Battlefield 4: Countdown to War Read online

  To his left, Merrick, the Boatswain’s Mate, steered four acres of US sovereign territory on its course across the South China Sea, the charmingly archaic wooden ship’s wheel a single concession to history in an otherwise twenty-first century machine. Beside him, Danes, Quartermaster of the Watch, kept track of navigation. Usually there was a lot of banter between them, but they had read Garrison’s mood, as had the other personnel up there. The heavy silence was broken only by the E2C Hawkeye on the deck a hundred feet below, blasting off on its routine sweep of the other fleets in the sector. The computer screens around Garrison teemed with constantly updated information, all you needed to wage war anywhere on the planet at the tap of a key. But right now he wasn’t looking at any of them.

  All this mighty hardware and all he could do was stare helplessly at the images on his phone. There was no disputing their identities; whoever took the pictures made sure the faces were in full view. They had even dragged what remained of Tex out of the chopper. Tex the whooping cowboy was the most popular; Price, reserved, a gentleman in the making; Kean, a heartbreaker that boy; Faulkner, solid, built to last; Deacon, little more than a kid. And then Olsen, on his last tour. He was the one Garrison felt worst about. He had sent him to watch out for the others.

  Once there was a time where images such as these were vetted, censored and filed away, never to be seen. They even relied on the news agencies to destroy any that could cause offence or upset. All that was gone. Every man and woman on the ship would have seen them by now. One face was missing though. Where was Kovic?

  9

  French Concession, Shanghai

  Standing by his kitchen window, Kovic rehearsed his questions for Cutler, and which piece of his mind he might want to give him. Louise’s departure had further darkened his mood, but he was determined not to lose it, tempting as it was. At least he would get some answers about what the fuck had just happened.

  In the courtyard below, an argument was under way about a washing line that had snapped, dropping some of the laundry on to the ground where the next-door neighbour’s dog had peed. He listened to the vicious exchange between the two elderly women who had shared the same subdivided apartment for forty years, but only ever traded insults, usually about each one’s dead husband’s infidelities. The guilty dog started barking and then someone turned up their radio to drown out both the dog and the row. Louise said she didn’t know how he could stand living with all the noise. The truth was he hated silence. Silence made you listen out for sounds, so it was harder to switch off. That was another thing he liked about his adopted home. All over Shanghai, quiet was in short supply.

  He slid his laptop into his backpack, tried the sunglasses one more time, tossed them away and shut the door.

  As he emerged from the stairwell the old ladies suddenly stopped screeching at each other and looked at him. They waved tentatively then started another exchange in lower tones, clearly about him. They took particular interest in him whenever Louise was around. They would have seen her leave. Perhaps the change in her expression had given them a hint that something was up. Despite their nosiness he liked them. He generally engaged them in conversation about the minutiae of Shanghai life, the pace of construction, the smog, the recent scandal about infected pork, bidding them farewell just as they edged the conversation towards his ‘beautiful friend’ and ‘future plans’. Any sign of increased intimacy – or the opposite – and he feared he’d be inundated with the vast reservoir of marital advice that all elderly ladies seemed to carry around with them, whatever the culture. Louise charmed them as well, asked about their grandchildren and even more important their ailments, and they liked her. And Kovic also humoured them because they were the next best thing to CCTV. Anyone looking for him, checking his door, they’d be the first to notice and tell him, in officious, concerned-but-nosy tones.

  He gestured at his face.

  ‘She’s very cross with me.’

  They thought this hilarious. The row was forgotten.

  He stepped out of the courtyard through the main gate of the shikumen and into the narrow street. Two cars, a Chery and a locally made Audi, faced one another like bucks in a clearing, the drivers both resolute, determined not to give ground. This would take some time. Shanghai’s planners couldn’t have dreamed of the automotive revolution that would wreak havoc on the narrow one-lane streets, and bring out the worst in its newly automated citizens. Just the other day they’d passed a similar stand-off, and Louise had said, ‘I wonder what the record is?’ And he’d told her.

