Shadow War

by Sean McFate

  “Is anybody hit?”

  Nobody responded, even Shwetz. The one in the back, the short one, was filming. He wondered if the man had filmed the whole battle—how long did it last, half an hour? He looked at his watch. Eleven minutes! He would have loved to get a copy, but he wasn’t supposed to be here, and he wasn’t supposed to engage the enemy. It was a serious breach of protocol. But it was spontaneous. An intuitive act. They had shot first. It was self-defense.

  He felt for his hood. Still on. Good.

  He took a deep breath, his pulse slowing. It had been a while since the last shot was fired, so he could relax. Take a moment. The hostile militia had been driven off. People were starting to drift back into the street. An old man shuffled past, a bag over his arm. Going shopping.

  A kid on his bicycle rode by, looked, circled back. Twelve. Maybe seven. Hargrove couldn’t tell his age, only that he was young. The boy stopped and stared. He looked nervous, until one of the militiamen started chatting with him—the older man with the antique helmet who had led the chant about Putin.

  The man stood up and went into the shop. They were sitting in front of a shop. Hargrove was surprised he hadn’t realized that. He looked around. They were in a residential neighborhood in a small town . . . what town were they in?

  He heard yelling, and instantly, he was alert, clutching his pistol.

  It was only the militiamen, saying good-bye to the boy on the bicycle. The boy was pedaling away, waving, a smile on his face. An odd kid, Hargrove thought. He hadn’t said much. But then Hargrove realized what they must have looked like, nine men in masks with AK-47s, sitting on a neighborhood corner. It had taken courage to come up to them. He never would have done it when he was a boy. But then again, he never would have seen masked gunmen in Centennial, Colorado.

  A bell rang, causing Hargrove to jerk his pistol into firing position. It was the chime on a door, the old man coming out of the store. One of the militiamen was following the kid, shouting for him. The man was holding a bag, but the boy was gone. It was a backpack, the kind Hargrove had carried himself, in elementary school. The boy must have been in elementary school. Was it a school day? No. There was no school. School was cancelled.

  “Is that the kind of kid you taught?” he asked the interpreter-teacher.

  “I can’t tell,” Shwetz said sadly.

  They were doing the right thing. The boy was proof. The Donbas Battalion may have seemed out of shape and poorly trained, but they had charged into gunfire. They had cleared this neighborhood of separatists. He watched the man with the backpack. He watched the older man look down at the bottle of Coke in his hand, obviously intended for the boy, but all that was left of him was the backpack and a cell phone. The boy had left his cell phone.

  They would give it back, Hargrove decided. They would find the boy and return his backpack and cell phone, because they weren’t just fighters. They were liberators. They were fighting for these people. Not for ideology, or politics, but for the ordinary people and their ordinary lives.

  He looked up at the Soviet-style apartments. The buildings were dull, yes, but the people were proud. He could see their colorful curtains. Their freshly painted shutters. There were flags, mostly Donetsk Republic, but that was to be expected, they had only five minutes ago liberated this block, using the spirit of the bayonet, of course, Sergeant Barkley had been on to something there, but also the spirit of compassion. And freedom. And self-determination. Everything he had learned in his CIA training program.

  He never saw the missile. He saw the old man with the antique helmet holding the cell phone, walking toward him. Then a shock wave, a huge noise, and the man was gone, and Hargrove was rolling on the pavement, covered in glass and blood, the ringing in his ears erasing the cacophony of car alarms.

  He never made the connection: the tracking function on the cell phone, the targeting mechanism of the missile. He felt the blast, saw blood spray a building. The windows were blown out. He was lying in blood. There was blood on the sidewalk, blood in his hand, and a hand under the curb. How could a severed hand be under a curb, and what had happened to the curb? He looked away. The top of the Coke bottle had been torn off, and it was lying in the street, the liquid pouring out, foamy and brown.

