by Sean McFate
“We need to build better barricades?” Charro asked, as he unloaded and distributed ammo magazines and clips. Sirko and I had pulled a few scraps into position, but Charro was right—they wouldn’t provide enough cover, and the factory wasn’t an ideal defensive position. I’d chosen it for its concealment and proximity to the target.
“Up to you,” I said, as Charro turned back to the truck for another load, Mother Mary’s hands upraised in bloody tattooed supplication on the back of his neck, “but I’m getting a couple hours of rack. We have thirty-six hours until the Donbas Battalion comes rolling into town, and as of right now, we’ve never even had eyes on the target.”
“If they come rolling into town,” Miles said. It was the mercenary’s lament, working with amateurs.
“I don’t know,” Wildman said slowly, as he worked the chambers on his SA-80 assault rifle with a practiced eye. Mercs are mechanics, always tinkering. “I’m happy we’re meeting the Donbas lads. Otherwise, this might all be too easy.”
CHAPTER 26
It was nearly eight, and almost dark, as Alie crept through the streets of Lozova, Ukraine, looking for the Furshet supermarket. It had been a long drive from Kiev, but she’d kept busy evading the most personal aspects of Hargrove’s questions. What had happened in Bujumbura? What had Locke done exactly? Why had he done it? How? Who with? He was excited, she could tell, not to confront Locke, but to meet him. But he was excited, mostly, to be out from behind his desk and in the field. Even if their first stop was a training school for the Donbas Battalion, this was war. Or at least a lot closer to it than Kiev.
“Have you been in a battle?” he asked, his eyes bright and his speech faster and more clipped than normal.
She thought of the villagers she’d seen slaughtered by the Janjaweed militia in South Sudan, and the bodies being stacked like firewood after the Gatumba massacre. She thought of her journey with Magdelena through some of the most violent regions on earth, trying to survive the gray market of human trafficking. She’d seen more rape and starvation than violent death on that underground railroad from African depravation into European slavery, but she’d seen deadly violence, too.
Women’s stuff, the old boys scoffed, when she pitched those stories. Actual news, as she put it. About actual human beings.
But it wasn’t war, so the old boy’s network never understood. They would run those stories, but only two or three times a year at most. Otherwise, it was too much, Alie. Too much. If you want to write here, write something else. So she left.
“No. No battles,” she said, knowing where Hargrove’s sympathies lay.
“What about Locke?”
It was insulting that Hargrove was only scratching the surface of her life—a life more interesting than most, including Tom Locke’s—but she didn’t mind. She was used to it in military and CIA company, and she didn’t want to talk about herself anyway. Nobody who truly lived this life did.
“There it is,” Hargrove said, pointing to a store that looked more like a Food-4-Less than a supermarket. Ukraine, especially in the east, was more third world than European. Or maybe it was just more 1963.
They were late. The store was closed. There were only three cars in the parking lot, and a pimply kid pushing the shopping carts inside. At first, Alie thought he was the only person around. Then she noticed a man on the bench, waiting for a bus.
“Pull up next to him,” Hargrove said. He rolled down his window. “Which way to the post office?” he asked in Ukrainian.
“Ten blocks as the crow flies. But it’s hard to find.”
“Perhaps you could show us?”
The stranger got into the back of the car, and Hargrove signaled Alie to drive. “Challenge and response authentication,” he whispered.
What is this, 1959? she thought, unfairly. Her nerves, she realized, were frazzled from the drive.
“What’s your name?” Hargrove asked the man in the backseat.
“Call me Jessup, sir. Take the right fork here. We’re headed east.” He paused, sensing Alie eying him in the rearview. “Who’s she?”
“Nobody,” Hargrove said.
“Nice to meet you,” Alie replied.
The man didn’t respond. He was her age, early thirties, and clearly military. He was also clearly unhappy. Alie wondered how long he’d been waiting at the Furshet, since Hargrove hadn’t made any calls during the drive.
“How’s the operation?” Hargrove asked, all smiles.
