Shadow War

by Sean McFate

  Not in this life. “No.”

  He smiled. “The sacrifices we make.”

  We walked outside into the chilly morning air. In an alley between the barn and an outbuilding, where they would be impossible to see from beyond the perimeter, stood a line of twelve black Range Rovers and two bulletproof black Mercedes, a businessman’s motor pool.

  “No Maserati, I’m afraid,” Karpenko said. “My fleet is built for safety, not speed.”

  So the Maserati is in London . . .

  A young Ukrainian with a Kalashnikov, probably in his teens, opened the barn door. Inside were two beater cars, a winch truck, a tractor, a rusty pickup of Soviet extraction, a three-ton truck, and the AgustaWestland helicopter. A farmer’s fleet, plus the bird. If the shit hit the fan, that was the backup plan.

  “I’ll take that one,” I said, pointing to an early 2000s four-door Opel with an eight-cylinder engine and a large trunk. It was the worst car in the lot, meaning it was the car no one would suspect. By the time Greenlees wandered out, looking disheveled in the same golf shirt and loafers, the young Ukrainian—Maltov’s driver, as it turned out—had loaded the trunk with our kit. Five minutes later, we headed out, stopwatch in hand.

  Three minutes to the iron gate at the end of the entry drive. Click.

  Nineteen to the entrance road of the Poltava Airport. Click.

  Eighty seconds to the terminal.

  We sat in the short-term parking lot. The airport wasn’t crowded. In fact, it was almost deserted. Which made it almost perfect.

  Too perfect, really.

  According to Sirko, Belenko had twenty to twenty-five men in the area. They had moved into a hotel in the center of Poltava, across the street from the city’s best brothel. Karpenko’s brothel. By two in the morning, any morning, they were mostly drunk. But if they had anti-aircraft missiles, their aim didn’t have to be perfect. In fact, it didn’t even have to be good.

  “Let’s check the airbase,” I told Maltov’s protégé. “Take the back way.”

  Sirko had pointed out the secondary airfield, a former Soviet air force base. Most people had forgotten it, Sirko told me, but he had checked it himself several months ago, and the runway was usable. I was sure Belenko’s men had checked it, too, but the location was still ideal. The airbase was eighteen kilometers from Poltava’s town center, and only twelve from the dacha.

  We skipped the main entrance—Poltava Museum of Long-Range Aviation, by appointment only, Greenlees translated from a small sign—and found a dirt track that cut through the forest a few hundred meters away. The forest was thick, but it took less than a minute to reach the edge of the parking lot. On the left was a low concrete building, with an abandoned flight tower behind it. On the right was the entry road, a metal gate, and a decrepit guardhouse. There was only one car in the lot, a beat up Soviet-era Lada, but halfway down the entry road, on a blind corner, a Škoda was sitting in the weeds. Belenko’s sentries, taking the lazy approach.

  As we watched, an old man and an older woman, themselves relics of the Soviet era, got into the Lada and drove away. Belenko’s men watched them go, then walked around the parking lot and checked the lock on the front gate. Three minutes later, their car was filled with cigarette smoke.

  “Lucky,” Maltov said. “No appointments today.”

  We circled through the forest to the back of the building, then climbed onto the roof. The parking lot in front was surrounded on three sides by forest. The two-lane entrance was gated, and the two-lane exit emptied onto the landing strip. Nine Soviet aircraft were exhibited in a horseshoe, eight imposing strategic bombers and a lone Antonov-26 cargo plane, the two-engine version of the An-12 Brad Winters had chartered.

  I surveyed the surroundings through my field glasses: waist-high weeds, a few abandoned buildings and aircraft bunkers, an obsolete radar array, and decaying gun parapets, presumably for air defense artillery. Weeds poked through cracks in the tarmac, but the runway was long, wide, and serviceable. Winters’s An-12 was an antique, even by Soviet standards. It had four turboprops, a glass nose, and 1946 technology, but it was tough and could land almost anywhere, as long as the ground was solid and flat. I’d used the An-12 to ferry guns and other supplies around Africa many times, and we’d landed on worse.

