by Alex Shaw
‘Thank you.’
‘Joe, can you take over for a minute?’
‘Sure.’
Sara exited the bar and Joe shrugged. ‘She’s a bit … what’s the word? Agitated at the moment.’
Tate nodded; it was no skin off his nose. ‘So what would you recommend?’
Joe leaned forward and placed his index finger on an item. ‘That. It’s something I concocted myself. Seafood stew.’
Tate nodded. ‘What’s in it?’
‘Scallops, haddock, and shrimp … with a dash of chilli. It goes surprisingly well with a bottle of white wine.’
‘Sold.’
‘On the stew?’
‘On both.’
‘Great, but I thought you were drinking beer?’
‘I’m on holiday. I’ll throw caution to the wind.’ He finished the beer in two gulps.
Sara reappeared; Joe gave her a mock salute and returned to the kitchen.
‘So what do people do around here for fun on a Saturday night?’ Tate asked.
‘Go into town, drink too much and fall over, or get on their boats, drink too much and fall overboard. You want another?’
‘Nice, you should work for the Camden tourist board.’
‘I’ve had a long day,’ Sara said.
‘Tell me about it.’
‘OK, I will.’ Tate rolled his eyes, but she continued to talk. ‘My ex-boyfriend woke me up drunk at four a.m. like he has done nearly every morning for the past week. Hollering at my window and ringing my bell. Then, when he finally decided to leave, he slashed the tyres on my car, which meant I had to take a taxi to the grocery store. Then when I got back, I found out the meat supplier hadn’t made his delivery, so I had to then spend an hour calling other suppliers to be able to serve my guests this evening.’
‘I’m sorry.’
Sara folded her arms. ‘So tell me about your day.’
‘I drove down from Bangor, and then got arrested and thrown in a cell by your very efficient Camden PD.’
‘So are you a dangerous criminal?’
He smiled. ‘A case of mistaken identity.’
Sara exchanged his old bottle for a new one. ‘I’m sorry, I’m just tired.’
‘Hey, I’m a Londoner. Anything less than a slap in the face is viewed as politeness in my local boozer.’
‘Boozer?’
‘Pub.’ Tate swigged his beer. ‘Did you get your tyres fixed?’
‘Yes. Why, were you offering to fix ’em?’
‘I was.’
‘Are you a car mechanic?’
‘No, but I can have a look.’
Joe appeared with a plate. Sara pointed across the room. ‘Take that spare table over there. I don’t encourage eating at the bar. It makes the place look messy.’
‘Fine,’ Tate said with a shrug and shifted to the table. It was nearer to the Russians.
Joe deposited a large bowl. ‘Enjoy.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Here.’ Sara placed a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc and a glass on the table.
Tate watched her walk back to the bar. There was a noise from the corner and he saw the large Russian also assessing Sara. He nudged the second Russian and said something Tate couldn’t quite make out. The older man remained silent.
Tate started to eat. He’d always liked fish and chips and, as a teenager, had a Saturday job at the local chippy. Back then some places still used newspaper to wrap the food in, well the outer layer at least. He remembered wrapping his brother’s order in page 3 of The Sun on more than one occasion to try to embarrass him. Whether he noticed the bare breasts of the page 3 girl or not he never mentioned it. Tate hadn’t been the best younger brother in the world and certainly far from the best son, but he and his brother had a strong bond. Tate took a sip of wine then continued to eat. What he was eating now shamed the simple fish and chips, and there wasn’t a mushy pea in sight.
A group entered the bar. A family. The parents appeared to be in their late fifties. Their two daughters, tall, mid to late teens. All four were dressed in matching blue hiking shirts, khaki shorts and sturdy boots. Tate noticed the big Russian obviously ogling the girls as they took a table.
‘Dad, can we order now? I’m hungry,’ one of the two girls said, from behind her iPhone.
Tate ate his meal and thought again how the world had changed since he was a kid. They hadn’t had iPads and iPhones; they’d had to make do with conning their parents out of change for the pinball machine or the pool table whenever they’d been treated to a pub lunch. He frowned; actually at the girls’ age he’d already joined the army whilst his brother had studiously studied for his A levels. Tate looked at the family again. The two kids absorbed in their screens, seemingly oblivious to where they were or who they were with, whilst the parents checked a large tourist map. Meanwhile the eyes of the smaller, older Russian continuously roved the room.
