Shadow War

by Sean McFate

  And next week, the way things were going, it might be zero. I wondered what percentage Winters was getting for my troubles.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  Greenlees glanced at me with his head tilted, like a bookstore owner looking over his glasses at a questionable customer.

  “Besides the obvious, I mean.”

  “He bankrolled the democracy movement.”

  “And Putin wasn’t happy.”

  “Some of his fellow oligarchs weren’t happy. Russia has made them rich. Turning toward Europe will make them richer, but why take the risk?”

  Because you were never satisfied, I thought, remembering my six months as Winters’s protégé in Washington. There was always something more. That’s how you became a billionaire—or a president—in the first place.

  “Nobody expected Putin’s response. After Ukraine’s Orange Revolution in 2004, he let the democracy movement destroy itself with infighting. It took him four years to install Yanukovych. But you know that they say about doing the same thing twice?”

  “It’s for idiots.”

  “It’s for Americans.”

  Greenlees paused, looking out the window at high-end apartment blocks along the Dnieper. We passed an enormous McDonald’s, half a block wide, a beautiful woman sitting in the front window sadly raising a burger to her mouth as we floated by.

  “Do you know who benefited most from the Iraq War?”

  Apollo and others like it. Within three years, it had gone from cleaning latrines on military bases in the Balkans to a private army powerful enough to overthrow half the countries in the world.

  “Vlad Putin, that’s who. Ten years ago, he didn’t have the courage to conquer Ukraine. Then the world got bogged down fighting medieval Arabs who lop people’s heads off in the name of Allah”—I winced at the characterization—“and Putin seized the future. Chechnya, Georgia, Crimea. Those were all . . . groping. Ukraine has always been the goal. And after Ukraine . . .”

  He looked at me, and I could see it in his eyes. Greenlees was a lone wolf, a voice crying in the wilderness. He’d probably been giving this speech for the last decade, with nobody to listen. Conspiracy was the last refuge of failures.

  So how did we end up in this car together?

  Greenlees sighed. He looked tired. “You don’t know anything about what’s going on here, do you?”

  “I’m sorry. I work in Africa.”

  “Typical,” Greenlees muttered, as we turned onto a wide pedestrian street. Several streetlamps were painted blue and yellow, I noticed, and blue-and-yellow Ukrainian flags hung from a few windows. We passed a woman dressed in some sort of peasant garb, clearly traditional, but wearing high heels. The country had reverted to Ukrainian spellings after Euromaidan, I had heard, such as Kyiv instead of the Russian Kiev. We are a free people, they were saying. Look at our words. Look at our clothes. We have a history that is ours.

  “This isn’t a war between Russia and Ukraine,” Greenlees said, following the patriotic businesswoman with his eyes, “so put away your quaint notions of country. It’s about economics and oil. ExxonMobil or Gazprom have more power than Belgium ever did.”

  I didn’t bother to tell him I’d put away that notion long ago. Or that Belgium had once slaughtered five million people in Congo.

  “Ukraine is a battleground between East and West. The Romans and Slavs; the Polish and Russian empires; Hitler and Stalin; NATO and the Soviet Union. And now, Putin. The oligarchs are taking sides. The people are, as usual, the victims of history.”

  As they say in Africa: when the elephants fight, the grass gets trampled.

  “That’s why the world is sitting on its hands, even as covert Russian troops pour over the border. Because this is nothing but a buffer zone to them.” He paused. Sadly. “And because there are no good options. Every leader in Ukraine is crooked.”

  “Except Karpenko.”

  “In the most optimistic view, I suppose.”

  He stopped, staring out the window once again. “The Verkhovna Rada,” he said, pointing toward a building strangely reminiscent of the Jefferson Memorial. “The house of parliament. In the West, they use money to buy politicians. Here, it is more honest. Every oligarch simply becomes a parliamentarian.”

  We turned right, along a street clearly intended by the Soviets as a parade route. The apartment buildings were so massive, they made the lives inside them seem small. I saw more traditional outfits, loose white tops with beadwork and aprons.

