by Max Karpov
And yet . . . he maintained an abiding faith in his profession, partly because journalism was the only job he was any good at. When he was focused, Jon had sometimes been able to break stories that no one else in Washington was reporting. There was no secret to it, other than persistence and patience, and the fact that he tended not to run out of questions. But Jon sometimes had trouble with the focus part—going back to J-School, when he used to load up on courses that had nothing to do with his major just because they interested him. He’d been an “experience junkie” for years, traveling for the sake of traveling and entering into several ill-advised romantic relationships. Only in recent months did he realize that he was becoming too old for that; collecting experiences was starting to seem like a substitute for living a life. It was something he was going to have to deal with, an appointment he’d have to make with himself.
9:09. The road turned slowly toward familiar reference points: the ominous oak that could’ve been scenery from a horror flick, the sagging barn that had stood since before he was born, before redevelopment churned through the D.C. suburbs, linking everything to the city. There were still rural pockets like this, two-lanes that felt like secret roadways into the past.
9:10.
The road straightened and Jon reflexively hit the music button and pressed the accelerator: Lights out tonight, trouble in the heartland, Got a head-on collision, smashin’ in my guts, man, I’m caught in a crossfire, that I don’t understand . . .
He let up on the gas where the road turned. How did we become such a nostalgic country, anyway? he wondered, although he already knew the answer: failure. It was one of Jon’s theories; everything had turned to crap for America in the mid-seventies: the presidency, the economy, Vietnam, the dream of an expanding middle class. The gasoline supply. A stunning series of failures had engulfed the country, leaving people distrustful of government and skeptical of the post–World War II notion of the US as a beacon for the free world. Then, as if to make up for it, when the decade ended we hired a president who told feel-good stories and made people nostalgic for an earlier version of itself, a president whose style alone became a form of leadership. And now the country was nostalgic for him.
Jon pressed twice on his brakes. Distantly, in the rearview mirror, he saw headlights; ahead, as the road turned, the red glow of taillights. For the past week—since he’d been writing about Russia—his life had felt a little like that.
He slowed again and jammed the brakes: his cell phone was ringing on the passenger seat. “Damn!” he said, punching off the music and skidding to a stop on the shoulder. It was 9:16.
“Hello?”
“Jon?”
“Yes. Go ahead.”
“I don’t have more than a minute,” the woman said. “Can you talk?”
“I’m listening.”
“You didn’t print what I gave you. You left out most of the details. It was good information.” Perfectly enunciated words, syrupy voice, heavy breathing during the pauses; Jon pictured his caller, for some reason, as dark and statuesque, late forties or early fifties.
“I know. Thing is, I’m having trouble confirming some of it, okay?” He was out of the car, walking into the field as if the outdoors might add some clarity to her words. The car behind slowed, double-flashing its lights at him as it passed. “Could we go over a couple of things you said? Real quickly?” When she didn’t respond, he went on: “You said at the last meeting of this group, there was talk of a preemptive strike, right? That was the word—”
“Which would leave no US fingerprints.”
“Which—wait, what?”
“That’s a direct quote,” she said. “From someone in the room. Maybe that’s your story.” There was a light, spooky insistence in her voice, different from the other times.
“A preemptive strike on Russia. Which would leave no US fingerprints.”
“Right.”
“Okay. Go on,” he said, feeling a rush of adrenaline. “Tell me what that means. And which room are we talking about? Can you give me the names—?”
“And here’s something else,” she said. “I understand there was also a meeting about this in Kiev. Last month, okay? And that someone from CIA was there, in the room.”
“A meeting about this preemptive strike on Russia, you mean. In Ukraine?”
“Mmm-hmm. Some of this is starting to leak on military websites, by the way,” she added. “I’m told the Post has some of it now, too.”
