Shadow War

by Sean McFate

  The fools might blow themselves up, he thought, before I have the chance. That would suck.

  Lying on his back, he pulled the small camera and transmitter from his bag, removed the adhesive tape from the bottom, and stuck it to the edge of the roof. He sighted it in on the facility, switched it on, and held his middle finger in front of the lens.

  “How do you read me?”

  “Fuck you, too.”

  He grinned and crawled back to the fire escape.

  “Bollocks,” Wildman said, looking down. Three armed men, weaving like drunks and singing what sounded like old Soviet marches, had stumbled into the alley and spotted the Škoda. The singing stopped, as they peered inside the car. One took his mobile phone from his pocket.

  Not good, Wildman thought.

  He crawled to the roof’s center, where there was a trap door. It was unlocked. Thank God for teenagers smoking cigarettes. He dropped into the stairwell and ran down, leaping three or four steps at a time. Before he got to the exit, he unholstered his 9 mm pistol and screwed on the large noise suppressor. He concealed it behind his body, then walked out the front door.

  The men were arguing when he appeared in the mouth of the alley, but they stopped when they saw him. They spoke, but he kept walking toward them. The first yelled and raised his weapon. Wildman drew and squeezed off three rounds so fast it sounded like automatic gunfire, but a thud rather than a bang.

  Two bodies fell to the pavement. The third man stumbled backward in a pink mist of blood. Wildman’s shot had gone wide and struck him under his right clavicle, rather than at his center of mass.

  “Ey! Chto yebat!” the man yelled in Ukrainian as he fumbled with his rifle.

  Wildman corrected his mistake, and the man slumped forward, landing on his AK-47, then clattering to the ground. Wildman looked around. Nobody yet. Casually, he walked toward the car.

  “Fuck,” he said, as he stared down at the dead men. How was he going to fit all three bodies in the trunk?

  CHAPTER 29

  Brad Winters straightened his red Hermès tie in the bathroom mirror, then brushed lint from the right shoulder of his Brioni suit. He checked his shave. He hadn’t missed a spot. He never did.

  He brushed his teeth. He combed his hair to the point it looked sculpted, and put an American flag pin on his lapel. He walked into the bedroom of his Manhattan apartment—a one-bedroom on Sutton Place, owned by Apollo Outcomes, of course—then into the living room. There was a bar and a piano, but he hadn’t touched either. He didn’t turn on the lights. He never did. It was 8:30 P.M. EST. 3:30 A.M. EBS: Eastern Bloc Standard. He wondered, for a moment, what Locke and his team were doing. So much, after all, depended on them. He went to the window and saw, one hundred blocks down, the Freedom Tower. It looked like his mother’s favorite cut-glass vase. It was ugly, but he didn’t think it an embarrassment, or a sign that America had lost its way. The things that made America great were intangible, and always had been. But was there anything worse than spending billions of dollars for something that looked cheap?

  Half an hour later, the town car pulled up to a skyscraper on Park Avenue, a few blocks north of Grand Central. The guards were still manning the desk, since it was only 9:00 P.M., and everyone here was putting in late hours. Occupy Wall Street had gotten it wrong; the banks had abandoned Wall Street for midtown decades ago. The hedge fund guys thought this hilarious. Dumb hipsters.

  He gave the guards the name of the company. They called upstairs. A minute later, he was in the elevator, where he took off his security sticker and crumbled it in his pocket.

  Blyleven was waiting for him when the doors opened. He was twenty-seven and thought he was Matthew McConnaughy. His coat and tie were off, his white shirttail was hanging out, and he had an extra button undone for chest effect. He was handsome, and confident, and rich, but he couldn’t quite pull off the look. And his wingtips were out of style.

  “Bradley,” he said. Brad wasn’t short for Bradley, but Winters ignored it. “Welcome home.”

  They passed through the small lobby. There was new art: two white squares on white walls. Winters knew the firm had paid a few hundred thousand at least, or they wouldn’t be here. The corner office—his old office—featured a painting of a nurse by Richard Prince. He knew that because Blyleven pointed at it and said, “That’s a Richard Prince.” Winters didn’t know or care who that was.

