For a minute she didn't seem to know where she was, but she soon regained her bearings. 'What time is it?' she whispered hoarsely to Ben.
'Four o'clock, but you have to get up. I need to talk to you about something.'
'At four o'clock in the morning?'
'Yeah. Get your stuff ready — I'll meet you downstairs.'
The reception area was empty as Ben waited for her; finally she came down the stone steps carrying her rucksack, her face a thundercloud. Ben spoke before she could say a thing. 'We've got to go to Spadeadam.'
She looked at him like he was mad. 'What are you talking about, Ben?'
So Ben told her about the old man and how he had seen him wandering off into the night. 'We met in the common room last night and he kept talking about Spadeadam and Blue Streak. It's a—'
'I know what Blue Streak is, Ben. Don't tell me you've started to buy all those stupid conspiracy theories.'
'Listen,' Ben urged. 'It all makes sense. If you're doing something you want to keep secret, the last thing you want is random people walking around where they can stumble upon it, right?'
'I suppose so,' Annie replied reluctantly.
'Why have we come to the area?' Ben pressed.
'For the bird-watching.'
'Do you think they get many bird-watchers here?'
'Yeah, quite a few, I suppose.'
'Exactly. So what's the best way to stop bird-watchers coming to Spadeadam?'
The two cousins looked at each other, their faces serious.
'Are you trying to tell me,' Annie asked slowly, 'that someone is shooting rare birds around here to stop bird-watchers trespassing into Spadeadam and discovering their… their… secret plans? Ben, Spadeadam is a serious place, an important facility. They train our soldiers well so that they don't lose their lives…'
When she put it like that, Ben realized how farfetched it sounded; but the pieces of the jigsaw still fitted, and somehow he knew he was right. 'Can you think of another explanation?' he asked.
Annie was shaking her head. 'Nobody would do something as sick as that,' she told him.
Instantly, Ben thought back to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. 'Believe me,' he murmured, 'I've seen them do worse. Anyway' — he decided to try a different tack — 'what about the old man? He's not all there. I bet you any money you like he's gone to Spadeadam. I bet he's just wandering around there, getting freezing cold. We've got to try and find him, make sure he's all right.'
'Ben,' Annie told him patiently. 'You can't just go wandering into RAF Spadeadam. Do you have any idea what they do there?'
'Yeah.' Ben shrugged, trying to sound as if he knew what he was talking about. 'It's an electronic warfare tactics range.'
'And do you know what that means?'
'Er… no,' he admitted. 'Not really.'
Annie sighed. 'Electronic warfare,' she explained, her voice taking on an almost school-teacherly tone, 'or EW, is manipulating the electromagnetic spectrum to defeat or evade the enemy.'
'Right,' Ben replied. 'And in English?'
'Jamming radars, stealth technology, scrambling your enemy's signals and using your own electronic weapons to destroy them. My dad says it's the future of warfare. At Spadeadam, they simulate the effects of electronic warfare so that pilots can learn how to deal with it. They have dummy targets for aircraft to practise on under EW conditions.'
She must have realized that Ben was still looking at her a bit blankly, because when she spoke again it was much more slowly and clearly. 'Planes fly over Spadeadam and blow things up, Ben,' she stated.'A lot. And the army's EW research, a lot of which goes on at Spadeadam, really is top secret.'
Ben fell silent. He knew Annie had a fair point — trespassing on an RAF base was a dangerous business — but he just couldn't shake off his conviction that something untoward was happening there. He thought back to his experiences in Australia — all had not been as it seemed at the US base there. Maybe that was why he was not so convinced as Annie that everything was as it should be in Spadeadam. 'You're right,' he said quietly. 'We're going to have to be careful.'
'We're not going to have to be careful, Ben, because we're not going.'
Ben shrugged. 'Speak for yourself,' he said. He picked up the rucksack that was on the floor beside him and made for the door.
'Wait!' Annie told him. Ben smiled slightly to himself. He knew, despite her arguments, that Annie would not be able to resist a bit of intrigue. He turned to look at her. 'My dad's an air commodore,' she appealed to him. 'Can you imagine the trouble I'll be in if we're caught?'
'Then we'd better make sure we don't get caught, hadn't we?'
Annie's face was still filled with doubt. Ben had one last suggestion to try.
'Tell you what,' he said. 'I've got my digital camera here. We'll sneak into Spadeadam and see if we can find anyone shooting birds. If we do, I'll take a picture of them and we can show it to someone who can put a stop to it. But if we don't find anything by sunset, we'll leave and I'll never mention it again.'
For a moment Annie didn't reply and Ben could see that she was grappling with her conscience. Then she took a deep, slow breath. 'Do you promise, Ben?'
Ben nodded his head firmly. 'I promise.'
She closed her eyes. 'All right,' she said. 'When do we leave?'
Ben glanced back towards the exit.
'No time like the present,' he observed, as he opened the door and stepped out into the early morning.
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Chapter Six
It was the rainy season in North Korea, and the season was living up to its name. Torrential rain fell through the humid air, so heavy that it blurred the bright red light of the twenty-five-metre-high torch on the top of the imposing Juche Tower. Lee Chin-Hwa gazed out at the hazy sight from the back of his Mercedes limousine — a luxury given only to party bureaucrats or those favoured by the regime. Few ordinary North Koreans had cars. If they wanted to see the splendour of the Juche Tower — built to commemorate the seventieth birthday of Kim Il Sung, the former Communist leader and father of the current leader, Kim Jong Il — they would have to walk. But nobody would be walking there at the moment. Not in this rain, and not at this time of the morning.
It was five o'clock and still dark. Lee Chin-Hwa had been awoken by a telephone call as he slept in the small apartment that he shared with his elderly mother on the outskirts of Pyongyang.
'Lee Chin-Hwa?' the harsh voice at the other end of the phone had asked.
'That's right,' he had replied groggily.
'There is a car waiting for you outside. You are required to attend the government offices.' There was a click as the phone was put down.
Chin-Hwa had always been interested in physics, ever since his schooldays when he had trudged dutifully every morning to the faceless concrete school near his parents' apartment block. His teachers, however, had been more interested in indoctrinating their pupils according to the regime's instructions. So instead of learning about atoms at school, he had learned about revolutionary history. And instead of learning about space, he had learned about the blessed life of Kim Il Sung. Only at home could he study the science that so excited him.
Chin-Hwa's father Ki-Woon had fought in the Korean War, during which time he had come into contact with some American soldiers. Through them he had learned a phrase which amused him, and which he used to repeat in his comic-sounding American accent every time he found Chin-Hwa reading one of his prized and illegal scientific textbooks: 'You can't keep a good man down!'
Ki-Woon had been a talented physicist himself. When Chin-Hwa was fifteen years old, however, his father had been instructed by the government to join those scientists involved in developing North Korea's nuclear programme. But Ki-Woon was a principled man: he was of the firm belief that science should be used for the good of mankind, not for its destruction.