Shadow War (10 page)

Brad Winters stood in the drizzling rain, driver's license in hand. In front of him stood a two-star army general and his aide-de-camp; behind him were three lobbyists chattering away about their pitch and a former congresswoman whose name he had forgotten. She worked on poverty now—but not in poverty, of course.

Two blocks away, he could hear the squeals of high school kids swarming around the tourist entrance to the White House. For a moment, he envied their ability to see the White House as something other than a pain in the ass, and this line as anything other than undignified. But he knew it was his height, and their puniness, that gave him a more accurate view.

“Brad Winters,” he said to the gunny inside the checkpoint, as he showed his driver's license. They checked his name, printed a badge with his picture on it, waved him past the dogs and through the metal detectors, and in less than sixty seconds he was walking on White House grass.

He made his way to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, a Second Empire colossus with marble floors and fifteen-foot ceilings. The EEOB, as it was called, was a classic signifier of historical importance. Official Washington, DC, from its offices to its bars and hotels, hated anything new. If it didn't look like something Thomas Jefferson would have designed, or even better, Julius Caesar, it wasn't worth taking seriously, so no one but tourists ever did.

Winters made his way up a grand staircase and down a hall lined with huge oak doors, each with a security keypad. He stopped at the one with a small placard,
RUSSIA & CENTRAL ASIA
, pressed a buzzer, and looked into the small camera.

“Hello?” A woman's voice.

“Hi there. It's Brad Winters for Naveen.”

The door buzzed, and he pushed it open. It felt bombproof.

The Old Executive Office Building had once been a nice place to work, back in the 1890s, when it housed the State, War, and Navy Departments, and everyone had a polished wooden desk, a window, and went home for the sunset. But that was when the federal government was a few thousand people, Washington had malaria swamps, and the biggest foreign policy challenge was the western frontier. Now it was cheap cubicles stuffed with senior functionaries, their half desks barely fitting their two computers—one classified, the other unclassified—their half walls obscuring a towering window looking out over traffic. Even though it was lunchtime, the room was more crowded than a think tank intern pit. Nobody here ate, unless they made a dash to the vending machines. National Security Council staffers were vampiric; they worked twenty hours a day for two years straight, tethered to an in-box, and considered it the best two years of their lives.

“Naveen,” Winters said, extending his hand as a lean young man in a wrinkled shirt and loosened tie came around the corner of one of the cubicles. Naveen Grummond was the CIA's lead analyst on EurAsia, seconded to the National Security Council to advise the president and other principals, making him one of the ten most powerful individuals in Washington in his area of expertise. It was a rare milestone few ever achieved. And yet, he'd only met the president once, in a receiving line at a White House reception, right behind a Hollywood starlet.

“Brad,” Naveen said with a frown.

“They declared a day of mourning in Mariupol,” Winters said.

“I saw.”

“The local police refused to follow orders from Kiev. They went over to the Russians.”

“The Russians want a land bridge to Crimea,” Naveen said, searching for something on his desk.

“The Ukrainian military had to intervene,” Winters continued. “Seven dead, right in the heart of Europe.” Only Naveen would think eastern Ukraine was the heart of anything, but Winters was playing to his audience. “The Russian trolls are saying twenty, killed by Ukrainian tanks rolling down peaceful citizens who only wanted to rejoin their Motherland.”

Naveen looked up, bags under his eyes. He'd lost hair, Winters noticed, since being rewarded with this godforsaken job. “What do you want, Brad?”

“Ten minutes with the president.”

Naveen smirked. It was their old joke. Naveen was the one that wanted ten minutes, not Winters, even though Naveen was more aware every day how pointless those minutes would be. “What do you really want?”

“Five minutes with the national security advisor.”

“Ha, me too,” Naveen snorted, flopping into his chair. Winters leaned on a desk for want of a spare chair. The office was buzzing, the incessant noise of the incessantly busy, but they might as well have been at a private spa. Nobody but Naveen's five or six subordinates noticed the conversation, and even they didn't have time to care what was being said.

