Kompromat

With the plane on auto-pilot and the cabin door locked, he leaned over to kiss her. He had kissed enough women in his time but oddly enough he had never kissed one in the cockpit of his own plane flying high over Russia.

Just at that moment, as though on cue, the cabin alarm rang. An automated voice said, ‘You are being followed by an unidentified aircraft.’

Jack quickly sat up straight and put his headphones back on. Rosie did the same. The Gulfstream was fitted with cameras angled all around outside. Jack switched on the display in front of him.

The automated voice said insistently, ‘Closing, closing.’

Although all looked normal and he couldn’t see anything untoward, Jack Varese felt the first stirrings of alarm. What was happening?

He switched on the intercom. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we seem to have quite a situation here. It appears that we are being followed by someone and that this someone is closing on us fairly fast.’

He turned to face Rosie. ‘You need to return to your seat, but could you ask Terry to come up?’

Terry was the co-pilot. However much Jack Varese liked flying the plane himself, it made a lot of sense to have a co-pilot on board, particularly on these long flights. As a matter of fact, having a co-pilot was probably a requirement of the US aviation authority, though he hadn’t checked this recently.

Moments later Terry Caruthers slipped into the co-pilot seat. Jack Varese jabbed the screen in front of him with his finger.

‘Whatever plane that is, it’s about twenty miles behind us right now, but it’s going a lot faster than we are.’

The blob on the screen was obvious.

‘Course seems to be precisely the same as ours, doesn’t it?’ Jack said. ‘Shall I push up the speed a bit?’

‘Why not?’ Caruthers drawled. ‘Seems like we have a race on our hands. This should be fun, shouldn’t it?’

‘Mach 0.85?’

‘We can do better than that,’ Caruthers said.

They felt the engine surge. The Gulfstream 550 could cruise comfortably at 600 miles or 0.8 Mach but the specifications clearly indicated that speeds right up to 0.9 Mach or around 700 mph were possible.

‘What the hell is that?’ Jack Varese turned his head to the right a minute or so later. Flying alongside less than a hundred yards away was the sleek, dark Ilyushin Il-96 which he had noted earlier that day at St Petersburg Pulkovo airport.

The other plane was close enough for him to see the pilot. ‘Jesus Christ!’ Varese exclaimed. ‘I think it’s Popov. What’s he playing at?’

‘When you’re president of Russia, you can break all the rules you like, I guess,’ Terry replied. ‘You make ’em, you break ’em!’

Varese pressed the zoom switch. The huge grinning face of President Popov suddenly appeared on the screen in front of them.

‘You guys oughta get yourselves a faster plane,’ the president’s voice came over the intercom.

Even though the two planes were still 200 yards apart, they could feel the shockwave of the Ilyushin’s afterburners.

Varese grasped the joy-stick, disconnecting the autopilot. He eased back the throttle.

This was a race he clearly wasn’t going to win.

Speaking into the intercom, he said, ‘I think President Popov is having some fun with his latest toy, ladies and gentlemen. You had better make sure your seat belts are fastened. If our friend decides to take it up to Mach One, we’re likely to experience some buffeting.’

And that exactly was what President Igor Popov did. The Ilyushin’s precise performance data were not described, not least in any publication that Jack Varese knew of. But it was perfectly obvious that breaking the sound barrier was well within its capabilities.

Over the tannoy, they heard the president’s cheerful comment, ‘See you when you arrive. I’ll make sure the drinks are waiting!’

Varese could imagine the president giving them a mock salute as he roared ahead and away from them.

It took a while for buffeting to subside.

Terry Caruthers, who had served ten years with the USAF before taking up a career as a civilian pilot, broke the silence. ‘There are people in Washington who will be quite intrigued to hear about what we saw today.’

There was a knock on the door. Ron Craig poked his head into the cockpit.

‘You guys all right?’ he said cheerily. ‘That was quite something, wasn’t it?’

CHAPTER FOUR

It was dark when they landed in Khabarovsk after the long flight from St Petersburg. A helicopter waited on the runway to transport them to the camp at the junction of the Amur and Ussuri Rivers.

The accommodation was not luxurious, but the huts that had been built in a clearing in the forest were sturdy and clean.

‘This is a research facility, not a tourist site,’ the bearded official who greeted them had explained gruffly. ‘We are monitoring tiger movements. We also safeguard the tigers. We will leave tomorrow morning at 8:00a.m. Please have your breakfast first.’

Someone banged on Barnard’s door as dawn was breaking.