Battlefield 4: Countdown to War Read online

  The driver moved off, still staring at him, weighing Kovic up.

  ‘American?’ He revealed a single long brown tooth.

  Kovic shook his head. It didn’t feel like a good nationality to be today.

  ‘French. You know – the Eiffel Tower?’

  The driver’s face came alive. ‘Paris! Good! My son studying neuro science there.’

  Okay. Welcome to modern China, thought Kovic.

  ‘I’ll look him up and tell him what a good man his father is.’

  The driver suddenly looked fierce. ‘You see him you tell him from me to stay away from French girls. Bad for his study.’

  Kovic nodded gravely, hoping the opposite for the young neuroscientist.

  The driver dropped him by the railhead at Longjing, a grim monochrome place. A smelting plant dominated the skyline, belching out sulphurous smoke that had settled a coat of grey dust on the entire town. The streets thronged with manual workers starting their day, all in the same grey tunics. This was how all of China used to look under Mao, Kovic knew; Chinese capitalism, rampant as it was, hadn’t completely obliterated the past.

  He should call in, but he couldn’t risk briefing Cutler down an unsecure line. And even an email from an internet cafe could expose his location. China was his patch. Now it suddenly felt like enemy territory.

  He was in survival mode now. Risk nothing; get out of the locality. He had lost his phone on the North Korean side where it was probably still giving out a signal. For all Cutler knew, he hadn’t made it out but died along with the others. And this had been his show; he could easily find his fast track to the seventh floor suddenly cut short.

  Kovic was hungry and a glance in a window reflection told him he looked a mess. Next to the railhead was a sprawling market. Whatever the mission he always carried cash, lots of it. He took a seat at a stall and ate a bowl of fried pork and noodles while half a dozen rail workers stared sullenly at his swollen foreign face. His beet coloured frostbitten fingers couldn’t begin to operate the chopsticks so he slurped the contents of the bowl straight into his mouth like most of the other diners were doing anyhow. China wasn’t big on table manners. At another stall he bought a plain blue suit and shirt, and got directions to the public baths. How easy China made this process; imagine trying to do it in America without getting arrested.

  The shower was tepid and pressureless, like being pissed on by a small animal, but it felt like the best he had ever had. The water that ran off him was a red brown from all the detritus he had accumulated overnight, the blood, some of it his, some the Koreans’, some the Marines’. He stared at it as it puddled around his feet. How little human beings amounted to, after they were gone. He stepped out, dried himself on a small damp towel. In his fresh clothes he started to feel more like a person again.

  He found a cab to take him to Yanji airport. He gazed out of the window, life carrying on as normal. He could never get over that about the world, how all kinds of shit could be happening in one place and a few miles down the road it was business as usual. He had once observed a refugee ship trying to land on the shore of Beirut with hundreds on board near starved, while all around it surfers enjoyed the breakers.

  The airport was brand new, like so much of new China. When he paid the driver he frowned.

  ‘What’s the matter? That’s a good tip.’

  The driver pointed. ‘Your face – it looks bad.’

  In the airport he bought a baseball cap and some foundation make-up and went to the restroom. The cab driver was right. It wasn’t so bad in the town where everything looked dirty, but here in these bright shiny surroundings and despite the new suit, he looked a wreck. He applied the make-up generously over his smashed nose and a gash on his forehead, then added the cap. It would have to do.

  All the time he had been in China he had mostly felt at ease. Not today. As a precaution he used the South African passport he always brought along on missions. He bought a ticket with cash – not many places in the world you could still do that – and joined a queue of men in suits headed for Security. In Departures he logged on to one of his email accounts and sent Cutler a do-not-reply coded message with no details other than confirmation that he was still alive.

  Never had the inside of a plane seemed so welcoming, and as he slumped into his seat he wondered, not for the first time, at the madness of his chosen profession. Just before he closed his eyes he glanced up at the TV screen in the seat back in front of him. Breaking News: US Forces killed in North Korea.

