Red Phoenix

CHAPTER 4 In the Shadows

The “Internationale” sounded odd to Colonel Sergei Ivanovitch Borodin. Its harsh, blaring refrain rebounded off the concrete-reinforced granite walls of the hangar — echoes chasing one another with nowhere to go. After a while Borodin swore he could have closed his eyes and heard the same series of notes three times over.

It was distracting, and he didn’t need the distraction. There were too many things he needed to watch carefully, too many things to remember. This mission was as much a diplomatic gesture as it was a military assignment. Of itself that held no great concern for Borodin. He’d served the State in a similar capacity across half the globe. But this place was so — he searched for the right word — so confined, so suffocating. Nothing at all like the vast, open deserts beyond Tripoli or the rolling grasslands around Harare.

This feeling of walking a tightrope over a deep pit had first come over him as he’d waited to fly out of Moscow’s Domodedovo Airport.

“Be careful, Sergei. Be watchful.” General Petrov, deputy commander in chief for air combat training, had whispered in his ear as they stood together looking out the departure lounge window into the late-night darkness. The old man had chuckled at Borodin’s alarmed expression, but his words had been blunt — a rare thing for the short, stout, white-haired friend of his father.

“These North Koreans are slant-eyes, yes, Sergei. But they are clever slant-eyes. They’ve played us off against the Chinese for decades, and only now does it seem that we’re pulling them into our nets. “But” — the old man had waggled a finger in his face — ”only just. They could easily slip outside. We can’t afford that, Sergei Ivanovitch. You understand? So you must not offend them. You must not disparage this personality cult nonsense — this godhead — they’ve built up around the old man Kim and his son.”

Petrov had dropped his voice and laid an arm around Borodin’s shoulders. “So, a word to the wise, eh? Walk softly in North Korea, there are powerful eyes watching. Politburo eyes, Sergei. You don’t want to count trees or dig for gold, you understand? Walk soft.”

Borodin shivered slightly as he remembered those last words. This might well be the season of glasnost, but the icy forests of Siberia and the man-killing mines of the Kolyma were still there — they’d just been pushed into the shadows a bit.

His memory moved on, through the long, high-altitude journey eastward across the Soviet Union, then lower above the rugged peaks of the Taeback Mountains, and finally south across the narrow plains toward Pyongyang. Into this cavernous hangar carved out of a mountainside east of the capital.

The “Dear Leader,” Kim Jong-Il, son of North Korea’s absolute ruler, had met the plane personally. No surprises there. Neither Borodin nor his political officer, Major Yepishev, had expected the Great Leader himself, Kim Il-Sung, to make an appearance. According to both the GRU and the KGB, the old man’s health was increasingly fragile, and they’d arrived on a hard, gray day, heavy with cold rain driven by the wind.

There wasn’t much trace of the rotten weather in here, though, Borodin thought, surveying the high-vaulted hangar that held not only his Ilyushin airliner, an Il-18, but also several other, smaller transports, a reviewing stand, and a uniformed crowd of North Korean dignitaries. The size of the place made a mockery of perspective and dwarfed its human occupants — stretching for several hundred meters from tunnels cut deeper into the rock out to a set of thickly armored main hangar doors. Lighting, ventilation, and fire suppression systems turned the ceiling into a nightmarish tangle of shafts, cabling, and piping.

The Soviet colonel couldn’t even begin to imagine the amount of labor it had taken to carve all of this out of solid rock. It surpassed even the massive engineering works carried out by his own country’s Civil Defense Force. He cast a sidelong glance at the row of impassive Korean faces on either side of him. What was going on inside those heads?

The silence alerted him. The band had stopped playing, and now Kim Jong-Il stood ready to speak at the podium.

Borodin found the man’s appearance unsettling. On the surface the “Dear Leader” seemed soft, pudgy — a stark contrast to the colonel, who’d always prided himself on his trim, flat stomach and narrow, high-cheeked features. But the eyes, the eyes were dangerous — cold and hard behind those thick glasses. They were eyes that suited a man who now controlled his nation’s entire internal security and military apparatus.

Kim’s voice was soft, commanding attention by necessity more than by bluster. “Socialist brothers, we welcome your presence here. We hope that your gracious visit will permit a useful exchange of information between our two great peoples …”

“Exchange.” Now there was an amusing word, Borodin thought. He and his men — some of the Soviet Union’s top pilots and aircraft mechanics — were a training team. Their very presence here chipped away at Kim Il-Sung’s so-called self-reliance doctrine.

It was all a nice little ballet. His team had to maintain the fiction that they were here to examine North Korean air tactics, and not just to show the Koreans how to fly the shiny new toys they’d been shipped from the Soviet Union. North Korean air tactics, what nonsense. These people thought the MiG-21 was a first-line aircraft.