  “Instytutska Street,” Greenlees said. “Yanukovych’s police shot forty protesters here. You can still see the bullet holes in the tree trunks. And the videos on the Internet.”

  I could hear the sadness in his voice. “What happened to Karpenko?”

  Greenlees turned with a sigh, as if I’d asked the wrong question. “His mentor, Sasha Belenko, went over to the Russians six days ago. The next night, so-called Ukrainian patriots seized the Donetsk Iron and Steel Works, a centerpiece of Karpenko’s empire. They raided the offices of his Financial-Industrial Group in Kiev.” Greenlees gave me a knowing look. “Corruption, of course. That’s the official charge.”

  “Belenko sold him out.”

  “Three days ago, there was an assassination attempt at a house in Poltava. Full frontal assault with RPGs and demo. Nobody claimed responsibility, but it was Spetsnaz.” Russian special forces. “The operation was too precise to be anyone else. Rumor has it there was inside help. Fierce fighting amongst his men. Karpenko barely got out alive.”

  Three days ago, I was buying arms in the Sahara.

  “Maidan Nezalezhnosti,” Greenlees said, signaling for the driver to double-park in the busy street. “The center of the struggle. Ten thousand gathered here for two months, until Putin’s puppet fell.”

  Maidan Nezalezhnosti was a concrete park, with a pond at the far end and trees along each side. Under the trees were makeshift tents and barricades, occupied by serious young women and older men in off-the-rack camouflage. I could see sand bags, Cyrillic graffiti, the burned remnants of radial tires. I didn’t know what war these people thought was being fought, but whatever it was, this wasn’t part of it.

  “Where are the young men?” I asked.

  “At the front. Hundreds have gone.”

  “But they’ll be slaughtered.” I had seen it too many times: untrained men and boys run over by trained troops.

  “I know that,” Greenlees said, “and so do they. I suppose that’s why you’re here.”

  He paused. He wanted me to say he was right, that things were being taken care of. But he wasn’t right. I was here for five days, to do two jobs. Maybe they would matter in the grand scheme of things. I trusted they would. But either way, by next week I’d be gone.

  “The Trade Unions building,” Greenlees said, pointing out the car window toward an empty space of blackened debris. “The Russians burned it down with protesters inside. Seventy-seven people gave their lives. Seventy-seven. And what does the world care?”

  Count your blessing, old man. It takes one thousand dead Africans before anyone in the West even notices. Ten thousand, at least, before the cavalry arrives.

  “Thirty-five years,” Greenlees muttered. “Half my life. And this is victory?”

  I looked out the window, past the shoddy barricades and piles of golden threadlike wire, the steel belts in burned-off radial tires. I liked Greenlees, and I trusted him, even if his jacket wasn’t pressed and his shirtsleeves were showing signs of wear. He was a gentleman, one of those old hands who seemed like a throwback to a more subtle time. But his information was useless, something I could get in half a minute from anyone at the U.S. Embassy. And he was clearly compromised. Us? We? Our? The old man had “clientitis.” He’d gone native, a cardinal sin for a field operative. I knew the company had to go outside its usual sources for work this black, but if this mission was so important to Winters, why would he saddle me with a sentimentalist?

  I looked up. The driver was star
ing at me in the rearview mirror. Sloppy. He was probably a plumber, before Greenlees brought him onboard.

  “We’re being followed,” I said. “Black car, halfway down the block.”

  “Don’t forget about the tan four-door that passed us thirty seconds ago.” Greenlees was right. I had been so focused on the black car, I hadn’t looked farther.

  “Russian FSB?” The FSB was the new acronym for the KGB.

  “One’s probably Russian. One Ukrainian. They’re following each other as much as they’re following us.”

  “I assume my room will be tossed when I get back.”

  “At least once, probably twice. For effect, mostly. I assume there’s nothing to find.”

  “Of course,” I said, as the car started to roll.

  Greenlees handed me three prepaid mobile phones to be used and discarded. I checked them. They were clean. I handed them back. We hadn’t used burners in the field in ten years. They were a dead giveaway. My cell phone had been programmed by the company with the right amount and type of contacts.

