Despite the aggressive anonymity manifested by the dozen men, when Romanenko arrived the eyes of each of them complimented the officer on a job perfectly executed. After he entered the station, they all purchased tickets to Sumy separately. Some waited in a coffee shop, some shopped aimlessly, one pretended to nap, others texted messages to false family members that matched their fake identification cards.
Before the Russian invasion, the number of trains headed east had been well run and numerous. Tourism was high. Since 2014, many lines had been cut back and services to cities like Novooleksiyvka and Kherson had been eliminated entirely. The fact that ordinary citizens could not get there, that routine business could not be conducted with the rest of Ukraine, did as much to cede the territory as the presence of Russian and loyalist troops.
There were only two trains to Sumy, one at 5:00 PM and the other at 10:00 PM. The trip was seven hours, and while Romanenko would have preferred the quieter, darker overnighter, it was too risky for them to remain in Kiev.
When their train was announced, each man boarded separately, though they converged in the same car, evenly divided near both exits. In the event of trouble for one man, the others would know it at once. A few sat together, ignoring one another. As they’d planned, Zinchenko sat next to a young woman. It was a tactical move; if necessary, she would be a hostage.
Romanenko and Tkach, the youngest member of the group, sat together, the leader at the window. He wanted to be able to see the train stations as they passed, watch for any law enforcement that might be waiting. It wouldn’t be long before the fire was out and forensic specialists from the Department of Internal Affairs were able to go through the wreckage. They would not find much, but they would certainly reverse-engineer what had happened, find the source of the destruction.
It had been one of Captain Klimovich’s prize captures from the war. During their retreat from Labkovicy, the Russian armored column had encountered their own light-infantry column racing in for what they thought would be a mop-up mission. Instead, the infantry was forced to lay down cover fire for General Novikov as his tanks withdrew. The light infantry made a heroic stand before abandoning their positions, leaving behind several of their weapons. Klimovich took them all, including two 2B14 Podnos 82-mm. mortars. One of them had been brought to his on-site residence by U-Haul, direct from Semenivka. He had assembled it that morning with the help of Tkach, but he had assumed the job of firing it himself. In case anything went wrong, in case it exploded, in the event of his capture, the mission could still continue with Sergeant Chorna in command.
Three days earlier, Zinchenko had found the perfect place from which to fire the weapon at the wall behind the Long Barracks. There were two, actually: a shed for the groundskeeper and the sloping bank beneath a footbridge that crossed the artificial lake in the center of the facility. The footbridge was in view of two separate security cameras; enhancement might reveal whoever was hiding in the shadows. It would serve as a backup, if needed. It wasn’t. An investigation revealed that the groundskeeper had pro-Russian leanings, spoken softly but spoken aloud under the influence of drink at the local bar. Romanenko made certain that he was ambushed outside the bar the night before and beaten into unconsciousness, his swipe card stolen. The crate was moved there, unopened until just before it was needed. Anyone who might go in there would not have had the tools necessary to raise the bolted lid.
Koval had worked out the trajectory on his computer. All Romanenko had to do was hit the wall or roof at the rear of the building. All the authorities had to do was find the Russian mortar. Opinion would be divided as to whether Moscow had sent in Special Operations personnel to attack the industrial showpiece of the new, modern Ukraine … or whether partisans had employed a stolen weapon to make it look as if Russians had attacked. The division would only help Romanenko: law enforcement would be split between watching surveillance videos and departure points for everyone. That was one reason the lockers had been placed inside the Long Barracks. When the TSL Global workers were interviewed, no one would be able to say, “Yes, we saw soldiers there.”
