The Children's Game

by Max Karpov

  “This is the day,” Delkoff said. August 13. It seemed, already, a historic date.

  Late that morning, they ran a full launch simulation from inside the warehouse, Delkoff sitting with Kolchak in the tight quarters of the command vehicle. Afterward, they relaxed in the shade, watching sunlight strengthen above the fields in a cloudless sky.

  Zelenko heated up canned chicken stew for lunch, which they washed down with warm tea drunk from canteen cups, the men gathered around a wooden table Delkoff had pulled from the farmhouse. They kept their eyes on their plates, each in the channel of his own thoughts. The lunch gave Delkoff a chance to recall why he’d selected these men, each of whom brought his own skill and motivation to the operation: four of them, including Zelenko, had lost a friend or family member to the war, and they blamed Russia’s president for that. Even Tamm, the Estonian, had motive: his brother, who’d worked for KaPo, the Estonian security forces, had been jailed in Russia for a month on phony espionage charges. Kolchak, on the other hand, came from a family of Ukrainian businessmen; he believed that what happened today would create new economic opportunities in his country. He was fighting for that.

  This afternoon, all of them would get what they wanted. Together they would produce an outcome that would break the impasse over Ukraine and allow the motherland to rise again. And even if these five men were not able to enjoy the fruits of that victory personally, their families would be taken care of.

  At 2:00 p.m., and again at 3:00, Delkoff put the team through launch simulations in the warehouse to keep everyone alert and motivated. Especially Zelenko. If Zelenko knew that Delkoff was on to him, he did a good job concealing it.

  The first signal from Moscow came at 3:47, a coded text on Delkoff’s phone: the president’s plane had just lifted off from Moscow’s Vnukovo International Airport, bound for his vacation palace on the Black Sea, 885 miles to the south. A two-hour-and-twenty-five-minute flight. It would take about half that time for the plane to come into range.

  Delkoff and Kolchak stood watching as the vehicles growled out of the warehouse, their Caterpillar tracks rolling across the road and into the cleared field. Pletner moved the radar module first. Then Tamm lowered the ramps from the transport truck and drove out the mobile command unit. Finally, Kolchak guided the missile launcher over the ramp of the lowrider truck, parking it between the other two so the three vehicles were lined up in the field side by side, ready to go. The rumble of the monstrous vehicles stirred something in Delkoff as powerful as any patriotic music, bringing tears to his eyes several times.

  Zelenko climbed into the radar module to turn on the optical tracking systems while the “Ukrainians” began activating the command unit. Delkoff waited outside, keeping lookout. He recalled how dark the clouds had been over his son’s rainy final battlefield last summer. Today, the skies were perfectly clear.

  His thoughts were interrupted by the familiar grinding sound of the missile unit rising on the transloader: the giant four-missile carrier tilting up from its flat position, as if waking from a great sleep, then beginning to rotate, the four eighteen-foot missiles pointed into the sky at a seventy-degree angle.

  Delkoff could hear the music again in his head as he walked back, feeling the Russian winds blowing across these Ukrainian fields. He knew the histories that bound the two countries: how Russia had begun as a settlement on the Dnieper River, in Kiev, back in the ninth century. How many years later, in 1922, it was Ukraine that had helped create the Soviet Union, and also Ukraine that had caused the empire to break apart, with its declaration of independence in 1991. Now, again, Ukraine would play a historic role, in establishing Russia’s return to greatness.

  He watched the radar receiver groan to life, rising up on the turret and swiveling in slow circles as if sweeping the sky for its target.

  Delkoff finally went inside the TAR to observe Zelenko, although he did not like being inside. Claustrophobia was one of Delkoff’s weaknesses; very few people knew that.

  He crouched closer and watched Zelenko’s screen, seeing what had just happened—the plane was beginning to turn slightly to the west from its normal path south, meaning it was heading toward Ukrainian airspace. Zelenko’s face was damp, but his hands were steady and his eyes remained fixed on the controls in front of him as the hypnotic pattern blinked on the circular radar screen. He barely seemed to notice that Delkoff was there.

