by Sean McFate
The cell phone rang again.
“Do you even know what the trap is?” Winters said, placing his hand over Gorelov’s phone so that he couldn’t answer. He knew Gorelov didn’t. The Russian had no idea what a man on the cusp of his dream was capable of. Time to push this confrontation to its conclusion and see what happened.
“Bring too few men, and I’ll capture them, parade them on camera, and show the world who you really are,” Winters said. “Bring too many, so many that the world media will see without a doubt that the Russian army is attacking a Ukrainian natural gas station . . . and I will blow it up.”
Everly’s chin disappeared entirely, like a turtle retreating into its shell. Gorelov looked stunned.
“That’s right,” Winters said, nodding, as he saw the light coming on in Gorelov’s weary eyes. “The big bang.”
“You’re going to blow up a transfer station.”
“And your invasion will be blamed.”
“But that would cripple the European economy . . .”
“And make the world realize what a threat you are,” Winters said. “Isn’t that what you fear? Not that this little invasion of yours blows up in your face, but that it blows up in Western Europe’s face, in a way they can’t ignore.”
Gorelov didn’t know what to say. Was this man, this Mr. Winters, really crazy enough to escalate the confrontation between Russia and the West into outright war?
“That’s mutually assured economic destruction,” he muttered, buying time.
“The West can weather it,” Winters shrugged. “But you can’t, not with an energy-dependent economy.”
“The Russians will do what they must,” Gorelov said. “They always do.”
“No Yuri,” Winters replied calmly, using Gorelov’s first name for the first time. “I’m afraid you misunderstood me. When I said ‘you,’ I didn’t mean Russia, although that certainly applies. I meant you, Yuri, the man who has been waking up half of Putin’s senior advisors at dawn to tell them how badly you’re mishandling this situation. When they see this story fire-hosed across international media, and they realize that you knew and could have stopped it . . .”
Three or four of the Russian’s cell phones were ringing, as they had been for the last twenty minutes. Now Winters’s phone joined in again, and Gorelov glanced at it, almost with dread.
“Pick up your phone,” Winters whispered, ignoring his own call. “Figure it out. But remember: I don’t need a military victory to defeat you. All I need is . . . testicular fortitude.”
“These men,” Gorelov said, nodding his fat jowls toward Winters’s ringing phone. “They must be fanatics, to blow themselves up for this crazy plan.”
“Oh Yuri,” Winters chortled, shaking his head. “I said the assault and explosion would be linked, in the media, in the eyes of politicians and Deep State players around the world. I never said they’d happen at the same transfer station.”
Winters felt a hand on his arm, pulling him gently backward, and Everly leaned forward into his line of sight for the first time.
“You can’t stop him, Yuri,” the banker said calmly. “I think you see that now.”
Gorelov looked beaten, slumped into his Italian suit, a cigarette turning to ashes in his fist.
“Yuri . . .” Everly said, getting him to focus. “Yuri . . . don’t you think it’s time we made a deal?”
CHAPTER 55
Somewhere out there, eight thousand feet beyond the clouds, in the cold upper reaches of the atmosphere, the drone was cruising on its appointed path. It was nothing more than a cold machine, invisible to eyes and instruments, transporting a large amount of explosives inside its protective shell.
There were other ways to destroy a natural gas transfer station. You could send a Tier One team, or a sniper with an incendiary round, but odds of human error were higher and tracks were harder to cover. You could destroy it with a cyberattack without leaving your command center, but every cyberaction was traceable, no matter how much you covered your tracks.
That was why when Apollo Outcomes wanted to send a confidential message, it sent a man to deliver it verbally, even when that meant a trip halfway around the world. When that wasn’t an option, for whatever reason, the company sent a fax. The fax system was so out of date that no one bothered to monitor it, and so low-tech it was untraceable after the fact.
It was the same thinking that made the kamikaze drone work. Who would suspect? Who would be able to trace it? The drone was an emotionless piece of equipment with no cybertrail, designed to incinerate on impact, and that made it the perfect weapon to set off a chain reaction that would be felt around the world.
