Battlefield 4: Countdown to War (3 page)

None of them moved. They were overwhelmed.

‘We are so fucked.’

Kovic watched as both vehicles drew to a halt. ‘Not yet. I want those wheels.’

He figured he had one advantage; these guys were conscripts, not Special Forces. Nothing like this would have happened to them before. The best he could hope for was to pick off whichever he could and scare off the rest. He aimed the M16 infrared at the driver in the first jeep. Bullseye. The driver flopped out of his seat while his passengers jumped for cover. Kovic followed them through the sight, picking off two more. He might be out of shape but his aim hadn’t deserted him. The remainder jumped into the second vehicle, which took off , fishtailing in the settling snow.

Kovic ran to the abandoned jeep and jumped in. The engine was still running. He stirred the shift until he found first, brought up the clutch until it bit, then manoeuvred towards the group behind the burned-out station wagon.

‘I got you in here; I’m gonna get you out, okay?’

‘How?’

Olsen was barely conscious. Faulkner was better but in shock from his pulverised arm. He closed his eyes, waiting for the morphine to take eff ect.

‘Plan B: we go through the military crossing.’

At Kovic’s insistence, the Chinese had agreed a back-up overland escape route via a disused mountain border post.

Price helped Kovic load the wounded into the vehicle. He was shaking with fear and shock.

‘Now, let’s get out of here.’

The snow was coming down harder and thicker now, a wind sending it straight at them. Kovic killed the lights and relied on his NV goggles, even though they made the flakes look huge, as if they were driving through a huge, exploded quilt.

‘This speed we’re not gonna make it,’ observed Olsen, uselessly.

‘Wanna get out and push?’

In the rear-view mirror, Kovic saw the second jeep had turned and was now in pursuit, gaining on them. So much for scaring them off . He tried to find a higher gear. There wasn’t one and in trying to up-shift he had lost speed.

As the second jeep drew closer Kovic yelled at Price to fend it off . But none of his shots deterred them. The road was still climbing but it was straight as far as he could see – which was not more than about two hundred feet. The other jeep was now almost alongside. Kovic wrenched the wheel. There was a screech of contacting metal, but the other jeep stayed obstinately on the road. Kovic swiped the jeep again. This time it veered off its path. Its nearside wheels caught in a ditch and it toppled off the road and rolled on to its side.

The first rush of relief didn’t last. A bend loomed out of the snow, a sharp left with a treacherous negative camber. He pulled hard on the wheel but momentum had got the better of the jeep. It wasn’t going anywhere except straight off the road, where it bounced, rose and bounced again, spilling all of them into the snow before coming to rest in some trees.

This is so not my night, thought Kovic.

He flattened himself against the bank and peered at the other jeep. The occupants had righted it and were back on board. The engine fired. It was coming his way. Kovic ducked out of sight as it went by, skidding in the slush. The NK hadn’t seen them go over the edge. He sprinted forward, slipped in the snow, recovered, vaulted into the back of the moving jeep and took aim. The suppressor on his Sig meant the two in the rear seats were gone without the guys up front even noticing, but then the vehicle lurched as it bounced through a pothole, throwing Kovic on to the driver and knocking his weapon out of his hand. The other man up front struggled
to free the barrel of an RPK that was trapped between his knees. Kovic smashed his left elbow into the side of the soldier’s head and lunged for the weapon before he could raise it. But the driver, distracted by Kovic’s sudden arrival, let go of the wheel. The vehicle slammed into a post, the impact throwing Kovic head first into the footwell, mashing his chin against the muzzle of the gun. He tried in vain to reach his gun that was now wedged under the pedals. The passenger freed his machine gun and loosed off a spray of fire into the sky that blasted inches from Kovic’s face, numbing the side of his head so that for a second he was sure he had been hit. What an unholy mess, he thought, as he struggled in the tangle of trapped weapons and writhing limbs. He grasped the barrel of the PRK, the heat searing through his gloves, and wrenched it in the direction of the driver just as its owner fired another volley. The bullets perforated the driver’s neck, so many and at such close range that his head almost entirely detached itself and flopped on to his chest. The passenger’s eyes bulged in horror. Kovic saw how young he looked and felt a flicker of pity before he seized the gun from his grip, jammed the butt into his chest and knocked him out into the snow.

