Shadow War

by Sean McFate

  “Thanks for meeting me on such short notice, Chad,” Alie said, sloughing off his appraising glance at her body, since this happened all the time to every woman she knew. Hargrove had a young man’s bulk and a Matt Damon smile, with blazing white teeth he must have bleached twice a month.

  “My pleasure,” he said, motioning toward his only chair. He was straight out of “the Farm” by way of Colorado State, or so he’d told her that the first time they’d met at one of those American gatherings—a bar or an official function, she couldn’t remember which. They had been circling each other ever since, but this was the first time she’d had a look at his life. It was clear the CIA had provided this standard-issue Colonial furniture, but he’d probably bought the big television out of his first paycheck. Everything was typically American, except for the ugly shirt, which he’d no doubt bought at some boutique on Khreshchatyk Street to blend in with the locals. But there was no way Chad Hargrove could pass for a local. Not with those aspirational teeth.

  “Glass of wine?”

  Maybe, if they were both still here in a few months, she’d ask him for a good dentist. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been to the dentist.

  “How about Scotch?” she said.

  He smiled and grabbed a bottle of Bowmore, a beginner’s top-shelf brand. His father had probably introduced him to it back in—where was he from? Suburban Denver?

  “Neat,” she said, as he dropped a few pieces of ice in a glass.

  She checked his bookshelf as he poured. Clash of Civilizations. The Tragedy of Great Power Politics. Some well-thumbed Kissinger and a less well-thumbed Stiglitz. York Harding. They were the kind of books young men read in college; the kind that never mentioned a woman, unless it was Margaret Thatcher.

  “So what do you need?” Hargrove asked, handing her the Scotch. “I assume this isn’t a social call.”

  She lifted her glass in a toast. “To information,” she said.

  “You know I can’t tell you anything.”

  She smirked. So FNG—Fucking New Guy. They loved being secretive.

  “Don’t worry, this is off the record,” she said, pulling out her smartphone. “And only a photo. Just wondering if you know this guy.”

  Hargrove studied the photograph. It was the Hyatt lobby. Two men talking in the corner, distant and out of focus, but recognizable.

  “I don’t,” he said, “but he’s American. Must be new in town. Never came to the embassy to check in. Probably a businessman, judging by the suit. I assume he’s a douchebag, otherwise you wouldn’t be asking.” He flashed the teeth. “What did he do, beat up some hookers in Bangkok?”

  Alie smiled to hide her anger. She was still known for her investigative reporting on sex slavery and refugees, even if she hadn’t broken a story in years. In some circles, that made her a hero. But in others, it was a joke. Women’s issues. Hookers. Aren’t they funny?

  “Not him,” she said. “The old guy.”

  Hargrove looked back at the image, relieved that this wasn’t competition. The old guy was American, too, probably the younger man’s father, maybe on vacation or some sort of find-your-ancestors-before-you-die . . .

  “Wait,” he said. “That’s Greenlees.”

  “Who’s Greenlees?”

  “John Greenlees, an old station chief, put out to pasture ages ago. He comes into the office every so often to talk to Baker, the deputy station chief. They must have worked together, but I don’t know, he’s in the wind. Nobody has cared about him in years. I only recognize him because I happen to have an office next to Baker.”

  An office? She almost laughed. She knew Hargrove stamped visas in the morning and spent his afternoons in a cubicle, typing up Baker’s cables. It was the fate of all greenhorn case officers who were undeclared.

  “What’s Greenlees up to?”

  “Nothing, as far as I know.”

  “He doesn’t work for, um, your people?”

  “Greenlees? No, he’s out of the game. But he’s got contacts, I’m sure, since he’s been around forever. He’s burned at the organization, though. Left under a cloud, not too happy about it, I hear. Something about a local mistress.”

  “Everyone has a mistress,” she said.

  Hargrove shook his head. “He left his wife for her. A CIA station chief doesn’t leave his wife for a sex worker. It’s blackmail material. And it’s not professional.”

  She’d heard him use the word before. Professionalism was a sacred concept to earnest young men like Hargrove.

