by Sean McFate
I took back the stick. “Object is to catch all men inside, so we maintain cover through the pipes to here.” I pointed. “It’s cover, but it’s also insurance. Spetsnaz aren’t stupid enough to shoot at us in the pipes.” I hope.
The team nodded. Incineration would be excruciating, but instantaneous.
“If we mistime, and there’s a patrol, we hunker down in the shadow. Whoever is closest, take them out. Silently. Assume one Spetsnaz on deck at the control building, so hug the dark.”
“The drone’s noise may alert them. I’ll park it here,” Boon said, pointing to the center of the maze of pipes. “Once the op is finished, I . . . or someone else,” Boon said calmly, at peace with the idea that he might be killed tonight, “can fly it out before the workers arrive.”
I could feel it now, like I always could at some point during the briefing. I could see the movement in my mind, and I was walking the steps, picturing myself there. The adrenaline was pumping, but I knew how to control that. Movement to contact would take seven to eight minutes, the same length as “Mars: The Bringer of War” from Holst’s symphonic odyssey The Planets. I could already hear the rhythmic beat of the music, its trajectory toward total obliteration. By the time we were on the ground, it would be an inferno in my mind.
“We split into three teams,” Miles said, pointing at the control building with the stick. “Jacobsen and Reynolds provide overwatch. Sniper anything that moves. If shit gets bad, use the M90 rocket launchers.” We had five, tough enough to kill tanks and blast through walls, but we could realistically only carry two. “Civilian collateral damage is authorized but discouraged. And don’t forget the drone. We’ll rig a block of C-4 to it, as a backup kamikaze, if the shit gets thick.”
Everyone nodded. They were feeling it, too.
“Wildman and I will breach the building’s east door,” Miles said. This was the most dangerous part. Close-quarters combat was the trench warfare of the modern world. But Wildman held up his det cord and duct tape with a grin, like it was a gift, and this mission was Christmas morning.
“Boon and Charro, take the west door. I’ll synchronize detonation over comms. I leave it up to each team how you stack and sector for room clearance. Watch your corners, and clear room by room. Hit tangos, spare civvies, and don’t bother with sensitive site exploitation. This is a snatch-and-grab, with prejudice.”
“Nonlethal takedowns?” Boon asked.
Easy for him, I thought. Boon was fast as a cat and could break black belts like he was swatting mosquitos. He was so quiet, they usually didn’t know he was there.
Me? No so much. Not anymore.
Miles nodded. “Nonlethal if possible, but no unnecessary risks. Locke and Sirko will be backup . . .”
Wildman and Charro fidgeted. Sirko wasn’t one of us; they weren’t comfortable with an outsider. I could see Maltov scowl, and Sirko smirk. The enforcer wanted to be there, but he was going to man the radio with Greenlees back here in the warehouse.
I guess you shouldn’t have manhandled Alie, I told him telepathically.
“Sirko and Locke will be second in the east door,” Miles said, raising his voice to drown out any objections, “providing firepower where needed. Sirko will be our interpreter. You can talk to each other, but only Sirko talks to the prisoners.”
“Remember the mission,” I said. “The more live Russian special operators Karpenko can parade before the cameras in flex-cuffs, the better.”
“What do I do?” Karpenko asked. He was no doubt thinking of his moment standing in front of the world, imagining himself there, the impending king of Ukraine. It always seemed so clean and easy on the sandtable.
“We’ll call Greenlees when the facility is secure. You walk down with Maltov and his men and scale the wall. If this all goes down right,” I said, turning back to the team, “we lock it down in eight minutes, and hold the objective until the Donbas Battalion arrives, expected 0600. The press birds arrive at 0700.”
More than two hours inside. It was a risk, especially in an active war zone.
“And if it goes sideways?” Jacobsen asked.
I pointed to the fish truck in the corner of the warehouse. Maltov’s men had welded scraps of steel to its side for protection, like something from Mad Max, and loaded it with three drums of gasoline wired to a few kilos of C-4 and a blasting cap.
“Maltov drives the truck,” I said, “and blows the front gate. We improvise from there.”
