The Black Sea – sample chapters - Andrew Turpin Thriller Author

Prologue

Tuesday, July 15, 2014

Chervonyi Zhovten village, Eastern Ukraine

The expanse of golden wheat, swaying gently in the breeze like waves heading for shore, stretched as far as the line of trees on the distant horizon. A handful of blue cornflowers and red poppies poked their heads above the blanket of yellow.

Overhead was an azure sky, a typical feature of Eastern Ukraine over the previous couple of weeks.

In the neighboring field, three rusty red combine harvesters were at work, operating in formation and throwing up clouds of dust as they chewed a swathe through the ripe heads of grain.

The temperature had risen to more than twenty-eight Celsius under a glaring sun, and Colonel General Georgi Tkachev—he still liked to use his old rank—was feeling the heat.

Flies buzzed around his head, and sweat was dripping from his short, receding blond hair down onto his metal-framed sunglasses. The heavily built former intelligence officer swatted the insects away with a sharp flick of his left hand. He leaned against the door of his GAZ Tigr 4×4 armored vehicle and drew deeply from one of his favorite Ziganov black cigarettes.

In a corner of the wheat field, next to the dirt track where Tkachev’s 4×4 was parked, were three vehicles that appeared at first glance to be olive-green battle tanks. They stood in a line, side by side, facing north toward the small city of Snizhne, a few kilometers away.

But these were no battle tanks. Their heavy-duty caterpillar tracks and solid steel bodies appeared similar to their battlefield brethren, but the array of technology mounted on the tops of the three vehicles told a different story.

Mounted on the one nearest to Tkachev was a green-painted rectangular board almost as wide as the vehicle and several meters long. It was supported by a hydraulic system that held it upright at an angle of about thirty degrees, pointing north. This was a target-acquisition radar with a range of more than eighty kilometers that could detect an aircraft flying as low as ninety meters.

The second vehicle had a chunky silver metal telescopic aerial that had been extended twenty meters high. This was a command post that contained an array of technology, including data display and control systems and computers. It was responsible for electronically directing the missile launchers to hit their chosen targets and to distinguish friendly aircraft from their enemies. It could also communicate via radio and satellite links with other distant command posts and with military headquarters.

The vehicle farthest away from Tkachev, the launcher, was the most fearsome of the lot. It had a swivel hydraulic unit on the roof onto which were mounted four identical slim green missiles, each five-and-a-half meters long with a pointed white tip and X-shaped fins at the rear.

The hydraulic system had been raised so that the four 9M38M1 missiles pointed north, in the same direction as the radar unit, which Tkachev knew was continuously scanning the skies ahead for potential targets.

The missile launcher, known as a Buk-M1 and code-named Grizzly by NATO countries, belonged to Russia’s 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade and was normally based at Kursk, about 550 kilometers farther north. A few other armored vehicles from the brigade stood amid a clump of nearby trees in an attempt to hide them from prying satellites and aircraft.

Tkachev’s radio crackled with two loud squelch breaks. He raised it and listened.

“Target located,” a disemboweled voice said in Russian through a flurry of static. It was the unit commander, who was ensconced in the command post vehicle in front of a circular orange radar screen at the center of a bank of controls. “Lock on.”

Just half an hour earlier, Tkachev had had an animated conversation with the unit commander, who was less than happy with being told that his small unit would need to withdraw over the border into Russia as soon as the operation was completed. The commander couldn’t see the reasoning, given his high hit rate over the past three weeks. What Tkachev didn’t tell him was that his unit was going to be temporarily replaced with another one that was much more covert in nature and had objectives that he couldn’t possibly reveal.

Tkachev could see a short, thin white vapor trail advancing across the skies to the north. He picked up a pair of binoculars and focused on it. There, in miniature but visible against the blue background, was the pale gray outline of the aircraft that was creating the trail.

He knew what was coming. He had seen it many times now, particularly in the preceding weeks across various parts of Eastern Ukraine, which was held by pro-Russian rebels intent on destabilizing and defeating the Ukrainian military forces pitted against them. The Ukrainians were being taught a lesson, and so were the damned Americans who were helping them out behind the scenes.

Tkachev, like a few of his former colleagues in the highly secretive Spetsnaz subunit 29155 of Russia’s GRU foreign military intelligence organization, had become a freelancer in order to provide the deniable and highly covert services required by the Kremlin. In Ukraine, he had recently been providing strategic guidance to the rebels and also directing the Russian units supporting them, including the Buk-M1 crew.

“Lock-on confirmed,” crackled the level tones of the unit commander over the radio. “Destroy target.”

“Destroy target. Roger,” responded the officer in charge of the launcher vehicle.

Tkachev took an involuntary step backward and placed a hand above his sunglasses, giving his eyes some additional shielding.

A second later there was a roar, and an enormous burst of orange-and-yellow flame erupted outward from the base of the launcher, causing a mushroom of gray dust and dirt to explode from the ground behind it. Simultaneously, one of the giant missiles soared skyward at almost a thousand meters per second—three times the speed of sound—trailing fire and white smoke behind it.

Tkachev raised his binoculars again and watched transfixed as the 9M38M1 screamed toward its target, a Ukrainian Air Force Antonov An-26 military transport plane, which he estimated was flying at about twenty thousand feet.

The white vapor trail generated by the missile converged relentlessly with the An-26 until, seconds later, there was a distant explosion, and an orange fireball appeared.

Tkachev caught a glimpse of large chunks of smoking debris plunging earthward. He lowered his binoculars as his radio crackled again.

“Target destroyed.”

Chapter 1

Tuesday, July 15, 2014

Portland, Maine

A CNN news bulletin was blaring from the television in the corner of Joe Johnson’s kitchen. Two steaming cups of coffee stood on the countertop, and three empty suitcases were lying next to the door that led into the hallway.

Johnson had just retrieved the suitcases from a storage locker in his garage. By the following evening, they needed to be packed and ready to go. One belonged to him, the others to his teenage children, Carrie and Peter.