  “Sex worker?”

  “Whore, I guess. That’s the word Baker used.”

  Which could mean anything. Whore was a generic insult used by old glad-handers like Baker, a way to put a woman in her place. Underneath.

  “He may have been compromised. That’s not something for print, of course,” Hargrove said, “although I can’t imagine anyone would care. That was years ago. And I assume nothing was proven, or they would have pulled his passport. But you know how rumors are. They can ruin a career.”

  She knew he intended to stay clean, but she also knew he wasn’t above exploiting a rumor or two, if the timing was right. That’s what reporters were for.

  “Any idea where to find him?”

  Hargrove shrugged. “At the embassy, I suppose. He comes in every now and then. I could ask Baker.”

  “No,” she said too quickly, and saw Hargrove hesitate. He was an ambitious FNG; he wouldn’t miss the implication that this was important to her. But there was no use not nailing it down.

  “Can you just let me know if he comes in?” she said too casually.

  Hargrove reached for the bottle of Scotch. She had been right about him, she thought as she watched him pour. He was well built. Wide, but in a bulldog way, unlike Locke, who was lean. And Hargrove was fresh. Clean. He had good instincts and a sharp eye, and he wanted to learn. He was a young man who could be molded—who wanted to be molded—if a woman knew how to handle him.

  “So who’s the other guy?” he said, handing her a glass.

  It was almost too easy.

  She handed him Locke’s card, with its bullshit consulting business. “It seems legit, but he’s ex-military. I knew him years ago. In Africa.”

  “Knew him?”

  She shook her head. “Just because I used to be a nun—”

  “I know,” Hargrove said.

  And I know you love it, Alie thought. She licked her lips and sipped her Bowmore. “Everybody makes bad decisions, right?”

  She was laying it on thick, but what the hell. She had been flirting with Hargrove for weeks, practically since he arrived in Kiev, and the longer something like that goes on, the more inevitable it becomes. And besides, she was lonely. It was a hard life on the road, where every story was temporary and every relationship short-lived. If she didn’t sleep with sources like Hargrove, who would she sleep with? Those were the only people she knew anymore.

  “You don’t think he’s a merc, do you?” she asked. One of the CIA’s new jobs was supervising the contractors hired to do what the Agency used to do.

  “You know I can’t talk about that.”

  Which meant he had no idea who Locke was. “I’m just saying, Chad, you wouldn’t believe some of the things this guy did in Africa.”

  “You wouldn’t believe some of the things I’ve done.”

  Like getting drunk with mistresses and junior staffers? Or taking mental notes at cocktail parties? Or paperwork? First-year agents were so enthusiastic about their paperwork. Spotting new agents to recruit. Running human networks. They never realized the bosses back in Langley didn’t read reporting by FNGs.

  She let it drop, turning her back and wandering the room, fingering a few of his books. He wasn’t brilliant, but he was a hard worker. Very organized. Passably neat. Probably bootstrapped himself to top of his class at the Farm. Even though he spoke Russian and Ukrainian, he probably wanted an assignment to the Middle East, because everyone did, that was where the promotio
ns were. Europe was over. Nothing but old-timers. But then he stumbled into this Ukraine crisis, and all those old movies came back. Dead drops in Nyvky Park; midnight meetings under bridges; surveillance of Soviet operatives. There was something romantic about fighting the Russians. It was the KGB, after all, who killed that poor man in London with the poisoned umbrella.

  And all he had been doing for the past three months was stamping visas in the consular section and meeting with schnooks. Then Locke comes along, and she drops an opportunity right into his overeager lap.

  If she’d stopped to think about it, she would have realized she was in a similar place: jammed in a career cul-de-sac and latching on to Locke as a way out. But Alie had stopped thinking about her motivations years ago. It was less painful that way.

  “I’m doing you a favor,” she said.

  “What?”

  Wrong tactic. Let him think he’s doing the favor. “I said don’t forget me, Chad. When you’re in the field.”

  “I can’t take you into the field, Alie.”