  The radars were operating on automatic now, and Delkoff controlled the authorization codes for the missile launcher. Even if Zelenko had some sort of a meltdown, there was nothing he could do to sabotage this mission—although sabotage probably hadn’t entered his thoughts. He was here to complete his job successfully, and then kill Delkoff. Nothing else. He’d been paid well for that.

  Before going back out, Delkoff patted Zelenko on the shoulder, feeling a flicker of compassion for his “son.” He had no intention of ever going in the radar unit again.

  Outside, he breathed deeply the Ukrainian air and turned toward Moscow, to the northeast. Toward where the president’s plane would appear in the sky, at 33,000 feet. He smoked a cigarette, touching the cross around his neck several times. He talked to his son, telling him again what they were doing, his eyes moistening with emotion in the warm air.

  When he finished, Delkoff crushed the cigarette under his boot and walked to the command vehicle. It was time.

  Kolchak and his two men were seated in front of the guidance and radar screens. The horizontal blink on Kolchak’s screen was the plane. Delkoff knew this from dozens of simulations; he’d seen the same signal in real time, as well, from tracking Ukrainian military transports over the past three years. This, of course, would be a very different target.

  He stood directly behind Kolchak as the radar shifted from SEARCH mode to TRACK. And then, at 5:12, Kolchak began a litany of verbal operational checks: “Optical system check. TRACK mode check. Lock target . . .” Finally, the last, “IFF override,” removing the Identification-as-Friend-or-Foe lock that prevented the launch. There were no barriers left. “Ready,” Kolchak said. He stood, yielding his seat at the center module to Ivan Delkoff.

  Delkoff heard the grinding of the launch rails elevating and locking in position. He typed in the ten-digit activation code, which he and Kolchak had built into the system weeks ago, and which he’d carried only in his head. The combination to Russia’s future, he thought, smiling to himself, as he had done many times over the summer.

  Then he nodded at the controls and stood, returning the seat to Kolchak. The missile launch was now operational. It would take less than five minutes to activate.

  Delkoff observed the rest of it from over Kolchak’s shoulder. He didn’t understand all of the signals they were monitoring, but he knew what was happening: the radar data had been transferred to the “seeker” controls in the heads of the missiles—data containing the plane’s location; its height and trajectory; all the information necessary to find, attack, and take down the president’s plane.

  “Ready for launch,” Kolchak said.

  The last phase was to unlock the command-fire control. All it took, then, was to press two buttons. They’d practiced this, too, many times. The Estonian, Tamm, pushed the first launch release. The Ukrainian, Kolchak, the second. There was good reason for that.

  “Launch,” Kolchak said. Moments later, the ground began to tremble and then the command center shook violently, as if it were being consumed by a massive earthquake. Delkoff felt the first of the eighteen-foot missiles burst from its launch chute, then the second.

  Then he heard the explosions, like sonic booms, coming seconds apart: a sound they hadn’t heard in any of the simulations. And, at last, silence. The men kept their eyes down at first, before cautiously trading glances. Twelve seconds was all it had taken for the missile to reach the plane, for the fragmentation warhead to take out the cockpit and front fuselage, blowing up the fuel tanks. It was done.

  Delkoff was the first to look. The launch site was smot
hered in smoke, the air acrid with the stench of burning rocket fuel; a ribbon of sunflower stalks was on fire. Delkoff pushed open the hatch and stepped out, hearing a sound he recognized from other, smaller operations: debris still falling from the sky, a faint sound like broken glass in the distance. And Delkoff knew: the president’s plane was gone. Turov had been right: America was about to be shaken from its sleep. But so, too, was the motherland. He turned and watched the other men emerging in the smoke, as if they’d just materialized on another planet. Which, in a sense, they had. The “Ukrainians.” Like three statues in the smoke. Then “his” team came out of the radar vehicle.

  “The new front has opened,” Delkoff said aloud, coughing as he tried to outpace the smoke. He said it louder, calling to his son, to his father, to his country, tears stinging his eyes, some of it caused by the smoke, some by his patriotism: “Arise, vast country.”

