Carter ghosted through the doorway in a blur of motion. Room clearance. Something he had done tens of thousands of times before. On the ranges at Pontrilas, on raids in Afghanistan and a bunch of other places. Breach the entry point, move forward with speed and controlled aggression. Suppress the threat on the other side of the door. Just like he’d taught the SF recruits back in Santiago.
Except this time, the target was a fellow Blade.
He swung his pistol from left to right as he moved deeper into the unit, instantly sweeping the area for threats. He found himself in a dimly lit space, ten metres wide and about twenty deep, all exposed brickwork and grey resin flooring. Fluorescent batten lights dangled from the steel rafters. Carter saw a small office cubicle built into the wall to his left, kitchenette and ablutions to the rear. A white box truck in the middle of the floor space, front cab facing the lowered roller shutter.
There was a metal workbench to the right of the truck, with a clutter of charging cables, burner phones and computer equipment laid out on the surface. Black duffel bags, three of them. Unzipped. Bricks of black tar stuffed inside. And weaponry. Carter saw a ton of hardware. Glock pistols. A Dragunov sniper rifle. AK-47 assault rifles. What looked like a GM-94 Russian grenade launcher, plus ammunition pouches filled with 43 x 30 mm thermobaric projectiles.
Vann was standing next to the workbench.
Hands at his sides. Unarmed.
Smiling.
‘Hello, Geordie,’ he said. ‘What took you so long?’
Carter stopped dead. The gun wavered in his hand. Vann laughed and wagged a finger at him. He had changed out of his Afghan rig into regular civvies.
‘You should have stayed out of this, fella,’ Vann went on. ‘Should have walked away when you had the chance.’
He was still smiling. A hollow sensation spread its fingers through Carter’s core. Something was wrong, he knew.
Very wrong.
‘Too late now, of course,’ Vann added. ‘Fucking shame, that. But then you never were very good at taking advice, were you, Geordie?’
Carter felt an intense pressure building between his temples. He kept his pistol trained on Vann’s centre mass. The smirk on the guy’s face widened. He didn’t look surprised to see Carter. The opposite, in fact.
Like he’d expected Carter to come crashing through the door at that precise moment.
‘Put the gun down, son,’ a voice drawled.
It came from Carter’s nine o’clock.
A voice he’d heard somewhere before.
American.
Carter looked past his shoulder.
A silver-haired man with a heavily lined face and pale blue eyes stood in front of the cubicle doorway. He was dressed in a black T-shirt, stone-grey trousers and dark hiking boots, and he gripped a Glock 17 pistol in his right hand.
The dark mouth of the barrel aimed squarely at Carter. Trained at a spot between his eyes.
Carter felt his guts turn to ice.
Bill Ramsey grinned and said, ‘Hell, son. You ought to see the look on your face right now. Frigging priceless.’
Carter stared at the ex-CIA director speechlessly. The pressure between his temples became steadily more intense. Invisible vice jaws clamped around his skull.
Bill Ramsey.
The man who had presented Carter with the Medal of Honor several months ago. The president’s most trusted confidant.
What the fuck is he doing here?
‘I won’t ask you a third time,’ Ramsey said in his languid Southern accent. ‘Lose the piece. Do it nice and slow.’
‘Do as he says, Geordie,’ said Vann. ‘Don’t be a fucking idiot.’
Carter ground his teeth in anger. He hated to admit it, but Vann was right. Two against one. Shite odds. Vann was less than arm’s length from the hardware laid out on the workbench. Carter could take down one of them, but not both.
The moment I open fire, I’m a dead man.
Very slowly, Carter lowered himself to a kneeling position and placed the Grach on the floor. Bill Ramsey’s knife-edge-thin lips parted into a smile.
‘Attaboy.’
He kept the Glock fixed on Carter while Vann stepped forward and picked up the Grach. The Ulsterman straightened up and set the weapon down on the workbench, out of Carter’s reach.
‘What the fuck’s going on?’ Carter said, flicking his gaze from Ramsey to Vann and back again.
Vann sidestepped the question and said, ‘I tried to keep you out of all this. Remember that. I gave you the chance to fuck off back home, and you didn’t take it. None of this is my fault.’
Carter shook his head. He tried to think clearly. To make sense of the situation. Couldn’t. All the wiring in his brain had been scrambled.
‘What the fuck is he doing here?’ he demanded, indicating Ramsey.
Vann said, ‘Bill is my business partner, fella. We’ve been working together for a while now.’
Carter stared disbelievingly at the former CIA man.
‘Got to hand it to you,’ Ramsey droned on. ‘You’re one stubborn son of a bitch. When I got the call to say you were approaching this place, hell, I almost spat out my coffee.’ He glanced at Vann and grinned. ‘Guess you were right. Your friend hasn’t got the good sense to know when to quit.’
The words floored Carter. ‘You’ve been tracking me?’
‘Every step of the way.’ Ramsey laughed and dipped the Glock 17, pointing the barrel at Carter’s side pocket. ‘The satphone. In case you’re wondering how we did it. There’s a tracking device in the battery pack. We’ve had eyes on you since you landed in Uzbekistan.’
