Games Traitors Play (25 page)

‘I was performing a manoeuvre we call the “Pugachev cobra”. The nose comes up like a snake and the plane almost stops in mid-air.' Sergei put down his glass and lifted his hand from flat up to ninety degrees, as if a venomous head was rearing. ‘It is a Russian speciality, useful in combat, too. Hard to see coming. Pull a cobra, your attacker overshoots and suddenly you're on their six o'clock. My instructor at aviation school, Viktor Georgievich Pugachev, was the first. For many years, we were doing this in SU-27s, much to the embarrassment of our American friends. They can do it now in an F-22, but in other Western jets this manoeuvre is not possible.'

‘And it went wrong?' Dhar asked, sipping at a mug of warm water. They were sitting in the hangar at Kotlas, the regular guards standing outside. The Bird had burst into song, talking more than he had ever done before. Vodka had loosened his tongue; or perhaps he had finally accepted that he was a man condemned to die. Apart from the alcohol, Dhar was enjoying his company. He had grown fond of Sergei in the past few weeks, liked the fact that his respect had to be earned. Their conversation tonight seemed to be a reward.

‘Terribly wrong. We Russians like to push it to the limit at air shows. Give the people some value for their money for a change. I was attempting the hardest, a flat cobra – it is easier in a climb – and I was entering too fast. I passed out for a few seconds – almost 15G. In order to perform the manoeuvre, first we must disable the angle-of-attack limiter, to allow the nose to pitch upwards. But this also disables the G-Force limiter. When I regained consciousness, it was too late. I tried to turn away from the crowd, but –'

Sergei stopped and blinked.

‘And twenty-three people died?'

‘Including seven children. I was sentenced to fifteen years, so was my co-pilot and two of the air show's officials.' Sergei paused. ‘I don't understand your beliefs, and I don't expect you to understand mine. All I know is that you are at war, fighting your global
jihad
, and Russia has many enemies in the world. Sometimes our battles are the same. It's not worth my life to know any more. My orders are to train you for an operation that might help to restore the world order. But please, if you can spare the lives of twenty-three civilians, then do it. For me, for the Bird.'

Marchant didn't know how many twitchers would make the journey to the Isle of Lewis, but he knew that a Steller's eider was an extremely rare visitor to the Hebrides. The sea duck bred in eastern Siberia and Alaska, and had only been spotted a few times in Britain in recent years. A solitary drake had stayed off South Uist from 1972 to 1984, while another loner had summered at roughly the same time in Orkney. There would be some twitchers who would not make the journey, wary that it might be another hoax. In 2009, a golfer claimed to have spotted one in Anglesey, prompting a rush to Wales, but it turned out that the photo posted on the Internet was a reverse image of a bird that had been snapped in Finland.

Myers had been understandably nervous about interfering with the RAF's Tactical Data Links, but he had been far more excited about hacking into a birdwatching website and sending out a false alert. Earlier that day, thousands of twitchers and birders had received messages on their mobile phones and pagers telling them that a Steller's eider had been spotted off the coast near Stornoway and was ‘showing well'.

All Marchant had to do now was monitor the blogs and chatrooms. He had left Legoland early, and was sitting in an Internet café near Victoria Station, waiting for the first comments to be posted. The photos would follow, uploaded by twitchers who had spotted a very different flying visitor from Russia. At least, that was the plan.

By Marchant's calculation, the two MiG-35s would be entering the UK's Air Defence Identification Zone in thirty seconds. The Remote Radar Heads at Benbecula and Saxa Vord would already have picked them up, and the Norwegian air force would have tracked and shadowed their progress across the North Sea, alerting NATO allies along their projected flightpath. The order to scramble Typhoons from RAF Leuchars would only be given when the planes entered Britain's ADIZ – and if the Recognised Air Picture ever reached Air Command at High Wycombe, something that Marchant hoped Myers was about to prevent.

He looked at his watch again, and then his mobile rang. It was Myers, unbearably nervous, calling from an unknown mobile number.

‘It's done,' he said. ‘You've got two minutes.'