  “Brad. Good to see you.”

  “Nice to be here, David.” He shook hands with David Givens, his old partner, and took a seat in the most expensive piece of plastic money could buy. Hatcher was there as well. The venture capital firm had four hundred million dollars invested at ten times leverage, and this was half the staff. The other half was under twenty-five and in the cubicles thirty feet away, talking with Hong Kong or Singapore. Only Givens was over forty.

  There were the usual pleasantries, and a bottle of Japanese whiskey, but it didn’t take long to get down to business.

  “What happened in Libya?”

  “Growing pains.”

  “Just like Guinea.”

  “Not like Guinea at all.”

  “But with the same results.”

  “Process over product,” Winters said, sipping his Yamazaki 18, the upper echelon’s whiskey of the moment. “You know that.”

  “And what is the process?”

  “We’re putting the right team together: engineers, drill crews, suppliers, security. We’re testing methods for staying off the grid. We’re practicing for the right hole. We haven’t found it yet.”

  “It’s been three years.”

  Three years was nothing, but it was a dog’s life on Wall Street. Three years ago, two of these partners were at Goldman Sachs, and three years before that, Wharton. Patience wasn’t their deal, and he wasn’t their mentor. Everything old was out, and here, Winters knew, he was old. So was Givens, if it came to that. They probably called him Yoda.

  “We talked about a five-year time frame . . .” Winters started.

  “So we’re still two years away from striking gold.”

  “I was hoping for another five.”

  “Brad,” Givens said, shaking his head.

  “Thirty-eight million,” Hatcher said. Hatcher was the numbers guy. He looked like a momma’s boy, but he had a kink for BDSM. Winters wondered if he was wearing latex underwear.

  “It’s only twenty-five,” Winters said.

  “Up front, yes. But we’ve done the numbers. That’s our opportunity cost.”

  That was what this was about. Hatcher, or more likely Blyleven, wanted to fund his own project, but this ancient investment was clogging the balance sheet.

  “It’s a lottery ticket,” Winters said. “You pay a little for the chance to make a lot.”

  “It’s not a lot. Not compared to Uber. It’s just a lot riskier.”

  Kids. They had never lived in a world of ordinary valuations. They were always chasing the next technology, willing to pay a billion even before it netted a million. Except it wasn’t even technological advancement anymore. That moment had passed. It was just business models now.

  “I’m sorry, Brad,” Givens said, and Winters could tell it was true. “It’s a legacy investment in a legacy business. No one invests in oil anymore.” That was clearly untrue, but Winters understood the point. He was moving too slowly. Or more apt, the firm was trying to move too fast.

  “We appreciate the investment in Apollo Outcomes,” Hatcher said.

  Damn right, you insufferable ass. I made that investment, then moved over to the company and grew it a hundred times over. Apollo Outcomes was no software bubble. It was real. It was boots on the ground.

  “If you were willing to take a little more of the company public . . .”

  “I’m not.” Ten percent already meant too much scrutiny.

  “Then we’re out of this side venture.”

  That was all. It was over in fifteen minutes. Hatcher shook his hand, Blyleven expressed his regrets, and
the relationship was done.

  “I’m sorry, Brad,” Givens said, as they walked to the elevator. “But it’s the right thing. No free rides. You would have done it yourself.”

  “No hard feelings. I knew it was coming.” It was half the reason he had pulled out of Libya. To force their hand.

  “If you want a personal investment—”

  “I don’t.”

  “Do you want to get dinner?”

  Winters looked at his former friend, but he knew that wasn’t quite the right word. More like former colleague. Or understudy. “I can’t. I’m on my way to London.”

  “Well, tell Josey I said hi. And . . . I’m sorry.”

  Winters stepped onto the elevator. Givens wasn’t so bad, he thought, as the doors closed. He was simply an idiot, only forty and desperate to keep up with the younger crowd.