  NINE

  Friday, August 13. Washington.

  Christopher Niles shaped his hands into parentheses and peered through the window blinds into his brother’s living room. Jon had lived in this unpretentious apartment just over the D.C. line for three years now and Chris still hadn’t been invited in.

  He tried knocking first. Now he wondered if Jon still lived here. He saw a dozen cardboard boxes inside, piles of books and magazines, a few pieces of mismatched furniture, two framed paintings leaning against a wall, a dress shirt on a hanger hooked over the knob on a chest of drawers. He pushed his face against the glass, looking closer, and saw the familiar old writing desk in a corner, with scraps of notes tacked to a cork board. His brother’s work station.

  Chris had decided to swing by Jon’s place before his “debriefing” on Petrenko, which was scheduled for 10:00 at Martin’s office. Sometimes, the best way to catch his little brother was to just show up. After talking with Anna last night, Chris had decided to try reaching out to him again. He’d even decided to offer help with the story. Maybe tell him about Andrei Turov. If Chris wasn’t going to pursue Turov, maybe Jon could.

  Talking, though, had never been their strong suit, and he knew it wouldn’t be easy to begin now.

  “Help you find anyone?”

  Chris looked down at a young woman walking her Yorkie. “Jon Niles,” he said.

  She arched her eyebrows and smiled. “Good luck. He keeps strange hours.”

  They walked into the parking lot together. She was an American U student, she told him, who seemed just as interested in Jon’s whereabouts as Chris was. Jon deliberately set himself up as a man of mystery sometimes, he knew. Women were intrigued by it, though seldom for long. Jon seemed to have a different girlfriend every eighteen months or so. Chris sometimes wondered if he was still searching for the sort of woman he’d imagined as a teenager, listening to his rock albums on headphones; the kind who didn’t actually exist in real life.

  By the time he reached the main gate to the 258-acre CIA campus off GW Parkway, Christopher was thinking again about Anna. About getting their life back and making plans.

  He was ready to hand off his “ten-minute” project to Martin. It felt like his last official act for the US government.

  “Turov’s operation—whatever it is,” Martin Lindgren said, as he slowly poured tea into his nineteenth-century-style English cup, “has been in the works for at least two years, we believe.”

  Chris nodded, although he suspected the op had been in the works much longer than two years. Certainly in Turov’s mind, it had.

  “What Max Petrenko knows is limited, probably to what he told you,” Martin added. “We’re not interested, frankly, in paying him another $85 K.”

  “I didn’t think so,” Chris said, watching the steam rise from Martin’s cup. Petrenko’s USB drive had contained a single file, which was largely worthless—a rambling seven-page report on “the children’s game,” with a few names and dates, and a lot of wordy and improbable speculations; parts of it read to Chris like a seventh-grade term paper. “Although I have to say, I’m a little concerned about Petrenko. Knowing what he does.”

  “Yes, well.” Martin set his teacup down gingerly, the handle gripped between his thumb and forefinger. It was one of Martin’s many incongruities: the proper demeanor, the slightly disheveled appearance. “So, what are we missing?”

  “Why Turov would hire Ivan Delkoff, for starters.”

  “Is there an answer here?” He reached for Chris’s report, then seemed to change his mind.

  “The obvious one would be his connections in the region. On both the Russian and Ukrainian sides,” Chris said. “On the other hand, Delkoff’s been critical of the Kremlin’s stops and starts in Ukraine. He lost his son there. Because of that, I wouldn’t put him together with Turov or the Kremlin. So he must’ve brought something to the table we’re not looking at.”

  Delkoff and Turov were—by temperament, experience, and physical appearance—opposites, Chris knew: Delkoff, a big, brashly nationalistic military commander; Turov, a canny, close-to-the-vest oligarch with strong ties to the Kremlin. Russia’s “crazy colonel” and its “dark angel.” Both men had served in the FSB years ago and held their own grandiose ideas about Russia. But as far as he could tell, their paths had never crossed before. Why now?

  Chris was also trying to make sense of the detail Petrenko had told him about Delkoff meeting with the Ukrainian secret service. Had he gotten that wrong?

