Dead fall, p.23
Dead Fall, page 23
“Jesus.”
Harvath nodded. “Now you know why I took this assignment. And why I’m going to see it through; even if I have to do it alone.”
“You’re not going to have to do it alone,” said Hookah. “We’re going to help you kill these Orcs. Every last one of them.”
“Amen,” Jacks replied.
“Ooh-rah,” said Krueger.
* * *
They found Biscuit standing alone outside smoking a cigarette. “You all right?” Hookah asked.
The young Canadian responded slowly. “This fucking war,” he said.
They all felt the same way. There was nothing more to say. It was time to shed their equipment, stand down, and rest for a little while.
The small building that had been prepared for them turned out to be an empty garage with a small, rustic guest accommodation above.
After Harvath had moved the Novator inside, they unloaded their gear and carried what they needed upstairs.
A fire had been lit in the fireplace and a pile of split wood stacked next to it. On the stove, a large pot of stew, probably rabbit, sat simmering.
“Holy shit,” Biscuit said from the bathroom. “A shower. And the water’s hot.”
“Don’t use it all,” Hookah warned, removing his battle belt and setting it in the corner next to his rifle. “Or else.”
A large glass bottle filled with cloudy liquid and stopped with a nicked-up cork sat in the middle of the dining table. In front of it were several glasses, as well as plates with pickles, cured pork, cheese, and pieces of dark rye bread.
Jacks uncorked the bottle and took a whiff. “Samohon,” he declared. “Ukrainian moonshine. Anyone interested?”
All the men, including Harvath, raised their hands. After what they’d seen inside the convent, they could each use a good, stiff drink.
Jacks lined the glasses up and poured.
While he did, the men peeled off their plate carriers, kicked off their boots, and made themselves comfortable.
Leaning back on the couch, drink in hand, Krueger said, “I forgot how good this feels.”
Removing some pain pills from his IFAK, Harvath sat down at the table, popped them in his mouth, and washed them down with a big swig of moonshine.
“Can you spare a couple of those?” asked Hookah.
Harvath tossed him the bottle of pills. The man shook some into the palm of his hand and then tossed the bottle back. “Thanks,” he said.
“Don’t mention it.”
The team was wiped out and they soon fell into a fatigued silence with nothing but the fireplace crackling in the background.
When Biscuit emerged from his shower, Krueger went next, followed by Hookah and then Jacks. Harvath volunteered to go last. With the burn he had suffered to his back, he’d be taking the world’s shortest shower and really didn’t care how much hot water was left at that point. He just wanted to get clean and apply some of the salve they’d given him at the hospital.
Finally showered, shaved, and with a couple of shots of moonshine in them, the men’s appetites began to return, and they helped themselves to food.
After they had eaten, Jacks said, “So what’s the plan?”
Harvath motioned for the team to move their plates and glasses. Once the table was clear, he spread out his map.
On it, he marked every location known to have been associated with the Ravens. He walked the men through everything he had learned.
“Let me get this straight,” said Krueger. “Up until three weeks ago, the Ravens were the ‘Murder, Inc.’ wing of the Wagner Group. Rape, murder, torture—the worst of the worst stuff we’ve been hearing about. Then, all of a sudden, they’re stealing the most precious works of art in the entire country. Works of art that have been very carefully and very quietly hidden. Do I have that about right?”
Harvath nodded.
“What happened three weeks ago that set them on this new and, presumably, highly lucrative path? Did Wagner HQ stumble onto some intel, pull these guys out of their combat role, and retask them?”
“I don’t think so,” Harvath replied.
“Why not?”
“First, nobody in their right mind would trust a group of criminals with that kind of assignment. Second, there’ve been rumors that Wagner lost contact with one of its units in Kharkiv Oblast. We think it was the Ravens.”
“Lost contact when?” Hookah asked.
“Just over three weeks ago.”
“Anything about where this unit was before it disappeared?”
“During the heavy fighting they were in this area,” said Harvath as he circled part of the map.
Hookah then pointed at a village due south and made eye contact with his teammates.
Harvath looked at him. “Do you know this area?”
“We were in that fight,” the man replied. “It was intense.”
“What happened in that village you just pointed to?”
“We came across a Russian unit that had been machine-gunned. Completely slaughtered. It was like they hadn’t even seen it coming. Most of their weapons still had the safeties engaged.”
“And that wasn’t all,” said Biscuit. “There was some bizarre trash left at the scene—almost like someone really wanted it to look like Ukrainian soldiers had committed the attack. Pieces of yellow-and-blue tape that they use for armbands, empty Ukrainian cigarette and MRE packages—as if they had slaughtered the Russians and then had sat down for lunch and a smoke. It just felt weird.”
“Weirder still,” Jacks added, “the engagement hadn’t been reported up the chain. We were the first ones to call it in.”
“That is weird,” Harvath agreed. “What about the unit itself?”
“I think what we found most remarkable was how clean they were—their uniforms, their boots…”
“And especially their hands,” Krueger hopped in to clarify. “Softest hands I’ve ever seen. Those were not soldiers; at least, not all of them.”