Thirty thousand feet above a roiling sea, two MiG-35s turned sharply to the south, their cockpits winking in the evening sun. As they began their descent towards the waves far below, both pilots knew that they were taking an unprecedented gamble, but they had been assured their presence would not attract the usual RAF escort. So far they had been left alone, apart from requests for identification from commercial air-traffic control on the ‘guard' frequency, which they routinely ignored, a brief visit from two Norwegian F-16s, and a mid-air rendezvous with an Ilyushin IL-78 refuelling tanker.

At 1,500 feet they levelled out and took another, far graver risk. Within the next five seconds they would be entering Britain's national air space, where they could be legitimately shot down. They set a course for Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis, twelve nautical miles away. Then, after wishing each other luck, both pilots hit their afterburners and accelerated to Mach 1.

 

In Alnwick, on the other side of the country, the Aerospace Battle Manager on duty at RAF Boulmer froze as he watched the two primary traces on his radar. The Russians were ten miles off the north-west coast, and closing. He had already rung through to Air Command at High Wycombe when the planes first entered the UK's ADIZ, picked up by the radar head at Benbecula off North Uist, but his was a lone voice. The Russians weren't showing up on Air Command's real-time Recognised Air Picture for the sector. On his word, High Wycombe had brought two Typhoon crews at RAF Leuchars to cockpit readiness, but they were reluctant to scramble them until they had more concrete data.

‘The skies above the Outer Hebrides are showing clear,' his opposite number had insisted.

Clear? He smacked the side of his radar screen in frustration. What the hell was going on? A terrorist strike? Two pilots trying to defect? It didn't make any sense. He was used to long-range Russian bombers – most recently a TU160 Blackjack – keeping him busy on their eleven-hour flights around the Arctic. Usually, they would head for the North Pole and then hang a left just outside the Scandie's ADIZ radar coverage and head down between Greenland and Iceland, skirting Britain's ADIZ.

Both sides knew the game. The Russian pilots liked to test the range of Britain's radars at Saxa Vord, Benbecula and Buchan, waiting for a response, which would often be intentionally delayed to confuse them. Moscow was also keen to measure the Quick Reaction Alert Force's response, and the RAF was happy for the practice, shaving a few seconds off every time. There was no real animosity. (On one infamous occasion, an RAF pilot had held up a Page 3 girl in the cockpit, prompting his Russian counterpart to moon from a window of his bomber in response.)

But this time was different.

‘Any sight of the Sibe?' a birder in a bobble hat asked no one in particular. The men, more than fifty of them, and a handful of women, were standing in the evening light on a cliff in Stornoway, looking down across Broad Bay, where a group of seabirds were riding on the water. Some of the birders were using digiscopes mounted on tripods, others were looking through telescopes. All had binoculars – Zeiss, Swarovksi, Leica, Opticron. Marchant had given a precise grid reference of where the bird had last been seen, knowing that the modern twitcher's armoury also included hand-held GPS units.

‘Not a squawk,' someone else said. ‘Time to dip out. They're all common eiders.'

‘And no sign of the stringer who phoned in the sighting.'

‘I saw someone earlier with a nine iron.'

‘The closest we're going to get to a Steller is in the pub. Anyone coming?'

‘Hold on,' an older man said, adjusting his binoculars.

‘What are you seeing?'

‘Christ. To the right of the big rock, two o'clock.'

As one, the group of birders raised their magnified gazes out to sea.

‘What the –'

Three seconds later, the two MiG-35s swept in low over their heads, forcing the group to duck and cover their ears. A couple of them remained upright, taking photos as the planes disappeared into the distance.

 

‘No sign of any Steller's eiders, but we've just been buzzed by another Sibe – a brace of MiG-35s!! Beautiful-looking birds, particularly in supersonic flight. Take a butcher's at the photos below if you don't believe me.'

Marchant read the chatroom message, smiled and sat back, glancing around the Internet café in Victoria. On his walk over from Vauxhall he had been aware of a tail, possibly two, but he had no desire to shake them off. He thought at first that they were Russian, but then began to think they were American: the dispatch cyclist, the woman at the back of the 436 bendy bus, a tourist taking photos on the north towpath. Either way, they were too thorough to be Moroccan, and it would have taken hours to lose them. Besides, their presence was reassuring, evidence he was attracting attention, arousing suspicion.