  I scanned the open fields. The rusty barbed-wire fence was worthless against vehicles, but the meadows were so rutted that only a ruggedized off-road vehicle could cross.

  “You could fly a convoy in here,” Greenlees said, staring at the Tupolev 160, a massive Soviet bomber that was the museum’s star attraction.

  “Flying in isn’t the problem,” I said. “It’s flying out.”

  Maltov was talking with the teenage Ukrainian, patting the building beneath our feet. “It’s good,” he said. “Concrete.”

  “What about the flight tower?” Greenlees asked. It was squatting between the parking lot and the landing strip, as if guarding the bottleneck there.

  “Too dangerous for shelter,” I said, “but that doesn’t make it useless.”

  It was a good setup: one narrow ingress route from the main road, with a blind corner and thick forests on each side. A sharp turn and a gate at the entrance to the parking lot, which weren’t prohibitive, but would slow an attack. Nothing but a narrow road from the parking lot to access the landing strip. Forty men could hold off 150 here, if they were smart.

  But Karpenko’s men weren’t smart.

  And there was still the question of antiaircraft missiles. Sometimes, a rutted field was an obstacle, and sometimes it was nothing more than four hundred meters of clear sight lines.

  “Let’s check the forest,” I said. Greenlees’s shoulders fell, but Maltov nodded to his protégé. He seemed to understand that, unlike in his line of work, precision was my stock in trade. I needed to understand every angle, calculate every distance. Men were going to die tonight. That was certain. Now was the time to get the details right, because once the shooting started, everything would go wrong.

  By the time we finished, the sun was straight overhead, and Belenko’s men had been relieved by a second shift. We watched them drive around the airbase once, then park right back where they had been before, as unprofessional as the first crew.

  It would be tricky. And dangerous. But it could be done.

  “Do you have a friend in the city?” I asked Maltov. “Someone nobody would know to watch.”

  He nodded.

  “What about cargo trucks?”

  “I can get what you need.”

  “C-4?”

  He smiled. “How many kilos?”

  We drove by an indirect route through the industrial section of Poltava, sticking to residential roads. There were hardly any cars, and steel metal shutters covered the windows. The town was a shithole in the faded industrial style, all rust and concrete and scraggly vegetation, the kind that absolutely refuses to die. No wonder so many people looked back on the Russian years with fondness.

  “Here,” Maltov said.

  Maltov’s friend ran a small grocery, with local specialties in front and a counter for beef buns and cabbage rolls in the back. There were a few men lounging on folding chairs, but nobody was eating, and I suspected the greasy beef buns had been sitting under a heat lamp for a month. This wasn’t really a restaurant, or even a retail store. The friend hadn’t even bothered to stock half of the warmers.

  “On the house,” Maltov said, as he gave us a plate of buns and took us through to the storage area. The room was half empty and filthy. There were meat hooks hanging from the ceiling, and bloodstains on the floor. I never thought anything would make me long for Karpenko’s brown bread and lard, but it had taken only half a day to find something worse.

  Twenty minutes later, Greenlees and I exited through the back door with a bag of pork rinds, neither having taken a bite of anything else. We left the car, but took the friend’s Škoda Yeti. The Škoda was two years old, while the Opel was fifteen, but it was still a good deal for Maltov’s
friend.

  “Three hours,” Maltov said.

  We spent the next two hours eating pork rinds and moving around Poltava, circling back a few times to watch Belenko’s hotel through my field glasses. There were at least twenty-five men, assuming half on watch, maybe as many as forty, and they weren’t trying to hide. They were moving between the building and the parking lot, packing and repacking two four-by-fours and two cars. It was nervous energy, not professionalism. They were eager. Or overeager.

  Forty men. Four vehicles. Probably a few cars on patrol. The leader was a Maltov type: muscle, up from the ranks. They had the numbers, but we would arrive first. We could slow them on the entry road, especially on the curve, and bog them down in the parking lot, but I doubted we could stop them.

  So it would all come down to timing.

