Battlefield 3: The Russian

out of breath, was slowly letting his left hand slide in the direction of Kaffarov’s right foot.

There was a loud blam from the other side of the reinforced door. Kaffarov’s eyes darted left and Dima lunged, hooking his hand round Kaffarov’s ankle and pulling it forward with such a jolt that Kaffarov landed on his back, the impact knocking all the wind out of him. The Uzi flew out of his hand, arced through the air, dropped on to the poolside and, like a lethal game of spin the bottle, revolved several times and came to a stop just out of Kaffarov’s reach.

There was another loud thud outside the door. He hoped it might be Kroll and Vladimir, but feared it was the Marines.

Dima sprang up and bent over Kaffarov, a hand tightening round his neck.

‘Show me where the nukes are. Now.’

Kaffarov’s mouth was moving but no sound was coming out. The complacency had gone, replaced by a look of dismay, as he absorbed what had just happened.

‘I told you they’re gone.’ He nodded in the opposite direction to the door. Dima released his grip so he could get his breath.

‘Don’t fuck with me. I will most definitely kill you.’

It was an empty threat, because he needed to get him back to Moscow alive. That was the deal. But his skin had turned grey.

‘Gone where? Who has them? Talk. Now!’

Kaffarov stretched a hand out as if trying to point further into the bunker. His mouth opened again as if in protest, but his body had surrendered. His chest went rigid as his head flopped forward. Dima locked his hands together, found the correct spot at the base of the sternum and pushed down, hard. Indelibly lodged in the back of his mind was the song they sang during first aid training, to get the rhythm right: In-out, in-out, my woman likes it hard. They were meant to sing For-ward, for-ward! For the Motherland with joy! but locked up in those huts for three years they had come to prefer the unofficial version. He opened Kaffarov’s mouth, held his nose and breathed in three times, then pushed down again. Nothing. There was another explosion outside, bigger this time, and all the lights in the bunker went out. He was in complete darkness.

All that firepower from the greatest forces in the world and the quarry had died of heart failure.

48

As he moved towards the blasted chalet, Blackburn had one thing only on his mind: Solomon, the last word uttered by the expiring Bashir. He didn’t even know if it was a name at all. He could have been trying to say something else. It hadn’t registered with his interrogators. Cole had been unimpressed. Nonetheless, it was the name he had given to the figure he’d seen on the bank’s security screen, and to the swordsman he had seen decapitate Harker. Solomon. He repeated it over and over. It expanded to cover everything that had conspired against him over the last three days.

He was going to be first in. Campo and Montes sensed it. Blackburn was a man possessed. They could have hung on, waited for Cole, regrouped. Montes had already radioed for full-on Medevac. If Cole was injured, so be it. All of his energy was focused on Solomon and the nukes now. Nothing else in the world mattered. Campo and Montes were with him, but as far as Blackburn was concerned he was on his own.

‘Hey, I hear something.’ Montes started clawing at the rubble. ‘We got injured here.’ Campo went to help. Blackburn ignored him, kept moving, climbing the steps to the shattered balcony.

The dead man on the first floor was face down. Western civilian clothes — black T-shirt and pants. Blackburn lifted his head: pudgy oriental features frozen forever into a contortion of pain from the fatal wound that had emptied most of the blood out of his system. He checked for a pulse, just to be sure. None. He glanced at the room. Nothing like he had ever seen before. So much wealth and so much damage. A lump of masonry from the front wall fell away, crashing to the ground below. Think. He called up the plans he had memorised, re-orientated himself. The walls were clad in wood panels, doors leading off to the left but none on the right — none that were visible. The plans he had examined at Firefly had shown that a corridor perpendicular to the landing had been cut into the mountain, leading to a cluster of underground rooms. How did you get in there?

Calm and very focused, he pulled off a glove and ran his hand over the surface. All the way down the left side of the landing, each panel ran floor to ceiling, with a narrow three millimetre gap between each one. No handles or apertures. No infrared devices. The door, if there was one at all, had been expertly concealed. He stood back, looked for any signs of wear. Thirty centimetres from the bottom, on the right-hand side of one crack, just discernible, were three red-brown fingerprints. He wiped a thumb across. They made a smear: fresh. How could they have gotten there? Was the panel beside them a hidden doorway? It had to be. He gave the panel a hard kick. Solid. He would have to blow it.

He radioed. ‘Breaching. Stand by.’

Campo came back. ‘Roger that.’

He applied the grenade launcher to his M4, transforming his rifle into a door buster. The shock could bring down more of the chalet but it was a risk he had to take. The blast seemed to shake the whole mountain: a thick cloud of dust filled the corridor. It minced the wood panels, exposing the door frame. He inserted another grenade and repeated the process. The second explosion felt even bigger. A lump from the ceiling came loose and before Blackburn could move it crashed down on him, knocking him to the floor. Then the left-hand wall caved, in bringing more of the ceiling with it. When he came to he was in darkness, cut off from the others.

‘Blackburn — talk to us! Over.’ It was Campo.

Blackburn didn’t reply. He flicked on his helmet light and in the dusty gloom he could just make out the door — opened by about thirty centimetres. He was quickly up and on it, shouldering it with all his weight, adrenalin pulsing through him, as an instinct stronger than anything he had known before drove him forward into the passage that led to the bunker.

The only light was from his torch. He caught the smell of chlorine, remembered a deep rectangle on the plan which could have been a pool. He paused, trying to hear over the sound of his own pumping pulse. Something. A movement. He kept going forward. He passed a room with screens: presumably the nerve centre. Then ahead he caught the glint of water. He couldn’t hear anything but sensed a presence. He was near now, near to what he had come for. He swept the space with the torch beam. A large corpse in the water, same size as the dead guy outside, a second man down on the poolside. And a third, crouching, his drenched clothes glistening in the torchlight, staring back at him.

49

‘US Forces! Freeze!’ said the voice.

Fuck off, said Dima to himself. Americans are always so melodramatic. He couldn’t see the American, but the American could see him loud and clear. Where were Vladimir, Kroll and the others? He had to assume the worst. He didn’t even want to think about Kristen — or Amara, whom he’d promised to deliver back to her father in one piece. He was alone and soaked; the man he had gone through madness to chase down and take alive was lying dead at his feet. And now he had an over-excited American playing cops and robbers with him. This job just gets better by the minute, he thought.

Blackburn examined his quarry through the infra-red torch on his weapon.

‘Do — you — speak — English?’

‘Sure, if you don’t know anything else,’ came the fluent reply.

In the dark Dima could guess roughly where the Uzi had finished up, but he was in no position to reach for it.

‘On your feet, legs: spread ’em. I’m coming forward, going to search you. You got that?’

No point antagonising him, Dima thought. If he’s young and inexperienced he might shoot me by mistake.

‘Yes, loud and clear,’ he replied, getting slowly to his feet, hands held high.

‘Touch the wall, legs apart.’

Judging by the voice, definitely mid-twenties at most, Dima thought. He did what he was told, heard the American approach, felt the hands patting him down, careful, deliberate. Conversation seemed worth a try.

‘What happened outside? Are we cut off?’