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.’
75
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.
76
‘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
77
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
