Shadow War (15 page)

And still those assholes at the U.S. Embassy called her a whore.

The nurse squeezed Alie's elbow and quietly closed the door behind her. The overnight was ending; the next shift would be arriving soon. Alie wondered if there were kind nurses on that shift, too, and if anyone would stay with Olena the rest of the day.
The husband comes every night,
the nurse had told her.
Just wait.

He hadn't come.

She thought of the ride back from Gatumba, when she had wanted respect, and Locke had refused. When he shut her out. She thought of Olena Kravitz's husband, in the hotel lobby, yesterday afternoon. A man who stayed with his sick wife every evening, until Tom Locke walked into his life.

She touched Olena's hand. It was bones. The woman had days, maybe hours, to live. She crossed herself, the first time she'd done that in years. She thought of Magdelena, another woman left behind.

If there was one thing Alie MacFarlane hated, it was being left behind.

I crouched behind a rusty hulk of machinery with my SCAR assault rifle, watching two boys explore the abandoned factory, a huge complex built in the Soviet heyday and later owned by Karpenko. This was the place, in fact, where he'd found Grigory Maltov, when the enforcer was acting as a union boss. The direct connection to the client was a risk, but worthwhile. The complex was a vouched location in an unknown city, and it was perfectly placed: two kilometers from Kramatorsk's city center, less than a klick from the target. Walking distance.

Besides, it was less than forty-eight hours until the assault, not much time for the enemy to piece together connections. We'd be fine, I was sure, as long as Miles's team arrived on time, and these boys were the only locals who happened to wander in.

As I watched the boys casually breaking glass, my thoughts drifted back to Burundi. I told myself it was the children—that both clients were fathers, that on both missions I had saved young lives—but I knew the connection was Alie. I thought of her confusion that day, when I left her at her doorstep and disappeared. Her effort not to cry, even though I was breaking her heart. That was her innocence, at the moment of being stripped away.

I pictured her three days ago in Kiev, the first time we'd spoken in ten years, and the hardness under her curves. I had dreamed of seeing her again, had followed her career from a
distance as it rose and collapsed. I thought we would reconnect, like in the movies,
bam,
we were meant to be together, we've known it all along. I thought she'd remember the good times: my tiny room in the guesthouse, when I'd run my fingers over her scarred backside, and she'd flinched, and shivered, and finally relaxed under my touch. Our night at the Belvedere overlooking Lake Tanganyika, when we talked about Leopold the human-eating crocodile and her personal savior, Simone Weil, the Christian mystic who advocated a life of giving, and who died of self-starvation in 1943.

I should have told her then, that night, when I saw who she was, and who she wanted to be. I should have told her that I was a soldier-for-hire, but still a scholar. That I was in Burundi to stop a genocide. That the country was in danger, even the missionaries, and especially the women and girls.

I should have told her I took her to Gatumba to show her the real Africa, to prove that what I did mattered, to give her a way to access the purity of purpose that drove Simone Weil, who died in solidarity with Nazi victims. But I miscalculated. I thought the massacre at the UN camp was a crime of opportunity, when it was the beginning of the end.

I didn't know that until I dropped her off and crossed the border into Congo, twenty kilometers away. Our mission parameters forbade it, but Miles and I were tagging along with Gaspard, a trusted comrade in the Burundian Presidential Guard. We found the girl half a klick across the border, facedown and silent, with a grown man on top of her and three others laughing. She couldn't have been older than eight or ten.

Miles sensed my anger. My . . . foolishness. He put an arm out to stop me, but it was already done. A slash to a throat, two stabs to a left lung, a cranium crushed with a rifle butt. By the time I reached to help the girl, I was covered in blood. And she
woke up. Somehow, she woke up to the pain, when she was safe, and started screaming.

The jungle exploded with shouts, vehicle engines, men crashing into underbrush. The FNL rebels were everywhere, in every direction. We ran. What else could we do? This was no raiding party. The FNL was massing for an attack. There were twelve of us, and probably twelve thousand of them.

