Shadow War (30 page)

Somewhere out there, eight thousand feet beyond the clouds, in the cold upper reaches of the atmosphere, the drone was cruising on its appointed path. It was nothing more than a cold machine, invisible to eyes and instruments, transporting a large amount of explosives inside its protective shell.

There were other ways to destroy a natural gas transfer station. You could send a Tier One team, or a sniper with an incendiary round, but odds of human error were higher and tracks were harder to cover. You could destroy it with a cyberattack without leaving your command center, but every cyberaction was traceable, no matter how much you covered your tracks.

That was why when Apollo Outcomes wanted to send a confidential message, it sent a man to deliver it verbally, even when that meant a trip halfway around the world. When that wasn't an option, for whatever reason, the company sent a fax. The fax system was so out of date that no one bothered to monitor it, and so low-tech it was untraceable after the fact.

It was the same thinking that made the kamikaze drone work. Who would suspect? Who would be able to trace it? The drone was an emotionless piece of equipment with no cybertrail, designed to incinerate on impact, and that made it the perfect weapon to set off a chain reaction that would be felt around the world.

The Russians were prepared for atom bombs. Brad Winters had thrown a stone.

I almost threw the sat phone into the undergrowth. Winters was supposed to answer. Winters always answered. That was the bare minimum of his guarantee: I risk my life, he answers the phone. Why would he give me the number, if he wasn't going to answer the phone?

I stared at the forest, frustrated and betrayed. We were in a thicket of bushes, half a klick from the warehouse, the trees providing some cover and concealment, even as the deep purple sky made dark spikes of the branches and leaves. The mission was a kite. I knew that. This was how kites worked. I knew that, too. But this wasn't how our kite was supposed to turn out. Jimmy Miles wasn't supposed to bleed out in a scrubby forest in Eastern Europe. Jimmy was supposed to die in a bar fight in Juba, or on the African savannah wrestling lions, or behind a Vulcan machine gun, mowing down a legion of machete-wielding fanatics. Or jumping on a grenade to save his team. Or with a wife, goddammit, one of those after-sex heart attacks that we always joked about, what a way to go. Not that either of us had a wife, but still . . .

I pushed past Karpenko, who was quietly sitting on his heels, and examined Miles's side with my Maglite. The bandages were soaked through, and blood was pulsing from his artery. But weakly. Too weakly. I shone my light on his face. His eyelids fluttered involuntarily, but his eyes didn't open. He was alive,
but he wasn't going to make it, and it was going to be a painful death. It might take an hour, but out here, without an evac, it was death, guaranteed.

I started walking, pulling Miles behind me on the litter, Boon moving ahead to walk point and Hargrove leaning on Alie in the rear. Hargrove murmured, every now and then, but otherwise, no one made a sound.

I stopped twenty minutes later on the edge of a potato field a half klick north of our intended route. It was almost sunrise, the first blue tinge on the horizon, and the world was quiet. Nobody was following; we'd left the firefight behind. Alie was behind me in the trees. Hargrove was in the shadows. But this was our hour, Jimmy's and mine. We'd watched the sun come up on dozens of successful missions. We'd smoked a hundred cigars in tight-lipped triumph. We'd told a million stories of these mornings over bourbon, while I played the “Toreador” aria, the macho bullfighter's song from Bizet's opera
Carmen,
to celebrate being alive—I mean really alive, not lives of quiet desperation—for another day.

But not today.

I signaled to Alie. She nodded. She understood that this was Miles's last stop, and she knew I wanted to be alone. She rounded up the company and moved off into the morning. I waited until I couldn't hear anything but Jimmy's shallow breathing, and the hundred thousand legs crawling out of the forest, coming for Jimmy, coming for all of us.

I remembered the way my grandfather signaled for me to come closer. He was ninety-eight, laid up in a hospital bed with a broken hip. He whispered, “I'm done.” I helped him pull the oxygen tube out of his nose, because he was too weak to remove it on his own. He died that night.

How do you kill a friend?

We were out of morphine, so I did it with my bare hands on his neck, in the classic style, choking him out.

Then I knelt beside him, not wanting to wipe the blood off my hands. I unbuttoned his shirt pocket. Jimmy always carried a heavy metal ring; he'd picked it up on a patrol in Bosnia, a lifetime ago. It was industrial, made for some broken off bolt-hole, but Jimmy used it to rap skulls and open beer bottles. The perfect piece for the perfect job, he'd say, but now there were no more skulls to rap. Nobody would ever use that brewing equipment in his storage locker outside Phoenix. They'd just, some day soon, stop paying the rent.

