by Max Karpov
Kolchak had set up a crude camera outside of the radar station and they replayed the sequence several times on a computer monitor—the men crowding in and cheering as the trail of smoke from the heat-seeking missile tagged the target and the plane exploded. Later, he would upload this video to YouTube, so the world could see their work.
He shut the celebration down as soon as the bottle was empty, and ordered the men to their vehicles. Turov had created two escape plans: the “Ukrainian” battalion would travel the same roads that had brought them here, hauling their missile launchers back into Ukrainian-controlled territory. After passing through the first checkpoint, they would detour to an abandoned coal processing plant, where they’d be met by two SBU agents. Ukrainian security would ferry them to a safe house and, ultimately, home. The missile launcher and radar command would stay behind, locked in the processing plant.
That was the story they’d been told. It was the story they would carry in their heads as they traveled to the checkpoint. Once there, their trucks would be stopped by Russian Spetsnaz officers, already tipped off that they were coming, and they’d be killed. This was the necessary outcome; the story they hadn’t been told.
Turov’s plan, after all, wasn’t just to kill the president. It was equally important to establish responsibility. In another day or two, the Kremlin would announce that two Ukrainians and an Estonian, all former intelligence officers, had been killed after opening fire on Russian soldiers at a checkpoint in Ukraine. They would also announce that the SA-11 missile system they’d been transporting had been recovered—minus two rockets—conclusively linking the assassination of the president to Ukrainian intelligence, and ultimately the United States.
Delkoff would follow the second escape route: he would journey east with Zelenko and Pletner through an hour and twenty minutes of farmland to the Russian border. On the way, they’d switch vehicles at the same sunflower farm where they had stopped for lunch two days before; from there, they would continue southeast, from the border crossing at Shramko to Rostov-on-Don, where Turov had made arrangements to deliver the three of them to a safe house. And then on to new lives.
This was the story they’d been told. No one had explained that they, too, would most likely drive into an ambush at the first checkpoint. And that they, too, would be killed.
The teams traded quick goodbyes. Hands were shaken, backs patted. Because of what they had just done, and the short celebration they had shared, there was real emotion in the men’s voices. All except Zelenko, Delkoff saw, whose emotion appeared self-conscious.
When the Ukrainian team’s vehicles finally rumbled away down the dusty farm road, Delkoff summoned Zelenko alone into the warehouse.
“I just want us to go over the route one more time,” he said. Delkoff spread the map on the rickety wooden table where they had all eaten lunch. He stepped back. “Show me again.”
Zelenko’s hands were unsteady as he smoothed the map, moving his fingers to find their location in the Donbas countryside. There was still a smell of chicken stew in the room.
Delkoff gripped the combat knife in his left hand. He stood slightly to the side but still behind Zelenko. Watching the sad, alert tilt of Zelenko’s head, the mole on his neck, the garden of little hairs in his left ear. “What are you going to do to me?” Zelenko whimpered. Not at all like his son now.
Delkoff said nothing. As Zelenko began to straighten, Delkoff stepped toward him. He raised his left hand and plunged the knife into the side of Zelenko’s head, just above the ear.
Zelenko made a gasping sound. He fell back into the table and crashed to the floor, the knife still in him. In seconds, he was dead.
Delkoff walked to the barn entrance. He squinted out at the brown fields in the glare of late sunlight. Now there was only Pletner, who was waiting for him beside the transport vehicle, with his thick, erect posture, his eyes wide and vacant. Delkoff waved him over.
“I need your help for a moment,” he called. Delkoff could see the young man’s fear as he walked to the warehouse. He almost felt what Pletner felt, the blood thumping in his temples. Pletner was young and malleable, and he would do whatever Delkoff asked. It was best to get this over with as quickly as possible.
Delkoff waited until he was standing in front of him. He raised Zelenko’s pistol to Pletner’s chin and fired. Pletner’s eyes widened and then closed before he went down.