“Okay,” Jon said, “but don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“Play news organizations off of one another. Can you give me a name? Or a time frame? I want to do this, but I need specific details to confirm—”
“I’m sure you can find more from your sources,” she said. “Gregory Dial may have been there, from CIA. And one of the generals. I’d guess there aren’t a lot of people in that circle, are there?”
“‘Circle’ meaning—?”
“Meaning it’s a small group. As I told you. Probably just five.” She paused, breathing heavily. “Most people aren’t paying attention, anyway. Eighty-five percent of national security meetings are on the Middle East. People don’t know what’s really happening with Russia. What the US is planning. Someone needs to report that. Quickly.”
“Okay,” Jon said, concentrating for a moment on breathing normally. What the US is planning. “That’s where—Tell me about this ‘no US fingerprints’ thing. Where does that—?”
“And I asked you not to record these calls, didn’t I?”
Jon said nothing. Which was probably a mistake. Because a moment later, she said “Buh-bye” and was gone.
He walked across the field to his car, his shoes sticking lightly to the earth. Jon had recorded her this time, actually, and was thinking about who he might go to now for a voice ID. He stopped and listened to the silence, turning in the stillness. He used to come out to these same summer fields with his ex-girlfriend Liz Foster, four or five years ago, parking among the cornfields like they were high schoolers, dousing the lights to make out.
Jon pushed the play button on his recorder app and waited. Nothing. He checked the list of phone recordings. Nada. It wasn’t there. “No! Damn it! Shit!” he shouted.
He tried again, several times, but nothing had recorded. The app hadn’t worked. He sat on the trunk of his car, fuming, breathing the warm air and craving a beer. Letting his heart rate return to normal as he began to recreate the conversation in his head. Someone needs to report that. Quickly. There was an urgency in her voice this time that hadn’t been there before. What was that about?
Jon finally called Roger Yorke, his editor at the Weekly American. Yorke had been Jon’s mentor since he first went to work at the magazine eight years ago. He lived on a leafy suburban street in Chevy Chase, where he was probably in his second-story study right now, reading history, sipping an iced bourbon. Yorke was a tall, introspective man with a mop of gray-white hair, a Brit who’d lived in the States for the past twenty-odd years editing the left-leaning Weekly American. Some journalists called him “the philosopher,” always respectfully, because of his deliberative manner and his tendency to put the news of the day into historical context. In his earlier career, Roger had been a foreign reporter, writing from war zones and on intelligence issues. He was still a reporter at heart, Jon thought, stuck in an editor’s job, with good sources in the intel community and at the Pentagon.
“So obviously she has an agenda,” he said, after Jon reconstructed the conversation. “I wonder, in fact, if her agenda may be the real story here. Rather than what she told you.”
“Possibly.” Jon batted gnats from the air. It was a typical Roger Yorke thought puzzle. But Jon was more interested in what she’d said about Kiev, and about “no US fingerprints.”
“So, then, to recap,” Roger said, “we know that this committee—was it a strategic advisory committee, she called it?”
“Right, Russia advisory group,” Jon said. “Fiv
e members, representing the Pentagon, NSC, State Department, and the IC.”
“We know that they met and discussed some sort of covert action. And the only name she’s given you is Gregory Dial at CIA—who categorically won’t talk with us.”
“Or with anyone in the media.”
“And she mentioned one of the generals again, whom she won’t—or can’t—name. But you think it might be General Rickenbach.” Roger’s mostly Americanized accent became British again when he pronounced “can’t” as “cawnt.”
“That’s who it sounds like.”
“And now she’s saying there was also a meeting last month in Kiev. Same subject: covert action on Russia. And that we had a CIA man there—was that Greg Dial again, or did she say?”
“Didn’t say.”
Jon waited, as Roger thought it out. “It sounds as if she doesn’t really know the whole thing, then, doesn’t it? Like she’s overhearing it in dribs and drabs.” Jon listened to the discreet sound of ice clinking as Roger swallowed a sip of bourbon. “Anyway, we’re not going to solve this tonight, are we? Let me make a call,” he said, which was one of Roger’s standard exit lines. “Go home. We’ll revisit this tomorrow.”
