Shadow War

by Sean McFate

  Maybe. Because if everything had gone as planned, and Alie and Hargrove hadn’t screwed the pooch, we’d have been inside the facility, waiting for the Donbas Battalion, when the Russian reinforcements arrived. There was no way Winters could have anticipated the Chechen mercs . . . or contacted them . . .

  Don’t get crazy, Locke, I thought, scoping the Russian commander’s right cheekbone to calm my nerves. Winters didn’t know where we were holed up. He thought we’d be in the facility as planned. The Chechens had followed Hargrove. In a way, Hargrove had saved our lives . . .

  “What now?” Alie whispered, sliding up beside me on her belly so the Russians wouldn’t see her silhouetted against the morning sky.

  There were only five of us left: me, Boon, Karpenko, Alie, and Hargrove, who was wrapped in bloody bandages and nearly comatose from shock and exhaustion. I thought about what I had in my ruck: field jacket, night-vision goggles, a small amount of ammo, four nutrition bars, water. Around my neck was the gold chain Wolcott had given me last week in Washington, so I could snip links if I needed funds. In the map pocket of the ruck was about thirteen thousand euros in a Ziploc bag, the last of my Apollo cash. Boon and I could escape and evade, but what about the rest?

  The smartest move was to leave them and run. They were war tourists, after all. Alie and Hargrove, at least, would probably survive. Karpenko, though, was wanted by all sides.

  “We wait,” I said, without taking my eye from my scope. One shot to the cheekbone, and the Russian commander’s head would blow out like a Jackson Pollock painting. I breathed deep and thought about the shot, the trajectory, the windage. I probably wouldn’t hit him from this distance, at least not a clean kill, and I was glad. For the first time in a long time, the thought of killing made me sick.

  I didn’t realize Alie was still beside me, until she put her hand on my back and started rubbing it gently. I had a scar; I don’t know if she remembered that. Maybe she could feel it. I had a brief, horrible thought that I might have been crying, but my scope was clear. My eyes were dry. Mercs don’t fucking cry.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, but it didn’t move me. She’d said that before. “I’m sorry I compromised your mission. I didn’t realize it would be like that. I didn’t realize that people would die.”

  Did she mean Miles? Or did she mean everyone?

  “I’m sure you’ve seen it before,” I whispered.

  Alie was tough. She’d been in back alleys and slave brothels and God knew where else in pursuit of her truth, places even I wouldn’t go. Anyone who thought she wasn’t a hardened warrior was a fool. But I knew she hadn’t seen anything like the last four hours before. I had never been in a worse battle, or on a more devastating mission, so how could she have been? We were lucky to be alive.

  “I don’t understand what you do,” she said. “I don’t see how you can live like this.” She paused. The carnage was catching up to her. “But I respect it, Tom. No one would go through that if they didn’t believe in the cause. Right? I didn’t realize that before. I guess that makes you think I’m naïve.”

  It made me wonder what I think. It made me wonder why it had come to this, why I made all the decisions I’d made—leaving grad school for Burundi, turning down Winters’s offer to climb the executive ladder, walking away from the one woman I never wanted to forget. Why bother, if all my choices only led me here?

  “I would have married you, Alie,” I said without turning from my scope. “In some other life. I would have taken an office job, and bought a minivan, and we would have raised our children on ice cream and spy novels, even the girl. We would have been happy.”

  I felt Alie’s hand moving down my back, and then falling away. “Oh Tom,” she said sadly, “what makes you think I would ever have wanted that?”

  I thought she’d leave me then, alone with my weariness and regret. But she didn’t. She lay beside me, not touching me, not moving. Was she watching the Russians below us loading their trucks, getting ready to ambush us at the extraction point? Or was she thinking what I was thinking: that there was still a place for us, a bed somewhere and happiness, at least for a night, until one or both of us left to save the world. Maybe Paris. Why not? The place didn’t have to be large or fancy, it just had to be there. One bed and one window would do.

  “What do we do now?” Alie asked again.

