‘I was in some small way involved,’ admitted Sir Adrian.
‘Well, I understand General Li has admitted that North Korea is going for one last throw of the dice. All or nothing. The Hwasong-20. Under construction now.’
‘That is exactly what he said. I was there.’
‘Lucky you, Sir Adrian. I hope I may have access to the general later. The Americans are first. But the Hwasong-20 will have to be quite different to its predecessor.’
‘In what way?’
‘Missiles that large are usually stored in underground silos and fired from them. The silo cover disguises the missile from prying eyes in the sky until it is removed for firing. Then the missile emerges vertically, riding a huge fireball that launches it into space. When clear of the earth it tilts on to its new trajectory, which will carry it to its target, where the warhead separates, drops and explodes.
‘But Hwasong-15 is carried on the back of a 32-axle vehicle. The two weigh a hundred tons. In North Korea, only a few specially prepared roads can begin to accept such a load. But it doesn’t matter. It only needs one to be successfully hidden in a cavern with a few miles of disguised highway for it to emerge and fire.
‘However, Hwasong-20 will have to be silo-based, built and hidden in some underground complex we do not yet know about.’
‘That is also my information,’ said Sir Adrian. ‘And that is where General Li comes in. He does know.’
‘That is bad for Kim. But not the last of his problems. That honour goes to the missile’s engine. North Korea has never been able to build missile power units big enough for the Hwasongs.’
‘So where does she get them? China?’
‘No, Russia. The missile potential of North Korea has increased rapidly since Kim Jong-un came to power. The reason is that he switched power units. There used to be two factories in the old USSR that built the Soviet engines. One was in Ukraine, the other just outside Moscow. Then came the break-up of the USSR, and out went the Ukrainian one. The Russian plant went on making the RD250 rocket engine. That was what was used to power the Hwasong-12, 14 and 15, and it accounts for the sudden increase in North Korean threat-level under the Fat Boy.
‘Then came disaster. In Moscow, the government began a trillion-ruble rearmament programme and switched to a new missile engine. The manufacturer of the RD250 lost the contract. Their name is Energomash. They found themselves with spare RD250s, but no orders. In steps Kim Jong-un. My information is that Energomash is rapidly upgrading some of its RD250 engines for shipment to Pyongyang to form the power unit of the Hwasong-20. If Energomash would stop doing that, Kim would be virtually finished. He would have the bombs, but no missiles to launch them.’
‘The government in Moscow will not prevent that,’ said Sir Adrian. ‘Not in their present mood. Russia is now as aggressive to the West as she was during the Cold War. So, no help there. When Energomash is finished and wishes to make delivery, how would they do that?’
Professor Dixon thought it over.
‘It will be a big bastard,’ he said. ‘A liquid-propellant engine, but only a single-stage one. And enormous quantities of hypergolic fuel, which is extremely toxic and unstable. I doubt it could be carried in an airplane. More likely on a sealed train. Across Siberia, north of the Chinese and Mongolian borders, down the isthmus to the tiny crossing point from Russian territory into North Korea.’
‘You said it was unstable. Could anything go wrong?’
‘Only if it were made to.’
Sir Adrian thanked him and left.
The summer sun was still shining and the terrace at Chequers still a pleasant place to lunch when the Prime Minister and Sir Adrian met again. When they were alone she asked:
‘So, your Korean defector. How was he?’
‘Very smart and very angry. Of course, the concept of “face” demanded that he hide it.’
‘Is that good?’
‘Very much so, Prime Minister. When a man is convinced he has been treated unjustly, he seethes with rage and therefore holds nothing back. General Li will tell everything he knows, and it will be a lot.’
‘Does he know why he was destined for arrest?’
‘No, he does not. He was utterly loyal to the Kim regime.’
‘Or who tipped him off in time to flee?’
Sir Adrian remained silent as he thought about his reply.
‘He has no idea, does he?’
