Battlefield 4: Countdown to War Read online

  BATTLEFIELD 4

  COUNTDOWN TO WAR

  Peter Grimsdale

  For Martin

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  54

  55

  56

  57

  58

  59

  60

  61

  62

  63

  64

  65

  66

  67

  68

  69

  70

  71

  72

  73

  74

  75

  76

  77

  78

  79

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Also by Peter Grimsdale

  Copyright

  1

  Chinese–North Korean Border

  The wall of wire stretched 880 miles. It was twelve feet high, supported every hundred yards by a concrete post that split into a Y near the top to make a double row of razor. The message was clear: do not cross.

  Kovic wished he hadn’t.

  He watched the border disappear under them, barely visible in the darkness, the condensation on the inside of the Sea Hawk’s windows already freezing. Olsen, the lead Marine, pressed the mic close to his mouth, his face a sickly green from the instrument lights.

  ‘Maybe you’ll start the next Korean War.’

  Olsen’s look said all he felt about the CIA.

  This was supposed to be the Station Chief ’s big play. ‘Do this right,’ Cutler told Kovic, ‘the White House’ll be calling to congratulate you in person. Highbeam’s our biggest coup since Bin Laden.’ How many times had he heard that one? Cutler was new to the region, impatient to make his mark, China just a stop on the elevator to Langley’s seventh floor. ‘It’s all fixed with Beijing, they’re right behind us. First ever Sino–US covert; too bad we can’t tell the world.’

  Kovic knew the Chinese would have vetoed that. They preferred it backstage. Beijing had pitched in, giving them the forward position with refuelling for the helo and arranging for a power cut to black out a corridor thirty miles into North Korea ten minutes before they hit the LZ.

  He picked at the ice on the window beside him. A piece slid away exposing the dark nothing below. A few wisps of low cloud flashed by. The Sea Hawk bucked as it swung hard left, slinging the Marines out of the flimsy picnic chairs they’d brought along for the ride. The pilot let out a whoop.

  ‘Go easy, Tex. This ain’t the rodeo.’

  Kovic had wanted this done with his own assets hand-picked out of Shanghai, but the Chief vetoed that. ‘Highbeam’s expecting John Wayne; he sees a bunch of Chinese riding into town, he could panic.’ What did Cutler imagine this was, a meet and greet? With all their kit on plus the amount of light they’d be shining on him, their man wouldn’t even see them; they might as well be Klingons. But Cutler wanted it his way, never mind if it was the best way, and that meant Marines.

  ‘Ten minutes to LZ,’ came Tex’s voice over the headset.

  A sudden updraught silenced him and tossed them all out of their chairs again.

  ‘Hey, Mr Pilot – you want my breakfast all over your nice clean chopper?’ shouted Faulkner.

  ‘This joyride better be worth it,’ said Olsen, looking at Kovic.

  ‘You bring my boys back in one piece,’ Garrison, their commander, had warned Kovic when he heard he’d be leading the mission. He had reasons for saying so that neither of them ever wanted to go over again.

  Kovic gazed at them. Even in their body armour, they all looked too young to be there, though he knew that he was, by their standards, middle-aged. The trouble with experience was you knew all the things that could go wrong.

  He decided it was time to put them in the picture; Cutler had insisted he wait until they were airborne. He flicked on his mike.

  ‘Listen up, guys, this here Highbeam wrote the Dear Leader’s entire missile launch protocol, source code – the whole shebang. He is the man behind North Korea’s nuke capability. Defectors don’t come much higher up the food chain than this.’

  Hype didn’t come easily to Kovic. His default mode was blunt truth, in a plain wrapper, no ribbons or bullshit, but he needed these guys enrolled.

  ‘Fuckin’ A, man!’ Deacon, the baby of the group and the noisiest, was the first to react, as if to make up for his youth. ‘We goin’ make his-sto-ree.’

  ‘That’s the plan, bro,’ nodded Kovic, hoping it would be the right kind of history.

  Eight hours earlier he had watched them step out of the Sea Hawk at the base outside of Xian, all tough guy banter and rap star swagger, and thought to himself how foreign they appeared – another reminder to him of how used he’d gotten to China. They looked every inch an invasion force, standing guard over the machine like they’d just put down in Mogadishu, eyeing all-comers as if they were hostiles, even the ground staff preparing to refuel. The Chinese weren’t big on manners, but if you wanted the place to work for you, you needed to show some respect.

  ‘He’s a high value catch so you treat him good, make him welcome,’ Kovic added, knowing that after six months on pirate deterrence in the South China Sea they needed to reset their attitude. The six of them packed themselves into the Sea Hawk’s cramped airframe, encased in all their kit: high molecular polyethylene helmets, ballistic plates and fleeces under their tunics, an M4 and a Beretta M9 each – typical Marine overkill – plus the new-issue four-tube NV goggles. Deacon and Kean were playing with theirs, like kids at Christmas. Tex the pilot had brought a customised M79 grenade launcher with the barrel cut so short it looked like a musket out of Pirates of the Caribbean.

  ‘I can’t shoot for shit, so this kills everything in a ninety-yard radius without I even open my eyes.’

