The first thing he noticed was the stars. A clear moonless night. Brighter than he had seen in all his time in Iraq, because most of the time the night had been viewed through NVGs (night-vision goggles). He hauled himself out of the aperture, struggled to his feet and immediately fell down again. Okay, take your time. Was there any time? His watch was gone, his armour was gone, his helmet gone, his M4, all the parts of him that said soldier: gone. He lifted himself on to his elbows and looked round. Nothing familiar, as if he’d been teleported to a different landscape. Then he recognised the Stryker, on its side, the booby-trapped truck, still intact. The IED hadn’t detonated. But both vehicles were half-covered in rubble, as if a giant dump truck had emptied its load all over them. He could see an arm, a boot. If there were others under the rubble he was deaf to their cries. No sign of his fellow soldiers, or the wounded in the Stryker.
Still on his elbows he craned round. On three sides of the plaza the buildings had collapsed, as if that same giant truck had flattened them under its wheels. Blackburn had seen plenty of bomb damage, villages razed by bombs, mortar and RPG, but this devastation was on a scale that reminded him of footage of German cities after World War Two, or of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The sight of it drained what little energy he had left. He rested his head in his arms. Had the PLR taken to the air and bombed them?
Then he remembered the tremors, the first as they entered the plaza. This was no air strike. It was an earthquake.
8
Higher Airborne Command School, Ryazan, Russia
From the air it looked so neat, so full of promise, like an architect’s model. A cluster of low-rise buildings with bright red roofs surrounded by perfectly mown grass, bisected by grey metalled roads that radiated out to the edge of the grounds. A place in which there was only order and logic, not a single movement that wasn’t regimented, practised and predicted. To the east, however, behind a curtain of trees, was where the action took place. Twelve olive green tents stood among a vast expanse of red-brown mud. Looking out of the grey framed windows, Dima felt as though his life was on rewind, spooling back to an abyss.
Thirteen years ago he’d stood down there, grateful to have crawled out alive. And promised himself he would never go back. And until 48 hours ago, when Paliov had shown him the photograph, he’d kept that promise. Isn’t life just full of surprises, he thought. You think you’re in control of your life, but fate has an unpleasant trick up its sleeve. I thought I was free, he reflected, but was it an illusion all along?
He had never forgotten the taste of that mud, in his mouth, in his nostrils and the sensation of it drying on his naked, battered body. It was a common belief that the red tinge came not from the iron in the local soil but the blood spilled by recruits.
The theory of how the Spetsnaz training worked was explained like this. Take an empty barrel and push it right down under water, then let it go. The deeper it’s taken, the faster and further it shoots up out of the water when it surfaces. At Spetsnaz there was no such thing as too deep. Every man was taken to the depths of exhaustion and humiliation. To learn how to take orders, to control and conserve resources when you were past breaking point. To go beyond the limits of human endurance. Only the best were inducted. And many of them didn’t make it. Star recruits with glittering records gave up, broken. Some took their own lives. A few turned their weapons on their instructors. Dima was very nearly one of those.
The whole platoon shared one long tent. In the upper bunks were the
New arrivals would be welcomed — or confronted — with a small white towel laid at the entrance to the tent. What should they do? Pick it up? Ignore it? Generally, their instinct was to step over it so as not to dirty it. At which point the inmates would take umbrage at this slight and so would begin the innocent’s first night of suffering. Dima remembered the hush, the expectant faces watching his polished boots already caked in mud, waiting to see where he would step. It was a lonely moment, the first of many. He stepped forward on to the towel and carefully wiped the uppers of his boots until they shone again. It bought him a bit of leeway, but not much.
As the Mil Mi-24 lost height he could see them, like ants crawling on the surface of the mud, the new recruits being put through their paces. How many would last? How many would end it all with a bullet — for themselves, unable to bear the shame of failure, or if their anger got the better of them, a particularly hostile
Today, it wasn’t recruits Dima was after: he had come for the instructors, the hardest and the smartest, full of pent-up energy for a return to the field, men to whom he could leave the more basic task of clearing the compound. Paliov had set no limits on how many men or how much kit, but that in itself bothered Dima. Paliov had made his name as a master of efficiency, never one to use a regiment where a platoon would do, who had fought long and hard against campaigns for better, more expensive, equipment. Why was he suddenly splashing out like this? Was this his last stand? Or something else?
He glanced at the other passengers, all eight of them Paliov’s underlings: Baryshev — surveillance, Burdukovsky — logistics, Gavrilov and Deniken, Yegalin and Mazlak — human doorstops. Only Burdukovsky, despite his girth, had the look of a field man, beady-eyed, his expression one of permanent quiet amusement, as if in on a joke to which only he knew the punchline. The rest looked like Aquarium lifers, unaccustomed to being let out into the daylight. He thought of Omorova’s blink — what exactly was it she’d hinted at in the Ops Room? All day the news had been full of Iran, Americans on alert along the Iraq border, the PLR consolidating control of at least three centres. And to cap it all, more earth tremors in the east. It was all happening in Iran, and they were going in to snatch a single rogue arms dealer with a small airborne army. Something wasn’t right.
They disembarked on to the apron outside the main building. Dima and Kroll were ushered straight to a prepared interview room. Three chairs, one table, a jug of water, two glasses. It was all eerily familiar. The only sign Dima could detect that put them in the post-Soviet era was the slice of lemon floating in the jug.
The door swung open to reveal the Camp Commandant, Vaslov. His gleaming hairless scalp was reminiscent of a baby’s, but the resemblance ended there. He had no neck to speak of, so that his head appeared to rise out of his collar like one of those wide, pillar-shaped rock formations Dima had seen once in a picture of Arizona. On his face, the features were crowded round a broken nose, as if reluctant to spread out. The famous glass eye stared fixedly into the middle distance, its predecessor taken out by an Afghan sniper’s bullet that was reputed to be still lodged in his brain — some said because it didn’t dare ask permission to leave. It was this injury, the last of several, which had eventually condemned him to this administrative role. Now and then, the bullet — or something — provoked him to uncontrollable bursts of temper, victims of which included a clerk, whose wrist had been broken when a document was found in the wrong file. He ran a tight ship, you could say. He lived on the camp all year round; he had nowhere else and no one else. Spetsnaz was his life, his family, his reason for being.
Vaslov glared at Dima, who didn’t rise. He was just a contractor now. No need for military niceties.
Without meeting his glare Dima spoke.
‘I thought someone would have killed you by now.’
What little there was of Vaslov’s lips disappeared altogether as he stepped into the room.
‘I’d shake you by the hand but I may have some use for it after.’
‘I’m glad we see eye to eye, at last.’
Dima couldn’t resist the joke. When they had first encountered each other he had just stepped on to the towel. Vaslov was an instructor and from day one he had had it in for him. Dima was smarter than him and they both knew it. Vaslov had made it his mission to break him. He never managed it, but what eventually evolved was a grudging mutual respect.
