Pandemic

In the cockpit, the two pilots pulled oxygen masks over their faces as they struggled to regain some semblance of control.

‘Mayday, Mayday, Mayday,’ the co-pilot shouted automatically into his microphone, before again hearing the tone in his earphones and realizing nobody would be able to hear his transmission.

At fifteen thousand feet, the captain managed to get the aircraft straight, and more or less level. ‘Closest land?’ he demanded.

The co-pilot already had the navigation chart unfolded. Using his out-spread fingers as a crude measuring tool, he calculated distances. ‘Crete,’ he said. ‘Come right. Steer zero two zero. Distance about fifty miles to the southern coast, around eighty to the airport at Irakleio.’

‘If we can keep this thing in the air that long,’ the captain muttered, as he cautiously eased the control column to the right, depressed the right rudder pedal and reduced power slightly on the starboard engine. The flight controls felt soggy and vague, and the gentle turn cost him another three hundred feet of altitude. ‘And if whoever’s flying those fighters lets us, more to the point.’

The co-pilot’s eyes scanned the instruments in front of him. Red and orange warning lights studded the panel, and yellow and red captions had erupted everywhere.

‘The fire’s out,’ he said. ‘That’s the good news. The bad news is we’re losing fuel. We’ll be tanks dry in about thirty minutes. The bigger problem is that hydraulic fluid’s pumping out of the hole where the port engine used to be. Flight controls are heavy and mushy, and that’ll only get worse, and we’ll probably have to do a wheels-up flapless landing.’

‘If we get that far, I’ll be happy to. Tell our passengers what’s happened,’ the captain said.

As the co-pilot selected cabin broadcast, a stream of tracer shells screamed past the left side of the cockpit, and both men felt the impact as they crashed into the port wing. Panels ripped and buckled, the aileron and flaps were torn away, and then the last eight feet of the wing lifted upwards and backwards before ripping off and tumbling away behind the aircraft.

And then there was nothing anyone could do. The Learjet lost virtually all lift from the mangled wing, turned inexorably to port and began to spin rapidly down towards the sea nearly three miles below. The two men in the cockpit fought it all the way, and managed to straighten the aircraft for a few brief seconds at just under a thousand feet. But they both knew they were going nowhere but down.

‘Brace for impact!’

As the glittering surface of the Mediterranean rushed towards them, both men saw a dark shape out to starboard, descending with them.

The captain shook his head in disbelief. ‘That’s—’ he started to say, and then the Lear impacted the water at a little over one hundred and eighty miles an hour.

At that speed, hitting water is pretty much the same as hitting concrete. The remains of the left wing and the nose of the aircraft struck almost simultaneously, the impact killing the men in the cockpit instantly. The aircraft fell onto its back, filled rapidly with water, and sank. Bits and pieces of debris floated up to the surface to mark its grave – but no survivors or bodies appeared.

The fighter aircraft that had followed the Learjet in its final plunge circled the impact site for five minutes, the two-man crew scanning the surface carefully, the pilot’s finger hovering over the firing button of the cannon. Finally satisfied, he made his weapons safe, pushed the throttles forward and climbed rapidly away to the west.

Chapter 1

Present day – Monday

Southern Adriatic Sea

Paul Richter eased the control column of the Sea Harrier FA2 gently to the left, then pushed it further, turning the bank into a slow barrel roll. He levelled the aircraft for less than a second, then turned sharply to port and accelerated to catch up with the other Harrier, which was already opening to the south-east. He glanced down briefly at the surface of the Adriatic glinting far below, and waited for the Senior Pilot’s inevitable rebuke.

‘Tiger Two, Leader. Stop buggering about and stay in formation.’

‘Sorry, Splot,’ Richter said. ‘Just checking I could still do it.’

The two Sea Harriers steadied on a heading of one two zero and continued their climb to thirty-one thousand feet, holding four hundred and twenty knots or about eight miles a minute. They were in battle pair formation, Richter holding position about half a mile to the right and behind Tiger One. It was his fifth Combat Air Patrol sortie since his temporary attachment to 800 Squadron, embarked on board HMS Invincible, for continuation training.

Richard Simpson, the head of the Foreign Operations Executive and Richter’s unloved superior, had bitched about it long and hard. However, Richter was still technically on the Emergency List and in the Royal Naval Reserve, and had argued that he was required to keep up his flying skills. If there had been a good – or even a faintly convincing – reason why he shouldn’t have gone, Simpson would certainly have used it. But everything was quiet in London, and Richter had just been sitting in his office moving paper from one tray to another and getting increasingly irritated, so Simpson had reluctantly, and somewhat suddenly, consented.

The previous evening a signal classified Secret, and marked for Richter’s eyes only, had been handed to him as he’d emerged from the dining room, and had explained exactly why Simpson had changed his mind.

‘Tigers, Alpha Sierra. Snap one eight zero. Two bogeys bearing one nine zero at sixty, heading north. Low.’ The voice of the observer in the Airborne Surveillance and Area Control Sea King Mark 7 was slightly distorted by his throat microphone, but perfectly understandable. The ASaC helicopter was positioned at about five thousand feet in a holding pattern some thirty miles ahead of the Invincible group.

‘Roger, Alpha Sierra. One eight zero.’

Richter followed Tiger One round in a tight starboard turn, rolled out heading south and began to descend, pushing the throttle forward as he adjusted the aircraft’s heading.

‘Tigers established on south. In the drop passing twenty-eight for fifteen.’

‘Roger, Tigers. Bogeys one eight five at forty-two. Low. Below five.’

Fifty miles to the north-west of Richter’s Sea Harrier, the Invincible group was heading south-east at a steady twelve knots through the Adriatic Sea, about seventy miles off the Italian Puglian coast, and approaching the end of a two-day ship-controlled exercise after an exhausting port visit to Trieste. Accompanying the Invincible were two Royal Fleet Auxiliary supply ships, one of them a tanker to cater for the carrier’s insatiable thirst for aviation fuel, and two frigates.

HMS Invincible, like her sister ships Illustrious and Ark Royal, is officially known as a Through-Deck Cruiser – a ‘CVS’. This somewhat bizarre appellation was forced on the Royal Navy by the political climate in the days when these vessels were constructed, after the word ‘carrier’ became unacceptable for a variety of reasons.

When the previous Ark Royal – the last ‘proper’ carrier belonging to the Royal Navy – had sailed into the scrapyard, the government of the day had decided, without apparently consulting anybody who might actually know what they were talking about, that in the future the Royal Navy’s Fleet Air Arm would only require helicopters. Protection against an enemy unsporting enough to use aircraft to attack a ship would become the sole responsibility of the Royal Air Force.

In theory, and back in the English Channel, this might have worked, but any credible blue-water navy has to carry organic fighter aircraft, and within a short time their lordships at the Admiralty had realized that the Invincible-class ships were almost ideally suited to the carriage of Harriers. The result was the Sea Harrier FRS1, which first flew in 1978. Following successful trials, Sea Harrier squadrons were formed and became the principal offensive weapon of the CVS.

The first practical test of the aircraft came in 1982, when Argentine forces invaded the Falkland Islands. A couple of dozen Sea Harriers flying from two small carriers – the Invincible and the ageing Hermes – were pitched against an air force that was vastly superior both technologically and numerically. The Argentinians fielded supersonic Super Etendards, Daggers and Mirage IIIs,