The realisation didn’t dawn on Carter. It punched him in the face. He thought back to the briefing. Santiago. Chile. Only a few days ago, but it felt like it predated the Big Bang. He remembered Mike Mullins’s serious expression as he handed Carter the satphone.
Whatever happens, do not lose this phone.
He said, anxiously, ‘Mullins. He set me up.’
Ramsey nodded. ‘Mike tipped us off that Langley was sending someone out on a search mission. I asked him to plant a bug on the satphone. A precautionary measure. Just in case you managed to locate David. But we didn’t think you’d get very far. Not this far, certainly.’
‘Jesus,’ Carter said. ‘Jesus Christ.’
Vann gave a snarl of contempt. ‘Get over it, you daft cunt. That tracker helped to save your life.’
‘What the fuck do you mean?’
‘Mullins told me about your movements,’ Vann explained. ‘Gave me time to replace that landmine on the trail with the light bulb. If it wasn’t for me, you would have been blown to bits.’
Several things fell into place. ‘That’s why you took out the landmine? Because you knew I was coming?’
‘If it was anyone else, I wouldn’t have bothered,’ Vann said. ‘But I didn’t want to see you get hurt. That’s why I did it. I saved you, mate.’
‘Bullshit.’ Rage flamed inside Carter’s chest, burning the back of his throat. ‘You left us for dead back there. Them Afghans could have wiped out the lot of us.’
Vann laughed. ‘I seriously fucking doubt it. I helped train you, didn’t I? I’ve seen you in action. I knew you wouldn’t have any problems dealing with a few poor-quality Taliban.’
‘Of course, we hoped that David would lose you in the mountains,’ Ramsey cut in. ‘That would have been better for all concerned. We could have avoided all of this unpleasantness.’
Something didn’t make sense to Carter. He turned to Ramsey. ‘Why would you get involved in trafficking gear? You used to run the CIA, for Chrissakes. You can’t be short of a few quid.’
Ramsey looked over at Vann. The two of them shared a look and promptly erupted in fits of hysterical laughter. Carter glared angrily at them.
‘This isn’t about the money,’ Ramsey said. ‘You couldn’t be more wrong about that, son.’
Carter snorted his contempt. ‘Fuck off. You’ve been selling smack to the Tajiks. Then you decided to rip them off. Take the drugs and the money for yourselves. Hakimi told me everything. He spilled his guts, right before he bled out.’
‘Half right. We’ve got an arrangement with the Tajiks. Or at least, we did. But not for money.’
Ramsey smiled. There was a gloating look in his eyes that unnerved Carter.
‘We were trading it for something else,’ he added. ‘Something much more valuable, in fact.’
Carter looked askance at Vann. ‘What the fuck is he talking about?’
‘See for yourself,’ Ramsey said.
He indicated the back of the truck with his Glock. An amused expression crossed his smooth features.
‘Go on, boy. Take a look. Then you’ll understand.’
Carter moved warily round to the rear of the wagon. The back door had been rolled up, he noticed. Five army-green trunks had been loaded into the cargo space, each one housing a waterproof metal container about the size and shape of a beer keg, sheathed in a protective carry case. An Alice frame had been securely fastened to each pack, complete with shoulder straps and back pads for easy transportation.
Ramsey was grinning with excitement. ‘You know what these are, right?’
Carter felt a chill crawl down his spine.
He had seen similar models to the containers in front of him. SADMs. Special Atomic Demolition Munitions. Otherwise known as backpack nukes. Portable weapons, developed by the US military at the height of the Cold War and designed to be carried to the target location on the back of a parachutist or infantryman. They could even be detonated underwater to destroy enemy shipping facilities.
Each metal casing housed a small nuclear warhead, Carter knew. A one-kiloton yield. Equivalent to a thousand tons of TNT. Small in comparison to the strategic nukes, but still powerful enough to destroy a football stadium-sized area.
He was looking at the Russian equivalent to the SADM. There were subtle differences in the design and function, but essentially the same destructive capacity.
Tens of thousands of deaths per bomb.
Whole sections of a city annihilated.
‘Beautiful, aren’t they?’ said Ramsey. ‘Kind of poetic, in a way.’
‘Jesus,’ Carter said.
‘Three tonnes of heroin,’ said Ramsey. ‘In exchange for five backpack nukes. That was the price the Tajiks set.’
Carter rounded on the two men. ‘You got these from the Tajiks?’
‘They have a guy in Moscow,’ Vann said. ‘Very well connected. He was supplying the bombs.’
Ramsey said, ‘The Russians lost a bunch of these things when the Soviet Union collapsed. Ninety-seven, according to the intelligence reports, although the true figure is probably much higher. A few of them eventually turned up in some weird places. One oligarch kept a backpack on display in his dacha in St Petersburg. Another guy had been storing one in his leaking basement. Said he’d kept it as a memento. But most of them were never found.