For the first time in nine years, he was preparing for a family summer vacation that involved more than just himself and the two kids and took them somewhere other than the Maine coastline. This time, not only were they going to Malaysia, but also two others were joining them.

One of them was his sister, Amy, who, ever since the death of his wife, Kathy, from cancer in 2005, had looked after the children whenever he happened to be away working. This trip to Malaysia would represent a thank-you to her in many ways.

The other person was Jayne Robinson, whose role in Johnson’s life had changed in recent months. Until April that year, he and Jayne had been freelance work colleagues on a number of war crime investigations, starting with the pursuit of an aging and notorious Second World War Nazi commander. But a few shared life-threatening situations during those investigations had drawn them closer together. And to Johnson’s slight surprise, they found themselves rekindling the brief love affair they had had in Islamabad in 1988, when Jayne was working for the British Secret Intelligence Service, also known as MI6, and Johnson for the CIA.

Johnson poured some milk into the coffee mugs and pushed one of them across the counter to Jayne, who was looking tired. She had been up late the previous evening reading a guidebook about the Malaysian portion of Borneo, where they were heading for a couple of weeks to see orangutans in the jungle and spend some time on the beach.

From Borneo, the group planned to return via France, where they were going to spend two more weeks with one of Amy’s friends, Natalia, who was renting a six-bedroom villa near Cannes for most of July and August.

Amy’s husband, Don Wilde, had volunteered to stay home to look after the Johnson family’s dog, Cocoa, a six-year-old chocolate Labrador.

Everything was set. Now they just needed to pack and get through the tortuous journey. The plan was to fly to Kuala Lumpur via New York’s JFK airport and Amsterdam, then take a local connecting flight to Kota Kinabalu International Airport, in the Malaysian-controlled Sabah region of Borneo.

“I need this break,” Johnson said. “I can’t remember the last time I took so long off work. Probably when I was a kid selling ice creams between backpacking trips.”

Jayne raised an eyebrow. “You really sold enough ice creams to pay for backpacking trips?”

“Yes. Thousands of them. I was immensely gifted.” He threw her a sideways glance.

Jayne laughed out loud. “And modest. Enjoy this break, Joe.”

The sound of footsteps clattering down the stairs echoed through the hallway and a few seconds later Carrie came in, her long dark hair trailing behind her. “Where’s my suitcase?” she asked. “I want to start packing.”

Johnson pointed. “You nearly fell over it.”

“How hot will it be in Borneo? I’m trying to decide what to take.”

“About eighty-five degrees,” Jayne said. “Maybe ninety. T-shirts, swim gear, shorts, and sandals. Maybe one pair of jeans and a sweater. That’s all you need.”

Carrie gave Jayne the thumbs-up and exited as quickly as she had entered, picking up a suitcase on her way out.

Since Jayne had come to his home, a two-story Cape Cod-style property on Parsons Road, just off Back Cove, Johnson had admired the way she had fitted in so well with his seventeen-year-old daughter, despite not having children of her own. It had been harder to bond with his son, Peter, but she had managed to achieve that partly by driving him unasked to and from his school basketball games. As a Brit, she knew little about basketball, but she had learned quickly and often traded comments about the up-and-down performance of the Maine Red Claws, the local team that played in the National Basketball Association’s minor league.

Johnson sipped his coffee. In some ways, it had come as a surprise to him when they had restarted their affair. Of course, he’d still felt attracted to her, just as he had two-and-a-half decades earlier. But he hadn’t seriously thought she felt the same, despite the occasional flirtation after they began working together again in 2011. She enjoyed her city life in London, while Johnson had no regrets about moving to Portland from Washington, DC, where he had held a busy job as a senior investigative historian—effectively a Nazi hunter—with the Office of Special Investigations.

Would she stay with him in Maine long-term? Johnson didn’t know, and didn’t like to quiz her too much this early in their rekindled relationship. She was a very independent person, he knew that. But he hoped she would stay. She had settled in well, and one of her old friends from the UK, who had married the Maine secretary of state, was living nearby, which helped.

He stared at the TV. The news anchor finished reading an item about Hamas rejecting proposals for a cease-fire with Israel, then glanced down at his monitor.

“News is just coming in from Ukraine of a military transport aircraft that was shot down not far from the border with Russia,” the anchor said. As he spoke, a ticker flashed across the bottom of the screen carrying the same news.

“It is being reported that the aircraft was a Ukrainian military transport and was destroyed by a missile believed to have been fired from within Ukrainian territory,” the anchor continued. “A source within the Ukrainian government has blamed Russia for the attack, which is the latest in a series of rocket attacks on aircraft in the area. The government source said that the Igla surface-to-air missiles used by pro-Russian rebel forces in Eastern Ukraine were capable of reaching a height of only 11,000 feet, whereas the aircraft shot down today was at more than 21,000 feet. The source is accusing Russian forces of bringing a far more powerful missile launcher into Ukraine specifically to carry out the attack.”

“Bloody hell,” Jayne said. “That’s another one shot down.”

“Yes, there have been several in the past few weeks.”

Right on cue, the anchor began to reel off a tally of the various Ukrainian Air Force aircraft shot down during the previous two months, since the beginning of fighting in the Donbass region of Eastern Ukraine. There were ten of them. All of the casualties were aircraft targeted by pro-Russian anti-government separatist forces.

“We will update you on this story as more information becomes available,” the anchor concluded.

“Vic will be tearing his hair out,” Johnson said.

His old friend Vic Walter, a CIA veteran, had been appointed the previous year as director of the Agency’s National Clandestine Service, generally known as the Directorate of Operations, and as deputy director of the entire organization.

Johnson and Vic had worked together for the CIA in Pakistan and Islamabad in the late 1980s. Although Johnson had left the Agency in September 1988 while Vic had stayed on and worked his way up the ladder, the pair had remained close friends.

