Battlefield 4: Countdown to War Read Online Free Page B

the wheels just spun. Then the revs climbed and for a time it looked as if they would make it. Kovic squinted ahead, focused with all his will as he replayed his memory of the map and sat-photos,how the track narrowed as it rounded a sharp hairpin, and where some landslip had spilt over the surface. He kept the gas steady as the jeep bucked over the uneven surface, but the gradient defeated the transmission until a sudden metallic crack under their feet told him the drive shaft had snapped. He stood on the brakes but the wheels were already locked. They were sliding backwards, the engine released from its burden revving to a scream.
    ‘I can’t hold it. Bail!’
    They jumped out, Kovic pulling Olsen and Price holding Faulkner before the jeep disappeared over the edge of the track and turned on its side, displaying its broken prop shaft like a dangling limb. The engine was still idling but the vehicle was clinically dead.
    ‘Okay. We walk from here.’
    ‘How far?’
    ‘A mile.’
    A mile on the flat in this was twenty minutes minimum, uphill twenty-five. Carrying a wounded man each . . .
    Kovic hauled Olsen on to his back, while Price hooked Faulkner’s good arm over his strong shoulders and half carried, half walked him. Faulkner was the biggest but Olsen felt like a steer, his weight seeming to double every few yards. Kovic dug deep into what resources he had left, forcing his mind to separate itself from the fatigue. The cold had slowed the seepage out of Olsen’s thigh but he was getting paler. Kovic felt the cold biting deep, freezing his face, gluing the hairs in his nostrils together. In Afghanistan during the winter of 2008 he’d come upon an oddly shaped mound in the snow. Curious, he’d dug into it and found an entire family huddled together in a last desperate search for warmth. Their corpses were fused together, frozen solid; they had become their own memorial.
    ‘Hey, see that?’
    Price, who was a few yards ahead, stopped and pointed into the gloom.
    ‘Fence.’
    ‘Hey,’ said Faulkner. ‘We’re almost there.’
    Kovic fired a distress flare which the snow clouds swallowed whole. The wind coming round the hill sharpened and drove intothem, slowing their progress further. Kovic started to count his steps, just for something to focus on other than the cold. With each step he imagined another dish on the menu at Mancun’s, promising himself double everything if he ever got out of this. Out here in the bleak white nothingness, brash, brittle Shanghai seemed like heaven on earth.
    The checkpoint was deserted, but the giant mesh gate was unlocked. Something had gone right, though somewhere inside him he had hoped fancifully for a Chinese welcoming party. He climbed up the watchtower and found the phone in its all-weather metal box. There was no dial, no buttons: just lift and wait for an answer. Hopefully someone in the border HQ would pick up. He looked down at Price, his arms around Faulkner and Olsen, trying to shelter them from the punishing wind that was itself now a weapon, whipping them unrelentingly.
    The phone line crackled. The voice sounded as if it was on the other side of the world. Kovic tried to speak. The frozen air ripped at his windpipe. The sweat from heaving Olsen had frozen on to his face like a glaze. He sank to his knees, his muscles going into shutdown, his memory too. What in the hell was the Mandarin word for help? He searched the recesses of his brain, feeling his consciousness receding as the cold claimed him. Finally, after what seemed a lifetime, it came. He tried to move his lips but they would hardly obey him.
    ‘Yu-cheng . . . Help.’
    He dropped the phone and lurched towards the steps. His only hope was to get back to the men, to share their dwindling warmth before it was too late for them all. He found a footing, lost it, tried another, and then fell the ten or so feet on to the snow that had drifted round the base of the watchtower. He landed softly, completely