There was still work to do. The semi-decapitated driver’s boot was still wedged firmly on the gas. Kovic seized the wheel – too late to stop the jeep slamming into a low wall and sending him airborne, tumbling over the hood and the wall and into an icy ditch. His nose smashed against a rock and he heard the crunch of splitting bone. On the way down he cursed Olsen, cursed Cutler, cursed the Agency and finally himself for being fool enough to accept the mission at all.

For a full minute he was immobile. Almost blinded by pain, he struggled to stay conscious, but could feel his brain giving up, shutting down. In this ditch, hidden by the wall, he could just remain and maybe the bad guys would go away . . . the snow could cover him and he’d never be found. It would be so nice and restful. He felt himself sinking.

Someone was screaming. He snapped back into consciousness, lifted himself a few inches and peered over the parapet where the jeep had come to rest. It was empty. If he could get it moving it was
theirs. He climbed back over the wall and jumped in. The wheel was slimy with blood and brain matter. He wiped it cursorily with his sleeve, fumbled with the controls and found the ignition, turned it and pumped the gas. It fired hopefully, then stalled. He turned it again; it fired and stalled again. Price was struggling towards him in the snow pulling Olsen and Faulkner. Together in the swirling snow they already looked like ghosts.

Kovic finally got the engine going, then revved it and rocked it back and forth until it found grip and reversed towards them.

He pulled out his phone. There were three agreed text codes:
Alpha
was mission accomplished,
Beta
was abort,
Gamma
was land exfil. He was about to text
Gamma
, which would alert Cutler to confirm the border crossing – if they made it.

‘Fuck this, we’re blown anyway,’ he told himself.

He dialled Cutler.

He picked up straight away. ‘What happened?’

‘Blown. Two men down plus the pilot. It was a fucking set-up.
Highbeam
had a surprise vest on.’

Silence. All he could hear were Cutler’s short quick breaths coming down the line. Kovic wanted to chew him out but that would have to wait. There were more pressing issues.

‘We’re twenty miles inside the DPRK. I have wheels, but we need that border post confirmed open. Otherwise we’re talking six dead Marines plus one of yours – on the wrong side of the wire, copy?’

‘We’re on it. Go carefully.’ Cutler hung up.

The Chinese were their only hope now; they better have that border crossing open. But Beijing would also have gone into damage limitation mode, while Cutler would be busy figuring how this was going to play back in Langley and how to cover his ass. But rage wasn’t going to get Kovic anywhere. The cover that the smoke from the burning helo had created was already drifting away.

His anger gave him a fresh surge of energy. They were going to get in this thing and get the hell across the border and Olsen and Faulkner were going to live, never mind the snow and however many NK were headed their way.

He helped them into the jeep, which had stalled again.

‘Where we goin’, man?’ Faulkner was vague with cold and pain.

‘Home. We make the border in this thing, someone Chinese side will scoop us up.’

No one else spoke. The sight of the two dead men and the burned up Sea Hawk with Tex inside it was fresh in their minds.

Olsen groaned. ‘Garrison warned me about you. Oh yeah, I know all about—’

Kovic cut him off . ‘Save it. I got you a ride out. We get over the border, we never have to so much as look at each other again – but until then we gotta make like we’re a team and look out for each other. That way we have more chance of staying alive. Right? Try and keep each other warm. We got a thirty-minute drive ahead.’

He didn’t wait for a response. He rammed the shift until he found first and the jeep jolted forward. The road was completely hidden under a carpet of white.

When it was this bad, the only thing was to think about the other bad times he’d gotten out of. The time in Sudan, captured by child soldiers high on smack who’d pushed the muzzle of a rifle up his ass and were arguing about who got to pull the trigger. In Kurdistan, the aggrieved knife-wielding hooker who thought he wouldn’t pay up because the Taliban commander he’d recruited her to sting turned out to be gay. And his first month in China, when an Indonesian arms dealer hung him by his heels from a high rise because he thought he was a rival . . .

He didn’t want to think about Garrison’s son, though.

