Games Traitors Play (24 page)

Primakov's test had sounded relatively straightforward at the time. He had asked Marchant to knock out Britain's early-warning radar system on the north-west coast for two minutes. Within that narrow window, two MiG-35 Russian fighters would penetrate British airspace, travelling just below the speed of sound until they were over land. Then they would turn around and head back towards Russia, leaving Britain's airspace before the radar was up and running again.

After Marchant had made some discreet enquiries, the reality seemed much more complex. The radar network was overseen by the Air Surveillance and Control Systems Force Command (ASACS) at RAF Boulmer in Alnwick, which was stood up in 2006 in belated response to the terrorist threats highlighted by 9/11. The Control and Reporting Centre, located in a reinforced bunker at ASACS, monitored the airspace around the UK, and was responsible for providing tactical control of the Tornado F3 and Typhoon F2 jets that were scrambled whenever the skies over Britain were violated.

The planes were part of the RAF's Quick Reaction Alert Force, and were based at Leuchars (covering the north) and Coningsby (the south). They had been particularly busy in recent years, shadowing the increasing number of Russian bombers that flew into the UK's Air Defence Identification Zone, a sensitive area just outside Britain's airspace.

There was only one man who could help Marchant, and he was sitting opposite him now in a corner of the Beehive pub in Montpelier, Cheltenham. Paul Myers liked his beer. He liked talking about Leila, too. Marchant gave him both, endless pints of Battledown Premium and stories of Leila in her early days at the Fort, and despised himself for it. Despite her betrayal, Myers had never managed to get over her, or dismiss the fantasy that she had once fancied him.

‘She used to talk about you often,' Marchant said. Myers was clumsy enough when he was sober, but he looked even more vulnerable and awkward when he was drunk. Perhaps it was because he liked to remove his thick glasses after a few beers, exposing his clammy face to the world.

‘Did she really? That's great. What did she say?'

‘That you were a good listener.'

‘They always say that. Particularly when they're pouring their hearts out about other men.'

‘And if she hadn't met me, then maybe…'

‘Honestly?'

‘Be careful what you wish for. You'd be the one feeling betrayed now.'

‘I do anyway. She betrayed us all, Dan.'

Had she? Marchant was always less sure when he was drunk. Alcohol could be very forgiving. For the first round, he had tried to sip at his beer, let Myers do the boozing, but it was no good. He had been drinking heavily ever since Prentice had been killed. There was no need to lay it on for the Russians, who were meant to be watching him for signs of disaffection. Besides, pretending to get drunk was not a skill he possessed. The KGB had become famous for it during the Cold War. His father had once told him a story about the
Rezident
in Calcutta, who appeared to get lashed on vodka with his contacts, trading on Russia's reputation for hard drinking, then be spotted sober as a judge half an hour later. Barely a drop had passed his lips.

‘Listen, bit of a turf war going on at the moment,' Marchant said, anxious to change the subject. ‘I need your help.'

‘New government, new rules. Fire away.'

Marchant knew that relations between Fielding and his opposite number at GCHQ, where Myers worked, had not been great in recent weeks, ever since Myers had pulled his rabbit out of the hat at the Joint Intelligence Committee. GCHQ was much more friendly with the Americans than MI6, and it had felt embarrassed by Myers's role in Spiro's humiliation. Myers was still meant to be on secondment to MI6, but had been ordered home.

‘We need to put the wind up the National Security Council. The coalition has been throwing its weight around.'

‘We?'

‘Fielding. Armstrong. Listen, a couple of Russian fighters will be tipping their wings off the Outer Hebrides next Tuesday. Usual operation. Into our Air Defence Identification Zone, fly along the borders of UK airspace for a while. Only this time we want them to get a bit closer. Smell the whisky.'

‘Nice one,' Myers said, his eyes lighting up. ‘MiG-29s?' Marchant knew that he liked his planes, and thought the idea might tickle him. Myers was an active member of a remote-control flying club in Cheltenham.

‘35s.'

Myers let out a loud whistle of approval, as if a naked blonde had just walked past. He had no self-awareness, Marchant thought, looking around the pub.

‘No one's going to get hurt,' he continued, ‘just a few politicians' noses put out of joint. Any ideas how we do it?'

