Tom Clancy's Op-Center--Dark Zone

by George Galdorisi

  “You’ve covered it very well.” Timoshenko’s dark eyes fixed on Yershov. “Though I would add that we are taking very strong, assertive steps to blind the enemy as to our actions and intentions.”

  “Yes,” Putin said, as though glad to be reminded. “Our agents abroad are shutting down key sources of intelligence.”

  “There is good reason for this,” the defense minister went on when he was certain Putin had finished. “The Cyber-Surveillance Directorate of the GRU has uncovered what we believe is a plot against one of our bases—most likely Sudzha, given what the spies in the Kremlin learned about our armored deployment.”

  The Glavnoye Razvedyvatel’noye Upravleniye was the nation’s main intelligence agency. The CSD was comprised primarily of old bureaucrats running teams of young men and women whose college education had been paid for in exchange for a minimum of ten years of service. As with so many military conscripts, enthusiasm for the job was low: fully eighty percent of Russian troops were indifferent to their work, and on remote bases like the Balkhash Radar Station or the 7018th Base for Storage of Rocket and Artillery Equipment, performance was flatly unreliable.

  “One of the young veterans was conducting due diligence on online employment applications for the FBI and the CIA when he uncovered a video embedded in one submission,” the defense minister said. “It depicted an assault on a base and our armored vehicles and tanks were delineated.” The big man shrugged. “Most technologists would have thought nothing of it, would perhaps only have filed the video, but our man checked the background of its creator. His name is Chingis Altankhuyag, and he is newly graduated from Stanford University in America. He is from Ulaanbaatar. His father is a high official in the Energy Ministry.”

  “Not a friend of Moscow,” Putin added.

  “To be sure,” Timoshenko agreed. “We are investigating further, but our immediate need is to have someone in place who is prepared to manage whatever might arise.” The defense minister nodded respectfully toward Yershov.

  The general dipped his forehead in acknowledgment of the compliment. Until that moment, he had not been entirely sure this wasn’t a demotion. The military had a way of cleaning house that defied understanding. Perhaps the ministry had decided it missed the bold if ultimately foolhardy way that General Novikov had acted. The Putin regime was fickle that way: sometimes the president favored the brash, sometimes the steady, sometimes both within the same week.

  Timoshenko regarded the general. “Do you have any questions, Anatoly?”

  “As you said,” he replied, his voice hollow, “you and his excellency have covered it.”

  “Then—walk me around?” Putin said to the general. “We have a dinner at ten, but I have not been in this building for many years.”

  The men rose and Yershov motioned toward the door, Putin and Timoshenko leaving in that order. The lieutenant was waiting outside and hovered behind them as they walked, the general talking knowledgeably about the tripartite triumphal arch, with its epic sculptures depicting the Russian victory over Napoleon in the War of 1812.

  But his voice, like his manner, was suddenly reserved. Yershov could bring himself to say nothing about what he considered to be a recklessly dangerous gamble. In an age of satellites and drones, of cyberhacking and cell-phone cameras, what the president was proposing was logistically impossible. And, uncovered, maneuvers designed to create an impression of power would expose what had been rumored for years: that Russia could no longer afford to maintain its wars. Timoshenko was a capable man but a bureaucrat; his reaction was expected. And even though Putin, in person, seemed no less dynamic, no less confident than he had appeared on television or in public, Yershov couldn’t tell whether the president himself believed what he was saying or whether he was spinning a bad—perhaps dire—situation.

  The motorcade departed nearly an hour after it had arrived. Putin had left the general with a warm handshake and a cocksure smile, both of which had an unexpected effect on Yershov: they made him want to succeed. But there was something else on his mind as he returned to his office to phone his wife and tell her that he was coming home and that they were going to Sudzha.

  The general realized that he was about to become the face of the new military in Crimea. If this modified Operation Gray Wolf failed, if the mood of the Ukrainians remained defiant, it was his reputation, his career that were at risk.