  ‘One pair went through the night. A local restaurant brought them both breakfast.’ And she’d smiled. Whether it was true or not, he couldn’t remember, but it made a good story.

  He took a right into the even narrower street where he garaged his Buick, a grudging concession to American flag flying, but also a popular import so it didn’t stand out. He didn’t use it much but today he felt a little fragile for the scramble of the Metro. The sanitation truck parked across the garage door was no surprise. A group of hard-hats were bent over a hole in the road from which a pungent smell was drifting.

  His backup phone buzzed. Cutler was getting impatient. How long?

  He texted back: Traffic. ETA 40. He wanted the meeting, but he wasn’t going to be hurried, probably another thing about him that got up Cutler’s nose. Above all, he needed to be on the front foot. He knew how these things usually played out, and he was damned if he was going to be made to carry the can for any of this.

  He gestured at the blocked garage door. ‘How long?’

  ‘Two minutes,’ replied a hard-hat without much conviction. Kovic thought about having a cigarette, remembered that he had given up – at Louise’s suggestion. But there was a still a packet in his jacket. Try to do one good thing today, he told himself.

  He had checked the morning headlines some hours ago. Characteristically, Beijing was ‘unable to confirm’ reports of disruption on the border. They could keep that up to eternity and beyond. North Korea’s news agency had put out the usual risible nonsense: ‘Foreign insurgents have been repelled by the valiant populace.’ No one was going to take that seriously. But Washington was a different matter. US press and TV would already be all over the White House, demanding their version of the story.

  What bothered Kovic right now wasn’t what the media would say, but what had actually taken place. He reviewed what facts he had. There were far more unknowns. He couldn’t even be a hundred per cent sure that Highbeam was a plant, only that he had been turned into a human bomb against his will. What wasn’t in question was that it had been a set-up, a trap they had walked right into. But whose trap? There was nothing considered or elegant about the ambush. Mounting an ambush with machine-gun toting conscripts was a recipe for chaos – they were more likely to kill each other than have any impact on their quarry. There was no evident chain of command; the officers who were supposedly in charge had tried to flee the scene in their jeeps. Even by North Korea’s pitiable standards it was a mess.

  But what happened after that was in another dimension. Kovic picked over his memory of what he saw from the snowdrift one more time. By his reckoning the assassins weren’t military, not even coverts. It wasn’t just their lack of uniform; the perfunctory executions, then their casual attitude around the corpses, smoking and joking, and the way they heaved them into the SUV as if it was something they did every day. And what bothered Kovic most was that they were inside China. Who where they? And who had sent them?

  And what was supposed to be the outcome: lure Americans into a trap on one side of the border and then have them killed on the other? None of it made sense. If he had been cleared to hire his own team locally, would it have ended differently? Maybe not – but it wouldn’t make international news. In the hierarchy of news events, American deaths ranked a lot higher than Chinese or Korean.

  ‘Hey,’ he called out to the sewage men. ‘I got to get moving!’

  One of them left the group round the ho
le and moved towards the cab with a studied lack of urgency.

  How was this going to play for Cutler? Kovic knew he better be prepared to navigate all the swift and lethal currents of Agency ass covering that would be going on. One thing he was damned if he was going to do was have this hung round his neck. It was the Chief ’s show, his plan, and the corrupted intel on which the whole fateful mission was based had come from his own sources.

  The thought flashed through Kovic’s head that maybe today was the day to bail, tell Cutler where to stick the damn job. For sure, that would be an end to all the lies with Louise. But he knew it was impossible. No one left the Agency voluntarily. And even if you went, you didn’t actually leave. Anyone who did was guaranteed to be a source of suspicion in perpetuity. There was another problem; he didn’t do the future. That was the place where no matter how much analysing, modelling, war-gaming, and downright worst case scenario imagining you did, stuff happened. Not only stuff you had overlooked, stuff you couldn’t have dreamed of in the nightmares lurking in the deepest recesses of your own twisted subconscious: Pearl Harbor, the Bay of Pigs, Lee Harvey Oswald, the Iran hostages, Bin Laden, the Boston Marathon. Maybe it was another sign of his enduring immaturity, that he had developed a taste for living in the moment and couldn’t give it up, not for Louise or anybody. Or maybe it was just a natural fear of the future.