Tate finished his meal and wiped his mouth on a napkin. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the older Russian jerk, as though poked with a cattle prod, and then thrust his hand into his jacket pocket. He pulled out a mobile phone, pressed it to his ear and turned away from the room. Moments later he rose to his feet and said something to the big Russian who stood and towered over him. They exchanged a few words. The older Russian’s voice was low, almost inaudible, but Tate caught the other say in Russian, “That is why he is needed on this mission.” He slapped the older Russian on the back and they left the bar.
There was something odd about the Russian’s coded language and their behaviour, something that brought back bad memories. Tate drained his wine glass, left cash for his food and drink on the table, waited for a minute and then, on impulse, followed the men. As he stepped outside, he saw the duo reach the other side of the parking lot. They inspected a Winnebago belonging to another guest. After some finger pointing and gesticulation, they moved towards an SUV. In the dim sodium lights, Tate could just make out a second Chevrolet Tahoe, which was the same colour as his own, parked next to his.
His brain, although fuzzy from several beers and the best part of a bottle of wine, tried to remind him of something. It came to him suddenly. The police had stopped him because he was driving the same car as the suspected killer … No. Tate stopped himself. He was overthinking the situation again, chasing ghosts, allowing thoughts of his last operation in Ukraine to get the better of him. He was on holiday, and besides, neither of the Russians bore any resemblance to him.
The stench of cigarette smoke filled his nostrils and he heard a voice. ‘What are you looking at?’ Tate turned as Sara stepped out of the shadows by a rear door. ‘Are you spying on them?’
‘Just getting some fresh air.’
‘I know, I know. I’ve been meaning to quit.’ She dropped the cigarette on the tarmac and ground it into the path with her foot.
‘It’s bad for your lungs.’
‘Mine look pretty healthy, don’t ya think?’
‘I can’t give you a medical opinion.’
‘Huh.’
The pair stood in silence staring at each other for a long moment before Tate spoke. ‘I’m going to take a walk, then go to bed.’
‘A walk, at night?’
‘Yeah, I’m English; we like to walk.’
‘There’s nothing to see. At night I mean. Drop by the office in morning and I’ll give you a tourist map.’
‘OK, I will.’
‘Goodnight.’
Tate watched her step back into the inn, stood for a moment then headed for the road. The inn was a way out of town, unlike the other places he could have booked, which were both more expensive and touristy. It was a fifteen-minute walk, he imagined, straight down Elm Street to the town centre. Directly across Elm he saw ornate sweeping gates standing either side of a road that curved one way then another. He could see houses set back from the road with drives and lawns. It looked respectable, and he remembered Chief Donoghue saying he lived opposite the inn.
Tate turned and started
walking towards town. He breathed in the cooling evening air and tasted both the sea and the trees, or was he just being fanciful? He’d gone no more than a dozen steps when bright headlights appeared from the direction of town, accompanied by the whine of a turbocharged engine and the rhythmic throb of music. The lights were lost momentarily in a dip before the car crested the top. There was no pavement on his side of the road and Tate was forced to scamper backwards onto the grass as the Nissan flew past, well in excess of the speed limit.
Its exhaust banged and popped as the car slowed and came to a tyre-squealing halt and then reversed back the way it had come until it was level with him. It was a cobalt blue, highly customised Skyline straight out of a “Fast & Furious” movie. The windows were heavily tinted. The driver’s powered down. From the gloom inside a head peered out. The driver had long hair, tied back with a bandana with a back-to-front, black baseball cap crammed on top. Tate met the driver’s red-rimmed eyes. The driver glared at him, as though assessing him before he snickered, floored the gas to spin the tyres and roared towards the road directly opposite the inn, the quiet respectable road where Donoghue allegedly lived.
