Foxbat Read Free Page B

north-west of the island of Baegryeong-do, before the
     craft turned south-east, passing between that island and the mainland, and then paralleling the North Korean coast for a while before returning to its home port.
    On every one of those trips, except this one, all the crew had done was catch fish. Twice patrol
     boats had approached them closely, but on neither occasion was the vessel boarded. Two days earlier, the National Intelligence Service – South Korea’s espionage agency – had
     decided that the mission was a ‘go’, and Yi Min-Ho had finally embarked on the fishing boat. With him came two bulky containers, each of which had needed two men to lift, and a
     single haversack holding his personal equipment.
    The boat had already made the turn north-west of Baegryeong-do, so the vessel was now about
     midway between the island and the largely uninhabited peninsula of Kuksa-bong, virtually the most westerly point of North Korea, jutting out sharply into the Yellow Sea.
    ‘It’s time,’ Yi said.
    The skipper nodded agreement, set the autopilot, and followed the NIS officer out onto the deck,
     where three crewmen stood waiting.
    ‘Open them,’ Yi ordered.
    One of the seamen produced a knife and sliced through the cord securing the lid of the
     container. He swiftly unlaced the cord from the eyelets, then flipped off the fabric lid to reveal the contents. In the glow cast by the deck lights – for obvious reasons the fishing
     boat was displaying the normal lights any patrol craft’s captain would expect to see – it appeared to contain just a single lump of black rubber.
    Protruding from one corner of it was a short but rigid hose, which another crewman now attached
     to a petrol-powered compressor standing ready on deck. Having secured it, he bent over the compressor, flicked a switch and pulled the starter cord. The engine roared into life, then settled
     down to a steady thrum. Almost immediately the blackobject began expanding, as the air rushed into it. An inflatable boat was already beginning to take shape.
    Yi Min-Ho watched its progress for a few seconds, then turned his attention to the second
     container. After the lid was flipped back, two of the crewmen bent over to extract an outboard motor, and placed it carefully on the deck. A small toolkit followed it, then a
     twenty-five-litre can of ready-mixed fuel. The outboard had a bulky and unfamiliar look to it, caused partly by its silenced exhaust but mainly by a thick, soft cover enveloping the entire
     motor apart from the control arm. This was made of anechoic fabric, designed to absorb radar waves. The NIS had calculated that, despite the mass of metal in the outboard motor, the boat
     would have an insignificant radar signature, about the same as a large bird.
    Yi nodded to the skipper, and headed back to the wheelhouse to make a last check of both the
     radar screen and the radar-warning receiver, and finally to pick up his haversack. He was wearing an all-black jumpsuit, under which were a camouflage-pattern jacket and trousers. In the
     haversack was all the equipment he hoped he might need to survive for a week in North Korea: a Kyocera SS66K Iridium satellite phone and spare battery, providing his lifeline to the boat due
     to pick him up once his mission was over; a Czechoslovakian CZ75 nine-millimetre semi-automatic pistol with two spare magazines, both fully charged; a GPS receiver; a pair of compact
     binoculars; a map; a notebook and pencil; seven days’ worth of American-issue MRE rations and five bottles of water.
    By the time he walked back onto the deck, the compressor had fallen silent. The
     four-metre-long boat was now fully inflated, and had already been lowered over the side of the fishing vessel facing away from the mainland, just in case anyone there was watching them
     through night-vision glasses. The inflatable was carefully secured by a line, while two of the crewmen, one wearing an all-black jumpsuit identical to