Delkoff dragged Pletner’s body into the center of the barn. He removed the jerry can from the steamer trunk in the back room and spilled gasoline in zig-zags across the floor, leaving his phone and the flame-retardant pouch with his own identification beside Pletner’s body. Then he pulled the knife out of Zelenko’s head and removed Pletner’s wallet and keys.
From the doorway, Delkoff turned back to the dead soldiers, thinking about Zelenko’s eager eyes, the resolute way he’d looked at him when they’d first met, in Donetsk, all those months ago. “You did a good job, comrades,” he said, and felt his eyes tear up. Ivan Delkoff did not feel good about this part, but knew it was necessary. Zelenko had said it himself: In war, you think differently. You have to or you don’t survive. In war, killing is just a survival tactic.
He lit a wooden match and watched the trail of fire leap across the warehouse toward the radar truck, consuming the furniture, the hay bales, Zelenko, and then Pletner.
“Forgive me,” he said as he walked away to the transport vehicle, feeling his son’s cross.
Delkoff began to drive, not east toward the checkpoint, as he was supposed to, but west, a long detour to another abandoned farmhouse. He had stored a travel vehicle there, a Hyundai Solaris with Ukrainian registration, along with a work shirt and dungarees. Delkoff had planned this escape as carefully as he’d planned Turov’s mission. The two had been parallel operations.
By evening, Delkoff was driving alone on the M03 highway north toward Kharkiv. Delkoff knew how to reverse engineer an “escape.” Knew where to drop breadcrumbs, how to set up a credit card trail, how to use CCTV surveillance to his advantage, how to slip information to the SVR and FSB. He knew how to lure Russia’s security services to Belarus, instead of northern France, where he would actually be. People always underestimated Delkoff, and they’d probably do so again.
Those weren’t deceptions that would hold for long, though. Delkoff knew that. If he was lucky, they might give him four or five days to make more permanent arrangements with his cousin, Dmitri Porchak. Delkoff sat in his window seat now as the train rolled through the countryside, the lights of distant towns skimming past. Breathing the taste of rocket fuel still in his lungs. He was on the 1:32 a.m. train from Kharkiv to Minsk tonight. In Minsk, he would board a car to Riga, where on Monday he would fly to Paris. No one would expect Delkoff to catch a train in Kharkiv, nor would they be looking for him in Riga, let alone France. He was trying to keep his mind clear of voices now, but his father’s patriotic music kept stealing his thoughts: We shall repulse the repressors Of all ardent ideas . . . Arise, vast country! Arise, vast country!
In the train station, Delkoff had avoided looking at televisions, or overhearing conversations. He didn’t want to know about it yet. Deferred gratification was part of his plan. For Delkoff, it was a necessity: not to look until he had arrived safely in France on Monday. Because Delkoff didn’t entirely trust himself. If he looked, he was afraid he would lose his center; he would be tempted to have a drink, to talk with a strange woman, to give himself away.
Also, he was trying not to draw attention to himself. Delkoff was a big, beat-up-looking man, who tended to draw curious glances anyway. Now he was wearing a paste-on beard and a knit cap, which probably made him even more of a curiosity.
He stared out the window from his private darkness as the train rumbled north. The lights in the countryside were like fires of freedom tonight, he thought, beckoning him to a new life. In another day or two, the Kremlin would announce that they had killed the perpetrators and recovered the missile battery. But they’d be
too humiliated to mention Delkoff. He was sure of that. Delkoff had now successfully extricated himself from Turov’s plan. What happened next was up to him. Not Turov. Not Russia. Just him.
ELEVEN
Capitol Hill, Washington.
The news from Ukraine quickly blanketed Washington in a fog of confusion and misinformation. Everyone in town, it seemed, was asking some version of the same question: “What’ve you heard?”
“At this stage,” Anna Carpenter told her son David, who called at lunchtime expecting an inside scoop, “all explanations seem plausible and any explanation seems premature.”
“Mom.”
“What.”
“Remember that conversation we had coming back from the airport?”
