Battlefield 4: Countdown to War Read online

  ‘Admiral Chang Wei is one of our greatest military heroes. He is revered for his devotion to the Party.’

  ‘For fuck’s sake, Hannah.’

  ‘Please can you lighten up on the profanities? He is one of my father’s oldest comrades.’

  ‘Yeah? Well your old man’s got great taste in friends.’

  ‘What’s more, he’s regarded as a standard bearer for all those who reject corruption.’

  ‘Okay, try this: Chang made no secret of his loathing of your pal Jin Jié as the shining example of everything he hates about the way China’s going. So if he wants to deliver the country from evil, he should get the hell out. Tsu turned out to be Chang’s go-to guy for all his dirty operations; neutralising him isn’t going to stop the Admiral from world domination.’

  She slammed her pass down on the card reader and pushed through the double doors. Chang Wei, of all people. Was it possible? Did her father know anything about this? Was that why he wouldn’t listen to her?’

  ‘Are you still there? Look, I know the MSS only hears what it wants to hear but I thought you were above that. Or are you gonna tell me that in the daylight you’re just another of those drones sucking dick for preferment?’

  She held the phone away in disgust, but she didn’t hang up. She would have completely discounted Kovic’s claims, but for the one small but terrifyingly significant detail – the texts that had emanated from the navy bureaucracy. Kovic was eff ectively telling her she was right. Now she felt completely alone, except for Jin Jié and this uncouth American barking down the phone.

  ‘So, anyway, you gonna get me outta here or what? Because the remainder of Tsu’s men are going to be crawling through the forest looking for us.’

  ‘Stay out of sight. Text me your location and give me six hours.’

  She killed the phone and pointed the remote at her car.

  52

  USS Valkyrie, South China Sea

  There was just the two of them in his quarters: Bale and Commander Garrison, his eyes fixed on the young radioman.

  ‘This stays in the room. No one outside is to know. No one.’

  Bale nodded vigorously, his eyes shining with excitement. When he enlisted he had been told to keep his expectations low, just do what he was told and not to expect recognition. His MAINCOMM supervisor on the Valkyrie had chewed him out more than once for asking too many questions. And he had nearly fallen in the shit again for daring to speak to Garrison. But hey, look where it had got him. And now his supervisor was under strict orders to leave Bale alone to concentrate on his special project. Garrison had even given it its own codename – Armature.

  Spread out on his desk was a large map of the Chinese mainland.

  ‘Okay, Bale, do your thing.’

  ‘I can input it to your laptop, sir.’

  ‘Just draw it in good old fashioned pencil, please.’

  ‘Yessir.’

  Bale bent over the map and positioned Garrison’s parallel rule, a family heirloom from his grandfather’s sailing days. The first line he drew followed the path of the first stream of ‘noise’ he had picked up – from the North Korean border to the point in the mountains west of Shanghai. Garrison hadn’t shared the significance of this; in fact all he knew himself was that it conclusively linked the scene of his Marines’ annihilation with the mountain hideout Kovic had just called from. His first thought had been to communicate this straight to Washington, but some instinct kicked in which stopped him. The CIA would get to hear about it and however he played it, it didn’t look good for them. If what Kovic was saying was right, Chang had led them into a trap. Langley might try and spin it or squash it. He wanted Bale to help him put some more flesh on it first.

  ‘Sir, you understand we don’t know what its content is unless someone in the NSA can decode it. And you gave me strict instructions not to forward it to them.’

  ‘Yeah, let’s not worry about that right now. Let’s concentrate on where it goes. See where that takes us.’

  Bale consulted his notes and drew another line.

  ‘This starts in the same mountain location and goes out to Zhanjiang.’

  ‘The base of the South Sea Fleet of the PLA Navy.’

  ‘Yessir.’

  ‘Can you be more specific? Zhanjiang’s a big base.’

  ‘Well, sir, there are two streams with an interval of about five minutes between them. The first starts on land—’

  ‘It’s mobile?’

  Bale nodded. ‘—and the second finishes on water.’

  ‘Okay, let me ask you this – how big a device would it need to be to generate this kind of stream.’

  ‘Sir, I don’t have that information.’

  Garrison smiled.

  ‘I’m asking your opinion. Give me your best guess.’

  ‘It could be as small as a laptop.’

  ‘So the device is portable. Possibly carried by an individual?’

  Bale wasn’t given to speculation but Garrison was pushing him.

  He nodded. ‘I guess so, sir.’

  ‘Okay, this is good. Where else?’

  Bale unrolled a large street map of Shanghai.

  ‘I’ve collected three streams coming from Zhanjiang.’

  ‘Coming into the city?’

  ‘No, going out – and from three different locations.’

  Bale consulted his notes again and carefully drew three small crosses.

  ‘Let me look.’

  Garrison bent over the map. The first he recognised. It was the Navy Ministry. The second he didn’t know but the third . . . He felt the blood drain from his face. He looked away so Bale wouldn’t notice, kept his voice matter of fact and level.