With each minute the snow thickened and the wheels lost even more grip. He slowed to below twenty, which was still too fast. The track met the border on the slope of a mountainside. The jeep protested furiously at the gradient. The clutch was shot, but he managed to force the shift out of second gear and back into first. He was following the contour of the hill but the negative camber on a right-hand curve tugged the vehicle sideways. He applied more gas but the wheels just spun. Then the revs climbed and for a time it looked as if they would make it. Kovic squinted ahead, focused with all his will as he replayed his memory of the map and sat-photos,
how the track narrowed as it rounded a sharp hairpin, and where some landslip had spilt over the surface. He kept the gas steady as the jeep bucked over the uneven surface, but the gradient defeated the transmission until a sudden metallic crack under their feet told him the drive shaft had snapped. He stood on the brakes but the wheels were already locked. They were sliding backwards, the engine released from its burden revving to a scream.

‘I can’t hold it. Bail!’

They jumped out, Kovic pulling Olsen and Price holding Faulkner before the jeep disappeared over the edge of the track and turned on its side, displaying its broken prop shaft like a dangling limb. The engine was still idling but the vehicle was clinically dead.

‘Okay. We walk from here.’

‘How far?’

‘A mile.’

A mile on the flat in this was twenty minutes minimum, uphill twenty-five. Carrying a wounded man each . . .

Kovic hauled Olsen on to his back, while Price hooked Faulkner’s good arm over his strong shoulders and half carried, half walked him. Faulkner was the biggest but Olsen felt like a steer, his weight seeming to double every few yards. Kovic dug deep into what resources he had left, forcing his mind to separate itself from the fatigue. The cold had slowed the seepage out of Olsen’s thigh but he was getting paler. Kovic felt the cold biting deep, freezing his face, gluing the hairs in his nostrils together. In Afghanistan during the winter of 2008 he’d come upon an oddly shaped mound in the snow. Curious, he’d dug into it and found an entire family huddled together in a last desperate search for warmth. Their corpses were fused together, frozen solid; they had become their own memorial.

‘Hey, see that?’

Price, who was a few yards ahead, stopped and pointed into the gloom.

‘Fence.’

‘Hey,’ said Faulkner. ‘We’re almost there.’

Kovic fired a distress flare which the snow clouds swallowed whole. The wind coming round the hill sharpened and drove into
them, slowing their progress further. Kovic started to count his steps, just for something to focus on other than the cold. With each step he imagined another dish on the menu at Mancun’s, promising himself double everything if he ever got out of this. Out here in the bleak white nothingness, brash, brittle Shanghai seemed like heaven on earth.

The checkpoint was deserted, but the giant mesh gate was unlocked. Something had gone right, though somewhere inside him he had hoped fancifully for a Chinese welcoming party. He climbed up the watchtower and found the phone in its all-weather metal box. There was no dial, no buttons: just lift and wait for an answer. Hopefully someone in the border HQ would pick up. He looked down at Price, his arms around Faulkner and Olsen, trying to shelter them from the punishing wind that was itself now a weapon, whipping them unrelentingly.

The phone line crackled. The voice sounded as if it was on the other side of the world. Kovic tried to speak. The frozen air ripped at his windpipe. The sweat from heaving Olsen had frozen on to his face like a glaze. He sank to his knees, his muscles going into shutdown, his memory too. What in the hell was the Mandarin word for help? He searched the recesses of his brain, feeling his consciousness receding as the cold claimed him. Finally, after what seemed a lifetime, it came. He tried to move his lips but they would hardly obey him.

‘Yu-cheng
. . . Help.’

He dropped the phone and lurched towards the steps. His only hope was to get back to the men, to share their dwindling warmth before it was too late for them all. He found a footing, lost it, tried another, and then fell the ten or so feet on to the snow that had drifted round the base of the watchtower. He landed softly, completely encased in the fresh snow. He had done it, got them back over the border. Now exhaustion overwhelmed him. Maybe he would stay here forever, just let go. Yes, why not? Didn’t he say he would die in China?

What’s the last thing you want to think of before you die? They tell you to fix on something special and precious, someone you love.
He saw her coming towards him.
There you are. I was wondering when you’d show up.
Louise’s face, looking down on him, shaking her head, her hair floating. She was laughing and holding out her hand.
Come on, come to bed. Come on . . .