Battlefield 4: Countdown to War Read online

  ‘Tell the round eye he’s not welcome today and to get his nose fixed,’ the cop shouted to Wu, oblivious of Kovic’s grasp of Mandarin.

  Kovic replied, ‘Tell him his mother is—’

  ‘Sha-bi,’ interrupted Wu. Only in China could ‘stupid cunt’ be something you could say in front of a cop.

  ‘You meant him – right?’ said Kovic. Wu smiled.

  Another thing he loved about this country, the common currency of breathtaking insults.

  A protester had climbed on to a US TV news van and was tugging at the satellite dish. Kovic had to take a closer look. Three police in riot gear leaped on the truck, grabbed the protester and threw him off. More of them were hammering the windscreen with their fists while the driver cowered behind the wheel. Another half-dozen protesters appeared from behind the truck, wrenched open the side door and pulled out a hapless young American TV technician and threw him on the ground. They were high on hysteria. For all Kovic knew they might stamp on the guy. He waded through the crowd towards them.

  ‘American go home!’ A kid who could have been no more than eighteen bellowed in his ear. Wu, right behind, put his hand on the kid’s face and pushed him away. Another cop grasped Kovic’s arm. ‘No good here – go.’

  ‘He’s right, boss, we should leave now.’

  But Kovic shook them both off and waded into the throng that was closing round the technician. In all his six years in China he had never seen such behaviour. Most Chinese, the young urbanites especially, hero-worshipped the States. He struggled towards the helpless American on the ground, though the crowd having decked him were now uncertain what to do next, as if they didn’t quite have the stomach for full-blown violence. Who were these protesters?

  ‘Please don’t do this,’ pleaded Wu, who was struggling to keep up, dismayed by the unexpected interest of his boss in this bit of local trouble. This wasn’t in the job description. Kovic’s duty was to stay out of trouble, to observe, analyse and report. Always report. Well screw that. He reached the group who were closing in on the technician who was on his back trying to shield his head. A youth tried to push Kovic back. He grabbed him and thrust his face into his.

  ‘Cào nǐ zǔzōng shíbā dài – Fuck your ancestors to the eighteenth generation.’

  The youth fell back. Wu looked horrified.

  ‘Where in hell did you hear that?’

  Kovic shrugged. ‘Some phrasebook.’

  It was enough to distract them. He pushed between them, seized the TV guy by the arm and lifted him back on to his feet.

  ‘Jeez, thanks, man. This is cur-razy. Not seen nothing like this since Cairo.’

  Kovic dusted him down then addressed the protesters in his perfect Mandarin.

  ‘If you don’t like America go bang on the Consulate gates. This guy’s just trying to do his job – which is to tell the world about your protest, which you can bet your news services aren’t doing. You got the wrong people here, kids.’

  Kovic bundled the shaken technician back into the truck and shouted to the driver to get the hell out of there fast. Several more riot cops had arrived and were pushing the protesters back towards the square. Kovic wanted to see the numbers but Wu was using his surprising strength to pull him back towards the car.

  ‘Please, boss, before it gets ugly.’

  ‘Guess they’ve forgotten who gave them Iron Man and Lady Gaga.’

  ‘I expect the Chief will have something to say about it,’ said Wu as he performed his second miraculous reverse of the morning. Wu’s faith in the authority of the Agency was as quaint as it was misplaced. But Kovic could see that he was shaken by what he had just seen. Even touching a foreigner was extremely unusual. Attacking property in public like that was also very rare; the penalties were severe – three years’ hard labour – so the protesters had to be seriously motivated. He turned to Wu who began weaving through the traffic again.

  ‘What do you think’s going on?’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Yes, you; tell me.’

  Wu was mystified. Kovic had never asked him anything like this before.

  ‘Haven’t you got an opinion?

  ‘China and America ver— are very solid.’ He took both hands off the wheel to clasp them together, and then swerved to avoid a bike with a tottering cargo of mattresses.

  ‘I don’t mean what you hope: what do you think?’

