Shadow War (6 page)

Two minutes later, exactly on time, an older gentleman walked through the rotating door of the Hyatt Kiev. He was wearing tan slacks, a golf shirt, a blue blazer, and well-worn loafers, his thin gray hair impeccably combed. He looked like a retiree on a junket, but he was clearly Greenlees. He had an ease most Americans can never pull off when they traveled, especially abroad.

He glanced around, then walked directly toward me. This was a public meeting in a busy hotel. Caution would only draw attention.

“Dr. Locke, I presume.”

“That's right.”

“John Greenlees,” the man said, extending his hand.

“Pleased to meet you sir,” I said, folding the
Financial Times
and giving him my Green Lighthouse Group business card, more for show than anything else.

“Call me John,” Greenlees said, taking the other seat. “How was the flight?”

“Not bad. I slept.”

“And the cab ride? The drivers can be maddening, I know.”

He had a vaguely British accent and aristocratic manner, as if channeling a John le Carré double agent from 1963. Even his teeth had gone British. I had seen it before in Americans who built careers abroad, a subconscious separation from their old lives. It was the CIA's version of wearing an Indonesian shawl.

“Traffic was light,” I said.

Greenlees flagged a waiter and ordered in Ukrainian. Turning to me, he said, “I'm having a vodka with lemon. And you?”

I raised my bourbon to show I had a finger to go. A high alcohol tolerance was mandatory in this business.

“To eat?” the waiter asked in English.

Greenlees looked at me, and I shook my head. “No thank you,” he said. Then, as the waiter walked away, “How long have you known Dave Wolcott?”

“Five years,” I said. “And I've never seen him smile.”

“That's him,” Greenlees said with a grin. “Droll. But a good man. I served with him in Nicaragua in 1986, before your time, I'm sure.”

“I wasn't aware.”

“Oh, it's hush-hush, as they say,” Greenlees said with a shrug, although no one ever said that. “I was under diplomatic cover. He was military intelligence. Just a title, of course. Nobody ever referred to Dave Wolcott as intelligent.”

I laughed. It was true. “You were supporting the Contras?”

“And covertly mining the Nicaraguan harbors.” His smile was genuine. It was a fond memory.

“I was in Panama,” I said.

“A paratrooper, I hear, then later in a special mission unit in the Balkans.” Special mission units, or SMUs, were elite forces trained for the nation's most secret and dangerous work. SEALs. Delta. They were the pinnacle of the military pyramid. Or at least they used to be. Now they served as the Apollo Outcome's favorite recruiting pool.

“82nd Airborne Division,” I said with pride.

“What regiment?”

“504th, under Abizaid, McChrystal, and Petreaus, before they made general.”

“I remember Abizaid in Grenada,” Greenlees mused, referring to the U.S. invasion in 1983. “He ordered his Rangers to drive a bulldozer into a line of Cuban soldiers.”

“So I've heard.”

“You must know Bernie McCabe from your time in the Balkans.” I recognized the tradecraft. It was a question to qualify me. There were no code words or secret signals between colleagues, that was fiction; common points of reference authenticated contacts.

“I know him, but Colonel McCabe wasn't in the Balkans. He commanded Delta Force when I was at Fort Bragg, then went private sector. He ran Sandline International with Tim Spicer, and put down the RUF in Sierra Leone.”

“I hear they hired a Hind helicopter for that one,” Greenlees said, shaking his head. Hinds were Soviet flying tanks. “Good God, what a mess.”

“They got the job done.”

“A good man,” Greenlees said, perhaps too wistfully. “They were all good men.”

I leaned forward, glancing over my shoulder. Alie was across the lobby with a group of charity workers, openly staring at us. So was the blonde. And a couple squared-off local goons. “Do you have somewhere else we can talk?”

Greenlees caught my eye, but didn't turn. An old mission girl, I almost said, meaning a temporary sex partner you pick up in some remote location. But there was no reason to share this information, and besides, I couldn't use that phrase for Alie. Mission girls are women you forget; but with Alie, it had been the opposite. Our time together had grown more important to me, the farther I'd drifted away.

