Battlefield 3

by Andy McNab

Genres: Action & Adventure

Synopsis

As bullets whiz by, walls crumble, and explosions throw you to the ground, the battlefield feels more alive and interactive than ever before. In Battlefield 3, players step into the role of the elite U.S. Marines where they will experience heart-pounding missions across diverse locations including Paris, Tehran and New York... Since 2002, EA's series of Battlefield games have set the standard for realism and ambition. And in Autumn 2011, with the global release of the hotly anticipated Battlefield 3, they're raising the bar even higher. Battlefield 3 will be the most authentic, vivid, all-action first person shooter ever. To be published alongside the game, Battlefield 3: The Russian is also best in class - the first time that a games publisher has worked so closely with an internationally bestselling author. Never before has a tie-in book benefitted from this level of collaboration from the creative team behind the game itself. Nor has it been written by a thriller writer with such a strong track record and reputation. Displaying all of McNab's trademark grit, authenticity and insight, Battlefield 3: The Russian is a scorching top-of-the-line military thriller and a heart-stopping race against time. Prepare to be blown away... ANDY MCNAB joined the infantry as a boy soldier. In 1984 he was 'badged' as a member of 22 SAS Regiment and was involved in both covert and overt special operations worldwide. During the Gulf War he commanded Bravo Two Zero, a patrol that, in the words of his commanding officer, 'will remain in regimental history for ever'. Awarded both the Distinguished Conduct Medal (DCM) and Military Medal (MM) during his military career, McNab was the British Army's most highly decorated serving soldier when he finally left the SAS in February 1993. He wrote about his experiences in three books: the phenomenal bestseller Bravo Two Zero, Immediate Action and Seven Troop. He is the author of the bestselling Nick Stone thrillers. Besides his writing work, he lectures to security and intelligence agencies in both the USA and UK. He is a patron of the Help for Heroes campaign. PETER GRIMSDALE is a multi-award-winning television producer with a raft of major documentaries to his credit. He is married to the writer Stephanie Calman and lives in south London.

Release date: November 1, 2011

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 416

Sample

I have been invited to work alongside many different gaming companies in the past, but up until now, I have always turned down their offers. But the opportunity to work with DICE and help develop Battlefield 3 was an opportunity I didn’t want to miss. Not only did it mean I’d get to work with gamers whose track-record of ground breaking games is world known, but it was also clear right from the start, that BF3 had something special, something that other games didn’t. The only word I can think of that explains it, is ‘substance’. BF3 wasn’t going to be a simple shoot ’em up—it was going to be packed with emotion, grit and the sheer physicality to take any gaming experience to another level.

I was first asked by the development team to help weave together the different storyline strands which make up the levels of the game. I worked with the team by providing ideas on how the action might play out, and just as importantly, giving possible reasons as to why the action might go in a particular way. I gave advice on how soldiers talk, act and think. For example, soldiers within the game needed to have the exact words and inflections to accurately reflect how solders in the real world speak. Words like ‘maybe’, ‘we will try to’ or ‘we will attempt’, don’t exist in a soldier’s world. We use words like ‘you will’, ‘I will’, ‘we will’. All dialogue is progressive because soldiers in the real world must be positive in everything they do. After all, real lives are at stake, so there is no room for failure.

The second part of my role was to work alongside the team’s graphic designers to make sure what you see and hear as you play the game feels ‘right’. We would sit for hours talking about how men and machines move tactically and how they look, even down to making sure that the soles of soldier’s boots were dirty and worn. A desert camp that is attacked by US tanks within the game is an exact replica of a camp on the Iraq/Iran border that I flew over four years ago. Authentic detail is so important because our brains are very good at telling us when something isn’t just right.

The third part of my job was to work with the actors and stuntmen in the motion capture studios, to ensure the game’s characters moved like men who had been handling weapons and fighting with them for all of their lives. I also explained their lines to them, so that they could do their job and display the appropriate emotions like fear, anger and determination as they carried out the task ahead.

BF3 is the most sophisticated game ever because it gives the player a far deeper, more physical presence within the world in which he/she is playing. An ex-US Tank Commander who has seen the game said the whole experience was better than any simulator he had ever been in, and that it gave him flashbacks to the Iraq war in a very positive way.