“All right, I will.” Jon took a long breath of the night air and returned to his car. He sat for a while and checked messages, noticing a missed call and text from Christopher. Jon’s older brother had been calling recently, sometimes leaving a message that he “just wanted to see how you’re doing.” The sort of thing Jon used to do, years ago. Strange.
Instead of heading home, he decided to drive out to see Carole Katz, his girlfriend, at her modest wood frame house among the cornfields. Carole was up past midnight most days, and urged Jon to come by anytime. Their relationship had become increasingly casual, which bothered him a little. He stopped on the way at the Gas ’N Go for a six-pack of Budweiser. The familiar white-haired clerk looked up and smiled when he came in, as if she’d been expecting him.
On his way to Carole’s, though, Jon changed his mind. He was too wrapped up in this story now to sit under the stars with Carole and listen to music, which was usually what they did at night. He needed to get home and write out everything he could remember from his conversation with 9:15.
Jon lay awake until well past 2:00 a.m., thinking about the phone call. Hearing the insistence in her voice: Someone needs to report that. Quickly. He thought of his father’s admonition to tell a story “that can help your country,” whatever that meant, and the way he used to pit Jon against his brother, as if trying to force a bond between them that never really formed. Jon attributed some of that to Chris’s unwillingness to accept another woman in the house after his mother’s death from cancer. He thought of his own mother, a quiet, gentle woman who’d returned to her native Switzerland after their father died. “Do something great today,” she used to tell him, although her definition of “great” was different from most people’s, certainly Christopher’s. What she really meant was, “Do something unexpected, selfless, generous.”
Maybe that’s your story, 9:15 said. Jon replayed the conversation over and over, sensing that somewhere in their brief exchange she had given him an important clue—not only about Russia but about who she was. Maybe Roger was right. Maybe that was the main thing: to figure out 9:15’s motivation. Maybe everything else flowed from there.
EIGHT
Thursday, August 12. Eastern Ukraine.
As distant headlights swung through the mist, Ivan Delkoff stood on the narrow gravel road, a Kalashnikov AK-103 strapped to his shoulder, a Makarov handgun and an NR-40 combat knife at his waist. It was twenty minutes past two, meaning the Ukrainians were arriving early.
The air was cool, thick with moisture. Delkoff had spent most of the past two and a half hours sitting on a wooden folding chair on the dirt road, chain-smoking Sobranies, occasionally eating a stick of beef jerky. Thinking about Zelenko and the little Makarov pistol he’d found hidden in his travel bag.
Delkoff had suffered from insomnia most of his life. It had grown worse since he’d quit drinking fourteen months ago. When he fell asleep too early, he often woke at night from battlefield dreams: dead soldiers coming to life in the farmlands, or his son searching for him in pitch-dark fields among the casualties. So Delkoff had developed a habit of staying awake as long as he could. There were times when he found solace in the deep silence of early morning, as if he’d wandered into some undiscovered country. But other times the stillness felt suffocating, reminding him of what he had lost and what he had squandered.
This morning was mostly that, so he was pleased when he finally saw headlights winding through the sunflower fields from the north: two long, unmarked diesel trucks; a lowrider transport towing the Buk antiaircraft missile launcher; and a midsized cargo truck, bearing the mobile command center radar unit.
Delkoff walked down to the farmhouse to wake his men. “Vstavay. Let’s go!” he called, shining a flashlight in their faces, holding the beam for an extra moment on Zelenko’s eyes.
Delkoff walked back to the road. An hour earlier, primed with suspicion, he’d gone downstairs and taken Zelenko’s travel bag. Digging through it as the men slept, he’d found the pistol stuffed inside a sock with his change of clothes and something else that seemed to be an electronic transmitter. He removed the bullets and returned the gun to his bag. Delkoff gave the soldier credit; he’d searched their packs before setting off and found nothing. There was only one reason Zelenko would have smuggled a gun into this operation. Finding it confirmed what Delkoff had suspected earlier: Zelenko was Turov’s assassin. The bullets were intended for him.
