Shadow War (9 page)

Nikolay Balashov, known as the Wolf, squinted as he entered the dark club in downtown Poltava. Last night, it had been thumping so loudly it could have shaken the radar installations in Stalingrad, he thought, with quick nostalgia for that old town name. This morning, it felt like this hole of a country: dreary and depressing, the bartender half asleep, the women slumped apathetically at the tables.

He walked slowly along the empty bar, the bartender not even moving from his slouch, until he saw what he was looking for: the red dress, the one so short that it barely covered her. She was with Ivan in the back, as he knew she would be, four men and two women, drinking
horilka
at 7:45
A.M.

She looked up and saw him. For a moment, she held his gaze. He didn't change his pace. She leaned in and said something to Ivan, who laughed.

He didn't care what she thought of him. She was an idea, one that recurred every few months in a dozen different faces. Dark hair, small nose. Hard bones. He didn't care about her red lipstick or her short dress, and he didn't mind her vicious smile. She was a denizen of this world, but then again, so was he. He liked the idea of some rough, violent romance that would shatter that part of her. A romance that would never occur, and that he would never act upon. Not
and,
he thought,
because
he would never act on it. He would never even ask her name.

“La Rus,” Ivan said with mock surprise, as the Wolf approached the table. Ivan was enormous and blockheaded, so he never had any use for subtlety. He was Belenko's enforcer; he came with the oligarch's contract to find the traitor Karpenko. The million-dollar reward being offered by Putin's FSB, though, was the Wolf's real reason for being here.

“I'm shutting it down. The club is off-limits.”

“Why, La Rus?” The Wolf wasn't sure where Ivan had heard that phrase for Russians, but it was an insult. “Are we finally going to do something?”

Typical. Foot soldiers always thought of the fight as the work. It was the part, after all, that was glorified in the old Soviet film footage. The stand outside Leningrad. The tanks on fire. The endless fistfights and car chases of American movies.

But it was these moments, the maneuvering before the encounter, when a true soldier thrived. The Wolf had learned that lesson from Sun Tzu and practiced it himself, in every battle of the last thirty years, from the mountains outside Kandahar to the shattered apartment blocks of Grozny and Tbilisi.

He was from the lost generation, the foot soldiers who had fought in Afghanistan in the late 1980s, at the tail end of the world's last great empire, when troglodyte commanding officers had plowed relentlessly ahead, in the old Soviet style, leveling villages and slaughtering the population to kill a few insurgents. He had watched helplessly as men like Andrei Sirko, his commanding colonel, turned the tribes against them and good Russian soldiers to heroin, and even now, thirty years later, he hated those incompetent commanders for the humiliation: the greatest country on earth, with the greatest weapons in the history of the world, brought low by primitives with a few Stinger missiles.

And then, a few months after their retreat from Kandahar, the Berlin Wall had come down, and the Soviet Union soon
after. He had spent a month on his army base in Bolgrad, getting smashed on vodka and cursing men like Colonel Sirko. He spent the next two months thinking the Soviet Empire was better off dead, and the next two years watching corrupt politicians sell state-owned factories; corrupt senior military officers sell off state munitions; and hardliners in the Red Army stage a coup for the honor of the Motherland . . . only to be upstaged by Boris Yeltsin, the Politburo's drunk.

After the coup, he lost hope. The army was in tatters. The KGB and security systems dissolved. He considered joining the new society, working as a bodyguard for the emerging capitalist class, but Sirko saved him. He had seen one of the new oligarchs on television, not Karpenko but one of the Russian bears, and behind him, for a moment, he had glimpsed Col. Andrei Sirko, with his rigid military bearing, and he knew that world wasn't for him.

So he lit out for the Balkans when Yugoslavia collapsed. He was the Lone Wolf then,
odinokiy volk,
quarrelsome and surly, fighting for the Serbs but fighting, really, without cause or country. He didn't fit it in the new world, he had decided, and he didn't want to. He was a soldier. Fighting was his life.

But he discovered something else in Bosnia, besides the cleansing power of war. He discovered that there were others like him. Thousands of others. Tens of thousands, even, young soldiers cut loose by the collapse of the empire, angry and lost, looking for money and adventure and trained in the rudiments of war.