“
Vive la mort! Vive la guerre! Vive le sacré mercenaire!
” I whispered over his body. The mercenary's battle cry, or maybe his lament.

I put the metal ring in my pocket. Then I pulled the pin on the white phosphorous grenade and gently placed it on Jimmy's chest. A funeral pyre, the Viking way. The enemy would see it from a kilometer away, especially in this dim light, but by the time they got here, if they got here, we'd be gone, and so would Jimmy Miles.

This wasn't supposed to matter. None of it. None of us. That was how we did this job, by believing we would beat the odds. I'd seen a thousand men die violent deaths, many at my own hand. I shot a man in the head in Nigeria because he wouldn't sell land to an oil company, and I couldn't remember his face. Alie was right. I'd watched a village full of women and children gunned down from the back of Toyota trucks for sport, the gunners laughing and counting kills, something I'd sworn I'd never do again after the massacre in Srebrenca. I had burned four good mercs and a retiree less than an hour ago, and left three Ukrainian allies dead in the dirt, and who was going to remember them, or know what happened to them, or care? We
were walking tombs of unknown soldiers, trying to make a difference, trying to do some good in the world.

By the time I reached the others, the rim of the earth was blue. They were standing in shadow, in a canebrake, looking out on a field of cow manure and crops.

“Charlie mike,” I told the team, or whatever was left of it. “Let's move. We have a mission to complete.”

It would have been what Miles wanted, because he was a soldier. But more important, I didn't know what else to do.

Brad Winters listened closely, as Everly and Gorelov hammered out their deal, sometimes in Russian, other times in English. Everly's first concern seemed to be transfers from Bank Rossiya, Putin's bank. Bank Rossiya had gone from $1 million in assets in the 1990s to more than $100 billion in 2011 by serving the needs of the Russian Deep State. Now it was a pariah institution, locked out of SWIFT, the international banking consortium, by sanctions imposed after Russia's annexation of Crimea two months ago. Everly wasn't trying to skirt those sanctions, not explicitly, but the Londoners clearly had clients and projects caught up in the mess, and they needed Gorelov's reluctant help to free them.

Half the conversation—the half in Russian—went over Winters's head. The other half mostly bored him. He was more intent on watching the men and understanding their relationship. When he and Everly had arrived, Gorelov was arrogantly dismissive, the man in control. Even now, he appeared the same, gruffly rebuffing his more urbane counterpart between slugs of vodka, rejecting aspects of every request.

But Winters could see the shift in power. He could tell that in his stiff, unflustered way, Everly was a bar brawler, and he was pounding the Russian into submission, piece by piece. He could see it in the way Gorelov shifted in his chair, in his reluctance to make the phone calls required to seal certain deals, in the way
he grimaced at odd moments like acid reflux was tearing his insides apart.

Ukraine was, in the end, little more than incremental business opportunities. Everly was less concerned with the fate of the country, Winters soon realized, than in making sure that current agreements—especially for the big energy companies, but for other clients, too—were honored no matter what happened in Kiev. Winters had offered the London bankers the chance to change Eastern Europe; they had chosen the status quo.

He daydreamed, briefly, about upending the relationship. During one long exchange in Russian, he even pictured the drone, floating downward out of the heavens, and then accelerating into the massive chamber where natural gas was compressed into liquid for concentrated delivery, the C-4 ripping the drone's skin apart like so many treaties and alliances and exploding it into a million worthless burned-out shards.

But Brad Winters was practical. He had seen this coming when the Indian banker called him on the private jet and told him his destination was Saint Petersburg. So when Everly and Gorelov offered him minor shale oil fields on the edge of Eastern Ukraine and free passage to operate, he accepted gracefully and then said, “And Azerbaijan.”

Gorelov scoffed. “That's not our country.”

Winters ignored the obvious lie. “I'm not talking ownership of the oil fields. I'm talking about a partnership, with one of your smaller national subsidiaries. My people will explore and extract the oil, and your people will ship it.”

“It's a dangerous region, an unstable investment.”

“I'll build a private military base, for the protection of your shipping lines, and for other work in the region. I'll keep you appraised of our activities, of course, and rest assured, you will find our services profitable.”

Gorelov squinted.

“And Georgia and Armenia, too,” Winters said, offhandedly, although he was not going to walk away without a piece of all three. “If we are going to be working together in the region, we might as well dominate it, right, Yuri?”

Those three countries formed the bottleneck between Russia and Southwest Asia. They had been a battleground between Deep States, dating back to the “Great Game” between Russia and England for control of central Asia in the 1800s.

“The Kremlin would never agree to that,” Gorelov snapped.