  He sat up. There was a man screaming into a radio. The car alarms were pummeling. There was a car, its tires flattened by shrapnel, with five men crouched behind it. His men. The Donbas Battalion. They were firing, and there were bullets coming back, but his men were in a perfect firing formation, holding their ground. They were real soldiers, brave men who stood and fought for their country.

  The old man was dead. So was the teacher. He was lying on his back in the road, with a hole in his head.

  No, it wasn’t Shwetz. Shwetz was behind the car, firing at the enemy. It was some other teacher. Or butcher. Or baker. Someone else whose family would receive a video of their last moments. If the cameraman made it out alive.

  And he would, Hargrove was sure of that. The Donbas men were disciplined. They were right. There was no way a separatist militia could push these soldiers back.

  Then he saw the T-72 tank come around the corner, crumpling a car in its path.

  “Get outta here!” he yelled in English to no one in particular, frantically searching for something to take out the tank. He tried to grab an assault rifle from the dead man, but it slipped out of his hands. He tried again, and again it was jerked away. It was still strapped to the man’s shoulder.

  He tried to run. He tried to pull away and get the hell out, but his feet kept slipping on the blood, and then he was falling backward, falling . . .

  No. He was being dragged backward. Someone was pulling him. He could feel the hand on his throat, and he couldn’t breathe, until he was in a car, in the backseat, being taken away. Kidnapped. Tortured because he was an American, because he was CIA . . .

  He kicked the door, but his knees buckled. He tried to grab the seat, but his hands were slick. He grabbed for his CIA service pistol but fumbled it. His shirt was slick. His stomach was covered in blood. He’d been shot.

  “I’ve been shot,” he screamed. “I’m covered with blood.”

  He heard the brakes, and he was thrown violently forward, then bounced back onto the seat. He had time to see the fist a half second before it hit his face.

  “Shut the fuck up,” the man said. Then they were moving again, faster this time. Hargrove didn’t know what to do. He couldn’t move. He was too stunned to talk, or think, or even make a sound . . .

  “Quit screaming. You’re not hurt.”

  Hargrove complied. He didn’t even know he’d been screaming. He felt his stomach. He didn’t know what he was feeling for, a hole maybe, but there was no hole. He was sore, but not split. It’s someone else’s blood, he thought.

  “Alie,” he said.

  “Shut up,” the driver said again.

  “You speak English.”

  “Don’t be an asshole.”

  Hargrove sat up. The driver spoke English. The driver was . . . Sergeant Barkley’s go-fer, what was his name? Jesus. No, Jessup. What was Jessup doing here?

  “You’re Jessup?”

  The man didn’t answer.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Rescuing you.”

  What about the other men? “What about the other men? The Ukrainians.”

  Jessup shook his head. “Can’t be done. Only you.”

  “But I’m not an asset . . .”

  “No shit. You’re a liability.”

  They drove in silence, Hargrove wasn’t sure for how long. He kept thinking of the old man with the bag. The kid on the bicycle. The missile. The Coke.

  “Good men got killed because of you,” Jessup said.

  It was true. Hargrove knew that, and he felt ashamed. “And Alie?”

  Jessup didn’t say anything for three or four blocks, until the town started to recede. Hargrove was sure the man wanted to punch him again. Was it the ambushed men
? The botched mission? Or was it him? Was he asking the wrong questions? Was Alie dead?

  “Your girlfriend left you fifteen minutes ago,” Jessup said.

  CHAPTER 35

  “It’s a go,” I said into my headset, as I watched Maltov walk away from the club. I had hoped the payment would work. Truly, it was the best option. But luck wasn’t on our side. At least we had given them a chance.

  I started humming Verdi’s Requiem as I moved into position. It was an instinct, a desire to find something that calmed me. For some guys, it was heavy metal. For others, the Lord’s Prayer. For me, today, it was the terrifying “Dies Irae” from Verdi’s death mass, a work that defined the relationship between man and his mortality, and thus his maker. This music, like so many classical works from my violin playing days, was etched into my soul. It made me feel like death incarnate.