By Chechnya, five years later in 1999, Nikolay Balashov was the Wolf, a conflict entrepreneur. He had a way of drawing other displaced men to his side: old Soviet soldiers and KGB officers, pro-Moscow Chechyans, fighters from the Caucuses and the “Stans.” It was a slaughter in Chechnya; they had shelled
Grozny like the Nazi's shelled Stalingrad. They had terrorized the populace and burned the rebel provinces to the ground. But that was what his generation needed. They needed to purge.

That was what Putin understood. That the old structures had to be torn down. That his base of power was a lost generation looking for a hard hand to guide it . . . empower it . . . and turn it loose. It didn't matter anymore that the Russian military was a mess. Russia had Putin now, and Putin knew there were better ways.

Chechnya. Georgia. Crimea. Ukraine. Putin's wars, but also the Wolf's. Together, they would take back their empire, one destroyed country at a time, because that was what they had been born to do.

Young men like Ivan, they would never understand. They weren't soldiers; they hadn't been raised with honor. They were thugs, born into the new world the Wolf had created. They valued nothing but money, worked for no one but the businessmen. They didn't love the rough, violent romance of war, like true soldiers. They didn't know how to maneuver before a fight.

“Give us an hour, La Rus,” Ivan said, calling the Wolf back to this club, this dirty town, this fight. “What can that harm?”

“There's always time for one more,” the woman in the red dress said lasciviously.

“Never speak to me,” the Wolf snapped. He could feel his heat rising—at the woman for speaking, at Ivan for his ignorance. What was the point of living like this? Without pride or purpose?

“One hour,” he said. “Make sure your men are ready.”

He turned and walked away. He wasn't worried. Ivan would follow orders. And in the end, he would get his fight. Karpenko was a hunted man. He needed to get out of Eastern Europe, to Vienna at least, and Vienna was 1,300 kilometers away. Even
Warsaw, not safe but a doorway to the West, was seven hours. An oligarch would never risk such a drive. He would go by air, by the helicopter that the Wolf's men—his real men, not Belenko's goons—had heard landing somewhere north of Poltava last night. And anything that could be flown out could be shot down.

All it took was professionals, and an intelligent plan. The Wolf was eager to show his old commander, Colonel Sirko, that this former foot soldier had bested him in both.

“Good morning,” Karpenko said, as I walked into the kitchen. It was 0600 and not yet full light. I hadn't expected to see him this early. But what was life without surprises?

Maltov handed me a cup of coffee. Karpenko looked sharp, clean-shaven and bright-eyed, dressed in a custom-tailored plaid blazer, English cut. This was the business Karpenko, the man who took meetings in the Square Mile of London and blended in at swank Belgravia restaurants. Or almost blended in. The only people the London upper crust looked down on more than the Eastern European nouveau riche were African princes who bought their Ferraris with humanitarian aid money.

“I apologize for last night,” he said, surprising me again. Warlords never apologized. Even Winters never apologized. Unless there was an angle. “I have been under stress, I admit.” His slightly stilted English was unnerving, like a serial killer. I glanced at Maltov, but the enforcer didn't blink. “But of course you know that. That's why you're here.” He paused. “Are you a father?”

Not in this life. “No.”

He smiled. “The sacrifices we make.”

We walked outside into the chilly morning air. In an alley between the barn and an outbuilding, where they would be impossible to see from beyond the perimeter, stood a line of twelve black Range Rovers and two bulletproof black Mercedes, a businessman's motor pool.

“No Maserati, I'm afraid,” Karpenko said. “My fleet is built for safety, not speed.”

So the Maserati is in London . . .

A young Ukrainian with a Kalashnikov, probably in his teens, opened the barn door. Inside were two beater cars, a winch truck, a tractor, a rusty pickup of Soviet extraction, a three-ton truck, and the AgustaWestland helicopter. A farmer's fleet, plus the bird. If the shit hit the fan, that was the backup plan.

“I'll take that one,” I said, pointing to an early 2000s four-door Opel with an eight-cylinder engine and a large trunk. It was the worst car in the lot, meaning it was the car no one would suspect. By the time Greenlees wandered out, looking disheveled in the same golf shirt and loafers, the young Ukrainian—Maltov's driver, as it turned out—had loaded the trunk with our kit. Five minutes later, we headed out, stopwatch in hand.

