Jon Stock - Games Traitors Play

‘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.’