Pandemic pr-2

by James Barrington

  For exercises, the Royal Navy had decided that AMRAAMs made things just too easy, so most aircraft employed on CAP sorties still used Sidewinders only. The weapon has a maximum engage range of only five miles, and to obtain a kill against another Sea Harrier, with identical performance and armament, is a true test of flying skill and combat ability.

  ‘Bogeys one seven five at thirty. Still low. Vector one nine zero.’

  ‘One nine zero, Tiger One.’

  The two fighters were heading directly towards the two inbound aircraft – another pair of 800 Squadron Sea Harriers playing at being bad guys – with a combined closing speed of well over one thousand miles an hour. The Sea King observer, known somewhat unflatteringly as a ‘bagman’ after the shape of the inflatable fabric dome covering the Sea King’s modified Searchwater radar that dangled from the side of the aircraft like a large grey pustule, was vectoring the CAP aircraft to a location above and behind the two targets.

  ‘Tigers, fence out.’

  Richter clicked his transmit button once to acknowledge, and immediately began preparing his aircraft for combat. On a pylon beneath the starboard wing of his Sea Harrier was slung a dummy Sidewinder missile pod. Externally almost indistinguishable from a genuine ’winder, the pod contains an infra-red seeker head identical to that in the live missile, but lacks the rocket motor and explosive warhead.

  Richter enabled coolant flow through the infra-red head, which would allow it to detect the heat signature of the target aircraft. He switched on the Guardian radar warning receiver, which would tell him if the attacking aircraft had obtained a missile lock on him, then pre-set the Blue Vixen radar to Air Combat mode. The agreed EMCON – emission control – tactics for the sortie required both Tigers to remain radar silent until almost within missile acquisition range of their targets.

  The two last preparations were probably the most important. When engaged in high-energy manoeuvring, the airflow through the huge inlets of the Rolls-Royce Pegasus engine can get badly disrupted, and in some cases the compressor may stall or surge and effectively stop. The Harrier glides like the proverbial brick – pretty much straight down – so Richter selected the ‘combat switch’ to engage the short-duration high-power setting.

  Finally, he checked his anti-g suit. In hard turns pilots’ bodies are subjected to very high stresses, and if their anti-g suits don’t function properly they can black out, with predictably unfortunate – and sometimes fatal – results.

  ‘Bogeys one seven five at fifteen. Low. Standby hard port turn.’

  ‘Roger.’

  ‘Tigers, turn now, now, now. Roll-out heading zero one zero.’

  Richter grunted with the increasing g-force as he hauled the Sea Harrier around in a tight left-hand diving turn. He felt the bladder in the waist section of his ‘speed jeans’ – the anti-g trousers – inflate rapidly as the g-force increased. It felt like a slow but powerful kick in the stomach, but prevented the blood in his head and torso from plummeting down to his feet and causing a blackout or g-loc.

  ‘Tigers steady on zero one zero, passing twelve for five in the drop.’

  ‘Roger, Tigers. Bogeys zero one five at eight.’

  ‘Tigers, radiate.’

  Richter reached down, switched on the Blue Vixen and scanned the display in front of him. ‘Tiger Two. Judy, Judy,’ he called immediately, the code word signifying that he had acquired the two targets on radar.

  ‘Roger that. Leader’s taking west, Tiger Two take east.’

  Richter’s target – the easterly of the two contacts – was still over six miles in front of him, just outside the Sidewinder’s kill envelope. The missile’s infra-red seeker head is slaved to the radar antenna: in other words, wherever the radar looks, that’s where the missile looks. Already he could hear the faint growl in his headset that told him the ’winder had detected the target Harrier, but he was still too far out of range to engage it.

  Richter watched the contacts on radar. As he expected, as soon as the pilots of the ‘attacking’ Sea Harriers detected the Blue Vixen radar transmissions on their Guardian sets, they split, breaking left and right and climbing. In air combat, height and speed are vital: an aircraft caught at low level is denied freedom of movement and is often an easy target.

  ‘Bogeys splitting. Independent pursuit.’

