Jon Stock - Games Traitors Play

‘That was the fools at Fort Meade. They are easier to shake off. The people down there have been on my tail for years. I will never have a better opportunity.’

‘We’ll be shot out of the sky any second now, trust me. But if they know we’ve got a dirty bomb on board, they might just think twice before firing.’ Marchant paused. ‘Drop the conventional bomb on GCHQ.’

Dhar seemed to hesitate, long enough to give Marchant encouragement. It was so frustrating to be sitting in front of him and not face-to-face. A conventional bomb was the lesser of two evils. Marchant knew that the GCHQ building had been built to withstand a plane crashing into its roof. The glass was bombproof, too. With a bit of luck, a thousand pounds of explosive dropped into the central garden would cause only minimal damage. Again, it was about finding common ground.

Dhar would get his headlines, and it might buy them some time to escape, although the SVR’s exit strategy did not inspire confidence. The plan was to head south-west after Cheltenham and eject in the Bristol Channel, where Dhar would be picked up by a Russian-manned trawler. Marchant would have to make his own way in the water.

‘I need to use the radio, tell traffic control we’re carrying a dirty bomb,’ Marchant said, but he was interrupted by an alarm signal in both cockpits. The aircraft’s internal and external fuel tanks were almost empty. ‘And I need to ring my friend at GCHQ, get everyone to move away from the windows.’

‘No warnings.’

Before Marchant could argue, Dhar had banked again and was flying straight towards the building.

‘I need to call traffic control,’ Marchant insisted.

‘Afterwards,’ Dhar said, as he locked his gunsight onto the grassy heart of GCHQ.

Paul Myers heard the jet overhead, and thought its engine sounded different from the Typhoons and Tornados that were a regular sight in the skies above Gloucestershire. He glanced up as he walked past the smokers’ pagoda and headed back into the main building, but the sky was bright and he couldn’t see anything. Besides, he was still hungry, and he needed to buy something else to eat from Ritazza.

A moment later, he was lifted up and thrown through the open door with enormous force. His crumpled body landed in a heap on the smooth tiles of the Street as the sound of broken glass cascaded behind him and thoughts of Chernobyl faded from his mind.

Marchant didn’t know until later whether the bomb dropped on GCHQ was conventional or radioactive. Events moved fast after Dhar banked the aircraft towards the Bristol Channel. Amid the noise of the fuel alarm, Marchant persuaded him to switch the r/t back on, and a warning came over the emergency military frequency almost immediately that their aircraft was about to be shot down.

‘We have a dirty bomb on board!’ Marchant barked back in reply, looking around frantically as he tried to spot the RAF jets that he assumed must be approaching. He hoped to God he was right. Even if Dhar had already released it, the threat might save their lives. ‘Repeat, we are carrying a thousand-pound radioactive dispersal device.’

The pilots of the two Typhoons closing in on the SU-25 from the west heard Marchant’s words. Surprised by the English accent, they referred upwards to Air Command for confirmation that they had permission to destroy the aircraft. They added that the SU-25 was losing speed and altitude, and appeared to be about to ditch in the Bristol Channel. After a brief pause, during which Air Command consulted COBRA, the order came back to hold fire. Marcus Fielding had finally managed to get through to the Chief of the Defence Staff.

In the event, there was no need for the Typhoons to deploy their missiles. Dhar had been battling to keep the aircraft airborne, and it had now become a lost cause. He had managed to reach the Bristol Channel, but they were a mile short of the planned rendezvous with the Russian trawler.

‘Prepare to eject,’ Dhar said calmly. Marchant realised that his ejection seat was controlled by Dhar. He could have removed him from the plane at any time. It gave him hope that Cheltenham had been spared too.

‘I promise I’ll take care of your mother,’ Marchant said, as he closed his eyes and braced himself.

‘Are you telling me that Daniel Marchant should be regarded as a hero?’ Jim Spiro said incredulously, looking around the table. The Joint Intelligence Committee was at full strength, with senior intelligence officials from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Britain and America in attendance.

‘Salim Dhar was on a mission to Britain to destroy three targets,’ Fielding began. ‘The F-22 Raptor because it was a symbol of American military might; the delegation of Georgian and US military personnel as a thank-you to the Russians for protecting him; and GCHQ as part of his own personal crusade.’

‘And he achieved two of the three,’ said Spiro. ‘Remind me why exactly we should be thanking Marchant?’ He nodded towards the director of GCHQ on his left. ‘I’m not sure Cheltenham will be putting a photo of him in their hall of fame. If any halls are still standing.’

Fielding had hoped he could let Spiro down gently, as relations with America had to continue, but it was hard to resist giving him a bumpy landing.

‘We believe Dhar was carrying two air-to-air missiles, and two thousand-pound laser-guided bombs. One of them was packed with radioactive caesium-137. I don’t need to remind anyone here of the devastation that would have been caused by a dirty bomb dropped either on the crowd at Fairford or on a town the size of Cheltenham. I’ve just come back from a debriefing with Marchant, and he confirmed that it was always Dhar’s intention to drop the dirty bomb on GCHQ — a personal bête noire of his. As we all know, the thousand-pound bomb that struck the building was, thankfully, a conventional one, and there was only minimal structural damage and one life lost.’

‘How can we be sure the bomb he didn’t drop was dirty?’ Spiro asked.

‘Royal Navy divers have found wreckage of the SU-25 in the Bristol Channel, and are in the process of stabilising the unexploded ordnance. They’ve confirmed the presence of caesium-137. We’re lucky it wasn’t detonated by the impact of the crash.’

‘So why did Dhar bother to drop anything?’ the director of GCHQ asked. ‘He’d clearly had a change of heart.’

‘Marchant talked him out of the dirty option, but failed to persuade him to abandon the whole idea,’ Fielding replied. He had to be careful what he said at this point. It was fair to say that Marchant might have been able to prevent the conventional attack too, but had been mindful of Dhar’s jihadi credentials. A discredited Dhar would have been of no use to anyone. Nobody in the room, not even Harriet Armstrong, knew that Dhar had finally been turned, and had the potential to be the biggest asset MI6 had ever run.

‘So what you’re saying is that Dhar only achieved one of his original three targets,’ Armstrong said, seemingly supportive.

‘Correct. And for that we must thank Daniel Marchant.’

‘It’s all very well you guys patting each other on the back,’ Spiro said. ‘I’ve got to explain to Washington why the most advanced jet fighter ever built was taken out by a lousy lump of old Russian hardware, flown by the world’s most-wanted jihadi and a rogue MI6 agent.’

‘You can tell them that if it hadn’t been for the presence of an MI6 agent in the cockpit — and, for the record, Daniel Marchant is no rogue — the damage would have been incalculably worse.’

‘There’s only one thing that’s going to make my President happy, and that’s the scalp of Salim Dhar. Are we any closer to knowing how he disappeared?’