The Plot to Kill Putin

by Max Karpov

  “The obvious one would be his connections in the region. On both the Russian and Ukrainian sides,” Chris said. “On the other hand, Delkoff’s been critical of the Kremlin’s stops and starts in Ukraine. He lost his son there. Because of that, I wouldn’t put him together with Turov or the Kremlin. So he must’ve brought something to the table we’re not looking at.”

  Delkoff and Turov were—by temperament, experience, and physical appearance—opposites, Chris knew: Delkoff, a big, brashly nationalistic military commander; Turov, a canny, close-to-the-vest oligarch with strong ties to the Kremlin. Russia’s “crazy colonel” and its “dark angel.” Both men had served in the FSB years ago and held their own grandiose ideas about Russia. But as far as he could tell, their paths had never crossed before. Why now?

  Chris was also trying to make sense of the detail Petrenko had told him about Delkoff meeting with the Ukrainian secret service. Had he gotten that wrong?

  “What about this idea of a fifth column?” Martin said, seeming to read his mind. “A coup within the Russian military?”

  “Possible. Except I don’t see Turov being part of any plot to kill the Russian president. Unless there has been a dramatic split between them. But I don’t see any reason to think that.”

  “Nor do I,” Martin said. Chris’s phone vibrated; he let it go. “And what about this chess game business? Petrenko said the first move may’ve already been played? What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know. Some sort of infiltration that we don’t know about, I imagine.” Martin frowned as his desk phone rang. Chris’s sounded again, too. “Or,” he added, “it might just be a bluff on Petrenko’s part. A way of upping his salary, so to speak.”

  “Is that what you think?”

  “Not really.”

  “What I’m getting is that it’s more serious than a penetration. The goal is to break us apart in some manner, tilt the—”

  The office door burst open and Julie Patton, Martin’s normally staid, middle-aged assistant gave them each a wide-eyed look.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” she said. “We’ve just gotten word that the Russian pres—”—her breath failed her mid-word—“president’s plane has crashed. Or been shot down. In Ukraine.”

  “What?”

  Martin followed Julie out to her office, Christopher in tow. They all stood in front of her computer, watching the news report coming across in real time on CNN.

  It took Christopher about a minute to understand what had happened. What Turov had managed to pull off.

  That much he knew right away: this was Andrei Turov’s doing. It had to be. The IC had been on edge for weeks, fielding nonspecific intelligence that something was coming. Some sort of “hybrid” or unorthodox attack against the West.

  And that, he sensed, was exactly what had happened, although it would be hours—maybe much longer—before the intelligence community or anyone else in the US government figured that out. He only regretted that he hadn’t done so earlier.

  So this is how it starts.

  “I have to deal with things now,” Martin said to him. “Can we regroup at 4:00? Julie!” he called.

  “I’m right here,” she answered. “Mr. Niles at 4:00.”

  Christopher knew that the best thing to do was get out of the way. He’d never seen Martin so flustered.

  But he also knew, as he walked down the corridor away from Martin’s office, that he was no longer retired from the Andrei Turov business. It wasn’t even an option anymore.

  TEN

  Somewhere in Belarus.

  Ivan Delkoff stared out the train’s window at the flat, sliding darkness of the countryside. He imagined the hours and days that lay ahead, traveling from Minsk to Riga, and from there on to northern France, to Germany, to God knew where else. Delkoff had long ago stopped celebrating victories. If you felt the urge to celebrate, and you possessed a heart and a soul, you did it privately, or not at all. War wasn’t like sports. Or, as a fellow soldier had once told him, sports was war for cowards. War was business, the most serious business in the world.

  For the soldiers who had brought down the Russian president’s plane, however, those considerations didn’t pertain. Let the men celebrate. But let them celebrate quickly.

  He had broken out a bottle of vodka and five plastic glasses and allowed his makeshift regiment to toast what they’d done. To Novorossiya. He even managed to share in their mood of revelry, but skipped the alcohol, knowing what still lay ahead. An hour later, after most of the smoke had cleared, there was still a cloying smell of rocket fuel in the air. But it was remarkable how quickly the calm of that great summer day had reclaimed the countryside, the only sound again becoming the sunflower stalks creaking with the breeze.

