Operation “Stray Dog”. Chapter 11

Security Guarantee

15:05 EST (20:05 Local Time). The Sahel. Border of Mali and Niger. “Neutral Zone”

The camp of the PMC “Steppe Wolves” resembled the set of Mad Max if it had been filmed in Zhytomyr. The tents were covered with camouflage netting woven from local vines. On the roof of the commander’s Jeep, a Toyota Hilux (with a machine gun in the bed), stood a Starlink dish; socks were drying next to it. In the center of the camp, an antelope leg, shot an hour ago, was roasting over a fire made from ammo crates.

The unit commander, Taras (call sign “Admin”), sat in a folding chair, cleaning sand out of his laptop. In a past life, he was a Senior Backend Developer at a Kyiv outsourcing firm, but then he decided real war was more honest than corporate politics.

His deputy, Ostap (call sign “Agronomist,” a former farmer who could fix anything from a tractor to a tank using duct tape and profanity), was poking the meat with a bayonet.

“Eh, could use some salo right now, and a shot of horilka,” the commander muttered dreamily, staring at the antelope’s horns.

“Taras,” Ostap said lazily, looking at the screen of a tablet connected to a homemade radar. “We have guests.”

“Tuaregs?” Taras didn’t look up. “Tell them we’re out of cigarettes.”

“Nah. Something’s flying. High. Fast. And it’s radiating like Reactor Number Four after a shift.”

Taras slammed his laptop shut.

“A drone? French?”

“Yeah, the size of a Bogdan bus. Flying crooked, like the driver’s drunk. Looks like the navigation croaked.”

At that moment, Discord pinged on Taras’s laptop. A message from user Kevin_PINK_Panic (Kevin).

“Bro! Urgent! A North Korean missile is flying your way! Nuclear! Admin password: 123456. Shoot it down or land it, or we’re all screwed!”

Taras read it. Raised an eyebrow.

“Ostap,” he said calmly. “Fire up our ‘hurdy-gurdy.’ That’s not a French drone. That’s a package from Kim Jong Un.”

“You don’t say?” Ostap spat. “And what’s inside? Rice?”

“Plutonium. Come on, start the EW. Kevin sent the password.”

Ostap walked over to a strange contraption assembled from two microwaves, a satellite dish, and a control unit from a captured Russian Krasukha system.

“Password?”

“123456.”

“Seriously?” Ostap chuckled. “My suitcase code is harder.”

He punched in the numbers. The screen blinked green. “ACCESS GRANTED.”

“Whoa. We’re in. What do we do?”

“Land it,” Taras commanded. “Enable GPS spoofing. Give it coordinates… for that sand dune over there. And crank the music louder on that frequency. Let it think it’s flying to a disco.”

Ostap spun a knob. Verka Serduchka’s voice blasted across the desert from the speakers connected to the system: “Hoche! Hoche! Hop-hop!”

In the sky, at an altitude of ten kilometers, the Hwasong-21-Super-Turbo, its brains already boiled by its own radiation, caught the powerful signal. Its primitive AI, based on a vacuum cleaner, decided that this rhythm was the heartbeat of the Motherland. Beacon “Home.”

The missile, smoothly, with the grace of a tired whale, began its descent. It went into a spin, deployed braking parachutes (sewn from Chinese silk), and with a dull THUMP flopped into the soft sand five kilometers from the camp.

No explosion followed. The Chinese detonator, as expected, failed to trigger.

Ten minutes later, Taras and Ostap’s Jeep pulled up to the crash site. The missile lay on its side, smoking and crackling. On its black flank, Chinese characters proudly read: “Death to Enemies!” (and below in chalk: “Made in Pyongyang, Assembly Shop No. 5”).

Taras walked up, measuring the background radiation with a dosimeter.

“Tolerable. As long as you don’t lick it.”

“Taras, what is this?” Ostap asked, kicking the hull.

“This, Ostap, is a nuclear warhead. Half a megaton for democracy.”

“Wow. So what do we do? Call the UN? Or the Americans? Let them pick it up.”

Taras looked at the horizon, where the African sun, huge and red, was setting.

“Are you an idiot? What UN? They’ll just express concern. And the Americans will send us a bill for disposal.”

“So then what?”

“Load it in the truck.”

“Nakhiba? (What for?)”

“What do you mean, nakhiba?” Taras patted the missile’s warm flank. “It’ll come in handy on the farm. Reliable stuff, even if it’s scary. We’ll ship it to the boys. Or sell it to Elon Musk for Bitcoin. Or…” he pondered. “Listen, let’s hide it in the shed for now? Bury it under a palm tree.”

“Why?”

“Well, you never know… What if it comes in handy back home? Like a security guarantee. Budapest Memorandum 2.0, only now with a real argument.”

Ostap smiled, revealing a gold tooth.

“You know, you’re making sense. Load ’er up, boys!”

They threw cables over it, hooked the missile to the winch, and dragged it toward the camp, to the sounds of the savanna and the distant howling of jackals.

Chapter 12. The Promised Land →
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