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  ‘I’d be grateful if you could pass on my objections to COBRA,’ Fielding said. Denton’s decision surprised him. His deputy should have rung him first. ‘Salim Dhar doesn’t do things by halves. He didn’t try to assassinate the American Ambassador in Delhi, he pointed his rifle at the President. He thinks big. Before we take out the jet, it’s worth considering the payload it might be carrying. There’s a chance Dhar’s armed with a nuclear weapon, or possibly a dirty bomb, which would rather spoil the Gloucestershire countryside if we shoot him down. The Russians are behind this, remember. The difficulty of sourcing radioactive isotopes isn’t a factor here.’

  ‘Are you saying we should just hold fire and watch while a state-sponsored terrorist flies around Britain attacking targets at will?’

  ‘Of course I’m bloody not. But we need to establish contact with Marchant first, before we risk triggering a major nuclear incident.’

  102

  ‘There it is,’ Marchant said, looking down at the circular silver roof of GCHQ, shimmering like an urban crop circle on the outskirts of Cheltenham. Its grassy centre was surrounded by the ring of the main building and, further out, radials of parked cars. The town was to the east, and the M5 to the west. It had taken two minutes to fly the twenty miles from Fairford. For a moment, Marchant thought the building would make an excellent substitute for Wimbledon’s Centre Court.

  ‘So this is the place that has led the global hunt for me and many of my brothers,’ Dhar said. ‘It is smaller than I thought.’

  Marchant was thinking fast now, measuring opportunities against risks. His priority was to persuade Dhar not to drop a dirty bomb on a densely populated area. But it was also evident that Dhar was willing to consider working for MI6. This was a hope that Marchant had held onto ever since he had first met Dhar in India more than a year ago, when he had found out they were half-brothers. It was why he had travelled to Morocco, chased leads into the High Atlas, flown to Madurai and faked his defection to Russia. And it was why Nikolai Primakov had died in a draughty hangar in Kotlas. He owed it to his father’s old friend to turn Dhar.

  The risks of running him would be considerable, not least the problem of London’s relationship with Washington, which would want his head more than ever after the attack at Fairford. Dhar would never stop waging his war against America. If he did choose to share information with Britain, spare the land of his father from the full wrath of his jihad, the rest of the world must never know.

  But would Dhar’s stock have risen after taking out the US Air Force’s pride and joy at an air show? It was brave and spectacular, in a Top Gun sort of way, but not exactly another 9/11. If Dhar was to be an effective British asset, he would have to do more. Which was why Marchant was desperately trying to think through the implications of an attack on GCHQ.

  A dirty bomb dropped into the middle of the doughnut would partially disable the facility for months, if not years, and would be a massive propaganda victory for jihadis everywhere. Air filters and life-support systems in the underground computer halls were designed to ensure that basic services continued in the event of a surface nuclear attack, but the disruption to the offices above ground would still be considerable. Caesium was particularly difficult to clean off metal surfaces such as the building’s aluminium roof.

  Then there was the population of Cheltenham to consider. It was too late to evacuate the town, even if it was possible. The panic as people fled after an attack would cause chaos as well as deaths; and then there would be those who died later from radiation-induced cancer.

  ‘A conventional thousand-pound bomb would do it,’ Marchant said. It seemed that it had been Dhar’s plan to drop the standard LGB on Fairford and the dirty bomb on Cheltenham: one for the SVR, one for himself, both sides happy. Marchant had talked him out of the first; now he had to do the same with GCHQ.

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Give you front-page headlines around the world and destroy much of the building.’

  ‘But I hate this place, and the people who work there,’ Dhar said, banking the plane around to the south. ‘They are the foot-soldiers of Echelon. Do you know how it feels to be hunted day and night, searching the skies for satellites and drones, not knowing if you can breathe at night for fear of being heard?’

  ‘You tricked them easily enough about your location in North Waziristan,’ Marchant said. He was surprised to hear Dhar namecheck Echelon, the Western computer network that sorted and analysed captured signals traffic. The hunted had finally found the hunter.

  ‘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.

  103

  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 fi
nally 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.

  104

  ‘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?’

  ‘The helicopter that found Marchant reported nobody else in the water. The entire area continues to be searched as we speak, but so far it’s as if Dhar never existed.’

  Fielding was lying, of course. He had no choice. According to Marchant’s debrief, the SVR had arranged for a trawler to be in the area. It had taken it a few minutes to find Dhar, as the plane had fallen short of the agreed ejection zone, but by the time the search-and-rescue helicopter had arrived, Dhar was on the trawler and heading out towards the Irish Sea.