  Victory was a complicated business, Delkoff knew. How you processed it mattered at least as much as the victory itself. Delkoff had loved the Russian president, and what he had done for the motherland. The whole idea of Russia Mir, a Russia without borders, a moral example for the rest of the world: all of that was a fine dream. But Delkoff had also loved the contract soldiers and volunteer fighters who’d given their lives for it in the fields of eastern Ukraine: Pavel and thousands of other Pavels, some of them buried in mass graves, or laid to rest in secret ceremonies because the Kremlin didn’t want to admit that it had inserted real soldiers into this war. You didn’t celebrate knowing that. You moved on. He heard the voice of Pavel’s mother again in his head—the hysterical wail after she’d learned what had happened: Putin killed him, Putin killed my son!

  Kolchak had set up a crude camera outside of the radar station and they replayed the sequence several times on a computer monitor—the men crowding in and cheering as the trail of smoke from the heat-seeking missile tagged the target and the plane exploded. Later, he would upload this video to YouTube, so the world could see their work.

  He shut the celebration down as soon as the bottle was empty, and ordered the men to their vehicles. Turov had created two escape plans: the “Ukrainian” battalion would travel the same roads that had brought them here, hauling their missile launchers back into Ukrainian-controlled territory. After passing through the first checkpoint, they would detour to an abandoned coal processing plant, where they’d be met by two SBU agents. Ukrainian security would ferry them to a safe house and, ultimately, home. The missile launcher and radar command would stay behind, locked in the processing plant.

  That was the story they’d been told. It was the story they would carry in their heads as they traveled to the checkpoint. Once there, their trucks would be stopped by Russian Spetsnaz officers, already tipped off that they were coming, and they’d be killed. This was the necessary outcome; the story they hadn’t been told.

  Turov’s plan, after all, wasn’t just to kill the president. It was equally important to establish responsibility. In another day or two, the Kremlin would announce that two Ukrainians and an Estonian, all former intelligence officers, had been killed after opening fire on Russian soldiers at a checkpoint in Ukraine. They would also announce that the SA-11 missile system they’d been transporting had been recovered—minus two rockets—conclusively linking the assassination of the president to Ukrainian intelligence, and ultimately the United States.

  Delkoff would follow the second escape route: he would journey east with Zelenko and Pletner through an hour and twenty minutes of farmland to the Russian border. On the way, they’d switch vehicles at the same sunflower farm where they had stopped for lunch two days before; from there, they would continue southeast, from the border crossing at Shramko to Rostov-on-Don, where Turov had made arrangements to deliver the three of them to a safe house. And then on to new lives.

  This was the story they’d been told. No one had explained that they, too, would most likely drive into an ambush at the first checkpoint. And that they, too, would be killed.

  The teams traded quick goodbyes. Hands were shaken, backs patted. Because of what they had just done, and the short celebration they had shared,
there was real emotion in the men’s voices. All except Zelenko, Delkoff saw, whose emotion appeared self-conscious.

  When the Ukrainian team’s vehicles finally rumbled away down the dusty farm road, Delkoff summoned Zelenko alone into the warehouse.

  “I just want us to go over the route one more time,” he said. Delkoff spread the map on the rickety wooden table where they had all eaten lunch. He stepped back. “Show me again.”

  Zelenko’s hands were unsteady as he smoothed the map, moving his fingers to find their location in the Donbas countryside. There was still a smell of chicken stew in the room.

  Delkoff gripped the combat knife in his left hand. He stood slightly to the side but still behind Zelenko. Watching the sad, alert tilt of Zelenko’s head, the mole on his neck, the garden of little hairs in his left ear. “What are you going to do to me?” Zelenko whimpered. Not at all like his son now.

  Delkoff said nothing. As Zelenko began to straighten, Delkoff stepped toward him. He raised his left hand and plunged the knife into the side of Zelenko’s head, just above the ear.