  Wu was silent for a time, pondering the difference. He took his loyalty very seriously, which made it next to impossible for Kovic to drag an honest opinion out of him. In that respect he wasn’t so different from those of his compatriots who believed the American way of life was the best, not because they’d tried any other, but because they hadn’t. It made a refreshing change from his own cynicism, but right now he needed to get beyond it.

  ‘Come on, just your view. I won’t hold you to it.’

  He looked suddenly very sombre.

  ‘I think someone doesn’t want China and America to be friends.’

  A heavy police presence round the US Consulate building was another sign that all was far from well. They swung into the murky car park under the imaginatively named Commerce Centre Building next door. It was heavily populated with top of the range German automotive hardware. It also reeked of piss. They observed the attendant shamelessly taking a leak against a wall. So very Shanghai, thought Kovic; so reassuringly inconsistent.

  11

  US Consulate, Shanghai

  Kovic told Wu to be back in forty-five minutes and took the elevator to the twenty-eighth floor. The sign on the door said United States Commercial Attaché, an unimaginative cover. He used it as little as possible. This was only Cutler’s third visit since his appointment to Beijing, but he kept a room permanently booked out to him with his name on the door, as if marking his territory.

  Kovic didn’t know whether Cutler hated Shanghai or just hated him. Either way he never stayed long, which suited him. Before Highbeam, their meetings had consisted of Kovic being grilled about his expenditure, an indiscretion by one of his field agents that had got back to Beijing, or his lack of progress tracking down Armistead, the fabled super-hacker the NSA wanted closed down – or better still permanently neutralised. Kovic didn’t do sucking up – or dick stroking; it just wasn’t in his nature. Their meetings mostly consisted of Kovic giving monosyllabic answers to a barrage of questions about the minutiae of his work. Today Kovic was going to be asking the questions.

  Mrs Chan glanced at him and looked away quickly. She was forty-two, her face a frozen mask of plastic surgery, her eyes surgically widened so she had a permanent look of dismay, as if she had unexpectedly been entered from behind. Her hair was permed into a brittle shell that looked like pieces of it would snap off if knocked. It amused Kovic to think of her as Moneypenny to his James Bond. She was easily embarrassed, and Kovic was embarrassing, which triggered her profoundly irritating, high-pitched tinkly laugh. He always addressed her in Mandarin, which she was entitled to feel was a transgression of office code and a veiled insult to her own very shaky English. Whatever he said to her to make her squirm, she had to take it, because he knew that she was accepting payment from the Ministry of State Security for any supposed nuggets of intel she could glean for her handler, with whom she was also conducting a torrid affair. Little did she realise that Kovic was keeping the affair alive with gossip that was almost entirely fictional.

  ‘I apologise if my appearance causes you discomfort, Mrs Chan.’ He bent closer. ‘My military police informant was disappointed with his remuneration. The cocaine is making him very jumpy and paranoid.’

  Her already wide eyes looked like they might pop out of their sockets. Kovic delighted at the thought of this rubbish going up the line and the police internal affairs department struggling to work out who Kovic’s mystery ‘mole’ might be.

  ‘By the way, may I say how pleasing you look this morning.’

  She giggled her infuriating giggle. Despite her unease, she was partial to a
compliment. He had checked out her past. He made a point of knowing as much as he could about everyone he came into regular contact with, however menial, and discovered she had been voted Most Physically Pleasing Female by the male students in her administration diploma class.

  She looked at him for a second, wondering desperately if this was the moment she should do her handler’s bidding and kiss him. But Kovic moved away and the spell was broken.

  ‘Mr Cutler is waiting for you,’ she replied in her clipped English, taking care not to trip over the ‘L’ in Cutler. She got up from her desk, tottered over to the double doors and tapped almost inaudibly and paused before she spoke at the door, as if she was allowing him time to finish his prayers.

  ‘Agent Kovic is here, sir.’