At the same time, his briefings at the Defense and Foreign ministries in Moscow had emphasized how much the Soviet Union needed Kim Il-Sung’s friendship and cooperation. The colonel knew that Kim’s dynastic communism was anathema to his superiors, but the North Koreans were at least nominal socialists, and they were opposed to the West. More importantly, the country occupied a crucial geostrategic position — it was the fulcrum between the Soviet Union, China, and Japan.

The “fulcrum.” The word described the Kremlin’s view of North Korea with precision. The Politburo saw it as the vital agent through which force could be exerted against either the Chinese or the Japanese. Borodin smiled inwardly despite his concerns. Considering his mission here, that was even a clever word play, one worthy of Crokodil, the humor magazine.

And if his country didn’t help Kim, the Chinese would be only too happy to oblige. That was something his country could not risk.

Borodin knew that firsthand. He had been stationed in the Far East early in his career. You couldn’t fly out of Vladivostok and remain unaware of the Chinese threat.

Their planes were old, antique relics for the most part. Their tanks and artillery were laughable by modern standards. And their men were underequipped. But there were so many of them and they were close to the Trans-Siberian Railway, the lifeline between European Russia and its Far Eastern possessions.

Everyone knew that the Chinese were just waiting for the right moment to stab the motherland in the back. Hadn’t those yellow-skinned, “pseudo-communists” spent years sucking up to the West, begging for technology and trade? Didn’t they insist on setting an independent, often anti-Soviet, foreign policy?

Yes, Borodin thought, the Politburo was wise to worry about North Korea’s leanings. The State didn’t need any more enemies in this part of the world — it needed friends and allies. Puppets. It was vital to give North Korea’s Great Leader as much help as he deserved, at the highest price he was willing to pay. The Koreans had already agreed to allow overflights by Soviet aircraft. Next, port visits by Soviet warships would be expanded into a basing agreement. The new aircraft he and his team would teach the North Koreans to fly were the first token of Soviet reciprocity. Others would soon follow.

His mission was to smooth the way for the diplomats and their treaties by showing these Asiatics just how valuable Soviet assistance could be.

He focused his attention back on Kim Jong-Il, the Dear Leader, still mouthing sanctimonious phrases about their “historic friendship” and the “common struggle against imperialism.” By all accounts the younger Kim should prove an ally in this quest for great Soviet influence, even if an unwitting one. His thirst for advanced military technology was well documented, and it was a thirst the Chinese could do little to satisfy.

Borodin came back to full consciousness of his surroundings as he realized that Kim’s speech was finishing, winding up with what must be a standard invocation. “And so we are confident that the colonel and his men will gain a greater understanding of the international socialist struggle and the dynamic contribution made to it by the Korean people under the guidance of our Great Leader.”

Kim stepped back from the podium to thunderous applause supplied by the phalanx of officers and enlisted men drawn up in the open area of the hangar. Borodin clapped along with them, meeting Kim’s eyes steadily and with a diplomatic smile stuck on his face. The North Korean dipped his head slightly toward the podium.

That was Borodin’s cue. As briefed, he bowed to Kim and the other dignitaries and felt carefully for the prepared speech scripted by the Foreign Ministry.

“The people of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics send their greetings …” Borodin read the hackneyed phrases aloud almost without thinking about them. He had read the same kind of stilted nonsense a dozen times before in a dozen different countries. These ceremonies were unimportant. The real work would come later, behind closed doors and in the cockpits of jet fighter aircraft. He was growing impatient to get on with it. The sooner they began, the sooner he and his men could get out of this bleak, Asiatic fortress-state.

“… The sophistication and extent of the underground installations is impressive, as is the level of training …”

Borodin laid down his pen and rubbed his eyes. The harsh, bright fluorescent lights of the GRU office were painful this late at night. He looked up from the paper, trying to get his eyes to focus on something farther than a few centimeters away. Not that there was much to see. A few old, battered wooden desks, paint scraps peeling off the walls, two clocks, one on Moscow time, the other set for Pyongyang, some filing cabinets, and the obligatory portrait of the General Secretary. Functional, but not esthetic. Borodin savored that last word. That was the kind of word only those who were really kulturny, cultured, could remember when they were on their last legs.

Little Mother, but he was tired. It was absurd to fly across eight time zones, spend a full day, and then spend the night hours trying to write a coherent arrival report. But his instructions from Moscow were clear. Complete, accurate, and timely reports were to be written, encoded, and transmitted by the mission commander, by him, each and every day. North Korea was clearly now a high priority for the staff bigwigs at Defense Ministry HQ.

He looked at what he had just written and nodded to himself. Certainly that was accurate enough. The North Korean air installations and crews were impressive. More than impressive in fact.

After the speech-making mercifully ended, the younger Kim had taken him in tow for a thorough tour of the Pyongyang-East Airbase. Borodin shook his head at the memory of it all. The vast transport plane hangar had just been the start. Behind it and above it lay a whole connected series of tunnels, barracks, offices, quarters, control centers, maintenance shops, and fuel storage tanks. The base radar installations were constructed in elevator shafts so that they could “pop up” and “pop down” for protection against enemy air attack. SA-2 Guideline surface-to-air missile batteries and radar-controlled, antiaircraft gun positions dotted the mountain slopes — ready to turn any strike aircraft attacking the few above-ground installations into piles of flaming wreckage.