“Of course. What are you hearing?”
“I’m hearing the worst, same as you.” He exhaled. “I’m hearing we did this.”
“What are you talking about?”
“It’s all over Russian social media. It’s starting to get out now on English-speaking sites.”
“That we did this? But not seriously.”
“Seriously,” he said. “They’re tying it back to CIA, saying we met with a Ukrainian arms dealer in Kiev over the summer. They’ve even put out a name.”
Anna was speechless, hearing the conviction in her son’s voice. “Well, that’s absurd.”
“You’re sure?”
“Let me call you back.” Anna clicked off and swiveled to face her computer. Was she sure? No; if she was, she wouldn’t have been so abrupt with David. It took less than two minutes for her to find what he had been talking about: several websites out of Russia and eastern Europe were giving surprisingly detailed accounts of the attack: the “assassination,” they called it, had been planned by an anti-Russian Ukrainian oligarch, Dmitro Hordiyenko, and carried out “with the backing” of America’s CIA. There were no named sources, and no one in Washington or the mainstream media seemed to be taking it seriously. But something about the story bothered Anna. There was an unusual authority to it. A sober tone not typical of Russian propaganda.
She sat in her office searching through Twitter traffic, switching channels on television, anxious to learn more. An hour and a half earlier, when the news broke, interns and Senate aides had rushed into the hallways, shouting that Putin’s plane had been shot down. Now what felt like a stunned silence filled the floor. Everyone was quietly soaking in the news, hunkered down on phone calls or staring at televisions or computer screens. Christopher had phoned just once, while she was talking with David. She hadn’t been able to reach him since.
Because of Anna’s seat on the Senate Select Intelligence Committee, she was one of the go-to people reporters called for security and intelligence stories. But she wasn’t returning media calls on this one. This was a story no one could adequately explain yet.
And something else bothered her: whatever had happened to the Russian president’s plane—sabotage, coup, a Ukrainian military attack—the US intel community had missed it. Completely. No one had seen this coming. Not even Christopher.
There was no official confirmation yet that Russia’s president had been on board the plane. But just before noon, mainstream news agencies began quoting “high-level Russian sources” verifying it. “REPORT: PUTIN DEAD” flashed up as a news banner, first on MSNBC, followed quickly by the identical words on CNN and Fox and as cut-ins on the networks. Moments later, she heard one of her entry-level office interns shouting: “Putin’s dead! CNN reporting: Putin’s dead!”
Anna stared numbly at the words on her television. The idea of nuclear Russia with no one in charge was chilling. The lack of a viable succession plan had always struck her as one of the most disturbing aspects of Putin’s Russia—even if, technically, there was a plan: under the Russian constitution, the prime minister became acting president, with elections required within three months. But given the covert nature of Russian politics, the succession wouldn’t be so neat. Everyone knew that. Russia analysts were already beginning to predict a prolonged behind-the-scenes power struggle, and a period of dangerous insecurity for Russia and the world.
The danger was exacerbated by the flurry of recent personnel changes in Moscow, Putin appointing former bodyguards to key security posts and as governors in three regions. In a political environment that valued loyalty over expertise and competence, the president’s men—the devils we didn’t know—were even more concerning than the president.
Anna stared at her TV as new details came across: military experts saying that the president’s plane had probably been brought down by a surface-to-air missile, similar to what took down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in July 2014, over a nearby region of Ukraine, killing all 298 onboard. Then, just after 12:30, a fuzzy photo appeared almost simultaneously on dozens of Russian websites, supposedly showing Dmitro Hordiyenko, the Ukrainian businessman and alleged arms trader, sitting in “a Kiev restaurant” with “an unidentified American CIA officer.”
Minutes later, Anna found a clip of the provocative speaker of Russia’s state Duma, telling a Moscow journalist, “We’re getting reliable reports now that the assassination was planned and carried out by American CIA, with help of Ukrainian SBU. You can be assured there will be serious repercussions if true.”