  The Chief was sitting at the large desk he had ordered on the Shanghai station budget for his infrequent visits. He had a short torso so the surface of the desk was a fraction too high for him, which gave him the look of a prefect sitting at the teacher’s desk. Although he had just flown in that morning the desk was swimming with documents as if he’d been there all night. He was tapping furiously at a camo-covered field laptop, which must have had some sentimental meaning for him, or was just an awkward attempt to convince visitors that he hadn’t always been desk-bound. In his crisp white shirt with sleeve garters and thin dark tie, he cultivated the image of a standard issue Langley suit, impossible to imagine dressed any other way. Kovic pictured him playing golf, standing behind a barbecue, screwing Mrs Cutler, all in the same, anonymous garb.

  ‘Zǎoshànghǎo – Good morning.’

  Cutler nodded, put the remains of a packet of Oreos into a drawer and finished his coffee, didn’t look up.

  ‘Sit down, Kovic.’

  The Chief ’s cellphone buzzed. He pressed it to his ear and turned away.

  Nice start, thought Kovic.

  There were two kinds of Bureau Chief in his experience, doers and readers. Cutler was a reader. He measured performance by the weight of intel produced, so Kovic fed him raw data by the ton. Material Kovic should have just given salient lines from or have précised or even discarded, he sent whole; extremely verbose minutes of every district intelligence meeting he had bugged, endless transcripts of meetings with field agents, including the mind-numbing minutiae of their particular domestic gripes and tiresome pleas for more cash or other perks. But Kovic sifted what he sent very carefully, since he knew it was all opened and read by their opposite numbers in the Chinese Ministry of State Security.

  Cutler showed no interest in mastering the language. ‘I’m a generalist, not a specialist,’ was how he justified it to Kovic, which was another way of saying he didn’t want to get sidetracked on his way up the Agency’s greasy pole. He ate at McDonald’s or Pizza Hut wherever he was in the world, and ordered whatever he wanted online to avoid having to deal with local shop assistants. He was the type of Agency man who regarded all foreign influences as potentially suspect and was alert to the possibility of contamination at all times. Kovic was his absolute opposite; a nowhere man who submerged himself in whatever culture he found himself, who traded on his indeterminate complexion, playing the ugly American only when it suited him. He ate local, lived in the heart of real Shanghai and excelled at the language, all of which Cutler found deeply troubling – even un-American.

  The Chief was listening hard to whatever was coming down his phone, his fingertips pressed to his forehead. In most other postings, there was the pervasive sense that America was the Superpower and called the shots. That’s what made Cutler hard. Places in the world where they had removed governments and put in new ones were even known as ‘off the peg’ governments, where heads of state were there at the Agency’s pleasure. But China was not one of them, and definitely not today.

  For Cutler’s kind, China was an insoluble Rubik’s cube. Nowhere else on Earth could you find burgeoning capitalism twinned with an utterly unbending, centralised ideology. The Communist high command had taken a shine to the free market; only they’d left the ‘free’ bit on the shelf. However many McDonald’s were opened, however many Buicks sold, they would never allow democracy. It only resembled Western society on the surface. Like the Prada knock-offs for sale along the Nanjing Road, it looked the part – but was from a very different place.

  Cutler was listening very hard, nodding occasionally to the unknown caller. Just by his demeanour Kovic could tell it was someone more senior. Was he being chewed out, or were they talking damage limitation? For once Kovic had to admit he was out of his depth too. Nothing of this magnitude had happened in his six years here. And he didn’t have a good feeling about what was round the corner.

  Finally Cutler finished the call, pocketed the phone, looked up and frowned.

  ‘You mean to say you’ve been walking around town like that?’

  Kovic was in no mood to be lectured.

  ‘Thanks for the welcome.’

  Cutler patted the sweat off his brow with a napkin.

  ‘Well, I just got in from Beijing so shouldn’t you be doing the honours?’

  Kovic couldn’t help himself.

  ‘I just got in from DPRK and a near-death experience; you arrived on the shuttle.’

  Cutler looked hurt. Just cool it, okay, Kovic said to himself. The Chief stared at him for a second, then, as if he had just received an urgent directive from his brain, completely changed his tone. His face contorted with sudden concern, he rose up from behind the desk like a crane – despite the short torso he had surprisingly long legs – came round the desk and grasped Kovic’s arm. He was about to shake his hand when he saw the swelling.

  ‘Holy Jesus.’

  ‘Frostbite actually.’