He wasn't sure if it was the Bombardier he had drunk at the Morpeth Arms on the way, or a sense of professional satisfaction, but he felt a wave of happiness pass through him as he stared at the photograph on the computer screen. It was a good one, visual proof that he had done what had been asked of him. He was tempted to intervene, but he knew that he should let the web take its own viral course. The pilots would already have reported back, and Primakov would be relieved that he had passed his final test.

Then he thought again about the doubters in Moscow. According to Fielding, Primakov's superiors would be analysing his every move. If they had been listening in on his last fateful meeting with Prentice, they would know he was about to resign. But had they heard? And was that enough? An MI6 agent on the eve of defection would be keen to embarrass the Service as much as possible. Marchant didn't know how or when Primakov intended to exfiltrate him, just that it would happen quickly. Primakov had promised a heads-up if he could manage it. Marchant realised how impatient he had become, how keen he was to meet with Dhar, talk about their father. The waiting game had gone on long enough.

He sat forward, copied the image of the MiGs and attached it to an email. Then he sent it to as many news desks as he could remember from his brief stint with I/OPS, writing ‘MiG-35s over Scotland' in the subject box. He wasn't as careful as he would normally be on the Internet, but that was the point. He wanted to force Primakov's hand, get himself out of the country as soon as possible. Dhar wouldn't wait for him for ever.

After he was done, he glanced at his watch. Lakshmi had asked him on a date. The invitation bore all the hallmarks of a trap, but he had to go. He hadn't seen her since the Madurai débâcle. He just hoped nobody would get hurt.

Fielding stood at the window of his office and looked towards Westminster. A tugboat was towing a string of refuse barges down-river. He knew it was a gamble, but he couldn't afford anyone to suspect that Marchant's actions, whatever he was up to, had been sanctioned by him. If the Russians detected Fielding's touch on the tiller, however light, they would never let Marchant meet Dhar. And that remained the most important thing. Fielding was convinced that only Marchant could stop the
jihad
that was soon to be unleashed on Britain.

He had wanted to talk to Myers more, discover what he had been asked to do, just as he had wanted to ask Marchant about the test that Primakov had set him. But he couldn't. He didn't trust himself. If Marchant or Myers had told him, he feared a part of him would have demanded action: a visceral response honed over thirty-five years of public duty. That was what he did, why he had signed up. There was also the very real possibility that there might be other Hugo Prentices in the Service, listening in, reporting back to Moscow.

Instead, he had put his faith in Marchant, trusted him to defect responsibly and in isolation. He wasn't sure why he trusted anyone any more. He had relied on Prentice too much since Stephen Marchant's departure and death. In some ways, his old friend had been a hopeless choice of ally. Prentice had never been interested in fighting Foreign Office battles or playing Legoland politics. But it was what he represented that had appealed to Fielding: an old-fashioned field man who had repeatedly turned down promotion in favour of gathering intelligence. Prentice had been immune to legal guidelines on human rights, tedious departmental circulars on personal-development needs, blue-sky meetings and resource planning. Mistresses had appealed more than marriage, rented digs more than mortgages. He had just wanted to get on with his job. Nothing more, nothing less. Except that it hadn't been as simple as that.

‘Ian for you,' Ann Norman said over the intercom.

The next moment, Ian Denton was standing in the middle of Fielding's office, looking a new man.

‘Good news and bad news,' his deputy said, louder than usual. ‘All our old SovBloc networks appear to be intact. Out of some perverse sense of loyalty, Prentice only seems to have burned Polish agents.'

Everyone knew that Denton had never liked Prentice.

‘He did it for the money, Ian, not to skewer us,' he said, unsure why he was defending Prentice. But Denton's triumphant tone was irritating. He preferred his deputy when he was bitter and quiet.

‘Does that make it any better?'

‘Less personal. The bad news?' Fielding knew it would be Marchant. His line manager had filed a formal complaint about him earlier in the day, citing poor hours and a disruptive attitude. HR had added a note on his file asking if Marchant was drinking again. All was going to plan.

‘We're getting word of a major security incident in the Outer Hebrides. The JIC is being convened, and we're being blamed. Oh yes, and Spiro's back.'