Foxbat

‘Perhaps they know the preparations they must make are too extensive to be carried out between passes,’ the President suggested.

‘Perhaps,’ Hicks agreed. ‘The other, less attractive, explanation is that they want us to see that they’re gearing up for war. They want us to be aware that they’re serious. In that case, some kind of an ultimatum or demand might be on its way to us right now.

‘But I do have one small piece of good news. The Agency’s been contacted by the British SIS, and they’ve said that they will be able to launch an air raid into North Korea should it become necessary. They’ll send a Harrier from the warship Illustrious and aim to hit the east-coast missile bases.’

‘Just one aircraft? Will that be enough?’

‘Apparently it took quite a lot of persuasion to get the Royal Navy to commit even one Harrier, sir. But it’s a very capable aircraft, and it should be possible for the pilot to achieve his objective. For one thing he’ll have surprise on his side. And the attack will obviously come from the east, from the Sea of Japan, while North Korea’s defences are optimized for assaults from the south, across the Demilitarized Zone, so the DPRK forces should be looking the wrong way.’

‘What about the North Korean fighters? They’ve got swarms of them.’

‘Agreed, Mr President, but with the exception of the Foxbat they’re all old and slow, and the Harrier should be able to avoid or outrun them.’

At that moment the door opened and the Secretary of Defense walked in, looking agitated and carrying a slim red folder. He nodded a greeting to Hicks, then turned to the President. ‘I’ve just taken this off the teleprinter from Pyongyang. It’s addressed personally to yourself, to the Prime Minister of Japan and to the President of South Korea.’

He passed the folder across the desk. The President opened it and read the short printed message it contained. Then he looked over at Hicks.

‘You’d better tell your contacts at SIS to get that Harrier warmed up,’ he said. ‘It’s pretty much as you predicted. They say they hope we were watching the recent demonstration of their Taep’o-dong 2 missile’s effectiveness, and they claim here it followed a homing beacon to land on an obsolete freighter they were using as a target.

‘They’ve also released details of that successful flight, and the detonation of their nuclear weapon, to all the international news agencies. So this is going to be all over the papers tomorrow. They’ve also helpfully explained, just in case the editors are too stupid to get the point, that approximately one-third of the continental United States is now within range of their weapons. The talking heads are going to have a field day working out exactly which cities the gooks will be able to nuke if we piss them off in any way. The public backlash is going to be huge, and we’re going to have to tread real careful.

‘That’s merely the preamble, if you like. The meat’s in the second paragraph, and this stuff hasn’t been given to the press for obvious reasons. They’ve targeted nuclear-tipped missiles on Japan, and are threatening to use them if our embedded forces oppose their “peaceful” incursion to “liberate” South Korea from its capitalist oppressors. And if we do interfere directly, the first target of their now fully-functioning Taep’o-dong type 2 ICBMs will be Los Angeles.’

HMS Illustrious, Yellow Sea

Richter was still working with Roger Black in the admiral’s quarters, studying maps of North Korea and trying to work out the optimum routes in and out – the tracks that would avoid as many of the known anti-aircraft defences as possible. Then suddenly the telephone rang.

Black answered it, then handed the receiver to Richter.

‘Commander Richter? This is the CommCen, sir. We’ve just received a Flash signal for you, but it’s only a single word.’

‘Which is?’

‘The word is “PROXIMATE”, sir. Do you need me to spell that?’

‘No,’ Richter said, sounding resigned. ‘I know what it means, thanks.’

‘It’s a go?’ Black asked, as Richter replaced the phone.

‘That was the code-word. It’s a go. We need to get airborne at first light tomorrow morning.’

Chapter Nineteen

Monday

USS Enterprise, North Pacific Ocean

Captain William Rodgers woke up the moment the phone in his cabin began to ring. He’d always been a light sleeper, and whenever he was at sea he seemed preternaturally attuned to any unusual noise or motion, even a slight change in the direction the ship was steering.

‘Yes?’

‘Officer of the Watch, sir. You asked to be called when we reached six hundred miles from the peninsula. The satnav says that’s where we are right now, and the Hawkeye’s warming up.’

‘Thanks, I’ll be right there.’

A signals yeoman was also waiting on the bridge when Rodgers arrived, and handed him an envelope. The captain ripped it open, pulled out the signal and read it. The yeoman waited, signal pad and ballpoint pen in hand.

‘No reply,’ Rodgers said. ‘No, wait a minute.’

There would, he knew, have to be some kind of a response to the signal, which had basically ordered him to hold the Carrier Battle Group well clear of North Korean territorial waters, and emphasized that neither the ship nor its air group were to participate in any acts of provocation. The latter instruction had merited a paragraph of its own, and had included a prohibition on any flights from the Enterprise except for purposes of pure self-defence, and that included surveillance and intelligence-gathering missions.

Rodgers was going to have to think more about that, but for the moment he’d already decided that the Hawkeye was going to be launched well before he had ‘officially’ read this signal. He’d also decided something else.

He turned to the signals yeoman. ‘No reply to this, but contact the Leyte and McFaul and tell them to detach. They’re to go to maximum speed and set up a picket line between the Korean Peninsula and Japan. On my authority, if any missile is launched from North Korea over the Sea of Japan, they’re to engage it.’

Positioning the two Aegis guided-missile destroyers ahead of the carrier would provide an extra margin of safety.

Eight minutes later, the Enterprise altered course slightly to port to take advantage of what little wind there was and, moments after the ship steadied on its new heading, an E-2C airborne early- warning aircraft, using the callsign Alpha Three, was accelerated into the air by the starboard bow steam catapult. It climbed away from the ship and continued up to just over thirty thousand feet, heading south-west directly towards Korea.

Mayang Missile Base, North Korea

Pak Je-San had meticulously plotted each stage of the operation, and had provided Kim Yong-Su with both an outline plan and explicit details. Kim, in turn, was implementing it step by step, with the full approval of the government in Pyongyang. Because of the scope of the operation, a number of the actions Pak had specified would necessarily have to be carried out by junior officers who would certainly not be privy to the overall strategy.

An Air Force tab-ryong, equivalent to a colonel, at the Mayang missile base was one of these officers. He’d been puzzled when Pyongyang had instructed him to mount a No-dong missile in the launch gantry. His confusion stemmed not from the instruction itself, which was clear enough, but simply because of the actual missile he’d been told to prepare. Mounting the payload and fitting the nose-cone also didn’t make