“I have a car,” Greenlees said, downing his vodka and rising elegantly from his seat. “Let me show you around.”

We bypassed the hotel's parking valets and went straight to the street, where Greenlees had a car waiting. It was a late-model BMW, with tinted windows and evidence of a Berlin green zone sticker scraped off the inside windshield. It was probably stolen in Germany and sold in Eastern Europe, a common fate for luxury cars. Either Greenlees liked to shop the gray market, or someone had given him an expensive gift. A shady-looking local was behind the wheel.

“My wife's brother,” Greenlees assured me, sliding into the front seat. Free agents like Greenlees often made their trade a family business to deter enemy infiltration.

“Saint Sophia's Cathedral,” he went on, pointing across the plaza. We turned north and passed a pastel-blue palace with golden roofs, straight out of a little girl's fairy princess set. “The Golden Dome, a monastery in a former life. Now, sadly, the oldest building in town.”

We passed several nondescript blocks of apartments with the sagging façades of neglected city neighborhoods, then merged onto a major road lined with hotels and businesses. Before long, the Dnieper River was crawling on our left, the hills steep on the far bank. Somewhere over those hills, Putin's hired goons were tearing Eastern Ukraine apart, but from here, Kiev seemed like any other post-Soviet city.

“What do you know about Karpenko?” Greenlees asked,
breaking the silence. This was the real conversation, and there was no safer place for it than his personal car.

“Only the name, I'm afraid.”

“He's an oligarch,” Greenlees said, “but you probably guessed that, or you wouldn't be here. There are perhaps twenty of them in Ukraine, and together they control over 90 percent of the wealth. Factories, natural resources, even chocolate.”

The concrete apartment blocks gave way to a large, leafy park, an archlike Soviet-era monument hanging desolately in the background.

“They're all gangsters, born from the ruins of the USSR. Often, they just showed up at a factory with a private army and claimed it.”

Our line of work,
I thought.

“Who was going to stop them? The locals? They were terrified. The old party officials? They were bought. Or shot.”

It was the story of the world. The strong do what they want; the weak suffer what they must. Two decades in the field, and I'd never known a country any different.

“It was a capitalist's dream, Locke. For twenty years, the oligarchs were off-loading duffel bags of cash from private jets into Cypriot banks, until the European Union shut that down. They buy mansions all over the world to keep their money abroad. That's why London's so bloody expensive.” He emphasized the British slang, and talked like it was a personal affront.

“Power makes them daft,” he continued. “Igor Kolomoisky keeps a shark tank in his office. When he doesn't like what's being said, he presses a button that drops crayfish meat to his pets.”

“Subtle,” I replied. It reminded me of Africa. Or James Bond. That was the kind of idea that starts in a movie, then spreads around the world.

“You heard about Yanukovych?” Viktor Yanukovych was the
recently deposed president of Ukraine, and was now under Russian protection in Crimea.

“I heard he had a kitchen shaped like a pirate ship.”

“Not a kitchen, Locke. A restaurant. At his private compound. With pirate-themed waiters.” While half the country starved, I figured he'd say next, but Greenlees surprised me. “While the price of bribes for medicine went through the roof,” he said.

That's the difference between Africa and Europe. Here, a fight between billionaires doesn't mean ten thousand starving children.

“What about Karpenko?”

“He's the youngest oligarch at forty-two, the son of a miner in the central city of Poltava. He was a finance student in Kiev when the Soviets collapsed. Two months later, he owned the mine where his father worked. Sasha Belenko, an old-school oligarch, brought him into the upper tier: factories, energy infrastructure, banking. Karpenko is worth $2 billion on the books, probably triple that in reality.”

Probably ten times that, if he was like other strongmen I'd known.

“He's second wave, so he's more refined. He's not above aggressive litigation, debt enforcement, hostile takeovers, but he tries to stay clean. The older oligarchs, the ones who spent most of their adult lives under Soviet Russia, wanted to be Robin Hood. Lovable outlaws. Karpenko wants to be Rockefeller. The Karpenko Group, you probably haven't heard of it, but it was the first Ukrainian conglomerate on the London stock exchange. The traders loved him. Until Crimea. Two billion is the new valuation.”