  6

  USS Valkyrie, South China Sea

  Commander Garrison looked over his glasses at the Lieutenant.

  ‘Shouldn’t we wait on confirmation, sir?’

  Garrison looked at Duncan. Why was everyone querying his orders today?

  ‘Marion, I don’t have to remind you of all people that we are living in the age of instant messaging. We don’t control the news agenda; it controls us. I want to talk to each wife, mother, girlfriend, next of kin before they see anything online. I want them to hear it from me that they are missing, that we are doing everything . . .’

  Everything – like what? If it was down to him they would have scrambled search and rescue, and the airspace above the NK border would now be alive with US Navy hardware. He would be on the line to Pyongyang delicately discussing the mutual benefit of their working this out together. But it wasn’t down to him. He was a walk-on in this goat-fuck; this was the CIA’s play and they had a habit of handling things their own way. Langley would be publicly and vociferously denying all knowledge, claiming it was another of the DPRK’s paranoid fantasies. Pyongyang was always protesting that their airspace or waters or territory had been violated by one ‘enemy aggressor’ or another. Meanwhile, the State Department, the Pentagon and the White House would all refrain from comment ‘pending investigations’, which was Washington-speak for multi-agency ass covering, as the story gradually withered for lack of substantiation.

  Duncan felt her cheeks redden.

  ‘I completely understand, sir. I was out of line.’

  He looked at her. She was about the same age as his son when— He swatted the thought away.

  ‘Just get their files, Lieutenant. I’ll make the calls.’

  He knew all about those calls. He hadn’t just made them. He’d received one. It was right here at this desk eight years ago when word reached him about Tommy. A big enchilada from the Pentagon, as high as they could get, on the line.

  ‘Commander, I regret to inform you—’

  He had guessed even as they were putting the call through, already pictured the headline – First serving Naval officer to lose a son in Afghanistan. But when they were done with the massaging and spinning, what the press got was a hell of a long way from the down and dirty CIA mission Tommy had stepped up for. And there was nothing about the CIA’s man who got out without so much as a scratch.

  Duncan returned from registry with the files of each of the men. She noticed his eyes looked a little pink, but knew better than to show it.

  ‘Sir, do you think there’ll be any survivors?’

  His look said it all.

  7

  French Concession, Shanghai

  ‘We have to talk.’

  Kovic stepped back from the mirror as far as his broom closet-sized bathroom would allow. His dark brown hair, thick and short, was plastered off to one side at the front by the gash he’d sustained, as if gelled into place by a particularly inept barber. Under the unforgiving fluorescent light his complexion, so useful for disguising his origins, was a lurid mix of zombie and nicotine. Should he try that foundation again? He shrugged. In the cramped, crumbling shikumen in Shanghai’s French Concession where he chose to live, he stuck out a mile anyway; he was a good few inches taller than everyone else for starters. With the bruising, he just looked like your average Westerner who had strayed too far from home, fresh from a dispute over drugs or a woman.

  He picked up the sunglasses and gently lowered them
on to his nose, where they perched ridiculously above the swelling so that the bottom of the rims cut right across his vision. He put them back on the shelf. Who gave a shit anyway? He was no Brad Pitt in the first place.

  ‘Are you hearing me?’

  Louise was leaning against the doorway, arms folded, in the classic female defence position.

  He’d known this was coming; it was only a matter of time.

  ‘I know, I look a “right hooligan”.’ He turned and grinned at her. ‘As you Brits would say.’

  ‘Don’t.’

  Cliché though it was, she unquestionably looked extra desirable when she was cross. Her midnight blue eyes were so dark they looked almost black and the angle of her eyebrows gave her a kind of feline aggression that took him right back to the first time his eyes fell on her.

  He opened his arms to her but she kept her distance.

  ‘I’m real sorry about your birthday. But hey, you should have seen the other guy.’

