by Drew Chapman
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To Lisa
For all the love and support
PART 2
MINSK, BELARUS, JUNE 17, 10:51 A.M. (GMT +3)
Gennady Bazanov sniffed at the thick morning air. Wisps of smoke drifted over Svyardlova Street in central Minsk, the scent of burning tires mixing with the reek of old garbage. Bazanov could even detect a whiff of gunpowder. They were the smells of disobedience, and Bazanov knew them well. He knew them from Kazakhstan, Moldova, from Ossetia in north Georgia, and most recently from Ukraine; places full of restless citizens, who thought they wanted democracy, unfettered capitalism, and freedom. But they were wrong; what they wanted was an illusion, a momentary madness, and Bazanov’s job was to help make sure they understood that.
Nagi Ulyanin, a young Belarusian State Security officer, jogged to Bazanov’s side as he walked north toward Independence Square.
“My ih skoro perevezem, polkovnik,” Ulyanin said nervously in Russian, a sign of respect to Bazanov’s authority. Ulyanin wouldn’t dare speak the Belarusian language to his superior. We will move them soon, Colonel.
“Vozmozhno,” Bazanov answered. Perhaps. Or perhaps not, Bazanov thought to himself. Perhaps it will all go to shit. Because that is what usually happens.
Bazanov saw the State Security officer shudder involuntarily. He was afraid of Bazanov, and that was the way Bazanov liked it. People should fear him. They should fear the consequences of disobedience. Even at fifty years old, Bazanov cut a menacing figure: compact and muscled, like the welterweight boxer he had once been, he kept his head shaved smooth and his dark suits perfectly pressed. Bazanov was a fixer, a colonel in the S Directorate of the SVR, the Russian foreign intelligence service, successor to the dreaded KGB. He moved from country to country, always in the old Soviet sphere of influence, making sure that the people who ran those countries made the right decisions: that they stayed loyal to Mother Russia, and the SVR in turn, and that their elections—if you could call them elections—went according to plan.
And lately, he had become a busy man. Too busy. From Bazanov’s point of view, the world had gone completely to shit. Completely. To. Shit.
Ulyanin checked his watch and looked back down the broad boulevard. The streets were empty, and the shops were all closed, many boarded up, a few with broken windows and burnt awnings. The violence in Belarus had been devastating. Minsk had shut down. The country’s economy had come to a standstill and was on the verge of ruin.
How had this happened? Simple, to Bazanov’s way of thinking. A portion of the Belarusian populace—dreamers and miscreants, Bazanov would say—had voted for the opposition candidate in the national elections two months ago. Forty-seven percent, enough to force a runoff election. She was a woman, the opposition candidate, young and pretty but completely unprepared for leadership, running on a platform of closer ties to the European Union, NATO, and the United States.
But did she really think Russia would allow that to happen? After Ukraine? After Crimea? Was the opposition that naïve? Belarus might be an independent nation, but it lay directly between Moscow and the historical enemy nations of Europe. Throughout time, armies had marched across this forested backwater of a nation to attack Russia with swords and bayonets, tanks and missiles. That would not happen this time. Not a chance in the universe.
And so this flat, inconsequential shithole had exploded into civil war. A civil war, nudged forward by Russia, and Bazanov in particular, that was tearing the country apart: separatist militias in the east; roving gangs of pro-Kremlin thugs in Minsk; two divisions of Russian ground forces just over the border, waiting to roll into Belarus. That was what they deserved. Reap what you sow.
“We start the operation in five minutes,” Ulyanin said. “The motorized tanks should be here. The rendezvous time is now.”
“And yet they are not here,” Bazanov said. “How unusual.”
Ulyanin caught the sarcasm and tried to force a weak smile to his lips. “You will not be displeased, Colonel Bazanov. We will redeem ourselves.”
Bazanov let out a low grunt and kept walking toward Independence Square. Belarus State Security had a lot to make up for. How they had let a national election proceed uncensored was beyond Bazanov’s imagination. How could they have missed the signs of voter revolt, of electoral unhappiness? That would never happen in Russia. The FSB—the portion of the reconstituted KGB that dealt with domestic politics—would not allow it. Bazanov himself would not allow it. He would have intimidated officials, arrested opposition candidates, closed TV stations, and blown up cell towers. And if that didn’t work, he would have bused in pro-Russian separatists and let them have their way with the local voters. It had worked wonders in Crimea, and it would work in Belarus.
“I hear trucks,” Bazanov said as he crossed Svyardlova Street. Those would be the OMON GAZ Tigrs, the Belarusian riot police’s antipersonnel vehicle of choice, gray and blue and mounted with tear-gas cannons.
“Yes, yes.” Ulyanin nodded eagerly. “You see, we are not late.”
“You were late two months ago,” Bazanov said. “And you remain late.”
Bazanov flashed back to that miserable morning in April, waking to his phone ringing in his Moscow apartment, Arkady calling from the Kremlin: “Gennady, turn on the fucking TV. Do you know what happened in Belarus? Lukashenko lost the fucking election by six points. How is this possible? Is nobody minding the goddamned store?” And then the endless meetings at Yasenevo, SVR headquarters, the hand-wringing, the blame. Ultimately, the responsibility for mopping up fell to Bazanov, as it always did. Which was fine. He was a fixer, and he would get it done.