Wildman smiled. I hadn’t noticed before that he was missing teeth. “Now you’re talking, boss,” he said.
CHAPTER 48
It took another ten minutes to finish the briefing—almost fifteen minutes total—but only because Maltov and Karpenko had to be walked through their part three times, even though it was straightforward.
If I call Greenlees and say “green,” walk down and act like you just kicked Russian ass.
If I say “red,” drive the fish truck to the front entry gate of the facility as fast as you fucking can. Park it there. Light the fuse. Run.
No shooting. That was the hard part for Maltov to understand: that the last thing I wanted was a Ukrainian cowboy running into a gas facility with guns blazing. That was why the Russians had sent Spetsnaz, their best-trained troops. That was why Winters was sending a Tier One team before the militia arrived.
“And if the Russians send reinforcements?” Jacobsen asked.
A good question, and a distinct possibility, given that the camera crews weren’t scheduled to arrive until 0700 and would probably be late.
“If the Russians roll in, I call the boss,” I said, meaning Winters. “I’ll see how far he wants to take this.”
“And if that doesn’t work, we blow the place up,” Wildman exclaimed, clearly liking the idea. Thank God Apollo provided a place for men like Wildman. Thank God he was here to cover my ass. But there was no way I was blowing the place up. I’d have rather run than take that chance.
“It’s 0213 zulu time,” I said. Shit, it was late. “Rack out. We’re up at 0415 to sanitize this place, and then move out. Let’s hit it.”
The team dispersed. They had two hours for last preparations and personal rituals before sleep: pray in the case of Charro, meditate in the case of Boon, listen to music in my case, sculpt bunny rabbits out of C-4, if you were a certain Welsh ex-SAS son of a bitch.
I kicked the sand table apart, making sure that no one could figure out later what had been planned here. I piled the few things we would leave behind on top—rations, spent batteries, ammo crates, excess equipment. One of Maltov’s men would burn it with white phosphorus after the op was done. Take only the objective; leave nothing behind, not even footprints. That was our mission, every time.
I needed rack, but instead of heading to my sleeping bag, I found myself drifting to the far corner, where the Ukrainians were holding Alie. She was asleep near a crate of smoke grenades, and even from across the warehouse I could see the curve of her neck, the soft golden skin of her cheek.
I heard angry voices and turned toward them. Maltov was shoving the pilot, who was gesturing toward Boon, who was siphoning helicopter fuel into one of the truck’s barrel bombs. Smart. Aircraft fuel was extremely explosive.
When I turned back, Alie was watching me. I expected her to get up, the better to confront me, but she only pushed herself to a seated position as I approached. Behind me, the loud Ukrainian curses crescendoed, until they turned into a single voice. It sounded like the pilot pleading.
“Hello again, Alie,” I said, as a scream ripped through the warehouse. Someone had lost a finger.
“Asshole,” she muttered to me, without her previous conviction.
“How do you like Karpenko?”
“I like him, of course,” she said wearily. “He’s a rich man. That’s how rich men get rich, by being smooth. Telling you what you want to hear. It’s called manipulation.” She paused. “He seems to have taken a genuine shine to you, though.”
I shrugged. “
Nobody’s perfect.”
“You saved his children. Or at least that’s what he thinks. He told me he doesn’t know where they are.”
“They’re safe,” I said, but I could tell she wasn’t convinced. Who did she think I was working for? The mafia? “I don’t know where they are, but I know who they are with. They are safe.”
“I guess you have to think that way . . .”
She trailed off. She was tired. Her hand was shaking. I noticed Karpenko’s label-less bottle of booze from Poltava, now empty. Perhaps they had been toasting better times. But the better times were in the past, and all we had was right now.
“We’re leaving before dawn. You’re staying here with Greenlees. It will be your job to get yourself to . . . wherever it is you want to go.” I felt bad for her, and I felt lost, although I wasn’t sure why. Perhaps because, after this was over, I didn’t have anywhere else I wanted to be. “You can take the bird, but I wouldn’t advise it. There are antiaircraft batteries between here and . . . everywhere. And the pilot . . . I think he’s lost some blood.”