Even the logistics facilities and train yards were hardened to prevent resupply trains from being caught at their most vulnerable point.

Naturally the North Koreans had saved the best for last.

A hangar even larger than the first, crammed with sleek, delta-winged interceptors, Jian-7s — Chinese-model MiG-21F derivatives. They’d allowed him to move freely throughout the hangar, inspecting everything at close range. For Borodin it had been like diving nearly thirty years back into his own past. The MiG-21 had been the first real combat aircraft he’d ever flown.

So many years ago. He and his wife, Tania, had still been a happy couple then. Borodin shook his head. Those were unprofitable memories. It was more important to concentrate on the task he faced here and now.

The colonel narrowed his eyes, trying to recall as much as possible of Kim’s last little speech, delivered near the wingtip of one of the camouflaged fighters. What had the man said? “We are confident of our ability to resist an imperialist attack and deliver a crushing blow in return. There are bases like this all over the People’s Republic, and they make the aggressor’s task impossible.”

Borodin tapped his pen thoughtfully against his chin. There had been something else. Something that had struck him as even more bombastic, more dangerous somehow. Ah, yes. “Four more bases like this one were recently completed near the present Demilitarized Zone. From them we will be able to launch our final drive for the liberation of the South. Our troops are well trained and can use our equipment at its maximum effectiveness.”

Borodin hadn’t liked the sound of that. “Final drive for the liberation of the South.” From anyone else he would have dismissed it as the standard propaganda line. But there had been a tone of inevitability or certainty in Kim’s voice that sent chills up his spine. Should he highlight that statement and his impression of it for Moscow’s attention?

No, perhaps not. You’re tired, Sergei Ivanovitch, he told himself. You’re dreaming. Putting strange interpretations on things you heard hours ago. Stick to what you know — air combat — and let the diplomats worry about the other things going on around this place.

He leaned closer to the paper, shutting away the uncertainties by remembering the show they’d put on for him.

Kim had no sooner finished speaking when he’d turned and nodded to a nearby North Korean Air Force colonel, who’d simply raised his hand overhead and shown a clenched fist.

A klaxon had blared from the hangar roof high overhead and Borodin had jumped. He’d had to stifle the urge to run for an aircraft — the old reflexes were still there from his days in the air defense forces, Voyska PVO. Instead he’d turned to watch men pour from doors in the walls. He’d picked one man in a flight suit out of the mass and tracked him as he ran over to a MiG — no a Jian-7, he corrected himself, not quite the same thing.

The North Korean pilot had bounded up the ladder like a gazelle as ground crew circled the aircraft, moving equipment and performing last-minute checks. Then a howling roar as the first jet engine fired up. The noise had bounced off the walls and hurt Borodin’s ears.

He’d felt air moving and looked up to see huge ventilation fans pumping fresh air into the hangar. More noise. The pilot he’d been concentrating on had just started his engine. Most of the exhaust seemed to be directed into a vent or pipe directly behind the aircraft. More tunnels in the rock, Borodin thought. Mother of God, these people were like moles.

As the first interceptor rolled off its chocks toward the main hangar doors, a North Korean Air Force colonel had pointed wordlessly to a huge clock directly over them. Obviously started the moment the alert began, it had shown just a little more than two and a half minutes elapsed time. Even considering the simpler systems and controls on the MiG-21/Jian-7, that was still a good time, well within Soviet training norms.

The exit doors, however, had still been closed. For a moment Borodin had half-wondered if they planned to show him an interceptor smashing head-on into reinforced steel. But then, as the Jian-7’s nose wheel crossed a yellow line painted on the floor, he’d heard a loud, ringing alarm above the howling jet engines and watched in amazement as the hangar doors snapped open, tons of metal moving in seconds. The jet had shot through, followed by another and another, until the entire battalion of aircraft had been scrambled. The entire exercise had taken nine minutes and fifteen seconds.

Borodin thought that was a damned good time. Even assuming that he’d been shown a hand-picked group of pilots and ground staff, it was clear that the weekly practice alerts carried out by the North Koreans paid off in professionalism and speed.

The colonel nodded to himself. Yes, mix the pilots he’d seen today with the newer MiG-23s he knew were operating out of other bases, add the even more advanced planes his country was shipping soon, and you’d have a damned good air force. An air force capable of handling almost any mission it was given.

Borodin remembered Kim Jong-Il’s cold, challenging stare. The final liberation he had said. Could he have been serious? What was it General Petrov had said about the North Koreans? Something about Pyongyang being almost inside the Soviet Union’s nets. Borodin began to wonder if it might not be more accurate to turn that phrase around.