Scorpion Winter by Andrew Kaplan Read Free Book Online Page A

a pretty thin line. Those are some very badass Mike Foxtrots,” Army slang for motherfuckers. “Makes Waziristan look like apple pie and motherhood. You Romeo that?”
    â€œHappy days,” Scorpion said, finishing his beer.

Chapter Seven
    Maidan Nezalezhnosti
    Kyiv, Ukraine
    T he giant television screen blasted the Plach Yeremiyahi rock band to tens of thousands of demonstrators clapping and moving to the beat in Kyiv’s Independence Square. The night was frigid and the crowd was dressed in heavy coats, wool caps, and Russian fur hats. Many were in their twenties, there more for the music and the noisy crowds than the politics. But scattered among them were older faces, some with orange scarves and flags. They looked around uncertainly, as though they had gotten lost on their way to a college rally. A giant banner on a Soviet-style building lit with floodlights proclaimed VSEUKRAYINSKE OBYEDNANNYA BATKIVSHCHYNA, the All-Ukrainian Union Fatherland Party, and signs in the crowd read KOZHANOVSKIY FOR THE PEOPLE . On the towering white column in the center of the square, someone had taped a poster with a squint-eyed photo of Kozhanovskiy’s opponent, Cherkesov, that read: HET ZLODIY. Down with the Thief.
    â€œPodyvit’sya na nykh.” Look at them, a long-haired young man in a jacket standing in front of Scorpion said to his blond girlfriend, indicating a middle-aged couple waving orange T-shirts in time to the music. “You’d think it was the Orange Revolution all over,” he added, his breath like puffs of smoke in the cold. For Scorpion, trying to acclimatize to the winter here, it was so cold it hurt to breathe.
    â€œWell, I think they’re klevyy ,” cool, his girlfriend said.
    Scorpion continued to move through the crowd. It had been a busy day for him. He had never been in Kyiv before, and flying into Boryspil Airport, looked out over the city dusted with snow. The gray Dnieper River divided Kyiv in two, the east or Left Bank an endless spread of apartment buildings and factories, the Right Bank a jumble of Soviet-style buildings, gold-domed churches, and, beside the river, a statue the size of the Statue of Liberty of a woman with a raised sword.
    He rented a fourth-floor apartment on Pushkinskaya on the Right Bank near vulytsya Khreshchatyk, Kyiv’s main street. His cover was as a Canadian journalist named Michael Kilbane working out of London, in Kiev to cover the election for Reuters.
    Being a journalist was standard cover, good enough to explain why he’d be poking around and asking questions. Shaefer had provided him with authentic-looking press credentials and promised to have MI-6 backstop his cover with the Reuters office on Canary Wharf in London. It was good enough for a standard police check. If he needed deeper cover, he would already be in bigger trouble than any story or identity could protect him.
    The music in the square stopped to cheers and shouts for “Bolshe!” more, and “Prodolzhaite igrat’ muzyku!”— Keep on playing! A man on the giant TV screen announced something to more cheers and good-natured catcalls, and then a woman in a black leather overcoat and Russian fur hat suddenly appeared and began speaking. The crowd quieted down, not because of what she was saying—Scorpion caught only that she was apparently introducing a speaker—but because, even bundled up as she was and distorted on the large TV screen, her looks were extraordinary.
    â€œKto ona?” Scorpion asked a man in a heavy jacket and wool cap standing next to him. Who is she?
    â€œYou don’t know Iryna?” the man answered in Russian, pronouncing her name Ee-ree-na, his eyebrows raised in surprise. Scorpion shook his head. “Iryna Mikhailivna Shevchenko. Her father was the founder of the Rukh, the Independence movement.”
    â€œSpasiba,” Scorpion said, nodding thanks and moving on around the edge of the crowd as the