Authors: James Barrington
North Korea maintains a huge standing army of just over a million men – almost as many
as the United States – with a further five million troops in reserve. It has some eight hundred combat aircraft, three thousand five hundred tanks and over ten thousand artillery
pieces. Almost without exception, these men, aircraft and weapons are located within forty miles of the border with South Korea, not least because technically the two nations are still at
war, despite the armistice signed in 1953. Virtually every battle plan that the North Korean forces have prepared is aimed at either repelling an invasion from the south, or actually
launching an attack on its more prosperous neighbour.
The gulf between the two countries is vast. South Korea is about twenty per cent smaller than
its brother nation, but has twice the population, a gross domestic product
four hundred
times greater, and the average worker there
earns about twenty times more than a North Korean. The North spends around thirty per cent of its national income on the military budget: the South less than three per cent. South Korea is a
major manufacturing nation, selling its products – everything from cars to computer components – around the world. North Korea has only one major export: hard drugs, produced with
the active support and compliance of the government and frequently shipped out using diplomatic privilege to avoid confiscation.
What North Korea hates – and fears – more than anything is the nation immediately
south of the Demilitarized Zone. Or, more precisely, that nation’s huge silent partner, America.
For any country with an extensive coastline, and especially one suffering from what amounts to
government-orchestrated paranoia, radar
surveillance of all its borders and seaward approaches is essential. In the south-east of its territory, North Korea has radar heads
located on the Kuksa-bong peninsula, the island of Sunwi-do, and on the promontory extending due west of the South Korean island of Gyodong-do. All are left unmanned, their signals fed
through a combination of cables and microwave links to a central radar station just outside Pyoksong.
The South Korean National Intelligence Service had been absolutely right: the silenced outboard
motor
did
have about the same radar signature as a large bird. But what Yi Min-Ho hadn’t considered, as he made his clandestine
approach to the landfall south of Suri-bong, was that birds very rarely fly in a straight line.
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
so-ryong
– the rank
equivalent to major – stared at the radar screen for a couple of minutes, then issued a curt instruction. ‘Keep tracking it,’ he snapped, ‘and tell me the moment it
makes landfall.’
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 Aïn 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. Immediately the door swung open and he stepped inside the hangar. Quickly he pushed the door closed
behind him, the latch clicking back into place.
‘You can relax, Dave,’ Dekker murmured into his headset microphone, after he
watched Richter disappear. ‘He’s inside now.’
Beside him, Wallace eased the sniper rifle off his shoulder and rested the butt on the ground,
while the front of the weapon was still supported on its bipod. ‘Just remind me, boss. How’s he going to get himself into the right hangar?’
Dekker still didn’t take his eyes off the scene in front of him. ‘He’s got a
plan – but it all depends on what he finds in there.’
Inside the hangar, three hundred yards away, Richter was beginning to hope that he
hadn’t wasted his time. In the light from his torch he could see three aircraft: two MiG-25PDS, the up-rated export model of the Foxbat interceptor; and a two-seat trainer, the MiG-25U,
probably belonging to the 110th Escadron de Chasse, if the Six briefing officer had got it right. But Richter had no interest in the fighters: he was looking for something much smaller.
The thing about hangars is that they’re very large and tall, designed to accommodate one
or more aircraft while they’re undergoing maintenance, and to facilitate this work they need banks of powerful lights mounted high up. Since lights periodically need their bulbs
replacing, what Richter was looking for was the cherry-picker hoist, or whatever the Algerians used to do this. What he was hoping now was that they
kept one in each
hangar, rather than rely on a single hoist shared between them.
Then he saw it, tucked back against one wall: a standard electric-powered cherry-picker with
controls in the cradle itself. The only problem was that it probably didn’t have the height for him to reach the very top of the building, but that wouldn’t matter. Up there,
Richter could see a latticework of girders supporting the gently curved roof of the hangar and knew that if he could at least reach the top of one of the steel side-pillars, he could climb up
the rest of the way. So as long as he was quiet, the guard outside shouldn’t hear anything, but if the cherry-picker was fitted with a petrol engine, he’d just have to do it the
hard way.
Moving the contraption was an unnecessary risk, so Richter left it in position, climbed into its
cradle, and ran the beam of his torch over the controls. Fortunately, they looked simple enough. He flicked on the master switch, shifted the joystick lever forward, and the cradle began to
move upwards and, to his relief, almost silently. As he neared the top of the side-pillar, he adjusted the elevation angle slightly so that the cradle stopped, virtually at its upper limit,
right beside one end of a steel rafter.
Shining his torch across the underside of the roof, he observed that its structure was strong
and simple. The main support was a single central steel beam running all the way from the front to the back of the hangar, with about a dozen girders positioned like ribs on either side of
it, and additional longitudinal supports to carry the roof panels.
He calculated it would necessitate a fifty-foot climb – at about a fifteen-degree upward
angle all the way, and hanging upside down underneath the rafter, in order to reach the central supporting span.
Richter secured a webbing strap to the harness he had already strapped around his torso, looped
it over the rafter and clipped it to the D-ring. That would now be his safety line. Then he pulled on a pair of custom-made leather gloves with yellow mesh webbing on the palms and fingers,
designed to provide the maximum possible grip, checked that all his equipment was secure, grasped the rafter with both hands and swung his feet up, digging his heels into the recessed sides
of the steel beam.
Immediately he could feel the strain on his arms and legs, and knew he had to get this climb
over with as quickly as possible. He reached out with his left hand, grasped the central beam, about six inches beyond his head, and repeated the manoeuvre with his right hand. Then he slid
his feet along the beam in the same direction. It was slow, hard work, but every time he completed these three movements, he was another foot closer to his objective.
And, he consoled himself, coming back it would be downhill all the way.