‘After I killed one of them it ceased to be a problem.’
‘In a fight?’
He lowered his eyes and met Dima’s. They looked cold and dead. ‘I made it look like that.’
‘Premeditated? Why weren’t you court-martialled?’
Gregorin kept his gaze on Dima. ‘No one found out.’
‘But you’re telling me.’
‘If I’m to be accepted for this mission Sir, it’s probably better we have no secrets.’
Kroll looked up from Gregorin’s file. ‘Impressive. How did you do it exactly?’
‘Following the fight, the man in question was hospitalised. I was concerned that he might make a full recovery, so I obtained access to the facility and administered a lethal dose of diamorphine.’
Dima reached for his file. Nothing run of the mill in there either. As well as tours in Afghanistan and Bosnia, he had worked undercover in Brussels, infiltrated a drug cartel in Dubai, carried out assassinations in the Dominican Republic and had been put in quarantine for a period over allegations, unproven, of collusion with the CIA while operational in Pakistan. Most commanders, Dima knew, would keep this man at a distance. He was perfect.
‘Thank you for being so candid. Wait outside.’
Gregorin saluted and left without a sound.
Kroll took a deep breath. ‘Better not get on the wrong side of him.’
Dima ignored him. His mind was elsewhere. Eventually he spoke. ‘I want Vladimir.’
‘You said you’d never work with him again.’
‘I said the same about you. Look where that got me. Do you have an actual objection?’
Kroll pushed out his lower lip. ‘Not at all. He’s in prison though. Drug trafficking.’
‘Then let’s get him out.’
‘Paliov could have a problem with that.’
‘He needn’t know. Which facility is he in?’
‘Butyrka.’
Dima let out a long breath.
‘Great. We’ll be lucky if he’s not dead from TB or AIDS.’
‘We’ll get Vaslov to order him transferred to a military facility and stop off on the way.’
‘He considers Paliov to have been a brake on his career. It’ll be an opportunity to get one over on him.’
‘You know everyone’s weak spot, don’t you?’
‘Except my own.’ Paliov’s photos had flashed up again.
Kroll stood up. ‘While I get it sorted, don’t you think you should put those two through their paces?’
Dima nodded. Kroll picked up the phone. ‘Send Zirak and Gregorin back in.’
The two candidates stood side by side, an unlikely pair. That was good, thought Dima.
He peered at each one. ‘The mission starts now. Your first task is to deliver Vladimir Kamarivsky to me by first light tomorrow. He’s incarcerated in Butyrka. You’ll find his details on the database. If there’s anything blocked to your report level, Vaslov will open it. I don’t care how you do it. Just bring him to me.’
Zirak looked mystified.
‘The “Jewish Ayatollah”?’
Vladimir, a Latvian Jew, was a legend at Spetsnaz for infiltrating the Iranian Supreme Leader’s staff. He prided himself on his knowledge of the Koran and his grasp of the intricacies of Iranian power was second to none.
Dima nodded. ‘Yup, that’s the one. Be back here by dawn.’
When they’d gone, Kroll turned to Dima and looked at him warily. ‘Is there something you’re not telling me? Don’t fuck about now.’
‘Just a feeling that this is going to be my last mission. I want my favourite people with me.’
9
Iraqi Kurdistan/Iran Border
Black had lost all track of time. His watch was gone, his radio smashed, his headset also gone. To escape the cavity in the rubble he’d had to strip himself of all the things that were designed to keep him alive. The sixty extra pounds of weaponry and bulletproofing the soldiers carried was useful, but also a liability. Even his water bottle had gone. His mouth felt as if someone had emptied a sack of brick dust into it, and the wind was full of particles that shot-blasted his features. The light was failing fast: it had to be around 1900 hours. That meant he’d lost six hours in the rubble. Once he managed to get on his feet he found cover under a pair of pillars that were drunkenly holding each other up. He stood still. He couldn’t hear anything so he looked for movement. The devastation was total. It reminded him of his grandfather’s pictures of Dresden, an entire living, breathing city reduced to nothing but rubble.
A dog came past, skinny and limping. It looked at him, hesitated as if uncertain as to whether he was friend or foe, thought better of it and padded away. Blackburn thought about his crew. Buried as well, or had they made their escape? The wind noise of his deafness was lessening. He became aware of a low intermittent moan and decided to head towards it. Perhaps there was something he could do. The street was strewn with debris and his balance was still uncertain. As his eyes began to focus he was able to pinpoint the source of the sound. A figure in military fatigues lay sprawled on the street, half hanging into one of the fissures that the quake had unzipped. Once he recognised the battledress as US he quickened his pace.
Black was less than a block away from the stricken soldier when he heard the vehicle. Definitely heavy duty, probably military. Help on the way? Something about the sound slowed him to a halt. The engine note — not the Stryker’s familiar Caterpillar diesel but a lower guttural thrum, more like a V8. Definitely not a Stryker or any other friendly vehicle he could think of. He crouched down behind a half-crushed van as the first of three Russian-made BTR-152s — six-wheeled APCs — nosed into view, alongside them a crowd of young men in improvised combat gear.
What followed was something he would never forget. Like all soldiers, he had seen some things in Iraq that he would have preferred not to, but that was part of the job. If you didn’t like seeing innocent people get killed and mutilated, don’t join the army. Then seeing the light go out of that girl’s eyes in that kitchen had upped the ante somehow: he had held her, the first and last man in her life, in a single intimate embrace before death. And now, even that would soon be subsumed by what came next. Sometime later he would grimly acknowledge that it had served his purpose. After that, he would no longer entertain any of that shit about the nobility and rightness of war.
The injured soldier, hearing the convoy, had managed to haul himself up on one elbow and was waving. The BTR shuddered to a halt. One of its armoured doors flew open and a figure clad in a shalwar kameez, face masked by part of his turban, jumped down and spoke to him. Several others armed with AKs tumbled out of the machine and took up positions around him. More young men, similarly dressed, crowded round. The turbanned guy and the Marine appeared to have found a common language — presumably English — but then the turbanned guy signalled to one of the crowd, who came forward with a camcorder and started filming. The turban stepped back and produced a blade, serrated like a breadknife but longer, as if specifically designed for what he was about to do. He grabbed the Marine by the hair and slashed at his neck, blood flying as he sawed with such ferocity that the decapitation was over in twenty seconds. Blackburn felt his lungs fill with breath for a shout, but self-preservation took over. As the man held the Marine’s head aloft for his comrades to admire, the flap of his turban slipped and Blackburn took a mental picture of the face — clean-shaven, which was unusual, high cheekbones and small eyes narrowed to slits. He bared his teeth and bit off the nose of the beheaded Marine and spat it out. His crew went wild, firing their AKs in the air and chanting something Blackburn couldn’t make out, then he waved them back into the vehicle and it moved off east at walking pace, the crowd chanting behind.
10
Ryazan, Russia
However good it looked, Dima didn’t like what he was seeing. He watched from his temporary Ops Room as the giant Mi-26 ‘flying slug’ he’d ordered, the world’s largest chopper, eased its way down on to the apron. Able to carry eighty troops with ease, it could even swallow an eight-wheeled APC. He wondered briefly whether Zirak and Gregorin would arrive to find Vladimir with his bags packed, all ready and waiting for them at the gates of Butyrka.
Half of him marvelled at the speed with which whatever he wanted was provided. The other half — the doubter, the sceptic, the half he listened to the hardest — knew this was all too good to be true, which was why he had called Paliov.
‘We have to talk.’