  I lifted my SCAR rifle and prepared to run. On the eighth note, the garbage truck accelerated past Maltov, who was a block from the club and still walking away, and then past my position in the alley, one of Maltov’s boys at the wheel. The guards had their eyes on Maltov; by the time they realized the garbage truck wasn’t stopping, it was too late. Twelve seconds into the Requiem, the truck smashed the club like a battering ram, collapsing half the front wall.

  We were shock and awe before the dust could settle, throwing flashbangs and smoke grenades of various colors as we poured into the breech. Charro pounded a guard in the head, Boon high-kicked the second in the solar plexus, and we leapt inside as the music frenzied at thirty seconds, our gas masks on and laser scopes dancing in the smoke. Pop. Pop. Pop. I could hear precision shooting, incapacitating the guards.

  I looked for the black tracksuit, my laser scope flashing through the smoke, the violent music in my head focusing my mind. I found the Russian on his back behind an overturned table and put a bullet in his shoulder, close enough that the muzzle flash would sear. I stomped his shoulder, snapping his clavicle, and he shrieked in pain. Killing the leader would incite the pack; hearing him screaming in pain would terrify them. I dropped a playing card on his chest. The King of Hearts. It didn’t mean anything; it was just meant to confuse. And it was some badass shit.

  “Nastupnoho razu,” I said. Next time. The only two words I knew in Ukrainian, taught to me by Sirko an hour ago.

  I stepped past the Russian. The smoke was thick, the music in my head winding down. It was time to go. I looked for my team, found them, and fired one more shot at a bodyguard moving in the smoke. Then I was in the back hallway and out the back door and running down the street, following my evac route.

  Two minutes, and everything was finished. Death had passed, the shadow moving on. The entire team was at the rally point, safe and accounted for. I nodded to Miles; he nodded back. We moved out in formation, silently, down the alley and out of sight, and before anyone could figure out what had happened, we were gone.

  CHAPTER 36

  Winters picked up the phone. “Yes,” he said.

  It was Wolcott. It was 1000 EST, so Wolcott was in. That was a rule at Apollo: Wolcott was always in. “It’s getting ragged,” Wolcott said. “Extracurricular activity a few blocks south.”

  “Is everything on schedule?”

  “For now.”

  “Let me know.”

  Winters hung up. That was another rule of the company. Winters hung up whenever he felt like it.

  1500 London time, two hours until the meeting, he thought, instinctively straightening his tie, cobalt blue with yellow parachutes, in honor of this club. He had flown overnight from New York to London, five hours’ time difference, and he was feeling the lack of adequate rest. He should be napping. But he couldn’t sleep, not with this much on the line, so he had fallen back on his familiar routine, and that meant a drink at the Special Forces Club.

  There was a time when gaining admittance to this redbrick row house on a quiet street in central London was an honor. It was the social hub of the international mercenary community, and at that time, he had enjoyed the exclusivity. The history. Now he could see how shabby it was: threadbare furniture, a stain on the carpet. Imperial decrepitude.

  He looked up. There on the wall, staring down from his portrait, was Sir David Stirling, the father of them all. The founder of the SAS in 1941 and, more important, Watchguard, the first modern mercenary company. Under the portrait was the SAS motto: “Who Dares Wins.” It was catchy, but he preferred the photo in the entry lobby of Churchill giving his famous “set Europe on fire” speech. As the Navy SEALs said: “The only easy day was yesterday.”

  1800 Ukrainian time, Winters thought, counting time zones. Ten hours until the Donbas Battalion arrived. Eleven until the press junket flew in.

  Eleven hours, he thought. Eleven hours until Karpenko’s victory speech, and then he could leave this fraying place behind. For a higher place. A more powerful place. Or maybe he should say, a deeper state.

  CHAPTER 37

  It wasn’t hard to find Kramatorsk, since it was only about twenty kilometers from the little town with the police station. Alie had expected roadblocks and soldiers, but the road was empty, the farmland punctured by two rusty factories with grasping pipes and defiant smokestacks, like south Alabama without the mosquitos. Actually, she wasn’t sure about the mosquitos.