  105

  Marchant still had a sore back from the Zvezda ejection seat, but otherwise he felt fine as he waited in one of the debriefing rooms for Fielding to return for a second visit. At Marchant’s request, the helicopter had taken him to the Fort, MI6’s training facility at Gosport, after picking him up from the Bristol Channel. The pilot had initially objected, but it was eventually agreed after some calls had been put through to Whitehall. Marchant had been given a physical check-up, then allowed to rest in one of the old rooms overlooking the sea, where he had studied as a new recruit with Leila.

  As Marchant had explained to Fielding, he had thought Dhar was dead when he first spotted him in the water, a hundred yards away. He had released himself from his parachute and swum over to him, dreading what he might find. A dead Dhar suited America, but not Britain. But Dhar was fine, if a little groggy. Marchant had doubted whether the trawler would show up, but a forty-foot vessel registered to St Ives was soon approaching from the south-west.

  ‘For a few moments, I thought I was going to drown,’ Dhar had said.

  ‘I know the feeling,’ Marchant had replied. When he had first hit the sea and water had filled his nostrils, memories of being waterboarded had come flooding back.

  ‘You know I cannot take you with me,’ Dhar said.

  ‘I’m not sure I’m invited,’ Marchant replied, glancing at the approaching trawler. They were both shivering, speaking slowly as they trod water. ‘Thanks, by the way.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For letting me come along. And for not destroying Cheltenham. Will the Russians be happy to see you?’

  ‘No. Georgia’s drunken generals will still try to impress America. But it is time for me to move on. Islam is sometimes useful to Russia, but mostly it is a threat.’

  ‘And you never did get to see Tarlton.’

  ‘Next time, perhaps.’

  ‘How will you make contact? The storytellers of Marrakech?’

  Dhar smiled at Marchant. ‘You know me too well. My taxi is here.’

  Marchant swam away as the trawler drew near. He wanted to be at a safe distance in case the SVR had already concluded that he wasn’t such a committed defector after all.

  ‘Our father, he would have approved,’ Marchant called out, hoping that Dhar could still hear him. ‘Family business.’

  Now, as he heard someone approaching the debriefing room at Gosport, Marchant was certain that he had turned Dhar. Last time, after India, he had hoped in vain.

  It was Fielding who knocked and appeared in the doorway.

  ‘I’ve brought someone along to see you,’ he said, slipping away as Lakshmi Meena entered the room.

  ‘Is your arm OK?’ Marchant asked as they embraced. Her wrist was in plaster, and her hug was not quite as warm as his.

  ‘I’m fine. How about you? I went by your flat, brought you some clean clothes.’

  ‘Thanks. Was the door open?’ They both smiled. Then she kissed him gently on the lips.

  ‘I found this, too. It had been delivered. I thought it might be important. The rest of your post was just bills.’

  She held up a padded envelope, addressed to him in unfamiliar handwriting. Marchant looked at it, then put it on a table to one side.

  ‘How’s Spiro?’

  ‘Mad at me for not preventing your so-called defection.’

  ‘Even though I stopped him killing your Defense Secretary and his generals
?’

  ‘You still took down a $155-million Raptor. The media lapped that up.’

  ‘I hope they’re keeping me out of it.’

  ‘It’s been agreed by London and Washington to airbrush you from the story. It was getting kind of hard to explain.’

  ‘But it was a two-seater plane.’

  ‘The media are reporting a bold strike at the West by Salim Dhar and a jihadi brother.’

  ‘Half right, at least about the brother.’

  ‘You did well to stop him. I don’t suppose you have any idea where he is now?’

  ‘Is that you asking, or Spiro?’

  ‘Most of the Western world.’

  Marchant hoped that one day he would be able to tell her that Dhar had been turned, that Britain now had an asset at the heart of the global jihad.

  ‘Is his mother safe? Shushma?’ At least he could talk to Lakshmi about her.

  ‘She’s fine. Spiro handed her over to MI6 when we landed back at Brize Norton. That was always the deal with Fielding. He wants a word with you on his own, by the way. I’ll get him.’

  ‘Will you stay after that? Please?’

  ‘Is a graduate of the Farm allowed to stay at the Fort?’

  ‘I’m sure it could be arranged, in the interests of a special relationship.’

  Two minutes later, Fielding and Marchant had stepped outside the debriefing room, leaving Lakshmi on her own, and were walking along the perimeter fence that overlooked the sea. A warm wind blew in off the water, lifting strands of Fielding’s thinning hair. It was greyer than Marchant remembered.

  ‘You did well,’ Fielding said. ‘It was a tough call to make about GCHQ, but the right one. Dhar’s value has soared on the international jihadi markets. The chatrooms were ecstatic after his attempt on the President’s life in Delhi. This time they’re beside themselves. They never thought someone could strike at the heart of Western intelligence.’