  ‘Okay. Double-check those coordinates?’

  He turned back to Bale and fixed him with a deathly gaze. ‘Absolutely no one else is to know about this, Bale. You come direct to me, as soon as you’re done. Doesn’t matter when, day or night.’

  ‘Understood, sir.’ Bale saluted and left.

  The door closed. Garrison was alone, listening to the blood pulsing in his temples.

  53

  Hangrui Expressway

  The road was slicked with rain, but Hannah drove like a bat out of hell. Not just because Kovic needed exfil ASAP; she was filled with the need to get out of the stifling atmosphere of Shanghai – fast, as if it would engulf and suffocate her if she didn’t hurry. There was something gratifying about the thunderous power of the Benz, her domination of the fast lane, wipers on high swatting the slanting rain, as if bearing down on slower vehicles, lights ablaze, all but pushing them out of her path, gave her back some sense of control over her destiny. One of the compensations about her country was that you could drive like a madman and not get stopped.

  In her head, she still didn’t know what to make of Kovic. He was a type that just didn’t exist in China. He was more like a character out of Wild West mythology. A loner, blazing his own trail, taking the law into his own hands, making more enemies than friends along the way. Since his appearance, her life had turned upside down. She had done things she would never have imagined herself capable of. He was nothing like her father and he was the polar opposite to the only other significant male in her life, Jin Jié, the visionary, the believer, who looked for the good in everyone with whom he came into contact. It shocked her how Kovic had got under her skin, as if he had detected that underneath her armour of reserve and respectability was an inner core of rebellion. And he had willed it to the surface. Now it came back to her. As she was facing the Director’s advances, desperately working out how to react, she had asked herself, what would Kovic do? She looked forward to telling him.

  A BMW she had blasted past was giving chase, the driver evidently infuriated at being overtaken by a woman. She pushed her foot down further, hearing the supercharger kicking in. The BMW shrank in her rear-view mirror as the needle edged past 200kph.

  She and Kovic were in much the same position, fugitives from their own organisations
, in pursuit of a truth to which their masters were either deaf or actively against them finding out. But still she was wary. He was clever, probably a highly skilled manipulator, a con man; he needed to be to do the work he did. Was he using her for his own dubious ends?

  And his claims about Admiral Chang Wei . . . the man was a legend; he commanded almost universal respect, her own father’s closest comrade. She had intended to put off telling Jin Jié what Kovic had told her until she was able to interrogate him face to face, but as she put more miles between her and the city, she started to doubt the wisdom of that. She selected the phone on the car’s computer and speed-dialled Jin Jié’s number.

  ‘Hannah, what a pleasant surprise.’

  He was always so fucking cheerful. Nothing seemed to faze him, no matter what his detractors threw at him, but up to now that had just been words. She told him what Kovic had said.

  ‘You’ve got to take precautions. You need a proper security detail, people you know you can trust.’

  He laughed.

  ‘So thoughtful of you to worry about me. Please don’t. What’s happening is just the inevitable knee jerk against progressivism. It’s to be expected.’

  ‘Chang wants to eliminate you. My sources for this are impeccable.’ She didn’t tell him it had come from the uncouth looking American he had seen her with the other night.

  ‘All right, I’ll lock the door and keep the curtains drawn, if it makes you happy. I’ve got to go; my lecture’s about to start.’

  He rang off. Hannah fumed to herself. Why didn’t anyone want to take her seriously? Couldn’t they see what was happening?

  54

  Huangshan Mountains

  Keeping directly under the cable car’s wires high above, Kovic slowly navigated his way through the forest; following them would surely lead him back to where the others had fallen to earth. The undergrowth was thick and the rain had made it boggy underfoot. Not much light filtered through the canopy above and the forest was filled with the strange sounds of exotic wildlife. Tsu had certainly been good for one thing – the land around his mountain had been almost untouched by humans.

  Kovic’s body still hurt like hell, but surviving the fall had restored his energy, that, and the grim satisfaction of having wreaked his revenge on Tsu. He plodded forward. The others had better have survived.

  He found Zhou first. He was sitting on a fallen tree barely awake, keeping watch. Qi was with him, asleep behind a curtain of foliage. Zhou had found him curled up in a foetal position, frozen in shock from the descent. Qi was so convinced he wasn’t going to make it Zhou had spent some minutes persuading him that he was still alive and intact. Thanks in part to luck, and his own light weight, Qi had hit the ground without injury. It was Zhou, the accomplished burglar with a track record of jumping off tall things, who had broken his leg. In spite of this, the joy of having survived had lifted his spirits. Kovic shook Qi awake. He looked up and eyed him with a mixture of relief and dread.

  Kovic read his mind.

  ‘The worst is over – that’s a promise. You did good. Real good. Get some rest.’

  Qi’s eyelids closed and he sank back into sleep.

  ‘No sign of Wu?’