  She rubbed her temples, fighting the headache. She felt cotton in her mouth, and she wondered about the last time she’d eaten. Early morning at the elementary school, she remembered, long before Hargrove had gone cowboy in the park. He was a good guy. Smart. A true believer. He wanted to work his way up in his country’s service: recruit spies, defeat enemies, and defend the flag in the pat way history books and novels portrayed.

  But he was impatient, as young men often are. He wanted to be Bill Donovan, the legendary head of the OSS during World War II, but act like Tom Locke, the mercenary, because he thought Locke was changing the world. Maybe he is, Alie thought, although she wasn’t so sure.

  To be like Locke, though, you had to understand where he came from. You had to know the scars, the bullet hole in the back of his left shoulder and the cut across his ribs, and all those fucked-up places in his soul. Hargrove was too fresh and innocent. His only scar was the tooth he’d chipped doing a keg stand in college, and even that had been immaculately repaired.

  She hated leaving him behind. It felt like Locke and innocent Alie in Burundi, with the roles reversed. But she knew that wasn’t true. She’d see Hargrove again, probably tonight, after he’d gotten his cowboy fix and rejoined the main body of the Donbas Battalion.

  She could have waited with the milita for whatever was coming. She could have found Locke that way, she was sure of it. But she had a feeling the militiamen were on the outside of whatever was really happening here, and she wanted to be inside. She wanted to find Locke before the action went down. It was the only way to get the real story, and that was what she was here for, right?

  Maybe she was impatient, too. Maybe she should have waited. After all, Hargrove knew where Locke was. He had him triangulated to within a hundred meters. But he had refused to tell her the location, even on their long drive together. Maybe Hargrove suspected that, with enough information, Alie would take the car and run.

  Funny, because she didn’t realize that herself, until it was already done.

  She pulled into a bar. Bars were a good place to collect information, but this one was mostly empty, even at 5:30 on a Friday afternoon. It was tidy, with strings of yellow flags advertising Obolon, a local beer. There was an unused Obolon dartboard, and two pensioners drinking out of Obolon glasses. The bartender cheerfully wiped a spot with an Obolon towel, chatting in rapid Ukrainian, but his smile didn’t diminish the depression that hung over the place.

  She ordered a pint of Obolon with a horilka back. When in Ukraine, drink as the locals drink. She drank. The bartender had lost his enthusiasm when he realized she didn’t speak Ukrainian, but she called him over for a second round.

  “Food?” she
said, miming the act of eating.

  The bartender pointed to a display of Lay’s potato chips.

  “Ukrainian?” She moved her hands like she was holding an assault rifle. “Militia?”

  He didn’t understand. Some people, when they don’t know a language, don’t even try. The formerly cheerful bartender was one of them.

  She made the motion of a gun again. “Kiev?”

  He shook his head. “Donetsk.”

  She showed him the picture of Locke on her phone, taken in the Kiev hotel bar two days ago.

  “American?” she said, motioning to ask if he had seen him.

  The bartender shook his head no.

  Alie drank her second round of local beer and liquor and ate the bag of chips. She left hryvnias on the counter along with her contact information—in case he saw “the Americain”—and got back in her car.

  She drove, trusting her instincts. Kramatorsk was a midsize city of five-story apartment blocks, but off to the west she could see larger apartments, and off to the east, a bristling black factory. The train station bridge, crossing ten tracks and several abandoned red and green engines, afforded a perfect view of the smoking colossus. No pedestrians, the town was quiet, the billowing smoke the closest thing to a social life.

  Beyond the train station, the pavement was scorched and windows blown out. At the river, she turned north. The trees were yellow and white, the green grass broken up with black mud. Monet would have loved the waterlillies, but Alie could see slag in their tendrils. She imagined the fish, nibbling at the corners of plastic bottles. The river made her sad for the people who lived here, although she couldn’t say why, it just made her feel like nothing would change, like this would go on and on until it was forgotten. But the white church with the gold metal onion domes, the one she caught only in glimpses—that was lovely.