Eight Yugos captured by the South Koreans had been towed by the South Korean Navy from their base at Cheju Island in the East China Sea to the naval special operations base near Inchon, refueled and rearmed, then sent on their mission. Staying at least three miles offshore, diving only when acoustic or electromagnetic threats were detected around them, they made their 150-mile trek across North Korea’s west coast in twenty hours. Before crossing into North Korean waters, two Yugos had to drop out of the formation because of massive engine or electrical malfunctions. But the men aboard the remaining subs considered the 75 percent survival rate a real bonus.
The last twenty miles to Sukchon, traveling into the mouth of the Yengyn Inlet, were made completely submerged. Using its passive sonar detection system to clear the area of nearby enemy ships first, the lead sub raised a global positioning system satellite navigation receiver on a retractable mast just two feet above the waves to get a position fix. Once the vessels reached their preprogrammed initial point, they bottomed themselves into the thick mud of the inlet about two thousand yards off the shoreline and waited.
Every spring, the Sukchon delta region falls victim to killer floods, so the area had recently been extensively rebuilt, with assistance from Chinese military troops and engineers. At least, that was the story most of the world knew. Those Chinese engineers had made other improvements as well: they had rebuilt nearby Sunan People’s Army Air Base into the new secret Military Command and Coordination Facility of the Korean People’s Army. In just two short years, Sunan had been transformed from a minor supply and transportation air base into North Korea’s main war-fighting nerve center.
The region was also the home of two full Army corps infantry commands, a mechanized corps command, nine artillery brigades, and five special forces brigades — over 100,000 troops stationed at three Army barracks in the immediate area. These served as the main reserve forces for the defense of the capital, Pyongyang, only thirty miles to the south. The air base facilities had also been beefed up: Sunan was the new home to one full air combat command, including a light bomber regiment, two ground-attack air regiments, five interceptor regiments, ten transport regiments, and three air defense regiments. Between one main and two auxiliary airfields nearby, more than three hundred aircraft were assigned to Sunan.
Sunan had other key forces as well. It was the new home of the Fourth Artillery Division, comprising eighteen medium-range and ten long-range ballistic missile batteries. The short-range FROG-5 and FROG-7 missiles had nonnuclear warheads, designed to blast any South Korean forces who dared move north of the Demilitarized Zone, just 120 miles to the south. Four medium-range mobile Scud-B missile batteries, designed to hit targets inside South Korea, carried chemical and biological munitions, mostly Vx nerve gas and anthrax agents. The other six longer-range rail-mobile Nodong-1 batteries, housed in concrete aboveground shelters covered with earth to camouflage them from spies, carried ten-to-one-hundred-kiloton nuclear warheads and had sufficient range to reach Seoul, Taegu, even Kwangju — effectively, over 90 percent of South Korea.
But the Command and Coordination Facility, or CCF, was the most important target at Sunan, and possibly the most important in all of North Korea, for reasons beyond its aircraft, infantry, armor, or even its deadly missiles.
It served as the main command and control facility for all of the military bases in North Korea, the Defense Ministry in Pyongyang, the Central Committee of the North Korean Politburo, and with Beijing. In times of conflict or heightened alert, the bases were linked together through the CCF so that the general staff could issue orders to all facilities at once, through one central coordinator. Although most of the world did not know it, Sunan was the tip of the spear, the key to the destruction of the Republic of Korea and the Communist occupation of the entire Korean peninsula.
That’s why Sunan had to be neutralized.
At the prearranged time, the minisubs lifted from the thick silt bottom and began cruising at minimum steerageway speed toward shore. At periscope depth, about six feet below the surface in the tiny vessels, a hatch popped open on each sub and eight commandos rose to the surface, gave each other an “okay” sign, then swam for their infiltration point. One sub’s hatch could not be reseated, and it had to be scuttled. Its crew had no choice but to swim for shore and either hide or try their best to make it back to friendly territory on their own. There was no emergency rescue plan for this one-way covert operation.
The leader swam slowly, using a minimum-effort stroke that placed him under the surface during all but a few seconds out of every minute. He stopped frequently to check his bearings, listen for danger, and check his troops. Every time he came up, the first thing to break the surface was the muzzle of his Heckler & Koch MP5K submachine gun.
It took twenty minutes for the team of forty-eight commandos to swim to shore and reach the wharf that was their landfall. They secured their swimming gear to the bottom in black nylon bags, climbed up a dockside ladder until they could get up inside the framework of the wharf, then made their way ashore. They found a dark, secluded area between two noisy ventilator units and stopped to dole out equipment and to rest. While the leader checked in via satellite to his headquarters, his men began to unpack their equipment.
Twelve commandos carried the waterproof weapons bags for all of them. Each man was armed with a submachine gun, with a shoulder harness and five-cell pouch system that strapped onto his calf, plus a 9-millimeter SIG Sauer P226 autopistol carried on the shoulder harness. The leg pouch contained three thirty-round magazines of subsonic ammunition plus the sound suppressor for the submachine gun.
Twelve other commandos, two per squad, carried the electronics, including target markers, radios, remote- control detonators, and night-vision equipment. Two commandos carried radios; two others carried medical gear. Six commandos were the “mules,” carrying the explosives — an assortment of plastic explosives, shaped cutting charges, antipersonnel mines, incendiary explosives, and Primacord, plus detonators and timers. When they were all loaded up, checked, their timing established, and their objective identified on the map and compared to their surroundings, they set off.
Sunan was actually a conglomeration of several bases, spread out over most of western Pyongan Namdo province. In peacetime, all the facilities were independent, run by several different branches of the military. Two South Korean commando squads were detached from the group and dispatched to set charges and electronic target markers on several other key targets on base, including the early-warning and fire control radars, surface-to-air missile sites, and the Scud-B and Scud-C missile sites. Another squad was dispatched to set explosives that would act as diversions and create panic and confusion in other areas of the base.
The CCF was the commandos’ main target. The remaining three squads, twenty-four highly trained commandos, moved toward this important objective.
The CCF compound was a sprawling one-hundred-acre site with a drab gray bunkerlike building in the center. Sneaking onto the compound itself was simple. The outer-perimeter security was in poor repair and had already been broken down by bands of roving citizens looking for food or trying to sell food to starving soldiers, or by soldiers on base sneaking supplies off base to sell to local black marketers. Ironically, the best place to penetrate the outer security zone was right in front. Since heavy road traffic from the main base often set off the motion and trembler alarms, they were usually deactivated during base-wide alerts when there was a lot of vehicle traffic. A few silenced gunshots took care of the lights they could not avoid. They saw signs indicating canine patrols inside the outer security ring, but they knew there were no dogs on duty — the soldiers on base had long ago sold or butchered the guard dogs for food.
The Command and Coordination Facility itself was a squat steel and concrete building, two stories above- ground but four belowground. A long concrete tunnel controlled access to the entrances, so a frontal assault was next to impossible. The guard tower on the roof and the two guard towers around the building were dark, but the commandos could not assume they were unmanned — in fact, they had to assume that a response team was already on the way, so speed was imperative. A short chain-link dog fence protected a twelve-foot-high electrified fence. There was no doubt that the fence was on — the deadly current flowing through it could be heard and felt from ten feet away, like waves of heat from a nearby furnace.
They were hamstrung — they could not go forward unless they blew the electric fence apart, nor could they retreat. The leader hunched down with his second-in-command, set to discuss their dilemma…
… when suddenly they heard a noise ahead of them. In a matter of moments, several dozen heavily armed soldiers rushed out of an access tunnel on the north side of the squat concrete structure before them, headed right for the South Korean commandos.
And the mission had barely begun…