The Russians were prepared for atom bombs. Brad Winters had thrown a stone.
CHAPTER 56
I almost threw the sat phone into the undergrowth. Winters was supposed to answer. Winters always answered. That was the bare minimum of his guarantee: I risk my life, he answers the phone. Why would he give me the number, if he wasn’t going to answer the phone?
I stared at the forest, frustrated and betrayed. We were in a thicket of bushes, half a klick from the warehouse, the trees providing some cover and concealment, even as the deep purple sky made dark spikes of the branches and leaves. The mission was a kite. I knew that. This was how kites worked. I knew that, too. But this wasn’t how our kite was supposed to turn out. Jimmy Miles wasn’t supposed to bleed out in a scrubby forest in Eastern Europe. Jimmy was supposed to die in a bar fight in Juba, or on the African savannah wrestling lions, or behind a Vulcan machine gun, mowing down a legion of machete-wielding fanatics. Or jumping on a grenade to save his team. Or with a wife, goddammit, one of those after-sex heart attacks that we always joked about, what a way to go. Not that either of us had a wife, but still . . .
I pushed past Karpenko, who was quietly sitting on his heels, and examined Miles’s side with my Maglite. The bandages were soaked through, and blood was pulsing from his artery. But weakly. Too weakly. I shone my light on his face. His eyelids fluttered involuntarily, but his eyes didn’t open. He was alive, but he wasn’t going to make it, and it was going to be a painful death. It might take an hour, but out here, without an evac, it was death, guaranteed.
I started walking, pulling Miles behind me on the litter, Boon moving ahead to walk point and Hargrove leaning on Alie in the rear. Hargrove murmured, every now and then, but otherwise, no one made a sound.
I stopped twenty minutes later on the edge of a potato field a half klick north of our intended route. It was almost sunrise, the first blue tinge on the horizon, and the world was quiet. Nobody was following; we’d left the firefight behind. Alie was behind me in the trees. Hargrove was in the shadows. But this was our hour, Jimmy’s and mine. We’d watched the sun come up on dozens of successful missions. We’d smoked a hundred cigars in tight-lipped triumph. We’d told a million stories of these mornings over bourbon, while I played the “Toreador” aria, the macho bullfighter’s song from Bizet’s opera Carmen, to celebrate being alive—I mean really alive, not lives of quiet desperation—for another day.
But not today.
I signaled to Alie. She nodded. She understood that this was Miles’s last stop, and she knew I wanted to be alone. She rounded up the company and moved off into the morning. I waited until I couldn’t hear anything but Jimmy’s shallow breathing, and the hundred thousand legs crawling out of the forest, coming for Jimmy, coming for all of us.
I remembered the way my grandfather signaled for me to come closer. He was ninety-eight, laid up in a hospital bed with a broken hip. He whispered, “I’m done.” I helped him pull the oxygen tube out of his nose, because he was too weak to remove it on his own. He died that night.
How do you kill a friend?
We were out of morphine, so I did it with my bare hands on his neck, in the classic style, choking him out.
Then I knelt beside him, not wanting to wipe the blood off my hands. I unbuttoned his shirt pocket. Jimmy always carried a heavy meta
l ring; he’d picked it up on a patrol in Bosnia, a lifetime ago. It was industrial, made for some broken off bolt-hole, but Jimmy used it to rap skulls and open beer bottles. The perfect piece for the perfect job, he’d say, but now there were no more skulls to rap. Nobody would ever use that brewing equipment in his storage locker outside Phoenix. They’d just, some day soon, stop paying the rent.
“Vive la mort! Vive la guerre! Vive le sacré mercenaire!” I whispered over his body. The mercenary’s battle cry, or maybe his lament.
I put the metal ring in my pocket. Then I pulled the pin on the white phosphorous grenade and gently placed it on Jimmy’s chest. A funeral pyre, the Viking way. The enemy would see it from a kilometer away, especially in this dim light, but by the time they got here, if they got here, we’d be gone, and so would Jimmy Miles.