“I’ll let the colonel answer that, sir.”
They drove east for half an hour before turning off the main road. Alie assumed they were close, but after another hour, they still hadn’t reached their destination.
“There isn’t much activity at night,” Jessup explained. “It’s mostly daytime patrols, especially with the militias. But once you’re in the valley, it’s wise to stay off the main roads.”
Alie was surprised this was the Donbas valley, since the word implied a low space between hills. Even in the dark, she could see this was flat farmland, with a few scattered forests and open-pit mines. Everything in Ukraine, it seemed, was flat farmland. These people were fighting over the Kansas of Europe.
I guess that’s why the world doesn’t care, Alie thought. But Kansas mattered, of course, if you happened to live in Topeka.
The destination appeared at first glance to be a rural elementary school on a two-lane road. Jessup directed them to a parking lot behind the building, where three cars were parked out of sight. There were six large camouflage-green canvas tents, further back at the tree line. They looked like they’d been bought from a World War II surplus store.
“The locals know we’re here,” Jessup said, “but there’s no reason to advertise.”
They walked to the front of the building. There was artwork on the walls and a long central hallway with doors along each side. Alie saw a monster with a misshapen head and five terrifying claws coming out of each forearm. The face next to it was perfectly round with no mouth.
Jessup turned into a small anteroom. The desk had a typewriter on it. The chart on the wall featured little gold stars. There was a door leading to another office. The principal’s office. This was an elementary school. Or at least it had been before the uprising.
Colonel Barkley was standing behind the desk with his hands behind his back. He was in his late fifties, over six feet tall with white hair, a beer belly, and the ramrod bearing of a military lifer. He wore an olive-drab baseball cap, military fatigues with a wide black leather belt and brass buckle, and spit-polished Corcoran jump boots. When he reached to shake Hargrove’s hand, Alie noticed an enormous Citadel class ring on the same finger as his wedding band. Behind him, on the top of a low bookshelf, was an old-fashioned slicer used to cut the edges off school projects and the fingers off people who double-crossed the mob.
“Welcome to the Dumb-ass,” Barkley said in a thick Southern accent. “Take a seat.”
Hargrove sat, and Barkley did too, his belly rolling over his belt buckle. He looked like a grandfather, and in fact, he was. Barkley had three messed-up kids back home in South Carolina—he hadn’t been there for them, he had realized too late, but that was no damn excuse—and six grandkids he figured he was going to have to put through college himself. That was why he took a few of these six- to twelve-week jobs with Apollo every year, preferably when it wasn’t Clemson football season. An operation would pay for a year of college. Twenty-four tours, and he might get them all through.
“No offense,” he said, holding up his hand to Alie, “but who’s the girl?”
“She’s with me, sir,” Hargrove said.
“Well, I know that, son.”
Alie expected Hargrove to back down. Colonel Barkley talked like Foghorn Leghorn and looked like the executive vice president of a small-town rotary club, but he had served twenty-five years in Special Forces, and that was obvious, too.
“You can trust me, Colonel,” Hargrove said. “I’m on your side.”
&nb
sp; Alie noticed Hargrove’s slight Southern drawl and stiff back. He looked like he’d grown a spine. The colonel was rubbing off on him. Hargrove was so young he was still bending to the characters around him.
“All right,” the colonel said, dropping the request. “What do you want to know?” He didn’t say it with respect, but with a slight air of annoyance. He wanted to pass this spot inspection quickly, like a kidney stone.
Jessup arrived with a chair. Alie thanked him and sat down.
“So how’s it going?” Hargrove said. He looked calm, but he couldn’t quit looking around, as if there was something to see.
“What do you mean?”
“In general. How’s the war going?”
“There is no war, son. There is an armed insurrection by pro-Russian forces, aided and abetted by little green men, courtesy of Comrade Putin. I hope you didn’t come all this way to ask me about that, because that is not my job. I am not here to fight. I train men.”