In recent years, Vic had quietly drawn on Johnson’s investigative expertise on a freelance basis on a number of occasions, for which Johnson usually enlisted the assistance of Jayne, who had left MI6 in 2012 to also go freelance. Most recently, the pair had unmasked the perpetrators of a terrorist bomb attack on the La Belle nightclub in Berlin in 1986, in which Vic’s brother had been so badly injured that he had committed suicide several years later.

Johnson knew that Vic had recently been on a top secret visit to the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, along with the US secretary of state, Paul Farrar, and Vic’s boss, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Arthur Veltman. The visit was to discuss cooperation with Ukraine in its ongoing conflict with the separatist rebels.

Based on his discussions with Vic, Johnson knew that any assistance would be of the “nonlethal” variety, including intelligence gathering. It might include technology that could stop Russian missiles, radar-jamming equipment, and devices to stop Russian interference with Ukrainian military communications, as well as items such as vehicles, night-vision goggles, and flak jackets.

Johnson took out his phone and logged on to the secure link he and Vic always used when they wanted to message, email, or call each other. They had each other’s public and private keys so they could encrypt and read each other’s messages. He began to tap away.

Vic, I assume you’re under the gun given Ukraine. Just heard another Antonov was shot down today. Hope the Kiev visit went to plan. Keep going buddy. We’re all heading to Malaysia/France on long vacation tomorrow. Will be in touch on return.

A few minutes later his phone pinged as a reply came back.

All going to shit here. DCI and Sec of State worried but sticking to previous plans re Kiev. Talks went well. More detail when we next meet. Enjoy vacation—wish I was going. Speak soon.

Johnson glanced back up at Jayne and read aloud Vic’s reply.

“Sounds like he’s on a high-wire act over at Langley,” he added.

Jayne nodded, then furrowed her brow and ran a hand through her short, dark hair. She looked distracted.

“What’s up?” Johnson asked.

“I was just thinking. Our connecting flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, that’s Malaysia Airlines, right?”

“Yes.”

“What route do they take out of Amsterdam? What’s the flight path?”

Johnson shrugged. “No idea. Presumably the shortest route. Over Eastern Europe, Russia, India. That way, I would guess.”

“Over Ukraine?” Jayne raised an eyebrow.

Johnson shrugged again. He could see what she was thinking, and she was probably right. The route would logically go that way unless the airline decided on a major diversion.

He put his hand on Jayne’s shoulder. “Don’t worry. We’re on a civilian airline, and we’ll be at thirty thousand feet. There’s no way the airline would take a route if they think there’s any risk whatsoever.”

Chapter 2

Thursday, July 17, 2014

Azov Sea Port, Russia

There was a slight crunch as the driver of the white Volvo truck engaged first gear. Yuri Severinov, sitting a few meters away in the front passenger seat of his Mercedes 4×4, looked up at the noise and watched.

The truck driver and his colleague in the passenger seat both appeared to be humorless men with short-cropped military-style hair, wearing unmarked green battle fatigues.

The powerful Volvo was pulling a long, red lowboy semitrailer on which sat a tanklike armored vehicle, about nine meters long, painted khaki green and covered with black-and-green camouflage netting.

The truck began to move along the dockside, past a row of four gantry cranes and a stack of shipping containers, and down a track that led alongside a line of dark gray grain elevators that towered above the port like soldiers guarding a fortress. Shadows were being thrown across the dockyard by the morning sun, now starting to rise in the sky.

Severinov nodded to his driver, who immediately slid the Mercedes into gear and followed the lowboy as it moved along the rough concrete surface of the dock. It hadn’t rained for a few weeks, and the semi’s twelve wheels threw up clouds of dust on either side as it gathered speed.

Severinov eyed the cargo on the back of the lowboy. It was no simple armored vehicle. Rather, it was a Buk-M1 ground-to-air missile launcher, capable of bringing down very large aircraft flying at almost any altitude. The Buk had just been unloaded from a freight ship owned by Severinov, a billionaire oil and gas oligarch, who had brought the vessel from his Krasnodar oil refinery on Russia’s Black Sea coast.

Two weeks earlier, Severinov had only a vague knowledge of the capabilities of a Buk-M1. But since he had received the secure phone call he had received from the Kremlin office of the president’s special adviser, Igor Ivanov, his focus had been on little else.

Normally, Severinov’s contact point at the Kremlin was Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev’s assistant, Mikhail Sobchak. But the call from the increasingly powerful Ivanov was something new and concentrated his mind. Ivanov was a former GRU officer who had a reputation for ruthlessness that was well founded. Once deputy prime minister, he was now an adviser in charge of special operations on behalf of the president and his small group of senior executives. Severinov knew from his contacts that Ivanov had been behind the organization of black operations and active measures to stir up hostility against the Kiev government in the Crimea and in Eastern Ukraine. He wasn’t known as the Black Bishop for nothing among the cadre around the Kremlin powerbase.

When the call came, Severinov had been busy overseeing a major maintenance turnaround, or temporary stoppage, at his Krasnodar oil refinery, near to Tuapse on Russia’s Black Sea coast. The refinery, owned and operated by his oil company, Besoi Energy, manufactured gasoline and diesel fuels for distribution across southern Russia. But every three or four years, it had to stop production for a few weeks for essential maintenance. It was a logistical nightmare and involved flying in specialist maintenance engineering teams from overseas as well as Russia to help carry out the work.

Alongside his fleet of oil tankers, Severinov also owned a few other boats, including two yachts used for vacations and a small cargo vessel, the Yalta, which he sometimes moored at a jetty at the oil terminal adjacent to his refinery. He used the Yalta to bring in a variety of refinery equipment, materials and vehicles as required, mostly from the Russian port of Rostov-on-Don, more than three hundred kilometers north.

Ivanov knew of the existence of the Yalta—the Kremlin knew everything. His instructions, passed on from the prime minister and the Russian president, had been precise and extremely confidential.