Eight of us made the Burundian border. “Go to Bujumbura,” I yelled at Gaspard, when we reached our SUV. “Raise the alarm. Make sure the men are ready.”

“Where are you going?”

“Gatumba.”

I saw Miles's mouth drop. I knew what he was thinking.
The white girl? Now?

“I'll be there,” I said.

How could I tell Alie any of this, on that long, rushed drive home? What good would it have done? Honesty would only have led to questions I didn't have time to answer and a conversation I didn't want to have. Not then, anyway.

But what about now? Could I turn our relationship around? Could I make her see that I had no choice, that it was fight that night, right then, or ten thousand people die, or a hundred thousand, or maybe more?

Could I explain that there are no medals for mercs? No celebrations. That I was on a plane out of Bujumbura as soon as the smoke cleared. That . . . that I could have said no to the flight . . . could have taken the time to talk to her, at least . . . but I was inexperienced, in over my head . . . and I've always regretted not saying good-bye.

I was tired. I could feel the heaviness in my limbs, and this fuzzy nostalgia, these thoughts of Alie . . . I knew that was a product of exhaustion, too. The Poltava operation had been stressful, right up until the moment six hours ago when Karpenko's dacha had gone up in flames. We hadn't landed at the factory until four in the morning, and I was running on two hours of sleep. I needed to rest, gather my faculties for the next leg, instead of watching these young boys beating a steel chair to death with a pipe.

My knees hurt from crouching. My back was sore from the two-hour flight in the cramped helicopter, with Greenlees pressed against my side. Time was catching up to me, both in the short sense and the long. When the boys finally wandered away, I stood up, pissed in the bushes, and felt an obscene amount of relief.

I walked back toward our base. The factory complex consisted of eight large buildings with sidewalks between them, surrounded by a chain-link fence. It was a former industrial behemoth, now a rust heap of tendinitis and trash, with a dense forest of weeds and brush closing in. At the corner of our building—the seventh from the entrance—I stopped, scanning the area. The hangar-size front door opened to a paved area, where we had landed the helicopter that morning. There were clear sightlines for ten meters, to the trees and weeds on the other side.

I walked around the back and inspected the emergency exit,
our secondary evac route. There was a building overlooking the exit, and three meters to an eight-foot-high fence crowned with rusty razor wire. First priority: cut an evacuation route through the fence to the forest beyond.

I entered through the emergency exit, bolting the door behind me. The interior of the building was massive, four stories high with floor rails for supply carts, ceiling rails where smelters had hung, and a three-quarters catwalk. The windows started twenty feet up, so dirty they looked like stained glass.

The helicopter looked tiny, sitting in the center of that vast cathedral, the early morning light falling in square patches around it. We had pushed it inside last night before racking, so that wandering kids and scrap scavengers wouldn't see it. The factory had been filthy then, but Sirko had cleared space for our sleeping rolls and scrounged supplies for protective barricades: a few oil barrels, a wooden door, some pieces of rusted metal that had eluded the scavengers. Now he was sitting with his head down, exhausted, Karpenko beside him using a rucksack for a seat.

The only other comfortable seat was the helicopter, where Greenlees was slumped in the cockpit. The pilot was walking toward him yelling in Ukrainian, and then with the ease of a thousand flying hours he was lifting himself through the door. He pushed Greenlees out, the old man falling awkwardly a few feet to the floor. Greenlees lay there, not moving. Then he dusted off his sleeves, pushed himself to his feet, and turned to face the pilot, who had jumped down beside him. For a moment, the scene was iconic, two curved men facing off in the slanting morning light like a George Bellows painting of boxers, until the pilot slugged Greenlees in the face, knocking him to the ground.

“What's going on?” I said, running toward them. “What the hell is going on?”