  “Let’s go,” I said, when the pork rinds were long gone and fondly missed. We drove slowly, taking extra turns, to a field south of Poltava, far from Karpenko’s dacha. Maltov arrived an hour later with two friends and two delivery trucks. The writing on the side of the trucks was in Ukrainian, but the pictures told the story: one had fish on the side, the other potatoes. They weren’t exactly what I’d had in mind, but they’d have to do.

  “Any trouble?”

  Maltov shook his head. “No trouble.”

  I gave him a stack of euros, and he passed it on to his friends, who left in the Opel. As soon as they were gone, I glanced at the sun, still high in the afternoon sky, and then out across the chaff from last year’s wheat. It was a fallow field, unplanted this spring, and the blackbirds were hopping across it in a detestable fashion, their dinosaur claws beneath them. Stravinky’s Rite of Spring ballet filled my head, with its insistence on grotesque beginnings. The “Harbingers of Spring” scene, especially, always made me feel unclean.

  I looked around, trying to shake the unease. Maltov and his driver were leaning against one of the trucks. The driver looked like Maltov’s younger brother, but of course all Ukrainian tough guys looked the same. If Maltov wasn’t born with a grimace on his face, he’d spent half a lifetime developing one. I doubted he’d see much of the second half.

  Greenlees, meanwhile, was slumped in the backseat of the Škoda with the door open and his eyes closed. It was a beautiful mid-May afternoon, sunny and warm, but it was wasted on the three of us.

  You get what you get, and you don’t throw a fit, I thought. It was something I’d heard my sister say to her four-year-old son the last time I’d visited her. A few weeks ago, the boy had turned nine.

  I picked up the sat phone and called in the landing strip coordinates for the charter plane. The conversation took ten seconds. Ten minutes later, the sat phone rang.

  “0215,” Wolcott said.

  “Done.”

  “It will work,” Greenlees said, as I hung up the phone.

  “I know,” I said, even though I wasn’t sure.

  Only fools were sure.

  CHAPTER 12

  Brad Winters stood in the drizzling rain, driver’s license in hand. In front of him stood a two-star army general and his aide-de-camp; behind him were three lobbyists chattering away about their pitch and a former congresswoman whose name he had forgotten. She worked on poverty now—but not in poverty, of course.

  Two blocks away, he could hear the squeals of high school kids swarming around the tourist entrance to the White House. For a moment, he envied their ability to see the White House as something other than a pain in the ass, and this line as anything other than undignified. But he knew it was his height, and their puniness, that gave him a more accurate view.

  “Brad Winters,” he said to the gunny inside the checkpoint, as he showed his driver’s license. They checked his name, printed a badge with his picture on it, waved him past the dogs and through the metal detectors, and in less than sixty seconds he was walking on White House grass.

  He made his way to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, a Second Empire colossus with marble floors and fifteen-foot ceilings. The EEOB, as it was called, was a classic signifier of historical importance. Official Washington, DC, from its offices to its bars and hotels, hated anything new. If it didn’t look like something Thomas Jefferson would have designed, or even better, Julius Caesar, it wasn’t worth taking seriously, so no one but tourists ever did.

  Winters made his way up a grand staircase and down a hall lined with huge oak doors, each with a security keypad. He stopped at the one with a small placard, RUSSIA & CENTRAL ASIA, pressed a buzzer, and looked into the small camera.

  “Hello?” A woman’s voice.

  “Hi there. It’s Brad Winters for Naveen.”

  The door buzzed, and he pushed it open. It felt bombproof.

  The Old Executive Office Building had once been a nice place to work, back in the 1890s, when it housed the State, War, and Navy Departments, and everyone had a polished wooden desk, a window, and went home for the sunset. But that was when the federal government was a few thousand people, Washington had malaria swamps, and the biggest foreign policy challenge was the western frontier. Now it was cheap cubicles stuffed with senior functionaries, their half desks barely fitting their two computers—one classified, the other unclassified—their half walls obscuring a towering window looking out over traffic. Even though it was lunchtime, the room was more crowded than a think tank intern pit. Nobody here ate, unless they made a dash to the vending machines. National Security Council staffers were vampiric; they worked twenty hours a day for two years straight, tethered to an in-box, and considered it the best two years of their lives.

