height of six thousand metres, an altitude it would attain in just over eleven seconds.
The moment the three Seersuckers had vanished, heading for their targets in South Korea, the technicians swarmed out of the hardened shelters and towed away the cruise missile trailers. And, because Pyongyang had made it clear that time was of the essence, in less than a minute the first of the mobile Scud TELs, or Transporter-Erector-Launchers, drove out of one of the shelters and across to the launch pad.
Chiha-ri had been the obvious choice for this phase of the operation. Not only did it host a resident Scud brigade, but it was also the principal technical support headquarters for all of North Korea’s Scud missile units. And, crucially, it was a mere fifty miles north of the Demilitarized Zone, close enough to ensure that their targets south of the DMZ would get the least possible warning of the attack. If the weapons carried by the Seersuckers did their job adequately, there might be no warning at all.
Within five minutes the six Scud launchers were in position and their technicians were making last-minute checks, all of them wearing full NBCD suits and breathing equipment because of the contents of the warheads. Once the weapons were ready, they would be launched without further reference to anyone. The orders from Pyongyang had been most specific.
The cruise missile’s unexpected manoeuvre had cost Richter ground, and he estimated he was now nearly a mile behind it. And, if his guess had been right, the warhead could detonate at any moment.
The growl in his earphones intensified and then the broken circle in the HUD solidified as the Sidewinder locked on to the target. Richter didn’t wait any longer: he fired the weapon. The solid-propellant rocket motor ignited and it streaked towards the HY-2. Just in case, he selected the starboard Sidewinder and made sure it also locked on.
The HY-2’s radar altimeter sent a further signal to the computer at five thousand metres, and the three- second detonation sequence began. The North Korean technicians had based their calculations on a missile velocity of three hundred and twenty metres a second, actually a little faster than the Seersucker was travelling.
The detonation sequence had less than one second to go when the ‘winder impacted with the rear of the cruise missile. The annular blast fragmentation warhead, containing over twenty pounds of high explosive, then detonated. The blast shattered the rear section of the HY-2, instantly destroying its rocket motor, and less than a tenth of a second later the remaining liquid fuel in its tanks exploded in a massive ball of fire.
The detonation wasn’t powerful enough to destroy the warhead, but that didn’t matter. It ripped the computer to pieces, wrecked the battery and fused the connections. The final signal never reached the nuclear device. Instead, it was torn from its mountings and began tumbling to the ground nearly twenty thousand feet below.
Richter deselected his second Sidewinder, pulled his Harrier into a steep diving turn to keep out of the blast radius and pressed his transmit button.
‘Cobra Two, one Sidewinder expended. Splash one cruise missile. Break, break. Alpha Three, what’s the status of those bogies now?’
‘Still inbound, Cobra Two. No, wait. Now they’re turning back onto north. It looks like they’re in a holding pattern. I’ll keep you advised.’
‘Roger. Break. Cobra Lead – what’s your status?’
‘Standby. Right. Two Sidewinders used and the missile is down. I’m turning away. Break. Viper One, sitrep.’
‘We just—’
But whatever Charlie Forbes was going to say was lost for ever as a colossal explosion tore through the sky.
Richard Muldoon actually ran through the outer office, and barely even paused at the closed door. Walter Hicks looked up in surprise as it slammed open. The two men had got back to Langley only a few minutes earlier.
‘Richard?’
Muldoon slowed to a trot and tossed a couple of photographs onto Hicks’s desk, then leant forward, resting his hands on the edge of the tooled leather.
‘NORAD’s just reported another nuke, Walter, less than two minutes ago. This one was over South Korea.’
‘Oh, fuck.’
‘It was pretty low-yield, definitely under twenty kilotons, and seems to have been an air-burst. The delivery vehicle was one of the Seersuckers out of Chiha-ri. They fired three, but two didn’t detonate, and we don’t know why. Maybe some kind of defect, or perhaps the Patriots got them, but I’ve seen nothing from the CFC so far. But this,’ he finished, ‘is what’s scaring the shit out of me. These are straight from N-PIC, and that’s the launch pad at Chiha-ri. As soon as the Seersuckers had been fired, they drove out these TELs.
‘According to the analysts, they’re Scud missiles, probably type B, and there are six of them. The TELs aren’t the same as the old Russian MAZ 543 launch vehicles, but they’re very similar. They’re being prepped ready for launch, so if the nuke that’s just gone off was the first strike, these are probably the second. The technicians on the pads are all wearing NBCD suits, which means these Scuds are carrying biological or chemical weapons. My guess is that the nuke was designed to deliver an EMP, and these are the follow-up weapons now that the Patriots batteries have probably lost their radar systems.’
‘Aimed where? Seoul?’
‘Almost certainly, and we’ve got nothing in the area that can take them out. They could launch all six of these before we could target a cruise missile or prep an air raid.’
‘Fuck,’ Hicks said again. ‘Wait a minute – what about those British Harriers? The ones that were supposed to hit the east coast missile sites. Are they still airborne?’
‘No idea,’ Muldoon said, turning to leave. ‘I’ll go find out. The Hawkeye off the
‘Richard,’ Hicks called to his colleague’s retreating figure, ‘if those aircraft are still in the area, don’t wait for official sanction. Just tell them to get in there and toast the base with whatever weapons they’ve got. We’ll sort out the legalities later.’
Richter was looking north when the warhead of the third Seersucker cruise missile exploded, but snapped his head around to the left the moment he saw the flash. Even from a distance – and he guessed he was at least thirty miles from the detonation – he knew at once that it wasn’t just the fuel in the HY-2’s tanks exploding.
A confused babble of voices burst onto the radio as the AEW Sea King bagman and the American Hawkeye controller transmitted simultaneously, but Richter ignored them.
He was far enough away that he hoped the EMP wouldn’t have much, if any, effect on his avionics, but he still turned his Harrier away from the blast and opened the throttle to put a few more precious miles between his aircraft and the nuclear explosion. He remembered from his basic NBCD lectures that the intensity of a nuclear blast diminishes more or less with the square of the distance from ground zero, but he had no way of knowing the yield of the weapon, nor how powerful the blast wave was now likely to be.
Then it hit him what seemed like only seconds later.
‘Jesus H,’ Richter muttered, and then his sole concern was to try to stop his aircraft being blown out of the sky. The Harrier slammed sideways and downwards as the blast wave hit it, the wings losing lift immediately as the aircraft stalled, then spun out of control.
Despite the harness, the violent manoeuvre bounced Richter around in the cockpit, his flying helmet crashing into the back of the ejection seat. Buffeted and dazed, he reacted instinctively, removing his feet from the rudder pedals and pushing the control column forward. The spin stopped in less than two turns and, the moment he was