By the time I was halfway there, Sirko had the pilot by the
shoulder and was dragging him away. He shoved the man against a wall and punched him hard in the gut. It was the “wall-to-wall counseling” of an old school military disciplinarian, and I had to admire the professionalism of his delivery. Effective, but within reason. Even today's soft army recruits wouldn't need to flash a stress card for that one.

“I shouldn't be here,” Greenlees moaned, as I pulled him to his feet and dusted off his shirt. He felt spineless and slack. A welt was already forming around his right eye. If my back was sore, I could only imagine how he felt.

“I shouldn't be here,” he said again.

“John.”

“I'm too old. I've been out of the game ten years. When Wolcott called, I thought . . .”

He thought it would be like the old days: stiff vodka and cherries jubilee.

Greenlees was staring at me, as if trying to peer into my soul. He looked away. “You wouldn't understand,” he said. “You don't know . . .” He stopped, sighed. “I should be with my wife.”

He looked frail, almost white, and unprepared for hard beds and cold meals. It could have been alcoholism but it was probably age, not to mention a punch in the face. Greenlees was right. I shouldn't have brought him. But it was too late now. A helicopter flight was too risky, and besides, we didn't have enough aviation fuel left to get him more than fifty kilometers. And forget cars. There was no way out of Kramatorsk until Apollo's ex-fil sixty hours from now.

“Do you need a drink?”

Greenlees shook his head no.

“It's only two days,” I said. “And it's only radio duty. You'll be fine.”

I watched him shuffle off unsteadily, a serious liability to a
difficult mission. What was it like, I wondered, to realize your best days were gone?

“What happened?” I snapped, turning to Karpenko. The oligarch was wearing the same suit and pocket square as last night, casually debonair, his hair slicked back. He looked like he was at the races—maybe horses, maybe charioteers. He probably hadn't slept on anything less than a mattress full of money for the past decade, but he seemed no worse for wear. It was clear he had packed his grooming products.

“The pilot said he was trying to use the radio,” Karpenko shrugged. He lit a Dunhill blue and offered me one, but I declined.

“Did he?”

Karpenko eyeing me coolly, as if to say, That's your man, not mine. He exhaled smoothly. “The pilot's an asshole,” he said.

Two hours until Miles and his team were scheduled to arrive. Two hours of holding these exhausted, frazzled amateurs together.

“Nobody touches that gentleman,” I said to Karpenko. “Nobody.”

I turned away. I was exhausted. I needed rack time, but I couldn't risk it until the team arrived. They couldn't come soon enough.

Alie watched Chad Hargrove dig into a plate of pirogis. He wasn't a fan of Ukrainian food, but he had an inordinate fondness for their version of dumplings. Two months ago, when they had first gotten together to swap information and insinuation, Alie had to talk him into trying them. Now he was eating them for breakfast. Like a real Ukrainian, he said. Alie didn't have the heart to tell him these pirogis were Polish.

“So Greenlees's wife is sick?”

“She's dying.”

Hargrove bit into a sauerkraut pirogi, his least favorite. He slathered the second half in applesauce. “I wonder what would make him leave when she was like that,” he said, with his mouth full. “Money, probably.”

“Or the chance to be back in the game.” Men always talked like that: gotta be in the game, gotta win the game. Even if I have to leave the woman I love—or say I love—behind. In her experience, men rarely talked about money in the same way. “Sounds like Greenlees missed his old line of work.”

“You mean because he hangs around the bureau? I suppose.”

Their two nights together seemed to have loosened things up. Hargrove was no longer playing CIA, trying to keep everything just below the surface. Now he was buying her breakfast at her favorite diner, the one with good booths for private conversations.

Hargrove looked around, spy style, then reached into his briefcase and pulled out his laptop. “Came in this morning,” he said as he logged on.

He turned the laptop to face her, and she read the report quickly. There had been a firefight at an abandoned airfield outside Poltava. An armored personnel carrier, truck, and multiple SUVs destroyed. Eight or nine trees knocked over, with extreme prejudice. Six dead, officially, all Ukrainians with criminal records. Pretty standard stuff, except . . .