“What do you mean ‘not all of them’?”
“The bodies of the guys who did manage to flick off their safeties and, who knows, maybe even got off a couple of shots—those guys had hands like soldiers. Rough, nicked up with cuts, and more than a couple of scars here and there.”
A security detail, Harvath thought to himself. “Anything else?”
“A couple were really pushing it age-wise. Lots of eyeglasses, too. One guy was even carrying a pipe,” Biscuit added. “We joked that the Russians must be so desperate that they had begun recruiting in libraries and faculty lounges.”
“Bottom line,” said Jacks, “they didn’t strike us as a combat unit.”
Harvath agreed. “What about vehicles?”
“There weren’t any. Whoever wiped them out had probably taken them.”
“Along with all the moving blankets, empty crates, and packing materials that were inside,” said Hookah.
“Exactly,” Harvath replied.
“You think the dead Russians were also art thieves?” asked Biscuit.
“I think they were the original thieves—experts and muscle sent from Moscow. Who knows how they crossed paths with the Ravens. Maybe it was just dumb luck or maybe the Ravens had gotten wind of what they were up to and had been following them. It doesn’t matter. Eventually, it happened. And because they were fellow Russians, the Ravens were able to get in close enough to take them out, which is what they did.”
“Leaving them free to take over their art racket,” stated Hookah. “The Ravens went AWOL from the Wagner Group and have been under their own management ever since.”
Harvath nodded. “A bunch of criminals alert to criminal opportunities. In a war zone no less. Go figure.”
“How do we catch them?” asked Jacks. “You’ve got more targets on your list than we can possibly cover.”
“We know where they’ve been, so the key for us is to uncover any type of pattern.”
Hookah walked over to his chest rig, pulled out his land nav kit, and, removing the protractor, returned to the table.
Borrowing Harvath’s grease pencil, he began marking off distances and making notes on the border of the map.
“Look at you go, Grandpa,” said Biscuit. “Old-school. How many cubits?”
“Just one,” Hookah replied without looking up as he gave the young Canadian the finger.
The rest of the team chuckled.
Harvath watched as the man continued to work. Soon enough, he set the pencil down, visibly frustrated.
“What is it?”
“Stolen anything,” said Hookah, “is a very specific kind of game.”
“Meaning?”
“Until you’re ready to get rid of it, you’ve got to have a safe place to keep it. Ditto for a hostage.”
Harvath nodded. “Keep going.”
“The Ravens, it’s safe to assume, are also on everybody’s shit list. You want them. The Ukrainians want them. The Wagner Group wants them. And if they haven’t already, once the Russians figure out what they’ve done, they’re going to want them as well.”
“Which means what?”
“I’m guessing that there’s a limit to how far away from… let’s call it their safe house that they’re willing to conduct operations,” Hookah said. “Easy out, easy back. That’d be the smart play.”
Harvath looked at the map, specifically all the locations the Ravens had already hit. “Then the key is to figure out what that distance is and try to determine their base of operations.”
The man nodded. “The front lines have moved back and forth. If these guys leaned more toward greed than they did smarts, I think they’d be hitting some of the locations farther out—at least while there wasn’t any fighting there. But they’re not doing that. They’re avoiding getting too close to the front, which tells me they’re disciplined.”
“Or scared,” stated Harvath. “Having gone AWOL from Wagner, they’ve cut themselves off from any battlefield intel. They’re blind, which makes them vulnerable across the board.”
“Agreed. They no longer have a full view of what’s happening. Even better, with everyone looking to kill them, there’s no cavalry coming to rescue them if they get in trouble. That bodes very well for us. If we can find them.”
Draining the last drop of moonshine from his small glass, Harvath dried the inside with his napkin, turned it upside down on the map, and motioned for Hookah to hand him the pencil.
“Based on the scale of the map, what’s the diameter of my glass?”
Hookah laid his protractor across it. “Twenty-two klicks.”
Centering the glass over each of the spots the Ravens had hit, Harvath traced a circle around it and then moved on to the next.
Once he was finished, he removed the glass and looked. The map was a mess. The circles were all over the place. Too few of them intersected in any way that might have provided useful information.
“Well, that was a total waste of wax,” said Harvath.
“Maybe not,” Hookah responded, placing his protractor back down and adjusting it.
As the man started drawing lines again, Harvath saw something—an actual pattern.
But to fully make sense of it, they were going to need one more piece of data. He hoped that Nicholas would be able to fill in the blank. Which brought him to the method of communication.
When operating inside, or very close to, enemy territory, the goal was to position yourself as a needle in a stack of needles. If everyone else was using a specific encrypted messaging app, that was the one you should be using. Standing out, being different, was not a good thing. It only attracted attention, usually undue attention.
The only problem with free, encrypted apps was that eventually they would be broken—usually by the Israelis, though the Chinese had been right on their heels lately. So had the Russians.
If Moscow could crack the popular messaging apps being used by the Ukrainians, it would be like the Allies breaking the Nazis’ Enigma machine—a complete and total game-changer.
