THE GHOST OF GROZNY

Operator Series, Book Two

Grozny, 2000. Fourteen years old, Magomed Khasiev watches from a hallway as Russian soldiers do something to his mother on a kitchen floor he will not let himself describe, not then, not ever. An hour later, he watches the same soldiers walk her out into the snow.

Zavodskoy, 2004. Nineteen years old. A quiet lieutenant in Ruslan Umarov's gang. The Chechen warlord, drunk and bored on a winter night, beats a woman to death on the floor of a back-room bar in front of his crew. What Magomed sees on that floor is not the woman in front of him. He puts three rounds into Umarov's chest and walks north through the snow.

Rostov, 2005. A bored sergeant copies his name wrong. A motor rifle regiment short of men absorbs him. And in the recreation hall of a backwater unit, an SVR colonel called Vladimir Galkin walks in on a chess game between a junior captain and a private nobody is looking at, and recognises what no one else has seen. A man who reads patterns the way other men read maps.

Erbil, May 2014. The boy from Grozny is a man under a name that was never his. Erasyl Kadyrov, Kazakh seismic geologist on the Rosneft paper, working the Western contractor security beat. By night, he sits across cheap plastic boards in Qaysari teahouses and encodes Operation Cradle 333 into the pawn structures of unremarkable games of chess. There is a woman watching him from a corner booth who is supposed to be on his side and who is also writing cables home that name him by his weaknesses. There is a British contractor across the bazaar who is starting to wonder why the same pawn keeps moving the wrong square at the wrong time. And there is a refugee camp at the edge of the city where, one afternoon in late spring, a child's football will bounce off his boot, and an old wound that has never closed will start, very quietly, to bleed again.

Inside the boards is a man who has spent his life not looking at a kitchen floor in Grozny. Outside the boards is a war the Russians have built for him to fight on their terms. He did not choose any of it. He may yet choose what he does next.

The Ghost of Grozny is the companion novel to No Safe Ground. They form a diptych and can be read in either order. The reader who arrives from Book One walks into the same four weeks in May 2014 from inside the man making the moves' head. The reader who starts here walks toward those same four weeks from the opposite side of the board. Either way, the last page of one closes the same door the last page of the other opened.

For readers of Daniel Silva, Mick Herron and Olen Steinhauer. Grounded military realism, moral ambiguity, and a chess motif that lifts the genre into literary territory.

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