Well, you did choose to become an arms dealer, thought Dima. If you want to sleep well at night sell eggs, or oranges.
‘By the way, I passed the US Marines on my way in. And I don’t think they’re here as customers.’
Kaffarov’s smirk now twisted up at one end.
‘Yes, the Americans seem to think they should have a monopoly of the world’s armaments market. So narrow-minded of them. And —’ he adjusted his grip on the Uzi ‘ — out of date.’
‘You know, those guys have had quite a bit of practice at this stuff. It’s only a matter of time before they figure out how to get in here.’
For a man who had the US Marines knocking on his door he wasn’t breaking into much of a sweat. Dima glanced at the dead North Korean, turning his pool pink.
‘And who’s going to guard you now?’
‘Do you want to apply for the job?’
It should have been a joke, but his face said otherwise. A rat in a hole too deep to dig his way out alone?
‘I can offer very attractive terms.’
Keep humouring him, Dima thought.
‘Well, it’s the first time I’ve been offered a job at gunpoint.’
No smile was forthcoming.
‘Farouk Al Bashir is dead. I heard it on CNN so it must be true. So I guess the PLR’s finished.’
Kaffarov shook his head.
‘On the contrary. With Bashir out of the way, the true force of the PLR will be unleashed: 9/11 will just be a footnote in history after what’s coming.’
Dima hoped this was an empty boast. He feared it wasn’t.
‘You don’t know it, Dima Mayakovsky, but you’re quite naive. I know your exact type. Steeped in the Spetsnaz folklore, never quite able to shake off that old Soviet bullshit.’
He shook his head. ‘And here you are, struggling to make a living doing other people’s dirty work. There are hundreds of you out there, bitter and twisted after having served the Motherland so faithfully. You should have grasped the opportunity when it was there. I saw the writing on the Berlin Wall. You know what it said? Every man for himself.’
Kaffarov was getting into his stride now. He pulled the Uzi in towards him a little: were his arms getting tired?
‘I know exactly why you’re here. Because some apparatchik in Moscow got to hear that yet another item of supposedly top secret weaponry had found its way on to the open market. You know what his first thought was? How do I cover my ass? Sack someone. Find a scapegoat, make them take the fall. Wait. Even better: tell the person you’re about to sack to organise a search and rescue operation. It’s bound to fail. Then sack them. Unfortunately the person you’ve chosen isn’t such a stupid jerk as you hoped: he brings his own men. But you still give him the wrong intelligence. Then boom! Sound familiar?’
Dima felt a surge of rage. Kaffarov knew all along, just as he had suspected. He nodded, pleased with himself.
‘I have many friends, Dima. I am a very popular man. Being rich makes you very popular. You should try it someday.’
Dima could feel his patience wearing out. The Uzi was still pointing his way but Kaffarov seemed to have got absorbed by his own smugness. He could see the inferior officer who lurked underneath, who had never succeeded in the military, who had probably taken a fair amount of shit from his more successful peers. How sad that a man of his wealth and influence was wasting time bragging on like this. More than sad: stupid.
Dima kept up a pensive expression, as if he was gratefully absorbing his wisdom. Standing over him, Kaffarov had overlooked the fact that while he was talking, Dima, slumped at the edge of the pool, drenched but no longer out of breath, was slowly letting his left hand slide in the direction of Kaffarov’s right foot.
There was a loud blam from the other side of the reinforced door. Kaffarov’s eyes darted left and Dima lunged, hooking his hand round Kaffarov’s ankle and pulling it forward with such a jolt that Kaffarov landed on his back, the impact knocking all the wind out of him. The Uzi flew out of his hand, arced through the air, dropped on to the poolside and, like a lethal game of spin the bottle, revolved several times and came to a stop just out of Kaffarov’s reach.
There was another loud thud outside the door. He hoped it might be Kroll and Vladimir, but feared it was the Marines.
Dima sprang up and bent over Kaffarov, a hand tightening round his neck.
‘Show me where the nukes are. Now.’
Kaffarov’s mouth was moving but no sound was coming out. The complacency had gone, replaced by a look of dismay, as he absorbed what had just happened.
‘I told you they’re gone.’ He nodded in the opposite direction to the door. Dima released his grip so he could get his breath.
‘Don’t fuck with me. I will most definitely kill you.’
It was an empty threat, because he needed to get him back to Moscow alive. That was the deal. But his skin had turned grey.
‘Gone where? Who has them? Talk. Now!’
Kaffarov stretched a hand out as if trying to point further into the bunker. His mouth opened again as if in protest, but his body had surrendered. His chest went rigid as his head flopped forward. Dima locked his hands together, found the correct spot at the base of the sternum and pushed down, hard. Indelibly lodged in the back of his mind was the song they sang during first aid training, to get the rhythm right: In-out, in-out, my woman likes it hard. They were meant to sing For-ward, for-ward! For the Motherland with joy! but locked up in those huts for three years they had come to prefer the unofficial version. He opened Kaffarov’s mouth, held his nose and breathed in three times, then pushed down again. Nothing. There was another explosion outside, bigger this time, and all the lights in the bunker went out. He was in complete darkness.
All that firepower from the greatest forces in the world and the quarry had died of heart failure.
48
As he moved towards the blasted chalet, Blackburn had one thing only on his mind: Solomon, the last word uttered by the expiring Bashir. He didn’t even know if it was a name at all. He could have been trying to say something else. It hadn’t registered with his interrogators. Cole had been unimpressed. Nonetheless, it was the name he had given to the figure he’d seen on the bank’s security screen, and to the swordsman he had seen decapitate Harker. Solomon. He repeated it over and over. It expanded to cover everything that had conspired against him over the last three days.
He was going to be first in. Campo and Montes sensed it. Blackburn was a man possessed. They could have hung on, waited for Cole, regrouped. Montes had already radioed for full-on Medevac. If Cole was injured, so be it. All of his energy was focused on Solomon and the nukes now. Nothing else in the world mattered. Campo and Montes were with him, but as far as Blackburn was concerned he was on his own.
‘Hey, I hear something.’ Montes started clawing at the rubble. ‘We got injured here.’ Campo went to help. Blackburn ignored him, kept moving, climbing the steps to the shattered balcony.
The dead man on the first floor was face down. Western civilian clothes — black T-shirt and pants. Blackburn lifted his head: pudgy oriental features frozen forever into a contortion of pain from the fatal wound that had emptied most of the blood out of his system. He checked for a pulse, just to be sure. None. He glanced at the room. Nothing like he had ever seen before. So much wealth and so much damage. A lump of masonry from the front wall fell away, crashing to the ground below. Think. He called up the plans he had memorised, re-orientated himself. The walls were clad in wood panels, doors leading off to the left but none on the right — none that were visible. The plans he had examined at Firefly had shown that a corridor perpendicular to the landing had been cut into the mountain, leading to a cluster of underground rooms. How did you get in there?