  “Naveen,” Winters said, extending his hand as a lean young man in a wrinkled shirt and loosened tie came around the corner of one of the cubicles. Naveen Grummond was the CIA’s lead analyst on EurAsia, seconded to the National Security Council to advise the president and other principals, making him one of the ten most powerful individuals in Washington in his area of expertise. It was a rare milestone few ever achieved. And yet, he’d only met the president once, in a receiving line at a White House reception, right behind a Hollywood starlet.

  “Brad,” Naveen said with a frown.

  “They declared a day of mourning in Mariupol,” Winters said.

  “I saw.”

  “The local police refused to follow orders from Kiev. They went over to the Russians.”

  “The Russians want a land bridge to Crimea,” Naveen said, searching for something on his desk.

  “The Ukrainian military had to intervene,” Winters continued. “Seven dead, right in the heart of Europe.” Only Naveen would think eastern Ukraine was the heart of anything, but Winters was playing to his audience. “The Russian trolls are saying twenty, killed by Ukrainian tanks rolling down peaceful citizens who only wanted to rejoin their Motherland.”

  Naveen looked up, bags under his eyes. He’d lost hair, Winters noticed, since being rewarded with this godforsaken job. “What do you want, Brad?”

  “Ten minutes with the president.”

  Naveen smirked. It was their old joke. Naveen was the one that wanted ten minutes, not Winters, even though Naveen was more aware every day how pointless those minutes would be. “What do you really want?”

  “Five minutes with the national security advisor.”

  “Ha, me too,” Naveen snorted, flopping into his chair. Winters leaned on a desk for want of a spare chair. The office was buzzing, the incessant noise of the incessantly busy, but they might as well have been at a private spa. Nobody but Naveen’s five or six subordinates noticed the conversation, and even they didn’t have time to care what was being said.

  Winters’s expression went from smiles to serious.

  “I heard the Hill is forming a Friends of Ukraine coalition,” he said. “They’re going to ambush the White House during their opening press conference. It’s going to be a full-court media blitz demanding military intervention to contain Putin.”

  Naveen sighed. “Who’d you hear that from?”

  “Highly pl
aced sources. I tried to knock them down with the usual talking points. Putin isn’t al Qaeda. Putin has nukes and a massive inferiority complex. We’re out of the nation-building business.”

  Naveen pursed his lips. “We’re doing all we can,” he snapped, “but sanctions take time, and the Germans have their own ideas.”

  “The Iron Bitch,” Winters said, shaking his head. It was their pet name for German chancellor Angela Merkel, who had a soft spot for her neighbors to the east.

  “Getting the military involved would make it more dangerous. Can’t they see that? What would we do if the Russians sank a destroyer? Draw another line in the sand?”

  “I just came to warn you,” Winters said, knowing he had his man on the ropes.

  “I know, I know,” Naveen sighed. “I owe you one. When’s the press conference?”

  “In two hours. A few congressmen, Senator Addison from Texas . . .”

  “Addison,” Naveen huffed. It was a button. Naveen hated Addison.

  “He’s going to say we can’t stand by, that we have to do something. He’s going to use the term pussy, Naveen. Or at least strongly imply it.”

  “Christ, Brad. We’re already at war in Syria.”

  “They’re going to make a congressional campaign out of it. Energy security. Ukrainian pipelines. Freedom gas.”

  Naveen laughed. Policy wonks never understood propaganda.

  “They’re comparing Putin to Hitler and the president to Chamberlain. It’s Munich ’38 all over again. It’s going to launch a news cycle and make it to the Sunday news shows.”

  Especially after Karpenko’s heroic moment on Saturday . . .

  Naveen didn’t say anything. Winters knew what he was thinking. The president was clear: no military interventions that could suck the U.S. into a shooting war with the Russians. The problem was that any intervention, beyond sanctions, could do just that.

  “I’m sorry, Brad,” Naveen said. “You know how it is.”

  Brad Winters held up his hands in surrender. “Understood.” He had groomed Naveen for more than ten years, cleared his way to this so-called prestigious post. Naveen owed him, but the man was a true public servant.