While Vladimir Putin had declared that Ukraine was not a real state, Yuri Luzhkov, Moscow’s mayor, had said it was time that Russia seized the Ukrainian Crimea, way to the south of where she was now. But the rumours were beginning to flesh out the Kremlin’s aggressive words and the pictures Anna had studied on Burt’s yacht began to turn the rumours into solid facts. First, the Russians were said to be distributing Russian passports to the Ukrainian population in the east of the country that bordered Russia. The purpose of this, if true, was to provide an excuse for Russia to defend its own in case of crisis. And Burt had said it was undoubtedly true.
It was the same tactic the Kremlin had used as a casus belli to invade the Republic of Georgia two years before.
Then came stories of weapons caches in the border areas, and an infiltration of Russian
But the rumour that drew Anna to the borders on this particular evening in January at Burt’s behest was that a consignment of unidentified materials was to be smuggled across the border in one of the long stretches of land where the border posts were stretched to the limit. It was the fourth or fifth such consignment that Cougar knew of. American satellites, including Cougar’s, had detected unusual movements on the Russian side for months, but Burt Miller never put his trust in technology. The ubiquitous eyes in the sky were supposedly all-seeing, but even the giant American WorldView satellite, which could pick out a car’s licence plate from space, was, in Burt’s opinion, highly flawed and relied upon to an insane degree by the CIA. How many remote-controlled Predator missiles did it take to kill one suspected terrorist in Afghanistan? Up to half a dozen—and this because the all-seeing eyes didn’t see all.
Anna drank some water from a flask, then strapped the Contender onto her body inside her thick jacket, its barrel extending behind her and over her waist. It was strapped for a rear draw, her favoured stance when shooting in tight circumstances. But the length of the barrel necessitated that anyway. It would have been impossible to walk with the gun strapped to the front. Then she stood and, once she was satisfied that it had gotten as dark as it was going to get, she strapped on the pack and began to walk the remaining miles to the rendezvous.
Burt wanted intelligence on the ground, human intelligence, not push-button intelligence from a video console in Virginia, so Anna continued to follow the rut on the left side of the track at first, its lighter shade of ice against the slightly darker snow making it just visible, and the tufted broken line of grass down the centre showed the way. After three miles she took out night vision binoculars and surveyed the terrain for three hundred and sixty degrees around her position. Finally satisfied she was alone, she turned off the track and, in almost complete darkness, set off at an angle in the direction of the border where copses of trees afforded some protection as she approached the foreseen rendezvous. She made the next three miles at a slow pace, in just under an hour, stopping at regular intervals to search in the dark with the aid of the binoculars. Then she found herself at the edge of another lake, bigger than the one that she’d passed earlier, and which, she knew, was the one that straddled the border itself.
She made a hollow in the reeds on the shore and, when she was satisfied she was concealed from all sides, she took out the night vision binoculars once again. She trained them first on the Ukrainian side. She needed to know first that behind her she was well protected.
To her alarm, she immediately picked out what looked like an old wooden agricultural cart of the kind still used by farmers in the area. It was stopped at the edge of a wood on a slight incline about a quarter of a mile behind her and above the lake. It was less than half a mile inside Ukrainian territory. At first she thought it had simply been abandoned there for the winter, but, on closer inspection, she picked out a horse grazing on a bag of hay tied around its neck, a little farther from the cart. She wondered if her arrival had already been seen.
Anna stayed in the cover of the reeds. One advantage of the cart’s presence was that she now believed she needed only to observe it if the rendezvous took place. It must be connected. At just after nine o’clock, several hours after dark and with the temperature now well below freezing and still falling, she saw movement up in the wood. There were three men wearing what appeared to be camouflage jackets and caps. She studied them closely to see if there were any insignia to say they were from the Ukrainian army—border guards in some kind of rear position, perhaps. But she could see nothing of any such detail through the binoculars. They were dressed as hunters, she guessed, not military, that was the reason behind the camouflage. They were using the cover of hunting.
She watched as one of the men took a piss in the grass at the edge of the wood and then walked to where the horse was standing, passively chewing, took away the hay bag, and led the horse towards the cart. Then he harnessed it to the cart, while the other two men began to descend towards the lake. They walked slowly, purposefully, apparently knowing where they were going. They reached the edge of the lake about two hundred yards from her and now she noticed they were carrying fishing rods.
She turned in the cramped space of the reed nest to look in the other direction, across the lake towards the border. She listened for the sound of an engine, but the stillness was complete and the silence unbroken with the exception of a duck calling in alarm from where the men stood.
The first sign she had of anything coming from the border was the light outline of water apparently pushed up by the prow of a boat. Then another white line appeared just behind the first. The binoculars began to pick out the darker shape of a craft against the water, and then a second craft. She fit the silencer to the handgun, placed the two grenades in a pocket of her jacket, and began to crawl through the reeds just above the waterline. It would be best if she could allow the transfer to take place, and let the Russian side of it retreat to the border. That way she would have only three men to contend with.
As the craft drew nearer, she recognised them as tracked amphibious vehicles, but there was no sound of an engine. Only now did the wave caused by the boats begin to ripple outwards and finally to reach the water below the reeds where she crawled. She was thirty yards from the men on the shore.
She dimly made out the shadows of the craft as they silently pushed through the reeds and finally rested on the snow with solid earth beneath it. She saw six men disembark, three from each of the craft, and then turn the craft around to make it easier to unload the cargo. When the covers came off she thought there were four boxes on each.
In her intense study of the bank ahead, and the contents of the craft, she hadn’t noticed that two of the men had walked to either side of the boats and were searching the area with binoculars. One of them was now approaching along the bank, on the other side of the reeds where she was hiding. She held her breath. The man came closer and finally stopped, standing just two feet from her, still concealed by thick reeds. She waited, considering the options; by remaining silent she would almost certainly be unobserved. But there was still a risk. She quietly drew the bowie knife from its sheath on her leg. The man didn’t move. It seemed as if this was his prearranged station. She gripped the knife and drove it into his calf muscle.
With her free hand she pulled him down by his wounded leg and, clamping one hand around his mouth, she drove the knife again into his throat. But the brief cry had already escaped his lips before she could silence him. She lay in silence on top of the dying man and felt the blood seeping from his throat and covering her hand. At last, he lay still.
She rolled away from him and snatched up the binoculars, training them on the spot where she’d previously been looking. She saw that all the men were stationary and looking in her direction. They were professionals, she now saw—special forces, not amateur smugglers. Nobody panicked. Nobody called out the dead man’s name. She watched as they went into crouched positions and drew weapons. She saw the leader wave his arm. Two of the men began to crawl fast on their bellies up the hill towards the wood and the cart. Two others crawled along the edge of the reed bed towards her. She couldn’t see the other three men. They might be with the men coming towards her, but behind them and invisible to her. Or they might be coming through the water, making use of the reed cover. Despite the nearly freezing temperature of the water, that was the way she would have done it in their position, form a pincer movement, even if it meant descending into the freezing lake where ice was now forming. Wherever they were, she watched what she believed to be a highly skilled formation growing around her.
The men who had gone up the hill were now separated and, twenty yards apart, were coming down the hill directly above where she lay. They had some height and were covering their fellows at the water’s edge. If she turned for an escape route now, she would lose sight of the formation—and there was nowhere to go, anyway.
The men coming towards her on their stomachs alongside the reeds were now less than twenty yards from her. Then the men on the hill skirted around again and were behind her. She sensed a man, certainly more than one