She didn’t question me on that.
“I’d take the Škoda, since it won’t attract attention. Drive with Greenlees back to Kiev. I can’t guarantee your safety, but it’s the best I can offer.”
I stopped. I was tired. I knew she would write about what had happened here, but I also knew it wouldn’t matter. We had her cell phone, so there were no photographs, and no one would corroborate what she’d seen. It would just be more rumors from the front lines, on an Internet already swimming with them. Worse things could happen. People were “disappeared” in war zones everyday.
“You shouldn’t have come,” I said, more tenderly than I expected.
She looked up at me. She was fierce, and then she wasn’t.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “For . . . you know.”
She wouldn’t take her eyes off mine, so I was the one who stood up and turned away, giving her a last small victory. It was the least I could do.
“Tom,” she said after I’d taken a few steps, causing me to turn. She was smaller than I had ever seen her before, but she was still everything I wanted . . . in some other life. “Don’t leave me here.”
Bam. A frag grenade to my heart.
“You can’t come with me,” I said.
She didn’t argue, so I turned around, started walking, and didn’t look back. What else could I have said? She couldn’t break me. I was far too hard for that, no matter how much she meant to me. I needed this mission to work, and she had to know that. I needed to do it right, so that everyone would walk away alive—including Alie.
Karpenko caught up with me a minute later, as I was pulling my sleeping bag over me like a blanket. He pulled up an ammo crate and lit one of his blue Dunhills. He crossed his legs, so that his $5,000 shoes were hovering near my face. I knew he had worked on this pose, maybe for years. It was his signature move: dominant indifference.
“I’ll take care of her,” he said. “I’m going to take her with me.”
He was the client. Fine.
“I’ve told her my story. I want her to write it.”
“Leave me out of it. And the team.”
“She knows. This was Ukrainian, purely Ukrainian. It is better for both of us that way. Especially me.”
He smoked his cigarette slowly. He was the only man in the warehouse who still looked clean. Never let them see you sweat.
“What is your father like?” he said.
“My father was Miniver Cheevy,” I said. Cheevy was a character in a poem I’d read in sixth grade, a hopeless romantic who dreamed about the past.
“He was a minister,” Karpenko said, nodding, as if that explained something.
My father was a drunk and an amateur historian, a lover of the doomed romance of the Confederate cause, not slavery but chivalry, for which our ancestors fled south across the Maryland border to fight with the Army of Virginia. He always wished he’d been born then, he said, but if he had, he’d just have pined for some other, earlier cause. The time period didn’t matter. You were either a man of action or you weren’t. Or as his hero Teddy Roosevelt once said, a “man in the arena,” or a nobody. That was why he pushed me, in his absentee-father, show-up-once-every-six-months way, into military service. Or maybe I’d done it to show him I wasn’t going to be the loser he’d always been.
“He named you Thomas after the prophet?” Karpenko mused, still misunderstanding.
Thomas was a disciple, and a doubter, not a prophet.
“He named me Jubal, after an American Confederate general” and patron saint of lost causes. “Thomas is my middle name.”
Karpenko puffed his Dunhill and recrossed his legs. “You have no doubt heard about my father,” he said. I hadn’t. “How I came back from college in Kiev after the Soviet Union collapsed and liberated the steel plant were my father worked. How he came out, covered in slag, and I handed him a check like all the other men, six months of unpaid wages. How we hugged, the first time since I was a boy. And then every worker hugged me, a long line of dirty men, crying as they poured out of that hole.”
“Yeah, something like that,” I lied. I had never heard a word about his past.
“It isn’t true,” he said, flicking away his butt. “It is propaganda. I don’t know who started it, maybe me, I honestly can’t remember.”
He lit another cigarette. It was his way of creating drama. Or calming his nerves.
“My father died when I was eight, soon after the Russians moved him to the steel plants in Poltava. It was a promotion, perhaps. Or a punishment. He may have been a nationalist. We were ethnic Cossacks, and the Soviets didn’t trust us. I hated the Russians after that, because my father never recovered. He only lived six months. He was sick, and the foreman never allowed him to go to hospital, even on the day he died.”