“That’s true, sir,” Hargrove said, taken aback. “But that doesn’t mean you don’t know how the . . . um, insurrection . . .”
Barkley did everything short of sighing. “You’ll have to ask the Ukrainians. Or your CIA bosses. I don’t do intel. I do combat. Next question.”
Hargrove hesitated. This wasn’t going as planned. Barkley was disrespecting the partnership between the CIA and the men in the field. And even worse, making him feel like a kid. “How many men have you trained?”
“Fifty a week, for five weeks, that’s two hundred fifty, give or take. About twenty percent wash out—” he paused “—and that’s a conservative number.”
“You don’t know how many men you’ve trained?”
“Not exactly.”
“But you get paid by the head.”
“I get paid by the hour.”
“But the Apollo Outcomes contract—”
“Son, my name is William Bedford Barkley. I am fifty-eight years old. I am a former full-bird colonel in the United States Army, Special Forces, and I have been training men in foreign lands to fight for their freedom since before you were born. And I don’t count heads.”
“But that’s not what your contract says,” Hargrove said. He wasn’t challenging the colonel, Alie could tell, he was trying to gather his thoughts. This wasn’t, as he would say, the professionalism a young go-getter had been led to expect.
“Jessup,” the colonel barked. The soldier was in the doorway so fast it was like he’d been standing there all along. Barkley had his own five-man team. Jessup was the youngest, and thus the gofer, but he was valuable, because he knew his place.
“Yessir.”
“Get this operative the numbers on how many men we’ve trained.”
“Yessir.”
Jessup left. Barkley stared at Hargrove. Waiting.
“I guess there’s not any paperwork on the battlefield, right?” Hargrove joked, smiling weakly.
Alie rolled her eyes. “How about a drink?” she said, nodding toward the half-empty bottle of Bulleit Bourbon on a shelf behind Everly. “To show that we’re all friends.”
Barkley looked at her, then Hargrove. When the man didn’t object, Barkley figured he had to oblige. He wouldn’t be surprised if the woman was the boss. It was like that these days.
“What training are you providing?” she asked, when she’d knocked back a tumbler of Kentucky’s eighth finest bourbon.
Barkley pursed his lips to show his distaste, but he figured he had to answer. “Physical fitness, marksmanship, individual movement techniques, battle drills, squad formations, first aid. The basics. That’s why we call it basic training.”
“You provide the weapons?”
“For those that don’t bring their own,” he said. “Who’d a thunk we’d be smuggling Kalashnikovs into Ukraine?” He let out a belly laugh as he poured himself another. He waved the bottle in midair, offering to refresh their glasses. No one declined.
Alie could see the headline: UNITED STATES ARMS MILITIA IN UKRAINE. But she wasn’t going to write it. That was small beer. And besides, it was a good idea. She’d heard Ukraine was a munitions desert, and the government was desperate for arms.
“How do you recruit?” Hargrove asked, having found his second wind.
“We don’t. They’ve been coming since Cri-mea went red. Young, old, everybody. The paramilitary leaders split them into groups of fifty and send them here. Two weeks later, I send them back.”
Hargrove gulped. “You think that will make a difference?”
The colonel sighed. He’d spent his career in “white SOF,” covertly training indigenous forces to fight for U.S. interests. These two probably didn’t even know the concept. It was all “black SOF” now, hallelujah for the scalp hunters. If these forever wars were to be won, Barkley believed, it wouldn’t be through Americans martyring bad guys. It would be through men like him training others to fight for their God-given rights so that we didn’t have to fight for them. Otherwise, it was terrorist whack-a-mole till the end of time.
“Young man,” he said, “I believe not only in the right to bear arms, but the obligation to bear arms. I believe in the power of those arms, rightly respected and rightly used. A polite society is an armed society.”
“I’m not sure I believe that,” Alie said.
“I didn’t ask what you believe. You asked what I believe. And I believe we are making a difference. Will it be enough in this particular case? I do not know. It would help if the United States government would provide additional funds, so that I can train twice as many men.”