Even here in quiet, picturesque Maine it appeared there were idiots marking their territory, and marking the road with rubber, but he didn’t care why. Tate carried on walking, away from the smell of gasoline and rubber. He wanted to make the most of the last light of the day, but his mind wanted to go back to the Russians at the inn. Who were they and why were they there? He remembered the last time he had seen Russian military officers; it had been in Ukraine several years before, and they hadn’t been friendly.
Chapter 4
Five years ago
Mariupol, Ukraine
It had taken the seven-man team Tate was part of less than four hours to reach the Russian-occupied Ukrainian city of Novoazovsk from Mariupol. Led by a former Ukrainian Spetsnaz officer, Victor Boyko, they’d scurried across fields and taken paths through the woods but on nearing the town had been forced to use an insurgent checkpoint. Dressed in mismatched camouflage fatigues, each had a white band affixed to the left arm of their field jackets to distinguish them as fellow members of the DNR – the Russian-backed and funded Donetsk People’s Republic. Carrying gifts, they’d passed with smiles; a team returning from a successful incursion into Ukrainian-controlled territory.
But the men with Tate were not DNR, they were members of “The Shadows”. A pro-Ukrainian partisan group who had attacked Russian fuel depots, cut supply lines, eliminated key personnel, and most recently hijacked a shipment of anti-tank weapons. What the group lacked, however, was the kind of intel that only the intelligence arm of a nation state could provide, and that was where Tate entered the frame.
Tate had been seconded to a clandestine unit known only as “E Squadron”. Operated by the Secret Intelligence Service, it utilised serving members of the UK Special Forces for ad hoc missions that were deemed too sensitive for overt British government action. Tate’s ability to pass for Russian, and his tenure with the SAS, made him the first choice to lead the direct-action part of their current fully deniable mission in Ukraine. Whilst Tate’s mission controller – his SIS officer brother Simon Hunter – sat safely in the British Embassy in Kyiv, Tate was sweating at the sharp end in the heat of a Ukrainian high summer.
Satellite intelligence had confirmed that an assault group numbering in excess of thirty members of Russia’s Baltic Fleet Spetsnaz Unit were barracked in Novoazovsk. Further intel indicated that they were planning an imminent amphibious assault on Mariupol in preparation for the establishment of a “land bridge” to Russian-controlled Crimea.
Leaving the unsuspecting militants at the checkpoint behind, Boyko had led the group further into occupied territory to an abandoned dacha – a tumbledown summerhouse, where their heavy weapons had been cached in a tarpaulin-covered hole under rusting agricultural equipment. Boyko had done little to suppress his pride as he showed Tate four packing crates containing anti-tank weapons, a mixture of units of the RPG-30 Kryuk (Hook), and the RPG-28 Klyukva (Cranberry). The RPGs had been designed to defeat modern armour so, Boyko confirmed, a crumbling concrete building would prove no problem. The two-storey, blocky Soviet building had once been a local government administrative office and was the largest structure in the street.
Tate and Boyko had taken turns watching the Baltic base while the remainder of the team lay low in the woods behind the OP – the observation post. During the course of the day, there had been movement outside the target building – regular Russian troops bringing food supplies and irregular militants scrounging. Given short shrift by the professionals, the militants had wandered off complaining loudly. The weather, an oppressively hot Ukrainian summer, had made them sweat during the day but now thankfully as evening approached had dropped to a less antagonising level, and more importantly the mosquitos had drifted away. Tate scratched a bite on his arm; he’d remember to use more DEET next time. Checking his watch, he calculated that there was only one more hour of Ukrainian daylight left.
Lying prone in the ruined house, Tate studied the base through a pair of field glasses. As the heat made the dusty tarmac shimmer, he counted the number of Russian troops outside the building. Four stood around smoking and idly chatting in the shade of the entrance porch while a further two, shirtless, worked on the engine of an APC – armoured personnel carrier, which sat hood up on the grassy verge. The relaxed posture of the men belied their identity and purpose. These were members of the Baltic Fleet Spetsnaz unit, and they were preparing for combat. Like Tate, they were Special Ops operators who knew the risks associated with their jobs; unlike Tate they were about to be tasked with taking by force a friendly city. Tate had no qualms in taking them out if it meant safeguarding the residents of Mariupol.