‘Build a massive wind turbine off Saxa Vord.'

‘Why?'

‘They're degrading our air-defence capabilities. It's quite a worry. Apparently, they create a confused and cluttered radar picture. Too much noise. Above, behind, around the turbines – you're invisible.'

Myers lived and breathed this stuff, Marchant thought.

‘I'm not sure we've got time for that.'

‘They're upgrading the system soon, anyway. No, what you need to do is take out a couple of remote radar heads. Saxa Vord, Benbecula, maybe Buchan. Depends where they're flying in.'

‘We can't really “take out” anything. This is meant to be low-key, deniable. I was thinking of a cyber attack, untraceable.'

‘The radar housing's reinforced anyway.'

Marchant tried not to be impatient, but Myers had an annoying habit of suggesting seemingly credible options, only to point out their flaws.

‘Thinking about it, your best option is to target the Tactical Data Links, either the communication system between the radar heads and the Control and Report Centre at Alnwick, or between Alnwick and the Combined Air Operations Centre at High Wycombe.'

‘Which would you suggest?'

‘The second one. The inter-site networks are fully encrypted, but they still use an old 1950s NATO point-to-point system called Link 1 for sending the RAP from Alnwick to High Wycombe.'

‘The RAP?'

Myers always seemed puzzled when others didn't understand what he was talking about, which was most of the time. And he used more bloody acronyms than the military, Marchant thought. ‘Recognised Air Picture. It's a real-time 3D digital display, based on primary and secondary radar traces, showing what's in the skies over Britain and evaluating contacts against specific threat parameters.'

‘And this vital part of our national defence is transmitted using sixty-year-old technology?'

‘The Americans have been trying to get NATO to upgrade it for years. Link 1 does the job. It's a digital data link, but it's not crypto-secure. As it hasn't been encrypted, it would technically be possible to corrupt the air-surveillance data before it reached High Wycombe.'

‘So the order to scramble the Typhoons might never be issued.'

‘In theory, yes. At least, the order could be delayed. Only High Wycombe can send up the jets, and they like to have the full picture.'

‘Could you do it? Get into Link 1 and delay the message to High Wycombe? The Russians will be out of there in two minutes. We don't need long.'

Salim Dhar pulled back the stick and put the SU-25 into an unrestricted climb. He felt in control, stomach tensed, ready to absorb the G-forces. For the first time, he had taken off on his own, without any help from Sergei, who was in the instructor's seat behind him. He wasn't one to lavish praise, but even the Bird had been impressed. The speed with which everything happened would still take some getting used to, but Sergei had drilled into him the constant need to think ahead.

All that remained now was for Dhar to release his ordnance onto the firing range that lay 20,000 feet below. According to Sergei, only the best jet pilots were able to fly solo and drop bombs accurately at the same time. It required precision flying and a rare ability to focus on specific parameters – height, speed and pitch – in order to get inside the ‘basket'. The SU-25 had eleven hardpoints that could carry a total of almost 10,000 pounds of explosive. There were two rails for air-to-air missiles, and the capacity for a range of cluster and laser-guided bombs, two of which his plane had been loaded with before take-off.

Dhar felt for the weapon-select switch. It was on the stick, along with the trim, trigger and sight marker slew controls. Laser engage was on the throttle, along with the airbrake, radio and flaps control. He was finally beginning to know his way around the cockpit. From the moment he had first sat in it, he knew that the plane's myriad dials and switches represented order, not chaos, that each one served a specific purpose. He liked that. All his life he had been guided by the desire to impose discipline on himself and on the world around him. It was his mother who had taught him the importance of daily routine: prayers, ablutions, exercise, meditation.

Sergei had worked hard with him on the simulated targeting system for the laser-guided bombs, or LGBs, and he felt confident as he reduced power to level off at 25,000 feet and settled back. For the next few minutes, until they reached the target zone, the plane would fly with minimal input from him.

He was less happy with Primakov. It was never going to be an easy relationship with the SVR. In return for his protection, Dhar had agreed to strike at a target in Britain that was mutually important to him and to the Russians. It wasn't a martyr operation, but it was beginning to feel like one. There wasn't enough detail about his exit strategy. In Delhi, his escape route had been planned meticulously, from the waiting rickshaw to the goods carrier that took him over the Pakistan border.

