Battlefield 3: The Russian

Dima smiled.

‘Amara called her on Gazul’s satphone: she said to come right over.’

He looked at Gregorin and Zirak.

‘Anybody want to bail out?’

No one did. There was just one thought chipping away at the back of Dima’s mind: what did Amara want out of all this? And when the time came for her to ask for it, would he want to comply?

40

Camp Firefly, Outskirts of Tehran

A dirty orange sun was seeping through the smoke and dust over the east side of Tehran. Inside the tent, Blackburn faced his interrogators across a folding table. It was just gone 0700. He had been allowed three hours’ sleep before being roused for questioning.

Lieutenant Cody Andrews from the US Military Police Corps did the smiling. Captain Craig Dershowitz, Marine Intelligence, did the writing.

‘Sorry about getting you up so early.’ Andrews’ smile widened. ‘We’d just like to get this done while it’s all fresh in your mind.’

Or too tired to figure whether I’m digging myself a great big hole, thought Black. Outside, Cole was waiting, doing his best to listen in on the proceedings.

Black recalled the events in the bank, the contents of the vault, the maps of New York and Paris, the circled locations and the two men on the security monitor.

‘Bashir and one other, right?’

‘Like I said, Sir.’

Dershowitz maintained an expression of deep disdain.

‘And you believe that the second man was the guy in the videos.’

‘Solomon, yes, Sir.’

Dershowitz renounced his vow of silence.

‘Solomon who?’

‘Just Solomon. Bashir spelled it out as he was dying.’

Dershowitz waved a pen in the air.

‘A first name, a last name, a codename. .?’

‘He didn’t say. He died.’

Dershowitz suddenly snorted. ‘Sure he wasn’t saying Salaam?’

Andrews put his head on one side as if he was trying to make up his mind which dessert to order.

‘Kinda strange name for a PLR, or an Iranian for that matter.’

‘Maybe if he’d lived another minute I’d have asked him that.’

‘Moving on to your motivation, Sergeant. You were pretty pissed about what happened to Harker.’

‘Is that surprising?’

‘And we understand you’ve been given some rough treatment by his buddies?’

Black shrugged. ‘It didn’t amount to anything, Sir.’

Dershowitz was evidently reading more into this than was good for him.

‘The bullet that killed him was from his own gun. What reason do you think he had for shooting himself?’

Black had the sensation of a man who was about to add two and two and get seven.

‘He had just fired it at me. I grabbed his arm through the windshield.’

‘When you were on the hood, holding on to the wiper.’

Andrews grinned, trying to lift the mood.

‘Superhero stuff, huh?’

The mood didn’t lift.

Dershowitz leaned forward.

‘Let’s see. You’re with Harker, and he gets executed. You’re in the bank, Bashir leaves. You’re on the guy’s hood under orders to take him alive and he shoots himself. I’m seeing a kind of pattern here, Black.’

‘What kind of pattern’s that?’

‘Like you’re not having a great war, Sergeant Blackburn. You want to go home or something?’

Black looked at them. He could feel his face burning, his fingernails grinding his palms. He was damned if he was going to let on how they were getting to him. Talk to yourself, his mother had said. When you feel bad or wronged, you’re your own best buddy. I’m trying Mom, he told himself. I just don’t think it’s working.

‘I grabbed his forearm above the wrist. At that moment the vehicle struck something which drove him forward on to the gun. It discharged. Ask Campo. Sir.’

‘You think Campo will back you up?’

‘He’ll tell you the truth.’

‘You’ve seen to that, huh?’

Black had had enough. He slammed his fist down on the table. Dershowitz’s laptop and coffee jumped an inch into the air.

‘Look, am I under arrest or what, because if not, Sir, I would like to get back to doing the job I’m here to do, Sir. I brought you the nuke, I’ve ID’d the executioner. I’ve brought you the results of my interrogation of Bashir as he was expiring. I got you a name!’

Andrews’ smile looked disarmingly real.

‘Good to see the fight hasn’t gone out of you, soldier,’ he said.

Cole was still waiting outside. He had a satphone to his ear, but Blackburn guessed he had been listening to every word.

‘How did it go?’

‘How do you think?’

Cole took a lungful of hot dusty air and blew it out through pursed lips.

‘I’ve been thinking.’

Great, thought Black: what now? In the last few days he had felt his respect for Cole, a soldier he had once deeply admired, crumble away.

‘I think we should press the reset button, huh?’

He ventured a smile. Cole didn’t do smiles, so this one looked as though he was at the dentist. He backed it up by gripping Black’s shoulder and following alongside as Blackburn walked back to his crew. After a few paces, Blackburn came to a halt. He looked around him at the buzz of the camp. One Osprey was preparing to land as another was taking off. Two AA guns were trained on the sky. Men, machines and weapons were moving in all directions: the US Marine Corps doing what it knew best. The Marine Corps that had been his guiding force all his life. He took a breath, straightened himself and gave his Lieutenant a brisk salute.

‘Whatever you say, Sir.’

What kind of an answer was that? he asked himself, as he walked on alone.

41

‘Weird shit, huh? As if we haven’t got enough on our minds, just fighting the freakin’ war.’

That was all Campo would say about it.

Black had tried to hang around outside the ‘interrogation tent’, as he now thought of it, to be there when Campo emerged. But Cole had called him to the briefing. As they crowded round the map table he caught sight of Campo arriving and moved over to his side. He looked shaken. His body language said Don’t talk to me.

‘Listen up, guys. Who likes to ski?’

Cole’s mood had changed, as if someone had given him a shot of something. In fact, he sounded completely different. Did he know something? Was it because of something Campo had told them? Blackburn told himself to calm down: all he’d had to do was tell the truth. But Andrews and Dershowitz had treated him as if he had something to hide. They’d made him feel like a criminal.