Cold East

ALEX SHAW spent the second half of the 1990s in Kyiv, Ukraine, teaching Drama and running his own business consultancy before being headhunted for a division of Siemens. The next few years saw him doing business for the company across the former USSR, the Middle East, and Africa.

Cold Blood, Cold Black and Cold East are commercially published by HarperCollins (HQ Digital) in English and Luzifer Verlag in German.

Alex, his wife and their two sons divide their time between homes in Kyiv, Ukraine, Worthing, England and Doha, Qatar. Follow Alex on twitter: @alexshawhetman or find him on Facebook.

Also by Alex Shaw

Cold Blood

Cold Black

Cold East

ALEX SHAW

HQ

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2018

Copyright © Alex Shaw 2018

Alex Shaw asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

E-book Edition © September 2018 ISBN: 9780008306342

Version: 2018-07-26

Table of Contents

Cover

About the Author

Also by Alex Shaw

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Epilogue

Dear Reader

Dear Reader

Keep Reading …

About the Publisher

To my wife Galia, my sons Alexander and Jonathan,

and our family in England and Ukraine

Prologue

Donetsk Region, Ukraine

‘I can’t see them yet.’

‘They’ll be here soon, he said so.’ Vitaly Blazhevich peered into the distance towards the besieged city of Donetsk. Smoke rose from tower blocks on the outskirts, the result of early-morning shelling by Russian-supplied Grad rockets. The ceasefire agreement between the Ukrainian government and the Russian-backed insurgent organisations of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) and the Lugansk People’s Republic (LNR) had been in operation for several months, yet attacks continued. The men around Blazhevich were a mixture of regular Ukrainian infantry and young, hastily trained members of a volunteer battalion. Despite the cold, the Ukrainians kept their spirits high as they rotated manning the vehicle checkpoint, cooking, and resting. Blazhevich had nothing but respect for the volunteers who, until recently, had been carrying on normal lives as university students, mechanics, bus drivers, doctors, and businessmen. Every now and then the group would spontaneously start singing Ukrainian folk songs or old Soviet tunes in Russian. They were Ukrainian and what mattered to them most was one country, not one language. The checkpoint was to the north of the small town of Marinka and straddled the road towards Donetsk. The adjacent flat fields of fertile black earth had been left barren in the conflict zone. A click away, the road forked and the treeline started.

‘Here.’ Nedilko handed Blazhevich a mug.

‘We should be doing more to help him,’ Blazhevich replied to his SBU colleague before sipping the bitter-tasting army coffee.

‘He likes pretending to be Russian.’

‘That’s true.’

Blazhevich saw movement ahead. He put his drink on the ground, raised his field glasses, and focused on the road. A white Toyota Land Cruiser appeared from the treeline. As it neared, the blue flag and markings of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) became visible on its paintwork. The Ukrainian soldiers manned their weapons, ever wary of a surprise attack. The checkpoint had changed hands several times so far; the men were taking no chances.

Nedilko’s phone rang. ‘Hello? OK.’ He pointed at the SUV. ‘It’s him, or at least he’s is in the vehicle.’

‘It’s four-up,’ Blazhevich replied.

Nedilko removed his Glock from its holster. ‘What’s the saying? “Plan for the best, prepare for the worst”?’

‘Something like that.’

As the Land Cruiser came to a halt, just short of the checkpoint, a series of rumbles rolled across the fields. The DNR were shelling again. A thin man, wearing a blue OSCE vest over a grey, three-quarter-length jacket, stepped slowly from the front passenger door. He held his arms aloft as a pair of Ukrainian soldiers advanced, weapons up. The rear door now opened and out climbed an Asian man followed by someone both SBU agents couldn’t mistake: Aidan Snow.

‘“Who Dares Wins”,’ Blazhevich said with a smile.

Snow led the trio towards the checkpoint. The man in the OSCE vest held out his hand to Blazhevich. ‘Gordon Ward, OSCE monitor. You must be from the Security Service of Ukraine?’

‘That’s correct, the SBU,’ Blazhevich confirmed, shaking hands. ‘Things getting busy back there?’

‘Hairy is the word for it. The DNR are systematically violating the ceasefire!’

‘We heard,’ Nedilko stated.

‘Well, here they are, safe and sound.’ Ward turned to Snow. ‘Don’t make a habit of this, will you?’

‘I’ll try not to.’

Ward flashed a swift smile, turned on his heels, and got into the Land Cruiser. The Toyota crabbed across the road before quickly heading back towards Donetsk and the rest of the OSCE monitors.

‘Vitaly Blazhevich, Ivan Nedilko, may I present Mohammed Iqbal,’ Snow said.

‘It’s Mo, to my friends,’ Iqbal added.