  Richter pulled the Harrier hard round to starboard in a 5g turn. His opponent was passing his level in a steep climb – the Sea Harrier FA2 climbs at fifty thousand feet a minute – and turning rapidly, just under six miles in front of him. The advantage Richter had was that he was still behind his assigned target, which was where he intended to stay until he could engage it with the Sidewinder.

  But the other Harrier pilot was having none of it. Realizing that a CAP aircraft was on his tail, he jinked to the left and started a tight diving turn that could bring him up behind and below Richter’s aircraft.

  Richter saw the manoeuvre, stopped his turn, reversed direction and hauled the Harrier into an even tighter turn to port, following his target, then rolled inverted and powered downwards towards the sea eight thousand feet below. At four thousand feet he forced the Harrier back into a climb. Despite the anti-g suit, Richter felt the blackness of g-loc creeping up on him as he pulled over 6g. The g-force diminished rapidly as the Harrier climbed. Adrenalin pumping, Richter scanned the Blue Vixen scope.

  Intellectually, he knew that it was all a game, a kind of maritime Top Gun, that the other pilot was from 800 Squadron and that they’d enjoyed a drink together in the Wardroom the previous evening, but in the cockpit it felt different. It felt real, and he reacted exactly as if the other aircraft had been a Russian MiG or a Libyan Sukhoi. The ‘enemy’ Harrier had rolled out heading east, four miles in front of Richter and three thousand feet above.

  ‘Got you, you bastard,’ Richter muttered as he closed with the bogey. The growl in his earphones increased markedly. He checked the head-up display, looking at the voltmeter to confirm the Sidewinder really had locked on to the other Sea Harrier’s exhaust and not the other obvious heat source – the sun – and waited for the diamond symbol to appear in the display.

  The target aircraft started a tight right-hand turn, but by then it didn’t matter. A final check that the bogey was within the missile’s minimum and maximum engage ranges, and release. ‘Tiger Two, Fox Two,’ Richter called. A Sidewinder kill.

  ‘Tiger Two, good kill. Tigers, terminate, terminate,’ the Sea King bagman called. ‘Pigeons for Mother three five zero at sixty-two. Listen out for Snakes this frequency.’

  ‘Alpha Sierra, roger. Break, break. Tiger Two, Leader. Roll out north at thirty.’

  Richter clicked his transmit button to acknowledge, then steadied the Harrier on north, continued the climb and levelled at thirty thousand feet. He scanned his radar, checking for both Tiger One and the other two Harriers. As soon as he identified the Senior Pilot’s aircraft, he took up station in battle formation again.

  ‘Tiger Two, Snake One.’

  ‘Tiger Two.’

  ‘Beginner’s luck, I’d call it, Spook.’

  Richter grinned behind his oxygen mask. ‘You know my motto, Randy,’ he replied. ‘Any time, anywhere.’

  ‘Yeah, right.’

  Richter glanced out to starboard, where Snake One had just appeared at his level. The other pilot waggled his Harrier’s wings in salute, then moved slightly ahead. Beyond Snake One, Richter could see Snake Two taking up station.

  Richter checked the fuel state and his aircraft position on the NAVHARS inertial navigation system. The time was just about right, and he was in pretty much the right place. He made a final visual check that he was in clear air, pulled back on the control column – the classic ‘convert excess speed to height’ manoeuvre when presented with any kind of an emergency – and simultaneously throttled back so that the other three Harriers shot ahead of him. Then he took a deep breath and transmitted.

  ‘Pan, pan, pan. This is Tiger Two with a rough-running
engine. Request diversion to the nearest shore station.’

  Between Gavdopoúla and Gávdos, Eastern Mediterranean

  Spiros Aristides had spent his entire working life as a professional diver, primarily in the Aegean, and in retirement he still enjoyed – albeit outside the law – what had once been his livelihood. Scuba diving in Crete is technically illegal, unless the diver holds a permit from the Department of Antiquities, but Spiros had never been particularly concerned about the legality or otherwise of what he was doing. He always carried his diving gear in a couple of sacks, just in case there were any prying eyes trying to monitor his activities, but in the eight years he’d been living on Crete he’d never so much as caught a glimpse of a policeman in the village where he resided, let alone a man from the ministry.