This wasn’t supposed to matter. None of it. None of us. That was how we did this job, by believing we would beat the odds. I’d seen a thousand men die violent deaths, many at my own hand. I shot a man in the head in Nigeria because he wouldn’t sell land to an oil company, and I couldn’t remember his face. Alie was right. I’d watched a village full of women and children gunned down from the back of Toyota trucks for sport, the gunners laughing and counting kills, something I’d sworn I’d never do again after the massacre in Srebrenca. I had burned four good mercs and a retiree less than an hour ago, and left three Ukrainian allies dead in the dirt, and who was going to remember them, or know what happened to them, or care? We were walking tombs of unknown soldiers, trying to make a difference, trying to do some good in the world.
By the time I reached the others, the rim of the earth was blue. They were standing in shadow, in a canebrake, looking out on a field of cow manure and crops.
“Charlie mike,” I told the team, or whatever was left of it. “Let’s move. We have a mission to complete.”
It would have been what Miles wanted, because he was a soldier. But more important, I didn’t know what else to do.
CHAPTER 57
Brad Winters listened closely, as Everly and Gorelov hammered out their deal, sometimes in Russian, other times in English. Everly’s first concern seemed to be transfers from Bank Rossiya, Putin’s bank. Bank Rossiya had gone from $1 million in assets in the 1990s to more than $100 billion in 2011 by serving the needs of the Russian Deep State. Now it was a pariah institution, locked out of SWIFT, the international banking consortium, by sanctions imposed after Russia’s annexation of Crimea two months ago. Everly wasn’t trying to skirt those sanctions, not explicitly, but the Londoners clearly had clients and projects caught up in the mess, and they needed Gorelov’s reluctant help to free them.
Half the conversation—the half in Russian—went over Winters’s head. The other half mostly bored him. He was more intent on watching the men and understanding their relationship. When he and Everly had arrived, Gorelov was arrogantly dismissive, the man in control. Even now, he appeared the same, gruffly rebuffing his more urbane counterpart between slugs of vodka, rejecting aspects of every request.
But Winters could see the shift in power. He could tell that in his stiff, unflustered way, Everly was a bar brawler, and he was pounding the Russian into submission, piece by piece. He could see it in the way Gorelov shifted in his chair, in his reluctance to make the phone calls required to seal certain deals, in the way he grimaced at odd moments like acid reflux was tearing his insides apart.
Ukraine was, in the end, little more than incremental business opportunities. Everly was less concerned with the fate of the country, Winters soon realized, than in making sure that current agreements—especially for the big energy companies, but for other clients, too—were honored no matter what happened in Kiev. Winters had offered the London bankers the chance to change Eastern Europe; they had chosen the status quo.
He daydreamed, briefly, about upending the relationship. During one long exchange in Russian, he even pictured the drone, floating downward out of the heavens, and then accelerating into the massive chamber where natural gas was compressed into liquid for concentrated delivery, the C-4 ripping the drone’s skin apart like so many treaties and alliances and exploding it into a million worthless burned-out shards.
But Brad Winters was practical. He had seen this coming when the Indian banker called him on the private jet and told him his destination was Saint Petersburg. So when Everly and Gorelov offered him minor shale oil fields on the edge of Eastern Ukraine and free passage to operate, he accepted gracefully and then said, “And Azerbaijan.”
Gorelov scoffed. “That’s not our country.”
Winters ignored the obvious lie. “I’m not talking ownership of the oil fields. I’m talking about a partnership, with one of your smaller national subsidiaries. My people will explore and extract the oil, and your people will ship it.”
“It’s a dangerous region, an unstable investment.”
“I’ll build a private military base, for the protection of your shipping lines, and for other work in the region. I’ll keep you appraised of our activities, of course, and rest assured, you will find our services profitable.”
Gorelov squinted.
“And Georgia and Armenia, too,” Winters said, offhandedly, although he was not going to walk away without a piece of all three. “If we are going to be working together in the region, we might as well dominate it, right, Yuri?”
