Andy McNab - Battlefield 3 - The Russian

‘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.

If Cole was expecting laughter he didn’t get it. But he carried on looking pleased with himself.

‘Thanks to our liberating the PLR’s nuclear device, intel have run a side-by-side comparison test with the signals it’s been giving off against a pair of pulses that have been picked up coming from here.’

He tapped a pencilled mark high on the southern face of the Alborz mountain range to the north of the city.

‘There’s nothing marked on our maps, but Bigbird is showing us this.’

He laid out a satellite shot of a large building surrounded by trees, tucked into a mountain slope.

‘Fuck’s that?’

Cole unrolled a copy of an old set of plans. It looked like a Swiss chalet, with overhanging gables and shutters on the windows. Quaint.

‘It looks like The Sound of Music ,’ said Matkovic.

‘Yeah, the hills are alive — with somethin’!’

‘A loud tickin’!’

‘What we’re looking at here, gentlemen, is the favourite holiday home of the late Mohammad Rezâ Shâh Pahlavi, one time Shah of Iran. Since it was a gift from his admirers back home, some farsighted archivist in Langley had the presence of mind to file away a copy of the plans.’

Black’s attention was wandering. Another day, another crazy mission. He looked over at Campo, who didn’t look as if he was taking in a word of what Cole was saying either. What had they asked him in there? What had they said? Whatever it was it had spooked Campo, who briefly met his gaze — distant, wary. Holy fuck, Blackburn thought, is this me or them?

‘You got all that, Sergeant Black?’

His attention snapped back to the briefing.

‘Yessir.’

Cole looked at him for a beat.

‘Okay, gentlemen, get to it. Black, over here.’

Campo filed out with the rest of the platoon. Blackburn went over to Cole.

‘Want to know why I’m looking pleased? Because the Colonel’s looking pleased. He’s happy, I’m happy. He’s happy because the Pentagon’s happy that we found that nuke. We get the other two. .’