Games Traitors Play

77

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.’