Shadow War (26 page)

It took another ten minutes to finish the briefing—almost fifteen minutes total—but only because Maltov and Karpenko had to be walked through their part three times, even though it was straightforward.

If I call Greenlees and say “green,” walk down and act like you just kicked Russian ass.

If I say “red,” drive the fish truck to the front entry gate of the facility as fast as you fucking can. Park it there. Light the fuse. Run.

No shooting. That was the hard part for Maltov to understand: that the last thing I wanted was a Ukrainian cowboy running into a gas facility with guns blazing. That was why the Russians had sent Spetsnaz, their best-trained troops. That was why Winters was sending a Tier One team before the militia arrived.

“And if the Russians send reinforcements?” Jacobsen asked.

A good question, and a distinct possibility, given that the camera crews weren't scheduled to arrive until 0700 and would probably be late.

“If the Russians roll in, I call the boss,” I said, meaning Winters. “I'll see how far he wants to take this.”

“And if that doesn't work, we blow the place up,” Wildman exclaimed, clearly liking the idea. Thank God Apollo provided a place for men like Wildman. Thank God he was here to cover
my ass. But there was no way I was blowing the place up. I'd have rather run than take that chance.

“It's 0213 zulu time,” I said. Shit, it was late. “Rack out. We're up at 0415 to sanitize this place, and then move out. Let's hit it.”

The team dispersed. They had two hours for last preparations and personal rituals before sleep: pray in the case of Charro, meditate in the case of Boon, listen to music in my case, sculpt bunny rabbits out of C-4, if you were a certain Welsh ex-SAS son of a bitch.

I kicked the sand table apart, making sure that no one could figure out later what had been planned here. I piled the few things we would leave behind on top—rations, spent batteries, ammo crates, excess equipment. One of Maltov's men would burn it with white phosphorus after the op was done. Take only the objective; leave nothing behind, not even footprints. That was our mission, every time.

I needed rack, but instead of heading to my sleeping bag, I found myself drifting to the far corner, where the Ukrainians were holding Alie. She was asleep near a crate of smoke grenades, and even from across the warehouse I could see the curve of her neck, the soft golden skin of her cheek.

I heard angry voices and turned toward them. Maltov was shoving the pilot, who was gesturing toward Boon, who was siphoning helicopter fuel into one of the truck's barrel bombs. Smart. Aircraft fuel was extremely explosive.

When I turned back, Alie was watching me. I expected her to get up, the better to confront me, but she only pushed herself to a seated position as I approached. Behind me, the loud Ukrainian curses crescendoed, until they turned into a single voice. It sounded like the pilot pleading.

“Hello again, Alie,” I said, as a scream ripped through the warehouse. Someone had lost a finger.

“Asshole,” she muttered to me, without her previous conviction.

“How do you like Karpenko?”

“I like him, of course,” she said wearily. “He's a rich man. That's how rich men get rich, by being smooth. Telling you what you want to hear. It's called manipulation.” She paused. “He seems to have taken a genuine shine to you, though.”

I shrugged. “Nobody's perfect.”

“You saved his children. Or at least that's what he thinks. He told me he doesn't know where they are.”

“They're safe,” I said, but I could tell she wasn't convinced. Who did she think I was working for? The mafia? “I don't know where they are, but I know who they are with. They are safe.”

“I guess you have to think that way . . .”

She trailed off. She was tired. Her hand was shaking. I noticed Karpenko's label-less bottle of booze from Poltava, now empty. Perhaps they had been toasting better times. But the better times were in the past, and all we had was right now.

“We're leaving before dawn. You're staying here with Greenlees. It will be your job to get yourself to . . . wherever it is you want to go.” I felt bad for her, and I felt lost, although I wasn't sure why. Perhaps because, after this was over, I didn't have anywhere else I wanted to be. “You can take the bird, but I wouldn't advise it. There are antiaircraft batteries between here and . . . everywhere. And the pilot . . . I think he's lost some blood.”

She didn't question me on that.

