Shadow War (8 page)

“He's right.”

“Because I'm old, and you're out of shape, and you don't even speak Ukrainian.”

I started to laugh, then tore off another hunk of bread. “Don't worry,” I said as I reached for the lard. “I'm definitely not out of shape.”

Sirko returned a half hour later, no doubt after a rocky chat with Karpenko. It wouldn't have been his idea to hire Apollo, but he had clearly given his assent, and that was all Karpenko needed to blame him for any problems. Like the cavalry arriving and consisting of a retiree and a guy in a suit.

Fortunately, he had an unmarked bottle of liquor, which turned out to be vodka, so I pushed the last heel of bread aside.

“98th Guards?” I asked, noticing the tattoo on his forearm when he gave me a glass. It was a blue shield featuring a yellow arm, clad in chain mail, holding a sword.

Sirko nodded. The 98th were Soviet paratroopers, but Sirko was pushing sixty, so of course Ukraine had been part of the Soviet Union when Sirko was coming up.

“I'm airborne, too,” I said, pounding my right fist on my chest, where I had worn my jumpmaster wings while in uniform.

Sirko smiled and thumped his chest. It was the universal brotherhood of military airborne: paratroopers, rangers, Russian Spetsnaz. Beyond the tough training was the shared suffering, topped off by secret initiation rituals like “Blood Wings” and “Prop Blast.” The U.S. Army put a stop to them in the 1990s after CNN caught Canadian paratroopers pounding jump wing pins straight into new member's chests—thus “blood wings”—but to old dogs like Sirko and me, the rituals would never die.

“Airborne,” he said, lifting his glass.

We drank.

“Were you in Bosnia?” I asked. The colonel didn't answer. I doubted he understood. “I was in Srebrenica, summer of 1995.”

The images came back to me: the beautiful valleys of northeastern Bosnia, the two Serbian “Red Berets” we captured on the road, the terrible beating we gave them, the first time I'd shattered teeth. It wasn't right, but I was raw and eager, and we were hunting Scorpions, a vicious Russo-Serbian militia that referred to Bosnians as cockroaches. Yugoslavia had shattered into ethnic violence, and the Scorpions, among others on the Serbia side, had elevated that disagreement into ethnic cleansing. Even the Red Berets were more afraid of their allies than they were of us, thus the missing teeth, but they finally gave up a location: Srebrenica. It was only forty clicks away. I radioed in the intel, and requested a change of mission to Srebrenica.

The response from military special ops command was instant and clear.

“Negative, Falcon 2-0. Charlie Mike.” Meaning
continue mission
. “Drina Valley is UN safe area and no-go zone.”

I locked eyes with Miles, my noncomm. “Your call, Captain,” he said.

I made the call. I followed orders. We stayed away from the valley. The next day, the thunder started to the east, the unmistakable sound of artillery, but headquarters refused our requests to investigate. For the next five days, I ignored the thunder and Charlie Mike'd like a good soldier, sticking to our original mission, my men angry and mutinous, until I finally said, “Fuck it. We're going in.”

I will never forget the town of Srebrenica: the smell of smoke and corpses; the burned houses; the destroyed Dutch troop carrier smoldering in the road. It was desolate, even in the center of town, but there were women in the wreckage, traumatized and starving, just as the Serbians intended.

We walked in double-wedge formation with Miles on point, nobody saying a word. On the north end of the town, the destruction was thicker. We saw the back wall of an old zinc factory, covered with blood. The ground was soaked in it, a long line of individual pools. We stayed off the road. Three hundred meters farther, we came to a fresh mound of dirt. Culver, one of the young buck sergeants on my team, started digging. Within seconds, a hand was sticking out. A child's hand.

Culver stopped. He looked up at me. He didn't say it, but he didn't need to. I could see it.
Fuck you, Captain.

Later, Miles put a hand on my shoulder. “It's all right,” he said. “It's my fault. I'm the NCO. I should have told you to fuck that order.”

But it wasn't his fault, and it wasn't all right. Eight thousand Bosnians were executed in and around Srebrenica, mostly men and boys, but for me, it only took one. I lasted another four years, but that was the end of my army career. Every time someone asked me why I'd gone merc, I thought of that dead boy, and HQ insisting I stay the course, and how I could have saved him . . . if only I'd had the freedom or the nerve.

“Srebrenica,” Sirko said slowly, pronouncing each syllable. He didn't understand English, but any military man in the Eastern bloc understood that word. “Srebrenica. Bosnia. Dah. I was there.”

He said something in Ukrainian, and I looked to Greenlees.

“He says that's when he left.”

I remembered the calm on the boy's face when we dug him out. There was a bullet hole in his forehead with powder burns around the entry. Barrel on bone. How much worse would it have felt, I wondered, if I had been on the same side as those butchers?