  ‘Yeah, he shoots better with his eyes shut, dontcha, Tex?’

  Kovic kept it simple, just a pair of two-barrel NV goggles and his Sig Sauer P226 with a Nightforce scope, suppressor and five or six clips.

  ‘Smooth, man.’

  Deacon admired the P226, still nodding in time to whatever was coming through his earbuds. Faulkner was absorbed in a game on his phone. Kean was curled up like a cat, out cold – though it didn’t stop him from farting, which he did often.

  ‘Hey, Kovac.’ Faulkner glanced up, waving a half-eaten Hershey Bar. In his enormous baseball-mitt hand it looked like a matchstick.

  ‘Kov – ich.’

  ‘This make you homesick?’

  He shook his head. Somewhere along the way he’d lost his taste for American candy, and a lot of other th
ings American too. He thought about what he could be eating now, like the special prawns with abalone at Mancun’s. If home was anywhere now, it was Shanghai. Everything he needed was there, everything in the world: imported or knocked off , in the malls and the movie theatres and along the sidewalks, where every kind of delicacy could be found, in delicious, steaming dishes. And then there was Louise, neither American nor Chinese, whom Shanghai had unexpectedly brought into his life. What was she doing now – apart from wondering where the fuck he’d gone this time?

  Faulkner bit off a chunk of chocolate, talking as he chewed.

  ‘So, Jason Bourne, how come you sitting in a Hawk full of Marines, ’stead of jumping across rooftops somewhere?’

  It was a good question. He could easily have passed on this one. His infil clearance had expired, he hadn’t used a weapon since Afghanistan, he was out of shape plus he had plenty going on in Shanghai. Every bone in his body had told him to stay away, but he knew he needed to make some sort of show for Cutler if he was going to stay in his post. They hadn’t exactly bonded. ‘Watch your back,’ Krantz on the desk back at Langley had warned him, ‘Cutler’s looking to China to make him King of the Hill. Stroke his dick a little, on account of your résumé’s got a bit more meat on it than his.’

  It was true, Kovic had done more than his share of hot postings: in Lebanon disrupting Hezbollah, in Liberia to sting an arms dealer, a stint undercover in Grozny posing as a Chechen returnee, two long tours in Iraq and then Afghanistan. His colouring and pronounced cheekbones meant he could pass as local pretty much anywhere from Vladivostok to Venezuela. Shanghai was supposed to be a reward, ‘a chance to reinvent yourself ’ Human Resources had claimed. The first two years he’d hated it, struggling with the language and trying to crack the mysterious codes by which China operated. Now he couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. If he had any say in it, he would die in the East – though not in North Korea, and not tonight.

  Price, the tall quiet one, chipped in.

  ‘If this screws up, who we call?’

  Olsen shut him up. ‘Hey, kid, no one’s gonna screw up, okay?’

  It was about time Olsen spoke some sense. He and Kovic knew full well that if they did screw up, they’d be on their own. This one was a deniable. The others didn’t get that, but who could blame them? They were serving soldiers with rules to play by. In the CIA rule one was don’t get caught, because no one will come for you.

  ‘It gets to daylight, we outta here, man,’ said Price. ‘Package or no.’

  Kovic nodded. As they got closer to the LZ some bravado was wearing off . Sometimes the ones who looked the toughest had got boot camp confused with the gym.

  ‘For sure. But no package, no bonus,’ said Faulkner.

  The talk of money woke Kean up.

  ‘No bonus means I gotta do ’nother tour, or the old lady’s lawyer’s gonna have my ass.’

  He’s more concerned about his alimony payments than getting his balls blown off by the North Koreans, thought Kovic: easier to fear the devil you know. They’d all volunteered like good patriots, but it was the money that fired them up. He didn’t have the heart to tell them that the fabled spec-ops bonus was discretionary, down to some anonymous bean counter in the bowels of the Pentagon.

  ‘And I ain’t gonna get no Chinky tail tomorrow.’

  ‘Ain’t that why your old lady’s got her lawyer on you in the first place, on account you can’t keep it zipped up?’

  ‘Yeah, baby! They don’t call it The Beast for nothin’!’

  Kovic smiled. A million Pentagon directives on the use of appropriate language and these guys were using the same terms his father had. It must be true what they said, that travel narrowed the mind. When he had once dared to warn Cutler about some xenophobic slight, the Chief looked at him over his glasses. ‘We’re not here to make friends, Agent Kovic, we’re here to get even.’

  That was US foreign policy in a nutshell, and from the mouth of one who had made a career out of missing all the big and ugly shows. Kovic despised desk jockeys like Cutler, who in turn was threatened by Kovic’s field record. That was what irked Cutler most about him, Kovic figured, and explained his need to remind him who was boss. And God help you if it was an election year.

  Kean was in full flow now, spurring on the others.

  ‘At Susie’s Bar in Ningbo they got these twins—’

  ‘They ain’t real twins, jerk-off . They just all look the same to you. They show you a girl and her grandmother you’d think they was twins.’

  ‘At least I don’t gotta pay for it.’