  Most weekdays he left his small house in Kandíra on the south-west coast, packed his equipment into his eighteen-foot workboat and headed off into the Mediterranean. Not much to look at, with faded blue and red paintwork and a bunch of old car tyres acting as fenders, the Nicos was nevertheless a well-equipped diving tender, fitted with a Gardner diesel engine, radar set, echo-sounder and even a Global Positioning System unit.

  Spiros had been given the last piece of equipment by one of his many nephews as a birthday present, which was the only reason it was still attached to the bulkhead in the tiny wheelhouse. He had never used it, and he never would. He knew the waters around Crete the way a gardener knows his lawn, and almost never even glanced at a chart. To have utilized the small digital display of the GPS would have been, for Spiros, an admission of defeat.

  Although Crete is one of the most visited holiday islands in the Mediterranean, attracting more than two million tourists every year, it has never been particularly popular with devotees of recreational diving. Quite apart from the prospect of a fine of up to one hundred and fifty thousand pounds if caught diving without a permit, the island of Crete is the top of a submerged mountain and, although there are excellent bathing beaches, around most of its coast the seabed slopes rapidly away, plunging precipitously to depths of hundreds of feet.

  If Crete isn’t a popular diving destination, the islands of Gavdopoúla and Gávdos are even less so. The only above-surface projections of another seamount lying some twenty miles to the south of Crete, the islands are tiny – Gávdos is the biggest at about five miles long by three wide – and, as with Crete itself, the seabed slopes rapidly to depths in excess of a thousand feet. Gávdos has a population of around fifty, while Gavdopoúla is unoccupied apart from a bunch of goats.

  But between Gavdopoúla and Gávdos lies a saddle, a section of seabed that almost joins the two islands and lies at an average depth of only one hundred feet below the surface of the Mediterranean. And it was there that Aristides had found the wreckage.

  When he first spotted the case, he didn’t realize what it was. Caught in the powerful beam of the underwater torch, the object swayed slightly, almost imperceptibly, from side to side. A bulky, squared shape festooned with brown and green marine growth, it rocked very gently with the slight current. But it caught his attention because of where it was, rather than what it was.

  Visibility underwater in the Mediterranean is usually good, but at a depth of eighty-five feet the light is grey and weak, and Spiros Aristides could see clearly only what his torch beam illuminated. And what it illuminated puzzled him. He lowered the beam and again played it around what was left of the aircraft’s cabin.

  Aristides knew little about aircraft but even he could recognize an executive jet when he saw one. Or what once had been an executive jet.

  After he’d discovered the seat the previous afternoon, he’d guessed that there was more to find, but it had taken him all of three dives to locate the remains of the cabin. The section of wing, torn away from the fuselage, had been easy, one end embedded in the sand, the other pointing up towards the surface in mute entreaty. He’d found bits of unidentifiable twisted metal, and a long and heavy chunk of corroded steel and aluminium that he’d guessed was an engine, but it wasn’t until he looked among the rocks fifty metres to the south of where the wing lay that he’d found the cabin. And even then he’d nearly missed it.

  Covered in marine growth, it had looked pretty much like another rock, until Aristides’s trained eyes had spotted the three more or less regular shapes of what had once been windows along one side of it.

  Aristides had checked his chronometer before doing anything else, and realized any exploration of the wreckage would have to wait. He’d looped a rope through two adjacent holes in the fuselage and secured it with a loose knot, then tied the other end to one of his lifting bags. He’d partially filled the bag, using expelled air from his aqualung, enough to give it sufficient buoyancy to hang in the water some twenty feet above the wreck. That had acted as a marker on this, his next dive.

  The front of the fuselage had been ripped off, leaving a wide opening through which Aristides now peered. Bubbles from his exhaled breath foamed and swirled above his head, forming an irregular silvery mass in the centre of the cabin roof. There had once been six seats in the passenger compartment, but only five were still secured to its buckled floor. The sixth lay about two hundred metres away, tipped on its side on the seabed some ninety feet below the surface. That same seat, and its grisly occupant, was what Aristides had found first.