  Cutler retreated to his chair, shaking his head with long pendulous swings as if admiring the width of his desk.

  ‘I hope you realise how serious this is.’

  Another of his stock features was his uncanny ability to state the obvious.

  ‘I’m working on it.’

  Cutler ignored the sarcasm. He bent over his laptop and pressed his fingers into his cheeks, forming white blotches. He had a large bald patch surrounded by greying hair, which contributed to his pious, monk-like demeanour. Kovic found himself propelled back to his schooldays, called yet again to the despairing principal’s office to learn the punishment for his latest outrage.

  ‘The Chinese are taking it pretty seriously too. I just came by People’s Square.’

  But Cutler wasn’t listening. ‘We have one hell of a problem on our hands.’

  Kovic was familiar with Cutler’s tendency to ‘own’ the seriousness of the situation – as if only he could determine the true gravity of events. It was the same with Armistead who Kovic was allegedly pursuing. Cutler had lectured him on the need to get him ‘before it’s too late’.

  To begin with, Kovic’s policy of drowning Cutler in paperwork had kept him at bay. But then there had been a change. Cutler had started querying briefs and character assessments of his assets. He was being more assertive, more inquisitive about Kovic’s activities, and quick to find fault, warning him not to get too ‘intimate’ with his sources. Cutler was like a throwback to the darkest days of the Cold War; he mistook Kovic’s empathy with China for brainwashing.

  Cutler was still shaking his head. ‘It’s a real concern.’

  ‘It’s a real fucking concern that five men died, three executed.’

  He winced; was it the expletive or the mention of the method of death?

  ‘Okay.’ He let out a long sigh. ‘Take me through it from the top.’

  He touched the dial of a recorder. Nothing less than verbatim would do. So Kovic took him through it all right, lingering on the executions he had witnessed through his peephole in the snow.

  ‘And they definitely didn’t see you? You’re sure?’

  Cutler looked down at the desk, pressed a forefinger on an Oreo crumb, lifted it and flicked it away.

  ‘If they had, do you think I’d be here?�
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  Cutler studied the ends of his fingers as if they might hold the answer. Eventually he said, ‘Too bad you didn’t have any witnesses.’

  Kovic thought about what this might mean. Ten years ago he would have considered his honesty was being questioned and possibly grabbed Cutler by the throat, a career ending choice. China had taught him to be smarter. To watch, listen, and wait.

  ‘Means you’re going to have to take my word for it.’

  ‘You didn’t want this mission.’

  ‘I went, didn’t I?’

  ‘But you were critical of it.’

  Kovic snorted. ‘With good reason.’

  Cutler glared. Kovic put his elbows on the desk.

  Now he could feel his restraint slipping as pure rage forced its way up like coffee through a percolator. He jabbed the air between them with a frostbitten forefinger.

  ‘I put my life on the line to get them back over the border, dragged them half a mile and then some guys came out of nowhere – or more precisely out of China – and assassinated them.’

  ‘The snow was pretty deep, huh?’

  Kovic nodded.

  ‘Visibility pretty bad?’

  Kovic nodded, wondering where this was going.

  ‘So pretty disorienting – low vis, battle fatigue, unfamiliar landscape—’

  ‘Where the fuck’s this going?’

  He could feel the tempting catharsis of losing it reaching out to him like one fateful drink to an alcoholic. Go on, just deck him. You know you want to.

  Cutler sighed. ‘I’m only preparing you for what may be ahead.’

  He reached into an attaché case next to his chair and produced a manila folder. He flipped it open. Inside was a clutch of photographs.

  ‘You better have a look at these.’

  He pushed them across the desk.

  The photographs were in colour, but because of the snow and the bad light, you could have been forgiven for thinking they were monochrome. Even the blood looked grey. It was the same vehicle, the shitbin DPRK jeep he had commandeered for their escape. It looked like it was in the same position as they had abandoned it. But in the photo it wasn’t abandoned. Arranged inside the vehicle were the corpses: Olsen, Kean, Price, Deacon and Faulkner, but that wasn’t all. With them were three others – judging by their uniforms, Chinese.