  He was missing. They had disabled their phones, removing the batteries when they were on the mountain. Perhaps he had forgotten to put his back together, though Kovic doubted he would overlook something so basic. Maybe he was lying unconscious somewhere. The rain was coming down harder. They were all soaked, dazed and hungry. Kovic texted Hannah their location from the satphone. The best they could do was wait for her rather than go looking for Wu.

  ‘Get some sleep. I’ll keep watch.’

  Zhou fell immediately into a deep slumber. Kovic watched his sleeping comrades. In the last forty-eight hours they had explored the limits of their capability, and risked their lives over and over for him and his crazy cause. It was his job now to get them back where they came from. Shanghai might be in a state of unrest, but at least it was their home turf; they knew how to go to ground there. Word would have come down from the mountain about them and their escape. But now that Tsu was gone, would anyone be bothered to come after them? About five metres away there was a narrow path through deep undergrowth that ran parallel with the fallen tree. Kovic kept watch on it, turning his head each way every few seconds so there was no chance of being surprised.

  It was inevitable. He hadn’t slept for thirty-six hours. Only jumping up and down on the spot could have kept him from following the other two and being sucked into a deep and all-consuming sleep. It might only have been for fifteen minutes, but it was deep enough for the search party to form a tight circle around him before they prodded him awake. There were five of them and five guns and no possible means of escape.

  55

  They stared at him down their gunsights for several seconds. They all looked young and inexperienced. Always a bad sign. Youth usually went with an inclination to shoot out of sheer nervousness. None of them looked at all calm. Mind you, their great leader was lying dead somewhere in the foothills of his own mountain. Maybe after the head had been guillotined, the body soldiered on.

  Eventually the tallest, who also appeared to be the leader, murmured in Mandarin.

  ‘He’s a real mess. Must be the one. Call it in.’

  Kovic slowly raised his hands. He figured at least giving himself up on the spot might distract them from searching for the other two still asleep just a few metres away. He hoped the guards hadn’t found Wu, but that would explain his silence.

  The leader prodded him to get up. Kovic rose, keeping his movements slow and deliberate. They patted him down and then grabbed his bag, with the satphone back inside. Unless they destroyed it, the GPS signal would lead Hannah to him, he hoped.

  The leader studied the screen. Kovic had emptied its call log. He dropped it in front of him and stamped on it.

  ‘You, come. Hands – on – head,’ barked the leader, in an apparently exhaustive demonstration of his English.

  ‘Sure thing.’ Kovic cursed himself for this lapse of concentration. After all he had been through in the last forty-eight hours, what an inglorious apprehension. The guards were whispering to each other as he staggered forward. What punishment had Tsu decreed for whoever took his life? Perhaps his hubris was such that he never legislated for such an event.

  It was a short march to an identical minibus to the one they had commandeered two days before. A guard sat either side of him. Since there was no possibility of escape at this stage he tried to relax, and conserve some energy for a moment when he might be able to use it. Did they even know the fate of their boss? Knowing the Chinese phobia about shame and ignominy, attempts would certainly have been made to hush it up, or at least spin it into a cour ageous death in combat. He wondered if they had found the body.

  As they drove off, the leader, who was seated beside the driver, turned to him, his face full of venom.

  ‘You pay – you die, same as him.’

  Kovic didn’t respond. So they knew. Well, at least he had accomplished this part of his mission.

  The leader, perturbed by the lack of reaction, reached out and slapped his face. But the force of the blow was minimal, because just at that moment the driver slammed on the brakes. The bus slewed to a halt. Broadside on the track ahead of them was a Mercedes Benz SUV.

  56

  Hannah stood in the middle of the path, her ID at arm’s length in front of her, her legs apart. Her Chang Feng sub-machine gun was hanging from her other hand.

  ‘MSS. Here to receive your prisoner.’

  The guards looked at each other. She was doing and saying the right things, but this was clearly the first time they had ever encountered a female MSS operative – or perhaps any armed female.

  ‘This American scum is wanted on suspicion of mass murder and I have orders to bring him in.’

  Nice touch, thought Kovic. But the fact she was alone, and the fancy SUV; they would take some convincing.
/>   The leader stuck his head out of the window.

  ‘Well you can suck my dick, cunt.’

  Oh dear, thought Kovic, simultaneously appalled and fascinated by how this was going to play out.

  Emboldened by their leader, another one chipped in.

  ‘Yeah, get ready to receive my cock.’

  What a shit country to be a woman in law enforcement. Hannah’s eyes widened.

  Now they all had to have a go. ‘She can do us two at a time.’

  ‘Yeah, one at each end.’

  Hannah shifted her weight slightly and raised the barrel of the Chang Feng. There was that resolute look in her eyes that he remembered from when she had first arrested him.

  ‘She’s way out of her depth,’ one of them said to another.

  The leader leaned towards the driver and said, ‘Go forward. And if she doesn’t move, run her down.’

  Hannah put away her ID and for a moment Kovic thought she was giving up. The driver revved the engine as if to warn her what he was about to do. Then instinct told him to duck – now.