  We’ll see, she thought, setting down her drink. She knew it was time to leave. There wasn’t much more she could do to set the hook. She already had the first half of what she’d come for—Greenlees’s name—even if, when she’d arrived, she hadn’t been acknowledging the second.

  Even now, it didn’t cross her mind, at least not the conscious part, that her next decision had anything to do with Thomas Locke standing her up three hours ago.

  But Hargrove understood. He was grinning behind his Bowmore, contemplating what to say next. She almost rolled her eyes. You can’t let them think everything is their idea, she thought, as she put down her glass and stepped toward him.

  “I’ve never been with an older woman,” he said, sliding his hand around her waist.

  Don’t blow it, she thought. I’m only thirty-four.

  CHAPTER 10

  Nikolay Balashov, known as the Wolf, squinted as he entered the dark club in downtown Poltava. Last night, it had been thumping so loudly it could have shaken the radar installations in Stalingrad, he thought, with quick nostalgia for that old town name. This morning, it felt like this hole of a country: dreary and depressing, the bartender half asleep, the women slumped apathetically at the tables.

  He walked slowly along the empty bar, the bartender not even moving from his slouch, until he saw what he was looking for: the red dress, the one so short that it barely covered her. She was with Ivan in the back, as he knew she would be, four men and two women, drinking horilka at 7:45 A.M.

  She looked up and saw him. For a moment, she held his gaze. He didn’t change his pace. She leaned in and said something to Ivan, who laughed.

  He didn’t care what she thought of him. She was an idea, one that recurred every few months in a dozen different faces. Dark hair, small nose. Hard bones. He didn’t care about her red lipstick or her short dress, and he didn’t mind her vicious smile. She was a denizen of this world, but then again, so was he. He liked the idea of some rough, violent romance that would shatter that part of her. A romance that would never occur, and that he would never act upon. Not and, he thought, because he would never act on it. He would never even ask her name.

  “La Rus,” Ivan said with mock surprise, as the Wolf approached the table. Ivan was enormous and blockheaded, so he never had any use for subtlety. He was Belenko’s enforcer; he came with the oligarch’s contract to find the traitor Karpenko. The million-dollar reward being offered by Putin’s FSB, though, was the Wolf’s real reason for being here.

  “I’m shutting it down. The club is off-limits.”

  “Why, La Rus?” The Wolf wasn’t sure where Ivan had heard that phrase for Russians, but it was an insult. “Are we finally going to do something?”

  Typical. Foot soldiers always thought of the fight as the work. It was the part, after all, that was glorified in the old Soviet film footage. The stand outside Leningrad. The tanks on fire. The endless fistfights and car chases of American movies.

  But it was these moments, the maneuvering before the encounter, when a true soldier thrived. The Wolf had learned that lesson from Sun Tzu and practiced it himself, in every battle of the last thirty years, from the mountains outside Kandahar to the shattered apartment blocks of Grozny and Tbilisi.

  He was from the lost generation, the foot soldiers who had fought in Afghanistan in the late 1980s, at the tail end of the world’s last great empire, when troglodyte commanding officers had plowed relentlessly ahead, in the old Soviet style, leveling villages and slaughtering the population to kill a few insurgents. He had watched helplessly as men like Andrei Sirko, his commanding colonel, turned the tribes against them and good Russian soldiers to heroin, and even now, thirty years later, he hated those incompetent commanders for the humiliation: the greatest country on earth, with the greatest weapons in the history of the world, brought low by primitives with a few Stinger missiles.

  And then, a few months after their retreat from Kandahar, the Berlin Wall had come down, and the Soviet Union soon after. He had spent a month on his army base in Bolgrad, getting smashed on vodka and cursing men like Colonel Sirko. He spent the next two months thinking the Soviet Empire was better off dead, and the next two years watching corrupt politicians sell state-owned factories; corrupt senior military officers sell off state munitions; and hardliners in the Red Army stage a coup for the honor of the Motherland . . . only to be upstaged by Boris Yeltsin, the Politburo’s drunk.