  “We keep waiting,” I said. “Play for the breaks. Something will come up. Something always does.”

  Twenty minutes later, we heard the helicopters, two Mi-17s, each capable of carrying thirty people. At first, I thought they might be Spetsnaz reinforcements, about to fast-rope into the facility from a hover. But the Russians were screaming and scurrying out of sight, like roaches when the kitchen light flicks on. The choppers are with us, I thought.

  “News crews,” I said, as the two birds came into view, black against the morning blue. “My boss lined them up for Karpenko’s victory speech. It must have been too late to recall them back to Kiev.”

  “So they’ll be going back soon,” Alie said.

  I took my eye away from the rifle scope and looked at her. She was smiling.

  “I can talk my way on,” she said.

  I believed her. Alie could talk her way out of a sunburn. “What about them?” I said, nodding toward the others.

  Alie looked over her shoulder, at Hargrove with his bandages, and Karpenko, lying faceup in the sun, smoking a cigarette. “Are you asking if I’d risk my life for Hargrove?”

  I laughed. “You already have.”

  “Then it’s my call.”

  I heard it then, even above the blades of the choppers setting down two blocks away in front of the gas facility. It was a jaunting whistling, “God Save the Queen.” I turned, knowing exactly what that meant. Don’t shoot my head off, assholes. Sure enough, Wildman appeared at the top of the fire escape thirty seconds later, carrying his SA-80, a rucksack, and an RPG. Splattered blood stained the front of his shirt.

  “It’s a proper shit show down there,” he said with a twisted smile.

  “I have to go,” I said to Alie. This was no time for moping, and no time for regret. We had miles to go, hundreds of miles, and most of it would be on foot.

  “Call of the wild,” Alie said, but she was smiling.

  CHAPTER 59

  “They aren’t going to find them, are they?” Everly asked, as the black Benz limo pushed through Saint Petersburg’s early morning traffic.

  “Unlikely.”

  Everly pursed his lips, pushing his lackluster chin deeper into his neck. “Did you warn them?”

  “I didn’t have to.”

  Winters had come up through army airborne, and he’d kept his military mind-set: never leave a man behind. Not an Apollo man. It was a guiding principle behind Apollo Outcomes. It was literally chiseled into a stone that someone had given him as a paperweight, which he’d passed down to the man who replaced him as the leader of the paramilitary wing of the firm. He felt wrong about what he had done, deeply wrong, but maybe, he reasoned, that was the price of success: to lay down a few of your core convictions in pursuit of the greater good. At least he had warned Locke.

  “It wasn’t necessary,” Winters said, with steel in his voice. “Karpenko, maybe. But my team?”

  “It was currency,” Everly replied bluntly. “Gorelov needed to save face in order to pitch our deal to his superiors.”

  They were quiet. Brad Winters was hardly ever quiet.

  “I admit,” Everly said, with a snuffling laugh, “I enjoyed seeing Yuri so . . . incontinent. I’d like to thank you for that.”

  “It was my pleasure. Sincerely.” Winters liked sticking it to a Russian, any Russian. He was Cold War that way.

  “He may try to use this . . . escape as an excuse,” Everly frowned. “To back out on your part of the deal.”

  “I don’t think so,” Winters said. “They had their chance at the facility, they have no one to blame but themselves. And this is a smart deal for the R
ussians.” Winters had planned it that way. He knew the power of mutual benefit. “That’s the real way Gorelov will save face. And besides—” he smiled at Everly “—I have the same protection as everyone else you negotiated for today: your bank and its backers.”

  Winters had long known the game. He knew the Deep State wasn’t a powerful cabal. It was a ruthless jungle of apex-predators in a zero-sum contest of conquest and annihilation, where every alliance was temporary, and everyone, even the largest players and power brokers, could be destroyed. Gorelov could fall out of favor with Putin all the way to a prison cell, or a grave. Karpenko could be sold for assassination. The London bank could fail, if it stopped being useful to the right people at the highest levels of influence. At the Deep State level, everyone was both predator and prey. That wasn’t a defect in the system, but its survival mechanism; competition kept everyone’s claws sharp.

