Yaroslaw's Revenge

Book excerpt: Halimpex, of Lviv, Ukraine had just been recognized as the world's largest volume producer of glass Christmas tree ornaments, when on November 14th, 2006, Bohdan Datsko its owner, was gunned down as his white C-class Mercedes passed through the security gate of his factory. Despite seven bullet wounds to the neck and chest, nobody had heard anything; nobody saw a gun; and no cartridge casings were found on the scene. Bohdan's driver, sitting beside the victim was unaware of anything amiss until he saw the blood. Six days later, Mad Max Kurochkin, a notorious Russian gangster, was arrested on charges of theft and extortion upon his landing in Kyiv while on his way to make preparations for President Putin's visit to Ukraine. Three days later, on November 23rd, Alexander Litvinenko died in London, England, of Polonium 210 radiation poisoning. On March 31, 2007, Mad Max Kurochkin was assassinated by a sniper's bullet, while he was being led from a Kyiv courthouse to a waiting paddy wagon. The sniper was not apprehended. In today's Ukraine, reality is much stranger than fiction. But Yaroslaw's Revenge threads a story through this tangled web to culminate in a story even stranger still The western world's press reported an act of piracy in the Baltic Sea, just off the coast of Sweden on July 24, 2009. Then, on July 28, the victim freighter, the MV Arctic Sea, sailed past Dover reporting, when hailed by the British Coast Guard, that all was in order. Yet the Russian Navy had already sent its entire Black Sea Fleet in pursuit of this ship - that was ostensibly carrying nothing but lumber. The MV Arctic Sea totally missed its destination port of Bejaia Algeria, and instead sailed slowly southward along Africa's western coast. In Yaroslaw's Revenge the tale of the MV Arctic Sea's actual cargo is the thread that links murder, assassination, piracy, espionage, drugs and war with the untimely death, on the third anniversary of that of Alexander Litvinenko, of Maj. Gen. Anton Surikov of the Russian GRU. The Cold War thriller is back! This time it is Canada's ITAC, the Integrated Threat Assessment Center, that holds the key to interdiction of a nuclear threat.