Snow was in Ukraine to facilitate the repatriation of Iqbal, a British citizen held captive for several months in Donetsk. Iqbal was one of many foreign students studying medicine at Donetsk University, but unlike the others he had been kidnapped by the DNR, who took exception to the colour of his skin. The news of Iqbal’s plight had come from a bizarre post on the DNR’s ‘VKontakte’ page. They used the Slavic copy of Facebook to inform the Russian-speaking world of their latest proclamations and ‘successes’ against the Ukrainian forces. Via VKontakte, Iqbal had been labelled ‘a black mercenary’ and ‘a spy’ by the self-appointed Prime Minster of the DNR. Iqbal was subjected to intimidation, beatings, and starvation by his captors. It was only after much negotiation that his release had been brokered and an agreement reached to hand him over to the OSCE. At least that was the official story, and the one that made the DNR look like humanitarians, but Snow knew otherwise. He still had the bruises and an empty magazine to prove it.

‘Incoming!’ A shout went up as a shell whistled overhead.

Snow grabbed Iqbal and threw him into the ditch at the side of the road as another shell flew past them to land with a thunderous cacophony further down the road.

‘Bloody twats!’ Iqbal’s Brummie accent grew thicker with his annoyance, as he spat out a mouthful of cold mud.

‘Stay down!’ Snow ordered. He looked up and saw the source of the shells. What he took to be a Russian armoured vehicle, possibly a BMP-2, had appeared from the fork in the road. Too far away to return fire, the Ukrainians took cover as best they could. Still visible, Snow watched the OSCE Land Cruiser skid around the tracked vehicle and take the fork in the other direction. Then, just as quickly as it had started, the shooting stopped. The BMP-2 turned and followed the Toyota towards Donetsk.

‘Nice of them to give you a sendoff,’ Snow said as he pulled Iqbal to his feet.

‘I’d have preferred a box of chocolates.’

Snow smirked. ‘Come on. We need to catch a ride back to Kyiv.’

Chapter 1

Morristown, New Jersey, USA

As James East neared Morristown Green, a raw October wind battered his cheeks with icy rain like needles. For a dead man he felt very alive. In winter the snow that covered the park and storefronts lent a Dickensian feel to the otherwise drab, post-revolution architecture; today, however, rain was all anyone was getting. Saturday shoppers traipsed like herds of deer, umbrellas up, searching for bargains. East pulled up his coat collar. It wasn’t the cold he disliked but the wind, which ravenously bit at his exposed flesh. He entered the green along a path that crossed the central square where a group of Latino youths dressed in baggy sweats were sheltering under the trees, smoking and taking snaps of each other. An elderly couple sharing a golfing umbrella joined East as he waited for the lights to change. They were holding hands and had probably been doing so since the Fifties. East felt a pang of jealousy. It had been three years since East had held his girl’s hand; she’d loved him and he had left without a word. They hadn’t spent much time together yet he remembered every second, every flicker of her eyelashes and how she curled her lower lip as she smiled. He closed his eyes briefly and could smell her perfume and feel her head upon his chest. East shivered – it was time to let her go. His eyes snapped open as a car horn sounded. The lights at the crossing had changed to ‘walk’. Back to reality, his reality. The man she knew was dead, he had to be, but James East was very much alive. He crossed the road and entered the discount designer department store. Inside he nodded at the security guard; the man returned his nod solemnly. East undid his jacket, brushed his hand through his wet hair and looked around. To the left stood rows of handbags and on the right the cosmetics counter, where a middle-aged woman was receiving a makeover from an eager teenage assistant with make-up as thick as a circus clown. East moved past more women inspecting bags and reached the menswear section. Aisles of shirts stacked by designer, colour and size were neatly arranged. He selected a size bigger than he needed; he chose not to advertise the fact that he worked out. He took three shirts, no flashy colours, with ties to match, over to the ‘tailoring’ area, which was run by a white-haired man with an Eastern European accent. Much to the assistant’s delight, he picked up a two-piece charcoal suit and entered the fitting room.

*

At the main entrance, Finch, the store security guard, fought to keep his eyes open. To say the former US Marine was bored by his job was an understatement. After ten years in the service of the good old ‘US of A’ he had been invalided out with a derisory disability pension. The irony was that the Navy had deemed him medically unfit to stand guard for long periods of time and therefore no longer suited to active service. Yet here he stood, a security guard in a department store, on his feet for eight hours a day. Where was the logic? Finch stepped outside for a blast of icy wind to wake him up. As he did so the detectors rang. Four men entered the store, while two women with heavy bags exited. Finch sighed and asked the women to step back inside; security tags left on again, he assumed. They moved to the jewellery counter where he started to remove their purchases to be checked one by one.

*

There was a scream and shouts followed by a series of loud staccato cracks. James East locked eyes with the menswear assistant. Both men dropped to the floor; they had heard the sound before – automatic gunfire.