  Another day, another lie. Once he thought it would be fun to lie for a living. It came naturally; his mother had told him so and his high-school principal said the same. ‘It may even be the only thing you’re good at,’ he’d told him. Never had he imagined what a rare commodity the truth would become. Louise gave him a sour look.

  He’d given her the knotted silver and amber earrings she’d admired when they passed the antique market in Dongtai Road. But just in a box and without the dinner and champagne attached, they hadn’t had quite the desired effect. She turned and took the two steps into the equally tiny kitchen.

  The fact that he had just disappeared into thin air for four days was nothing unusual. At first she had taken his sudden absences in her stride and accepted his vague excuses of impromptu business pitches in Shenzhen or Beijing. But vanishing over her birthday, he’d crossed a line. And then there was the state in which he’d come back. As well as the face there was the deep graze on his shoulder left by Korean shrapnel. He told her it was down to a drunken fall down the back stairs of a club. And the nose – well, that he could put down to his impressive arsenal of Mandarin insults; Louise knew all too well that his patience shortened with every drink. In fact, with her encouragement he had been dry for weeks, so he would have to claim a lapse. As for the frostbitten hands, well, they were shaping up into a nice swollen purple and would pass for collateral damage, proof of how useless fists were as fighting tools.

  But then he thought, who am I fooling? She’s looking at me like I’m a slow-motion car crash. And that was the way it had to be. His apparent benders were the ideal cover, no matter how much they disappointed her. No way could he share with her any of the events of the last thirty-six hours. She could never know what he did – or even his real name.

  ‘I’m afraid this is just not working for me.’ She sat down at the kitchen table, opened a compact and started to do her face.

  He tried some contrition.

  ‘Honey, truly, I know how you feel. It was a serious mistake and I’ll make it up to you.’

  No reaction. There were only so many ‘vanishing tricks’, as she’d started to call them, that any woman worth respect would tolerate, and only so many silences or shrugs. That was the price of trying to have a relationship in the field. As soon as it went anywhere, the problems started. He imagined Cutler’s wife was safely contained in some suburb off the Beltway back in Virginia, her curiosity smothered by Prozac and the belief that there was something patriotic about her dumb, unquestioning subservience. Louise was different. She deserved more and better, he was starting to realise, and that was a problem.

  He watched her putting her war paint on. God, he wanted her.

  Being a good liar was what had got him the gig. Once you joined the CIA, the truth was quarantined, a no-go area. What had ever led him to believe he could be different? Lesson One on Day One of training at the Farm: thou shalt have no god but the Agency. Lesson Two: whoever you were no longer exists. Lesson Three: your personal life can go to hell, so stick to one-night stands.

  He’d given Louise quite a detailed sketch of dull State Department work; Commercial Liaison, he’d called it, lots of schmoozing with Chinese businesses and banging the drum for Uncle Sam. Her career, teaching English to men in suits so they could talk to other men in suits – and tell Western hookers what they wanted – was turning out not to be absorbing or unpredictable enough to keep her distracted from wondering why he kept disappearing.

  Before Louise he didn’t have much understanding of women. Mastering Mandarin had been a breeze compared to fathoming female thought processes. You could study for years and just when you thought you’d graduated, they threw you a curve ball and, just like that, you were back in third grade. But she had provided a crash course and brought him up a level. Now he owed her something for her effort.

  She snapped the compact closed and glanced up at his battered face. ‘And you know what else? Even when you do show up, half the time you’re not really here.’

  It was true even now that his head was elsewhere, the cold-blooded execution replaying itself like a nightmare from which he couldn’t fully wake up, the questions stacking up about what just happened and why.

  He looked at her, feeling like a fraud.

  ‘It won’t be like this forever. I’ll change.’