But the game is just one window into the BF3 experience—this book is another. It seemed a natural progression to write a novel based on the game as there is still so much more of the story to tell. That story is Dmitri ‘Dima’ Mayakosky’s, a Russian ex-Spetsnaz Special Forces soldier. He finds himself in a world that no longer has the certainty of the old Communist dictatorship he once served.

Dima will certainly never win a humanitarian award for the role he plays in BF3, but the novel gives you the opportunity to see things from his point of view, and maybe understand the decisions and actions he takes when he finds himself in this most impossible of situations.

I hope you enjoy the book and game. I think they work really well together.

Andy McNab

Beirut, August 1991

They’d been stood on alert since 0600. Moscow didn’t call until three, the hottest part of the day, in the hottest month, in what must have been the last non-air-conditioned hotel in Beirut. But that was the GRU’s (Foreign Military Intelligence Directorate) style: they never failed to disappoint. Dima swung his legs off the bed, felt his head swim. Picked up the receiver. Two thousand kilometres away, Paliov’s voice, full of anticipation.

‘You set?’

‘For the last nine hours.’

‘A red Peugeot, Jordanian plates.’

‘Where?’

There was a pause. Dima pictured him, his desk in Moscow littered with memos and telexes, all stamped ‘Urgent—most secret’.

‘Four blocks from Khalaji’s hotel, the Majestic Palace, a parking lot on a bomb site.’

‘That narrows it down. Half the city’s a bomb site.’

‘The whole Iranian nuclear delegation’s at the hotel, so it’ll be swarming with their own security. But they’re not permitted out of the grounds. Our information is Khalaji’s all set. You won’t have any problem.’

‘You always say that and we always do.’

Paliov sighed.

‘I assure you, everything’s in place. Khalaji thinks the Americans are coming for him, so there’ll be no resistance. Just get in and drive. Tell him there’s a plane waiting just across the border and show him the documentation as we agreed. Once you’re on the move, if he realises who you are, what can he do? Just have the autojet ready.’

The chemical cosh: always the GRU’s answer to any problem.

‘And if there is a problem?’

‘Kill him. Better Iran’s nuclear prodigy dead than the Americans really do get their hands on him.’

Paliov rang off.

Dima dropped the phone back on to its cradle and looked across at Solomon.

‘It’s a go.’

Solomon sat cross-legged on his bed, the disassembled pieces of his US-sourced Colt 45 laid out in front of him. He didn’t react, just glared—his default expression. Still so young—twenty—but projecting an intelligence that would have been intimidating in someone twice his age. Once Dima had been his mentor but Solomon didn’t need mentors now. Beside him Dima felt old and inferior, not a good feeling before a hit. For a few seconds neither spoke as they listened to the overhead fan stirring the soupy city air. Near the window a fly was noisily trying in vain to separate itself from a slow gluey death on the wax ribbon. Outside in the traffic, horns blared, the collective frustration of Beirut’s drivers at the permanent gridlock. Then, without warning, Solomon’s face split into a mirthless grin.

‘You know the part I’m looking forward to? When Khalaji realises he’s not headed to the land of the free. I want to see that look.’

Not for the first time Dima wondered about his protégé. Particularly disturbing was the pleasure Solomon took in others’ misfortune. And on this, his first GRU field assignment, how come he manages to stay so cool, Dima wondered. He got up, went to the bathroom, sneaked a sip of vodka from the flask in his washbag. Just a small one to see him through the next few hours. He returned to the room, picked up his 45. Holstered it. Solomon frowned.

‘You cleaned it?’

‘Yes, it’s fine.’

Solomon raised the barrel of his own gun and examined it for the umpteenth time. ‘With all the dust here. Plus these 45s are notorious.’

Know-all, thought Dima. It was the ammunition they should be worrying about. Bootleg bullets with a weak charge. Why should they use this American crap anyway? Paliov’s obsession with disguise. Never mind the weapons, just get the intel right.

He glanced at the ejected mag and the rounds. Solomon had scored a cross on the nose of each bullet. He was using JHP rounds for maximum damage. Dima’s hope was that no shots would be fired today.

‘Let’s do it.’