  Thinking of Putin, and then of his disgraced predecessor, Yershov found himself possessed of a sudden demon. He would not share General Novikov’s fate. Fueled by his own strong natural resolve, enriched like uranium by some residue of Putin’s charm, magic, charisma—whatever it was—the general was determined to succeed.

  No guns would be turned toward the enemy. No Special Operations units would parachute behind the lines. Not even drones would cross the border, since those were all tied up in Crimea. And Colonel General Anatoly Yershov would mount war games in that frontier the likes of which would define psychological warfare for generations to come.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Semenivka, Poltava Oblast, Ukraine

  June 2, 8:45 PM

  The location had not been chosen at random.

  When it was established in the sixteenth century, the town of Semenivka, in the Poltava province of Ukraine, had been little more than a rest stop for horses and riders. The way station was a sad, muddy, lonely reminder that the Golden Age of Kiev and Vladimir the Great had come and gone.

  Vladimir was a scion of the fabled Rurik Dynasty. A Slavic Rus who had fled fratricidal conflict in his native Russia, he established a new, increasingly powerful empire in Kiev. The glory that began in AD 980 lasted for four centuries, after which members of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth warred on Kiev and carved Ukraine into pieces that were constantly being shuffled from one foreign dynasty to another.

  In the itinerant roots of the legendary king and the subsequent carving up of his realm, possessory claims were created that persist to the modern day.

  But the way station persisted and a town was founded around it, and it has remained an agricultural town known for its grain, sugar refinery, and flour mill. The coat of arms consists of abundant wheat and rich cherries, and the air is wholesome with the smell of what the town proudly produces. The sixty-two hundred citizens are industrious, and, for the most part, they are Ukrainian loyalists—many fiercely so—who often wear the blue and yellow of the flag in their daily dress.

  At the heart of Semenivka is a boxy three-story building made of peach-colored brick with rust-colored brick between the windows. A central section was four stories high, made of the same pale brick, with a double row of azure brick between each floor. At the top of the central tower was a mosaic of a shield with an upright sword behind it and a bold red star on the face, the emblem of the local police.

  A spotlight shining down from the roof, and the hooded glow of a nearby streetlight, were the only nighttime illumination. Apart from public drunkenness and an occasional anti-Russian protest, the police did not have to respond to many emergencies day or night. The one-time castaway location was now a hamlet largely shut off from the chaos centered in Russia to the east and Kiev to the west. But the isolation was not absolute.

  On the third floor of the police station was an office that overlooked the main street. It was painted a faded forest green and the linoleum was water-stained. There was an old, heavily scuffed and chipped dark-brown wooden desk that had been taken from a schoolroom in a schoolhouse that had been destroyed during the Second World War. On top of it was a clunky black dial telephone, an ashtray, a smartphone, and a MacBook. Tucked in the corner, under a window, was a working stereo record player with speakers dangling wires from the wall and an old brass rack filled with LPs—Sinatra, Aznavour, as well as local Ukrainian artists of the 1970s. It was playing now, the A side of the debut album of the seminal folk group Kobza.

  At this moment, nothing else seemed appropriate.

  Sitting rigidly in a stiff wooden chair behi
nd the desk was a man dressed in a long-sleeved, mottled blue camouflage uniform—his customary attire. It was a half size too small, intentionally hugging the thirty-three-year-old officer’s lean, athletic form, though the breast was flecked with ash. Above it was a dark round face with a long, traditional Cossack mustache and close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair. The eyes were brown … and damp with tears.

  The man refused to look in the direction of the smartphone. Tonight, it was an enemy, a devil, something evil. It had informed Captain Taras Klimovich of the bloody murder of his friend and loyal colleague Galina Petrenko, who had just completed what she assured him was a carefully planned liaison with her former employer, Ambassador Douglas Flannery. The dire report from Fedir had been confirmed by a glance at the news on the computer.