  What Winters hadn’t realized was that East and West no longer mattered. The Deep State, as seen through the bankers, penetrated across the great divide, from London to Moscow. Its interests didn’t track with normal geopolitics, or even official government positions. He had been raised a patriot, always believing that it was us versus them; that national interests trumped business; that flags were, in the end, more than cloth.

  But that was twentieth-century thinking, and as he’d just learned, the modern world was much bigger than states, and much more dangerous and profitable, too. Yes, there was negotiation left to do, but Glenn Hartley and his partners were now looking at three times as much drillable land as he’d promised in Ukraine. The security environment was worse, sure, but Apollo would roll its Ukrainian security contracts into Azerbaijan, either with the financial backing of the U.S. government or some other partner. Within a few years, his conglomerate would be pumping millions of barrels, and Apollo would be the best military force in the hot zone between Russia, Iraq, and Iran. And then, if and when the time was right, Gorelov would learn what Winters had taken to heart: that all strategic alliances are temporary, until the next opportunity comes along.

  “I hope you’re not disappointed,” Everly said, misinterpreting the silence. “It was a brilliant plan, in its way. Expose the Russian military invasion. Blow up our energy network. Pressure the world into war. Jolly good as bluffs.”

  If you say so.

  “But the world doesn’t work that way, I’m afraid,” Everly said. “It is not remade, all in one whack. History is a series of carefully applied pressures, moving things incrementally toward where you want them to go. It’s managing crises, not creating them. That is our business, Mr. Winters. The steadying hand. That’s how we’ll push Putin into line. And you gave him a mighty big push today.”

  Everly was wrong. History didn’t work like that. It was a constant collision, a series of catastrophic breaks and long repairs. Bin Laden had changed the world in a moment, when his men flew airplanes into the World Trade Center. George Bush had remade the world in three weeks, when he blitzkrieged Baghdad. Bush had intended to break the Middle East so that he could build back: newer, modern, and better than before. The first part worked; the second part . . . not so much. But that was a failure of execution, not vision. It didn’t mean the idea was wrong.

  “Cheer up, old chap,” Everly said with a knock on the shoulder and fresh British pip. “We did a good thing today. You did a good thing. It was impressive indeed.”

  “Thanks,” Winters said, without much conviction. They were approaching the airfield. He could see the private jet on the tarmac.

  “We’d like to express our appreciation,” Everly said, turning serious. “We’d like to buy back your firm’s stock and take you private, through a shell company, of course. You’ll have complete managerial control, and once your firm meets our clients’ needs, you’ll never have to depend on another government contract again. The possibilities are greater, Mr. Winter, than even you can imagine.”

  He was talking about a 10 percent stake in a $1.8 billion company at current valuations, probably more once the hedge funds got wind of the rumors and drove the stock through the roof. It was more than payment in full. And it would correct Winters’s most foolish error, when he had listened to his New York banker friends and decided fifty million in his pocket was better than the anonymity of being privately held.

  “Take your time. It’s a big decision, I know. We don’t expect an answer right away.”

  “I accept,” Winters said.

  Everly raised an eyebrow. “To our partnership, then.”

  “To our future.”

  Winters smiled, and whether the smile was false or how he truly felt, even he wasn’t sure. This wasn’t how he had hoped his Ukrainian gambit would turn out; but maybe, if he played this opportunity right, it was better. The London bankers thought they were buying him, but Winters knew that if you were going to climb a man to power, you had to stand close.

  Everly snuffled his nasal laugh, and Winters realized that, in his way, the man was truly enjoying himself. Today was a major victory; maybe even bigger than Winters understood.

  “It was clever, you know, what you said about nobody knowing you.”

  “It’s the truth,” Winters said. “It’s my code.”

  “It’s our code,” Everly corrected him, “but you can rest assured, my friend, Vladimir Putin is going to know you now.”