They took a cab, an Opel with several different coloured panels. The interior stank of sweat and the driver’s lunch. Solomon sat, arms folded, sullen as a teenager forced to take out the trash.

‘If we were CIA we’d have our own car and our own driver,’ he said, in his perfect American English. ‘And our own radio net.’

‘Maybe you chose the wrong side.’

He said nothing, as if he was thinking the same.

‘Look on the bright side.’ Dima tapped his chest. ‘At least we get to keep these polo shirts with the logo. And the chinos.’ He slapped Solomon’s thigh.

‘Yeah, courtesy of the souk, run up by a kid cross-legged at a sewing machine who should be at school. They look about as American as falafel.’

‘Khalaji won’t notice. He’s a physicist.’

‘He’s been in America once. You haven’t.’

Dima gave him a reproachful look. Solomon’s attitude had nearly got him flung out of his fast-tracked Spetsnaz training. From day one he’d been marked down as trouble. Always awkward, always challenging his tutors, always a better idea of his own. They complained to Dima, to Paliov, and then to Dima some more. Dima could only blame himself. Solomon was his find, plucked by him from the blasted slopes above Kandahar in the dying days of Russia’s futile occupation. He had been part of the great diaspora of youth who flocked to Afghanistan to help defeat the ‘Evil Empire’. Dima, operating undercover, spotted the boy’s potential and turned him. His calm, his discipline, his amazing facility with languages, and his ruthlessness were precious assets. The GRU needed him, Russia needed him, Dima insisted. Okay, they said. When his two years are up, he’s on your watch. This was Solomon’s first assignment and Dima was having doubts.

They left the cab a few blocks from the hotel, took a walk past it, found the bomb site parking lot. Just the short distance through the sticky smog had already drenched him in sweat. There was no sign of the Peugeot, but he spotted a small bar opposite. As if pulled by a magnetic force, Dima headed straight for it, slammed a five dollar bill on the counter and ordered a double.

‘What are you having?’

Solomon lurked by the doorway.

‘Just water.’

‘You have any vices at all?’

Solomon gave him a blank glare that seemed to say, ‘Does it look like it?’, and again Dima felt uneasy.

On a shelf above the bar was a small black and white TV. An image of Gorbachev, released from house arrest, but neutered, humiliated. The great hope—now hopeless as the Soviet Union crumbled around him, the revolution he had started careering out of control. Where would it end? All Dima could envisage was chaos. Hardly the great socialist dream he had promised Solomon he was signing up for.

‘Maybe Khalaji will help put us back on top.’ Dima tapped the bulge under his jacket. ‘Think about it: portable nuclear capability.’

Dima’s irony was lost on Solomon. For the first time that day, the boy’s eyes lit up. The idea had caught his imagination as it had fired up Paliov and the rest of their masters back in Moscow. Dima slapped down another five dollar bill and ordered the same again.

He’d warned Paliov there’d be a problem, and now, as the Peugeot came into view, he saw what it was. Coming slowly up the street, it almost ground to a halt as a wheel hit one of the many potholes. The car was more than fully laden.

‘Fuck. He’s got his whole family in there.’

There was a fresh scrape all down the side, exposing bright metal, and the offside end of the front bumper was bent forward as if it had got entangled with another vehicle. The car swerved erratically before bottoming as it mounted the curb.

‘Wait,’ Dima hissed at Solomon, who was starting to cross the street. ‘We need to check if he’s being followed.’

That second vodka didn’t feel so great now.

From the other side of the road they could see Khalaji at the wheel, his wife beside him, heads twisting round, looking, panicking.

That’s Plan A out of the window, thought Dima. What the hell was Plan B?

Nothing else came up the street behind them. Dima and Solomon walked towards the car. As soon as Khalaji saw them he leapt out. A wiry man, his shirt collar way too big for his scrawny neck.

‘Hi, hi. Over here!’

This guy has no idea! Dima motioned to him to cool it, get back in the Peugeot. As they got nearer they could see the back seat was full of children.

Dima felt the contents of his stomach rearrange themselves.

‘We’ll have to kill them,’ said Solomon. ‘Sedate him first. Then get them out of the car. He’ll never know what happened.’

Another fucking fiasco. Blame Paliov as he might, in the end Dima knew it was his own fault for agreeing to the mission. It just wasn’t in his nature to say no—especially these days with all the old guarantees of employment being torn up.

