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I had been circling for two hours over Murmansk, but the Russians would not let us land.

‘Landing permission denied,’ said in the best Star Trek original-series Mr Chekov accent.

I didn’t know if this controller was an Iron Maiden fan, but he would never have believed me anyway; a rock star moonlighting as an airline pilot – incredible. In any case, I didn’t have Eddie on board and this wasn’t Ed Force One. It was a fishing expedition.

A Boeing 757 from Astraeus Airlines with 200 empty seats and me as first officer. There were only 20 passengers from Gatwick to Murmansk: lots of men called John Smith, close personal protection, all of them armed to the teeth. Not that Lord Heseltine needed it. He was pretty good at swinging the mace around when he had to. Then there was Max Hastings, former editor of the Daily Telegraph. He was on board too. I wondered if the Soviet controller read any of his leader columns. I thought not.

‘What sort of fish are there in Murmansk?’ I had enquired of one of the John Smiths.

‘Special fish,’ he deadpanned.

‘Big fish?’ I offered.

‘Very big,’ he concluded as he left the cockpit.

Murmansk was the headquarters of the Soviet Northern Fleet. Lord Heseltine was a former Secretary of State for Defence, and what Max Hastings didn’t know about the world’s armed forces wasn’t worth printing.

The world below us was secret and obscured, submerged beneath a cotton-wool bed of low cloud. To negotiate, I had a radio and an old Nokia mobile phone. Incredibly, it got a signal halfway round each holding pattern, and I could text our airline operations who would talk to Moscow via the British Embassy. No sat phone, no GPS, no iPad, no Wi-Fi.

As James Bond says to Q at the beginning of Skyfall: ‘A gun and a radio. Not exactly Christmas, is it?’

After two hours of going round in circles, physical and metaphorical, the rules of the game changed: ‘Unless you go away, we will shoot you down.’

One day, I thought as we turned and headed towards Ivalo in Finland, I should write a book about this.