“I'd take the Å koda, since it won't attract attention. Drive with Greenlees back to Kiev. I can't guarantee your safety, but it's the best I can offer.”

I stopped. I was tired. I knew she would write about what had happened here, but I also knew it wouldn't matter. We had her cell phone, so there were no photographs, and no one would
corroborate what she'd seen. It would just be more rumors from the front lines, on an Internet already swimming with them. Worse things could happen. People were “disappeared” in war zones everyday.

“You shouldn't have come,” I said, more tenderly than I expected.

She looked up at me. She was fierce, and then she wasn't.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “For . . . you know.”

She wouldn't take her eyes off mine, so I was the one who stood up and turned away, giving her a last small victory. It was the least I could do.

“Tom,” she said after I'd taken a few steps, causing me to turn. She was smaller than I had ever seen her before, but she was still everything I wanted . . . in some other life. “Don't leave me here.”

Bam.
A frag grenade to my heart.

“You can't come with me,” I said.

She didn't argue, so I turned around, started walking, and didn't look back. What else could I have said? She couldn't break me. I was far too hard for that, no matter how much she meant to me. I needed this mission to work, and she had to know that. I needed to do it right, so that everyone would walk away alive—including Alie.

Karpenko caught up with me a minute later, as I was pulling my sleeping bag over me like a blanket. He pulled up an ammo crate and lit one of his blue Dunhills. He crossed his legs, so that his $5,000 shoes were hovering near my face. I knew he had worked on this pose, maybe for years. It was his signature move: dominant indifference.

“I'll take care of her,” he said. “I'm going to take her with me.”

He was the client. Fine.

“I've told her my story. I want her to write it.”

“Leave me out of it. And the team.”

“She knows. This was Ukrainian, purely Ukrainian. It is better for both of us that way. Especially me.”

He smoked his cigarette slowly. He was the only man in the warehouse who still looked clean. Never let them see you sweat.

“What is your father like?” he said.

“My father was Miniver Cheevy,” I said. Cheevy was a character in a poem I'd read in sixth grade, a hopeless romantic who dreamed about the past.

“He was a minister,” Karpenko said, nodding, as if that explained something.

My father was a drunk and an amateur historian, a lover of the doomed romance of the Confederate cause, not slavery but chivalry, for which our ancestors fled south across the Maryland border to fight with the Army of Virginia. He always wished he'd been born then, he said, but if he had, he'd just have pined for some other, earlier cause. The time period didn't matter. You were either a man of action or you weren't. Or as his hero Teddy Roosevelt once said, a “man in the arena,” or a nobody. That was why he pushed me, in his absentee-father, show-up-once-every-six-months way, into military service. Or maybe I'd done it to show him I wasn't going to be the loser he'd always been.

“He named you Thomas after the prophet?” Karpenko mused, still misunderstanding.

Thomas was a disciple, and a doubter, not a prophet.

“He named me Jubal, after an American Confederate general” and patron saint of lost causes. “Thomas is my middle name.”

Karpenko puffed his Dunhill and recrossed his legs. “You have no doubt heard about my father,” he said. I hadn't. “How I came back from college in Kiev after the Soviet Union collapsed and liberated the steel plant were my father worked. How he came out, covered in slag, and I handed him a check like all the
other men, six months of unpaid wages. How we hugged, the first time since I was a boy. And then every worker hugged me, a long line of dirty men, crying as they poured out of that hole.”

“Yeah, something like that,” I lied. I had never heard a word about his past.

“It isn't true,” he said, flicking away his butt. “It is propaganda. I don't know who started it, maybe me, I honestly can't remember.”

He lit another cigarette. It was his way of creating drama. Or calming his nerves.

“My father died when I was eight, soon after the Russians moved him to the steel plants in Poltava. It was a promotion, perhaps. Or a punishment. He may have been a nationalist. We were ethnic Cossacks, and the Soviets didn't trust us. I hated the Russians after that, because my father never recovered. He only lived six months. He was sick, and the foreman never allowed him to go to hospital, even on the day he died.”

