Games Traitors Play

95

The morning had dawned bright and clear in the Cotswolds, and the ground staff at RAF Fairford were already busy laying out the tables and chairs in the private enclosure towards the eastern end of the runway. It was a big day for the base, and General Glen Rogers, head of the United States Air Forces in Europe, was taking his run around the airfield early, before the VIPs began to arrive. The USAF would shortly be pulling out of Fairford, leaving it as a standby facility that could be reactivated at short notice for the use of B-2 Spirit stealth bombers and U2s.

All the usual merchandise stands were present. Jogging at a steady pace, Rogers passed the Breitling Owners’ Club, a dogtag stamping stall for wannabe GIs, and a stand that would later be selling Vulcan memorabilia. Now that was a plane he wished he had flown. This weekend, though, was all about modern military hardware, and in particular the global export market for the F-16 Fighting Falcon, one of America’s finest fourth-generation jet fighters, otherwise known as the Viper.

The delegation from Georgia had spent the night on the base, drinking too much of their own Kakhetian wine in the officers’ mess, but he couldn’t blame them. Today marked the official beginning of a new era for the Georgian air force. Six F-16Ds had already been delivered to Alekseevka Military Airbase, but the deal between Washington and Tbilisi would be formally signed off in the private enclosure. To mark the occasion, the F-22 Raptor, a plane that was strictly not for export, would make its debut at Fairford with a breathtaking display of fifth-generation manoeuvrability.

Rogers used to fly jets himself in the mid-1980s, briefly serving with the Thunderbirds F-16 display team, and he was particularly looking forward to the Raptor show. Today’s pilot, Major Max Brandon, would demonstrate its vast air superiority over an old Russian SU-25 ‘Frogfoot’, the current mainstay of Georgia’s air force, in a mock-up of a Cold War dogfight that promised to be one of the highlights of the weekend.

The only blot on the Gloucestershire landscape was the arrival of Jim Spiro, the CIA’s Head of Clandestine Europe. He had turned up in the middle of the dinner with the Georgians, wanting an urgent talk about a perceived security threat that was making the Brits jumpy. (Fairford always made the Brits nervous. A few years earlier, a B52 had flown in low over the runway as part of the display, only for the pilot to be told by ATC that he had got the wrong airfield. So much for precision bombing.) Rogers had not met Spiro before, and he hoped their paths would never cross again. Marines had that sort of effect on him, particularly ex ones who had featured in the infamous CIA torture memos.

If the Agency had its way, the contract with the Georgians would be signed in a reinforced bunker five hundred feet underground, and there would be no Royal International Air Tattoo at all. He had told Spiro to relax and enjoy the day, reminding him that it did much to reinforce the special relationship between Britain and America. That was the problem with the spooks — they saw threats everywhere.