I raised my vodka glass for another round. Sirko poured. We
drank in silence, each of us lost in our thoughts, until Sirko put down his glass and spoke.

“He asked if you have a plan,” Greenlees translated.

“A thin one,” I said. “Mostly assumptions.”

Sirko nodded. “That's what he figured,” Greenlees said, as Sirko pulled out a worn tactical map case with a faded Soviet star on the front and slapped it on the table. Inside were old Soviet army maps of the Poltava area, complete with an acetate overlay showing military graphics and enemy units. In the side pockets were an orienteer's compass, a map protractor, a small maglite with a red lens for night vision, a few markers for the acetate overlay, and two chem lights. A true soldier's kit.

I pulled out my tablet computer and, while Sirko watched, punched up some GIS satellite maps with movable three-dimensional overlays of the same location: population density, satellite imagery, topography, and militia movements, courtesy of the gerbils. My tablet was security encrypted, ruggedized for field deployment, and completely sterile. I would never use it for writing, and it contained no identifying information. It was simply a traveling reference library. It had its own solar panel and could locate a GPS satellite, but it wasn't Bluetooth or Wi-Fi enabled, and it would never connect to the Internet or a cell phone tower. There was no such thing as cybersafety. I had often tracked prey by remotely locating a smartphone. The only way to stay secure was to stay off the grid: Sirko and I represented two means of doing just that.

“Now,” I said, as the maps opened. “Where the hell are we?”

Sirko pointed to a blank spot three kilometers from any road, in the middle of the countryside. He had set up this safe house three years ago, he told us with pride. Hired the old couple in the false farmhouse that fronted the main road. Built the fence and laid in a power supply. Even Karpenko didn't know about
it. That caution had probably saved Sirko's job, maybe even his life, when the assassins hit Karpenko's mansion a few days ago. Security chiefs don't usually survive security breaches.

“What happened in Poltava?” I asked.

Sirko grimaced. “Bad partners,” Greenlees translated. “But they are dead.”

I waited for Sirko to say more.

“He told Karpenko to run after the first night here,” Greenlees continued. “Before the enemy could regroup. But Karpenko wouldn't go. He wanted to wait for you.”

Not for me, for Winters. At this point, apparently, the oligarch trusted his American friend more than his most trusted security man.

The colonel pushed the map forward, pointing to the Poltava airport. Change the subject, the motion said. Let's talk about the future, not the past. So I did, and for the next two hours, Greenlees earned his money translating between us.

By then, I was exhausted, the last sixty hours finally catching up to me. Or maybe it was the buzzing lights, and the linoleum kitchen, and the dead fly that had somehow burrowed into the lard.

“What should I know about Maltov?” I asked, folding up my tablet. I was reluctant to cut Sirko loose; he was a kindred soul.

But the old colonel smiled, or maybe he grimaced once again. “Maltov is . . .
krysha,
” he said. “Only
krysha
. Ho
hrabr
.”

“
Krysha
means ‘muscle,'” Greenlees translated, knocking back a vodka nightcap. “Maltov is only muscle. But he is brave.”

Greenlees looked at me, wondering at the deeper meaning.
Maltov clearly saved his ass during the assassination attempt
,
I wanted to explain, but Greenlees looked tired beyond caring, and I felt guilty as I watched the old man shuffle behind Sirko toward one of the outbuildings. The exhaustion was coming over
me, though, and my sympathy felt fuzzy and weak. It was dusk, and frogs were calling from the trees, and my mind slipped into the pastoral beauty of “At Night,” a song from Delius's
Florida Suite
. The music took me out of Ukraine and back to my childhood home, where I used to sit at my window at five years old and listen to the frogs. That was before the divorce. Before my sister went to live with another family, and I talked my way into Saint Thomas Choir School, a boarding school in Manhattan for musical savants. That was back when I would listen to Beethoven and the frogs, and wonder what it was like to live free, on your own. I knew exactly what it was like now, and it wasn't anything like I had dreamed it would be.

“Oh hell,” I said, when I saw the bunks.

Greenlees threw his bag on the bottom. “Too old to climb,” he said.

It wasn't even midnight, but I dry-brushed my teeth, jammed the door with a chair, and closed my eyes. This was a plum assignment, I reminded myself. Winters was watching. Six years in the bush, and he'd called me back. I needed to keep quiet and figure it out, to come up with a plan for tomorrow, but instead of focusing on the operation, my mind kept drifting back to my first run in an An-12 cargo plane, more than ten years before.

I was bootstrapping a planeload of weapons from Bulgaria to Liberia with six pilots who were drinking homemade Slivovitz, chain-smoking Caro cigarettes on ammo crates full of RPGs, and using a car GPS suctioned to the windshield to navigate the Sahara. We stopped for fuel at an unmarked Algerian military base deep in the desert, and a caravan of camels delayed our departure as they meandered across the runway. We were leaking so much hydraulic fluid by then that I figured we were going to crash, and at least three times we almost did. It was one hell of a ride.