The ground rumbled now as the trucks came closer, their headlights diffused in the mist. In a war without insignias or uniforms, these two vehicles had passed as a Russian Volkov artillery unit at the checkpoint eighteen kilometers northwest of here. Delkoff himself had arranged the passage, to make sure no one examined their cargo or noticed the men’s Ukrainian accents.
Delkoff and Pletner walked out to meet them—“the Ukrainians,” he called the other team, although one of the three was actually Estonian—while Zelenko opened the warehouse.
The five men exchanged cursory greetings in Russian, all of them dressed in military fatigues, none quite the same design, color, or fabric. They’d been through more than a dozen drills together now, but it still felt like an unholy alliance to Delkoff: soldiers from different armies fighting for the same outcome and no one really at peace with it. Friday night, after the operation, they would all go back to being enemies again. That was the idea, anyway.
Mikhail Kolchak was a missile regiment commander from the Ukrainian army, a compact man almost Ivan’s age, with four grown children, all married and living in Kiev. He had intense, military eyes offset by a soft, splotchy face, with tiny red and green veins on his nose and cheeks. The two missile operators were closer to Zelenko’s age, one a muscular bodybuilder type from Kolchak’s SBU regiment, the other a lean man with sinewy arms, an engineer and former intelligence officer from KaPo, Estonia’s intelligence service. Good soldiers.
They stored the vehicles in the warehouse, where they would stay until Friday afternoon, safe from Russian satellite surveillance. Afterward, the men went in the farmhouse to sleep, the Ukrainian team upstairs, the Russians downstairs. In the morning, they all gathered back in the warehouse for breakfast as Delkoff reviewed the mission. They took turns, then, running simulations, Delkoff watching the men closely, keeping them busy all day.
Delkoff sat out alone again Thursday night in the Ukrainian farmland, waiting for daylight the way he had waited for headlights the night before. It was quiet again, the strangest part of the night, when even the breeze seemed tired, whispering in the sunflower stalks. Occasionally, he recited part of “The Sacred War,” the song Delkoff’s father used to sing to his sons: Arise, vast country, Arise for a fight to the death . . . Fly over the Motherland . . . This is the people’s war, a Sacred war!
Delkoff fingere
d the wooden cross around his neck, the cross his son had worn. This morning, with the old Russian melody in his head, he felt more certain about his assignment than ever before. If God existed, this was what He had put him on earth to do. He’d never felt that as strongly as he did tonight.
It was close to four in the morning when he decided at last to go inside, locking himself in the room at the rear of the warehouse. He stretched out on the cot in his fatigues and army boots, closed his eyes, and was asleep almost instantly. When he woke, ninety-five minutes had passed. Delkoff walked outside and urinated into the corn field. He walked down the unpaved road, his boots crunching the gravel. There was no music in his head anymore.
His thoughts kept returning to Zelenko, whose eyes had reminded him of his own boy . . . dark, recessed, seeing life from a distance, but eager if you called on him, eager for anything. Pavel’s life had ended in an instant, exploded by Azov battalion fire two hours from here, on a little farm road like this. He’d been killed by contract soldiers from Ukraine’s National Guard, days before one of many “cease-fires” went into effect. Killed by men like Kolchak and this missile operator, who’d probably celebrated their strikes with high fives and cries of Slava Ukrayini! “Glory to Ukraine!”
By the time Delkoff returned to the warehouse, the air had lightened, and the corn and sunflower stalks glinted with dew. He could see the impressions his boots had made in the dirt going the other direction. Zelenko and Kolchak were standing together again, in the cleared field beside the warehouse, Zelenko talking and gesturing. But when he saw Delkoff, Zelenko turned away and lowered his arms.