And next week, the way things were going, it might be zero. I wondered what percentage Winters was getting for my troubles.

“What happened?” I asked.

Greenlees glanced at me with his head tilted, like a bookstore owner looking over his glasses at a questionable customer.

“Besides the obvious, I mean.”

“He bankrolled the democracy movement.”

“And Putin wasn't happy.”

“Some of his fellow oligarchs weren't happy. Russia has made them rich. Turning toward Europe will make them richer, but why take the risk?”

Because you were never satisfied, I thought, remembering my six months as Winters's protégé in Washington. There was always something more. That's how you became a billionaire—or a president—in the first place.

“Nobody expected Putin's response. After Ukraine's Orange Revolution in 2004, he let the democracy movement destroy itself with infighting. It took him four years to install Yanukovych. But you know that they say about doing the same thing twice?”

“It's for idiots.”

“It's for Americans.”

Greenlees paused, looking out the window at high-end apartment blocks along the Dnieper. We passed an enormous McDonald's, half a block wide, a beautiful woman sitting in the front window sadly raising a burger to her mouth as we floated by.

“Do you know who benefited most from the Iraq War?”

Apollo and others like it. Within three years, it had gone from cleaning latrines on military bases in the Balkans to a private army powerful enough to overthrow half the countries in the world.

“Vlad Putin, that's who. Ten years ago, he didn't have the courage to conquer Ukraine. Then the world got bogged down fighting medieval Arabs who lop people's heads off in the name
of Allah”—I winced at the characterization—“and Putin seized the future. Chechnya, Georgia, Crimea. Those were all . . . groping. Ukraine has always been the goal. And after Ukraine . . .”

He looked at me, and I could see it in his eyes. Greenlees was a lone wolf, a voice crying in the wilderness. He'd probably been giving this speech for the last decade, with nobody to listen. Conspiracy was the last refuge of failures.

So how did we end up in this car together?

Greenlees sighed. He looked tired. “You don't know anything about what's going on here, do you?”

“I'm sorry. I work in Africa.”

“Typical,” Greenlees muttered, as we turned onto a wide pedestrian street. Several streetlamps were painted blue and yellow, I noticed, and blue-and-yellow Ukrainian flags hung from a few windows. We passed a woman dressed in some sort of peasant garb, clearly traditional, but wearing high heels. The country had reverted to Ukrainian spellings after Euromaidan, I had heard, such as
Kyiv
instead of the Russian
Kiev
. We are a free people, they were saying. Look at our words. Look at our clothes. We have a history that is ours.

“This isn't a war between Russia and Ukraine,” Greenlees said, following the patriotic businesswoman with his eyes, “so put away your quaint notions of country. It's about economics and oil. ExxonMobil or Gazprom have more power than Belgium ever did.”

I didn't bother to tell him I'd put away that notion long ago. Or that Belgium had once slaughtered five million people in Congo.

“Ukraine is a battleground between East and West. The Romans and Slavs; the Polish and Russian empires; Hitler and Stalin; NATO and the Soviet Union. And now, Putin. The oligarchs are taking sides. The people are, as usual, the victims of history.”

As they say in Africa: when the elephants fight, the grass gets trampled.

“That's why the world is sitting on its hands, even as covert Russian troops pour over the border. Because this is nothing but a buffer zone to them.” He paused. Sadly. “And because there are no good options. Every leader in Ukraine is crooked.”

“Except Karpenko.”

“In the most optimistic view, I suppose.”

He stopped, staring out the window once again. “The Verkhovna Rada,” he said, pointing toward a building strangely reminiscent of the Jefferson Memorial. “The house of parliament. In the West, they use money to buy politicians. Here, it is more honest. Every oligarch simply becomes a parliamentarian.”

We turned right, along a street clearly intended by the Soviets as a parade route. The apartment buildings were so massive, they made the lives inside them seem small. I saw more traditional outfits, loose white tops with beadwork and aprons.

“Instytutska Street,” Greenlees said. “Yanukovych's police shot forty protesters here. You can still see the bullet holes in the tree trunks. And the videos on the Internet.”

I could hear the sadness in his voice. “What happened to Karpenko?”