Throughout his career, Romanenko had met many officers, many troops, many politicians, and many officials from both Russia and Ukraine. He had been on exercises with units from other republics of the fallen Soviet Union. Never in his experience had he met anyone as impressive as Captain Klimovich. Almost supernaturally calm, the man, a heroic warrior and a master technician, had devised a brilliant scheme … and this phase was just a part of it. No one man could fight a war or battle single-handedly. But there were some struggles that could not endure without single men, inspiring leaders like Klimovich. There was not a lot in Romanenko’s life that the forty-year-old major could say he looked forward to. This operation was surely one of those, but the highlight of it would be finally meeting the captain when it was all done. Even if fierce patriotism hadn’t driven him, the opportunity to shake the hand of that great man would have.
To think that a fiend like Putin was said to be a hero, Romanenko thought as his beloved countryside flashed by. He is a hollow shell, a chest, a face, empty swagger. He is a throwback to the czars at whose boots the Russian people yearn to kneel.
Ukrainians knew it. And, soon, so would the world.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Fort Bragg, North Carolina
June 3, 10:00 AM
The Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC, was a twelve-person contingent with a five-person support team. They trained in readiness at Fort Bragg, lifted off five miles away from Bragg’s Pope Air Field, and were available to be detached on request by Op-Center at any time of the day. The only caveat was that the Posse Comitatus statute precluded the team from deploying in the continental United States without a presidential waiver, a procedure that was as time-consuming as it was formal. It had not yet been an issue; when it was, as Dawson once put it, “those who need to know also need to look the other way.”
Upon returning to Bragg from New York, Volner immediately felt the uncommon cool and clean taste that followed the storm and the tornadoes he’d just missed the day before. He went directly to where the team was drilling in a two-story “shoot house,” conducting an exercise in initiative-base tactics. It was all about moving and shooting, or not shooting, depending on the threat and the target. Sergeant Charles Moore had laid on the extra drilling with the expectation that they would be going to Crimea on a mission.
Volner waited outside, talking to Roger McCord at Op-Center on a secure line, waited for the men to finish their drilling. Volner had already alerted Moore by text that they’d be going on mission.
After giving Volner a little space to decompress from what turned out to be a kill mission, and to reengage with the team, Moore put on his chronic look of concern.
“The mission is only for recon,” Volner told the men as he gave them a general briefing. “At present, the status in the arena is Threatcon Normal.”
Moore frowned. “Until we touch down and that level skips right up to Delta.”
“Which is why we drill,” Volner said.
It was a simple, obvious, and deflecting answer, but Volner didn’t want to be drawn into further debate. Especially when Moore had a point. The team would be inserting themselves into a very narrow buffer zone between “Mad Vlad” Putin, as they called him, and an enemy. But while Moore was a natural cynic-in-training who was about to graduate, Volner preferred to be an optimist.
The team retired to their barracks, several of the men passing near the major and offering silent support for the call he’d been forced to make the day before. They gave him a smile of approval, a thumbs-up, and then restored his space.
Except for Moore, who shambled beside him like a bear.
“Everybody okay at Lejeune?” Volner asked suddenly.
Moore looked at him. “What’re you, reading my face now, Major?”
Volner shook his head. “I saw the tornado on the news last night, noticed the heavy wind damage in our lot,
couple of Special Ops recruiting trucks with broken windows, signs torn down. I know it was worse ninety miles southeast.”
“Yeah, my buddies there are fine,” Moore said. “Buildings took some hits, basements flooded, they lost power for a couple hours, but no serious injuries.”
“Glad to hear it.”
“But you’re right,” Moore went on, “I was just thinking about that, about how you can train like we do and meanwhile a tornado can drop on your head and you’re shit outta luck.” He shook his head. “Funny how the world is.”
“Unpredictable,” Volner said.
“Yeah.” Moore regarded his companion. “Speaking of which, I wish I’d been there to support you, Major. I should’ve been.”
“Thanks, I spoke up for you but … Dawson. He did okay.”
“Hell, sure, he’s all right … for West Point.”
Volner smiled thinly. “The man jumped down a staircase, right where he knew I might be shooting, and protected the ambassador. I’ve got my issues with Brian Dawson, but yesterday he aced it.”