Winters's expression went from smiles to serious.

“I heard the Hill is forming a Friends of Ukraine coalition,” he said. “They're going to ambush the White House during their
opening press conference. It's going to be a full-court media blitz demanding military intervention to contain Putin.”

Naveen sighed. “Who'd you hear that from?”

“Highly placed sources. I tried to knock them down with the usual talking points. Putin isn't al Qaeda. Putin has nukes and a massive inferiority complex. We're out of the nation-building business.”

Naveen pursed his lips. “We're doing all we can,” he snapped, “but sanctions take time, and the Germans have their own ideas.”

“The Iron Bitch,” Winters said, shaking his head. It was their pet name for German chancellor Angela Merkel, who had a soft spot for her neighbors to the east.

“Getting the military involved would make it more dangerous. Can't they see that? What would we do if the Russians sank a destroyer? Draw another line in the sand?”

“I just came to warn you,” Winters said, knowing he had his man on the ropes.

“I know, I know,” Naveen sighed. “I owe you one. When's the press conference?”

“In two hours. A few congressmen, Senator Addison from Texas . . .”

“Addison,” Naveen huffed. It was a button. Naveen hated Addison.

“He's going to say we can't stand by, that we have to do something. He's going to use the term
pussy,
Naveen. Or at least strongly imply it.”

“Christ, Brad. We're already at war in Syria.”

“They're going to make a congressional campaign out of it. Energy security. Ukrainian pipelines. Freedom gas.”

Naveen laughed. Policy wonks never understood propaganda.

“They're comparing Putin to Hitler and the president to
Chamberlain. It's Munich '38 all over again. It's going to launch a news cycle and make it to the Sunday news shows.”

Especially after Karpenko's heroic moment on Saturday . . .

Naveen didn't say anything. Winters knew what he was thinking. The president was clear: no military interventions that could suck the U.S. into a shooting war with the Russians. The problem was that
any
intervention, beyond sanctions, could do just that.

“I'm sorry, Brad,” Naveen said. “You know how it is.”

Brad Winters held up his hands in surrender. “Understood.” He had groomed Naveen for more than ten years, cleared his way to this so-called prestigious post. Naveen owed him, but the man was a true public servant.

“It's set in stone, Brad,” Naveen said. “I'm truly sorry.”

“Honesty, Naveen,” Winters said. “That's all I ask.”

He knew the value of letting Naveen think he let him down. He could use that guilt later. But the truth was, Naveen Grummond had given him exactly what he wanted.

There were wheels outside the government. Wheels with far more power and influence than Naveen could see from his narrow point of view. That was the world Winters was working in. And right now, all he wanted was to make sure that his biggest client, the U.S. government, stayed out of the way.

“Thank you, my friends,” Karpenko said. “From my heart, from my wife and daughter, and from my son, I thank you.”

He held up his vodka. At the long table before him, set up in the barn with wooden benches for seats, thirty-five men lifted theirs. “God bless you,” Karkpenko said.

The men dug into the food. It was a simple meal of brown bread, lard, bacon, and the remnants of everything else, but each place had been set with a candle, a napkin, and a stack of euros.

A last supper, I thought as I tore off a hunk of bread. I had eaten many last suppers. Some were in brocaded dining rooms with formal servants, but most were even more rudimentary than this: tins of sardines or whatever plants had been scrounged, a small group of men eating silently in some remote nowhere place in the hours before dawn. The Romans were wrong: Those about to die don't salute you. They care only about each other.

The plan was a good one. I had gone through it step by step, first with Karpenko and Sirko, then with Maltov. We had laid it out on this very table, using blocks of woods and stacks of euros as cars and buildings, a plank for the runway, hay for the trees. I knew the colonel didn't like it, so I had walked him through it carefully, noting the pros and cons, the possible evacuation routes and worst-case plans. I let him waver, change a few minor details, but it was too late for new ideas, and I wasn't backing
down. The more serious conversation was with Maltov, who would lead the assault. It was a dangerous job, but Maltov didn't hesitate.