Greenlees turned with a sigh, as if I'd asked the wrong question. “His mentor, Sasha Belenko, went over to the Russians six days ago. The next night, so-called Ukrainian patriots seized the Donetsk Iron and Steel Works, a centerpiece of Karpenko's empire. They raided the offices of his Financial-Industrial Group in Kiev.” Greenlees gave me a knowing look. “Corruption, of course. That's the official charge.”

“Belenko sold him out.”

“Three days ago, there was an assassination attempt at a house in Poltava. Full frontal assault with RPGs and demo. Nobody
claimed responsibility, but it was Spetsnaz.” Russian special forces. “The operation was too precise to be anyone else. Rumor has it there was inside help. Fierce fighting amongst his men. Karpenko barely got out alive.”

Three days ago, I was buying arms in the Sahara.

“Maidan Nezalezhnosti,” Greenlees said, signaling for the driver to double-park in the busy street. “The center of the struggle. Ten thousand gathered here for two months, until Putin's puppet fell.”

Maidan Nezalezhnosti was a concrete park, with a pond at the far end and trees along each side. Under the trees were makeshift tents and barricades, occupied by serious young women and older men in off-the-rack camouflage. I could see sand bags, Cyrillic graffiti, the burned remnants of radial tires. I didn't know what war these people thought was being fought, but whatever it was, this wasn't part of it.

“Where are the young men?” I asked.

“At the front. Hundreds have gone.”

“But they'll be slaughtered.” I had seen it too many times: untrained men and boys run over by trained troops.

“I know that,” Greenlees said, “and so do they. I suppose that's why you're here.”

He paused. He wanted me to say he was right, that things were being taken care of. But he wasn't right. I was here for five days, to do two jobs. Maybe they would matter in the grand scheme of things. I trusted they would. But either way, by next week I'd be gone.

“The Trade Unions building,” Greenlees said, pointing out the car window toward an empty space of blackened debris. “The Russians burned it down with protesters inside. Seventy-seven people gave their lives. Seventy-seven. And what does the world care?”

Count your blessing, old man. It takes one thousand dead
Africans before anyone in the West even notices. Ten thousand, at least, before the cavalry arrives.

“Thirty-five years,” Greenlees muttered. “Half my life. And this is victory?”

I looked out the window, past the shoddy barricades and piles of golden threadlike wire, the steel belts in burned-off radial tires. I liked Greenlees, and I trusted him, even if his jacket wasn't pressed and his shirtsleeves were showing signs of wear. He was a gentleman, one of those old hands who seemed like a throwback to a more subtle time. But his information was useless, something I could get in half a minute from anyone at the U.S. Embassy. And he was clearly compromised.
Us? We? Our?
The old man had “clientitis.” He'd gone native, a cardinal sin for a field operative. I knew the company had to go outside its usual sources for work this black, but if this mission was so important to Winters, why would he saddle me with a sentimentalist?

I looked up. The driver was staring at me in the rearview mirror. Sloppy. He was probably a plumber, before Greenlees brought him onboard.

“We're being followed,” I said. “Black car, halfway down the block.”

“Don't forget about the tan four-door that passed us thirty seconds ago.” Greenlees was right. I had been so focused on the black car, I hadn't looked farther.

“Russian FSB?” The FSB was the new acronym for the KGB.

“One's probably Russian. One Ukrainian. They're following each other as much as they're following us.”

“I assume my room will be tossed when I get back.”

“At least once, probably twice. For effect, mostly. I assume there's nothing to find.”

“Of course,” I said, as the car started to roll.

Greenlees handed me three prepaid mobile phones to be used
and discarded. I checked them. They were clean. I handed them back. We hadn't used burners in the field in ten years. They were a dead giveaway. My cell phone had been programmed by the company with the right amount and type of contacts.

“I'll stick with a sat phone,” I said, not making a big deal of Greenlees's error. “You have the Berettas?”

Beretta Nanos were my favorite pistols for this type of work, small and easy to conceal. No silencers. Noise suppressors reduced range and accuracy, changed the gun's balance, and never muffled noise as advertised. If you want to kill silently, get a crossbow.