  Three shrunken, skeletal shapes peered impassively back at him from the seats they had now occupied for over thirty years. He rested the beam of his torch on them, one at a time. Their clothing had largely vanished, as had their flesh and the fabric of the seats they rested in. The two bodies closest to him had slumped down, but a third, towards the rear of the cabin, still sat unnaturally upright.

  Aristides crossed himself, then eased forward gently into the cabin, careful to avoid touching either of the first two bodies, until he could see the third one clearly. Then the reason for the corpse’s unnatural stance immediately became clear. A shard of metal, probably aluminium and apparently ripped from the fuselage of the aircraft itself, had speared through the back of the seat and was still lodged between two vertebrae of the corpse’s neck.

  Hanging suspended centrally amid what was left of the cabin, Aristides swung round in a complete circle, his eyes following the torch beam as he searched for anything of value or interest. He stopped the beam between two of the seat frames and focused it on a dark bulky shape squatting among the marine growth and debris covering the buckled floor of the cabin.

  Aristides moved carefully towards this object, transferred the torch to his left hand and then extended his right arm. He gave the thing an experimental prod, and it moved slightly across the floor. Then he pulled it towards him and studied it more closely. Made of what appeared to be rotting leather, it looked like the kind of bag usually carried by doctors.

  Putting the torch down carefully on the floor, and wedging it so that it illuminated the bag, Aristides pulled the heavy diving knife from its sheath strapped to his right calf. Holding the bag firmly with his left hand, he stabbed the knife into the side of it and then ripped it open. He tipped the bag onto its side and looked down in puzzlement as a cascade of corroded medical instruments tumbled out.

  Aristides mentally shrugged and transferred his attention to the object that caught his attention immediately he had peered into the cabin. Unlike the leather bag, this was bouncing gently and improbably against the ceiling of the aircraft cabin, rather than lying on the floor. That meant that it was either naturally buoyant or, more likely, waterproof and airtight.

  Picking up his torch again, Aristides reached for the object of his interest. Only then did he notice what appeared to be a small silvery tail dangling from it. As he peered more closely, he realized that this tail was actually a handcuff and immediately he recognized the bulky briefcase. The handcuff, which had presumably once been fastened around the wrist of one of the corpses below it, suggested that the case contained something valuable. Light, certainly, but valuable.

&nb
sp; Professionally conscious of the passage of time, Aristides checked his chronometer and backed out of the aircraft’s cabin, now holding the briefcase in his left hand. He wanted to try to identify the aircraft itself, if he could, before having to surface.

  Aristides secured the case to the line holding the lifting air bag, then swam back to the remains of the fuselage. He noticed what appeared to be part of a registration number visible near the rear end of the cabin, on the starboard side, and rubbed his gloved hand over it until he could make out the first letter. He couldn’t interpret any of the following digits until he’d scraped off some of the marine growth with his diving knife. That revealed three numbers which, together with the initial letter ‘N’ – Spiros instantly interpreted this as the Greek capital letter nu – he wrote on his waterproof pad. It looked to him as if there was another number, perhaps even two numbers, but it or they were indecipherable without shifting more growth.

  Aristides wondered if the registration would be repeated on the other side of the cabin, and swam around to check. But when he spotted the jagged hole in the fuselage, he forgot all about checking numbers.

  Southern Adriatic Sea

  There was a brief silence on the frequency, then the squadron Senior Pilot, flying Tiger One, responded.

  ‘Tiger Two from Leader. Can you make it back to Mother?’

  ‘Negative,’ Richter snapped. ‘I need a long concrete runway to put this down on, not a steel postage stamp.’

  ‘Roger. Go to Guard and check in with Homer. Suggest you steer two four zero initially. I’ll accompany you. Snakes, Tiger Leader turning port and following Two. See you back on board.’

  Richter was already in the turn onto south-west, as he switched frequency and selected the emergency code 7700 on his Secondary Surveillance Radar transponder. This setting generates an unmistakable, and absolutely unmissable, symbol on air traffic control radar displays.