Three minutes to the iron gate at the end of the entry drive. Click.

Nineteen to the entrance road of the Poltava Airport. Click.

Eighty seconds to the terminal.

We sat in the short-term parking lot. The airport wasn't crowded. In fact, it was almost deserted. Which made it almost perfect.

Too perfect, really.

According to Sirko, Belenko had twenty to twenty-five men in the area. They had moved into a hotel in the center of Poltava, across the street from the city's best brothel. Karpenko's brothel. By two in the morning, any morning, they were mostly drunk. But if they had anti-aircraft missiles, their aim didn't have to be perfect. In fact, it didn't even have to be good.

“Let's check the airbase,” I told Maltov's protégé. “Take the back way.”

Sirko had pointed out the secondary airfield, a former Soviet
air force base. Most people had forgotten it, Sirko told me, but he had checked it himself several months ago, and the runway was usable. I was sure Belenko's men had checked it, too, but the location was still ideal. The airbase was eighteen kilometers from Poltava's town center, and only twelve from the dacha.

We skipped the main entrance—Poltava Museum of Long-Range Aviation, by appointment only, Greenlees translated from a small sign—and found a dirt track that cut through the forest a few hundred meters away. The forest was thick, but it took less than a minute to reach the edge of the parking lot. On the left was a low concrete building, with an abandoned flight tower behind it. On the right was the entry road, a metal gate, and a decrepit guardhouse. There was only one car in the lot, a beat up Soviet-era Lada, but halfway down the entry road, on a blind corner, a Škoda was sitting in the weeds. Belenko's sentries, taking the lazy approach.

As we watched, an old man and an older woman, themselves relics of the Soviet era, got into the Lada and drove away. Belenko's men watched them go, then walked around the parking lot and checked the lock on the front gate. Three minutes later, their car was filled with cigarette smoke.

“Lucky,” Maltov said. “No appointments today.”

We circled through the forest to the back of the building, then climbed onto the roof. The parking lot in front was surrounded on three sides by forest. The two-lane entrance was gated, and the two-lane exit emptied onto the landing strip. Nine Soviet aircraft were exhibited in a horseshoe, eight imposing strategic bombers and a lone Antonov-26 cargo plane, the two-engine version of the An-12 Brad Winters had chartered.

I surveyed the surroundings through my field glasses: waist-high weeds, a few abandoned buildings and aircraft bunkers, an obsolete radar array, and decaying gun parapets, presumably for
air defense artillery. Weeds poked through cracks in the tarmac, but the runway was long, wide, and serviceable. Winters's An-12 was an antique, even by Soviet standards. It had four turboprops, a glass nose, and 1946 technology, but it was tough and could land almost anywhere, as long as the ground was solid and flat. I'd used the An-12 to ferry guns and other supplies around Africa many times, and we'd landed on worse.

I scanned the open fields. The rusty barbed-wire fence was worthless against vehicles, but the meadows were so rutted that only a ruggedized off-road vehicle could cross.

“You could fly a convoy in here,” Greenlees said, staring at the Tupolev 160, a massive Soviet bomber that was the museum's star attraction.

“Flying in isn't the problem,” I said. “It's flying out.”

Maltov was talking with the teenage Ukrainian, patting the building beneath our feet. “It's good,” he said. “Concrete.”

“What about the flight tower?” Greenlees asked. It was squatting between the parking lot and the landing strip, as if guarding the bottleneck there.

“Too dangerous for shelter,” I said, “but that doesn't make it useless.”

It was a good setup: one narrow ingress route from the main road, with a blind corner and thick forests on each side. A sharp turn and a gate at the entrance to the parking lot, which weren't prohibitive, but would slow an attack. Nothing but a narrow road from the parking lot to access the landing strip. Forty men could hold off 150 here, if they were smart.

But Karpenko's men weren't smart.

And there was still the question of antiaircraft missiles. Sometimes, a rutted field was an obstacle, and sometimes it was nothing more than four hundred meters of clear sight lines.

“Let's check the forest,” I said. Greenlees's shoulders fell, but
Maltov nodded to his protégé. He seemed to understand that, unlike in his line of work, precision was my stock in trade. I needed to understand every angle, calculate every distance. Men were going to die tonight. That was certain. Now was the time to get the details right, because once the shooting started, everything would go wrong.

