Jet sighed and closed her eyes. “It’s always nice when things work out.”
“I’ll say. Are you coming home now?”
She checked the cheap stolen watch and smiled in the moonlight. “About time, don’t you think?”
“Be careful.”
“Always.”
Chapter 58
Dudarkiv, Ukraine
A ground fog blanketed the fields north of the Boryspil International Airport, lending the farmland a spectral appearance beneath the stippling of midnight stars. Yulia sat cross-legged in the freshly turned soil with a pair of binoculars glued to her face and two Igla-S shoulder-fired surface-to-air missile launchers beside her. A rusting Nissan Pathfinder was parked nearby, its lights extinguished. The driver, Pavel, lounged against the passenger door, staring at the glittering complex a few kilometers away.
The airport glowed like a Vegas casino, its runways illuminated and the terminals alight with night traffic on long-haul flights to and from Europe and Russia – as well as one in particular that Yulia was watching with rapt attention as it pushed back from the gate. A Boeing 767 bound for London, scheduled for takeoff in just a few more minutes, with well over two hundred passengers aboard, including three American diplomats critical to ensuring there would be swift international outrage at the flight’s destruction shortly after takeoff.
The wreckage and the abandoned launch tube would bear out that a Russian missile had been used, indicting the pro-Russian separatists and solidifying the administration that Yulia worked for as the morally superior choice to run the country. The civil war, in which Russia had been supporting the separatist rebels fighting what they claimed was the illegal military coup and ouster of the democratically elected government, had been bloody and violent – but this would serve as the deciding blow, at least per the analysts who’d devised the plot to shoot down an airliner with a Russian missile, making it straightforward to blame the separatists for the unconscionable act of terrorism.
That it had been hatched by anti-Russian forces wouldn’t matter. The world would believe what it was told by the media, which had already been primed with fake threats from unnamed insurgent factions aligned with the Russians. Now, a few hundred innocents would have their lives sacrificed to achieve a noble cause, and it didn’t bother Yulia in the slightest that she was about to commit a crime against humanity. She’d watched her country torn apart, and if some airline passengers had to die in order to bring about a new world order with nukes on Russia’s border, as well as anti-Russian forces controlling the most valuable corridor for Western goods to Russia, so be it.
She didn’t understand all the geopolitical nuances at play, nor did she much care whether her country was being used as a pawn in a larger chess game. What she knew was that she hated the Russian pigs with a consuming passion, the venom originating in a teenage atrocity at the hands of two drunk Russian tourists that she’d spent her adult life putting behind her.
Anything that would hurt Russia was good in her book, and if the entire nation was nuked into the Stone Age, so much the better. She’d never shared her motivations with anyone, but the thought of the headlines the following day, the Russian bear tarred and feathered in the world’s eyes before it even had a chance to react, made her heart beat faster.
She adjusted the binoculars to better track the airliner, whose running lights were blinking as it trundled slowly in its departure taxi to the runway. Those who’d planned the attack had given her all the information she’d require, right down to the exact position where she would need to wait in order to be directly in the plane’s path on takeoff. Yulia had been in the cold field for almost an hour, the surroundings pitch black, the area uninhabited except for a few remote farms whose residents had long before gone to sleep.
“Won’t be long now,” she said.
“Let me know if you need anything,” Pavel said, his voice gruff from years of smoking and a taste for the distilled spirit.
“I’m fine. It’s getting ready to make the turn onto the runway.”