As she watched the news, Anna kept flashing back to one thing: the story that Harland Strickland had brought to her office and laid on her desk yesterday morning, alleging that the US was secretly discussing a preemptive attack against Russia.
What was going to happen to that story now? Was it possible that was what had just occurred? Had Harland somehow known this was coming? Was that why he was so nervous about it leaking?
The vice president’s chief of staff called Anna’s office just before 1:00. Could Anna attend a special National Security Council briefing at the White House?
She had been hoping to meet Christopher for lunch. But the vice president’s urgent request superseded that. Instead, she asked her chief of staff to call her a car for the 1.2-mile drive down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House.
TWELVE
Situation Room, the White House.
The meeting was already under way when Anna arrived, tucked into her seat, and made a quick survey of the men and women around the table: intelligence officials; NSC staff; and reps from the White House, State Department, and Pentagon. An odd group, pulled together by the vice president from among those still in town. On the bank of wall monitors were fuzzy but dramatic still images of the white-red-and-blue presidential plane beginning to come apart in midair.
The accounts of what had happened resembled by then a giant, ungainly ship, Anna thought, which was beginning to turn in a clear direction. The stories officials had “heard” were becoming the same story, in some cases word for word: the downing of Putin’s plane had probably been a “military coup,” planned and carried out by two or three Russian generals and a former head of Russian security services. Several TV reporters whose tweets were known to be in sync with White House messaging had already begun spreading this story in 280-character doses, attributing it to “senior White House sources” or just “sources.”
Anna had no idea where the coup story started, but it filled obvious gaps. How else could the president’s plane, armored with advanced antimissile technology, have been so vulnerable?
General Jared Coffman, the head of the US European Command base in Stuttgart, Germany, was giving a summary of what was then known, his face filling one of the screens: “. . . the missile, which appears to have been a Buk SA-11, Russian-made. Ground-to-air, which would have exploded within ten feet of the cockpit, puncturing the plane with shrapnel. It was the shrapnel rather than the missile itself that brought it down.”
“Which is exactly what happened with the Malaysia airliner attack in 2014,” said General Harold Rickenbach, seated three seats to Anna’s left.
“There are similarities, yes,” Coffman replied, then paused before elaborating. “Initial indications are
the crash site was probably fifty to sixty kilometers from where MH17 went down. And we do have surveillance assets in the area reporting a Ukrainian missile battery was seen in the vicinity on Friday.
“President Putin had been traveling from Moscow to the presidential palace at Cape Idokopas near Sochi when the attack occurred. The plane was just about halfway there.”
“This is still contested territory?” asked General Rickenbach.
“The crash site appears to be in separatist-controlled territory. But the launch point may be contested. Too early to say.”
Anna noticed, as she had before, the striking contrast, in temperament and presence, between the two generals. Rickenbach was a thickset, intense man with a large, bald head, flushed skin, and dented nose. Coffman, a light-skinned African-American with dark hair, had a long, sage-like face, drooping eyes, and earlobes the size of teaspoons.
“These new images seem to confirm that there were most likely two explosions,” Coffman said. “Meaning the first missile may have been destroyed and the second got through.”
“Would the Ukrainians have access to that sort of weapon?” asked the vice president.
“Both the Russian and Ukrainian militaries have SA-11 missiles and launchers, yes,” Rickenbach said. “The Ukrainian arsenal has a somewhat older model than the Russian army.”
Anna knew Rickenbach, and detected from the slightly elevated pitch of his voice that he was privately ecstatic about what had happened in the skies above Ukraine. And he wasn’t the only one. For the Russia “hawks,” a lot of America’s intelligence headaches, and imagined future headaches, might have just been cured.
“This shouldn’t have been possible, though,” said Julia Greystone, Director of National Intelligence, with her even, commanding tone, addressing Coffman rather than Rickenbach. “I mean, how would they have gotten through missile defenses? I’d hate to think Air Force One could be that vulnerable. There must’ve been some sort of internal sabotage.”