“There was an airplane?”

Hargrove nodded. “Headed west. NATO logged it, and approved it, crossing into Romania.”

“Locke,” Alie whispered, and her disappointment surprised her. He had flown in for an assassination. To kill six people, not to mention blow up a house. Why did she care about this man again?

“What does Baker think?”

“He's at a meeting, probably will be for hours. But he won't think anything of it. If your friend hadn't been on my mind, I might not have looked closely, either. And that's how I found this.” He pointed at the NATO flight report. “I checked back right before I came here. Already wiped from the system.”

Our secret,
Alie thought. “Good thing I left early, then.”

He didn't answer. She had walked out at three in the morning, while he was asleep, and Hargrove was hurt. Puppy dog hurt.

“I'm joking, Chad,” Alie said, reaching for her
pertsovka
. She always drank the local liquor, even when it was hot pepper vodka. Buying local was a point of pride. “I'm sorry about leaving. I just . . . I couldn't get Greenlees off my mind.”

“Oh yes. Good old irresistible Greenlees.”

Suddenly, she felt annoyed. “I'm not going to apologize.”

“I'm not asking you to.” He stabbed a pirogi. “And besides, you just did.”

Had she really? Jesus. She didn't want to do this: the loaded banter, the relationship probing. She didn't want to have to work to keep this kid with the Colgate grin from feeling like he had the upper hand. He was just a mission boy, right?

She sat back. She realized the operation was probably over, and whatever Locke had come to Ukraine to do, it was done. But that didn't mean it was over for her. She was a reporter. She could find him. Or at least the mess he'd left behind.

“What's your relationship with Thomas Locke?” Hargrove asked.

First name. Official. Hargrove had done his homework.

“We knew each other ten years ago in Africa.”

“Knew each other?”

“Slept together.”

“Like us.”

If you say so. “We left on bad terms. He was posing as a human rights scholar, but . . . he kills people, Chad.”

It sounded so stupid when she said it. And worse, she wasn't even sure it was true.

“You saw it happen?”

No, never. “I didn't need to,” she said, motioning toward the reports. “You've read about his work.”

Hargrove put his hand on top of hers. He wanted to appear sympathetic, but Alie knew he was jealous. Locke was out there doing something. He was in the shit. And that was why Alie loved him, or hated him, or whatever these feelings were. Did she really feel this strongly about Tom Locke, even after all these years?

“What would happen if you saw him now?”

Alie took a sip of her
pertsovka
and eyed Hargrove, wondering what he was fishing for. What had she shown him just now?

“I don't know,” she said. It was a stall, but it was also the truth.

Hargrove nodded, chewing his pirogi.

“I talked to Greenlees this morning,” he said. “He called for Baker on an aviation channel. His coding was old but still valid. He wants a CIA emergency extraction. It seems he's lost faith in your friend.”

Or he missed his wife. “Did he say where?”

“No. He was cut off. But I triangulated his location.” Hargrove smiled. “Kramatorsk.”

It struck her that Chad Hargrove was breaking his own rules. Just talking with a reporter about mercenaries was, as he'd say,
unprofessional.
Especially if you had feelings for her. But this was an opportunity for both of them. There was something big here: a story, a second chance, a promotion, an adventure, revenge.

“You have a plan?”

Hargrove nodded. “There's a CIA contract in the area. Training and advisement of a militia called the Donbas Battalion. They're overdue for an inspection, and with Baker ass-deep in paperwork. . . . It's three hours of official oversight work, at most, and then twenty klicks to Kramatorsk.”

Klicks.
Hargrove already thought he was a soldier. But he was clever, she had to give him that. He hadn't come up with this plan this morning. He must have been working on a way to get into the field for weeks.

“I can get us there, Alie,” Hargrove said, the excitement clear in his eyes. “I have Greenlees triangulated to a tenth of a mile. My question is: can you get us inside?”