‘Stay down.’ East’s voice was controlled and firm. The elderly assistant bobbed his head in assent and crawled deeper into the dressing rooms. East worked his way, at a crouch, out of the alcove. What greeted him on the shop-floor was shocking. Two men holding Uzi submachine guns stood in the central aisle, firing off rounds indiscriminately at any shopper who dared move. The security guard, white shirt turned crimson, lay sprawled across a collapsed glass counter. Two women had been dropped next to him. As the store fell silent one gunman changed magazines while the second continued to swing his weapon in an exaggerated arc. East noted their actions: uncontrolled, jerky, and amateur. There was a sudden blur of movement as a portly woman ran from behind an overturned display. The gunmen tracked her with their weapons on fully automatic. Rounds spat from the barrels, showering her and the surrounding area. East hugged the floor as rounds impacted against the back wall, hitting fittings and spinning off at obtuse angles.

The woman, eyes wild, was thrown sideways, mid-stride, as white-hot lead tore into her flesh. She came crashing down with a sickening thud on the thinly carpeted shop-floor. Her eyes saw East and her mouth moved; she reached out her hand. ‘Pamageet minya.’ ‘Help me,’ she pleaded in Russian.

‘Nie dveegaisia!’ ‘Stay still,’ East hissed back in the same language. But it was too late. Her hand trembled, fell limp, and her eyes glazed over. East’s jaw tightened – he was going to stop them.

*

There were footsteps on his left by the escalator. Two more gunmen were ascending to the upper floors, one a little ahead of the other. East craned his neck; the first pair now had their backs turned and their weapons pointing away. East moved with speed and stealth towards the disappearing gunman. Reaching the bottom of the escalator he launched himself up, two steps at a time, no longer caring about the noise he made, only the distance he covered. The nearest gunman turned, Uzi held upwards in one hand, the short barrel pointing at the concrete above. His eyes registered East but not before East’s open palm crashed up into the underside of the gunman’s nose, flattening cartilage and breaking bone. As if struck by a sledgehammer the man dropped the Uzi and fell sideways. East grabbed the weapon and squeezed the trigger. A three-round burst ripped through the gunman before burrowing into the side of the escalator.

There was more gunfire from above. East flattened himself against the metal steps and was carried upwards. As his head crested the shop-floor he saw that the fourth gunman, oblivious to his colleague’s demise, had started to spray the room. East raised the Uzi and fired a controlled burst into the back of his target’s head. The man fell instantly, body dead before it had stopped falling. Around him shoppers and staff cowered and wept. Two X-rays down, two more to go. East hit the stop button on the stairs and peered over the side at the ground floor. Save for sobbing, the area was quiet once more as both gunmen again changed magazines. One was silent and had a crazed expression on his face, while the other seemed to be quietly chanting. East had to act; he had to take them out now. He moved down the metal steps, took a deep breath, and then broke cover at the bottom.

The nearest X-ray looked up, eyes wide as East fired. The gunman stumbled backwards as rounds impacted his chest before he crashed into a counter. The second gunman returned fire and charged forward. East pivoted, fell to one knee to lessen his profile, and acquired the target.

‘Allahu Akbar!’ the gunman yelled.

East looked into the man’s eyes and released second pressure on the trigger. The X-ray fell upon him and glass exploded around both men. The X-ray was history, but his momentum took East down with him. East’s head hit the carpet-covered concrete shop-floor with a loud crack and his world went black.

*

British Embassy, Kyiv, Ukraine

Aidan Snow sipped his black coffee as he listened via the internet to the Today programme on Radio 4. The main news of the morning was an explosion at rush hour on the Moscow metro. It had happened at a station Snow knew well, one close to the international school he had attended as an ‘Embassy Brat’ twenty years before. So far the number of fatalities hadn’t been released but Snow knew it would be high. The radio announced that the explosion had been confirmed as an IED and that a Chechen group, the Islamic International Brigade, had claimed responsibility. An expert on Russian security matters from the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies had been quickly found and, in heavily accented English, gave his opinion. He explained that the Russian authorities wouldn’t accept that the real Islamic International Brigade had carried out the attack, due to the fact that the FSB had either captured or killed its leaders. Indeed, the leader of the group had been publicly put on trial and was at this very moment serving a full life term in Russia’s most secure prison. The expert went on to say why he thought the bomb had been detonated and who else could be responsible. A splinter or copycat group using the same methods…

