Eventually there was a reply. ‘. .
‘They can’t hear me properly: we’re too far down.’
The light went out and they were plunged back into darkness.
31
Camp Firefly, Outskirts of Tehran
They’d barely been there six hours, but to the fleeing Iranians it must have looked like the US Army owned the place. Civilian families, a weary, straggling column of them, escaping the quake and the PLR, were now being waved away by the ring of soldiers guarding the encampment.
Cole and Blackburn watched, their faces set in resignation. Also under the camo net, at a distance from the main base, was Gunnery Sergeant Mike ‘Gunny’ Wilson, the EOD, who was probing the device with a Geiger counter. He had already run it over Black, Campo and Matkovic, plus the tank crew that had extracted them from the bank, and pronounced them safe. Now he was meticulously examining Black’s find, in a kind of professional slow motion, as if he had all the time in the world. None of them wanted to think about the fact that Al Bashir was on the run, almost certainly with two of these things. They sat, patience and nerves stretched, waiting for Gunny to make his pronouncement.
Taking their time was all part of the EOD mystique: these were the men who had cheated death time after time, calmly disabling devices with added booby traps designed to catch them out. They were among the most respected men in the field, and among the most frequent casualties. ‘Least when it’s our time to go, we go. When you’re that close and it blows, we’re gone baby gone,’ Blackburn had once heard one say. But Blackburn wasn’t paying full attention to Gunny’s investigation. He couldn’t stop thinking about what he had seen on the monitor, the man with Al Bashir. Clean shaven, high cheekbones. Just like Harker’s executioner.
He wanted to tell Cole but he knew he would be suspicious and start questioning him: ‘Still got that on your mind, huh? Eating into you is it? You watching from a safe distance as that sword. .?’ Blackburn got up and paced about, replaying over and over what he had seen on the vault security monitor.
The images in his mind were as clear as if he had the tapes. Four views. Two were blank. One showed the main customer floor with the bronze doors of the entrance. The other showed a second smaller exit, which was the one that Al Bashir and one other man had passed through. The second one was carrying two cases. Campo had spotted it first.
‘Holy fuck — you see what I’m seeing?’
They all stopped and stared at the screen. Blackburn glanced back at the one remaining nuclear device.
‘Bashir’s sidekick’s got the other two. .’
Campo shrugged.
‘Let’s not jump to conclusions.’
Matkovic snorted.
‘No: let’s not get too worried that America’s Most Wanted just left the building with two WMDs.’
Black raised a gloved hand.
‘Just shut up and watch, okay. There’s fuck all else we can do.’
His voice trailed off as he stared at the monitor. The two men exited the building. The camera angle showed a small area of the street. Al Bashir hesitated. The second man looked round, tall, clean shaven, high cheekbones, local dress. To Blackburn it looked as if he was staring straight at him, right through the security camera, taunting him.
Campo shrugged. ‘They waiting for a cab or what?’
Matkovic turned to Black. ‘Who’s the other guy?’
Campo turned away from the screen. ‘Don’t know, don’t care. Fuck all we can do about it. We need to secure that nuke.’
After what seemed a month, Gunny set down the Geiger counter and pulled off his gloves. He chuckled and shook his head.
‘It’s a nuke Jim, but not as we know it. Fucked if I’ve ever seen anything like it.’
Cole, arms folded, sceptical, shrugged.
‘Thought they only belonged to James Bond bad guys.’
‘Well it’s Ruskie, no question about that.’ He pointed to the Cyrillic script and glanced in Black’s direction. ‘Any Russian speakers on your crew?’
Black shook his head.
Gunny peeled off his bomb gear.
‘Back in the Nineties,
‘The equivalent of our Foreign Military Intelligence Directorate.’
‘Bonus point, Lieutenant. In fact it was widely concluded that Lebed was shitting us to gain cred in Washington, which he was hoping to make his new home.’ Gunny nodded at the device, relishing the opportunity to share his knowledge with an appreciative audience.
‘Okay, now figure this: weapons grade plutonium has a market value of over four thousand dollars a gram. So for the Russians to have parted with one of these, well, someone’s had to pay them a hell of a lot of roubles — unless they’re supplying the PLR for other reasons. I mean, I don’t want to worry you guys but it’s starting to look an awful lot like Russia vs. US of A all over again. Like the Cold War just came back and got way hot.’
Gunny put the device on a pallet and four of his team took it away.
‘Hey, no going over the bumps, okay?’
Cole remained still, staring at the ground. Eventually he looked up at Black.
‘You ready for another YouTube moment?’
32
Niavaran, Northeast Tehran
They waited in the crack in the road until the Humvee had gone away, and then waited a bit longer to be really sure the coast was clear.
Dima led, the others followed several metres apart. There were no cars to hijack or steal. Everything on wheels, right down to the last supermarket trolley, had been pressed into service for the mass evacuation of the city. There was a brief moment of excitement when they spotted a Peykan, but it soon faded when they discovered it was missing its engine. Several stray dogs had come up to them, hoping for food.
‘Believe me, I know just how you feel,’ said Vladimir, scratching the head of the nearest canine. ‘Watch out for Kroll as you pass.’
‘I once ate a fox,’ said Zirak.
‘I’ve had cat,’ said Gregorin. ‘I still spit up fur balls.’
‘In the ’50s, when my father was a prisoner in the Gulag,’ began Vladimir, ‘he and some of the others made a pact that if any of them froze to death, the rest would eat him.’
‘I hope there’s a funny ending to this story,’ said Kroll.
‘There isn’t,’ said Vladimir.
They walked on in silence.
Too tired and hungry to stay focused, Dima let his mind wander further than he had yet allowed himself in these past twenty-four hours. Inevitably the photographs swam back into focus in his head, where he had stored every detail. The young man’s eyes, the shape of his smile, the fine crease in his chin and the slight arch to his eyebrows, all confirmed for him beyond doubt who his mother was.
Camille had been the right person at the wrong time, though looking back over his life now, when would have been the right time? Dima had been sent to Paris to befriend the impossibly smart Harvard students, the future powerbrokers of America. She was one of the few French girls who hung around with them.
There was a dinner, one of the secretly Soviet-funded ‘Detente’ occasions that brought together American students interested in discovering more about the Evil Empire and bright young things from the USSR — those who had achieved the rare privilege of a scholarship to study in France. Of course, like Dima, all the young Russians
