forces.
The moment the inflatable touched the beach, the crewman jumped out and held the bow steady
while Yi Min-Ho shrugged his haversack onto his back and climbed out, his boots crunching on the pebbles. Without a backward glance, the crewman immediately pushed the inflatable away from
the beach, and climbed back into it.
Yi looked back once, checking that the boat was well clear of the strand and already heading
south-west to rendezvous with the fishing boat, then he tramped across to the cover of the trees that bordered the shore. There he stopped, put down his haversack and took out the Kyocera
satellite phone and the GPS receiver to check precisely his current position. He’d landed almost exactly where they’d calculated, and this he hoped was a good omen. He next
switched on the Kyocera, made a call that lasted less than fifteen seconds, then turned the unit off.
Yi hefted the haversack onto his back again, tucked the GPS receiverinto
one of his pockets, and started walking. His destination lay some fifteen kilometres directly to the east, but he would probably have to walk about double that distance. He couldn’t
cover the entire route in darkness, but the final section of his journey would be in the hill country south of Kungnak-san, where he could probably travel safely in daylight. If nothing
unexpected occurred, he should be in position sometime the following morning.
Aïn Oussera Air Base, Algeria
The base looked almost deserted in the ghostly green light of the image intensifier, but
Richter could see at least a dozen sentries posted around the hangars ranged inside the boundary fence. Most seemed to be smoking, the sudden flares of brightness unmistakable through the
NVGs. That was good news from the point of view of the SAS team, because sentries with lighted cigarettes give away their positions every time they draw in a lungful of tobacco smoke, but
also have degraded night vision and are less likely to be fully alert.
‘That’s it,’ Richter murmured into his boom microphone, ‘the second one
from the left.’
The satellite pictures they’d studied at Hereford had clearly identified the hangar that
Six and the Americans wanted investigating. They’d also shown, on three separate passes, that it normally had sentries posted on all of its four sides, which presented a problem, but
Richter thought he’d worked out a way around that.
‘Still happy with the plan?’ Dekker asked.
‘I’m not happy with any of this, but I don’t see any other way of getting a
look inside. Do you?’
‘No, not unless we take out about half those sentries first. And since the
Head-shed’s very keen to ensure nobody knows we were here, that’s not an option.’
‘Right,’ Richter said, ‘we’d better get on with it.’
To the front of their position, a wadi ran diagonally towards the airfield’s boundary
fence. It looked around four or five feet deep,enough to conceal a crouching man, and was the obvious way to reach the fence undetected, which now made Dekker nervous.
‘If I was in charge of security at this place,’ he said, ‘I’d stick a
handful of Claymores in that ditch. I think our best approach is straight to the fence, keeping low. The guards are positioned around the hangars, not on the boundary, and there aren’t
any watchtowers or dogs to cause a problem.’
Dekker turned aside for a short conversation with his number two – a small wiry
sergeant-major named Wallace – then he briefed his men. Just he and Richter, accompanied by a trooper carrying a collapsible aluminium ladder, would cross the open ground to the
airfield boundary, while the rest of the men stayed well back. If they reached the fence undetected, Richter would use the ladder to get inside. Then it had to be all up to him, since he was
the deniable asset, carrying no possible means of identification. The SAS troopers would protect his progress, of course, but under no