Free Shadow War by Sean McFate Page B

was finding out whether the boss enjoyed his company or treated him like a necessity.
    â€œGrigory,” Greenlees said, stepping forward and extending his hand. Maltov didn’t shake it. He just frowned at us, clearly unimpressed. But that meant nothing. This kind of man was always unimpressed. That was his job.
    â€œThe fixer?” Maltov said, and I knew from the phrase that he was a fan of Western action movies.
    â€œTom Locke,” I said, extending my hand. Maltov tried to crush it. He clearly understood that in America, he would have been cast as the villain. And not without reason.
    â€œGet in,” he said.
    We retrieved our bags from the trunk of the car. Greenlees had packed lightly, in a 1990s-era stretchbag that had clearly come out of mothballs.
    â€œWe have equipment,” Greenlees said, indicating the trunk.
    Maltov grunted.
    â€œThis wasn’t his idea,” I muttered to Greenlees, as Maltov packed the radios, beacons, and landing lights without bothering to balance the weight
    Within minutes, we were airborne, the ground passing swiftly below us, a dark, endless countryside of flat fields that could have been Kansas or the more fertile upland of Eritrea. I was half asleep by the time we banked steeply and dropped low, a few meters above the treetops. My stomach hit my throat as the pilot skimmed the treeline. It was a common military tactic to fly nap of earth, using natural features to evade radars and missiles, but not like this. The pilot was a cowboy.
    â€œWe’re near Poltava,” Greenlees said into the headset, the first words any of us had spoken for an hour. I wasn’t surprised. Karpenko was a wanted man. Contrary to popular wisdom, wanted men usually stayed close to home.
    When we swung over the road, I suspected we were close. Even in the dark, I could see it was dead straight with open fields on both sides and a compound at the far end. The edges had been cleared, probably recently. No power lines, meaning they had been buried. We slowed as we approached the compound: a house, a barn, and two outbuildings surrounded by a perimeter fence and six, seven, eight men with AK-47s and dogs.
    It would take an army to storm this place, I thought, as we bounced down in the formal garden. I wasn’t until I stepped into the mud that I realized this garden wasn’t shrubs and flowers, but two-foot-tall weeds.
    â€œTraditional dacha,” Greenlees said, sliding up beside me.“Summer home from the Imperial Period, original Russian Empire. Probably abandoned during the late Soviet years. This isn’t one of the homes on our list.”
    Karpenko owned eight homes that Greenlees knew of, including the Poltava mansion that had been assaulted last week. This one was either a recently purchased safe house, or an early purchase on the way up. Karpenko came from a poor background in Poltava; owning this local emblem of wealth was probably the culmination of a childhood dream.
    Until reality outstripped that dream a thousand times over.
    Now he was a prisoner to that wealth, with two guards at the front door and a keypad security system. Five number. No scrambler. Amateur.
    Inside, there was a security room, with two men monitoring camera feeds on laptops, then a second door made of steel. A guard with a handheld metal detector was waved away by Maltov, telling me even Karpenko’s own men were probably being checked. And that this wasn’t a job interview. Karpenko hadn’t even met me, but I was already hired. He was desperate.
    â€œCaptain Locke,” a man said, entering the room. He was tall and thin, a generation older than Maltov, wearing forest green fatigues and a 9 mm pistol. I could tell by his bearing he was ex-military, probably Ukrainian special forces. He was almost surely Karpenko’s head of security.
    â€œColonel Sirko,” Greenlees whispered, as the man and I shook hands.
    The colonel nodded. “Come,” he said, like a