Snow clicked off the broadcast and continued to eat his breakfast in silence, even though he had now lost his appetite. Terrorism was senseless: innocent civilians were targeted based solely on the actions of their governments, whom they probably hadn’t voted into power. Yet it was endemic the world over and it sickened him. Saturday had brought reports of a suspected Al-Qaeda attack on shoppers in a New Jersey department store and today it was the turn of commuters in Moscow. Snow shuddered as he imagined the horror created by the detonation and panic among the Muscovites. He pictured the metro station in his mind as he remembered it, with its scrupulously clean floors, advert-free walls, grand architecture, and fur-clad crowds. As a teenager he had frequently explored Moscow by jumping on the metro after school, much to the annoyance of the British Embassy driver. He had sat and listened to the Muscovites, often taking the train to the end of the line into areas that were strictly off the tourist path. In the late Eighties, just before the Soviet Union crumbled, Moscow had been an exciting place. There had been something in the air, a note of dissent those in power had chosen to ignore, to their ultimate cost.

Today, the people in power were jumpy; an attack in one European capital city put all the others on high alert. Moscow, having once again attempted to resurrect the Soviet Empire by illegally annexing Crimea and invading Eastern Ukraine, had made itself target number one. It had no one else to blame, but it was the Russian people who were suffering and not the warmongering cocks in the Kremlin.

The door to the room Snow was camped out in opened and Alistair Vickers entered. He sat heavily in an armchair. ‘You’ve seen the news, I take it?’

‘What next?’

Vickers shrugged. ‘I have no earthly idea, but Jack’s just called for a video conference.’

On cue, Snow’s secure iPhone vibrated to show an incoming email from Jack Patchem, his boss at SIS. It contained just one word: Moscow. ‘We’d better go to your office then.’

Vickers reluctantly dragged himself out of the comfy chair.

*

Several minutes later Patchem spoke without preamble as the video-link started. ‘Terrible news from Russia. The last thing we need is the loony brigade annoying the Kremlin.’

‘Do we know who’s responsible?’ Snow asked as Vickers pushed a plate of custard cream biscuits towards him.

‘Only what the media is saying, but our man on the scene is confirming thirty dead now, some foreigners. The FCO doesn’t know yet if this includes any Brits.’

‘Was there any advance warning of the attack, any increased chatter seen by GCHQ?’ Vickers asked.

‘None, and that’s what’s so worrisome. The only chatter we have is after the event, the usual rhetoric praising the suicide bomber and thanking Allah. Allah the almighty, who invented Semtex!’ There was a pause and Patchem apologised. ‘I know, gentlemen, I know. Call me an Islamophobe, but you understand what I mean. These crazies want to blow us all up in the name of Islam.’

‘Their view of Islam.’

‘Yes, Aidan – you’re right, of course.’ In London, Patchem took a sip of water. ‘Actually, one phrase has come up a few times: “The Hand of Allah”. We don’t have anything on it yet; it could be a new group aligned to Al-Qaeda or IS, or, who knows, perhaps the name of an operation or just a turn of speech.’

‘If it’s the name of a new group, that would back up what the Russians say.’

‘That it’s not the Islamic International Brigade? Aidan, you know as well as I do that the FSB and GRU would never admit some key members of the group might have evaded capture.’

‘I’m surprised the Kremlin isn’t trying to pin it on “Ukrainian Banderite fascists”,’ Vickers said.

‘I had a beer with Bandera’s grandson once. He wasn’t a fascist, he was Canadian,’ Snow replied.

Patchem agreed. The Kremlin had labelled the new Ukrainian government fascists and called the protesters who had ousted the old Moscow-backed President ‘Banderites’ after Stepan Bandera, the Ukrainian wartime nationalist leader who had chosen the Nazis over the Soviet Union. ‘We can’t rule out anyone at this stage.’ Onscreen, Patchem closed his eyes and pinched his nose. ‘Look…’

‘Everything OK, Jack?’

‘What, Alistair? Yes, just not sleeping as much as I should.’ Patchem drank some more water and then cleared his throat. ‘So, Aidan, welcome back and congratulations on “collecting” Mr Iqbal. How is he?’

‘He’s still catching up on his sleep. They kept him chained up in a garage for most of the time, and if he wasn’t chained up he was digging trenches.’

‘Trenches?’ Patchem frowned.

‘Apparently the leader of the DNR is a World War One buff; he loves the idea of trench warfare,’ Vickers added. ‘Which is very odd, when you consider he’s holed up in the middle of an industrial city!’

‘The whole thing is very odd. Alistair, how long until we can get Iqbal back to the UK?’

‘Midweek I’d say. He’s going to be talking to the SBU today; they want a debrief on everything he saw during his time in captivity. They’ll be chatting to Aidan too. It’s all going to be taken down as evidence against the DNR. Of course, I’ll be there to record the session.’

‘Good. Aidan, finish writing up your report, and then, once the SBU are happy, bring Mr Iqbal home. In the meantime, keep a low profile, but have your “grab-bag” and passport handy.’

‘I always do.’