Khalaji was back in the car, window down, eyes bulging with expectation. One of the children in the back was wailing.

‘Mr Khalaji, I’m Dave,’ said Dima.

‘Dave…’ repeated Khalaji, frowning, as if he was trying out the name. ‘The message said Dean.’

Shit, thought Dima. What had they agreed? Dave, Dean, Dima, not a lot of difference. He felt his head clouding. Maybe the vodka hadn’t been such a good idea. Or maybe he should have had a third.

The wife leaned across her husband, frowned at Dima from under her veil, snapped at Khalaji in Farsi. ‘I can smell liquor on his breath.’

Suddenly Solomon was at Dima’s side, edging him away from the car window, wearing a broad grin like he had never seen on his face before.

‘Hey folks, how y’all doin’ today? My name’s Dean and we’ll be taking you from here on to your destination. Ma’am, if you’d step out of the car please, and your little ones.’

If there was any more to Solomon’s sales patter Dima wasn’t going to hear it, nor were the Khalajis, because what happened next rendered their feeble cover story redundant. A pair of new but dusty Chevy Suburbans swung into view and slewed to a halt in the middle of the street. Eight doors swung open and eight Caucasian men in T-shirts, shorts and shades stepped out, all armed. Four covered, four approached. Two of those covering took aim at Dima. Khalaji’s wife screamed so loud Dima’s ears sang.

Solomon was no longer at his side. At the first sign of trouble he had made himself invisible among the parked vehicles.

‘Hands in the air, cowboy,’ one of the shaded ones shouted, repeating the order in Arabic for good measure. Dima fumbled for his 45, aimed, squeezed, missed, aimed again—and it jammed. A fraction of a second later and the gun was gone from his hand—which was now spurting blood. The Yank had shot it clean out of his grip. Dima dropped to the ground as the Americans got to the other side of the car, opening the doors, reaching in and scooping up the Khalaji family into the bosom of democracy. Dima cursed Paliov for his stupid, ill-planned, under-resourced missions, he cursed the 45, the one or two too many vodkas and pretty much everything else about his shitty life so far.

A flicker of movement between a parked Datsun and a Mercedes—Solomon, behind the cars, choosing a position. And from under the Peugeot he saw one of the Americans inching towards him round the car, taking no chances. With his good right hand, Dima wrestled the Beretta from the left pocket of his chinos and fired at one of the American’s feet—just as he lifted it.

He heard doors slamming, the Americans retreating.

‘Family secured. Good to go. Go now!’

Better dead than the Americans get their hands on him. Dima hadn’t shared that with Solomon. Didn’t need to. Solomon would know. The bullets, that family… The American whose foot Dima had just missed swung into view, big jaw, Zapata moustache, mirror shades.

‘You Commie cunt.’ The American lifted his M9, took aim. The air between them exploded.

The American sank to his knees, his forehead cratered by the bullet that had entered the back of his head and chewed its way out front. His mouth had turned into a perfect O as if preparing to sing. He hovered there a second, then he slumped on top of Dima, pinning him down, the contents of his smashed head emptying out over his face.

There were more shots from Solomon’s position. More screams and shrieks—

‘fuckoutahererightnow!’ Doors slamming and furious wheelspin—and then silence.

SOLOMON LIFTED THE corpse off Dima, wiping his face with the fake polo shirt.

Dima breathed out.

‘You got Khalaji? You stopped them taking him, didn’t you?’

Solomon shook his head slowly.

‘How come?’

He prodded the American corpse with his toe.

‘It was either shoot Khalaji or him.’

Dima let a couple of seconds pass while the meaning of what Solomon was saying sank in.

‘You saved my life.’

No comment from Solomon, just a glare of contempt. Eventually he nodded.

‘Yes. I fucked up.’

Moscow, 2014

Dima opened his eyes, a second of blankness before he remembered where he was and why. The call could come at any time, they’d said. It was just after three. Bulganov’s voice was thick with fatigue. He told him when and where. He started to give directions, but Dima shut him up.

‘I know where it is.’

‘Just don’t fuck up, okay?’

‘I don’t fuck up. That’s why you hired me.’ Dima hung up.