  “What about this idea of a fifth column?” Martin said, seeming to read his mind. “A coup within the Russian military?”

  “Possible. Except I don’t see Turov being part of any plot to kill the Russian president. Unless there has been a dramatic split between them. But I don’t see any reason to think that.”

  “Nor do I,” Martin said. Chris’s phone vibrated; he let it go. “And what about this chess game business? Petrenko said the first move may’ve already been played? What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know. Some sort of infiltration that we don’t know about, I imagine.” Martin frowned as his desk phone rang. Chris’s sounded again, too. “Or,” he added, “it might just be a bluff on Petrenko’s part. A way of upping his salary, so to speak.”

  “Is that what you think?”

  “Not really.”

  “What I’m getting is that it’s more serious than a penetration. The goal is to break us apart in some manner, tilt the—”

  The office door burst open and Julie Patton, Martin’s normally staid, middle-aged assistant gave them each a wide-eyed look.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” she said. “We’ve just gotten word that the Russian pres—”—her breath failed her mid-word—“president’s plane has crashed. Or been shot down. In Ukraine.”

  “What?”

  Martin followed Julie out to her office, Christopher in tow. They all stood in front of her computer, watching the news report coming across in real time on CNN.

  It took Christopher about a minute to understand what had happened. What Turov had managed to pull off.

  That much he knew right away: this was Andrei Turov’s doing. It had to be. The IC had been on edge for weeks, fielding nonspecific intelligence that something was coming. Some sort of “hybrid” or unorthodox attack against the West.

  And that, he sensed, was exactly what had happened, although it would be hours—maybe much longer—before the intelligence community or anyone else in the US government figured that out. He only regretted that he hadn’t done so earlier.

  So this is how it starts.

  “I have to deal with things now,” Martin said to him. “Can we regroup at 4:00? Julie!” he called.

  “I’m right here,” she answered. “Mr. Niles at 4:00.”

  Christopher knew that the best thing to do was get out of the way. He’d never seen Martin so flustered.

  But he also knew, as he walked down the corridor away from Martin’s office, that he was no longer retired from the Andrei Turov business. It wasn’t even an option anymore.

  TEN

  Somew
here in Belarus.

  Ivan Delkoff stared out the train’s window at the flat, sliding darkness of the countryside. He imagined the hours and days that lay ahead, traveling from Minsk to Riga, and from there on to northern France, to Germany, to God knew where else. Delkoff had long ago stopped celebrating victories. If you felt the urge to celebrate, and you possessed a heart and a soul, you did it privately, or not at all. War wasn’t like sports. Or, as a fellow soldier had once told him, sports was war for cowards. War was business, the most serious business in the world.

  For the soldiers who had brought down the Russian president’s plane, however, those considerations didn’t pertain. Let the men celebrate. But let them celebrate quickly.

  He had broken out a bottle of vodka and five plastic glasses and allowed his makeshift regiment to toast what they’d done. To Novorossiya. He even managed to share in their mood of revelry, but skipped the alcohol, knowing what still lay ahead. An hour later, after most of the smoke had cleared, there was still a cloying smell of rocket fuel in the air. But it was remarkable how quickly the calm of that great summer day had reclaimed the countryside, the only sound again becoming the sunflower stalks creaking with the breeze.

  Victory was a complicated business, Delkoff knew. How you processed it mattered at least as much as the victory itself. Delkoff had loved the Russian president, and what he had done for the motherland. The whole idea of Russia Mir, a Russia without borders, a moral example for the rest of the world: all of that was a fine dream. But Delkoff had also loved the contract soldiers and volunteer fighters who’d given their lives for it in the fields of eastern Ukraine: Pavel and thousands of other Pavels, some of them buried in mass graves, or laid to rest in secret ceremonies because the Kremlin didn’t want to admit that it had inserted real soldiers into this war. You didn’t celebrate knowing that. You moved on. He heard the voice of Pavel’s mother again in his head—the hysterical wail after she’d learned what had happened: Putin killed him, Putin killed my son!