockets, and started walking. His destination lay some fifteen kilometres directly to the east, but he would probably have to walk about double that distance. He couldn’t cover the entire route in darkness, but the final section of his journey would be in the hill country south of Kungnak-san, where he could probably travel safely in daylight. If nothing unexpected occurred, he should be in position sometime the following morning.
The base looked almost deserted in the ghostly green light of the image intensifier, but Richter could see at