Under cover of darkness, the Volvo truck and its highly sensitive cargo had arrived at the Krasnodar terminal two days earlier from somewhere farther down the Black Sea coast. The demeanor of the two men in unmarked military dress who were in charge of it had told Severinov not to bother asking any questions about their mission.

His task was to load the Buk onto the Yalta and to add extra camouflage netting to protect it from the prying eyes of Western spy satellites and aircraft. Then he was required to transport it across the Black Sea, through the Kerch Strait at the eastern end of the Crimean Peninsula, and up through the Sea of Azov—the saucepan-shaped sea directly north of the Black Sea, on the eastern side of the Crimea. The Buk was eventually offloaded at an anonymous industrial dockside at Azov Sea Port, a few kilometers down the Don River from Rostov-on-Don.

The Kremlin also specified that Severinov carry out the task personally, not delegate it to one of his men, as he normally would do. It had left Severinov feeling somewhat demeaned, to say the least, but he had little choice in the matter.

The conversation with Ivanov had been civil, but the urbane Kremlin fixer left Severinov in no doubt: declining the job was not an option. Severinov’s account with President Putin and Prime Minister Medvedev, once full of riches, had been heavily in the red for the previous couple of years after a number of blunders that had angered his paymasters.

Most recently, he had again, to his shock, come off worse in an encounter with American war crimes investigator Joe Johnson, who had, embarrassingly, exposed his part in the bombing of a Berlin discotheque in the 1980s, when he was working for the KGB. Johnson had also outwitted him in escaping from St. Petersburg over the border into Finland. This had followed previous embarrassments at Johnson’s hands in Afghanistan, all of which reflected badly on the Motherland. As a result, the Russian president had given him a year to eliminate Johnson permanently. Already, three months of that deadline period had passed, and Severinov knew he could not upset the president any further.

Severinov and Putin had once both worked as equals for the KGB in Afghanistan during the 1980s but had then left the intelligence agency and gone their separate ways. Putin became a spearhead of the political elite who took charge as Boris Yeltsin’s grasp on power weakened, while Severinov turned to business and enriched himself, thanks mainly to patronage from the president and his siloviki.

The president had expected a payback, of course, in the shape of utter loyalty and unerring completion of certain tasks when required. And that was where Severinov, initially successful, had fallen short more recently.

Severinov initially assumed that the Buk would be used somehow to assist the pro-Russian rebels who were running amok in Eastern Ukraine. He knew that several Ukrainian Air Force planes had already been shot down in the region, one as recently as two days ago. That was a good thing in his opinion. He felt that the destruction of the Soviet Union in the years after 1990 had diminished the Motherland on the international stage. There was no doubt too that in many of the peripheral former Soviet states there was a good deal of pro-Russian sentiment. Those rebels should be supported.

Of course, Russia couldn’t be seen to be actively assisting the rebels, but the damned Americans were poking their noses in by assisting the Ukrainian government, so he failed to see why Moscow shouldn’t do likewise.

However, despite his patriotic feelings, there was a moment when Severinov felt slightly uneasy as Ivanov explained, in confidence, exactly what the Buk would be used for. The revelation came with the usual implicit threat: if he disclosed the information to anyone, he would join the other patzani, or inmates, in one of the bloodied basement cellars of Butyrka, one of central Moscow’s largest and most notorious prisons.

After he had learned their intention, it was obvious why they wanted him to transport the missile launcher on his somewhat battered freighter rather than use one of their sleek Russian navy vessels. They were clearly intent on a completely deniable operation.

The Kremlin knew well that the West tracked every Russian navy vessel like a hawk and almost certainly was doing likewise with the Buk units operated by the Russian military in areas adjacent to the Ukrainian border.

However, intelligence told them it was unlikely that the same degree of intense surveillance applied to merchant vessels such as Severinov’s freighter.

Severinov’s task didn’t end in the town of Azov. Ivanov had ordered him to accompany the Volvo from Azov Sea Port to an unofficial border crossing into Ukraine 220 kilometers north, very near to the Seversky Donets River and the border village of Severny.

The border crossing and the territory beyond were controlled by pro-Russian separatist forces and were therefore far safer than the checkpoints farther south that were closer but were controlled by the Ukrainian government forces.

At the Donetsk crossing point, he was to meet a former colonel general of the GRU’s Spetsnaz special forces, Georgi Tkachev, at a hut near to some houses down a country lane on the Russian side of the border.

Severinov had worked briefly with Tkachev on a handful of previous operations. In the past, the GRU had assigned Tkachev to a special subunit hidden away within military unit 29155, which in turn was part of the 161st Special Purpose Brigade.

But Tkachev was now an independent contractor deployed on covert operations by different factions within the government, mainly the Kremlin, though private sector employers also used his services.

At Donetsk, Tkachev would take charge of the Volvo and the Buk, escort it across the border into Ukraine, and return it the following day to the meeting point. From there, Severinov would be responsible for escorting it back safely on the Yalta to Tuapse.

Despite the Kremlin demand for confidentiality, there was one person with whom Severinov had discussed the mission: his old friend Leonid Pugachov, a colonel in the FSB with whom he had studied at university and joined the KGB in 1980. Unlike Severinov, Pugachov had remained in the intelligence service after the breakup of the Soviet Union, switching from the foreign service to the domestic FSB. He often gave Severinov informal assistance with operations in return for very generous deposits into his bank account—even at his level, FSB employees were not well paid.

In this case, the reason Severinov had mentioned the Buk to Pugachov was because he didn’t want any interference from some overzealous FSB or police officer while transporting the launcher through Russian territory. He knew he could rely on his old colleague, whose reach spread to most corners of the FSB’s empire, to prevent any inadvertent holdups.

Now Severinov, wearing a long-sleeved black cotton shirt, folded his arms as his driver followed the Volvo along the bumpy track out of the shipping terminal and onto the highway to Azov. They needed to take a route past Rostov, then up the A-280 north through the mining city of Novoshakhtinsk, parallel to the Ukrainian border.

On the sidewalk near the port entrance, a group of pupils and a couple of teachers emerging from a school gate near the port entrance stared at the oddly shaped cargo as it passed.