Four-thirty, a stupid time to choose to swap a girl for a suitcase of money, but he wasn’t making the decisions. ‘Remember: you’re just the courier,’ Bulganov had said, trying to swallow his pain.

Dima called Kroll, told him twenty minutes. He took a cold shower, forcing himself to stay under until the last traces of sleep were gone. He dried, dressed, gunned a Red Bull. Breakfast could wait. He gave the case one last check. The money looked good: US dollars, five million, shrink-wrapped. The price of oligarchs’ daughters was going up. Bulganov had wanted to use counterfeit, but Dima had insisted—no tricks or else no deal. Barely a dent in the man’s fortune—not that it stopped him trying to beat them down. The rich could be very mean, he’d learned—especially the old ones, the former Soviets. But the Chechens had set their price. And when a fingernail arrived in the post, Bulganov caved.

Dima put on his quilted coat. No body armour: he couldn’t see the point. It weighed you down and if they were going to kill you they’d aim for the head. No firearm either, and no blades. Trust was everything in these exchanges.

He handed in the key cards at reception. He’d paid last night. The woman on the desk didn’t smile, glanced at the bag.

‘Going far?’

‘Hope not.’

‘Come back soon,’ she said, without conviction.

The street, still dark, was empty except for clumps of old snow. Moscow under new snow he liked: it rounded off the sharp edges, covered up the grime and the litter, and sometimes the drunks. But it was April, and the frozen remnants clung to the pavements in long, winding fortifications, like the ones they’d been made to dig at military school. The tall, grey buildings disappeared into low cloud. Maybe winter wasn’t over just yet.

A battered BMW swung into view, weak lights bouncing off the glaze of ice. The tyres slid a little as it shuddered to a halt in front of him. It looked like it had been rebuilt from several unwilling donors, a Frankenstein’s monster of a car.

Kroll grinned up at him. ‘Thought it would remind you of your lost youth.’

‘Which part?’

Dima didn’t need any reminders: any idle moment and the old times crowded in—which was why he did his best never to be idle. Kroll got out, popped the trunk lid and hefted in the bag, while Dima took his place at the wheel. The interior smelled of sauerkraut and smoke—Troikas. You wouldn’t catch Kroll with a Marlboro. He preferred those extra carcinogens that came in Russian tobacco. Dima glanced at the ripped back seat: a bed roll, some fast food boxes and an AK: all the essentials of life.

Kroll slid in, saw the expression on Dima’s face.

‘You living in this crate?’

Kroll shrugged. ‘She threw me out.’

‘Again? I thought you’d got the message by now.’

‘My ancestors lived in yurts: see, we’re going up in the world.’

Dima said it was Kroll’s nomadic Mongol blood that got in the way of his domestic life, but they both knew that it was something else, a legacy of having lived too much, seen too much, killed too much. Spetsnaz had trained them to be ready for anything—except normality.

He nodded at the back seat. ‘Katya has standards, you know. One look in here and she might decide to stick with her captors.’

He shoved the shift into drive and they took off, fishtailing in the slush.

Katya Bulganova had been snatched in broad daylight from her metallic lemon Maserati, a vehicle that might as well have had ‘My Daddy’s rich! Come and get me!’ embossed on the hood. The bodyguard got one in the temple before he even saw what was happening. One onlooker said it had been a teenage girl brandishing an AK. Another described two men in black. So much for witnesses. Dima had little sympathy for Katya or her father. But Bulganov didn’t want sympathy and he didn’t just want his daughter back. He wanted his daughter back and revenge: ‘A message to the underworld: no one fucks with me. And who better to deliver it than Dima Mayakovsky?’

Bulganov had been at Spetsnaz too, one of the generation that bided its time then cut loose in the free-for-all Yeltsin years, to grab their share. Dima despised them, but not as much as those who came after, the grey, lifeless micromanagers. Kushchen, his last boss, told him, ‘You played the wrong game Dima: you should have shown some restraint.’