  The shots played themselves over and over, without warning, the pictures in slow motion. The straight arm rising to aim, the shot, the move to the next man lying half frozen and exhausted in the snow.

  The guy in the sewage truck turned the ignition, it almost fired then stalled. When he tried again the starter was in its death throes. Kovic sighed, lit a cigarette, then called Wu.

  10

  ‘Agent K! How are you?’

  ‘Stranded. Where are you?’

  ‘Look up.’

  He looked and saw the BMW X6’s lights flash as it advanced with a low metallic beat from its profligate eight cylinders. That detail was one of many Kovic had managed to absorb from Wu’s exhaustive enumerations of his prized machine’s attributes. He had had it wrapped in matt black with tinted side and rear lights. Wu called it the stealth look – surely a contradiction in terms, Kovic thought, more like ‘Hey, look at me. I’m a drug dealing gangsta!’

  Growing up in Detroit had given him a deep distaste for the automobile. Its giant plants had lured his grandparents to America and enslaved them and their children, only to spit them out a few decades later into a half-deserted wasteland. But Kovic hadn’t burdened Wu with all that as he fawned over his precious toy. Foolishly, he had even conceded a mild admiration for German machinery, which Wu had fatally misread as an invitation to kill him with detail. Sure, the five on-board cameras that gave an almost complete view of what was happening ahead, behind and even above could be handy for surveillance – if the car hadn’t been so damned conspicuous.

  Grinning, Wu opened the passenger door while still in motion, like a getaway driver grabbing his accomplice from a heist. A deafening blast of Bruce Springsteen – a Kovic favourite though not at that volume – hit him like a wall, the sound waves causing the shop fronts to shudder.

  ‘Take it down a bit, can you?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘TURN IT DOWN!’

  Wu grinned. ‘These are nine channel, 825 watt amps with sixteen speakers and exclusive neodymium magnet drives to produce crystal clear acoustic fidelity.’

  ‘You’re talking to yourself, man. Just drive.’

  Where he had found or borrowed the million plus yuan for this sleazemobile Kovic didn’t want to know. It couldn’t be what they paid him. He climbed in and inhaled the aroma of leather.

  ‘Why are you here anyway? I didn’t ask for you.’

  Wu was Kovic’s security detail, which might have seemed ridiculous since Kovic was both taller and more heavily built. One of the few perks of the Shanghai posting was supposedly the local muscle. Initially, Kovic was having none of it. He didn’t want anyone shadowing him and attracting unnecessary attention, and preferred to take care of any pursuers himself. The candidates on offer were all lumbering thugs who had come out of sedentary jobs in the military, liabilities in any kind of fight. Wu was different, and his own choice. Lean, bright, committed, and an Olympic standard marksman, he had been invalided out of Zhōngguó tèzhŏng bùduì – the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Special Forces – after an eye injury. Kovic happened on him when he was acting as security detail cum interpreter for a Russian arms dealer Kovic was hoping to turn. The sting went badly wrong when Kovic tried to apply some blackmail and in the ensuing struggle Wu, trying to intercede, inadvertently killed his boss. Impressed by Wu’s defensive skills, as well as his remorse, Kovic had also witnessed his terrible shame. Without thinking about it he made him an offer. Come and work with me and we’ll never speak of this again. How could Wu refuse?

  Kovic eased himself inside. He was still feeling fragile. Wu frowned at him in awe.

  ‘Oh man, your face looks like the fruit left at the end of the market that no one wants to buy.’

  ‘To the Consulate – hurry.’

  Music to Wu’s ears. He stepped on the gas and the BMW surged forward.

  ‘Zero to sixty-two in only five point four seconds!’