  CHAPTER 60

  The pilots were back in the cockpit by the time Alie burst onto the scene. The helicopters had been on the ground for more than forty minutes, and the reporters were eager to leave this dry hole in a dangerous war zone. They had been up since 5:00 A.M.; they had four-star food and expense accounts waiting for them back in Kiev; and the only people going in or out of this pipeline facility were employees.

  Alie took advantage of their eagerness to slip past the thin line of spectators that news cameras always attract and grabbed one of the women by the arm, a low-level on-air personality, although Alie didn’t recognize her, since she had long ago given up watching American television news. She was risking a pistol-whipping from the so-called protection, but Alie knew her looks would save her. She wasn’t a desperate damsel in distress, but she knew how to play it for TV.

  “Please,” she begged. “Take me with you.”

  The newswoman turned, startled. She was young and beautiful, the right kind of woman for the post-Internet news, and Alie knew she’d have no sympathy for a freelancer in a bind.

  “I’m an American,” Alie said, with flagrant despair. “Take me with you. Please. My husband. He’s hurt.”

  The woman looked at the bloody rags covering the man’s face and his staggering steps. He looked like he was about to fall over.

  “My name is Alie . . . Alie Jenson. I’m from Missouri, USA. My husband . . . he’s a minister. We’re Christian missionaries. We’ve been stranded for a month. Please. My husband needs medical attention. The Russians . . . they beat him. They beat everyone at the mission . . . even the children.”

  The woman eyed her, but not with compassion. With greed. Behind her, a cameraman was calling for her to get onboard.

  It took her only a second to decide.

  “It’s against the rules,” the reporter whispered as she ushered them into the helicopter. Alie knew the woman smelled a story, but she was going to be disappointed when they got back to Kiev, because there was no story to be had.

  “What’s his name?” the reporter shouted over the rotors, as they rose into the air, but Alie tapped her ear, pretended she couldn’t hear her. The reporter turned away. Alie leaned into her husband, settling into the flight.

  “It’s only Kiev,” she said into his ear, “but it will have to do.”

  Karpenko smiled, although nobody could see it under the filthy bandages. “Better than Vilnius,” he said.

  Eight hundred miles away, the drone eased out of the blue sky and came to rest on the deck of a rusty scupper in the middle of the Black Sea. Jacob Ehrlich sighed and began the postflight inspection. This w
as the last one of the night, so he went quickly, like a Hertz employee looking over a just-returned rental car at the end of a long shift. Fifteen minutes later, the drone was packed up and hidden in the hold.

  Ehrlich took off his hat and wiped the sweat from his forehead. The sun was up, the deck was rolling beneath his feet, and there was nothing in any direction but water, as far as the eye could see.

  Just another boring nothing day in paradise, he thought, as the engines kicked in for the long boat ride home. But at least I’m getting paid.

  EPILOGUE

  British Virgin Islands

  July 4, 2014

  I should have known, I thought, as I watched him take a seat at the beachside bar, like a man who owned the world. He was wearing a Panama hat and Bermuda shorts, and was puffing a nice cigar, like the ubiquitous middle-aged white man on vacation that crowded every beach north of the equator, and quite a few south of it, too.

  But he wasn’t on vacation; he was here for me.

  After Boon, Wildman, and I had humped it out of Ukraine, we spent a few weeks on the run, watching our six for an Apollo hit team, but it never materialized. Maybe Winters had decided we weren’t a threat; maybe we were just that good. By the time we reached Ankara, Turkey, my money was running low, so I saddled up and flew to the British Virgin Islands with the last of our stash. I knew the company would find me if they wanted to, since I was flying on my real passport, using my real name. So when I didn’t see anyone at the airport, I thought they might let me go, and I was disappointed. Was that all I meant to them? Then I spotted a stiff loitering across from my bank. Apollo Outcomes knew everything, apparently, including where I kept my secret emergency cash and safety deposit box.

  So I pulled back and waited to see what happened. Two days later, the boss arrived and hit a bar at the beach. He wasn’t hiding or planning an operation. He was here to be found. There was nothing to do but oblige.