  CHAPTER 30

  Alie stared at the enormous, pajama-clad ass of the man on the jungle gym. They weren’t really pajamas, more like an ill-fitting ninja suit, solid black with a blue-and-gold ribbon tied around the upper right arm, symbolizing independent Ukraine. This was the uniform of the Donbas Battalion, although uniform wasn’t exactly accurate, since every man was supplying his own. The sloppiness was not instilling Alie with confidence, but she’d seen worse. She’d seen half-naked kids with broken mirrors for jewelry charging tanks with machetes.

  The man in the ninja suit swung for the next rung, missed, and went down in the sand, screaming and grabbing his balls.

  “I don’t know what to say,” Hargrove said. “I seriously, swear to God, do not know what to say.”

  The trainers had set up a tire course for agility drills and six-foot wooden walls for the recruits—no, volunteers—to scale, but otherwise the operation was one officer in sunglasses watching thirty grown men on a playground. Jump the swings. Climb the ladder. Slide down the slide. Low crawl. High crawl. Make a circuit. Do it again.

  Off to the side, a group of six was drinking water, two of them bent over with their hands on their knees. Behind them, another group of six was sitting on their rucks with their boots off. Alie recognized the squad assigned to march with their fifteen-pound rucks. Five miles, Colonel Barkley had said. It had taken them an hour and half.

  “I don’t know what to say,” Hargrove said again.

  It was the only thing he’d said all morning, but he must have said it a hundred times. Americans had seen videos of al Qaeda recruits training like this in the run-up to the Gulf War and laughed. We were going to fight these dogs? What a joke. And yet, right here, in front of him, American trainers were doing the exact same thing.

  “Honestly, Bill,” Hargrove said. “To say this isn’t what I expected would be such a vast understatement, that I can’t even say it. So what is left to say?”

  Colonel Barkley didn’t respond. He’d been around the world a dozen times, from Indonesia to Latin America, and this was how it was done. Every method had been tested; every exercise had a purpose. Even with the Iraqi security forces, this was the way it was done. The difference was time. In Iraq, the trainers had six months, and that still wasn’t enough.

  “I have to work with what I have,” he said. “I have two weeks to train whatever comes my way.”

  “But these guys aren’t even in shape.”

  Some were, some weren’t. This was a representative cross-section of a modern society, not a CrossFit class. There was nothing substantially different about these Ukrainians than any other army Barkley had trained, and there was nothing substantially different about the way he was training them. He wasn’t a scientist. He was a mechanic. It amazed him that the bureaucrats still hadn’t figured this out.

  “My job is not to get them into shape, Officer,” Barkley said, emphasizing Hargrove’s unearned title. “That is not going to happen in fourteen days. I assumed that would be self-evident. My job is to strengthen their minds. To give them the spirit of the bayonet, by which I mean the will to persevere. When I am through with these men, they may not be able to run a mile, but they will have the intestinal fortitude to fight.”

  “What are you talking about?” Hargrove asked.

  “I’m talking about the warrior spirit, son.”

  “With bayonets?”

  “With your bare hands, son, if that’s what it takes.” The colonel could feel himself getting hot. This was the mission: the lesson that had been taught to him in 1981, when he enlisted, and that he had taught to thousands around the world. Harden the mind. Control the fear. Trust the team. When you lived it, you understood. If you lived like a pussy, it could not be explained.

  “I need to see your results,” Hargrove said coldly. He’d lost the sir, and the respectfulness, of the night before. “Where is the Donbas Battalion?”

  “At the front. Sir.”

  Hargrove waited for more.

  “Five miles up the road,” Barkley spat. “Jessup will show you the way.”

  They argued halfway to the Donbas Battalion headquarters before Alie gave up. Hargrove insisted the training was a travesty, a swindle, a gross injustice to the American taxpayer and the CIA. She understood; this wasn’t the world you imagined when you were at Camp Peary, running obstacle courses and reading field manuals. This wasn’t how the military was portrayed in all those history books back in Hargrove’s room. But it was how the world actually was. Alie had seen it before: in Sudan, in Kenya, in Niger.

  “Locke trained security forces in Burundi, Chad. They prevented a genocide,” she said.

