Cole, arms folded, sceptical, shrugged.
‘Thought they only belonged to James Bond bad guys.’
‘Well it’s Ruskie, no question about that.’ He pointed to the Cyrillic script and glanced in Black’s direction. ‘Any Russian speakers on your crew?’
Black shook his head.
Gunny peeled off his bomb gear.
‘Back in the Nineties, Sixty Minutes ran a segment with former Russian National Security Advisor General Aleksander Lebed, claiming that they’d lost track of over a hundred suitcase nukes with a yield of one kiloton — that’s equivalent to a thousand tons of TNT. Claimed they’d been distributed to members of the GRU. You know what that is?’
‘The equivalent of our Foreign Military Intelligence Directorate.’
‘Bonus point, Lieutenant. In fact it was widely concluded that Lebed was shitting us to gain cred in Washington, which he was hoping to make his new home.’ Gunny nodded at the device, relishing the opportunity to share his knowledge with an appreciative audience.
‘Okay, now figure this: weapons grade plutonium has a market value of over four thousand dollars a gram. So for the Russians to have parted with one of these, well, someone’s had to pay them a hell of a lot of roubles — unless they’re supplying the PLR for other reasons. I mean, I don’t want to worry you guys but it’s starting to look an awful lot like Russia vs. US of A all over again. Like the Cold War just came back and got way hot.’
Gunny put the device on a pallet and four of his team took it away.
‘Hey, no going over the bumps, okay?’
Cole remained still, staring at the ground. Eventually he looked up at Black.
‘You ready for another YouTube moment?’
32
Niavaran, Northeast Tehran
They waited in the crack in the road until the Humvee had gone away, and then waited a bit longer to be really sure the coast was clear.
Dima led, the others followed several metres apart. There were no cars to hijack or steal. Everything on wheels, right down to the last supermarket trolley, had been pressed into service for the mass evacuation of the city. There was a brief moment of excitement when they spotted a Peykan, but it soon faded when they discovered it was missing its engine. Several stray dogs had come up to them, hoping for food.
‘Believe me, I know just how you feel,’ said Vladimir, scratching the head of the nearest canine. ‘Watch out for Kroll as you pass.’
‘I once ate a fox,’ said Zirak.
‘I’ve had cat,’ said Gregorin. ‘I still spit up fur balls.’
‘In the ’50s, when my father was a prisoner in the Gulag,’ began Vladimir, ‘he and some of the others made a pact that if any of them froze to death, the rest would eat him.’
‘I hope there’s a funny ending to this story,’ said Kroll.
‘There isn’t,’ said Vladimir.
They walked on in silence.
Too tired and hungry to stay focused, Dima let his mind wander further than he had yet allowed himself in these past twenty-four hours. Inevitably the photographs swam back into focus in his head, where he had stored every detail. The young man’s eyes, the shape of his smile, the fine crease in his chin and the slight arch to his eyebrows, all confirmed for him beyond doubt who his mother was.
Camille had been the right person at the wrong time, though looking back over his life now, when would have been the right time? Dima had been sent to Paris to befriend the impossibly smart Harvard students, the future powerbrokers of America. She was one of the few French girls who hung around with them.
There was a dinner, one of the secretly Soviet-funded ‘Detente’ occasions that brought together American students interested in discovering more about the Evil Empire and bright young things from the USSR — those who had achieved the rare privilege of a scholarship to study in France. Of course, like Dima, all the young Russians were recent recruits of the GRU or the KGB or one of the other ministries that could justify the expense of sending its best and brightest to the West. And Farrington James was a standard-issue preppie, with one of those patrician Boston names that looked like it had been written down the wrong way round. Who calls a kid Farrington, for fuck’s sake?
Dima had briefly auditioned him with the standard leading questions about China and Africa, until it became clear that James made Ronald Reagan look like a liberal. He was about to strike him off his target list when James introduced his fiancée, Camille. First Dima noticed her hands, fine porcelain-delicate, then her eyes, green-grey, with finely-drawn eyebrows and a smile which, when she beamed it at Dima, made him think that she had created it just for him.
Camille Betancourt was the only daughter of the Marquis de Betancourt, part of the flotsam that bobbed on the surface of French society for no good reason other than seven or nine generations earlier one of them had been given a plot of stolen land — and a title that had probably been snatched as well. What little Betancourt money was left over from the father’s monstrous gambling addiction went on keeping his daughter out of trouble and all polished up, in the hope she would snare a rich American like James.
And it had all been going so well. The Marquis toasted Farrington with the last of the family’s wine cellar. Dazzled by the father’s aristocratic charm as much as by the daughter’s beauty, Farrington proposed, but Camille, harbouring doubts about her boyfriend’s true sexual preferences as well as his politics, was taking her time to give him an answer. And then Dima arrived in her life.
Holy fuck, he thought, I’m really letting myself go tonight. Trudging through the ruins of Tehran, he realised that he hadn’t allowed his memories such free rein since giving up drinking ten years before. But for the first time in ten — no, twenty-five — years, he had a good reason to remember.
James had swanned into the banquet mainly for an opportunity to lecture the Russians on how Marxism was really Satanism for the twentieth century. Lost in the hyperbole of his own self-righteous pomposity, he was blind to what was happening as Dima’s laser gaze locked on to the exquisite young French woman at his side, sipping Soviet-bought vintage Dom Pérignon.
Six weeks: that’s all they had. Neither Farrington nor the Marquis were going to stand for Camille’s affair with a young Soviet, but Camille had already told her father that she didn’t care a damn about Farrington or France. As far as she was concerned, she now belonged to Dima, and was ready and willing to elope to Moscow with him. And if he needed any convincing, she was carrying his child.
He never saw her again. All trace of her vanished overnight as if she had never existed. The tiny apartment she had rented was let to another student. Her tutors at the Sorbonne were told that she had dropped out of her course and moved abroad. Frantic, he appealed to his masters in Moscow for leave to go in search of her. But his superiors in Paris had already alerted the Kremlin, and the next thing he knew he was being dispatched on an urgent mission to French West Africa.
A year later a friend in Paris sent him a cutting from France Soir: the only daughter of the Marquis de Betancourt had been found drowned in the lake of the family’s château in the Loire, whether it was by accident his friend couldn’t say. And what had become of the child? ‘Channel it,’ Paliov had told him. ‘Direct that rage into your work. Don’t waste it: turn it to your advantage.’
Now, here he was, on the wisdom of that advice. He had compressed all of his feelings into a tight ball of fissile energy that sat deep inside him. Whether it had served him well he didn’t know. Perhaps it was what had made him awkward, aloof. ‘You’re so difficult, Dima: you’re your own worst enemy. So much potential, so little to show for it.’ How many times had he heard that? He looked over his shoulder at the men following behind. Vladimir, Kroll, had they fared any better? Each of us in our own way is a casualty, he reflected. The GRU’s walking wounded.