Battlefield 4: Countdown to War Read Online Free Page A

with blood and brain matter. He wiped it cursorily with his sleeve, fumbled with the controls and found the ignition, turned it and pumped the gas. It fired hopefully, then stalled. He turned it again; it fired and stalled again. Price was struggling towards him in the snow pulling Olsen and Faulkner. Together in the swirling snow they already looked like ghosts.
    Kovic finally got the engine going, then revved it and rocked it back and forth until it found grip and reversed towards them.
    He pulled out his phone. There were three agreed text codes: Alpha was mission accomplished, Beta was abort, Gamma was land exfil. He was about to text Gamma , which would alert Cutler to confirm the border crossing – if they made it.
    ‘Fuck this, we’re blown anyway,’ he told himself.
    He dialled Cutler.
    He picked up straight away. ‘What happened?’
    ‘Blown. Two men down plus the pilot. It was a fucking set-up. Highbeam had a surprise vest on.’
    Silence. All he could hear were Cutler’s short quick breaths coming down the line. Kovic wanted to chew him out but that would have to wait. There were more pressing issues.
    ‘We’re twenty miles inside the DPRK. I have wheels, but we need that border post confirmed open. Otherwise we’re talking six dead Marines plus one of yours – on the wrong side of the wire, copy?’
    ‘We’re on it. Go carefully.’ Cutler hung up.
    The Chinese were their only hope now; they better have that border crossing open. But Beijing would also have gone into damage limitation mode, while Cutler would be busy figuring how this was going to play back in Langley and how to cover his ass. But rage wasn’t going to get Kovic anywhere. The cover that the smoke from the burning helo had created was already drifting away.
    His anger gave him a fresh surge of energy. They were going to get in this thing and get the hell across the border and Olsen and Faulkner were going to live, never mind the snow and however many NK were headed their way.
    He helped them into the jeep, which had stalled again.
    ‘Where we goin’, man?’ Faulkner was vague with cold and pain.
    ‘Home. We make the border in this thing, someone Chinese side will scoop us up.’
    No one else spoke. The sight of the two dead men and the burned up Sea Hawk with Tex inside it was fresh in their minds.
    Olsen groaned. ‘Garrison warned me about you. Oh yeah, I know all about—’
    Kovic cut him off . ‘Save it. I got you a ride out. We get over the border, we never have to so much as look at each other again – but until then we gotta make like we’re a team and look out for each other. That way we have more chance of staying alive. Right? Try and keep each other warm. We got a thirty-minute drive ahead.’
    He didn’t wait for a response. He rammed the shift until he found first and the jeep jolted forward. The road was completely hidden under a carpet of white.
    When it was this bad, the only thing was to think about the other bad times he’d gotten out of. The time in Sudan, captured by child soldiers high on smack who’d pushed the muzzle of a rifle up his ass and were arguing about who got to pull the trigger. In Kurdistan, the aggrieved knife-wielding hooker who thought he wouldn’t pay up because the Taliban commander he’d recruited her to sting turned out to be gay. And his first month in China, when an Indonesian arms dealer hung him by his heels from a high rise because he thought he was a rival . . .
    He didn’t want to think about Garrison’s son, though.
    With each minute the snow thickened and the wheels lost even more grip. He slowed to below twenty, which was still too fast. The track met the border on the slope of a mountainside. The jeep protested furiously at the gradient. The clutch was shot, but he managed to force the shift out of second gear and back into first. He was following the contour of the hill but the negative camber on a right-hand curve tugged the vehicle sideways. He applied more gas but