  “And?”

  “They don’t even have playgrounds. Three years in that country, and I never saw a single slide.”

  Hargrove stared out the car window. The guards for the Sloviansk Battalion appeared briefly, waving them through. Jessup, driving in front, had vouched for them. “I don’t want to hear about Locke,” Hargrove said.

  She knew it was trouble when she saw the camp: men in mismatched black fatigues packing trucks, gear being tossed haphazardly, small groups of wandering militiamen. There were far fewer men than she had anticipated, maybe eighty at most, but that could be for tactical security. These days, nobody concentrated troops in camps. Too easy for the enemy to count, capture, or bomb. Except for traditional armies, most forces operated in small units now.

  Twenty minutes later, they were gearing up to head out with a patrol. And Hargrove was fuming. The militia was sloppy, he said. The mercenaries—his mercenaries, the ones the CIA hired—had been curt. There was no respect for authority. His authority. The CIA’s authority. The authority of being . . . right and proper in your work environment. Of being fucking professionals.

  “They’re going to Kramatorsk,” Alie said. She had seen it in the master sergeant’s eyes when she mentioned the city. It was only twenty kilometers away. That was why the men were gearing up. “They’re going early in the morning,” she said, when Hargrove didn’t answer. “Mission early. Assault on the enemy early.”

  Hargrove wasn’t listening. He was staring at a group of men smoking cigarettes and cutting up for a militiaman with a cell phone camera. This was the unit they’d been assigned to shadow.

  “We’re going to Kramatorsk,” Alie said, grabbing Hargrove’s arm. “That’s why we’re here.”

  “I’m going to do my job,” Hargrove snapped. “I’m going to make sure these men get what’s coming to them. And then, and only then, are we going to Kramatorsk.”

  Alie watched him stalk off. Of all the macho bullshit . . . of all the wrong times. Locke was out there, twenty kilometers away. How could this patrol possibly matter?

  “I suppose you’re a soldier,” Alie said to the man beside her. His name was Shwetz, and he was their interpreter. He was dressed in black, with blue and yellow cloth tied around his upper right arm. A Kalashnikov was slung incompetently over his shoulder.

  “I’ve been trained,” Shwetz replied, handing her something black.

  “At the school?”

  “Yes. For two weeks. Two weeks ago.”
r />   She took the black item. It was a full-face ski mask, with only the eyes and mouth cut out. She shivered involuntarily, remembering the docks in Bosaso, Somalia, when they’d put her in a hood, when she’d lost Magdelena . . . there was no way she was putting it on.

  “What did you do before?” she said, handing it back.

  Shwetz smiled from inside his ski mask. “I was a teacher. Third grade.” Alie could see it. He had a gentle disposition and fearful eyes. “But I guess, really, we are all soldiers now.”

  CHAPTER 31

  Miles and I were sitting on our rucks, eating cold French field rations. One of the best perks of being a private sector soldier was that you didn’t have to choke down American MREs—Meals Ready to Eat, aka Meals Rejected by Everyone. It was embarrassing, as an American, that the French version was so much better.

  “Reminds me of Tamanrasset,” Miles said, in the way other people might reminisce about their anniversary dinner at the Olive Garden or hearing Pachelbel’s Canon yet again. I knew why he was thinking of Algeria. It was only Miles and me on that mission, and we had played backgammon for three days, while our local contact became increasingly unhinged with worry. We ignored him, and in the end, our man walked right into the line of fire and was killed, as we knew he would. If I recall correctly, I beat Miles 213 games to 62, although I wasn’t convinced he was trying.

  “Reminds me of Guinea-Bissau,” I said, picking up a bite of freeze-dried navarin d’agneau with my ivory mission chopsticks, “when we left Tailor in the jungle.” We were hunting a Colombian drug lord that had taken over this West African country, making it a transit point for cocaine going to Europe. Tailor had made the mission a living hell, constantly bitching about the local prostitutes and his scrotal infection, so when we accidently lost him on an all-night op, we weren’t in a hurry to reunite.