  ‘And zero to ER if you don’t take it easy, man: it all aches. And you don’t want any of my bodily fluids on your precious black leather.’

  Wu slowed right down.

  ‘It must have been big, big hangover.’ Any trouble was explained away like this, by mutual agreement.

  Kovic looked at him and raised an eyebrow. Wu raised both hands off the wheel in surrender.

  ‘Oh sorry. A big hangover.’

  ‘Yes, a major hangover.’

  Wu thought that was hilarious. ‘Major Hangover. I like that very much! And Colonel and General Hangover even worse?’

  ‘Are even worse. Yes, very much worse.’

  The downtown skyline reared up in front of them, like a crazed architect’s proposal for a city of the future, only this one had already been built, the tallest, newest and shiniest blurred by the low hanging smog. Even after six years it still took Kovic by surprise, the relentless drive skywards at a pace that put the US to shame. A century ago Detroit had experienced the same breathless progress. Would Shanghai suffer the same fate? It reminded him of plants in his father’s greenhouse that had bolted in their eagerness for the sun, only to wilt, having grown too fast to support themselves. Under all the glass cladding there was something fragile about Shanghai’s foundations.

  ‘I’ll take Fuzhou. There’s a protest starting in People’s Square.’

  ‘What protest?’

  Wu prodded the touch screen on the dash. The sat nav disappeared and up came local TV; an ad for a pet hair-perming product modelled by a shih tzu whose coat was frozen in tiny ringlets. The animal looked startled, as if electric shocks to its genitals had been part of the perming process.

  Wu touched the screen again and got CNN. ‘. . . since early this morning, gathering with slogans proclaiming outrage at what they’re claiming is an American-backed incursion . . .’

  The world outside became mute as Kovic zeroed in on the pictures: a hundred plus young men and women carrying placards marching in a circle, stony-faced.

  Kovic reached out to pause the picture. They were all quite smartly dressed and young, just the type who usually loved all things American. He touched Play. ‘. . . as yet unidentified Americans and Chinese thought to be among the dead . . .’

  And Chinese? This was a new one.

  ‘Yeah, some screw up.’ He didn’t want Wu to read the depth of his concern and get curious.

  ‘A real screw up, yeah.’ Wu nodded vigorously.

  Though he had no reason to doubt Wu’s loyalty, Kovic had said nothing about the border mission. Like Louise, Wu was used to his boss’s sudden disappearances.

  Kovic changed his mind and tapped the screen. ‘Take me there.
I want to see it.’

  ‘But you can see on the screen.’

  Kovic gave him his Nike look. They were already on the ramp up to the Yan’an Expressway, but locked in a near-static jam of cars. Without protest Wu selected reverse and amid a cacophony of hooting, forced his way across the traffic to the emergency lane and backed out. Wu enjoyed this kind of challenge – especially when flagged down by police, so he could brandish his diplomatic licence and enjoy the disappointed look on their faces as they waved him on. At the intersection he did a U and worked his way across town. Wu’s grasp of the Chinese driving style – fluid yet restrained – was a matter of envy for Kovic, who was apt to get cross and then stuck. Wu’s objective when behind the wheel was never to come to a halt, that whatever the obstruction, be it a pedestrian, a washing machine on the back of a moped or a red light, he would find a way past it without making contact.

  The police had blocked off the end of Wusheng Road. A motorcycle cop pulled up beside them and tapped on the side window.

  ‘Tíng chē – stop. No way through.’

  He frowned across at Kovic.

  ‘It’s not good for Westerners right now.’

  Wu waved his licence, but today it wasn’t going to do the business. Through the window they could hear the sound of the chanting bounce towards them off the sides of the buildings.

  Kovic opened the door.

  ‘I’m going in.’

  ‘You’ll be late for the Chief.’

  ‘Fuck the Chief.’

  The cop didn’t like disobedience. He came round to Kovic’s side and blocked his passage. Kovic knew that if the cop could avoid it he would prefer not to have to touch the lawai; foreigners were still thought by some to be as verminous as Shanghai sewer rats.