‘Fortunately, no. Neither does the North Korean government. The denunciation and the tip-off remain a mystery to both.’
‘It was you, wasn’t it, Adrian?’
‘One does one’s best, Prime Minister.’
Marjory Graham took a long and thoughtful drink of her wine in order to keep a straight face.
‘Was there a fox involved?’
‘I fear you may be right, Prime Minister.’
‘And the General’s news?’
‘The principal nugget is that there is no way the Kim regime ever intended to denuclearize North Korea in exchange for trade concessions – even vital ones. The Americans are not best pleased at having been nearly fooled.’
‘Hence the cancellation of those concessions, and no further summits?’
‘Precisely.’
‘Winter is coming. Without huge imports, which they cannot pay for, the North Korean people will starve again.’
‘The Kim regime does not care, Prime Minister.’
‘So, his next stage?’
‘It seems – or so General Li claimed, and I have further information to back this up – that a truly massive new missile is being built under his direction in a secret cavern which American over-flights have not yet spotted.’
‘Could our young cyber-hacker out at Chandler’s Court find it?’
‘We could always try, Prime Minister.’
‘Yes, Adrian, so please do. Coffee?’
Sir Adrian found Dr Hendricks in his office in the computer wing of the old manor house, next to the operations hall, with its state-of-the art banks of computers humming gently. He laid a single sheet of paper in front of the scientist’s nose.
‘There is a factory in Russia called Energomash,’ he said. ‘Is there any mention of it in the public domain?’
Jeremy Hendricks pulled his computer towards him, logged on and began to tap in his question.
‘It’s there all right,’ he said. ‘Publicly listed: manufactures equipment and component parts for the space industry.’
‘That’s one way of putting it.’
‘Board of directors, share issue, a reference to government and defence contracts. A lot of subject headings are classified, meaning covert. So the chances are most enquiries will be rebuffed on security grounds. We would do the same. It seems they build missile parts.’
‘Never mind the corporate structure. Can we learn anything about their technical side?’
‘Not in here. We’ll have to go next door and consult our own classified intel on these people. Not for public consumption.’
In the main hall Dr Hendricks crouched over a different computer and tapped in his questions.
‘Their safety mechanisms are rigorous at every stage and, yes, they are computer-controlled. With ultra-complicated firewalls to protect them from examination, let alone interference.’
‘But if one could get through the firewalls, cross the air gap – even though supposedly impossible – could one insert a tiny malware and withdraw unnoticed?’
‘There is only one computer hacker in the world who might be able to do it, and we both know who that is.’
Luke Jennings came from the residential wing with his mother. He was, as ever, pathologically shy in company, unwilling to shake hands or make eye contact, despite his mother’s promptings. Sir Adrian did not insist.
Inside the computer hall, having checked that everything was in its exact place, he relaxed visibly. The mere hum of the computer banks acted almost like a sedative on him. Dr Hendricks showed him a piece of paper with line af
ter line of figures and hieroglyphs on it. They were the firewalls of a super-computer far away in Russia.
Sir Adrian again noticed a change in the relationship between the boy and the older man. The two seemed to have grown still closer. He spotted what he thought it could be. For the first time in his life, Luke Jennings had a colleague. All his young life, tapping away in the attic in Luton, he had been alone. At Chandler’s Court, at first, they had all been strangers. It seemed that, at last, one other human being had entered the boy’s closed world and been allowed to remain there. But, for all his knowledge of the cyber-world, for all his years at GCHQ, for all his weeks of observing Luke over his shoulder, Jeremy Hendricks could still not comprehend, let alone emulate, whatever it was the boy did to achieve the impossible.
‘These people are being very dangerous to our country, Luke,’ said Hendricks. ‘Do you think we might find out what they are up to?’
The boy’s eyes lit up. He studied the figures in his hand. Another challenge. When he heard the admonishment ‘I suppose it cannot be done,’ he came alive. It was what he lived for.