For some reason, it made me think of Alie.

But that wasn't right. Alie and I hadn't crashed and burned, like my parents. We hadn't even bootstrapped to a destination. I'd just gotten out in the middle of the journey and walked away.

Chad Hargrove checked himself in the reflection of the china cabinet's glass doors and straightened the tablecloth—
classy touch,
he thought—one last time. He had been out for drinks with the chauffeur of a second-term Kiev city council member, and his half-finished cable for Langley was still on the table.

The doorbell rang again.

Leave it,
he thought. He liked the idea of looking busy.

“Allison,” Hargrove said with a smile, opening the door to his spacious duplex on the ten-acre U.S. diplomatic compound in Kiev. If he lived in Washington, DC, on his junior CIA salary, he'd be marooned out by Dulles in a cramped one-bedroom. In the field, everyone lived like kings.

“Thanks for meeting me on such short notice, Chad,” Alie said, sloughing off his appraising glance at her body, since this happened all the time to every woman she knew. Hargrove had a young man's bulk and a Matt Damon smile, with blazing white teeth he must have bleached twice a month.

“My pleasure,” he said, motioning toward his only chair. He was straight out of “the Farm” by way of Colorado State, or so he'd told her that the first time they'd met at one of those American gatherings—a bar or an official function, she couldn't remember which. They had been circling each other ever since, but this was the first time she'd had a look at his life. It was clear the CIA had provided this standard-issue Colonial furni
ture, but he'd probably bought the big television out of his first paycheck. Everything was typically American, except for the ugly shirt, which he'd no doubt bought at some boutique on Khreshchatyk Street to blend in with the locals. But there was no way Chad Hargrove could pass for a local. Not with those aspirational teeth.

“Glass of wine?”

Maybe, if they were both still here in a few months, she'd ask him for a good dentist. She couldn't remember the last time she'd been to the dentist.

“How about Scotch?” she said.

He smiled and grabbed a bottle of Bowmore, a beginner's top-shelf brand. His father had probably introduced him to it back in—where was he from? Suburban Denver?

“Neat,” she said, as he dropped a few pieces of ice in a glass.

She checked his bookshelf as he poured.
Clash of Civilizations
.
The Tragedy of Great Power Politics
. Some well-thumbed Kissinger and a less well-thumbed Stiglitz. York Harding. They were the kind of books young men read in college; the kind that never mentioned a woman, unless it was Margaret Thatcher.

“So what do you need?” Hargrove asked, handing her the Scotch. “I assume this isn't a social call.”

She lifted her glass in a toast. “To information,” she said.

“You know I can't tell you anything.”

She smirked. So FNG—Fucking New Guy. They loved being secretive.

“Don't worry, this is off the record,” she said, pulling out her smartphone. “And only a photo. Just wondering if you know this guy.”

Hargrove studied the photograph. It was the Hyatt lobby. Two men talking in the corner, distant and out of focus, but recognizable.

“I don't,” he said, “but he's American. Must be new in town. Never came to the embassy to check in. Probably a businessman, judging by the suit. I assume he's a douchebag, otherwise you wouldn't be asking.” He flashed the teeth. “What did he do, beat up some hookers in Bangkok?”

Alie smiled to hide her anger. She was still known for her investigative reporting on sex slavery and refugees, even if she hadn't broken a story in years. In some circles, that made her a hero. But in others, it was a joke. Women's issues.
Hookers.
Aren't they funny?

“Not him,” she said. “The old guy.”

Hargrove looked back at the image, relieved that this wasn't competition. The old guy was American, too, probably the younger man's father, maybe on vacation or some sort of find-your-ancestors-before-you-die . . .

“Wait,” he said. “That's Greenlees.”

“Who's Greenlees?”

“John Greenlees, an old station chief, put out to pasture ages ago. He comes into the office every so often to talk to Baker, the deputy station chief. They must have worked together, but I don't know, he's in the wind. Nobody has cared about him in years. I only recognize him because I happen to have an office next to Baker.”

An office? She almost laughed. She knew Hargrove stamped visas in the morning and spent his afternoons in a cubicle, typing up Baker's cables. It was the fate of all greenhorn case officers who were undeclared.

“What's Greenlees up to?”

“Nothing, as far as I know.”

“He doesn't work for, um, your people?”

“Greenlees? No, he's out of the game. But he's got contacts, I'm sure, since he's been around forever. He's burned at the or
ganization, though. Left under a cloud, not too happy about it, I hear. Something about a local mistress.”

“Everyone has a mistress,” she said.