“Yes they will,” Winters said, “if you explain it to them correctly. It's better to have me inside the tent pissing out, after all, then outside pissing in.”

Gorelov stammered, but Winters held up his hand. When a man was beaten, there was no point in indulging his concerns. “I must insist,” he said. “That is my price, and it's a onetime offer.”

He was thinking of the drone, and of Thomas Locke and his men, no doubt creeping up on the facility right now. He tapped his watch.
Time is running out, Gorelov. I'm not a patient man.

“I require proof of your goodwill,” Gorelov said, squatting like a toad. He seemed to have spent the last hour sinking into his chair, as if it were mud. The air was foul with his smoky stench. “The Near East for Karpenko.”

“No.”

“And your men.”

I lay prone on the roof of the apartment building where Wildman had planted the last camera, watching the pipeline facility through my scope. It was a clear blue morning, almost full light, and I was pinpointing heads, trying to grab that rush you feel when you have a man's life in your hands and he doesn't know it, but it wasn't coming. I had been angry after Miles died, and then brokenhearted. Now I wanted to feel angry again, but I couldn't muster it. I felt wrung out. Not just exhausted, but empty. The only thought that kept running through my head was,
What am I doing here? How did it come to this?

I wasn't surprised the Donbas Battalion didn't show at 0600. Everything had gone to shit so far, and besides, militias were notorious for being late. By 0630, I was agitated. My body was locking down, my brain curling up on itself, my stomach wanting to vomit, except I hadn't eaten anything but a single energy bar since Miles and I ate MREs in the warehouse twelve hours ago and talked about old times.

Then three military trucks screamed up to the facility gate, and dropped their tailgates.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.
What the fuck?

Russian reinforcements poured out, shouting and gesturing, and my heart dropped into my boots as they covered the exit points and swarmed into the facility, fanning out in search formation. I scoped the Spetsnaz commander, and I could practi
cally read his lips when he saluted the officer in charge.
No one is here but us, sir!
Of course, he was speaking Russian, so that piece was in my head. But I could read the signs. We'd been sold out.

If the militia had been hit, prisoners might have been captured and interrogated. Had someone, under duress, given up the location of the assault? But no one outside my team knew about the mission, except for the Apollo men with the Donbas Battalion. They wouldn't crack. And they wouldn't have told the Ukrainians. This mission was blacker than black.

Two minutes later, a call came in on my sat phone. I hit Talk on my earpiece, still scanning the facility through my rifle scope.

“Mission abort. What's your sitrep?” Winters's voice.

“Three hundred meters south southeast of the objective,” I said, giving him a false locale. “We ran into trouble. I called—”

“Is the client with you?”

“Affirmative.”

Winters paused, long enough for me to sight the Spetsnaz leader's head in my crosshairs. It was a clean shot.

“Roger,” Winters said. “Make your way to the extraction point ASAP. Bird en route. Watch your fourth point of contact, and wait for the signal.”

Two seconds later, the Spetsnaz commander reached for his radio, listened, then frantically waved his men to get into one of the trucks.
We have them!
I imagined him saying, as I watched his lips move. The vehicle belched black smoke and lurched forward, heading east, toward the extraction point. That was the signal.

“Wilco out,” I said, ending transmission.

Brad Winters had done the worst thing any commander could do: he'd betrayed his men.

Maybe. Because he was also trying to save us. The five points of contact for landing after a parachute jump are (1) balls of feet,
(2) heels of feet, (3) thighs, (4) ass, and (5) shoulder blades. So when Winters said “fourth point,” he was telling me to watch my ass, in a way that no one without jump wings would understand. Somebody outside the military had been listening, forcing him to make the call.

Maybe. Because if everything had gone as planned, and Alie and Hargrove hadn't screwed the pooch, we'd have been inside the facility, waiting for the Donbas Battalion, when the Russian reinforcements arrived. There was no way Winters could have anticipated the Chechen mercs . . . or contacted them . . .

Don't get crazy, Locke,
I thought, scoping the Russian commander's right cheekbone to calm my nerves. Winters didn't know where we were holed up. He thought we'd be in the facility as planned. The Chechens had followed Hargrove. In a way, Hargrove had saved our lives . . .

“What now?” Alie whispered, sliding up beside me on her belly so the Russians wouldn't see her silhouetted against the morning sky.

There were only five of us left: me, Boon, Karpenko, Alie, and Hargrove, who was wrapped in bloody bandages and nearly comatose from shock and exhaustion. I thought about what I had in my ruck: field jacket, night-vision goggles, a small amount of ammo, four nutrition bars, water. Around my neck was the gold chain Wolcott had given me last week in Washington, so I could snip links if I needed funds. In the map pocket of the ruck was about thirteen thousand euros in a Ziploc bag, the last of my Apollo cash. Boon and I could escape and evade, but what about the rest?

