Andrew Kaplan - Scorpion Winter

“I saw the TV yesterday in Chernobyl,” Shelayev said sullenly.

“When you planted that C-4, what the hell did you think you were doing?”

“Saving my country,” Shelayev said, looking up. “Alyona too.”

“The Serb who killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand and started World War One probably didn’t mean to start a war either. But he did,” Scorpion said grimly. “But why should it bother you? You’ve already got a lot more blood than Cherkesov’s on your hands.”

“What?” Shelayev looked startled. “What are you talking-”

“Alyona’s friends. Ekaterina and Fedir. Kulyakov killed them because Gorobets was looking for you. If I hadn’t got there in time, Alyona would be dead too. And then there’s Dennis.”

“Who?” He looked wide-eyed at Scorpion.

“My InterInform guide, Denys. Your little Spetsnaz lavoushka trap in the apartment in Pripyat killed him. If Ukraine falls to Russia, you’ll have done it.”

Shelayev stared at him. “Gorobets told me-” he began.

“Can’t you get it through your thick skull?” Scorpion snapped. “Gorobets wants you dead. You and Alyona both.”

“So you say,” Shelayev said, standing up. Before Scorpion could stop him, he snatched a second Spetsnaz ballistic knife from behind a pot on a shelf and pointed it at Scorpion. The force of the knife, if the stories were true, could put the blade through his entire body and out the other side.

“We had a deal,” Scorpion said, his eyes on the knife.

“I don’t trust you. You’re trying to trip me up, you CIA mudak bastard. I love my country. My father was a hero. He fought the Germans in the Great Patriotic War.”

“Before you do something stupid, just one question: Why are you trying so hard to protect the man who wants you and Alyona dead?”

“It’s not true,” Shelayev said, shaking his head. “I did it for my country, but also for Alyona. She was in the middle. She was desperate.”

“I know. Her mother was dying and the authorities threatened to release her brother, Stepan, from Pavlovka. Do you know who did that?”

Shelayev didn’t answer.

“Gorobets,” Scorpion said. “But you already knew that, didn’t you?”

Shelayev stared at him, his eyes wide and blue.

“I caused this, didn’t I?” he said.

“You lit the match. Gorobets set the explosive.”

“I am the traitor,” Shelayev said, almost to himself.

“Dmitri, if you are willing to tell the truth we can stop this.”

“And then Kozhanovskiy and the Jews win!” he snarled.

“And what about Alyona?”

“Alyona was a dream. Besides, after all this radiation…” Shelayev gestured vaguely at the house and the woods. He sat back down at the table but kept the knife aimed at Scorpion’s chest. With his other hand, he took a long swig of the horilka. He wiped his blond hair out of his eyes.

“Do you know Taras Sherchenko, the poet?” he asked. He began to recite:

“When I die, bury me

On a grave mound

Amid the wide wide steppe

In my beloved Ukraina…”

He looked at Scorpion. “She wants to be an actress. So beautiful,” he said.

Shelayev put the knife in his mouth and pressed the release with his thumb. He gagged as the blade shot through the roof of his mouth and brain, the point and part of the blade sticking out of the top of his skull, gushing blood as he toppled to the floor.

Verkhovna Rada

Kyiv, Ukraine

Scorpion drove through the darkness toward the checkpoint at Dytyatky, the road with its patches of snow a ghostly white in the headlights. His cell phone had finally gotten into range and he picked up a BBC news broadcast. The Russians had announced a deadline of midnight, after which Russia “would take whatever steps are necessary, including military action, to ensure the security of ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine,” the cell phone broadcast said.

“In Kiev,” the announcer went on, “the meeting between presidential candidate Viktor Kozhanovskiy and acting president Lavro Davydenko has ended without a joint statement or any sign of compromise. Mr. Kozhanovskiy has accused Mr. Davydenko of indifference to the suffering of the Ukrainian people and a callous disregard for the sovereignty of the Ukraine. He again demanded that NATO fulfill its obligations under the Membership Action Plan agreement.

“Mr. Davydenko, speaking through his spokesman, Mr. Oleksandr Gorobets, declared that Mr. Kozhanovskiy has no legitimacy because the crisis was caused by Iryna Shevchenko, Mr. Kozhanovskiy’s campaign manager, who is accused of murdering the late Svoboda presidential candidate, Yuriy Cherkesov, whose assassination sparked the crisis. He demanded that Mr. Kozhanovskiy stop protecting her and that she and the accused assassin, a Canadian national named Michael Kilbane, be turned over to the authorities before the Russian deadline.

“In Moscow, the American, British, and French ambassadors have presented a jointly sponsored note to the Russian Foreign Ministry stating that if Russian troops cross the Ukrainian border, NATO will regard it as an act of aggression upon a NATO member country. In London, the prime minister stated in a televised speech to the people of Great Britain that ‘all eyes are now turned to the Ukrainian border. We hope and pray that Europe, which knows well the devastation of war, will not see it revisited upon us.’ ”

At Dytyatky, Scorpion stopped at the checkpoint and stepped into a telephone-booth-like radiation detector. He placed his hands and feet on metal pads. The machine buzzed.

“ Tse ne dobre,” the soldier said, shaking his head. It is not good. “What you are doing in Exclusion Zone?”

“How bad is it?” Scorpion asked.

“You should wash clothes, body. Scrub good,” the soldier said, making a fist to indicate strong.

“Very bad?”

“ Tse ne tak uzhe y pohano,” the soldier said. Is not so bad. “Like maybe two X rays. But you wash good, yes?”

“ Tak,” Scorpion said, nodding.

On the road back to Kyiv, he stopped again at the trailer-restaurant in Sukachi. The same woman, Olena, was behind the counter. He had some borscht and salo, strips of pork fat on black bread. He told her he needed to shower and change clothes.

“Too much radioactivnist?” she said. “What did you do there in zona?”

“I am a scientist. We like to get dirty,” he said.

“There is no hotel or banya bathhouse here,” she said. She looked at him. “My late husband. You’re almost the same size. Come.”

She led him to a house behind the trailer. While he took a shower-ice cold, of course-she laid out a workman’s clothes. He put them on and went back to the trailer to pay her. She waved the money away and poured glasses of horilka for both of them at the counter.

“They don’t fit bad,” she said, sizing him up. “May you have better luck with them than my Hryhoriy had, Tsarstvo yomu nebesne.” God rest his soul.

“He had a bad time?” Scorpion said.

She shrugged. “They were a bad luck family. It started with his grandfather in the Holodomor. He gave his son-Hryhoriy’s father-to a Russian woman, a party official. It was to save him. They were starving. This was when the Bolsheviks deliberately starved millions to death. If the Komsomol brigades found you with even a single grain of wheat, they would shoot you. Cannibalism was widespread. Some say four million died, some say seven, some ten.” She shook her head. “No one knows. The Bolsheviks said it was part of Stalin’s war against the kulaks, but,” motioning him closer, “many believe it was to wipe out the Ukrainians. Hryhoriy’s father was the only member of his family to survive, but it did no good.”