I thought of what Alie had said, about Karpenko being smooth, about his ability to manipulate you into liking him. I admit it. I liked him.

“I want my son to know me,” he said, blowing a big lungful of smoke. “I want him to understand that I did this for my country. For our country, because Ukraine is his, too. Is that too much to ask?”

I didn't know. I didn't have a son. “Your children are safe,” I said, eyes closed.

“Yes, but I am not.”

I was tired. I had a mission to run in less than two hours, and time was ticking down. Besides, he wasn't asking if he should risk his life for his cause. He'd already made up his mind.

“You shouldn't smoke,” I said. “Nobody smokes anymore. It will kill you.”

They met in a restaurant, one with a bare concrete façade and burgundy curtains closed over the windows, a type very common in the East. The inside was ornate, burgundy and gold, with abundant curlicues and lurking cherubs in the old Russian style. Even in the deserted quiet of 4:45
A.M.
, or maybe because of it, Winters felt like he'd stepped inside a Fabergé egg.

But if the restaurant décor was delicate (and it was), their contact seemed designed to counteract it. The Russian sat heavily in the back corner of a back room as if made of a thousand pounds of lead, his neck bulging over the collar of his too-small Italian suit. He was sixty, perhaps, and rough, with loose jowls and a shock of unnaturally black hair, a cigarette between fat gold-ringed fingers, a five o'clock (
A.M.
) shadow crusted onto his slumping face. On the table in front of him were a pack of cigarettes, a bottle of vodka, espresso in a glass cup with an ornate metal holder, and six cell phones.

I always expect Russians to look different from the stereotype,
Winters thought,
but they never do.

“Mr. Gorelov,” Everly said, extending his hand.

Winters had studied Putin's inner circle, and a few outer ones too, but he'd never heard the name. He didn't like that. It put him on shaky ground. Who was this man?

“This better be good,” Gorelov grumped. Behind him, a couple of bodyguards were frowning. Winters had counted eight in the restaurant, all armed, smoking on the job.

“I don't know if it's good,” Everly said. “But it's important.”

“I hope this isn't about the transfer agreements again,” Gorelov grumbled. No formalities, Winters noted. And no espresso for his guests.

“Any change in your position?”

“No change.”

“Have you discussed it with your superiors?”

“I have no superiors,” Gorelov said.

“Of course,” Everly replied, dipping his nonexistent chin. “But I assume the right people know of our proposition. Our clients expect . . .”

“I don't give a damn about your clients,” Gorelov said, burying his head in his coffee. He was stonewalling. Winters wondered if it was personal, or personality. About 110 Russians owned 40 percent of the country's wealth. Winters suspected more than a few were Everly's clients, and Gorelov's enemies. Stereotypes suggested that Russians were men of titanic grudges.

“So who is he?” Gorelov sniffed, jerking his head.

“This is Mr. Winters.”

“Pleased to meet you,” Winters said, extending his hand.

The Russian drank vodka from a short glass. He looked anything but pleased. “An American,” he said.

“An expert on Ukraine,” Everly replied, only slightly exaggerating.

Gorelov turned toward him for the first time, his eyes bloodshot. “You have something for me?” he asked in gruff, accented English. He was a man, Winters could tell, who liked to dominate the conversation.

“I have an opportunity,” Winters shrugged, almost as if he regretted it, “created by you.” There was no point in being coy.

“Let me guess. You think you can use Little Russia for your advantage.” A derogatory Czarist term for Ukraine, meant to irritate him.

“We must protect Western interests,” Winters said.

“And expand them, because you are takers. But Ukraine is ours, Mr. Winters. It always has been, and it always will be. When the czars ruled, Ukraine was a province, just like your California. When the Soviets came to power, they marched through Kiev, just like Moscow.
Ukraine
means ‘meadow' in Russian—did you know that?—because they grow our grain. They feed our mothers. They nourish our factories with coal. They speak our language, with an atrocious accent, yes. They are not our most sophisticated region, but they are ours.”

“That's not what the international community says.”

“International community. What does that mean? The West? What is the West, in the face of hundreds of years of history?”