The smartest move was to leave them and run. They were war tourists, after all. Alie and Hargrove, at least, would probably survive. Karpenko, though, was wanted by all sides.

“We wait,” I said, without taking my eye from my scope.
One shot to the cheekbone, and the Russian commander's head would blow out like a Jackson Pollock painting. I breathed deep and thought about the shot, the trajectory, the windage. I probably wouldn't hit him from this distance, at least not a clean kill, and I was glad. For the first time in a long time, the thought of killing made me sick.

I didn't realize Alie was still beside me, until she put her hand on my back and started rubbing it gently. I had a scar; I don't know if she remembered that. Maybe she could feel it. I had a brief, horrible thought that I might have been crying, but my scope was clear. My eyes were dry. Mercs don't fucking cry.

“I'm sorry,” she said, but it didn't move me. She'd said that before. “I'm sorry I compromised your mission. I didn't realize it would be like that. I didn't realize that people would die.”

Did she mean Miles? Or did she mean everyone?

“I'm sure you've seen it before,” I whispered.

Alie was tough. She'd been in back alleys and slave brothels and God knew where else in pursuit of her truth, places even I wouldn't go. Anyone who thought she wasn't a hardened warrior was a fool. But I knew she hadn't seen anything like the last four hours before. I had never been in a worse battle, or on a more devastating mission, so how could she have been? We were lucky to be alive.

“I don't understand what you do,” she said. “I don't see how you can live like this.” She paused. The carnage was catching up to her. “But I respect it, Tom. No one would go through that if they didn't believe in the cause. Right? I didn't realize that before. I guess that makes you think I'm naïve.”

It made me wonder what I think. It made me wonder why it had come to this, why I made all the decisions I'd made—leaving grad school for Burundi, turning down Winters's offer to climb the executive ladder, walking away from the one
woman I never wanted to forget. Why bother, if all my choices only led me here?

“I would have married you, Alie,” I said without turning from my scope. “In some other life. I would have taken an office job, and bought a minivan, and we would have raised our children on ice cream and spy novels, even the girl. We would have been happy.”

I felt Alie's hand moving down my back, and then falling away. “Oh Tom,” she said sadly, “what makes you think I would ever have wanted that?”

I thought she'd leave me then, alone with my weariness and regret. But she didn't. She lay beside me, not touching me, not moving. Was she watching the Russians below us loading their trucks, getting ready to ambush us at the extraction point? Or was she thinking what I was thinking: that there was still a place for us, a bed somewhere and happiness, at least for a night, until one or both of us left to save the world. Maybe Paris. Why not? The place didn't have to be large or fancy, it just had to be there. One bed and one window would do.

“What do we do now?” Alie asked again.

“We keep waiting,” I said. “Play for the breaks. Something will come up. Something always does.”

Twenty minutes later, we heard the helicopters, two Mi-17s, each capable of carrying thirty people. At first, I thought they might be Spetsnaz reinforcements, about to fast-rope into the facility from a hover. But the Russians were screaming and scurrying out of sight, like roaches when the kitchen light flicks on.
The choppers are with us
, I thought.

“News crews,” I said, as the two birds came into view, black against the morning blue. “My boss lined them up for Karpenko's victory speech. It must have been too late to recall them back to Kiev.”

“So they'll be going back soon,” Alie said.

I took my eye away from the rifle scope and looked at her. She was smiling.

“I can talk my way on,” she said.

I believed her. Alie could talk her way out of a sunburn. “What about them?” I said, nodding toward the others.

Alie looked over her shoulder, at Hargrove with his bandages, and Karpenko, lying faceup in the sun, smoking a cigarette. “Are you asking if I'd risk my life for Hargrove?”

I laughed. “You already have.”

“Then it's my call.”

I heard it then, even above the blades of the choppers setting down two blocks away in front of the gas facility. It was a jaunting whistling, “God Save the Queen.” I turned, knowing exactly what that meant.
Don't shoot my head off, assholes.
Sure enough, Wildman appeared at the top of the fire escape thirty seconds later, carrying his SA-80, a rucksack, and an RPG. Splattered blood stained the front of his shirt.

“It's a proper shit show down there,” he said with a twisted smile.

“I have to go,” I said to Alie. This was no time for moping, and no time for regret. We had miles to go, hundreds of miles, and most of it would be on foot.

“Call of the wild,” Alie said, but she was smiling.