Yet the truth was, anything that happened here, today, was a holding action, rearguard nonsense meant to stop the bleeding. The entire region was collapsing, one country after another. The Kremlin could mobilize all the tanks and soldiers it had, for as long as it could afford to do so, but Bazanov knew that what was truly called for was something much larger. A piece of business that could change the world, not just Belarus.
“The runoff election is in two weeks, Colonel,” Ulyanin said. Ulyanin was a toady, and an incompetent one at that: nobody called an SVR agent by his title in the field, where any passerby could hear it. “Today’s operation will break the back of the opposition thugs in Minsk. The western part of the country will react to this—shake with fear. They won’t know which way to vote. And the east will side with Moscow. The combination will be overwhelming. The runoff election will swing back to Lukashenko. It will be just as you wish.”
“And if it is not? Then what? Will you offer me your resignation? Or better, your head on a platter? Can I march you to the woods outside Orsha and have you shot?”
Ulyanin paled, laughing uncomfortably.
“Oh, you think we don’t do that anymore,” Bazanov snarled. “Don’t test me.”
He lit a cigarette and reflected upon the state of his life: running here, there, Chisinau, Donetsk, Minsk, trying to contain all those self-involved children, all asking for their freedoms, and all at once. If you let every last person do exactly as he or she pleased, then chaos would reign; you would be stuck with a globe full of screaming schoolchildren, without discipline
or law. The very thought of it turned Bazanov’s stomach.
He slowed as they reached Kirava Street. Two blocks away, in front of the lobby of the now shuttered Crowne Plaza Hotel, a gnarled wall of overturned cars and barbed wire marked the barricade of the opposition brigands. Smoke rose from behind the ragged wall of broken concrete. The barricades were manned mostly by students, mixed in with unemployed hooligans. If they couldn’t make trouble at football matches, then marching in the street would suffice.
Behind Bazanov, on Svyardlova, the OMON riot trucks had appeared, their black grill ironwork making them look positively medieval. But that was the point, wasn’t it? Bazanov nodded approvingly: perhaps today would turn out better than he had thought.
“Step back, Colonel,” Ulyanin whimpered. “I don’t want you to be run over.”
“Yes, you do. You wish I would be run over. Then maybe your nightmare would end. And stop calling me colonel where anyone can hear, you idiot.”
Ulyanin hung his head and backed onto the sidewalk to let the trucks pass. Bazanov watched the Belarusian soldiers perched in the gun turrets above the truck roofs. He wished them courage. Actually, what he wished for them was ferocity. A willingness to die for the cause. If they had been Russians, he would have had no concerns. Russian security police were like dogs, bred to be ferocious unto death—at least the sober ones were.
All at once, the soldiers fired their tear-gas cannons, and Bazanov watched as contrails of white smoke arced over Kirava Street toward the barricades. Ulyanin handed him a yellow bandanna, soaked with water: “For the tear gas, for your face.” But Bazanov waved it off. He’d breathed in more lungfuls of tear gas in the last year than the baby-faced Ulyanin had breathed in lungfuls of oxygen in his entire life.
A line of Belarusian special forces double-stepped down the street to follow the Tigr trucks. They carried black truncheons and Milkor Stopper rubber-bullet rifles. Bazanov instantly recognized that as a mistake. In the last month, things had gotten far too out of hand for shooting rubber bullets at bands of street opposition. Lead was what was called for, and nothing less would do: lead in overwhelming volume, that pierced hearts and shattered skulls.
Then, as if to confirm that opinion, gunfire erupted from behind the barricade. Even from two blocks away, through the tendrils of tear-gas smoke, Bazanov could see the red muzzle flashes of AK-47s from behind the car-and-concrete barriers. Bullets streaked through the air around Bazanov and Ulyanin, smashing into the building behind them, blowing out windows and pockmarking concrete. Bazanov spit out his cigarette and grabbed Ulyanin by the hand, running him toward cover. No wet bandanna would save their lives now.
“They have rifles!” Ulyanin shrieked, this time in Belarusian, his panic obviously getting the better of him. Bazanov understood the Belarus language. It was a cousin of Russian, the same alphabet, the same words, slightly different pronunciation. Hell, Belarus was basically the same country as Russia, which was why this uprising was such a betrayal.
“Yes,” Bazanov yelled back. “And your men better have rifles as well.”
“Of course, of course.” Ulyanin was on his hands and knees now, crawling behind a parked car as the bullets pounded into the pavement all around them. His tremulous voice betrayed his lack of confidence. The security men didn’t have rifles, and Bazanov knew it. This was another failure.
“Call for backup,” Bazanov said, crouching near Ulyanin behind a late-model, black BMW. “Tell them to bring double the troops, double the firepower. And tell them to hurry. Make the phone call, Milhailovich. Now!”
