Battlefield 4: Countdown to War Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 . . .
    He was woken by what sounded like a couple of dull thuds, possibly thickly booted feet jumping down from a vehicle, he imagined. He heard the sound again. He opened his eyes but everything was dark, even darker than before. There was something in front of his face. He blinked and felt wetness. He was buried in the snow. How long had he been lying there? He blinked the snow away until with one eye he had a view of part of the scene in front of him.
    The huddle that had been Olsen, Price and Faulkner was gone. There was an SUV. Help had come. Two silhouetted men were loading something into the back of the vehicle. He thought he could feel the heat coming off it – warmth, comfort, safety. He struggled to move, found he couldn’t. He saw a third man standing over a heap on the ground, an arm raised.
    There were two more thuds, accompanied by tiny flashes. Then the two men from the SUV joined the gunman. One took off his glove and reached for a cigarette packet, his hand bright white against the rest of the darkness, three marks like arrows jutting from the cuff . They stood over the body for a minute, smoking and talking, wisps of smoke and condensation floating away from them. Eventually two of them bent down and lifted the corpse by an arm and a leg, as if it was a fresh kill from a hunt, and dragged it to the SUV. It was Olsen.
    Kovic closed his eye. Didn’t move again.

3
    USS Valkyrie , South China Sea
    Commander Garrison looked over his glasses at the young radioman.
    ‘Let me stop you right there, son.’
    He knew the kid meant well, but right now he looked like he wished the deck would swallow him up. Bale took a couple of breaths to try and steady his nerves. He knew the Commander had an obsession with plain English, he’d heard him chew out an intelligence officer for talking about ‘delivering information-centric capabilities’. He glanced at Lieutenant Duncan, but she was concentrating very hard on something on the tip of her boot. Garrison felt sorry for the kid and tried to throw him a lifeline.
    ‘Just imagine you’re explaining it to your—’
    No, that would sound sexist. He had to watch that these days. He glanced at Duncan, a tiny smile just visible on her lips, then his gaze drifted to the first purple of sunrise off to the east.
    Bale pressed on.
    ‘Sir, it’s just there’s this algorithm stack and for the last three hours it’s – our reflex monitors—’ Bale’s sentence faltered to a stop, like his engine just ran out of gas. Garrison failed to stifle a chuckle.
    ‘Bale, when were you born?’
    ‘In 1991. Sir.’
    ‘You know where I was in ’91? Right here on this ship, in the midst of the first Gulf War. Now when we’re at war we have to tell it like it is. No bullshit, no jargon.’
    Bale wished to Jesus he’d kept quiet. He shouldn’t even have been scanning north at this time. But the signal, if it was a signal, was like none he had seen before. He had shown it to Ransome when he came on duty, who’d dismissed it as random noise. But Bale was sure there was something to it. It was much too sharp, plus therewas the way it pulsed. He had stepped out of the control room straight into the path of Garrison on his daybreak walkabout and, well, he couldn’t help himself.
    ‘Give it one more try.’
    Bale took a deep breath.
    ‘Take it slowly.’
    ‘There’s a communication stream emanating from a point on the