  “You know this from years of struggle,” Klimovich told himself over and over. “Nothing is guaranteed.”

  But the loss was bitter and incalculable just the same. And unexpected. It was like his little sister, the wife of a commercial jet pilot, who accepted that her husband would be coming home after work … until the day he didn’t. Years of borrowed time in an inherently dangerous profession suddenly flood your soul until it is immobilized by the weight, numb to the reality.

  And then, slowly, the truth takes hold.

  Captain Klimovich had lost people before—in tank battles, on surveillance missions, but never to an assassin. What made this worse was that, unlike warfare, there was time to move with caution, safeguards that could be put in place. Unless you become complacent.

  That’s when a predator strikes you or your team, he thought.

  Vigilance was the reason he was stationed here instead of with his command. They communicated by courier, not by phone, radio, or email. It wasn’t because he was fearful, and he certainly wouldn’t want to suggest to his men that he was more important than any one of them. Rather, the cost in time and manpower of having to watch his back against just such an assassination would have been prohibitive. That was why his office was here, with two floors of police below, his back to a brick wall, and a Fort-224 carbine in the top drawer of his desk. The fast, compact Israeli-built bullpup assault rifle was a favorite of the Israel Defense Forces and Ukraine’s many special operations detachments.

  A cigar he had lit when he returned from dinner lay cold in the ashtray. Klimovich knew that he must allow his anger to cool as well: the mission would continue after this brief, brief period of mourning, and revenge would be taken on the savages who had ordered this murder. The same savages who had invaded his country. The same savages he had defeated before and would defeat again.

  Only this time it would be different. He would undermine everything the Russian people held dear in coordinated moves so unexpected, and a show so dramatic, that every corner of the world would take note. When he took charge of his command once more, it would create a visual and psychological impression so strong that Moscow would never be the same. Literally overnight, Ukraine would become the voice of oppressed citizenry everywhere on earth.

  Slowly, with effort, he reached into his shirt pocket and withdrew his lighter. With the other hand, he raised the cigar. He lit it again—not because he needed the smoke but because life must continue, fire must not be extinguished.

  The captain took no joy in the familiar aroma. He had started smoking them because virtually every adult male who smoked, smoked cigarettes. Klimovich disliked the smell, and the cigar was a way of dispersing it while remaining sociable. That was, in fact, how he got his nickname. He had been with a group of officers who teased him about how they had nobility in their midst, someone who could afford the more expensive extravagance.

  Klimovich had replied, “How better to put a fox amid the hounds than by distracting them with a smoke.”

  As his feint-and-concealment tank tactics proved triumphant in drills and in combat, the name had fallen into general usage.

  Hiding in a glen, behind a tree, in a long shadow. The Fox.

  Drawing on the cigar, Klimovich had to prioritize. Galina’s colleague in New York, Fedir Lytvyn—the man who had called to inform him of the murder—had been ordered to go to ground at the embassy. He hadn’t wanted to; Fedir was eager to go out and find her killer, but Klimovich had told him to stay where he was, at least for the present. He needed time to think. The New York Police Department and the FBI would be pursuing the murderer, and he couldn’t afford to risk the life of his only other New York agent. Although the captain had no legal authority over the Sluzhba Zovnishn’oyi Rozvidky Ukrayiny—indeed, he had no official sanction for this operation whatsoever, other than the quiet approval of certain of his superiors who had given him an invaluable associate, a hawk circling the bear—everyone involved in the multidivisional action was fully committed to the captain’s vision.

  The captain had to remain sharply zeroed in on that mission: to strike the Russian aggressor hard, fast, first, and in a way that he would never expect.

  The captain looked at the landline. That was the last place he had spoken with Galina. He spent another moment of reflective respect, then considered his next move before picking up the receiver to dial Fedir’s number.