Harvath’s transmissions were too sensitive to risk being intercepted. Pulling out his phone, he powered it up but placed it into airplane mode. He then opened the proprietary, encrypted app his organization used and wrote up an overdue situation report. There was a lot to fill Nicholas in on. There was also that missing piece of data he needed.
Once his SITREP was ready, he clicked out of airplane mode and tried to see if there was any cell service.
It took a few moments, but eventually he was able to lock onto a weak signal that bounced between one and two bars on his phone.
He hit send and waited for confirmation that his message had been received on the other end. When he saw the confirmation, he put his phone back into airplane mode and powered it down.
There was no sense in leaving it on. It would probably take Nicholas a while to get back to him. He wanted to grab a good chunk of uninterrupted sleep before it was his turn to take watch. He also knew that a live phone could be a beacon for the enemy, like striking a match at night and lighting a cigarette at the front lines. It was much better to be safe than sorry.
Tucking his phone in the pocket of his fatigues, Harvath bedded down for the night. It took a moment for the tension of the day to leave his body and for his brain to lower its alert level, but soon enough he had stepped off the edge of consciousness into a deep well of dreamless sleep.
* * *
Three villages over, a Russian Leer-4 electronic warfare system—capable of picking up more than two thousand cell phones within a ten-mile range—sat beneath a high-tech web of advance camouflage netting.
Inside the command truck, a signals specialist beckoned his commander over to look at his screen.
“What do you have?” the commander asked.
“A handful of cell phones. Each has been turned on and then back off. They seem to be exhibiting a level of operational security.”
“Where are they?”
The specialist overlaid a digital map. “They look to be somewhere on the grounds of the Mother of God Convent.”
“A convent? Why the hell would a bunch of nuns be concerned with operational security?” It was a rhetorical question. The commander didn’t expect an answer and pressed on, asking, “Were you able to intercept any of their communications?”
“Negative,” the specialist replied. “It’s encrypted. It appears that all but one of the phones are using the Telegram app.”
“Ukrainian soldiers?”
“That’d be my guess.”
“What about the phone that’s not using Telegram?”
“It’s using a type of encryption I’ve never seen before. From what I can see, it looks to be light-years ahead of Telegram. Whoever’s using it is probably high value. Maybe a military or intelligence officer.”
The commander thought about their options. “Do we have any reconnaissance teams in the area?”
The specialist consulted a list. “No, but we do have a four-man assault team. Spetsnaz soldiers. They can be on target within the hour.”
“If possible, I want the high-value target captured and brought back for interrogation. If not, take them all out. No survivors. Just make sure that the team brings back that phone. Moscow will be very interested in getting their hands on such new technology.”
CHAPTER 23
KYIV
Kozar, the Ukrainian Intelligence official who had accompanied them on the overnight train from Poland, had done Nicholas a huge favor. In addition to getting him set up in his own accessible office, he had teamed him with one of the brightest stars in their agency. He assumed her job was to keep an eye on him, but he liked having her around.
She was a twenty-one-year-old hacker extraordinaire named Yulia. Behind the keyboard, she went by the nom de guerre Valkyrie.
Yulia was fast and unbelievably intelligent. She spoke three languages—Ukrainian, Russian, and English. She wanted to learn anything Nicholas was willing to teach her; anything at all that would help her better serve her country.
His small stature wasn’t off-putting to her. Neither was his rather checkered past. And like Kozar, she loved dogs. In a word, she was perfect.
They got along instantly, and their bond was only deepened when, worried about the comfort of Argos and Draco, who were relegated to the cold concrete floor, she sourced two foam mats and brought them into the office.
“I’m sorry,” she said as she entered the office and handed Nicholas a bowl and spoon. “This was all they had. Beef borscht. A Ukrainian classic.”
“Don’t apologize,” Nicholas replied. He had just fed the dogs and was looking forward to getting some food himself. “Borscht reminds me of my youth. Besides, how many soldiers at the front tonight won’t get a hot meal at all?”
“You are right. I need to practice more gratitude.”
He smiled. “It’s all about perspective. Did you hear the one about the Ukrainian soldier who was being interrogated by a Russian officer?”
She shook her head.
“The Ukrainian looks down and sees that the officer has only one boot. He asks, ‘Did you lose a boot?’ ‘Nyet,’ the Russian replies. ‘I found a boot.’ ”
The young woman laughed. “Perspective.”
“It is the key to everything.”
“Speaking of which,” she said, changing the subject, “am I going to get a preview of your presentation? I know our digital team is looking forward to it.”
“You do,” he answered, holding up two fortune-cookie-sized pieces of paper. “There are the two case studies. Which one do you want to tackle first?”
On one, he had written the provocative words Naked Pictures (of my wife). On the other Come Fly with Me.
The way he was holding them, only he could see what he had written.
Yulia reached out and took one.
“I already regret this,” she said. “No, I don’t want to see any naked pictures of your wife.”
Nicholas chuckled. “Don’t worry. A, I’m not married. B, we’re using someone else’s wife. In fact, several others.”
“I am not following you.”