Those three countries formed the bottleneck between Russia and Southwest Asia. They had been a battleground between Deep States, dating back to the “Great Game” between Russia and England for control of central Asia in the 1800s.
“The Kremlin would never agree to that,” Gorelov snapped.
“Yes they will,” Winters said, “if you explain it to them correctly. It’s better to have me inside the tent pissing out, after all, then outside pissing in.”
Gorelov stammered, but Winters held up his hand. When a man was beaten, there was no point in indulging his concerns. “I must insist,” he said. “That is my price, and it’s a onetime offer.”
He was thinking of the drone, and of Thomas Locke and his men, no doubt creeping up on the facility right now. He tapped his watch. Time is running out, Gorelov. I’m not a patient man.
“I require proof of your goodwill,” Gorelov said, squatting like a toad. He seemed to have spent the last hour sinking into his chair, as if it were mud. The air was foul with his smoky stench. “The Near East for Karpenko.”
“No.”
“And your men.”
CHAPTER 58
I lay prone on the roof of the apartment building where Wildman had planted the last camera, watching the pipeline facility through my scope. It was a clear blue morning, almost full light, and I was pinpointing heads, trying to grab that rush you feel when you have a man’s life in your hands and he doesn’t know it, but it wasn’t coming. I had been angry after Miles died, and then brokenhearted. Now I wanted to feel angry again, but I couldn’t muster it. I felt wrung out. Not just exhausted, but empty. The only thought that kept running through my head was, What am I doing here? How did it come to this?
I wasn’t surprised the Donbas Battalion didn’t show at 0600. Everything had gone to shit so far, and besides, militias were notorious for being late. By 0630, I was agitated. My body was locking down, my brain curling up on itself, my stomach wanting to vomit, except I hadn’t eaten anything but a single energy bar since Miles and I ate MREs in the warehouse twelve hours ago and talked about old times.
Then three military trucks screamed up to the facility gate, and dropped their tailgates.
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot. What the fuck?
Russian reinforcements poured out, shouting and gesturing, and my heart dropped into my boots as they covered the exit points and swarmed into the facility, fanning out in search formation. I scoped the Spetsnaz commander, and I could practically read his lips when he saluted the officer in charge. No one is here but us, sir! Of course, he was speaking Russian, so that piece was in my head. But I could read th
e signs. We’d been sold out.
If the militia had been hit, prisoners might have been captured and interrogated. Had someone, under duress, given up the location of the assault? But no one outside my team knew about the mission, except for the Apollo men with the Donbas Battalion. They wouldn’t crack. And they wouldn’t have told the Ukrainians. This mission was blacker than black.
Two minutes later, a call came in on my sat phone. I hit Talk on my earpiece, still scanning the facility through my rifle scope.
“Mission abort. What’s your sitrep?” Winters’s voice.
“Three hundred meters south southeast of the objective,” I said, giving him a false locale. “We ran into trouble. I called—”
“Is the client with you?”
“Affirmative.”
Winters paused, long enough for me to sight the Spetsnaz leader’s head in my crosshairs. It was a clean shot.
“Roger,” Winters said. “Make your way to the extraction point ASAP. Bird en route. Watch your fourth point of contact, and wait for the signal.”
Two seconds later, the Spetsnaz commander reached for his radio, listened, then frantically waved his men to get into one of the trucks. We have them! I imagined him saying, as I watched his lips move. The vehicle belched black smoke and lurched forward, heading east, toward the extraction point. That was the signal.
“Wilco out,” I said, ending transmission.
Brad Winters had done the worst thing any commander could do: he’d betrayed his men.
Maybe. Because he was also trying to save us. The five points of contact for landing after a parachute jump are (1) balls of feet, (2) heels of feet, (3) thighs, (4) ass, and (5) shoulder blades. So when Winters said “fourth point,” he was telling me to watch my ass, in a way that no one without jump wings would understand. Somebody outside the military had been listening, forcing him to make the call.