  Zelenko made a gasping sound. He fell back into the table and crashed to the floor, the knife still in him. In seconds, he was dead.

  Delkoff walked to the barn entrance. He squinted out at the brown fields in the glare of late sunlight. Now there was only Pletner, who was waiting for him beside the transport vehicle, with his thick, erect posture, his eyes wide and vacant. Delkoff waved him over.

  “I need your help for a moment,” he called. Delkoff could see the young man’s fear as he walked to the warehouse. He almost felt what Pletner felt, the blood thumping in his temples. Pletner was young and malleable, and he would do whatever Delkoff asked. It was best to get this over with as quickly as possible.

  Delkoff waited until he was standing in front of him. He raised Zelenko’s pistol to Pletner’s chin and fired. Pletner’s eyes widened and then closed before he went down.

  Delkoff dragged Pletner’s body into the center of the barn. He removed the jerry can from the steamer trunk in the back room and spilled gasoline in zig-zags across the floor, leaving his phone and the flame-retardant pouch with his own identification beside Pletner’s body. Then he pulled the knife out of Zelenko’s head and removed Pletner’s wallet and keys.

  From the doorway, Delkoff turned back to the dead soldiers, thinking about Zelenko’s eager eyes, the resolute way he’d looked at him when they’d first met, in Donetsk, all those months ago. “You did a good job, comrades,” he said, and felt his eyes tear up. Ivan Delkoff did not feel good about this part, but knew it was necessary. Zelenko had said it himself: In war, you think differently. You have to or you don’t survive. In war, killing is just a survival tactic.

  He lit a wooden match and watched the trail of fire leap across the warehouse toward the radar truck, consuming the furniture, the hay bales, Zelenko, and then Pletner.

  “Forgive me,” he said as he walked away to the transport vehicle, feeling his son’s cross.

  Delkoff began to drive, not east toward the checkpoint, as he was supposed to, but west, a long detour to another abandoned farmhouse. He had stored a travel vehicle there, a Hyundai Solaris with Ukrainian registration, along with a work shirt and dungarees. Delkoff had planned this escape as carefully as he’d planned Turov’s mission. The two had been parallel operations.

  By evening, Delkoff was driving alone on the M03 highway north toward Kharkiv. Delkoff knew how to reverse engineer an “escape.” Knew where to drop breadcrumbs, how to set up a credit card trail, how to use CCTV surveillance to his advantage, how to slip information to the SVR and FSB. He knew how to lure Russia’s security services to Belarus, instead of northern France, where he would actually be. People always underestimated Delkoff, and they’d probably do so again.

  Those weren’t deceptions that would hold for long, though. Delkoff knew that. If he was lucky, they might give him four or five days to make more permanent arrangements with his cousin, Dmitri Porchak. Delkoff sat in his window seat now as the train rolled through the countryside, the lights of distant towns skimming past. Breathing the taste of rocket fuel still in his lungs. He was on the 1:32 a.m. train from Kharkiv to Minsk tonight. In Minsk, he would board a car to Riga, where on Monday he would fly to Paris. No one would expect Delkoff to catch a train in Kharkiv, nor would they be looking for him in Riga, let alone France. He was trying to keep his mind clear of voices now, but his father’s patriotic music kept stealing his thoughts: We shall repulse the repressors Of all ardent ideas . . . Arise, vast country! Arise, vast country!

  In the train station, Delkoff had avoided looking at televisions, or overhearing conversations. He didn’t want to know about it yet. Deferred gratification was part of his plan. For Delkoff, it was a necessity: not to look until he had arrived safely in France on Monday. Because Delkoff didn’t entirely trust himself. If he looked, he was afraid he would lose his center; he would be tempted to have a drink, to talk with a strange woman, to give himself away.

  Also, he was trying not to draw attention to himself. Delkoff was a big, beat-up-looking man, who tended to draw curious glances anyway. Now he was wearing a paste-on beard and a knit cap, which probably made him even more of a curiosity.