Severinov thought that his men had done as good a job as they could in disguising the Buk—a necessary precaution. From a distance, and to an untrained eye, the camouflage netting made it look more like a regular army vehicle than one of the most lethal portable ground-to-air missile systems on the planet.

Chapter 3

Thursday, July 17, 2014

Chervonyi Zhovten village, Eastern Ukraine

The location was the same, but the scene was quite different from two days earlier. Georgi Tkachev climbed out of his Tigr and stood on the soil in the corner of the field. As far as he could see, there were short wheat stalks, as the combine harvesters had now cut down the crop for that year. Dust and chaff hung heavy in the still summer air.

To his right, where on his previous visit there had been three Buk units in a line, there was now just one: the launcher that he had escorted from the other side of the Russian border. All the men in the backup vehicles in the trees had gone: Tkachev didn’t want them around for this particular mission, code-named Operation Black Sea.

He and his boss, Igor Ivanov, had agreed that the fewer witnesses for Operation Black Sea, the better.

Tkachev had assumed escort duties of the Buk launcher from a man he knew from a few past operations. Yuri Severinov was one of those oligarchs of whom nobody took much notice of but whose face occasionally appeared in the business media. Tkachev knew his type: former KGB men who had acquired their wealth through their often long-standing political and intelligence service connections. In turn, those connections sometimes required the services of people like him. Indeed, one of his close former Spetsnaz colleagues, Vasily Balagula, had died working for Severinov earlier that year on an operation in Germany. Tkachev decided not to raise that subject with Severinov, however.

Tkachev had been slightly surprised to find someone of Severinov’s stature delivering the Buk in person. Presumably he was under instructions from on high—most likely the same people to whom Tkachev reported. But why he was carrying out that role was something Tkachev didn’t ask. Time was of the essence.

The launcher, now shorn of its camouflage netting, had been removed from the Volvo’s lowboy semitrailer, which was now hidden among the nearby trees. It stood in the field next to the dirt track, more than half a kilometer from the narrow country road that ran north to Snizhne, a line of trees and bushes protecting it from the stares of passing drivers.

Tkachev, who was wearing a lightweight radio headset and microphone, walked over and glanced up at the top of the Buk, which was about three-and-a-half meters high. The four missiles pointed north and were raised at forty-five degrees, their white tips glinting in the sunlight. Then he levered himself up onto a foothold at the front of the vehicle and clambered into the cramped cabin.

The two men in unmarked fatigues who had come in the Volvo had introduced themselves as Dmitry and Andreas. They were now in the cabin, checking the control panel. The panel, made from gray metal, had two display screens and a series of yellow buttons and controls, including a red joystick.

The cabin was equipped with a radar system, but compared to the one in a Buk command-post vehicle, it was relatively basic. There was no ability to scan 360 degrees but rather just a more restricted frontal view. Similarly, there was no ability to distinguish between friendly aircraft, enemies, and civilian planes. Still, that was not important today.

The essential information that Tkachev required would be fed to him by another command-post vehicle stationed inside Russian territory. That vehicle not only had its own full radar system but also had access to Russian air traffic control systems. There would be no mistake made when it came to determining the target.

“Are you all ready?” Tkachev asked. He fingered a five-centimeter scar that ran from the left corner of his mouth up into his cheek, the souvenir of a knife fight many years earlier in Afghanistan.

Dmitry looked up and nodded. “Yes, we are prepared.”

“Good. I will watch from outside and communicate from there.” He tapped his headset.

Tkachev climbed out of the Buk, and Dmitry closed the armored trapdoor behind him. That would remain firmly shut during the firing process—essential given the large volume of heat, smoke, and dust generated.

Tkachev rolled the sleeves of his khaki camouflage shirt up to the elbow. On his left bicep was a circular blue-and-yellow insignia, showing a black bat flying above a globe symbol. It was the badge of the Spetsnaz of the GRU. Like his title of colonel general, the badge was something he had clung on to unnecessarily, but it was to him a reminder of his life’s journey, even his identity, and a source of immense pride.

Tkachev walked back to his 4×4 and glanced at his watch. There were still several minutes to go, he estimated. He pressed a button on his headset and began to speak in Russian.

“SNOWCAT, this is FIREFLY. Repeat, SNOWCAT this is FIREFLY. Do you read?”

“Affirmative, FIREFLY,” came the response. “We have target on radar. Estimated arrival time six minutes. Airspeed 490 knots. There is only one birdie in the sky in that slot. Prepare yourselves.”

“Roger. Six minutes. Will confirm.”

Tkachev did a quick calculation. That was a speed of almost one thousand kilometers per hour. The plane was nearing their position fast. He swiftly switched circuits on his headset and rapped out instructions to Dmitry and Andreas.

“Check radar. Only one bird approaching. It should appear on screen inside the next two or three minutes. That is your target. Confirm.”

“Roger, confirmed. Will update on sighting.”

Tkachev felt his adrenaline surge. This was the key moment. He had to trust the two men inside the Buk launcher to carry out their job properly, but they appeared extremely professional, as he had expected.

He focused on his watch and waited, a pair of binoculars in his right hand. Almost precisely two minutes later came another squelch break. It was Dmitry.

“Bird on screen. I repeat, bird on screen.”

“Good,” Tkachev said. “That is your target. Go ahead.”

“Okay. Locking on,” Dmitry said.

Tkachev raised his binoculars to his eyes and scanned the sky. Eventually he located the plane, clearly outlined against the blue sky, a thin vapor trail streaming behind it. It was a large twin-engine Boeing 777 jet airliner, as expected, probably traveling at an altitude of about 33,000 feet. There was a pause of about eight seconds. Then Dmitry spoke again.

“Locked on.”

“Good,” Tkachev said, keeping his eyes glued to his binoculars. A thought flashed across his mind of the three hundred or so passengers and crew he assumed were on board: men, women, children, and babies. But then he forced himself to block it out and concentrate on the outcome he was aiming for.