The mission was black, deniable. If Tate became compromised, neither the SIS nor the Ukrainian government would be coming to his rescue. And any scent of British involvement would cause an international incident. Tate knew if captured, he would have to rely on his Russian language skills to talk his way out; but up against Russian Spetsnaz, there was little chance of this. Tate wasn’t planning on messing up; neither were the men around him. The Shadows consisted of not only Ukrainians, but also Georgians with previous experience of Russia’s aggression, Chechens no longer loyal to Kadyrov, Poles and Lithuanians, wanting to protect their cousins, and Russians who did not believe the Kremlin’s lies. The Shadows were, in effect, a “Ukrainian Foreign Legion”.
Tate took a momentary breather to wipe his face when a sound reached his ears – distant, amorphous, and becoming louder. Like approaching thunder but regular, repetitive, mechanical, manmade. A low rumble, heavy engines.
‘Armoured vehicles!’ Boyko confirmed, appearing at Tate’s shoulder. Tate hoped it was APCs rather than anything heavier. Boyko read his mind. ‘Our rockets should be able to penetrate their plates. Have no worries.’
‘Train, fight easy,’ Tate said.
‘Is that a motto of yours?’
‘I borrowed it from General Alexander Suvorov.’
‘For a Russian he was a wise man.’
‘He’s not here – he must be.’ Tate adjusted his field glasses to point at the far end of the street. He saw a dust cloud, and then the unmistakable shape of a Russian BMP-2 emerged. It was a light-armoured vehicle, faster than a tank and suited to urban warfare. Fitted with a 30mm auto cannon, a coaxial 7.62mm PKT machine gun, and an ATGM missile launcher; it was a deadly piece of hardware. ‘And here comes the worst.’
A note of worry sounded in the Ukrainian’s voice. ‘Your intelligence stated it would be no more than two vehicles.’
‘Yep, and here we have an armoured column.’ Tate started to count. The first two vehicles were BMP-2s. The next four were T-80 battle tanks, a model Russia had officially mothballed in December 2013 and in amongst these were two soft-sided green Kamaz military trucks.
‘This is not good,’ Boyko murmured. ‘Do you think this will be
part of the assault?’
‘Not the first wave; that’ll use guile, not strength – hence the Spetsnaz. The armour will roll in later.’
The column became ominously larger as it grew nearer. The two BMP-2s came to a halt over in front of the APC as the tanks and trucks carried on past the OP and deeper into the city.
‘You were right, I think,’ the Ukrainian said, slapping Tate on the back.
‘True, but what was in those trucks?’
‘I do not care – it did not stop here.’
Tate let out a sigh of relief; although they were armed with the correct weapons to defeat battle tanks, it would not be possible to knock one off at a time without receiving heavy and sustained incoming fire for their trouble. A figure climbed out of the lead vehicle. Tate adjusted his focus to bring the newcomer’s face into sharp profile. A new intel package had arrived the night before, and this included an image of the intelligence officer from Moscow. The face Tate saw now matched a digital photograph from the pack. ‘Target confirmed. That’s Maksim Oleniuk.’
The troops, who had been smoking, dropped their cigarettes and snapped to attention, exchanging salutes with the man in charge. Oleniuk inspected the APC. He tapped the hood with his palm and spoke to the men working on it before he turned on his heels and entered the building.
As a former officer, Boyko was not used to taking orders and Tate could sense him becoming impatient at his side. The engine of the APC came to life. There was whooping as the soldiers congratulated their mechanics. More men now stepped out of the building to inspect the vehicle, joined by the crews of the BMP-2s.
‘We are ready,’ Boyko announced deliberately. ‘Just give us the order.’
Tate nodded. Killing was never easy, but if neutralising these professional soldiers safeguarded the innocent residents of Mariupol, there was no real alternative. He checked his watch. There was now about forty minutes of sunlight left. The Russians would at least get fed and watered before they launched their attack, and that would be when they were at their most vulnerable. Tate looked at the Ukrainian and tapped his watch. ‘Tell your men, ten minutes. Then engage.’