Lenny Varnachev paid the taxi driver in cash and walked into the Haifa Sands Hotel, where he checked in as Ivan Borovich. In his second-floor room, which looked over the famous harbour and bay, he opened one of the two cheap cell phones he’d bought in Baku before flying to Haifa. Having switched it on, he made a quick call. After exchanging no more than fifteen words, he ended the call and made for the door.
The Anchor Holdings building was a light industrial two-storey property in a rundown area of the Mifratz commercial zone attached to the Haifa port. Varnachev let himself in and made himself a coffee in the upstairs section of the warehouse and administration building while he waited for his associate to appear. From here he could look down on the parking area that formed the centre of the commercial estate. As he sipped his coffee, vans and trucks came and went, loud beeps sounded when a forklift reversed and overworked men in overalls and hi-vis shirts went about their work. It was a perfect cover for Lenny Varnachev: while the combat side of Wagner Group was loud and obvious—and on CNN—Lenny’s work entailed client management and the planning of operations that clients didn’t want to be associated with. It meant a reversion to his old habits from the GRU, where fake identities, front companies and ‘safe’ buildings kept his trail cold.
Below him, a ten-tonne truck pulled up outside the building and the broad figure of Avi Aaron leaped out of the driver’s seat. He was wearing jeans and a blue worker’s shirt that sported a white logo.
‘Come in,’ Lenny yelled when the front door creaked open, and he heard Avi stomp up the stairs like an ape.
‘Coffee?’ he asked as Avi entered.
‘You can’t pull me away with no notice,’ he barked at Lenny. ‘I’ve got three men rewiring an entire transformer loom, and it’s on a ship tomorrow morning.’
‘I’ll take that as a yes,’ said Lenny, ignoring the man’s anger, as he’d been trained to do in the GRU. ‘Two sugars, no milk?’
Avi whipped off his cap and sat at the kitchenette table. ‘Can we make it fast? When you get a maintenance contract for a gas project, the money’s okay but the turnaround times are virtually impossible.’ The Israeli, realising he was getting no sympathy from the Russian, asked, ‘We all good?’
Lenny smiled. ‘I told you we’d have to be prepared to respond quickly, and you’ll have to be ready tomorrow.’
‘Tomorrow?’ exclaimed Avi, who had a neck that started under his ears. ‘What’s happening tomorrow?’
‘You’ll be contacted urgently to replace an electrical control panel on the Pontus gas rig. It’ll be on D deck and they’ll be in a hurry because that ECP controls the power to the rig,’ said Lenny. ‘And they can’t take the gas off the rig and onto the process ship on Sunday without the ECP.’
‘And why won’t they call DVJ at Hadera?’ asked Avi, referring to the electrical contractors with the mandate for the rig.
‘Because DVJ doesn’t have the Siemens electrical control panel that Pontus needs, and you do,’ said Lenny.
Avi leaned forward. ‘I don’t carry a Siemens ECP, let alone one that controls a network of thousand-KVA transformers. DVJ will have it. It’d be part of their contract.’
‘Normally they would,’ said Lenny. ‘But not as of tonight.’
Avi shook his head slowly. ‘Look, Ivan …’
‘Perhaps I should explain the facts of our relationship to you,’ said Lenny, crossing his legs as he sipped on his coffee. ‘I could go to the Shin Bet, show them the dossier I have on Claudette Aaron, and let them decide whether Seabed Electrical retains its security clearance to work on Israel’s energy infrastructure.’
Avi looked at his hands.
‘I mean, she is your wife and a director of your company, right?’ continued Lenny, keeping his tone friendly. ‘And I believe that the security services would be fascinated to know that, before she became your wife, Claudette Aaron was known as Leila al-Dayad, part of Fatah’s al-Dayad faction in Gaza.’
‘She was a kid, caught up in a pile of shit created by her father and uncles,’ Avi snarled. ‘If an Israeli Jew can forgive her, it should be none of your business.’
‘Oh, I agree, it’s none of my business,’ said Lenny, nodding. ‘But the Shin Bet? They have different priorities.’
Avi slumped in defeat. ‘We’ll be ready to go tomorrow, but getting an ECP of that size at short notice will not be possible.’
‘Follow me,’ said Lenny, and he led the Israeli down the stairs into the building’s ground-level warehouse. In the middle of a concrete floor sat a large, cream-coloured steel cabinet with five vertical doors. The word Siemens was stamped on the left-hand door.
‘That’s the ECP?’ asked Avi, perplexed.
‘Yes,’ said Lenny. ‘All you have to do is install it. And best of all, you get to send an invoice. Back your truck in here. I’ll fire up the forklift and help you get it loaded.’
■
Lenny watched Avi’s truck leave the industrial estate and pause at the intersection with the main road. What the Israeli contractor understood to be a replacement Electrical Control Panel for the Pontus rig was actually an electromagnetic pulse machine—precision engineering that used explosive charges and a steel vacuum tube to send a sudden burst of electromagnetic energy through the atmosphere. If triggered at the right time, the EMP machine would fry and disable any electronic or wired circuitry within a hundred-metre radius. It didn’t have to be the end-of-days machine that American preppers warned about on social media; it only had to disable the circuit boards, chips and sensors that comprised a gas rig’s blowout preventer. If the BOP could not stop the flow of gas during an emergency event, fire could flow unrestricted through the rig, destroying it.
He crushed his burner phone under foot and flushed the pieces down the staff toilet. He had one last coffee then left the building, walking for several blocks to see if he was being followed. Once satisfied he was not, he took a taxi back to the Haifa Sands Hotel and opened the second burner phone. On the other end, Boris Orlevski picked up quickly.
‘You still in Muscat?’ asked Lenny.
‘Yes,’ said Boris.
‘Are we on time?’
‘Yes,’ said Boris. ‘The package is halfway to Port Said.’