Battlefield 3: The Russian

As they bumped along the track up into the mountains these thoughts took him right away from the job in hand. Amara’s tap on his shoulder brought him back. From the seat behind she pointed at the gates up a steep ramp to the left. Dima slowed down about ten metres away and then pulled to a halt. They checked out the gun nests on either side of the gates. Two men in each: one with binoculars, the other with a machine-gun. They were NSVs — a universal anti-infantry, anti-aircraft, anti-everything weapon, discontinued after the collapse of the USSR, made under licence in Iran. Except those were probably the original Russian models, courtesy of Kaffarov.

‘They should recognise the car,’ said Amara. ‘I mustn’t look like a prisoner.’

‘Then you do the talking.’

Her outfit looked pretty convincing. She had taken a silk suit and wrenched off one of the sleeves and all of the buttons of her blouse, consistent with someone having grabbed her. Now the tied tails of the front held it closed. The trainers on her feet looked incongruous — but what would you wear for a post-quake, possibly pre- nuclear getaway?

They politely let her out, Dima nudging Vladimir to stand up straight.

‘Wait near the car. Let them come to you. The further in we can get before trouble starts, the better.’ She did exactly as she was told, trembling and looking for all the world like a woman whose house had just survived a brutal looting, whose virtue had even been compromised. The tears rolled down her cheeks as if she’d told them to. What a natural, thought Dima: she could have a bright future in the GRU.

A guard came forward, his Kalashnikov on his hip.

Amara practically threw herself on him.

‘Tell Kristen it’s Amara.’

He nodded at the Chevy.

‘My own security detail.’ She pressed a hand against her chest. ‘I said no, but Gazul insisted. They saved my life.’

‘Where is your husband now, ma’am?’

She touched him on the arm and shook her head, letting her hair fall over her eyes: she was good.

He walked back to his post, picked up a phone. A few seconds later the gates whirred open. Dima shifted into Drive and they rolled through. They were in.

43

North Tehran Airspace

Black and Montes watched through a starboard window as a pair of F-16s screamed past the Osprey.

‘They better leave something for us!’ shouted Chaffin over the roar of the rotors.

Black continued to watch until they turned into silver specks at the end of their ascending vapour trails.

‘They’re taking out the perimeter AAs and any other hardware they can lock on to. Plus any stray air cover they might have up there.’

‘We any closer to knowing who or what’s gonna be waiting for us?’ said Campo, as if he now knew how to zero in on Black’s weak spot.

Black didn’t know. His crew always looked to him for the answers. If he had one, he’d give it to them. If he hadn’t he’d give them some possibles. Always something. They thought of him as the smartest: the guy who was going to get home, get to college and go up in the world, be a teacher like his Mom, maybe. But Blackburn didn’t know where he was going. His judgement had been shaken. Nothing in the world looked how it used to. Campo, his former friend, sat staring out at the sky. He’d almost killed him earlier. He had to hold it together. Who or what was waiting for them? Perhaps only God. Perhaps nothing. He thought of his father, in the Vietcong’s cage in the water, from brave soldier to terrified teenager: what had he expected to face in the end?

The images from the CCTV screen in the bank vault flashed back to him. Bashir had been easy to ID. The more he thought about the second man, the more a voice in his head clamoured for attention. A guy cuts a Marine’s head off with a sword on the Iraqi border; thirty-six hours later he’s moving nukes around with Al Bashir in downtown Tehran. Andrews and Dershowitz hadn’t looked convinced. Now Blackburn was having his own doubts. Felt himself headed into a whole tunnel of self-doubt: not a good way to be going into a mission.

The mountains reared up like a great barren wall, the only patches of green being the vegetation down below in the valleys. Blackburn tried to imagine the hard, sunbaked rock covered with snow, shut his eyes for a moment and took himself back to a day out with his family, swooping down Blacktail Mountain in Montana, breaking the rules and going straight down. The trick was knowing when to break them.

‘LZ three miles. Prepare rope!’

44

Alborz Mountains, North of Tehran

The distance from the gate to the chalet was two hundred metres. Dima drove at walking pace to maximise the time they had to take in the buildings and scan the surroundings.

Kroll piped up from the back.

‘Hey, guess what — both nuke signals just stopped.’

‘Is the scanner fucked again?’

‘Nope. Still getting a signal from the third device.’

‘Any ideas?’

‘Could be underground. In some kind of vault.’

As they got closer to the house they saw a Mercedes G-Wagen: black with black glass. Kaffarov’s? There were two other vehicles, a brand new Range Rover Evoque and a battered 1990s Peugeot.

Amara pointed.

‘The Range Rover — that’s Kristen’s.’

‘So she’s free to come and go?’

‘Only with minders.’

‘For the world’s most notorious arms dealer, he’s not exactly overburdened with security,’ said Kroll. ‘Either he’s smart enough to know that it just provokes the wrong sort of attention, or he’s mad enough to think he’s untouchable. Maybe both.’

‘Facts would be a lot more useful than speculation,’ said Dima.

‘Only trying to help.’

‘Right,’ said Dima. ‘First golden rule: stay in touch.’

Each of them had a radio headset. The plan was to send in Amara, with Zirak and Gregorin. They would scope the place, give Dima a sitrep and pinpoint Kaffarov. It was the sort of operation Dima relished: a plan made on the hoof using whatever available assets there were — in this case Amara and a small tight crew of utterly dependable men all capable of thinking on their feet. They had stayed with him on this, when many saner people would have bailed out. He watched them walk up to the house. The young blonde from the photos waved ecstatically from one of the balconies.

It all looked much, much too easy, he thought.

The first rocket landed exactly where Kristen was standing, as if it had been aimed right at her. She didn’t even have time to react. One moment she was waving, then she was gone. The balcony disappeared in a cloud of atomised concrete that engulfed Gregorin, Zirak and Amara below. He heard Amara scream, then the second rocket smashed into the mountainside fifty metres away. Dima felt himself flying backwards, then cartwheeling, until a wooden fence brought him to a halt just in time to see the two gun towers flattened by another strike.

Dima was up first, looking for Kroll and Vladimir. They were pulling each other to their feet. He pointed at the downed gun towers.

‘Get to the AAs. See if they still work. Whoever’s up there, stop them — now!’

He was moving towards the chalet, not thinking about Gregorin and Zirak or Amara and Kristen: only Kaffarov and the nukes. That’s what he’d come for. He’d made it this far, paid too high a price not to collect his prize. No one was going to take it from him now.

He picked up speed as he got to the pile of rubble, and found some steps, half broken, jutting out from the facade. He scrambled up them on to a chunk of balcony that immediately broke away when he stepped on to it,