‘The Tajik came into possession of these units eight months ago. Don’t ask me how. Our guy reached out to his associates. Told them to put the feelers out. See if any parties might be interested in a sale. Terrorist groups, the Taliban. That’s how we heard about the hardware. The Tajik gangsters handled the negotiations. It was a swift deal. Nukes are a buyer’s market. The Tajiks asked for fifty per cent of the product as a down payment, the other fifty on successful delivery. We completed the exchange at the roadhead this morning. A beautiful moment. You should have been there to see it.’
‘I saw enough,’ Carter snarled. ‘I saw them bodies.’
‘It had to be done. The Tajiks, Hakimi. Those guys knew too much. Leaving them to walk away free? Hell, that was a risk we couldn’t take. You see where I’m coming from. Right?’
Carter stared at the American and tried to assemble the fragmented thoughts in his head.
Heroin for nukes. The straight swap made sense. It avoided the problem of cash. The number-one obstacle for anyone involved in the drug business. Smuggling gear into a country was a relatively risk-free undertaking. The big issue was getting the money out again. Money always left a trail. Everything had to be rinsed clean. Which took a lot of time and effort and expense. By insisting on a direct trade, both parties avoided the hassle of dealing with hard currency.
‘This is what you’ve been doing in-country all this time?’ he asked Vann. ‘Smuggling gear so you could buy nukes?’
‘It didn’t start out that way,’ Vann replied. ‘I was originally sent in to train the rebels.’ He cocked his head at Ramsey. ‘Bill was working the other end of the operation.’
‘The National Alliance needed weaponry,’ Ramsey explained. ‘They were up against a serious military force, ably supported by Pakistan and China. It was clear they’d need more than a few AK-47s to have any chance of success. My job was to supply the hardware. David would train the rebels. Show them how to work it. RPGs, small arms and so on. And Stingers.’
Carter’s eyebrows lifted in surprise and puzzlement. FIM-92 Stingers were easily transportable surface-to-air missile launchers. In the right hands, you could bring down almost anything with them. Choppers, aircraft, drones.
For a brief moment he wondered why the Afghan rebels needed anti-aircraft weapon systems. But then he recalled what Mullins and Ortega had told him about the fleet of Black Hawk helicopters. Spoils of war, they had said. Seized by the Taliban in the wake of the withdrawal from Afghanistan.
He thought about the Chinese-supplied drones.
The support from Russia.
Ramsey said, ‘The initial plan was to target the Taliban by providing limited assistance to the rebels. That was Langley’s idea. A small-scale insurgency. Minimum risk. But a few of us were pushing to widen the net.’
‘Meaning?’
‘We wanted to go after Chinese targets inside Afghanistan. Civilian aircraft, ferrying engineers and geologists to and from the mining sites, the factories. We argued that disrupting Beijing’s operations was the best way to destabilise the Taliban. Force the Chinese to pull out. Isolate the regime in Kabul. Deprive them of allies.’
Carter remembered something Sharza had told him.
The Chinese are opening mines now.
They want the Taliban to guarantee the safety of their workers.
‘What did Langley say?’ he asked.
He wanted to keep Ramsey talking, letting the American warm to his theme. Buying himself time to figure out an escape plan.
Somehow I’ve got to get the fuck out of here.
‘The Company vetoed the plan.’ Ramsey sniffed. ‘POTUS himself weighed in on it. Told them not to do anything that would piss off Beijing. Around this time, the CCP had started making noises about recapturing Taiwan by force. The president dismissed it as more of the same old sabre-rattling bullshit from Zhongnanhai. But I read the intelligence reports. I could see that the Chinese president was determined to go the distance this time. Full-scale amphibious assault. The biggest in history. A million men. It’d make the Normandy landings look like a beach party. That’s when we decided to pursue a different strategy.’
Ramsey was bragging now, eyes shining with feverish intent. Carter swallowed nervously. He knew there was only one possible reason why Ramsey would be telling him this stuff. But his mind really didn’t want to go there.
Ramsey went on. ‘We knew the Taiwanese wouldn’t be able to withstand an all-out invasion. Support from our side would be strictly limited in the interests of avoiding a full-blown nuclear confrontation. Sure, we might threaten the Beijing elite with sanctions, but that would be the extent of it. So we figured we needed a new type of deterrence. The kind that would make them think twice before they messed with anyone again.’
He gave a chilling smile. Carter felt a quivering in his chest.
Ramsey said, ‘There’s a private jet coming in today. Landing at the airfield north of here. Wheels up in sixty minutes. The nukes are being transported to Taiwan. We’ve got friends on the ground over there. People we can trust. Folk who are determined to resist the Chinese menace at all costs, even if it means sacrificing their own lives.’
Carter didn’t want to ask the question. But he asked it anyway. He had to know for absolutely sure.
‘What are you going to do with them?’
‘We’ll deploy the nukes at pre-designated sites around the country before the Chinese invasion,’ Ramsey said. ‘At strategic airheads and harbours. Any forward operating base the Chinese are planning to establish. When the attacking forces land, we’ll detonate them remotely. Right in the path of the enemy. And, by God, teach them a lesson they won’t live long enough to forget.’