He leaned forward, glanced round. The Ops Room team had retreated. He fixed his gaze on the woman. ‘Comrade.’ He liked the old nomenclature when it came to people he recognised as allies. ‘Are you saying that’s all you have or that’s all you’re allowed to have?’
‘I’d say the latter.’
‘So if you were my commanding officer, what would your advice be?’
She looked at him like a woman who didn’t always get the respect she deserved, but was getting it now.
She blinked — differently this time, a little more slowly. ‘Watch your back, at all times.’
She stood up and gestured at the files she’d brought. ‘You want these?’
He shook his head. ‘Can I reach you if I need more? Information, that is.’
She smirked. ‘You’ll have to get clearance.’
‘From your mother?’
She laughed and swept out of the room.
He watched her go. Supressed a thought or three and turned to Kroll.
‘We’re going to need all the toys. This job doesn’t smell right.’
Kroll sighed. ‘You love to do everything the hard way, don’t you?’
‘Meaning?’
‘This is easy. It’s undefended. There are no sentries. There’s only one way in and out. If they’ve got manpower there they’re not showing up on the images. Those trucks may have kit on board but they won’t have time to make ready if we don’t give them warning. We go in and slot everyone who isn’t Kaffarov, swing him on to your back and pull him out. Job done.’
‘Sometimes, Kroll, I honestly wish I was you. You make everything sound so simple. Maybe that’s why your life is so complicated.’
‘You’re going at this as if he was Bin Laden.’
‘Because there are a lot of unknown unknowns. Me and Donald Rumsfeld, we no like unknown unknowns.’
‘Like what?’
‘Like, why is Mother Russia expending any energy on repatriating this shit-fuck? Why has Al Bashir gone to all the trouble of deliberately getting on our tits when we’re supplying his kit?’
Kroll went back to his laptop and started typing again.
Dima nodded at the machine. ‘Is that your go-plan?’
‘Letter to my wife. Won’t take a minute. I think this time I might be in with a chance.’
Dima let his head drop into his hands. Kroll paused, fixed Dima with a frown. ‘You haven’t said why you accepted the assignment. Did they blackmail you?’
‘Worse.’
‘What then?’
The photographs flashed in front of him for the hundredth time.
‘They gave me hope.’
7
Iraqi Kurdistan/Iran Border
Not much got to Black: that’s what his buddies believed. Patient when tempers were frayed, calm when others were jittery, measured when they were up to their armpits in the shit. It was a source of private pride that he got credit and respect for being what Cole called a ‘steady, solid soldier’, which was good because Cole didn’t do compliments.
At Fort Carter, lined up on the freezing Michigan tarmac before they boarded the plane, the Colonel had told them,
He showed early promise, commended in his first week in Iraq for pulling a half-burned Sergeant from a Humvee sinking into a drainage ditch. The FOB Commander, Major Duncan, had told him, ‘I see a great future for you in the Marines.’ But that wasn’t the plan. Once he’d done it, proved to himself he could, he was all done with it. Stay alive, stay sane, get home.
All his life he’d heard his father’s screams at night, found him covered in sweat in the cold Wyoming dawn, the same story in the morning. ‘Just my goddamn kidney stones, son.’ The stones that he never went to hospital to have removed. As a kid he’d accepted the excuse. In his teens he’d begun to question his mother, who just replied with silence and, when pressed, tears. So he did some research. Read up about his father’s platoon, about Khe Sanh in February ’68. Michael Blackburn never spoke a word to his family about Vietnam. Henry was determined to understand his father, who hadn’t waited for the draft, who loved John Wayne movies, who had grown up listening to Grandfather Blackburn’s euphoric tales of the liberation of Europe, of cheering crowds and grateful French girls throwing their underwear at them. But three weeks into his tour, his father, then just eighteen, was cornered along with his entire platoon in the jungle. He and the three others who survived spent the rest of their teens in a Viet Cong bamboo cage not much bigger than a coffin, sometimes immersed up to their necks in a snake-infested tributary of the Mekong. The week he came home, he married Laura, his high school sweetheart, his prom queen, who had promised to wait for him. But the man she married wasn’t the boy she’d danced with. He quit college midway through the first semester and by Christmas had been fired from the 7-Eleven he was training to manage. She would never admit it but from then on Laura, the grade school teacher, was the breadwinner.
For Henry, enlisting wasn’t about fighting for his country. It was more personal than that, to slay a ghost that haunted his family’s life. A validation of his father’s decision to go to war, that fighting was a worthwhile and noble choice. And privately — to prove to himself that he could go into battle and come back in one piece, solid and, more to the point, sane.
Today he was having trouble sticking to his plan. He had done the right thing. As soon as the girl was contained he’d gone for the battery. Found the grips. Paused, looked, checked the initiator, picked a wire to disconnect and cut the circuit. Shouted down to the men below: ‘Clear!’
But on his way back to the stairs, he’d felt his legs turning to water. He’d stopped, looked down at the girl, reached down, and as he closed her eyes for the last time he saw his hand was shaking. In that moment he heard one of his father’s unforgettable screams and realised that it wasn’t in his head but in his mouth. He was screaming so loud the walls were starting to shake. And as the walls folded in he crashed down across her body and felt the floor collapse under him.
How much time had passed, he had no idea. It took him a while to remember where he was. The dead girl beside him was a reminder. He replayed the scene: the girl, the detonator, the girl again, closing her eyes, his scream — a grim comfort to realise that it wasn’t reality that was caving in, it was the building. An air strike? He thought again and remembered the first tremor, expecting it to be an APC and not seeing one, and the second, prolonged shudder that set him off. Bigger than anything a RPG could deliver.
As his eyes adjusted he could see a triangle of light. No, not light so much as a shape of grey in the blackness. His left wrist was trapped under something metal. Foul-smelling water from a ruptured drain had drenched him, weighing down his fatigues. His body armour had probably saved his life but it was also trapping him in the cavity he now occupied. He reached round with his right hand and unstrapped the ceramic plates to give him more mobility. Then he undid his watch, a present from his mother, which made it easier to work the wrist loose. His hand was numb, and so swollen it felt like a baseball glove had been grafted on. He mentally checked the rest of his body, toes, legs, flexing each muscle, gradually becoming aware of a pulsing throb on the back of his head. He snapped his fingers, heard nothing except the rushing of air — the sound of no sound. His eardrums had been blasted. His ears still worked, though most of what they heard was the pulsing thud of the pain. He inched forward, sliding from his armour as if it were a moulted skin, toward the dull light, quietly thrilled that whatever had happened had spared him — for now. He wasn’t religious, but thanked an invisible deity for that triangle of light he was twisting and scratching towards like a low-bellied reptile.