  “I’ll stick with a sat phone,” I said, not making a big deal of Greenlees’s error. “You have the Berettas?”

  Beretta Nanos were my favorite pistols for this type of work, small and easy to conceal. No silencers. Noise suppressors reduced range and accuracy, changed the gun’s balance, and never muffled noise as advertised. If you want to kill silently, get a crossbow.

  Greenlees nodded. “And the other supplies.”

  I had sent the list through Wolcott before leaving Washington. The Berettas were on it, but so were other necessities for an airlift: infrared lights to outline a landing strip, marker beacons, aviation radio, laser range finder, broadband scanners, and night-vision and field glasses. For an operation like this, supplies were often the most difficult part.

  He handed me an envelope of euros, probably the €50,000 Wolcott promised. I shook my head and handed it back. “I’m set for now.” There was a decent chance the goons would pick me up on suspicion of being suspicious, and I didn’t want to give them a reason to detain me.

  “I’ll pick you up here at 2100,” Greenlees said, as we pulled up in front of my hotel. “Wear your fine dining attire.”

  Nine o’clock. Damn. I thought about the dinner date I’d be missing with Alie and felt a tinge of guilt. I wanted to see her. I wanted to explain myself. Who I was. Why I left. Maybe, if she didn’t walk out after the first glass of wine, I’d tell her that I hadn’t forgotten her, even after all these years. That she always meant something to me.

  But she was a reporter. I was clandestine. I was never really going to meet with her. Was I?

  CHAPTER 7

  We drove silently through the sparse night traffic, Greenlees’s brother-in-law watching me with quiet disdain in the rearview mirror. No trouble with the FSB, Russian or Ukrainian, so I’d had a chance to shower and nap before changing into field clothes, and I was feeling fresh. Greenlees was wearing the same retiree-on-vacation outfit he’d been wearing before, but now with extra wrinkles, both in his shirt and under his eyes. He looked like he’d been at it for an extra ten hours, even though we’d only been apart for six.

  Alcoholism, maybe—it was a common malady in the field. Or maybe he’d been compromised. It wasn’t unheard-of for these old Cold War warriors to lose their way when the world changed.

  “I was visiting with . . . someone,” he said, by way of explanation. “I made promises, you see . . .”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said, not wanting the old man to struggle on. It was clear that his young Ukrainian wife (judging from the age of his brother-in-law) and decade (at least) in retirement had softened the man Ronald Reagan had sent to lay mines with Dave Wolcott in Corinto. We hadn’t even left Kiev, and it looked like my Sherpa was coming apart.

  What have you gotten me into, Winters?

  We took the long route, stopping several times and making several left turns at red lights to see if anyone was following us, which they were. Eventually, we pulled up at a restaurant, walked through the dining room, and out the back door to another car. Old school. Like 1950s old school. So old the goons following us might even be fooled. At least the new driver was a professional. By the time we pulled up to a field somewhere beyond the outskirts of Kiev, even I didn’t know what direction we’d gone.

  The helicopter appeared less than a minute later, flying low against the dark sky, its lights off. It was an AgustaWestland corporate model, intended to ferry business executives on short commutes. Limited range. Unarmed. Seating for seven at most. It might have been Karpenko’s, but more likely, given that Karpenko was a wanted man, it had been rented in the last few hours.

  “Grigory Maltov,” Greenlees whispered, as a burly man stepped out. “Karpenko’s fist.”

  Maltov was a classic enforcer, maybe a former bodyguard, probably a thug jumped up to the inner circle because of his extreme efficiency at disagreeable tasks. Every organization had a man like this, and twenty more waiting in line to take his place. The key was finding out whether the boss enjoyed his company or treated him like a necessity.

  “Grigory,” Greenlees said, stepping forward and extending his hand. Maltov didn’t shake it. He just frowned at us, clearly unimpressed. But that meant nothing. This kind of man was always unimpressed. That was his job.

  “The fixer?” Maltov said, and I knew from the phrase that he was a fan of Western action movies.

  “Tom Locke,” I said, extending my hand. Maltov tried to crush it. He clearly understood that in America, he would have been cast as the villain. And not without reason.