“I still wish I’d been there to assist,” Moore grumped. “Helluva get, pair of Russian hatchets.”
It was more than just a professional sentiment. Volner and Moore couldn’t be more dissimilar, but there was a real bond between them, forged in combat, burnished in peace. Volner, clean-cut and slender; Moore bigger and broader, his craggy features topped with dense, salt-and-pepper hair. The two men also hailed from different and highly competitive services, but they had quickly become good friends and had remained effective co-workers for more than three years. Volner had been an Army major, Seventy-fifth Rangers, for just two years, while Master Gunnery Sergeant Charles Moore, United States Marine Corps Special Operations Command, had been wearing his uniform for nearly two decades.
They meshed well, their team was a trim unit, and the only question mark going forward would be Paul Bankole. Op-Center’s international crisis manager always went with the team, and this was his first assignment since they lost Hector Rodriquez. The familiar interactions were always difficult for a new man; it was tougher for a new man who was replacing a deceased and well-liked member of the team. Bankole had been appointed only three months ago; most of the platoon knew him only by sight. He would be arriving in late afternoon by the same UH-72A that had brought Dawson. Bankole had texted earlier that there were still considerable mission parameters to plan and review at Op-Center.
For now, though, like Volner himself, the team had an open space around them. He would have the team gather their gear, stow it in the ready room, and relax. They needed that before they got on a transport and headed east—into a David and Goliath situation where a slingshot could send the entire region to war.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Op-Center Headquarters, Fort Belvoir North,
Springfield, Virginia
June 3, 10:57 AM
Paul Bankole had always thrived on risk.
Perhaps it was in his genes. His father was a doctor, his mother a nurse in Enugu; they found themselves in the newly declared Republic of Biafra at the onset of the Nigerian Civil War. The Bankole family were loyalists who nonetheless remained for the duration of the thirty-month war: the siege of the tiny nation had resulted in widespread famine, disease, and injury. When it ended, they fled to the Dominican Republic and then to Atlanta. Paul was one year old. Ironically, his birth against the backdrop of a makeshift morgue—photographed by a reporter for Newsweek—made him a poster child for the global Biafran Airlift that ran blockades to bring in food, water, and medicine.
Like his parents, who worked for a free clinic in Atlanta, the boy grew up taking on difficult challenges. It was as if he sought them out, whether it was playing football at an inner-city school or, later, serving with the élite SEAL Team Six. In his last tour, he operated extensively in Syria and Iraq, in black ops, taking down ISIS leaders in increasingly risky raids.
After the firefight that left him with two bullet holes in his right arm, one in his right hip, he spent just over a year in the wounded-warrior battalion at Balboa Hospital in San Diego. He recovered physically faster than he did mentally. It wasn’t just having to accept that his old life was gone. He watched the news of the terrorists of Boko Haram ravaging his homeland and he wanted to go there to fight. That, too, could never be. It took him a while, but eventually he came to terms with the fact that his wounds were so severe that he’d never serve with the teams of any kind again. Upon his discharge from the hospital, Bankole was stationed at Navy Personnel Command in Millington, Tennessee. He was grateful to be breathing: his Algonquin friend Keme Decontie had died in his own bloody arms. And a newfound faith had given him a new perspective.
Bankole had discovered Buddhism while he was recuperating, and he had taken to it as if it had always been a part of his life. He was willing to bet it was part of his previous life—that’s how sure and absolute the fit was. Bankole came to understand that his wounded body was something that he should allow to heal as he strove to find truth and achieve happiness without substantiality and self-entity.
He loved those highly spiritual concepts, and he loved the language. And dwelling less on his body had allowed him to recover better and faster. Bankole was convinced that being open to “the universe” had brought him here. Why else would this opportunity have come to him, through someone who knew someone who knew Chase Williams? And at a time when the need at Op-Center was so great?