“Proceed,” came Dmitry’s flat tones. It was as if he were requesting a sandwich in a down-market Moscow deli.

Away to Tkachev’s right came the familiar roar and the enormous cloud of flame, smoke, dust, and debris as the 9M38M1 missile took off. Guided by its own internal radar system located in its nose cone, it streaked toward the Malaysia Airlines jet high in the sky above them and still in the early stages of its journey from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur.

Behind the rapidly ascending missile was a trail of white exhaust gases that hung almost motionless in the still air.

Through Tkachev’s binoculars, everything was crystal clear. As expected, the missile didn’t actually strike the airliner—that rarely happened, although if it had done, an impact fuse would have activated the seventy-kilogram 9N314 fragmentation warhead that was built into the midsection of the missile.

Instead, as Tkachev guessed would be the case, the missile’s other fuse—a proximity fuse—kicked into life as its radar system detected that its target was very close. Tkachev saw the orange flash as the warhead detonated.

That explosion caused two layers of preformed fragments—bowtie-shaped and square pieces of steel—that were built in around the warhead to be propelled outward at massively high speeds. They formed a barrage of several thousand pieces of metal that slammed into the cockpit area of the nearby aircraft.

The devastating impact blew Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 apart.

Dmitry’s voice came in Tkachev’s earpiece. “Target destroyed successfully.”

“I saw it. Now let’s get the hell back into Russia.” He took his phone from his pocket and keyed in a secure message to Ivanov.

Chapter 4

Thursday, July 17, 2014

Schiphol Airport, Amsterdam

Johnson knew something was wrong even before they had landed in Amsterdam. The captain of their KLM flight from JFK announced only that onward passengers to Kuala Lumpur needed to check with their airline, as there were ongoing issues with connecting flights. When he asked a flight attendant for further details, she avoided eye contact and told him to ask when on the ground.

As they made their way off the aircraft, it became obvious that the issues were more serious than the usual causes of flight delays.

Large numbers of armed police and other security guards in berets and pale blue shirts were swarming the terminal, all of them grim-faced. Groups of obviously distraught passengers were gathered together, some of them weeping openly.

It took Johnson only a few moments to find out from a member of the airport’s support staff what had happened. Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 to Kuala Lumpur—the same route his family and Jayne were due to fly later that evening—had crashed somewhere in Ukraine, the woman said. It was believed to have been shot down by terrorists, although no more was known at this stage. Because of the uncertainty, airport police had called in reinforcements.

“We do not yet know whether Malaysian Airlines will fly that route again tonight so I can’t advise about your connecting flight,” she said. “You need to collect your luggage, and we will keep you updated. I am very sorry, but I do not know more right now.”

Johnson’s first instinctive reaction was one of relief: it was not their flight that had been hit. Peter and Carrie, all of them, were safe. He immediately castigated himself for that selfish thought as he watched the people weeping around him.

His second reflexive thought—one that sent a slight shiver through him—was about the Russians. Surely they weren’t targeting my flight and made a mistake? After all, he had a very long history with them, dating back to the Afghanistan war of the ’80s. But he shook his head and dismissed the idea. They definitely weren’t that incompetent.

Carrie, who was standing next to Johnson as the woman gave him the details, instantly burst into tears, and Peter looked as though he might do likewise. Amy gave a short shriek and stood open-mouthed while Jayne immediately took out her phone, checking for more information online.

“It’s the bloody Russians,” Jayne said. “Has to be. Why the hell are passenger jets flying over Ukraine with all that shit going on? I mentioned it yesterday, after we heard about that Antonov being shot down, remember?”

Johnson put an arm around each of his kids. “Let’s wait before jumping to conclusions,” he said. “But I suspect you’re right.”

Jayne peered at her phone. “There’s media coverage everywhere,” she said. “They’re reporting there are no survivors. Three hundred on the flight, according to this report. All dead.”

Carrie grabbed her father’s arm firmly, tears still trickling down her face. “I’m not going on that plane tonight,” she said. “I’m not going to Borneo. Definitely not.”

“Me neither,” Peter said. “I want to go back home.”

Johnson could see his children were not thinking logically in their panic and thought momentarily about trying to reassure them, but then he realized that was going to be a fruitless exercise. He ran a hand through the half circle of short-cropped hair around the side of his balding head, trying to think of what to do next.

“We don’t want to just abandon our vacation after all that planning,” Amy said. “Isn’t there another route or another airline we could take to get there?”

But even before she had finished speaking, Carrie was shaking her head firmly. “No,” she said. “I’m not getting on another plane. Not if they are being shot down.”

Johnson put his hands up. “Listen, let’s take our time deciding what to do. We’ll get our bags. Then let’s have a coffee and discuss it.”

Forty minutes later they had collected their suitcases and made their way to the departures hall, which had been partially cordoned off with red-and-white police tape. Already, bunches of flowers had begun to pile up next to the Malaysia Airlines check-in desks, which were closed. A man was wandering around shouting something about his brother being on the crashed flight and where the hell were airline staff. At one of the closed check-in desks a teenage girl sat on a trolley, head in hands, weeping.

Amy trailed behind the rest of them, talking on her cell phone. Johnson turned to her just as she finished her call and put her phone back in her pocket.

“I just spoke to Natalia,” Amy said. “Listen. She’s heard the news about the crash. She said if we want to, we can go straight to Cannes and spend our whole holiday there instead of going to Borneo. There’s plenty of space at the villa. We can either fly to Nice and hire a car, or we can get there by train. We don’t need to fly if we don’t want to.”

Before Johnson could open his mouth, his children made the decision for him.

“Yes,” said Carrie. “Can we do that? We’ll go by train. I’m definitely not going to Borneo. You can go by yourself if you want, Dad, but I’m not getting on that plane, even if you give me a million dollars. No way.”

Peter was nodding in agreement as she spoke, and Jayne threw Johnson a quick glance that said he wasn’t going to win this debate.

