he reckoned, be a big enough gap for him to climb through.
He checked his equipment to make sure everything was properly attached, then seized the sides of the opening he’d created, and pulled himself up. He wriggled through the gap and lay flat on the roof, checking all around him before moving on.
At that moment Colin Dekker was still looking in the wrong place, at the nearer edge of the roof, but he now spotted Richter within seconds of him emerging. He nudged Wallace and gestured towards the hangar.
‘Alpha and Bravo, look sharp,’ he said into his microphone. ‘Spook’s just climbed onto the roof. Let me know if any of the guards spot him.’
Beside him, Wallace trained his sniper rifle on the roof of the hangar, pinpointed Richter through the scope, then dropped the muzzle of the weapon so that it would cover the sentries on the ground.
‘Spook. I’m moving forward towards the gantry,’ Richter said softly. He was confident that the roof would take his weight – having seen the immensely strong steel skeleton supporting it – and now his biggest concern was to avoid making any noise.
He stayed in a crouch, just in case any of the guards looked up: the sight of a man standing upright on top of the hangar in the moonlight would bring an instant burst of fire from the ground. Not only would he be less noticeable on all fours, but it would also enable him to spread his weight more evenly on the rooftop.
The panel he’d forced open was close to the front of the hangar, so it took only a couple of minutes, even moving slowly and with the greatest care, for him to reach the lighting gantry. From the satellite pictures, the structure had looked fairly substantial, but Richter guessed that at least some of its apparent width was actually shadow, because when he stopped directly above the main doors and looked down, the gantry seemed incredibly narrow.
He glanced over the edge of the high building, looking straight down. The guard was visible below, leaning back against the main entrance doors, a cigarette burning in his mouth, and his rifle slung over one shoulder. The advantage for Richter was that human beings are very limited in their normal field of view: most regard the world at eye level and below, and rarely bother looking up. The bad news is that people in some occupations, pilots and professional soldiers in particular,
Stepping back from the edge, Richter murmured into his microphone. ‘Spook. I’m starting across now.’
‘Alpha One. Roger that.’
The gantry wasn’t going to get any wider however long he hesitated, so Richter took a deep breath and lowered himself onto it. He deliberately ignored the guard below, and also the two sentries standing in front of the target hangar, because clearly there was nothing he could do about them. If any of them spotted him, the first he’d know about it would be a bullet. He concentrated on moving steadily and silently, taking care not to kick against anything – a floodlight or the gantry itself – or trip over the cables, and focused, instead, on getting to the far end.
Halfway across, a sudden gust of wind rattled the entire structure, and for a minute or so Richter paused, just in case a sentry heard the noise and looked up, but then the breeze died away and he continued his careful progress.
Less than four minutes after he’d stepped onto the gantry, he climbed off it thankfully at the other end, and began crawling up the gently sloping roof towards the central ridge. He wouldn’t need to get into this hangar: merely force a panel and look carefully inside, and record whatever he saw there with the camera.
More or less reaching the centre of the roof, he took out his jemmy, and began to lever up a panel. The sound of tearing metal was not loud enough to be heard by the guards below, and soon Richter was able to lift the entire panel free and peer down, along the narrow but powerful beam of his torch as it illuminated the interior of the hangar.
Directly below him was a small electric-powered towing truck, normally used to manoeuvre aircraft in and out of the hangar or around the hardstandings. To one side of that, closer to the wall of the building, was another cherry-picker, but what astonished Richter was what else occupied the hangar.
‘Shit a brick,’ he muttered as he fished the Nikon out of his pocket. ‘Six will never believe this.’
Chapter Three
Monday
Well before he left Seoul, Yi Min-Ho had spent several hours with his colleagues at Naegok-dong working out the optimum route to his objective, though there had actually been little choice. The coastal area was mainly flat, but cultivated and inhabited, and therefore potentially dangerous. The hills extending north of the coast provided very difficult terrain and, although taking that route would guarantee the least chance of being detected, it would take him an unacceptable length of time to reach his objective.
So Yi stayed near the coast, and followed the main – almost the only – road. He walked along the grass verge because the sound of footsteps – even those made by his rubber-soled boots – risked alerting someone to his presence. Every fifty paces or so he stopped and listened for a short while, in case his ears might detect something his eyes had missed.
Twice he froze into immobility on hearing the sound of movement nearby, his hand reaching for his pistol, but each time the noises faded away. Animals, he assumed, resuming his solitary march. Once a vehicle – an old truck lacking one of its headlamps – rattled past the ditch where he’d already taken cover. He stayed motionless for a few minutes after it had passed him, just in case anyone was following it on foot.
His GPS unit told him that he’d covered almost three kilometres in the first hour, and he calculated that he should reach the vicinity of Ugom in another two. Yi stopped between two stunted bushes for a brief rest, ate a small chocolate bar and washed it down with a mouthful of water, then resumed his steady progress eastward.
Richter held the Nikon firmly by the strap and aimed it at the far end of the hangar, pressed the button, then moved the digital camera slightly to cover the next section of the floor of the large building. Because of the filter, the electronic flash was invisible to his eyes – and more importantly, invisible to the sentries standing outside the building – but was ideally matched to the infrared-sensitive media inside the camera.
He took a dozen pictures, then another couple just in case, switched off the Nikon and replaced it in his pocket. There was no way he could refit the metal roof panel, so he just pushed it down until it was more or less level with those either side of it.
‘Spook. I’m on the way back,’ he murmured into his microphone, then started crawling across the roof back towards the lighting gantry.
‘Roger,’ Dekker replied. ‘Heads up, all callsigns. Watch the guards, but don’t fire unless you’ve no other option.’
Wallace settled the stock of the rifle comfortably into his shoulder and aimed it along the left-hand side of the nearest hangar, looking out for the sentry.
Before stepping out on to the lighting gantry, Richter checked below for the current positions of the guards, who still appeared totally unaware of his presence. The return trip seemed to take less time than before, and within five minutes he was crouching on the roof of the first hangar to make a final check all round him, before re-entering the building itself.
He slid his legs into the gap where he’d lifted the panel, his feet locating the steel beam. He crouched down on it and did his best to pull the panel back into place behind him. It wasn’t a good fit, and would be obvious to anyone doing an inspection of the roof, but from the ground it would probably pass muster.