Sir Adrian spent the night at a local hostelry: ancient brickwork, age-blackened timber beams, locally raised game pie. Over coffee and Calvados he found a discarded Daily Telegraph and tested himself on the Toughie crossword, completing two-thirds of it before conceding that was as far as his brain could take him. He knew that, in semi-darkness, the Fox would work through the night.
He returned to the manor at 8 a.m. Somewhere inside, the teenager who was baffling the world’s superpowers was asleep. In the surrounding woodland the close-protection soldiers were changing shift. The night team had not slept – just in case. Dr Hendricks was still up, waiting.
‘I watched every move he made,’ he told Sir Adrian, ‘and I just don’t understand how he did it.’ He held out another sheet of paper. ‘These are the access codes to the master computer of Energomash. That computer controls the manufacture and fitting sequences for the RD250 missile engine, latest model.
‘The Achilles heel lies in the fitting procedure. With all that hypergolic fuel sloshing about, one single tiny spark … In any case, Luke has got the codes, and no one over there seems to have noticed a thing.’
On the drive back to London Sir Adrian had cause to thank Ciaran Martin at the National Cyber Security Centre for allowing him to snitch Jeremy Hendricks from his staff. The man had turned out to be exactly the one to bridge the gap between the vulnerable eighteen-year-old who understood everything about the cyber-world and little about the real world and the much older spymaster who had seen and sometimes practised the tricks and deceptions of the secret world but could no more fly through cyberspace than to the moon.
But Weston was worried about one thing more than any other. There would have to be an end to the clandestine unit at Chandler’s Court. As Alexander the Great wept when there were no more worlds to conquer, there would come a day when there were no more puzzles to crack – or at least not at government command.
To crooks, Luke Jennings would be priceless – he could break into banks. But that must never happen. He could not be signed up to work in an office block with a hundred other colleagues – he was too fragile. Jeremy Hendricks might wish to remain his mentor, his professional adoptive father, but Operation Troy would end. What then for Luke? Weston was still consumed with worry on that score when he arrived back at Admiralty Arch.
Chapter Eighteen
IT IS OFTEN thought that, because North Korea announces itself as a communist state, it can have no religion and must indeed be dedicated to atheism. Not so. The Democratic People’s Republic is profoundly religious and the devotion of all its citizens is compulsory.
The break with convention is that every North Korean is obliged by law to worship three mortal gods – one alive and two deceased. These are the three Kims – grandfather, father and son. Portraits of the dead two, Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il, are mandatory in every home. They are on the wall as would be the crucifix in a devout Catholic house. Regular checks are made to ensure they are mounted, displayed and worshipped.
Lapel badges of the living god, Kim Jong-un, are also pandemic. Any reference to him without the title ‘The Marshal’ is punishable. Every personal benefit derives from him.
As with all religions, legends have been concocted to underpin the national faith. In the case of North Korea, one of these is the sanctification of a mountain where the middle Kim, son of the Founder, is said to have been born. This is holy ground. The mountain is called Paektu.
It is a dormant volcano situated in the extreme north-west of the country, north of the Yellow Sea and Korea Bay, up against the Chinese frontier. This was where the regime chose to construct its ultra-secret rocket silo to house the in-development Hwasong-20.
Just below the lip of the caldera is a humble timber shack, the putative birthplace of Kim Number Two. The idea behind the legend is to ‘prove’ that this Kim was born to humble but holy origins on Korean territory and rose by his own merits and therefore is well worthy of being worshipped as a living god. Of course, it is all nonsense.
The second Kim was in fact born in Siberia, safely under the protection of Stalin, where his father commanded a military unit of Chinese and Korean exiles. His boyhood and upbringing were perfectly comfortable. It was the genocidal Stalin who, after the defeat of Japan in 1945, virtually created North Korea and imposed Kim Il-sung upon it as communist dictator. It was he who, with Soviet support, launched the Korean War.