She was correct. There seemed little alternative, although the idea of spending three and a half weeks with one of Amy’s friends wasn’t filling him with enthusiasm. “Okay,” he said, reluctantly. “Cannes it is.”

Johnson’s phone pinged as a secure text message arrived. He glanced at the screen, tapped in his key and read it. It was from Vic and was extremely brief.

It’s the Russians again. Stay safe en route to Borneo buddy.

Johnson didn’t reply.

***

Thursday, July 17, 2014

Washington, DC

Some distance south of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, a white-haired lady hunched her back and, with a slight shuffle, walked along the broad pathway toward a solitary bench at the top of a slope. She took a seat on the right side of the bench and glanced down at the array of white gravestones that were spread out in neat lines on the grass beneath her vantage point.

This corner of section 35 of Arlington National Cemetery, only a couple of miles southwest of the White House and a short hop over the Potomac River into Virginia, was a good meeting place, in Anastasia Shevchenko’s experience. She had used it a number of times when working at the rezidentura in Washington a few years earlier, and it was distant enough from the political buzz of Capitol Hill for the contact she was due to meet now to feel secure.

Shevchenko cast an expert eye around the cemetery. There had been no sign of trailing coverage as she had made her way on an extended surveillance detection route around downtown Washington and over the Arlington Memorial Bridge. She was confident she was black—she had seen nothing untoward.

In her right ear was a small earpiece through which she could hear her team of four covert SVR countersurveillance officers from the rezidentura who were placed at various points around the cemetery. None of them had given her an abort signal.

In theory, there was no reason for her not to be black, given she had entered the US only a few weeks earlier under a completely different identity. But the countersurveillance people were always cautious; they had aborted a couple of recent meetings, including one at this same location five days earlier on suspicion that the FBI were tailing them. There was no hard evidence of that, but the feds were professionals, and it was better to be safe than sorry.

Since her arrival in DC on July 2, she had spent most of her time at a rented apartment on Fifteenth Street NW, a block away from Lafayette Square. During the past few days she had been waiting for the confirmatory call that had finally come that morning.

A half hour or so later, the contents of the call were all over the television and radio news. A Boeing airliner carrying nearly three hundred people had been shot down over Ukraine. All passengers and crew were dead.

Shevchenko hunched her back again. She was normally anything but round shouldered. In fact, her slim, wiry physique was well toned for her age.

She took a phone from her pocket and made a pretend call, engaging some imaginary friend in an animated conversation that required her to pivot on her bench and scan the area behind as well as in front of her. Still there was no sign of any observers, no shadows behind trees or men loitering and smoking cigarettes. No women with prams or unusual-looking dog walkers.

Shevchenko replaced the phone in her pocket, next to a Czech passport identifying her as Tatiana Niklas, a fifty-eight-year-old teacher from Prague. The only accurate element of the passport was her age, which was spot on, but the rest of it was the identity of a woman who had died twenty years earlier.

Her black shoulder-length hair normally had only a few flecks of gray in the mix. But that would have been lost on any onlooker now. She had colored her hair a pale gray, almost white, adding at least fifteen years to her apparent age. Makeup had also lightened her dark complexion. She was fluent in Czech, having spent three years in Prague during the 1980s, and was confident she could cruise through any interview required at US immigration. After all, “Tatiana” was one of her longest-standing and solid legends, or false identities—she knew her background as well as that of a twin sister, and she often used the identity when recruiting agents for security purposes.

There had been no questions upon her arrival at Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport, which was a less obtrusive entry point than Washington’s Dulles International or New York’s JFK. She had been waved straight through. From there she made her way directly to Washington.

Major General Shevchenko was a key figure in Russia’s foreign intelligence service, the SVR, so the steps she had taken to alter her appearance had been necessary. Just three months earlier, she had been ejected from the United Kingdom and bundled on a flight back to Moscow after being caught handling a mole she had cultivated in London. The mole, none other than the CIA’s London station chief Bernice Franklin, had been uncovered following an investigation by one of the CIA’s freelancers, Joe Johnson.

The failure in London had not gone down well with Shevchenko’s direct boss, the counterintelligence deputy director Yevgeny Kutsik, while the overall director in charge of the SVR at Yasenevo, Maksim Kruglov, maintained a noncommittal silence. She guessed her ambitions to one day accede to Kruglov’s throne had taken a severe knock.

But she accepted her fate and therefore laid low for a few weeks in Moscow.

Other intelligence agencies, sensing a moment of personal vulnerability, were quick to pick up on what had happened. During those weeks, she had a couple of extremely discreet approaches: a potentially lucrative one to spy for the Mossad and another from the German intelligence agency, the BND. In her disgruntled state, she had been slightly tempted by the former but had declined after two days of contemplation.

Then this opportunity to resurface in the US capital had come up, and all that had been forgotten.

Kutsik’s attitude toward her when briefing her on the operation seemed clear: she was still well regarded, but likely in the last-chance saloon. He deliberately let slip that she had been chosen ahead of others who badly wanted the gig, such as Pavel Vasilenko, deputy chief of the American department, who had already done a lengthy stint in the Washington rezidentura a few years earlier. The SVR wasn’t a “one strike and you’re out” organization, but two strikes was a different story. She knew she couldn’t afford another blunder; otherwise the wild dogs like Vasilenko who were snapping at her heels would have her on the floor.

Kruglov, who on the face of it had always supported her, had seemed much more conciliatory when she met him and even wished her good luck in Washington. But nevertheless, she was very aware that you were only as good as your last operation in this environment.

To her left, in her peripheral vision, Shevchenko caught a movement. There he was, her contact, whom she had cultivated during her previous stint in the US capital, when he had been significantly farther down the career ladder than he was now.

The man, now code-named TITANIUM, had visited Moscow a few weeks ago on a business trip for an international conference, and she had taken the opportunity to renew contact with him.