  For different reasons they both knew that wasn’t going to happen. She nodded at the coffee left on the table between them in noman’s-land. He downed it quickly and held the cup out, half hoping she might reach out to take it and he could hold her. The thought of her body temporarily obliterated all other thought. But then she shook her head in disappointment and the cup hung there between them, untaken. The bottom line was that they had both started to care for each other too much. He had naively thought he could keep it on a level, but she was too good for that and he owed her more, far more than the job would allow.

  He’d had a buddy in training at the Farm whose wife had left him without warning. Eight years of marriage and she’d gone one Sunday morning while he was out jogging, ‘Enough’ squirted in Olay hand cream across the kitchen table. It was only the writing medium that was unusual; officers’ relationships failed all the time. They should have another memorial wall at Langley to commemorate all the marriages the Agency chewed up.

  He watched her as she continued to get ready for the day in sullen silence. She wasn’t even going to dignify his promise with a response. She was right; he wouldn’t have either.

  It had started so well. They were both fugitives from their own countries. She had no interest in America, which was all right by him. Shanghai with its collisions of cultures, the ongoing duel between past and future, amused her as it did him. Being with her made him feel even more at home and even less like going back to where he had come from. She’d told him from the get-go she didn’t do housekeeping or nurturing. ‘You can get that from a local girl who wants to go and live with you in America,’ to which he’d shot back, ‘Who wants to live in America?’ He’d surprised himself about that; the place had got under his skin, detached him from home like no other posting had done.

  Her bluntness surprised and pleased him. The first time, a mere thirty minutes after they’d met, at a sports bar in Pudong, she’d said, ‘We could go to my place and fuck, unless you’d hate yourself in the morning.’ Soon he was hooked. It made a refreshing antidote to the wearying coyness of the local girls; even the ones for hire behaved like Mormons. That and her wavy blonde hair, like a beacon in the sea of straight black; he could see her coming a mile away. When the sun shone there were little glints of copper in it like it had been forged from some rare alloy used only in the most hi-tech weaponry. And the sex, of course, not just how it felt physically but the way it opened up a space in which he could be someone other than Kovic the liar and sometime killer. Someone better than he dared imagine he could be.

  He made a move towards her. He couldn’t help it.

  ‘I’m late for work.’ She took a step back, scooped up her b
ag and hoisted it over her shoulder. It looked heavier than usual. But she was wearing the earrings. Come on, Kovic. Give it a try.

  ‘Look, I’m not much use to anyone right now; I got a shitload of stuff to deal with. Why don’t we talk later? We could ride out to Zhujing, to the place you like by the lake.’ It was frequented by young courting couples getting away from their relatives, none of whom had their own bedrooms, let alone apartments. It was just that, the very romantic corniness, that she liked.

  He stepped aside so she could get through the narrow doorway.

  ‘I suppose a blow job’s out of the question?’

  The crack nosedived, crashed and burned somewhere in the space between them. The door closed behind her and was gone. Fuckwit, he told himself. Last night he hadn’t counted on finding her there. He assumed she’d waited at the restaurant the first night, then gone back to her apartment, then when there was no word, stayed away. Maybe she’d even been worried; let herself in, waited up, then finally, with her fine slim hand still marking her place in her book, had gone to sleep. When he got in he’d been on the move for thirty-six hours. Boy, had he been glad to see her – a beacon of humanity after the carnage on the border. But now, looking round the apartment, he noticed the few things she kept there – her hair drier, a coffee pot, her birth control pills – were gone.

  His backup phone buzzed with a text from Cutler. Get in here, now.

  8

  USS Valkyrie, South China Sea

  Garrison was on the bridge in his grey leather swivelling chair. Wow, just like Captain Kirk in Star Trek, Tommy had exclaimed, aged eight, on his first visit to a control tower. These were the most coveted seats in the navy and when he was counting up the pluses in his life Garrison tried never to forget that. Sure his ascent to that lofty position had probably cost him his marriage, but this ship was his kingdom and this was his throne, as long as the Pentagon allowed.