“What about the will of the people?”

Gorelov scoffed. “The people want to be Russian. That is why they fight.”

“They want to be free.”

Gorelov waved the suggestion away. He drank vodka, then coffee, then dragged on his cigarette. One of his phones buzzed. He ignored it. “They want to be happy. They want to be free of this violence brought on by the meddling of the West.”

“The West didn't create the crisis.”

“But you believe you can exploit it.”

“I know I can,” Winters said, switching to the first person.

Gorelov laughed, one of the least joyous sounds Winters had ever heard. It sounded like a cat choking on a brick of coal. “You think a businessman,” the Russian said with disgust, “can face down the greatest nation on earth.”

That's our phrase buddy,
Winters thought, and no kleptocratic petrostate is going to steal it. But he wasn't offended. He was intrigued. It was going to be brass balls and bullshit, he could see that. No wonder France buckled like a Peugeot under a tractor-trailer when Putin dared them to intervene.

“It's not a matter of facing down,” Winters said. “This isn't intimidation. I plan to beat you at your own game.”

“And what game is that?”

“Military exploitation.”

Gorelov grunted, or maybe it was another laugh. “I am a bureaucrat, Mr. Winters.”

Good to know,
Winters thought. “And I'm a military man, with a private army.”

The Russian glanced at Everly and frowned. This was new. Winters saw his advantage and moved in, cornering the Russian with his eyes.

“For years, you have counted on our passivity,” he said. “On our refusal to meet you with force. No please, don't insult me by objecting, you know it's true. You support our enemies—Iran, Syria, even Afghanistan—in order to grind us down, to make our Deep State interests weary of war. But I am different, Mr. Gorelov. I feast on war. Conflict is my business, and business is booming. But it can be better. My dream, unlike the men you bully, isn't peace. It is war. The type that grinds you back, the way you have subdued Georgia and Chechnya, the way you will try to grind down Ukraine. In other words, I am what you fear most, without knowing it. I am a Putin of the West.”

Gorelov visibly recoiled, as Winters knew he would. “You are no Putin,” he grunted.

“No. I am not a monster.”

Gorelov pounded the table, making his vodka glass rock. He curled his hand around a cellphone, his weapon of choice. “You insult me, Mr. Winters.”

Winters smiled. He had hit the big man where it hurt. At this level, every Russian worked for the state, and that meant Vladimir Putin, because in Russia, Putin
was
the state. He had reined in the oligarchs with ex-KGB muscle and crushed all po
litical opposition. If you opposed him you died, went to prison, or, if you were lucky, into exile. If you worked with him, he gave you whole cities or entire segments of Russia's economy, bringing unfathomable wealth and power. It was institutionalized mafia—Nigeria with nukes and snow. It wasn't much different, in all honesty, from how the country had been ruled for the last thousand years, except for brief interludes from 1917 to 1921, and most of the 1990s. At those points, the country was chaos.

Putin created his order, Winters had to admit, as he watched the Russian fume. Too bad he was such a shit.

“Don't worry,” Winters said, when he'd stretched out the silence and Gorelov was sufficiently rattled, “I am not merely talking. I will show you how like Vladimirivich”—he used the honorific for Putin, a serious breach of etiquette for outsiders—“I truly am.”

“You're going to attack Ukraine,” Gorelov snorted.

“Only the parts you want.”

“We'll stop you.”

“At what cost?”

“It doesn't matter the cost,” Gorelov said smugly, “because we control it all, and the Russian people are with us. The Russian people, the ones you call Ukrainians, will never accept you. They will curse your name.”

“Do you know who I am?” Winters said smoothly.

“I know everyone, Mr. Winters,” Gorelov said, leaning forward. He looked ready to bite. “And I have never heard of you.”

“And the Ukrainians won't either, Mr. Gorelov. Even when my man is king of Kiev.”

Gorelov blinked. He sat back in his chair, his hand cradling a cell phone. He hadn't considered the power of anonymity as a choice, and now it was his turn to be thrown off balance, to think, as Winters had only minutes before: who is this man?