Bankole smiled. He had asked that question then, but not now. The teachings of his beloved Diamond Sutra reinforced the idea that theories are inadequate expressions of truth. Though his job required him to speculate daily, he’d found that intuiting what to do rather than thinking about what to do served him—and his colleagues—far, far better.
He sat in his office, reviewing history, local religious and political affiliations, protocols, Russian and Ukrainian troop deployment. He memorized the names and numbers of the people he was to contact on the ground. When that was done, he went to the Geek Tank to work with Aaron and Ambassador Flannery, making sure the hardware and software were functional. If the JSOC lost contact with their one Ukrainian speaker, they were—in a word—screwed.
“Paul, you want to come to my office? I’m here with the ambassador and Allie Weill.”
It was McCord. Allison Weill was the cartographer from the Geek Tank, though that description didn’t describe the scope of her knowledge. In addition to basic maps, she was schooled in raster-based and vector-based GIS, geospatial data structures, and advanced spatial data analysis. Privately, Dawson had described her as “the lady you want to be stranded on a desert island with if you want to get off that island.”
Tucking his tablet under his arm, Bankole walked down the corridor with the slightest limp, the result of two hip reconstructions. Though he had been with Op-Center for several months, he still didn’t feel fully integrated into the group. Everyone had been welcoming, especially Chase Williams—but the ghost of his predecessor was like mist. It was everywhere, clung to everyone. Bankole didn’t force himself; acceptance would come.
Weill’s back was to the door as he entered. She turned and smiled. The young woman was reportedly descended from Corporal Richard Warfington, one of the noncommissioned officers who traveled with Lewis and Clark on their historic journey to the Pacific.
“Good morning,” Allison said to him.
“Good day,” he replied.
The two had spent several nights the previous week working on maps of the Mafraq al-Saeed region of the Shabwah province in Yemen for the CIA. Op-Center was helping to identify Al Qaeda operatives and command centers in the Arabian Peninsula. Those strikes had been one hundred percent successful, based on place-and-route algorithms Allison had created to predict leadership movements.
“Hi, Paul,” McCord said.
The office was smaller by half than Williams’s office, with only room for one good chair. Allison was in that. McCord was standing behind his desk; Ambassa
dor Flannery was in his seat.
“We’ve got—not a helluva lot to love here,” McCord continued.
Bankole laid his tablet on the desk. Allison connected it to hers, and a map of Ukraine filled the screen.
“Allison, walk him through it, please,” McCord said.
She expanded a view of the eastern region.
“The Crimean Peninsula,” she announced. “Ten thousand square miles, all of it controlled by Russia or Russian-allied forces—except for this tiny piece of land known as Arabatska Strilka, the Arabat Arrow. It’s roughly sixty-nine miles long by a hundred and sixty-seven miles wide.” She zoomed in again to reveal a Rorschach-like image that could have been a straight-ascending jet and contrail viewed from the side or a chimpanzee with a very long tail holding a baby monkey.
“That’s where you and the team are going,” McCord told him.
“Geopolitically,” Flannery added, “of all the bad places to be, this is the best.”
It took Bankole a moment to figure that out. “How ‘good’ is not the worst?”
“You will find many places to get ashore on the northern half of the peninsula, which belongs to Kherson Oblast, Ukraine, and faces the Sea of Azov,” the ambassador told him.
“The terrain there is flat, very flat,” Allison said. “Just grasses and lagoons. The Arrow is a fairly recent geological development, a pileup of sand and shells washed up from the sea about a thousand years ago.”
“People live here?” Bankole said, marveling at the bulk of the Arrow, which was mostly the narrow section.
“About thirty-six hundred citizens do,” Flannery said. “Mostly in two northern villages, Shchaslyvtseve and Strilkove. These are natural-gas transit centers—workers and engineers always coming and going. If you dress like the locals, no one will give you more than a passing glance.”
“Eighteen of us arriving in a group will attract attention,” Bankole remarked.
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