Ulyanin fumbled with his cell phone. Bazanov scowled and then sprinted across the street to get a better look at the fighting. With bullets singing past his head, he flattened himself against the doorway of a shuttered bakery. Shots were ringing out from both sides now, and Bazanov hoped the OMON police were aiming true. But his heart sank as he saw the first of the Tigr trucks backing up, away from the barricades. A soldier who had been manning the tear-gas gun was slumped over, his lifeless body laid out on the truck roof, arms splayed out on the slate-gray steel.
“Blyad,” Bazanov hissed to himself as he reached for his phone. It was time to make calls of his own; to report back to Moscow. The day had turned into another disaster, as he had predicted it might. The runoff election was a mere two weeks away. Thirteen days, with the coming of the next dawn. He knew he should be more upset about that, frustrated with the incompetence of the Belarusian security forces, but he found that he couldn’t work up the anger.
The Kremlin would yell, the tanks on the border would rev their engines, but the truth was, despite all his protestations to the contrary, he understood that the citizens of Belarus were right to rise up against their iron-fisted dictator. They were right to want democracy and all the freedoms it promised. They were right because they’d been fed a steady stream of illusions from the West. Illusions about prosperity and the good life. All day and all night, on television and in pop songs, in magazines and movies, they saw dollars and Porsches and big-breasted women. They were told they could have all of these things if they emulated the West, if they were like the hypnotized fools of Paris and London and New York. Consumers, lemmings, mindless balls of greed and avariciousness. The citizens of Belarus were like moths to a flame. They could not help themselves. They wanted the things they were told to want. Who could resist?
No, Bazanov thought as the Tigr trucks hightailed it back down Svyardlova Street for safety, chased away by a hail of machine-gun fire, he would not punish the moths. What was the point of that? You had to go to the source of the problem, instead, and everything was in place to do just that. The process had already begun.
What he would do now was extinguish the flame.
OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA, JUNE 17, 8:15 A.M.
What bothered Bingo Clemens the most was that he wanted to do it. No matter the protestations to the opposite, no matter how much he complained about the work, the long hours, the dark, cramped rooms and the dangers to his health—Bingo wanted back in. He wanted to be part of the Ascendant team again. And that just killed him.
The phone call had come at seven thirty in the morning, his mother yelling upstairs to his closed door, “Bingo, a man on the line for you. From New York City. Says it’s important. Top secret. He won’t tell me his name over the phone.”
Bingo’s blood froze. Only one person could be calling from New York City with a top secret message.
Garrett Reilly.
He wanted Bingo’s help. He wanted Bingo to leave his room, and Bingo hadn’t left his room much for the last nine months. Not since the last time he’d helped Garrett Reilly. And that had almost got him killed. And yet . . .
He took the phone call.
“Bingo, I need you in New York,” Garrett said. “The team is coming back together.”
Bingo mumbled a nonresponse, running his thick fingers through his out-of-control Afro. Bingo was a former analyst for the RAND Corporation, an expert on all things military, and currently a shut-in.
“There’ll be a plane ticket waiting for you at SFO.”
“I saw your face on the TV,” Bingo whispered. “You’re in trouble.”
“Consider every phone call monitored. And act accordingly,” Garrett said. “And believe nothing.”
“What if I don’t want to do it?”
There was silence on the line, as if, Bingo thought, Garrett hadn’t quite understood the question.
“Maybe I should just stay here.”
“No. You’re coming East.” Just like that—as if what Garrett thought was the last word in what Bingo should actually do. The guy had not changed. He was still an arrogant son of a—
“And I need you to stop over in Palo Alto as well,” Garrett continued. “I’ll send you the address via the old method.” In the past, Garrett had communicated with members of the Ascendant team through instant-messaging applets i
n online shooter games. The avatars they used had nothing to do with their real names, and while they could be watched and read by intelligence agencies, they couldn’t be traced to physical locations. “I’ll send you some burner cell numbers as well. Call me from the road.” Then Garrett hung up.
The dread started immediately. A ball of worry right in the center of Bingo’s stomach. Yet, despite his anxiety, he packed a bag, almost as if on autopilot. Why was he doing this, stuffing two shirts—he only had a few shirts—and a couple of pairs of beige chinos into a carry-on bag? Doing exactly as he was told to do by Garrett, as if he were Garrett’s zombie slave? He knew the answer. It was simple. The month and a half he had spent with the Ascendant team last year had been the most exciting time in his life. More had happened to him in those few weeks than in all the other weeks of his life combined. No matter how much he complained about it and had been frightened by what happened, those were the memories that he replayed in his head over and over before he went to bed at night.
He’d had an adventure, and deep down inside, he wanted another one.
He finished packing and told his mother he needed to go to New York for a few days. She clucked and worried and pried, but he said it was classified business for the government. That made her cluck and pry more. His mother had been a full-on hippie in her prime, marching up and down the streets of Berkeley at the drop of a hat. Civil disobedience and mistrust of government were her raison d’être, and the idea that her little boy—although Bingo wasn’t little, he was six foot two, and he was no boy now, having just turned twenty-seven—was going to work for the government sent her into paroxysms of worry and indignation.
“Do you realize what you’re doing? What this means? As a political statement?” she cawed as he dragged his carry-on bag down the front steps of their South Oakland bungalow to the waiting taxi. “Do you understand the implications?”