I thought of what Alie had said, about Karpenko being smooth, about his ability to manipulate you into liking him. I admit it. I liked him.
“I want my son to know me,” he said, blowing a big lungful of smoke. “I want him to understand that I did this for my country. For our country, because Ukraine is his, too. Is that too much to ask?”
I didn’t know. I didn’t have a son. “Your children are safe,” I said, eyes closed.
“Yes, but I am not.”
I was tired. I had a mission to run in less than two hours, and time was ticking down. Besides, he wasn’t asking if he should risk his life for his cause. He’d already made up his mind.
“You shouldn’t smoke,” I said. “Nobody smokes anymore. It will kill you.”
CHAPTER 49
They met in a restaurant, one with a bare concrete façade and burgundy curtains closed over the windows, a type very common in the East. The inside was ornate, burgundy and gold, with abundant curlicues and lurking cherubs in the old Russian style. Even in the deserted quiet of 4:45 A.M., or maybe because of it, Winters felt like he’d stepped inside a Fabergé egg.
But if the restaurant décor was delicate (and it was), their contact seemed designed to counteract it. The Russian sat heavily in the back corner of a back room as if made of a thousand pounds of lead, his neck bulging over the collar of his too-small Italian suit. He was sixty, perhaps, and rough, with loose jowls and a shock of unnaturally black hair, a cigarette between fat gold-ringed fingers, a five o’clock (A.M.) shadow crusted onto his slumping face. On the table in front of him were a pack of cigarettes, a bottle of vodka, espresso in a glass cup with an ornate metal holder, and six cell phones.
I always expect Russians to look different from the stereotype, Winters thought, but they never do.
“Mr. Gorelov,” Everly said, extending his hand.
Winters had studied Putin’s inner circle, and a few outer ones too, but he’d never heard the name. He didn’t like that. It put him on shaky ground. Who was this man?
“This better be good,” Gorelov grumped. Behind him, a couple of bodyguards were frowning. Winters had counted
eight in the restaurant, all armed, smoking on the job.
“I don’t know if it’s good,” Everly said. “But it’s important.”
“I hope this isn’t about the transfer agreements again,” Gorelov grumbled. No formalities, Winters noted. And no espresso for his guests.
“Any change in your position?”
“No change.”
“Have you discussed it with your superiors?”
“I have no superiors,” Gorelov said.
“Of course,” Everly replied, dipping his nonexistent chin. “But I assume the right people know of our proposition. Our clients expect . . .”
“I don’t give a damn about your clients,” Gorelov said, burying his head in his coffee. He was stonewalling. Winters wondered if it was personal, or personality. About 110 Russians owned 40 percent of the country’s wealth. Winters suspected more than a few were Everly’s clients, and Gorelov’s enemies. Stereotypes suggested that Russians were men of titanic grudges.
“So who is he?” Gorelov sniffed, jerking his head.
“This is Mr. Winters.”
“Pleased to meet you,” Winters said, extending his hand.
The Russian drank vodka from a short glass. He looked anything but pleased. “An American,” he said.
“An expert on Ukraine,” Everly replied, only slightly exaggerating.
Gorelov turned toward him for the first time, his eyes bloodshot. “You have something for me?” he asked in gruff, accented English. He was a man, Winters could tell, who liked to dominate the conversation.
“I have an opportunity,” Winters shrugged, almost as if he regretted it, “created by you.” There was no point in being coy.
“Let me guess. You think you can use Little Russia for your advantage.” A derogatory Czarist term for Ukraine, meant to irritate him.
“We must protect Western interests,” Winters said.
“And expand them, because you are takers. But Ukraine is ours, Mr. Winters. It always has been, and it always will be. When the czars ruled, Ukraine was a province, just like your California. When the Soviets came to power, they marched through Kiev, just like Moscow. Ukraine means ‘meadow’ in Russian—did you know that?—because they grow our grain. They feed our mothers. They nourish our factories with coal. They speak our language, with an atrocious accent, yes. They are not our most sophisticated region, but they are ours.”