A key factor in her successful recruitment had been the scarcely disguised threat of blackmail. Again, based on observation and intuition, she had found out a long time ago whom TITANIUM was sleeping with, other than his wife. The surveillance team at the embassy had ascertained recently that he was still carrying on with that mistress.

In the process, the team had also somehow discovered that he was on a long course of antidepressants and had been quietly and confidentially seeing a psychiatrist as well as his regular doctor. Another factor lay in the occasional unguarded hints that his political views were not always in alignment with his role.

In short, he was a powerful man in a vulnerable position, and in that vulnerability, Shevchenko saw an opportunity that she had taken. TITANIUM had been angry at the trap he had fallen into—she had made it clear he had no choice but to cooperate unless he wanted his personal business to get into the media. But at the same time he seemed to like the dollars that were now flowing into his numbered Swiss bank account and complied with her demands.

Shevchenko remained seated, her arms folded, as TITANIUM slid onto the bench next to her.

“Here we are again,” he said.

Shevchenko returned her gaze to the middle distance in the direction from which TITANIUM had come. “Indeed we are,” she said. “Are you certain you are clean?”

There was no obvious sign of anyone in the vicinity. The cemetery was quiet.

“I am certain as I can be.”

“Good.”

She knew that TITANIUM had a good reason to visit this section of the cemetery and indeed came here fairly frequently, which was why she had chosen it. It was unlikely that the FBI, knowing his habits, would follow him here. After all, his father, a Second World War air force bomber pilot, had been buried two years earlier little more than a hundred meters from where they were sitting. If only he knew what his son was doing.

TITANIUM cleared his throat a little. “I see your operation went according to plan. Devastating.”

“It wasn’t my operation. But yes. It was.”

“The speculation has already begun, which is good. I have plenty of ammunition that you and your contacts can use to fuel that in the next few days.”

“Give me the highlights,” Shevchenko murmured, touching his forearm briefly and unnecessarily. “And keep your voice low.” He was speaking a little too clearly for her liking.

“Right. There is only one real highlight, from which all the others can follow.”

“And that is?”

TITANIUM leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees and cupping his chin in his hands. He glanced sideways at the Russian. “Did you know that our secretary of state and the CIA director held a meeting with the Ukrainian president four weeks ago in Kiev? A long meeting with a lot of follow-up actions, promised by our president, which the secretary of state communicated.”

Shevchenko had some difficulty in stopping herself from jerking upright in surprise. “What?”

“Yes. You heard correctly.”

If true, this was a meeting that had gone so far under the radar as to be almost invisible. There had been no inkling at Moscow Center, the SVR headquarters, of such an event, although intelligence relating to some kind of military assistance had been picked up.

“What actions? Are you talking about intelligence or weaponry? Or both?”

She turned her head toward TITANIUM, who nodded once.

“Both.”

“What type of weaponry?”

“Javelin anti-tank missiles. Firefinder missile detection radar. Humvee armored vehicles. Night-vision goggles. Flak jackets. You name it. Lots of stuff.”

Shevchenko nodded thoughtfully and let her left knee stray sideways until it touched his, where she left it for a few seconds. “Ground-to-air missiles? Patriots or Stingers maybe?” The US defense manufacturer Raytheon was known to have sold its Patriot weapons system to a number of countries, including Poland.

“Not quite yet. Possibly Patriots to come. But don’t let that stop you.”

Shevchenko gave a quiet laugh. “No, it won’t stop us. Thank you.”

There was a pause as Shevchenko digested the implications of what she had just been told. This opened the door to significant opportunities and endless speculation that the White House, Pentagon, and State Department would struggle to deny convincingly.

“Do you have any documentary proof of the meeting? Memos, diary entries, follow-up emails?”

“I was anticipating that.” TITANIUM reached into his pocket and removed a small flash drive. “There. Photos of memos and emails on that. But only for use if absolutely necessary. I would rather you didn’t use them for obvious reasons—my security. I don’t think it is necessary. This is all about the smoke, not the fire, in my view.”

Shevchenko took the flash drive and pocketed it. “I agree. The smoke is the key thing. But this proof of the fire behind it will be useful internally at Moscow Center for my and your credibility, even if we don’t use it externally.”

“Anything else?” TITANIUM asked.

“Not for now. Let’s meet again in a few days. Site GREEN?” That was at a golf course near to TITANIUM’s home.

“Yes, site GREEN.”

“I am going to work out some other potential locations. We also need to set up a better channel of communication. Face-to-face meetings like this are high risk for both of us. I will give some thought to that and come up with a plan. It will involve using a covcom device, probably a phone app of some kind.”

“Yes, covcom would be better. I agree.”

“We need a place where we could come fairly close together to operate it, but without actually meeting. I know your schedule is hectic, but is there anything in your weekly routine that involves a regular stop outside the office, like a restaurant or bar?”

“You might find this amusing, but for years, I have fairly often stopped on my way home for a hot chocolate at a small café, a favorite place of mine. Maybe once every two weeks. It gives me half an hour of normality in my crazy working life, and I’ve stuck to it as I’ve risen up the ladder.”

Shevchenko considered the idea. “That might be a possibility. I would need to structure it carefully to ensure security. We can discuss it further at our next meeting. Usual communication channels until then.” The pair of them kept in touch using seemingly innocent text messages on burner phones that were changed regularly.

She scrutinized TITANIUM. “Are you okay? Not finding all this too stressful?”

TITANIUM gave a slight sigh. “I’m okay. Sort of. I don’t find it easy, but it’s fine.”

He stood and nodded at Shevchenko, then turned and walked away in the direction he had come from. She pulled a pack of cigarettes from her pocket and lit one. She made a mental note to get some high-definition satellite photos from Yasenevo of the alternative meeting sites she had in mind, other than this one and the golf course.

“Bozhe,” she murmured as she crossed her right leg over her left, a prearranged signal that conveyed a disperse message to her lead countersurveillance officer from the rezidentura team.

God. This little cookie is up to his neck in this, she thought as she watched him disappear. It’s a spider’s web.

***