  After the coup, he lost hope. The army was in tatters. The KGB and security systems dissolved. He considered joining the new society, working as a bodyguard for the emerging capitalist class, but Sirko saved him. He had seen one of the new oligarchs on television, not Karpenko but one of the Russian bears, and behind him, for a moment, he had glimpsed Col. Andrei Sirko, with his rigid military bearing, and he knew that world wasn’t for him.

  So he lit out for the Balkans when Yugoslavia collapsed. He was the Lone Wolf then, odinokiy volk, quarrelsome and surly, fighting for the Serbs but fighting, really, without cause or country. He didn’t fit it in the new world, he had decided, and he didn’t want to. He was a soldier. Fighting was his life.

  But he discovered something else in Bosnia, besides the cleansing power of war. He discovered that there were others like him. Thousands of others. Tens of thousands, even, young soldiers cut loose by the collapse of the empire, angry and lost, looking for money and adventure and trained in the rudiments of war.

  By Chechnya, five years later in 1999, Nikolay Balashov was the Wolf, a conflict entrepreneur. He had a way of drawing other displaced men to his side: old Soviet soldiers and KGB officers, pro-Moscow Chechyans, fighters from the Caucuses and the “Stans.” It was a slaughter in Chechnya; they had shelled Grozny like the Nazi’s shelled Stalingrad. They had terrorized the populace and burned the rebel provinces to the ground. But that was what his generation needed. They needed to purge.

  That was what Putin understood. That the old structures had to be torn down. That his base of power was a lost generation looking for a hard hand to guide it . . . empower it . . . and turn it loose. It didn’t matter anymore that the Russian military was a mess. Russia had Putin now, and Putin knew there were better ways.

  Chechnya. Georgia. Crimea. Ukraine. Putin’s wars, but also the Wolf’s. Together, they would take back their empire, one destroyed country at a time, because that was what they had been born to do.

  Young men like Ivan, they would never understand. They weren’t soldiers; they hadn’t been raised with honor. They were thugs, born into the new world the Wolf had created. They valued nothing but money, worked for no one but the businessmen. They didn’t love the rough, violent romance of war, like true soldiers. They didn’t know how to maneuver before a fight.

  “Give us an hour, La Rus,” Ivan said, calling the Wolf back to this club, this dirty town, this fight. “What can that harm?”

  “There’s always time for one more,” the woman in the red dress said lasciviously.


  “Never speak to me,” the Wolf snapped. He could feel his heat rising—at the woman for speaking, at Ivan for his ignorance. What was the point of living like this? Without pride or purpose?

  “One hour,” he said. “Make sure your men are ready.”

  He turned and walked away. He wasn’t worried. Ivan would follow orders. And in the end, he would get his fight. Karpenko was a hunted man. He needed to get out of Eastern Europe, to Vienna at least, and Vienna was 1,300 kilometers away. Even Warsaw, not safe but a doorway to the West, was seven hours. An oligarch would never risk such a drive. He would go by air, by the helicopter that the Wolf’s men—his real men, not Belenko’s goons—had heard landing somewhere north of Poltava last night. And anything that could be flown out could be shot down.

  All it took was professionals, and an intelligent plan. The Wolf was eager to show his old commander, Colonel Sirko, that this former foot soldier had bested him in both.

  CHAPTER 11

  “Good morning,” Karpenko said, as I walked into the kitchen. It was 0600 and not yet full light. I hadn’t expected to see him this early. But what was life without surprises?

  Maltov handed me a cup of coffee. Karpenko looked sharp, clean-shaven and bright-eyed, dressed in a custom-tailored plaid blazer, English cut. This was the business Karpenko, the man who took meetings in the Square Mile of London and blended in at swank Belgravia restaurants. Or almost blended in. The only people the London upper crust looked down on more than the Eastern European nouveau riche were African princes who bought their Ferraris with humanitarian aid money.

  “I apologize for last night,” he said, surprising me again. Warlords never apologized. Even Winters never apologized. Unless there was an angle. “I have been under stress, I admit.” His slightly stilted English was unnerving, like a serial killer. I glanced at Maltov, but the enforcer didn’t blink. “But of course you know that. That’s why you’re here.” He paused. “Are you a father?”