Being a holy mountain, Mount Paektu remains forbidden to the North Korean people and is wholly army-occupied: this enabled the excavations to be carried out in secret. Many of them were hand-dug with the use of thousands of slave labourers from the numerous concentration camps. No one knows how many died of overwork, malnutrition, disease and exposure in the bitter sub-zero winters that clothe the summit for five months a year.
General Li had revealed all this to the Americans, but no condign action was taken. Attempts to engage in a constructive dialogue with the third Kim persisted, the elusive prize being the voluntary denuclearization of North Korea in exchange for trade concessions in the form of Western donations of food and oil. In parallel, the manufacture of the Hwasong-20 continued until it lacked only those crucial engines from Russia.
The chill of winter came early to Moscow, with the telltale sign – the biting winds off the Eastern Steppes – warning of the freeze to come while most of Europe still enjoyed late-summer sunshine.
In an isolated siding behind the Yaroslavl railway station a very secret train was being prepared. The Trans-Siberian is a famous railway, but only one of its several variants makes an unbroken journey from Moscow to Pyongyang without ever entering Mongolian or Chinese territory. This is run by the North Koreans themselves. Such a vehicle was the secret train in the siding.
The scene was reminiscent of something out of Tolstoy. The huge engine was wreathed in plumes of smoke. On the longest rail network in the world, nearly 4,000 miles, over seven time zones, there are long sequences where there are no engines powered by diesel or cables. Coal-fired steam trains are still used.
To cope with some of the slopes, and in case of a remote breakdown, there were two massive locos decorated with the crossed flags of Russia and North Korea. The crew was made up of Koreans. Behind the locomotives and their coal bunkers were three sealed freight wagons. These contained, in component parts still unassembled, the new RD250 missile engines from Energomash. Russian and North Korean security guards ringed the train to prevent any unauthorized person even attempting to approach it.
Finally, the last bureaucracy was satisfied, the last official pacified and permission given to roll. The iron wheels screamed and began to turn, the steam-spewing monster eased out of the siding, past the passenger trains with their scurrying human cargoes, and turned towards the east.
Those who have ridden the Trans-Siberian will testify it is not the most comfortable train in the world. Only devotees of r
ail travel try it.
For seemingly limitless tracts it passes through Russia’s all-embracing forests of pine, larch and spruce. This is the vista, hour after hour, day after day, for those who choose to stare out of the window. The killer is the boredom. The only humans on this train were the security guards: docile, impassive, obedient, devoid of reading matter but apparently immune to tedium.
In the guard coach there were bunks where many simply dozed through the journey. There was basic, tasteless food, but at least there was enough of it, a blessing in itself. And the tea – endless mugs of tea from the inexhaustible samovar. Whether they knew what awesome power they were guarding or how unstable the huge canisters of hypergolic rocket fuel were will never be known. But probably not. They had no idea. They just had their orders and a job to do.
Night became day and then night again. They rolled out of European Russia, through the Urals and into their native Asia. They steamed slowly through dimly lit towns wreathed in pollution clouds, and on to Yekaterinburg, where, in 1918, the last Tsar and his family were slaughtered in a cellar, and neither knew nor cared.
The days dragged by, and the nights, as the Siberian cold gripped the fathomless forests. The coal was shovelled in the engine cab, the engine roared, the water boiled, the pistons turned and the wheels rolled.
They passed through cities with names the Korean guards could neither read nor pronounce: Novosibirsk, Krasnoyarsk and Irkutsk, where US pilot Gary Powers was shot down in his U-2 spy plane in 1960. Out of the windows here the guards saw a huge lake. It was Baikal, the deepest in the world. They did not know that.
To the south lay Mongolia, but they didn’t cross the border. This cargo was not to risk possible impoundment, or even examination. Then the country to their south became China, but the track stayed inside Russia. Khabarovsk came and went and they turned south at last for the border with their home. Vladivostok slid past and, finally, the train stopped.