  ‘Deacon, you’re a virgin, man! You don’t even know where to put it.’

  Another ripple of laughter shook the picnic chairs.

  Olsen growled.

  ‘Enough already. Change the channel, will ya?’

  ‘Hey, Kovic: I been wonderin’ – do they really got them straight pubes?’

  Olsen gave Deacon a look that silenced him. There was a lull. Tex was slowing down. He turned briefly and gestured at the ground.

  ‘Whoo-yeah! Santa and Rudolf twelve high!’

  Snow. The supposedly state of the art meteorological imaging from Fleet Command had confirmed clear skies. They might as well have gone with Pyongyang TV’s weatherman, whose forecast had to be approved by the Party. Wouldn’t you know, thought Kovic: this job just keeps on getting better and better.

  What he didn’t know then was that the snow would save his life.

  2

  LZ, North Korea

  The Sea Hawk’s engine note changed to a heavy drumming pulse as the rotors flared and brought it to a hover. Kovic slid the door open and the icy gale blasted away the warm human fug that had built up on board. He scanned the barren moonscape below. None of what he could see remotely resembled the satellite images. Cutler’s information had been thin. All he’d said was that Highbeam’s vehicle would be parked up north of a cluster of concrete blocks imaginatively referred to in the brief as a ‘deserted village’. ‘Just swoop and scoop,’ he’d added, smirking at his great new catchphrase.

  Kovic spotted a dark-coloured station wagon pulled off the road. Better be him and not some young lovers seeking a commodity even rarer here than food – privacy.

  He switched to the troop net, went over the drill again.

  ‘We surround the vehicle, one at each corner, no closer than ten feet, weapons down but ready. We don’t want him thinking we’ve come to kill him. Once I’ve confirmed ID, he gets out the car, we frisk him. If he has luggage I have to check it. We’re on the ground ten minutes. No more.’

  ‘You the boss,’ said Kean.

  Olsen cut in. ‘My information was two minutes.’

  ‘We leave when I say; when I’m good and ready.’

  There wasn’t time to go over just why Olsen felt like he did about taking orders from the CIA. Kovic knew all too well. He and Garrison went right back. He knew about their unfinished business. Right now he just needed Olsen to get the job done. They weren’t going on vacation together – just in, out, and home. No friending on Facebook.

  ‘You want to get out of here sooner,’ he told him, ‘get on and tell your men who goes at which corner.’

  Olsen sighed then assigned each man a corner. Kovic didn’t care which of them went where; he just wanted a clear chain of command.

  ‘Okay, Tex, put us down.’

  As they descended, Kovic flipped down his NV goggles, blurring the snowflakes into clumps like bright white cotton balls. Fucking useless piece of kit. The frozen hillside looked barren and empty; he preferred working in crowded places with a multitude of distractions. Out here there was nowhere to hide.

  The snow was coming down thick and fast now, transforming the locality into an unlikely Christmas card scene in March, not to mention a white carpet of light which would show them up like figurines on a wedding cake. But they weren’t doing stealth tonight. The Sea Hawk’s clatter saw to that.

  There were no new cars in North Korea
, just as there were no new washing machines or TVs. If you saw a beat up old Nissan like the one they were looking at cruising your neighbourhood in America you would call your kids inside, here it was quite likely to be the personal transport of the nation’s top nuclear programmer.

  The wipers made a single sweep and through the screen Kovic could just make out a lone figure at the wheel. In his experience defectors could often be a pain in the ass. Some had an over-inflated sense of their own value and tried to strike last-minute deals, or showed up with loved ones they’d decided they couldn’t be parted from – girlfriends, boyfriends, mothers and other assorted hangers-on hoping for a place on the American magic carpet out of whichever hellhole they’d had the misfortune to be born in. One guy Kovic had lifted in Beirut tried to bring his dog. Some, fearing reprisals, had a last-minute change of heart. Those were the emotionally tough ones. There were gulags filled with the extended families of these people – everyone they had ever loved or given birth to, mere hostages in waiting.

  Tex set the Sea Hawk down on the road.

  ‘We have now landed in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Set your watches back fifty years.’

  ‘Keep her running, Tex.’ Kovic jumped down and ducked under the rotors.

  ‘I’m going to walk up this left side of the road until I’m parallel with the driver’s window. Olsen – move your men into position when I start talking.’

  The snow was gathering thickly on the ground. Kovic approached the car, stopped twenty feet away and trained his torch on the figure at the wheel: high forehead, hollow cheeks, long upper lip, slight break in left eyebrow – check. He was wearing a suit that was much too big for him, the cutting edge of DPRK couture no doubt. He had an unnatural grin on his face. And he was shaking so much the lapels of his coat were vibrating. Kovic quietly cleared his throat and switched his brain to Korean, running a quick mental check that he’d got the guy’s real name right.

  ‘Shun-kin, I bring greetings on behalf of the government of the United States.’

  The man at the wheel continued to grin but didn’t move, didn’t even look round. Deacon, Kean, Faulkner and Price took up their positions, one at each corner, with Olsen at the back, bookending Kovic. He wanted Highbeam to see the men; give him a sense of security and reassurance that this was for real.