By the time we finished, the sun was straight overhead, and Belenko's men had been relieved by a second shift. We watched them drive around the airbase once, then park right back where they had been before, as unprofessional as the first crew.

It would be tricky. And dangerous. But it could be done.

“Do you have a friend in the city?” I asked Maltov. “Someone nobody would know to watch.”

He nodded.

“What about cargo trucks?”

“I can get what you need.”

“C-4?”

He smiled. “How many kilos?”

We drove by an indirect route through the industrial section of Poltava, sticking to residential roads. There were hardly any cars, and steel metal shutters covered the windows. The town was a shithole in the faded industrial style, all rust and concrete and scraggly vegetation, the kind that absolutely refuses to die. No wonder so many people looked back on the Russian years with fondness.

“Here,” Maltov said.

Maltov's friend ran a small grocery, with local specialties in front and a counter for beef buns and cabbage rolls in the back. There were a few men lounging on folding chairs, but nobody was eating, and I suspected the greasy beef buns had been sitting under a heat lamp for a month. This wasn't really a restaurant, or even a retail store. The friend hadn't even bothered to stock half of the warmers.

“On the house,” Maltov said, as he gave us a plate of buns and
took us through to the storage area. The room was half empty and filthy. There were meat hooks hanging from the ceiling, and bloodstains on the floor. I never thought anything would make me long for Karpenko's brown bread and lard, but it had taken only half a day to find something worse.

Twenty minutes later, Greenlees and I exited through the back door with a bag of pork rinds, neither having taken a bite of anything else. We left the car, but took the friend's Å koda Yeti. The Å koda was two years old, while the Opel was fifteen, but it was still a good deal for Maltov's friend.

“Three hours,” Maltov said.

We spent the next two hours eating pork rinds and moving around Poltava, circling back a few times to watch Belenko's hotel through my field glasses. There were at least twenty-five men, assuming half on watch, maybe as many as forty, and they weren't trying to hide. They were moving between the building and the parking lot, packing and repacking two four-by-fours and two cars. It was nervous energy, not professionalism. They were eager. Or overeager.

Forty men. Four vehicles. Probably a few cars on patrol. The leader was a Maltov type: muscle, up from the ranks. They had the numbers, but we would arrive first. We could slow them on the entry road, especially on the curve, and bog them down in the parking lot, but I doubted we could stop them.

So it would all come down to timing.

“Let's go,” I said, when the pork rinds were long gone and fondly missed. We drove slowly, taking extra turns, to a field south of Poltava, far from Karpenko's dacha. Maltov arrived an hour later with two friends and two delivery trucks. The writing on the side of the trucks was in Ukrainian, but the pictures told the story: one had fish on the side, the other potatoes. They weren't exactly what I'd had in mind, but they'd have to do.

“Any trouble?”

Maltov shook his head. “No trouble.”

I gave him a stack of euros, and he passed it on to his friends, who left in the Opel. As soon as they were gone, I glanced at the sun, still high in the afternoon sky, and then out across the chaff from last year's wheat. It was a fallow field, unplanted this spring, and the blackbirds were hopping across it in a detestable fashion, their dinosaur claws beneath them. Stravinky's
Rite of Spring
ballet filled my head, with its insistence on grotesque beginnings. The “Harbingers of Spring” scene, especially, always made me feel unclean.

I looked around, trying to shake the unease. Maltov and his driver were leaning against one of the trucks. The driver looked like Maltov's younger brother, but of course all Ukrainian tough guys looked the same. If Maltov wasn't born with a grimace on his face, he'd spent half a lifetime developing one. I doubted he'd see much of the second half.

Greenlees, meanwhile, was slumped in the backseat of the Å koda with the door open and his eyes closed. It was a beautiful mid-May afternoon, sunny and warm, but it was wasted on the three of us.

You get what you get, and you don't throw a fit,
I thought. It was something I'd heard my sister say to her four-year-old son the last time I'd visited her. A few weeks ago, the boy had turned nine.

I picked up the sat phone and called in the landing strip coordinates for the charter plane. The conversation took ten seconds. Ten minutes later, the sat phone rang.

“0215,” Wolcott said.

“Done.”

“It will work,” Greenlees said, as I hung up the phone.

“I know,” I said, even though I wasn't sure.

Only fools were sure.