  The twenty-eight-year-old Fedir was a tech-savvy young man who had come to the attention of the SZRU when he was a student at Cherkasy State Technological University. He was also a black belt in the native Ukrainian form of karate, Simmey-do, which made him an essential hire. In one of her daily eyes-only intelligence reports from the start of this project seven months before, Galina had indicated that she suspected Fedir had a very strong crush on her. She had found that flattering, not threatening, and had mentioned it only “in the event harm should befall me and drive him to a rash reaction.”

  The young man answered with a snap in his voice. “Is there news, Captain?”

  “I have spoken to no one other than you,” Klimovich replied with characteristic calm. He did not feel the need to explain that he had been sorting through his own thoughts and feelings.

  “Sir, I can’t just sit here,” the young man said. “I cannot.”

  “It’s difficult, I know,” the captain replied. “But I want you to continue doing just that. We lost a valuable asset and a treasured friend.”

  “Which is why you must tell me her assignment, let me complete it.”

  “Special Agent Lytvyn, the news report I read said that the Russian dog took her phone,” Klimovich told him. “Her contact is the only name on it. They will certainly be watching this individual in New York.”

  “Then I will scout the source patiently,” Lytvyn replied. “Spiral approach, around the target and then in. I’m not afraid!”

  “If I thought you were, you wouldn’t be a cornerstone to our intelligence gathering,” the captain remarked. “That’s why I must continue to insist that you wait.”

  “Captain!”

  “They will watch the embassy as well,” Klimovich said. “You know that!”

  “Then I am perfect bait,” he said.

  “Fedir,” he said, shucking the formality he had employed earlier. “Have you ever known bait to survive a fishing trip?”

  “The fish dies, too,” Lytvyn said manfully.

  “True enough,” Klimovich agreed. “But I want to make sure we get the right one—Vlaidimir Putin.”

  Lytvyn fell silent.

  “I know I cannot order it,” Klimovich went on, “but let’s see what law enforcement might learn. The embassy will follow up. Stay inside. There is still time, and we must know more.”

  “For the operation, yes,” Lytvyn replied. “Every minute that passes, the killer himself gets further undercover.”

  “I say again, the objective is Russia,” the captain said emphatically. “The goal is the heart of the bear, not an eye or a fang. Strike that and we have inflicted a mortal wound.”

  Klimovich could hear Lytvyn breathing heavily at the other end of the phone. He remembered what it was like to want vengeance so acutely that it eclipsed other thou
ght, larger goals, rational behavior. Klimovich had spent a great deal of time in Russia, when it and Ukraine were still part of the Soviet Union. He graduated from the Leningrad Higher Military Command School in 1983 and commanded a motorized infantry division in the Transcaucasian Military District. In 1996, the young man graduated from the Academy of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. There his best friend—Jakiv Antonyuk—was badly beaten by Russian troops who found out that the boy was gay. He died in the infirmary. Klimovich’s first thought was to kill the Russians one by one, assuming—correctly, as it turned out—that justice would not be served in a court martial. There was no way the death of a soldier who was both homosexual and a Ukrainian would put Russians in front of a firing squad. On the contrary. They didn’t even go to prison, the verdict being that Jakiv had provoked them, sexually. Jakiv was retroactively discharged. In the ensuing twenty-plus years, that hatred had metastasized into governmentally sanctioned gangs that roamed the breadth of Russia attacking gays.

  At that time, Lieutenant Klimovich had requested, and was granted, permission to resign his command under the assumption that he, too, was gay. Returning to his homeland in 2002, he joined the Academy of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Fueled by his hatred for Russia, he rose quickly to his present command. He resolved that there was no reason to kill those men, though he would welcome the opportunity to kill them honorably if it arose in combat. It was enough to shame them and those who supported their actions. A mission, any mission, is not nurtured solely by rage but by patience—“the long journey,” as he had come to describe it.

  “Commander, this is … sir, I am trying, but it is impossible.” This was the only word the young man could think of.

  “Special Agent, we will get him, I promise you,” Klimovich said, his voice showing steel now.

  “How, if he dissolves in the shadows?”