Whenever he raised his concerns with Primakov, the Russian reminded him of the risks Moscow was taking by shielding him. Without the SVR's help, he would be dead. It was hard to disagree. The global scale of the CIA's manhunt had taken Dhar by surprise. It had also upset him. Drone strikes were killing hundreds of brothers. Using six kidnapped Marines as a decoy had bought him time, and the taste of revenge, but he knew he had been close to being caught on several occasions. Primakov reassured him that the SVR would help after the attack, but the truth was that he would be on his own again, on the run.

‘Do you know what your final combat payload will be?' Sergei asked over the intercom as they approached the target zone. Dhar moved the gunsight onto a column of rusting tanks.

‘A pair of Vympel R-73s,' he replied. He was sure that he would be able to deploy Russia's most advanced air-to-air missiles after endless sessions on the simulator. Besides, if all went to plan, the enemy would be unarmed and unprepared. And he would only need one of them.

‘Watch your trim on the approach. What about LGBs?'

They will kill you after this is over, Dhar thought, easing the stick to the left, so there was no harm in telling him. But for the moment he said nothing.

‘Engage the target now,' Sergei ordered, frustrated by Dhar's reticence.

Dhar released the bombs. The aircraft seemed to jump before, climbing, he rolled away to the left.

‘Two thousand-pound laser-guided bombs,' he finally said, almost to himself. ‘One of them is a radiological dispersal device.'

Sergei didn't say anything for a few seconds, as if he was allowing time for both of them to acknowledge the implications of what had just been said. ‘That's a lot of collateral.'

Dhar couldn't disagree. A thousand-pound radioactive dirty bomb would cause widespread panic, fear and chaos. There would also be multiple civilian casualties. Not at first, but when the caesium-137 began to interact with human muscle tissue, the radiation dose would substantially increase the risk of cancer. If decontamination proved difficult, entire areas would have to be abandoned for years, if not decades, as the wind and rain spread the radioactive dust into the soil and the water supply. Were the British people innocent? He would have said yes a year ago. But something had changed since the discovery of his father's allegiance to Russia. Britain and its people were no longer off limits.

Dhar looked down at a rising plume of smoke below him, and thought again about what lay ahead.

‘Target destroyed,' Sergei said. ‘And no collateral.'

Myers had taken every possible precaution when he phoned Fielding. The GPS chip in his SIM card had been disabled, making its location harder to trace. It also incorporated triangulation scramble technology, first seen by GCHQ's technicians in a handset seized in Peshawar's Qissa Khwani Bazaar. By altering the broadcast power, it confused network operators about the handset's proximity to base-station masts.

He didn't want anyone to know that he was phoning MI6, least of all Marchant, who he felt he was betraying by making the call. It wasn't that he doubted Marchant's story. He knew there was an unspoken pact amongst the intelligence services whenever a new government arrived. Chiefs would stick together, wary of their new political masters as they established themselves. But his request to embarrass the National Security Council by allowing Britain's airspace to be breached made Myers uneasy. Marchant was on the warpath, which meant fat arses like his own had to be covered.

Myers looked around his untidy bedroom in Cheltenham as he waited to be connected: an empty pizza box on his unmade bed, dirty clothes on the floor, a half-built remote-control plane on top of an open wardrobe, and the bank of computer screens. He knew that some of what was on the hard drives should have stayed within the circular confines of the Doughnut, but at least he hadn't left his office laptop on a train. At the last count, thirty-five had been lost by GCHQ staff.

Myers justified his own software breaches on the grounds that he liked to work late, often through the night. And 99 per cent of the work he did on his home network was in the interests of the taxpayer and national security. Just not this particular request. He switched the phone to the other hand while he wiped the sweat off his palm. He never liked calling Fielding.

‘This is starting to become a habit,' Fielding said. ‘I trust the line is secure.'

‘Untraceable. I'm sorry to ring you again, but I thought you should know.' Slow down, he told himself.

‘Know what?'

‘Daniel Marchant came to see me yesterday. He's asked me to do something, said it was your –'

Myers looked at the phone. Fielding had cut him off.