Hargrove shook his head. “He left his wife for her. A CIA station chief doesn't leave his wife for a sex worker. It's blackmail material. And it's not professional.”

She'd heard him use the word before. Professionalism was a sacred concept to earnest young men like Hargrove.

“Sex worker?”

“Whore, I guess. That's the word Baker used.”

Which could mean anything.
Whore
was a generic insult used by old glad-handers like Baker, a way to put a woman in her place. Underneath.

“He may have been compromised. That's not something for print, of course,” Hargrove said, “although I can't imagine anyone would care. That was years ago. And I assume nothing was proven, or they would have pulled his passport. But you know how rumors are. They can ruin a career.”

She knew he intended to stay clean, but she also knew he wasn't above exploiting a rumor or two, if the timing was right. That's what reporters were for.

“Any idea where to find him?”

Hargrove shrugged. “At the embassy, I suppose. He comes in every now and then. I could ask Baker.”

“No,” she said too quickly, and saw Hargrove hesitate. He was an ambitious FNG; he wouldn't miss the implication that this was important to her. But there was no use not nailing it down.

“Can you just let me know if he comes in?” she said too casually.

Hargrove reached for the bottle of Scotch. She had been right about him, she thought as she watched him pour. He was well built. Wide, but in a bulldog way, unlike Locke, who was lean.
And Hargrove was fresh. Clean. He had good instincts and a sharp eye, and he wanted to learn. He was a young man who could be molded—who
wanted
to be molded—if a woman knew how to handle him.

“So who's the other guy?” he said, handing her a glass.

It was almost too easy.

She handed him Locke's card, with its bullshit consulting business. “It seems legit, but he's ex-military. I knew him years ago. In Africa.”

“Knew him?”

She shook her head. “Just because I used to be a nun—”

“I know,” Hargrove said.

And I know you love it,
Alie thought. She licked her lips and sipped her Bowmore. “Everybody makes bad decisions, right?”

She was laying it on thick, but what the hell. She had been flirting with Hargrove for weeks, practically since he arrived in Kiev, and the longer something like that goes on, the more inevitable it becomes. And besides, she was lonely. It was a hard life on the road, where every story was temporary and every relationship short-lived. If she didn't sleep with sources like Hargrove, who would she sleep with? Those were the only people she knew anymore.

“You don't think he's a merc, do you?” she asked. One of the CIA's new jobs was supervising the contractors hired to do what the Agency used to do.

“You know I can't talk about that.”

Which meant he had no idea who Locke was. “I'm just saying, Chad, you wouldn't believe some of the things this guy did in Africa.”

“You wouldn't believe some of the things I've done.”

Like getting drunk with mistresses and junior staffers? Or taking mental notes at cocktail parties? Or paperwork? First-
year agents were so enthusiastic about their paperwork. Spotting new agents to recruit. Running human networks. They never realized the bosses back in Langley didn't read reporting by FNGs.

She let it drop, turning her back and wandering the room, fingering a few of his books. He wasn't brilliant, but he was a hard worker. Very organized. Passably neat. Probably bootstrapped himself to top of his class at the Farm. Even though he spoke Russian and Ukrainian, he probably wanted an assignment to the Middle East, because everyone did, that was where the promotions were. Europe was over. Nothing but old-timers. But then he stumbled into this Ukraine crisis, and all those old movies came back. Dead drops in Nyvky Park; midnight meetings under bridges; surveillance of Soviet operatives. There was something romantic about fighting the Russians. It was the KGB, after all, who killed that poor man in London with the poisoned umbrella.

And all he had been doing for the past three months was stamping visas in the consular section and meeting with schnooks. Then Locke comes along, and she drops an opportunity right into his overeager lap.

If she'd stopped to think about it, she would have realized she was in a similar place: jammed in a career cul-de-sac and latching on to Locke as a way out. But Alie had stopped thinking about her motivations years ago. It was less painful that way.

“I'm doing you a favor,” she said.

“What?”

Wrong tactic. Let him think he's doing the favor. “I said don't forget me, Chad. When you're in the field.”

“I can't take you into the field, Alie.”

We'll see,
she thought, setting down her drink. She knew it was time to leave. There wasn't much more she could do to set
the hook. She already had the first half of what she'd come for—Greenlees's name—even if, when she'd arrived, she hadn't been acknowledging the second.

Even now, it didn't cross her mind, at least not the conscious part, that her next decision had anything to do with Thomas Locke standing her up three hours ago.

But Hargrove understood. He was grinning behind his Bowmore, contemplating what to say next. She almost rolled her eyes.
You can't let them think everything is their idea,
she thought, as she put down her glass and stepped toward him.

“I've never been with an older woman,” he said, sliding his hand around her waist.

Don't blow it,
she thought.
I'm only thirty-four.