  “Get in,” he said.

  We retrieved our bags from the trunk of the car. Greenlees had packed lightly, in a 1990s-era stretchbag that had clearly come out of mothballs.

  “We have equipment,” Greenlees said, indicating the trunk.

  Maltov grunted.

  “This wasn’t his idea,” I muttered to Greenlees, as Maltov packed the radios, beacons, and landing lights without bothering to balance the weight

  Within minutes, we were airborne, the ground passing swiftly below us, a dark, endless countryside of flat fields that could have been Kansas or the more fertile upland of Eritrea. I was half asleep by the time we banked steeply and dropped low, a few meters above the treetops. My stomach hit my throat as the pilot skimmed the treeline. It was a common military tactic to fly nap of earth, using natural features to evade radars and missiles, but not like this. The pilot was a cowboy.

  “We’re near Poltava,” Greenlees said into the headset, the first words any of us had spoken for an hour. I wasn’t surprised. Karpenko was a wanted man. Contrary to popular wisdom, wanted men usually stayed close to home.

  When we swung over the road, I suspected we were close. Even in the dark, I could see it was dead straight with open fields on both sides and a compound at the far end. The edges had been cleared, probably recently. No power lines, meaning they had been buried. We slowed as we approached the compound: a house, a barn, and two outbuildings surrounded by a perimeter fence and six, seven, eight men with AK-47s and dogs.

  It would take an army to storm this place, I thought, as we bounced down in the formal garden. I wasn’t until I stepped into the mud that I realized this garden wasn’t shrubs and flowers, but two-foot-tall weeds.

  “Traditional dacha,” Greenlees said, sliding up beside me. “Summer home from the Imperial Period, original Russian Empire. Probably abandoned during the late Soviet years. This isn’t one of the homes on our list.”

  Karpenko owned eight homes that Greenlees knew of, including the Poltava mansion that had been assaulted last week. This one was either a recently purchased safe house, or an early purchase on the way up. Karpenko came from a poor background in Poltava; owning this local emblem of wealth was probably the culmination of a childhood dream.

  Until reality outstripped that dream a thousand times over.

  Now he was a prisoner to that wealth, with two guards at the front door a
nd a keypad security system. Five number. No scrambler. Amateur.

  Inside, there was a security room, with two men monitoring camera feeds on laptops, then a second door made of steel. A guard with a handheld metal detector was waved away by Maltov, telling me even Karpenko’s own men were probably being checked. And that this wasn’t a job interview. Karpenko hadn’t even met me, but I was already hired. He was desperate.

  “Captain Locke,” a man said, entering the room. He was tall and thin, a generation older than Maltov, wearing forest green fatigues and a 9 mm pistol. I could tell by his bearing he was ex-military, probably Ukrainian special forces. He was almost surely Karpenko’s head of security.

  “Colonel Sirko,” Greenlees whispered, as the man and I shook hands.

  The colonel nodded. “Come,” he said, like a man who knew three words of English, and had just exhausted his supply.

  There were no guards in the inner sanctum, but there wasn’t much else to make it feel like home. The rooms were elegant, but damp and musty, with hardly any furniture. The enormous fish tank along one living room wall held dirty water . . . and a large pile of mobile phones. I thought about what Greenlees had hinted at: that the assault in Poltava had been an inside job. So now Karpenko was confiscating cell phones. Good. That meant he was learning.

  If the oligarch was paranoid, though, it certainly didn’t show. He entered the room moments later, seemingly at ease. He looked like who he was: a businessman. He was wearing a casual suit, tapered cut in the London style, with no tie and unbuttoned cuffs. He was my age, early forties, in Western shape, probably a member of a fancy gym or three, but he wasn’t wearing anything flashy except his expensive watch, the same one from the file photo back in DC. Aside from a simple iron wedding band, his hands were clean. I knew he was eaten up inside by the recent turn of events—I wouldn’t be surprised if he had ulcers so bad he was shitting blood—but he could have been interviewing a cake decorator for his daughter’s birthday party, he was so languid and calm.