  He stared out the window from his private darkness as the train rumbled north. The lights in the countryside were like fires of freedom tonight, he thought, beckoning him to a new life. In another day or two, the Kremlin would announce that they had killed the perpetrators and recovered the missile battery. But they’d be too humiliated to mention Delkoff. He was sure of that. Delkoff had now successfully extricated himself from Turov’s plan. What happened next was up to him. Not Turov. Not Russia. Just him.

  ELEVEN

  Capitol Hill, Washington.

  The news from Ukraine quickly blanketed Washington in a fog of confusion and misinformation. Everyone in town, it seemed, was asking some version of the same question: “What’ve you heard?”

  “At this stage,” Anna Carpenter told her son David, who called at lunchtime expecting an inside scoop, “all explanations seem plausible and any explanation seems premature.”

  “Mom.”

  “What.”

  “Remember that conversation we had coming back from the airport?”

  “Of course. What are you hearing?”

  “I’m hearing the worst, same as you.” He exhaled. “I’m hearing we did this.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “It’s all over Russian social media. It’s starting to get out now on English-speaking sites.”

  “That we did this? But not seriously.”

  “Seriously,” he said. “They’re tying it back to CIA, saying we met with a Ukrainian arms dealer in Kiev over the summer. They’ve even put out a name.”

  Anna was speechless, hearing the conviction in her son’s voice. “Well, that’s absurd.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Let me call you back.” Anna clicked off and swiveled to face her computer. Was she sure? No; if she was, she wouldn’t have been so abrupt with David. It took less than two minutes for her to find what he had been talking about: several websites out of Russia and eastern Europe were giving surprisingly detailed accounts of the attack: the “assassination,” they called it, had been planned by an anti-Russian Ukrainian oligarch, Dmitro Hordiyenko, and carried out “with the backing” of America’s CIA. There were no named sources, and no one in Washington or the mainstream media seemed to be taking it seriously. But something about the story bothered Anna. There was an unusual authority to it. A sober tone not typical of Russian propaganda.

  She sat in her office searching through Twitter traffic, switching channels on television, anxious to learn more. An hour and a half earlier, when the news broke, interns and Senate aides had rushed into the hallways, shouting that Putin’s plane had been shot down. Now what felt like a stunned silence filled the floor. Everyone was quietly soaking in the news, hunkered down on phone calls or staring
at televisions or computer screens. Christopher had phoned just once, while she was talking with David. She hadn’t been able to reach him since.

  Because of Anna’s seat on the Senate Select Intelligence Committee, she was one of the go-to people reporters called for security and intelligence stories. But she wasn’t returning media calls on this one. This was a story no one could adequately explain yet.

  And something else bothered her: whatever had happened to the Russian president’s plane—sabotage, coup, a Ukrainian military attack—the US intel community had missed it. Completely. No one had seen this coming. Not even Christopher.

  There was no official confirmation yet that Russia’s president had been on board the plane. But just before noon, mainstream news agencies began quoting “high-level Russian sources” verifying it. “REPORT: PUTIN DEAD” flashed up as a news banner, first on MSNBC, followed quickly by the identical words on CNN and Fox and as cut-ins on the networks. Moments later, she heard one of her entry-level office interns shouting: “Putin’s dead! CNN reporting: Putin’s dead!”

  Anna stared numbly at the words on her television. The idea of nuclear Russia with no one in charge was chilling. The lack of a viable succession plan had always struck her as one of the most disturbing aspects of Putin’s Russia—even if, technically, there was a plan: under the Russian constitution, the prime minister became acting president, with elections required within three months. But given the covert nature of Russian politics, the succession wouldn’t be so neat. Everyone knew that. Russia analysts were already beginning to predict a prolonged behind-the-scenes power struggle, and a period of dangerous insecurity for Russia and the world.

  The danger was exacerbated by the flurry of recent personnel changes in Moscow, Putin appointing former bodyguards to key security posts and as governors in three regions. In a political environment that valued loyalty over expertise and competence, the president’s men—the devils we didn’t know—were even more concerning than the president.