Dima didn’t do restraint. On his first posting, in Paris as a student spy in ‘81, he discovered that his own station chief was preparing to defect to Britain. Dima took the initiative and the man was found floating in the Seine. The police settled for suicide. But initiative wasn’t always appreciated. Enough people higher up thought he had done too well, too soon, which was how he ended up in Iran training Revolutionary Guards. In Tabriz, near the Azeri border, two recruits on his watch raped the daughter of a Kazakh migrant worker. They were only seventeen years old, but the victim was four years younger. Dima got the whole troop out of their bunks to witness proceedings, then made them stand close enough to see the look on the boys’ faces. Two shots each in the temple. The troop excelled in discipline after that. Then in Afghanistan, during the dying months of the occupation, he witnessed a Russian regular soldier open up on a car full of French nurses. No reason—out of his head on local junk. Dima put a bullet in the corporal’s neck while he was still firing, tracer rounds arcing into the sky as he fell.

Perhaps if he had shown more restraint he would at least still be at Spetsnaz, in a civilised posting where he could use his languages, a reward for the years of dedication and ruthlessness, not to mention the chance to reclaim a bit of humanity. But Solomon’s defection in ‘94 had done for Dima’s reputation. Someone had to take the rap. Could he have seen it coming? At the time, no. With hindsight, maybe. The only consolation—he’d packed in the drinking and that had been the toughest mission.

The streets at this hour were almost empty, just as they used to be all day long in his childhood. Under the throngs of imported SUVs, Moscow’s vast avenues lost their grandeur. There was a queue to get on to the Krymsky Bridge, where a beat-up Lada had been rammed by a Buick. Doors open, two men shouting, one wielding a crowbar. No police in sight. Two drunks staggered along the pavement, joined at the head like Siamese twins, plumes of vapour rising from them into the frozen air. When they reached the BMW they paused and stared. They were men from the past, probably no more than fifty years old, but with faces so ravaged by drink and bad diet they looked much older. Soviet faces. Dima felt an unwelcome sense of kinship, not that they would have known. One spoke, inaudible through the glass, but Dima lip-read: ‘Immigrants’.

Kroll tapped him on the shoulder—the lights had changed.

‘Where are we going, anyway?’

He told him. Kroll snorted.

‘Nice. Residents sold the window glass so the authorities put up plywood instead.’

‘Capitalism. Everyone’s an entrepreneur.’

Kroll was off. ‘Fact: There are more billionaires in Moscow than any other city in the world. Twenty years ago there weren’t even any millionaires.’

‘Yeah, but probably not round here.’

They passed rows of identical blocks of flats, monuments to the workers’ paradise, now filled with the drugged and the dying.

‘Tombstones in a giants’ graveyard,’ said Kroll.

‘Easy on the poetry: it’s a bit early for me.’

They parked between an inverted Volga, stranded on its roof like an upturned beetle, and a Merc, the passenger compartment burned out. The BMW blended right in.

They got out. Kroll lifted the trunk lid and reached in. Dima moved him aside.

‘Careful with your back.’

He lifted the bag out of the trunk and set it on its wheels.

‘Big bag.’

‘Big money.’

Dima handed Kroll his phone. Kroll tapped his shoulder where his Baghira was holstered.

‘Sure you want to go in naked?’

‘They’re likely to scan me. Besides, it will impress them.’

‘Oh, you want to look like a tough guy. Why didn’t you say?’

They exchanged a look, the look that always said it could be their last. ‘Twenty minutes,’ said Dima. ‘Any longer—come and get me.’

The lift was dead, its doors half-closed on a crushed shopping trolley. Dima collapsed the grab handle of the case and lifted it. The stairs stank of piss. Despite the hour, the building was alive with the thump of rap and domestic disputes. If it came to an exchange of fire, no one would hear or even care. A boy of no more than ten came past, with the low nasal bridge and pinched cheeks that Dima recognised as foetal alcohol syndrome. The grip of a pistol stuck out of his hoodie pocket, a dragon tattoo on his gloveless white hand. The kid paused, glanced at the bag, then Dima, considering. Behold the flower of post-Soviet youth, Dima thought. He wondered if he had been right not to bring a gun. The boy, expressionless, moved on.

The metal apartment door made a dull clang as he thumped it. Nothing. He thumped again. Eventually it opened half a metre to reveal the muzzles of two pistols, the local equivalent of a welcome mat. He stood back so they could see the case. Both of the faces behind were shrouded in ski. . .