outside Pyoksong.
The South Korean National Intelligence Service had been absolutely right: the silenced outboard motor
The signal generated by the intruders’ motor was detected by the Kuksa-bong radar head immediately the inflatable moved away from the fishing boat, but at first the operator at Pyoksong had ignored it, just as he ignored all other small and intermittent returns. It was only when this ‘bird’ began following an arrow-straight track directly towards the North Korean coastline that he called over his watch supervisor to investigate.
The
Then he strode back to his own desk and picked up the telephone.
The task was simple enough. There were three hangars in front of him, and Richter needed to get himself into the middle one, or at least take a look inside it. The problem was that while the two hangars on either side each had a single guard stationed in front of its huge sliding doors, the middle building had six men watching it – one posted at each of its four sides and a two-man roving patrol. Getting in undetected was not a viable option from the ground, so he was going to have to try the roof. Or, to be precise, the lighting gantry.
The satellite photographs supplied by the Americans had revealed one single dark line cutting across the fronts of all three buildings, and their analysts’ best guess had been an overhead duct carrying power cables. Looking from where Richter now lay, concealed behind a stack of empty oil drums near the perimeter fence, their assumption was clearly correct, but the structure also carried banks of spotlights to illuminate the hardstanding immediately in front of the three hangars. Since it carried massive lights whose bulbs would periodically need replacing, this meant the gantry had to be strong enough to support a man’s weight, and therefore Richter could crawl along it to reach the target hangar. The trick now was getting up onto the roof of the first one in line.
All three hangars had been built to the same design: windowless brick walls supporting a metal roof, with aircraft-width doors at the front, pedestrian doors at the back and on both sides – each with a single light burning above it. These doors would obviously be locked, but that wasn’t an insurmountable problem. The difficult bit would be managing to open one of them without collecting a bullet from a sentry.
For a while Richter just waited and watched what the guards were up to. From his confined position he could see only the rear and one side of the left-hand hangar, and the backs of the two others further along. The sentry guarding the nearest hangar occasionally appeared at the far end, glancing directly along the side of the building before returning to his post at the front. But while Richter watched he never bothered to walk the full distance to check round the back. The rear door at first seemed to offer the best chance of getting inside without this particular guard spotting him, but that wasn’t going to work because of the roving patrol and the single sentry stationed at the back of the middle hangar. The moment Richter approached he’d be seen by one or other of them.
The side door therefore was his best, in fact his only, option. He’d just have to somehow crack the lock on the door as quickly as possible. For almost half an hour Richter patiently watched the sentry’s routine, trying to work out a pattern to his timing, but there didn’t seem to be any. Sometimes the man would check the side of the hangar twice inside five minutes, then he might not reappear for another ten. There was no point, Richter decided, in waiting any longer. The guard’s unpredictable movements were working against him, and he was just going to have to take his chances.
He carefully studied the side door through his binoculars. It appeared to have both a mortise and a Yale-type lock, which was irritating, since two locks would obviously take longer to crack than just one. Richter opened his leather wallet and selected two picks – a snake and a half-diamond – and also a tension wrench. From another pocket he took a device that looked something like an electric toothbrush, actually a SouthOrd Model E100C Electric Pick, then inserted a thin steel probe called a needle into the pivot arm at the end, and tightened the hexagonal screw.
Then he checked in with Dekker, so the SAS man would know what he was planning. ‘Alpha One, Spook. I’m going in through the side door, after I next see the guard check this side of the building.’
The voice in his earphones was quiet and reassuring. ‘Roger, Spook. We’re watching your back.’
Three minutes later the sentry stuck his head around the far corner of the hangar and glanced along the side of the building, then again retreated.
‘Spook. I’m going in now.’
The moment the guard vanished, Richter moved, sprinting across the fifty-odd yards of short-cropped grass that separated him from his objective. The side door was slightly recessed into the brickwork, but not enough to hide him from sight. He had to make sure he got the door open before the guard decided to take another look this way.
The first thing he did was check for wires or sensors, or any kind of an alarm system. He wasn’t really expecting to find one, since the hangar lay inside an airfield constantly patrolled by armed guards, but it was his practice to check everything, and usually twice over. Then he tried the door handle, just in case somebody had forgotten to lock it, but that got him nowhere. He slid the tension wrench – a slim steel tool shaped like an elongated ‘L’ – into the keyway of the mortise lock and exerted gentle turning pressure, then inserted the snake pick and started probing.
Lock-picking was a skill Richter had only recently acquired, while attending a short course in Camberwell conducted by a professional locksmith employed as a consultant by the Security Service, MI5. That instruction had been arranged solely in preparation for this operation.
The lock was an exterior-quality five-lever unit, but it felt old and worn and, more importantly, loose. Holding the snake pick lightly between forefinger and thumb, he began twisting it gently, locating the various wards and trying to visualize the shape of the key that would fit, then moving the levers gently, guided by the pressure of the tension wrench. It was a delicate, highly tactile process, and here Richter was trying to rush it. Suddenly he felt the wrench move slightly in his hand, and he continued turning. With a faint click, the pick and wrench rotated through a complete circle. The first lock was now open.
He tried the door handle again, but it still didn’t budge. Richter transferred the tension wrench to the other lock, and took the electric pick out of his pocket. This type of lock was known as a pin-tumbler, and he saw with some surprise that it wasn’t just Yale-pattern: it was actually a genuine Yale. According to the MI5 man, unless there was something very unusual about the design, opening a pin-tumbler would normally take only a few seconds. This realization had persuaded Richter to replace the entire security system for the entrance door of his attic apartment in Stepney.
Through his night-vision goggles, Colin Dekker lay watching the figure crouching at one side of the hangar. Beside him, outside the Ain Oussera boundary fence, Sergeant-Major Wallace was doing much the same, but he was peering through a Davin Optical Starlight scope fitted to a 7.62mm Accuracy International PM sniper rifle, with a bulky suppressor attached to the end of the barrel.
Wallace wasn’t concentrating on Richter, though. His weapon was aimed towards the front of the hangar, at the corner where the sentry would appear if he suddenly decided to take another look along that side of the building. If the Algerian guard spotted Richter, then Dekker’s instructions were perfectly clear: Wallace was to take him out at once, before he could raise the alarm. Then it would be up to Richter to conceal the body, probably by hauling it inside the hangar, assuming he could get the door open. It wasn’t much of a plan, admittedly, but it was the only one they had, under the circumstances.
Richter inserted the needle all the way into the keyway then eased it back a fraction in order to allow it to move freely, exerting gentle pressure on the wrench and then pressing the button to activate the pick. The unit hummed and shifted slightly in his hand as the vibrating needle impacted the pins, and only seconds later he was able to rotate the wrench. He released the button on the pick and turned the lock against the pressure of the spring holding the latch. With his left hand he reached for the door handle, turned it and pushed with his shoulder.
