Jon Stock - Games Traitors Play

‘Welcome back, Frogfoot One. You’ve missed quite a party. Give me thirty more seconds before I’m on your six o’clock. I’m about to pull that Pugachev cobra we were talking about. One final treat to keep your generals sweet.’

Dhar heard the American, but chose to remain silent, just giving two more taps on the PTT switch to signal his assent. He was confident that everyone — the crowds, air-traffic control and the American pilot — would assume that his aircraft was the same one that had left the air show twenty minutes earlier. After all, SU-25s weren’t a common sight over the Cotswolds. To look at, it was identical — except that the weapons slung beneath its wings were not dummies. A few moments ago, he had held a brief conversation with the control tower at RAF Fairford. The exchange had passed without suspicion, their warm welcome back confirming that the switch of squawk codes had been successful. Dhar had never met the brave Georgian pilot who had been recruited by the SVR. All he knew was that he had orders to ditch his plane and eject after passing him over the North Sea.

‘Frogfoot One, do you copy me?’ The American said. ‘I’m proceeding east to west along the display line, with all due respect to Viktor Pugachev. Watch and learn, Frogfoot.’

Dhar could see the Raptor in the far distance now, rearing its nose as it seemed to almost stall, exposing its underbelly. He flicked the weapons select switch on the stick, just as he had done countless times on the simulator with Sergei. Only this time it was for real. The Vympel under his left wing was a heat-seeking air-to-air missile that travelled at two and a half times the speed of sound. It was packed with a 7.25-kilogram warhead and had a maximum range of twenty-nine kilometres. Dhar was less than two kilometres away now, and closing. Minimum engagement range was three hundred metres. He looked across at the American aircraft, using his helmet-mounted sighting system to designate the target. And then he fired.

Marchant thought they had been hit when the missile scorched away from under the plane’s left wing. Then he realised what was going on.

‘Jesus, Salim, what are you doing?’

‘Exploring the common ground.’

At first, the crowd assumed that the missile streaking across the sky was all part of the spectacular show, and a cheer went up. Major Brandon was less ecstatic. His heart missed a beat when an alarm in his cockpit warned that an incoming missile had locked on to the infra-red heat of his F-22’s exhaust. His first thought was that the aircraft’s flat vector nozzles were meant to disguise the heat. His second thought, honed in hours of training, was to deploy his Chemring flares, but he wasn’t carrying any because their use had been banned by the air show’s organisers. The last thought he ever had was that he was a sitting duck, nose stuck in the air and travelling at a hundred knots.

‘Frogfoot One?’ he said, a moment before the missile found its target, embedding itself deep within the left engine and then tearing it apart.

Dhar took the plane on a long sweeping arc away from the airfield, glancing down to his right at the plume of smoke rising from the runway.

‘Now we drop our first bomb.’

‘Salim, we’ve got to stop this!’ Marchant shouted. ‘We’re going to be shot down any minute. Every fighter in southern Britain will have been scrambled.’

‘Frogfoot One, please identify yourself,’ a voice from the control tower demanded on the military emergency frequency. Dhar flicked off the radio. He could see the flames of the Raptor now, the wreckage on the runway, as he continued to bank around to the east. He thought of Sergei, the photos he had shown him of his own crash, the carnage as his MiG had skidded through the crowds, carving families apart. The Raptor had broken up over the runway, causing little collateral damage. But Dhar knew that what he was about to do now would not be so precise. The hospitality marquees were to the left of the runway, just before the control tower. The American military had assembled en masse in the largest tent, entertaining their Georgian counterparts. Enemies didn’t get more legitimate.

‘Tell me the target,’ Marchant said, desperate to engage Dhar. The aircraft had levelled out now, and was about to begin a low approach from the east.

‘The Georgian government is converting their country into a Christian one, turning their back on our Muslim brothers to appease America.’

‘Are they here? The Georgians?’

‘In the marquee next to the control tower. Here to buy F-16s from the Americans.’

So that was why they had flown to Fairford. There was a logic to Dhar, a rationale, however dark, that demanded Marchant’s respect, if not his understanding. He knew that neither the SVR nor Georgia’s Muslim population was keen on the country’s realignment with America. Had Dhar done enough already in the eyes of other jihadis to cool the relationship? Marchant looked down through the canopy. The SU-25’s cockpit visibility was not great, but he could make out a row of stalls, packed with people, immediately behind the hospitality marquees.

‘Don’t do it, Salim. It’s too crowded. Too many innocent lives will be lost.’

Marchant knew he had to keep talking, try to sow seeds of doubt. Despite his self-assurance, Dhar would be questioning his own actions. Marchant had read enough intelligence reports from Guantanamo. Even the hardest jihadis deliberated about the legitimacy of targets, wrestled with how to determine the innocent.

‘The dirty bomb is not for now,’ Dhar said, flicking the weapons select switch on the stick. He opted for the conventional LGB and locked onto the marquee with his gunsight, letting the Klyon laser range-finder retain the target as he approached. Then he closed his eyes and thought again about his father. Deep down, below the layers of prayer and wishful thinking, he knew that Marchant had spoken the truth. It had been too much to hope for the Chief of MI6 to betray the West. At least, in his father’s anti-American stance, there had been some evidence of their shared blood. Stephen Marchant would have approved of the swaggering Raptor’s destruction, the silencing of the hysterical commentator and the incessant rock music.

‘This is not what our father would have wanted,’ Marchant said, scanning the skies. ‘You’ve made your point, given America a bloody nose, screwed the arms deal. Now let’s get out of here.’

Dhar was determined to release the bomb as the plane flew fast along the display line. He had rehearsed it so many times on the simulator in Kotlas and above the ranges of Archangel with Sergei. Please, if you can spare the lives of twenty-three civilians, then do it. For me, for the Bird . Innocent lives would be lost, but the military target was legitimate. Generals, Georgian and American, chests blooming with medal ribbons, plotting their next assault on the Muslim world.

But as he looked down at the marquee, his mind surging with thoughts of Sergei, his father, Daniel, he pulled up at the last moment into a steep climb, the G-forces pushing him back into his seat as if in reprimand for the destruction he had been about to unleash.

‘If I am to retain any credibility,’ Dhar said quietly, as he levelled out at one thousand feet and turned towards the north-west, ‘I must go through with my final target.’

Fielding had watched with horror from the lay-by as the Raptor was engulfed in a fireball and fell from the sky. His thoughts were with the pilot, but he was also trying to calculate the damage to Britain’s relationship with America should it ever be known that Daniel Marchant, a serving MI6 officer, was with Salim Dhar in the cockpit of the other jet, as he now suspected was the case.