This was the standard line. Apollo Outcomes was a business; contractors were taught to always ask for additional funds to elongate the operation or widen the scope. Hargrove wasn’t biting. He hadn’t even seen the training grounds, and he was already worried he was going to have to write this colonel up.
Barkley shrugged. “The efficiency of my actions is not a calculation I have been tasked to make.”
Hargrove started to object, but Barkley rose from his seat, his beer belly accosting them from across the desk.
“It’s late,” he said. “We start early. And we had very little notice of your arrival. We did not have the time to requisition a feather bed, I am afraid, but I can offer you a bunk in a classroom with my instructors. If the girl wants private quarters, she will have to sleep in a closet.”
Hargrove looked appalled, but before he could object, Alie jumped in. “We can share quarters,” she said.
Barkley stared at her, and he didn’t look like a grandfather anymore, at least not the kind she remembered. He looked like a man who had tolerated enough.
“I bet you can,” he said.
“I’m not going to give him a blowjob, if that’s what you’re implying,” Alie said. She snatched the bottle of Bulleit and poured herself a glass. Then she laughed, and Bill Barkley did too.
“I have to admit, I’m disappointed,” Hargrove said, raising his glass for another drink. It was a joke, but Alie knew there was some truth in there, too.
CHAPTER 27
Half a world away, and seven time zones behind, Brad Winters walked into the scallop-pink lobby of 1050 Connecticut Avenue, with its oversized plastic plants, and took the escalator to the second floor. He was wearing his civilian “dress blues”—a boxy suit with an American flag lapel pin, the exact same kind that had become a conservative cause célèbre during the 2012 presidential debates. He knew empty gestures were never as empty as they seemed.
He entered Morton’s steakhouse, adjusting quickly from the overly bright atrium with the four-story American flag to the darkness of the steakhouse interior. There was a Morton’s in every city in America. There were five in Washington, DC, alone. This was the only one that mattered.
“Your locker, Mr. Winters?” the hostess asked.
The restaurant had a long narrow vestibule, with wine bottles forming one wall and polished wooden lockers forming the other. Each locker was a square foot and featured a small silver
nameplate. The hostess unlocked the one with “B. W.” etched on the plate and stepped back. There was no one else in the vestibule, and if anyone had glanced around the corner, they would have seen that there was nobody in the dining room. There never was.
Winters removed a small box. “Thank you, Sheila,” he said.
Sheila smiled. That was her job: to recognize and smile. “Your guest is here, on the balcony.”
She walked through the crowded bar and toward a small glass door. Winters followed her onto the patio, a thin strip of concrete covered by a black awning. The patio was only one floor above Connecticut Avenue, so it was loud. The view was upscale chain stores and nondescript offices. For a high-end steak restaurant, the tables and chairs were cheap. Nobody came here for the ambiance, but everybody came. Even at 4:30 on a Wednesday, the tables were full of men in suits, puffing away on cigars. They came because it was a tradition. And because it was off K Street, and three blocks from the White House. And because, in a city that had banned almost all forms of smoking, this patio was one of the few refuges where you could indulge.
The general, Winters noticed, was already well into his indulgences, a half-smoked stogie protruding from his lips—a Cuban, for Christ’s sake—and an empty glass of what used to be Scotch in front of him.
“General Raimy,” Winters said, extending his hand. “Thanks for meeting me on such short notice.”
“It’s my pleasure,” the general said, without standing. Normally he wore his uniform with all his pins and medals, including his four stars. Today it was a suit. His security detail sat three tables away, drinking soda water.
“Well, I know you’re a man who loves his country.”
“And his steak.” The general smiled. It was true. The man liked his perks.
“Macallan 18, neat. Another round,” Winters said, as the hostess slid the menu in front of him. “So how is the Pentagon?”
“Large,” the general said.
“I spent half the week in the Capitol building,” Winters said. “I could say the same thing.” He opened the small box from his locker. “But it would be a lie. That place gets smaller every year.”
