Foxbat

the White House.

‘Mr President, we’re detecting about a dozen returns, spreading out in a fan. It now looks like a test of decoys, not a MIRV, because the trajectories are fairly close together and the release occurred simultaneously.’

‘And the impact point?’ The President had asked this same question four times since the three-way conversation had started, and each time Harmon had given the same answer.

‘In the Pacific, sir, somewhere north-east of Hawaii.’

‘So you’re sure none of the warheads, or whatever this fucking thing is carrying, could reach American soil?’

‘No, sir. The laws of physics are absolute. The contents of the North Korean warhead are headed straight down towards the surface of the ocean, and there’s not the slightest possibility any of them could hit even Hawaii, let alone the continental US.’

MV Kang San 5, North Pacific Ocean

Standing at the stern of the Kang San 5, Lee Kyung-Soon saw the flash and checked his watch. Right on time. Moments later he saw a compelling and utterly distinctive shape climbing above the horizon, and a few seconds after that heard the echoing thunder of the detonation.

This ship was, he knew, a safe distance away from the explosion on board the Kang San 3, but despite that he walked briskly back to the accommodation section and climbed up to the bridge. There he made a broadcast forbidding all crew members to venture out onto the upper decks for at least the next two hours. He knew that radiation could pass through steel, but at that distance there was realistically very little danger from fall-out, and the blast wave would dissipate long before it could reach them.

North American Aerospace Defense Command, Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado

The klaxon sounded again, startlingly loud in the vast operations room. ‘Nuclear detonation! Nuclear detonation! Stand by for location.’ General Harmon looked up at the display screens, his eyes confirming what he was hearing through his headset. ‘Whereabouts, for fuck’s sake?’

‘North Pacific Ocean. Approximately fifteen hundred miles northeast of Hawaii. It now looks like the North Korean missile was a live one.’

‘Mr President,’ Harmon said, his voice high with tension, ‘I repeat there’s no danger to us or anyone else, but we’ve just detected a nuclear detonation in the North Pacific. One of the devices deployed from the North Korean missile was obviously a functioning nuclear weapon.’ The silence on the line was so long that for a moment Harmon thought the communication link must have failed. ‘Mr President?’

‘Still here, General. What’s the location of the explosion?’

‘Roughly fifteen hundred miles north-east of Hawaii, sir. And that means—’

‘I know what it means, General. It means the fucking North Koreans can now deliver a nuclear payload to the west coast of mainland America.’

Office of the Associate Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Langley, Virginia

‘I don’t believe it,’ Walter Hicks said. In front of him lay a series of photographs of the aftermath of the nuclear detonation in the Pacific, taken from surveillance satellites, and a hastily prepared schematic showing the path the North Korean missile had followed. This did, Hicks had to admit, suggest that the warhead had been responsible for the detonation.

But if that hypothesis was correct, it left a whole raft of unanswered questions, starting with how and finishing with why.

‘What have we got from Ok’pyong?’ he asked.

Richard Muldoon leant forward and placed three more photographs on Hicks’s desk. ‘These,’ he said, ‘are from the pass immediately before the North Koreans hit the starter button. They show a large, probably three- stage, missile on one of the pads at Ok’pyong. Based on the shadow and the angle of the sun, and making an allowance for the thickness of the launch platform, N-PIC has calculated the height at between one hundred forty and one hundred fifty feet, with a diameter of just over six feet. That means it’s a lot bigger than a Scud or a Taep’o-dong 1, so their analysis is that it was almost certainly a Taep’o-dong 2. It had probably been fitted with an elongated nose-cone, as the one they launched back in July zero six from Musudan-ri was only about one hundred twenty-four feet tall.’

‘Do you believe North Korea’s developed a missile-capable nuclear weapon, and that’s what they’ve just test-fired?’

‘I don’t know, but it is the logical conclusion. There’s no doubt that they fired a missile, and there’s also no doubt a nuclear weapon was detonated at about the time and at the same place the missile landed. I’m just not certain the two events are linked, not least because all our previous estimates suggested that the Taep’o-dong 2 had a likely maximum range of about four thousand miles. The distance this missile travelled was closer to six thousand. That’s a hell of a jump – a massive improvement if it was carrying a nuclear warhead as well. Empty, maybe it could have made the distance – with a weapon on board, I doubt it.’

‘How big was the nuke?’

‘Think Hiroshima. Ten, maybe fifteen, kilotons, an absolute maximum of twenty. We’ll have a better idea when we get the results of the atmospheric sampling.’

‘An air-burst?’

‘N-PIC doesn’t think so. The Keyhole birds recorded two small merchant ships in the area shortly before the launch from Ok’pyong. Early images showed them sailing south-east in company, but a few hours before the explosion one of them turned north-west towards Polynesia, and the other stopped moving altogether. If the missile was the real deal, the stationary ship probably had a homing device on it – the Taep’o-dong is very inaccurate – and the second vessel then embarked the crew and sailed out of the danger area. Personally, I think we’re looking at a redundant merchantman with a bomb in the hold triggered by a timing device. N-PIC’s tracking the second ship, and we’ll confirm its identity pretty soon, but it looks as if both were flying North Korean flags.’

Hicks leant back in his chair and laced his fingers behind his head. ‘This is fucking serious, Richard. If the North Koreans have developed a missile that can travel six thousand miles, that puts a hefty chunk of mainland America within range. Whatever the truth about the missile, we now know for sure that Pyongyang’s capable of detonating a nuclear weapon outside a hole in the ground in North Korea, and that significantly alters the balance of power in the region.

‘It also alters things here in the States. We haven’t got an effective anti-missile shield working yet, so if the North Koreans did decide to launch a nuclear attack, there wouldn’t be a lot we could do to stop them. I know we could easily turn their country into a radioactive wasteland – and I’m sure Washington would be happy to do just that – but we’d also be looking at a serious death toll over here. Meanwhile, I know the Pentagon has just hiked the DEFCON state to Three, but is there anything else we can do?’

Chapter Sixteen

Sunday

HMS Illustrious, Yellow Sea

‘What are you going to do now?’ Roger Black asked Richter.

They were sitting over the remains of a late breakfast in the Wardroom dining room. During the night, the Illustrious had moved further north, and deeper into the Yellow Sea. The Air Group was still flying continuous sorties, the Harriers carrying out Combat Air Patrols with live weapons, and the Merlin