“I am Ukrainian,” he said with a meaningful glance at Sirko. “This is my fight.”

He was right. Everywhere I went, it was a local fight—over freedom and self-government, sure, but also over bread, and beer, and who got to fish which river, and how a society's energy would be spent. Even the evacuation of an oligarch's family, necessitated by a disagreement between rivals, was tied up in nationalism.

So I let Maltov call in the men on the assault team, in small groups, and explain their role in the operation. It was clear immediately that they were loyal to him, even more so than Karpenko; he must have brought them into the oligarch's service. Which was good. Maltov would be their leader tonight; when things went wrong, which they would, the men would have to trust in him. And the more times he explained the operation—the positions, the timing, the intent—the more he owned the plan. I didn't want Maltov to think about what to do when the enemy showed up. I needed him to know. Because I wouldn't be there with him on the front line. My place, as always, was with the principal.

I sliced off a lump of bacon, shoved it into a bit of bread, and stuffed it in my mouth. Maltov had risen to speak, but when Greenlees bent over to translate, I waved him away. I knew what was being said, even though I didn't understand the words. This is the moment. This is what we live for. Or maybe what we're paid for, I didn't know Maltov that well. Karpenko is a good man, he would say. He is our patron. Our future president. But this isn't for one man, it is for Mother Ukraine, or whatever they called this place.

There was some pounding on the table, a few shouts. It was either false bravado, or false ideals. Death should be respected, not shouted down.

I slipped out into the night and looked up at the sky, always there, almost empty. It was cold and clear, with a quarter moon. Too much light.

But this was what we lived for. This was what we did. And we had to go now.

I pulled out a cigar, an old habit I'd picked up in the army. I liked the ritual before an op: the snip of the tip, the careful burn, the slow char of the edges. It reminded me of General McChrystal, my first and best commanding officer, and Miles, my right-hand man, and every Special Operations Forces commander thereafter, until the day I left the organized world behind and stepped out into this unknown.

I heard a noise behind me, in the direction of the house. I turned and saw a woman's face framed in a window. She was holding a baby, so she must have been Karpenko's wife, but she was younger than I had expected, with dark hair like Alie's and the same penetrating eyes, the kind that hinted at other choices, other lives she might have lived. She didn't look scared. She didn't look any way at all. She just stared at me, not moving, and then, slowly, she disappeared.

In Kiev, Alie stared at Hargrove's ceiling, wondering how she had ended up here. Not that it was a bad place, this warm bed, and this warm body. It was better than an orphanage in Burundi. Better than a refugee camp in South Sudan or a backwoods cabin in south Alabama, where the screens don't fit the windows and the mosquitos are murder. It was better than a house in the suburbs, two kids, a yoga class, and a husband who
either disappeared for months at a time or resented her for making him stay home and mow the lawn.

She got up and poured herself a drink. At least she was alive. At least she was here, where her efforts might matter.

Walk out, Alie,
she thought.
Walk now. You still have time.

The Wolf looked down at the map. He had marked five primary locations: two airfields, an industrial park, a large construction site, and the soccer stadium. The stadium was covered by a Chechen missile team. The airfields: too obvious. The industrial park and construction site: a problem.

Where was the helicopter? Where would they hop? Would they risk a short flight to a waiting plane?

“Reinforce the fire team, here,” the Wolf said to Ivan, pointing to the airport. Ivan's men were shaky, but then again, they only needed to pin Karpenko down until the Chechens arrived. “Double the watch on the other. And from now until morning, no one is off duty. Everyone must be prepared.”

“You think they will go tonight?”

“I would,” the Wolf said, and he couldn't think of a better reason to be ready than that.

And Winters? What was he doing, safe in Washington, with his $6,000 suits and two-hundred-year-old townhouse? What was he thinking, now that his plan was on the line?

I stubbed out my cigar and looked up at the stars.
Forget Winters,
I thought. On a mission, the world was an oyster, closed in on itself. Winters was nothing. For the next four hours, this place, and these men, and these guns, were the only things that mattered.